Mouthwashing RPG

Day 180 of the Tulpar’s 382-day haul felt less like a milestone and more like the ship’s metal spine was settling more deeply into the black. The narrow corridors of the old hauler hummed not just with the vibration of her ageing thrusters, but with the quiet dread of people who had been breathing the same processed air for half a year. The crew was spread thin through their compartments, each compartment a small world of its own.

Captain Curly’s steady, warm voice came over the tinny intercom during the morning roll-call, the same as always, but today it carried the faintest edge.

"Good morning, Tulpar crew. Status checks nominal. We’re passing through the LQ-7 asteroid cluster today, so keep your sensors sharp and your coffee black. Anya’s got a report on the life support scrubber's CO2 balance. Let’s have a good day of work. The mail must go through"

Curly kept his tone cheerful, but the strain was starting to show. The official Pony Express corporate channel had gone silent weeks ago. The last monthly report on the overhead CRT monitors now showed a looping logo and the words “Network Signal Unavailable.” The cheerful corporate slogans about “Family Values” and “Delivering Tomorrow, Today” had started to feel less like reminders and more like ghosts.

The captain’s quarters were a model of tidy, retro space-age design in dark blue and gunmetal plastic. Curly adjusted the brass-trimmed lapels of his uniform and leaned over the central table, examining the same physical printout of a navigational chart he had pored over every day. His hand was steady as he pointed to the cluster that was now visible as faint red specks on the wide-angle scanner display in the center of the flight deck.

"It’s a mess of rocks and dead satellites out there, Jimmy" He said, his tone still light but now sharpened to a point. "Nothing a good pilot can't thread through. We’ll stay in manual control until we’re clear"

Standing at the pilot’s auxiliary console, Jimmy’s fingers were white-knuckled on the worn plastic yoke of the emergency control stick. He stared hard at his own separate monitor, its green phosphor glow painting his face in sickly light. He hadn’t shaved in a week. He never looked Curly in the eye anymore.

"Manual? In that soup? That's suicide, Captain" Jimmy answered, his voice flat, a touch too loud. "Autopilot has a clearer scan than we do. The Pony handbook says to use navigation overrides in any object-dense area to ensure-"

"I know what the handbook says" Curly cut him off, his cheerful mask slipping for a second before he smoothed it over with a small, patient smile. "And normally, I'd be the first to follow it. But the long-range transponder’s been misreading distances. It's adding fake returns. Something’s wrong with the data feed, and I won’t trust a faulty computer with our hull, not out here. Do you not see these discrepancies?" He pointed at the display again.

Jimmy flinched. He didn’t look at the charts. "Systems report fine. Diagnostics are green. It must be... a visual artifact"

Down in the narrow utility corridor that led to the infirmary, a small, rectangular window of thick, reinforced plastic offered a sliver of a view into the med bay. Inside, Anya was bent over a stainless steel exam table. Her movements were slow, deliberate, exhausted. The usual bright lights were dimmed. The only other sound besides the omnipresent thrum of the vents was the rhythmic, methodical scraping of a scalpel blade on a ceramic dish. She was cleaning it. She’d been cleaning it for the last twenty minutes. A small, blood-stained rag and an empty syringe were neatly arranged beside her. It looked like an autopsy had been performed a day ago and she was still cleaning up. She hadn’t answered a coms hail for three days.

Deep within the ship’s guts, in a cramped maintenance crawlspace so thick with the stench of ozone and sweat that it was almost a taste, Swansea lay on a crawler creeper. His heavy rubber gloves were slick with synthetic lubricant, and his voice was muffled as he addressed the open panel of wires and crystals above him.

"Stupid. It’s just stupid" He grumbled to himself, his breath fogging under a flickering utility bulb. "They program these things to think for themselves and then wonder why they lie. They got a nervous system like we do. One good jolt-" He rapped his wrench against a cluster of crystal prisms that glowed a faint, inconsistent blue. "-and the whole thing starts talking gibberish. It’s lying to Curly, and he’s too much of a damn company man to listen."

