Session 135: Random Number, Generator

Previously, Across the Horizon...
Aboard the mysterious ship orbiting the moon of Ducorde, our brave adventurers have avoided having half their number defenestrated into the void of outer space by a bored feline Esper. To the eternal chagrin of that half, Yves immediately adopted the Esper.
In order to escape the ship, however, the generator that powers the ship's more elaborate functions must be repaired, as Cait Sith destroyed it nearly three hundred years prior.
Faced with his greatest challenge yet, the captain of the Starfall surveys his available resources (plentiful but utterly perplexing) and his available assistants (same), and then gets to work.
Leaving everyone else to assist however they can.
We join our brave adventurers as they attempt to start the journey home...
**
Bast pauses his inventory of the mangled generator pieces, crouching like some sort of vulture as he surveys the mechanical remains. "Well. This is quite thoroughly dead."
"And I don't suppose 'zot or cut bait' is going to help, this time." Linnet raises an eyebrow nearly into her hair.
Yves is a breath away from lending a helpful hand to the demangling when, for once, he thinks better of it. With a thoughtful glance over at Cait Sith, he says, "Why don't I find this Esper a really comfortable napping spot? I remember some closet items that would nest up cozily. Somewhere quiet, away from all the noise you're going to be making while working on this..." He silently mouths and out of your way at Bast as he makes to scoop up the cutest little murdercat of recent encounter, Triscuit (who merely aspires to murder at his current age) possibly aside.
"The ship isn't, though. So it must not be the only source of power around here. I think...I want to sort out what this thing powers besides our way home - might help with the how." Bast gives a distracted nod to Yves as he starts pacing the floor to try and trace the connections.
"Would it help to sort the remnant pieces and sort of puzzle them all together a bit?" Orrey asks.
Linnet moves to one side of the trash heap and begins sorting similar-looking pieces into piles. Or, well, what would have been similar-looking pieces before they were thoroughly mangled. "Orrey, you take the other side?"
Yves makes very soothing little coaxing noises as he attempts to bundle Cait Sith up into his arms. Which doesn't quite work until he sets on the idea of taking off his cool adventuring coat and sort of sliding the sleep-heavy Esper into that hammock, at which point he can very slowly walk his bundle of murder away from the work area toward the nearest bedroom with all those cozy beds and piles of clothing (from the long-dead crew (who probably deserved it, and would be dead at this point anyway after 300 years, so it's fine and not weird, honest!)).
Luca wanders around for a moment, looking way out of their depth. Finally, they bite the bullet and just ask Bast directly. "Uh...anything I can do to make your job easier? Fetch parts? Hold a light?"
"Wires." When that doesn't seem to produce the desired effect, Bast tears his attention away from the machinery long enough to clarify. "Need more, most of the old ones won't be usable, see if you can find some lying around. Don't yank them out of anything that's working yet, we still don't know what most of the things are around here."
"Loose wires, as many as I can find, don't disconnect anything. Got it."
Elsewhere, Cait Sith would never do anything as lowborn and simple as show gratitude for a favor. Instead, the Esper simply curls up and goes to sleep, safely away from any muttering moogles or crystal collectors.
Orrey crosses his eyes trying to get some odd pieces lined up. "Something this complicated would need some serious instructions to maintain, right? They'd need to train new people on how to deal with issues that came up. I'm going to go search for a manual, or a diagram, or something!"
His piece said, Bast gets down on all fours to examine what used to be the base of the generator and track one of the conduits from the tiny stub that survived Cait Sith's centuries-old rampage. After a zap and some muffled cursing, he backs up a little and tries to glean some information from the details of the floor around the generator. The cursing gradually grows less muffled.
Yves tiptoes back toward the wreckage several minutes after he left with a coat o' cat, now bearing less cat. And also less coat. He looks even lankier than usual, without that layer to give his torso the illusion of heft. "How's it going?" he asks the room in general.
"Watch your feet, please, I'm attempting to organize things. By...thingness." Linnet has several piles now, and the things do have different qualities of thingness about them, though whether that's helpful is entirely up to Bast.
