I’ve been running the Cosmic Dark RPG by Graham Walmsley, and there is a whole campaign taking the employees of Extracsa through to the edge of the known galaxy within the book.

Part of the campaign concerns creating the planet all the PCs are from and showing scenes of them bonding (or otherwise) as they grow up. In addition, as they head to bed before each assignment, they undertake a psych assessment under the benevolent authority of Extracsa - here we get a sense of their current headspace and perhaps foreshadow the challenges of the up and coming assignment.

I’ve combined this all into a storyfied view of what each player came up with, which excludes the details of each assignment (I may write that up later), but instead gives you a flavour of the PCs, their home planet and how they dealt with the stress and strain of working for Extracsa through their career.

Assignments

Employees

A note: Cosmic Dark allows employees to retrain their specialism between assignments through accelerated learning and implants.

Children of the Dust

Six assignments, two deaths and one impossible reunion: the story of six friends from Arrakish.

Arrakish was a world that was barren, a desert planet, devoid of water.

Beneath its two suns, darkness was rare and the desert stretched for miles, immense but strangely beautiful. Fossils showed this was not always the case - ancient oceans, enormous tunnels beneath the surface - all invited endless arguments among geologists. Some believed they had been carved by water. Others suspected something older and considerably stranger.

The inhabitants shared their bodies with the Erycks, symbiotic organisms that lived within their brains, feeding upon cerebral fluids and occasionally conferring unremarkable but unique abilities. Whether these creatures were a gift or a curse was a matter of perspective.

For six children growing up together, this was just their home.

There was Klee, short, bespectacled and physically unimpressive, who dreamed of becoming a geologist before deciding that working in a local shop might be more comfortable. Marik, tall, gangly and unusually mature, considered Klee his greatest rival. Klee, who possessed little competitive instinct, was quite prepared to concede Marik's superiority.

Kai was tall, stocky, perpetually grubby and fiercely ambitious. She wanted to become a captain, with golden decorations upon her shoulders. She was particularly close to Marik, with whom she shared a shaved head and an appetite for imagining life beyond Arrakish.

Bahrat, small and rather ratty-looking, preferred science and mathematics to almost everything else. Dixit, tall, also bald and possessed of a goatee, preferred practical knowledge, although he also dreamed of books and computers that were difficult to obtain on their impoverished world.

Then there was Zx, known to his friends as Zee (for some reason he ignored this and insisted on Zed, but they all knew him as Zee), whose talents included suspicion, concealment and an extraordinary capacity for hiding.

At four years old, he had buried himself in the sand during a game of hide-and-seek with Kai, breathing through a straw while the game continued without him - for days.

They were children of a cruel world, but their childhood was not entirely cruel.

They made sand angels. They collected fossils. They argued about what might exist beyond the second sun.

Klee imagined distant worlds containing frozen water that might be transported back to Arrakish. Kai suggested cannons as a possible solution - shooting water across vast distances, maybe as solid, ice cannonballs. Marik wondered whether, on a parallel planet covered by oceans, people could simply float about without dissolving.

Dixit and Kai speculated about water snakes living among the dunes. Bahrat became lost in the dunes attempting to imitate Dixit's desert survival techniques, forcing his rival to organise a rescue party.

There was laughter, embarrassment and the uncomplicated friendship of children who had yet to discover how far from home their lives would take them.

And there was Extracsa™️.

The corporation promised employment, money and passage away from Arrakish.

Marik believed in it almost immediately. Zee was less convinced, questioning the company's promises and wondering whether its representatives were entirely truthful.

Neither could have imagined what awaited them.

Extraction

Kai, Marik and Klee entered Extracsa's service together.

The corporation began with psychological assessments. Klee admitted that his greatest fear was the cold. Marik confessed to a terror of drowning, suffocating, particularly the prospect of being trapped somewhere as water rose around him.

It was a curious fear for a man raised on a planet where water was almost mythical.

They were also asked questions about loyalty and sacrifice. Would they help a dying colleague before saving themselves?

Marik's response was unambiguous. Klee was less certain.

Then came their first assignment, Extraction.

And Marik died.

