These guys are cold blooded
After docking with the Aether Processing Station and going through decontamination, including eliminating any scents, you receive permission to transport your relic to the reliquary. You load it onto your grav-sled and make your way across the station. This is the perfect opportunity to test your engineer’s environmental systems hack.
Before arriving, you learned that the Zhian are a cold-blooded species and their space station is always warmer than others due to this fact. Their skin is not sensitive to temperature changes and they rely heavily on readouts. Your engineer has come up with a plan to override the environmental controls and lower the temperature in the reliquary to 9° Celsius, making any Zhian sluggish while making your crew just slightly cool. He activates the hack as you enter the Reliquary.
Upon entering this section of the station you are greeted by an older Zhian woman in a lab coat. “I don’t visit the Aether except a couple of times a stanyear, so it is quite fortuitous that it is during one of my visits that you brought a relic.” She gives you a toothy grin that you’re sure was supposed to be friendly, but all those long jagged teeth are a little unnerving.
“You don’t normally work here?”
“A lot of my people don’t care for the vacuum of space, including me. We have several different areas of expertise that come up here occasionally to collect research or check in on a project. Believe it or not, I’m actually a virologist so I usually sift through these relics looking for DNA and RNA strands from microscopic organisms when I come up here, but we have various biologists, botanists, and even archaeologists that come up here at times as well. I’ve really learned a lot of fascinating things by doing this.”
You offer her a lopsided grin of your own. “I was hoping we could get the two credit tour of the reliquary while we’re here.”
“I might not come here too often, but I think I can manage to explain this place. I doubt many of the other non-Zhians that have come here have ever asked for a tour. I approve of your scientific curiosity.”
There was a lot more to see in the reliquary than you expected and then there came a point where your tour guide suddenly shifted down a gear. She never stopped explaining things but she was definitely moving a lot slower. You glanced at your nav officer and he made his way back to the area in the reliquary where a lot of animal DNA was stored. As soon as the DNA was obtained your engineer started raising the temperature back to 25° Celsius. By the end of the tour the Zhian scientist was back to her animated self.
“I don’t know what happened to me back there. I must be getting hungry; I did work right through my lunch break giving the tour. Oh, let me ping your ship with a couple of tokens so you can visit our planet sometime or, if your vessel is small enough, use our gate.”
You receive the typical 1 fame point and 2 Zhian tokens for delivering a relic to the Aether processing station. Once you return to the Space Zoo you will receive ([d4]+2)x1,000 credits for the DNA samples that you gathered. Your next stop should be the Zhian Prime Zoo located at the mission point on Zhian Prime.
When you reach the mission point on Zhian Prime, listen/read Story 53.