Picking up in the sadly interrupted due to time constraints last episode, we rejoin our morally ambiguous crew in the middle of a fight in the vault on Bakunin. I’m reordering some of the events here just to make it a bit more cohesive, but the first scene plays out just outside of Pelc Securities with a Haqq woman, a fixer by the name of Izzi. She’s watching as a full on riot has started to break out, outside the security office and she steps inside to talk to her boss, the Chief Executive of noodles (not his actual title). As she walks in she sees that the reception area is covered in blood. Something is terribly amiss, so she sprints for the elevator and confirms with her dronbot, a little rooster looking bot by the name of Muraquib that they have all the authorization passcodes necessary.
As the elevator dings open and she enters the chaotic vault she watches as Kirk Lazarus, after taking a massive massive hit from the Uberfallkommando combat rolls away and slips up to the nearest chimaera, putting a finger to the goat creatures lips and shushing him, he shanks the goat, and follows it to the ground keeping a finger to its lips to stay quiet. Izzi then walks in, nods to Senor Massacre and gives him a slap on the butt, and starts cursing out the wounded chimaera, an adorable little lemur fella with a psywar attack! The chimaera’s stunned (mostly because it does not speak Turkish, even a little bit), but with the lemurm’n distracted, shadow leaps into action and slashes into the uberfallkommando with his Teseum Chopper in an upward stroke that bisects her. At this the lemur chimaera is all sorts of done and she leaps out of the way and up the elevator shaft to some form of possible safety from these monsters.
I’ll admit here, I totally forgot that the uberfallkommando is a nemesis and should have more wounds, but cinematically it was pretty great, so I’m happy with it.
Status report: Wislaw is very dead. He was set upon by the two Chimaera that executive noodles ordered into the fray. Sayid is still TO Camo looting, so I assume that boxes just pop open and the contents disappear. Senor Massacre is bored and hurrying the team along so he can finish setting up his trap.
That’s when Executive Noodleman, sets down his box of noodles for a moment and tells the team, “Here’s the thing, I backed the wrong horse on Neoterra and got shuffled off to the backwater job three months ago. I’m getting pretty sick and tired of the corporate life, and this is the most excitement I’ve had in a long time. So… what are you guys doing later?”
Kirk responds by shouting “Surviving!” surprising no one, and Izzi chimes in that she’ll follow XO Noodles’ lead for now.
So the team continues to loot the vault gaining some assets and things to keep their ship going and pay general stuff as well as cracking two boxes in particular, one with Combined Army equipment a stealth repeater and a Morat Scimitar. The other box contained a modhand and a light flamethrower (these are mafioso safe deposit boxes after all). They also retrieve a small device for Kotsya per a private message he got in a previous mission. While they’re looting Izzi is busy on her comms buying them time before this building gets investigated (which was a good idea because I had some plans).
Once they’ve removed everything they can find of value (and their time is running out for using this riot as a distraction) they move back up to the upper floor and as they look out and the roiling mob of people outside the Pelc Security office they watch one of the rioters gets shot square in the chest by a rubber shotgun round, and a team of RiotGRRLs is approaching to quell the mob as violently as possible.
Shadow pops smoke in front of the entrance to cover their escape. Izzi manages to find a service elevator right near the building entrance. She then proceeds outside looking haggard and persuades the RiotGRRLs not to fire! Wislaw Securities has been assaulted, and people died in there! HELP! The RiotGRRLs are distracted long enough for most of the team to escape to the service elevator, but Tkazi’s just barely spotted, but the RiotGRRLs shotgun misses and he escapes. Izzi fades into the chaos and meets up with the team onboard the ship.
Arriving at the ship Executive Noodles walks aboard with a huge supply of luggage and immediately commandeers the nicest cabin, which still isn’t that nice, but he wants to rough it just like these other hooligans. Izzi arrives with him carrying a small bag while her roosterbot struggles to carry the rest of her luggage. Meanwhile the crew gets back to doing what they do best, specifically Kirk, who in a previous encounter had lost all fear of fire, begins building a fire in the cargo bay… and dancing around it. Shadow, being from Ariadna, thinks nothing of it and begins roasting some meat. The crew then holds an intervention to get Kirk some psychological help and everyone else gets medical attention. The system for healing in this game is pretty complicated, and while lingering injuries are interesting mechanically and thematically they don’t really match our games theme, so we just heal the party up and deduct some assets from their haul for it.
The crew then gets all their introductions with Izzi and Noodles out of the way and look through their current missions! Right now on their docket:
-Helping Tugg Speedman on Svalarheima salvage some equipment from an abandoned research lab
-Head to Bourak to fix a political appointment
-Return to Paradiso to transport cargo to the Human Edge System
The crew decides it’s time to head to Svalarheima, they are in system after all, so it’s a short run out to the planet from Bakunin. Tugg Speedman gets them geared up with ropes and equipment, etc and they head to Ægir. This passage from the Infinity RPG Core book is really the inspiration for this mission:
“Ægir was once a major Solokovian port. During the NeoColonial Wars it was struck by a terrible fire which essentially destroyed the entire city. The inferno spread so quickly that many of the city’s subterranean arcologies were completely cut off from the surface. Most of those were simply sealed and left as charnel houses.”
So they arrive at the port and Izzi gets some intel from another local scrapper, specifically to be cautious of active security systems, and worse yet Trollhatten Trolls have been seen in the area. A vicious brute of monster, the Trolls seem semi intelligent, but extremely aggressive.
