> On Dec 29, 2017, at 10:14 PM, Bruce Johnson <xxxxxx@PHARMACY.ARIZONA.EDU> wrote:
>
> Of course it wasn’t that simple…he also came back from a POW camp to find his wife had been killed, completely randomly (traffic accident) just before he came home from the “last mission” he’d promised her.

This is the earliest bit of Ricky’s  PBEM stuff I can find right now, this is a conversation with a paymaster on the scout base where Ricky was trying to collect his pension check…

THIS is how a Traveller game is run :-) This one ran for several years.

"I pick up my check, say "Hi" to the marines and try to leave.

Doug puts his big, beefy hand down on that check and leans over toward you saying
quietly, "O'Brien *convince* me not to notice this 'detain for medical reasons'
on my screen."

He nods you back toward the chair, "If you have a meeting tonight, and you want
to make it. You'll talk to me now."

If you try to leave the Marines will 'detain' you...you can get creative and
*maybe* make it outside, but you don't think you could make it off the base. "

If you sit back down, Doug will ask you...

"So, Ricky tell me *all* about what you're up to these days."

Ricardo:

"All right, if you and .." I point a thumb at the MP's,"...these apes insist, I
suppose I could get a quick version in."

I drag the chair over and flop into it.

"The short version starts yesterday evening...I was sitting in my flophouse room,
broke...the game was rigged, you know me Doug, I'm a good card player, and
_quietly_ drowning my sorrows with a cheap bottle. Someone knocks on my door;
it's a messenger with a letter for me, I have to sign for it.

"It's a letter from Hobbes Medina and Sung...the most expensive damn law firm in
the subsector. Drunk as I was, I was still deeply suspicious...what the hell
would they want with a nobody like me?

"I open it up, and believe me this doesn't help at all, all it says is that I'm
invited to a meeting at ten the next morning on a matter that could be beneficial
to me. How the hell they found me I don't know..I haven't exactly been
advertising my presence here. Hell I haven't even gotten busted once!

"So this morning I decide to go. I shower, shave, and funny thing, I poured my
usual wake-me-up and started to drink it...tasted like crap. The only time it
does that was the day we'd go on mission, remember?

"I wandered over to the law offices, and get ushered into a room to wait. Theres
a dozen or so other people, eventually show up, and we're all mystified. There's
none of us know each other, except for two distant cousins, but a lot of us have
similar names. All any of us know is that we all got identical letters inviting
us to this meeting.

"After a few more minutes, old man Sung himself walks in, senior partner. says to
us, welcome, and he aplologized for the mystery, but all will soon be revealed.
He pops in a playback chip and we start watching the recorded last will and
testament of one Akus Moby.

"This guy was ancient, both realtime and and calendar...he was on one of the
first sub-light ships out of here, to Gorath, and on a couple others so he'd
spent _decades_ in cold sleep. Turns out that when he'd gone off on his first
mission, his wife had divorced him, married some other guy, but she was pregnant
with Moby's daughter at the time.

"Turns out that all of us in that room were descended from that daughter.

"He was a hellraiser cursed with wanderlust, and never really did settle down,
though he made a pile of money along the way."

Ricardo grins at the look in Doug's eye. "Hell no there's none of it left! He was
like me, or rather I'm like him...spend it like water when I have it."

"What he DID do was keep track of his various hellion grandchildren, and after he
died, he gave his lawyers orders to round up the troublemakers, and give them a
really strange choice, and this is where it gets weird, Douggie.

"We'd each inherited a share of his ship, the 'Mae Lee', but only on the
condition that we lived on her, ran her, and kept her going as a commercial
enterprise for seven years. After that we could do whatever we wanted with her.
If we didn't like this, we could collect 5000 credits for our troubles and walk
away.

"I think I beat everyone else to the lawyers desk by a minute.

Ricardo grins even wider, and leans back. "So congratulate me, Doug, I'm one
seventh owner of a 1000 ton exploratory trader, the 'Mae Lee'. She's berthed at
Mark, up in the Quental Main, and the lawyers have passage booked for us already
and we ship out in four days.

"So you see, you HAVE to let me go to that meeting; they're going to elect a
Captain tonight, and if I'm not there to spread some common sense, we'll end up
with a beanpole archaeologist, or a bad actor running it. Worse, they could pick
one of the _squids_ to run her.

OOC> I assume, like lawyers the galaxy over, that I was duly given copies of the
papers I signed, at 1 cr per copy charged to the client.

"You don't believe me, look here, the official papers. " I toss them over to him.

"And besides, tell that damn shrink who put in the medical detain order that I
_still_ don't want to sleep with my mother, I don't hear voices in my head, and I
don't want to kill cowardly sniveling little noble naval lieutenants anymore.

"It gonna be fun, Douggie, like old times shipping out to the boonies, but this
time I get to keep going, make some money, too.

"Hell, why don't you take your twenty years and join us? We're gonna need more
than seven people to run this thing...care to sign on for a seven year mission?"

"Now, if you're sure I'm not going to get you in trouble for letting me off on
that detain order, I'll take my check, and see if I still have some computer
priveleges around here, there's a couple of my new partners I'd like to check out
some more and I think I got all I can out of the Maston U library.

"Then I have a seven o'clock dinner reservation at the TAS.

Ricardo stands up, tries to get his check and leave.

If I'm successful, and I can use the Base library computers without hassle, I
look up the following:

The "Foundation for Former Naval Personnel"; are they registered on Argent as a
non-profit; in fact do they exist at all? it sounds like a scam.

What more can I get on Mira?

Then I cash my check on base, go to the flophouse, settle my bill, collect my
stuff, and add it to the gun and knife in the locker.

Then I head to the meeting at the TAS.”

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs