LogBrink-Jason-18

Game log for the 2015/04/12 session of Brink, as taken by Jason

The party has just crashed their way aboard Ark 17, into a section with no grav and no atmo. (They might have been atmo until just recently, when some jerks cracked open the hull.) Torch sees a crewman pulling himsself toward some sort of control panel, transmits a halt order over the guard frequency, is ignored, and kills the guy.

We take our bearings and discover that we're in the heat management system, which means we can assume that the reactor is coreward, and we shove off in that direction with Puff in the lead. Puff sees an Ark 17 crewmember with a weapon facing the wrong way and tries to grab the weapon. His approach gets hung up a little and instead of sneaking up behind the guy, they bump and the guy jumps away, and then fire from an unknown source takes him out. On the other side of that bulkhead, there are armed and angry dudes. Absinthe spots someone up a shaft who's visibly cranking on some sort of valve. Cipher heads to a control panel. Raskolnikov brings up the coolant controls, checks system integrity, and finds that someone is shutting off coolant to this engine, but the engine itself is not, and that means we're about to be proximate to a thermal catastrophe. The Doc calls ou the target, Torch sends his flock after them, and carnage ensues. No more threat from that angle. The Doctor opens the valves again.

Puff, at the starboard bulkhead, looks through the porthole in the hatch he just dogged and sees someone in a cobbled together vac suit dog the hatch from his side and weld it shut. We can't go that way. Cipher uses his computer panel to try to figure out how to navigate the ship. Forward leads us to a collection area that in turn leads to cargo or spineward to the forward reactor rooms. Mmm, reactortastic. The room being sealed off is the next coolant housing - our chamber governs number 3, theirs corresponds to enginre 4. Cipher finds a communicator on the body, but it's not working.

Absinthe opens the hatch forward and discovers it has atmo - we have to rush thorough against the wind. The next section has power but thanks to our help, it also has emergency lighting. The Breaker Boys try to get through a vent but can't hold on against the current; they're forced to go through the door just like everyone else. Puff checks out location and realized that if one of the lines here gets cut, this space becomes radioactive as hell. Probably best to get to the reactor area where there might be some containment. Puff looks through the port to the reactor room and sees that there's a firefight going on in reactor control. Torch tells Cipher to contact the crew of Ark 17 and warn them about the Flycatchers. Puff begins to feel nauseous and discovers that the feeling abates when he moves away from the door. Cipher applies his special skills and figures out the unlock code for the panel, unlocks the forward hatch, and tells everyone to move out. Steff opens the foward door and immediately takes fire, but rides the door's motion to get out of it. She yells "Help me, mister! Don't shoot, don't shoot, please!" Absinthe thinks the incoming fire sounds different from stationside weaspons, suggesting we're being shot at by Ark crew. She improvises a smoke generator from her oddments and commands her fellows to move through under the cover, then darts through, lands on a hostile who goes flying, and effectively creates a beachhead for her team.

As we move through, Hitch's position gets illuminated by some sort of sticky flate. Glinda enters her spirit cave, looks into her pool, and sees little flickering lights, which she realizes correspond to the situation in the room. That tells her that there are maybe 20 hostiles, and that they're advancing in bounding overwatch. She so notifies the team.

Puff, in a vent shaft, is looking for ways to not go into that room full of gunfire. He heads aft to where a knife is holding open the shaft, removes it so the shaft can seal, and then goes forward. The emergency lights in the room stop flashing.

Torch leads his followers in a counterattack. They are long on aggression and short on tactical savvy, so they take some casualties, but they gain position and are able to drive the enemy back. Dr Raskolnikov tries to hide from the incoming fire, but when he looks left, he sees an improvised hand granade there, which goes off. He cringes behind his suitcae, which buffers the harm, but he goes flying from the explosion, hits a bulkhead, and gets knocked right out.

Torch and his flock begin to get a sense of what's going on. Unfortunately their information is that there's some sort of incoming munition. Torch orders an assault past it but they can't advance far enough and the group ends up getting shot pretty good, and then that munition turns out to be an EMP. It's just lucky that Torch's followers are savages and not the sort of people who really miss all that electrical jazz.

Glinda changes reality and makes the defenders think they're no threat, so they're not under fire anymore.

Torch's gang runs low on ammo, forcing them to stop and reload just as the enemy moves to flank. The group nearest Glinda and Absinthe, thinking that the area is devoid of hostiles, are moving toward them in a non-combat fashion. As they approach, they try to apprehend the group. The locals are willing to talk with the team so long as they disarm.

As the gang reloads, Torch transitions to his cutter and cuts the supports on some cargo racks in quick cross-deck slide, then kicks them all open. That drives the hostiles into the open.

