Grinding Gears

Keter’s supplies must be secured!

With Mytene producing over 60% of all Keter-manufactured goods, we are keen to keep production running smoothly in the wake of the unfortunate failure of the Orion Gate. While our specialists are working on increasing output, we must ensure that they are undisturbed and that mining and manufacturing can continue as normal despite the natural slight panic among the population!

We are seeking volunteer guards to work alongside our normal security forces and ensure that any attempts at theft or the disruption of smooth production will come to naught.

- Enduring Steel, General Secretary of the Mytenean Industrial Corps

delicate_harmony - Mike
verdant_moon - Rose
Tiny Ember [?] - Iain
Thoughtful Singer [?] - Mat

Summary

The players land in Mytenea, the main city of Mytene, and meet up with Enduring Steel, the General Secretary of the Mytenean Industrial Corps. While some small spitting slugs attempt to get into their dropship, the party is given their first tasks - to resolve a dispute with some local citizens about food supply at a food warehouse, and to investigate reports of a faulty sentry turret on a mining installation.
They manage to resolve the food supply situation with minimal conflict by engaging in calming discourse and also hacking into Enduring Steel's computer at the dock to check what the food distribution plans actually are. The citizens settle down to wait for food to be distributed the next day. It is clear from the plans that the supply situation following the explosion of the Orion Gate is a little precarious, but not truly dire unless rioting breaks out or equipment is destroyed.
The mining installation turns out to be full of looters who have hacked the sentry turret to shoot anyone else. The party deal with this, and with a group of city guards who rush in thinking the party are the looters. The sentry turret is fixed, and its passcode set to 'Mogglewomp.' The city guard are given custody of the looters and left to pass on the new turret safeword to the miners when they return.
The party return to Enduring Steel, who hastily sends them out again to reports of a warehouse on fire - a warehouse which contains a type of equipment which is really important right now, the sort that can manufacture other tools and equipment. They are told to retrieve that equipment at all costs. Unfortunately the warehouse is both very on fire and clearly lacking the equipment which has been removed, and the party must follow the robbers' tracks into the wilderness outside the city.
Encountering but bravely defeating such delights of Mytenean wildlife as raktors and cave slugs, the party eventually track down the equipment deep inside an abandoned old mining level. The robbers turn out to be a party of bandits who seem to have come from Ace's World, plus one Mytenean troublemaker, Unquiet Antimony, who they spotted earlier at the food warehouse. The party subdue the bandits and load them onto sleds with the equipment to take them back to the city, but do not manage to leave before decay creatures arrive and destroy two-thirds of the equipment.
Upon leaving the mine, the party discover that cave slugs hold grudges, and that the players are very much no longer welcome in the slugs' cave. They return to Mytenea and hand over the equipment and the unconscious bandits to Enduring Steel.

Enduring Steel is a little disappointed that only some of the equipment has been returned in a fixable form, but nevertheless thanks the party for their efforts and is particularly grateful for all the looters, bandits and troublemakers that have been successfully apprehended by the party.
Mme Verdant Moon, 1616 remains in Mytenea for a short while to engage in diplomacy - smoothing over the hacking incident with Enduring Steel and spending some time helping to reassure citizens and managers alike that things escalating into rioting/looting/combat will help no-one in the long term. Verdant Moon also interrogates the bandits and Unquiet Antimony. The motivation of the bandits is pretty simple - they're suffering from Ace's current vendetta against bandits on Ace's World, and they wanted a way to manufacture their own equipment (…and weapons) without having to trade through the ACE organization. Unquiet Antimony, meanwhile, just seems to have a deep distrust of the Mytenean Industrial Corps and authorities in general - they do not trust Mytene to look after its citizens, and saw this as a way to gain credit with an off-world group who might provide a place to escape to in future. All of them seem to have assumed the abandoned mine would be safe from decay because it had been a functional mining site in the past and therefore surely must have been close enough to the city's shipheart to be okay.
Upon returning to her ship, Verdant Moon asks around to find out if anyone knows what's actually happened with the Gate. Solid information is in short supply, however. Most people agree that an explosive failure of an interstellar gate, as seems to have happened here, is almost unheard of. Gates do require maintenance - no-one is quite sure for what, but presumably to ensure they keep sending ships to the right place? - but no system has been cut off like this due to gate failure in living memory. The general opinion is that the Keter system ought to be able to be self-sustaining - systems are not usually selected for terraforming unless multiple worlds can potentially produce useful output - but that the slow pace of settlement on Kylal, the narcissism and pleasure-seeking of the settlement on Ace's World, and the mysterious complete failure of settlement on Hive IV mean that the Keter System is perhaps not as robustly self-sufficient as it ought to be. However, there is no doubt that Mytene is extremely productive and can probably, just about, make up for these deficits. It's definitely a risk though and things would be better if more of the worlds in the system were currently able to produce useful supplies.
Delicate Harmony, meanwhile, returns to the Unquiet Journey determined to help with the supply crisis however is possible, suggesting to the onboard Forge that augments allowing Various to consume non-standard foodstuffs could be beneficial in the short term, as well as suggesting to the ship's authorities that if the ship happens to have surplus supplies then these could valuably be shared with other parties in the system to reduce the risk of unrest. These suggestions are listened to politely and, although they have not yet been acted upon, they are under consideration.

The food and equipment supply situation is stabilised for now - there will likely still be shortages and problems, but the risk of immediate societal breakdown appears to have passed unless any new crises arise