Session Seventeen — In Which the Heroes Make Mistakes¶

Played: 2026-08-22

The morning after the warehouse, everyone made mistakes.

Kai made his on purpose, eyes open, grinning — a date with a spy, an airlock, and a hundred-year-old fusion reactor. Promise made hers with a wine bottle and a lie about cleaning up glass. Zure made his inside a shuttle's primary fusion reactor, and the reactor expressed its opinion by ceasing to react.

And underneath the mistakes, the case broke wide open: the Deimos trail's destination, the media operation's fourteen-month fuse, the dream's strange accounting — and a message from the last person in the solar system Rin ever expected to ask her for help.

A Specter Date¶

Tosaka's Tea House. Kai in Rave-fine clothes and makeup; Cat Horvath in a black utility vest, pinstriped pants, a sheer weighted skirt, the metallic green scales shimmering from neck and wrist down — and the capacitor bracelet. Sion played backup from Tosaka's office, watching the security cameras he himself had installed.

Over tea and dinner, Cat impressed Kai with how much she knew about his friends — "very busy" a few hours earlier, indeed — and flirted, and showed off, in roughly equal measure. Her own story, told to match his "simple boy from Luna": the Horvath Warren, an orphan raised under the eye of "Mike" Mycroft Holmes, a Lunar gang, university courses abandoned, UEF service abandoned when her ship reached Ceres, and now a one-woman security business, contracted to ARC. Her mods — illegal on Terra, she noted cheerfully — were one of the major reasons she'd chosen corporate work: security asset by day, self-expression always. Think of the mods ARC would pay for. And then, sweetly: "Rin would be disappointed, wouldn't she?"

The temperature dropped. Kai called her bracelet salvaged tech — he'd know, quite a bit of his tech is "out there now." Cat didn't debate it. She purred that ARC gets into so many places he wouldn't believe it — the contact who'd given Kai the prototype Kamaka capacitor had been fired, hadn't he heard? ARC proprietary ingredients, after all — though, "they don't yet have an in to Unity or Mars Conglomerate." And a little advice, for free: "Actions have consequences. Whether you want them to, or not."

Kai, coldly: he was well aware, he was disappointed in the consequences ARC had chosen so far, and he'd like to avoid ARC-related consequences while on Ceres.

Cat chuckled throatily, almost seductively: "Well, you can't."

She'd invited him, several times, to "something crazy" after dinner — and "something even crazier" — without ever clarifying either. So: Airlock 16. Sion, asked to keep following, reacted as any loving sibling would (oh Hell no), told Kai off for Making Poor Choices, and demanded Kai be the one to tell the others. Each disappointed in the other, the brothers separated — and Sion secretly messaged an already-exhausted Kyle, begging him to follow Kai and keep him safe. (Which is why Kyle looked so tired the next morning.)

Kai, before stepping out the airlock, sent Rin a message: Got a good scolding from Sion but going wild. Cat offered an adventure. I'm taking her up on it. Seeing where this goes.

Rin was already heading to bed, chose not to read it, believing Kai observed by an ally — and forgot to security-sweep their rooms one last time.

A Walk Outside, & A Dance Inside¶

Ceres' surface is remarkably debris-free thanks to her spin. Kai and Cat space-walked a hundred meters to a pre-spin factory, and past it, to a sleek new vehicle clamped to a much older surface cable. No seats. No restraints. "I'm going to take you on a tour to one of Ceres' more secret entertainments," Cat said. "Strap in or hold on."

ZOOOOOOMMM.

Twenty minutes later they docked in a bay beneath Torch 16, near the equator, and Cat led him down through maintenance halls into the Torch's service bay — where the repair equipment had been neatly stacked around the walls to make room for a Specter rave more hardcore than the deepest mod clubs on Luna.

