Let’s play again – Starship Traveller, part 2

In the last exciting episode of Starship Traveller… We were picked up by population control androids, but it turns out cellphones gum up their works so we walked away. Then we met some primitives in huts, who were nice enough folks but not useful to our endeavor of getting home. And we lost several off-screen crew members to a poison that came back with us from a scouting trip. And we still have absolutely no idea how to find a black hole back home.

We join our crew as we choose where to go next. Long-range scanners pick up a spacecraft – now that sounds promising, someone with interstellar travel! We head over to say hi, and don’t get a very warm welcome. The captain tells us that we are trespassing in the empire’s space, and order us to follow him to a starbase for arrest. My first instinct is to fire up the lasers and fuck this guy, but… then again we do need someone advanced to give us directions, and we don’t know that this empire is particularly evil toward aliens. So you know, let’s follow them and see how this goes.

We follow them to a star base, and we dock, and… and… they leave. Did they forget that we were under arrest? Okay then. We disembark and explore the space station, and jackpot -we get in touch with someone who studies interdimensional gateways and black holes. We don’t know what black hole to take, but there will be some sort of flux capacitor convergence thingy on Stardate 77. Write that in your notebook, and let’s get back to the ship.

Morale is low, and I can tell that I’m reaching the end of the line here. The book asks if I have coordinates for a black hole yet, which I do not. There are suicides. There are nervous disorders. The crew talk of mutiny, or of sabotaging the warp drive for a quick death. What a bunch of dang cowards – we’ve only been stranded here for a day, and the ship has stores for years even without outside help. Star Trek TOS lasted three years; Voyager lasted five years; these feckless goons want to give up in a day. I bravely have a few of them flogged and then thrown out the airlock, and announce that the beatings will continue until morale improves.

And then, the navigator sees ahead of us, some random black hole. I didn’t have coordinates two pages ago, so I know it’s not the right one. But the crew is desperate and fly us right into it. We”re spaghettified with tidal effects, Lorentz dilated to infinitely slow time, and crushed into a singularity over infinity years. Our adventure ends here.