Songs sung and winging wung
SURGe was fun. Sharp was back from down South, so we were scheduled to finally finish off the Hellsing game from before Christmas - we were on the final session, but every time he tried to run it, someone was missing (a different person every time, including Sharp himself.) However, once we'd all met up, we got a text from Mike saying he wouldn't be in until that evening...
I volunteered to run Paradise instead, as Mishi was still recovering from a total loss of voice, and was still sounding a little hoarse. I'd done absolutely no preparation, had no scenario in mind, and hadn't DMed for half a year ... but what the hell, I figured, I'll just wing it and see what happens.
Sharp needed to create his character anyway, as he'd been away while the rest of us had done character creation, and while Mishi had a character from the original Paradise game (Sabin, the French thief) she needed to port him from the original mutilated Exalted Mortals system to the Cyberpunk 2020 system we were now using. While they scribbled away and debated weaponry ("So, how big a submachine gun can you fit into your cybernetic arm, and how many rounds does it hold?") I tried to come up with something that would last more than five minutes.
I settled for ripping off Deus Ex: Invisible War - at one point in Lower Seattle, there's a bar with a greasel pit (greasels being green scaly transgenic chicken-lizards with teeth and acid spit.) One of the greasel owners knows his greasel doesn't have much of a chance in a fight, but if his opponent mysteriously disappears, his greasel will win by default, and the slim odds on it winning would give him a hefty return on his bet on it.
Well, Paradise doesn't have greasels ... but it does have rats. Big, big ones. So I had the team convening at a scummy rat pit to meet a contact, finding him face-down in a pool of his own vomit, then being recruited by a dodgy fella ("he looks like he's permanently sidling, even though he's actually moving forwards... in fact, he manages to sidle and scuttle at the same time, which is quite impressive...") in order to slip a drug into the food of a certain rat.
There's just one problem: the rat in question, an up-and-coming competitor named Longtooth, is owned by a paranoid gang lieutenant. In order to discourage the players from just nuking the rat, the lieut, and everyone else within a few blocks' radius, I specified that the drugged rat needed to make it to the competition, otherwise another opponent would be substituted.
In the meantime, Sabin is working the crowd. He slices the pocket of a gangster, preparing to catch his wallet, but doesn't expect a pump shotgun to follow it, hitting the ground with a 'thunk'. Luckily (high luck roll :) ) the thunk coincides with a bass beat from the band in the corner, and the overweight, bald but still very threatening-looking gangster doesn't notice. After a moment of panic, Sabin spots a particularly obnoxious baggy-pant-wearing Eminem-lookalike behind him, arms draped around a couple of laydeez, and an interesting course of action suggests itself...
A few seconds later, Sabin wanders out of the crowd with a smile on his face, several hundred dollars richer (one of the fat gangster's bodyguards jostled him on the way out, and Sabin's hand just happened to find itself close to his pocket...) and the shotgun is conspiciously absent from the floor. Behind him, a high screeching voice - probably meant to be coquettish and girly - screeches:
"Heeeey hunni, is that a shawtgun in yer pocket, or are ya just happy to see me?"
A small commotion, as someone realises their jacket is suddenly much lighter, then:
"...did you say shotgun?"
"No, dude, she's only..."
"Drop 'em."
"...wha?!"
"Guys. Right, you're not going anywhere until you drop those pants..."
"Alright, alright! But I ain't got nothing hidden in these, look..." (ker-clunk.) "Aw, shit..."
Meanwhile, as the resulting barfight begins to spread around the entire bar, the team are gathered around the scrawny rat-owner, who briefs the team and is persuaded to pay half their payment up-front. After the briefing, Ito takes the man aside and intimidates him into promising him a quarter of the man's winnings as well as the mission payment, receiving a ring as a guarantee. The man promises him the (mostly worthless) ring is a token of a favour owed by a respected gang family, and that it's the most valuable thing he owns; Ito, more experienced in combat than fast-talk, accepts this and lets the man go.
Sharp's character (as yet un-named) wanders up to the betting booth and places a thousand-dollar bet: Bluebell versus Longtooth, betting on Bluebell at 100:1 against. Ito follows him with a hundred-dollar bet. The bookie starts looking very nervous...
