Remember Rule 0! Game Idea 7-28-2017 Blue Love Efrosian Scientist Gharlassa has just announced a major break through. He has an isolated lab way out in the sticks. He just publicly announced that he has conquered death. Appended is a stack of data analysts are working on. The PCs are asked to go examine this, secure Gharlassa, and investigate WTF is going on before something stupid happens. -*- Gharlassa was a high-energy physicist on Efros. He was successful and doing very interesting work. He was married to Palliope, a star ship designer. Palliope was killed when ratty junker starship decided to fail near her space station. It lost anti-matter containment and exploded like a bomb, severely damaging the space station and killing a lot of people. -*- About three days later, Gharlassa turned up missing along with millions of credits of experimental equipment from his university, several looted science funds and a good chunk of the last transporter his wife used. Law enforcement searched for him, but their hearts weren't in it. Property crime seemed less urgent in the wake of the disaster. -*- Starfleet reports indicate pirates using a weird cloaking device. It was very successful right at first and is still an ugly surprise. Worse, it seems to rely on principles Gharlassa was working on. -*- Gharlassa's videos show what he was doing. using experimental equipment he developed a way to save and stabilize his wife's transporter pattern. His next goal was to use this to save his wife. Raw material and energy in, his wife's transporter pattern should equal fresh copy of wife as she stepped into the Transporter the morning of the accident. Some of the data includes video of previous tries. Gharlassa sets up raw material and runs it through the transporter using his wife's pattern as a filter. And he gets dead bodies physically identical to his wife. Perfect in every way, except not being alive. There's insane math that quantifies atomic and molecular interactions. Once he's completely broken physics he tries again and gets the same result. Now he's not sure why anyone is alive coming out of a transporter. He transports test animals over and over again. Family and students join him for a while, but they quit, because he's obsessed far past reason. One who sticks is a young student woman named Hellassa. She is plainly experiencing a mix of star-struck admiration and infatuation. Gharlassa is oblivious. -*- On the last try, Gharlassa tries something desperate and wrong. He sets up his experimental transporter, and Hellassa steps in. Palliope walks out. Alive. She looks puzzled. Last thing she knew she was transporting to an Efrosian Space station on her way to work. -*- As the ship arrives, everyone who knows physics and transporter technology can tell. If you start with a fresh and well preserved transporter pattern of person X, and if the initial transport is Person Y, then you can make person X walk out of that transporter. Normal transporters create their patterns in a sort of virtual memory made out of energy. It's not stable. It lasts long enough for one transport and maybe a little more. Gharlassa stole equipment that experimented with making these sorts of insanely complex energy patterns more stable. He has math that talks about the brownian motion of living systems and other esoteric matters. His math comes close to proving that alive is a different energy state than being dead. His experiment bears this out. So if you try to recreate a person using a transporter filter and raw material, what you get out of it is dead, too. But if you put something alive in the front end, what you get out is alive. -*- When the PCs arrive at Gharlassa's isolate lab and beam down, they can hear crying and yelling, Palliope is heartbroken and *extremely* angry. In her mind, Gharlassa murdered Hellassa to recreate her. Gharlassa is so insane he doesn't care. "I'd have murdered a dozen of her to get you back!" Needless to say, this family discussion is not going well. Now the PCs have to decide. Did a crime occur? Which one? Is Palliope back from the dead or is it Hellassa shape changed into a copy of Paliope? And what should be done with Gharlassa's machines and work? -*- Action Bits: Gharlassa created a new flavor of cloaking device and sold it to some rough customers in order to get more money to fund his work. Bad guys with strong opinions on just who owns Gharlassa and his work show up to try and force the issue. They don't want the secrets of their cloaks getting out, they don't want a golden goose in Gharlassa getting away and they figure setting up a clinic to resurrect rich patrons could be a VERY lucrative business model.