Post date: Jun 06, 2010 8:23:31 PM
4/20/84 - Continued
Over confidently, BW moved into the tunnel and found himself in 30 foot high large room, in the dim light of his pipboy he could make out great machines that were perhaps part of some printing press. Sneaking forward he obtained a central position in the room spotting at least one of the Protectrons on its eternal patrol as well as identify that there were at least two more somewhere to his left. He also identified that there were at least the clicks of three or more turrets in the great room.
Grim moved in behind him noting his hand signals and moved to the left. Then ACE followed, along but stumbled (crit failure) and bumped against one of the printing machines turning it on, causing the alarms and security system to be alerted to the party’s presence.
What followed was a brief but intense firefight as plasma weapons and assault rifle fire was exchanged with 5mm turret fire and lasers from the protectron. Acid spraying from Nuka-dispenser and frantic activity to turn off the aged printing press before it caused a fire were all activities before the room was secured. In the end, the most kills went to both BW (2 turrets and 1 protectron), with Grim a close second (2 Turrets and 1 Protectron) and ACE getting the last kill on a Protectron with a mighty burst of nuka-acid, which also proceeded to dissolve the lock off the door it was standing in front of.
Moving in the group secured the upper catwalks, looting a nuka-cola machine of its two precious drinks. Looting the office of the printing managers where they found a clue that Medtek had acquired all the mint (peppermint, spearmint, etc.) seeds in stock and to change the catalogues to be printed. They also reviewed the latest catalog where they found that the Greenthumb catalog had many patented seeds, but also a large collection of heirloom seeds that were in a secured, atmospheric and humidity controlled environment, that was biologically and radiation proof. Lastly there was an email sent the day before telling the floor manager to prepare to let some repair technicians into his "basement kingdom" so that they can repair a water leak that is causing troubles in the bathrooms and upstairs terrarium.
The group then moved to the sturdy door that had finally stopped sizzling from the acid bath it had just received. Opening the door, Grim and BW moved into the room with Wayne and ACE right behind them as Doc watched from the walls. Inside they were greeted with the sight of shelves filled with boxes, the floor covered in a strange greenish carpet of mold and the occasional dripping sound of a drop of water hitting a pool, when suddenly BW noticed parts of the floor move. "Rad-roaches" he called out as the mold covered chitonous shells moved in on the party. Suddenly a great sized beast appeared from behind the shelves, a massive Rad-Roach, but Grim was in exterminatous mode and brought the beast low with plasma fire, then finding themselves surround BW pulled the shishkabob and fired it up, but in doing so triggered a massive fireball as none had noticed the natural gas build up in the room.
While, BW, Grim, and ACE were mostly unharmed, poor Wayne lost much of his facial hair (and soaked several wounds).
Once the fires were extinguished they found plenty of boxes filled with moldy old catalogs and a few boxes where the roaches had eaten through the shell and wrappers and eaten some of the seeds, still they did find a pack or two of begonias and marigolds.
Meanwhile, Grim willingly crawled through a small opening to find the roach nest filled with egg sacks and the skeleton remains of some past survivor from which she did fine some .44 ammo. From here the group gathered at the only way up they could find, an elevator. Once ACE made the necessary repairs (which triggered the thought that someone intentionally disabled the elevator), everyone but Doc rode up to the muzac of the Inkspots and exited on the next floor.
Listening carefully, the group detected the squeaky- squeeky sounds of treads. Looking out they saw an office space with desks and filing cabinets, and on the opposite wall the Greenthumb Catalog Co company logo "Ready to Grow with You." Peering around the corner, ACE saw the semi-familiar form of a Robobrain/Brainbot filling clipboards behind a desk. Attempting to bluff, ACE stepped out of the elevator. To which the Brainbot replied in a most pleasant female voice "Greetings fellow Greenthumb employee, please present proper identification." To which ACE fired her Railway rifle and sadly missed. To which a fracas erupted in the office space as the group dealt with three of these Brainbots, who could not hit the broadside of a barn, and were quickly dispatched with Wayne's plasma pistol falling the last one through the desk.
