Post by Trish on Jul 24, 2013 0:15:59 GMT -5
BIG STORY ARC: Story Map
So far, Chris saw the Time Key. This led KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs to Earth with the Mass Key where he annihilated Adena. Adena came back. Morkos the Brain King gave the mutant students his ship and gave Adena the Mind Key. Students are assembled to head into space and end the threat of the keys.
Chapters-
1. Spaceport
2. The City of Perpetual Light
3. The Deadliest Winter
4. Planet Peanut
5. Empire of Puppets
6. Wandering
7. The Men in the Moon
8. A World of Knowledge
9. Easy
10. The Spicy Whore of Freedom
11. The Sun God
12. The Thunder in the Prince
13. Fighting against Time
14. KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs
15. Resolutions
Chapter 1: Spaceport
The MindCraft is preset to a space station. Adena finds she can use the Mind Key as a universal translator.
At Customs, the group is cleared and Emma is set to the interstellar embassy. She finds out she is a ‘Chell’, which is a hybrid from a race called the A`Kali. She is ‘T’Chell of Earth’, the 20th hybrid made on Earth. She is given a large amount of money owed to her due to a class-action settlement, enough to payroll their trip.
They meet Lixxa, a lovely green alien woman. She is waiting for her ‘partner’ Hetas to finish shopping. Hetas is a lovely blue alien lady. They two merge together into a blue-and-green swirled entity named HeLix. HeLix explains she is from a species called the Myxomygastrians. They are a stage beyond ‘mutants’, they are all unique beings. Instead of reproducing, they now bond and meld together to create fewer, better creatures. KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs is an insane member of this race with a socially-disgusting 7-member bond made for power instead of love.
Emma sees a group of beautiful snake people. One of them has a cute jacket that appears to have a fluffy white collar, but is actually emitting a mist of frigid vapor. She is pretty awesome! They are of the A`Kali race, and will take the time to talk to Emma, even though she is gross. Emma learns that A`Kali physiology causes them to undergo a full-body mitosis at puberty. This leaves ones entity which keeps its name and has all the best mental qualities for civilized society, and one who has all the unwanted qualities which is retarded or insane and usually just killed. Good-splits are ‘Firsts’, bad-splits are ‘Seconds’. Emma has never split, so she is a ‘Heavy’, and some have two heads and are called ‘Doubles’. One member of the group is a slow-witted Second, carrying the bags. Emma was part of a galaxy-spanning experiment to try to find a way to ‘purge’ the Second without it becoming a living being, so they would not have to deal with killing them or with the evil geniuses. Emma is told she can be given a medicine that will encourage the split.
In the Food Court, they find a man preaching a gospel of a life without need, without crime, without sickness or suffering. He sounds crazy, but he keeps talking about a ‘key’ to it all. Taken up on his offer, he tells them of a utopian city where all are welcome. This leads to the Energy Key.
At the talk of keys, the Formless Ones attack, possessing different things in the food court. The heroes defeat the Formless Ones, and take the MindCraft to The City of Perpetual Light.
Chapter 2: The City
The heroes find the city they were told of. It is surrounded by a rung of decaying ships; colony ships, merchant vessels, pirate ships, warships – all of them abandoned. They are welcomed into the city. It is using the Energy Key for limitless free energy – and with this energy and energy-to-matter replication technology, there is no wanting in this city. Any person in this city can get almost anything they want with little effort and virtually no wait. There is no crime, because anything a person would want to steal for can be given to them simply by requesting it from the city. The key is out in the open.
There is no fight here and no danger. However, it is inevitable that KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs will find this place and take the key, if the heroes do not take it now. The city has battery life to keep itself going for another hundred years, but after that the utopia would begin to decay into normal life. However, KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs will take over in well under that amount of time, so they are doomed to a worse fate if left alone. The heroes take the key.
While there, they meet people who fled from another world many years ago after a catastrophe caused by a similar artifact. They get directions to this world to seek the green-colored key there on Planet Essward.
Chapter 3: The Deadliest Winter
The heroes find a world of humanoid people who live in stick huts. Despite their primitive culture, every building has a sophisticated metal roof. All the plants also have mighty shells which they can retract into, and do so every night. A cute child named Bloobie helps to cover the Mindcraft with a metal canopy.
Every night, even though it is temperate, it snows. The warm snow devours anything it touches that could remotely be considered food, and in the morning sun it fades into particles that float back into the sky.
Long ago, this was a civilized, spacefaring race or normal people. However, the climate caused the better part of every year to be dominated by terrible, terrible blizzards. One member of their race came across the Life Key. He used it to try and bring the weather pattern to life, so it could understand that it was out of control and hurting people. Sadly, the life key does not grant these gifts, and all he did was create a devastating new life form. Their civilization was thrown back to medieval level, their streets and cities eroded by the crystalline swarm. The swarm lives in big pockets that stay in the sky, floating islands of hunger. The heroes find a way to save this world, and are rewarded with information. They are told where the genius with the key was banished off to.
The heroes head off in the MindCraft. However, in the system’s asteroid field they are attacked again by the Formless Ones. Giant rock monsters assault the ship! It is here that the man Chris met months ago appears, in a space suit, holding a collapsed scythe. He uses the Time Key to jump the ship forward in time, and escape the Formless Ones.
In exchange for a snack and some time to sit, the man known only as the Time Traveler tells them the true story of KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs and the Formless Ones. Many years ago, the Myxomygastrians and another race known as the Rais were at an evolutionary arms race. While the Myxomygastrians were primed to combine into one super-being, the Rais were becoming communal beings of pure energy. It was difficult to tell who would reach this ultimate level first, and neither side was comfortable with having an alien god poised to overpower them. This led to a war, each side trying to exterminate the other. A leader among the Myxomygastrians came across the Mass Key, and with its power committed the most heinous war crime.
