Things continue to look fairly normal, even considering the terrible things that are going on in the world around us. Bruce (Arthur Michael Vincent Pulfrey-Downs) indicates that he is totally obsessed with listening to NPR's ongoing coverage of the war in Iraq. Chris (Michael Sangaree) describes a radio show he heard in which a man-portable "bunker buster" weapon was described as "inhuman" because it would "perforate" the occupants of the targeted bunker. Tim (Serpentine) simply makes comments about Hollywood and its only parenthetical relationship to reality. Paul (Kumar Singh) reflects upon the similarities between actors and prostitutes. Chuck suggests that the main difference is that the actors get paid enough to buy their own drugs. Mike (Jack Smith) disagrees, suggesting that the real difference is that prostitutes get more respect.
We open the session with Horatio Mycroft Pulfrey-Downs' dirigible hovering above the Flying Dutchman, which in turn is floating above the German sky-fortress. Michael Sangaree and Serpentine have just crash-landed onto the top of Mycroft's dirigible's gasbag. They watch as their hijacked aircraft plummets off the side of the torn gasbag and crashes into the sky-fortress flight deck.
They examine their position and decide to enter the dirigible through the gasbag. Their landing breached at least one of the gas cells, so the entire gasbag is suffused with helium. Serpentine quickly realizes that he sounds like a pirate chipmunk. He spends a lot of time squeaking out, "Arrrgh!" in a high-pitched voice. Up above him, Michael Sangaree squeaks out, "Hey! Remember that we have bombs!" They decide to set one bomb someplace important-looking in the gasbag structure. They are a bit handicapped by the fact that they have no Engineering skill, but still find a place that looks like a good place to put a bomb. Arrgh!
Michael Sangaree suggests, "Let's sneak our way to the engine room... Oh wait, let's just fight out way down. And if there's a bell along the way, we'll ring it. Remember, there's only three minutes of fuse on that bomb." Serpentine simply howls, "Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiai!" and runs down into the structure of the dirigible.
Serpentine and Michael Sangaree quickly come face-to-face with five goons. Sangaree knows what to do: he drops to one knee and effortlessly blasts away four of them with one long burst from his Thompson gun. The survivor has a moment to gape at the sight of his companions getting blasted across the corridor before Serpentine pins him to a wall with a fractal-serrated kukri. It is unclear if the final goon was more worried that Serpentine was going to kill him, or simply going to have his way with him and then drop a $10 bill next to him.
Serpentine asks, "Can I make a Navigation roll to find the Engine Room?" Nobody is sure why. Michael Sangaree points out that there's a sign over a nearby hatchway labeled, "Engine Room."
Serpentine and Michael Sangaree break down the Engine Room door, ready to confront clouds of goons. They are a touch surprised to find that there is nobody around. Serpentine is busy puzzling this problem out when Sangaree turns to him and demands, "How dare someone else put a bomb in the Engine Room first!" Serpentine asks, "Is it one of ours?" Sangaree responds, "No, you idiot! It's one of Mycroft's!"
The two of them abandon the dirigible... quickly. Serpentine rushes for the bomb and chops off the fuse. He hears ticking. "Dammit!" Sangaree runs to the bridge, intent upon crashing the doomed dirigible somewhere other than on top of the Flying Dutchman.
Jack Smith watches as a squad of ten men cast out ropes and rappel down to the Flying Dutchman. Another group of men simply leaps from Mycroft Horatio's dirigible towards the jungle. He watches in amazement as gossamer wings expand from their backs. They glide down beneath the tree cover before he can take any particularly dramatic action. Then he remembers that there is an assault group heading towards him. He leans out of a side window and starts picking them off as they descend. His first volley takes out four of them. His second takes out four more. (He imagines that weeks later someone will ask, "What smells so bad?" and he will be forced to respond, "I think I left a dead Chinaman stuck to the top of the gas bag...").
The survivors of the descending group open fire. One of them manages to bruise Jack Smith. Another wings Monette, the cook. Smith demonstrates remarkable restraint in the subsequent gun battle, as he suspects that falling from the dirigible into the jungle could actually hurt him. He attempts to sneak up on them, but is quite horrified to find out that they cut through the dirigible gasbag and moved around to get the drop on him. Of course, this is no more than a small setback as their bullets barely dent his hide. And he blasts them to pieces with two shots. He calls out to the air, "Somebody else gets to clean the gas bag." One of the crew pipes up, "You made the mess, you clean it up."
Jack Smith looks around for a mop. He doesn't find one. Instead, he spots a small bomb in the superstructure of the dirigible. He has a sinking moment when he realizes that the assault team members were wearing the same origami hanglider backpacks as the jungle team.
