LogWanderers-Jason-10

Game log for the 2017/02/19 session of Wanderers, as taken by Jason

Eight days later, the group arrives in Sparta. Three members (Meatloaf, Colson, and Sabatini) of Satan's Prom Date flake off along the way. Meatload says he needs to go back to Apollo's Well to deal with some stuff that got stolen, and will hook up with the gang in Sparta, but the other two just leave for parts unknown along the way.

Violence, alone in her gyrocopter, approaches Sparta and sees it deserted. She decides to land on top of one of the containers in The Tumble, and it's only after she does so that she notices the slime stains. She also sees movement out toward the ship. She starts looting, while keeping her head on a swivel. She sees people and begins to retreat toward the gyrocopter, where she plans to create a defensive position. As one of the bogies crosses her line of fire, she blasts him.

Approaching the town, Major Tom hears the shooting, and takes SPD along by the bow to see what's what. Some people might just look, but Tom asks the psychic maelstrom. At the grocery store, there's an emaciated guy cleaning up one aisle, and another raking stuff off a shelf into his cart, and the people in line at the seafood counter are killing one another.

Grey Rat looks around and sees movement on the ship at deck level. Ace does not drive any more cautiously but, behind the wheel of the Superbird, allows SPD to take point. Major Tom reads the situation.

Violence begins taking fire from a different angle, so she crawls around and returns fire from a slightly different position and angle. She takes a little frag from from ricochets, but when she pops up in an unexpected location, she lays down some righteous hurt on a guy.

Major Tom comes around the bow and sees two guys preparing to rush a young girl on top of a container. He orders SPD to take the guys out. Their numbers and firepower mean it's no contest- SPD just stomps the raiders. Major Tom previously led a gang that killed the people who killed Violence's parents, so she's not alarmed.

Fifi goes to try to rub out a couple people from the Apollo's Well security force, but after she sneakily erases the first one, the second sees her taking aim, and yells out, "Fifi's a turncoat!" Several other gang members hear and immediately turn around. She tries to come up with a plan but there are too many of them and there's no time, and they open fire.

Ace and Grey Rat finally round the bow and find SPD in a shootout with Fifi. Ace hits the breaks and throws the steering wheel hard over, keeping the Superbird from driving into the fire zone, but temporarily taking himself and Grey Rat out of the fight.

Major Tom hears the gunfire from behind and slows to a stop to turn around. Leroy Brown, who has been coveting Tom's job, smashes him in the back of the head with a pipe wrench as he rides past and KOs him. Violence, who feels a certain personal connection to Tom, shoots Leroy. Fifi stops screwing around and wages fucking war this time, going cyclic on the gang and scattering the ones she doesn't kill. Leroy Brown, not dead yet, also heads off for the hills.

Spoonman begins dragging a couple of dead bodies (Mama Cass and Corbeau) off to the taco truck.

Violence runs up to Major Tom, head still on a swivel. Ace drives up with Grey Rat and they unass the Superbird. Violence makes it clear that she won't tolerate Grey Rat hurting Major Tom, but then, Grey Rat usually does the stuff that nobody else can see anyway. Grey Rat asks the maelstrom how to rid of SPD, and sense that he needs to convince Tom that there's a better way. He uses the time and intimacy that come with healing Tom to command him to get rid of his gang, because they've been holding him back. When Tom wakes up, he feels oddly free, for the first time in a long time. He picks up Leroy's pipe wrench and goes back to a bar called the Jukebox. When he slaps the jukebox with the pipe wrench, it begins playing Graveyard Train. He pulls a guitar off the wall and begins noodling around with it, teaching himself to play while catching up with Violence. Tom warns her about the dangers of the goo, the black tanker truck, and the faceless kid.

Fifi loots the bodies and comes up with 1-armor and some guns.

Ace also goes looting and also asks the maelstrom what Blondie is up to. He feels a weird pulsing, almost a drumbeat, and senses that she's out there and she's angry. There's something calling us off to the east.

Grey Rat goes to the taco truck and finds him making kidneys into nutrient paste for Randy. Spoonman also manages to isolate some black goo, which he decants into a vase, and then analyzes. He finds a vein of this black goo in the maelstrom, coming from as far east as the Cliffs of Insanity, where it's like a giant waterfall. When he's done, the sample has become flaky, ashen, and safe to the touch, though it's still pretty gross.

As Violetta loots Sparta, she comes across a little boy, four or five years old. The skin around his mouth is starting to grow over his mouth, and one of his eyes is leaking down his cheeks. It's not quite leaking black goo but it's not leaking something good- not that an eye can leak anything good. Anyway, the kid first tries to hide, but when he knows that Violence has seen him, he says, "help me." She uses the shotgun to help him end his wretched life. When he dies, he sprays black goo. Ace asks if she's OK, and she replies, "I'm OK, but I wouldn't get too close. I just smoked a goo baby." Ace suggests that this looting process should now operate on the buddy system. Violence claims a flat bed, which she will use as aa transporter for her gyrocopter. As Ace loots, he notices a manikin watching him. He's pretty sure it wasn't there five minutes ago. He smashes the manikin. It makes him feel better. Tom comes around the corner, tells Ace he remembers these manikins, and blasts it with a shotgun instead.

As we regroup, Tom and Ace both announce strong feelings that the group should head east. There's nothing east of Sparta before the Cliffs of Insanity, so we'll want to pack carefully, but we also don't want to stay here. Ace suggests making camp in a defensible spot 1-2 miles outside of Sparta.

Tom goes to ask Grey Rat about this sore on his gums. GR diagnoses the Fix and suggests that maybe Spoonman can help. Yikes.

