Flyover Country: Chapter 4

"Nob City" by Félicien Nourry

Continued from Chapter 4.

By the time Krissa, BQ, and Batias make it to Manny's construction site (having stopped along the way to sell the pilot's laser pistol and the various shit they ripped out of the gravcar), it's fairly late in the afternoon. Keeping mum about the mess they'd gotten themselves into and out of—and the several thousand credits they'd made—they question the others about what they've learned. Mustang and Roman have tapped their underworld networks for info about Manny, but learned nothing juicy. Sarai has been schmoozing at a karaoke bar, and although she's learned nothing at all about Manny or the job at hand, she has made the acquaintance of a down-on-his-luck businessman named Hoop Barrett (more on him later). Time to meet Manny.

Mansour Saleh is in early middle age, younger than Elias. He's very short, wears a great big beard, and is, by the standards of the Collines, a rich man, having worked his way up from junk dealing to  moneylending to slumlording and now construction. As Elias predicted, Manny is dismayed when six people show up (“It's not a six-person job. It's barely a one-person job. I'm not paying for six people!”), but he's susceptible to flattery and quickly charmed by Sarai's easy manner and fluent French. He brings her, and through her the rest of the crew, up to speed.

There are a several dozen people working on the site, roughly divided into two shifts (day and night); there are also dozens of people living around the construction site, on all four sides of the lot, who could conceivably be keeping an eye on what's happening. The mysterious find, however, is cordoned off behind and below a palisade of scaffolding and tarps. Only about a dozen people know what's actually going on under there: Manny himself; the night foreman, Cecilia Saxena, who's been supervising the excavation, and the small group of workers who've been doing it; the day foreman, Tu Samir; and Manny's secretary, Gloria Moretta. The ruin was originally discovered on Tu's watch; the workers who first encountered it got moved to the night shift.

Manny wants to talk money, but the crew insist on first having a chance to evaluate the find. Manny leads them under the tarps and shows them: Emerging from the earth at one corner of the foundation pit is a smooth, white convex expanse of some kind of ancient composite material. Definitely pretech. The PCs put their heads together and determine a few basic facts, including where the entrance is and that they could probably punch their way through with a demo charge, although that seems like it's probably an unacceptably unsubtle way to do the job. Krissa, meanwhile, has realized that the structure is psychically responsive; she's pretty sure that she could telekinetically "touch" an activator for its systems. It's just that nobody else knows she's a psychic yet.

The crew decide to employ a little stagecraft to impress Manny with how difficult and dangerous the job is. Roman cooks up a flashy but harmless chemical reaction to make it seem like the structure might flash-fry an intruder who monkeys with it, BQ throws in a bunch of intimidating technobabble, and Sarai eventually persuades Manny that the crew (and Elias) deserve 40% of the take.

While this all happening, a breaking news bulletin arrives:

Just before noon today, a gravcar belonging to Khabara-based multistellar corporation Minara Foods was hijacked in Freeport. In a brazen attack, at least three heavily armed and armored assailants seized the vehicle and forced the pilot to take them into the upper slums, several kilometers east of the city limits, where they grounded and sabotaged the vehicle before escaping on foot, narrowly eluding Minara security. The gravcar pilot was recovered alive; she is injured but in stable condition. The lone passenger, Minara Vice President of Purchasing and Wholesale Simon Katib, who appears to have been the target of the attack, is missing and feared dead. Minara security requests any information related to the identities of the assailants.

* * *

Having provisionally secured the bag, the crew split up. BQ thinks they might be able to activate some kind of door interface if they can wake the facility's dormant systems by broadcasting the right radio signal, so Roman and Mustang get to work on that while he scans the structure and takes notes. Krissa and Batias go to "reconnoiter the perimeter" ("watch soap operas in the quarters Manny has offered them" and "find the nearest bar," respectively). Sarai interviews the night-shift workers as they arrive.

Cecilia Saxena, a burly woman with a cybernetic arm, is chatty and forthcoming. It's an open secret, she explains, that Tu Samir is in the pay of the Bautista syndicate, helping them keep tabs on Manny's operations. The Najeeb syndicate undoubtedly has a mole of their own in Manny's organization, although whoever that is must be more discreet than Tu; Cecilia doesn't know their identity.