He annihilated the mass that made up the Rais and there homeworld, leaving nothing by emptiness. However, the Rais were on the verge of becoming energy beings, and their minds could survive with no physical form. Survival kept them alive, but not sane. They lost their minds and individuality, becoming spirits of rage that possessed matter and took their anger out on whatever they beheld. The only thought they can still focus on is The Key.
They refer to the Mass Key, which they could use to restore their bodies. However, their scrambled mélange of hive-mind and individual does not process that there is more than one key, and they are drawn to any mention of any of the Universe Keys. The billions of minds that make up the Formless Ones as a whole are cordoned off in a sector of space where the universe is safe from them. However, little groups of them escape, and what exactly is holding the whole mass there is questionable. Their desire for the Mass Key is infinite, and they may be the one entity more dangerous with the Keys than KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs.
The Time Traveler does not give up his key, for simply keeping it out of phase with the normal time stream, KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs can never get it. After his tale, he takes his key and leaves. His last comment is that they can look further for the Life Key on Planet Peanut.
Chapter 4: Planet Peanut
‘Planet Peanut’ leads them to a strange cosmic formation. The ‘peanut’ is two Earth-sized worlds that crashed into each other. This peanut planet is orbited by a large moon, lit up with the lights of civilization.
The moon is a friendly world, overcrowded like a space-Tokyo, shared by two sentient races. Due to nothing other than the whims of the universe, the worlds collided. Half of each race was lost, and the survivors fled into space. A man, a refugee from his own world, came in passing. He had a strange green key, and he used it to make their large moon a life-supporting world all its own. The refugee ships landed, and 10 billion people now share a world smaller than Mars. Still, they have gotten over their dark past and live happy and busy. There is a museum that showcases the most beautiful item – a small red gem with streaks like dark blue lightning bursting from its center. It was formed by the collision of the two planets, and it is called the Gem of Ten Billion Souls.
Hey, Adena owes Myra a gem! They also find the direction their savior left in.
Anyway, leaving this planet they find themselves caught in a Sub-Cee field, that prohibits the tricks most craft use to travel faster than light. This field is being generated by a pirate base on a free-floating asteroid, with a small fleet of ships. The field is a few light-days across and the pirates use it to assault merchant vessels!
This is not OK, and the heroes will stop it! Of course, the only way to stop it is to destroy the reactor on the base. They find some way to do this, and scatter the fleet.
Chapter 5: Empire of Puppets
The trail that started on the snow planet leads them to a new world. This world is green and clean and it confuses the ship’s main sensors. It registers no large-scale sentient life, and yet it has a huge well-maintained metropolis spanning a thousand miles.
Landing here, they find the city to be populated by walking, talking ‘people’ that are amalgamations of mossy stone and other debris. They tell a tale of the God-King who came to their world, with his daughter the Goddess-Princess (not a bad title!). He created the first few of their kind to entertain his daughter, but then ended his own mortal existence for reasons unknown. The Goddess-Princess became the Goddess-Queen, and she still resides in their city. It is by her will and her love that they walk and talk.
It turns out the refugee from the snow-world came here with his daughter and the despised Life Key. He killed himself, leaving his daughter with the Key, and she went mad and created her own puppet kingdom.
The heroes get a chance to look around, and meet some of the elder golems while trying to ascertain the location of the queen. The oldest golem notes their keys, and that they are the same as the Queen’s key. The old golem has also seen a man with a black key, but he left after a short visit. Their tour is interrupted by the Mass Ship, which arrives and sends down Kaywat. Her literal lightning speed gets her to the self-proclaimed queen and the Life Key is lost. As she arcs back to the ship, there is the horrible rustling sound of every golem-citizen losing their false existence at once. If there is any up-side, KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs seems to remain unaware of their meddling.
Chapter 6: Wandering
Lacking other options, the heroes head for spacefaring civilization. The man with the black key traveled in a ship, so he had to pass through somewhere. As luck would have it, the interstellar truck stop they arrive at did meet the man. They call him the Wanderer. He roams around and around and around and around. He came by looking for fuel, but the stop did not carry what his craft required, and sent him off to a better place.
Many interstellar fuels are made from Helium3. Nearby is a lovely green and gold rippled nebula rich in swirling currents of the stuff. It is collected by large triangular light sails, and the nebula is swarming with them. It is named after a local dish where meat, cheese, and other savory sauces are served over triangular chips. In English, the name would translate best to the ‘Nacho Nebula’.
Jiji is there, and obtains a hostage. It is Bloobie! It is revealed that each of the 7 members of KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs is perfect for one of the keys, and Jiji is the Life Key. Kaywat is there to back her up, and the hostage is traded for the Energy Key. They two escape on a train, but that train is not faster than Jake! Jake will give chase, and he must strip off his UN-armor to catch up. The two combine their keys and strip Jake of his x-factor. Never again will he make fire, and he can only run as fast as his anatomy allows. This turns out to be pretty fast.
Jake’s new ‘powers’
Superspeed anatomy-
*Run at Good(10) Ground speed (60 MPH).
*1d3 punches
Chapter 7: The Men in the Moon
Once Jake has had time to come to terms with himself, the Nacho Nebula does serve its purpose. Though it was many years ago, the Wanderer’s visit was remembered, and the heroes learn of his next destination.
