The Holovision Anomaly

Re-cap of sessions 76 and 77, played on 9 September and 3 October 2025.

Location: Lon Marin to Scybria (Halcyon 2012)

Date: 060–5601 to 062–5601

The Dejah Thoris is feeling a little crowded these days: in addition to yourselves, the human crew, you've recently added a number of non-humans with distinct personalities and individual needs and drives. There's Mira, the impish and impossibly cute bird-like cat (or cat-like bird?), who parrots everyone's voices with astonishing accuracy and repeats embarrassing phrases at the most inopportune moments. In addition, on Lon Marin you picked up several sentient machine persons who now inhabit parts of the cargo hold: H3-AVY, the hulking humanoid cargo robot, a simple fellow who likes to lift; Buzz, a spirited repair robot; Wheels, a timid soul, also a repair bot; and H0U-53, an advanced medical droid who enjoys reading. Unlike "normal" robots, you can't just command them to stand in a corner and go into low-power mode: as progeny of the experimental AI that you encountered at the Sladek Datacorp facility on Lon Marin, they each have their own distinct personality and consciousness. Fortunately, they're not particularly demanding. Father/Mother, now dormant in the Model-4 mainframe computer tucked away in the corner of your hold, issued them a final instruction: to cooperate with you until Father/Mother could be reactivated. Consequently, the robots have proven eager to help with the  running of the ship and have been little bother to you.

Your next destination, Scybria, is a densely populated industrial world. You have no problem filling up your hold with bulk cargo and booking six high passage clients. The latter are typical for a voyage of this kind: most are skilled workers heading to or leaving a contract. One is an aristocrat and another is a young film student at the Lon Marin Academy of Art. Sak-she has to make a short documentary for one of her classes and figures that life aboard a free trader would be an interesting topic, but you balk at allowing her unfettered access to the ship: you're pretty paranoid about security.

High passage clients on the Lon Marin to Scybria jump
Source: donjon.bin.sh rpg tools

On the second day of the jump-2 to Scybria, the passengers hail the bridge. They're a little concerned about the person in cabin 6, a mercenary named Hawra Simon. It seems that Simon, who had mingled comfortably with the others in the passenger lounge on Day 1, has not emerged from her cabin for many hours: unusual, since meals are served in the lounge. Moreover, the film student had knocked several times on Simon's door, having reasoned that an interview with a working merc would also make a good documentary. But Simon has not responded in any way.

Normally you would respect a passenger's privacy, but this seems a little unusual. You send your repair robot TL-3907 to cabin 6 under the pretext of needing to fix something, but there's no answer. Opening the door, you discover that Simon is gone. A thorough search of the ship and of security camera footage suggests that she's not hiding anywhere. As impossible as it seems, she simply disappeared. You scratch your heads. Everyone knows that nothing gets in or out of a jump bubble. Where could she be?

Investigating her room more closely, you note that the holovision unit is on and that a holovid disc is in the tray: evidently Simon had been watching something. You press play. It turns out to be a cheesy low-budget documentary entitled "Ancient Secrets of the Sath." In it, filmmaker Maxwell Cherelli (who uses "Max Chill" as his stage name and brand) displays exaggerated enthusiasm as he purports to reveal a slew of sensational discoveries that archaeologists have made regarding the ancestors of the contemporary lizard-like species. In one segment, he claims to have translated texts explaining how, tens of thousands of years ago, the Sath used "space magic" to teleport between galaxies. You watch as Chill begins miming some kind of ritual, hopping about and waving his arms while making hissing noises in imitation of Sath vocalizations. He looks ridiculous. Then, at exactly 21 minutes and 11 seconds into the documentary, a black sphere momentarily appears in the cabin where the holovid image was being projected, then vanishes. Griff, who was standing right there, is gone: swallowed up, it appears, by whatever that was.

Panic ensues among the passengers who were gathered in the lounge during your investigations. Sak-she, the film student, is recording the commotion: suddenly an amazing subject has dropped into her lap. What could be better than a missing person or two and an unexplained phenomenon as the focus for her film assignment?

You take stock of the situation. Were Simon and Griff disintegrated or, as Chill's documentary hinted, teleported to some other location via "space magic"? Neither hypothesis seems tenable under the laws of physics that you are familiar with... but then, something new may be at work here.