Yves sits down on the floor near Linnet, and peers at the piles accordingly. "Oo, taxonomy!"
"Right, that was the word, rather than 'thingness.' Yves, thank you for reminding me how language works." Linnet gives him a tired smile.
Yves, who has gotten over a surprising amount of his grimness since the rescue/acquisition of a murderous Esper, digs into his satchel and offers Linnet a flask from within. "We've been here a while, and we've been through... a lot, so, uh, have a drink? Nothing weird in this one. It's just coffee. Okay coffee and a little bit of rum and a splash of maple syrup, but nothing harder than that."
"Hm, interesting combination." Linnet takes a gulp and holds a pondering expression. "Where'd you get the maple? Did we have that in the galley and I just missed it?"
With a frustrated scree of claws on metal, Bast gives up on extracting the floor's secrets and comes over to look at the piles organized by Linnet and Orrey for anything he missed on the first pass.
"Oh, no, I picked that up the last time I was out shopping," Yves says earnestly. "My grandmother always liked--I mean, still likes, since now I know she's not dead, but anyway, she always said that maple syrup was the second best sweetener, since you don't need, I guess, widespread agriculture to deploy it effectively, and can get it from forested areas pretty easily. I mostly just like the flavor of it, but, you know, maple, anything that wants to be sweet can use a bit of maple, right? Right." He slides one thingy into a slightly differently thingifying pile. "I keep thinking I should work out some cocktails with it, but I've never known much about how to mix those. I end up putting in everything I like and it just tastes like too much, or nothing in particular. It's easier to make drugs. That's chemistry, not, uh, cooking, I guess? Whatever you call making cocktails, since there's probably a name for it, but 'cooking' and 'baking' both sound wrong, unless you're making the cocktail on a stove."
Orrey wanders around the ship looking for some sort of archive of manuals or physical books for a long while until he hits on the idea that the books are IN THE SHIP. On a console like the one in the Sphere on the Starfall. With that inspiration, he checks every screen he can find, zigzagging through the corridors and checking every room he can think of in a random pattern until he finds a small flickering screen on some kind of device that is barely attached to a column on a wall, dangling by a frayed cord that somehow hasn't broken off. Another frustrating electronic search eventually leads him to an icon that resembles some kind of tool that opens a treasure trove of illustrated diagrams, some of which might look like a generator.
"Mixology, was the word I learned for it. Which makes it sound much more scientific and process-based than "thingifying." But I like 'thingifying' for lots of purposes."
The documents Orrey has found on the display in the Stellar Extraction Chamber showcase a wide variety of machines, the specifics of which scroll past him as quickly as their images. There are several of the spheres of the ship, though; they could warrant further review, especially seeing as the designs seem mutually exclusive -- there is not room in the larger sphere for both of the apparatuses he sees diagrammed there.
Linnet sits back on her heels and looks up at Bast. "Hi, Cap'n. No idea if this helps, but the thingies are here, the broken whatsits are here, the doohickeys are over by Yves' knee, the whosits are in that teetering stack on the right, and the few gizmos I found are over there. And the broken wires are mostly stripped and put in this scrap pile."
Yves looks up from his thingifying of thingy piles, and points helpfully to the thingies, whatists, doohickeys, whosits, and gizmos as Linnet discusses them. He doesn't point to the broken wires. Those seem self-explanatory.
Bast gives Linnet a baffled look. "What is that even-...huh." Thought unfinished, he homes in on the whosits, pulls a few off the top of the stack and sits down to try several arrangements before squinting at one that seems to make some sense to him. "...what were they doing with a flywheel of all things, and what were they slotting into these cutouts?" Armed with new questions, he gets back to poking through the carefully organized piles with a clear sense of purpose.
"Well, good, if some of it makes sense to somebody, then that's progress." Linnet starts braiding a few of the stripped wires.
Yves takes a nip from the coffee++ flask, and waves it toward others who might want a slug. It has been a long day.
There are many long minutes spent poring over the thingness of things before Luca returns, but they return triumphant. A wrist-thick bundle of wires is coiled over their shoulder, and they lift it off and hold it high. "You are not going to believe where I found these!"