As night falls, a follow-up news report comes over the air:

Tefera Personal Defense has issued a statement regarding today's attack on a Minara Foods gravflyer, asserting that the entire incident, including the hijacking, occurred beyond Freeport city limits and that there was no failure of the security network in Sainte-Odile. They assure the public that this is believed to have been an isolated incident and that there is no expectation of subsequent attacks. In response, representatives from Minara acknowledged that their vehicle was operating in the so-called "Collines," but insisted that it was engaged in routine company business and in no way provoked the attack.

BQ wants to keep investigating the pretech ruin, but the others decide to call it a night, advising Manny to post armed guards. Mustang goes to hang out with Krissa; Roman and Sarai join Batias at the bar, where Sarai's efforts to solicit favorite recipes from the locals are stymied first by Roman inveighing against the insalubrious drinking water in the Collines and launching into an impromptu (and surprisingly well received) chemistry lecture and then by Batias getting rip-roaring drunk and projectile vomiting all over several people, including the proprietor. They get kicked out and drag Batias back to Manny's apartments.

Krissa has used her oracular powers both to scout for danger and to check on how her crewmates will react if she lets them know she's a psychic. At least some of them seem inclined to react positively, which gives her the confidence to confess her big secret to Mustang and Sarai and explain that she can wake the pretech systems without them having to find the right signal frequency—although they can still fake the radio signal for the sake of the others, particularly BQ, who comes from a planet where people are inclined to see psychics as witches in need of burning. They all bond a bit. We learn that Mustang got into the whole rootin'-tootin' Wild West thing when she was cast as the lead on the children's program Annie Oakley's Adventures in Infinite Space.

Late in the night, when all of the PCs are abed—even BQ, who's set up a cot in the tarpaulin tent that shrouds the ruin—a primitive (i.e., TL3) drone comes buzzing and snooping around the construction site, trying to get a look under the tarps. One of Manny's guards shoots it down, and Mustang and Roman manage to recover a partial recording from its innards, showing a couple of balaclava-wearing operatives sending the thing on its way. They all get back to bed, with plans to reconvene in the morning.

* * *

A hungover Batias contacts a local fixer and for-hire intelligence analyst he knows, Fatemeh Harbi, and sends her some stills from the video along with the specs of the drone. She can't be certain who the operators are, but takes a guess: a local private-security firm called Sunrise Strategies, connected to neither the Bautistas nor the Najeebs but rather the Umba family, whose Freeport territory is well to the north. Not necessarily information they can act on, but it does encourage them to get moving.

Mustang declares that she's figured out the signal, Krissa pushes the psychic doorbell, and (as precognitively foreseen), a hardlight hologram of some kind of anthropomorphic exotic bird pops up in front of the pretech ruin. It addresses the crew in an archaic form of Mandate that most of them can't make heads or tails of, but amateur archaeologist BQ has taken some correspondence classes on Classical Mandate and is able to serve as interpreter.

The hologram identifies itself as the custodian of the facility and demands that the PCs identify themselves or leave the premises; after some back and forth about the passage of time, the state of the Sector, and the condition of the facility, however, BQ manages to persuade the thing that it's too damaged to be able to judge whether the PCs really are or aren't a maintenance team come to put things right, and it had better let them in so they can make repairs. It does.

The facility is small—just six rooms—and dilapidated, but intact. Turns out it was a monitoring station keeping track of the long-ago terraforming of Morrow and later geoengineering efforts. There's nothing  extraordinary in it, but there are a bunch of functional computer systems and literal tons of near-priceless pretech junk. It takes the crew only a few hours to identify the most valuable and transportable items, with some remote help from Elias.

They pocket a few odds and ends (pretech cosmetics, TL5 tools, holocodices, translation discs, a roachpopper, polymorphic nanites, a TL5 espresso machine…), connect with the computer systems, identify some valuable data, and prepare to extract everything. Batias scurries off to find a data storage unit to back everything up in case ripping the servers out renders them permanently inoperable, for which he ends up paying a hefty markup. Now they just need a plan for getting everything onto the ship.

* * *

I had the ancient holographic construct speak Middle English (i.e., a cobbled-together mix of bits from Chaucer, the output of a Modern English to Middle English translator, and stuff I made up), then texted translations to BQ's player, who got to interpret and deliver them to the others however he wanted. Fun! Silly!

I also lined up all sorts of peripheral characters and Milieu machinations and set a breadcrumb trail of clues for my players to follow to figure out who was sending drones to spy on them, who the Najeeb mole was, what shadowy figures were trying to poach their treasure trove, and so forth. And the scoundrels mostly ignored them, banking on their ability to smash, grab, dodge danger with precognitive psychic powers, and make a rapid getaway in their powerful spaceship.