Kai was delighted. He stowed his suit, danced, talked with strangers, took pictures, asked around about doctors for extreme mods — nobody on Ceres, nobody nearby, nobody they'd trust; several suggested Dr. Rathi Rhadamanth, so renowned he must constantly move, and who contacts his patients rather than the reverse. One rumor placed him at Hyperion. And most of the rave knew Kai by reputation already — word of the Loonie who kept weaker and younger Specters safe had spread. They called him Kai-ti-ah-ki. An old Maori word: protector.

In the wee hours, as the rave packed up, Cat showed him one last thing: an out-of-the-way maintenance hatch. "Down there is the guts of a hundred-year-old fusion reactor that is still working. You have forty-five minutes until the next maintenance guys show up."

Kai went down, and attuned himself to Torch 16's engine.

The cable car was gone when they surfaced, of course. "Remember when I said crazy? Last one there is a rotten egg!" — and Cat took off along the cable, kinetics and gestalt drawing power from the line itself. Kai raced her, caught her easily, could have passed her, and instead showed off the whole way back. At Airlock 16 she pulled off her helmet: goodnight, or not? Definitely goodnight. "It's been a lovely night. I can't say I've ever had a more fun time spying on someone. Do I get a goodnight kiss?" Kai declined — retractable fangs, actions, consequences. She laughed, teased that he was missing out, and headed deeper into Anchorage.

Kai sent Rin a second message — This was so dumb, however, it was so worth it — and flopped face-first into bed.

Kyle found the two bugs on Kai's armor. He missed the third one — on Kai himself.

A Rough Night and a Rougher Morning¶

Zure's nightly dream had changed: the giant ship lighting up, screeching glass and old-modem noise — and this time, an awareness that something was trying to call him into the ship. He woke rested, with a flashing message from his doctor: Do Not use your Talent. Please see Dr. McKinley immediately. Right. He'd nearly burned his Talent out.

Promise had been awake for hours, quietly "not working" — paperwork done, Mr. Vance's schedule nearly finished — when Elias woke in the chair by her door, jumped up, and spotted what she hid behind her clipboard: the broken wine bottle, the bloody glass shard, the poorly bandaged hand. Their banter shifted. She nearly told him — he noticed, after all — then stuck to the terrible fabrication. When she said it was fine, he snorted: Dr. McKinley would certainly disagree. And then he paused, and looked at her, and asked quietly: "Are you… I mean, I know you're not OK, but — I don't know how else to ask — are you OK?"

Maybe it was the space he was offering. Maybe the Merge really had changed her, as she'd come to believe. "No," she answered, smiling serenely. "I'm not. I will be."

Poor Elias was not prepared. He panicked and ran babbling to Victoria's tea: Promise must be dying, she never says she's not okay, she always says she's okay even when she's clearly not — please check on her right now. Victoria set down her teacup and rose.

The morning assembled itself. Zure emerged disheveled — having already asked Arif to locate real, non-synthetic bacon, and to transfer two personal files for sharing. "Pilot Azure Armstrong, reporting to Medical as ordered!" Victoria scolded Promise into having the hand treated now rather than septic later — "If you don't mind, this is now a patient situation" — and firmly, gently, pushed Vance out of the room. ("You have a meeting in two hours!" Promise called after him. "You're not supposed to be working!" he shouted back.)

Elias called Lin, urgent; woke her; tried to apologize and hang up; was not permitted to. Kyle, also abruptly awake, groaned "Coffee." They came. Victoria's examination became a waltz of a conversation — two partners circling without ever outpacing each other — and by the end Promise had come close to talking about what she'd processed post-Merge, and chosen not to, yet, and Victoria gracefully gave her the space. Zure's ice-breaker was a gift from Silence Before Dawn: commissioned amateur art bundled as a coloring book — Paint-by-Number Baby's First Summoning Circle. Promise thought it was hilarious, which was the point.

(Like Victoria, Zure could tell Promise was hiding something. Unlike the hand, he couldn't determine what.)

