The time had come to gather a crew. Dogstar arranged for me to meet the infamous Hugo Salvia. He thinks Hugo is indispensible to our crew. I found him in a rundown hotel room in La Paz, staring into an odd corner of the room. He didn't turn to face me when I entered the room.
Turns out he's undead too, a zombie. "I died in some kind of bizarre tattooing-shamanic ritual that involved ink and implants. It was like the death of a thousand cuts. Are you familiar with that form of torture?"
"That's what you get for living out on the bleeding edge." I felt a little intimidated. And when I'm nervous, I get snarky.
"I control this body through remote-viewing, an alternate consciousness. It's always 3 am where I'm at."
"Sounds like a bad case of dark night of the soul. I guess there's no there there."
He's also got really bad gas from chewing on all this different vegetation that he keeps in various pouches on his body. It allows him to project his POV all over the place. "If there are catalytic reactions, I can go," he said in his creepy mutter. I couldn't get a good angle on him, so I sat down at a table covered in food scraps. So he still had to eat something.
"There's some crazy catalytic reactions in this room," I said. We mummies are very sensitive to badly prepared corpses. We prefer those prepared with resins, spices and unguents. "So you can't head out into a vacuum, like deep space?"
"There is no true vacuum. I can attest to that. It helps to have a piece of something. It gives me some ions to sniff. Otherwise, I am searching as if through Markov chains and that can take forever. No references."
"I'm going to have to stop leaving bandages around," I said, looking around the room.