This was the session where the stopper got pulled out of the mutant powers bottle. SPOILERS for the MY0 metaplot.
A new PC: Starbuck the Stalker. A shy loner who keeps himself to himself in his 2nd/3rd floor air duct, which he hops up and down to with his frog legs. He's got Extreme Reflexes too, which is one of the less fun mutations but pretty useful.
PC lineup: Starbuck, Ines the Dog Handler, Guillermo the Gearhead, Miguel the Enforcer.
Assembly: the Ark starts work on a workshop, a marketplace and a Zone Wrestling fighting pit (the pit is on B2 and B3 in No Smoking's domain).
A week or two has passed since last session. One night... Zone Ghouls attack! Starbuck boings up to the 7th floor to make sure Guillermo is OK. He encounters two Zone Ghouls who attack him, but he uses his frog legs to boing away to the server room where Guillermo and Miguel live.
The ghouls follow. Starbuck fires arrows super-fast at them, injuring one, but his mutation overheats and he gets dizzy and disoriented. Guillermo uses his Human Magnet power to tear down a metal strut from the building's false ceiling and clonk one of the ghouls with it. Miguel charges in with his axe at the ghoul with a scrap pistol and very nearly kills it – only a collar of scrap armour saves its life. The ghouls flee. Miguel pursues setting the pistolero on fire with his mind and killing it. Starbuck leaps into action again and kills the remaining ghoul with an arrow to the heart.
Meanwhile, Ines uses the cover of the mayhem going on in the ground-floor courtyard and car park ramps to sneak down to where No Smoking is barking orders to his people. She convinces him to let her guard the slave Sira, and briefly checks in on her.
Then Ines puts her plan into action. She waits until No Smoking is headed towards the fight with his two bodyguards, then uses her Puppeteer power to make them shoot him. No Smoking is only injured. He shoots and kills one of the bodyguards. The second is able to start explaining and apologising before getting shot too. Ines slips away.
Counting the costs in the morning, more than a dozen mutants have been killed, much loot has been taken from the Ark, and the ghouls destroyed the in-progress smokehouse project.
Time passes. The mutants work on projects. Guillermo fixes some scrap armour for Starbuck and makes a new one for Miguel. Then, one night, the murders come back. Guillermo finds himself compelled to kill Miguel. He starts wrapping a bike chain round the enforcer's neck, but Miguel is able to beat him down and knock him out.
Guillermo hadn't just heard voices. He'd seen a face. Gunitt, one of Marlotte's crew. Ines stomped upstairs and collared Esteban to demand to see Gunitt: he's been sick for weeks, he can't possibly be involved in any murders, came the reply.
Well anyway, it turns out Gunitt had developed a new mutation, which causes him to send out uncontrolled telepathy when he slept. He'd tried not to sleep, but how do you not sleep? He was the cause of the murderous voices. Debate ensues about what to do. Kill him quietly and frame Esteban? Kill him noisily and frame Esteban? In the meantime, the PCs search Gunitt's dwelling and find an old cassette player.
In the end, a public meeting is convened on the roof. Gunitt, coaxed into lucidity for a moment, explains what happened. Miguel drops him off the roof. Problem solved! Right?
Guillermo takes Miguel on a scrap-collecting tour of nearby streets. They pick up, among other things, a phone containing a small dynamo, which Guillermo realises (player idea + Comprehend + Jury-Rig) that eh can use to power the cassette player.
The miraculous device plays amazing music from the Old Time ("Call Me" by Blondie) and, when you flip some other switches, you hear a voice. A stern voice, repeating a message: all personnel of security clearance 5 or higher are to proceed to their nearest command centre. Then it lists the coordinates of 5 places, Alpha to Echo. All other citizens are to remain in their homes.
Starbuck thinks about things, looks at his sketched maps of the Zone... comprehends. The mutants mark down the locations of the five command centres.
// ** Transmission ends. ** //
Comments