Characters:
"Fatbox" (John M) - demo/EOD
"Hillbilly" (me) - medical specialist
"Love Handles" (Vic L) - demo/EOD
"Princess" (Andy D) - cryptographer/sniper
"Short Bus" (Mike D) - computer programmer
Present but NPC'ed:
"Momma's Boy" (Tom P) - computer programmer
In reserve:
"Caveman" (Jon L) - demo/EOD
"Barbie" (Mike H) - demo/EOD (MIA)
The player of "Momma's Boy" couldn't make it today, so he stayedwith the Triumvirate's folks to help Boomtown deal with the sudden change in leadership. Love Handles was suffering from the Holk's deadly plant blast. Hillbilly treated him with some of the anti-rad pens and healing injectors we had, but it didn't help. He had a fever and was tired much of the time. We decided he's mutating, we can't stop it, and that we should start calling him The Love Holk.
Pretty much from there we headed right out to the Fountain, the nuclear reactor. Love Handles had learned some programming from Short Bus, and handled the operation manual for it. Princess carried the tablet computer with the Fountain's guard robot's access application. It was pretty routine. We approached the Fountain. The walker robot guard approached us. We used the tablet to tell it we belonged there, and it let us by.
The reactor wasn't accessible without an eye scan from a pure-strain human. Luckily, we still have three of them. Princess got scanned and we went in. We chatted with a welcome-droid, passed a rusted-out security bot, "signed in" to make the welcome droid happy, and checked the place out. We found some snack machines. Fatbox went to smash it but Hillbilly stopped him and used a silver card with two gold bands/stripes from Amy the Triumvir. We selected A4 (Love Handles shouted he wanted that one) and got him some old snack food.
Basically, from there, we explored the nuclear plant. It was in standby mode. It was really hot, with lots of dust and particles in the air. So we put on gas masks and stewed. We had cards that fit some of the doors, and the labels helped us identify the colors and types of our cards. We used them to access others, find more cards, etc. We found some oddities - like a double-barreled shotgun with dragon's breath rounds set as a trap in a looted hospital, a dead security guard, and some guard bots in various states of disrepair.
Here is the flow chart of the Fountain:
We found quite a lot. We searched security first, finding the dead guard. Hillbilly swiped his badge (grey with two blue bands), and Love Handles found a hidden second one (red with three green bands). We also took his flechette pistol, some pills he had (they'd turn out to be anti-rad pills with serious side effects), and his clipboard. On it was a note complaining that he was tired of resetting passwords and from now on, people had hints. We had two:
#1 was for a Doctor Abandonatto, saying her safe was set to the year "Your Galen's empire fell." Er, maybe Rome? 476 or 1453.
#2 was for the Power Center crew, called them "Trek War nerds and word geek losers" and it simply said:
AE2HN2OPRS4T2U
and a note about it not being the chemical sign for Trilithium Crystals.
(I'll let readers figure it out for themselves)
We scanned the plant with the security cams (Hillbilly didn't bother to look, he was busy nosing around at the notes.)
The we split up. Love Handles took a nap in the Security Office while Short Bus handled the computers. He turned on the intercom. He also disabled security bots as we went, overrode doors to open them up if we lacked a card, and so on. Princess, Hillbilly, and Fatbox explored.
We tried the hospital but couldn't get in, and disabled the door by swiping the wrong cards too often. Oh well. So we headed to the environmental control area and turned on the A/C and filters. We looted some gas masks and a fire extinguisher (Hillbilly ripped the doors off the lockers that held them.)
From there we combed the place. We found the vehicle bay and its contents (seven spider-crawler-carriers, two power-dozers, a self-driving UPS-style truck, and some golf carts that we joked couldn't turn in the hallways), a droid bay with two active and 70-odd semi-intact droids (Fatbox ordered the two Mark V general purpose to follow us), and some active security bots with flechette mini guns and lasers and a claw-hand that can reshape into other forms. Neat. Short Bus turned them off as we approached.
