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Samora in Starship's Mage
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Junkertown station: arguably less “one town of a million or so souls in space” than “ten or so separate space stations sharing little more than a center of gravity,” wrapped around trans-shipping docks in the unpatrolled and lawless outskirts of a fringe system far from the Mage-King of Mars, his Hands, his Navy, or his laws. It spreads across a zero-g lattice seven kilometers tall and wide, and about fifteen long, a mismatch of towers, hollowed asteroids, and spin habitats bolted to (or relocated within) a no-longer-spinning O’Neill cylinder and multi-kilometer docking towers. Whichever part you’re in, Junkertown is a place where people mostly come to do business they might be forced to avoid elsewhere. Its component parts are run by the practices and predilections of those who happen to own their part of the station or the power to insist on some measure of control anyway. Less than half of the people living there have any plans to stay. Tonight, crumpled in an alley in one of the spin sections, there’s about to be another hoping to leave.

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She's a young woman, in apparent good health except for being unconscious, crumpled on the ground. One hand is clutching a glowing shield, there's a sheathed sword at her side, and she's wearing a steel cuirass. In general, she looks about a thousand years out of date and eight to ten drinks out of normal.

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A flashlight spot flickers across her face. From someplace behind the glow, a voice says, "Hey! You can't sleep here, air and spin's not free."

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She shifts in her sleep--and then snaps the rest of the way to awake and is on her feet in an instant and taking a mental inventory. "Where am I? Who are you? Have you seen a guy in full armor and a really tall guy with a bunch of bottles?" Her accent is unfamiliar but perfectly understandable.

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Unfamiliar accents are a way of life in a transit port in the Protectorate. At least it's not French. The flashlight flicks to point at the floor, revealing a man in a leather jacket over a "Bottles? Lady, I don't think you need more of what got you here. This is Diego's ring, and that means you're not welcome if you're not paying to stay. You have a room someplace?"

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"No, I was on the Isle of Kortos a minute ago and would quite like to get back there. Can you point me at somewhere I can buy a teleport?" Not that she should take one until she's had a chance to Sending Phrenk and Marshall and confirm whether whatever trap that was got them too or they're still back where they were.

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The voice sounds slightly more sympathetic. "Jumpships dock on the towers. Never head of Kortos, but if that's your ship, they should still be up there if they haven't marooned you. If that's where you're going...maybe you can find another ship there?"

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A port with no teleport wizards? Must be a small one. Or wherever she is is short on fifth-circle wizards. She's got to have gone a long distance; they make their walls out of metal and they've never heard of Kortos.

"Can you tell me how to get to the towers from here? Also, what's the difference between a jumpship and a regular ship?"

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The voice pauses, evaluating "drunk or drugged?" for a moment then continues with studied incredulity.  "System ships tool around the planets here, jumpships leave the star system by teleport, like you said. The port towers are on the north end of the main habitat. Do you need to be walked there?"

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Star . . . system? Tool around the planets? "Hang on, am I even on the planet Golarion?"

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"Never heard of it," the man says, apparently coming down on the answer of "drugged" and not liking the odds on the question of "by choice or not?".  "This is Junkertown, in orbit of Junkrat, Snap system. Do you need medical?"

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Oh dear. "I seem to be uninjured, but my party members may not be, and a place of healing is as good a guess as any for where they'll guess to look for me. I can follow directions if you'd rather not walk me there; I don't want to take up too much more of your time."

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The security thug appears to decide not to trust the drugged woman on her odds of navigating to directions, and points up the sloping curved corridor from the side passage Samora was passed out in. "I'll walk you off the ring, at least. Hub access this way. Is your com on the local network?" The corridor's slope, what 40 yards or so is visible, is relatively gentle...but as the security guard points Samora along it, it doesn't feel like it's rising, even though the corridor just keeps curving steeper ahead as they walk.

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"I do not have a com or know what that is. Also I think I might have been injured after all, I'm perceiving the hallway as sloping up in front of me but it doesn't feel like I'm walking uphill." She looks back over her shoulder. "It also looks like it's sloping up behind me." Blasted Evil ghost sorcerers and their weird kinds of damage she's never heard of.

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The security thug stops talking to process that, even while leading her briskly past what look, despite mostly metal construction and illegible signage like gambling parlors, bars, small food stands, and side corridors lined with doors. "...Landrats. Where the hell is Golarion and what kind of strange religious cult does it have, lady? It's a spin hab, the floor does that. It's a whole circle, and it spins for that luxurious fake gravity you're feeling."

