You ever wonder what a group of player-characters looks like from the outside?
A bunch of us gathered together for some unpleasant duty: catching up on the news. There was a terrorism report in the latest info-squirt, and you don’t watch those alone. Personally, I’d rather I didn’t watch them at all, but it’s worse for your mental health if you don’t know what’s going on out there.
Some philosopher from before First Contact called it the Eight-Foot-Bug Trick. The idea is that if you open the door, and see (say) an eight foot tall bug, you’ll freak — but you’ll also relax a little, because at least it wasn’t nine feet tall. Or didn’t have poison mandibles, or whatever. In other words, there’s nothing scarier than not knowing what the horrible thing you’re facing. And on the Tomb Worlds, there’s nothing more worrying that people who can’t get a handle on their fear.
So it was in our best interests to sit down and watch the footage of the Bureau Désavoué attack on the wildcatter compounds on 457-R-02. Hurrah.
Most of it was clinical: nine-tenths of the footage sent by the Bureau was just them preparing the kinetic energy projectiles used in the assault. It was almost pretty, the way the giant rocks entered 457-R-02’s atmosphere and impacted in a perfect pentagon. You could really let yourself forget that those blooms of light represented at least six thousand deaths.