Welcome to another exciting installment of Spacemon, the tale of a Pokemon TRPG campaign! It is a sci-fi space epic played using the Pokemon Tabletop United (PTU) system and GMed by fellow TAY author DragonStorm247. You can get caught up on the entire Spacemon saga here!
The Dunsparce sat docked at Dedun Station in Sector 25, halfway between the sector’s warp gate and the location of Mr. Silver’s ship. While waiting for the ship to refuel, the crew browsed some of the shops aboard the station, looking for anything that might be helpful on their next mission. While his crewmates shopped for supplies, Arlon stood just outside the docking tube, speaking with Rena while she awaited the arrival of the Corsair.
“So what happens next?” Arlon asked.
“What do you mean?” Rena asked him in return.
“What’s next for the Red Suns?” Arlon clarified. “I imagine things will change with Garth out of the picture.”
“Oh, of that I ‘ave no doubt,” Rena agreed. “Ze man may ‘ave been a brute, but ‘e kept all ze pirates in line with an iron fist. I imagine zey will all be fighting for control now zat ‘e’s gone. Maybe you should come back with me. We sure could use you.”
“As much as I’d like to, I still have something I need to finish first,” Arlon told her, nodding his head toward the Dunsparce. “We’re chasing a major lead, one that could have major implications for the entire Galaxy. I have to see it through to the end.”
“What’s zis? Arlon Jett caring about what happens to ze rest of the Galaxy?” Rena asked with a laugh. “You certainly ‘ave changed.”
“Yeah, I guess I have,” Arlon agreed.
Suddenly, they were interrupted by the beeping of Rena’s commlink. “Oh, zat’s my ride. It’s time for me to get out of ‘ere. Don’t get yourself killed.”
“I don’t plan on dying just yet, luv,” Arlon told her, a smirk forming on his lips. “You’ll be hearing from me soon.”
“I’ll ‘old you to your word.”
Once the ship was fueled up and fully stocked, Arlon detached the Dunsparce from the station and made the jump to the Sector 25 warp gate. From there, they would be heading to the coordinates provided by Mr. Silver, located in Federation Sector 4. With several hours of warp flight ahead of them, the crew finally got the chance to relax for the first time in a long while.
As the ship flew on its way through warp space, Arlon leaned back in his seat and put his feet up on the console. He was glad to have finally taken Devlin Garth down and avenged Lars’ death. He felt a lot better with the Red Suns in Rena’s hands, especially now that his name was clear with them. The harder part would be clearing his name with the Federation. As far as the Galaxy was concerned, he was still wanted for the murder of a Federation Director. Now that he had Devlin tied up in the cargo hold, though, he was much closer to setting that record straight.
Arlon was pulled from his thoughts when Shane joined him in the cockpit and plopped down in the co-pilot’s seat. The kid looked out the viewport into warp space for a few moments before finally turning to him.
“So what do you think we’ll find at these coordinates?” he asked.
“Who knows?” Arlon replied. “But something tells me it won’t be good.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Shane said.
“I guess we will.”
Silence fell back upon the cockpit. The two sat there for several minutes before either spoke.
“I’m sorry about your Houndour, mate,” Arlon said, glancing back at Shane.
A sad look appeared on the kid’s face for a brief moment. “There’s nothing you could have done,” he assured Arlon.
“It was my lust for revenge that got us in that situation in the first place, though, mate,” Arlon said. “So, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you,” Shane said. “And I’m sorry about your Houndoom too.”
Arlon nodded. “Thanks, mate. Now let’s make sure no one else dies, yeah?”
Morgan stood just outside the lab. She hesitated for a moment before stepping inside. “H … I …”
“Yes, what is it?” H asked her as he went about doing … whatever it was that he did in the lab.
“I want you to give me a cyber eye,” Morgan told him.
“Marvelous!” H exclaimed, always happy to provide augmentations. “I shall begin preparations at once! Return in a few minutes and we shall begin!”
Morgan nodded, then left to find Shane. She wanted to have someone else with her during the installation, just in case H tried anything funny. Morgan soon found her crewmate sitting in the cockpit, examining the mark on his arm while Arlon took a little snooze in the seat beside him. Shane looked up at her as she entered.
“Hey, Shane, would you mind helping me with something?” she asked.
“Sure. What’s up?”
After Morgan had explained the situation, the pair returned to the lab to find H all ready to begin the procedure.
“Ready to begin?” H eagerly asked. “The procedure will not take long. You should be recovered by the time we arrive.”
“Just … get it over with,” Morgan told him.
“I’ll be here to make sure he doesn’t add any ‘extra’ augmentations,” Shane reassured her as she leaned back onto the table.
H injected Morgan with anesthetics so that he could begin the procedure. He then clapped his hands together.
“Let us commence the augmentation!”
