Tim (Sir Brindal Karth de Hazat) is otherwise occupied and doesn't show up, but Paul (Sean Punch), Dan (Koa so k'Terr) and Chris (Peter Sangaree) all appear as scheduled.
The characters start out the day in New Berlin, where they debate several important civic issues relating to the city and the various duties of the City Council. Foremost among these is the question of whether or not the City Council members (e.g., the characters) should be paid a salary. Sadly, they demonstrate their continuing political maturity by failing to come to an actual decision.
The one significant festival of New Berlin is the Running of the Hiipos, scheduled to happen in several months. The characters decide that the festival is going to be something worth talking about, and further that it will provide them with a good opportunity to invite a lot of powerful people to visit New Berlin so the characters can curry favor. Koa so k'Terr writes formal letters of invitation to Brigadier Samuel Tennyson of the Muster logistics organization, the Charioteer Director Sam Parsons (Master of Cargo at Sonnbourg Port on Delphi), the Scraver Linus Link, and any number of lesser ship captains, Tuam merchants, and others. He invites them all to attend the festival and take a look at the facilities of the New Berlin Spaceport. To round out the mix, he also writes a number of letters to various Ur-Obun luminaries he knew back on Velisamil. The characters' obvious goal is to persuade at least a couple of these folk to start sending shipping through New Berlin, in preference to Prince Cassius Field.
Peter Sangaree suggests that the group invite some nobles, in particular the Earl Gerald Soult-Hawkwood and any other Byrrem Isles Hawkwoods the characters can think of. He points out that the connections between the Custom House and the Byrrem Isles nobility are relatively weak. In order to support guests of this caliber, the characters decide that they need to put together a nice hotel, preferably in a hacienda style. Peter Sangaree concludes that it will be necessary to install electric power, climate control, and running water. He notes that of the two fusion engines the characters have available, only one is consumed by the demands of the Armory and the Machine Shop, leaving the other mostly unused. The characters agree to devote it to the new hotel.
Koa spends a month designing a beautiful hacienda-style hotel, drawing heavily from the Obun style of buildings that blend into the local environment. His intention is to decorate the interior predominantly with artifacts obtained from the local Pakorgo tribesmen in the delta, both because it is appropriate to the region and because it is incredibly cheap. The hotel will be placed some distance back from the spaceport, on a wooded hill with large restaurant windows facing the landing field. Koa's Architecture roll passes by 8, leaving him with a truly inspired design. His Civil Engineering succeeds by 2, ensuring that the physical structure is fairly durable as well.
After momentary debate, the characters decide that the hotel will mostly be staffed with local people, but that professionals will be necessary to actually run the place. They give Bob Lungflook the task of hiring a Hotel Manager, a Concierge and a Chef from the mainland.
Koa determines that the Hillside Hotel will cost about 2000 FB in construction costs, plus an additional 10,000 FB in furnishings and equipment that can't be locally produced. Most of the construction staff can be hired from the New Berlin population, but five Professional-level employees from Lachann will be needed. The characters estimate that it will take about four months to construct the hotel. Unsatisfied with this timetable, the characters talk to Senator Hareb of the Chibren to see if he can arrange faster construction. He produces a Chibren engineer named Alwin Trillet who claims that he can finish the building in only 2 months, but that he must change the design from wood-frame to steel-frame, and use concrete. His costs will be 1000 FB higher than Koa's original estimate. The characters debate for a very brief time, and then hire him. They arrange to disguise his work crews as Muster and Engineer contractors from the mainland.
Once the characters' construction deal with Alwin Trillet is complete, Senator Hareb makes a request. He explains that the Chibren have been taking deep core soundings in order to set up a geothermal power plant. However, proper analysis of their data requires a lot of computation. The Chibren want to use the Big Thinker, and are willing to pay for the privilege. Sean Punch estimates that the entire project will take about two months, consuming fifty hours of dedicated time for the Big Thinker.