They are sent to a garden world called Cazshma. When they get there, they find a smoky grey marble. It is not safe to land, so the heroes beam down. As the only living man on the planet, the Wanderer is easy to find. He is a nice man, of humanoid alien race, dressed simply with a walking stick and the black Key around his neck. It turns out to be the Space Key, and they learn it makes him perfectly selectively invulnerable. This has kept him safe through all his travels, however, it offers not power to move him from place to place so a ship is required.
His name is Dion. He landed on this world to experience it, but their ruler learned of the Space Key and its powers. His ship was destroyed, and he was not allowed to leave. More and more force was sent to take the Key away. Of course, none of it could. There was an impasse; they could not break his barrier, and he could not leave. He also could not simply give the key to the increasingly desperate and insane man leading the charge. Eventually, the planet ran out of resources with which to wage their war, and the planet was choked to death by one man’s greed. The Wanderer was stranded. But! That was then, and now there is nothing keeping him here, besides a lack of a way to leave. The heroes have a ship!
Or – do they? The sky quakes and shakes, and the moon roses at unnatural speed. The rapidly moving moon causes a gravity storm that rocks the continents and rips the MindCraft from its orbit, sending it hurtling to the ground, destroyed. A single eye forms on the moon’s surface, and the orb splits into a massive fanged maw. The moon’s molten core glows in it throat. The Formless Ones have escaped their sector, and en masse have possessed the moon. The moon monster takes a bite of the planet, and continues to chomp away at the world in search for the Universe Keys. The heroes must race to find a Cazshma spacecraft – now that there’s enough hands to operate it, the Wanderer knows of ships that can escape the stars.
Rushing against a sentient apocalypse, the heroes find a ship just in time. And, boy, do they find a ship. Their new ship is a massive, mighty military battlecruiser, fit to wage war on other planets. It is named Tomorrow’s Bright Dawn. They escape in style, leaving the Formless Ones behind. The battlecruiser proves easier to operate if Adena makes it sentient with the Mind Key.
Chapter 8: A World of Knowledge
The Wanderer has joined their motley crew and has a bit of advice. Much time ago, there was a benevolent man who briefly held but the Mass and Mind Keys. We know the Mind Key can provide all knowledge, but at a horrible cost. To get around this, the man used the Mass key to create an entire world that served no purpose but to contain this innumerable knowledge. It provides comfortable gravity, breathable atmosphere, and a convenient terminal in which any being may ask it one question. Although it is out of date by an unknown amount of time, it’s a better place than anything to start looking for things like the Universe Keys. KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs is sure to head there.
As a bonus, the combined form can only ask one question – but the divided individuals could ask 7. This is as close to ‘weak’ as KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs gets. The conundrum involves the Mind Key. The Mind Key can update the planet, allowing it current information. They get to the planet first, and this gives them three options.
1: Update the planet with current information and get food answers to their questions. However, when KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs arrives, he will get this same information.
2: Hide and wait for KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs to come and go, then update and ask. However, there is every chance he will destroy the planet when he is done with it, giving them no turn.
3: Ask their questions with the outdated info and get the best information they can, then be free to deal with KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs as they please when he arrives.
Whatever they get, they will then be on their way.
Chapter 9: Easy
The clues lead them to an abandoned facility once owned by a powerful interstellar race called the Pharat Empire. The task seems simple enough; the space station is in the middle of nowhere and it is abandoned. The entire affair has been rigged by Schedos as a trap. The heroes are beset upon by an army of robots and armed emplacements controlled by Schedos.
The heroes overcome, and turn the tables, and as Schedos lacks any grand offensive powers he becomes their prisoner. Though he is the least powerful individual of the 7, he is required for KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs to fully wield the Time Key. The heroes are able to contact part of the currently-disbanded 7, and trade Schedos for the Life Key. They are half-way to getting Jake his powers back with this, and can restore him once they have the Energy Key.
However, Jiji is a sore loser and she destroys the battlecruiser, leaving them stranded on the station. Now all she needs to do is wait for them to run out of air, and come back to collect the Mind, Life, and Space keys at her leisure.
But, the 7 are not our heroes only enemy. They won’t have to worry about running out of air, because a ship from the pirate fleet has tracked them here – and without their battlecruiser they are no match for it. Unless, of course, the pirates board the station to attack. They do so; the heroes beat them, and take off in the pirate ship, which is named The Spicy Whore. On board, Jake finds the best kind of super power – a GUN.
Smart Ion Machine Weapon- Remarkable(20) damage. It can fire 1d10 Full Auto. Instead, it can also smart-target, allowing it to fire a single bolt at any number of targets. It can do this twice in one round.
Chapter 10: The Spicy Whore of Freedom
While traveling in search of the real Force Key, their pirate ship receives a message from another ship in its fleet that is unaware the Spicy Whore has a new pimp. It talks about a shipment of slaves that needs some clear intel on their area. The heroes can’t stand for that, can they?
The heroes manage to defeat the pirates, and send the captured people back to their assorted homeworlds via a bigger ship’s lifeboats. However, some of the slaves recognize the Universe Keys – one of them is a holy symbol back on their homeworld.
The hot trail leads them to planet Umat, inhabited by the humanoid Umatians, but ruled by a powerful globe-spanning church. From space, the planet is covered in clean cities and blue oceans, with a few giant circular black scars that cannot be explained from orbit. The surface is peaceful, but busy. This place is a polar opposite of the snow world –the city is advanced and technical, but the society is primitive and almost tribal. They worship a ‘God’ whom they insist lives IN the sun, and their toil and laws are allegedly passed down from him directly. They have a chain of massive canisters that fly through space to the sun, and come back full of solar energy to run their world. They feel they must put food and riches and other things in the canisters when they go back as tribute to the sun god. They even believe he comes down from time to time and selects from their women to bear his half-God messiahs.