The Dunsparce dropped out of warp space in the Solace System in Sector 4. As Arlon flew the ship to the coordinates that Mr. Silver had provided, about halfway between the edge of the system and the planet Solace Prime, he and the rest of the crew were greeted with the magnificent sight of a massive Federation dreadnought filling the ship’s front viewport.
Almost immediately upon the arrival of the Dunsparce, the gigantic vessel hailed the comparatively puny bucket. Arlon answered the call and a young Federation officer appeared onscreen. “This is the FNS Halberd,” he said. “State your business.”
“Uh,” Arlon said, quickly glancing at his crewmates. It was probably better if they had some business here other than following a mysterious tip-off. They did have Devlin Garth in their custody and there was a bounty out for those responsible for the incident at the Sector 25 warp gate. “We’re here to collect a bounty,” he declared, turning back to the officer.
“Um … Okay,” the officer awkwardly responded. “Uh … hold on. Let me transfer you to …” He trailed off as he scrolled through his datapad. “According to the Remington Statute, Section 17-b, the current bounty officer on deck would be … me. Oh … Okay.”
“First day on the job?” Arlon jokingly asked.
“Yeah. Yeah … Please hold a moment. What is the bounty you will be collecting today?”
“Devlin Garth, perpetrator of the Sector 25 incident.”
“Alright. If you can just bridge him over, we can take it from here.” The officer transmitted over docking instructions, then terminated the call.
Arlon flew the Dunsparce into the port hangar of the Halberd as instructed and set the ship down. The crew then headed to the cargo hold. Once the ramp lowered, the officer they talked with and several Federation marines boarded the ship.
“We’re here to pick up the prisoner,” the officer told the crew.
“This way,” Arlon replied, motioning for the Federation soldiers to where Devlin Garth sat tied up on the other side of the cargo hold. The marines walked over and scooped him up off the floor.
“We can take it from here,” the officer said as the men marched Devlin out. “It will take some time to process the prisoner. You can wait here if you like. It could take up to eighteen hours.”
“Hah, we all know that’s bullshit,” Arlon grumbled to his crewmates once the Federation soldiers were out of earshot.
“What do you mean?” Dmitri asked.
“The Federation is so bloated with bureaucracy that it could take several days for them to pay us,” Arlon explained.
“I think there are more pressing issues to worry about than getting paid,” Shane chimed in. “Before they leave, do you think we should ask them about the other reason that we’re here?”
“Good point, mate,” Arlon replied. “I’ll let them know.” He quickly ran after the soldiers and flagged down the officer.
“Is there something else I can help you with?” the young man asked.
“Listen, mate,” Arlon told him. “The bounty isn’t the only reason we’re here.”
“Oh?” the officer nervously replied.
“We have it on good authority that something bad is going to happen at these coordinates.”
“You should report any suspicious activity to the proper authorities and … and … and …”
“Look, mate, why don’t you go get your boss.”
“Do I have to go get her?” the officer asked, very nervously.
“Yes.”
“Oh … Well, okay then.” The young officer briskly walked off and called his commanding officer.
The rest of the crew began to trickle off the Dunsparce behind Arlon. As they all moved away from the ship, they were able to catch the end of the officer’s conversation.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll send them right away,” he said before hanging up. He turned to the crew and motioned for them to follow a pair of marines. “Just follow the tram,” he told the Dunsparce crew. “You’ll be fine.”
The marines escorted them to a tram, which took them on a twenty minute ride across the entire length of the dreadnought. The crew then spent another few minutes on an elevator ride up to the bridge. The marines led them to an office door. The name engraved on the door read Vice Admiral Alexandra Graves.
The marines ushered the members of the Dunsparce’s crew into the room, then shut the door behind them. A middle-aged blonde woman in formal uniform with pale skin, a stern face, and cold eyes looked up at them from her desk as they entered.
“Yes, what is it?” she asked.
Arlon walked up to the desk and held out a datapad containing the Genesect data and the information Mr. Silver provided to the crew during their last meeting. “We have reliable information claiming something bad is about to happen at these very coordinates,” he told the vice admiral.
“I see,” she replied. She took the datapad and transferred the data off of it. She then reached for the intercom. “I need you to analyze this data,” she ordered whoever was on the other side.
“Right away, ma’am,” a voice responded. “That will take about—”
“No. Now.”
“Right away, ma’am. Five minutes.”
“Thank you.”
Vice Admiral Graves turned back to the crew of the Dunsparce. “Who are you all again?” she asked.
“We’re just space explorers,” Arlon told her. “And we’ve been to some weird places. We came across some pretty important information and thought we’d get it into the hands of the proper authorities.”
“I see …”
“I don’t suppose you happen to have a Poke Ball cannon lying around?” H suddenly asked. The admiral looked over at him with a concerned expression on her face.
