Slippity-slip. Here's last time.
Our heroes fly out of Babel and head towards Koldos, one of the two fragments in the Ice Cloud. En route, they cross paths with a Robot Man salvager ship. It's towing a damaged rocket, clearly wrecked from a battle. They decide to hail the ship, just to be polite, and learn that the Robot Men are towing it from Glade to Levitos.
They ask what will happen to the ship, and the Robot Men tell them that the lifeforms within will be terminated and then the ship dismantled for scrap. The heroes, of course, aren't cool with terminating lifeforms, but Iris asks them to clarify and it turns out the lifeforms are fungus and rodents. Oola points out that the fungus might be something they can use, so Iris, rolling her eyes a bit, asks if they might board and check out the lifeforms. The Robot Men agree, and the heroes cross over to the damaged ship and meet a Robot Man named XK127, or as organics call him, "Clanky."
Oola harvests some of the earth and lichens from the ship, and notes that it looks like it was shot down a while ago. They take the stuff back to their rocket and Oola makes some space in their farm compartment, and the ship continues on its way.
They arrive at Koldos and find the downed alien ship easily; it's a huge triangular thing with a tear down the side. Oola climbs in no problem, but Iris and Zeenia aren't quite so agile and slip back down the side of the ship. Oola rigs up a rope, but as she's anchoring it, she hears a snuffling sound behind her. A snow drift stands up to reveal a 12-foot-tall creature with a terrible toothless black maw - an ice fiend!
She calls for help and tries to put the beast to sleep, but it shakes off her science. Zeenia and Iris climb in, and Iris shoots at it, but it just gets made. It punches Oola backwards against the wall and roars in hunger, as Zeenia turns invisible and sneaks behind it. Iris jumps in front of Oola to protect her, and brandishes her sword. She stabs it and it stumbles, but then belches frigid air over them (which their space suits fortunately protect them from).
Zeenia stabs it in the back with her danger bling, and it flails around with its huge fists, knocking both Zeenia and Iris about. But then Zeenia lashes out and catches it in the neck, and it falls dead to the icy floor. Zeenia promptly cuddles up to it for warmth; this place is hazardous to her health.
The characters search the ship and find some trinkets of alien origin - not functional, but probably interesting to their erstwhile employer. Zeenia also finds a strange gold ring with a huge red gem. As she picks it up, it activates, and fires a red beam. It hits Iris, who goes slack-faced and begins mimicking whatever Zeenia does or says. Oola steps in and shuts the thing off, and the heroes agree that this particular artifact probably shouldn't enter the open market. They collect what they do find and get back on the ship.
Their flight back to Babel is uneventful, and they meet up with Walflump Broseptos. They turn over the trinkets they found and he pays them (they don't mention the ring, though). He tells them that finding a way through the Barrier is difficult - as a Babelonian, he's under scrutiny from Queen Anathraxa's folks because his people are naturally gifted in psionics, and she tends to kill or enslave them. He agrees to keep looking, and hail the characters if he learns anything.
Now with some extra Slips in their pockets, the heroes decide to go somewhere that they could improve their ship. They set a course for Barter.
You can buy anything on Barter, and the characters hunt around until they find a merchant who can tinker with their ship. She's an Earthling called Lux, and they talk about armor and weapons. Their ship has a nose-mounted tangle gun, and it's pretty well armored already. Adding more weapons is hard because of the type of ship (a Bird Man Yacht), but the heroes wonder if they could add a device to jam radiophone signals. Lux says she can build something like that - it'll release a burst of static and disable any radiophones in the radius (including theirs). The only hitch is that she says it'll cost 4000 Slips, and they have just under 3000.
Oola asks if maybe they could undertake some kind of work for Lux and get a discount, and she thinks about it and comes up with a job. The Kryptoria, a Skalinate freighter, set out from Barter heading for Gyptos and never made it. Radiophone contact indicated that they may have run into trouble near the fragment of Stygia. Perhaps the heroes could find out what happened to it, maybe bring it back?
Zeenia and Oola have only heard that Stygia is uninhabited and not terribly interesting, but Iris has heard much stranger stories. She's heard that people who go to Stygia come back...different. Not changed physically, but mentally, even spiritually. Zeenia is intrigued, and of course Oola is fatally curious at the best of times, so the crew takes the job. They fly out into the Slipstream towards Stygia, and who knows what adventures await!
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