This is all rather primitive and laughable up until they meet a being who is a good foot taller than everyone else, completely physically superior, and has feline features to their head and hands. It turns out that a race known as the Pharat Empire did indeed have the key, and at a time it was at the space station where Schedos set his trap. A Pharat officer swiped the Key, which was thought to be a trinket, and took off on his own.
The Force Key allowed him to hollow out the sun of the Umat’s system and live safely inside. It also allowed him to force energy into the canisters and send them back and forth from the planet to the sun. It ALSO allowed him to fire beams at the planet that would break the atomic bonds of the matter they his and cause catastrophic nuclear explosions. With his race being much more physically powerful than the Umat, his gifts of technology, medicine and energy, his house in the sun, and his ability to nuke them from orbit, it did not take him long to become a god to the primitive people. They built cities to tame the planet, and now they are building him a war fleet with which he can begin conquering the universe. This is, not okay.
Chapter 11: The Sun God
The heroes can all agree that this is not OK. They have to fight some soldiers, but they’re not very good soldiers, and they can stash their ship inside one of the containers to ride along with the tribute. This gets them to the Sun God’s palace, which is indeed inside the sun.
He does not give up the Force Key, and instead wants theirs! 10 feet tall, solid muscle, feline fighting skills, and control over the very things that hold Reality together, he is a hell of a fight. At least he can’t use his nuclear blasts up close like that.
Once he is defeated, the people are free to live their own lives in the wonderful cities they built. However, there is no one telling that bubble in the heart of the sun not to stay open! The heroes get out of there fast, having slain a god and obtained the majority of the Universe Keys.
Chapter 12: The Thunder in the Prince
KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs must be dealt with, but a more pressing matter is the Spicy Whore’s depleting fuel reserves. They reach a planet with a spaceport that has the fuel they need, and Emma’s money is good to buy it! However, the situation here is similar to the last – an advanced world, run by a primitive form of government. This world echoes the Orient of Earth, with one man in charge based on his bloodline. The King has shut down all trade in the ports, a reaction to a problem he cannot understand.
The culture believes in demons and spirits, and his son appears to be possessed by a demon. They believe it to be a ‘thunder demon’, as was prophesized. After making a purchase from a trader at the port, the Prince became ill, prone to fits, and confused of mind. While there is no ‘demon’, the young man has been taken as a host by an extradimensional entity. The creature has difficulty comprehending our world, and cannot survive in it, and is merely clinging to the boy for its own life.
The Keys can truly be used here. The Space Key can separate the prince and the entity. The Life key can let it survive in our world. The Force Key can give it an ethereal body made of assorted forces. The Mind Key can allow it to communicate with and understand the locals. While they can’t get the creature back to where it belongs, they have made it into a new being that can live in comfort. It is now hailed as the Thunder Spirit, a minor, friendly deity. With his son restored, the King is happy to reopen the ports and the heroes can buy their fuel and leave.
Chapter 13: Fighting against Time
Back on the trail, the heroes find KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs easy to track. He has been invading and destroying stations and worlds devoted to scientific thought. The trail follows a pattern, and the heroes come to the last one he destroyed. This being the last suggests whatever he was looking for here. The facility is not destroyed, merely the people in it. There is a mental uplink, though, for anyone brave enough. Thomas shall be brave enough, and get a little of the knowledge of the researchers put into his brain. This gives him the inventing skills he has always wanted.
It also teaches him about Cosmic Thread. This is a 1-dimensional supermassive celestial structure; virtually a string of single particles as heavy as a dozen solar systems. This insanely focused gravity theoretically allows a ship that circles it in the right direction to travel backwards in time. When and where the Time Traveler and his Key will be in the future is unknowable, but where he has been in the past is written. With this, inevitably KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs will track the Time Traveler down and get his key. Once he has the Time Key there will be nowhere to hide, and with the Mass and Energy Keys there is almost nothing that can stand against him.
Chapter 14: KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs
The heroes take the Spicy Whore to the cosmic thread the researchers were studying and find the Mass Ship there. The massive craft has plenty of parking, and they are able to find KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs and his minions observing the Cosmic Thread in an open-to-space bay. The final fight commences!
Mid-Fight, the Time Traveler appears to help out. And, help out he does! Using his Time Key and the Life Key, he restores Jake’s X-Factor, turning him into a time-blasting super speedster!
KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs is an unstoppable opponent, able to instantly restore any damage with his Mass Key. His minions are far lesser, but still a threat. Ideally, he can be defeated y being shoved out of the ship into the cosmic thread, which will destroy him outright. This can be hinted by some other things going out. Once Raxon is defeated, the Mass Ship will begin to expand and crumble, and anyone without a ship to escape in is doomed. Fortunately, the Spicy Whore survived the encounter and the Force and Time keys combined can get the other keys un-stuck from the Cosmic Thread.
Chapter 15: Resolutions
The threat is gone, but the Universe Keys must be dealt with. As long as they exist, the threat of one insane being collecting them and becoming all-powerful. The heroes must solve this.
Some options:
-The Keys in unison can do anything, make anything. They can MAKE a being that is fit to wield them. This will make them safe and put a great force of good in the universe.
-If someone took all the keys and commanded the Space Key to create the Ultimate Barrier around themselves and all seven Keys, and then used the Keys to erase their own life, the keys would be forever trapped in the barrier. This is a sad sacrifice,
The heroes are free to try their own ideas!
With the Keys gone, the last threat is the Formless Ones. Once they return to Earth, if they launch the Spicy Whore into deep space, the Formless Ones will chase it through the infinite black and never bother the Earth again.
