RPG Grove

The Siren contains the following modules:

Captain’s Room: with a view of the stars and a fish tank that takes up one wall
Medbay: recently upgraded with experimental tech and a chatty AI
War Room: abandoned and important data screens covered in dust
Armoury: with work benches that encourage outrageous experimentation
Gunnery: housing the ship’s defences that need constant calibration
Bar: with drinks deemed unfit for organic consumption in several star systems
Kitchen: filled to the brim with barely edible nutrient packs
Recreation Rooms: with a full VR unit installed
Pod Garden: a newly discovered fungal people have made this their home
Mech Hanger: with machinery in dire need of repairs
Augury Chamber: with ancient star maps that hint at a shared destiny
Reactor Core: outfitted with illegal technology

It also has:

• A highly experimental power source that has developed sentience
• An AI created by one of our fallen crew members (possibly destroyed by Captain Kyeera Hastur)
• An overly helpful robot that can’t quite hold itself together

What did you learn about the ship's past that no one else knows?

The ship was constructed along plans created by an ancient species with mystical beliefs. Its systems are connected through intricate patterns intended to promote good fortune and protect it from the ghosts that species believed inhabited the void. The patterns converge on two nodes; one is the Augury Room, the other...

What secret area of the ship did you discover?

The antipodal counterpart to the Augury Room is the Lofty Shrine, tucked under the ship's dorsal superstructure. It's full ritual purpose is unclear, but the "altar" is capable of realigning the ship's connective systems, presumably to refine its astromantic protections against bad luck and the unrestful dead.

What part of the ship did you use to lure your former comrades to their deaths?

It was so easy. The confusion wrought by the warning klaxons blaring coupled with most of the Siren’s lighting system flickering thanks to a ship-wide multisystem failure meant they’d follow me and not think twice. We had to get away before Captain Hastur caught us. I was so heroic, directing them into the escape pod, making the sacrifice to stay behind and send them on their way from here since the pod’s internal launch relays were fried. The beguiled ones never questioned any of it. Never tested if I was truly one of them. Never thought to investigate the pod’s loose interior panels behind which I’d hastily hidden the explosives that were set to blow once the detonator lost contact with a transmitter in my pocket. I thumbed the device as I typed a line of code into the computer terminal and brought the Siren’s systems back online. I didn’t pull up a view screen as I flicked the transmitter’s kill switch, but feeling the Siren rock slightly as the shock wave washed over her hull, I knew it was over.

What secret sacrifice did you make in the past to protect the ship?

I may not look like a shaman, but I know the rituals that allow the souls of the fallen to reside within ancestral weapons. That these energies help guide the weapon to always fire true. When the Siren’s prototype zero point reactor core began behaving oddly, no one in the crew could figure out how to fix it. We were minutes from a full core meltdown when I attempted the ritual in reverse, drawing the souls out of my rifle and funneling them into the ship’s energy source. To my utter disbelief it worked, but left me with an empty husk of a weapon, as a dozen generations of my predecessors were now spending eternity keeping the zero point core stable. I had never shown much engineering aptitude prior and played dumb when the reactor began displaying sentience.

In what unlikely way did you come to own this ship?

The official story is that I inherited the Siren from a distant relative. While that is technically true, the real story is far more... complicated. The Siren, then, the LWS Vespira was a top-of-the-line, light-weight battleship that was soon to be in the possession of my grandfather. Shortly after he commissioned it, he passed, and through the long and arduous legal processes that my people use to determine succession (a necessary evil when one's offspring can number in the hundreds or thousands), I was granted ownership... of the debt. My second cousin was granted rights to the ship, while I was expected to pay it off.

To make a long story short, my luck turned around when my cousin was hijacked and murdered in cold blood (no pun intended). So, I hijacked the hijacker, took possession of the ship through right-of-conquest, and for good measure, blasted the hijacker's corpse at close-to-lightspeed through the space station that housed the supercomputer tracking my debt, thereby erasing it and dissolving the corporate entity that created the ship in the first place.

So... happy endings all around.

What evidence of the past did you try to remove from this ship?

The ship was so quiet after everything that happened, and I would have preferred it to stay that way. Unfortunately, our resident tinker, may his soul rest in eternity, had noticed something that I tried desperately to hide from the others. My loneliness. Neither Tik, with their closeness, nor Lav, with their empathic abilities, had been able to see it. So that damned fool created something... just for me. It, of course, would be useful to everyone else, but I knew it was mine.