Was their confidence misplaced? Find out next time!

Lore24: April

"Village" by Sergey Vasnev

 

Continuing from March. Late again, and for the same reason. Not doing a great job of actually coming up with one thing every day, but hey, approximately seven a week ain't bad, right? And I'll redouble my efforts to do it correctly. (Starting tomorrow.)

April is the Gene Wolfiest month:

1. Duchess Thekla and Chatelaine Sophia are identical (?) twins; Sophia governs from their family seat as regent, while Thekla roams the stars with her comitatus in the torchship Farewell to Refinement, searching for who knows what.

2. The Continuum (aka "the union"; still not 100% certain about names) weapon manufacturer Charis produces firearms sought after all over the Pale.

3. Although the machine intelligence that ancient drug discovery depended on is now forbidden, drug manufacture is a simpler affair, and myriad formulas survive, some jealously guarded: recreational drugs, drugs to induce torpor for interstellar voyages, drugs to sustain the trance cogitors function in, and more.

4. A secret society called the Benthic Lance searches, in its glacially slow manner, for something it believes to be buried beneath the seafloor on an ocean world somewhere in the Pale.

5. The laws of the Empire (it's a capital E now, why not) are bewildering to outsiders, particularly visitors from the Continuum, but visitors are subject to the law all the same. Two frequent points of friction between empire and Continuum are amercement (payment or service demanded by a lord to settle a claim of trespass) and distrainment (when a lord simply seizes what’s owed, or what they feel is owed, by force). Via the process of replevy, fortunate or persistent petitioners can get their distracted possessions back in a court of law; the quickest, easiest way to resolve a demand for amercement is often just to offer one's service willingly.

6. “Adulterine improvements” are stations, ports, or other facilities built within a lord’s fief but without their approval. Some are hidden from view, tunneled into asteroids or the like, while others are brazenly placed in the far reaches of a weak lord's territory.

7. In most of the Empire, the commoners can be divided into the vassal minority (i.e., free persons; “citizens” in the language of the Continuum) and bordar majority (enserfed persons tied to their domicile and subject to an annual chevage by their lord).

8. Whereas in the Continuum the Ministries of Concordance, Memory, and Information labor endlessly to maintain mutual intelligibility of the universal language among their myriad worlds, recording and transmitting new coinages and correcting linguistic drift, the language of the Empire has fractured into a thousand dialects. The nobility all learn the same ossified, formal ancient speech, but the commoners represent a veritable Babel. On one planet—or on one continent of one planet, even—a vasal smallholder's plot might be a virgate; on another, the equivalent property is a sulong, and a virgate a unit of measure; on still another, the sulong is a unit of measure, a smallholder's estate is a carucate, and a virgate is the plot worked by a bordar.

9. Erre (or eyre) is a lord’s right—usually exercised on the emperor’s behalf by heralds, although vassal lords with subvassals are expected to perform erre themselves—to inspect the holdings of any vassal at any time. The lord or herald performing erre will convene a hallmote (i.e., a manorial court) and demand the fief's customal (i.e., an abstract of the customs of a particular manor) and extents (i.e., formal valuation of a given manor and its holdings).

10. In some parts of the Empire, the lord may impress their bordar subjects into service in the manorial household, whether as ancillae and famuli (female and male servants, respectively) or military personnel (the mayne or mesnie, i.e., the household guard).

11. Every century (as reckoned on Aaru), and in certain rare emergencies, all of the emperor’s direct vassals are expected to appear in court at Spire, an event know as the Assizes.

12. A palatinate is a fief whose lord exercises imperial powers as a proxy for the emperor; many systems ungovernably distant from Aaru are so ruled either directly (as in a march palatine) or via a high-ranking vassal lord whose seat is only a few light years away (as in a duchy palatine).

13. A pittancer is an officeholder, usually religious but sometimes part of a manorial household, who distributes alms and charity to the poor.

14. The names, structures, and makeup of military units raised locally in the Empire, either for in-system action or, in rare and dire circumstances, for some grand fossato, vary widely; they might be called banners, banda, minghan, or by any of dozens of other names. Basic unit sizes range from the low hundreds to several thousands. Some are all conscripted bordars, other exclusively vassals, many a mixture.