Business done, the team retire to Ito's bar for sake and planning. Sabin's underworld connections pay off as usual: he's heard of Arakh, the gang lieutenant owner of Longtooth. He's eccentric, paranoid, and has a nasty reputation. His home is an old tramp freighter that he's managed to have hauled out of the water, dragged a few blocks inland, and set up in an abandoned industrial district. The boat is surrounded by blockades of junk topped with guards - not particularly good ones, mostly armed with Shoot-Me-Own-Foot-Off Dibbler's cheap Chinese submachine guns, but even cheap guns hit once in a while if there's enough lead in the air. However, Arakh is also known to distrust the Paradise banking system (probably for good reason) and keeps all his savings as gold within his dwelling - a powerful motivator for the team, especially if they can use the excuse that robbing Arakh blind is great cover for their rat-drugging mission.
I'd originally intended for the team to infiltrate through the old maintainance tunnels which riddle Paradise, but they decide to go for a different approach: Arakh likes his food, and has a delivery sent from a Chinese kitchen once a week. Conveniently, Koori's cousin's cousin's wife's brother's son works there occasionally, and he's just come on duty. Koori promises him one favour in return for borrowing the stall's delivery van and uniforms.
Well, delivery van might be stretching it slightly: the delivery vehicle is a typical nomad vehicle, cobbled together from whatever was around at the time. It seems to have originated as a bicycle, converted to a motor-trike by adding an extra rear bike wheel and bolting a motor directly to the front axle, then converted to a cargo carrier by adding a cargo box and two chunky car tires to support the back of it. At some point, someone has decided that it doesn't go fast enough, and bolted a second motor to one of the bike wheels at the back. There's a stove with a tall chimney for keeping the food warm inside the cargo compartment. The controls are a mix of car-style pedals and bicycle-style levers, and instead of a pump on the down-tube, there's a pump shotgun.
Koori falls in love instantly, and claims the driver's saddle by duct-taping his rifle behind it. The rest of the team climb aboard - Sharp's character curled up in a food crate in the cargo box, Sabin perching on one of the mudguards, Ito sitting calmly on top. Ravensford declines to ride the rattling contraption, citing health reasons, and bustles off back to his surgery (I felt uncomfortable running and playing the game at the same time.)
Just before leaving, Koori's cousin's cousin's wife's brother's son wanders up swinging a can of vegetable oil and demands some cash. The connection between the two is unclear, until Koori passes him the cash and he starts pouring the oil into the vehicle's fuel tank. Koori guns the engines and screeches off in a cloud of fried-food-smelling smoke. The bike's pulling a little to the right due to the asymmetric engine mounting, and the two engines are having trouble matching speed so the front wheel spins a bit every so often - but he's lost happily in nostalgia, having been brought up driving things like these from the age of seven.
There's a brief altercation with a carful of opportunistic armed robbers halfway to the boat, but Ito and Koori make embarrassingly short work of them: two go down almost instantly. The third manages to aim his submachinegun and pulls the trigger. His magazine drops out of the gun and hits the ground, followed a couple of seconds later by his body. As the team drive off, they hear the robbers' car being hotwired and driven off behind them. Nothing stays abandoned for long on Paradise.
It doesn't take long to get to the camp. When the team roll up at the gate, the guard looks at them suspiciously and decides to search them. Koori and Ito try to intimidate him, but he takes it as a challenge - he's halfway through cocking his assault rifle when Sabin steps in to calm the situation. The thug doesn't take much convincing, and entirely forgets his intention to search in the adrenaline rush. The boat is a few hundred yards past the barricade, and the team notice a few more clumps of guards/goons/general gang personnel hanging around before they drive up a loading ramp and through a large doorway cut in the side of the boat hull.
They're met by a soft, bald, fat youth by the name of Ely, who fusses around them, complaining that the team's request to take the food up to Arakh themselves is most irregular. Eventually, however, he acquiesces and allows the team to unload the food - Koori conceals his rifle within a box containing leftovers intended for the rats. Ely leads the team through the boat, past some storerooms filled with weaponry - both run-of-the-mill cheap stuff, plus some heavier gear: grenades, a couple of heavy machine guns, and a rocket launcher. Does Arakh just like collecting weapons, or does he have dangerous ambitions? While Sharp's character contemplates nicking some of the grenades, Ito scrutinises Ely more closely - he doesn't appear to be keeping a close eye on the team, but he seems a little too poised and calm for the ineffectual image he projects ... not to mention the fact that even to Ito's penetrating eye, he's carrying absolutely no weapons, which on Paradise usually signifies someone who is confident that they wouldn't need them to keep themselves out of trouble.
