The Exo-Guardians faction leader, Ixthia the Unbreakable, summons you to their improvised workspace.
Documents litter the normally organized Exo-Guardian common room, highlighting the contrast between the modern metallic room trappings and the decrepit parchments laden with ink sketches and handwritten text. Ixthia the Unbreakable gently handles the ancient papers, their copicrusted fingers tracing a stylized sigil of a sleek creature with a feathered tail. Noticing company, they set aside the file and speak with a measured tone.
Starfinders, I have a task of great significance. I’ve received reports of a strange occurrence on Aucturn. I know ‘strange things on Aucturn’ sounds redundant, but these reports detail something unusual for Aucturn: an event potent enough to bypass the planet-wide illusion that blocks our sensors. Scanners and eyewitnesses in orbit confirm a protracted display of colored flashes over Aucturn’s eastern hemisphere just below the equator, likely some sort of supernatural discharge massive enough to be seen from space through Aucturn’s bizarre atmosphere. Some of the more superstitious witnesses are calling it divine intervention, although that seems a stretch for a planet known to invite hallucinations."
“When the light show subsided, our scanners became opaque again, but even then the illusions were… off. Contrasting images overlapping each other, like a vidscreen trying to display two different streams at once. Whatever happened down there, it’s had a real impact on the planet itself. I ask that you fly to Aucturn, dock at Grindhold’s spaceport, and learn what you can about this occurrence. Whatever it was, I know it’s important. Aucturn is a hostile location even under normal circumstances, so be careful and be prepared.”
"Any questions?"
Aucturn isn’t a common conversation topic, but some of you might know its fell reputation....
“The Society has few friendly contacts on Aucturn, so you’ll have to start from scratch. Begin at the spaceport in Grindhold; the locals won’t be friendly, but they trade with outsiders and the settlement is close to where everything happened. Tread carefully: cultists dedicated to Nyarlathotep run Grindhold’s society, and servants of the Empty Traveler are scheming and malicious at best.”
Aucturn is the farthest Pact planet from the sun, with poisonous air, high gravity, planet-wide illusion magic, and a weird organic quality to its geography. Most creatures indigenous to Aucturn are monstrous and violent, but some humanoid settlements call the planet home. Immigrants to Aucturn are usually cultists to outer gods or other dark powers, meaning their civilizations are often chaotic and profane. The cultists of Aucturn have a longstanding conflict with the Dominion of the Black. Something about the planet attracts the Dominion’s aberrant agents, but mutual hostility prevents either organization from discovering why. The strongest cult on Aucturn is that of Nyarlathotep, the outer god of conspiracies, fell secrets, and forbidden knowledge. Nyarlathotep’s faithful hold most leadership positions on Aucturn, and they assert that the Crawling Chaos embraces the planet because it’s actually the womb of a fetal deity.
Yes, simply lights. The rate and intensity of the lights our scouts described sound vivid, but they could be anything: military action, occult ritual gone awry, geological phenomenon. Aucturn is notoriously difficult to scan, which is why it’s so crucial that you see what happened yourselves.”
Yuqab comes to the same conclusions that Ash comes to... Aucturn is the farthest Pact planet from the sun, with poisonous air, high gravity, planet-wide illusion magic, and a weird organic quality to its geography. Most creatures indigenous to Aucturn are monstrous and violent, but some humanoid settlements call the planet home. Immigrants to Aucturn are usually cultists to outer gods or other dark powers, meaning their civilizations are often chaotic and profane. The cultists of Aucturn have a longstanding conflict with the Dominion of the Black. Something about the planet attracts the Dominion’s aberrant agents, but mutual hostility prevents either organization from discovering why. The strongest cult on Aucturn is that of Nyarlathotep, the outer god of conspiracies, fell secrets, and forbidden knowledge. Nyarlathotep’s faithful hold most leadership positions on Aucturn, and they assert that the Crawling Chaos embraces the planet because it’s actually the womb of a fetal deity.
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A large hover suit with a shield slowly lowers to the ground a few meters away from the others. With a hiss of steam, the cockpit opens, and a green-haired halfling with a prosthetic right arm exits. He approaches the group and grumbles, "Just once I hope we don't have to beat up someone who wants to become a god."
He then appears to be distracted for a moment, and whispers to no one in particular, "You won't like it if you get ripped off this time."
"Anyway, I am called Kneepuncher, at least when I am in that getup," he continues, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the powered armor. "I think we all know why they picked me for this job."
He listens to Ixthia's briefing, then mumbles, "Yep, more godlings. He doesn't know anything the others haven't mentioned about Aucturn, so skips to the usual questions. "Any idea what's going to try to make out lives miserable this time? Or at least what did the same for previous Starfinders?"
"No, and that's why we're sending such skilled agents. Be ready for anything Aucturn is extremely dangerous. Aucturn’s atmosphere is toxic, so make sure your environmental protections are intact. The planet’s gravity is also twice that of Absalom Station’s, so plan accordingly. Lighter loads would serve you well. Navigating Aucturn’s surface with conventional technology or spellcraft can be unreliable given the planet’s eldritch influence. You’ll probably need to seek help from locals, which can be tricky when environmental protections are active. Consider how to communicate without speech.”