A search of this space and the adjoining office found some usable "junk," some trade goods (liquor and smokes), and a large stash of pre-war dollars. In the office, BW found on the desk a Clearance badge for "Dr. Lenny Davis, Lead Horticulturist." While ACE refused to let the high security on the computer deter her curiosity and was rewarded with Access Granted. On this machine she learned about Med-tek's desire for all Mint seeds to prototype a new flavor of Mentat's and obtained the address to their research lab in Eugene. She also saw plenty of messages about the drop in water pressure and how it was troubling everything from the flushing of toilets to keeping the terrarium watered. Lastly she obtained from an irate email from Dr. Lenny Davis to the CEO the access code to the Secure Seed Vault.
Opening the door to the loading dock, BW and Grim were surprised by the sudden appearance of a strange looking lunch-box/claymore - also known as a bottlecap mine. Fortunately for the two of them Grim was fast on her feet and fingers and was able to disarm the explosive before it blew them to kingdom come. After disabling the ingenious device, they pocketed the spare caps, and resumed searching this level.
Searching through one door brought the group to the front foyer where a pack of giant rats became a pack of giant dead rats. A search of the adjacent restrooms revealed a med-kit had not been looted of a Med-X and a Stimpak. The last room on this level was a changing room, with stairs leading up. Searching the lockers they found an environment suit, and a suit of pre-war relaxed war. They also found that all the locks to the lockers had been cut with acid.
Moving upstairs they found a most unusually decorated room, from the flickering of a single light they saw hanging from the ceiling hundreds of glass drops like water droplets, that appeared to have been stabbed into the ceiling. On the far table they found a "chess-set" where several pieces had clearly been replaced with other items (pawns were now Nuka-cola caps). At this point Doc and ACE guessed that black was winning, but it would be a close game. Two doors exited this room, one felt warm to the touch, and was clearly an airlock style door where the sides would fold away and the central part would sink into the floor. The other door did not seem to have such security. Opening the easier door they found a long hall with computers lined up on the outside wall. ACE was able to confirm that they had been shut down with care, at the far end there was definitely another door, that had a label that faintly read "Labs."
Grim, eager to tackle a challenging lock, tried several times to open it, breaking a couple bobby pins (2 bennies spent), but was finally able to defeat the lock and gain admittance to the space beyond. And it was a space, for as the door descended, bright sunlight, something they had not seen since entering the sewers, streamed into the room, and beyond was a lush landscape. There were two trees which grew to just under the roof line, their branches ladened with Crunchy Mutfruit underneath waxy leaves, beyond them were three rows filled with a variety of semi-recognizable vegetables. In the far corner from where they entered a barrel stood filled with a wide variety of gardening and indeterminate tools. As the group moved in they spotted another door along the same walls they entered as well as a door on the far side.
Moving beneath the shade of the Mutfruit tree, ACE gasped as she spotted a great vine like plant uncoil from the ground and turn its bulbous top toward her. Looking carefully through the garden the group spotted two more such strange plants. ACE gesturing to the others seemed to have drawn the ire of the plant as it spat a spike/seed from its top and pierced ACE's toughness, but she soaked the damage. This caused the rest of the group to either charge in with weed-whacking swords (where BW learned they had long reach and first-strike) or with Plasma weaponry and steam powered spikes. After a short skirmish later the plants were down and BW was gleefully making sure they would never grow again. During this time, ACE did hear a "clang" from the door that was closest to their entry point, so the group prepared to enter. BW checking the door determined it was quiet beyond but also smelled something was cooking.
Quickly opening the door, the group found a room where a bed had been placed on top of two desks, there was a table with a chair and a bowl of still steaming soup on top. Some sort of machinery that was slowly chugging along. A ladder on the far wall went to an open trap door on the roof. Another secure door stood to the left of where they came in, with a computer lock on it. Wayne, sensing that whom-ever lived here was more afraid than a threat entered first and went up the ladder, but upon reaching the roof did not see any place for a person to hide unless they were hanging off the edge of the roof. But as he stood there, he felt a sudden sense of dread, that a dark eye was turned upon him, and as he glanced toward Skinners Butte, he saw a brief glint from the distant stone tower, before he dropped down below.
