Reroll

One orbital hop to Hawaii, and “Cho Areum” has her agreed-upon sum.  Hopefully it's not too traceable.  Hmm.  I’m an idle world traveler now… I go ahead and take some pictures; while I qualify for True Teleport, that’s only good for sixteen hundred miles if I get enough of my library out (and I can’t bring them with me when I travel if I keep them out…), and Hawaii is over two thousand from the coast.  Still… an orbital hop takes less time than a flight, most of the time, and I have my own starship… which is small enough to fit inside the party starship… which is a self-sustaining stealth nuclear weapons platform and manufacturing plant.

Power, water, food, air, manufacturing, nuclear weapons… hmm; we could be a small country ourselves, other than the little issue that we only have carriage for a thousand people.  Maybe we can get a Base Ship with the Colony Ship framework eventually?  That would be good for a million... Regardless, I have the shadow pilot fly back to the main ship and dock in the canopy: It’s nice having arbitrarily large numbers of servants, I can sip drinks while someone else does the work, because I did the work for them to be there to do it for me.

Although I can't say I earned the fantastic seed of power that's grown that allowed me to create the servants….

Regardless, I go through the narrow passage in the docking canopy and get to the party ship, leaving my shadow pilot behind to tend my little ship: Refuel from the party ship, check mine over for maintenance needs, clean up after me, watch the scanners, and so on.

Meanwhile, I check with the shipboard VI, and get directions to where Ed and Betty are working: They're in one of the many cargo bays.  I head down there…

…and immediately feel something poking my foot. I look down: A loose diamond.  The floor is covered with hundreds of diamonds, scattered around, each exactly the same size. “Three hundred golds each,” my Appraise ‘Al’ informs me. I look around, and also see jade, incense, silver, onyx, marked bones, and many other items. Betty casts Fabricate again, making another as I watch; this time, making a pile of diamond dust.

I recognize the stuff easily enough: They're spell components.  Diamonds are used for a lot of things: Raise Dead, Resurrection, True Resurrection, Permancy, and others; Incense is used for Visualization of the Mind, Visualization of the Body, Rite of daily Purity, and others; Onyx is used for Maw of the Nightmare, Animate Dead, Create Undead, and others; and so on.  I do have a question though: “There's got to be like a million golds worth of components here.  What's going to happen when the wealth reset hits?”

“Nothing,” Ed comments off hand, “A character's wealth is the gear they carry. We just leave ‘em all here until we need them.”

“Also, they're just spell effects,” Betty adds, “Those have listed costs too.  It's not like your shadow army vanishes at midnight when you're simply using your class features.”

I nod, “True enough.” I pause, “Say, mind if I snitch some of these? I have an experiment to run.”

Betty shrugs, “Knock yourself out.”

I collect several thousand golds worth of the various magical reagents, find an unused cabin, get out my Library of casters for support, and make several more shadow minions.  These all have the same build: They're Mages, but almosy completely lacking in talents: Just  a single base sphere (I go with Alteration).  Instead, I give them Spellcraft boosting feats and item creation feats, most notably for the moment including Craft Wondrous Item and Cooperative Crafting. Cooperative Crafting is to speed things up: It lets multiple casters work on the same project and all reduce the time taken (normally that's only good for meetings requirements), so by getting fifteen of them together they can make what I'm after in a day.  Craft Wondrous Item is, of course, the creation feat for the item I'm using to test: An Amulet of Undead Persuasion. Despite the name, what it does is make ‘feed’ for undead.  It *does* make it *slightly* easier to control an Undead fed in that way if you hold the amulet… but not by much.  And even at that, you need to be a dhampir (a kind of half-vampire race) to make use of that aspect. It can really only keep a single hungry undead sated, and isn't ‘tasty’ for them… but for an undead that would prefer not to hunt… well, it may be the only viable option.  I hand them the materials, give them their orders, and put my library away.  The main reason for getting the full library out, of course, is the skill boosting: My pocket crafters don't have the required spells or race, so getting a ten point bonus will really help them get it done.  Cooperative Crafting helps there too, as each assisting crafter adds two more points to the Spellcraft check needed to make the item.  So with one ‘main’ crafter with nine ranks in Spellcraft, Spellcraft as a class skill, Skill Focus in Spellcraft, the Magical Aptitude feat, and an Intelligence score of ten, that's a starting modifier of seventeen. With fourteen “assistant” crafters each adding a two point bonus, a five point bonus from my Implement, and a five point bonus from using my library to boost my caster level when I made the crafters, they end up with a final Spellcraft modifier of fifty five; they can very easily make one per day despite missing basically all of the requirements… as long as Betty is willing to feed the machine suitable reagents.

I let them get to work, and head back to report in.

I give Ed and Betty a rundown of the meeting with the Resistance, let them know my remaining budget for the month from the hospital, and that I completed the transaction with the newly minted Korean woman.  

Ed nods, “All right… I'll want to think about how to respond to them.”

I shrug, “They're not expecting an answer until Wednesday; we have time.”

Betty shrugs, “I'm game for a meeting. Worst case scenario we all reroll and try again as someone else.”

I chuckle, “About why I'm risking it, yes.  So did you guys pick a target?” I've been gone basically all day.  Travel by orbital hop still takes hours.

“Yes,” Ed responds instantly, “we want to wipe a production facility off the map.”

“Rescue their supernatural workers, compromise their supply chain, and demonstrate we're not to be trifled with all in one go,” Betty adds.

“...and if that doesn't work out, they're far enough away from everything else that we can just nuke them from orbit,” Ed finishes.

I mull it over briefly, “Sounds good; got the details?”

We go over the plan: The compound is a fenced warehouse in Kansas; the nearest building (outside of the compound itself) is a good three miles away; given that the blast radius from ship's weapons is less than a mile, we have plenty of room for error if we go that route.  Much of the facility is actually underground: The warehouse keeps the rain off, but the prisoners doing the work are in reinforced concrete cells spread between five basement levels.  The facility is handled by Guardians, controlled by controllers stationed in the top basement.

Plan A is straightforward: Incorporeally walk through the walls, drop a few grenades in with the controllers, then go into the building through the front door and let everyone out. Those who are amenable, we bring up to our ship.

Plan B isn't quite so clean: Flood the place with my shadow soldiers using Starfinder weapons via Shadowstuff Armament, knock down the front door, kill anything that fights back, and then evacuate the prisoners as per Plan A.

Plan C we don't much like: We fight them all ourselves. If they have some trick that beats the shadow flood, we use our more material minions and ourselves, doing… basically the same as Plan B.

Plan D is calling fire to rain down from heaven.  If we can't sneak in and kill the controllers, and we figure we can't fight our way through, we GTFO, place a call to the ship, and have the minions we left behind hit the big red button and literally nuke the place from orbit.  The idea here is that it's generally better to die than live as a slave.

Additionally, while we don't really think it will work (buffs and gear all crumble when we die), we also set Plan D up as a deadman switch: If we don't check in within range of a particular schedule, the minions hit the big red button anyway.

Plans in hand, I spend a few hours mass manufacturing combat type minions while Betty and Ed dump long-duration buffs on them (Improved Mage Armor for a boost to armor class, Superior Resistance for general saves, and Energy Immunity to stop energy damage), before I store them. Once we're ready, we fly down in our personal starships, and survey the place directly….