> On Dec 28, 2015, at 1:41 AM, Jeff Zeitlin <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ***************
> The manager, such as he is, of the local starport (nominally class C,
> but more like a class D in reality) calls you, the captain of a free
> trader landed here, to what passes as his office, near the entrance to
> the extrality zone. When you get there, he gestures at a person
> sitting bound and blindfolded in a chair, somewhat the worse for wear,
> with an odd-looking hat-and-mask covering his head and face, and
> explains...
>
> "I found him like this at the gate, with just a note in a local
> dialect that I can barely puzzle out if I'm lucky. The note seems to
> say that he can't stay on the planet any more - but he's clearly a
> native, so I may have misunderstood something. The note refers to him
> as "Jabru", but it's not clear whether that's his name, or some sort
> of descriptor. When I called the mayor of the nearest town to see if
> he could tell me anything more, he took one look at my 'guest' and
> literally spat the word "Jabru", said if he were seen anywhere off the
> port, he'd be killed, and walked away. He won't take my calls now; his
> assistant says he won't talk to me until "Jabru" - or maybe "the
> Jabru" - is gone."
> *****************

The PC’s, out of compassion, or hoped-for renumeration, take the poor soul aboard.

At the very least, the Captain reasons, he can earn his way with some labor-intensive, easily trained tasks. (the chief engineer has been complaining about flaky electronics connections, which means spending hours in dusty wiring boxes, and access panels checking and cleaning (and replacing) old, brittle Molex connections. Boring, but a trained monkey could do it, like washing dishes for your restaurant meal, if washing dishes lead to bashing your knuckles on sharp box edges over and over again.)

The first hitch happens almost immediately. When the 'Jabru' is delivered to the ship, the steward starts to untie him.

Immediately the dock crew starts yelling and drops their tools, including the 10M containers they were loading. "NO ! No! JABRU!!!!" is about all the crew can make out in the panic.

Only a hasty application of a sizable bribe and a promise that the Jabru will remain visible, outside, next to the airlock, hooded and tied to the chair until the ship is sealed for takeoff will the locals resume loading the ship.

The PC's will likely make a note to not ever come back to this backwards, superstitious port again.

“Not even the expensive beer was good!” says the gunner.

Upon launch to orbit, the poor 'Jabru' is finally untied, revealing a slight young woman, dressed in rough, typically male local clothes (accounting for the port manager's confusion). She's been tied up for quite some time and is dehydrated, hungry and has numerous bruises, old and new, superficial cuts and burns, cracked ribs, etc. Not seriously injured, but pretty clearly tortured.

The very first problem the crew has is that she doesn't speak anything but a local dialect that is distantly related to common languages in the sector.

Any crew member with multiple language facility will be able to make themselves understood (think someone from the Phillipines who speaks Filipino Spanish communicating with someone from Angola, who speaks Angolan Portugese*, or someone from modern-day England speaking to someone who only knows Old English). Otherwise a fair amount of time will be spent establishing communications.

The second striking thing that the crew notices is that the ‘white' of her eyes are deep purple. After a while (and suitable language rolls ) she's able to explain that this is what is the 'Mark of the Jabru’.  It is a demon/monster/boogeyman from her culture; and it most often manifests in youg people 18-25 years old. They're considered dangerous and immediately killed or banished.

In the past they were killed in a ritual fashion, but some centuries ago, after first contact from the Imperium, offworld banishment became the norm, at least for those wealthy enough to afford it.

She turns out to be quite good at the tasks given to her, and rapidly grows to be a well-liked shipboard member.

It *might* occur to some PC's that they came to like her *awfully* quickly....

1) "It's only business”:

She was the co-heir to a sizable on-world business/criminal empire. Her brother wanted everything for himself, and contracted with an off-world cosmetic surgeon for a vial of eye dye, a temporary eye-coloring agent used in some subcultures as cosmetic enhancement. Once her eyes turned purple, he was able to get her tortured and banished as a ‘Jabru’ in order to claim the family business entirely as his own.

At the GM's discretion, she may have off-world contacts who will enable her to mount a mission of revenge...the PC's could profit handsomely if she's successful in what ends up as a gangland-style war that they participate in.

2) "Burn her, she's a witch!”:

Her eye color is the result of a long-conserved mutation that made the possessor affected by infrequent fungal blooms in the local ecosystem. The bloom causes their eyes to become deep purple: in the past "Jabru" or 'purple eyes' lead to madness, usually violent. As a measure of communal protection, they started killing anyone subject to the mutation when it manifested. Although the gene that lead to the madness was long ago eliminated from the population, the related gene for 'purple eyes' was not.

