Collins Does Solo RPG 'The Wretched'

Music (Outer Dark – Chris Bissette)

Day 10, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

Today I have decided to grow a monumental pair of testes. In the refresher this morning my brain yet again got to business doing it’s finest work. I’m surprised people don’t take showers more often than once a day as I legitimately come up with all my best ideas in the refresher and this one is a real doozy. But what is it I hear you asking, what is so brilliant that it requires bollocks the size of a building?

I’m going outside.

Yeah I know, dangerously idiotic what with the king of hide and go murder living out there but hear me out ok.

For me to get rescued I need someone to hear the beacon, for them to hear the beacon they need to be reasonably close. Most long-range comms is done via relays and I do not know where the nearest relay is so I have no idea whether it is being picked up and rebroadcast. That means for me to be able to have a better chance of being heard I either need to shout louder or create a narrow comms cone that works in a similar way to cupping your hands around your mouth when you speak. If I can do both then my chances of being heard improve exponentially (or at least I think they do).

Creating a cone is relatively simple, I limit the spread via the control terminal and I can physically angle the antenna to point it in the direction I want it to go. That brings me to the first of the very large problems I need to overcome for this plan to work. Where do I point it? Ok this part is tricky so you’ll have to keep up with very complicated the science here. I’m going to send it all aft, right behind me, as in to where I have come from. Why? Because I know where I have come from and what is back there. When we left Exocron we travelled in a straight line, there were no turns or fancy manoeuvres because we didn’t find anything interesting to salvage. I know since the incident and the engines failing the inertia has kept me travelling forwards, albeit with a slight spin around the centre of mass but importantly forwards. That means that Exocron is still directly behind me… ish. Problem one solved.

Problem two, realign the antenna. I know what you’re thinking, just do that from the control panel too. But this sadly is just like those old space horror movies where there is a convenient plot flaw and the fine alignment can only be done by a control panel next to the antenna or the command cable has been severed or something conveniently inconvenient. Well it’s none of those. This time it is simply that this is an old ship and the tech on here is shit. The alignment is done super old school style. Hit it with a rock till it moves… kinda. I need to release the clamps and then rotate the antenna using the gears system. Its apparently not that hard (so the manual says) as it is designed with EVA suits in mind. Why is this system so archaic. Well these days comms are just broadcast out in all directions and the relays catch it and sent it on to where it needs to go if it’s destined to be a long distance message. The days of needing to send a signal long range by yourself are long gone. Until about 10 days ago that is. As such there hasn’t been the need to do fine tuning for very long time. It is effectively a back up to a back up of something that’s already ancient. So I get to go out there and turn the antenna by hand to solve problem two.

Problem three is a simple but very important one. Don’t get killed in the process. For this very minor but critically important step I have decided to do two things.

One, have a decoy.

Two, go on the attack… I’m told a wizened old general once said that the best defence was a strong offence. Since I’m not as crazy as some of my crew mates I will not be charging the creature head on and try and sock him one up side the head. No, I’m taking the tactically advantageous and definitely not cowardly way of booby trapping the hull. Sadly I’m fresh out of landmines and automated heavy repeating blaster turrets so what I’m going to do is something much more dangerous. I’m going to create a ring of high voltage death around belly of the ship. That way, when the creature moves from the aft to the fore of the ship he’ll end up touching the cable with that ridiculously long dangertail of his and take a huge kick right up his tailpipe…. If that doesn’t kill him outright, it’ll certainly make him jump and if he jumps, he’ll let go of the ship and end up lost to space. Ah, shame…

So this morning I spent my time prepping this whole charade and building the bits I needed. Thankfully I found all the cable I could need in the cargo hold yesterday, it’s amazing what you find when you’re not looking for it.

My decoy is twofold, at the stern of the ship I have set 3 different noise making devices. One that hammers on the hull, one that is general noise and one that’s on an automated pully system that moves from port to starboard and back again. All three get set off at different intervals based on a crude timer and I hope that they’ll keep the creature preoccupied long enough for me to at least rig up the electrified cable of death, it’ll be a bonus if I can get the whole job done and be in before my decoy fails.

Anyway, wish me luck and just in case, this is Joshua Collins, Flight Engineer of the salvage ship The Wretched signing off…hopefully not for the last time.