Earth Tier
With Friends Like These
As a little foreshadowing I want to offer a special roleplaying challenge for you. Let’s jump down the road a piece - to the actual sub base - and assume you have received intel about opposition headed your way. You can assume it’s similarly inserted agents from your favorite rival organization. Assume the intel suggests you set up an ambush taking advantage of the base’s static security features - blast walls, defensive bunkers, guard towers and so forth - setting up to funnel your targets into a kill box.
Describe in detail how you set your ambush. Take a few minutes to collectively plan out cover, lines of fire, sniper nests, mines, vehicle traps, etc. Where do each of you set up and what preparations do you make?
The party deployed itself to put a kill box in the central roadway outside the main dock building.
Nikolas - took up a sniper nest on the elevator tower roof
Piv - hid within the structure of the dry dock crane
Kruger - joined Nikolas on the roof
John 117 - hid near the northern bridge exit ready to sneak in behind anyone who used it
Terry - hid near the northern bridge exit ready to lay down suppressive fire
Rentlov - took up aerial overwatch
Piv blew enough of the southern bridge’s supports that any ground vehicle trying to use it would collapse it into the water below.
(Unbeknownst to the players, during this vignette they were playing the forks Ozma captured and brainwashed - either when they willingly went with Angel or when Ozma took the Pontes Station safe house.)
Bridge Over Troubled Waters
The smart tires skid on the loose gravel as the tread fluctuates to maximize traction and dust billows around the vehicle as the truck breaks to a halt. Corroded cables and melted deck panels make the bridge look hundreds of years older than it should and the rising of the road span ahead hides the far side from view.
The water below looks stagnant and dark in the flat light of the dull sky, like something spilled in the channel has congealed around the stanchions supporting the bridge. On the opposite shore what was once coniferous forest is now just a landscape of scattered, skeletal tree trunks, pointing like bony fingers into the dead white sky.
Surely the bridge can hold the weight of a single truck? Definitely. Probably. Maybe? Sure, it’s safe to cross. Sure…
Rentlov scouted the bridge but saw no obvious threats and Piv - reviewing the footage Rentlov brought back - determined that the bridge was indeed sound enough for the single truck but opted to scout ahead on foot nonetheless.
Nikolas began driving across, but as the truck reached the zenith of the span a massive black nanite swarm flowed up the bridge stanchions from the water below and attacked the truck and team, trying to disassemble it. Defensive driving, heavy gunfire and grenades from above mostly held off the attacking swarm, but Piv in his slower Daitya was quickly left behind - failing to jump aboard the truck as it raced by.
Bullets, plasma bolts and grenades tore up the swarm and the bridge, and though the truck did not make to across unscathed, it did make it across. It power-slid to a stop and the team opened up a scathing cover fire for Piv and he lumbered the last 100 meters to safety. It was a close call.
Pastime
The dull sun set almost an hour ago, darkening the eerie landscape and slowing your progress even further. Ghost contacts that prove to be nothing plague the scanners and ratchet your already taut nerves up another notch. The constant, hyper vigilance is taking its toll, even in your synthmorphs, and you need to find a safe place to hole up and take a break.
Is that light up ahead? Artificial light? Lights actually - lots of them. Just off the road the through the trees. Trees? There are trees! Lots of them too - an actual living forest! And that’s music? Seriously - organ music? What the fuck?
Wary of the lights and the fact that there was now live vegetation everywhere, Rentlov did low speed, stealth recon up road and then back again. As he returned he could see that the lights were at an athletic field and that a deeply disturbing game of little league baseball was being played in a park along the highway. The players were not moving in entirely natural ways and the small crowd in the bleachers was uncanny - somehow inexplicably frightening. Beyond the field, other lights could be seen, like those of a small city - where the town of Gig Harbor, WA was supposed to be.
The party opted to simply drive on by and Nikolas picked his way down into the median and kept the truck from view as they passed. Once beyond the park and looking back the sentinels were stunned to realize that what they had assumed to be the night-darkened silhouette of a water tower was in fact a monstrous TITAN machine and that was slowly moving about the city. It trailed a web of hundreds of thin strands - cables or wires - that appeared to run down and into the town.
Nikolas drove on.
If a TITAN Falls in the Forest...?