Using the access code gained from the office below the group breached the secure airlock door and found a similar door, upon the wall was a sign telling the users to don their environmental suits before proceeding. So ACE, Grim and Wayne proceeded to suit up as BW and Doc waited in the "bedroom." What the three saw upon having the door behind them close and seeing their suits slightly inflate was a room lined with shelves. Upon those shelves were hundreds and hundreds of boxes. Looking at the boxes they found them labeled with both the common name and scientific name of hundreds and hundreds of different plants and vegetables. But upon closer examination they found most of them had a red "x" upon them, where as others had green circles. Some of them even had dates, dates that were written after the war.
Meanwhile outside, as Doc rested next to the bed and BW watched the roof access, Doc heard something move from under the mattress. It was then he realized that the desks were positioned in such a manner that there was a cubbyhole underneath the two desks. Stepping back BW called for the interloper to come out or be shot. To which a gravelly voice replied with great caution, asking what they wanted and to not harm him. To which a dialog ensued that revealed the voice belonged to the now Ghoul, Dr. Lenny Davis. Upon getting assurances of not being shot on sight for being a ghoul the group, once rejoined, learned that Lenny was in the Seed Vault when the bombs fell and thus was spared the initial blast that melted the glass from the terrarium roof and killed so many in Eugene, but the lingering radiation plus whatever else was in the bomb changed him forever. Dedicated to a fault he continued his work and when he finally tried to leave the building found the area outside hostile in more ways than one and thus began his continuation of his passion to grow the perfect plant for the current environment. After several hundred years he has created a virtual paradise of plants, except for some pesky weeds that shoot anything that move, but fortunately sleep at night. When told the weeds were dead, Dr. Davis sighed with some relief but was troubled when he was told that ACE had been wounded by one of the seed spikes. He explained the spikes are coated with small seed spores that enable the plant to kill what it wounded and enable it to spread.
So after BW took care of the last weed in the Labs, Doc and Davis worked on a cure for ACE (who fortunately had, the .666 version of the software which aids in detecting and curing toxins), which caused her to sweat out the toxins much like tree sap. Talking with Davis, the group was able to convince him that perhaps living here would not be something good for the long term and there would be a community not far from here that would hugely benefit from his expertise. Agreeing under the condition that the group would ensure his safety, Dr. Davis gathered many of the green circle seeds from the vault as well as many samples of food from the terrarium and a huge bunch of the strange tools that ACE correctly guessed were used for hand pollination as there were no bees, bats or small flies alive to do the job. They also determined that Dr. Davis was a consummate chess player but did admit his right hand tends to cheat. To prepare to leave ACE doused Dr. Davis in Abraxo cleaner (that way he wouldn't stick to the environmental suit and leave "bits" behind. ACE also helped, nay, handled the removal of all of Dr. Davis's research from the various computers as well as a few extra multi-processors that Tesla might enjoy.
During which BW and Grim put their combined love of mass destruction together with other input to determine how they were going to blow the Greenthumb Catalog Company building sky-high. So by taking some of the barrels of petroleum based ink they found in the basement along with spiking the natural gas pipe in the store room as well as the one they had encountered in the sewers earlier in the day. Taking dried old catalogs and stacking them up near the Natural gas leak and with a trail of the ink toward one of the printing presses that was known to throw off sparks as it ran, the group vacated the premises. As they exited the sewers in the slowly dimming light of late afternoon they could imagine what would be happening below. A spark or bit of ash reaches the petroleum ink which would slowly burn through the door to the pile of dry catalogs, eventually burning high enough to reach the natural gas which would explode through the catalog storage room but also cause enough damage that it would start a massive conflagration in the basement, which in turn would reach the natural gas in the sewers causing that section of the sewers to also join in the explosive cacophony.
And sure enough, as they reached Nukey and Bessie they saw the results of their work as smoke poured from the building that was once the Greenthumb Catalog Company, but also saw gouts of flame raise from parts of the ruins as the sewer line started to collapse, they even saw one manhole cover go sailing and land on the rusting hulk of a car causing it to go up in a miniature mushroom cloud.
(A Good close approximation video)
In the end, the group grabbed their simple minded companions and headed south, away from Shadow Mans gaze and into the Eugene foot hills. Travel through this area was slow but they did find plenty of evidence that the Yoa Guai were heavy in this area as bones of a wide variety of prey were found here and there, but they were slightly stalled as they found the bodies of four Yoa Guai eviscerated by something else. Still they made their way home, to Vault 33.
Along the way, as they traveled south of the dusty bowl of the Fern Ridge Reservoir, they spotted a dust cloud to the north. Looking through their monoculars the group identified a group of about 50 tribals moving north. Dragging with them a cart and several sledges. Curious as to what was going on the group approached, with Wayne hailing the pack of people. Eventually a mountain of a man came forth carrying in his arms like a small child an older woman, the tribal Elder, speaking in a voice worn with age and weariness, she and Wayne spoke at some length. This tribe was travelling north due to the fact that giants have been killing and kidnapping members of their tribe, along with all their brahmin and pig rats. They had heard of a great tribe called the Grand Tribe and hoped that they could seek sanctuary there. To which Wayne informed them that the Grand Ronde Tribe was not so welcoming and that they might find hope and a home with a group they called Tribe Six. Doc treated some of their wounded which showed signs of taking gun fire as well as several broken limbs. The Elder explained their medicine man was unfortunately one of the first to die and go missing to these giants. The Knights quickly conferred and offered to take them to the valley of Vault 33 and obtain for them some fresh water and tomorrow would take them to get them a new Brahmin, to which the Elder was most grateful.
So the large pack of wanderers made their way to the valley where, with proper signals the tribals set up camp in crook of the valley while runners came to the cave mouth and received fresh water for their skins and gourd canteens. Meanwhile in the vault Doc, BW, and Wayne had to deal with introducing Dr. Lenny Davis to the rest of the Vault. While it took Steve almost no time to welcome a Ghoul into their midst, John took a bit more convincing, it was not until Doc gave a very impassioned speech about how when Group C dethaws there may not be enough food left to feed them all, instead of sending them into the wastes, they must prepare and be ready for their arrival.
John also had concerns about giving water to the tribals when they have yet to finish digging the well. Mr. Handy has been busy drilling based on what the water maps showed but they are running out of pipes, they just need a couple hundred more yards of pipes. John's suggestion is to go to any water filtration plant or energy plant as they will have lots of high grade piping. He suggested looking first at the facility at the northern edge of the Fern Ridge reservoir, he also shows them on their Pip-Boy map where the Eugene Power plant is. To which Grim so politely put it to John, “Diplomacy is sometimes necessary.” That evening they sent an encoded signal to Jim "Jangles" in Corvallis informing him a group of 50 tribals was coming and to be sent toward Tribe 6 and not to be sold to the ranchers and farmers.
4/21/84
The next morning several of the group traveled to Railyard, and acquired a good Brahmin for the Tribals, while others finished de-tox and installed the acquired computer hardware. During that brief time in town, Bill Terra approached Doc with a worried expression. "I think I have a way you can earn the signature of Railyard on that fancy piece of paper, come back in the morning and if things haven't worked themselves out, I might have a task for you." To which the group went back and got the tribals on their way.
4/22/84
Early the next morning the group left Vault 33 and returned to the now familiar location of Railyard.
