Reroll

We have the discussion in a living room off the bridge, locking Joe out of the room.

“Can we just reroll?” Betty seems slightly incredulous.

I shrug, “Why not? We retired characters every now and again for in person games, it was never a big deal as long as we didn't hop builds too often.”

Ed nods, “That is true… all right and what build are you proposing?”

I smile, “The same master-of-all trades build for all of us, interestingly.”

“‘Master-of-all’?” Betty raises an eyebrow, “that's a bold claim.” She's hooked.

My smile broadens, “With these rules, I can also deliver on it. Any basic party role, covered, INCLUDING melee in an anti-magic field thanks to two ‘mundane’ pets. Here….”

I walk them through the plan, getting it all out on illusiory paper so they can keep track. It starts with Fey Adept as the “active” portion of the Gestalt build - it's a great Spherecasting chassis, with a keystone ability: Create Reality. The minionomancy potential from that allows a Spheres Omnicaster build, thanks to some Advanced talents that are accessible starting at level ten (notably Permanent Image, which changes the duration to “Permanent” on the shadow minions).

That, of course, is necessary for crewing the new ship….

“You're seriously looking at a Cruiser?” Ed has his eyebrows up in his bangs now.

I shrug, “Well, with the ability to make arbitrarily large numbers of partially arbitrary minions, we can actually fill up those hundred crew slots.”

Betty frowns, “You don't have any weapons on this design….”

I chuckle, “That leads nicely into the other half of this build. We use three templates - Ghost, Advanced, and Primarcane - for stat boosts and their special abilities, and fill the rest of that side with ‘dips’: One level in Soldier for the Starfinder proficiencies and wealth, one in Incanter for the magic talents and a bonus feat for the Spell Proxy feat so we can turn those unlimited minions into unlimited magic talents known and nice caster level boosts, and two into Conscript for….”

They read the five combat talents I selected with that.

“Seriously? We each get OUR OWN starship?” Now Ed's hooked.

I smile, “Indeed. We need to keep them Small so they'll fit in the docking canopy of the mothership. I fully endorse the Tug base frame, as that is the only Small ship that can take a Heavy weapon mount… and it's on a turret no less.  We keep most of the luxury amenities on the mothership, as well as the Industry, Fuel Synthesizer, and Drift Engine, so the small ships need only concern themselves with weapons, shields, engines, basic sensors, and stealth… we of course will use a data net so we can all take full advantage of the mothership's sensors and science crew.”

I take a breath, “Now… obviously, please do NOT nuke anything without discussing it with all of us.” I pause, “And of course, we have the mech from those two talents spent, and the Wild Cohort from the feat earlier…” Betty gets it.

I nod, “And a very disposable minion in an Eidolon thanks to Mythic Expertise, paid for by the 'Unchained’ oracle curse… which won't matter, as we don't deal with Outsiders. We want the Eidolon for piloting, so we go with Dex focused builds for them, Skilled(Piloting), and spend the Eidolon's feats getting the Pilot sphere and Pilot's Savvy so they can do whatever very effectively in Starship combat.”

I continue, “Now, for the base race, I found a gem: The race builder. We go with a 'monstrous' race, pump Charisma, and particularly of note pick up the at-will spell-like option for Heroic Fortune….”

Ed blinks, “Wait… so a free Hero Point whenever we want, which can be used to recharge….”

I nod, “Any daily resource, yes. We'll all be infinity engines.  Unlimited use of Shadow Points for Create Reality, unlimited use of the flexible talents known from Primearcane's Miraculous Lore, unlimited use of our Mythic power… we'll just need to rest a bit between uses to recharge.”

Ed considers, “You know, if I use Hierophant for my Mythic base, that recharge means any divine caster gets access to the entire spell list via Inspired Spell; with the Mythic being rechargeable… an Oracle could ROCK.”

Betty nods, “The Mythic Archmage path has the same thing for arcanists in Wild Arcana. Substitute Sorcerer, and that's the entire Sorcerer and Wizard spell list available….”

I consider, “Those do work quite well too, don't they? Yeah, cool idea.  You lose the limitless minions….”

Ed shrugs, “Only one of us needs that to fill the mothership. We'll each have three real minions, one of which is intelligent….

