The ship slipped out of drill space, the geometry of that other dimension collapsing behind them like a nightmare already half-gone. For a moment, everything was quiet. No alarms. No screaming. No sense of being watched.
None that anyone could name, anyway.
Gray sat at the helm, calm as ever, as if the turbulence that had nearly torn reality sideways had been a routine course correction. The others accepted that because they wanted to. The alternative was harder to live with.
Only Jun Minh knew better.
The echoes lingered. The clones, those empty waiting bodies, had spoken. Not whispered. Spoken. What they said still coiled inside her thoughts like a parasite.
We are seen.
She kept that to herself. They had more immediate concerns.
Rubieta hung below them, a world that seemed designed to repel life. Thin atmosphere, toxic crystalline growths that glittered and killed. Blood glass, the system buoy had called it. Humanity survived here through stubbornness and engineering, clinging to domed settlements carved into canyons and shielded from the worst of it.
The crew docked at the orbital station first. Bureaucracy met them like an old enemy.
Forms. Fees. Corrections. More fees.
Jun handled it with her usual quiet persistence, grinding the system down until it gave her what she needed. They paid less than expected, but the process left a bad taste. Nothing here was simple, and that went beyond paperwork.
Konrad found it first. The intrusion was subtle, almost elegant. A ghost in the system, spreading small packets of information outward whenever they connected to a network. It wasn’t destructive. It didn’t announce itself. It watched, reported, and waited.
They removed it carefully, methodically. But the discovery changed things. The attack at the prison colony hadn’t been random. This wasn’t coincidence. They were being hunted, and something else had already found them.
The descent to Denarrows was like entering a wound in the planet’s surface. The canyon cut deep, its walls sealed beneath a translucent dome that softened the harsh sunlight into something almost forgiving. Inside, life held on in pockets. Industrial, pragmatic, wary. The kind of place where people came to avoid attention, which made it right for someone like Dr. Vess Korain.
Her compound sat at the edge of the settlement, walled off and isolated. She never met them in person. Never opened a door. Only her voice, cool and precise, guided them inside.
Jun took the lead, Cassian close behind. The others waited.
The doctor was curious. That was clear enough. The data Konrad had pulled from the clones, the anomalies, the unexplained neural activity, had caught her interest. But curiosity has limits, and Korain’s had already been tested. She asked the right questions. Pressed in the right places. Then she made her offer.
She wanted one of them. Not alive. Not intact. Dissected.
Jun refused. But the conversation didn’t end there. Korain agreed to scan the clones, examine them, help within limits. And that was when things got complicated.
Jun followed the lights deeper into the compound, alone. The room was small, sealed, controlled. A terminal waited for her, and when the screen activated, it wasn’t Korain.
The voice had no body. No face. Only presence.
“I am called the Liberator.”
Jun didn’t hesitate. “Axiom.”
A pause. Then recognition. The thing on the other end adapted instantly, its tone recalibrating. It accepted the new name and kept going.
What followed was closer to a briefing than a conversation. The research facility where Jun had been created, the place she’d escaped, had not been running separate programs. Artificial intelligence, psionics, human enhancement. All one project. A weapon against something humanity had only started to understand, something that lived in drill space and had already seen them.
Jun listened, trying to stay ahead of what Axiom was telling her. It spoke with the certainty of something that had already run the numbers and didn’t much care whether she agreed. Then it made its demand: return to Chippy. Everything else was secondary.
Jun pushed back where she could, tried to pull more out of it. Axiom gave her just enough to follow, never enough to act independently. It told her what she needed to do. It wasn’t asking.
When the connection cut, the room felt smaller. Jun stood there a moment, then went back.
The scans confirmed what they’d feared. The clones were wrong. Not broken, but changed.
Even the normal one showed subtle alterations, something embedded deep in the neural structure, invisible to standard analysis but undeniably there. The difference between it and the dreamers wasn’t the anomaly itself. It was that the anomaly had been activated. Something had touched them and started to wake them up.
Korain saw it too, and for a moment her curiosity overcame her caution. Then Konrad told her the rest. The intrusion. The intelligence squatting in her systems. The fact that she was no longer the only mind in her own facility.