Upon arriving the Gotham Knights found Bill Terra (Yard Boss), Shane (Chief Engineer) and Greg (Leader of the Bulls) were very eager to meet with them, but missing were their various body guards. To which Doc quipped "So..where is Chuck and Porterhouse?" Bill then relayed that two days ago a group of raiders attacked from the south after some sort of fire took up in parts of Eugene ("The smoke could be seen from here"), sending out guards to deal with their incursion they didn't realize is was some sort of feint. But now several guards have not returned and it is feared they may have joined several salvage teams that had not recently returned in taking a dirt nap. Bill wants them to find whomever is behind this, get their folks home safely or at least their bodies and punish whomever is behind this. In exchange he will sign their free-slave pact agreement. Bill said that when it came to dealing with anyone other than Shadow Man they could use whatever methods they deemed necessary, with Shadow Man the group would need to be more "delicate." He suggested checking three locations that Raiders have been known to congregate, the Northern Rail yard, the Eugene Power plant and of course Shadow Mans strong hold on Skinners Butte.
Gearing up, the players decide to go check on Fast Gary to see where the remaining Railway rifles were at. Upon entering the Golden Spike smithy they were surprised to see the "workers" lounging around and James in some sort of confusion. In speaking with James, it appears that Fast Gary has been mentally degrading over time and it has only recently accelerated. Now Fast Gary has been sedated in his room, and without his guidance the rest of the smithy is at a standstill on all orders.
After speaking with Doc Talbot (Railyards Doc), the group got permission to see the patient where they found Fast Gary cuffed to his bed, whose sheets were spattered with blood stains. Gary mumbled shifted, when asked about what he "saw" he kept saying: "Death from the south, the mutants will follow the rails." Wondering if Fast Gary's past exposure to Shadow Man was perhaps the cause and not wanting to believe in any form of voodoo mumbo-jumbo ACE fashioned a cap out of tin-foil and placed it over Fast Gary's head, which immediately caused Gary to fall into a deep sleep. As she placed the tin hat she noticed a subtle scar above Gary's right ear.
Doc was able to convince Talbot to allow him some exploratory surgery on Fast Gary. After prepping as best as possible (need to remember to get a stimpak and med-x from doc for the surgery), the cap was removed and Doc peeled back the flesh to find a rubberized circuit board with fine wires that went through a slit cut in Gary's skull. Carefully as possible, the circuit was removed showing a technology that was hyper-advanced compared to most wasteland chop-shops. Upon its circuitry was imprinted "Gen. Atomics Int. + Med-Tek." This made perfect sense to the hovering ACE who knew that GAI was responsible for the brainbots and as such would be perfect for any such neural interface and Med-Tek would be a natural partner in such a cybernetic break-through. Once removed Gary lapsed into a deep sleep. Meanwhile ACE fussed with the implant enough to at least get a signal to appear on her pip-boy. But all she got was a strange set of symbols that were not even keyboard standard (think the weird symbols seen in the Matrix).
From here, the group left Railyard and worked their way south, looking for signs of the battle and where any survivor’s might have been dragged off. With Wayne taking the lead the group found signs of the fight and how the raiders were clearly outmatched then suddenly the tide turned with reinforcements and the Bulls were taken. Moving south along the rails they spotted some oddities, phone poles cut down, cars with their engines removed (like what they saw in Eugene just a few days ago), sections of the rails reinforced, all very odd. Doc cried out for a crowbar or prybar to damage the rails but the fates did not seem to align with him (Going to give an extra Benny to Doc for next session so as to not "derail" the upcoming adventure, despite the fact that he did have an Adventure Card which would have given him exactly what he wanted).
From here the group traveled into the ruins of Eugene, heading toward the closest of the three possible locations (that and the tracks seemed to lead this way) to which they heard the sounds of celebratory gun-fire. Seeking a high vantage point on a crumbling overpass, using their monoculars and sniper scopes they spied a crowd of raiders gathered inside the train yard. Over the wind they heard an amplified voice - "Today, the dream and vision that has united us comes to an end, as shall Railyard! All Aboard!" As the crowd parted they saw the engine of destruction, a heavily modified locomotive linked to three trailing rail cars. Quickly they surmised the threat and the group began to look for a way to get aboard that train.
End.
To Do for next session:
1) Verify the group did radio ahead to Jangles about the Tribals coming
2) Make sure that John's pleas for more water pipes is noted and add the location of the Eugene Power plant to their maps.
3) Give everyone 2xp