Wandering Cricket

*crickets*

The mission briefing was cloaked in an air of mystery - a top secret rendezvous with an unknown entity in an undisclosed location. How could we resist? Navigator Lord McFuzz only had a vague intuition of where to point us (aside from in the direction of more points, obviously), so Fleet Admiral Skunk struck a deal with Dogi to be our boogeyman/spirit guide as a form of repentance for showing up at Wombat o’clock. On a civi, no less, our “guide” instead noodled around back towards the tail and provided very little in the way of direction. Happily, this is a well-charted star system, so Lord Mcfuzz was able to run us through the Nostrils and slap-bang into the marketplace with no difficulty.

Once there, we reveled in the phantasmagoric wonderland, which boasted the exotic (piano-pinball, human petting zoo) with the more pedestrian (ice cream shop, comedy club). Radmax disappeared into the seizuredome for an extended period, and we nearly lost a maggot or two in the depths of the dance truck. Pilots roamed around interacting with friends and a few off-duty pilots. Once we had thoroughly released our night market yayas, the fleet reassembled and stopped for a fuel dump before taking a victory lap through the crowds, collecting high-fives on our way towards further glory.

We nipped along to the Charlestown system, stopping for snacks along the way, before heading over the hyperspace byway into the Boston system. On the way both TNT and McFuzz ejected their respective protocol d'roids into space right in front of Dr.Claw.
He did not crush them, and was awarded double cup points for his discretion. Here, we dazzled the bar food and discovered some strangely configured wormholes that seemed as if they had gotten lost on on the way to a better-designed destination. We didn’t pass up the opportunity to orbit a familiar black hole on the other side of the asteroid belt, where we pulled off a fairly solid redcoat formation. After that, back to base, where Stogie was awarded a medal of chic for his plaid-on-plaid-on-plaid, and new babymaggots TNT and Molasses were subjected to some gentle hazing after turning in fine performances on their first spaceflight.