I don't know whether it was an AI or a VI, but the first time it popped out at me, I nearly shot it. Not that that would do any good. After that day, it wouldn't leave me alone. Just chattering away and trying to fill the void in my soul with its companionship. It would simply have been annoying if it didn't use his voice.

I couldn't take the guilt. I ripped its module out of the computers, and smashed it for good measure... But sometimes I swear I can still hear it.

What part of the ship houses a part of you that you’ll never recover?

It was in the kitchen that Lav began to learn about their own individuality. It was through the study of others. Species love to talk about their foods and delicacies as if they were the highlight of the universe. It was something so uniquely individual, even if they learned that food could also be - and was sometimes best understood as - communal. The nutrient packs were like their home. Bland. Mundane. Something to give you sustanence and nothing more. Something to keep you moving through your next cycle for the good of the whole. But here - in this kitchen - different additives, things called spices and flavors would be added. A dash of some strange flakes might make a pack taste salty, briny like the sea. Dried green leaves might make one taste like savory earth. And heat. Oh, Lav loved the discovery of heat. Not temperature. But somehow taste. All different kinds of heat. It made their auralcels glow excitedly as they decided which they preferred (a rich, earthy, smoky heat) and which they absolutely did not (how do you describe the taste of just..hot. Not heat, just..HOT). But best of all, communal sharing without domination. Laughter as one panicked over a new sensation of heat. Offers of aid without expectation of reciprocity. Judgement, but..friendly judgement over the making of a stupid mistake. No one controlling, saying they must eat in this way.

But the kitchen only holds nutrients. It is there to provide nutrition. To get us through the cycle.

What part of the ship is broken and beyond repair, like you are?

The crown jewel, if there ever was one, of the Siren's War room was an expansive, semi-spherical dome made from crystalline alloys that allowed for an unfiltered, breathtaking view of the cosmos. The walls and ceiling shimmered with a faint iridescence, a byproduct of the dome's intricate energy-field lattice that shielded against radiation and micro-meteoroids. Stars glittered like scattered jewels, and nebulae painted the endless void in hues of lavender and gold. The War Room was a nerve center of strategy and coordination. At the center stood a rotating holo-projector, capable of rendering a three-dimensional map of the ship’s surroundings for tactical planning or navigation. A low hum of technology permeated the air, as the dome also served as a tactical observatory. Embedded panels along the edges displayed real-time star charts, ship telemetry, and celestial phenomena.

After a heated confrontation with the Corporation, however, the dome now sits as a shadow of its former glory. The once-pristine crystalline panels are cracked and clouded, their protective lattice damaged beyond repair. Stars appear fractured, their light distorted into kaleidoscopic streaks that shimmer like tears across the dome’s surface. A faint flicker of the damaged energy field pulses erratically, casting uneven shadows that ripple across the chamber. The central holo-projector still functions intermittently, displaying ghostly, glitching images of star maps long outdated. The faint hum of the room has been replaced by an unsettling silence, broken only by the occasional groan of stressed metal.

What dangerous aspect of the ship is known only to you?

The Augury Chamber. Those ancient star maps? That shared destiny?

I know why the navigation system hasn't been able to pinpoint the stellar coordinates of Map A17-M25Vx. It's because I sabotaged the map.

Because I know what we'd find there.

There's a weapon there, housed in a derelict ship floating free in space for eons. A bomb, to be exact. A star-killing -- no, not just star-killing, system-killing -- bomb created by a long-dead species in the last stages of an ultimately futile war against a conquering force. The ship was carrying this bomb to their enemy's home system, where it would fuse the cores of every star within five light-years of the detonation. The destruction that would follow is almost unimaginable.

I love our Captain. I've sworn my devotion to her, and I do not regret a moment of it. But I know our Captain. Better than anyone else does, I think. And I know that she would not hesitate to retrieve and use that bomb if she felt the ends were justified. I cannot countenance the willful extermination of trillions of sentient life forms. I cannot let the Captain or any of the crew learn of it. It cannot be an option, not ever.

What part of the ship did the Captain miss the most?

Please. Have you seen her talk to those fish? Again... love the Captain. Adore her. But even I have to consider vacating the Captain's Quarters when she's feeding those things. The baby talk. The names. What does 'bitsy pookums' even mean? And the fish kisses! Stars of my ancestors, the fish kisses!

There was one time, when we were being intimate... she called me by one of the fish names. I mean, I went with it, because I didn't want to hurt her feelings. That was the first time I truly understood why the rest of the crew found cleansing showers so appealing.

Yeah. Not excited about being back with Bitsy Pookums and the rest of the school.