Beacon Hunter Quest #2

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>>504246

You allow your perception to shift ever so slightly to Araella, but you try to hold back to avoid being burned. You just want to see her spirit, not get hit by it. It extends past her body, strangely unbounded and undisciplined as though her spirit is fire and she's simply the fuel that it burns from. Near her left hand you notice a difference though. She's extended it over the circuit. Her energy instead of radiating away is directed as though propelled. It flows violently from her to her target, the difference between it and the rest of her is like the difference between a torch and a flamethrower. You're pretty sure that she's overdoing it, but this isn't really your area of expertise. The energy bathes the device, though when you look at it through your eyes instead of your mind you see nothing.

Araella rolled 18, 9, 10 vs effective DC 21, spent 14 for regular failure

After a few moments of projected spirit washing over the circuit, the speaker makes a popping noise. It pops again, then another time sooner than the first. The pops become more frequent until they end up as a sort of regular white noise emitting from the speaker. The sound is like that of a heavy wind blowing on a fire, which seems appropriate. After a few moments of that, Araella cuts it off.

She looks at you. "Boom. Easy." A bead of sweat drips from her forehead.

>Araella's focus: 16/31

You're not sure whether or not to be impressed. On the one hand, from what you know about this kind of exercise the newest and least experienced trainees capable of performing it at all produce a single tone. More experienced Navigators ar able to manipulate the energy more finely, causing the speaker to emit series of notes, then any imaginable sound. The noise Araella created was unrefined and chaotic, but on the other hand she picked up the skill of using focus directly faster than you believed possible. You didn't really have to explain anything, she just made it work. That alone exceeded your expectations. Combined with the fact that she's able to project energy enough to complete the circuit to activate the speaker, it's very impressive for someone with as little experience as her.

You opt to congratulate her. "Pretty good. That's an intermediate's exercise, and although you didn't do it right you did show that you have the basics down. Expending as much effort as possible to succeed will only get you so far. Next time try to modulate the flow of the energy you're projecting. The speaker should be emitting a single constant tone. Still, I'm very impressed, getting it to make any noise at all is beyond what most people with your experience are capable of."

>2/3

>>504252

Though you're not sure how long she's technically been a navigator, the speed at which she picked up the basics once you explained them is far beyond anything you've ever heard of. Most people take weeks to perform even the simplest task by projecting focus externally. You remember the first thing you tried. You were just trying to figure out how many rocks there were behind a barrier with your extrasensory perception. Now a task that you could do with an instant to focus, at the time it was far beyond your capabilities. It took days to even get your perception outside of you in the first place. For Araella it took moments.

You continue. "For now you should get some rest. I can tell that that took a lot out of you, and we're going to be heading to somewhere potentially very hostile. The Beacon is a great place to recover your energy but I have to confess that I don't really know the best way for you to go about doing so. For me, I let my mind rest on some anomaly in the Beacon. Sleep always works fine too. I'd suggest that you look for some sort of weird energy. Maybe somewhere where your hair stands on end. That might work for you."

She responds to the affirmative and then walks off. Turning a corner and disappearing behind a geometric metal structure which floats unsupported near the catwalk.

You turn your mind to plans for your next move. You want to explore the ruins on Illica, but you're not really sure where to start. You're not even there though, and that's the next step. You'll figure out where to go once you arrive. For now you have a couple options. You could:

>Teleport to somewhere in Illica's orbit path. It'll have a high risk of detection, since ships are going to be around the planet and looking out. The Vesuans are quite insular, and they're likely to be prepared for anyone jumping in close to their planets.

>Fly there manually. You'll jump just outside the beacon and just head over to the planet. You can take an awkward vector and be pretty stealthy. There's still a moderate chance you're detected, but few people are going to expect someone to waste hours flying from the beacon when they could have just jumped directly.

