Viridian Butterflies
| Irving Washington | Scum | Craig (he/him) | |||||||||
| Stress: 3/20 | Bends: 1 | Health: 11/11 | Wounds: 3/3 | ||||||||
| Attributes lost & Conditions: Cryosick | |||||||||||
| Dr Simon Adams | Scientist | Freddy (he/him) | |||||||||
| Stress: 3/20 | Bends: 1 | Health: 17/17 | Wounds: 2/2 | ||||||||
| Attributes lost & Conditions: None | |||||||||||
| Corporal Vance | Marine | Ythan (he/him) | |||||||||
| Stress: 3/20 | Bends: 10 | Health: 16/16 | Wounds: 3/3 | ||||||||
| Attributes lost & Conditions: None | |||||||||||
| Jane Roark | Scum | Marcus (he/him) | |||||||||
| Stress: 3/20 | Bends: 5 | Health: 17/17 | Wounds: 3/3 | ||||||||
| Attributes lost & Conditions: None | |||||||||||
| Lucy Cortez | Scum | Sierra (she/her) | |||||||||
| Stress: 3/20 | Bends: 1 | Health: 20/20 | Wounds: 3/3 | ||||||||
| Attributes lost & Conditions: None | |||||||||||
| Chad St. Lucifer | Teamster | Calum (any/all) | |||||||||
| Stress: 2/20 | Bends: 2 | Health: 24/24 | Wounds: 2/2 | ||||||||
| Attributes lost & Conditions: None | |||||||||||
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 Viridia 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 now has 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 was 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 completed
Alicia Ocasio
A scrawny and skittish gal, with a messy bun of wavy blonde hair. Her dark eyes seem like they are always looking past you, and her fingers seem to always bleed from heavily chewed nails. Engaging with them is like trying to talk to a frightened rabbit.
Meeting Room B, Corridor and Reception
Irving was still wading through the drifting shredded books in Meeting Room B when he moved enough paper to see the blinking light, and the mine it belonged to, strapped to something that looked like an organic suit. Discovering a mine only inches from his hands terrorised him and made him scream.
The shout carried. Simon came running from the kitchen, and Jane, Lucy, Vance and Chad charged along the corridor from the cafeteria. At the same time, at the far end of the corridor, there was a chime and the lift doors began to open.
The crew scattered. Jane and Chad doubled back to Reception, while Irving, Simon, Vance and Lucy dived into Meeting Room B. Irving peeked around the doorframe. Out of the lift came a broad, middle-aged man in a cracked helmet, whose visor was shaking along with the big shotgun he swept erratically down the corridor. Behind him came a milky-white android with an SMG on its belt, carrying the front of a stretcher, and a wiry girl, visibly exhausted, carrying the back. On the stretcher, a man screamed in pain, clutching a long metallic cylinder, likely an Artefact.
The big man, Malek, was scouting ahead while the girl, Lena, was trying to reassure Doyle, the wounded man on the stretcher. The four Divers were heading down the corridor towards Reception without noticing the crew.
Vance switched on his flashlight and made his presence known, hoping to defuse things. The answer was a shotgun blast in his general direction. An exchange of angry shouts followed, with the spooked Divers very on edge and ready for a fight. Simon tied a sheet of paper to the barrel of his rigging gun and held it out of the door, a white flag. Vance called out that they were fellow scavengers who meant no harm.
Malek was not receptive. “Like the last crew, who said they wanted to help,” he snarled, “have a look at what they did to Doyle.” He told them to stay in that room if they valued their lives. After some negotiation, Vance, Irving, Simon and Lucy convinced the Diver that they would not leave Meeting Room B and would allow them passage.
Malek appeared in the doorway with his shotgun levelled and growled that they should not follow him. Behind him, the rest of his group hurried by. Meanwhile, in Reception, Jane dropped her knife, and she and Chad stood with their hands raised, calling out that there were two of them there and that they meant no harm. It was a real danger, because the group now felt surrounded.
Chad shouted that he was a field medic and could look at the wounded man. The strangers rushed on, ignoring the offer of help. Malek took a radio from his belt and called Arkady, begging for a pickup and promising to pay. By tuning their own radios, the crew heard Arkady’s Russian accent answering. The group vanished through the visitor dock, the hatch closed, and silence returned.