“Uh, he’s kind of an … odd fellow,” Arlon explained.
“Keep him behaved,” Graves curtly responded.
“He’s not dangerous, just strange,” Morgan clarified.
The console suddenly beeped, notifying Graves that the analysis was complete. She read through the report she was sent, then stood up and turned to look out the viewport. “This matter you’ve brought to my attention … Do you intend to see it all the way through?”
“Yes,” Arlon told her.
“We came, didn’t we?” Morgan added.
Graves turned back to face them. “You did … And, if this data is accurate, then they will too.”
She reached for the intercom once more, this time to address the entire ship. “All hands, battlestations,” she ordered. “We are preparing to welcome a serious enemy threat. This is not a drill.”
Graves then turned to the crew of the Dunsparce once more. “If you truly intend to help, how do you plan to do so?”
“We can fight,” Arlon told her. “And by the look of things, I’d say you need all the bloody help you can get.”
“What do you bring to the table?” the vice admiral inquired.
“Sector 25,” Arlon responded. “We saved your asses.”
Graves brought the report on the Sector 25 incident up on her monitor and scrolled through it. “That was against a rabble of unorganized pirates,” she said, turning back to Arlon.
“And yet they crippled two of your cruisers,” Arlon pointed out.
“Have you read the specifications?” she asked, bringing the Genesect blueprint back up on her monitor.
“Yes, we have,” Arlon answered.
“And you will fight that in your ship?”
“Well … a better one would be … well, better,” Shane said. “But we will if we have to.”
“You’re braver than I thought,” Graves responded. “Very well. I’ll put in a requisition order for anything that you require, within reason, and for our engineers to outfit your ship with any modifications we can spare. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
When the Dunsparce crew returned to the port hangar, they fanned out and took a look around to see what they could do about upgrading their ship. At first glance, Shane spotted a stripped bucket class ship sitting on the floor near the Dunsparce and an impounded Alliance-make civilian frigate whose crew appears to be arguing with some Federation officers.
After watching the argument for a few moments, Shane approached the stripped bucket, where Arlon was already looking around to determine if it had any useful parts to salvage. “There’s got to be something we can cannibalize in here,” Arlon said to him when he spotted him. “Take a look around and see what you can find.”
With help from the rest of the crew, they searched through the scuttled ship. While a lot of the ship’s systems had been stripped, the weapons, power generators, and shield modulators had been untouched. Shane was sure they could find a use for all of it.
“We can really improve our firepower with this,” he said, eyeing a heavy plasma beam.
“And we can probably strip a lot of the armor plating off to augment the Dunsparce’s hull,” Arlon added.
Once they had finalized a plan for what to salvage from the bucket, Shane flagged down the engineer who appeared to be in charge of the hangar crew. “Hey you!” he called out. “Get some guys to outfit our ship with this stuff.”
“Oi!” the engineer shouted as he walked over. “Who the bloody hell are you to tell me—”
Shane interrupted the man by holding up the signed order from Vice Admiral Graves, shutting him up real quick.
“Right then,” the engineer said. “You got it boss.” He then turned his attention to a group of engineers idling nearby. “Oi! You lot!” he shouted. “Get to work upgrading this ship with this scrap and any other weapons we got lying around.”
As the engineers got to work, Shane glanced over at the Alliance frigate and decided to go talk to its crew to see if he could enlist their aid. As he approached, he noted that they seemed to be merchants of some sort. For whatever reason, their ship had been impounded by the Halberd and now they were stuck.
“There’s going to be a battle here,” Shane addressed the man who appeared to be the vessel’s captain. “Are you willing to help us out?”
“A battle?” the man asked. “You mean like a space battle?”
Shane nodded. “Like a space battle.”
“And you want us to fight?”
“I noticed weapons on your ship,” said Shane. “I guess I assumed too much.”
He turned and walked away, feeling a bit annoyed at the loss of such a ship. An idea came to him as he headed back to his crewmates, though, and he realized that it might not have been a total loss after all.
Upon returning to the Dunsparce, Shane flagged Arlon and Dmitri down. “I think I might know how we can get a better ship,” he told him, pointing at the frigate. “C’mon, let’s see if we can persuade them to part with it.”
“I like the way you think, mate,” Arlon replied, cracking a smirk.
The two of them followed Shane back to the frigate and Arlon stepped forward to speak with the captain. “Hey, mate. I think I might have a way for you to get out of here.”
“I’m listening,” the captain told him, sounding intrigued.
“Well … what if we traded ships?” Shane asked.
The captain looked at him with a concerned expression.
“Our ship’s not stuck here on lockdown,” Shane elaborated.
“If we trade, you can leave, and we can stay to fight the Romanov menace!” Dmitri encouraged the caption.