>Jump directly onto the planet's surface. Instead of risking detection, you'll just jump right onto the planet. It's an incredibly risky maneuver, but you have the skill to pull it off, probably. You'll just need to calculate the exact path of Illica and figure out exactly where the planet is going to be as you perform your jump. You'll have a bit of leeway as long as you get the absolute spacial coordinates within the planet's gravitational field, since the location you're teleporting too will move along with the planet.

>3/3

>>504258
>>Fly there manually. You'll jump just outside the beacon and just head over to the planet. You can take an awkward vector and be pretty stealthy. There's still a moderate chance you're detected, but few people are going to expect someone to waste hours flying from the beacon when they could have just jumped directly.

>>504258
>Fly there manually. You'll jump just outside the beacon and just head over to the planet. You can take an awkward vector and be pretty stealthy. There's still a moderate chance you're detected, but few people are going to expect someone to waste hours flying from the beacon when they could have just jumped directly.

>>504258
>>Fly there manually. You'll jump just outside the beacon and just head over to the planet. You can take an awkward vector and be pretty stealthy. There's still a moderate chance you're detected, but few people are going to expect someone to waste hours flying from the beacon when they could have just jumped directly.

>>504268
>>504306
>>504445
>Slow and steady

Roll For Me 3d10+19 vs DC 37 (base DC20 + 17)

Rolled 6, 3, 4 + 19 = 32 (3d10 + 19)

>>504476
Witness me, dice gods!

Rolled 5, 8, 8 = 21 (3d10)

>>504476

Rolled 10, 8, 10 + 19 = 47 (3d10 + 19)

>>504476
I am glad we have this focus thing because we don't have good rolls

>>504488
>>504513
>>504775
Rolled 32, 40, 47 vs DC 37

Regular Success.

Spend 5 for Great Success?

Also the rolls so far have been pretty hard. The feel I've been trying to go for is that of a fairly experienced character doing fairly difficult things. Like right now even though you chose the lowest DC option, the rolls still had a less than 50% chance of resulting in success before focus was spent. It worked out though.

>>504810
Don't spend

>>504810
Don't spend. We'll need it for failures.

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You decide you'll approach Illica by simply flying there. Your ship is small and nobody is expecting your arrival. With some luck you won't even be seen at all. You stand up and start walking to your ship.

You move along the catwalk you were using as your resting location. As you pass the strange structures around you and through the enclosed spaces that appear periodically along the path to your ship you steady yourself. Walking along the path is an ordeal, to be honest. Gravity is inconsistent and occasionally the path itself will invert. On one such section of the path you take a look above you, gazing into the abyss. The lights illuminating the edges of this particular area fade out inconstantly. The points after which only black remains form a sort of ragged edge to the hole above you. Additionally, there are myriad other structures: catwalks, platforms, even rooms scattered seemingly haphazardly all the way 'down'. As you pass by a particularly interesting you decide to look more closely.

You're not in any sort of hurry; traveling by ship is going to take hours, especially with the idea you have in mind. Plus it's not like you're on a clock at all in the first place. The only thing that has a chance of running out is your patience, and maybe the food on the Jet ship. You haven't actually appraised its stores but it's probably fine. There's no rush.

You climb over the railing of the catwalk and take a short hop, landing on an outstretched panel of an odd hydroponic station. On it grows a single tree, rooted to a pentahedronal base of some kind. There's quite clearly not enough room for the tree's whole root system. You wonder how it's sustained. Are the roots someplace else, transported to sustenance by a sort of sustained portal? This is the inside of a beacon, after all. That wouldn't be the strangest thing you've ever seen in one of these. You look at the tree. You don't recognize the species, you're no botanist or whatever after all, but it looks old. It's rather enormous, but the trunk seems to be roughly the same width as the hedron it's embedded in. Maybe it was transplanted there from somewhere else? Or pehaps the base somehow grows or gets replaced as the tree ages? It extends a long distance upwards.