Sean Punch agrees to take on the project, and negotiates with Master Processor-Wright Thorne of the Brain Factory. Between the two of them, they decide that the project will require the services of three Brain Factory people for two months (70 FB per month per person comes to 420 FB; double that for taxes and it's 900 FB). Thorne tells Sean Punch that Big Thinker time will cost him 20 FB per hour. The two of them eventually agree to deal with the whole matter as a subcontracting of services. The Master Processor-Wright Thorne quotes a price of 2500 FB to Sean Punch, who turns around and negotiates a price of 4000 FB with the Chibren.
At the start of the Hillside Hotel construction project, the colony had a total of 27,150 FB on hand. The month's income in 02/5006 is 3480 FB.
Koa proposes that the characters should get some of the local tribesmen to perform at the Running of the Hiipos, further emphasizing both the local color and the completely commercial nature of the festival. He looks to Bob Lungflook to find a local who can talk to the Pakorgo to arrange this. Bob proposes several locals who have been involved in trading tools with the Pakorgo, in particular one youngster who has shown a surprising ability to pick up the tribal language.
Their efforts prove to be successful: a delegation of Pakorgo mystics agrees to show up and perform the Hunting Dance. Koa insists that they perform it several times through the festival, according to a fairly strict schedule. The tribesmen agree to his request, though it isn't clear that they really understand the concept of schedules and linear time.
Peter Sangaree, faced with the fact that the characters have been embarrassed by the paltry quality of their gifts several times in the past, decides to make some high-quality engraved bolt-action rifles for their guests. As it turns out, he happens to be one of the best gunsmiths on the planet (skill-17), and already has CNC Lathe design files for a good bolt-action rifle, so the manufacture of the guns is not too hard for him. However, while he can easily figure out how to place engravings onto one of his guns, he isn't much of an artist.
Peter first contacts the Chibren, asking them if they might have any engravers he could hire. He ends up talking to Senator Ariarchus of the Cultural Preservation Syndicate, a rather crusty old fellow who clearly hasn't talked to outsiders all that much. The Senator explains that the Chibren don't have any engravers, but they do have think machine records of thirty designs by the old master Emfrem, dead for the last 1000 years. He is willing to sell them to Peter. His initial offer is 800 FB for each design for unlimited use. Peter responds by offering a rifle for each design. Ariarchus listens to the deal, talks briefly to Senator Hareb, and hangs up the phone in disgust.
Peter calls back, and gets the negotiations going again. After several other offers die miserably, the two of them agree that Peter will pay 500 FB for the rights to place the engravings upon 100 guns, with his choice of the specific engraving on each weapon. Senator Ariarchus promises that Groupleader Ribben will bring by the designs on a cassette the next time he visits New Berlin, along with histories of each design (important to enhance the artistic value of the guns).
With his artistic problems out of the way, Peter arranges a trip to Tuam to look at bicycles. Because the Church has largely forbidden the common manufacture of trucks, Peter reasons that bicycles should be hot sellers in New Berlin, and might provide a useful export good. Nobody else is doing much of real interest, so the rest of the group piles into the Luftking to go with him. The characters fly into town and promptly get rooms at the Plow and Sickle inn.
Peter finds that there are a wide variety of bicycles available in Tuam. He looks at vendors in both the High City and the Low City, and assembles the following pricelist:
|
Type |
Price |
|---|---|
| Simple metal, very crude | 2 FB |
| Good metal, geared, cheap | 5 FB |
| Good metal, geared, good workmanship | 10 FB |
| Carbon-fiber, very light | 20 FB |
| Three-wheeler with cargo basket | +50% to base model cost |
| Three-wheeler rickshaw with two passenger seats | +100% to base model cost |
Looking at the prices, Peter decides that he will have to provide some sort of buy-to-own plan for New Berlin residents, as most people just don't have that sort of money to throw around.
While Peter looks at bicycles, Sean Punch hunts down a vendor of semi-licit vidchips and spends 200 FB restocking his collection.
Koa goes shopping on a slightly more erudite note. He wants to ensure that the students at the "Obun Diplomacy School" have access to a reasonable library, and wants to buy one in Tuam. He finds that there are eight booksellers in the High City, each specialized on a particular subject area. Each of them charges about 5 FB for a typical volume, a price that makes Koa gasp when he considers the need to purchase hundreds or thousands of volumes. He also finds that there are a multitude of booksellers in the Low City, and that they only charge about 1 FB on average, though they carry nothing dealing with either the world beyond Tuam or any technology more sophisticated than TL4. He eventually decides to buy 100 assorted textbooks from High City dealers, on topics ranging from agriculture to simple mathematics to diplomacy. Looking at Koa's booklist, Peter offers some additional suggestions, some of them on the crass side. Koa diplomatically chooses to ignore them.
