generally important info
(possible) major NPC
minor/incidental NPC
With party's biomorphs having been dosed with Flavor-Aide, those in synthenic or digital bodies (and thus not incapacitated by the drugs) had a few hours to do things by themselves. Crow got into contact with
Markus then began to track Newt Xu's current location and activities on the spimes. Markus located Newt in the mess hall, and at this point, Crow took a break from studying the spider to also physically shadow Newt. Crow was able to follow Newt around for about a half hour, at which point Newt finally noticed the tail. Newt demanded to know what Crow was up to. Markus then mesh messaged Newt, appologizing for the activities of his eccentric friend, Crow. Newt, now realizing these two people were tracking him physically and digitally, told them both to (in short) fuck off. The two ended up recieving a tiny @-Rep ding for being stalkerish weirdoes.
Grace woke up from her Flavor-Aide hangover (even though she was not at the party, it got to her through the vents). She realized that the "Newt Xu" that Markus and Crow were tracking was the same Newt who had loaned her the room our group was staying in. She spent a few more minutes investigating Newt, and found that he had a completely solid background as a sort of scum "ambassador" on Luna.
With that lead exhausted, and nothing else obvious popping up, Azif decided to do a sort of brutal brute force: he got some servers, uploaded his muse, forked it multiple times, and began to have the muses, in accelerated time, exhaustively search through recent arrivals. (Since Azif had no intention of later merging the forks, he was essentially killing copies of his muse: although many people would find that stressful (akin to killing a pet), Azif did not). However, for the muses to get a good certainty about potential leads, they would need a few days, even with their minds sped up.
With no further leads for the time being, the party had some down time. Crow and Andrey studied the spider further, and were able to train it to follow very simple commands. Markus began to interact with the ship's digital community. Markus also tried to figure out potential weak points that
On day 4 of our time on "Fresh Fish", the entire swarm suddenly made an unexpected burn that would shave a few more weeks off of our time to Mars. Marcus hacked into the bridge spimes of the "Fish", and saw that, indeed, the captain had made the call. When the captain, who was well-respected in the swarm, made the call, the rest of the fleet decided it would follow suite.
On day 5, the probationary period where all newcomers were required to remain on the "Fresh Fish" had come to an end. Also, Azif, with his muse forks narrowing down the list of subjects, spotted what looked to be Rajesh (based off of body language). This person, now possessing the female ID "Di Xuen", was headed to the docking umbilicle, to disembark off of the "Fresh Fish" onto the craft "Zoa". With time running out before Rajesh/Di would leave the "Fish", we decided to confront him.
Markus and Crow were able to reach Rajesh quickly, but Azif and Grace got stuck behind some crowds and were delayed at getting to the umbilicle. Grace tried hacking into Rajesh's mesh inserts at this point, but Rajesh detected her hacking attempt, went offline, drew a pistol, and began to shout that he was being attacked. Crow attempted to grapple Rajesh at this point, shouting for him to calm down and put the gun away. However, he wasn't able to secure Rajesh, and Rajesh ended up putting several well-placed shots into Crow, hurting Crow badly--Rajesh seemed to be moving inhumanly fast (meta: he had a Speed of 3 or 4). Azif, worried that the scum would be able to muster up a posse quickly enough to secure the area (and stop us from kidnapping Rajesh) quickly contacted a gangster he knew (one Nasser Necaru), and offered Nasser 10,000 credits to "start something" immediately against a rival. Finally, Markus (who was present via his armed drone) at this point launched a mini-missle to take out Rajesh. The hit was solid, badly injuring Rajesh, but still not killing him. However, the blast from the missle reduced Crow (who was already torn up by being shot by Rajesh) to rubble, and also burst open the umbilicle.
Azif and Grace, who were still a slight distance away from the umbilicle, survived by grasping onto hold points before the emergency bulkhead closed off the damaged umbilicle. Markus's drone was lost, sucked into space. Crow's corticle stack was recovered by emergency drones on the "Yolanda Be Good". Two bystandars were also sucked into space before being recovered by the "Yolanda". Meanwhile, Rajesh survived, though badly injured, since he was wearing a smart-fabric vac suit! He, too, was recovered by emergency drones, and brought to the "Yolanda Be Good". Fire fights continued to break out arond the "Fresh Fish" as gangsters decided it was time to settle scores, and the captain decided is was best to exert his authority, and lock down the ship for two hours until the chaos abated.
+~12 days post-start