The bomb is attached to a structural member of the dirigible frame. Jack Smith has three rounds to deal with it. He spends one round to plan: "I shall use brute force!" He spends a second round to tear the structural member out by main force. And he spends the third to hurl the bomb out through the gash torn in the top of the dirigible skin. The explosion is very pretty against the night sky.
Arthur Michael Vincent Pulfrey-Downs and Kumar Singh (also known as "Herr General Baron von Weezer") rush to the flight deck of the sky-fortress, intent upon finding a plane. They know they are running against time: the bombs set in the Raketenmagazin will detonate in less than three minutes!
They find that the only aircraft available are single-seat fighter planes. Kumar Singh indicates that he would rather be tied to the airframe than be forced to be cozy with Pulfrey-Downs, especially knowing the sorts of things that Pulfrey-Downs has done back in Burma with Filipino boys while high on opium.
Pulfrey-Downs picks out his plane, leaps to the controls and guns the engine. Kumar Singh barely has a chance to strap himself onto a wing. The plane wheels about and heads down the runway. It quickly becomes obvious that normal takeoff from the sky-fortress is catapult-assisted, an option that Pulfrey-Downs does not have. He tries anyway (+1 difficulty). The plane goes plunging off the deck and towards the jungle. It is impossible to tell who screams louder: Pulfrey-Downs or Kumar Singh.
Kumar Singh howls out, "Pulfrey-Downs! You did make sure to get one with gas in the tank?" Pulfrey-Downs yells back, "Of course! It's fully fueled, and it has a full bomb load!" Kumar Singh simply howls. Pulfrey-Downs starts jettisoning bombs.
About this time the bombs in the Raketenmagazin go off, sending rockets in all directions. One stray rocket hits the escaping plane, inflicting just enough damage to make Pulfrey-Downs' piloting that much more exciting. Serpentine reflects that anyone watching from the sky-fortress probably doesn't know what Pulfrey-Downs thinks he's doing, though they might wonder what he's dive-bombing.
Pulfrey-Downs manages a controlled crash into the jungle. The plane ends up wedged into the upper levels of the tree canopy. He looks at the shattered airframe and mourns, "It'll never fly again!" He looks around for Kumar Singh. The little Sikh took four levels of bashing damage in his tumble down into the foliage. He comes back to consciousness to find Pulfrey-Downs leaning over him. "Kumar! Wake up! I need your knife!" He opens his eyes and asks, "Professor? How many of those healing elixirs do you have?" "Just one. Here it is." Slurp. "I'm healed." The two of them cut themselves free of the plane wreckage.
Michael Sangaree finds himself slowly spiraling towards the ground aboard a burning dirigible. He struggles with the controls to direct it off somewhere other than into the Flying Dutchman. Meanwhile, Serpentine looks for more origami hangliders, complaining, "Hey! Those bastards have gliders! I want gliders!" This plus an Inspiration point gets him a pair of gliders.
Michael Sangaree fixes a course (or so he hopes) and joins Serpentine in the struggle to don origami hangliders and flit away from the doomed dirigible. Sangaree takes to the air as a natural and returns to the Flying Dutchman. Serpentine takes a more roundabout route but makes it back in one piece.
Sangaree strides back onto the Flying Dutchman's bridge and asks, "Jack - how's things going over here?" Jack Smith looks up from cleaning his rifle to rather casually offer, "We just had to slosh up the interior a bit." There is an explosion in the background as Mycroft's dirigible crashes on the jungle floor. The sky-fortress is clearly following in its path. Some of the crew are abandoning ship, while others are hoping that the crash won't be all that bad. In contrast, there are a few fires on the Flying Dutchman, but none out of control.
Meanwhile, down on the ground Pulfrey-Downs and Kumar Singh are running like maniacs to avoid the crashing sky-fortress. They travel through the jungle like ghosts. They head towards the site where Horatio Mycroft's commandos touched down.
Sangaree, Serpentine and Jack Smith get the Flying Dutchman back under control and ponder their next move. Then they see that the Ministerium fur Kultursichherheit has established a base camp down in the jungle and realize that the answer is so obvious. Jack Smith mans the 75mm gun and commences bombarding the camp. The camp defenders fire back with ack-ack, but inflict only cosmetic damage to the Dutchman.
Jack Smith is loading a fresh shell into the gun when he asks Sangaree, "I wonder where Pulfrey-Downs and Kumar are right now?" Sangaree peers at him through a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels and offers, "Perhaps we'll be able to see them in the glare from the explosions."
