It’s not every session your character narrowly avoids getting her face blown off by crazy survivalists. It’s also not every day I throw down my entire hand of cards and manage to find a way out of the mess, either. But when a crazy survivalist in an armed camp in the middle of Nebraska puts a gun to your head and tells you to have the reject from a Trek convention to put down the crazy gun or he’ll blow your head off, and the reject fails to put the gun down…
SNAFU.
So we’re in the Midwest, which is free of lizard infestation but has to deal with crazy survivalists instead–men who live by the rule of “the strong survive” or something like that. Nebraska, to be exact. Exactly where Ren Colby’s family has been living for probably about the last ten or twelve years, since her father stopped being a diplomat and decided to go back to the Senate (where, coincidentally, her brother of the same name is serving, but we’ll not get into that just yet). Having narrowly escaped Indonesia and Thratchen (don’t ask, please don’t ask) and spending a brief stint in Kanandra (I probably spelled that wrong) and losing five months in our escape process, we got taken in by a group of civilians in Nebraska trying to eke out an existence in a world gone completely crazy. Enter the Holnists, our crazy survivalists, who kill those they can’t kidnap, treat their women like cattle, and take all the food and the guns for themselves when they can get their grubby paws on them. Said camp that’s taken us in? Yeah, they got hit and their leader killed (and his grey matter being spattered all over me. But again…). So we put order back after the raid (or some sembelance of it) and Ren suddenly finds herself leader of this camp.
Her reaction? Well crap.
She can’t leave these people to get wtfpwned by these crazy survivalists. They won’t leave. So what do she and the rest of her companions decide to do? Walk into an armed camp of Holnists and end them however we can. Suicide mission, declares the psuedovillain that’s been our traveling companion for months (turns out he was the reject’s CO in a former life). And it probably is, but we’re not going down without a fight.
So we’re down our artillery (our Aylish fairy, Tyche), but we still make a go at our run anyhow. Takes us three days to make it to this armed camp. Approach by night, crawling through mud to make it to the palisades. Scale the wall. Four of us make it to the ground on the other side without being seen. The pulp superhero from Cairo? Not so much. She goes over the wall again, to the outside, after guards spot her, and goes to ground, hiding. Reject and Ren stop the poor, confused man from Oroush from climbing back up to save the damosel in distress.
“The mission. We’ve got a job to do, and she can take care of herself.” We press on, find a mess hall, hole up in there and try to formulate a plan.
And blow a few perception rolls in the process (which leads us to the mess we find ourselves in when we walk out again).
So we walk out after deciding that we’ll be making our stand wherever they happen to keep their munitions, if at all possible, and hope that we can convince them that we’re stronger than they are. We’re certainly more foolhardy, after all.
Reject (Amarant) walks out first, gun ready. Nothing happens. Ren (me) goes to follow. I actually make my roll, notice the guy who’s watching the back door…in time to get my shirt grabbed and a gun shoved in my face.
You don’t have to be a Marine (which Ren is) to know that this is a piss-poor situation to be in, especially when your life depends on the eight year old (because Kanandrans are cloned and have hyper-accelerated growth….so the reject is an eight year old–or maybe a seven year old, I don’t remember) not doing something stupid.
Which he commonly fails at. Epicly.
So I’m supposed to tell him to put down the gun or else this nutcase is going to blow my head off.
“Amarant? We’ve got problems.”
Amarant looks. Doesn’t put the gun down.
Well, shit.
So I look at the cards in my hand. I trade seize initiative for an opponent fails. So I’ve got an opponent fails, a drama card, a presence card, and a haste card. All right. I can work with this.
Throw an intimidate roll and manage to delay the guy in pulling the trigger to blow my head off. Great, that’s fantastic. Grab the gun, jam it in his face (I’d wanted to snap his neck, but my result didn’t end up being high enough to just kill him outright — bummer! I’m a medic. I know where to press so it snaps, right? I’m a Marine. They’ve shown me at least once how to snap someone’s neck fast, right?) and knock him down.
So I’m alive. For the moment. At 7:30 next Thursday, though….well. That may well not be the case. Apparently…we’ve drawn a lot of attention.
But I think I know what I’m going to do. (What would Alison Stockbridge do?)
Step on the guy’s neck and take his gun, look up at the wall and whoever’s got the spotlights down on us. Smile real big and strike a dramatic pose.
“I’m Aemaren Decker. You’re going to put those guns down or my friend here is going to open up with his boom stick, and that’s going to take you down. Hard. And don’t think he won’t do it. You’re mine, now.”
….it won’t work. But it’s a nice idea.
