Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

After a long break, The Gryphon and I played Confed again on Saturday with our old friends. It's a game run by and created by our friend, The Cheshire Cat.

Now, when we last played the crew of the Vandervecken was in the middle of a race, which had since ended. As I learned, the Vandervecken did win the race but did so much damage to their ship that all the prize money had to go back into it. The only money anyone got out of it was what they made betting on the side. It was paying off at 5-to-1 odds, so it was a nice chunk of change. In my character, Carmella Maylock's, case that was $5,000.

A new adventure had started. The crew of the Vandervecken had been hired to figure out who was smuggling firestones off an independent planet whose entire economy was based on those gemstones, which had a light radiating from within. They were highly regulated by the government, and ships were scanned both coming in and leaving. This was supposed to keep people from smuggling out larger quantities, however, somebody was succeeding in doing it.

The crew had already started some of their sleuthing the previous week, but plenty still needed to be done. The main things they'd discovered was how the gems were supposed to be handled. They'd gathered enough information to start to do analysis.

Participating in this session were myself as Carmella Maylock, a cheval trader (or gypsy) who's been made the default ship's captain; The Paper as Katy Swenson, a 21-year-old adventurer from a rich family; The Martial Artist as Taiwan MacGuyver, the idiot savant ship's engineer and my character's second cousin, twice removed; The Dormouse playing Liang Tze, a Shaolin monk who is strongly opposed to deadly violence; The Gryphon as weapons expert Jenna Starfall; The White Rabbit as Alauzhi, a large female cat creature skilled with weaponry; The March Hare as Fader, a baron and reckless adventurer; The Punster as Kilroy, a brilliant scientist and engineer; and his wife as another cat creature named Cupcake, this one with an artistic bent. She hadn't played her character since 2001 and joked that she jumped out of her cabin, ready to pursue the grail, which had been the task at the time she last played.

Kilroy, who's an engineer in the traditional sense of the word, was crunching some numbers to figure out how someone might fool the scanning devices that are used to sweep for gemstones. Most of the rest of the crew paid a social call on another ship's captain, who happened to be a cheval trader, just like Taiwan and Carmella.

Cheval trader are all distantly related, so they call each other "cousin." As it is, both Taiwan and Carmella had been on the ship once before: Taiwan when he was very young and Carmella for two and a half weeks on her way to college. He gave her a ride for part of the way. So Taiwan and Carmella led the delegation, with the other crew members following their lead.

Before they stepped on the ship, The Cheshire Cat asked The Martial Artist and I what our position had been with our family, the cheval traders. Taiwan said he'd been a ship's engineer. I didn't have to think too hard, because I'd already done some thinking about her history, and I knew that Carmella had a variety of skills because she'd been flying around on her own little ship for awhile, running errands and doing small jobs here and there.

"Errand girl," I said.

Immediately, The Dormouse started teasing me. "Could you go get me some coffee on Betelgeuse Five?"

"Not that kind of errand," I hissed, lapsing into character.

After the group was met by an underlying offering refreshments, the captain greeting Carmella and Taiwan and then was introduced to the rest of the group. They all sat down at a table for a chat. Not wasting much time with pleasantries, the captain asked the crew their business. Taiwan told him that the Vandervecken crew was investing firestone smuggling.

The cheval traders are space gypsies, if you will. They travel around, take odd jobs here and there. They're not above bending the law to suit their purposes, and it's not uncommon that cheval traders are born on a ship between star systems, as was Carmella, who was born on The Intrepid. While cheval traders sometimes are involved in smuggling, they always profess not to be.

So when the subject came up, the captain replied that he'd heard smuggling was happening in the area. He shared some observations he had made, some of which might turn out to be useful. He noticed, for example, that there was a lot more platinum coinage floating around than there used to be. He produced a piece of 12, which is shaped like a pie slice and, together with 11 other pieces, forms a circle.

Jenna bought one from him in order to test it back on the Vandervecken.

The other useful information the captain provided was that the smuggling was fairly recent, having cropped up within the last few years. Before leaving, the captain invited the Vandervecken crew to a formal party on his ship, a welcoming party. Everyone, of course, accepted.

I forget which character requested taking a tour of the ship. It might have been Alauzhi. The captain acquiesced, allowing Taiwan to show them around. Carmella noticed a few improvements had been made since she'd stayed there, but nothing major.

Taiwan tried to skirt where he knew smuggling bays might be found, but one of the crew members did spot one. Taiwan dashed to it first and opened it, finding it empty.

Back at the ship, Jenna was able to analyze the platinum and discover it came from a different planet than the ones which typically provided platinum for the government's mints. So this became a factor that the crew bandied about. Maybe somebody was bringing in platinum and using it to pay for the gemstones they were smuggling out.