“Two,” Betty corrects, “Kenny has the ‘Intelligent Vessel’ mech enhancement in the selection list.”

Ed shrugs, “Regardless, the Tug only has two seats, so an Eidolon with an Accelerated Datajack in the other seat is sufficient… and with us being Vancian casters, we can shuffle out the Primarcane template….”

They get to work on their own new builds, using slightly different template sets: Betty goes with a Sorcerer base, drops Incanter and Primarcane, replacing them with the Half Celestial and Fey Creature templates for some spell-like and Supernatural abilities. Ed does similarly with his Oracle, going with the half-dragon and Phrenic Creature templates for the stats and psi-like abilities.

Which is fine; variety is good, they still have the important minions, and they still have very hefty  boosts from their setups.  The basic statistical boosts aren't quite as high as mine, but to be fair they have more short-term flexibility in their casting… especially since they both grab Versatile Spellcaster and Heighten Spell, letting them cast sixth level spells “normally”, which means their Mythic gets them access to sixth level spells from their entire respective lists as well… which, admittedly, has some seriously nice options.

They do take my designs for the companions and Mythic path abilities, and we all agree to buff each other (and our pets) up regularly.   So we'll all be invisible full time (except against the people we choose: Selective Illusions and Permanent image from me, using the Shared Magic feat from Spheres of Power to give them ‘ownership’ of the spells for themselves and their pets so they can flip their own visibility on or off for select people at their own pleasure), regenerating full time (Eternal Steel from me), immune to the five basic elements full time (all five versions of the Energy Immunity spell from Spell Compendium handle that: It lasts 24 hours, and does what it says on the tin; so we'll need to renew it daily, but that's trivial) thanks to Betty, and in constant mental communication with each other (Telepathic Bond and Permanancy, thanks to Ed's creative use of the False Focus feat to skip material component costs of a hundred golds or less combining well with Fabricate to make materials he can then turn around and use to power other spells with expensive components).

We park our ship in orbit, and when midnight rolls around, it's downright quick to do the new  character sheets, as we already have them fully planned out.

We do hear a very girly scream when we're back in the real world in our new ship, followed quickly by, “What in the Abyss just happened?”  Oh, right: We didn't let Joe in on the plan.  Oops.  

I wonder what that looked like from his perspective?

We rush over to the room he's in, and I spend a shadow point to armor myself quickly, as do Ed and Betty.  We somehow perfectly know our way around the ship that's about fifteen hundred feet long (and it is currently practically abandoned - four people inside, and it's built for long term support of a thousand).

Joe's uninjured: He's standing in place, breathing hard, and looking around like the walls are out to kill him.

…which is doing some interesting things to her bare chest.  Oh, his bare chest, even if he doesn't look anything like a male.

Well… clothes are easy… Betty beats me to it with Clothier's Closet, drawing an imaginary line between two doorposts and creating a variety of outfits.

“Who are you three?” Oh, right. Joe isn't hooked into the instant recognition aspect.

Betty beats me to it, “Right… well, I'm Michelle… Betty, rather.  This is Nicole… err, Ed… and Lana… err, Kenny.”

It's Betty’s turn to be super short; she looks just a hair over four feet tall, has a huge set of hips with a wobbly backside, pale skin, smooth muscles, and a waspish waist to go with her dark blue hair (which is quite short: It only goes down to her ears) and orange eyes.  Her knockers are nice.. quite big, but not so large as to look unnatural. Her template gave her white feathered wings.

Ed is very tall, well over six feet, with crazy huge knockers… FIVE of them. She's extremely pale, with simple brown hair down to her shoulders,a waist I could easily wrap my hands around, which balloon out to larger hips and a gigantic jiggling backside, muscle definition everywhere… and of course, as a half-dragon, he is scaled and has matching wings and claws.

I take a moment to check myself out too: While Ed and Betty are very pale, I am straight-up WHITE, like a painted mannequin.  I'm pretty tall, too; Ed has maybe three inches on me. My chest is tiny in comparison, but still very good handfuls. My waist… okay, I look like a wasp there as well… my hips are just ridiculous, though, and I ended up with scaled wings… reminds me of snake skin, huh.

And of course, as ghosts, all three of us are just slightly transparent.

Now how do we explain this….