DEAD or ALIVE
C37,000 REWARD
Notify THE GRAND ADMIRAL of the TERRAN STAR NAVY
The littlest member of the Devil's Fang, Bad Seed Bixy is a Ganymedean horticulturalist serving as the crew's doctor. Bixy is about 300 years old and helped cultivate the "garden" part of Titan Garden, their expertise ensuring a rich array of plant life that would best serve the breathing needs of the Garden's various residents and visitors. They are a hopeful but somewhat jaded personality, having lived a long enough life to watch the machinations of the Sol system play out, but hopeful in that they feel like there is a real chance for bad things to improve. Bixy has been around the system in their years and has picked up a number of tasty recipes, and they enjoy working a side gig as the Coelacanth's cook. They'll often invite Whisper to help out with food prep and oven management- handy with those hot metal hands and at-the-ready oven mitts- and Whisper is just very oh-gosh for the opportunity to help feed the 999 pirates of the Devil's Fang.
The Coelacanth is built to be a self-sustaining metal ecosystem, and in the belly of that ecosystem is Bixy's hydroponics lab. Feeding a crew of pirates at scale in the depths of space means relying on a plant-based diet, and while a Ganymedean like Bixy- and much of the Inner Belt crew for that matter- would prefer something meaty to eat, you gotta work with what's on hand. Fortunately, as an accomplished and well-traveled professional Bixy has a collection of seeds from all over Sol and a few of those seeds grow into rich plants that almost satisfy a taste for the texture of meat. Callistan recipes are heavily plant-based and tend to favor searing-hot spices, which go a long way towards masking a vegetarian diet from a picky eater. Terran rice is also a staple ingredient, with a whole section of Bixy's lab dedicated to growing the grain. Occasionally an away team will head to an uninhabited world to catch some game to eat- on these occasions the captain herself likes to take on kitchen duty and cook up a big batch of fried rice and mystery meat seasoned with her secret Mercurian blend of spices. Bixy's hydroponics lab also includes herbal ingredients for teas, beers, meads and the pleasure of a good smoke. Overall morale among the crew remains high, and a full glass and a full belly goes a long way towards maintaining that trend- if you're a member of the Devil's Fang you have Bixy to thank for that.
In addition to their subsistence farming efforts, Bixy is a practitioner of Ganymedean herbal medicine, treating the crew's ailments with a host of plant-based solutions. Bixy's got a little apothecary station set up on the Coelacanth in a room near their hydroponics where they offer potable ground herbs as well as topical applications to treat internal and external conditions- it's not an uncommon sight to see a crewmember with a limb or a joint wrapped up in an ace bandage, keeping one of Bixy's herbal blends firmly applied to an external site. Terran and Neptunian crewmembers tend to be skeptical of Bixy's herbalism but for twenty-plus years they've been keeping the Devil's Fang stitched up and in working order. And really, this ship ain't making any pitstops at any general hospitals so you're gonna have to live with what's available to you, starfarer.
As a crew doctor Bad Seed Bixy joins their crewmates in boarding parties and raids on other ships to ensure the inevitable injuries are treated quickly and don't spiral into fatalities. Their primary piece of boarding equipment is a rideable medical station called the Funk Doc Express. Riding the Funk Doc Express off a boarding round allows Bixy to carry a wide array of herbal treatments, home-grown gauze pads and organic sutures curated to focus more on cuts, burns, punctures and other battle-related injuries likely to arise in the course of taking a starship by force. In order for crew to be able to locate Bixy in the chaotic heat of a confrontation the Funk Doc Express comes equipped with a bright headlight and a bumping sound system; playing music helps crewmates echolocate medical assistance, and the tempo of the music can also help carry the captain's orders in earshot, letting crew know whether she's holding a position, falling back or pushing forward. Bixy doesn't carry a weapon but they will use their lashing, stinging root vines to defend themselves or their patients if they need to.
It wasn't common for Outer Belt people to get drawn into a conflict between the Terran Star Navy and a band of ex-United workers, but a few managed to find themselves drawn into the pirates' cause. Bixy had been brought to Venus on a contract to help plan a Venusian Garden, a parallel to the Titan Garden project they'd worked on two hundred years ago. Bixy's clients learned they were still alive and so thought they were the foremost expert in assisting with their needs: they were looking to create some Terran and Venusian plant hybrids, plants that could scrub heavily-used air the way Titan's garden does but also have the waxy exterior coating to survive Venus's acid rain. Believing they were just working on another self-contained Garden dome project, Bixy shipped off to the Inner Belt to begin work hybridizing plants to find the right blend for their clients' stated needs.
