The Wretched - Solo RPG - Recovered Log - Day 12

Recovered Log - Day 12

Audio recordings of a play-through of Chris Bissette's solo journalling roleplaying game. 

Day 12

 

Dom Mooney · The Wretched - Day 12

Day 12 - 6 cards

• 4H - your comm system blinks into life - garbled chatter from a far off vessel. It falls off silent before you can respond. What were they saying?
• QD - You spend the day taking the engine apart completely and putting it back together in an attempt to fix it. You don’t think that it’s worked and you think that you may have damaged it. 1 block permanent Phase balancer prevents this.
• KH - skittering scratching in the air vents - you fear the creature or something else has got aboard the ship - how do you make sure that you don’t attract its attention?
• 7H - had to crawl into a narrow space between the hull to fix lighting - what was it like squeezed there between the hull and the cables - 1 block
• 3D - after you threw it out the airlock, it spent hours trying to get through the windows on the observatory deck. You fear its integrity has been compromised and spend an hour reinforcing them by welding sheets of metal inside - 1 block
• 9S - despite the thick hull of the ship you somehow know when it is near your section of the ship - how? 1 block

Day 12, salvage ship ‘The Wretched’. Flight Engineer Dom Mooney reporting.

I woke to voices. I thought I was dreaming at first, but then I realised it was the comms system. Sorting out the AE246 module seems to have worked, and I’d caught the back end of a transmission. Just a routine status report, but the first human voice I’ve heard in over a week. Numbers, trajectories, ship performance. She signed off as the Company Merchant Vessel Kip Thorne. Not a ship I know, but somehow a connection to people. A connection to hope. Somehow I need to get through this. I’ve been drifting. I need to focus. Yesterday was a wake up call. If I want to get home, I need to work this problem through.

The close call in the airlock convinced me that I needed to reinforce the weaker parts of the ship as a priority. I took the portable welder and some hull plate from what remains of the workshop and closed off the Observatory Deck’s windows. I focussed on the light of the weld, ignoring the creature which was drawn towards the blue flicker as the metal melted and sealed. Soon, the view of the stars and the outer hull was obscured. As I stood back to check the job, the lights flickered and then went out. Normally they come back again, so I realised that something was wrong. I took the electrical kit, and went into the access conduits; tight, quiet and yet somehow secure. I reached the main light panel, and replaced the burned out circuits.

That’s when I heard it. I froze, nearly dropping the tool-kit. Something was in the air-shaft. I could hear skittering & scratching, and it looked like the panel was distorting. I shut off my torch and tried to make no noise. I was conscious of the sound of my breathing, of the slight condensation on the visor. I’d left the rifle in the Observation Deck as it was too big. I waited for what seemed an age and then more. Carefully, I made my way back through the shafts and conduits, and when I got out I checked where every exit was from that air-system and welded plates over all of its vents and extraction points. I’ll just have to accept the fact that the may get stale in some areas.

I worked into the evening on the drives, pulling apart the control system and trying to set it back up again from the back-ups. For a few minutes, I thought I may have broken it, and I may have permanently damaged the core, but the phase balancer seemed to bring it back into balance. It still won’t engage though. I’m going to have to try this again another day, after some rest.

This is Dom Mooney, the last survivor of the Wretched, signing off.