The surviving accounts do not establish the circumstances. For his two companions, the loss must nevertheless have been devastating.

Kai had lost her closest childhood friend. They had imagined escaping Arrakish together, and now the journey seemed to have ended almost before it began.

Klee had lost his oldest rival, a boy against whom he had measured himself for years. Perhaps he remembered lying in the sand while Marik contemplated their futures. Perhaps he remembered how readily he had conceded that Marik was the cleverer of the two.

Whatever their private grief, the corporation continued.

There were further assignments to complete.

Time Murder

Kai and Klee continued into Time Murder, joined by Bahrat.

For Klee, the years away from Arrakish had not diminished his attachment to home. His quarters contained a jar of sand, a teddy bear called Mr Bojangles and an unused chess set.

Asked how he wished to die, he imagined in old age, reclining under the burning suns on Arrakish with a gin and tonic.

Bahrat had also brought a jar of sand, but his was mounted upon a rotating stand and monitored by a camera. Nearby lay mathematical equations, a physics textbook and a slide rule. A note book contained day after day of observations on each specific grain of sand.

One man preserved his childhood for comfort. The other studied the hell out of it.

Bahrat admired Klee's extraordinary calm. As children, he had once asked how Klee achieved it.

Klee had recommended lying down, making sand angels and ceasing to worry about the flow dynamics of sand.

It was advice Bahrat had never quite managed to follow. Though he secretly envied this simplicity of thought.

Kai, meanwhile, kept a photograph of herself and Marik in a bar on Kaluga 5, a reminder of the friend she had lost.

Her other possessions were more practical: smart, new medical equipment, the instruments of a profession that would increasingly define her.

Whatever she might once have imagined becoming, she was now responsible for keeping people alive.

It was a sadly appropriate profession for someone who had already seen a friend die.

Transparency

The third assignment, Transparency, brought Kai and Bahrat together with Dixit and Zee.

For Kai, there was comfort in seeing familiar faces from Arrakish, even as the work became stranger and more dangerous.

Dixit and Bahrat resumed an association coloured by their childhood rivalry. Bahrat still remembered the occasion when, determined to demonstrate his independence, he had ventured into the desert with just a paper knife and became lost.

Dixit had saved him.

For all their differences, there was a bond between them that science could neither explain nor remove.

Zee, meanwhile, had grown into a man whose appearance and ambitions suggested considerable self-confidence. The boy who had once doubted Extracsa's promises increasingly appeared to embrace its corporate philosophy.

Kai's own past was considerably darker.

During a psychological assessment, she recalled falling into a pit trap, unable to escape, and losing a third of her body weight before finally receiving medical treatment. Her recovery had been agonisingly slow. She had needed to learn to walk again.

She did not know who had been responsible.

The experience had left scars that no amount of professional achievement could entirely conceal.

And when the assessments turned to hypothetical murder, the answers were no more reassuring.

Bahrat identified Kai as the colleague he would gladly kill, given the opportunity or order.

Kai, asked how she would murder a teammate, selected medical drugs.

Whether the answers reflected genuine hostility, dark humour or the effects of repeated psychological interrogation was hard to determine.

They were, after all, childhood friends, but also work colleagues in a brutal and unforgiving corporate environment.

Every Sunrise

The fourth assignment, Every Sunrise, brought Kai, Bahrat, Dixit and Zee together once more.

By now, the children of Arrakish had become experienced employees of Extracsa - even Associates, although experience had not necessarily brought wisdom, happiness or even a clearer understanding of their employer.

Dixit still remembered the unbearable dryness of their home world. The sensation of leaving the habitat and feeling his skin shrivel in the relentless dry heat and wind and this had never quite deserted him. As a child, he had wanted books and modern computers, luxuries that Arrakish rarely provided in sufficient quantities. Now he worked among the technological marvels of an interstellar civilisation.

Zee had undergone an equally remarkable transformation. The suspicious boy who had once warned Marik that Extracsa might be concealing something had become a man who imagined his perfect day as one spent earning the recognition of his peers, followed by fine wine with senior executives.

Bahrat's ambitions were more solitary.