Cutter tries to negotiate with the security commander, who asks if he's seeking asylum. "Yes!" That's a twist.

Torch's troops, reloaded, try to assault into the enemy who has been deprived of cover. They discover that the enemy have set up a heavy machine gun. That pretty much neutralizes the flock. Torch gets knocked down and at that point the handful of survivors panic. The ship security detail arrests Torch and his surviving flock.

Puff continues trying to get forward but comes to another iris, which is locked closed. He makes a radio call and asks Cipher for the code to unlock it. The last code used works, the iris opens, a strong wind starts, and Puff crawls through. The iris seals behind him. He looks through an air handler port and sees a very large number of cryotubes. He tries to turn off the power but doesn't have the access. He can pull a schematic and see the power cable routing. He makes sure to open up the vent covers so he can make it out quickly. As he does so, he sees movement, visible only by the lights it occludes. It turns out to be two people, one of them a person in a vac suit, the other in an armoed vac suit with an assault rifle. Puff waits for them to go by, then drops down behind them with malicious intent. Just as Puff springs, the armed one ducks and spins into the tubes. Puff grabs the unarmed one and uses him as a human shield, then tells him to radio his armed friend and tell him to come on out. He offers to trade the gun for the captive, which works just fine, but then comes the sudden and inevitable betrayal. The armed one goes for his sidearm as Puff goes for the assault rifle. Puff misses and takes pistol fire. Everyone involved takes cover, and then Puff goes in after him. Puff catches him by surprise and that fight doesn't last long at all. Puff kills the armed one and takes the unarmed one to the air vent he had previously designated as his iris.

The rest of the party get disarmed and granted asylum. They're taken to an elevator and are en route to a different part of the ship when the power goes out. They restore power to the elevator and take us someplace that looks like a mess hall, populated by many armed guards and someone named Captain Takahashi. As the station crew try to assess the situation, Absinthe, Torch, and his flock both get identified as suspicious characters and put in the corner facing in. The Captain then goes to interrogate Cipher and the kids... but the kids quickly begin to seem suspicious and get put in the corner along with the rest. At this point, only Cipher strikes them as someone they can work with - and isn't that a terrifying thought. Cipher explains about what has become of Brink, with the total lack of cultural cohesion, government, etc. Cipher eventually convinces Takahashi that he must speak directly with the captain of the ship to explain the depth of the disaster on Brink.

They bring Cipher before Captain James. James doesn't entirely appreciate our decision to board via torpedo. Cipher eventually tries to explain the difference between 'Neers and Flycatchers in terms of venereal disease. Takahashi interrupts to tell James about a situation in storage. There have been more breaches. At this point James indicates that this is now officially a military operation and Takahashi will take control. Takahashi has lost interest in Cipher's crap and sends him to the brig.

Puff continues moving through the central aisle of the storeroom he's in, looking for something good as he tries to move forward. He's switched armor so that he looks like a ship secuirty officer. He ends up in an elevator, which loses power almost as soon as he gets it going. He gets the doors open and moves into the shaft, pulling himself upward, looking for sickbay. He pulls open the door when he gets to the appropriate level and finds a hell of a ruckus in place, with the medical personnel struggling to keep up with the mounting casualties. Since he's all bloodied, they direct him to triage. When the medic realizes Puff isn't wounded, Puff knifes him. A nearby orderly notices and now it's on. Given the number of armed soldiers in the room, the position is not tenable, so he goes running back to the elevator.

Back in the mess, the trooper covering Absinthe's commlink announces that "another one has turned and is attacking sickbay." Torch overhears this and begins preaching to him about The Devourer. Private Sykes has become Torch's right hand (impulse: to follow through on Torch's intentions). The corporal cuts Torch loose, hands him a sidearm, and asks what he needs to do. This confuses hell out of the other guards and things get freaky. Torch just hands the pistol back and starts trying to convert Corporal Williams to his flock. Absinthe takes advantage of the distraction to produce one of her folding blades and kill her guard. That's when the shooting starts.

Silk gets killed in the exchange and Hitch gets hit bad. Torch bellows for everyone to stop shooting. Williams tells him to control his people, by which he really means Absinthe. Glinda uses her ritual to make herself seem harmless. Absinthe stops to ask Torch why she should stop shooting, and takes a couple rounds. Raskolnikov wakes up and begins trying to assemble a weapon. Sykes goes to use his pistol to fire at the other guards, but Torch is able to convince him and Absinthe to stop shooting, which delivers a brief pause in the fighting. Then Rasnolnikov comes out of his briefcase with some sort of ubertechnologcal widget and yells "nobody move"! Hitch, bloodied and bruised, lunges as Raskolnikov in sheer rage, gets knocked to the ground by Corporal Williams, and dies.