15. Everybody knows that the Rule forbids humans from crossing the Pale and leaving the Sanctuary, but there’s little agreement about whether Outsiders are beholden to the Rule, or to what extent it constrains them. Are they conversely forbidden from crossing the boundary? Are they permitted to enter, but forbidden from leaving? No one is certain.

16. The Judges, Arbiters, mischievous demons, or avenging angels imagined (or known) by some to enter the Pale and interact with humans are described variously: as luminous beings beneath human-like masks; as creatures of once-perfect whiteness soiled by their transit through these low domains, like dirty snow; as an incompressible mass of blinking eyes and howling mouths; as animate void.

17. In the popular imagination of the civilized (Ruled) systems, the Recusant Worlds are all in the thrall of abominable powers: tyrannical thinking machines, genetically modified philosopher-kings, hive minds. Such things do exist, or at least have existed, in the dark corners of the Pale, but the more mundane and much more common reality is small populations leading a hardscrabble existence, without the benefit of advanced technology whether proscribed or permitted.

18. It is possible to induce torpor in humans and safely hold them for years in a hibernatory state at temperatures near the freezing point of water, but if true cryogenic sleep ever existed, its secrets are lost. Tall tales are common in which ghost ships drift between the stars laden with frozen colonists, tens of thousands of years old, or survivors of lost ages wait in hidden vaults deep underground for some signal at which they will rise to lay claim to the Pale—or to gather their banners and assault the throne of heaven.

19. Missions on behalf of the Continuum outside its borders are undertaken by Commissars-Expeditionary and their adjutants—usually a troika representing the Ministries of Concentration, although larger (or, very rarely, smaller) parties are sometimes marshaled.

20. On Kaimana, near the heart of the Empire, the ducal seraglio grew so vast, over the course of countless generations, and became so inextricable from the functioning of the manorial household, that it eventually merged with the administration. The dukes receded into a figurehead position and eventually disappeared from public view entirely, living out lives of hedonistic bliss—one imagines—deep in their maze of a palace while a small army of courtesan-bureaucrats sees to the duchy's affairs.

21. Not all of the systems in the volume of space governed by the Continuum belong to the Continuum, strictly speaking. Uncoordinated and "less-coordinated" worlds exist at various points on a centuries-long timeline of gradual, uncoercive integration into the greater polity.

22. Interstellar piracy requires tremendous coordination and years of planning, and its execution is a long, lonely, dangerous enterprise. Pirate vessels coast for years at relatively low velocities to intercept torchships (which cannot afford to maneuver much, especially on long-haul voyages) near their destination systems or to pillage slowboats deep in the void.

23. The ecosystem of Berken is dominated by the feral descendants of several species commonly kept as pets long before the Continuum was established.

24. The proliferation in the Empire of cults around mystery traditions, oracles, and proscribed entities, so worrisome to the Commissars of the Continuum, is generally self-regulating. Little sooner than the rise of the Cathedral of Spring comes the advent of the Covenant Against the Cathedral of Spring, and the new faith ebbs with a tide of schism and theological recrimination. It is difficult, too, for even the strongest faith to leap from star to star, even along the banks of the River; proselytes seem to lose their way in the labyrinthine corridors of the great ferries.

25. A knightly cohort charged to reclaim a lost colony in the Chattra system arrive after a decade in transit to find that the herald's now 25-year-old report of murder and mayhem seems to have been mistaken—the supposedly extirpated noble house whom the emperor granted the fief (with whom none of the newly arrived knights is intimately familiar) is safely ensconced on their throne.

26. The ancients did cruel and degenerate things with artificial humans. Explorers have recorded ruins in which, it seems, lab-grown bodies were teleoperated in environments inimical to human life or its mechanical simulacra. Intense radiation, for instance, ruined even the hardiest clone bodies, but not so quickly that they could not serve for a few short days of labor.

27. On Bakayan, a tree grows whose fruit is so delectable that, fresh, it’s said to be cripplingly addictive. The preserves and other shelf-stable derivatives that reach neighboring systems are merely delicious.

28. Throughout the Pale, on almost any world with an environment even remotely resembling those in which humans evolved, one will find the near-universal rudiments of human civilization: goats and bamboo. A thousand strains of each exist on a thousand planets and moons, heir to all manner of genetic meddling across tens of thousands of years, yet still substantially resembling their distant ancestors from prehistoric Earth.

