Path Information
How to enter The Relative Ship:
The path is “The Relative Ship”. To get there, you need to go out into empty space and ensure you can hear NOTHING. This means no communications and you need to hold your breath, so you can’t hear yourself breathe. The only thing you should be able to hear is your heartbeat. Close your eyes. In your head, start thinking the words ‘tick tock tick tock’ over and over to yourself, as close to one per second as possible. Your heartbeat will start to slow down to be in time with the ticking. When it has, open your eyes again, and you’ll be on the relative ship. The closer your internal tick/tock/tick/tock is to 1 per second, the more time you’ll have.
If you are travelling in a group, you may wake up on different ships, depending on how well each member of your group did. Whoever does the best, ensure you fill in the rest of your group.
Rules of the Relative Ship:
The Relative Ship is a broken ship that is caught in a time loop. You’ll have somewhere between 8 minutes and 10 minutes for the first loop when you arrive, depending on how effective your internal clock was.
After time runs out for the loop, the ship will explode. If you’re still on the ship when it explodes, you will become Lost. So, make sure you get to the next ship before then. At each ship, you’ll need to find the emergency exit door and open it. Outside of the ship, you’ll see another identical ship, floating nearby. Make sure you leave the current ship and get onto the next ship before time runs out. The interior of the next Relative Ship will be almost identical, although some things may have moved around. Also, the emergency exit will be in a different position each time.
Relative Time:
On each successive Relative Ship, time will start moving quicker and quicker. This means that some mechanical components of the ship which are still functioning will seem quicker, and you might have trouble progressing past things like spinning fan blades, and any electrical fires will be especially dangerous.
In addition, the ship will explode after a lessened amount of time, meaning that your time limit to solve each ship will be shorter and shorter. Depending on how well you did when you entered, you’ll have approximately 10 loops of steadily decreasing amounts of time before the time limit will be so low as to effectively trap you there forever. When this happens, you will become lost.
The Relatives:
You’ll notice that there are very lifelike statues everywhere. These will resemble family members or close friends who have died of old age, or genetic disorders – possibly ones you know, possibly ones you don’t know (due to the Unknown). In reality, these are remnants of past travellers who attempted The Relative Ship, but failed to solve it in time to get free. They will move, very slowly, over the course of a time loop, and may attempt to speak or interact with you if you stay still for too long.
These will creep you out, but they’re not really dangerous. Once you’ve identified the Others on the ship, you should be able to mostly ignore The Relatives.
The Goal:
You need to figure out what is causing the ship to go wrong, and fix it. The exact thing wrong with the ship is always different, but it will be one of the following:
-A mechanical failure on the ship. If it’s this, you need to find the component which is breaking, and find a replacement part for it somewhere on the ship.
-An external entity acting on the ship. If it’s this, you will need to find spacesuits on the ship, and go outside to fight it
-The ship drifting into something (either a large object, or something like a gravity field or electrical storm). If it’s this, bad luck. You’ll need to find a way to move the ship, hopefully using the practice. This is quite unlikely unless your karma is very poor, so hopefully it doesn’t come to this.
Dangers – The Ship:
There are a number of dangers that are posed by the ship itself. Apart from the obvious (the ship exploding will kill you and cause you to be lost) there will most likely be a number of other dangers. Other Finders have noted things like electrical fires, oxygen leaks, and even in one case, a room with spinning fan blades.
These are mundane, and exhibit no special properties, so they aren’t too dangerous to start with, but most of these will become increasingly difficult to deal with on each successive loop of the Ship.
Dangers – Injuries:
It can be tempting to get caught up in conflict with the Others around the ship. Be very careful. While it may seem like any injuries will be healed by the time you get to the next loop, this is deceitful. Any injuries you sustain will come back to you upon successful completion of the path. Also – injuries you sustain will be worse, depending on which loop you’re in – the later in the loops, the worse the injuries.
