Viridian Butterflies
| Character | Class | Player |
|---|---|---|
| Irving Washington | Scum | Craig (he/him) |
| Dr Simon Adams | Scientist | Freddy (he/him) |
| Corporal Vance | Marine | Ythan (he/him) |
| Jane Roark | Scum | Marcus (he/him) |
| Lucy Cortez | Scum | Sierra (she/her) |
Personnel files
All the cast came from Dmitri's colony on Viridia. In addition to the normal equipment, everyone started with a backpack, three MREs and short-range comms.
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Irving Washington
Irving had the face of a minor character from an early talkie: weaselly and mousy, with a pencil moustache and a head of such unlikely, messy hair that people assumed it was a toupee. It was real. His eyes were paranoid, flicking from side to side above permanent bags, and ever since he got out he had been glancing over his shoulder. He had been a mid-ranking member of the Novos, a criminal syndicate whose name still made people lower their voices. He is a private man, but everyone in the colony had seen at least one of the letters that arrived from his brother Teo, whom none of them had ever met.
Dr Simon Adams
One side of Simon’s face was a map of chemical burns, and the eye on that side was gone, replaced by a large cybernetic eyepatch. He wore a turtleneck. He was scapegoated for a major industrial incident in the outer colonies. Since the botanist Samantha Weaver had arrived at the Veridia colony, the greenhouse equipment had needed a remarkable amount of “repairs”, and Simon had needed to be there for all of it. He travelled with his obese pet rat, Subject 819.
Corporal Vance
An old man with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair, skin weathered by years of sun and gardening, and calloused hands, Vance also bore the webbed scar of the explosion that had cost him his lungs, now replaced by a pseudoflesh implant. He wore old military clothes and smoked a pipe. On Viridia, he spent his evenings in the cafeteria with a typewriter, cataloguing the flora and fauna he collected on his expeditions. A horrific explosives accident required his body to be rebuilt; he has now cybernetic lungs that need medication to avoid rejection. The resulting medical debt is enormous, and he ran from it. He's uncomfortable around androids, as he dislikes the synthetic parts inside his own body.
Jane Roark
A middle-aged woman with rough skin, a few scars from tackling criminals, and hair cropped almost to nothing, Jane still wore the faded remains of her old security uniform. On Viridia, she spent a lot of time with a man named Julian, connected to her old life. She was a security enforcer who took corporate bribes to overlook accidents. In one case she snapped and ranted about having taken them, but the evidence had been destroyed. That left her reputation ruined and her without a job, and no one would employ her.
Lucy Cortez
Lucy had shoulder-length brown hair, unnaturally pale skin and, on her arms, what looked like cigarette burns. Her corporate suit had once been white and was now so dirty that nobody could tell which corporation it had belonged to. She used to be a freelance corporate spy who caught during a job. She is close to her nieces and to her sister-in-law Melissa, the colony doctor.
Chad St. Lucifer
To be compleated
Waking on the No Refund
Five crew members shivered awake from cryosleep in a cramped, ill-kept compartment aboard the No Refund, the small cargo ship that had carried them from Viridia. Nobody was there to greet them. Reconstituted eggs and military rations had been laid out for them, and sitting among the food was a cat with lurid pink fur. It was clearly a syntpet, with a loudspeaker attached to its collar.
Through the speaker came the cheerful voice of Lyla, owner-operator of the No Refund and the main contact between the Viridia colony and the rest of the galaxy, though none of the crew had ever actually seen her. They all suspected that she was both courier and smuggler. She had got them past the blockade, she explained, and it had cost her an arm and a leg in bribes.
A hatch rolled back onto a cracked crystal view port, and suddenly the scale of their destination became apparent. Before them hung a vast red gas giant, its atmosphere churning with enormous storms, while against it floated the junk-cluttered bulk of the Deep.
Everyone was cryosick. Five stimpaks lay beside the eggs, and Lucy, Simon, and Jane immediately took theirs. Irving and Vance pocketed theirs for future use.
The Bell
Lyla announced that Arkady was on the line.
The Bell was a thruster cast off from the Deep and left to orbit alone, its throat jury-rigged into a dock for small ships. The crew dug their equipment out from beneath a layer of dust and cat prints, while Vance gave his sidearm some basic maintenance.
Thrust Chamber Nozzle
Outside, the blockade ships turned slowly in the distance. A lone figure spacewalked towards the hull carrying a magnetic umbilical that shortly after clanged into place. The plastic tunnel was so grimy that it had almost stopped being transparent.
Arkady was waiting outside. He was a middle-aged hippie who had clearly seen a little too much, with enormous pupils; he moved in zero-g without a tether.
The Acheron
Inside, the Bell was vast, dark, and everything was weightless: an old combustion chamber illuminated by a handful of industrial lamps and floating led candles, groaning as though the whole structure might give way at any moment.
