Magpie Empire

It really shouldn't come as any surprise to me that players will always do stuff that they aren't really supposed to.

In tonight's game, somehow our intrepid crew managed to jump ahead to an event that I had not intended to happen for several sessions yet. This isn't necessarily a bad thing of course but it will doubtless cause some interesting ripples along the line. The event that started the whole debacle off was the result of an extremely lucky dice roll on behalf of the captain, who had set the ship's sensors to detect changes in heat signatures in a fairly localised area and, as a result of the incredibly lucky roll, managed to spot an anomalous heat reading on the surface of the planet. Of course the crew went after this like a dog after a bone and managed to find out that "something" had emerged from the sea onto a beach and then "walked" off inland. Still no terrible worry for me, since I knew that though they may have been able to track the thing to a nearby city, there was no way they could find it unless it actually wanted to be found. How wrong I was. Firstly they managed to find the damn thing's general location, and then they pulled something so completely unexpected out of the hat that I had no choice but to fold and reveal exactly where it was.

So, first alien contact made then.

There then followed a significant amount of language exchange (damn you phonics!), by the end of which, the parties involved are able to communicate fairly fluently with each other.

For long-term readers, they've bumped into TitianGyreOnJonquil.

I look forward to next week's session with great interest.

Some Good, Some Bad

So yesterday I received a replacement Tungsten E2 from Amazon¹ and my new Nokia 6630², this occasione dboth great joy and a flurry of activity as both had to be charged and then synchronised with the old hardware before porting over. This led to an extraordinarily rushed afternoon, which resulted in me being late to the game ... though that didn't turn out to be any bad thing as Candia (sans LJ) was sat in my seat doing a job application, so there was a bit of a delay to starting anyway.

When I returned home, I doscovered to my utter horror that, while I had programmed it, I had failed to set the video recorder to "timer" ... thus I recorded neither Battlestar Galactica nor Lost.

I was gutted.

On the bright side, I can grab the BSG repeat at the weekend and I'm sure I could convince the Fox to bung the missing episode of Lost onto a disk for me ... so by no means the disaster it could have been.

¹ who were magnificent about the whole returns thing, I won't be a penny out of pocket, but who made the actual process of finding out how to return an item so convoluted that it took the Fox's incredible money-saving skillz to finally crack.
² another example of the Fox finding something for free ... I tell you the man has a gift.