COLD OPEN READ-ALOUD
Two pods, two players — the same recording, a half-second out of sync. Warm, synthesized, airline-safety-video cheerful.
"Good morning, and welcome back. Revival sequence initiated for Asset 44-301. Thaw services, metabolic stabilization, and tissue-lease reactivation are complete. You may experience trembling, disorientation, or grief. This is normal.
Your service term has been assessed at fifty labor-years, commencing upon planetfall. Please do not be alarmed — with the gene-therapy suite included in your revival outfitting, your projected life expectancy now exceeds two hundred years. Your term represents barely a quarter of the wonderful time ahead of you.
Please note: promotional commitments made by Meridian CryoCare, Inc. were discharged in acquisition proceedings. Helios thanks you for your under—"
The voice dies mid-word. The pods hiss open early — the warming cycle isn't finished, and your body knows it: everything shakes.
A woman in a patched vac-suit is braced over your pod, a bypass tool jammed into its control panel. She is not looking at your face. She's reading your name plate. Whatever she came for — you're not it.
She's already moving. Down the row, pod after pod, frost and status lights. Behind her, someone hisses: "Dez, you're waking the whole rack—"
GM staging notes
- Only the PCs wake — they were the learning curve. Frost hides nameplates; Dez popped two emergency releases to check faces before Mateo figured out a sleeve wipes frost. Nobody else wakes all session.
- One bypass tool, three avalanches: the awake PCs, the lockdown, and a shipful of crew hiding from the audit her incident guaranteed. Trace every cause back to Dez.
- Yuki is not in this room. Where she is lives on the manifest — plant it as the natural next question.
- Answer questions only. Rescuers never volunteer. First groggy "what year is it?" earns the pity beat: "Oh. Oh, you're kidding. Mateo — this one's a deep-freeze." (If nobody asks, make sure an invoice timestamp shows 2412.)
- Thaw-shakes: each PC takes ⬛ on all checks until their first success, then it burns off.
- Don't explain 50 labor-years. If pressed: "It means you were about to spend the next fifty years digging. Same as Yuki." Then move.