This week we played The Final Voyage of The Selene by James Mullen. We learn how each of our characters originally boarded the Selene: A suspicious figure hands Courier Kerenski a briefcase as he hurries towards the passenger boarding line for the Selene… where his briefcase is immediately confiscated by security. Dr. Tsien, ten years after escaping the virus-ridden Station Rona and signing up to be a ship’s doctor, is assigned to the Selene. Artiste Bahk has been here for years, attempting to improve ship-board morale with his comedy routine. Professor Ursel Carris watches the Earth stock market crash, taking her research funding with it, and moves all her lab equipment onto the Selene as a last resort to continue her work.
In Act One, our characters settle in and get to know each other. Everyone meets up at the holo-pub to enjoy a synth-ale, but Bahk’s best efforts are unable to cheer up a gloomy Professor Carris. Later, Dr. Tsien flags down Kerenski to ask what exactly it is a Courier does, and gets some euphemistic answers. Bahk joins Kerenski for a game of racquetball, where the courier grills him on the ship’s security protocols. At the swimming pool, Professor Carris and Dr. Tsien discuss the struggles of a career in science.
In Act Two, some suspicious things start happening. Dr. Tsien catches Kerenski trying to break into the secure storage area at night, looking for his briefcase, and promises to try and get it released for him. On the observation deck, while viewing an interstellar anomaly, Professor Carris is concerned with eye protection, but Dr. Tsien begins acting very strange. Professor Carris has a private conversation with Bahk, where she urges him not to waste his life as one of the last of his species, and offers him some dangerous dust to use in self defense. This feeds Bahk’s suspicion that he’s being watched, and he asks Kerenski for advice about protecting himself by non-lethal means.
In Act Three, everything comes to a head. Professor Carris confronts Dr. Tsien in medbay and accuses him of exploiting Bahk’s species for medical experiments. The doctor accuses her of raving wildly, and has her confined to a quarantine cell before paging Kerenski to report to the medbay. When Kerenski arrives, Dr. Tsien says he can have his briefcase, and in exchange the doctor wants to hand off something he’s been carrying for too long. It turns out he’s referring to the alien symbiote living in his body, which transfers into Kerenski before he can object. Bahk, passing by in the hall, sees Kerenski leaving medbay with Dr. Tsien’s lifeless corpse behind him. Panicking, Bahk steals the doctor’s keys and tries to take off from the shuttle bay, even though the Selene is still in interstitial space. Meanwhile, Kerenski tries to deliver the contents of the briefcase to Professor Carris, but opening the briefcase in the quarantine area causes some kind of explosive reaction that leads to the Selene’s destruction.
In the epilogue, we see Artiste Bahk, alone in Dr. Tsien’s shuttlecraft, emerge from interstitial space into an unexplored part of the galaxy. Courier Kerenski, walking into a meeting on Earth, tells his contact he’s got something new to deliver.
Story Games Club 