Ely sees Ito and Sabin into Arakh's office, then leads Koori and Sharp's character down to the rat kennel. When Koori asks him innocently which rat is Longtooth, Ely points (even more innocently) to the rat in pen #10, who does indeed have particularly long teeth. While his back is turned, Koori opens his box of leftovers and sprinkles the contents of the drug vial into them.
Upstairs, Arakh's room is opulently carpeted (even if the carpet is, on closer inspection, recycled plastic) and dominated by a huge desk in its center, with a large armchair behind it. Slumped in the armchair (and slightly overflowing the sides) sits Arakh - bald, grotesquely obese, dressed in a kimono-esque garment with voluminous sleeves which hide his folded arms. While Ito tends to the food, Sabin is scoping the place. There's a safe at the back of the room, quite clearly visible. Actually, very clearly visible. Sabin's visual enhancements reveal a cold patch on the opposite wall, behind a picture of an ugly woman who looks like she could be Arakh's mother. A quick scan of the rest of the room brings up four warm patches, one in each corner of the room - radiators, maybe? Both Ito and Sabin notice the grey line across the front of Arakh's desk, and the seam in the carpet tracing a square from the desk and around his chair - a security shutter of some sort, perhaps.
As Ito serves the food, he edges around the desk until he's standing on the other side of it, a few feet from Arakh and just inside the security shutter. He notices that although Arakh is still facing calmly towards the door, his folded arms are slowly following Ito as he moves around the desk. Some sort of concealed weapon up his sleeve, probably. Sensible.
Sabin wanders over to the painting, and Arakh suddenly laughs. "So, boys, how much did they pay you to kill me?"
Ito replies: "You are mistaken. We are not here to kill you ... only to take your gold. If you would unlock the safe..."
The fat man kicks a footswitch under his desk. There's a buzzing, the noise of a whirring motor, and the very visible safe at the end of the room swings open slightly.
Sabin smiles. "The other safe, s'il vous plait."
Another belly laugh. "Most perceptive!" Another kick of a hidden pedal; the fat-lady portrait slides upwards, revealing a safe. Its mechanism whirrs and clicks, the handle spins, and the door swings slightly ajar.
Sabin pauses: it can't be this easy. The door is conveniently just ajar enough that he can slip a thin knife in and probe around the edge of the door. There's an obvious piece of piano wire in there. Too obvious? He leaves it alone, and looks at the thickness of the safe door. There's probably some sort of explosive device in there, a boobytrap for those that don't know the right procedures. Well, screw the procedures... that door's probably thick enough to shield him if he were to step far enough aside. Sabin yanks the door open and ducks to the side, peripherally noticing that this takes him to a point about a foot from one of the mysterious warm spots. There's a twang from within the safe, and the sound of a pin falling within the safe.
Meanwhile, Ito is guarding Arakh, making sure he doesn't do anything foolish. He notices that the man's elbows, which from a distance had seemed to be casually resting on the arms of his chair, are actually hovering a bare millimetre above. Panic switches? "I would advise you to move your hands slowly away from there."
Arakh lifts his elbows slightly. The fabric of his clothing shifts, and a gap opens up between the two sleeves, through which can be seen plastic, metal, and something wooden wrapped in tape. A cybernetic limb, and a sawn-off shotgun. Arakh's finger begins to tighten on the trigger. Ito's sword flashes out and up, instantly severing both the man's wrists. The shotgun jerks up, then there's a deafening boom as it discharges, blasting a hole in the ceiling just over Ito's right shoulder. The second, so far unseen shotgun goes off a fraction of a second later, then the man jams his sparking wrists down on the panic buttons. Steel shutters slam up, encasing both men in a small steel cell. An alarm goes off.
Sabin is still bracing for an explosion, so the shotgun blasts don't startle him as much as they might otherwise. The alarm, however, does - and even worse, the warm plate next to him slams upwards, revealing a chunky nozzle topped with what looks like some sort of sensor: a sentry gun. The safe appears to be fairly inert, perhaps just another trick to scare the unwary, and the flamethrower is rather more immediate a threat. He vaults upwards onto the door of the safe, intending to flip over, land on the other side, grab the gold and scram. Then he hears the fizzing from within the safe...
