Honestly, with all the stress of combat and the horror of fighting things that belonged in a Michael Jackson Video, the title ‘Scotsman’ cracked me up. I started laughing uncontrollably until I cried, and it even helped to deal with the stress of finding out I’d been dead and frozen for who knows how long.
There’s a joke. The British army was marching to war, and there was a Scotsman at the top of a hill they were passing who started mocking them, calling them doughty playboys and crown weaklings.
The colonel broke off a squadron and sent them up the hill to ‘silence that shepherd’.
After a few moments, the squadron went over the hill, there was some shouting and cries of pain and the Scotsman reappeared, playing a bagpipe which was outlawed by the English crown at the time.
The colonel sent a company, 60 soldiers strong, over the hill to silence the Scotsman.
More screaming and cries of pain, and a few minutes later the Scotsman reappeared, this time proudly flashing his kilt at them to show off the fact that he was dressed in nothing underneath.
Scowling in anger, the colonel finally detached an entire regiment, 800 men strong, ordering them to drub that Scottish swine!
More screaming, the clattering of weapons, and finally one English soldier staggered back over the hill, terribly injured and bleeding, and yelled to the colonel, “it's a trap, sir! Don’t send any more men! There’s two of them!”
So, whatever this system was, it clearly had some understanding of my world’s culture, and just possibly, at least a hint of a sense of humor, or possibly just irony.
I now had 4 points that I could not spend while I was inside of this… ship. As a man of my word, I started dragging bodies to the lock, stacking them and the suits on hooks, as well as the body of one of the ghuls into the starting area.
After I was done with the fairly nasty task, I cleaned myself off with a bit of water and rested. I didn’t know if I should keep exploring or return to wherever I had come from, but right now I had a ton of questions and some E-credits to spend, and I was getting hungry, thirsty, and tired. I had no intentions of eating while I was covered in bone dust or that nasty ichor from the Ghuls, so when I finally loaded up the lock with all the stuff I had found, I tried to figure out how their ‘collections’ worked.
I reentered the dungeon, and closed the door, and sealed it with the bar. There were two buttons, one of which was currently glowing green, and the other one red.
It looked like a set from about 50 different sci-fi movies, so when I made sure the door was sealed, I pressed the red button.
I heard a whoosh, and the green light turned off, to be replaced by the button that glowed red. After a half an hour or so more, it turned yellow, so I pressed the green button again, and after a few minutes of hissing, the button returned to green. I discovered that the airlock was now empty.
Okay, the airlock behaves like an airlock. I opened the door to find the room once again clean and tapped my watch.
Would you like to exit the rift?
█ Yes, I would like to exit the rift and allow it to enter a restore cycle (24 hours).
█ No, I would like to return to clearing the rift in its current state.
Ugh. Look, I get it, technically I didn’t owe the Unification anything, but I WAS a man of my word, and clearing this place might even get me out of my obligation in a big hurry. The problem was, as far as I knew, their ‘cell’ was the only place it was safe for me to eat and sleep, which meant clearing this bitch. Something about that didn’t seem quite right to me, but I wasn’t sure about what part of it.
Well, on the plus side, I could lock down the doors. I stepped into the ‘suit room’ and closed the door, resting for a few moments in the room which was remarkably LESS musty now that it wasn’t filled with cheap CG movie monsters.
I took off my filthy gloves and started eating the ‘ration packs’ with my somewhat clean hands, holding them by their foil-style wrappers, and washing down each tasteless bite with a necessary gulp of water.
Why did the first room have a pair of creatures that were clearly highly dangerous and then a room full of what my old gaming buddies would have called ‘yard trash’? Did it have something to do with the overload status? And what exactly did Class E mean anyway, in dungeon parlance? Was E more dangerous than A, or was it less dangerous?
I tried fiddling around with my ‘traits’, but I didn’t even know where or how to get started, especially with the genetic stuff, but it was cool to see the new levels on my character sheet, even if I couldn’t do anything about them.
Anthony Michael Wilkins (Base Human)
Classes: Returner (3)
Energy Credits: 350
Free traits: 4
Chimera (physical affinity): 2
Melee Training (novice)
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Bushwack (amateur)
Durability (novice)
Imagination (mental affinity): 3
Survival (novice)
Empathy (novice)
Undefined (spiritual affinity): 2
Evolutions and Adaptations:
Re-engineered
Resist Mutation
Big game hunter
Scotsman
Recycler
I noticed that when I paid close attention to one of the traits, a small box appeared that gave me a little more information. It didn’t help me USE them, but it certainly let me know what they were for.