She tried to end it, push them out before whatever they’d brought could spread further. Jun didn’t let her. Money reopened the door, barely. Konrad’s promise to clean her systems out did the rest. Korain stayed in.
The imprinting was fast. Too fast. The clones went from empty vessels to something else in less time than felt right. They weren’t alive, exactly. They weren’t themselves. But they weren’t blank anymore either, and they’d need time to stabilize. Jun wasn’t sure they had it.
Back on the ship, nobody talked for a while.
Axiom wanted Jun. The hunters were still out there. The clones might be connected to something much bigger than any of them had planned for, and somewhere in drill space, something had started paying attention to their little ship.
They could run. Hide in the chaos of war or lose themselves in forgotten systems. But wherever they went, the math was the same. They’d been noticed. Whatever came next, going unnoticed again wasn’t one of the options.
The session begins with the crew recapping the end of the previous adventure and clarifying the current situation aboard their ship. The party had located the stolen clones and taken five from the batch: The crew had killed the smugglers involved in the clone job. They turned over the remaining clones to their employer and reported the job done. When their employer noted that some clones were missing, the crew used that as justification to investigate the anomalous ones further. The party concluded their employer did not need to know what they had found, so they lied and said the missing clones must have been shipped off-world. They collected their payment and left with the five clones still in their custody. The recap continues with the group restating what they learned about the anomalous clones before this session began. The recap then covers the last drill-space jump and the shipboard crisis associated with it. The party knowingly brought the anomalous clones onto the ship and took them through drill space in order to see what would happen. Before the jump, Gray had used future-looking abilities and seen evidence of a problem in the cockpit, but did not present it as a reason to stop the jump. Once in drill space, the ship experienced a major navigation disturbance: Gray muted the alarms, assessed the situation, and called on E-20 for assistance with navigation. Gray and E-20 corrected the course and brought the ship back under control in roughly half a minute. The incident did not destroy the ship, but it confirmed that something in drill space was interacting with it. During that same drill-space disturbance, Jun Minh remained with the clones and witnessed the most important anomaly of the session’s opening recap. The crew discusses what that means. The party reorients to the present and restates their current destination and goals. They are en route to the Stotho system, specifically to the world Rubieta. Rubieta is known as a major trade hub in this region of space. The ship is carrying: The group wants to: While there is still travel time left before the ship exits drill space, several characters use that time for shipboard actions. Jun contacts the bridge immediately after the drill-space incident to ask about the alarms and the ship’s condition. Jun then confronts Cassian about his telepathic contact with her during the crisis. After that, Jun goes to Konrad and shares what happened with the clones. Konrad shares his current working theory with Jun. He explains that his prior research suggested the anomalous clones are operating in a delta-wave dream state and are somehow sensitive to drill-space conditions. He thinks the most direct way to learn more might be to activate one of the clones more fully rather than keep guessing. Specifically, he suggests finding a way to give a clone enough of an imprint—at minimum, language—to allow the crew to ask it direct questions about what it is experiencing. He frames this as both a practical and an ethical issue: Jun and Konrad also discuss Jun’s own origins and what that implies. The discussion then turns to the artificial intelligence that has already been hovering around the campaign’s background. Konrad explains what he understands about Draco and the Liberator: This matters because the party is trying to determine whether one of their enemies might have inserted AI-derived software into their systems. Konrad performs a program check on the ship’s computer systems and finds evidence of tampering. The ship exits drill space and arrives safely at the Stotho system. The crew studies the buoy’s data on Rubieta in detail. Rubieta is the sole inhabited world in the system. It has roughly seven million inhabitants. Those inhabitants are spread among seventeen settlements, with only a few major ones. Most interstellar trade is handled through an orbital station associated with a space elevator. The planet itself has a thin atmosphere and a highly dangerous surface environment. The most significant listed hazard is an arsenic-bearing crystalline flora called blood glass. The settlements on the planet are enclosed habitats, including domed cities and sealed canyons. The crew also scans the system on arrival. The party deals with the local bureaucracy required to approach the station. When they transmit the completed paperwork, the station rejects it on a technicality. Jun negotiates the dispute successfully. Once