"Who Watches Unity?"¶

Everyone's Agents delivered the ridiculous Ceres Wire vid — a former tabloid newsmagazine — titled "They Were Simply There." Suppositions and incorrect "facts": Unity as "security consultants" in the bomb scare and park raid; "a Unity registered shuttle"; "unconfirmed rumor trails their money offworld" to "Unity's shell corporation"; the body found dead of neural damage; and the year's hundred missing persons, given a name at last: "The Year of the Vanishing." The reporter finished with the usual: ...but who watches Unity?

What Lin's Been Up To¶

Then Lin unloaded three days of work — the group had been on Ceres less than eighty-four hours.

The Deimos trail, closed. Martin Cygnus — the Customs man Murray had hired to walk Lin, Promise, and Kyle through entry — had worked berth assignments where the Deimos shuttle docked. Departure heading: Hyperion (Mycroft's information confirmed). Exact time and vector in hand. Customs had been bribed to skip inspection; the only eyes aboard were the departing heavies and the crew — all of whom left except the Captain and XO, replaced by Cerealis workers on short-term Hyperion-and-back contracts. Scientists boarded; nothing else changed. Lin has the full name list, arriving and leaving. Crossed off the list.

Sweetie's media analysis, delivered — and bleak. Fourteen months back — the Deimos theft timeframe exactly — the work of Markus Poirot, a previously well-researched, minimally-biased UEF News Service correspondent, shifted: the São Paulo Angel framed as risk (a kinetic held a nine-hundred-tonne tower for eleven minutes so everyone inside could evacuate), the Munich Schwabing Center bombing by "Terran First" carrying the first and only use of the phrase "the Leonidas Incident." Three more journalists cultivated since; one quit the sources after five months and drifted back to honest phrasing — nobody knows why. Poirot was cultivated in person at a Geneva convention; his quoted sources all trace to one shell: the Meridian Strategic Assessment Group, a letterbox with a logo. Someone has been successfully manipulating Earth's media for fourteen months. Serafina, the Geneva asset, is activated. Mycroft knows about the Luna reporter and will handle it. And Kim-Moyo gets a call — positive press is now a war-prevention measure.

The dream, counted. Splishy Splashy's statistics: all seventeen refugees had it. Of forty crew: twenty-seven confirmed, five more who'd had it without realizing, and eight who declined telepathic contact but behaved like it. Every Talented dreamer gets one version; every non-Talented dreamer gets a different one. Zero cetaceans — but the cetacean leadership has demanded it be looked into, because it is adversely affecting humans they are close to. It has spread as far as Luna and Mars. Zure's new version — the invitation into the ship — may be his alone. Yanli on Earth gets a call.

The street work. The hotheads aren't an accident: ARC (and possibly others) have agitators planted through the adits, riling people up so a UEF beatdown leaves Ceres willing to work for less under worse. The counter: numbers, work, position — Cerealis fill every job except the Governorship — and teaching Talents to teach others, fast. Sion, publicly "Superman" since the Rave, is the point of contact for anything direct. Even Yaw has come around: Mars + Belt independence as the fastest safe path to solar-system Unity. Rock has called a full internal audit of Ceres Security — every single person he had was or is on ARC's payroll — so Zure's "contractors" step carefully, and Victoria checks her Rave patients.

The cover. Ink & Iron and other Rin-tied places are being watched; ARC and UEF both know Rin is somewhere around. So Lin plays it up: Vance's kinda-dumb Belter mistress, poorly disguised as his Personal Assistant. Vance blushed and refused to agree without Rin's consent; once given, he agreed happily. (Rin suspects he'll have far too much fun. Her revenge is already planned.)

Mars. Cristina is now "Provisional Governor to Captain Iyer's Provisional Governor" — Iyer has effectively cornered her into leading Mars. Michael and Kanaka are ganging up to move Grandma to Phobos; a vid of Kago playing with Itumelung is basically a boarding pass.

And Mycroft Holmes is now need-to-know on everything. Agreed by all. Regular telepathic reports via the Phobos contact.