Down in the rat kennels, Koori and Sharp's character are halfway through feeding their third rat - #8 - when the sound of shotgun fire reverberates down through the metal decking of the ship, closely followed by an alarm. Koori grabs his gun from the rat food box, drops the food, leaps backwards to give himself some breathing space, and aims the gun at Ely. The fat youth drops his ineffectual guise and rushes Koori, but he slips on some of the discarded leftovers and stumbles just long enough for Koori to fire. Two rounds and he's down. Then there's another explosion from upstairs...
Upstairs, Sabin manages to arrest his tumble and comes to a halt balancing on the edge of the safe door, a second before the grenades in the safe explode, shrapnel ricocheting off the opposite wall. The explosion sets off the blind-fire reflexes in the room's turrets - the flamethrowers fire a long stream at the door, setting the carpet alight, and machine-gun turrets at the back of the room aim to cut off the legs of anyone stupid enough to be at floor level. Sabin teeters, but manages to keep his balance.
Inside the steel cell, Ito swings his sword again, gutting Arakh, who starts laughing again, hysterically, even as his intestines spill out of the gaping hole in his abdomen. Two brick-shaped packages slither out, trailing wires... an explosive kill-switch. Ito begins frantically hitting the arms of the chair. There are no obvious buttons, but he noticed the man hitting something to turn on the security measures, and surely there must be some way to turn them back off. He gets lucky: on the third hit, the alarm stops, the wall retracts, and the turrets deactivate.
Sabin flips down from his perch and goes to grab the contents of the safe on his way out. It's empty. There's no time to look around, though: Ito is already sprinting out the door. As they leave, they hear another wet thunk, like that of a heavy package hitting a sodden floor. Then the room explodes behind them, the explosion following the running figures up the exit corridor in true cheesy Hollywood fashion.
Down below, the rats are going crazy from the explosions, the shots, and the scent of Ely's blood. One of them - #1 - gets lucky: it hurls its body against the door of its cage, and the cheap lock pops open. It scurries out into the room, takes one look at Koori, and bolts out the door. Koori just has enough time to notice its exceptionally short teeth before its tail vanishes out of sight. From outside, he can hear shouts: "Hey, that's Longtooth! Catch it!" and countermanding orders: "No! The boss is in trouble, that comes first!"
Goddamned smart-arses and their ironic names...
On the deck above, Sabin and Ito manage to find a couple of vent shafts and drop down them, landing in the loading bay next to the delivery vehicle. Koori is already in the saddle, sniping at guards outside and preventing them from ascending the ramp into the ship. The rest of the team scramble aboard, just as some enterprising guard outside breaks open a weapons cache and pulls out a rocket launcher. He's dead before the launch flash has faded, a bullet from Koori's rifle through his head, but he managed to get off his shot - the loading bay is soon going to be a very bad place to be. Koori burns rubber, and with the rest of the team holding on for dear life, launches the van from the top of the ramp. There's a bone-jarring thump as it hits the ground at the bottom, but miraculously it holds together. With the rest of the team providing suppression fire, and Koori taking one-handed pot-shots at anyone foolish enough to show themselves, they high-tail it out of the camp.
Back upstairs, a pool of molten gold is slowly forming underneath the blazing remains of Arakh's chair and desk, dribbling out of what remains of his body.
---
All in all, I think it went off not too badly considering the utter lack of preparation. I did end up railroading things somewhat at the end to speed it up, because despite my fears about lack of material, I managed to over-run by almost an hour and a half (sorry for holding everyone up! ^^;). And the whole thing about the melting gold was probably entirely illogical and totally contrary to something I'd been saying earlier about me not being a cruel DM :P
I enjoyed running the session - it's nice being back in the DM seat again, especially since it was a one-off, so I don't have to worry about things like 'plot', 'continuity' or 'preparation'. I'd said beforehand that the session probably wouldn't be considered canon to Mishi's game, either, so I had a lot of freedom - which I didn't actually take advantage of: at the end of the session, the team were pretty much back where they started.
A little way into the game, a group vacated a room (we were playing in the corridor) so we sneaked through to grab it. While we were moving through, we were approached by a student journalist who was covering SURGe for an assignment (with the possibility of submitting to the Strathclyde Telegraph student newspaper if it got good marks.) She'd talked to Mike over email, but since he wasn't here, I ended up talking to her instead. That was quite interesting - unfortunately, I didn't know too much about SURGe's history, but I hope I gave a good impression at least. I ended up emphasising the more light-hearted aspects of the club: film nights, Chewie's Captain Jack In Space character - she'd been enthused at by Keef (LARPer and Wearer of Skinny PVC Trousers), so she had presumably heard enough deep roleplay stuff.
