Urban Jungle

In the morning we returned to the ruins of the ancient city, and spotted what looked to be a hangar.  While we approached it from the air we saw a cloaked figure on a nearby roof watching us descend.  Possibly disfigured, the man or woman was covered from head to foot by a hooded dress, and leaned on a very tall cane (walking stick?)

iPod dropped Max and Roland off to scout the hangar, and took the ship back into the air to observe.  Soon the ground team was swarmed with the infected, and the ship had several leap onto it.  Roland was bitten and mauled.

Max insisted iPod let Max and Roland back into the ship, but quarantined them in the cargo hold.  Max chained Roland to some cargo rigging to keep him restrained, but he didn’t show any signs of infection.  To be honest, with Roland I’m not sure how we could tell…   he’s half feral to begin with. Ivy insisted on breaking quarantine to examine him.   He was covered with blood (not his own) which was crawling towards his wounds.   Ivy and Max resorted to burning the goop off of him.  Afterwards, Max was both restrained and given pain killers.  Ivy said that he would recover… At this point, several hours later, he doesn’t seem to be transformed.  Maybe the disease has mutated? I think we were just very, very lucky.

We decided to scout the suburbs for other possible repair facilities.   Actually, Turlich insisted that we scout around, and was determined to go alone.  iPod released Max from quarantine to join him, since he still hasn’t shown any signs of infection despite his exposure to Roland. The first one we found seemed to be the home of a small troop of creatures, bizarre things which made the most terrible noise and weren’t frightened of us.   Ivy identified them as ‘Howler Monkies’, and suggested that they were too dangerous to work around.

We moved to another location and found the ruins of another ancient garage.  iPod feels that the equipment we need is there, and workable, but it will take  several hours to load it onto the Bettie Page.  We will be working steadily until sunset…

An Eventful Night

Recap from other players game missed on 12.November.  Normal text was translated from the Portuguese, italicized text from the Spanish.

iPod felt that the safest way to spend the night would be to take the Bettie out beyond easy swimming range from shore.  Soon after sundown we heard hideous shrieking and moaning from the land.  Shortly after midnight we felt banging on the hull….  iPod submerged the ship, and the ’survivors’ who had swam after us continued their pursuit until they drowned themselves.

One of them managed to swim into the engine intake is that the right word? and jam a metal rod into the engine.  The ship was still mobile, but much slower than it should be.  Note: now the ship cannot submerge to any depth, and is very slow to move.  Finding a way to repair the ship was now our first priority.

Ivy took samples from the body in the engine while iPod checked on the engines.  The body was mutated? infected? ___  by some sort of strange organism.  It’s blood seemed to be alive, aware of us, and hungry or something else? We finally contained the contamination in Ivy’s chest of scientific equipment and burned the rest.

Phillip, the boy we rescued from the ruins of a ship, is conscious and about, but seems to be confused and distant.  He seems to have a grasp of the geography, says his parents taught him about it, and believes that there is some important information about the plague to be found in a city called Glasgow, which is in a place called Scotland.  He gave iPod a rough idea of where that is.

…now we’re nearly out of scientific equipment and low on medical supplies.

iPod, Roland, and the Bettie Page

The Bettie Page, iPod in the Bettie Page, iPod and Roland.  Click on thumbnails for full picture.

(by Irvin’s player)

Herocon 2008

I went to Herocon yesterday, a local gaming convention in Glen Burnie which (not surprisingly) concentrates on the Hero system.    Unfortunately, this was a super busy weekend so I just played in a single game.  it was the second installment of Lee Garvin’s The Noble Wild (basically an improvised encore, and a very good time was had by all).  It was a ‘non funny’ sentient animal game run in d20 (D&D 3.5) and designed to be a child friendly experience.   It was that, but it was also a great con-game for any audience.  Well done, Lee!

Other players were Sandy Antunes, his daughter, and another lady too young for me to feel comfortable mentioning her name on the internet (but she could very well be a clone of her older sister…).  Now that it’s over, I finally figured out where Sandy may have heard my name before – either Women in Gaming or another mailing list (whose name I don’t recall) dedicated to intergenerational gaming.

Not much more to say, except that I will definitely spend the whole weekend there next year.  And thank you to Mike Surbrook for putting this thing together, and not letting Scooter ‘weasel’ out of coming again!

The Journey Begins

[Normal text is translated from the Portuguese.  Italicized text is translated from the Spanish.]

Waited on the sub while Max and Roland went off to get supplies. They ran into some trouble, and we were observed leaving. The ship took some minor damage from torpedoes.

I expected us to be ‘expendable’ but I’m beginning to wonder if we’re considered ‘disposable’ as well. How much does Mr. Brookes want/expect to get this report back?

Made the dive easily enough, but there was some damage to the porthole due to pressure. We came up on the other side of the wall. Once across we spotted a derelict on the inside… Roland scaled the wall and retrieved a survivor, a drifter known to iPod as Phillip, who had survived amidst the wreckage. Badly injured, barely conscious, cyborg, judging from his mass.

