Contract: Reclamation of Auctioned Goods
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Our intrepid H̶e̶r̶o̶e̶s̶ bloodthirsty murder hobos survived their first starship combat only to find themselves a butt puckeringly short distance from a soon to be collapsing star.
The recently arrived Sahjon destroyer declared the The Hole system in lockdown. All vessels were to immediately power down all systems except life support and await boarding. as a show of force they destroyed a cargo vessel that had previously been tried in absentia in a league court for smuggling of Meridath artifacts.
Jerzac Scarlewe knew that if the sahjon found possessed the coordinates you would be quickly executed. Skillful piloting by Roquesta (Rocket) Strauss allowed Acquisition Vessel 14 to avoid notice for 2 rounds. Bash must have sneezed and inadvertently fired a torpedo off into the debris field which alerted the sahjon interceptors to the Vessel's presence.
The interceptors took turns hammering your ship while you raced towards the edge of the gravity well. Not long before you were able to warp, the destroyer peeked around the debris field and raked your stern with laser fire. The attacks devastated your sensor array, damaged your turret, and left you warping out with a hull that was starting to look like swiss cheese.
You took a break in your warp travel to repair the ship. Through some skillful engineering from Scotty and Tralia Lightfoot the crew was able to fully repair the ship.
At the end of your 20 day journey, you cautiously dropped your warp field to view what should have been an empty void of space. Instead you find a massive gravity well, no visible light, and an odd infrared reading. After another warp closer you discovered this stretch of space contained a Sol sized star surrounded by a dyson sphere with a small station tethered to the sphere.
On the final approach, Scotty determined the station was being ripped apart by the gravitational forces and then a further inspection revealed the more pressing concern was the stars corona leaking through the dyson sphere. The station has roughly 2 hours to live.
After docking with a huge rent in the station, Scotty skillfully bypassed the archaic Celonian interface on one of doors. Environmental pressure, temperature, and gravity lower than humans prefer greeted you.
The party travelled along the outer corridor of the cylindrical station until they reached another corridor going towards the center. After turning down the corridor they notice a plaque on the wall. After a bit of puzzling out, Tralia and Jerzac realize 1) this archaic celonian says "wall of dead suns: fortification 8749" and 2) the text looks like cuneiform, the oldest writing on earth.
Finally the party reached the core of the station. It was a large cylindrical void with yet another cylinder in the center connected by a platform and catwalks. Looking down you could see large window showing the dyson sphere.
Just as Scotty stepped in to go after the core computer, a large hologram of a celonian appeared before them. It said (as near as I can remember and you could translate) "What....these?" Bash and tralia failed to avoid needles taking blood samples. After lightning fast analysis it said "intersting.....old traces.....meridath....celonian. Who....side......war.....meridath or celonian?" Bash elegantly said neither. Hologram dude retorted with "stellar collapse initiating."
How will our level 1 H̶e̶r̶o̶e̶s̶ bloodthirsty murder hobos survive basically standing on a collapsing star?