Prior to the characters' departure from Tuam, the Baroness Karen Sirreya-Hazat seeks them out at the Plow and Sickle. She is quite upset with them, arguing that the characters' functionaries back at New Berlin seem to be deliberately preventing her from gaining access to Sir Brindal Karth's financial records. Peter responds, "Then they're doing their jobs." Predictably, this does absolutely nothing for the Baroness' mood. She becomes furious. She stalks around. She sputters and yells.
The performance comes to an abrupt end when Koa calls up his psychic powers and uses Heart's Command upon her, forcing her to become willing to listen to the characters' words. She listens. At this point, Peter suggests that she should attend New Berlin's Running of the Hiipos festival, where she can look for promising (easy to dominate) Hawkwood nobles she could marry. He suggests that if she were married to a Hawkwood, she could easily prevail upon the Grand Duke (or any number of other important Hawkwood nobility) to grant her a fief on Gwynneth. She claims that she is unconvinced, and that she wants to replace her family's lost lands through her own efforts, not by marrying some sot. Peter does his best to describe the grueling and challenging nature of life on the frontier, mentioning several of the various dangers the characters have already found (including soul vultures, high-tech squatters, and hostile tribesmen). No matter how eloquent Peter tries to be, he just doesn't seem to be able to get through to her, so Koa does another Heart's Command on her to make her instantly agrees to everything Peter says. This abrupt shift in opinion seriously weirds Peter out, especially given that he wasn't aware of Koa's actions.
The characters determine that the Baroness Sirreya-Hazat is staying in the Siegfried Arms, and arrange to send information about the festival to her there.
The characters let four months go by, during which time they prepare for the festival and watch as their operations reap money. During this time, they find themselves visited by Sir Oliver Auget de Hazat, one of the Count Marco Linford de Hazat's vassals. Sir Auget de Hazat arrives in a hired Flyers' Association jet and delivers a letter from the count to Sir Brindal Karth de Hazat.
The letter, though superficially as polite as almost all communications among the nobility, is scathing in content. The Count barely acknowledges that Sir Brindal Karth and his entourage learned where the five missing Hawkwood ships went, but didn't complete the picture. Specifically, the Count wants the characters to be able to tell him why the Hawkwood ships didn't come back. The Count plainly thinks that Sir Brindal Karth should be betraying more personal interest in this problem, considering that he are a lot closer to the situation than he is. As a final note, the Count also comments that he got a very positive status report on the operations of the Fennen Marsh fief from the Baroness Sirreya-Hazat. He is suspicious of this new development, and asks Sir Brindal Karth what terrible thing he has done to the Baroness.
The characters hold a debate on what sort of message they should send back. They hold this conversation in one of Sir Brindal Karth's chambers, watching his Apothecary treat his syphilis with almost Harkonnen methods. Peter eventually crafts the response: he explains that Sir Brindal Karth and his people expect to interview a lot of people who might know something very soon, and that more information may be available in about three months. Koa notes that the spacefarers on the guest list for the Running of the Hiipos would be good starting points. He also suggests that the Vuldrok might know something useful, and would be a lot less likely than the Hawkwoods to hide what happened, because this isn't a military secret to them. He also brings up the possibility that the character might be able to prevail upon the Vuldrok to lend them transportation out to the Mystery Planet.
As a side note, the characters discuss the problem of extracting information from the guests at the Running of the Hiipos. Peter suggests using either drugs or Koa's mind powers to interrogate guests, but also admits that this sort of behavior would have to be handled very carefully. Both Sean Punch and Koa don't think much of this plan, and suggest that taking the low road would be a much better idea: arrange to provide a lot of courtesans for the characters' more important guests, then debrief the courtesans after the festival ends. Everyone agrees that this latter plan is much safer than widespread psychic investigation.