As you search for a good place to hole up until morning, you begin to notice strange objects along the roadway, highlighted by the truck’s low light optics. At first the structures look like crooked street lamps, but they are too tall and they seem randomly scattered along the median. They are tall and thin - 50 meters high or more - and made of some kind of extruded metal. As the truck picks it’s way down the highway the density increases until the road is covered by what looks more like a surreal, bamboo forest than anything constructed - leafless and lifeless, but not without movement.
There are things leaping about in the upper levels. Monkey-like artificials of some kind if the sensors are to be believed, and for the moment they seem to be ignoring your presence. At first you think the unnerving, low-power radio signals trickling in through the truck’s receiver are from the robots - until you realize they are coming from the metal trees themselves. The signals clear and you hear human voices - some calling out confused, some begging for help or sobbing, some screaming in harsh whispers and madness.
Just get home as fast as...
I have no idea what…
Mommy, is that you…?
Run, RUN…!
I told her not to move. They like the ones that move…
Noooooo!
They mostly come at night...mostly?
The density of the strange structures increased to the point that the truck could not pass without forcing its way through the metal trunks. As Nikolas maneuvered to turn and go back they way they had come, the strangely silent arboreal artificials seemed to attack - dropping on those outside the truck and leaping through the hole in the roof left by the missing turret. Rather than causing damage however, the bots glommed on to the sentinels’ bodies with sucker-like mouths and force-downloaded random seeming memories through their skin-links. Memories that had apparently been harvested from human minds during the Fall by the strange TITAN aerial array.
You miss your dead wife.
You embezzled from your company and are being investigated.
You abandoned your family to flee the Fall.
You lost your mommy and are afraid of the scary monsters.
You murdered someone just to steal their food.
You sacrificed yourself to save a stranger from a headhunter.
You tried to bribe your way aboard a transport and were betrayed.
You were a scientist who contributed some programming to one of the original TITANs.
You are dying - oh God you are dying!
Dome Sweet Dome
The remnants of the AB dome slump across the near horizon like the remains of a titanic jellyfish, the buildings and other structures of the ruined town shrouded like ghosts in the thin, decayed polymer sheeting. Remarkably, a few compartments are still intact and semi-pressurized, giving the center of the mass a bloated, pulsating form.
As you slow the truck to a stop to survey the best way through or around you realize there are people among the stalled flood of vehicles clogging the road ahead. Some in cars and trucks, a few on motorcycles or scooters, but most on foot. They are universally still, seemingly watching your approach, waiting for you to make the first move...
Just south of Bremerton WA, Nikolas stopped the truck and the party scanned the crowd with enhanced senses as Rentlov took a scouting fly-over. Sun bleaching, tattered clothing, flat tires and drifts of dust and desiccated detritus revealed that these people had not moved for years - perhaps since the last days of the Fall. Like biblical pillars of salt, the bodies seemed to have been frozen in place as if everything organic had been turned into some kind of solid resin. A lingering reminder of the inexplicable wroth of the TITAN nanite swarms.
The party backtracked and found an alternative route to the west, around what was left of the old city, the failed dome and the graveyard of statues.
Your Own Worst Enemy
The sentinels carefully drove through the abandoned grounds of the Bangor Submarine Base as Rentlov made a high speed scouting flight over the target zone. Review of his mnemonic record revealed no obvious threats and identified a major source of energy emissions inside the largest structure on the base’s Delta Pier. They hid the truck in a copse of trees outside the blast walls defending the pier and made their way to the docks.
John 117 forked himself by the expedient of removing his stack from his own body and plugging it into one of the steel morphs the team had brought along as backups. The fork then took off to find any bunkered warheads that he could use as a plan B failsafe.
The team crossed over the southern bridge and began checking buildings, making their way to the primary structure in the middle of the facility. As they approached, all hell broke loose as their own forks launched their ambush and attacked them(selves).
(Caught by surprise, the players were asked to roll initiative for both their primary characters and their own brainwashed Ozma forks, and then instructed to roleplay both of their opposing characters in the subsequent firefight.)
At first it looked like the Firewall sentinels were going to be slaughtered, with Kru and Rentlov taking some serious hits. However, some hot sniping by Nikolas, some raw luck for Rentlov and the fact that Firewall Terry had a mini-gun, quickly turned the tide. The fighting was quick and brutal and with Ozma Terry going down in a withering crossfire the battle ended.