Their briefing from Speedman:
“Your best point of entry is through the ventilation duct above Arcology six. It’s a long fall, so you’ll need climbing gear to get in. Once you make it down the 240 feet to the street level we’re not sure what you’ll find. This Arcology has been abandoned for decades, but some of the defense systems may still be active. Make your way to Block L34. Should only be a few blocks away from the drop point. You’re looking for the Espeseth Labs building 12th floor.”
The crew on arriving at Arcology Six’s maintance hatch sees Shadow with climbing plus immediately just hop down and start crawling around. Izzi and Tkazi set up a winch platform then start the descent. As they’re descending, Shadow and Kirk make it down easily, but Izzi slips, fortunately Tkazi manages to catch her fall, and the team is on the ground. They secure the lines for later.
“As you descend into a burned out husk of a city the true size of the catastrophe becomes all too clear. The floors are riddled with bones, dust, and ash. There must have been hundreds or perhaps a thousand or two living in this particular arcology. As you come to a landing on the central floor of the chamber your boots crunch into a thick layer of bonedust and debris that coats the floor.”
Here they take a look around and notice a few things, first there’s some tracks through the dust, definitely some human tracks and then something Kirk identifies as definitely alien. He couldn’t tell the species, but their non human and walking upright. They also notice some troll activity, clearly fresh as theirs gnawed bones and other things displaced in the area.
Shadow takes the lead heading through the city towards their destination. He manages to remain hidden, but stumbles onto three trolls! After some slick stealth rolls by the team they evade the trolls and continue on their route. Losing a bit of time rerouting, but not picking a fight.
Shadow arrives at the building first, a 15 storey building with a large open glass lobby. The building was constructed to appear as though it was carved from the walls of the cave arcology, but it is artificial. A holographic sign in front continuously flickers getting halfway through its title before shorting. On approach shadow spots an autoturret. After some comms discussion where they put together different plans, Shadow gets impatient and slips from cover to cover up and behind the turret. He clicks the off button and then at Izzi’s suggestion pulls the battery. Once they get closer Tkazi notices that the turret has an MSV2… and it appears to have some Tohaa tech grafted to it!
Everything inside the building appears to be functional and powered. The team begins ascending the stairs. There are two stairwells, and they begin moving up the left hand one cautiously. Their destination is at floor 12 and from the schematics there’s a security checkpoint at floor 9. As they reach floor 6 though the team finds a camera. Izzi manages to hack the camera to shut it down. From here the team splits up. Izzi and Executive Noodles (who has thoroughly had enough of this dust, thank you) head back down to floor 5 and find an office with a terminal to hole up in. Izzi starts checking through any public files on the terminal to make sure they don’t blow their cover.
Shadow, Kirk, and Tkazi continue ascending until they reach floor 8 when a stealthy hacker manages to crack their communications and starts asking just exactly their doing here! The mysterious voice warns them that they’ve secured floor 9 and not to come closer. They state that maybe there’s a way for the two teams to help each other. They’re after stuff on floor 15, but there’s an additional security station here that’s not on the records (floor 11). After discussion back and forth Izzi’s bot and Tkazi head upstairs to bring the salvage equipment, cutting torches, prybars, etc. up to meet the mysterious new group.
Meanwhile Izzi continues talking to the group, negotiating, and also trying to keep them distracted, because on floor 8 Kirk and Shadow exit the building and start climbing up the side!
Tkazi hits floor 9 and as promised this floor is filled with traps. The security station requires people to exit the stairwell and pass two autoturrets, adhesive mines, and finally at the doors to the next stairwell some claymore mines. Whoever this new group is, they do not want any one (or any trolls) raining on their parade. Outside Kirk and Shadow ascend, but bad news… past floor 9 there are no more windows. There are however some ventilation opennings up on floor 14, so they keep going to find those.
Tkazi arrives at floor 11 with the salvage tools, and at the door meets James Donally. He’s the mysterious voice, and he ushers Tkazi in to meet with the rest of his group. There’s a human woman, Adela Green, and then 7 Tohaa. 5 of the Tohaa look fairly generic, but there’s also one that looks in charge, a female named Taros Alai, and a heavily armored one Urail Koltor. The team continues to reassure them and a few of the Tohaa break off to continue working on the next security station.
Shadow and Kirk have managed to infiltrate the building, but they hear something as they climb through the ventillation shafts. It sounds like a dronebot! As they look down from one of the vents they see tiny patches of carpet warn completely away by a bot following exactly the same path for the last few years. As that bot clicks its way into view they see it’s a Mulebot with a CombiRifle! On its next pass Shadow jumps down in it! The poor Mulebot doesn’t quite notice and continues on its course, registering that its actuators may be malfunctioning.
And with that… Shadow lops its poor mechanized body in two with his massive Teseum Chopper… poor dronbot.
After that we had to end for the night as it was getting late. Good game! We got through a lot farther than I thought. Status of floors is below… mostly so I remember!
Floor 1 turret
Floor 5 izzi and noodles
Floor 6 camera
Floor 8 Shadow/Kirk exit
Floor 9 BUNCHOTRAPS! Autoturret, adhessive mines, and a pair of claymores
Floor 11 second security station with Tohaa and Tkazi
Floor 12 team objective
Floor 14 ventilation ports; shadow and kirk
Floor 15 Tohaa objective
It Rhymes with Hockey 