Category: Uncharted Worlds: Actual Play

#RustbucketTales   #Part8  

Some interesting backstory from this session, not to mention a lovely example of different character agendas making a mess for each other…

Previously on Uncharted Worlds…

…Kestrel talks to a new passenger, Matha Dowe, in a bar. She’s a turncoat from the Shards of Xa; “I need to get outsystem. My former crewmates won’t be too happy to see me”. Later, Orcha checks out her identity and discovers that she is a bounty hunter…

…Anvil tries to find out what’s wrong with his hand scanner and connects it to the test system. A massive amount of data downloads, then a message pops up: “Hello. My name is Sai.”

….Orcha centres Reverend Klune’s head in his scope and squeezes the trigger. It explodes like a ripe melon and Klune falls to the floor. He looks up to see people pointing in his direction and yelling…

…Fleet Captain Rutland tells Kestrel “you were supposed to recover the ship quietly, not cause a diplomatic incident”

…Sai’s screen says “I am not registered”. Anvil says “Hmmm. I can probably fix that….”

…Kestrel shakes hands with an Ironclad supply clerk in front of a crate of guns.

…Orcha-17 tells Orcha-37 “You’re going to have to make it right. You’re going to have to find me another Greenworlder. Let me know when you’ve got someone”

…Anvil pushes the (full) tiger cage across the landing pad towards a warehouse guarded by armed men.

After their adventure with the tiger, the crew of the Rustbucket decide to do some nice, safe trading for a while. Having traded some dustspice for vegetables on the garden world of Qahwah, they set course for Jagatika, the next major world down the line. On the pleasant journey the crew bonds. Anvil starts treating Dev with some respect, on the grounds that she’s started doing her job properly (meanwhile, she’s established that he has absolutely no romantic interest in her). Orcha bonds with Anvil by showing an interest in the ship’s engineering quirks – which are many. Rustbucket, it turns out, is a converted stealth gunboat – the port and starboard cargo bays would normally hold missiles, there’s a forward weapons assembly which is just empty (well, technically its smuggling compartments). But careful checks of the serial numbers of major components shows that they belong to several different vessels – mostly from the same class, but all marked as no longer in use, stricken, or mothballed. And that, plus a few probing questions and the chance discovery of a cancelled bounty on Kestrel reveals the truth: Kestrel was discharged from Ironclad for stealing. Shipments went missing, even a few ships. Vessels and parts that were meant to be mothballed were redirected – including the Rustbucket. No wonder Kestrel was so nervous about working for Ironclad: she’s flying their stolen property right under their noses.

Jagatika: the most populated world in the cluster, a crowded, filthy pit full of people desperate to get out. The city is stratified, literally ruled over by the wealthy who live in the uppermost levels of the tallest towers. Living conditions, services and infrastructure get worse the lower down you go, and the police rule over everything with an iron shock-baton, afraid the slightest spark could lead to food riots or worse. Most people spend their entire lives indoors, and never see the sky.

Rustbucket touches down at a vast spaceport atop a huge arcology. Through the rain, they can barely make out the shape of others surrounding it, and as they came in to land they could see them as far as the eye could see. Unusually, Kestrel leaves the customs clearance to the others, skips her customary post-landing bar-crawl / buyer hunt, and catches a rapid transit from the starport to the heart of the city. Once there, she switches to transit elevator to Deck 50, then (after the police check her invitation) a far smaller elevator to the upper levels. Eventually, she winds up at the imposing door of a private apartment in the high 60’s, where a snooty butler (who looks down his nose at her stained and utilitarian shipsuit) shows her in to the living room of her brother, Peregrine.

Peregrine has a lot of space, and a view, huge towers glistening in the sun, with private flyers flitting between them. The lower city is shrouded by the ever-present cloud deck – out of sight, and out of mind. Perry was always a social climber, and he’s come a long way from Deck 31 where they grew up – thanks mostly to his wife. Kestrel thinks he probably wants to lecture her about dragging the “family name” through the mud, and the conversation starts out that way, with Perry needling her about her failed naval career. “Mother would have been so proud of you if you’d been an admiral”. But it turns out Peregrine needs her: he has a family problem, his wife’s niece, Phoebe, who has taken up with the wrong sort of man and is living somewhere in the 20’s. Peregrine wants her hustled offworld, “somewhere nice, like Qahwah or Lyca”. And he makes it clear that he can and will make trouble for Kestrel if she refuses. Naturally, there’ll be compensation if she accepts: ten thousand credits should cover it. After making sure there are no tigers involved – she charges extra for them now – Kestrel makes a show of reluctantly accepting the offer, a plan already forming.