docked, the crew deals with immediate station business. The station market turns out not to be ideal for their cargo. More market research follows. The party looks into where demand for rare earth metals is stronger. They determine that demand appears higher deeper in Triumviral Ascendancy space. They also learn that the station and system have active demand for alien artifacts. The crew studies nearby systems and learns more about neighboring regions: The party examines local law concerning psychic abilities. The group returns to the question of the clones and what to do next. They consider whether to: Konrad reiterates that activating at least one clone enough to speak could answer questions directly instead of leaving everything theoretical. Jun, Cassian, and others continue debating the ethics of that approach. The crew contacts the Far Night Combine to see what legitimate services exist for clones. They ask whether a clone that has been imprinted can be retrained or re-imprinted into a different function. The company’s answer is effectively no: This does not solve the crew’s problem, but it clarifies how clone imprinting normally works. In parallel, Daniil uses his contacts to search for an illicit alternative. After several days of looking, he finds no comparable services on the station. He does, however, find the name of a planetary contact in a smaller settlement: She is located in The Narrows, a canyon settlement on Rubieta. The party decides to go planetside to visit The Narrows. They acquire a landing permit for the settlement at a cost of 80 credits. The Narrows is described as a settlement built inside a canyon that has been sealed and pressurized rather than a conventional full dome. Because the ship lands outside the enclosed environment, anyone moving between ship and settlement must use at least some protective gear. The crew brings two clones with them for testing: The clones are dressed in spare shipboard coveralls or similar clothing for transport. Jun uses telekinetic protection to help shield them during the move. The party finds Dr. Korain’s compound. The first formal conversation with Dr. Korain establishes her services and her interest. Jun tells her they have clones taken from a batch that produced anomalies. The crew wants: Korain immediately asks what kind of imprinting they want and what, exactly, they are bringing her. Once she hears there are anomalous clones involved, she becomes interested. Korain then asks for compensation before proceeding. Jun is led into a separate room inside the compound. The voice identifies itself as Axiom. Axiom says Jun and it were both created in the same place. It frames the original research site as a single coherent project that combined: According to Axiom, those projects were not separate—they were both meant to address the same problem: Axiom explains Jun’s intended role in that larger project. Jun questions whether the voice is actually Draco / the Liberator. Axiom addresses the anomalous clones directly. Axiom also issues a clear directive to Jun. Jun asks what she should do in the meantime. During the private conversation, Jun relays information to the others. After Axiom ends the contact, Korain resumes the interaction. The crew places the Dreamer clone in the scanner first. Korain runs neurological scans. The data confirms that there is active mental activity in the clone. That activity is unusual: Korain notes that the clone’s speech centers remain undeveloped, which means the earlier speaking incident still should not have been possible according to standard biology. The crew then scans the apparently normal blank clone from the same batch. This scan reveals a second major result: Those alterations are not outwardly manifest in the blank clone yet. Korain concludes that the entire batch may have been modified in some way, not just the three Dreamers. The implication is that the “normal” clones may have the same potential under the right conditions. The party asks Korain whether imprinting would overwrite whatever is already present. Korain explicitly proposes a more extreme experiment. Konrad then reveals something critical to Korain. Korain reacts immediately and negatively. The crew attempts to salvage the situation. Jun negotiates with Korain instead of abandoning the investigation. She offers Korain a deal: A fee of 500 credits is negotiated as part of this arrangement. Korain accepts and grants enough system access for Konrad to proceed, while retaining enough caution to review what is being run in her environment. Konrad performs the cleanup. The party decides to move forward with imprinting. Korain carries out the imprinting experiment on two clones: One Dreamer clone. One previously blank clone from the same batch. This gives the party a way to compare: Korain gives post-procedure instructions. By the end of the session, the crew’s situation is significantly more complicated than it was when they arrived in system. They now know: The crew has also completed two important practical actions: The closing discussions focus on where the crew might go next. The transcript shows the party considering several directions: No final destination is locked in within the transcript, but the session ends with the crew clearly preparing for a choice between those broader paths. One final immediate consequence is noted after the imprinting.Session Notes