The Wardens send us to Flare City colony at the Wind House Hotel & Resort. It is located inside of a mountain, and is one of the few places where the surface of the planet can be seen. We go off and do different activities, since everything is complimentary to us, but one evening we get together to have dinner.

At dinner, a woman approaches the table and introduces us as Julie Stern, the corporate liaison for the Venusian Advisory Board. She hands us business cards. She says that we were recommended by the local Warden office, and that she needs us to look into a man by the name of Hector Valdez. He is listed as a mid-level manager at a company called Geo-Excavations. She believes that he is part of corporate espionage against Rare Earths Inc., another large corp on Venus. She wants this to be resolved so there is not out and out war between the two corps. She wants to go with Wardens instead of the local law enforcement because we are potentially more impartial.

Katya excuses herself to go to the restroom, and on the way checks the area to make sure we are not being watched. She can’t find anything.

Julie tells us that they will be getting a warrant to search Hector’s apartment. She says that mining rights have been fought over by the corps in the Cryst Rift Zone. Hector is trying to climb the corporate ladder by securing mining rights for his company, by whatever means necessary.

Dr. Reilly and Lyeland ask her for more information, and what is really going on. She says that she has no more information. We decide to visit the Warden office the next day, since it is late.

We visit the Warden office, and they verify that Julie came in to see them and she is legitimate. We gripe about it, but eventually agree to take the job.

Hector’s place in in a different settlement called Diamond Head, and we take a shuttle there. The trip is about one hour. The area that he lives in is a trendy location that has a lot of small shops. We plan to go up and search his place while he is at work, but he is out on his balcony so we decide to surveil him. After a short while another man comes to the door and begins manhandling Hector before closing the door after him. We go in hot, but before we can get to the room the whole thing explodes, blowing the windows and doors out. Most of us are knocked down, but Katya and Lyeland are not and see in the distance someone calmly walks away. This is probably our suspect.

We are picked up and taken back to the Warden office, and the fire department comes to take care of the scene.

We head back to our ship and gear up, then head back to Engineering. We decide to remove some of the oxygen so the passengers will pass out and be less agitated, and we can more easily identify the space monster.

After this we head back to the cargo hold, and check on the sarcophagus. We see that the seal has been broken and there is a trail of ectoplasm there.

Suddenly something attacks Katya from above. It seems to be the creature. She fires at it, and it tries to affect her mind and then Michael’s, but it is ineffective. Rusty takes a shot with his sniper rifle and hits it, but it is still alive. It grabs onto Michael and wraps its tentacles around his neck; Jeff is so scared that he starts laughing hysterically, and Rusty passes out.

Michael manages to get an arm free and slices the creature’s head off with his blade. Thomas runs up and stabs him for good measure.

We put the creature in the sarcophagus and begin cleaning up so the populous doesn’t find out about him.

We go back to the room where we locked Dr. Wells, but he has been bludgeoned by Carstinsen (before we found him in the Captain’s quarters). We find a blood spattered hijab, worn by Carstinson as he committed the murders and a journal written by Dr. Wells that talks about the seal being broken on the sarcophagus, and that he was afraid of the possibility of Carstinson killing his own wife.

Jeff copies all of the security tapes and wipes them from the ship’s system so word doesn’t get out. We turn the oxygen back on, fix the engines and take our leave back to Warden Prime.

Warden Prime is a huge space station compared to our home base, and it has everything including a ship repair yard, sensor arrays, computers and armories.

They take the sarcophagus containing the creature and the bodies of Carstinson and Dr. Wells. The people on the station take it up to Floor 23. Dr. Reilly asks exactly what is on Floor 23, and they tell us that no one is allowed to know that.

We have an audience with Capt. Dearborn, and he congratulates us on a successful mission. He says that our ship will be upgraded with higher tech and we will be going on shore leave at a resort on Venus.

Monica Gabrielli is the security chief that we will be working with on the Mariner of the Stars. She escorts us down to the engine room, and there are two security guards posted here. We go further down to the energy flow regulation system which is between two of the main transit drives.

After checking the scene, we are positive that he was struck from behind with a very heavy object, splattering his brains all over the place. The control unit was also struck, as there are cracking and dents on the machine.

Jeff sees from the computer that the the flow control went off at 1:32am Standard Earth Time. On the surveillance feed he sees a figure running wearing a dark cloak which obscures their characteristics.

Dr. Reilly checks the body and doesn’t find anything strange. Gabrielli tells us that Maria Mayamoto found the body, but was too emotionally unstable to give any information.

There is a UWC political delegation led by Rep. Helen Falk also on the ship, and they have taken an interest in the murder and keep badgering the captain and security personnel about it.

We speak to the cruise director, Petra Mendoza. Hardy, the man who was murdered, was pretty old school and called the Mariner “his ship.” He was regarded highly as one of the best engineers, but was short tempered and didn’t have much time for others. Hardy’s behavior has been strange of late — he was arguing with several people before launch. He was seen arguing with Dr. Sebastian Wells and also Helen Falk before launch. Petra Mendoza, the cruise director, may know more about Dr. Wells.