Meanwhile, Anvil has grown concerned about his survivability (synths being hard to treat) and has decided to look for a stock of “spare parts”, a few backup organs in case of a shooting. He’s got a lead on a chopshop owner down on city bottom who is rumoured to deal in synth parts, but thinks he needs help finding them. Orcha offers to help – he worked here for a year as an enforcer to Bryanna Steiger, “the sculptress”, a major underworld figure. And she owes him a favour after that last job. So they head off to her workshop in the mid-decks to look her up.

Orcha’s password is old, but still good; he and Anvil are shown through the workshop and into the back office where Steiger and her lieutenants run the operation. Steiger seems pleased to see Orcha, and after a little reminiscing, they get down to business. Yes, she knows this chop-shop – its owner, Cornell, is a problem for her. He doesn’t make the appropriate payments, doesn’t have a sense of loyalty. She can get one of her people to show them how to get there, but she wants Orcha to remind Cornell of who he should be paying tribute to. That out of the way, Orcha makes his real request: he needs to find a Greenworlder priest. Steiger doesn’t even ask why, but promises that if there’s one on-world, she’ll find them. On the way out, one of Steiger’s bodyguards hands Orcha a concealed stun pistol in case he needs it – Jagatikans don’t like to kill people – and introduces him to Fay, a hard-looking street soldier who’ll be acting as their guide.

Meanwhile, Kestrel has skimmed the file Peregrine’s PI’s had dug up on cousin Phoebe. She’s running a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on Deck 22, living with Lynard, her business partner, in a capsule apartment. After meeting Dev in an actual sit-down bar, they navigate the crowds to the coffee alcove. There, she gives Phoebe her comm number and convinces her to call her when she gets off-shift, then hangs around with Dev and waits. Dev isn’t used to this – she doesn’t know how to move with the crowd, doesn’t pitch her voice to be heard above the ever-present background noise, and almost commits the ultimate faux-pas of throwing her (disgusting) low-deck “coffee” down a recyc chute rather than handing it to someone who needs it. But Kestrel avoids any major incidents.

A few hours later, after a quick comm-call, they meet Phoebe and Lynard in a “park” – more a wider corridor, where the crowds mill around an abstract sculpture. Kestrel gives them the low-down: Peregrine doesn’t approve of their relationship, and is offering her Cr8,000 to get Phoebe offworld. When Lynard protests, she mentions the actual plan: she splits the money with them and they both go. Everyone’s a winner: Kestrel gets to piss off her brother, Phoebe and Lynard get an offworld holiday, and they all get paid. They’re initially reluctant, worried about losing their business and the lease on their capsule, but Kestrel talks them round by pointing out that they don’t need to come back and could use the money to start elsewhere, somewhere nice. Maybe a farm? And that sells it. Of course, they’ll need to sneak Lynard onto the Rustbucket under a false name, but Kestrel can slip someone a few credits to falsify the records, and Perry won’t know he’s been had until its too late. Phoebe agrees, and Kestrel and Dev head back to the starport to make the arrangements.

Orcha and Anvil catch the rapid transit over a few sectors, then take a series of transit elevators down to the industrial decks, and then a succession of service elevators and maintenance stairwells to the recycling centres on city bottom. There are crowds even here, but now they’re the homeless and destitute, living in the public corridors and scrounging for paste. Down at the bottom, Fay leads them to a nondescript maglocked door – the chop-shop.

Anvil’s negotiations go badly – Cornell names an outrageous price for a “backup chassis”, more than Anvil can really afford even after the Nerian job. Anvil asks whether he could pay for some of it in medical tech, then steps outside and calls Sai on the ship. He has the idea of getting Sai to check whether there’s anything in the junkyards he can repair. After a few seconds and a horrific amount of bandwidth, Sai announces that there are six medical suspension pods available which could be refurbished, that she has already correlated a list of the required parts with what is available in local recyc centres, and that delivery of all components can be arranged to the ship. Would Anvil like her to place the orders? After saying “yes”, Anvil steps back inside and seals the deal: it’ll still cost him a lot of his money, but now he gets to spend three days fixing junk rather than being wiped out. He leaves Orcha to deliver his message and steps outside, his head already full of rebuild pathways. Orcha refuses Fay’s offer of assistance and sends him to wait outside as well, the door’s heavy maglocks making a solid “clunk” behind them.

