LogWanderers-Jason-8

Game log for the 2017/01/29 session of Wanderers, as taken by Jason

Three days into the desert, Ace and Fifi continue pushing hard for Apollo's Well. Blondie's taken to riding Fifi's bike while Fifi rides the 'bird. We've gotten into a running gun battle with the Datsun Cannibals when Grey Rat's car throws a rod. He loses control and ends up rolling it, which throws him from the vehicle. Major Tom sees it happen and turns to check it out. Most of the pursuers follow, with only a few chasing Ace. At Fifi's prompting, Ace holds the car steady long enough for her to unload on the bikers. She goes cyclic, splashes two in a dead hurry, and then starts leaning back in the seat to fire out the driver's side rear window. We take a near miss from a grenade, which the car's armor soaks up, and then the last biker decides he's had abough enough of playing sportsball today.

Back near Grey Rat's crash site, Major Tom tries to read the situation and gets worried that with the heavy rat mask the Brainer wears, grabbing him wrong might break his neck. He grabs him by the gear harness instead, snagging him and getting him onboard without any great difficulty, and then tries to outdistance his pursuers. He breaks away. Grey Rat seizes the opportunity to do a Deep Brain Scan on Major Tom. Tom's secret pain is that he isn't as famous as he thinks he should be.

When Ace and Fifi circle back to the crash site, the Datsun Cannibals also begin to circle back. The whole gang is more than Ace wants to try to take on, so he runs, heads through a canyon, and then skids the car sideways at the exit so that Fifi can broadside the gang with the doof cannon. Fifi's fire inflicts gruesome hurting on the gang, sending Datsun Cannibals flying bodily off their motorcycles, but their return fire does two points of damage to the Superbird, one point to Ace, and makes Fifi's life untenable.

From her point of view, the noise of the doof cannon shoves her bodily into the rainforest. She screams and snaps out of it. Ace would have sworn she was dead. Her head's in his lap, she's bleeding out many orifices, and he's not wearing pants. Gross. She's unconscious. Nothing to be done for it but to get back on the road to Apollo's Well and hope to meet the rest of the group.

The plan works out OK and we all arrive at Apollo's Well around the same time. Grey Rat comes over to check on Fifi. He lays his hands upon her, which seems to help her, and exposes him to the psychic maelstrom. For him that's music videos. Her name is Rio, and she dances on the sand, but she's gone daddy, gone, your love is gone... but now she's back, and she's different. He realizes her connection to the maelstrom has grown stronger.

For Fifi, she's still in the jungle, and she can't shake the sense that she's being followed by some sort of slithering menace. As Grey Rat finishes whatever she did, Fifi wakes up.

Blondie says "damn" when Fifi wakes up. Ace sucker punches her, and then she pulls a sword. Ace clinches, they circle briefly, Ace tries to disarm her, slips, almost gets his innards sliced into outards, and comes away with a handful of hair. She ends the fight by pointing the sword at him and saying "not another word, asshole," and walking away. Ace gives her the finger, vigorously, but speaks not another word.

The Major approaches Fifi and suggests a barter for the motorcycle, as a gesture of goodwill. Fifi instead goes to Blondie and makes a deal where she gets her bike back once she helps Blondie get a new bike of her own. Instead, Fifi finds a guy having a firesale on vehicles, as the settlement clears out, and gets a combat bike for the price of a handful of cartridges.

Ace goes off to find Duster, and doesn't get a dozen paces gone before someone yells, "Ace, you motherfucker!" See, Ace deserted the settlement guard once, and Badge remembers. He won't let Ace in. Grey Rat volunteers to go to Duster and get the thing for Captain Savage.

Twitch takes Grey Rat to a dive bar full of the usual low-lives. He points GR to the bartender, Duster, and watches Grey Rat to make sure he doesn't slip away. Duster's good humor evaporates. He takes the Brainer into the back room, then locks the dor. Grey Rat reads him and sees that he's super nervous. He's still got it but, um, it's hidden, and he can't get to it right now. It's behind a stone 20 feet down the well. With the well running dry, it's very hard to get that close to it. He tries to imply that this is all Grey Rat's problem, but GR points out that if he spreads the word around that the thing got sold on, it would rapidly become Duster's problem. Duster folds and has Ray cover the bar, then goes to the well with Grey Rat.

The well is a huge shaft, maybe 8 feet across, with a crowd all around it. Duster tells him that there was a shooting there yesterday. Grey Rat looks around and sees that two guys seem to have influence over the mob. They look to represent competing interests of some sort. The local constabulary look real twitchy - like, anything could set them off, and there'd be a whole lot of shooting. One leader is Abnet, a caravan leader, and the other is Butters, a smart guy and father figure to a lot of locals.

Grey Rat decides to open his brain and see what happened to the well. The music video track is Men At Work, "Down Under," in which video people walk around the desert a lot. After that, Metallica, "Trapped Under Ice." The guy to talk to about getting into the well is Spambot, and he's probably down there already. Grey Rat decides to approach the well, and the pushing and shoving starts immediately. He makes a little headway but then the crowd stops letting him advance. He politely tells the person in front of him to step aside, or Grey Rat will melt his brain. They'll do that if they can come with - so now GR has two people following him. They gets them closer, but eventually they get close enough that one of Butters' people takes a swing at Grey Rat. Grey Rat, in a giant mouse costume with huge mittened hands, just pushes the incoming punches past. The guy looks like an idiot and eventually his friends drag him away, allowing Grey Rat to get to the edge.

He can barely see the bottom, maybe 150 feet down. As they wait, a bucket of mud comes up, and there's a frenzy to get to it and suck the moisture out of it. Spambot comes up riding the bucket, and Duster gets his attention, claiming that GR is a hydraulic engineer. Spambot slaps him in the face and tells Duster not to lie to him. Grey Rat claims to be scouting the problem for Spoonman, and Spambot's willing to let him take a look. As they ride the ropes down, he sees the spot where the thing is hidden. Down on the bottom, three men are digging. Mud goes up, rocks go to make more wall for the well. They're more than 200 feet down, and the bottom 30 ft are new. Parts of the floor are dry, so the current thinking is that this was an artesian well, and something blocked off the flow. The water seeps, which is a good thing, but they don't know where it comes from. Spambot confirms that scavengers have already started trying their luck, but the guard is holding them off. Once the guard lose hope, the settlement dies. Grey Rat isn't confident that Spoonman can do anything about this. Grey Rat levels with him about needing to stop for Duster's thing, and Spambot decides to help out, by arranging a signal code with the guys running the winches. The plan works out perfectly. The thing turns out to be a litle rubberized plastic box. He retrieves Duster, tells him he's off the hook, and they go back to the bar.

GR goes to use the "little mouse's room." He starts to jimmy open the window when some patrons enter and ask him what he's doing. They don't seem to mean it in a helpful way, but GR deflects them by claiming that he can get them out of town, and possibly employment as thugs. They're interested. They'll have to get wheels but they think they can do that.

Major Tom goes to talk to the masses outside of the settlement. When Grey Rat comes back, Tom has 20 people talked into leaving, including Badge. GR directs his three toward Major Tom. There's a moment of mutual disgust when the three of them turn out to be former members of SPD who'd already taken off on Major Tom once. Ace and the Rat open the thing and discover that it's a digital key. Ace mutters something about needing a better place to sell it, but Grey Rat calls out for Spoooooonman, who promptly pulls into town.