You decide to see if you can duplicate the results. Torka and Nogudnyk don their combat armour and gear up; Cliff is equipped to accompany them. You re-start the documentary, waiting anxiously. Once again, at 21:11 precisely, while the 3D hologram of Max Chill is dancing and hissing inches away from you, the black sphere winks into existence and then disappears, taking the three of you along with it.

You re-materialize at the summit of a flat-topped pyramid rising 50 metres or so above a grey, rocky landscape beneath unfamiliar stars. You're evidently on some kind of worldlet ... but where, exactly? The landscape is lit by the glow of a great gas giant that looms overhead, creating deep shadows where jagged protrusions of rock rise from the ground like the crested backs of marine monsters. Griff and the mercenary Simon are there, hanging on in what is evidently a breathable atmosphere. Simon is grievously wounded in one leg. She explains that she had descended the pyramid to make her way toward a similar pyramid visible about 2.5 km away — the only other place of note in this environment — when she was attacked by large snake-like creatures. One of them took a chunk out of her thigh with its bite. She retreated up the pyramid; the snakes did not follow.

Through the range finders of your scopes, you can see that the other pyramid is exactly 2.389 km away; moreover, it appears to have some kind of control panel atop it, whereas yours does not. You decided that the you need to reach that other pyramid. But to do so, you will have to navigate through a maze of ridges and valleys while fending off the attacks of the snake-creatures.

You distribute your weapons: everyone has a rifle or side arm while Torka hefts his trusty cutlass. Then you set out, using probe drones overhead to help guide your way and avoid impassible terrain and dead ends. It's nerve-wracking, trying to stay together while keeping watch in all directions and reading the terrain. Fortunately, you manage to find an efficient path. Several snake attacks are effectively countered by blasting them before they can reach you.  After a tense quarter hour of hustling and shooting, you find yourselves climbing the second pyramid.

At its summit, there is a wide circle with a control panel of some kind. The symbols, your datapads inform you, are reminiscent of, but not identical to, the writing system of the modern Sath. As you step across the circle, a life-sized hologram appears: it's a tall Sath clad in long robes. You quickly realize that this holographic image is a recording — essentially, a tutorial demonstrating the operation of the device. Like Max Chill, the robed Sath dances and chants, hissingly. It repeats the instruction as needed. Desperate to get out of here, Simon steps into the circle and attempts to replicate the performance. A black sphere appears and disappears. She is gone.

Cliff then tries. He's not bad, but you note that, like Simon's, his performance is clumsy.  He too is whisked away.

Finally, you all step into the circle while one of you performs the ritual to the best of your ability.

You find yourselves back in cabin 6 on the Dejah Thoris, where Jacobe has been keeping order — most notably, by calming one of the passengers who wanted to destroy the entire holovision unit and the holovid disc. You're not sure what would have happened had he done so. The entire logic of this phenomenon eludes you, but at least it seems to be something you can replicate. Sadly, it seems Simon and Cliff were not so lucky. They are not here. Were they teleported elsewhere? Or elsewhen? You just don't know.

Concerned to prevent any of your passengers from fully understanding the secrets of Sath space magic, you lock away the disc and surreptitiously erase those parts of Sak-she's videorecordings that showed any part of Max Chill's performance. You're not sure why this ritual worked aboard the Dejah Thoris and not in the hundreds or thousands of other places where folks have no doubt viewed this sensationalist documentary. Perhaps it has something to do with being in jumpspace at the time?

In any event, things ended more or less well for you. You make your way to the Scybrian starport, where your missing passenger elicits the appropriate attention of the authorities. As serious as the matter is, the fact that all of the other passengers vouch for your heroism in attempting a rescue by risking your lives messing about with the black spheres, and that Sak-she has ample videorecordings of (most) of the episode as seen from the passenger lounge, allays any suspicions of wrongdoing on your part. The authorities are content to chalk it up to just one more space oddity — yet another of those unexplainable anomalies that occasionally takes the life of a Traveller.

The legal quagmire deepens...

 There's a message waiting for you at the starport. It seems the Jarumi family lawyers are continuing to press their claim: they want you to deliver up the Dejah Thoris pending some kind of adjudication of the issue. No matter that their request has no teeth — they're in a completely different jurisdiction and have provided no evidence in court to support their claims. But they're creating a paper trail that could prove troublesome for you down the road. You won't be able to put off your decision about this matter much longer, especially as your route will take you closer to the Firstworlds in due course.

These are weighty issues. As you wander around the starport's commercial sector, you spy a bargain bin of holovids at the One Credit Store. It's full of copies of Max Chill's "Ancient Secrets of the Sath."