Once she finished with that, Jenna decided to go downtown to the marketplace and see if she could spot any evidence of graft going on at guard checkpoints. Since she was going shopping, and several members of the party needed formal gear, they joined the shopping excursion, including Carmella.

This made for an amusing scene in an expensive dress store as Jenna, who's something of a fashion expert, worked together with the clerk, Serge, to put together outfits for the crew to buy.

"No, no, no," Serge would say, with a vaguely European accent. "This is much better for madam." The Cheshire Cat was, of course, playing Serge, who was an NPC (non player character). He was hilarious and had us all laughing.

Carmella went first and got a very beautiful dress that gave her a plus 7 in charisma. When she saw the price tag, of $5,000, she blanched at first and then said, "Oh, well, there goes my prize money. It was found money anyway."

Surprisingly, Liang spoke up, "Put that money away. I'll get that for you." Over Carmella's weak objections, he reminded her that she'd had his back several times. Also, he had more money than a non-materialistic monk knew what to do with.

In turn, after they hit the dress shop, Carmella helped him find a nice open air market to purchase the food items that he would use in creating a special dish for the party.

Jenna got herself a dress that, by the time she got done, gave her a plus 10 in charisma. And amusingly enough, the suit they purchased for Kilroy was the best of all. His suit was from measurements alone, as he was still at the ship doing calculations. His gray suit gave him a plus 15 in charisma.

When the crew returned to the ship, Carmella and Jenna pressed him to model it, and he surprised the entire crew with how good he looked in it. "Where did Kilroy go?" they joked.

Meantime, Alauzhi and Fader visited a local barber shop, where Fader got a shave and a haircut and actually began looking respectable. Alauzhi decided to try a haircut, too, which was funny because no one there had ever dealt with a Lindual, which is what the cat people are called. Still, one elderly hair dresser did her best, and Alauzhi was pleased.

This counted as the light entertainment of the evening. We broke for cheesecake, prepared by The Paper and delicious, as always.

Back on the ship, Kilroy had determined at least three ways that someone could get past the scanners. After further discussions of ways people might be smuggling gemstones, the idea that it was an inside job seemed more plausible, perhaps someone in the Navy, whose job it was to scan the ships. Either that or someone was cloaking their shipments so that they were undetectable. Another possibility: that the Commerce Department was involved in the smuggling operation, because the health of the economy was entirely based on the heavily restricted gem trade.

Jenna set up a meeting the next day with a representative of the government who had hired them for the job.

Now, the original noblewoman who had hired them wasn't available, but they were able to speak to someone else. First, they swept the office for bugs, which seemed to make her nervous. Perhaps it was just the possibility that she was being bugged. At any rate, they found none and she breathed a sigh of relief.

The crew asked her a lot of questions about practices, such as whether or not she knew there was an increase in currency. She said she didn't. They asked about the way scanning takes place and asked her for information about ships' manifests and other data for analysis. She promised to provide any non-classified information and to answer further questions if needed.

While some other people returned to the ship to do data analysis, Carmella got an idea. Why not go to the source? Why not use her underground contacts to find out what she could? She formed the idea to pretend to be a customer interested in smuggling out gemstones and see what she could learn.

After doing some asking around, she managed to find a contact in the form of one Grigor, a particularly loathsome underling in an ill-fitted suit. She wasn't alone: her monk, Liang Tze, had her back, along with Jenna. The two of them were a pair. Liang was dressed to impress in a white suit that had "bad ass monk" written all over it. Jenna wore her sternest face and kept her hand on her gun.

As The Cheshire Cat explained, the way Grigor saw it was that Carmella was the pretty face sent there to negotiate, backed up by her heavies. "The person sent ahead to make contacts," he said.

"See? Errand girl," I said, triumphantly. "It doesn't mean fetching coffee."

The Gryphon took a time out and requested that I try to come up with lies that make sense.

"What do you mean?" I pressed.

"Well, sometimes you come up with implausible lies," he said.

"Then help me come up with something using the big brain." The "big brain" is an allusion to the fact that our characters, living many centuries in the future, are smarter than any of us. This allows us the option of putting our heads together to get help from other players. After all, our character could probably figure it out better than we could.

We decided on my original plan, to pretend to be a buyer. Grigor said he'd be capable of helping us, but he had to talk to some people. Further pressing didn't help, but he did set up another meeting, to meet back there at 10 a.m.

Immediately afterwards, Jenna suggested talking to the police, to let them know what was going down so they wouldn't have any inconvenient raids or arrest the members of the Vandervecken. Kilroy took charge, since he hadn't done much but analysis so far this session. While we were there, he talked a bit about some of the smuggling theories that had been bandied about, and after we left, Carmella made a general announcement to the group that, since insider involvement was possible, that they should refrain from tipping our hand too much until they knew what was going on.

This was a fun session. It was good to get back in the game. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next time around.

Further adventures from Confed:

Confed adventures index

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

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