In Which Sacrifice Saves a Character

We've been playing our second Numenera campaign for about a year now. Numenera is a rather open-ended system that encourages the GM to reward creative play: anyone can try to do anything, and there is essentially one scale and one mechanism for doing just about any sort of task. If you're trained (or the higher-level version, Specialized), you just have an asset (or assets) toward making the roll. The scenario is an ancient world situation (think Vance's Dying Earth, but with more Steampunk-ish elements), and the current campaign is ocean-oriented. We have a ship (and more recently have also acquired a small submarine), and most of the characters have seafaring or other aquatic backgrounds.

( cut for long )