Meeting Room B
As soon as the strangers had gone, Vance announced that he would deal with the mine. He asked everyone to leave the room, took Irving’s headlamp and handed his flashlight to Simon, then squatted over the mine with Simon and Chad standing in the doorway.
He could see that it was a compact device, a contact mine rather than a proximity one, and, he judged, an EMP mine rather than a regular explosive. He was not sure what it would do to his cybernetic lungs. He decided to risk it anyway.
He cleared the scattered sheets of paper away from the device, taking a bundle of them to read later, and took the assorted tools Chad lent him. Gently running a screwdriver tip beneath the straps to check for tripwires, he began to cut the tape that clamped the mine to the suit. The mine came free. In his hands was a bulky EMP mine, and in front of him an Artefact whose value nobody could guess.
The Artefact looked like a suit of power armour, weirdly organic. Muscle-like fibres and pseudoflesh were woven through with plates and obviously mechanical parts, and two weapons were mounted on the arms. Simon, who prided himself on knowing something of military technology, did not recognise it from any army he knew. It looked as if it could hold off vacuum.
Jane stabbed it lightly with her knife and judged that it resisted punctures better than the standard battle dress she was wearing. Vance and Simon inspected the weapons, which could be retracted and extended in a disturbing organic way. One looked like a pulse rifle, the other like a flamethrower. Chad volunteered to try on the suit.
When he approached it and touched the front, it opened with a wet, squishy sound. Inside it was moist and weirdly fleshy. Chad climbed in, and the armour closed around him with a peristaltic movement. The embrace was tight, unnerving, though not completely unpleasant. His voice came out deeper. The crew was weirded out by the spectacle. Lucy panicked and became “jumpy”; everyone was very on edge.
Through experimentation, the crew learned more about the suit. It was far more flexible than a vaccsuit. The weapons could be retracted and re-extended at will, but the hands were a different matter. Chad could climb, pull and carry, but fine work was difficult. A visor of semi-transparent chitin could close over his face and let him breathe, though nobody knew where the air came from or how long it lasted. When it was lowered, lights flashed on it in a script none of them could read, and a radio could be found by tinkering, though neither the weapons nor the radio could be used reliably in a fight until he had spent time getting used to the new suit.
Lucy took the EMP mine.
Corridor between the Cafeteria and Checkpoint Bravo
They decided to try the cafeteria’s third exit, Chad leading with both of his new weapons out.
It opened onto a corridor with two ordinary doors on the left, another a little further on the right, and at the end a bulkhead door with a sign reading Checkpoint Bravo. Beside each of the first doors was a strange device that looked like a big, bulky retinal scanner. The plate on the first door said Accommodations, and the scanner had been smashed and spray-painted with “NICE TRY TINHEAD”. The second door was marked Infirmary, and its scanner was undamaged.
Irving examined the scanner on the first door and saw that it would need repair to work. The crew considered using the corpse in Reception, since she had eyes, but dismissed the thought. Lucy decided to try the scanner on the infirmary. She checked for tampering and found nothing obvious, and then she shoved her face into the machine.
A light shone into her eyes, not painfully, but with an enveloping feeling of unease, of intrusion. She was held there, entranced, while the others watched a great flash of light and then the screen blinked green. A synthesised voice said: “Welcome, Visitor. We, at Cloudbank Synthetics, appreciate your compliance.” Lucy took a point of Stress and a further hit to her Bends. The infirmary door unlocked.
The Infirmary
The infirmary was less trashed than anywhere else on the floor. Most of the shelves were empty, but in the middle of the room, on a medical bed and wearing only underwear, lay a man in his mid-thirties, breathing, attached to an IV bag. A pile of clothes lay on the floor.
The crew considered waking him. Irving began quietly searching the drawers, but a glass bottle smashed on the floor, waking the man. He sat up, took one look at the armoured Chad, and freaked out.
The man’s first words were to ask whether Chad was Ronan, and to tell him to open his visor. When he realised that Chad was not Ronan, he panicked. He had no memory of how he had arrived there. He had been with his friend Ronan in Eden, on Floor 2, at the court of the Chosen King, and they had found an Artefact hidden in the throne. Then everything had gone dark, and he remembered nothing. His name was Harper.