In the robotics bay we found some more security bots and some all-purpose mini bots. Short Bus tried to work on the bots but accidentally sent a fizzing, spinning, smoking bot battery into himself and Fatbox. Fatbox dove for cover but Short Bus took some radiation and burns before it fizzed out. Hillbilly worked on him (last grey stick, 1/3 of a red stick). We couldn't get any of the sec-bots except one to follow us - well, two, but one had disabled legs so we eventually set him up to guard the front door.
Once we puzzled out the puzzle, we opened up the main areas for the plant. It took 12 hours, but we powered up the plant enough to charge the battery packs we needed. Also, we got schematics of the feeds out from the plant for the power generated. We also slept in shifts over the next day while we got things together. Short Bus, at Hillbilly's suggestion, set up a super-user or admin account (I can't remember what he was able to access) with a password for us, just in case, and not to share it.
We eventually found the safe in the hospital - Princess's Per 18 or whatever helped. We found some pills and another swipe card. We now have six of varying levels.
We eventually left, using a Power-dozer to load up the truck and hooked-together spider-bots to carry three powered batteries for warbot. We headed back to Boomtown, followed by some robots, a train of vehicles, etc. We awed them completely.
Basically from there we just did housekeeping. We rested, talked to Amy, Love Handles had his truck painted by some talented locals, etc.
We spent a five-day round trip taking Amy to the Ziggurat and getting her eyes fixed, then brought her to The Fountain to get her introduced to the security bots as a welcome party, etc. We set up the sheriffs in town as security, told them to organize a militia, and took over the barge from Velveteen. We used the barge to bring three batteries and a power-dozer out to the lake to Warbot, load her up, and then set it adrift and left.
As soon as we got Warbot powered back up, Hillbilly, "Hey, Softie, how high can you fly?"
"Hold onto your seats," said Softie, and we slammed down into them with lots of Gs.
She pulled us up to a sub-orbital height and showed up the ground below. THIS was the prop that held up game:
Fatbox points out Boomtown on the map.
Here is our area map, showing the outline of Softie's allowable area:
And yes, she can fly up a narrow channel to Ottawa. Interesting. We have theories.
And here is a close-up of our area, labeled with places you might recognize from past summaries.
After was just disordered housekeeping. We stopped by Crow and gave him some laundry detergent we'd found (he was delighted, and poured it into glassed to look through). We stopped by 12.7 Mike Mike and gave him our two Mark V bots and empty shell casings. We went back to Bal'Cree and checked in on things.
Someone (I think our GM) suggested we solve our language issues. Learn the local tongue? Hillbilly instantly said, "No, we teach them English." Everyone laughed. But Hillbilly has a point - what happens when we all learn the local lingo and then release 4-5K 20th Homeland troops who only speak 21st century English as a common language? Teach all of them Kazooistani or Bal'Creenese? Yes, but they'll do better if they come out to people used to English and then learn the local lingo on top of that. We put the 20th Homelanders who stayed in Bal'Kree in charge of teaching the locals English, with the help of Mark VIII and Severin.
We also started our plans for the future. I'll share them in a future post. But we've got a fully powered Warbot. Her black ray gun batteries were removed for legal reasons, she's out of torc grenades for her launchers and mini-missiles for her mini pods, but she's got batteries of lasers and blasters and decades of power (and we've got a spare half-tank of gas, heh.) She'll be a very useful asset. It's just a question of setting up the campaign's parameters so we adventure, not play civ-building logistics.
Notes:
This session was not an action-oriented session. It was really just solving some puzzles, organizing resources, making some rolls, and dealing with Boomtown's final status. It was still fun, and there were plenty of times we broke down in hilarity over comments, in-game silliness, and combinations of both.
For example, possible names for our area:
Kazooistan
The Knights of Impurity
The Knights of Kazooistan (the middle ground)
That map is pretty awesome. andi, who is a certifiable Gamma World nut, made that by hand.
The flow chart was great, too. Much better than a map, and we learned a pile of useful things from the codes on it.
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