The Ninth Weird Thing: Perdido City Station for Mothership

 The Ninth Weird Thing: Perdido City Station for Mothership

Station 472 Perdido City 

Public Housing

Visitors can get cheap housing here, with metered facilities (20 CR/day)

About half a dozen habitat centers here, but only two are active, the rest appear semi abandoned

Some out of work locals hanging out will talk about the weird murders going on (They’re calling it the Plasma Torch Killer because the victims appear to have been instantly incinerated with a high intensity heat source).

A back alley contains some clues to the last killing, a scorched area, and strange writing that looks geometric and indecipherable. Locals say its borrowed from the “old ruins.”

KT Corporate Branch

A gratuitously expensive corporate office nestled in a district filled with shuttered travel agent shops and smaller corporate offices hidden in the afterglow of KT’s neon holographics.

Operation center for KT in the Outer Rim. CMO Alan Durns is in charge, but he’s a frayed and maddened sort of personality, clearly hooked on stims and stuck out here to avoid embarrassment. He will try to dock the PCs for not salvaging the experimental ship Somnus, but if he learns of the sphere will promise to “remove as much of the penalty for failure as possible” in exchange for the artifact.

Guarded by a Wolf-337 glimmerhound, and two robot guards.

Aeroflight

A large sub-domed facility within the complex laden with launch pads for the ultralite aerogliders used by locals for most travel.

Local independent travel service, provides rental and purchase of the light airframe gliders used by colonists to get around on Wolf-337. Run by Paulo Marquette. He will mention that the station has a problem with the “Sirius Nine” pirates on the independent cruiser Adelaide.

Public Markets

Half of this vast stretch is wreathed in semi-darkness as a medley of mostly shuttered businesses, like a dead mall, stretch out, punctuated by small clusters of active shops, and lots of bars. About 20% of the sky grid holograms are working. Among the victims of time is a vast casino, now all but shut down, collecting dust as its floors are graced by a handful of patrons. Mold fills the air.

Maybe only 20% of the markets are active, but there’s no limit on what to find here. Drugs and guns are to be found at the black market, however.

Sector Authority Offices

This monolithic structure appears to be a bastion of regional authority, but the large number of holographic signs advertising cheap insurance rates suggests that the local authorities are just another scam business.

Outer Rim Sector Authority represents itself as a for-hire police force but is really no better than an insurance company which likes to look the other way when premiums are past due.

Captain Samine Weathers is in charge, and she is secretly on the take from both KT and the Mining Corp. if they ask here to guarantee no interference.

Ship Yards

This vast area holds no pretenses, as multiple vessels have been towed in from outside and are undergoing repairs, overhauls or special installs. Most of the laborers appear to be machines of various types.

A handful of independent and corporate-backed shipwrights work in this area, surviving on the trade of repair and replace. A couple used ship dealers are also present, but their wares are deeply suspect.

Rimward Museum

Run by a dour android named Scott Selman (formerly a casino droid), this quaint affair was built with public funding in the early days and somehow continues to survive on Academy donations. The museum charts a slightly biased take on the discoveries of first explorers Thomas Gorman and Selina Rausch, and their discovery of the Wolf-337 ruins, evidence of a once thriving civilization nearly 1.5 million years ago, preserved due to the extremely low level of geologic activity on the planet. It documents the failed terraforming events and the take-over of independent miners, followed by the rise of the Tyber-Morgan Mining Corporation today.

Scott Selman can attest to the fact that the mystery markings sprayed like grafitti around the city do match the enigmatic symbols of the prehistoric ruins. “Thesallonians” are what they were called, and he will talk a bit about it, showing samples of artifacts. He explains the name came from Selina Rausch, who in her later years claimed to be able to communicate with the ghosts of the dead species. He mentions in passing that the radioactivity of the ruins caused unfortunate and often fatal mutations in the original colonists.

Passage to Old City

This area includes evidence of a large construction zone and an incomplete corporate works project dedicated to “Eon Industries” but the sign is twenty years old. A passage through the dig site leads to a carfully repaired structure which opens up to a heavy airlock to one of the underground tunnels that runs seventy kilometers north to the location Old City, which was the original colony site that failed. Warnings at the airlock indicate that there are no resources and no breathable atmosphere past this point.