You extend your mind to the space around you, checking for somewhere where gravity is abnormal. Finding a spot off to the side of the tree, you leap off the platform and allow yourself to fall upwards to the tree's canopy. You sit there and look out into the cavernous area of the beacon you're in. You can see your stolen ship on the platform where you left it. You're happy to see that it hasn't drifted off. A short distance away you see Araella, frustratedly brandinshing one of her pistols at a chunk of metal. You're not really sure what she's trying to accomplish, but whatever it is doesn't seem very restful. You pause for a moment more before leaping down from the tree. Just being here is a pleasant distraction.

>1/4

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>>505594

Your boots impact the catwalk heavily, creating a clanging sound that echoes around you, fading into the distance and then returning. You make your way over to the ship, where you find Araella yelling at a large piece of floating metal. She fires several shots from her energy pistol into the thing. They get absorbed, causing the object to glow slightly for a moment. Araella stops yelling for a moment and appears excited, but as the glow fades her expression sours. She holds out her hand and closes her eyes but nothing happens. After a moment she clenches her hand into a fist.

You walk up next to her. "Good effort." You say, pretending to know what she was trying to do. "But it's time for us to head out. We're heading over to Illica now that we've caught our breath. We're taking the long way, so you can catch some shuteye while we're flying."

"I almost had it." She responds. "The energy felt like it was coming back together, you know?"

"Sure. Let's go." You turn and walk to the ship. She follows.

--

Inside the ship you pull up your map of the Vesua system. Right now you're at the outskirts, inside the beacon. You have little information about common Vesuan travel routes and patrols, so you opt to do the safest thing you can. You mark the location you intend to teleport to. Your destination is 'below' the solar system. You've decided that going relatively far perpendicular to the orbits of the planets in the system is most likely to result in safe travel. There will only be a small window where you'll be in the places most likely to be patrolled. You're pretty sure that not even the Vesuans would bother having ships travel several light-hours down into empty space on a regular basis. Maybe if you had been seen there might be some danger. You throw together the ship information and figure out where your want to be in space, then send it off to the beacon. The response feels instantaneous. The energy flows through you. You're ready. You jump. The ship fades out.

As you rematerialize you find yourself surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. You maneuver the ship towards where Illica is going to be in 9 hours and hit the 'go' button. The ship starts accelerating.

You decide to take a short nap.

>2/4

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>>505605

----

6 hours later you awaken naturally. Having nothing else to do you recheck your course calculations and trajectory. You find something rather annoying. You seem to have miscalculated your acceleration. At this rate, Illica is going to be a fair distance past where you intended to intercept its orbit. You can't start accelerating again otherwise you won't be able to slow down in time to not slam into the planet and die. There's only one solution, really. You adjust your angle so you're no longer perpendicular to the orbit, directing yourself towards where the planet will be at your speed at that angle. You check and recheck everything to make sure it's all correct. You're not really sure how you made the error in the first place. Maybe the map was imprecise, and the data you've gotten from local transmitters corrected it?

Regardless, there's no helping it. You make the change. Your new course puts you close enough to the orbit that you're worried you might be noticed, but you'll just hope that it doesn't happen. It'll probably be fine.

You bide your time traveling the rest of the way by fiddling with your trinket. You work on setting up something that can compare all the files in the archives you took from the ship to the transmission you've saved. You've got quite a bit of experience with the type of encoding the transmission has. You start by focusing on how the metadata containing information about how the transmission was sent and how it should be read might have ended up being corrupted or garbled over such a long distance. It should have been the strongest part of the signal so it's the best place to compare, you're hoping something will match directly with the transmission you already have so you don't need to seek out someone to help you. You don't finish by the time you're in what you consider to be the 'danger zone' of the system, so you put your work on hold.

You place your hands on the ship's manual controls and check your sensors for any salient information. You've gone dark so you can't get any information from outside sources now, they'd ping you and the Vesuans would want a ship signature. The two options you have of not showing your signature or revealing your Somnius credentials are both fairly undesirable. You pilot the ship towards the planet, now clearly in view. Most of your approach is uneventful.

