Mothership Scenario in progress. Space hippies and gravity ghosts!

Never go with a space hippie to a third location. 

PCs are crew on an enormous interstellar hauler, much larger than usual Mothership spacecraft, 2km long or so. Generally cylindrical, it has artificial gravity generated from a thin array down the centerline of the craft. "Down" is toward the central axis of the ship; corridors slope away and down. AG works by tricking the spatial membrane into acting as if sufficient mass is acting on it through hyperspace higher dimensional interactions. Cylindrical arrays of similar engines at the equator, prow, and stern serve as the main drive, pushing and pulling fake mass across real spacetime, and, as a bonus, the enormous real mass of the ship and its cargo. Heavy lifter shuttles act as tugs for manoeuvering into habs and stations.

The name of this hauler is the Bûshanjî. [Sketch or diagram to follow, God willing]

For several decades it trundles between Industrial X system and the neutron star Claro. Numerous planets survived Claro's evolution, with one gas giant pulled apart into an enormous torus of gas surrounding the compact object. The gas is not uniformly mixed; it orbits in layers according to mass, chemistry, and peculiar interactions with Claro's hellacious magnetic fields. Deuterium, helium II, irradiated hydrocarbon ices, ice-CIV and ice-XCIII arrange themselves into patacrystaline metamolecules of enormous value for materials science, nanotech fabrication, antimatter reactor catalysts, and many stranger applications. 

 A permanent station crewed by two Skyjack scientists orbits quite close for observations, a tax write-off for the hauling company's primary investment, a mostly automated pumping station that concentrates the 'slurry' and several other interesting compounds (mostly handled by a different contractor). The Bûshanjî docks every few years and loads its tanks with slurry, which compresses to convenient density in the hauler's AG field.

Within the torus of gas is a band of oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and water vapor, with significant pockets of carbon, silicon, iron, and other heavier elements. There is a xenobiology with photosynthesis and a wide variety of life, more than could plausibly evolve in the tens of millions of years since Claro's evolution. That xenosphere is considerably complicated now with the admixture of terrestrial organisms and the feral descendants of alien pets.

The company got another tax break transporting colonists to the torus, primarily a sect or techno-ideological ethnos of zero-G adapted humans and their microgravity maize, quinoa, cannabis, flying cats, all kinds of things. They called the habitable band the Diadem, a jewel of a habitat for fanatical spacers such as themselves, natives of the float who dreamed of a life outside habs and wheels, cylinders and stinky spacecraft.

The Diademese wanted to go back to the land, as it were, and once they had collected enough floating trees and lumps of carbonaceous dust to have some floating land to grow maize and cannabis on, they mostly cut ties with the Company and with human space in general.

The Company's transportation bylaws, and indeed the statutes of most humanspace polities*, do not allow colonists to fall off the edge of the map; those who want to do so need to own their own starship! Essentially, the Company is liable if a colony exports political unrest and bad publicity back to humanspace, such as by building an invasion fleet or transmitting seditious pablum. Any Diademese person wishing to permanently leave the colony may transmit an Exeunt request, and the next Company ship will pick them up and provide reintegration counselling to deal with the crazy shit that made them want to leave their isolated colony.

The Bûshanjî has orders to pick up one such refector, a party named 6.Sapinud-Frênay Azardokht ud Azaddokht 16.Zarmandokht ud Yazdindokht 5.Shahdokht-Savanghva Azadeh-i Tajbanu Bahmanbanu Banugushnasp. All that; she will respond to Frênay or The Azadeh.

Up to four of the PCs will take the 8-seat cutter to a waypoint habitat at the edge of the Diadem, take the Azadeh aboard with up to 1.2 cubic meters of luggage. Refectors frequently have relations, coreligionists, cult leaders, or other members of the colony who oppose anyone leaving. You will defend the refector and see her safely aboard, and discourage pursuit if necessary.

Frênay, who is in fact a high status princess sort of person, will be followed by three Diademese who will attempt to abduct or kill her. They will first attempt to attach themselves to the outside of the cutter, wearing antiquated but military grade stealthed vacc-suits; should that fall through, they will translate themselves directly into the Bûshanjî by means of entities resident in the torus whose relationship to time, space, matter, and gravity has been of great importance to the Diadmese, particularly since the Company started filtering out the slurry and taking it away in a polarized grav field.

Let us call these entities duendes, goblins. Humans have a body composed of an antentropic arrangment of matter. The duende's existence in this cosmos is by means of articulation of the metric tensor of spacetime; operations along the 5th, 7th, and 9th through 11th dimensions support functions analogous to senses and cognition; the metric disruption at the boundary between the duende and normal space produces energy, most of it consumed by the duende but some escaping in ionizing radiation, visible light, radio frequencies, and gravitational waves.

It's an invisible space creature that can apparently violate simultaneity within the gravity well of the Claro star system because, in effect, the duende is already everywhere in the well. Duendes cannot attend to everywhere within that space at one time, but they can move their locus of articulation freely, appearing to human eyes and visual sensors as a curious distortion of the light moving through a roughly spherical space, 2 to 5 meters in diameter. After some decades of contact and communication, select Diademese can translate their persons anywhere they can communicate to the duendes. It... does not always work; expect the first sign of intruders aboard the Bushanji to be part of a body sticking out of a bulkhead, the majority of its blood and organs strewn about the compartment.

The duende are not just curious and willing to help these odd little entities they have discovered, life-like phenomena that can be detected as density of electrical waves bounded in four dimensions of space and yet performing limited imaginal and mnemosynchronous operations across the 4th through 8th dimensions. They're adorable, they think they're people. However, these electrical wave organisms also manipulate much larger four dimensional arrangements characterized by high energy density and a small but steep field of polarized gravitational attraction; in this manner they move about the cosmos, very slowly creep between stars, and, here around our venerable star, they are interfering with the circumstellar medium. Their polarized gravity field is a fascinating artefact, aesthetically pleasing to observe, and some among our hukamaâ and magoi have made exciting discoveries in the boundary region where our quiddity intersects the steep flux. Unfortunately, a numerous party of observers are now trapped within this artefact, their quidity and haecceity almost completely dampened. They are alive but suffering, as any would, constrained to one minute volume of our star's gravity well!

We must rescue our friends. The 'humans' have control over this effect, but we are all too cognizant of the difficulty in performing coherent dialectic with these beings. In the all too probable event that they are unwilling or unable to terminate the polarization field, we must terminate it ourselves.