The wall extends about 30 feet above the water line. Wide enough to walk on. Train tracks run along it, and some sort of trolly line/guide wire is suspended above it without visible supports. (Mag suspension? Ultra thin supports too far away to see against the sky?)

All together we spent about five days at sea. Starting journal dated from landfall.

Day one

The beach was barren, no sign of people visible, but we heard a scream. Followed sound above the dunes and saw four men on horse running down two unarmed people… Unsure if any of them were truely human. The victims may or may not have been diseased. The horsemen were almost robotic. None of them used language.

We caused a distraction, but didn’t manage to stop the slaughter. They obviously heard me when I spoke to them, but didn’t understand, or have any interest, when I tried to speak to them. They didn’t attack either. We broke off and ran when the ground began to shake.

The shaking was cause by a huge (vessel? City? both?) city which was several miles across, which (rolled? hovered? something else?) across the ground towards the beach. It settled by the water, and several people exited it and put together a (path? board? ) and fed huge tubes from the city to the ocean. The itself and the armor the horsemen were wearing was made of some sort of odd material. The architecture of the city was alien exotic. Lots of towers and strangely shaped roofs. The workers wore clothes which seemed to be made of less exotic material, but each wore a single color from head to foot… the colors didn’t seem to indicate rank or position.

Couldn’t come up with sensible plan to infiltrate the city. Not sure how they communicate, and our clothes won’t let us blend in. We followed the path of destruction the city had left behind it. The ground was churned and radioactive where it had passed (according to Ivy). Everything it crossed must have been (ground up and?) sucked inside the city. (Power? Raw materials for something else?) The land it hadn’t passed over was arid and nearly lifeless as well. No signs of habitation, but if the (peasants? diseased?) had lived along the path there wouldn’t be.

The path led back to the ruins of an ancient city. Max, Turlich and I took a look around. A few signs and scraps of newspaper survived, but they weren’t written in any language I’d ever seen before. The letters themself looked almost normal, but there were some odd letters which looked like

ø å æ

but the architecture was fairly normal. There was even a building which must have been a McDonalds, down to the golden arches.

There were surprisingly few vermin, given that the city had been abandoned since the infection.  We saw one wild dog, who fled from us (so we knew that humans were familiar to it).  We did spot one survivor, but couldn’t tell if he was a real person, or infected, or a mutant.   The building he fled to was one of the tallest ones in the block, and we had no way of telling how many others it might hold.  By ths time it was getting dark, so we went back to the Betty Page and went out to sea for the night.

First Impressions

The following are transcribed from handwritten notes in Portuguese which Honesty has taken to refer to while preparing the report of the journey which Mr. Brooks requested.

iPod (real name Koffie St. James (?)) – owner of the Betty Page. superficially very much what I’d expect from a drifter (but what would I know about drifters…?) More to him than meets the eye. Kept his cool well when he received the cash (probably better than l I did when I saw how much there was). Appears more interested in socializing than in hard and fast plans and logistics, but that may be a clever facade.

Max Stacy – Seems to be along as muscle. personable enough.

Roland Gronsaville – also presumably along as muscle. Very much a ‘high energy’ personality. I’m a little doubtful about spending long periods of time in a submarine with him.

Ivy – Seems fairly good natured. I gather she has some sort of scientific background. She seems to be slightly confused as to what she’s doing here, as am I.

Turlich St. Julian – I have absolutely no idea what his function on the team is to be. He seems to be the least at ease with the situation of the bunch.

There was some sort of commotion with the police at the docks. Didn’t have time to investigate, but one of their cars had rolled off the pier into the water and they attempted to hire Mr. St. James to pull it out. Mr. St. James having feigned intoxication, was not given the job.

[OOC: I'm limiting myself to the information communicated and shown IC here.  It's pretty sparse because Honesty has barely met the others]

Honesty Falls

The following is still spotty, as I don’t have names for many of the groups and organizations within the game yet…

Honesty’s father, Trevor Falls, is one of the powerful elite who holds “elected” office. She was pampered (and bored) as a child. As a teenager she flaunted her parents by seeking out other disaffected teens and ‘protesting’… Which usually meant meeting in someone’s basement and griping about how bad the government was.

When some members of the group were beaten by the police, and one disappeared, Honesty began to understand how oppressive the government really was. She also harbored a nagging feeling that it was her presence in the ‘protest’ which brought it to the government’s attention to her friends.

As an adult she became a journalist, hoping to use her position and name to bring about actual change. After a few years of battering her head against the system she quit in discuss, and has since sought other ways to change the status quo.   She’s joined an underground organization which is actively working against the status quo.   They have hired a bunch of mercenaries to sneak across “The Wall”, report on actual conditions on the other side and, more particularly, on what it is which has provoked such an extreme government reaction recently…

---

Honesty is the undergrounds chronicler aboard the Betty Page.  She is taking detailed notes as the adventure unfolds.  They are hand written, in Portuguese, and kept on her person at all times.