So far, Chris saw the Time Key. This led KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs to Earth with the Mass Key where he annihilated Adena. Adena came back. Morkos the Brain King gave the mutant students his ship and gave Adena the Mind Key. Students are assembled to head into space and end the threat of the keys.
Chapters-
1. Spaceport
2. The City of Perpetual Light
3. The Deadliest Winter
4. Planet Peanut
5. Empire of Puppets
6. Wandering
7. The Men in the Moon
8. A World of Knowledge
9. Easy
10. The Spicy Whore of Freedom
11. The Sun God
12. The Thunder in the Prince
13. Fighting against Time
14. KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs
15. Resolutions
Chapter 1: Spaceport
The MindCraft is preset to a space station. Adena finds she can use the Mind Key as a universal translator.
At Customs, the group is cleared and Emma is set to the interstellar embassy. She finds out she is a ‘Chell’, which is a hybrid from a race called the A`Kali. She is ‘T’Chell of Earth’, the 20th hybrid made on Earth. She is given a large amount of money owed to her due to a class-action settlement, enough to payroll their trip.
They meet Lixxa, a lovely green alien woman. She is waiting for her ‘partner’ Hetas to finish shopping. Hetas is a lovely blue alien lady. They two merge together into a blue-and-green swirled entity named HeLix. HeLix explains she is from a species called the Myxomygastrians. They are a stage beyond ‘mutants’, they are all unique beings. Instead of reproducing, they now bond and meld together to create fewer, better creatures. KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs is an insane member of this race with a socially-disgusting 7-member bond made for power instead of love.
Emma sees a group of beautiful snake people. One of them has a cute jacket that appears to have a fluffy white collar, but is actually emitting a mist of frigid vapor. She is pretty awesome! They are of the A`Kali race, and will take the time to talk to Emma, even though she is gross. Emma learns that A`Kali physiology causes them to undergo a full-body mitosis at puberty. This leaves ones entity which keeps its name and has all the best mental qualities for civilized society, and one who has all the unwanted qualities which is retarded or insane and usually just killed. Good-splits are ‘Firsts’, bad-splits are ‘Seconds’. Emma has never split, so she is a ‘Heavy’, and some have two heads and are called ‘Doubles’. One member of the group is a slow-witted Second, carrying the bags. Emma was part of a galaxy-spanning experiment to try to find a way to ‘purge’ the Second without it becoming a living being, so they would not have to deal with killing them or with the evil geniuses. Emma is told she can be given a medicine that will encourage the split.
In the Food Court, they find a man preaching a gospel of a life without need, without crime, without sickness or suffering. He sounds crazy, but he keeps talking about a ‘key’ to it all. Taken up on his offer, he tells them of a utopian city where all are welcome. This leads to the Energy Key.
At the talk of keys, the Formless Ones attack, possessing different things in the food court. The heroes defeat the Formless Ones, and take the MindCraft to The City of Perpetual Light.
Chapter 2: The City
The heroes find the city they were told of. It is surrounded by a rung of decaying ships; colony ships, merchant vessels, pirate ships, warships – all of them abandoned. They are welcomed into the city. It is using the Energy Key for limitless free energy – and with this energy and energy-to-matter replication technology, there is no wanting in this city. Any person in this city can get almost anything they want with little effort and virtually no wait. There is no crime, because anything a person would want to steal for can be given to them simply by requesting it from the city. The key is out in the open.
There is no fight here and no danger. However, it is inevitable that KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs will find this place and take the key, if the heroes do not take it now. The city has battery life to keep itself going for another hundred years, but after that the utopia would begin to decay into normal life. However, KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs will take over in well under that amount of time, so they are doomed to a worse fate if left alone. The heroes take the key.
While there, they meet people who fled from another world many years ago after a catastrophe caused by a similar artifact. They get directions to this world to seek the green-colored key there on Planet Essward.
Chapter 3: The Deadliest Winter
The heroes find a world of humanoid people who live in stick huts. Despite their primitive culture, every building has a sophisticated metal roof. All the plants also have mighty shells which they can retract into, and do so every night. A cute child named Bloobie helps to cover the Mindcraft with a metal canopy.
Every night, even though it is temperate, it snows. The warm snow devours anything it touches that could remotely be considered food, and in the morning sun it fades into particles that float back into the sky.
Long ago, this was a civilized, spacefaring race or normal people. However, the climate caused the better part of every year to be dominated by terrible, terrible blizzards. One member of their race came across the Life Key. He used it to try and bring the weather pattern to life, so it could understand that it was out of control and hurting people. Sadly, the life key does not grant these gifts, and all he did was create a devastating new life form. Their civilization was thrown back to medieval level, their streets and cities eroded by the crystalline swarm. The swarm lives in big pockets that stay in the sky, floating islands of hunger. The heroes find a way to save this world, and are rewarded with information. They are told where the genius with the key was banished off to.
The heroes head off in the MindCraft. However, in the system’s asteroid field they are attacked again by the Formless Ones. Giant rock monsters assault the ship! It is here that the man Chris met months ago appears, in a space suit, holding a collapsed scythe. He uses the Time Key to jump the ship forward in time, and escape the Formless Ones.
In exchange for a snack and some time to sit, the man known only as the Time Traveler tells them the true story of KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs and the Formless Ones. Many years ago, the Myxomygastrians and another race known as the Rais were at an evolutionary arms race. While the Myxomygastrians were primed to combine into one super-being, the Rais were becoming communal beings of pure energy. It was difficult to tell who would reach this ultimate level first, and neither side was comfortable with having an alien god poised to overpower them. This led to a war, each side trying to exterminate the other. A leader among the Myxomygastrians came across the Mass Key, and with its power committed the most heinous war crime.