Koa's invitations manage to draw in several of the important guests on the guest list, including the Muster Brigadier Samuel Tennyson, the Scraver Linus Link, the Earl Gerald Soult-Hawkwood, the Baronet Robert Arlor de Marlwen, and the Lady Iphegenia Soult Arlor de Marlwen. Director Samuel Parsons of Sonnbourg Port on Delphi sends his regrets.
The rest of the guest list fills out fairly well, with four Hawkwood nobles from the Byrrem Isles, five high-ranking Guildsmen, and four Obun aristocrats (invited by Koa in the hopes that they might be interested in lobbying the Hawkwoods to place an Ur-Obun reservation near Fennen Marsh) all agreeing to attend. The Vuldrok Jarl Gunther Feggen of Erlwood also agrees to attend, but several days after the actual festival ends and the rest of the guests leave.
As something of an aside, the characters extend an invitation to certain of the Chibren notables, including Senator Pippen, Senator Hareb and Groupleader Ribben. Unsurprisingly, all three of them decline.
The total guest list rounds out to some 22 notable folk, plus a total of 150 people among their retinues, and a total of fifteen aircraft inbound, ranging from hired Flyers' Association Luftkings and Gassler Wrens to elegant Lift Yachts. Peter manufactures 22 engraved bolt-action rifles as gifts for the most important visitors, each identical with the recipient's name burned into the wooden stock. Each comes with hand-carved mahogany gun mounts and a burnished case. Altogether, these gifts cost the characters 2000 FB to manufacture.
The characters contact a Madam of the Courtesans' Guild in Tuam, who agrees to provide two dozen literate Courtesans, each costing 20 FB per day, plus whatever else they can make. The total cost to the characters is an eye-popping 4800 FB. The Courtesans are instructed to write down anything they learn and report anything interesting back to the characters. Peter makes certain to point out to them that if they come up with anything important, they'll get a bonus.
Noticing the rather decayed appearance of Constable Grigori's teeth, Peter sends him off to Tuam for some professional dentistry in the High City at a cost of some 200 FB. Grigori is extremely pleased with the results. Peter tells him, "Put your clothes back on, man. But none of this 'morality' business the next time we want to kill somebody."
Reasoning that gambling will be a social activity popular with many of their guests, the characters ensure that new decks of cards and sets of dice are easily available at all of the common houses in New Berlin, and that there is a room with gaming tables set aside within the Hillside Hotel.
For those to whom gambling holds few attractions, the characters arrange for the Baronet Robert Arlor de Marlwen to lead hunting parties out into the wilderness. They offer him the services of their Carrier VERTOL and their pilots. Peter reasons that this will be a fine opportunity for some of the guests to try out their new rifles.
The festival will begin with a welcoming feast in the evening, at which the food and alcohol will flow freely. Several of the characters plan to give welcoming speeches, and the most notable of the guests will be paraded in front of everyone else. The whole event will be held at the Hillside Hotel, so everyone will be able to see the New Berlin Starport and watch any ships that come in.
The second day will be filled with a tour of the town and the spaceport, with some attention paid to the characters' ambitious plans for future expansion. That evening, the Pakorgo mystics will perform their Hunting Dance for the visitors.
The third day will feature the Running of the Hiipos proper. The characters (and the locals they have engaged to actually run the event) have found that hiipos don't run very fast on land, so the run will be held in a swamped rice paddy. The character intend that local idiots will run along the creatures, goading them on. Sir Brindal Karth will hand out prizes to exceptional runners, predominantly bicycles and money. After the run is finished, everyone will go to another feast, featuring local delicacies and a very small amount of hiipo meat (because the stuff really tastes terrible).
The fourth, fifth and sixth days will be comparatively free of actual events. All through the fourth day the characters will make themselves generally available for their guests through a series of breakfasts, brunches, lunches and cocktail parties. Their hope is to be able to find out what their guests are looking for in a spaceport, and possibly to negotiate some terms if anybody is interested in actually doing business. The characters expect that most of the guests will depart on the fifth and sixth days.
Finally, the whole cycle starts up again on the seventh day, when the Vuldrok guests led by Jarl Gunther Feggen appear.