Bast wordlessly holds out one hand for the flask as the other is carefully prodding at a piece of the flywheel with an only slightly jagged piece of machinery - which, alas, refuses to fit. Three gulps go down like water before he wipes his mouth on his sleeve, passes the flask back, and sets the latest failure aside just in time for Luca's return.
"In the loo," Linnet ventures. "Did you happen to find a hammer? Do we need a hammer? Would some loud banging help, or at least be therapeutic?"
"Under another murderous feline?" Yves guesses. "Do I need to talk to them? Were they already asleep?"
Luca offers the bundle of wires to Bast with both hands and an elaborate bow, then straightens. "Officer's cabin. Bit of a shrine, tons of loose wiring, weird juxtaposition, lucky us!"
"...a shrine at which they were offering wires? Or made out of wires? Is there one of the Twelve who particularly likes wires?"
"Huh. A shrine?" Bast looks over the wires approvingly. "Well, they don't need them anymore, and these should work pretty well. Nice find. Now, how did they generate a charge..."
"You're right," Yves says, "I would not have--wait, you said 'believe,' not 'guess', so I guess you're wrong. I would believe that. But I totally wouldn't have guessed that."
The lights in the mysterious ship flicker and dim, but just for a moment. Cait Sith stretches all four paws and rolls onto their back, well away from anything that would pin this on them. The display in front of Orrey flickers and blinks, and as Orrey watches, one of the diagrams erases itself.
Orrey, already having pulled out a sketchbook since he knew he wouldn't be able to get the console back the Bast, lets out a little squeak of dismay and hurriedly starts sketching. Faster than he's ever done before, the diagrams and words sprawl across pages and pages of his sketchbook. Hardly even taking his eyes of the screen, he switches from image to image, picking up two pencils and holding a third in reserve, he manages to snatch all of the information before it disappears, though he barely understands what any of it means. The brain is processing pure visuals and not picking up anything of the engineering behind it all. There's a beauty even in these technical documents that Orrey can't seem to help but pull out as he goes, as well. Alternan science is an artform.
Orrey's return to the room is one full of arm waving, relentless optimism, and artistic description, only a tiny portion actually helpful. "BAST! You gotta see this stuff I found! There were DIAGRAMS and everything!"
Yves pops to his feet to ask, immediately, "Diagrams?!?!?" He's probably going to appreciate them aesthetically. Or something.
Bast sets down the wire he's been coiling and hops up to his feet, suspicion that this might turn out like the last time the party has found diagrams plain on his face. "Alright, let's see them."
"...oh, huh," Yves says, and starts fishing around in his satchel. After a moment, he comes out with a widget--or possibly a thingy, the specific taxonomy of the piece is not immediately apparent--and holds it out to Bast. "Would this help? I picked it up while I was stowing Cait Sith, since it was in the pocket of one of the coats I pulled out for the bed. Where I'm sure it ended up on its own. Or because some human put it there. That's definitely how it got there. While all those people here were alive. I am sure that is the very logical reason why it would be somewhere like that. Anyway, hope it helps I'm gonna go check on that Esper bye!" He leaves the widget/thingy atop the place in Orrey's diagram where it looks to possibly fit, and scampers before any questions can be raised.
"...can't fault his enthusiasm." Linnet has amassed an intricate foot-long braid of wire scraps and is still working.
"I mean, just look at this sleek elegance balanced out by whatever this crazy swirl of parts and wires is supposed to be. And this one looks a lot like Linnet's hair when Yves is playing with the Lightning a little too close." Orrey says, flipping pages, careful not to smudge.
Linnet gives Orrey a Look. "I don't want to know."
Bast's eyes hungrily rove over the sketches as Orrey provides exhuberant commentary, finger tracing connections and outlines. "-three-gauge, gotta be at least a five-gauge line here not to melt, crystals, of course it's crystals with these people, but why - oh. Oh, this is straight out of Yoshuelje's party hat." He catches his breath. "Yeah, we can't do that here, not with what we've got, not without a foundry at the least. But this-" He taps his finger just below the widget Yves supplied, several times, in frenzied emphasis. "-bet you half the damn ship I can get at least half the output they did now that we have an alternator that's not in five pieces." He lifts it and sets it down carefully by the pieces he'd already loosely reassembled, takes a moment to go through his tools, and gets to work.
