flotsam and jetsam for tabletop games, by quadra.
Hunted by an invisible creature on the mining station Ypsilon-14, the crew must make a new plan of action…
J. 
Olivia Hanlon 
William Henry Harrison 
Can Rashid 
Dana Bolt
The crew rushes the protesting Sasha into a cryochamber and activates it. As they watch, his struggles slow and the manic look on his face freezes over. He is suspended.
J sighs and hands Sasha’s SMG to Dana, the Solarian miner who’s been helping them. Dana puts down the pistol she’d been using, and the group makes their way back to the Grasshopper’s kitchen. Can lingers behind, and when nobody’s looking, she pockets the gun.
Can puts on a blue cassette tape she found in the station’s mess hall, and some slightly garbled rock music plays over the ship’s comms. Hearing it, Dana nods. It’s one of the station admin Sunny’s favorite tapes.
The crew discusses what to do next. J wants to hunt down the monster. Can wants to find the scientist. Ultimately they decide the monster is the priority. Can suggests finding spraypaint to spray the monster with so they can see it, but they don’t have any on board. Fortunately, Dana knows the miners have some on the station for marking areas of the mine, and she can show them where it is.
They decide that the marines, J and Olivia, will take the spraypaint and infrared goggles so they can see the invisble monster and spray it, and William Henry Harrison will take the foam gun to try and immobilize it.
They head out to the mining station’s main work area — looking around, the marines worry that the heat radiating off of the various machines may be masking the monster’s heat signature. They quickly check their bioscanners, and see that something is behind the machines.
The crew, whispering as they creep into the room, decide to try and turn the machines off — Dana approaches the central control terminal as the others cover her. As they fan out, the marines see the bioscanner reading is coming from a vent behind one of the machines.
Typing quickly, Dana shuts down the machines, their everpresent rumbling falling silent. The station is quiet.
The marines see the bioscanner blip start moving towards the habitation area of the station. J approaches the vent as Olivia covers her. Peering in, she doesn’t see anything. They decide to double back to the habitation area and grab some cans of spraypaint along the way.
In the hab area, Olivia sees a large heat signature in the ceiling. It’s quickly moving towards Mike’s room, the engineer who disappeared before the crew arrived. J notices another, smaller heat signature behind them, in Jerome’s room. Dana and William Henry Harrison check out smaller one as J, backed up by Can and Olivia, check out the bigger one.
Cautiously peering around the edge of the doorway, Dana and WHH are relieved to see that the small one is Prince, the station’s resident cat.
Meanwhile, J kicks open door to Mike’s room. Inside she sees, in infrared, the monster hanging from the ceiling. Before she can spray her fluorescent yellow can, it leaps on her and slashes her across the chest with its one functional arm.
Buckling, J manages to spray some of the creature w yellow paint. As it reels and screeches, she backs away into the hallway, unblocking the others’ line of sight through the doorway.
Can shoots at the half-visible creature twice with her pistol, hitting it only once.
Olivia shoots her SMG into the doorway, hitting something — blood seems to spurt out of thin air.
The others shoot and miss the creature as it lunges at Can, grabbing her and pulling it to its still-invisible maw. As she struggles in vain against its crushing grip, she manages to get two more bullets into it. She screams as it begins to tear her apart.
J, limping, drops the spraypaint and gets a few shots off, but they go wide, embedding into the station walls.
Dana rushes up and grabs Can’s coveralls, ripping her out of the creature’s grip, a trail of gore roping from her chest to what is now visible as a huge, partially-yellow-painted, bloody circular maw, articulated teeth rippling in gory waves.
With uncanny sangfroid, William Henry Harrison clomps forward on metal boots, shoves his gun into the creature’s mouth, and fires. All at once, the teeth splay out as the creature shrieks its death knell, and falls to the ground.
Dana tries to hold Can, her chest a bloody lacerated mess, as she panics, screaming, emptying her pistol into the creature. One of the bullets tears into the ten-gallon hat on WHH’s head, who is still standing beside it.
Furious, he spins around, rips the gun from her grasp, and crushes it in his robot hand.
Dana and the crew rush the now-unconscious Can to the Grasshopper’s medbay. J finds Sunny and brings her along.
Later, Can comes to, bright lights in her eyes, J at her bedside. The others stand behind her in the room, looking worried. She looks down at herself lying in the bed, her torso covered in bloody gauze.
J tells her she’s going to be ok, but the creature mutilated her, and she’ll be permanently disfigured. Much of the front of her torso will be a mass of scar tissue.
J grabs her hand. “I’ve got a half dozen scars like that, kid. You’re an adult now. You’re one of us.”
As Can rests, the crew drags the creature’s corpse to the station’s ore refinery and burn it. They discuss the remaining issues — Mike is still missing, and the scientist is nowhere to be seen. In the discussion, they realize hydrophobia is why the people affected by the creature’s secretions smell bad — they just weren’t showering!
Meanwhile, Can, lying alone in the medbay, pops another bottle of pain pills. She craves them all the time, now.
To be continued…
