Double Exposure

A Tale from the Time of New Worlds for 5 players

The Ryak-Ř Tale

The paleontological record of Ryak-Ř was clear. Life flourished on the world for billions of years, and then was erased for a million. Life arose again, exploded over the planet, thrived, multiplied, diversified, and then evaporated. The Ryak-Ř people evolved at the end of the fourth cycle. They puzzled over this cycle of death.

The Ryak-Ř star was one of the oldest in a stellar bubble. What had been a dusty stellar nursery supplying the materials for dozens of stars, hundreds of planets, and uncountable fragments of rock and ice was now a clear spherical region of space surrounded by a thinning wall of expanding dust. The density of dust had been random, and there were holes in the wall of the bubble. Every two billion years or so, as the bubble orbited the galaxy, a clear space aligned with a source of incredibly strong radiation. Like a sunbeam through a window, that radiation would fall upon the Ryak-Ř world again, sterilizing it.

In the flicker of galactic time they had, the Ryak-Ř mobilized their entire civilization to build great arks. Each ship carried tens of thousands in cryosleep pods, as titanic engines hurled them through space at an appreciable, relativistic fraction (0.54c) of the speed of light.

The arks launched as soon as they were filled and ready. The Iron Bender's Fire Along the River Between the Golden Mountain Ridges is your ship, one of the last to flee. The gamma and X-ray radiation is rising, even in the innermost parts of the ship, despite the layer of water tanks, the layer of recyclable waste tanks, and row after row of cryosleep pods. Most of the outermost pods hold corpses, or those on the dying edge of resuscitation. There are already failures on the pod rings inside of the outer ring.

You should be alone in the Deep Dark, a feeble flicker of life in the Great Void. Somehow, your sensors recorded a contact. Collision at these speeds, with something that gets past your shields, should be fatal. Your exterior cameras died long ago, made extinct by the radiation that would do the same to you. Yet, the sensors on those cameras have detected... things. Things crawling up the support struts to the superstructure that holds the giant stone and metal shield at the front of the ship. Do they mean to sever your greatest protection?

The Iron Bender's Fire... is designed to separate into pieces on arrival, so that tugs and shuttles can access every ring of cryosleep pods, can get to the great biodomes, can even sever the great nuclear engines to set up a station in orbit over the new homeworld. You can access the controls, here in your storm cellar — but that should not happen in the Deep Dark. What is happening? What would do this? Why?