I volunteered to run Paradise instead, as Mishi was still recovering from a total loss of voice, and was still sounding a little hoarse. I'd done absolutely no preparation, had no scenario in mind, and hadn't DMed for half a year ... but what the hell, I figured, I'll just wing it and see what happens.
Sharp needed to create his character anyway, as he'd been away while the rest of us had done character creation, and while Mishi had a character from the original Paradise game (Sabin, the French thief) she needed to port him from the original mutilated Exalted Mortals system to the Cyberpunk 2020 system we were now using. While they scribbled away and debated weaponry ("So, how big a submachine gun can you fit into your cybernetic arm, and how many rounds does it hold?") I tried to come up with something that would last more than five minutes.
I settled for ripping off Deus Ex: Invisible War - at one point in Lower Seattle, there's a bar with a greasel pit (greasels being green scaly transgenic chicken-lizards with teeth and acid spit.) One of the greasel owners knows his greasel doesn't have much of a chance in a fight, but if his opponent mysteriously disappears, his greasel will win by default, and the slim odds on it winning would give him a hefty return on his bet on it.
Well, Paradise doesn't have greasels ... but it does have rats. Big, big ones. So I had the team convening at a scummy rat pit to meet a contact, finding him face-down in a pool of his own vomit, then being recruited by a dodgy fella ("he looks like he's permanently sidling, even though he's actually moving forwards... in fact, he manages to sidle and scuttle at the same time, which is quite impressive...") in order to slip a drug into the food of a certain rat.
There's just one problem: the rat in question, an up-and-coming competitor named Longtooth, is owned by a paranoid gang lieutenant. In order to discourage the players from just nuking the rat, the lieut, and everyone else within a few blocks' radius, I specified that the drugged rat needed to make it to the competition, otherwise another opponent would be substituted.
In the meantime, Sabin is working the crowd. He slices the pocket of a gangster, preparing to catch his wallet, but doesn't expect a pump shotgun to follow it, hitting the ground with a 'thunk'. Luckily (high luck roll :) ) the thunk coincides with a bass beat from the band in the corner, and the overweight, bald but still very threatening-looking gangster doesn't notice. After a moment of panic, Sabin spots a particularly obnoxious baggy-pant-wearing Eminem-lookalike behind him, arms draped around a couple of laydeez, and an interesting course of action suggests itself...
A few seconds later, Sabin wanders out of the crowd with a smile on his face, several hundred dollars richer (one of the fat gangster's bodyguards jostled him on the way out, and Sabin's hand just happened to find itself close to his pocket...) and the shotgun is conspiciously absent from the floor. Behind him, a high screeching voice - probably meant to be coquettish and girly - screeches:
"Heeeey hunni, is that a shawtgun in yer pocket, or are ya just happy to see me?"
A small commotion, as someone realises their jacket is suddenly much lighter, then:
"...did you say shotgun?"
"No, dude, she's only..."
"Drop 'em."
"...wha?!"
"Guys. Right, you're not going anywhere until you drop those pants..."
"Alright, alright! But I ain't got nothing hidden in these, look..." (ker-clunk.) "Aw, shit..."
Meanwhile, as the resulting barfight begins to spread around the entire bar, the team are gathered around the scrawny rat-owner, who briefs the team and is persuaded to pay half their payment up-front. After the briefing, Ito takes the man aside and intimidates him into promising him a quarter of the man's winnings as well as the mission payment, receiving a ring as a guarantee. The man promises him the (mostly worthless) ring is a token of a favour owed by a respected gang family, and that it's the most valuable thing he owns; Ito, more experienced in combat than fast-talk, accepts this and lets the man go.
Sharp's character (as yet un-named) wanders up to the betting booth and places a thousand-dollar bet: Bluebell versus Longtooth, betting on Bluebell at 100:1 against. Ito follows him with a hundred-dollar bet. The bookie starts looking very nervous...