29. Traditionally, the Pale is understood to contain one thousand stars; in fact, it has somewhat more than a thousand star systems, many of which have more than one star, so that the total number of stars is perhaps half again one thousand or more. Nevertheless, the Pale is sometimes referred to as “The Thousand Suns,” and the Empire as “The Thousand-Sun Empire,” or simply as “The Thousand Suns” itself. Although the Empire controls, even notionally, not much more than half the Pale, it may indeed contain a thousand stars, or at any rate close to that number.

30. A researcher found to have been privately conducting illegal experiments in the field of machine intelligence has, disgraced and awaiting censure, apparently burned herself to death; the remains match her genetic record. Commissars-Detective of the Ministry of Safety suspect misdirection—and, if the human remains are the product of cloning, a conspiracy to assist and protect her.

Death to the d20 Skill Check

 

There are a couple great bundles on itch.io right now:

Palestinian Relief Bundle

TTRPGs for Trans Rights - West Virginia

On the off chance that somebody reading this post in the next few weeks isn't already aware of these, well, now you know! Get in there! These are both great causes and they're asking incredibly low prices for a ton of cool stuff; both bundles contain, and either bundle is worth it just for, FIST (an immaculate work of genius, reading which is akin to touching the face of God). Highly recommended!

The second bundle also contains Songbirds 3e, which I'm reading through right now. Beautiful design, lovely writing, lots of fascinating ideas. I was, however, brought up short by this:

It's my bête noire: the d20 skill check. A completely average, untrained person can accomplish the impossible 15% of the time? And the highest bonus you can get on a check (at least from stats and skills) appears to be +9, so even the world's greatest expert at something is going to fall at a task of normal difficulty 10% of the time?

This isn't to pick on Songbirds, which is better equipped than most D&D-derived games to ameliorate the weird badness of d20 skill checks (with complications instead of outright failure, and multi-check challenges to squash the variance a bit). Songbirds just happens to be in front of me (and to have made some infelicitous choices in describing the DCs). These systems are everywhere, a crummy bit of received unwisdom that we can't seem to quit even though Traveller's beautiful 2d6 checks are right there.

In a 2d6 system, even one that has fairly small modifiers, it's possible to have a DC that's literally impossible for an average, untrained person (say, DC 12 in Stars Without Number, where an untrained character gets a -1) that a highly competent character (with, say, +3 from the relevant skill and +2 from an attribute) will succeed at more often than not. A particularly specialized character (with the Expert class ability, the Specialist focus, etc.) can do the impossible regularly even at lower levels, and at higher levels can do it almost routinely. That's cool! It gives players satisfying character definition just from a few +1s, without demanding loads of crazy bespoke special abilities.

SWN, true to its Traveller roots, is a little fussy—much more granular with skills than most OSR games. But 2d6 is still great even with a minimalist system. Look at FIST! Apart from some very narrow trait-based specialization, you've basically just got a -4 to +4 range of modifiers from attributes. An unspecialized character is only rarely going to get a full success on anything, but a specialist will usually succeed, and almost never outright fail, in their wheelhouse. Every point counts for a lot; finding time for a smoke break so you get a +2 on your next RFX roll makes a huge difference. It's all satisfying and rewarding for the player, but with plenty of room remaining for things to go horribly, unpredictably wrong (especially when you push the characters to do stuff they're not good at).

Marketing Song

I used to work in advertising (shame, shame) and would collect wretched fragments of slide decks and reports to the board and whatnot and turn them into silly little poems. Was poking through some of my files just now and was like, oh, these. I should put these up on the ol' blog. Et voilà:

 

SEARCH DOES NOT LIVE IN A SILO

Search
does not live in a silo.
Search is a human behavior
that is embedded in the customer journey.

Crawl, walk, run:
Minimum viable product.
Desired consumer behavior.
Desired future state.
System of the future,
become relevant.
Drive desire.
Convert.

 

OPERATIONALIZING THE LIFECYCLE

Do we need to change the way we work?
Does our structure set us up for success?

Thank you.

NEXT STEPS

We'd like to align
on moving forward
with reaching out
to all of the recommended subcontractors
for availability.

 

SHORTFALLS

address shortfalls
in practice-area capabilities

continue network rationalization

begin disposal process

 

AN UNPRECEDENTED APPROACH TO BRAND MANAGEMENT

design-driven brands
are future-focused
agile systems
in a deliberate state
of constant evolution

an agency
that is machine-driven
but human-led

Flyover Country: Chapter 3

"City Gate" by Hector Ortiz

Continued from Chapter 2.

