Bruce (Goat Gulgusskun) realizes that he can probably write one of these little intro pieces without any reference to what is really happening. Tim (GE Smith) would agree, except that he is off doing other more important things. Chuck doesn't even realize that he completely agrees with Bruce's opinion. Paul (Bob the Saurk) explains that he really needs to live out the vicarious sense of power that he gets from this game, and that his life seems colorless and bland without it. Except when he's playing City of Heroes on the net. Chris (Caleb Kagan) finally admits that his character is based upon the least-interesting cop character from The Shield. Ernest (Liz Blessing) points out that the other characters are much more interesting and recommends that everyone watch the program all the time. And then he tells everyone, "Meat makes the crust!" Bruce and Chris trade uneasy glances and move their chairs away from Ernest.
The start of the session finds the characters stomping through the Flesh-Eating Jungle of Sternvaal. Bob the Saurk complains, "Some of these plants are colored fuchsia!" Jo-Jo explains, "Those are the ones that eat people's flesh. That's why this is called the Flesh-Eating Jungle." Bob tells the others, "I found something! This plant gives you an itchy rash and attracts bugs! Who wants some?" Caleb Kagan tells him, "Could you avoid fumbling your perception rolls out there, Bob?"
Liz Blessing explains that she is wearing heavy flak armor even though it hides her girlish figure. She rather mournfully comments that the demlux don't seem to be susceptible to her various feminine charms. Goat Gulgusskun pretends to be interested as he concentrates on stepping into Jo-Jo's footprints.
Bob the Saurk is on point when he realizes that there are demlux sentries all around. He sneaks up to one of them and eviscerates him in one blow, then runs through the underbrush frantically dodging a fusillade of return shots. He looks around and asks, "Say, did these guys look friendly? No? Okay, that's good."
Caleb starts planning how to produce a series of videos entitled When Saurks Attack! He'll follow them up with a special titled Survivors of Saurk Attack, though he suspects that he might have some trouble finding any actual survivors.
Bob the Saurk expresses no interest in his impending video stardom. He runs up to another sentry and executes an instantly-lethal "deception attack" upon the poor bastard. He explains to the others, "I run at him with a tambourine in one hand so he thinks I'm a gypsy minstrel, then I stab him through the tambourine." Goat Gulgusskun finds this explanation unconvincing. Caleb moves over to a tree trunk and rather haplessly looks around for anything to shoot at. Unfortunately, one of the demlux spots Caleb first and inflicts a deep wound on him.
Liz notices that Jo-Jo is frozen in fear. She sees only one problem with this: he is also maintaining a deathlock grip upon Liz's sniper rifle. She drags him and the rifle along as she searches for cover behind a low rise. Goat makes his own way over to Caleb, medical kit in hand. He pumps Caleb full of painkillers, then blazes away at an incoming demlux. Caleb comments, "I can't feel my privates!" He expresses his anger at this development by dropping the demlux Goat injured.
Caleb is shocked and amazed to see Bob the Saurk inflict a mere light wound on a demlux. A tone of concern in his voice, he asks, "Are you losing your touch out there, guy?" Bob pretends he didn't hear as he grimly chops again, felling the sentry.
The last sentry realizes that all of his compatriots are dead and that he is surrounded by savage player characters, foremost among them a blood-drenched saurk. He turns and runs. Caleb and Goat run after him. They can smell his fear. Bob follows an instant behind. The sentry leads the characters a merry chase through the trees.
Caleb, aided by Liz's directions, closes on the escaping sentry, then shoots him in the back. And misses. Bob the Saurk and Caleb finally manage to overrun the fleeing sentry. Caleb notices that the demlux has a hand grenade (sans pin) in his hand. He shoots him anyway. The demlux cries out, "Allahu akbar!" and drops the grenade. Then trips over a root and falls on top of the thing. He blows himself up. A rain of demlux parts falls over a hundred-meter radius. None of the characters suffer any damage more severe than a disarrayed wardrobe.
As usual, Goat takes care of the injuries.
After a bit, Liz and Jo-Jo reappear. Liz indicates that she found the others characters by following the smoke trail, and imagines that the characters should be moving on because others could too. Jo-Jo proudly tells the others, "I have a gun now!"
The characters find the demlux caves. Bob the Saurk gets nominated as the scout. He is able to see seven demlux sentries at the cave mouth, including two with light machine guns, plus four more standing in the trees nearby. Bob returns to the others and says, "I think we can forget the quiet approach."
The group sketches out a quick plan: create a disturbance, attract the attention of the guards, then send Bob in to get the prisoners. Caleb manages the first part very nicely by blowing his stealth roll. He attracts a lot of sniper bullets. Bob suggests, "Hey Caleb! Maybe Goat could knit you some cover?" Caleb ignores Bob in favor of shooting back at the demlux.