Business done, the team retire to Ito's bar for sake and planning. Sabin's underworld connections pay off as usual: he's heard of Arakh, the gang lieutenant owner of Longtooth. He's eccentric, paranoid, and has a nasty reputation. His home is an old tramp freighter that he's managed to have hauled out of the water, dragged a few blocks inland, and set up in an abandoned industrial district. The boat is surrounded by blockades of junk topped with guards - not particularly good ones, mostly armed with Shoot-Me-Own-Foot-Off Dibbler's cheap Chinese submachine guns, but even cheap guns hit once in a while if there's enough lead in the air. However, Arakh is also known to distrust the Paradise banking system (probably for good reason) and keeps all his savings as gold within his dwelling - a powerful motivator for the team, especially if they can use the excuse that robbing Arakh blind is great cover for their rat-drugging mission.
I'd originally intended for the team to infiltrate through the old maintainance tunnels which riddle Paradise, but they decide to go for a different approach: Arakh likes his food, and has a delivery sent from a Chinese kitchen once a week. Conveniently, Koori's cousin's cousin's wife's brother's son works there occasionally, and he's just come on duty. Koori promises him one favour in return for borrowing the stall's delivery van and uniforms.
Well, delivery van might be stretching it slightly: the delivery vehicle is a typical nomad vehicle, cobbled together from whatever was around at the time. It seems to have originated as a bicycle, converted to a motor-trike by adding an extra rear bike wheel and bolting a motor directly to the front axle, then converted to a cargo carrier by adding a cargo box and two chunky car tires to support the back of it. At some point, someone has decided that it doesn't go fast enough, and bolted a second motor to one of the bike wheels at the back. There's a stove with a tall chimney for keeping the food warm inside the cargo compartment. The controls are a mix of car-style pedals and bicycle-style levers, and instead of a pump on the down-tube, there's a pump shotgun.
Koori falls in love instantly, and claims the driver's saddle by duct-taping his rifle behind it. The rest of the team climb aboard - Sharp's character curled up in a food crate in the cargo box, Sabin perching on one of the mudguards, Ito sitting calmly on top. Ravensford declines to ride the rattling contraption, citing health reasons, and bustles off back to his surgery (I felt uncomfortable running and playing the game at the same time.)
Just before leaving, Koori's cousin's cousin's wife's brother's son wanders up swinging a can of vegetable oil and demands some cash. The connection between the two is unclear, until Koori passes him the cash and he starts pouring the oil into the vehicle's fuel tank. Koori guns the engines and screeches off in a cloud of fried-food-smelling smoke. The bike's pulling a little to the right due to the asymmetric engine mounting, and the two engines are having trouble matching speed so the front wheel spins a bit every so often - but he's lost happily in nostalgia, having been brought up driving things like these from the age of seven.
There's a brief altercation with a carful of opportunistic armed robbers halfway to the boat, but Ito and Koori make embarrassingly short work of them: two go down almost instantly. The third manages to aim his submachinegun and pulls the trigger. His magazine drops out of the gun and hits the ground, followed a couple of seconds later by his body. As the team drive off, they hear the robbers' car being hotwired and driven off behind them. Nothing stays abandoned for long on Paradise.
It doesn't take long to get to the camp. When the team roll up at the gate, the guard looks at them suspiciously and decides to search them. Koori and Ito try to intimidate him, but he takes it as a challenge - he's halfway through cocking his assault rifle when Sabin steps in to calm the situation. The thug doesn't take much convincing, and entirely forgets his intention to search in the adrenaline rush. The boat is a few hundred yards past the barricade, and the team notice a few more clumps of guards/goons/general gang personnel hanging around before they drive up a loading ramp and through a large doorway cut in the side of the boat hull.
They're met by a soft, bald, fat youth by the name of Ely, who fusses around them, complaining that the team's request to take the food up to Arakh themselves is most irregular. Eventually, however, he acquiesces and allows the team to unload the food - Koori conceals his rifle within a box containing leftovers intended for the rats. Ely leads the team through the boat, past some storerooms filled with weaponry - both run-of-the-mill cheap stuff, plus some heavier gear: grenades, a couple of heavy machine guns, and a rocket launcher. Does Arakh just like collecting weapons, or does he have dangerous ambitions? While Sharp's character contemplates nicking some of the grenades, Ito scrutinises Ely more closely - he doesn't appear to be keeping a close eye on the team, but he seems a little too poised and calm for the ineffectual image he projects ... not to mention the fact that even to Ito's penetrating eye, he's carrying absolutely no weapons, which on Paradise usually signifies someone who is confident that they wouldn't need them to keep themselves out of trouble.
