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Epilogue: Mayhem on the Moonbase
“Your vision clears and you see that you are in a futuristic lounge dominated by a panoramic window. You are momentarily disoriented as a huge red planet slides across the window, followed by a speedier bright light. The structure you are in is rotating like a giant Ferris wheel, and you are slightly nauseated by the very low gravity.”
🔴 The Red Planet's Shadow
The crushing weight of the Theran ash cloud vanishes instantly. You materialize into a world of sterile steel and slow, rotating momentum. Out the panoramic viewport, the colossal, rust-colored mass of Mars fills your vision, flanked by the swift, bright streak of its sister moon, Phobos. Area M23 is a highly classified ORUS facility tucked away on this lumpy chunk of space rock. Because the station loops like an enormous, 100-yard-wide Ferris wheel, you are left adjusting to a disorienting, feather-light 0.1 G gravity environment.
Through an open airlock at the end of the lounge, tactical yells shatter the hum of the life support systems. A half-dozen ORUS Mars Marines clad in heavy ballistic armor are desperately taking cover. They are unleashing barrages from non-lethal splat rifles—designed to protect the station's delicate hull from decompression—while screaming commands into the adjacent chamber: “Game over!” “Go to hell!” “Stand down!”
Before leaping through the airlock into active combat, the squad has an immediate opportunity to scour the futuristic lounge area for hardware.
Success Rewards (No Check Required for Retrieval):
- Futuristic First Aid Kit: A single-use medical pack that automatically removes a -1 injury penalty from one agent's trait or attribute.
- The Heavy Weapons Rack: Contains a raw, vintage sawed-off double-barreled shotgun, an industrial-grade chainsaw, and the devastating BSG9000 "Big Splat Gun" capable of launching balloon-sized containment gel-packs.
🐙 Hell on Mars
Stepping through the airlock, you enter a massive, 20-foot-high control hub lined with flickering server banks and heavy structural beams. Crouched behind the consoles are the battered remnants of the defense squad. Standing in the center of the destruction is a towering, 12-foot-tall octopoid-faced humanoid wearing a tailored overcoat, a striped wool shawl, and an absurdly floppy hat. It is CthulWho, the erratic, reality-hopping cosmic lord of time and space.
CthulWho is currently braced inside a 15-foot magnetic donut-ring wrapped in thick copper coils and pulsing temporal lights—the base’s experimental dimensional portal. He is aggressively tuning the portal framework with a sleek, black acoustic auger topped with silver.
A grizzled, square-jawed soldier with three chevrons stitched to his chest—Sergeant Guy—spots your arrival. "Did the Magister send you? Are you here to help? He's disintegrated half my team with that damned rod! Our splat guns aren't doing jack against him... we need something with actual kick!"
Hearing your boots click in the low gravity, CthulWho turns his bulbous, ancient eyes toward you, his tentacles twitching with amusement. “I’ve been anticipating you, my clock-crossing ill-wishers. I sense my minions are near … but there is something else … a disturbance in the force … of spacetime … objects out of space and time. You must leave, now. Do not dare oppose my merry mayhem!”
⏳ Ready to Alter the Fabric of History?
Enjoying the reality-bending exploits of our ORUS agents? You can jump into the timeline yourself! Gear up with your own spatiotemporal extrapolator, hunt down CthulWho's escaped anomalies, and protect the space-time continuum in this standalone Timepunk adventure.