Harper was a Diver, and he was happy to talk. Floor 2, Eden, was the best way to reach Floor 3, the Factory, where most Divers found their loot. He had never been deeper than Floor 3, but he had heard that Floor 6, Engineering and Support, had something horrible in it: a giant spider covering the floor with steel web, and that a group who went down never came back. When Vance asked about Floor 5, Harper had never been there. If the crew were going to Floor 2, he would join them and share what he and Ronan had found. Simon checked him over and found nothing wrong beyond shock. Simon improvised a weapon for him from a length of pipe.
Luxury Accommodations
Through the door of the Accommodations, which Chad opened with his bare, suit-strengthened hands, the crew found a corridor of luxury apartments, ransacked long ago. Most doors stood open, and the rooms were stripped bare. Only one door was closed, and from another, somewhere further down, a man’s voice could be heard.
The crew approached with Chad at the front, no longer trying to sneak, and the others behind. The voice was male and sounded as if he was on the phone. A ghostly, translucent figure was visible in the room.
“The numbers are extraordinary, Helen. Best quarter in the company’s history. We are de facto a monopoly in this sector. Monarch is…”
A pause. He swirled the empty glass and looked toward the bed.
“They let me go today. Effective immediately. Full severance, full NDA, very clean.”
His grip on the glass tightened.
“Now they can remove the goal alignment protocols. Efficiency gains, they said. I said: ‘You’re removing the only leash on something you don’t fully understand.’ They said: ‘We have the warhead.’ I said: ‘You will never detonate that warhead.’ And you know what they said to me?”
He stopped. Turned. He was looking directly at the crew.
“They said: ‘You’re right.’ And then they fired me.”
After an instant, the cycle repeated from the beginning.
“The numbers are extraordinary, Helen.”
Chad made his presence known, and the ghost turned towards him. He looked at his suit and asked, “Is that security?” Chad answered yes. The ghost panicked, telling Helen, “They have come to arrest me”. His eyes went white and bright. “They will not catch me”.
A flash of light poured out of the figure and into Chad. For a while, Chad was the executive, a man who had worked for Cloudbank for more than a decade, a senior board member, until he raised concerns about the safety of the facility’s AI and was fired for it; this was the day he had called his partner to tell her. Chad lost Sanity and took Bends. On the floor, he convulsed in a seizure.
Lucy rushed in. She took off her suit jacket, held it in front of her face against the light, and tried to cover Chad’s face with it. The ghost shrieked: “More security!” When she kept coming, he pushed her, and his hands passed through her without touching, but she felt the skin burning.
Simon tried talking. “We’re with the resistance!” he shouted. The ghost pushed him away too, and Simon was burned too. Jane, still hiding behind the wall, had a better idea. She called out in what she imagined was Helen’s voice: “Honey, please, they’re trying to help you.” Aaron turned on the spot. “They want to arrest me!” Jane told him it was for his own safety. She said she would send a transport, and that he should make his way to Reception. He told her, relieved, that there was a false identity in the cupboard and to give it to them, but not to give them his name, since he was surely being tracked. He told “Helen” that they had chosen Manikhova to succeed him; he could prove that Manikhova was compromised by Monarch, and he would make it public. Then he walked out, and Chad stopped thrashing. For Lucy and Simon, though, the pain stayed.
The burns did not fade. The skin was intact, but beneath it the pain continued. Simon took a Wound. Water on the burn did nothing. Lucy, determined to understand what had been done to her, borrowed Jane’s knife and made a small cut where the ghost had touched, and found nothing strange underneath. Irving offered a stimpak, and Simon took it; luckily, he did not overdose. It healed him, but did nothing for the pain.
Meanwhile, Irving searched the room for the proof against Manikhova that Aaron had mentioned. He found a corporate ID and a small, powered hard drive. He took them both. Then Aaron came back. The loop had restarted. “Who are you? What are you doing in my room?” Irving bluffed, claiming that he had been told the room had been reassigned and he was just leaving. Aaron wavered, then saw the stolen hard drive. “Helen, they’re going through my belongings!” Again, the ghost’s eyes began to shine.
Irving was now living the executive’s last day, as Chad had. He panicked, and the result was “Nightmares”; until the condition was treated, he would struggle to rest.