Goat and Liz help take some pressure off Caleb by opening fire on the demlux. Goat actually manages to kill one of the snipers. Then Liz takes a severe hit. Jab! Goat is on the scene with his painkillers. And Liz finds herself back in the fight.
Caleb moves in and tear-gasses half the sentries while Bob simply murders the rest. He moves in to the cave mouth to engage sentries three and four at a time and is quite shocked to start suffering light wounds. Caleb grabs a light machine gun from a collapsed firing position and charges down the corridor blazing away as he goes. Demlux fall left and right. Liz notes the single-minded way that both Bob and Caleb have charged down into the caves and comments, "You know, one of the great developments in combat since the invention of modern firearms is the ability to attack at a range." Caleb admits that he's tried this, but has never managed to actually hit anything doing it.
The characters push in to the depths of the cave complex to find a crowd of shouting demlux. Of course, none of the characters understand demlux tribal languages, so none of them have any idea what the excitement is about. They manage to deduce the essence when Bob fights his way into a cave containing what looks like the missing Representative Joshua Cabal and a couple of wounded bodyguards. Bob cuts down one of the door guards and pushes into the cave. He reasons that he'll have more killing room inside.
Caleb arrives on the scene and briefly contemplates firing his new machine gun gangsta-style. He decides that short, controlled bursts are a better idea. His conservatism is rewarded by a deathly-accurate fusillade that takes out the two remaining demlux guards in the corridor.
Liz takes careful aim down the corridor into the cave, clicks on her laser sight, and tags the wounded demlux engaged with Bob the Saurk twice, knocking him down from system shock. Liz calls out, "Bob! Save the Representative by killing everyone else in the cave!" Bob obliges.
One of the demlux guards watches the terrible whirlwind of devastation that is Bob the Saurk and decides to hide behind the one thing in the room that has value: Representative Cabal. He draws a knife and indicates to Bob that if he moves, then the politician gets it. Representative Cabal proves that he isn't just good on camera by jabbing the demlux with his elbow and breaking free. Bob strikes at the demlux, who evades, tackles Representative Cabal and commences throttling him. Bob cuts him again. And again. Until he dies.
The excitement and the terror subside to leave a lot of wounded people. Representative Cabal has a light wounds, and both of his bodyguards have infected deep wounds. Bob the Saurk has two light wounds. Caleb Kagan and Liz Blessing both have deep wounds. And finally, the one surviving system-shocked demlux has three deep wounded. This is actually enough wounded people that Goat cannot actually heal everyone right away. He stabilizes his various patients and heals them until he runs out of psi points.
Liz asks Representative Cabal, "How are you?"
Representative Cabal seems rather surprised by his rescuers. He comments, "You're not marines..."
Liz is very breezy in her response, "No, we're just kinda freelance. We're here to rescue you. As you can guess, the ICPA isn't too enthusiastic about getting you back."
Representative Cabal still has trouble understanding the characters' good motives, asking, "You're... here to rescue me...?"
Liz replies, "Yes. Can you speak enough demlux to know why they took you?"
"They wanted to ransom me for small arms and to get the humans off Sternvaal. But there has been no response from the government, and no marines. And now a bunch of rag-tag mercenaries shows up. No offense, of course."
Liz lets him know the full depths of the situation, "It's worse than that. We're here out of the goodness of our hearts. And as far as the outside world knows, the government hasn't even seen any ransom demands."
"Why would you people risk your lives to do this? Patriotism isn't very popular right now."
"Then call us unpopular. We're working with a fairly large network of people unhappy with the actions of the hard-line elements of the ICPA government. Plus there are aliens involved."
Caleb breaks in, "Should we be prepping people to move? We've been here for almost an hour." Goat pitches in, "We'll need stretchers for the two bodyguards and the demlux. But we'd still better move. There are sure to be more demlux coming."
A quick check of the caves reveals that the demlux weren't much on furnishings or communications devices. They are pretty clearly extreme tribalists.
Liz cautions that the demlux aren't the only danger. She also knows that there is a black op team on the planet, and suggests that they might be heading in to find the Representative right now. She thinks there is at least a 50% chance that they've already found the characters' parked SUV at the edge of the jungles. She tells the Representative about this team, and indicates that she thinks its mission is to make sure that he doesn't come back. She offers to transport him to the nearest convenient other planet. Representative Cabal asks, "Why should I believe you?", clearly still not convinced that the characters are the knights in shining armor that he might have hoped for. Liz explains, "Because we just greased like twenty demlux to help you. And then there are the aliens."
"Aliens? Which aliens?"
