Reroll

When morning rolls around, I've finally had the Regeneration talents for a full twenty-four hours… so I apply Eternal Steel to everyone (plus the pets, and all metallic gear everyone has) before changing out my Spheres talents known: It's nice to have my Warp Storage back… and to be able to teleport short distances, hide my own magic aura, and control exactly what I look like.

I had to set aside a lot for that trick… but now that it's done, well… it is Permanent.  It even explicitly works fine on creatures without a Constitution score, so I get to have it on my incorporeal self as well. The healing isn't really enough to affect an individual battle meaningfully, but it gets rid of death by injury until something dispels it.  Poison, disease, stoning, and so on still apply, of course… but I have the healing talents to fix most of those.

Mind, I'm looking forward to tenth, when a lot of options open up with Advanced Talents: True Teleport in Warp, Scrying in Divination, Permanent Transformation in Alteration (which makes Alterations Instant, despite the name) and the Permanent Image in Illusion (which makes illusions Permanent… and my shadow minions are illusion effects, so tbat's great for stocking up). I'll be able to have some serious fun with those and my flexible talents… and possibly also tick the last box on “Things the Inquisition cannot abide.”

Regardless… we all have breakfast, feed out pets, and get down to business.

Ed starts, “How do we want to play this rescue?”

Betty considers, “Our ship can fly within an atmosphere… we could get close to the buildings in question and use the scanners… we did go high end on those.”

I nod, "And I have the Warp sphere again, so we don't even strictly need to land her to board… which is probably good, seeing as how the ship is some two hundred feet long: We could do an invisible in and out once we find her.”

Ed considers, “I can't see any large holes in that… Kenny, how many people can you shuttle at this point?”

“As many as we like…” I pause, “One at a time, because I didn't grab Mass Teleport this morning.”

Ed pauses, “Okay… I can't see this playing well as a party endeavor, then.”

Betty shrugs and looks at me, “How do you feel about running this one solo?”

I consider, “Pretty good, actually. If I don't bring a meatsuit I am VERY stealthy, as is our ship. The plan is an in-and-out… it should be fine, really.”

Ed nods, “Great… details… we'll want a tub full of water ready for her, obviously.”

I chuckle, “Obviously… the spare quarters have them, at least per the plans we wrote up.”

Betty considers, “How about we go check that out?”

I smile, “Yes, let's do that,” I pause and check the personal comm unit that is built into most Starfinder armor… yes, my shadowstuff armor has both ships contacts in it already… and I have NO idea how that works.

Betty clearly does the same, as she issues an order: “Please approach, remaining cloaked, and hover one hundred feet above my current position.”

I get a notice from my com, on the main ship's channel, “Return command acknowledged; ETA two hours.”

Betty relays the same to Ed, adding “She was apparently in orbit.”

I bob my head a bit, “Cool.” I'll need to try that with my personal ship, too… it's why the VI, really.

We wait the two hours for the ship to arrive, and during that time, I pull a spare personal comm unit out of my Warp Storage (they’re cheap, so I nabbed a few), unlock it, set up Ed as an authorized user, and hand it over, “So you're not left out.”

He chuckles, “Thanks… I'm going to need to start dipping on the Ninja side, aren't I?”

I shrug, “probably, yeah.  I'd recommend Soldier so you can toss grenades or fire other weapons easily with the Shadowstuff Armament feat.  For now, though… that will let you call the ship, provided we keep the comm charged up… but it has an eighty hour battery, so… not hard.”

We all get notifications on our comm units at the same time… a group channel, it seems: “I'm here.”

Which is good, because the ship is running silently.

I go outside and look up… okay, if I look long enough, I can kind of see the ship's outline… my Perception ‘Al’ can apparently make it out readily.  This should be okay, really.

Ed speaks up, “Kenny, you up for getting us all up there?”

I consider, “I'd rather not Warp over completely blind. Give me a bit…” I disposes my Animal Companion, and simply fly up into the ship… it's certainly visible from the inside.  I go to the top, open an access port there, look down… I can see through the ship.  And it's purely technological, theoretically.  Fun.  I Warp back down.

Now, of course, I know exactly where the top of the ship is, because I was there.  And I can see it, because the ship is effectively invisible.

So I reposess my animal companion, call everyone over (including the pets), and one at a time Warp them up to our ship's roof before joining them all myself… and then we all go inside to see how it turned out.

We all know the layout: We designed it together, after all… but a floorplan sketched out on paper doesn't do this place justice: It's two hundred feet long from bow to stern, fifty feet tall at the highest point, a hundred fifty wide at the widest, with something of a diamond cut shape. Each of the crew cabins are two story affairs at about nine hundred square feet… per floor, arranged in a hexagon around the bridge for quick access to duty stations. These one person “crew cabins” are bigger than the house I grew up in… and dripping in luxury.

The kitchen counters are polished marble, the baths are full-sized jacuzzi (also in marble), the faucets are gold, the chairs and couches are silk, the marble flooring is heated, and on and on.  The walls barely seem to be there: From any room in one of these cabins, it looks like I'm in a little glass room looking outside the ship, with marked portals going to the adjacent rooms.

I take a closer look, and figure out how it works: Technically, the walls and ceiling are a matte white… but it doesn't matter, because I basically never see the actual color.  This thing has little projectors buried all over the place, which use the walls and ceiling as projection screens.  Which makes me wonder… “Ship, what options do we have for the walls?”

Hidden speakers sound off, “The default is to tie them into ship's sensors for security reasons, but I have a wide variety of preprogrammed nature scenes, and can render and store short loops of almost anything you can describe.”

I consider, “So if I wanted, say, a spot on a sandy beach on a grassy island with sheep feeding nearby, I could have that?”

The walls go white for a few seconds while the ship speaks, “Certainly; rendering now… there.”

I look and… yes, I have calm ocean waves beating against golden sand on one side, a grassy green plain with some fluffy white sheep grazing contentedly on the other.  Nice… “How long is the 'short loop'?”

“A round number…. for the manufacturer. It works out to approximately seventy-six seconds with your units and number system.  I rendered the loop to the limit of the projectors’ storage, closing ot so the seam will be almost unnoticeable.”

I consider a bit, “Thank you for the demonstration. Please set it back to the default.”

The ship's speakers pipe back up, “You're welcome,” as the scene switches back to the view outside.

Okay, now these… THESE are nice digs.

…and the entire ship is set up that way.  

In the bridge, it serves a very practical purpose: There's no need for a separate viewing screen… and while it is slightly disorienting, the floor is done up the same way as the walls in the bridge: It's like the duty stations are just floating there, which I imagine helps when a fight is in three dimensions. And the stations themselves? Holographic interfaces: Switching profiles will be a snap.

Of course, we didn't just come here to gawk.  Ed gets practical, “Ship, please take us to…” he gives the city, “we are looking to rescue someone.”

“Acknowledged…” I watch as the world falls away as the ship rises and starts traveling, “ETA twenty minutes.”

Of course, the bridge and crew quarters are just a small fraction of the ship's total volume. Most of it is taken up by the power core, engines, weapons mounts, environmental systems, shield generators, cargo bays, the Industry, the Fuel Synthesizer, and so on… which we also tour while we're traveling.

Sadly, we reach our destination before we really get to play with the Holographic Amusement Center, so we all head to the bridge….