At this point, the crew are right back where they started (meeting Elias Bensaïd at the Café Cosmopol about a job) and right where I want them: beholden to both the Milieu (who provided them a ship and expect it to be put at their disposal from time to time) and the Commonwealth spy agency, IRIS (who essentially swiped the ship via some legal skulduggery and also expect to be able to call on the crew for odd jobs). The new job, however, involves neither of them directly.

Elias explains (French accent, remember): "A businessman in the Collines, Manny Saleh, finds, in the foundation pit his people are digging for a new building, something old is there, underground. He wants help getting in, he shares a percentage. Now, Manny is not such a bad guy, for a slumlord. But Manny is, how you say, a big wheel on a small…bicycle? He is the king in his quartier; he cannot imagine he would be betrayed, does not understand how small he is in the big picture. Manny believes he has kept his find a secret, but he has not. He thinks he calls me, I send a locksmith"—he gestures at the crew—"we help him fence his treasure, fastoche. A little cut for you, a little cut for me. We must convince him things are not so simple. Not only because we want a bigger cut, but because they are not. Others want what Manny has found."

He starts counting out advice on his fingers. "One, Manny doesn't speak Mandate well, so use l'argot; he will be better disposed. And don't be rude about his height. Two, right away, he will say, bon sang, why does Elias send so many people, I will not pay for all this! You must convince him, this is a bigger job than he comprehends. You will not only open his treasure box, you will find out who else is snooping around, you will conceal what you find, you will contrive to remove whatever treasure is there without these snoopers perceiving you, you will protect the operation with force if necessary. Three, don't let him name a price yet. He will try; it will be low. I tell him, my people must assess the situation. Tell him the same. Gather evidence, build a case for us. And four, be subtle. You don't show up all at once, you don't come with flashy vehicles, with high-tech gear. Manny is being watched already. Questions?"

They ask a few, and learn that Manny has ties to two Milieu syndicates active in his area: the Najeebs and the Bautistas. Both will expect a cut if something valuable comes from his dig, whereas Elias wants to carry this all off as quietly as possible and keep the biggest cut for the crew and himself. After a bit of haggling, everybody agrees on a 60/40 split of the take (i.e., 40% for Elias and 10% for each PC).

* * *

Getting to Manny's construction site involves either flying (extremely indiscreet) or hoofing it. The trip is a bit of a schlep: almost 10 kilometers, mostly uphill, through the Collines du Sud, the ramshackle favelas that climb the ridge east of Sainte-Odile. Leaving Sainte-Odile and entering the Collines on foot, the players have to pass through a checkpoint (manned by Tefera Personal Defense, the private-security firm contracted by the city to police the wealthier disticts). The cops try to shake them down a bit—six armed individuals, including one with a sniper rifle (Batias picked it up while shopping at the spaceport) and one with a spear, are surely up to no good. Sarai manages to sweet-talk their way through without them having to cough up a bribe, though.

There aren't many major roads, mostly just crooked alleys and lanes between tightly packed buildings, shaded from the oppressive suns by awnings and canopies. The crew stops partway up for a late breakfast at a market stall, enjoying some poulet à la moambe and fresh fruit (Roman abstains, of course). Then they decide to split up: Batias, BQ, and Krissa will head straight to Manny's construction site while Mustang, Roman, and Sarai check in with some of their underworld contacts to see what they can learn about Manny, the Najeebs and Bautistas, and whether there's any buzz about the find yet.

* * *

The direct path turns out not to be. After encountering a vendor selling pineapple-and-goat kebabs and helping themselves to second breakfast, Batias, BQ, and Krissa come around a corner into a small open area where three lanes meet, where they find a large and growing crowd. The collinaires are banging on a door, waving weapons, shouting—and throwing rocks at a gravcar (think a spinner from Blade Runner) that's hovering above the scene. Unfortunately, the mob is yelling in l'argot morrovien (i.e., French), and Mustang and Sarai are the only two PCs who speak it. Should they try to find a Mandate speaker? Backtrack and find a different way up?

Before they can decide, Krissa finds her compad buzzing—the pilot of the gravcar, having spotted three armed outsiders enter the picture, is trying to contact them. Krissa picks up, and the pilot explains the situation: Her client is in the building below that the mob is trying to force their way into, afraid to come out on the roof for a pickup. Could they disperse the mob, or at least make sure the roof is clear? (A few collinaires have managed to climb up there already.) The pilot loops the client, one Simon Katib, in; he's willing to cough up a solid 500 credits for the PCs' assistance. Sure, they say!