Ely sees Ito and Sabin into Arakh's office, then leads Koori and Sharp's character down to the rat kennel. When Koori asks him innocently which rat is Longtooth, Ely points (even more innocently) to the rat in pen #10, who does indeed have particularly long teeth. While his back is turned, Koori opens his box of leftovers and sprinkles the contents of the drug vial into them.
Upstairs, Arakh's room is opulently carpeted (even if the carpet is, on closer inspection, recycled plastic) and dominated by a huge desk in its center, with a large armchair behind it. Slumped in the armchair (and slightly overflowing the sides) sits Arakh - bald, grotesquely obese, dressed in a kimono-esque garment with voluminous sleeves which hide his folded arms. While Ito tends to the food, Sabin is scoping the place. There's a safe at the back of the room, quite clearly visible. Actually, very clearly visible. Sabin's visual enhancements reveal a cold patch on the opposite wall, behind a picture of an ugly woman who looks like she could be Arakh's mother. A quick scan of the rest of the room brings up four warm patches, one in each corner of the room - radiators, maybe? Both Ito and Sabin notice the grey line across the front of Arakh's desk, and the seam in the carpet tracing a square from the desk and around his chair - a security shutter of some sort, perhaps.
As Ito serves the food, he edges around the desk until he's standing on the other side of it, a few feet from Arakh and just inside the security shutter. He notices that although Arakh is still facing calmly towards the door, his folded arms are slowly following Ito as he moves around the desk. Some sort of concealed weapon up his sleeve, probably. Sensible.
Sabin wanders over to the painting, and Arakh suddenly laughs. "So, boys, how much did they pay you to kill me?"
Ito replies: "You are mistaken. We are not here to kill you ... only to take your gold. If you would unlock the safe..."
The fat man kicks a footswitch under his desk. There's a buzzing, the noise of a whirring motor, and the very visible safe at the end of the room swings open slightly.
Sabin smiles. "The other safe, s'il vous plait."
Another belly laugh. "Most perceptive!" Another kick of a hidden pedal; the fat-lady portrait slides upwards, revealing a safe. Its mechanism whirrs and clicks, the handle spins, and the door swings slightly ajar.
Sabin pauses: it can't be this easy. The door is conveniently just ajar enough that he can slip a thin knife in and probe around the edge of the door. There's an obvious piece of piano wire in there. Too obvious? He leaves it alone, and looks at the thickness of the safe door. There's probably some sort of explosive device in there, a boobytrap for those that don't know the right procedures. Well, screw the procedures... that door's probably thick enough to shield him if he were to step far enough aside. Sabin yanks the door open and ducks to the side, peripherally noticing that this takes him to a point about a foot from one of the mysterious warm spots. There's a twang from within the safe, and the sound of a pin falling within the safe.
Meanwhile, Ito is guarding Arakh, making sure he doesn't do anything foolish. He notices that the man's elbows, which from a distance had seemed to be casually resting on the arms of his chair, are actually hovering a bare millimetre above. Panic switches? "I would advise you to move your hands slowly away from there."
Arakh lifts his elbows slightly. The fabric of his clothing shifts, and a gap opens up between the two sleeves, through which can be seen plastic, metal, and something wooden wrapped in tape. A cybernetic limb, and a sawn-off shotgun. Arakh's finger begins to tighten on the trigger. Ito's sword flashes out and up, instantly severing both the man's wrists. The shotgun jerks up, then there's a deafening boom as it discharges, blasting a hole in the ceiling just over Ito's right shoulder. The second, so far unseen shotgun goes off a fraction of a second later, then the man jams his sparking wrists down on the panic buttons. Steel shutters slam up, encasing both men in a small steel cell. An alarm goes off.
Sabin is still bracing for an explosion, so the shotgun blasts don't startle him as much as they might otherwise. The alarm, however, does - and even worse, the warm plate next to him slams upwards, revealing a chunky nozzle topped with what looks like some sort of sensor: a sentry gun. The safe appears to be fairly inert, perhaps just another trick to scare the unwary, and the flamethrower is rather more immediate a threat. He vaults upwards onto the door of the safe, intending to flip over, land on the other side, grab the gold and scram. Then he hears the fizzing from within the safe...
Down in the rat kennels, Koori and Sharp's character are halfway through feeding their third rat - #8 - when the sound of shotgun fire reverberates down through the metal decking of the ship, closely followed by an alarm. Koori grabs his gun from the rat food box, drops the food, leaps backwards to give himself some breathing space, and aims the gun at Ely. The fat youth drops his ineffectual guise and rushes Koori, but he slips on some of the discarded leftovers and stumbles just long enough for Koori to fire. Two rounds and he's down. Then there's another explosion from upstairs...