He annihilated the mass that made up the Rais and there homeworld, leaving nothing by emptiness. However, the Rais were on the verge of becoming energy beings, and their minds could survive with no physical form. Survival kept them alive, but not sane. They lost their minds and individuality, becoming spirits of rage that possessed matter and took their anger out on whatever they beheld. The only thought they can still focus on is The Key.
They refer to the Mass Key, which they could use to restore their bodies. However, their scrambled mélange of hive-mind and individual does not process that there is more than one key, and they are drawn to any mention of any of the Universe Keys. The billions of minds that make up the Formless Ones as a whole are cordoned off in a sector of space where the universe is safe from them. However, little groups of them escape, and what exactly is holding the whole mass there is questionable. Their desire for the Mass Key is infinite, and they may be the one entity more dangerous with the Keys than KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs.
The Time Traveler does not give up his key, for simply keeping it out of phase with the normal time stream, KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs can never get it. After his tale, he takes his key and leaves. His last comment is that they can look further for the Life Key on Planet Peanut.
Chapter 4: Planet Peanut
‘Planet Peanut’ leads them to a strange cosmic formation. The ‘peanut’ is two Earth-sized worlds that crashed into each other. This peanut planet is orbited by a large moon, lit up with the lights of civilization.
The moon is a friendly world, overcrowded like a space-Tokyo, shared by two sentient races. Due to nothing other than the whims of the universe, the worlds collided. Half of each race was lost, and the survivors fled into space. A man, a refugee from his own world, came in passing. He had a strange green key, and he used it to make their large moon a life-supporting world all its own. The refugee ships landed, and 10 billion people now share a world smaller than Mars. Still, they have gotten over their dark past and live happy and busy. There is a museum that showcases the most beautiful item – a small red gem with streaks like dark blue lightning bursting from its center. It was formed by the collision of the two planets, and it is called the Gem of Ten Billion Souls.
Hey, Adena owes Myra a gem! They also find the direction their savior left in.
Anyway, leaving this planet they find themselves caught in a Sub-Cee field, that prohibits the tricks most craft use to travel faster than light. This field is being generated by a pirate base on a free-floating asteroid, with a small fleet of ships. The field is a few light-days across and the pirates use it to assault merchant vessels!
This is not OK, and the heroes will stop it! Of course, the only way to stop it is to destroy the reactor on the base. They find some way to do this, and scatter the fleet.
Chapter 5: Empire of Puppets
The trail that started on the snow planet leads them to a new world. This world is green and clean and it confuses the ship’s main sensors. It registers no large-scale sentient life, and yet it has a huge well-maintained metropolis spanning a thousand miles.
Landing here, they find the city to be populated by walking, talking ‘people’ that are amalgamations of mossy stone and other debris. They tell a tale of the God-King who came to their world, with his daughter the Goddess-Princess (not a bad title!). He created the first few of their kind to entertain his daughter, but then ended his own mortal existence for reasons unknown. The Goddess-Princess became the Goddess-Queen, and she still resides in their city. It is by her will and her love that they walk and talk.
It turns out the refugee from the snow-world came here with his daughter and the despised Life Key. He killed himself, leaving his daughter with the Key, and she went mad and created her own puppet kingdom.
The heroes get a chance to look around, and meet some of the elder golems while trying to ascertain the location of the queen. The oldest golem notes their keys, and that they are the same as the Queen’s key. The old golem has also seen a man with a black key, but he left after a short visit. Their tour is interrupted by the Mass Ship, which arrives and sends down Kaywat. Her literal lightning speed gets her to the self-proclaimed queen and the Life Key is lost. As she arcs back to the ship, there is the horrible rustling sound of every golem-citizen losing their false existence at once. If there is any up-side, KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs seems to remain unaware of their meddling.
Chapter 6: Wandering
Lacking other options, the heroes head for spacefaring civilization. The man with the black key traveled in a ship, so he had to pass through somewhere. As luck would have it, the interstellar truck stop they arrive at did meet the man. They call him the Wanderer. He roams around and around and around and around. He came by looking for fuel, but the stop did not carry what his craft required, and sent him off to a better place.
Many interstellar fuels are made from Helium3. Nearby is a lovely green and gold rippled nebula rich in swirling currents of the stuff. It is collected by large triangular light sails, and the nebula is swarming with them. It is named after a local dish where meat, cheese, and other savory sauces are served over triangular chips. In English, the name would translate best to the ‘Nacho Nebula’.
Jiji is there, and obtains a hostage. It is Bloobie! It is revealed that each of the 7 members of KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs is perfect for one of the keys, and Jiji is the Life Key. Kaywat is there to back her up, and the hostage is traded for the Energy Key. They two escape on a train, but that train is not faster than Jake! Jake will give chase, and he must strip off his UN-armor to catch up. The two combine their keys and strip Jake of his x-factor. Never again will he make fire, and he can only run as fast as his anatomy allows. This turns out to be pretty fast.
Jake’s new ‘powers’
Superspeed anatomy-
*Run at Good(10) Ground speed (60 MPH).
*1d3 punches
Chapter 7: The Men in the Moon
Once Jake has had time to come to terms with himself, the Nacho Nebula does serve its purpose. Though it was many years ago, the Wanderer’s visit was remembered, and the heroes learn of his next destination.
