Date: Not specified in the session log
Attendance: Jon, Carl, Arnold, Dax
Before any of them had a ship, or a captain’s chair, or a crew to speak of, they were just kids on Prospero’s Dream — and Danny, older and better-connected, had a lead too good to pass up.
Someone was selling the location of Superstar Games. Every kid on the station knew the name, the same way they knew the name of the game that studio never got to finish: Grand Theft Space 6000, weeks from release when the disaster hit that shattered Gaea and turned half the Choke into a tomb. The rumor was that pallets of the game were still down there, buried and untouched. Danny knew the drop point — a dead train station in a poor district, long out of service — and knew the Bratva wanted that data as badly as anyone. He wanted to beat them to it. The kids didn’t need much convincing.
Getting to the drop meant getting past a Tempest guard first, posted at the edge of the tracks. They didn’t fight him — they hacked the station’s PA system and paged him to the medbay by name, and watched a young, not-yet-legendary Cutter jog off to answer a call that didn’t exist. Making it down the tracks after that meant crossing a bridge strung between two towering points, the city a long, dizzying drop below. Halfway across, a train came out of nowhere. Arnold’s foot caught in the rail. With no time to think, they clipped in their magnetic grapples and grav boots and rode out the train from underneath the tracks, boots to steel, wheels screaming inches above their heads.
At the station, Yandee was waiting — not the Yandee who’d one day run the whole Bratva, just a capo with a handful of thugs at her back, standing around for a courier who hadn’t shown yet. The kids used an FPV drone and a smoke bomb to blind the whole group and bolt for the stairs. In the chaos, someone caught something strange: the smoke didn’t seem to touch Yandee at all. Dax and Carl reached the courier first, took the data, and ran. Jon and Arnold, cut off from the others, scrambled up a rusted ladder that started shedding rungs under their weight — they made it to the surface on nothing but grapple line and nerve. All four of them lost Yandee’s men in the crowds, a hovercar’s spotlight sweeping the street behind them the whole way.
They found Loshe on the docks — a friend of Jon’s father, and willing to trade oxygen tanks and rebreathers for one specific favor: an ignition coil, pulled from a particular wrecked car somewhere in the Choke. It sounded simple. It wasn’t.
The tunnels down were bad from the start. They passed through a shanty town that had been abandoned for who knows how long — poems scratched into the walls about children who vanished at night, skeletons with their chests torn open like something had reached in and taken what it wanted, and one locked cargo container that, when they finally forced it open, held nothing but bones. Claw marks were everywhere, deep gouges that looked almost avian. Nobody wanted to stay and figure out what had made them.
Past the village, a long pipe swallowed the light entirely, and somewhere in the dark, without warning, Carl was just gone — mid-sentence, mid-step, swallowed by a slope none of them saw coming. One by one, the others followed him down, the ride equal parts terrifying and, for a few seconds, actually kind of fun — right up until it dropped them two stories into a black lake, something eel-shaped writhing just under the surface. Jon went last, and just before he let go, he heard something behind him. A voice. Asking him to stay. To play. He didn’t answer. He screamed the whole way down the slide, and every one of them swam for the shore like their lives depended on it, because they did.
They came out the other side into the ruined roads of the old city, and Superstar Games rose up ahead of them — with Yandee’s crew already parked out front, still fumbling with a locked door. The kids didn’t bother with the front entrance. They climbed a neighboring building, grappled across to a broken window, and started crossing one at a time — until the voice from the lake found them again, this time inviting them to a pizza party, to come play with him. A massive, half-melted animatronic came around the corner after that, chasing them the rest of the way across the gap. They made it through and slammed a door behind them just as it caught up, hammering to get in.
Inside, a second animatronic — damaged, but lucid — warned them about the thing in the halls, and begged for help finding a group of kids the mascot had taken and it couldn’t reach on its own. They found that group deeper in the building: kids and adults both, some of them clearly stranded here for years, sheltering behind a wall of server racks wound in scavenged copper wire like a makeshift faraday cage. It was, they explained, the only thing keeping them safe. Not from the animatronic. From something else.
The something else arrived a moment later — small tears opening in the air, single-eyed, clawed things reaching through from wherever they actually lived, snapping at anyone close enough to grab. They couldn’t fully cross over, but that didn’t make the claws or teeth any less real. The kids ran for a freight elevator and slammed the controls, and as it started down, one of the creatures forced its way in after them, cornering them against the walls — until something enormous hit the roof from above. The same animatronic that had chased them across the gap tore the elevator’s ceiling open, crushed the creature in one fist, looked at the kids for a long moment, said something none of them wanted to remember too clearly, and vanished back into the dark. It had never been hunting them at all. It had been trying to keep the aliens from getting to the survivors, and the aliens had been using it — or trying to — to get to them first.
They left the missing kids in its care and went looking for what they’d actually come for. They found it in the warehouse below: crate after crate of Grand Theft Space 6000, untouched since the day the disaster hit. They filled every bag they had.
On the way out, someone decided an ignition coil wasn’t worth the trip they’d just had. They found Yandee’s car parked in the garage, hotwired it, and drove the whole thing to the surface — handing it over to Loshe in one piece, coil and all, in exchange for the air that had gotten them home.