We are at Chris' (Michael Sangaree) place today because Bruce (Arthur Michael Vincent Pulfrey-Downs) decides that following his weird work schedule is more important than being available to host. Mike (Jack Smith) has had enough of this sort of pointless revisionism, so he does other things for the day. Tim (Serpentine) and Paul (Kumar Singh) just show up, smile and nod.
And then we talk about the injustices of the world and how they cause our lives to be less ideal than they should be.
The Flying Dutchman drifts in to Lima late at night for supplies. And research. Serpentine and Kumar Singh take the lead in looking for clues on the location of the Gem the characters seek, because Arthur Michael Vincent Pulfrey-Downs doesn't read Spanish. Michael Sangaree suggests that looking at libraries won't do any good, as they will only contain the same information that hasn't been helping every other group of explorers who have come through looking for the gem. Pulfrey-Downs is forced to mention that he agrees with the way Sangaree thinks. Michael Sangaree gets a horrified expression on his face and concludes that he hasn't been drinking enough.
It doesn't take any of the characters long to get the quick story of the Gem of Urighu. It is quite an old legend, featuring Incan priests, Conquistadors, desperate flight, hidden valleys, even more hidden cities, and journeys into the deepest depths of the dark Amazon. Much of this information is available in convenient coffee-table book form.
Amazingly, the Biblioteca Real de Lima does include some useful information. In particular, it includes several journals from various doomed expeditions of missionaries and conquistadors into the jungles. The forewords of these volumes are normally written by local academics explaining, "This expedition went into the jungle. Only one man came back, and this was the book he was clutching. He didn't survive long after his return." The journals typically start off in quite a coherent manner, and then go through a well-defined series of stages:
Most of these expeditions didn't manage to find anything except snakes, bugs and starvation.
This information does help the characters determine which directions not to go, and what not to do. The characters stretch out a big map of Brazil and a pile of travelogues and attempt to determine where to start looking.
Kumar Singh suggests hiring a native guide as well, someone who can direct the characters to the valley. It turns out that Kumar Singh knows the Majordomo of the Hotel de Castille, and that this fellow can arrange a local guide who has at least seen a jungle before.
Pulfrey-Downs heads down to the market, intent upon purchasing essential survival equipment and huge quantities of unnecessary survival equipment. He gets completely ripped off in the process, but he doesn't care because he's paying in gold. Some of his better purchases include mosquito netting with 6" webbing ("It'll protect us from jaguars..."), anti-jaguar bouillon, bat-shark repellent, quinine tablets, shrunken mole-man heads, shrunken chupacabra heads, anti-piranha boots, and a parakeet cape ("I was told that over 5000 parakeets died for this cape."). In the process, Pulfrey-Downs attracts a massive number of bad guides. Kumar Singh takes advantage of this effect by filtering out all the bad guides based upon how rapidly they descend upon Pulfrey-Downs' money.
Documents, supplies and guides in hand, the characters board the Flying Dutchman and head towards the jungle. Arthur Michael Vincent Pulfrey-Downs indicates the correct general direction with an Academics roll, and Michael Sangaree sets a course that will not run the characters into the side of a mountain with a Navigation roll.
Pulfrey-Downs splits his traveling time between the bridge, where he offers helpful navigational suggestions to Sangaree, and his quarters, where he reads the deranged ravings of dead missionaries using a Spanish-to-Cantonese dictionary he purchased in Lima (very cheap, surprisingly).
Michael Sangaree pilots. He spends most of his attention on not hitting any mountains during the journey over the Andes. Once over the jungle, he uses binoculars to examine the local terrain and compare it to the scribbles Pulfrey-Downs keeps on handing him. This effort is initially handicapped by the fact that he uses the stereoscope of a naked woman he purchased in France instead of binoculars. He is on the bridge is on deck when he spots two fighter planes shadowing the dirigible through the clouds. He looks for markings to indicate nationality or criminal organization. Kumar Singh mocks him, "You think the Godfather is going to have insignia on his aircraft?" Michael Sangaree responds, "They appear to be working for Queen Doppleopolous! It's time to declare Martian law!" Kumar Singh takes away Sangaree's binoculars and flask.