The task proved difficult. The waxy features that allowed a plant to survive acid rain limited their carbon-recycling qualities, they asked if the protective characteristic was needed for a glass-domed environment, as dropping it would make their job much easier. Bixy's employers insisted the hybrids needed to survive exposure to Venusian elements- this wasn't a problem when Titan Garden was constructed, and the unwillingness of Terran employers to provide a straight answer to their questions started to raise suspicions. The project was presented as a Garden, a self-contained dome, and there was a working example of one orbiting Saturn right this minute. No one could or would explain what these odd contract requirements were for, until Res Ship Nine landed on Venus.
The ship's doors opened to a gruesome display: Star Patrollers lay strewn all around the main hangar, a line of red juices painting a path from the hangar bay towards the bridge. The first mate was in shambles, the captain was in pieces. Someone had to oversee putting the project overseer back together again. All medical professionals on staff were ordered to report to the landing site to tend to the injured, and Star Patrollers were assigned to clean up the dead. Bixy packed their medical bag and headed to the site to treat the wounded, trying like everyone else to understand what had happened to Res Ship Nine- it wasn't a hard puzzle to solve, however, as the wounded spoke with a grim frankness. They spoke of devils. The Devil had come and brought all of hell with her, they lamented. They came because of Venus, they came because of the terraforming project, because of their hubris. "Terraforming"... Bixy's hybridizing contract started to make a lot more sense. Their leafy sound receptors picked up quiet talk of these devils being spread amongst security personnel on Venus, that things had taken a turn and something had to be done before this thing spiraled out of control. Bixy brought ease and comfort to the wounded, and when the site was secure they boarded their own little ship and took off from Venus, plotting a course for Terra.
A cargo vessel full of supplies and soldiers was making its way around Sol. There were reports that a Terran Star Navy unit opened fire on a group of United Robotics workers who had taken to piracy, theft and sabotage, and a number of those workers survived and were retaliating against Terran starships in the area, so be mindful of who you allow to board your ship. Consult with your security agents. Keep your airlocks sealed. Identify all ships entering your vicinity. It was sound advice, but space is a dangerous place as it is, the crew of the cargo vessel couldn't imagine how someone could board a starship without permission, without someone opening the doors and letting them in. That was preposterous, right? That was about the time a blip came up on the ship's radar. A small starship was approaching their coordinates, and it was coming in fast.
Whisper's voice creaked like a nervous doorhinge as he hunched over behind the ship's pilot seat. "Oh, uhh.. Miss Anibelle. Shouldn't we, uhh.. I think we're going a little fast". There were a few Terrans and Martians in the crew behind them, but the bulk of the newly-minted pirates were Mercurian and Venusian. Some of the Venusians began to grow out their Carapace forms, holding onto what they could. The Mercurians began to flash into their own Firewalker forms, completing the crew's devilish appearance. "'Fraid the time for nice and slow is over, Whisper", June lowered her goggles and assumed her own carapace. Whisper's starlight form flickered more frantically as the craft barreled towards the Terran cargo vessel- it was big and they were approaching it from the long angle. There was plenty of buffer zone for them. "Trust me, this is gonna work.." Anibelle's blue-devil form flashed around her as she seized the quantum reins of every horrific outcome of their current course- she could see the Anibelles of other concurrent dimensions come through unscathed, she doesn't see the ripples of her own fate rebounding towards her. She was confident in putting her Mercurian curse to the test. "Hold on tight to something, boys, we're going in hot!" The crew hollered, some cheered. Whisper began to scream.
Bixy's little Ganymedean ship zipped along through space- it was designed for their own people's tiny bodies but it was meant to haul large plants from one world to another so it was built with a fairly large cargo hold. They were sorting through their own thoughts- terraforming another world, wiping out its ecosystem to make room for another, using the Garden project as a front to set the ball in motion and using Bixy's own horticultural knowledge to achieve these ends. They were mad, they felt betrayed, but they didn't know exactly who they were mad at yet. What they did know was someone else was mad too, and that those someones were picking a fight with a giant, and they could probably use some medical help of their own. They waffled on whether they should really link up with a bunch of bad seeds like this, having seen what they did to the soldiers of Res Ship Nine. They didn't have long to waffle, as the sight of a much larger cargo ship came into view. It was putting out a distress call.
Today is a quieter time than those early days. Bixy was in the Coelacanth's galley, brewing an experimental new blend of tea leaves they'd been growing in hydroponics. They held the mug with both hands and dipped one root tendril into the tea, drinking it up in proper Ganymedean fashion. One of the newer crewmembers- a hare-like Neptunian- was asking Whisper how the crew came up with the idea for boarding rounds. Wouldn't slamming into a ship like that just kill you? The ship's resource coordinator tapped his red-hot metal fingertips together. "Oh, uhh... well. that's a little bit of a story". Bixy approached the pair, offering the cup of soothing tea up to the much taller pirate. It was a peaceful moment, with naught but the hum of the engines to intrude upon the curious new blood. What better time share the tale of the night the Devil's Fang Pirates were born?