A Trip to Nemo's Lair
01 Jan 2025Quazer Yetkin
It was a visit I'd been dreading. In truth I didn't really need to make it, but I couldn't face the thought of the enforced festivities. New Year's Eve, 3310, and all I wanted was to get the hell away from people. So I did what I usually do when I'm bored, and started engineering modules just for the hell of it.My Vulture is fairly well tricked-out by now, and strictly speaking doesn't need the work. G5 Dirty Drag thrusters, a decent bi-weave shield, and plenty of module reinforcement. I call her Beadle's Hand - small, but deadly. But the twin frag cannons were still at G3...what the hell, I thought, let's just finish the job.
Zacariah Nemo's base always sends a shiver up my spine every time I need to go there. Not for nothing is he known as one of the sketchiest characters in the galaxy. He claims to be cybernetically enhanced, but most people know this is just cover for his enormous drug habit. He's notorious for staying up into the small hours, whacked out his dome on onionhead, spouting drivel over the airwaves. "Manifestos" he calls them, but really they're just drugged-out rants about whatever piece of factoid flotsam that's got wedged in his brain that week: flying saucers, chimpanzees, cryptocurrency...all the garbage that washes up on the shore of a feeble mind. You ever find yourself in Yoru, tune your FSS to the short-wave band and eventually you'll hear him. He's as reliable as a pulsar.
By far the worst thing about his place are his "Xihe Companions". Most people are a little creeped out by those things, but you can get used to a cybernetic Yorkshire Terrier after a while. Nemo's "menagerie" is another matter entirely. He's got these little dwarf guys that run about in bellboy costumes going "Doo doo doo! Doo doo doo!". There's another character he dresses up in Napoleonic gear and calls "Le Colonel". He thinks it's hilarious. The four-legged variety are the skeeviest of all. God only knows what he does with them.
The trick to dealing with Nemo is to get in and out as quickly as possible. On no account should you ever become engaged in conversation, because your chances of leaving in a timely manner plummet. It's worse than Ram Tah trying to push his cybergoth mixtapes onto you. Sure enough when I get there he's wiped out on space weed, but he was sufficiently compos to do the engineering. Afterwards he asked me if I wanted to hang out and watch a documentary about Adolf Hitler, but I took a hard pass on that.