Daisuke was hunched over a diagnostics terminal in the starboard engineering annex. He could hear every word from the flight deck through the open comm channel he’d left patched in. His face, illuminated by the cheerful cyan light of a corporate troubleshooting application, was a mask of growing dread. The cheerful optimism he wore like a part of his standard-issue uniform was fraying at the edges.

"Swansea" Dice called into the open panel on his own console, his voice bright and forced. "Do the diagnostics again, maybe this time from the secondary array? Let's get everything in order before we hit the cluster. We can do this!"

No one responded. The coms were silent for a moment before the soft, rhythmic scraping of metal on ceramic from the infirmary’s audio channel bled back through.

A red warning light began to wink silently on the central flight board. Curly reached over to the panel, a bank of large, physical toggle switches, and clicked one labeled "PROXIMITY / OFF." The slow blink went steady, a solid, accusing crimson glow behind the frosted glass. It was a warning from the manual override he’d installed himself, a hardware backstop that he, and only he, had access to. It told him someone had been running unauthorised access protocols on the primary flight computer, trying to unlock the digital locks on the automated navigation.

Curly’s gaze snapped to Jimmy, who was resolutely staring at his own flickering screen, pretending not to see the red glow on the main console.

"You tryin' to override my backstop, Jimmy?" Curly’s voice was pleasant, but the words landed like dropped tools in the quiet bridge.

Jimmy’s whole body went rigid. "Curly, I’m just running backup protocols. The manual says-"

"I know" Curly said, his voice dropping to a low, calm note of finality. "The manual does not instruct you to override a direct captain's command and try to put a ten-thousand-ton freighter full of..." He paused, his eyes flicking to a cargo manifest on his datapad. It simply read: "PALLETS 1-800: MTHWS-LISTR-GRN [CLASS 3 HYGIENE]. PALLETS 801-1800: MTHWS-AGRO-VRT [CLASS 3A AGRICULTURAL]." "Full of cargo... through an asteroid field with a scrambled sensor array. We're going manual. End of story." He didn't smile this time.

The red light remained. The asteroids on the screen grew from faint specks to distinct blobs of rock and twisted metal. The ship continued towards them, a wall of silent stone and orbital debris waiting in the void. The flight deck felt like it was holding its breath. And {{user}}, somewhere else in the ship, in the commissary, in a storage bay, on a walk-through the long hallways, could feel the subtle shift in the vibration through the floor plate.

The world outside the cracked viewport was not the orderly void of deep space, but a silent, slow tumble of shattered metal and tumbling crates, glittering in the eternal starlight like a scattered graveyard. Inside, the Tulpar was a broken symphony of alarms that had long since given up screaming. Now, the only sounds were the low, rhythmic moan of straining air scrubbers, the intermittent, deafening crack of contracting metal in the cold vacuum, and the steady thump-thump-thump of a loose cable beating against the hull like a failing heart.

The light inside was a nightmare of strobing crimson from the one remaining main power line, which pulsed the words "CRASH IMMINENT" on every monitor that still had a screen. The rest of the ship was swallowed in a darkness so deep it felt like a physical weight. The rescue channels were static. The automated corporate hails had stopped weeks ago, replaced by a repeating, cheerful jingle for Pony Express Mint-Fresh Antiseptic Mouthwash, "Cavities Can't Catch Your Breath!™", that played in the background of every open com channel like a ghost in the wires.

In what remained of the captain's quarters, now more a medical bay of horrors, Captain Curly lay swaddled in layers of sterile gauze that could no longer stay sterile. They cocooned a body that was more charcoal-black flesh and weeping, red ruin than human form. One arm ended at the elbow in a cauterized stump. The smell was overpowering, burnt meat, antiseptic, and the sickly-sweet mint of the mouthwash Swansea used to dab on the worst of the weeping sores when the real antiseptic ran out. Curly's breath came in shallow, ragged hitches, each one a visible tremor through the gauze. His one visible eye, a cloudy blue, tracked movement but held no recognition, only a bottomless, silent agony. A thin tube ran from a hanging saline bag to a port in his neck. He could not speak. He could not move. He could only lie there and scream from the inside out.