The ship was headed toward Saturn when it was sabotaged. Jeff checks out the damage to the engine and he sees that it would not be fixed easily — it will take time, but he can do it.

We head to the infirmary and Thomas asks Maria about what happened. She found out about the problem and woke up the head engineer from hypersleep. He was very grumpy and went to go fix the problem when he was murdered. A very large wrench which was used for opening a housing on the engine is missing — this was likely the murder weapon.

Then we head to Petra Mendoza’s office and ask her about Dr. Wells and Rep. Helen Falk. Hardy was getting along with Gunther Eichman — a politician from Saturn — Falk approached them and started an argument with them. She says that Hardy was having a conversation with a colleague of Dr. Wells — a research assistant named Nate Carkinson. Dr. Wells is part of a research team heading to Titan, and they were part of an archaeological study on Mars. We notice that when she mentions Miyamoto, her voice softens a bit. The last person she saw Hardy with was an actress named Zarina Bahar.

Mendoza says that Maria and Hardy were having an affair, and that she was far too good for him.

Thomas does background checks on all of the people on the ship. We decide to interview Gunther Eichman first. He says that Hardy’s brother Samuel is part of the Saturn delegation; there is a play to reduce tarriff’s so they can build an industrial facility on Rhea. Eichman says that he is opposed to an industrial yard being built since it is UWC encroaching on them. Hardy told Falk to piss off. We toss his apartment while he is being interviewed but we don’t find anything — he was signed in to his gravity couch during the time of the murder.

We interview Nate Carstinsen. He says that he went to live on Mars a few years ago with his wife, Mattie, and worked for Dr. Wells. He says that Wells had found information on an ancient manuscript that he thought would lead to the discovery of another race living on Mars before man. He says that he regrets taking the job, because he has since lost his wife. Wells found an alien burial chamber and inside, a large object with concentric circles inscribed on it. He thought it was like a sarcophagus, and his plan was to have it removed and studied at the University. They put it in their warehouse, and soon afterward strange occurrences began. Equipment was malfunctioning, and shortly Mattie passed away for unknown reasons. He says that the sarcophagus is on board, in the cargo hold. This is what Wells got into the argument with the Chief about, since Wells was asking for additional security around the sarcophagus. Hardy told him no, and Wells was furious. He is obsessed with it, and doesn’t eat or sleep, he just watches over it. Carstinen says that he was at the casino during the murder, but the cameras don’t see him. We also check his bank account and he did not go to the casino that day. Katya cold cocks him and then steps on his neck until he admits that he was down in the cargo hold…he has been trying to get the doctor away from the sarcophagus. However we check the feed on the cameras, and he wasn’t there either.

We head down to the cargo area and speak with Dr. Wells. He seems disoriented, but when we introduce ourselves as Wardens he responds with excitement, telling us all about his discovery in a manic fashion.

Dr. Wells, we’ve determined, is crazy. In interviewing him, Thomas recognizes the symptoms of a Nyphelous, otherwise known as a “night terror”. These things float through space until they detect a mind up to 10,000 miles away. Once they detect something, they fly towards it and control minds. They are telepathic and can search through memories for phobias and fears, driving them crazy and living off of the fear that they generate. Eventually once they are completely crazy, they feed off of the body. They can appear as other people, alter perceptions, coercion, etc. They however can only affect one mind at a time.

Now that we know what is going on, we decide to lock the doctor in the conference room. As we are doing this, we see on the security cameras that there is a riot going on on the promenade. Security Chief Gabrielli and Zarina Bahar are about to get swallowed by an angry mob.

We rush down to the promenade and save the two women and the security guards who weren’t already killed. We look out and we see Nate heading toward the Captain’s quarters, and assume that he was responsible for the murder. We catch up to him and Katya and Jeff shoot him and he drops the weapon that he was about to brain the Captain with. Just before Katya puts him down for good, he starts speaking in a cult dialect saying “The bringer of terror has awoken!”

We decide that we need to find this thing and kill it, so we head back down to the engineering department.

Jeff fixes his suit and we head over to the other ship to see if we can open the door. With the device that we found, the door does open and we are able to search the ship. We find basic survival gear, some space suits and ammunition. Jeff swaps out his damaged space suit for a new one, though the new one is not armored.

Jeff checks out the operation of this ship and it seems operable. He accesses the logs and finds that this was not the original ship that was sent to check on the security of the base. This ship intercepted a communique from the base concerning a monolith they found in the mine, destroyed the Wesley Corp. ship and docked here.

The monolith is holding up the cavern roof inside the mine, and has strange markings on it. We decide to head into the mine to investigate.

We enter the warehouse and see several crumpled corpses laying around. One of them is wearing a backpack with a hose attached to it. Toward the back of the room we see a black creature about twice as big as a person, partially frozen to the back wall. Katya immediately fires a grenade launcher at the beast, and it wounds him.

The beast breaks free of the ice and starts shambling towards us. The rest of us take shots at him as well. As he moves in closer, Katya draws her chainswords and rushes the creature.

As the creature is occupied, Thomas runs into the mine and examines the monolith. There is strange writing on here that is consistent with other weird languages that have popped up recently. As soon as he does so, however, the creature turns around from where it was standing and runs at top speed into the monolith, missing Thomas by inches and cracking the monolith. The room shakes and rocks start raining down on him. We can’t see him anymore behind all of the rubble.