"Actually, there are two of them. You've already heard about the Anzani. They're at war with the BreeKhanAr." Liz goes on to explain the entire situation between the BreeKhanAr and the Anzani, with significant emphasis upon the various undesirable policies and strategies used by the Anzani. Goat helps as much as he can.
Representative Cabal is incredulous. "Either you're the luckiest sons of bitches in the universe or you're all totally insane. But your story does explain a lot."
During this discussion, the characters mount everyone up on stretchers and head out into the jungle. Liz decides that she finds Representative Cabal appealing in a reminds-me-of-my-dad sort of way. Caleb Kagan holds his head and mourns, "Oh god. I can just see how things is going to go..."
Representative Cabal, still blissfully ignorant of Liz's unhealthful designs upon him, offers, "If what you're saying is true, then you may be able to help. Both in the shooting and the non-shooting way. If you can find the names of the ICBM officials who were involved in contact with the BreeKhanAr, then I can put pressure on them to cooperate. And any dirt you can get on the Anzani would be helpful." He indicates that he has Anzani translation software on his yacht, and that the Anzani compound at the Voniri Free Trade Center will have the necessary information.
Liz groans, "I hate voniri." Goat responds brightly, "Good. Because you might end up getting to kill a whole lot of them."
By this time, Goat has regained enough Psi points to heal up the bodyguards (though not to cure their diseases). He is able to cure one of them, but not the other one. He explains to the unfortunate bodyguard, "You've got psi-resistant bacteria..." As a side benefit, he is able to confirm to the other characters that both bodyguards really are human (there had been some concern that one or another of them might have been ramzani shapeshifters).
Some moments later, the demlux captive is also in good shape. Liz (with Jo-Jo's help) interrogates him. Caleb helps. The Representative does too. Bob and his threats of, "I cut off his hand!" doesn't. It turns out that the demlux really were making ransom demands. Their demands sounded pretty extravagant ("Get all humans off Sternvaal!") but the government (the local ICPA Marine commandant) was just stringing them along.
The characters expect that the black ops team is going to be tracking them into the jungle. Seeking to be on the correct end of the next hail of gunfire, they decide to ambush the ambushers. They pick an attractive site around a cave and establish a blood trail inside; given that the characters' company still includes two members on stretchers and one prisoner, this is none too difficult.
The characters place the high-value targets (including Representative Cabal, the demlux prisoner, and Jo-Jo) deep inside the cave, out of direct sight of the mouth. A simple screen of brush hides the cave mouth, but not too well. Bob and Caleb set up on the right flank. Goat and Liz stand on the left flank. Caleb has an emplaced light machine gun and five neuro-shock grenades (loaned from Goat). Goat has five more grenades. Bob is the stealthiest, so he acts as scout.
Bob watches carefully as five soldiers move in quietly. He comes up over the comlink, "They're coming in. When do we want to start shooting?" Caleb responds by popping up and opening fire with his light machine gun. The black ops return fire with silenced submachine guns. Caleb gets a nasty bruise. Bob runs in and cuts the closest trooper in half, then uses the fellow's body as a shield to block his comrade's gunfire. And then a commando Bob didn't see fills him full of lead. Bob staggers under the impact of a deep wound.
Goat pops up and tags an incoming commando. And then again, thanks to Liz's command points. And then again, finally knocking the man down.
Caleb dishes out a deep wound on the commando that shot Bob. He yells out, "On your nine, Bob! There's a guy on the side where your arm is disintegrating!"
Liz pops up and tosses a neuro-shock grenade at an incoming commando. He falls, stunned. Liz is excited, "Ooh! A prisoner! I need to take my prisoners quickly before you people kill them!" Caleb reminds her, "Don't forget about cyanide teeth..." Liz reassures him, "Then I'll just have to extract all of his teeth..."
Bob finds himself slowing down under the pressure of his wounds. It is only Liz's warning that keeps him from taking more damage. Bob swarms the commando in front of him and chops him down. Liz calls over her comlink, "Finish him, Bob!" Bob turns to swarm the guy who hit him earlier, inflicting a second deep wound. Caleb comments, "I bet that guy really wishes he could fall down." And very appropriately the commando surrenders.
Liz interrogates the surviving commandos. She is able to confirm that there were only five of them on the mission. They are all agents from the Alpha Centauri Internal Security service, rather like ICPA Marshals in conception but more like brownshirts in execution. Their mission was to kill Representative Cabal, one way or another.
Each character gains five experience points and two Genre points (one because the characters rescued the Representative, and another because they took both demlux and ACIS prisoners).
Bruce tells everyone else, "I won't be here next week!" Ernest adds, "I won't be here either!" Everyone else responds, "But you wouldn't have been here anyway." Chris volunteers to host in Bruce's place.
Goat spends 12 experience points to gain Telepathy 2 (8 points) and Stealth 2 (4 points).