Alone with Cornell, Orcha delivers Steiger’s demand to pay up, but sees that Cornell won’t buy it unless he demonstrates that he’s serious. So, he slips his knife out, prepared to take off a finger. And that’s when it all goes wrong: Cornell is faster than he looks, dodges Orcha’s grasp, and whips out a stunner. When Orcha tries to take it off him, Cornell doesn’t hesitate to use it. Hearing the sound of stunner fire from inside, Anvil and Fay suddenly realise they’re locked out. But all they can do is beat helplessly against the door.

Inside, Cornell starts dragging the partially paralysed Orcha towards the back room workspace, taking about sending a message of his own, maybe an eye. But he makes the mistake of putting Orcha down while he deals with a retinal locked door – Orcha drags his own stunner out of his pocket, lines it up, and shoots Cornell in the back, then a second time at close range in the back of the head just to make sure he stays out. It takes an age for him to crawl his way through the shop to the door, only to find the maglock has a fingerprint scanner on it. Well, he did need to send a message, and he still has the knife…

#RustbucketTales   #Part7  

You don’t “repossess” a psychotic planetary dictator’s ship, kidnap his daughter and steal his pet tiger without consequences. Amazingly, they managed to talk their way out of them.

Previously on Uncharted Worlds…

…Kestrel talks to a new passenger, Matha Dowe, in a bar. She’s a turncoat from the Shards of Xa; “I need to get outsystem. My former crewmates won’t be too happy to see me”. Later, Orcha checks out her identity and discovers that she is a bounty hunter…

…Anvil tries to find out what’s wrong with his hand scanner and connects it to the test system. A massive amount of data downloads, then a message pops up: “Hello. My name is Sai.”

…Fleet Captain Rutland tells Kestrel “you were supposed to recover the ship quietly, not cause a diplomatic incident”.

…Orcha hits (naked) Sigfried with his stunstick as he goes for a weapon, then stuns Brigette for good measure…

…The Fenris lifts off and boosts for orbit, under fire from a Nerian guntruck…

…Orcha and Anvil stare at the green-striped hunting tiger in the diamante collar, pacing back and forth. Voiceover: “Grendel hasn’t eaten a Minister in six months”…

…Dev asks Orcha: “So its more important that you beat your brother.. sibling… whatever you are, than not kill someone?”; After a pause, Orcha says “yes”…

…Orcha tries to stun the apparently dozing, escaped tiger. It swipes him with a claw, breaking his leg and knocking him down. Then it pins him, savaging his helmet while he stabs it repeatedly with the stunstick…

…An Ironclad Lieutenant backed by a half dozen marines takes Brigette and Sigfried into custody, promising that they will be taken to the Nerian embassy. On the way to the docking tube, she warns Kestrel: “my father has a long reach”.

After docking the Rustbucket at Lyca Highport, Orcha takes a call from his rival clone-sib, Orcha-17, who is insystem. 17 is pissed because he killed Reverand Klune back on Ashera rather than capturing him; unmentioned, but hanging in the air, is that the Epoch Trust wanted him alive for interrogation about certain aspects of his religious beliefs. “You’re going to have to make it right,” says 17. “You’re going to have to find me another Greenworlder. Let me know when you’ve got someone”. Cursing, Orcha heads off to get his leg seen to and to acquire meat for the tiger.

In the bazaar, after being shot full of painkillers and bone-regrowth agents and fitted for an exocrutch, Orcha buys a lamb carcass. He’s just having it packed when his comm beeps – one of his tailored alerts for the bounty hunter boards, the one for him. It seems that the Nerian Embassy has put a price of Cr 100,000 on his head, and the same on Anvil and Kestrel. Immediately afterwards his comm beeps again with an incoming call from Orcha-17. Suspecting that 17 will try and collect, Orcha immediately dumps his comm, then snags a disguise and heads back for the ship.