Ace confronts Melody and tells her to stop following him around. She won't.

In the morning, we find four manikins outside of our camp, either standing or sitting in lawn chairs. One of them is holding a beer. There are no tracks. Fifi wants Violence to help her blast them, but Grey Rat and Spoonman want to investigate. GR reads the situation, determines that the manikin with the beer is in charge, and manages to read through the maelstrom to what's beyond it. He's not seeing music videos, he's seeing the production team for the videos. They explain that the manikins are props, stand-ins, and that they need us to leave to get out of their shot. We also need to get clear of the pyro. When he comes out of the maelstrom, the manikin had moved its beer to the other hand. Grey Rat advises us to move on. Violence takes her gyrocopter up and looks around, and sees a flash from somewhere on the aft superstructure of Sparta. Someone there is watching with binoculars.

Ace and Fifi go for a scout, trying to clear a perimeter about half a mile around our camp in every direction. They come over a ridge and find several members of SPD. Ace suppresses them to keep them from getting to their bikes, letting Fifi handle the actual murdering of the people. She wipes out the two who came from the constabulary, and most of the others, leaving just one guy (Meatloaf) limping away. Fifi greases him too. As Fifi's about to loot the bodies, Violence drops down and uses gestures to communicate that there are more of them out there. Ace races off in that direction and doesn't have too much trouble catching them, but then they start trying to use their numbers to outflank him. He responds by using machine guns to kill them all, and comes away with nothing worse than grenade frag damage to the radiator on the battle buggy. He loots 3-barter from his kills.

As Violence circles back toward the ship again, he finds a manikin on the bridge, waving at him. He reports that to Spoonman, who tries to use augury through Randy to figure out what's up with the manikins. Randy asks him to wait, time passes, and then she says, "OK, it's done." Now there's a manikin in the truck. She tells him to make it work for her. Spoonman moves himself to wherever Bailey Blue is, which turns out to be the inside of a shipping container. Full of manikins. There's a big smear of goo in front of him. He asks the manikins if that's Bailey. They don't respond, so he opens his mind... and reaches beyond the maelstrom. She's the goo, but she's still tied to all the manikins. Each of them is, in some way, a fragment of her. The maelstrom also does this weird flickering thing, as though time was stopping, and she moves around when it stops. She can only move when nothing else moves. Thinking he's figured it out, he exits the container, and that's when he getw jumped by a guy with a fireman's axe.

He has a chance to duck away but he'd be pressing himself against a goo stain, so he doesn't duck. Wham! He gets KO'd by the axeman.

Grey Rat comes out and tells the rest of us that Spoonman vanished and now there's a manikin. Tom develops some strong opinions which can best be expressed by loading and locking his weapons. Grey Rat asks Randy where Spoonman went, and she tells him he went to go look into the manikins. She also refers to the manikin in the taco truck as her body, and threatens to create a flesh eating nanovirus to devour Major Tom's balls if he touches "her body." Grey Rat susses out that Tom knows something about mankins that he doesn't, and asks. Tom explains about Bailey Blue.

Fifi looks for Spoonman in the maelstrom, and sees him hanging by one foot from some vines, while natives ready a cook pot.

We convoy up and drive toward the ship. Fifi rides with Violence on the copter, while Major Tom takes point for the ground convoy, with Ace and Grey Rat following. Violence examines the ship and sees a man lying atop the bridge, scoping the gyrocopter. He points the guy out to Fifi, and then plans a course that will force the guy to stand up and expose himself to Fifi to keep the copter in sight. Fifi shwacks the observer and drops onto the deck of the ship. Violence lands on the deck and teams up with Fifi. As they work their way into the ship, Fifi almost puts her hand down in a big smear of goo, but a timely yank from Violence stops her. The goo is going to make the going treacherous.

The vehicle convoy gets to the hull, and they get inside without making contact. Ace takes point and shoots the first guy he sees. The bullet wounds spray blood and slime all over the wall. Ace warns the others that there's an enhanced slime threat, and loans Grey Rat his 9mm so that the Brainer won't have to rely on knife work against these walking biohazards.

Violence and Fifi consult on tactics. They agree on a measured advance toward Spoonman's presumed location. Inside the ship, holes have been cut into the containers to turn the container stacks into usable space, but now they're all full of black goo. When they get to Bailey Blue's place, they find a fresh blood trail, and follow it.

Violence leads off and follows it to a bulkhead. Looking through a peephole, she sees that the scavengers are outside in the Tumble, and they Spoonman trussed up by the fire. There's no hatch here to let them out, but Fifi has an automatic weapon and AP ammo. There's a hatch now, though it doesn't close real well. When Fifi kicks it to knock the new door out of place, it gives way a lot more easily than she expects, and she sort of launches herself out of the ship and falls onto a container.

Ace, Major Tom, and Grey Rat go running to the guns. Tom puts his boot down in some goo and wipes out, leaving him sitting in a big puddle of the nasty. He's suddenly in the maelstrom. He hears the familiar call for a cleanup in aisle 5, and as the janitor mops up the mess, Tom realizes that he's the mess being mopped up. Grey Rat takes a look at him, says "welp," and kills him with Ace's 9mm. "Let's hope we can save Spoonman."

Fifi gathers her wits and moves into battle. The scavengers maneuver to stop her and run smack into Violence's shotgun fire, and many of them die in a hail of discarding sabot slugs. Fifi finishes off the rest with her assault rifle, but takes a nasty wound from their return fire.

Spoonman wakes up and sees Fifi rescuing him, as Ace and Grey Rat emerge into the tumble. Violence goes back through the ship to her gyrocopter, while the rest of the gang exfil in ground vehicles.