"Not to distract you, but these here seem to be Spheres. Or things in Spheres that could potentially have something to do with the Starfall." Orrey says ominously.
"Bast, you're a mad genius and if we make it out of this alive, you're getting a play written about you. At least a one-act," Linnet says.
Somewhere else in the ship, Yves is checking the pockets of a lot of hanging clothing for other small yet vital parts of gods even know what at this point. Just in case. (Being Yves, he is rapidly distracted by any room that looks more interesting than a bedroom, because if it's not cool and adventuresome, clothing is sort of boring.) (Then, still being Yves, he checks another set of officer's quarters in case there's a replacement Adventure Coat in working condition in any of them, since he's not sure when, if ever, he'll get his current one back from Cait Sith.)
The pieced-together flywheel is the first to show signs of life, completing one painfully slow rotation around its axis before picking up speed. Something sparks, and Bast dives into the mess of wires he's put together with one of the insulated segments from the organized wreckage, grounding the charge on the body of the ship before it does any serious damage. There's a mechanical whine from one of the moving pieces somewhere, the clicking sound from the alternator doesn't seem to bother Bast so it's probably fine, most of the old wreckage is either still unused or tied together in the most improbable ways...but it seems to be holding?
As the wheel suddenly slows, dumping its energy into the conduits leading away to other pieces of the ship before it begins to pick up speed again, Bast sits down heavily a couple of paces back from the generator and just stares at it for a few seconds, daring it to come apart on his watch. As it inexplicably fails to do so and the lights in the hold grow brighter, he finally turns to the rest of the party.
"Well. This is fine?"
"If it gets us back home, it can fall apart five seconds after we get there for all I care. Now, how do we steer? ...Yves, I think you might need to go get the instructional cat."
"Wait," Luca says, "steer? Are we not using the sphere?"
"...does the sphere do the steering? Look, I have no idea how any of this works." Linnet gives Luca a very expressive shrug carrying the weight of all the creeped-out terrible happenings on this ship.
Yves has just returned with a coat full of cat, and an overfilled satchel. "You would not believe what I--well, you'd probably believe what I found, it's books, but it turns out this ship has a name! It's a terrible name! Let's leave as soon as possible."
"Interesting. Care to share?" Linnet asks.
Bast gives Linnet a nonplussed look. "We didn't bring this ship up here, I have no idea what taking it back down would involve, it's probably best for everyone if we just go back the way we came in."
"It's called Atma Weapon and that sounds like a great ship name for something we might want to, uh, not be on too much? For too long?" Yves is trying very hard to explain this in hushed tones so as not to disturb the coat-sleeping Esper.
"...are we seriously taking doom cat back with us?" Linnet looks pained.
Cait Sith, two hours removed from trying to suffocate Linnet, makes a little snoring noise as they sleep.
Orrey shrugs. "At least this one didn't actually attack us... But I think locking you into a room to die might count." He frowns.
Luca wibbles a hand. "Boredom can make you weird," they note.
"Aw, Cait Sith didn't even get to murder the people who hurt their friends, can't blame them for being testy when we woke them up," Yves says. Coos, almost. "This will be fine, just like with all the other ones we've met! I'm thinking a sort of sound-insulated cubby with a nice entry flat?" He nods approvingly to Luca.
"How weird have you been?" Orrey asks, intrigued.
"Does Atma come up anywhere else that we know of? Besides that one book."
Linnet glares at Cait Sith and Yves. "YOU are responsible, Thunderbun, for keeping Doom Cat from teaching our existing ship's cat any bad habits. I don't want Triscuit trying to lock us in a room or destroying the engine."
"If ATMA gave us info about Espers, and this is a Weapon...it's probably to use against them." Orrey finishes off slowly and sadly.