As size of the planet in your viewscreen increases. You notice a ship on your sensors. You've gotten quite close without any hassle, but if you've seen this ship then they've probably seen you. You change your course away from them, hoping that they decide to pay you no mind. You set your sensors to constantly update that direction just to be safe, though. A few minutes later you get more information fromt he sensors. The ship's angle has changed. It points directly towards where you were going. This is bad.

>3/4

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>>505612

You speed up. You can afford to make your approach a little more dangerous in order to avoid being intercepted. You set your ship to not even respond to any hails. Once you get into the atmosphere you'll be able to find somewhere to hide.

--

Your sensors continue to indicate the path of the ship chasing you, though presumably with a few minutes' delay. It's clearly trying to predict your path to intercept you, but aside from 'towards the planet' it's been largely unsuccessful. You've been adjusting your couse to keep throwing it off. Furthermore, it's unwilling to accelerate to your speed, so you're gaining distance slowly.

You reach the atmosphere. You angle your ship towards the largest mountain you can see, not bothering to put of the brakes. You'll let the drag slow you down.

As you pass through the stratosphere you begin losing sensor information about the ship chasing. It might be unnerving if you didn't know that the ship is probably having similar sensor troubles. Once your information is no longer consistent you make a sharp direction change to throw the ship off even further. You'll find an actual facility to explore later. For now the focus is on getting away.

--

You find a large cave embedded in the third sizeable mountain you pass. You change your path so it's straight towards the mountain and angle your ship so the bottom points directly at the thing. You fire the thrusters to decelerate. The ground rushes up to meet you and the mountain looms over you. The foothills around it are heavily forested. This area unfortunately seems to have no notable architecture. It's all wilderness. Whatever, you need to focus on landing for now. You'll probably find some sort of old communications station near some major geographical feature when the time comes. It'll work out. You come to a harsh stop.

The ship clatters gently on the ground. You've made it. You look into the back of the cabin of the ship. Araella is sound asleep on the bench in spite of the bumpy landing. You're honestly a bit impressed, even envious of her ability to sleep through that whole thing.

Regardless, you've got plans to make. You're going to:

>Lay low for a while. You caught a bit of heat and although you weren't identified, someone is probably looking for you. You'll wait for a while and then search the planet for a communications facility.

>Go somewhere civilized. You'll leave your ship behind hidden somewhere. You'll ask around discreetly for information about ruined places. Hopefully there's somewhere on this planet where they accept visitors.

>Lose any heat you might have. Showing up out of the blue might draw too much attention to you depending on how big of a deal that ship that was chasing you is. You'll draw them to this ship and let them find it, maybe crash it so they think you died. You'll steal another ship to get off the planet when the time comes.

>4/4

>>505622
>>Lay low for a while. You caught a bit of heat and although you weren't identified, someone is probably looking for you. You'll wait for a while and then search the planet for a communications facility.

Low DC, less of a chance of needing to spend focus.

>>505637
Remember that you can regain your focus with just a good night's sleep. It's just faster if you go to a beacon, but not required.

>>505774
I know, but I'm still going for low DC. When our focus gets into the mid twenties, then I'll go for more risk, but right now, I'm playing it safe.

>>505622
> go somewhere civilized
Planets are big, ships are small, surely that won't find it stuck in some no name cave

>>505622
>>Go somewhere civilized. You'll leave your ship behind hidden somewhere. You'll ask around discreetly for information about ruined places. Hopefully there's somewhere on this planet where they accept visitors.

>>505622
>Lay low for a while. You caught a bit of heat and although you weren't identified, someone is probably looking for you. You'll wait for a while and then search the planet for a communications facility.

>>505622
>Go somewhere civilized. You'll leave your ship behind hidden somewhere. You'll ask around discreetly for information about ruined places. Hopefully there's somewhere on this planet where they accept visitors.