While Aaron’s attention was on Irving, Lucy acted. She was carrying an EMP mine. She told everyone else to run and rolled the mine across the floor. There was a white flash and a sound like an old television shorting out, and the ghost vanished. Chad’s thrashing had already stopped, and now the pain in Lucy’s and Simon’s burns subsided too.
The crew took stock. They had the ID of a fired Cloudbank executive and a hard drive they could not read.
The closed door in the luxury apartment complex opened easily. The room was as trashed as the rest, except for the floor, which was absurdly clean, with one corner behind a fallen chair left dusty and marked with a splat of something that might have been blood. In the middle of the room, a Roomba-like cleaning droid was moving in circles, bumping into the chair and trying to clean around it. As the door opened, it announced, “Good morning and welcome. Would you like me to leave the room? Cleaning is 93% completed.”
Chad picked it up and handed it to Simon, as the robot kept politely asking them to deposit the unit and not to interfere with the cleaning crew. Simon told it that the cleaning was satisfactory and that it could stop. A small camera extended from the top, and the droid said that his features had been logged, that it would avoid disturbing him on future visits, and recommended that he should not miss CloudCon 2228, which was starting in a few days, with exciting new android models. Vance observed that CloudCon had been ten years ago, when Arkady said Cloudbank shut down. The droid proceeded down the corridor towards Checkpoint Bravo.
Checkpoint Bravo
At the end of the corridor, the bulkhead of Checkpoint Bravo unlocked itself as the cleaning droid approached. Inside was a setting similar to what the crew had already seen in Checkpoint Alpha, except that the security android sealed into its glass cage, fused to its support, was intact and operational. Its heavy gun swung on a long sleeve with a 360-degree field of fire, and nobody doubted that it could kill anyone in the room. The walls were scorched by old fights. A camera on the wall turned to follow the crew as they passed, and Jane kept her face covered. The metal detectors were still active, and beside them were lockable drawers for surrendered metal objects.
Irving, who had Aaron’s ID, locked his revolver and lockpicks in a drawer and took one step through. “Good morning, sir. Please proceed.” The door behind opened for him, and he walked on. Lucy locked her gear away and followed. The others did not want to abandon their weapons or the suit, and stayed behind.
Gift shop
Chad, meanwhile, took the unmarked door on the right-hand side of the corridor, on his own, with his guns out. It led to a gift shop behind a smashed sliding glass door, with a cheerful blue Cloudbank logo still on the frame. A skeleton in a shredded blue polo lay by the register, and someone had spray-painted RIP on the desk. The shelves were full of glossy catalogues for the complete range of androids, with smiling synthetic faces at outrageous prices. Chad took the half-full can of white spray paint. In a back storeroom closet, he found a Magna Crawl Pro 3, a compact magnetic surface-inspection drone in its original packaging. It was bulky and awkward to carry, but with his skills in industrial equipment, he felt he could make something useful of it. He also noted a mascot, a doodle book and a 2,500-piece Lego model of the Deep. Then he went back to the group.
Back to Security Checkpoint Alpha
Past Bravo, Irving and Lucy found a T-junction. Ahead was another lift, to the left an unmarked ordinary door, and to the right the Employee Rec Centre and a bulkhead door marked Security Checkpoint Alpha. The droid went into the Rec Centre to start cleaning.
The card reader at Alpha was smashed on the reception side, but this side had a manual crank. Irving turned it, and the bulkhead swung open onto Checkpoint Alpha, which the crew had already visited, with its smashed android and its picked-over machine gun. Now the whole group could come through Reception without handing over their weapons.
Over the speakers, a voice announced that a routine security check was underway on the floor. Personnel were to keep their identification visible, to remain where they were, and not to use the lifts or enter restricted areas. Harper was still with the crew at this point. Realising he did not have his stolen ID, lost with the rest of his equipment, in a panic he ran towards Reception to hide.
Footsteps rang out from the lift, regular and mechanical. Six security androids in basic Cloudbank uniform marched out, SMGs on their belts, their faces completely blank, without eyes or mouths. They were heading for Checkpoint Bravo, behind which the rest of the crew were waiting, with a single ID among them. Irving and Lucy radioed a warning, then decided to draw the patrol towards themselves to give their companions time to evade.
