Collins Does Solo RPG 'The Wretched'

Day 5, Entry 2, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

I spent the day in the engine room trying to fix the heart of the ship. It’s still not beating sadly. I took it apart piece by piece, taking careful notes of what went where and how it was fitted so that when I found the problem I could fix it and still know how to rebuild the engine.

I got to this one part that seemed to have so much torque behind it that the power tool I was using couldn’t shift it so I resorted to adding in fulcrums and additional weight in the form of one hungover human. In hindsight it was never going to work and me smashing myself in the face was entirely predictable. I managed to get a good cut to my forehead when expectations and reality abruptly collided at force.

I dragged my sorry arse around to the medbay. It’s not a large facility but perfectly adequate for the doc to do her thing in. She was still in her office sprawled behind her desk. She would regularly work long and hard, something I never comprehended is that the medics constantly need to do lots of extra work on top of normal work to keep their licenses up to date. I suppose on a small crew there is little to keep the vocational person occupied except research and extracurricular learning.

The only time Amy wasn’t found working hard was either when she was cooking or sleeping. She could always do some amazing things with ships rations and chorizo or paprika which was a welcome change when we all got together for dinners. I miss those dinners and the chatting round the table with my friends I miss it so much.

I patched myself up, not as well as it should probably be but good enough, I won’t die from my misadventure…

I forgot to mention this previously but a few days ago I was in the medlab before. There is a wonderful glass ceiling that is standard for this type of vessel, I think it’s to do with a psychology thing where people who are unwell need to be able to see the outside to aide in relaxation and recuperation. You know, see the stars and planets and any god dammed aliens that are trying to headbutt their way in. I got the handheld plasma torch and some sheet metal from the cargo bay and made a second skin over the weakened section. That way should chief knobhead breach the glass he’ll headbutt metal and I now know how painful that would be but also I want to try and keep this section of the ship pressurised. There is some overly useful equipment in here that simply cannot be moved. An added bonus is that I cannot see the monster when he is there hammering away.

I’ve been wracking my brains as to why the creature is here murdering everyone and how he came to be on this ship. I’m calling it a he now… I obviously don’t know its gender or even if being sexed is a thing for the species, haven’t stopped long enough to look up a skirt or drop a zipper etc but I figure as it’s killing everyone like a crazed psychopath that on the balance of probability it is male. Anyway, the whys. Don’t know, we are a long range salvage ship, we roam about and recover broken stuff, we aren’t a long range probe ship. I doubt we have entered the unknown regions although we weren’t far from the boarder. Oh god… what if the inertia has pushed me out past the Heighlian Gap? That means my chances of someone coming to find me would be dramatically reduced, like catastrophically low, sub zero in fact. That would suck. I’m just going to say that it has not happened, and that people will be able to triangulate the beacon I fixed, and then they will come pick me up, and all will be well.