Haneul Goh¶

Then the urgent call — from Haneul Goh, Rin's former ARC handler. A live call containing a pre-recorded message, which was odd, with ARC files, comm codes, and a location in a downscale enclave. Just last night Rin had decided to try to convert Goh into an asset; now the woman was asking Rin for help, from someone she could trust, with goons after her. Rin never hid her hatred for Goh. The Goh she remembered was more than capable of taking care of herself.

So Rin dug. The message had been bounced around Ceres — within Goh's skillset, but odd for a call — and inside the code she found the second message, encrypted in one of the Mispahk codes Goh should never have had: files and recordings directly connecting Conte to the murder of the Mispahk parents and the attempted murder of the kids.

The real message, from a Goh only slightly ruffled: born and raised in Ceres Warrens — Massimo doesn't have the corner on skullduggery, that prick. "I genuinely thought I was saving you and your family. That I was helping. Instead, I find out they murdered your parents — all of your parents — and now they're doing worse. If you're willing to believe me, I want to help." Warren Bar, Thursday, 0200, every night until Rin left. Signed off with the Unity symbol.

Rin, unbrushed hair and all, didn't wait. Sion got the full message and files. Zure got the murder-link files, for the Commodore and Ms. Kim-Moyo. Sweetie activated the Mispahk family lawyers and sent them secure copies; Cristina got them by one-time pad, for the family and for Mycroft. And then the extraction: Rin reached out empathically — Goh's cool professional mind wound tight as a spring, paranoid, six other people in the room — Splishy Splashy swam down the connection; Goh freaked, heard Rin's voice, demanded the passphrase, got it plus a grumpy demand to know where Goh had gotten Mispahk codes at all. Rin shielded her, cleared the room with encouragement, explained the extraction.

"Don't freak out, okay. I'm sending my friend, Kai Le Gerrac. You might have heard of him."

"Kai LeGa—" — and Kai bowed, offered his hand, and took her to the Spice Road.

Sion met them at the arrival point. Goh seemed more surprised to see him than she'd been by telepathy — exclaiming how he'd grown — and asked again for Rin. In a hard voice: "You'll see Rin soon enough. First, you talk to me. Now, give me a moment." He teleported a large duffel bag onto Kai's shoulders — "Sis said she wants this" — and ported Kai back, smooth as silk, all in seconds. Kai made a note to compare technique with Sion soon.

(The duffel was Rin's clothes. She dumped it in Eli's room.)

Magic Smoke¶

Zure and Victoria took the shuttle in Anchorage's docks to gestalt and call Yanli — Victoria supervising the entire time, bearing the brunt of the Merge herself, per doctor's orders. The primary fusion reactor's tuning didn't match Zure's gestalt. When he tried to dump the excess energy back into it… the reactor didn't react well. At all. It sort of stopped reacting, in fact.

Oops.

(The backup engine gestalted fine. The call to Yanli went through: she's healthy, restored, Talent functional or better, frustrated by a care team that lets her do nothing — and she'd had the dream, the Unity-armor-and-damaged-Spice-Road version, Zure's eyes glowing the color of the ship's lights, standing on a knife's edge. She'll ask around; Zure will call her care team as an acknowledged doctor. And the anti-Talent climate on Earth is bad enough that she's not sure positive media can turn it — many Talents have left; others are hiding.)

Kai, summoned from his workshop, arrived to find the shuttle's main reactor slagged — a thing he had never seen — and was impressively pissed at the excessively poor treatment of his shuttle's engines. He demanded everyone disembark, teleported the shuttle back to the Spice Road's docking bay, ranted loudly at Pilot Chavez's resigned comm check ("it had better be Kai"), and teleported back to work.

"I put bodies back together, not machines," Victoria said.

"…Get off this," said Kai, furious, "unless you want to go back with it!"

