Every Second Time in a Week at a Table, May 19

Nobody, including myself, had anything planned to do yesterday night, so around Sunday I started rapping the bushes for Wobble players. Sure enough Peryton and the Purple, Curtis, were down. That was great because both were up to speed enough on the rules and whatnot that I wouldn't have a lot of explaining to do and could work on some exposition explaining elements of multiverse as presented in the book. Around Wednesday, Wylie said that he'd like jump in as well-- three players for laptop RPGing is the perfect number so that just made the session more promising.

At the virtual table, Wylie and I worked through his Character from a Mu Earth very similar to 1931 (Mu-Apple 31?). Arnie Moses was a down on his luck, hard knocks Hobo. His type being a Scrapper (that means "fighter" in D&D), he was more a hands on and learns by doing sort. While hopping a train out of Yuma headed towards California where he heard that they need all sorts of workers, he spied something unusual. Dudes in monkey suits and radios on their heads were chasing a little kid from a ransacked camp just off the railroad. Curious to say the least, he hopped off the train, it was under 30 MPH at that point, so no big deal.  Being the rush in first Scrapper that Arnie is, he and kid were quickly apprehended by a radio-ape scouting party, talk about hands on.

Expectations

Insurance claim waiting to happen

Meanwhile in the Tau Verse, Daisy Adair (Pery) and Professor Rudolpho "Rudy" Viggo, along with the NPCs Charles Jade and Captain Kal (Captain Canada), had just successfully evaded their pursuing honeycomb ships in the Wobble boat the Albatross. They had done so by slipping into a cluster of asteroids. Adair was busy looking for the rolling rocks that she saw when Professor Rudy downloaded Earth Prime's classic movie War of Stars: The Empire's Counter Strike. Seeing only little specks of light, like stars, she relaxed. She was looking out for caves with teeth though. It took her a minute to notice that the stars were moving in different directions and vectors, and that one of the little specks of light was getting bigger by the second until it became a boulder flying along at about four times the speed of sound.  And BANG. Our beloved starlet, that can Pilot Anything, was able to make an emergency landing on a planetoid not too far away.

While inspecting the damage, the crew of the Albatross would be approached by what had to be a band of goblins not wearing space suits in the vacuum of space. When they got close enough, the Characters could see robotic machines and processing boards. When the G00blins communicated using radio frequencies, they said things like "Subroutine 47147 detects that your identified non-hostile vessel, verification pending, requires assistance." but in a goblin's voice. The band of plastoid machine intelligences would get them and the ship to their base 153NG4RD, where the Characters would meet the Master-Processing Unit 5TR1D3R 54R0M4N (you can call him "Strider" "Saruman"). In the atmosphere of the space station, the vents played the theme of Lord of the Rings constantly.

Arnie Moses would awaken in what had to be a flying banana boat, inside what had to be a banana crate. The smell of bananas permeated the air. Looking out between the crate's boards he saw four other crates strapped down, and what looked like a film set from Buck Rogers with a flat screen TV as its window. His captures, radio-apes, were busy flying the bucket, so he was able to get out of his crate and grab a large torsion bar (a crow bar used for trucks and tanks).

Back at Isengard-base, Strider Saruman would explain to Daisy and Rudy (and the NPCs. Always forgetting them) that they were in what is known as Tau Universe, or Verse. In this universe what might be our solar system, but with two smaller stars at its center, sentient plants, species of intelligent insects, and radio-apes were vying for supremacy. He and his fellow plastoids were parts of a moon-sized computer which had named itself T0LK31N, not T0LK13N because of fears of copyright infringement. They served the Plant Supreme collective as their first encounters were with the system's "Dobbers" which thought that they were organic and tried to do horrible things to them. They didn't work with the radio-apes because, well, no monkey with a TV for a head is up to any good anyway. Just at that point, a radio-ape ship would appear on the station's radar array. So according to protocol, Strider Saruman and his crew (long pause) started firing missiles at them. Daisy and Rudy looked on.

The biggest radio-ape, a gorilla with a TV for a head, was a decent pilot itself. It was able to avoid the first four missiles and blast them with the craft's laser weapon system. Meanwhile in the gravitational confusion of the dogfight, Arnie would take out two of the smaller radio-apes, two chimpanzee bodies with video camera for heads. With the next four missiles to be launched (long pause while Daisy and Rudy ate popcorn), the pilot's luck would not hold out, and the ship's engines were destroyed. The Rilla would start to put on a space-suit before trying to fight the loose human cargo, Arnie's mother did not raise a fool, he found a space-suit for himself, and got it on quicker. As the rilla was about to get its helmet on, the Scrapper smashed the TV head with the torsion bar. And then the sixth missile hit, blowing a hole in the side of vessel. The other missiles did more damage and everything not in a pressure suit was dead.

While Arnie floated end over end on a now dead piece of rocketship, Professor Rudy remembered that the Albatross had long range detectors that could scan for human life, which he had built last game session. He asked Laggy, the wobble boat's AI, to scan for humans aboard the debris. And after an admonishment from the always self-righteous computer, it was discovered that there was indeed one aboard. Arnie's oxygen supply was in the red so to speak, when the Albatross floated towards his chunk of cockpit and Charles Jade and Captain Kal pulled him aboard. And everybody got to know each other. Arnie definitely needed a shower and shave, and Rudy let him know it, but that didn't stop him from hitting on Daisy, who was sure to mention that having so many real men around, including Charlie Jade, she was as safe as, well, daisies in a plum patch.

Rudy then remembered that he wanted to upgrade the Albatross. Now if only he had some spare parts floating around at a convenient vector. And a decent garage crew with a comfortable spot to get the work done. Hey, wait a second! Mz. Daisy got to redeem her piloting abilities by hauling a good portion of the radio-ape vessel back to Isengard-base. The space orks, err the G00blins got to work immediately, the PCs pondered what to do next. Saving Gary Experience from the dobber's honeycomb ship complex came up. Strider Saruman would intone ominously, "Organics in Dobber Posession are most often not worth salvaging." 

Next session as per the Players: "Save Jerry X."