The Beach Episode
In the previous session of our Traveller campaign, the players had got into a gunfight in the backstreets of Acadie city, and managed to extricate themselves with a prisoner to recover and plan their next actions.
176-1105: Early Morning Travels
Khadashi and Shinzaro had managed to make it to a secluded place whilst the police swarmed onto the location of the fire fight. They had managed to drag with them the unconscious woman who Shinzaro had shot, and made sure that she wasn’t going to die any time soon.
Eventually they realised that trying to slip back into the starport with Khadashi in his shot-up condition and an unconscious (and shot up) woman, whilst the city was alerted probably wasn’t the best idea, so Shinzaro went back by herself.
She was still wearing her cloth armour though, which though not illegal was suspicious. She made a Deception check, and I gave her a bane die (roll 3d6, take the lowest two) because of the armour, which gave her a final result of 6.
The security team paid very close attention to her, patting her down for weapons and double and triple checking her ID. She flirted with them enough to make them uncomfortable, and insisted the armour had been part of her costume for a ‘special adult club’ she had just come from. There are some disparaging comments about ‘furries’ but she is finally let through, swishing her tail as she goes.
Since they don’t want to leave the Perfect Stranger unattended, Shinzaro looks after the ship whilst Zanobia goes out to hire another air car to pick up Khadashi and his prisoner. Whilst all this was going on, I had Khadashi roll a d6 to see if anything interesting happen, getting a very boring 3, so nothing bad and nothing useful. There could have been police patrols, there could have been rebel rioters who may have been willing to help.
By the time they’ve bundled their prisoner into the car, a police car has started circling around and taking a note of their registration – it was unusual for an air car to be set down in this part of the city so late at night. Since they don’t want to risk starport customs, they head back out into the forest where they attempt to wake up the woman and extract some information from her.
According to her ID, she is Elisha Hoburn, an off-worlder from St Denis (Old Islands/Reft 2424). Zanobia made a Persuade check to get information out of her, and got just high enough to start getting information – but it would take 50 minutes to complete the task. After 15 minutes though she gets bored and they kick her out the car, with a knife for her to cut herself free.
As they leave, they spot a couple of aircars heading their way, so they go dark and try to lose them. As it happens, they were police cars to see what is going on out here, since they’d tracked the suspicious hired aircar via its registration, and it heading out into the middle of nowhere was even more suspicious. Technically, they could have followed them back, or had another group pick them up when they landed, but I felt that would have slowed things down so decided that these particular police were lazy and not wanting to get involved in anything dangerous.
So they dump all their weapons and armour into the sea, drop off the car again and head into the spaceport unchallenged. Aboard the ship, they decide it’s time to lift off, get clearance and head up into space.
They notice another ship take off shortly after they do – a Far Trader named the Regensturm, which seems to head out to the 100 diameter jump point. Though they had 2 parsecs of fuel, they planned to head to a gas giant to pick up more fuel, then remembered that there was no gas giant at Acadie. So it was back down to the other side of the planet to pump sea water for fuel.
It took several days for them to fill their extended tanks, but that was fine because they had found a nice tropical beach from which to do it. This gave them enough time to heal up and get some rest.
According to the healing rules, you need a sick bay to recover, but I allow a medic roll to be used with a bane without a sick bay. Even with that penalty, it only takes 3 days for Khadashi to heal his wounds. The wonders of futuristic technology.
The players have a discussion about what they want to do next, and whether they should just deliver the ship without the data it was supposed to have. They may not get all of the Cr250,000 award if they did that, but they could argue that they should get some.
Alternatively, given that the ship itself is worth MCr80, they could just run off with the ship. They might be able to get away with it, at least for a while.
Personally, I wouldn’t be too bothered if they did this, though the slow jump speed of the ship does mean they would find it difficult to outrun the law when it finally comes looking.
182-1105: Cheesecake
Fully fuelled, they decide to head to the mining town at Houillon to follow up on the mention of someone named Joel Bisset which they found in the ship logs. They are welcomed at the empty patch of ground that is the local ‘space port’, but quickly determine that Joel is dead – he was killed in a stupid, silly gun fight over a keg of beer. At least, that’s what his daughter Isabelle tells them.
He’d had some help from the previous crew of the Perfect Stranger after a run-in with government forces (he was a political agitator), and had agreed to look into who was funding the rebel groups here and providing them with arms.
She does provide a bit of information – one of the groups the crew had run into were the Services de Formation Ecoris – a company providing self defence training, but possibly a front for Joyeuse intelligence. Since they’d had some difficulty figuring out what to do next, I decided it was easier to have Isabelle cooperative and trust them without too much effort, which would help them focus on where to go next.
Whilst Khadashi and Shinzaro are getting this information, Zanobia is sunning herself on the top of the Perfect Stranger, whilst a group of young local men are cleaning the outside of the ship. For some extra credits, they’re willing to strip down a bit and act as eye candy for her.
They come away from Houillon with information, and also a couple of jobs. There are a couple wanting quick passage off-world – Raymond Albrecht and Madeleine Vernant. The crew settle on a price of Cr3,000 to take both of them to Sochi City at Colchis.
The town also has a few crates of ‘material’ they would like shipped out – 4dT of radioactive ore. They want to avoid any entanglements with both Amondiage and Colchis customs, so their contact at Sochi will pay Cr25,000/dT for delivery. This is quite a reasonable sum of money, so there are bound to be complications.
Rather than simply jump to Colchis though, they decide that they want to go check on the warehouse where the first gun battle with the original crew happened. There might be some more information there about what happened to the ship’s data cores.