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She's not sure why the floor spinning would produce that sensation but if it's not some kind of dexterity damage or something it's not urgent. "Fascinating. And I'm not a cultist, I'm Iomedaean," she says in a reassuring tone. "Though I suppose you might not have heard of the ascended gods here. She's Lawful Good." 

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"....Uh huh," the guard says. "I'm sure you're good or fine or whatever." Another couple minutes, and the passage opens up double-wide, to a couple yards across, and there starts being more traffic of people walking other directions, even given the low level of the overhead lights, and then they come out to a multistory lobby, with four floors of balconies with stairs up and down. They're on the second floor up from the bottom. He leads her to a set of doors set into a wall, and pushes a button that lights up with an arrow pointing up. After a moment, the doors open to a smaller room, a few yards square. He points inside.

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Samora is giving this planet an embarrassing impression of Iomedaeans but that's not likely to be important unless she's stuck here for longer than it takes to prep spells tomorrow, Sending her party, meet back up if they're all here, and Plane Shift out.

That room is either a jail cell or a platform that goes up and down and the man's body language and the arrow and the way the floor isn't quite connected to itself makes her guess it's the latter. In she goes.

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Inside another button press closes the doors, and Samora's guess is proven right as there's a feeling of movement for a moment, and the glowing number "2" on the wall changes to "3", "then "4", "5"...."6" and "7" flash past, and then it changes to blank. The guard suddenly jerks with a thought. "Uh, you never been in a spin hab, have you ever been in zero-g?" He doesn't wait for an answer, and points at one of the many rails lining the walls. "Grab on, and try not to lose your lunch, OK?" Beneath Samora's feet, the feeling has gone from moving to...lighter and lighter, like she's about to float away.

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Oh, that's very weird. Less nausea-inducing than monsters exploding their innards at her, though, and anyway she didn't have a lunch to lose. "Thank you for the warning."

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The floating sensation fades, until it feels like what Samora has heard featherfall sometimes does. The slightest push off the floor or pull on the handrail is enough to start her drifting off the floor entirely, but it's also warning to instead press on the rail and brace her feet on the floor just in time. The display flicks to "H" and then the floor actively drops away from her for a moment, which her bracing avoids, then everything settles into floating. Another moment, and the doors open with a soft chime and a voice saying, "Hub". The guard gestures out into another lobby, this one lit brighter by lights and the glow coming in from a padded circular entryway. Though it's yards across, more metal grab-handles are everywhere, freestanding rails in front of the lifts and a small kiosk near the entrance, plus ones located all around the padded entrance area. "You want to try pushing off for one of those rails, or do you want me to drag you along with me? I'd prefer not to leave you floating in the middle of the lobby."

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"I think I can manage." She goes for it, none too gracefully but with plenty of leg strength to make up for it, and lands with an amateurish bump on the indicated rail.

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The guard lands smoothly on one of the rails nearer her, and points for one of the rails recessed into the padded entryway. "Over there, then hand over hand to the edge. I'll point you to the docks medstation."

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She boings thataway. "Thank you for your help! So I know for next time, is there more to operating the box that goes up and down than pressing the button for the place you want?"

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The guard gives her a look as they crawl towards the edge. Clearly, he's reevaluating his definition of 'the furthest place in the galaxy from the Protectorate's laws as marked by educational requirements'. "Public lifts, no...secure lifts can require an access card of a verification key by com." And then they reach the edge, and....the world before her is steel and lighting and open to the sky. The cavern it opens to is a cylinder that must be a miles across, and several times that long. It must be in "zero-gravity" like this hub, though, judging from the people, market stalls, and...is it a cart when its floating around? It's lit by massive glowing bars across the sky, lighting up the interior like daylight. Much of the interior of the cylinder is taken up by various castle-sized constructions of metal and...could those be entirely glass? Some are blocky, some are drums of various sizes, some open and visibly spinning, others closed off. Everywhere, metal and glass and fabrics, and almost nowhere wood. And also everywhere....crowds of people. Even as they stand at the edge, a few people are leaving or arriving or leaving the hub they're holding onto, and there must be hundreds, if not thousands going about their business in the floating marketplaces between the buildings.

The guard points at the near end of the cylinder, where the blocky constructions almost close in entirely. "Docks are that way. Central medical's down there too, look for the red cross or read the signs. It's a couple [half mile or so]s."

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Wow! Samora has been to Absalom multiple times but she's going to gawk like a tourist anyway, because this place is almost as big and way weirder. Flying buildings made of glass! 

She can't read this language but she can look for the red cross and if she gets to the docks she's presumably gone too far. "Alright. Goodbye and thanks again!"

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