About this time, Pulfrey-Downs sends up a flare. Actually, he sends up about a dozen flares in a clever binary code of his own invention. Sangaree is completely unable to understand the code, but he does figure out where Pulfrey-Downs is. He lowers the dirigible down to basket altitude, then heads to his room to pick up ammunition and an emergency supply of alcohol.
Everyone touches down in the jungle to meet up with Pulfrey-Downs and Kumar Singh. They have big old-fashioned lanterns. They head out into the jungle, searching for Mycroft and his goons. Sangaree estimates that the commando party included about twenty goons. The characters decide that they should each bring one Gem of Urighu for safekeeping. Sangaree cautions each of the others, "Guard it with your life. Or, if you're not that concerned, with the life of the guy next to you."
Pulfrey-Downs attempts to track down Mycroft's commandos. Sangaree offers, "You know, the last time I was in a forest with an automatic weapon I was hunting the Most Dangerous Game." Jack Smith asks, "Panzers?" Sangaree: "Nope. Migrant workers in a California forest. You give 'em some speed and send them off. They just keep on goin' until you catch 'em." Smith comments, "You must be the strangest man to ever leave the Border Patrol."
The characters track the commandos to the bank of a tributary of the Amazon. Pulfrey-Downs looks for signs of a boat. He sees nothing and concludes, "They had a submarine!" He explains this to Serpentine, who responds, "No, they're over there." "Where?" Wham! "Now I track." Serpentine walks off while Pulfrey-Downs is still staggering around. Serpentine concludes that they had several canoes, and launched them. He thinks they went downstream, towards the ancient temple. He is slightly concerned by the fact that the river is going the wrong way! It should be flowing south, but it seems to be going north.
The characters head downstream. Serpentine hears a roaring sound from behind, a roaring sound that seems to be getting closer. Jack Smith indicates, "I can shoot it!" Sangaree tells him, "It's a wall of water! You could shoot it, but then you'd be the strongest man to ever leave the French Foreign Legion and then drown!" Serpentine listens some more and concludes that it is an engine, not a wall of water. He estimates that the engine has ten or twelve cylinders, plus that new carburetor the Germans designed. He's just making stuff up, but only Pulfrey-Downs knows and he's too busy screaming because he ate another berry.
The characters decide to climb trees and get ready to swing out on vines to kill everyone on the boat. Serpentine: "I just like swinging on stuff. Actually, I just like swinging." The other characters respond in unison, "We know. Now shut up."
What comes down the river? A modified Chinese junk, modified with super science to skim across the surface of the water. It is moving fast enough that the characters take a +2 difficulty penalty to swing out and land on the deck. Pulfrey-Downs almost falls off the side, but everyone else manages to land in fine style.
A tremendous fight against piles of Blue Dragon Tong ninjas ensues. All of them are Untouchable, so shooting them is quite difficult. After a couple of minutes of moderately one-sided bloodshed Michael Sangaree offers, "Looks like we've offed half of them. That's pretty good." Serpentine looks up from gutting a ninja and agrees, "Yep, and we're only getting butchered."
Pulfrey-Downs finally clambers up to the deck only to come face to face with a particularly nasty-looking ninja. He dodges backwards and shoots the fellow, avoiding the man’s swingin’ ninja sword. Kumar Singh takes note, squashes the ninja with one quick strike, and watches the fellow keel over. Kumar Singh comments, "I just realized: these guys go down when they're just crippled! What cowards."
Serpentine notices that there is someone attacking his friend Sangaree. He lashes out with the Claws of Apepi. Over the course of three strikes, he inflicts sixteen levels of damage to the guy. The ninja explodes. Serpentine asks, "Who's going to clean up Sangaree?" Michael Sangaree responds, "I have Perfect Poise, so even if I do become rumpled or soiled all I need is a quick brushing-off." He refrains from actually brushing himself off, preferring to shoot off a full-auto burst at the ninja standing next to Jack Smith. He converts the guy into a fine red spray, but doesn't hit Smith in the process. Not that mere bullets have ever bothered Smith.
With the deck mostly cleared of hostile Blue Dragon ninjas, Serpentine comments, "Pulfrey-Downs! Drive the boat!" Pulfrey-Downs discovers that there is a protected cockpit, and that nobody has bothered to deal with the pilot. Just to complicate things, an aged Chinese gentleman appears at the bow in a whirl of ribbons, cloaks and death, right behind Sangaree. There is a surprised howl and a blur of movement as Dr. Li Fu Chang grabs Sangaree and throws him off the boat. Sangaree grabs on to a rail and hangs on for dear life as the hydrofoil skims wildly down the river. Pulfrey-Downs jumps down into the cockpit and wings the pilot. Smith shoots at Li Fu Chang, who dodges. Serpentine makes three attacks at Li Fu Chang. The first claw strike does five levels of lethal damage. The second strike does five more lethal damage. And then Kumar Singh steps up, "He's not dodging me at all?" Sadly, Dr. Chang has no more dodges available so he isn't. Five more damage. Then one more. And another four. Serpentine has been keeping careful count. He asks, "That would be twenty levels of damage. Is the Chinaman still standing?" Jack Smith offers back, "Is what still standing?"