Asked what his life would look like if he possessed everything he wanted, he imagined an existence devoted entirely to his mathematical problems, including the behaviour of his miniature sand dune. He acknowledged that such a life might be rather dull, but considered the prospect close to perfection.

Dixit might have found this amusing. Years earlier, he had rescued Bahrat from the Arrakish desert after the young physicist attempted to survive using nothing more than a paper knife and some poorly remembered botanical reality TV instructions. Despite their rivalry, they had remained friends, and there was comfort in having someone aboard who remembered those ridiculous childhood adventures.

Kai's dreams were different.

When asked what she would do if she never needed to work again, she imagined visiting a planet with trees, grass and a proper horizon. She wanted to make friends - Theresa maybe? Then run through wheat fields and have a picnic beneath a warm sun. She wanted to stay awake as late as she pleased.

There was no mention of promotion, wealth or Extracsa.

For someone who had grown up on a desert planet, endured terrible physical suffering and already lost one childhood companion, it was an extraordinarily modest ambition.

Just an afternoon beneath gentle twin suns.

Perhaps it was the sort of afternoon she and Marik might once have imagined together, back when they had wondered whether swimming in water would cause them to dissolve.

But Marik had been dead for years.

And the others were still alive.

For the moment.

Every Sunset

The fifth assignment, Every Sunset, brought Klee back into the company of Kai, Bahrat and Dixit as Zee was promoted to some secret project.

Klee had missed the previous two assignments, and much had happened in his absence. The others had accumulated experiences, injuries and memories that were difficult to communicate to someone who had not shared them.

Yet some things remained reassuringly familiar.

Bahrat was still absorbed by his scientific theories. Dixit remained ambitious, enthusiastic about Extracsa's potential and apparently quite prepared to contemplate a universe in which every civilisation possessed a corporate franchise. Bliss!

Klee, meanwhile, continued to contemplate retirement.

He had endured docked pay on a previous mission and felt the corporation could be considerably more responsive to employee grievances. Even though he remained committed to the notion that the pension was the prize, the resolution of his pay being docked almost consumed him.

It was a wonderfully obsessive but modest ambition beside Dixit's dreams of limitless corporate expansion.

The psychological assessments continued, asking increasingly uncomfortable questions.

Would Klee consider killing someone in war to be murder? He was uncertain. The circumstances mattered, as did the identity of the victim. The possibility of an Extracsa senior executive seeing or hearing his answer, complicated his response considerably.

Kai was more decisive. Asked whether she would kill someone who might kill her, she answered that she would, provided the threat was imminent and she acted in self-defence.

Bahrat was asked what disappeared when a civilisation died.

He spoke of culture, uniqueness, good food and, above all, knowledge.

It was a revealing answer from a man who had spent his life attempting to understand the universe. For Bahrat, extinction was not merely the loss of living beings. It was the destruction of everything they had learned, experienced and created.

He had spent his childhood pursuing mathematical answers while the others played among the dunes. He had constructed a tiny, monitored laboratory around a jar of Arrakish sand and dreamed of a life in which he might devote himself entirely to solving scientific mysteries.

Sadly, at the end of Every Sunset, Bahrat died.

The precise circumstances are not preserved in the surviving account, but the outcome was unmistakable.

Another child of Arrakish was gone.

For Klee, there was the loss of someone who had once admired his ability to remain calm. Perhaps he recalled their childhood conversation about sand angels and the futility of calculating how sand moved.

For Dixit, there was an older memory.

A small boy wandering into the desert, determined to prove that he could survive alone. The unsuccessful search for edible plants. The rescue party Dixit had assembled. The immense relief of bringing Bahrat home.

On Arrakish, Dixit had saved him.

This time he had not.

And Kai, who had served on every Extracsa assignment, was once again confronted by the death of someone she had known since childhood.

First Marik. Now Bahrat.

She had become a medical officer to help people, to save people, and she had helped everyone on her missions in some fashion. There was an immediate, tangible value to her work.

But medicine did not guarantee survival.

The company would continue. The survivors would be assigned elsewhere. The psychological assessments would resume.

Bahrat's equations would remain unfinished.