They are sent to a garden world called Cazshma. When they get there, they find a smoky grey marble. It is not safe to land, so the heroes beam down. As the only living man on the planet, the Wanderer is easy to find. He is a nice man, of humanoid alien race, dressed simply with a walking stick and the black Key around his neck. It turns out to be the Space Key, and they learn it makes him perfectly selectively invulnerable. This has kept him safe through all his travels, however, it offers not power to move him from place to place so a ship is required.
His name is Dion. He landed on this world to experience it, but their ruler learned of the Space Key and its powers. His ship was destroyed, and he was not allowed to leave. More and more force was sent to take the Key away. Of course, none of it could. There was an impasse; they could not break his barrier, and he could not leave. He also could not simply give the key to the increasingly desperate and insane man leading the charge. Eventually, the planet ran out of resources with which to wage their war, and the planet was choked to death by one man’s greed. The Wanderer was stranded. But! That was then, and now there is nothing keeping him here, besides a lack of a way to leave. The heroes have a ship!
Or – do they? The sky quakes and shakes, and the moon roses at unnatural speed. The rapidly moving moon causes a gravity storm that rocks the continents and rips the MindCraft from its orbit, sending it hurtling to the ground, destroyed. A single eye forms on the moon’s surface, and the orb splits into a massive fanged maw. The moon’s molten core glows in it throat. The Formless Ones have escaped their sector, and en masse have possessed the moon. The moon monster takes a bite of the planet, and continues to chomp away at the world in search for the Universe Keys. The heroes must race to find a Cazshma spacecraft – now that there’s enough hands to operate it, the Wanderer knows of ships that can escape the stars.
Rushing against a sentient apocalypse, the heroes find a ship just in time. And, boy, do they find a ship. Their new ship is a massive, mighty military battlecruiser, fit to wage war on other planets. It is named Tomorrow’s Bright Dawn. They escape in style, leaving the Formless Ones behind. The battlecruiser proves easier to operate if Adena makes it sentient with the Mind Key.
Chapter 8: A World of Knowledge
The Wanderer has joined their motley crew and has a bit of advice. Much time ago, there was a benevolent man who briefly held but the Mass and Mind Keys. We know the Mind Key can provide all knowledge, but at a horrible cost. To get around this, the man used the Mass key to create an entire world that served no purpose but to contain this innumerable knowledge. It provides comfortable gravity, breathable atmosphere, and a convenient terminal in which any being may ask it one question. Although it is out of date by an unknown amount of time, it’s a better place than anything to start looking for things like the Universe Keys. KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs is sure to head there.
As a bonus, the combined form can only ask one question – but the divided individuals could ask 7. This is as close to ‘weak’ as KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs gets. The conundrum involves the Mind Key. The Mind Key can update the planet, allowing it current information. They get to the planet first, and this gives them three options.
1: Update the planet with current information and get food answers to their questions. However, when KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs arrives, he will get this same information.
2: Hide and wait for KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs to come and go, then update and ask. However, there is every chance he will destroy the planet when he is done with it, giving them no turn.
3: Ask their questions with the outdated info and get the best information they can, then be free to deal with KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs as they please when he arrives.
Whatever they get, they will then be on their way.
Chapter 9: Easy
The clues lead them to an abandoned facility once owned by a powerful interstellar race called the Pharat Empire. The task seems simple enough; the space station is in the middle of nowhere and it is abandoned. The entire affair has been rigged by Schedos as a trap. The heroes are beset upon by an army of robots and armed emplacements controlled by Schedos.
The heroes overcome, and turn the tables, and as Schedos lacks any grand offensive powers he becomes their prisoner. Though he is the least powerful individual of the 7, he is required for KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs to fully wield the Time Key. The heroes are able to contact part of the currently-disbanded 7, and trade Schedos for the Life Key. They are half-way to getting Jake his powers back with this, and can restore him once they have the Energy Key.
However, Jiji is a sore loser and she destroys the battlecruiser, leaving them stranded on the station. Now all she needs to do is wait for them to run out of air, and come back to collect the Mind, Life, and Space keys at her leisure.
But, the 7 are not our heroes only enemy. They won’t have to worry about running out of air, because a ship from the pirate fleet has tracked them here – and without their battlecruiser they are no match for it. Unless, of course, the pirates board the station to attack. They do so; the heroes beat them, and take off in the pirate ship, which is named The Spicy Whore. On board, Jake finds the best kind of super power – a GUN.
Smart Ion Machine Weapon- Remarkable(20) damage. It can fire 1d10 Full Auto. Instead, it can also smart-target, allowing it to fire a single bolt at any number of targets. It can do this twice in one round.
Chapter 10: The Spicy Whore of Freedom
While traveling in search of the real Force Key, their pirate ship receives a message from another ship in its fleet that is unaware the Spicy Whore has a new pimp. It talks about a shipment of slaves that needs some clear intel on their area. The heroes can’t stand for that, can they?
The heroes manage to defeat the pirates, and send the captured people back to their assorted homeworlds via a bigger ship’s lifeboats. However, some of the slaves recognize the Universe Keys – one of them is a holy symbol back on their homeworld.
The hot trail leads them to planet Umat, inhabited by the humanoid Umatians, but ruled by a powerful globe-spanning church. From space, the planet is covered in clean cities and blue oceans, with a few giant circular black scars that cannot be explained from orbit. The surface is peaceful, but busy. This place is a polar opposite of the snow world –the city is advanced and technical, but the society is primitive and almost tribal. They worship a ‘God’ whom they insist lives IN the sun, and their toil and laws are allegedly passed down from him directly. They have a chain of massive canisters that fly through space to the sun, and come back full of solar energy to run their world. They feel they must put food and riches and other things in the canisters when they go back as tribute to the sun god. They even believe he comes down from time to time and selects from their women to bear his half-God messiahs.