The Earl Gerald Soult-Hawkwood and his daughter Lady Iphegenia Soult Arlor de Marlwen show up first. Given their close relationship to Sir Brindal Karth, they are offered rooms within his townhouse. The Brigadier Samuel Tennyson shows up soon afterwards in a lift transport, surrounded by a suitably-impressive bodyguard of harsh-faced Muster troops.
The welcoming feast is a bit unorganized, mostly because the characters hadn't fully emphasized the scale of the event to the Manager and Head Cook of the Hillside Hotel. The two of them had expected only 22 guests, not 172, and were on the verge of death trying to accommodate them. When the characters sought him out, the haggard Hotel Manager rather breathlessly explained that for such an event, the normal ratio of staff to guests is about three-to-one, and he is far short of that. The characters hand him 500 FB in cash and free use of the Luftking, and tell him to get some more staff, quickly. He takes the money and uses it to hire in people from Tuam, most of whom arrive over the night. The remaining events are a touch more organized: glasses are never empty, plates of food simply appear and vanish, and well-dressed servants are everywhere.
The Brigadier Samuel Tennyson proves to be a rather crusty individual. He is initially not particularly impressed by the characters and their colony, making it very clear that he doesn't think they have the infrastructure to support his needs. He flatly rejects their proposal to pick up the costs of a rail loading facility and a rail line to their nascent port in exchange for free landing privileges. However, he does offer to route about a dozen lower-priority cargoes through per year, paying "standard" cargo rates, as a test. He also suggests that the characters buy some cargo-movers able to manipulate standard-sized cargo containers. At a minimum, he says that they will need one for each end of their rail line. The one major success the characters manage to achieve with the Brigadier happens rather by surprise, when they agree to fly him out to visit their port (which really isn't much more than a small natural bay with a primitive jetty). Brian the Goat was the VERTOL pilot for the run. Brigadier Tennyson quickly recognized Brian as a fellow veteran of the Stigmata conflict, and spent much of the flight in the co-pilot's seat, trading old war stories. Most of the positive concessions the characters got from the Brigadier occurred after his conversation with Brian.
While most of the rest of the group is failing to convince Brigadier Tennyson that he can run a war out of the New Berlin Spaceport, Koa so k'Terr does his best to show off his psychic coven to the visiting Obun aristocrats. All four of them are quite formal in their ceremonial robes and headdresses, and given to behaving appropriately. Koa, who has spent quite a number of years far from the company of his brethren, is absolutely stunned by the oblique and infuriatingly spiritual way the lead aristocrat talks. Koa's efforts to get the Obun to negotiate with him about either sending instructors for the school or petitions for a nearby Ur-Obun reservation are completely confounded by the aristocrat's blandly accepting view that such matters are properly dealt with by the Hawkwoods, freeing the Obun that they might direct their attention towards more worthwhile pursuits. Koa leaves the Obun in the school's garden convinced that all four of them are deeply interested in watching the grass grow.
Having gotten what they can from their more important guests, the characters turn their attentions to several of the lesser lights on the guest list. Three people among them turn out to be worth some attention.
Cheevo is a jovial-seeming Charioteer shipper who is clearly from far, far away. He wears what looks like a skintight Hawaiian shirt, open to his navel, and quite obviously has absolutely no body hair. He wears a small think machine on one hand, and proves to be quite adept at manipulating it using only a few gestures of his wrist and fingers. His speech is also extremely unusual: he has a habit of dropping articles all over the place, in a manner that makes some of the characters think that something strange and chemical happened to the speech centers of his brain.
Cheevo tells the characters that he owns three ships, including the Vestal Maiden, which currently sits upon the New Berlin Spaceport landing curtain. He boasts that he is in all businesses at once, shipping whatever needs to go from one place to another, and is very interested in using the New Berlin Spaceport to expedite his cargoes through Gwynneth. He claims that he has been in the Kurga Caliphate, and that his ships travel all across the Known Worlds, leaving it up to the characters to infer that if they want anything, he can find it somewhere among his trade contacts. The characters also infer that Cheevo is engaged in smuggling, and probably not just the relatively benign types. Peter briefly excuses himself from the conversation to call up Constable Grigori and instruct him to place some men watching the Vestal Maiden, just to make sure Cheevo doesn't try and slip any contraband off it during his stay.
