Everytime At the Table: 8 Jan 23

 And so it was the finale of season two of Spacers: the W&J Clusters. Peryton, Iron Curtis, and Just Ben were taking bets as whether I'd show up, it was Bowie Day Eve after all. Well, I had my fun drinking too much and writing bad material, then I took a nap to burn off the drunk. About fifteen minutes before show time, I showed up with only a slight headache and being very thirsty.

Alezander B Captain of the Arcadia, Nextremi 37, and Gal Qixtar of the Gyyko Clan of the Devvah species finally made planetfall on Galileo. The Crig passengers aboard were so happy to be home. The moving city of Spost-Spost sprawled out before them. Of course with cargo having not paid their full fare, the crew of the transport ship decided to give the prodigal returnees a ride home to Crig Brood 146,034, known as Wise Key 27 as named by its human discoverers a few centuries ago.
They all then met the Prince-breed Crigs that were genetically designed to be the intelligentsia and managers of Crig broods. While no one was offering to pay the bill, things moved into the Back Chambers where they met Arodda, or Queen 146,034. For a human-like insect she had kept her figure despite being the mother of about two million Crig-- they have test-tubes and incubators these days, thank you very much.

Nextremi and Alezander had to get used to be talked about while they were in the room, because the Crig autocrat did not consider them truly sentient, much like the million plus off-spring of her own. Humans just aren't known for their planned breeding so in her mind the humans there were probably "Jo-Shmo"s meaning not-quite idiots but really dumb. Instead she couldn't help but speak only to Gal Qixtar despite his frequent glancing towards his partners. It became clear that she considered the humans as his pets. As this sunk in, another bomb dropped, she had plenty of money to spend because she was providing ground forces for the Panni United Kingdom as they invaded planet Earth.
Arodda then asked how much did she owe. At this point Gal Qixtar looked at the Captain, trying to make it clear that the humans were his PARTNERS. Seeing that the feral human did not lie to her, the brood engineer lightened up. She already knew, from the returned Crig, how much was agreed upon, she was their Mom after all. She dropped her racist act and let all three of her guests know that they had a friend.

Don't let this write up fool you. This session was mostly smoking and joking. Hilarious moments include me giving a long speech to everyone looking so interested for like 10 minutes. My screen had frozen. So much for that exposition.

One of the things that I worked out with this W&J Cluster session was the interstellar drive and a time dilation convention. While FLAT-Drive is done in instantaneous objective time, those "jumps" require at least five light years of somewhat clear space to function without the landings be in the middle of a gravity mass. There is a lot of time spent in "Near Travel" which is roughly .8 Light. So Alezander has been traveling abroad The Arcadia for about nine years of his life, but he's been gone from Earth for 50 years. There is currently in this Spacers setting no such thing as a Faster-Than-Light communication beyond the ships and their personnel exchanging information.

Iron Curtis also remembered that he had two sex-slaves, err ship's crew aboard Aracdia. Doctor Orlando and Bloom. We decided that these two clones, bought at Cassini Station (back in April 2022 in play days), wear tank-tops with their names pasted on them for ease of reference. Yeah, we need to start keeping better notes while boozing through our adventures.