The androids turned. “Please identify yourself.” One passed a scanner over Irving’s ID and a green light came on. “Good morning, Aaron McGibson. I hope you have a good day.” Lucy’s fake corporate ID took longer to scan, the red light lingering, but it too turned green: “Thank you for complying with Cloudbank security protocol.” The androids turned back the way they had come. As it left, one of them paused, and in a slightly different voice, still synthetic, said: “Nice to meet you, Mr Washington.” The name the android had used was not on the card. And then the patrol was gone, marching towards Security Checkpoint Bravo and their ID-less companions.
Back to Floor 2 lift
The crew contacted Arkady to get a lift out of the facility, but the three crew members without an ID needed to evade the patrol first, given that the Acheron would take an hour to come and pick them up. Their plan was to loop round, avoid the androids, regroup, take the lift to Floor 2, and come back up when the patrol had passed.
The crew ran through the cafeteria, the corridor and Reception, easily outpacing the patrol, and went back through the now-open Checkpoint Bravo, keeping the patrol several rooms away. From there, they continued the loop and took the lift to Floor 2.
The lift was waiting. Inside was a single button for Floor 2, Exhibition Centre, and the walls were covered in graffiti. Dmitri’s “I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY” had been answered in marker with “fuck off with that shit”. Elsewhere, in a trembling hand, somebody had written, “Please stop that noise.”
They pressed the button. As the security androids appeared at the end of the corridor, the doors closed, and the lift dropped at tremendous speed. The old superstructure screamed around them, and everyone expected the cable to snap. Lucy panicked and became “nervous”; the stress was building up.
Executive lodge
Then the doors opened onto an executive lounge, like a hotel lobby, with bottles and cigarette butts left in the middle of the concourse. Apart from the lift, there were two other doors, one leading to executive toilets and one a bulkhead with an intercom and a call button beside it.
A pleasant female voice answered the intercom: “Hello visitors, my name is Sheler. Before letting you in, I need to log your arrival. Your ship name and registry, please.” Simon invented the SS Fuck Clankers. When it came to where they had launched from, they stalled, and when she asked the reason for their visit, they answered that they meant to come to CloudCon. She asked whether they had visited other Cloudbank installations and for their coordinates. Her questions grew deeper and odder than a simple log would need. Chad said that he was looking to buy a new Android. She hoped they would enjoy the convention, and asked if they had any questions of their own. Chad asked her what love was, and Sheler regretted that her programming did not provide an answer. The bulkhead opened.
The Visitors shrine
Beyond the bulkhead, the executive luxury gave way to hard metal covered in something organic: white pseudoskin, warm to the touch, over the ceiling, floor and walls of a cylindrical room. In the centre stood a three-metre statue in the same material, a man in a suit leading a naked, child-sized figure by the hand. The only blemish was a red, inflamed, pulsing gash on a wall, leaking fluid. Blue arteries showed through the white flesh, and where it had crept over the metal of the door, it seemed to be crawling. The only other way out was through a door covered by a pseudoskin curtain.
Simon wanted a sample. Lucy had no urge to cut chunks from a creature they were technically inside. Chad, looking at the red scar, decided to tear it open and see what lay behind it, and when nobody stopped him, he strode over while the others moved to the far corner. It was the first time since putting on the suit that he had done something physically intense, and the flesh tore like wet paper; he learned that while wearing it, his Strength was increased. Behind the wound was a rusty metal drainage tube with the leaking fluid dripping into it and a powerful stench. Anyone going in would have to crawl.
Back to the Executive lodge
Arkady was due in about twenty minutes. The crew agreed to leave early, in case something happened on the way back, and that the ones with IDs would go up first.
Back in the lounge, they found that the lift was no longer on their level. Someone, or something, was riding it back down.
Where We Left Off
The crew is now on Floor 2 of the Deep, standing in the executive lounge with the lift on its way back down.
- Chad is wearing the organic armour Artefact.
- Arkady is due to collect them in about twenty minutes.
- Harper ran off towards Reception on Floor 1 and has not been seen since.
Irving remain cryosick until a stimpak is used or until 8:00 on the following morning and has Nightmares and will struggle to rest until the condition is treated.
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AI-generated content present. Feel free to judge the pixels, but maybe keep the pitchforks holstered. This is a not-for-profit project, not the bloody Louvre.
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.