After fishing around in the ‘points’ list for a little while on my watch, So many of them were canceled out because they didn’t apply to my species, but several of them attracted my attention. I could use five points to buy a new ‘trait’, and a lot of them had boring titles like ‘basic strength’ and ‘basic durability’ which almost felt like they were designed to be ignored. You could also use the points to increase your affinities, for a number of points equal to the affinity’s current rank. So far, though, I seemed to be getting ranks in the affinities just from doing what I was doing, so I wasn’t going to spend them right away.
Erf, I must be weird, because I had a lot of interest in all of those abilities. I KNEW that the Governor would strongly encourage me to take scavenger when I gained five points, but jury-rigging was probably a trait I could earn for myself. An ounce of duct tape is worth a pound of repairs, at least in the field. Unless, of course, it could stack with all of the weird fixes I already knew. Also, was it even possible to gain traits from experience? It seemed to happen with ‘bushwack’, but that might have been because all of the traits involved were things I had learned however long ago I’d been alive.
After some threshing around, I discovered what ‘quirks’ were.
Quirks:
Big Ears: Goblins can hear a flea fart from a hundred feet away in a wind tunnel. As a returner, you may alter your ears to resemble those of a goblin and gain enhanced hearing. (1 point)
Scrounging: Goblins are master scroungers and can find useful or vaguely edible items under almost any circumstances where other creatures would detect only trash. There are no physical effects from this quirk. (3 points)
Shifter: Returners can assign their quirks either permanently, or temporarily as a shifted form. Shifter gives you one alternate form to which you can assign purchased quirks that can be activated temporarily by spending essence energy. Current Essence: 0 (undefined spiritual affinity) (5 points)
But, I couldn’t purchase any of them yet. Spending points only occurred when you were not in a rift, due to… whatever method the system used to install them. I wondered if that could change. Not to mention, if I wanted to use the quirks I had gained, I would need to get the shifter quirk, since I had no intentions of spending the rest of my life with giant bat-ears and never getting a decent sleep again.
After resting for a bit, I started snooping around the room. I didn’t find any extra resources, but the suits may have already been this room’s reward, so I started opening up another airtight door.
LOTS of skeletons! It looked like some sort of a 150-foot cargo bay, but this time, the skeletons were walking around. Some of them were in shredded spacesuits, much worse shape than the ones I had killed, and others were in the wrecked remains of jumpsuits, much like the one the meat the ghuls had been eating had worn.
I wasn’t sure what they were doing, but they were walking around. There were a few crates that had broken open, and a skeleton would occasionally act like they were going to push it, but whatever was there was in shards on the floor, often stacks.
There was also a skeleton wearing what looked an awful lot like a hard hat, walking around with a classic brown clipboard. He looked like he was taking some sort of notes, but if he’d ever had a pencil or pen it was long gone now, and he occasionally pointed at another pile of refuse and clacked at one of the other skeletons.
In truth, it looked like a working cargo bay, getting checked and balanced by a hard-working crew, but they had probably been repeating the same tasks for at least a decade.
I was wondering about bosses. Every game had ‘bosses’ when you reached the end of a level. The fact that the skeletons seemed to be doing the same thing, again and again, was reassuring since I had to assume a boss of some sort would be slightly smarter. Even the foreman with the clipboard looked just as dilapidated as the rest of the walking dead.
Maybe the first creatures I had encountered, the Ghuls, were the level bosses? That would make sense. Except that… well… so far there had been TOO MANY skeletons roaming around. The Cargo hold probably had a good 50 of them, and the suiting room had at least 12.
When you spend any time on a ship, you begin to get a feel for the number of crew members that should be in any particular area. The cargo bay was big, but it didn’t have a ‘cargo exit’ which meant that whatever was in there had to come through the passageways, probably the ones I had already traversed. The crates were not particularly large, and whatever room that was was a lot less of a loading bay, and a lot more of a storage space… and storage spaces, meaning useful things for the ship itself like spare parts, food, and stuff for the ship’s store, and junk like non-flammable paint, was seldom packed with workers.
I think, perhaps, that might have been the whole ‘preparing for an overload’ thing. All I knew was that even as stupid as they were, I had a lot of work ahead of me if I wanted to clear this thing.
Nope, nope nope. There was no way I was going to spend the next two or three days emptying the ‘resources’ of this bay. Not an effing chance. And 50 skeletons? If they all swarmed me at once, even with a restricted bottleneck like one of the doors, they could just bury me with biting, clawing bodies. I think I needed to try and spend my points and credits on useful stuff before I even dared tackle the giant crowded room.
Maybe that meant I would have to reset things or try a different rift, but I thought I had already done pretty well for a day’s work. I closed the door quietly and headed back to the airlock.
Would you like to exit the rift?
█ Yes, I would like to exit the rift and allow it to enter a restore cycle (24 hours).
█ No, I would like to return to clearing the rift in its current state.
I unhesitatingly pushed the ‘yes’ button.