The young woman is simply an unfortunate susceptible to the 'purple eyes' fungus; she's otherwise an intelligent, talented person who will make a fine engineer if given the appropriate training, and will gladly join the crew for just room and board if offered a chance, almost like a ship’s mascot.

3) "The Incredible Hulk”:

 As above, but "Jabru" are still subject to fits of incoherent rage. She might seriously harm or even kill someone while in this rage state; she'll come out of it with no memory of what happened.

She seriously maimed her cousin in such an incident. As she was an heir to an sizeable fortune, her family was able to have her banished instead of executed outright. With suitable treatment she may be able to supress the madness; she needs to never become angry. Her family will pay the crew a sizable amount to get her off-world to a treatment facility.

 About 4 days into Jump someone sets her off and she attacks maniacally with anything to hand.

4) “Possession”:

 "Jabru" are the result of parisitazation of a rare invertebrate on her planet. Like other parasites http://io9.gizmodo.com/12-real-parasites-that-control-the-lives-of-their-hosts-461313366 , these parasites control their victim's central nervous systems.  In this case, the parasite will cause the victim to be friendly, even (depending on the PG-to-X-rated ness of the game) wantonly sexual, in order to infect others with the parasite, which is accomplished by a long, thin, bony structure used to inject a fetal parasite into the victim.

The crew may notice the young woman’s personality changing from the time they take her aboard, from a frightened young girl to a wanton seductress. As other crew are infected, the survivors will notice others with eyes that are turning purple; a sign of the impending maturity of the parasite.

5) “Skinwalker”:

 "Jabru" are a locally conserved genetic strain of psions (think a genetic trait linked to greater survival like sickle-cell anemia: people with only one allele are more resistant to anemia, poor kids who get both genes from their parents get the disease; in this case they are psionic, the purple eye color is just something that tagged along for the ride, genetically)

Jabru are empaths whose ability is to appear to a person as someone else they know, often an idealized or desired version of that person. If you have a crush on someone a Jabru will appear as that version of the person, reciprocating your affection.

When you meet the real one, as they say, 'hijinx ensue’.

The GM can take this to light-hearted mistaken-identity comedy or take it as dark as Solaris: "Your character meets your dead wife, real and in the flesh…she runs up and embraces you.”

(Note: the definitive 1972 version, which remains, to me at least, one of the most haunting movies I’ve ever seen)

If the Jabru has control over this and malevolent purpose this can go more towards version 5 below....

6) "American Horror Story: Starship”

"Jabru" are highly capable sociopathic psions with a number of talents: they can make you think they're other people, they can 'hear' others thoughts and they have limited telekinetic powers; they can cause sensors to report the wrong conditions, thus suppress or create electronic warnings and make computer systems behave erratically.  Keeping them hooded and tied up limits their power.

After freeing the Jabru, who appears to be the innocent young woman described above, the PC's start having odd failures aboard ship during jump. When confronted the Jabru can appear to be other PC's leading them to suspect each other in the failures.

The GM should reduce the ship to inconsistent emergency lights, flashing beacons, alert sirens, etc. Air systems fail (or appear to), producing copious clouds of water vapor; reactors report they're going critical, all sorts of phantom errors happen. You push the elevator button for engineering, you land on cargo deck 3. Etc.

This would play out better on a larger ship, perhaps the PC's are passengers or crew on a liner.

An excellent excuse to run a horror-style adventure.

*True story: back in the 70’s when I was a callow youth working my way through college (back when you COULD ‘work your way through college’ on a minimum-wage job), I worked in the cafeteria in a bussing station, ended up as a shift supervisor (No increase in pay, more responsibility, mainly I was the one who told people which of the three nearly indistinguishable cafeteria stations they worked in, and had to reach into the big disposals when an errant fork got jammed in there. Reaching through, mind you, about 12" of food waste, ice and mixed sodas :-/

Anyhoo, since this was a campus job it was one of the few that foreigners on student visas could take without violating their visa terms, so my shifts were almost always about 50% poor kids from other countries.

Why poor? Well they had to work for about $2.30 an hour scraping dirty plates...you didn't do this for fun.

One semester I had a kid from Brazil and one from Angola on the same shift. Both *technically* spoke Portugese. A number of times I was called in to translate between one kid's broken english to the other's broken english because they couldn't understand their mutual language.

--
Bruce Johnson

"Wherever you go, there you are." B. Banzai, PhD