As the fighting stopped, the sentinels received an encrypted comm signal from inside the main building. Kru opened a channel and a taut, haughty and supremely irritated voice almost screeched, “Well fuck! Would you please just stop? I can not comprehend how I continue to underestimate you interfering band of misfits but...PLEASE...JUST...STOP…for one fucking minute and listen to what I have to say. You might actually realize you are fighting for the wrong side…”
The party regrouped and approached the massive main hangar door as it began to scroll upwards. John 117, still in cloaking camo, was given access through the floor as the hatch over a large moonpool within the structure slide open.
As they moved inside the bay, Kru spun up the antimatter bomb on his back and activated it’s deadman’s detonation function.
Through the Looking Glass
You roll in hot and blooded to find an undamaged, state-of-the-art Reaper standing over the restrained form of what can only be the current instantiation of the Song Cai Flower ego - a massive conglomeration that looks most like a madman’s version of a flex bot. The reaper is wired to some kind of harpoon that has penetrated the exurgent morph and appears to be exuding a mass of fast-forming nano-constructs that have bored into and fused with the target. It looks like nothing as much as a scary robot holding another scary robot on a cybernetic dog leash.
The backdrop to the tableau is a large armature that has been constructed out of a mass of cannibalized equipment and fabbed parts - the detritus of which is discarded around the margins of the scene. Heavy cables run into the shadows and a deep, audible hum from the device indicates it is tied into the base’s still-functioning fusion reactor. The familiar, matte black door of darkness defined by the frame indicates the gate is already powered up and active.
In a calmer but still taut tone the Reaper morph speaks aloud. “As usual, your timing is uncanny. As you can see however, I have things well in hand. Accordingly, I would appreciate a chance to win you over to my cause...or would you prefer we just start shooting again now?
(At this point the players were told that whatever actions they took would result in one of two mutually exclusive story resolutions. They were also told that once they had decided there was no changing their minds and that the unselected option would forever remain a secret since within the narrative it would never have happened.)
Option #1 - None Shall Pass - (if the players try to stop Whitegate’s plan)
Option #2 - Back to the Future - (if the players allow Whitegate’s plan to proceed)
The party showed surprising restraint in not instantly blowing the Director away and letting him speak. Whitegate’s words were clipped and fast but conveyed the following.
Whitegate’s plan hinged on his assumption that a Reaper morph and an armored squad of synthmorphs suddenly appearing through a wormhole in the midst of one of the most secure military bases in the world to interrupt a Project TITAN development workshop should be sufficient to capture the scientists’ attention. The exabytes of data detailing the history and aftermath of the Fall Whitegate would then download to the scientists would be sufficient to convince them of the truth - once the initial panic subsided of course.
He admited that the various theories about time travel are contradictory but even if the least efficacious of them is true, what would be the loss? At best, his plan would create a revised or perhaps a branching timeline. At worst it would initiate a new Big Bang. Either way the results would be TITAN free…
There was a moment as Rentlov and maybe Terry actually seemed to be considering the possibility of letting Whitegate go through with his plan but as Rentlov began a debate over tacnet, Captain Kruger detonated his bomb - effectively choosing Option #1.
None Shall Pass
Everything goes dark with an instantaneousness that defines the word. When you rez in some indeterminate time later you do so from backups made prior to egocasting for Earth - approximately 36 hours ago. Back aboard The Shepherd’s space station you have immediate access to sensor data that quickly gives you a rough overview of events over the missing time. Though catastrophic the circumstances certainly appear to have been decisive.
As you shift to the station’s real-time inputs you can scan the six kilometer wide glass crater and trace the massive plume of radioactive dust that is streaming east from where the submarine base previously stood. Whatever was down there - whoever was down there - has been reduced to atomic components and free energy, and any plan they might have had has been vaporized as well. Mission fucking complete.
After a long silence while you each contemplate the destruction below The Shepherd again utilizes the voices of your muses. “Well done sentinels. Transhumanity may very well owe you it’s very existence. My emotional subroutines identify that as a significant burden to bear.
Now, let us consider the future you have won for us…”
(By way of helping craft their character’s own epilogs, the players were asked to respond in writing to the following prompts prior to the next game session.)
• Where do you go - inner system, outer system, rimward, exoplanet?
• What do you do - old job, retrain, old economy or new?
• Do you willingly maintain a relationship with Firewall and/or your fellow Song Cai sentinels?
• How has your character changed since waking up on the Song Cai Flower?
• What one thing do you really really want out of the rest of your potentially immortal life?