Sangaree leaps over the rail, guns drawn, ready for anything. He shouts out, "Ha! Oh, wait. What happened to him?"
Pulfrey-Downs glares at the pilot and tells him, "Your master is dead! Surrender now!" A vein bulges in ninja's forehead. Neither of them is paying any attention to the hydrofoil's course. Up on deck, Serpentine and Kumar Singh look ahead and shout out in unison: "Tree! Tree! Treeee!" Smith and Sangaree respond by opening fire on the pilot, gunning him down and shattering the forward Viso-Screen in the bargain. Serpentine grabs a tree branch with the Claws of Apepi and swings into a diminishing series of circular orbits of moderate safety while the hydrofoil zooms on ahead towards what he takes to be certain death. "Whee! Whee! Whee!" Kumar Singh reflects upon his escape options. He comments, "I've seen hydrofoils before. Trying to jump off one of these things is like jumping into concrete." He holds on and waits for the worst.
Pulfrey-Downs finds himself in control of the hydrofoil, but without much to look at up front except shattered electronics and broken glass. He still manages to slow down the boat and avoid killing everyone (Piloting at +1 difficulty). He then circles back around to pick up Serpentine. On the way, Michael Sangaree comments, "Last I saw he was pitching over the deck. I think he's dead." Jack Smith very helpfully suggests, "We should try and salvage the Claws of Apepi. It must be worth something." Everyone very tastefully refrains from mentioning these ideas to Serpentine when they finally extract him from his tree branch.
Pulfrey-Downs "fixes" the Viso-Screen by yanking out the remains of the thing. Jack Smith looks at the ruined device and muses, "Perhaps it originally allowed you to see under the water as well." Pulfrey-Downs acidly responds, "Well, we'll never know now." Smith shoots back, "At least until we hit something." Pulfrey-Downs changes the subject by motioning to Peter Sangaree, "Sangaree, here's a bottle of Chinese whiskey I found, and here's the pilot house. Why don't you drive while I take a look around belowdecks." Sangaree grabs the bottle and answers, "But the Chinese don't make whiskey. Oh what the heck."
Pulfrey-Downs investigates the workings of the hydrofoil. It features super-science engines, hydrofoils, and a very complicated array of pipes leading to the dragon-head in the front. Pulfrey-Downs figures out that the pipes are the feed mechanism for a flame projector. A foot-pump assembly on the deck triggers it. Pulfrey-Downs likes it so much he thinks about how to take credit for the design.
The characters continue zipping down the river, right into the teeth of the roaring sounds. Someone finally says, "Hey! That really does sound like a waterfall! Brakes! Brakes!" In the pilot-house Michael Sangaree sulks, "Oh fine. I slow down." Then he decides (at Serpentine's prompting) that this is the perfect opportunity to jump a waterfall, just like all of those heroic fellows at the Niagara Falls.
Sangaree guns the engines and sends the boat out into space. Pulfrey-Downs yells out, "I've never felt so alive!" Jack Smith yells out, "We're all going to die!" Serpentine ponders, "Do I have to spend Inspiration to still be wearing that origami hanglider?" Sangaree leans over and tells him, "Why do you think I agreed to make this jump?"
The hydrofoil falls a cinematically-large distance down into... treetops. Rather like the fall into trees from Ravenous. Pulfrey-Downs estimates that the boat fell a mile. A whole mile! Michael Sangaree shakes his head and tells the Englishman, "You know Doc, you probably should have mentioned that they have some truly stupendous waterfalls in this country."
It takes little time for the characters to determine that their commandeered hydrofoil will never float again. They ponder how they will continue down the river until Serpentine makes a remarkable discovery: the origami hangliders are designed to convert into origami canoes! Two of them can be hooked together to make a canoe. They assemble them and prepare to continue down the river. They know that they are ahead of Mycroft-Horatio's guys because they saw them paddling as they shot past. Serpentine also saw that Mycroft has recruited the surviving MFK guys into his group.
As a side detail, Pulfrey-Downs swears he saw the silhouette of a pterodactyl as the characters were falling through the cloud. He tells Kumar Singh, "But that would be impossible. Pterodactyls are native to Africa - we saw them on that expedition where Louie the Finger got boiled alive by pygmies."
The next session will be the final Adventure game! But in the meantime, each character gains three experience points.