Dr. Reilly checks the Engineering and Supply areas of the base and we don’t find anything else. We gather what information we had and head back to the hangar. We take the equipment out of our shuttle and put it into the other shuttle, then take off toward Puck. Katya gives Dr. Reilly some of the gross monster chunks from her chainswords as samples.

We return to base and are debriefed by Captain Dearborn. He says that we should get some rest because our next mission is imminent, and it will be our first outing with our new ship, a Knight Errant class Corvette. We will be traveling to Warden Prime, with orbits Earth. Before he leaves, Dr. Reilly gives the monster samples to the lab for analysis.

We board the ship and enter cryo-sleep for the long journey. After we come up out of our cryo couches, our readouts show that it is 7:32 PM Earth time, but we have woken up 2 weeks early. We hear the female synthesized computer telling us that the ship has received a distress call and has automatically slowed the ship and changed course to intercept. We will be there in 13 minutes.

We suit up and prepare to board the other ship, then head to the bridge. The distress signal is coming from a ship called the Mariner of the Stars. It is a space cruise ship. We check the scanners and we see that there is power and life support on board, but the vessel is drifting.

Communications are opened between us and we speak with Captain Andre Martel. He says that there was an accident and the engines have been knocked out.

We are greeted by a young woman who says that she is in charge of security. Dr. Reilly stifles a guffaw upon seeing her. She leads us to the promenade area with all of the shops where we see patrons who are trying to enjoy themselves.

We make it to the bridge and meet the captain. He says that their drives have been sabotaged. They sent their engineering officer Miyamoto to check on things and she later reported that their engineering Chief Hardy had been murdered — bludgeoned to death. Their security forces have been overwhelmed. We ask to see the body, and he agrees, and says that the amenities of the ship will be available to us while we are working the case.

We are a newly formed group of Wardens stationed on Puck, a moon of Uranus. The Warden base, Warden 5, is currently under construction. The closest existing stations are in the Kuiper Belt, Warden 4 (The Lighthouse) and Warden 2 (The Umbrella) orbiting Saturn.

Our team has been getting the lay of the land for the last couple of days. We are summoned by Captain Roland Deerborn to the briefing room. He is broadcasting from Warden Prime, stationed above Earth.

The Captain explains that though we just finished training, we have a situation that needs our attention Veronica Station (on the moon of Miranda, also orbiting Uranus). The ice mining colony sent out a broadcast which was a scream and some creature growling, and then nothing. We need to investigate.

We have a roster and schematics of the base, and will be taking an orbital shuttle (not our main ship) to check things out. There are 32 miners, 10 mechanics, 4 doctors, 3 administrators and 2 security officers. The commander on the base is John Levirit.

The team gears up and deploys. We take the shuttle to Miranda and descend into a deep canyon to reach the dock entrance. Strangely, there is a mist surrounding this area. Since it is a vacuum, we are at a loss as to why this can happen.

As we approach, we see that the docking bay doors have been left open. There is another ship in here, with the Wesley Corporation logo on the side. The ship seems fully functional but there are no hot spots where living things may be.

Jeff manages to hack into the base’s security cameras, and he sees that the supply area, engineering and the packing area do not have functioning cameras. The rest of the areas show piles of bodies, but no living beings.

He also finds communications that were attempted to be sent out from the last 18 hours, more recently than the 3 days that the Warden Captain told us. There are also video recordings of the security detail arriving 13 hours ago. There is grainy video showing the people in the base going about their business. Without any warning or alarm, objects are being thrown around and people being hurled into walls so hard that they are killed instantly. We see a black blur on the film that is darting between the people and tossing them around. There seems to be only one of them in the base.

The second recording is of the security shuttle landing. The team of 8 mercs pile off of the ship and set up a defensive perimeter around a single person who is not wearing combat armor. That person is taking some readings using an unknown device. They are moving toward the mine entrance, near where the three video feeds are out. As the video continues, we see them enter a set of doors and the feed goes out, but a few minutes later the person with the scanning device and two of the mercenaries run out of that area, and they run to the docking bay but we are not sure by the video if they made it out.

Dr. Reilly consults his information on creatures to try and determine what the assailant is, but to no avail.

We determine that the life support and gravity are all intact in the station, so we disembark and start looking around. We take a look at a fallen set of armor and it appears to be a highly advanced set of armor. His helmet seems to have been smashed in by severe blunt force trauma. Dr. Reilly checks the damage and takes samples.

Jeff tries to open the door of the shuttle but to no avail; it seems to be the most complicated door lock known to man. Also, strangely the Wesley Corp logo seems to be recently attached. This is perhaps a mercenary vessel.

We head into the base and just see bodies lying everywhere. On the security feed of our ship, we see the same person with the scanning device approaching our ship. He plants a device on our ship and enters. We race back to the ship and have to hack our way in. Katya runs to the cockpit and sees the man at the helm. She puts him in a headlock but he cackles wildly and throws down a grenade. Jeff is caught in the blast and takes some damage.