Seriously, the planes are unmarked planes of German manufacture, early Messerschmidt monowing designs. Michael Sangaree heads for the Origami Spad. He hopes to find out if the characters are at risk of encountering a whole mess o' Messerschmidts.
A quick flyby convinces him that the pilots are human (whew!) and wearing German uniforms. He turns to fly up and over the dirigible, hoping that they will follow him. Pulfrey-Downs is waiting for them in one of the machine-gun turrets.
This plan doesn't work out exactly as planned, as the planes simply follow Sangaree, reasoning that they can come back and finish off the dirigible at their leisure. Sangaree banks hard right, twists, and opens fire. He lands several bullets on the engine cowl of the first plane. Satisfyingly critical gouts of smoke and flame pour from the plane as it loses altitude. Sangaree fires on the second plane, sending it tearing past its companion on a death spiral. The first plane attempts to escape, but to no avail.
Sangaree follows the first plane, shooting off portions of his wings and trying to force him to land. Strangely, the plane seems to be trying to gain altitude. Back on the dirigible, Pulfrey-Downs and Kumar Singh observe the progress of the dogfight. Pulfrey-Downs mentions, "It looks like the plane is heading towards that small mountain." Kumar Singh shouts, "That's no mountain!" A huge sky-fortress looms into view. It is large enough that the top of its gas bag can support an entire landing field. The muzzles of massive artillery pieces jut from its underside. The characters quickly conclude that they might be able to outrun or outmaneuver it, but certainly cannot outgun it.
Pulfrey-Downs swiftly abandons the machine gun turret for the bridge. He turns the dirigible around to hide it from the sky-fortress.
Sangaree finally notices the sky-fortress. He also notices that the disabled plane is trying to make it to the sky fortress. He pulls dangerously close to the disabled plane, makes sure the pilot is looking at him, then shoots the guy the finger and pulls off very fast. He heads directly back towards the dirigible. Or a flock of birds, he's not entirely sure. Whatever he is flying towards, it must be better than the sky-fortress.
On the way back, two more Messerschmidts find him. And draw the combat into the same cloud bank the Flying Dutchman just entered (+2 difficulty due to obscured vision). Pulfrey-Downs goes back to manning a machine gun, leaving Kumar Singh at the dirigible controls. Sangaree chops down one plane. And then another. Neither gets close to the Flying Dutchman.
Sangaree takes a quick skip up above the cloud bank to check the situation. He sees that the sky-fortress has drawn up closer. Then he sees several flashes from the fortress. Hundreds of projectiles spray past him. A single rocket hits the dirigible. Everyone quickly realizes that the sky-fortress is equipped with an "area denial" anti-aircraft weapon. Kumar Singh yells out, "Let's get into the cargo plane and attack the sky-fortress directly!" Serpentine agrees.
Pulfrey-Downs does not agree. Expecting that the Flying Dutchman can outrun the sky-fortress, Pulfrey-Downs takes the helm again, figures out the maximum altitude of the cloud cover and guns the engines and the sails at that altitude.
Sangaree notices that the surviving fighter plane has an antenna, though he can't tell if it is for radio or radar. He guns the fellow down, just in time to dodge his way through another rocket volley. One rocket blows up ineffectually on Sangaree's windscreen. He speculates that his alcohol-laden breath may have prematurely detonated it. Nothing hits the dirigible.
By late afternoon the Dutchman is heading east at full throttle. Sangaree returns to the Flying Dutchman and lands the badly-damaged Origami Spad at +2 difficulty. To compound his problems, he's also smoking, and drunk, and has an unexploded rocket stuck into one side of his cockpit. Appropriately, his landing is Inspiring (6 successes).