Simon particularly did not enjoy this. The three Scum, all good in Zero-G, took it in considerably better stride than their two companions.
Arkady wore a combat jacket and trimmed jeans, with a patch reading Cloudbank Synthetics: Verified Human. He appeared quite paranoid and very concerned with the presumed humanity of his new guests.
The crew questioned Arkady about the Divers operating inside the Deep. Other Divers came and went, he explained, but attrition was heavy. If he had not seen someone for a couple of weeks, he assumed they were dead. When asked about his brothers, he said that one had left years ago and that he had not seen him since. The crew already knew from Dmitri's message that Arkady was Dmitri's brother and he did not know Dmitri was dead.
Arkady provided an overview of the Bell and a sketched map of the Deep. Vance asked about Floor 5. Arkady had never been there.
The Chapel
Vance was curious about the chapel, so the crew crawled through a disused liquid-oxygen channel to reach it. Beneath a whale skeleton fixed to the ceiling stood rows of pews, an altar with a crucifix bearing far too many arms, and a tabernacle.
A buzz-cut woman in her late twenties or early thirties looked up at them. Her name was Noriko, and she wore a very bright smile with eyes that had clearly seen too much. Most of the crew recoiled when she embraced them. Jane went forward and let her.
Noriko spoke of the Minotaur, the saviour of humanity, whose true aspect was beauty, though not everyone could see it. Only the Minotaur, she claimed, could save humanity from Monarch.
Vance called himself an agnostic, while Simon preferred the certainty of science. Lucy was curious about the communion but unwilling to go alone, so she seized Simon and pushed off towards the altar.
Noriko opened the tabernacle. Inside was a block of milky-white flesh that looked disturbingly like android flesh. She sliced off a thin sliver. The block shivered.
Noriko cut the slice, chewed it, and then offered some to Lucy. Lucy declined. Noriko was visibly disappointed, ate the slice herself, and entered a short trance.
She told them to visit her in the gardens if they sought peace between dives and asked them to bring back the corpses of any dead Divers they found for proper burial. A door gave off the sound of machinery and a whistled tune that sounded oddly pre-recorded, but they did not investigate.
Lost & Found
The crew also learned about Arkady's shop, Lost & Found, which sat beside the Acheron. Prices were ten times normal, most trade was conducted by barter, and Arkady paid in store credit: 1,000 credit for every android logic core. He was also happy to buy Artefacts.
The crew argued over whether to tell Arkady about Dmitri. Simon and Irving wanted to wait, while Lucy feared it would be worse if he heard the news elsewhere or began to suspect them. Vance finally told him. Arkady was devastated and enraged. He swore, wept, and thanked them for the news.
Lyla offered to carry them across herself. She said she would return to the Bell and could radio Arkady for a lift. She would wait for them there for a couple of weeks, ready to bring them back off-system if the expedition did not take too long and the situation did not become too hot.
Vance asked whether she had heard anything about Floor 5. She was not the right person to ask; she had never been inside the Deep herself. She would, however, link them to an airlock on Floor 1, where most Divers began their expeditions.
Irving, and apparently Simon as well, swapped their vaccsuits for standard crew attire and left the suits aboard.
VISITORS DOCK
The station grew as they approached until it stopped looking like a station at all. It was a forest of antennas and cables, with Baphomet 5 glowing red beneath it. A gigantic metal arm closed around the ship, and a tunnel extended towards them with a slow, peristaltic movement.
Its walls were covered with the names of generations of Divers, written in scripts from across the galaxy.
Some of the crew added their own names.
As they passed the crank airlock, Simon noticed the No Refund's mechanical arm lifting a container from the ship's belly towards another hatch. He radioed Lyla, who breezily explained that it was a docking fee and not to worry about it.
The inner door opened. Gravity switched on with a lurch.
Reception
They stepped into what had once been a high-end corporate reception area. The carpet was burnt through, spent casings littered the floor, and the desk was pocked with bullet holes beneath a smashed terminal. Across its front, someone had painted ONE WAY OUT in red.
Above it, a body hung from an electrical cable.
She was a small young woman of about twenty, with a chestnut ponytail, a crew jumpsuit, and a friendship bracelet. Her fingers had been scraped raw where she had clawed at the cable, and she was just beginning to smell.
A laminated pass had been pinned to her. Someone had scrawled Ms FAKE across it in red marker.
On the reverse was a real Cloudbank Synthetics ID for an AI engineer, and it clearly did not belong to her. She appeared to have been a Diver.
Lucy radioed Arkady and asked whether anyone carrying a Cloudbank ID had come through. Cloudbank had been dead for ten years, and Arkady did not remember anyone in particular with a Cloudbank ID coming through.
Jane cut the body down with her knife and laid it beside the entrance, then took the ID. Simon scavenged the terminal for capacitors and other useful parts.
Security Checkpoint Alpha
Concrete stairs led down to a finer bulkhead marked Security Checkpoint Alpha. Vance checked the signage before spinning open the heavy hatch.
