Session 1 — A Birthday for Strangers
“Six strangers walked into a bar. Nobody’s laughing yet.”
Where: The Long Layover Cantina, Flammarion Highport
The job: Collect the IISS retrieval contract from Anders Casarii and ship out to recover the stranded Far Trader on Walston.
The Gathering
The crew came together one at a time in the noise and neon of The Long Layover Cantina, weapons checked at the door like everywhere else on a Class-A port.
Kael Marten was first through, settling in to wait. Zane Auryn drifted in next, then Krieger and Gavin arriving together. Dax was already there before any of them — though the only face he knew in the room was Krieger’s, the rest of the crew still strangers to him.
Six names on a contract; not yet a crew.
The Briefing
Kael, Zane, and Krieger broke off to meet the patron, Anders Casarii of the IISS Detached Duty office. The deal was as promised: the retrieval contract, refuelling vouchers, middle-passage tickets aboard the far trader Autumn Gold, and Cr6,000 in up-front cash to seal it. Everything they needed to go collect the ship waiting high and dry on Walston.
The Watchers at the Bar
While the others were away, Gavin noticed it first: a man at the bar, watching their table a beat too long — and two friends with him, spread out and casual in the way that isn’t casual at all.
Gavin and Dax didn’t wait to find out. They moved on the men, got close, and held them discreetly at gunpoint under the lip of the bar — keeping it quiet enough that the cantina never noticed. Under pressure, the men gave up the shape of it: they weren’t here for the crew at all. They were waiting for Zane.
By every read, they were spacers with a score to settle — the hard, patient kind who’d been hunting a long time. Zane, for his part, couldn’t place a single one of them. Whatever he’d done to earn this, it was buried somewhere in a past he didn’t care to remember.
Springing the Trap
The other three returned. Kael clocked the standoff instantly and quietly passed the word around the table — the whole crew now in on it before a shot had been fired.
What followed was less a plan than an improvisation, executed cold:
- Zane slipped a waitress some coin to round up the staff and march a mock “birthday song” over to the men at the bar — a wall of noise and bodies to foul their sightlines.
- Kael quietly armed a slow-release aerosol grenade, seeding a creeping mist across the room to kill what was left of their visibility.
When it sprang, it sprang fast. Under the cover of song and haze, Zane hauled Gavin clear of the line of fire without anyone seeing it happen. Kael swung a barstool at the second man —
— and missed.
The mist was rising, the song still going, and the first honest blow had just gone wide. Steel and intent in the air, and nobody had backed down.
Cliffhanger
The trap is sprung, the cover is blown, and the cantina is one breath away from a brawl. We ended here — initiative not yet rolled.
The crew has the contract, the cash, and a berth waiting on the Autumn Gold. All they have to do first is get out of this bar.
Next time: the fight at The Long Layover — and whether the crew can make their berth on the Autumn Gold before Flammarion’s law makes the morning complicated.