in media res
Through happenstance and dumb luck (good and bad), you’re on the slow liner “Indignant Pause” R-OO1256 trundling along on a Jump-1 route to Bellerophon (Esperance Subsector 0709 A88A986-E). This is a human populated water world within the Vegan Autonomous District. This may or may not be your final destination.
Bellerophon is 99% water on the surface, this drops to 98% during some low tides when island regions can be seen. There are deep trenches but mostly it’s pleasant shallows. Weather is sometimes troublesome as storms can be cyclonic.
Bellerophon is earth-life in climate, oxygen atmosphere is provided by photosynthetic seaweed and algae that cling to anything that stays still. Naturalists will note that the seaweed here is sometimes carnivorous and usually motile. Bellerophon is also the home of a non-sentient life form made famous for a wide-spectrum novel antibiotic serum it produces. This life form is currently protected by Imperial Ecologists as the population had drastically dropped due to over-harvesting.
Players should prepare for a watery destination. They may be attending Bellerophon for tourism or travel reasons (just passing through) or perhaps has part of an ImpEco team or one of the Conservation Activist groups. There are lots of reasons to go to Bellerophon.
Unless you have an excellent reason (such as Cr50000 instant transfer), you’re in a low berth (though I’ll accept anyone with good Spacer skills as working passage). You have a 10 kg baggage allowance. This means you’re frozen until it’s time to wake up, a task usually administered by a medic.
And you just woke up.
Usually, when you wake up, you’re free to breathe the air. But you wake and the plexiglass cover on the cryotube is still down. A panicked face flashes before your eyes for a second and then you lose focus. Red and blue lights blind you. The face reappears and mouths something.
Then a massive impact. And darkness
The players wake up, things are not ok.
Roll [5+] for the cryotube opening. For anyone whose tube doesn’t open, they will require assistance from other players.