…but they're still willing to hear what the mob has to say, if they can find a collinaire who speaks Mandate. As they push their way through the crowd, they do find one, and he asks for their help: Apparently the building the mob's trying to break into is some kind of brothel where a few gangsters have lured local teenagers with promises of easy money and are now holding them at the pleasure of some offworlder pervert who flies over from the Green Zone a couple times a week. The collinaires want their kids back and they want the pervert dead, but they can't scrape together more than a couple hundred credits to pay for assistance.

The PCs put their heads together. Simon, it seems, is bad news. Simon's money, however, is pretty good. Maybe there's an opportunity here to get paid…twice? In his spaceport shopping spree, we learn, Batias didn't just get that sniper rifle; he also picked up a demo charge, some glowbugs, some thermal flares, and a grapnel launcher (He's basically broke now. This will be a recurring theme.) He takes aim at the brothel roof, fires, and clocks a collinaire in the head. Whoops. He tries again, sticks the landing, and secures the rope. Our heroes ascend.

On the roof, one collinaire is trying to batter the door down, one is shouting to the crowd, and one is now sitting on his ass, clutching his concussed, bleeding head. The PCs shoo the uninjured pair off the roof at gunpoint, then herd the injured guy into the corner farthest from the door. Batias boldly steps to the edge of the roof, dodges a couple rocks—the crowd's mood has turned decidedly against the PCs—and then gesticulates for them all to back off, waving his rifle menacingly. In spite of the language barrier and the fact that he's wildly outnumbered, Batias manages to cow the mob.

The pilot eases the gravcar down toward the roof, and Krissa tells Simon to come on out. He emerges, makes a run for his vehicle—and gets tackled by BQ. Chaos ensues. Simon panics, the pilot starts hollering over the comms, and a couple of the gangsters from the brothel comes up the stairs to see what's going on. After a brief standoff with the better-armed Batias, the gangsters simply close and lock the rooftop door and retreat. The PCs insist they're still going to put Simon on the gravcar; they just want to be sure he doesn't fly off without paying them. The coax the pilot down.

Now covered by Krissa's laser pistol, Simon is bundled into the back seat. To the pilot's dismay, BQ clambers into the front passenger seat and jams a stun baton (another recent spaceport purchase) into her ribs. Krissa and Batias squeeze aboard. They get Simon to unlock his compad, then wrestle it away from him and drain his accounts, netting 2,000-odd credits. They start debating what to do next—should they just dump Simon straight into the mob? He wets himself. Now the pilot cuts in.

"Listen," she says, "I don't give a shit what you do with him at this point"—Simon wails miserably—"I just want to get out of this in one piece myself. If I shut down the flight recorder and get you out of here, will you cut me part of the take and help me make it look like a kidnapping?" Sounds good to them: They transfer her a couple hundred credits, throw Simon to his grisly fate, and speed away. The pilot puts them down up at the top of the Collines, not far from Manny's construction site, hands over her laser pistol, lets them bind her hands, and then slips away to await "rescue."

Krissa stands watch while BQ tries to wipe the gravcar's computer system and Batias sets a demo charge in the cockpit as Plan B. BQ's a smart guy, but he has no background in computer science and struggles to make heads or tails of the system. When Krissa's precognitive powers tell her that an armed corporate-security gravflyer is about to swoop down on them, they rip what electronic components they can out of the dashboard, disappear into the nearest alley just in time to avoid detection, and then set off the demo charge, blowing the gravcar to smithereens.

* * *

The whole Simon Katib misadventure occurred in a single short-handed session, with half the group unable to attend, and started with one sentence in a random-encounter table I slapped together for the trip up through the Collines: "Some kind of street gathering is being broken up as a grav vehicle comes in to land, or a mob is gathering to attack the grav vehicle." I rolled up a slimy little NPC for it to revolve around, extrapolated from there, and then watched my players make a delightful mess out of it.

A precognitive psychic makes her own luck, to some extent, but we also established here that the group is just naturally lucky. So many things could've gone wrong for them but didn't, particularly when it came to bullying NPCs into backing off without a fight. Batias facing off against an entire mob, in particular, could easily have ended with him being ripped to shreds; the collinaires mostly had rocks and clubs for weapons, but a good number of them had zip guns or pipe rifles, and there were several dozen of them!