Pulfrey-Downs hears the uneven clanging of the landing brackets and tells Kumar Singh, "I'll pilot until Sangaree gets his whiskey-swilling, cigar-smokin ass up onto the flight deck." Sangaree objects to this characterization on the basis that he doesn't smoke cigars with his ass. Under Sangaree's expert guidance, the dirigible loses the sky-fortress, though in the process Pulfrey-Downs loses a few years off his life.
No sooner have the characters managed to evade the sky-fortress than they want to find it again, this time on their terms. Pulfrey-Downs proposes constructing a device to detect the vessel's presence at extreme range using invisible heat waves. Armed with foreknowledge of its location, the characters will be able to sneak up on it and destroy it. The other characters agree that this sounds like an implausible but otherwise reasonable plan.
Pulfrey-Downs sets to work on his Radiometric Extrapolatatory Detection Interferometer, or RED-I (pronounced "red eye") device. The hardest part of the development process is making up the acronym. The research difficulty is set at 60 (per the Eagle Eyes knack). It takes him 54 hours to finish the research, and another four hours to actually construct the device. Working 16 hours per day, he finishes in about four days. The final device is usable only by Pulfrey-Downs, and offers a 3 die pool. On the plus side, it suffers no penalties to perception rolls for darkness or atmospheric conditions. The device is a huge console with a big pneumatic bellows. A complicated, twisted array of cables lead to a pair of knobbly goggles that fit over Pulfrey-Downs' head. The entire console is extremely cold, cold enough for Michael Sangaree to make ice cubes for his whiskey.
With Pulfrey-Downs obsessed with the RED-I, Michael Sangaree turns to the question of actually infiltrating the sky-fortress. He asks Serpentine and Kumar Singh, "Hey, do you guys still have those armbands you got when you stopped at that German beer-hall? I think we should disguise ourselves as Nazis." Kumar Singh asks, "I know you're drunk, but do you seriously think that I look like an Aryan?"
It develops that Pulfrey-Downs, Serpentine and Sangaree all look pretty close to Germans and speak German. Sangaree tries to make Kumar Singh look white. Sadly, the final effect makes him look more like a clown (less the round red nose). They decide to simply put a gas mask with a swastika on him, with a leather flight jacket, some leather gloves, high cavalry boots and a fumigation gun. The effect is intended to be unreasonably sinister. He ends up looking like a gas-masked Nazi supervillain. Michael Sangaree tells everyone else, "If anyone asks, his face was badly burned during the Great War. He was bobbing for apples in a tub of mustard gas." Serpentine dubs him General Baron von Weezer.
Everyone loves this plan.
Kumar Singh and Sangaree use their nonexistent Style skills to create fake German uniforms. Sangaree explains to the others, "We'll all be officers, but Kumar Singh will have the highest rank. He'll have a baton and a monocle, but he won't be able to wear it because he's in a gas mask!" This is widely considered to be a flaw in the plan, so the characters persuade Butters the mechanic to modify the gas mask to incorporate a monocle on a little robot arm. Kumar Singh's disguise gets further improved with jodhpurs, riding boots and a Nazi Stallhelm.
Everybody absolutely loves this plan.
Butters the mechanic has an Engineering pool of 4. This is better than everyone except Pulfrey-Downs, who's busy. He gets the job of preparing four explosive charges: two for the rocket room and two for the engine room. Actually, we only need two but we want two backups. One of the four will be a dud, but nobody knows which one.
Pulfrey-Downs searches for the sky-fortress while Sangaree commands legions of empty liquor bottles.
Day one. Nothing.
Day two. Nothing.
Day three. Nothing. Herr General Baron von Weezer is becoming upset.
Day four. Still nothing. Sangaree conquers Asia with a horde of Jack Daniels bottles.
Day five. More and more nothing.
Michael Sangaree finally gets disgusted with the RED-I and sets a course for the most likely site of the hidden city. What does he see waiting there? The sky-fortress. He stands the Flying Dutchman off in the clouds so the fortress doesn't spot it. Then the characters wait for nightfall to go in and kill them all... err... disable their craft...