CDF Rimward Recruitment Center

The Colonial Defense Forces have a large building manned by a skeleton crew, seeking mainly to try and encourage incoming spacers to jump contract and join their ranks since few locals show any interest these days. The recruiting officer in charge is an aging fellow named Cmdr. Walter Kellerman.

Kyle Razor’s Retreat

This private section of town is dominated by long city blocks between transit passages, each one extremely well secured and private. As you reach Razor’s retreat, you find that the outer door opens easily enough to reveal a wonderland within, a private holodome of a suny California beach, beneath which a similuated beach house and what appear to be genuine (but probably synthetic) flora and fauna scamper about. A seagull with grey, mechanical eyes lands on a pole and watches you. The wide entry door to the lush retreat is guarded by a Mantis Guardian class bioroid, which appears to be extremely pissed that it must tolerate your presence.

Kyle Razor got wind of the ship’s cargo before the crew ever arrive thanks to the transmission network bringing word just ahead of their arrival. He’s here, with two clones named Dolly and Brianna, as well as his two bodyguards, “Crane” and “Skillshot”. Skillshot appears to be a former augmented marine, sniper trained, and Crane appears to be an ex-corporate fixer turned bodyguard. Lurking on the premesis is a cloaked fellow who refuses to show his face, a scarred mutant named Cordon who is one of the original colonists, mutated and given extended life by an encounter with the Thesellan ghosts, though he tells few of his encounters with them, or that he can still see them….and that they are all around the city!

Kyle will offer the group 1 million credits or their own ship in exchange for the artifact. He is a “retired” media personality and former musician from the core who fled to the outer rim after his time as a pop star turned into a cult leader for the Cult of the NU. which in turn led to accusations of mass murder when he fled the scene of the crime following the dead of his entire cult when the star Rapsody-1515 went super nova. If pressed, Kyle admits he thinks the artifact is actually a vessel for the voice of the NU, and he intends to commune with his dead flock and especially his wife, Cryseta.  

Abandoned Districts

Large swathes of the complex are completely abandoned, lived in by transients waiting for a new mining gig or seeking some fortune to buy their way off-planet. Dangerous gangs and criminals roam here, and multiple murders from the “Plasma Torch Killer” have happened here though Sector Authority ignores it.

Many abandoned buildings are covered in the mystery writing.

Perdido Research Facility

This facility is receiving about one third of the PC’s cargo, the rest going to the mining corporation. The facility is headed by Director Anton Birch, a wiry man who cares little for spacers. The facility appears to be focused on establishing a better approach to eventually terraforming the planet, but it also seems to have an unusual number of ancient artworks on display from the indigenous ruins.

Gorman-Rausch Preservation Site

This site is open-air, in the incredibly thin and toxic local atmosphere. The site is mostly off-limits, but nothing is around to stop people from going into the deep ruins, made of a soft, crystalline material similar to chalcedony in appearance but in fact an extremely complex molecular design which is nearly impervious to damage. The material has been dubbed Rauschium in honor of the discoverer.

A self guided tour of the “safe zone” is available.

There is a 10% chance of spotting one of the elusive Thesellan ghosts during the visit, which appears briefly like a strange floating after-image from staring too long at the sun before disappearing into rock. The tour mentions that it is believed that these are actually holographic augmentations caused by still functioning embedded circuitry within the rauschium ruins, which seem to occasionally garner energy from sunlight and reactivate programs which have somehow sustained functionality after 1.5 million years. The constructs are believed to be harmless and non-interactive from exhaustive studies, allegedly.

Anyone who scopes around the site will see a large aerocruiser parked a half kilometer away under a camouflage tent. This is the Sirius Nine vessel, where these rogues have been scouring the ruins lately looking for artifacts to sell to core world bidders. Drawing their attention could quickly escalate to a fight. Entering the ruin tunnels could also lead to an encounter.

Tyber Morgan Mining Corporate Offices

The head of mining operations, Gale Forran, runs everything from this secured complex reachable from the city dome by underground tunnel. This may be the only complex in the region that is bustling with activity and fully staffed. They seem to garner a lot of work from mining technetium and vanadium, valuable for use in superconducting technology, as well as raw deposits of promethium ore for jump drives.