On the Rustbucket, Anvil has made an unwelcome discovery. Dev has completed all the set maintenance while left alone and in charge, and in the process ran a systems test against the air-gapped backup comp. Meaning that Sai, his new AI friend, is now loose in the ship’s system. Sai hasn’t caused any damage – she’s mostly been using the ship’s sensors to look at the stars – but its a potential problem, especially if anyone else finds out: AI’s are meant to be registered and safeguarded in most systems. Fortunately he knows people who can fake papers, at least for synths; he’s just started making plans on how to acquire a fake registration when Orcha calls in on a disposable comm with the bad news.

Kestrel meanwhile has gone to work, looking up an old Ironclad friend from Supply who she knows deals on the side. Its not the best trade, but she moves a unit of her low-quality dustspice for a cargo of “mislaid” Ironclad small arms and a half-ton of real meat. Her friend will cover it up the usual way – shipping error, power failure in the freezer, had to be dumped – while selling the dustspice at an outrageous markup to rec-starved Ironclad crews. Kestrel has just arranged delivery when she gets the heads-up; she has a very nervous walk back to the ship, wondering if someone will try and claim for her.

Back at the ship its a nervous wait for the cargo exchange, before a paid of cargo wranglers show up with a couple of containers of “machine parts”. While Kestrel is getting launch clearance to get the hell out of here, Anvil scans the cargo, and discovers the bomb maglocked to the inside of the container. It has a timer, rather than a remote detonator, but some crude anti-tamper units which will trigger if the maglock is interfered with. So Anvil takes to the container with a laser cutter, then tosses it out the airlock after launch.

Kestrel sets a course for a jump point while the crew argue about what to do. “We should have tossed that bint out of the airlock,” “Can we hack the bounty boards and make the notice disappear?” “If we can get hold of an Orcha, we can collect on me…” “if we’re going to be like that, why not find a bent genetic engineer and collect on all of us?” After going round in circles a few times, they come up with an idea: why not trade the tiger to make it go away? Kestrel places a call to the Nerian Embassy and asks to speak to the Ambassador…

Amazingly, it works; Ambassador Leif agrees that he will lift the bounty if they deliver Grendel on his terms. While heading for Lyca Down to make the delivery, they realise that this is only a temporary solution. The Ambassador is almost certainly acting on his own initiative, in response to information from Brigette and Sigfried; who knows what Jarl Egil will do? Orcha suggests simply removing the problem: jump back to Neria and assassinate the Jarl. Or, they could use the information gained from Sigfried and Brigette’s in-flight interrogation to try and support a coup instead. Fortunately, the upcoming landing distracts them from that. Orcha climbs outside during the landing procedure, planning to take up a sniping position on top of Rustbucket to cover the exchange, but miscalculates, busts his exocrutch and loses his sniper rifle overboard. His efforts to avoid falling off a moving starship are very visible, and Rustbucket is fined by the port authority for conducting EVA in flight in the landing zone.

On the ground, things look bad: the warehouse has a pile of armed guards, and they have a SAM team with a hullbuster in a perfect firing position. As Orcha is trying to provide cover and Kestrel is needed in case they have to dust off in a hurry, its left to Anvil to make the actual exchange. As he rolls the tiger cage down the ramp (singing to it to calm it – something which seems oddly effective), Dev says “I’m glad we’re getting rid of it”.

Its a long walk to the warehouse, under the guns of the Nerian guards. And once Anvil gets there, the Nerian military attache asks him straight out: why should he obey the Ambassador and let Anvil live, rather than take his head back to the Jarl and claim the glory for himself? Anvil offers him the data he recovered showing the conspiracy between Sigfried and the Admirals to defraud the naval budget (which led to the whole repossession in the first place). The attache wants to see it. Which means that Dev has to make the long walk under the guns with the valuable data chip. But when its delivered, the attache is satisfied; he lets them go, and the Rustbucket boosts for orbit.

In orbit, and the bounty lifted, Kestrel reluctantly reaches a conclusion: maybe they need to get Ironclad to lean on Neria, otherwise this mess is going to follow them everywhere. “We could probably spin it that Ironclad owes us, given that it was their job”. When the others agree, she puts a call through to Fleet Captain Rutland, and burns the favour she’s just earned. Ironclad will make it clear to the Jarl that the Rustbucket is under their protection, and that there is to be no retaliation against its crew. It might not get them completely off the hook – there may be “rogue elements” – but it should prevent any overt moves like bounties or piracy. Its safety assured, Rustbucket heads for a jump point and further adventures…