Somewhere, perhaps, his jar of sand still turned slowly upon its stand, the camera recording its movements for an observer who would never return. Never solve the mystery.

The Invisible Hand

The sixth assignment, The Invisible Hand, brought together Kai, Klee, Dixit and Zee.

And Marik.

The same Marik who had died on Extraction.

The same tall, awkward boy from Arrakish who had believed that nothing in space could frighten him.

The same childhood friend whose photograph Kai had carried through years of employment and whose death Klee had accepted as an irreversible fact.

Marik was alive again.

The records offer no explanation.

For Kai, who had served continuously since the first assignment, the reunion must have been extraordinary. She had lost Marik, survived dangers of her own, watched Bahrat die and continued working in the company that had taken her so far from home.

Now the friend she had mourned stood before her.

For Klee, there was the equally impossible sight of his childhood rival returned from the dead.

Zee had known Marik as a child but had never served alongside him. Dixit, too, remembered him from Arrakish rather than from that disastrous first assignment.

For them, the surprise was different: the return of someone whose life they had understood to have ended long ago.

Their reunion stirred memories of Arrakish, of childhood afternoons spent beneath the twin suns, imagining the strange creatures that inhabit their world and those beyond it. Kai had once spoken of escalopes, great horned beasts that supposedly roamed in flocks beyond the dunes, although her grasp of their whereabouts was somewhat vague.

She and Dixit also talked about the small water snakes, the mystical cornichons that could be spotted crawling into the sand as the sun rose in the morning. Perhaps, they reasoned, larger versions of these creatures might even inhabit space, swallowing planets whole.

Dixit then declared that he would never sleep again. Such fears seemed almost quaint now, after years in Extracsa's service, although the universe had proved considerably stranger than anything they had imagined as children.

And what of Marik himself?

Did he remember dying? Had he experienced anything during his absence? Was he the same person who had departed on Extraction?

The psychological assessments offer one tantalising detail.

When asked whether Extracsa could be a force for good, Marik dismissed the question.

Extracsa was already a force for good.

Death had apparently done nothing to diminish his corporate loyalty. Surely the stellar employee every corporation wishes for!

Zee's own assessment was similarly complimentary. He praised Extracsa's culture, its consistency and its transparency, although he acknowledged that the last quality could occasionally be excessive. Maybe certain things were best left unsaid or unseen.

Kai was less concerned with the company's virtues. As medical officer, she saw her contribution in the immediate, tangible assistance she provided to her colleagues.

Dixit wanted to expand the corporation still further. More Extracsa. Bigger Extracsa. Maybe Better (if possible and no offence intended to Extracsa senior management) Extracsa.

Klee wanted better treatment for employees, and eventually his pension. But most of all recompense from his docked pay during the Extraction assignment and interest on top of that. A practical dream.

And Marik, who had somehow returned from death, remained convinced that Extracsa was fundamentally benevolent.

It was a remarkable collection of attitudes, particularly among people who had already paid such a considerable price for their employment.

There was, however, one conspicuous absence.

Bahrat had not returned.

The scientist who had spent his life investigating the physical world would never have the opportunity to examine the impossible resurrection of his childhood companion.

His equations remained unanswered.

His sand continued to turn.

What remains of Arrakish?

Six childhood friends had left a dying world in search of opportunity.

Kai had served on every assignment. Klee had come and gone, enduring the corporation while keeping one eye upon retirement. Dixit had joined later and found in Extracsa an expression of his own expansive ambitions. Zee had transformed from a suspicious child into an enthusiastic corporate loyalist.

Bahrat had died.

Marik had died and returned.

Their childhood on Arrakish seemed unimaginably distant, yet each carried some fragment of it into adulthood.

A jar of sand. A photograph. A fear of water. An equation. A memory of a rescue party searching the dunes.

Extracsa had taken them across the stars, but the corporation had not erased the people they had once been.

Perhaps that was why Klee's childhood advice remained so strangely appropriate.

"Stop worrying about the flow dynamics of sand."

Lie down.

Make an angel.

On Arrakish, beneath the relentless light of two suns, that had once been enough.

And perhaps, after everything, it might be enough again.

But there was one problem. What had happened to Arrakish?