The characters agree to a later meeting with him, but maintain significant reservations about dealing with him in the future (not that they tell him that).
The Baronet Morris Aukan-Hawkwood is a very straightforward person, compared to Cheevo. He is introduced to the characters by the Lady Iphegenia, who describes him as a fiefholder in the Byrrem Isles, near to her father's estates. The Baronet tells the characters that he wants to berth his personal yacht out of New Berlin, and to make certain other necessary improvements to accommodate his various needs. Specifically, he wants to construct a hangar on the field and a townhouse in the city, and to import an appropriate staff for both of them. The characters request that he recruit at least some of his staff from local personnel, but otherwise do what they can to welcome him and his business to Fennen Marsh.
The last visitor the characters spend time with is Gail Pawab, whom they initially notice sitting alone, off to one side of the rest of the crowd, moodily drinking from a mug of yam beer. They notice that she doesn't appear to be very fond of the yam beer, but that she doesn't appear to care much. They also notice that she is unusually listless and depressed, and while she is willing to talk to the characters she doesn't appear capable of showing all that much interest in anything at all. She notes that her current business involves moving small cargoes of exotic foodstuffs (including live animals) and spices down to Gwynneth, and that she has had problems with cargoes spoiling in orbit due to military blackouts of Prince Cassius Field. She disinterestedly agrees to route her cargoes through New Berlin, provided the characters can give her some assurances that they will be moved through to Lachann quickly.
At this point, the characters try asking her about the Mystery Planet on the edge of the Gwynneth system, reasoning that she might have learned something about it in her time as a Charioteer. It turns out that she has had significant experience with the place, back when she was the Cargo Master on the Charioteer bulk hauler Weeping Widow. During the Emperor Wars, the Weeping Widow found a Scraver derelict that had been there. The ship was drifting with only minimal life-support still functioning. Even from the exterior, the Charioteers could tell that something terrible had happened to it: the hull was misshapen and warped, and many hull plates appeared to have been melted away. The boarding parties found that most of the Scraver crew were dead, some of them in terrible, violent ways. Her group managed to find a single survivor in a lifebubble. They brought the man around and dosed him with truth drugs, then asked him what happened. She talks very casually of deliberately overdosing the man, to the point where he was sure to die, noting that it was all okay because the mood suppressants kept her from feeling anything. At this point in the story, several characters feel chills crawling up and down their spines. Pawab's monotone, hopeless delivery helps not at all to dissipate these feelings.
For all that it becomes obvious that Gail Pawab has performed a lot of terrible acts in her career, the characters continue to listen until she lets something really valuable slip. She tells them that the dying Scraver talked of actually landing on the surface of the Mystery Planet, and of finding an Annunaki city there. The Scraver party entered the city, and found what he described as a "door to another world". He placed a radio transceiver on it, with an activation code to ensure that nobody else would be able to find the location easily. Soon after the Scravers reached the city, terrible things started to happen to them. They were forced to leave many of their people in the city and flee back to the ship, but the terrors followed them even into orbit. The characters aren't sure exactly what the Scravers faced, but from Gail's description it (or they?) were still on board the derelict when the crew of the Weeping Widow found it, and proceeded to exact a terrible toll upon the Charioteers as well.
The characters make sure to get the code for the transceiver from her.
At this point in the conversation, a man walks up and introduces himself as Gail Pawab's personal Apothecary, Rupert. He explains that she's been on Mood Suppressants for most of her life and is now undergoing radical therapy to recover from them. He estimates that she's due for another "attempt" in about five or six hours. As the characters conclude that Rupert is one of the most horrible humans they have ever encountered, he comments, "At least she hasn't used a gun yet." Peter notes that she is carrying a sidearm, and asks her for it. She hands it over. Peter very carefully removes both the clip and the bullet in the chamber before returning it to the Apothecary and bidding him a good day.
The session ends with the characters watching most of their guests depart from New Berlin and Fennen Marsh. They expect that the Vuldrok emissaries will arrive there within the next day or two. Each character gains three experience points.