Dicks in Space

An Elvish delegation arrived at Veridia Three bearing terrible news: 287 infected, 43 dead from a mysterious neural phage. Sentinel Aelindra and Counselor Starweaver were among the infected. During the emergency council meeting, Steven experienced violent visions: ancestral memories of a vast civilization being torn apart.

The crew traced the phage to Research Outpost Theta-7, where they confronted Dr. Keras Vynn, an elderly bioweapons scientist dying from his own early prototype. Vynn revealed the full scope of Project Echo: a multi-species genocide program commissioned by the Carlito shapeshifter faction. The Thri-kreen genocide 80 years ago was merely the prototype, a proof-of-concept for species-targeted bioweapons. Vynn had since developed variants targeting elves, humans, dwarves, orcs, and others.

In his final act, the dying Vynn released multiple phages across Imperial space, infecting millions, before the station began its self-destruct sequence. The crew escaped with the Project Echo database, K'tharax coordinates, and the horrifying understanding that the Scattering, the event that nearly destroyed Steven's people 80 years ago, was not a natural catastrophe but a deliberate genocide.

With the phage spreading exponentially (Aelindra dead by Day 8, half-elf researcher Ezzra infected and deteriorating, Starweaver symptomatic), the crew raced to K'tharax, an ancient Thri-kreen colony ship. There they found 2,000 colonists trapped in 72-hour temporal loops for 68 years since the Scattering. The ship's AI, MYRMIDON, a merged collective consciousness of Thri-kreen minds, offered impossible choices about the colonists' fate.

Steven gained Dimensional Sight as he accessed fragmented memories from the collective, learning that the complete cure formula was preserved in a Memory Vault on Trellis, Hugh's homeworld. The crew collected critical memory fragments, but the cure data was incomplete without the vault.

As Ezzra's condition worsened (she continued working despite her own infection, using herself as a test subject with clinical detachment), the crew learned that Hugh's homeworld held not just the cure but painful truths about his family's complicity in the Imperium's atrocities. Gertie sent a message confirming what she'd discovered: Trellis was built on Thri-kreen ruins, and the Memory Vault lay 203 kilometers south of Trellis City.

On Trellis, the crew was approached in a bar by an odd cadre of Dicks, Ricks, and other strangely named men. A Kobold named Rust gave them a lead on the Records Office, where they discovered that Governor Ashford had signed execution orders for Gertie's parents (Engineers Thorne), who had stumbled upon the Memory Vault six months prior. Worse, Hugh's mother had been killed during phage testing on Trellis 15 years ago. The false prosperity of Hugh's homeworld concealed decades of Imperium experimentation.

Rust led the crew to what he claimed was a shortcut, but it was a trap set by Arty and Deladrin. The crew killed both attackers, only to watch them dissolve into goop, revealing that every encounter with the pair had been shapeshifter impostors. The real Arty and Deladrin, their identities stolen by the Plasmoid Collective, later surfaced alive.

Rust took the crew by rickshaw to the Memory Vault, an ancient hexagonal crystal structure containing billions of Thri-kreen memories. Steven and Dimitri together absorbed the memories, destroying the vault in the process but obtaining the complete cure formula.

Confronting Governor Ashford, he admitted to signing the execution orders for Gertie's parents but denied knowledge of Hugh's mother's death. As The Plasmoid Collective began assaulting Trellis, Ashford helped The Dicks escape the planet. Gertie executed Ashford as they left.

A massive fleet battle erupted in Trellis orbit: The Plasmoid Collective against The Dicks, aided by the Barbarus clan and the resistance fleet. Unexpectedly, the heavily damaged remnants of the Third Fleet arrived, already battered from covert plasmoid attacks on the revived Fleetstravaganza. Together they defeated Carlito. Ray, the pilot who had volunteered since the earliest days, gave his life in the battle, the only casualty on The Dicks' side.

High Commissar Drel Voren emerged, having faked his assassination years prior using a shapeshifter body double, and requested the cure for millions of infected Imperium citizens.

In the aftermath, numerous shapeshifters on Veridia sacrificed parts of themselves for the initial cure synthesis. The Imperium hunted the near-extinct Plasmoid Collective and used their biomatter for mass distribution. But the phage had destroyed the biometrically-linked Flurnum currency, severing biometric links even in asymptomatic carriers, with gold reserves woefully insufficient. Combined with the catastrophic military losses from the plasmoid fleet attacks, the Imperium fractured. The main government pulled back to New Thespera; the Elven Coalition seized the name and what remained. Voren's Concord stabilized the Pact Worlds region with the Third Fleet. The economic devastation created the vacuum that corporations, especially EJ Corp, rushed to fill.