Upstairs, Sabin manages to arrest his tumble and comes to a halt balancing on the edge of the safe door, a second before the grenades in the safe explode, shrapnel ricocheting off the opposite wall. The explosion sets off the blind-fire reflexes in the room's turrets - the flamethrowers fire a long stream at the door, setting the carpet alight, and machine-gun turrets at the back of the room aim to cut off the legs of anyone stupid enough to be at floor level. Sabin teeters, but manages to keep his balance.
Inside the steel cell, Ito swings his sword again, gutting Arakh, who starts laughing again, hysterically, even as his intestines spill out of the gaping hole in his abdomen. Two brick-shaped packages slither out, trailing wires... an explosive kill-switch. Ito begins frantically hitting the arms of the chair. There are no obvious buttons, but he noticed the man hitting something to turn on the security measures, and surely there must be some way to turn them back off. He gets lucky: on the third hit, the alarm stops, the wall retracts, and the turrets deactivate.
Sabin flips down from his perch and goes to grab the contents of the safe on his way out. It's empty. There's no time to look around, though: Ito is already sprinting out the door. As they leave, they hear another wet thunk, like that of a heavy package hitting a sodden floor. Then the room explodes behind them, the explosion following the running figures up the exit corridor in true cheesy Hollywood fashion.
Down below, the rats are going crazy from the explosions, the shots, and the scent of Ely's blood. One of them - #1 - gets lucky: it hurls its body against the door of its cage, and the cheap lock pops open. It scurries out into the room, takes one look at Koori, and bolts out the door. Koori just has enough time to notice its exceptionally short teeth before its tail vanishes out of sight. From outside, he can hear shouts: "Hey, that's Longtooth! Catch it!" and countermanding orders: "No! The boss is in trouble, that comes first!"
Goddamned smart-arses and their ironic names...
On the deck above, Sabin and Ito manage to find a couple of vent shafts and drop down them, landing in the loading bay next to the delivery vehicle. Koori is already in the saddle, sniping at guards outside and preventing them from ascending the ramp into the ship. The rest of the team scramble aboard, just as some enterprising guard outside breaks open a weapons cache and pulls out a rocket launcher. He's dead before the launch flash has faded, a bullet from Koori's rifle through his head, but he managed to get off his shot - the loading bay is soon going to be a very bad place to be. Koori burns rubber, and with the rest of the team holding on for dear life, launches the van from the top of the ramp. There's a bone-jarring thump as it hits the ground at the bottom, but miraculously it holds together. With the rest of the team providing suppression fire, and Koori taking one-handed pot-shots at anyone foolish enough to show themselves, they high-tail it out of the camp.
Back upstairs, a pool of molten gold is slowly forming underneath the blazing remains of Arakh's chair and desk, dribbling out of what remains of his body.
---
All in all, I think it went off not too badly considering the utter lack of preparation. I did end up railroading things somewhat at the end to speed it up, because despite my fears about lack of material, I managed to over-run by almost an hour and a half (sorry for holding everyone up! ^^;). And the whole thing about the melting gold was probably entirely illogical and totally contrary to something I'd been saying earlier about me not being a cruel DM :P
I enjoyed running the session - it's nice being back in the DM seat again, especially since it was a one-off, so I don't have to worry about things like 'plot', 'continuity' or 'preparation'. I'd said beforehand that the session probably wouldn't be considered canon to Mishi's game, either, so I had a lot of freedom - which I didn't actually take advantage of: at the end of the session, the team were pretty much back where they started.
A little way into the game, a group vacated a room (we were playing in the corridor) so we sneaked through to grab it. While we were moving through, we were approached by a student journalist who was covering SURGe for an assignment (with the possibility of submitting to the Strathclyde Telegraph student newspaper if it got good marks.) She'd talked to Mike over email, but since he wasn't here, I ended up talking to her instead. That was quite interesting - unfortunately, I didn't know too much about SURGe's history, but I hope I gave a good impression at least. I ended up emphasising the more light-hearted aspects of the club: film nights, Chewie's Captain Jack In Space character - she'd been enthused at by Keef (LARPer and Wearer of Skinny PVC Trousers), so she had presumably heard enough deep roleplay stuff.