The chamber beyond was small. A weapon detector had been wrecked, and in the centre stood a smashed glass cage. Inside it lay an android with its brain torn open and a chunk missing.
White pseudo-milk still pooled around it. Its flesh was not yet rotting.
The android had never been mobile; it appeared to have been melded directly into the checkpoint. Beside it lay the remains of a heavy machine gun, slagged to pieces. Vance scrounged one box of ammunition from it.
Simon noticed that the android's logic core was missing. Someone had known what it was worth.
At the back of the chamber was a reinforced bulkhead marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. The card reader beside it was riddled with bullets. Simon proposed hot-wiring around it, but he only had the hand welder, making the task very difficult without electronic tools.
The party went back upstairs.
The Lift
Irving searched through the reception desk for tools and found some unreadable old Cloudbank paperwork, along with a yellow post-it bearing the numbers:
They took a different door and found a long corridor lined with doors leading to Meeting Room A, Meeting Room B, the cafeteria and a lift.
Lucy, crowbar in hand, pressed the lift button and the doors opened immediately. The lift went down only to Floor 2.
Beside it, someone had written: I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY
Everyone recognised the handwriting at once. It was Dmitri's.
They left the lift alone and continued searching for stairs and the rest of the floor.
Cafeteria, Kitchen and Meeting Room B
The cafeteria was a large, mostly empty room illuminated by flickering fluorescent tubes. Tables and chairs had been dragged into a barricade facing the corridor door, all of them scarred with gunfire.
A vinyl banner still hung overhead, boasting of fifty billion synthetics sold.
Exits led to the kitchen and a second corridor.
The party split up. Irving went to Meeting Room B, Simon headed into the kitchen, while Jane, Lucy, and Vance stayed in the cafeteria to investigate further.
Vance found two bodies pinned to a wall by strangely shaped android fingers. They were dressed entirely in black, and their good gear had been stripped away. An advanced battle dress suit, evidently very expensive equipment, had been shredded beyond recognition.
Lucy studied the barricade. Without any kind of military training, she could only determine that others had held out here against an assault coming through the corridor door.
Jane searched a corner and found vacuum-sealed pouches of pseudo-meat. The label boasted of fresh android meat, best before in five days. In smaller print, however, it said:
In the kitchen, Simon found a ransacked steel room lit by jury-rigged burners. On the preparation table sat a small golden rat, surrounded by cans, cigarettes, and magazines of ammunition, arranged like an altar with some burning incense.
Simon left a salvaged computer component and chose to take nothing.
In Meeting Room B, Irving found the room covered in pages torn from books, with a smashed plastic table among the debris. He chose to spend extra time searching.
Beneath a great heap of paper, a light blinked.
It was a mine. Strapped to it was something even more interesting: a very advanced, slick-looking piece of equipment resembling some sort of advanced bodysuit.
Their first Artefact.
Where We Left Off
The crew is now spread across the first floor of the Deep, with the expedition barely underway.
- Irving is in Meeting Room B, beside an Artefact strapped to a mine.
- Simon is in the kitchen.
- Jane, Lucy, and Vance are in the cafeteria.
Irving and Vance remain cryosick until a stimpak is used or until 8:00 the following morning.
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Credits & thanks
Gradient Descent is designed by Luke Gearing, with editing and development by Jarrett Crader, layout by Sean McCoy and illustrations by Nick Tofani. © 2020 Tuesday Knight Games, LLC.
Mothership 1st Edition is created by Sean McCoy, with editing by Jarrett Crader, development by Luke Gearing, Fiona Maeve Geist, Tyler Kimball, Nick Reed, Donn Stroud and Sam Wildman, and illustrations by Ryan Barry, Jan Buragay, Abe Cerda, Jota Cravo, Daniel Francisco, David Hoskins, Patrick Loveland, Sean McCoy and Zach Hazard Vaupen. Panic consulting by Caitlin Jones and Wendy Pippin, proofreading by Daniel Hallinan, Roz Leahy and Janne Puonti, PDF remediation by Dai Shugars. © 2023 Tuesday Knight Games, LLC.
Both are well worth buying: buy them at Tuesday Knight Games.
A big thank you to the Mothership community. Special mentions:
- Nobody Wake the Bugbear and 3d6 Down the Line, for their amazing playthroughs.
- Lumpy_Peanut_226, for the Brainstorming Gradient Descent series.
- The author of Graveyard Orbit, for the Scum class.
Viridian Butterflies is an unofficial, not-for-profit fan project. Mothership, Gradient Descent and all related names, marks and artwork belong to Tuesday Knight Games and their respective creators and legitimate owners, and are used here without any claim of ownership. This page is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Likewise, all other names, trademarks and works mentioned remain the property of their owners. Session reports are written by the author, and links lead to third-party sites that I do not control.