This is all rather primitive and laughable up until they meet a being who is a good foot taller than everyone else, completely physically superior, and has feline features to their head and hands. It turns out that a race known as the Pharat Empire did indeed have the key, and at a time it was at the space station where Schedos set his trap. A Pharat officer swiped the Key, which was thought to be a trinket, and took off on his own.
The Force Key allowed him to hollow out the sun of the Umat’s system and live safely inside. It also allowed him to force energy into the canisters and send them back and forth from the planet to the sun. It ALSO allowed him to fire beams at the planet that would break the atomic bonds of the matter they his and cause catastrophic nuclear explosions. With his race being much more physically powerful than the Umat, his gifts of technology, medicine and energy, his house in the sun, and his ability to nuke them from orbit, it did not take him long to become a god to the primitive people. They built cities to tame the planet, and now they are building him a war fleet with which he can begin conquering the universe. This is, not okay.
Chapter 11: The Sun God
The heroes can all agree that this is not OK. They have to fight some soldiers, but they’re not very good soldiers, and they can stash their ship inside one of the containers to ride along with the tribute. This gets them to the Sun God’s palace, which is indeed inside the sun.
He does not give up the Force Key, and instead wants theirs! 10 feet tall, solid muscle, feline fighting skills, and control over the very things that hold Reality together, he is a hell of a fight. At least he can’t use his nuclear blasts up close like that.
Once he is defeated, the people are free to live their own lives in the wonderful cities they built. However, there is no one telling that bubble in the heart of the sun not to stay open! The heroes get out of there fast, having slain a god and obtained the majority of the Universe Keys.
Chapter 12: The Thunder in the Prince
KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs must be dealt with, but a more pressing matter is the Spicy Whore’s depleting fuel reserves. They reach a planet with a spaceport that has the fuel they need, and Emma’s money is good to buy it! However, the situation here is similar to the last – an advanced world, run by a primitive form of government. This world echoes the Orient of Earth, with one man in charge based on his bloodline. The King has shut down all trade in the ports, a reaction to a problem he cannot understand.
The culture believes in demons and spirits, and his son appears to be possessed by a demon. They believe it to be a ‘thunder demon’, as was prophesized. After making a purchase from a trader at the port, the Prince became ill, prone to fits, and confused of mind. While there is no ‘demon’, the young man has been taken as a host by an extradimensional entity. The creature has difficulty comprehending our world, and cannot survive in it, and is merely clinging to the boy for its own life.
The Keys can truly be used here. The Space Key can separate the prince and the entity. The Life key can let it survive in our world. The Force Key can give it an ethereal body made of assorted forces. The Mind Key can allow it to communicate with and understand the locals. While they can’t get the creature back to where it belongs, they have made it into a new being that can live in comfort. It is now hailed as the Thunder Spirit, a minor, friendly deity. With his son restored, the King is happy to reopen the ports and the heroes can buy their fuel and leave.
Chapter 13: Fighting against Time
Back on the trail, the heroes find KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs easy to track. He has been invading and destroying stations and worlds devoted to scientific thought. The trail follows a pattern, and the heroes come to the last one he destroyed. This being the last suggests whatever he was looking for here. The facility is not destroyed, merely the people in it. There is a mental uplink, though, for anyone brave enough. Thomas shall be brave enough, and get a little of the knowledge of the researchers put into his brain. This gives him the inventing skills he has always wanted.
It also teaches him about Cosmic Thread. This is a 1-dimensional supermassive celestial structure; virtually a string of single particles as heavy as a dozen solar systems. This insanely focused gravity theoretically allows a ship that circles it in the right direction to travel backwards in time. When and where the Time Traveler and his Key will be in the future is unknowable, but where he has been in the past is written. With this, inevitably KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs will track the Time Traveler down and get his key. Once he has the Time Key there will be nowhere to hide, and with the Mass and Energy Keys there is almost nothing that can stand against him.
Chapter 14: KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs
The heroes take the Spicy Whore to the cosmic thread the researchers were studying and find the Mass Ship there. The massive craft has plenty of parking, and they are able to find KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs and his minions observing the Cosmic Thread in an open-to-space bay. The final fight commences!
Mid-Fight, the Time Traveler appears to help out. And, help out he does! Using his Time Key and the Life Key, he restores Jake’s X-Factor, turning him into a time-blasting super speedster!
KayOnJiScheSyRaxUs is an unstoppable opponent, able to instantly restore any damage with his Mass Key. His minions are far lesser, but still a threat. Ideally, he can be defeated y being shoved out of the ship into the cosmic thread, which will destroy him outright. This can be hinted by some other things going out. Once Raxon is defeated, the Mass Ship will begin to expand and crumble, and anyone without a ship to escape in is doomed. Fortunately, the Spicy Whore survived the encounter and the Force and Time keys combined can get the other keys un-stuck from the Cosmic Thread.
Chapter 15: Resolutions
The threat is gone, but the Universe Keys must be dealt with. As long as they exist, the threat of one insane being collecting them and becoming all-powerful. The heroes must solve this.
Some options:
-The Keys in unison can do anything, make anything. They can MAKE a being that is fit to wield them. This will make them safe and put a great force of good in the universe.
-If someone took all the keys and commanded the Space Key to create the Ultimate Barrier around themselves and all seven Keys, and then used the Keys to erase their own life, the keys would be forever trapped in the barrier. This is a sad sacrifice,
The heroes are free to try their own ideas!
With the Keys gone, the last threat is the Formless Ones. Once they return to Earth, if they launch the Spicy Whore into deep space, the Formless Ones will chase it through the infinite black and never bother the Earth again.