Dangers – Others:
On the ship will be between 2-4 Others, who will attempt to impede your progress. If they can prevent you from fixing the ship, they get out instead of you. But, they will take on any injuries you sustain. So – they will most likely injure you or slow you down, but cannot kill you, as then they would die when they get out. There seem to be a cast of 6 Others that could show up, with 2-4 showing up each time you visit. But, since they sometimes get out, it’s hard to keep track of them.
As a general rule, the Others will try and trick you or sneak up on you, so make sure you watch your back.
Dangers – Current Known Others:
- The Distant Relative.
This will appear to look like a Relative, but be somebody who you don’t recognise, or who isn’t related to you. Given that the Relatives might be people who lived before you were born, this can be a hard one, and hopefully you don’t get it. If you fail to identify them as somebody not related to you, they will attack. They’re quite quick, and very strong. If this happens, that loop is most likely a write-off for you (although try not to get too injured). On the plus side, in subsequent loops you can find them and identify them as not related to you, meaning that they won’t be able to do anything.
- The Alien.
The Alien is a primal, insectoid creature. Its primary purpose seems to be to injure you to take your place. It’s not that strong, but is incredibly sneaky, and will attempt to come at you from an angle you don’t expect. If you get this Other on your ship, I would strongly recommend staying as a group, or at least in pairs, and not getting too distracted. If you see it coming it’s MUCH easier to deal with.
- The Expanse.
The Expanse is a force that doesn’t seem to have a corporeal form. When you’re outside of the ship, you may feel yourself starting to drift away from the ship. If this happens, remain calm, and use whatever methods you can to get yourself back to the ship. DON’T under ANY circumstances look away from the ship. If you look away from the ship, when you look back to it, it will be MUCH further away and very difficult to get back to.
- The Lost Love.
The Lost Love will look like a Relative, but somebody who you were close to who didn’t die of natural causes. This Other is the main reason why it is recommended to travel in a group. Whoever knows this person will start to become enamoured with them, and want to stay in the same room as them, eventually wanting to just be around them. If this happens, it’s up to the rest of the group to pull them away. Get them out of the room of the Lost Love, and ensure they don’t go into it in subsequent loops. Be warned, this will anger the Lost Love, and on subsequent loops they may attack. They’re not that strong, but they are able to sneak up on you fairly easily, so watch your back.
Not known to players:
The Mimic
The Mimic is an other which appears as something slightly different each time. It will look like a regular object, but a different one for each ship. If it isn’t identified by anybody in the ship, it will creep up to you and attempt to touch the back of your neck. Who knows what will happen if it manages to pull that off.
Boons:
- Minor Boon – You’ll age between 1/90 and 1/80 slower, depending on how quickly you managed to escape the Relative Ship
- Minor Boon – Once The Relative Ship is saved, you can input any coordinates you want. It will start spinning up, move incredibly fast, and you will black out due to the forces. When you wake up, you’ll be at a port or dock at the place you were trying to go.
- Minor Drawback – Entering The Relative Ship multiple times is dangerous. Each subsequent time you enter it’ll be the same thing going wrong with the ship as the first time, but you will start at the same loop you left at.
- Medium Drawback – You’ll be especially vulnerable to whatever caused the damage to The Relative Ship when you were there. So – if it’s a broken part, parts like that will stop working around you. If you flew into something, you’re much more likely to do that. If you were attacked by an Other, that type of Other will be more likely to show up for you.
General Advice:
- Make sure you bring some kind of timekeeping device so you can track how far through each loop you are. These will still work based on the local time of the ship, meaning that if you have 10 minutes before the explosion when you first get there, it will always be 10 minutes on that clock (although the clock will speed up with everything else on each subsequent ship).
- This will also help you keep track of anything else that happens during your time, and when it happens. For example, maybe a component will break starting a fire after a few minutes. Knowing when exactly this will happen will be very helpful.
- Watch your surroundings. Note down if anything seems suspicious. As far as we can tell, the Relative Ship tends to like Others that sneak up on you and catch you by surprise. That is why travelling in groups for this Path is so often recommended. Always travel in pairs at minimum.
- Take note of the Relatives. The Relatives are remnants of people who have become Lost, and so are good markers of what NOT to do. This may provide a useful clue in a time where you’re uncertain.
