I suppose it all started with the Dalek I mentioned last time. It ambushed me during a takeoff in Caledon, popped right into the 85 behind me... It identified itself as Serrao, and demanded I take it to the coordinates of a Dalek signal it had detected. Naturally, I had no intention of doing so, and managed to activate the temporal grace defenses before it could open fire. Then I disabled the external shields and opened the doors, blowing it out into the vortex...along with myself, almost.
Strange thing is, that judging by its casing, it came from somewhere pre-time war. I've never seen a Dalek like that in SL space, at least the ones that were a threat a while back all seemed to be time-war varient Daleks. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it...and I really need to note that one of the worst things you can do is toss a Dalek into the vortex. Their casings allow them to survive what would normally kill other species, so all I did was cause Serrao to end up in some random location in some random time period, and that's assuming it didn't have any time travel technology built in...
Well, like I said, that wasn't the end of it. A couple weeks later I was exploring a planet named Splintered Rock. Nice place, lots of sand (Second note: Never again use a fan powered hover vehicle on a desert planet). Anyway, I was there because I received a tip that something strange was going on out in the deep desert. It turns out, Serrao had ended up here and had gotten the equipment together to go play in the sand...and unearth a crashed Dalek warship. Of course, I didn't know it was Serrao at the time, or even what was going on, really. But I kind of got a big hint when I saw a saucer rising out of the dunes...
I knew I had to stop that ship before it reached any of the settlements, or made an attempt to escape. Unfortunately, the downside to a Type 85 TTC is that is was designed for exploration, thus very little in the way of offensive systems, and I didn't really have anything on hand capable of taking down a Dalek ship...so I improvised. I blew full steam back to the spaceport where I'd left the 85 (again, NO more fans on sand) and rushed down to the gateroom. Like I said, no weapons on hand, but one thing I could turn into a massive bomb, the alteran stargate.
It was already connected to the 85's power, of course, but now I needed to throw that link wide open, critically overload the naqudah it was mostly made of, and blow it sky high...hopefully after I'd gotten it off the ship. So after I'd set that to build up, I took off and rematerialized aboard the saucer, where I confronted Serrao. I got lucky, I admit that. It'd had to hook itself into the ship to be able to control it alone, and thus was unable to bring its gun to bear at the time. Long mutually threatening and insultful conversation short, it revealed what I already suspected about how it had arrived here, my fault. More concerning was the fact that it revealed that the saucer wasn't the original signal he had been looking for in our earlier encounter, it was something he had found here...
The sound of small muffled explosions from the 85 cut any further talks short. In my rush to put my plan together, I'd forgotten to properly guard against power feedback from the gate, and it was playing all sorts of havoc...and leaking enough energy to let Serrao in on what I was doing. While it began to disconnect from the saucer, I made a break for the 85 and dematerialized...leaving the gate behind. The resulting explosion was a sight to see. As it was, with half its systems damaged from the feedback, the 85 barely managed to get us away, and I don't know for sure what happened to the Dalek. We managed to limp back to New Gallifrey, where the 85 was able to begin its regeneration, restricting me to time ring and stargate(not my own unfortunately, blew it up, remember?) travel for a while.
Though now minus a stargate and gateroom because of the resulting damage, the 85 is back up and running again with a splendid new 'desktop theme' as you can see. Hopefully Serrao went down with his ship, but we'll see. In the meantime, I'm heading back to the steamlands for some more fun.