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Bouncing into the room is a just-out-of-her-teens girl. She is human, and wears a "SMC #1 fan" t-shirt.
"Hi! I'm Gunnz, and I'll be your pilot today!" she grins, bouncing over the briefing chairs but not actually sitting down on one of them. As she listens a sigh escapes her "Of course its Aucturn."
She offers Kneepuncher a fist-bump. "Awesome idea. Kinbara... can you get me one too?"
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"You're sending us to investigate a light show? Things must be slow at the Lorespire." A human man sighs as he listens to the briefing. "We can assume we weren't invited then? We should be getting hazard pay for this."
He looks around the room to see what he's working with, and offers Kneepuncher a subtle nod at the sight of his shield. "Looks like a few of you can take a hit or two. I'm Santos, I'll shoot stuff and punch stuff for you. Don't expect much else."
"Excellent. I doubt you will encounter hostile starships on route, and I recommend taking a scientific ship instead, but the decision is yours."
Hoping aboard the Pegasus, the party makes their way to Aucturn. The navcomputer says it'll take days.
On day six the whole ship shudders as electronics momentarily go haywire. During that split second, you hear a high-pitched wail seemingly within your own heads.
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"Ugh..." screams Gunnz, as the distortion rips through the "Best of SMC" that she has been subjecting the crew to for the last six days.
"Blasphemy!" she cries out in mock shock. "It's like they reversed 'Girl Gone', and then overlayed the peaks of the modulated chorus from 'Fly by' all over the top of 'Dance Forever' but sung in Vesk."
The horror on her face is ... indescribable.
[dice=Will]1d20+8
Santos grabs his head. "What is happening?"
The party agrees that the strange occurrence hit the ship in a wave from bow to stern, suggesting it was caused by a wave emanating away from their current heading.
Scans of the planet predictably unhelpful, although the mishmashed illusory images Ixthia described are still present: the northwest hemisphere looks like an orange gas giant with an incomplete ring, while the southeast looks like a barren, jagged asteroid. Furthermore, attempts to hail the Grindhold spaceport from orbit respond with garbled nonsense. With no way to establish contact, you must approach unannounced.
The settlement takes shape as you descend: a walled commune with patchwork infrastructure laced haphazardly between round huts made of ashen adobe. Grindhold’s spaceport is integrated into its fortifications, suspended over the walls by pillars resembling hair strands the size of trees. Transmissions from the spaceport sound like a baby’s babbling pitched down an octave, but the landing docks are almost empty. /you can land on any dock or right outside the city without interference.
Most of Grindhold is a congregation of cowled, joyless humans in respirator masks shuffling between airtight adobe pods whose airlocks open with crude retinal scanners. Streets that can fit vehicles remain clogged with meandering locals, some food trucks casually pushing people out of the way with no objection...
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"Well, I don't really want to walk any further than necessary down there. Lets land at the spaceport, and as close to the main building as we can. " suggests Gunnz.
"Makes for a quick get-a-way too, if required. Maybe that signal scrabbled their coms too. Who knows, maybe it was aimed at the planet, not at us."
Sealing up, the party strikes out. It's not long before the alien nature of Aucturn manifests. Outside of a larger adobe structure emblazoned with an inverted ankh made of welded scrap, a circle of humans wail in apparent sorrow while repeatedly standing then prostrating themselves against the structure. They use daggers to carve vertical scratches into the building’s walls, sometimes cutting their hands to leave streaks of blood along the wall as they collapse. They scream in a pidgin language....
You understand their cries: “You’ve traveled astray and left us empty! Leave us not in a hauntless dark! We crawl before you! Return! Return!”
The building is a temple of Nyarlathotep.
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Gunnz rolls her eyes in her suit. "They want something to return. Some type of cultists maybe?" she suggests.
Then, eyeing up the building she adds "So, I dated this guy, Kurt. Sadly he was more into ley lines than my lines, but... One of his books showed a symbols like that ankh. It was a symbol of Nyarlathot... well, I'm not going to finish saying that name. Bad luck apparently."
She suppresses a grin as she remembers how Kurt stopped her saying the name when she tried reading it in his book.
Ignoring them, the party continues to explore the area. A trio of strange creatures stride upright through the crowds, dipping their claws into fleshy sacks and marking passersby on the forehead with drops of the black ichor contained within.
They're broadcasting a telepathic message that Ash translates, “Blessings from the womb mind! Rejoice in the bloom of consciousness before the first hunger arrives! A beautiful dawn!” The friendly orocorans are immediately deferential when they get to you, bowing and offering you one of their bags...
Gunnz knows them to be Orocorans, indigenous creatures that feed on Aucturn’s veins of hallucinogenic ichor and are normally feral and drug-addled, but these three are surprisingly lucid and clearly mean no harm.
They're offering a bag, any takers?