We wait. And watch. Shortly before dusk, Serpentine spots a second dirigible floating up next to the sky-fortress. It looks like Great War surplus, but modified and upgraded. It doesn't look like either Subekhatan (no Egyptian theme) or the Blue Dragon Tong. The Ministry for Cultural Security already has a sky-fortress, and probably doesn't need a spare dirigible. The characters conclude that the new arrival is probably Mycroft Horatio Pulfrey-Downs, particularly since the new dirigible is also hiding in the clouds away from the sky-fortress.
Michael Sangaree brings the Flying Dutchman up above the sky-fortress as silently as he can. The characters sneak on board using the drop basket, led by General von Weezer. They bring along parachutes in bags, though the sky-fortress is floating barely above tree level. The sentries do not spot the characters as they move towards a support structure near the landing deck. They don't even notice that there's a big-ass dirigible floating up above them. The characters notice that there is another big-ass dirigible floating above the Flying Dutchman.
This is something of an unwelcome development, and the plan is immediately modified to deal with it. The characters split up. Kumar Singh (flawlessly disguised and well-known as a one-man army) and Pulfrey-Downs (who has the Engineering skill to find the rocket room and engine room) take two explosive charges and head into the body of the sky-fortress. Michael Sangaree and Serpentine head to the flight deck to steal a plane and rescue the Dutchman. Their plan is to attack Mycroft's dirigible first, because landing will involve a dynamic crashing sort of action on the top of the gasbag. They take the remaining two explosive charges.
Pulfrey-Downs manages five successes on an Engineering roll to find the main Rocket Magazine. He guides Kumar Singh through the corridors of the sky-fortress as if he had designed it himself. They find that they have little trouble getting past the guards: "General Baron von Weezer" simply glares at them and orders them aside in a rasping Schwabian accent. The guards watch as Kumar's form strides by. One of them mutters, "Great. We've got another freaking 'supervillain' on board."
The Rocket Magazine ("Raketenmagazin") is a large room manned by a relatively small number of technicians and a single Major. The technicians are hard at work placing rockets into large loading racks, and have little patience for the Nazi supervillain and his toady. Pulfrey-Downs scans the room and quickly determines that the best way to inflict damage upon the place is to aim one of the loading racks towards the main magazine and wire all the rocket motors to fire using an explosive charge.
Kumar Singh strides up to the Major and informs him in his best High German that this is an inspection. The Major is having none of it. He points a finger at Kumar's chest and indignantly shouts, "Von Weezer! I know von Weezer, and you are not von Weezer!" The ersatz von Weezer simply draws out his knife and goes for the Major's throat. The Major responds with a barehanded attack. Kumar Singh notices suddenly that the Germans don't equip the guys who work in the Raketenmagazin with guns. His respect for their organizational intelligence goes up a notch. This newfound respect does not, however, prevent him from chopping the Major's head off. He kicks the head to the side and gestures to one of the enlisted men, "You! You are ze new Major!"
The enlisted crew take this development with admirable equanimity, leading Kumar Singh to suspect that random Nazi supervillains showing up and killing officers is just one of those things that happens when you're on the Ministerium fur Kultursichherheit sky-fortress.
Meanwhile, Pulfrey-Downs rather nonchalantly pulls out a couple of explosive charges and starts wiring up a rack full of rockets. He turns to General Baron von Weezer and asks, "Sir? Could you order all the men out? It's important for my inspection." Kumar Singh commands the men to leave the room. They don't seem particularly enthusiastic, but they follow his orders. A moment later, Pulfrey-Downs tells Kumar, "Von Weezer? I suggest we run for it. We don't have much more than three minutes worth of fuse." Fssshhh... They run for the flight deck to steal a plane.
The session ends with Kumar Singh and Pulfrey-Downs running for the flight deck. Michael Sangaree and Serpentine are swooping around for a controlled crash landing on Horatio Mycroft Pulfrey-Downs' dirigible, and terrible things may be happening to the crew of the Flying Dutchman.
Each character gains three experience points.