Luca nods. "That seems in keeping with the whole 'extract stars and turn them into crystals' thing."
"All signs point to doom device." Orrey nods in agreement.
Yves looks down fondly at Cait Sith. "They've been so restrained, given everything that happened to stars before... All of them, not just this one! Besides, Triscuit isn't an Esper, what could he even learn? To claw things? He already claws things."
Bast gives the reconstituted generator a suspicious frown and says "Don't go closer than three paces to this thing, just in case. I want to check something." before heading for the elevator.
Orrey glances down at his holy symbols and seems to be having some serious, uncomfortable thoughts.
"...so were the crystals we found crew members, or Espers?"
Luca gets an expression that says they've just had a really awful thought. "If the ship was meant to condense Espers into crystals, and something turned it on the crew....in Alterna you were your Job..."
Yves looks intrigued. Appalled. Intripalled. Appagued.
"How sure are we that what turned it on the crew wasn't the doom cat, here?"
"Pretty sure," Yves says. "Cait Sith wouldn't have said otherwise if they did in the crew. They would've been boasting."
"This whole ship is a graveyard. I think I'm going to leave these here." Orrey carefully pulls out all of the crystals and leaves them in little color-sorted piles. He writes the names that he knows on the walls above them. 
Linnet gives a big sigh of relief.
Cait Sith squirms around in the coat to get more comfortable, holding onto their tail with all four paws. The crown droops over one eye as they sleep.
"May you rest in whatever peace you can. May whatever you've done not haunt you or the rest of the world." Orrey gets up and walks over to be with his friends.
Linnet removes a single crystal from her pocket - collected what feels like weeks ago, but was only hours - and stares at it. "This is a Farmer's crystal. What was it doing on the ship? This came from the Stellar Extractor. Friends, help me sound this out." Linnet hasn't taken her eyes off the crystal. "It's a civilian job crystal, it was in the canister that the Stellar Extractor spat out to me, and there's nobody alive on this ship except the cat. What was it extracted from?"
Alone up in Sabik's room, Bast looks through the glass once more before stepping back and slowly pacing around the rest of the space.
"The people they were pulling apart," Yves says grimly. "The people they didn't think counted as people. That's who. Stellar Extractor, right? They were breaking down the stars into these."
Luca can only ask "Why, though?"
"...what Esper would have taught us how to farm? I sort of thought people figured that out for themselves," says the city girl who can't keep a potted plant alive.
"...empire? Prioritizing one set of people over others?" Yves shrugs in frustration. All the larger gestures he might make are forestalled by coat-cat.
"I would have thought Yinha did that." Orrey says.
"...I'm going to keep this one for further study, and thought, and reflection, and probably regret." Linnet closes her fist around the crystal and whispers a brief prayer to whoever might have once been...it. Or associated with it.
"Maybe Yinha did that by talking someone into an extraction chamber to make Job crystals to give people," Yves said dryly.
"All right, you two, don't start. Let's get back to our own world and then have philosophical debates. We can resolve it with a pie-flinging contest if you give me a few hours." Linnet is all business again.
"Right. Back to the sphere?" Luca suggests.
Bast rejoins the group at the smaller sphere. After a few parting words for the mysterious ship (some more colorful than others), they file inside, select Relay, and marvel as absolutely nothing happens.
Fortunately, Cait Sith wakes up long enough to say that the command must be sent from the Cockpit, which leads Bast to grumble his way up there to enable the option.
He does not return for some time. Just before someone is elected to go after him, the intercom crackles to life. "You need to see this," is all he says.
Upon joining Bast in the Cockpit, the adventurers understand why.
The Atma Weapon's orbit has taken it to the dark side of the moon. Nox takes up the entire view; Ducorde cannot be seen at all, not even its rings.
The dark side of the moon is not a featureless expanse of shadowed rock.
It has exploded.
The dark side of the moon is a rupture, a hole torn in Ducorde's satellite.
What caused the eruption is plain to see, because the fragments of it litter the remnants of the moon.
The truth wasn't in Alterna.
It was here.
The Great Crystal exploded here.