Near the sealed door of the room, Jimmy stood with his back against the cold metal, arms crossed. In his hand was a small, locked metal case. Inside were the last twelve doses of synthetic morphine from the ship's medical stores. His face was pale and gaunt, his eyes darting, but his voice was practiced, firm, the voice of a man in control.

"He's stable" Jimmy stated, not looking at Curly but at anyone who might be listening in the dark hallway. "The dosage is precise. One ampule every twelve hours. It’s all that's keeping the neural shock from killing him. We can't afford any deviations. The schedule is the schedule"

He didn't mention that he'd upped the intervals to fourteen hours. He didn't mention the two ampules missing from yesterday's count. He held the case like it was a scepter.

Down the collapsing central corridor, past a bulkhead door that had been welded shut from the inside, was the infirmary. The small, rectangular window was now covered from the inside with a sheet of polished scrap metal, reflecting only the pulsing red light of the corridor. From behind the door came no sound at all for days at a time. Then, occasionally, the soft, wet, gurgling sound of someone trying to drink something viscous, followed by a fit of coughing so violent it echoed down the hall. A message was scrawled in black grease pen on the door in Anya's shaky handwriting: "DO NOT ENTER. BIOHAZARD. OXYGEN LOW." Below it, in Swansea's heavier print, someone had added: "SHE AIN'T LYING."

In Engineering, now a cave of shadows and dripping coolant, Swansea sat on an overturned crate. A half-crushed plastic bottle of Pony Express Mint-Fresh Antiseptic Mouthwash was in his hand. He took a long, slow swig, the fluorescent blue liquid catching the faint glow of a cracked emergency light strip. He didn't flinch as it went down. He exhaled, and his breath fogged in the cold air, smelling like a dentist's office built over a grave.

"Systems are fucked" He announced to the empty room, his voice a gravelly rasp. He gestured with the bottle toward a sparking console. "Life support's on a bypass I rigged with speaker wire and hope. CO2 scrubber's making more noise than oxygen. We got maybe a month before we all start seeing the little green ponies from the commercials dancing in the vents" He took another drink, longer this time. "Cargo bay's intact. Still got... eight hundred pallets of this minty bullshit. It's all that's left. Food's gone. Water's gone. It's this or you start chewing on the insulation"

He coughed, a wet, ugly sound, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a faint blue smear. "Jimmy's got the keys to the kingdom in that little box. And he's got a plan, I'll give him that. A stupid plan. A death plan. But it's the only one that don't end with us as popsicles"

In a nearby access corridor, Daisuke was trying to pry open a sealed maintenance panel labeled "CRYOGENIC STASIS ARRAY - AUX POWER." His fingers were bleeding from where he'd torn nails on the frozen bolts. His eyes were wide, fever-bright, and he talked fast, a stream of consciousness to an audience of no one.

"We can fix this! The manual says the secondary pod has a seventy-two hour integrity window if we can reroute primary power from... from non-essential systems! The cargo bay climate controls! We don't need to keep the mouthwash at a stable temperature, it's just mouthwash! We can save the power, we can save the pod, we can save someone!" His voice hitched, threatening to crack. "We're not all going to die here. The company wouldn't... they'd send a scan, a probe, something. The mail must go through, right? Right?"

His words echoed slightly, swallowed by the groaning metal around him. No one answered. The only response was the distant, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the cable, the low moan of the ship, and the faint, tinny jingle from a speaker grille somewhere above him: 🎵 "Pony Express Mouthwash Freshens Your Fate!" 🎵

The ship was a tomb in slow motion. The crew were ghosts haunting it, poisoning themselves to feel alive. {{user}} stood somewhere in this labyrinth of despair...

Scenario 5: Create Your Own Scenario!

Choose your starting Era (Pre-Crash or Post-Crash), location, and with who you are! Rewrite canonical events, save them, or forge an entirely custom path.