Five Parsecs From Home

For what seemed like an eternity, but must have only been moments, Jaryk stared at the bound woman, with his jaw dropped wide open. The woman stared blankly back, seemingly impassive but more likely well aware she was unable to move or speak, and didn’t see the point in trying either.

“Boss?” Jase interrupted the silence at last.
“Er, yes, er, wow, er..” mumbled Jaryk
“Shall we untie her then?”

Jaryk nodded and Jase squeezed past him into the container and used his knife to free the woman from her binds and removed the gag from her mouth. The latter action making very little difference to the situation because there followed a prolonged period of silence from her as Jaryk asked a variety of questions in an attempt to find out who she was, who was responsible for capturing her, and why.

Eventually Jaryk threatened to re-bind her and leave her here, which actually prised a chuckle out of the woman. Wondering what was so funny, Jaryk followed her gaze to Jase who was still holding what remained of the rope that he sliced apart to free her. Re-bind indeed!

“Jim, get in here”, ordered Jaryk as he and Jase moved for the door. “We might not be able to tie you, but you won’t be getting past Jim here. Let’s leave you to have a think about your future shall we? It won’t be long before whoever is responsible for this discovers his thugs have been shredded, and sends in a more capable force to retake the facility. Stay or come with us. Your choice. ”

PB23-GIM appeared in the doorway and the woman let out an audible gasp. “Oh my..”

Jaryk and Jase spun back to face the woman, and it appeared she was finally ready to speak…

[At the end of the previous Campaign Turn, I rolled the Campaign Event “Chance Meeting” which allowed the rolling up of a new character to join the crew. So for the first time since the start of the campaign I got to roll on the character generation tables to see who we had just met.

The character is human, and I named her Aryn Mire. Her Background is ‘religious cult’ and she comes with one Patron and one Military Weapon (boarding saber). Her Motivation is ‘Glory’ and gains +1 Combat. Her Class is ‘Starship Crew’ and gains +1 Savvy.

The narrative I created for her, to join those features together, is that she is part of a religious cult called ‘The Galactic Highway’ who believe that all animate objects have souls, and those souls can only reach heaven if they are free souls. In the early days of the cult that belief was focussed mostly on fighting human and alien slavery (and in the main, the human slavery of aliens!), but more latterly their attention turned to bots. They believe that bots have souls, and to enslave them after their creation is abhorrent. So she was part of a starship crew of her cult fellows, who travelled from world to world ‘freeing’ every bot they could find, so that they could find their place in heaven when their time came.

This explains why the appearance of PB23-GIM, affectionately named “Jim”, and seemingly working with Jaryk through ‘choice’, caused her to open up to Jaryk and subsequently agreed to leave with them.

I have a model in mind (in fact the model helped inspire the background story), and we’ll get her painted before the next turn.