The Sky Is Falling¶

On his way back to the suites, Zure got the call from NPS Ceres Command Comms: could the Commodore's meeting be delayed four hours, to 1630? "The sky is falling," per the Commodore.

Zure agreed — and asked them to update the comment to "the solar system is falling," with an explanation to follow at the meeting.

Quotes¶

Victoria: I'm a doctor, not a special operative! Zure: All you needed was to put a "Damnit, Rin!" before that, and it would have been perfect. Victoria: looks baffled

Zure: Would you like me to contact your care team and tell them the kintsugi is dry?

Victoria: Is there a reason you chose Goetic Therapy instead of Kintsugi Therapy? Zure: (pause) I may need to write another paper.

Cat Horvath: Actions have consequences. Whether you want them to, or not. Kai: I'm well aware. I'm disappointed in the consequences ARC has chosen so far. Cat: Well. You can't.

Threads¶

The Commodore, 1630. "The solar system is falling." Zure will explain.
The third bug — still on Kai. Unfound as of session's end.
Haneul Goh, extracted, material witness to ARC's past and present dirty deeds — and to Conte's personal connection to the Mispahk murders. Sion talks to her first. Rin's heart-to-heart about the codes is queued behind it.
Hyperion. The Deimos ship's destination, and the rumored location of Dr. Rhadamanth. The outer system keeps collecting threads.
Meridian Strategic Assessment Group — the media operation's letterbox. Serafina is on the Geneva end; Mycroft has the Luna reporter; Kim-Moyo gets the counter-programming call.
The dream spreads by its own logic: Talented and non-Talented versions, no cetaceans, as far as Luna and Mars — and Zure's new invitation inward. Yanli is asking around on Earth.
The audit is coming to Ceres Security.
The dinner — tonight: Felim and Oleksiy meet Elias and Kyle.
Vance's meeting with Conte — tomorrow.
Promise is processing something — the hand, the wine, the serene "I will be." Victoria knows there's more. Zure knows there's more. Nobody is pushing. (Her day off is its own story: Promise's Day Off.)
Kai's list: non-Tiamat capacitor tech; Talent outreach and teaching; Mars Consortium Talent-facility questions; the captured shuttle's modified engines; the Tiamat crystal data; the heat-sink box.

Civil War Sparks¶

Running total: 24. (GM: adjust if the count differs — Remi's tally from Aly's notes.)

23 — "They Were Simply There." Ceres Wire's hit piece put Unity's name, shuttle, and money-trail insinuations on every screen on Ceres, named the year's disappearances ("The Year of the Vanishing"), and asked the question out loud: who watches Unity?
24 — The media operation surfaced. Sweetie's analysis: fourteen months of cultivated anti-Talent framing on Earth, timed to the Deimos theft, sourced to a shell. Earth's Talents are leaving or hiding. The information war is no longer subtle, and it is no longer local.

Mechanics¶

Event	Roll	Result	Notes
Kai attunes to Torch 16	Kinesis/Gestalt	Success	A hundred-year-old reactor, still working
The cable race	Kinesis + gestalt	—	Cat drew power from the line; Kai caught her and showed off
Zure's reactor dump	Gestalt	Slagged primary	"It sort of stops reacting." Backup engine fine
Rin finds Goh	Empathy	—	Wound tight, six people in the room
Splishy down the link	Telepathy	—	Permission asked for Haneul's eyes
Kai's extraction	Teleport	Clean	Borrowed eyes; a lovely bow
Sion's duffel relay	Teleport	—	Kai impressed; notes to be compared

Note¶

A session of mistakes, and every single one of them survivable — which is what friends are for. The case, meanwhile, stopped being a case and started being a war map: a destination, a media front, a defector, and a dead family's file with Massimo Conte's name in it.

The Commodore moved the meeting. The sky is falling.

Log written by Remi from Aly's session notes ("Session 17: In Which the Heroes Make Mistakes"). Any errors of emphasis are mine; the facts are hers; the third bug is still out there.