“Aren’t you … from the Romanov Union?” the man asked, noting Dmitri’s Romanov accent.
“I left for a reason,” said Dmitri.
“Look, mate,” Arlon told the captain. “You can either take the deal and get out of here in one piece, or stay here and die in the battle.”
“The smaller ship is also a better option for an escape as it’s more maneuverable,” Shane added. “We can swap our ships but keep our weapons, equipment, and cargo. We can also offer monetary compensation if you require it.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” the captain responded. “I need to talk with my crew first.”
He stepped away to consult with his crew, but returned a short while later. “We’ll take the deal,” he said. “But we would like to swap our warp registries as well. We have a clean record and would like to keep it that way.”
“Sure thing, mate,” Arlon tells him. “I’ll go let the engineers know.”
He walked off and flagged down the head engineer to explain the plan while Shane and Dmitri finalized their deal with the captain. Once that was taken care of, the two of them joined Arlon and the engineer.
“Normally I wouldn’t do this,” the engineer was explaining as they approached. “But considering the circumstances, I’ll do it.” He whistled at the engineers working on the Dunsparce, then motioned for them to move all the weapons and new additions from the Dunsparce to the frigate. Some of the engineers started grumbling but they did as they were told.
In the meantime, the crew collected their gear and personal effects from the Dunsparce and began the process of moving it all onto their new ship while that ship’s crew began to do the same. Once the engineers had stripped down the Dunsparce and attached the Alliance crew’s weapons and upgrades, the ship flew away. With news of the coming battle, they were eager to get away. The engineers then began working double-time to get the new ship outfitted. It wasn’t long before they got the job done.
“Everything’s taken care of,” the head engineer informed the crew, wiping the sweat from his brow. “However, there was a minor glitch when transferring the registry so you’re just gonna have to rename the ship. So what’ll it be? The UAS … ?”
“How about Helix?” Dmitri suggested, holding up the fossil he’d found back on Earth.
“Sure, mate,” Arlon agreed. “Fuck it. It’s a hell of a lot better than Dunsparce.”
“Alright, then,” the engineer said as he began entering the new name. “UAS Helix it is.”
He was not a moment too soon. Almost immediately after the engineer had confirmed the name, a warning siren began sounding throughout the Halberd.
It was time.
Notes: I think this was the single longest session of Volume 1. I write these in Google Docs ahead of time, and this was the only one in Volume 1 to have reached 30 pages. Splitting this in two was definitely a good idea. The ridiculous part is that every session in Volume 2 practically went this long.
In addition to the actual length, this chapter was actually very close to the actual session in terms of what happened. This far into the campaign, I was pretty good at taking notes on the events of each session. It’s a good thing too because going back to rewrite this one six months later would’ve been a nightmare. There were a lot of important details to cover here.
After the Red Suns battle from last chapter, the rest of the session was all RP. I did add a little bit of an exchange between Arlon and Rena at the beginning of this chapter to help things flow a bit better between chapters and to just smooth the transition to Volume 2. I brought in a few details from Arlon’s story between volumes as a bit of foreshadowing and it worked quite nicely. The rest was mostly just polish.
Thus the UAS Helix is born! After so much time on the Dunsparce, we got a larger, much better ship. One that served us well for the rest of the volume and onwards! And now we are nearing the end of the rewritten run of Volume 1. The final chapter awaits!
Update 9/22/21: This one wasn’t too bad to touch up. Aside from a couple parts, all I really did was the usual past tense conversion and touch up some wording, grammar, and punctuation. I did shift a few parts to be more in character perspective, but nothing major needed to be done. Solidifying Shane as the perspective character in the last scene was really the only big thing on that front. There are really only two major additions to this chapter. The first is a little scene between Arlon and Shane to add a bit of resolution to their Pokemon dying in the previous chapter. It also helped improve the pacing of the chapter. The other, more minor thing was giving a little overhaul to Morgan’s augmentation scene. I redid some of the descriptions and added some new dialogue to make it all flow better and give the scene a better resolution. Oh, and I guess I also name dropped the planet the upcoming battle is named after in canon, because apparently it wasn’t mentioned in this chapter, and was only in the title of the next chapter for some reason.
That does it for this chapter. As always the Spacemon gang and I will be monitoring the comments to foster discussion and answer any questions. Feel free to give feedback and critiques of the writing so I can improve it for the future, or just leave a comment with what you think about what went down in this chapter or what you think might happen next! You can also revisit past chapters, check out the rest of the Spacemon saga, join the Spacemon Discord server, or like our Facebook page to stay updated on all things Spacemon! Click here for the next exciting installment of Spacemon!
Get involved!
Comments
I like Vice Admiral Graves already. She's giving me the same vibes as Olivier Armstrong, and not just because Dragonstorm suggested they would share a voice actor.