SESSION 72: IS IT TOO LATE TO SAY SORY
General Summary
Previous Session: SESSION 71: LET'S TALK ABOUT EFFING ZION
Next Session: SESSION 73: GOD BLESS AMERICUS
Players: The Fellowship of the Doing the Things, Andy, Arminius, Lex Garridan, Linda, Morag, Patch Radam
September 6th, 2317
(Adventure Day 136)
Linda scooped up Morag in her arms and headed back to the Ms. Man airship. Morag was alive and breathing, but still badly hurt by the deathclaw's attack. Covering their back carefully, Scipio scooped up a deathclaw's hand. With his trophy, he left the Mount Zion nuclear plant and returned with the others. Scribe Okonkwo lowered the airship, let them aboard, and then lifted up into the sky. Patch rushed to Morag's side, healing her wounds and giving her an emergency dose of antidote. The party was safe for the moment, but it had been a close call for Morag.
Linda's holy work for the Children of Atom not finished. The nuclear reactor, a receptacle of Atom's blessed Glow, was still tainted with wild deathclaws. She insisted they return. Scipio noted that he, Linda and Morag alone had killed four of the beasts. Morag had only been injured when the deathclaws were able to close the distance. With more fighters, they would have better odds. Lex and Patch disagreed. Seeing Morag carried in half-dead, with tales of radiation and deathclaws left them wanting to leave. An argument ensued, carrying on until Scribe Okonkwo made his way up the ship from the engine room to the bridge. The Master Scribe wondered aloud who the captain of the ship actually was, as they didn't seem to have a clear leader. The Midwest Brotherhood of Steel staff of the ship preferred Dr. Patch to be captain, as he was a Midwest Brotherhood officer and war veteran. Andy watched the complex scene unfold. Patch called for the airship to move on, deciding that the nuclear plant was too dangerous.
Linda was upset that they were abandoning Atom's cause. She implored them not to leave. Lex watched the argument go in circles. Then she took action. Somehow employing her modified Vault 40 genes, she reached into Linda's mind and puppeteered her into agreeing to go. The mentally dominated Linda went to her room to lay down. Scipio left the bridge, having nothing more to add to the conversation. Lex, having used her powers on her friend, left to be alone as well. A tension hung throughout the ship. Okonkwo directed the ship towards the ghost town of Numan and they were on their way.
While flying, Morag visited Linda, who was despondent. Having her mind dominated was confusing and waking up in her room with no one around reminded her of Caesar Altus's betrayal in Flagstaff. The Heroes of St. Louis had successfully turned the election of a new Caesar and things seemed to be going well (see: SESSION 32: THE REMAINS.) And then, in an instant, a grenade fell at Linda's feet. When she had awoken, she was in a wagon train heading to New Orleans, and most of her friends were gone. Waking up confused in this new airship was a shock. And she had failed Atom's call. Morag did her best to console Linda, reminding her that they were going to Holy Toledo to do the most important task for Atom, a task which would never be completed if they were killed in Mount Zion. Beau did his best to add some comforting words but was nearly incomprehensible.
The airship reached the area over Numan in the mid-afternoon. After surveying, it was clear that the site had been abandoned for fifteen years. There weren't even any significant roads or trails through the ghost town. It was said that the place was once home to over a hundred Institute Synths who had left Boston looking to start over again. But one day, nearby folk noticed that the town had been abandoned. The Midwest Brotherhood had sent investigators and found no answers.
It was getting to be dinner time, so the crew waited before touching down. Just as promised, Lancer Wieck had cooked a hot meal at 17:00. As this was their first day on the ship, it was an elaborate dinner with a variety of dishes. After the disagreement on the bridge, the meal was a little quiet, but it was the first good food they had had since Braxton's dinner at the outset of the war.
The Party all disembarked from the Ms. Man and examined the abandoned town of Numan. At every turn, they saw well-made structures meant for permanent habitation. The Synths who had come here had poured concrete, planted crops and even set up a full pump system for the town well. They clearly intended to stay here for a long time. Scipio and Linda broke off to search the area for salvage and found a small cache of goods someone had recently hidden there. Morag discovered three graves next to the old town hall. And when Lex examined the headstones, she could still make out the faint outlines of a lantern shape: the official mark of The Railroad. It was said that the Commonwealth Railroad organization had gathered all of the Institute's Synths and "Reset" them with new personalities so that they could live free, but Morag was starting to have doubts.
There were a few old pieces of paper blowing around the town hall, and Morag spotted one which still had some legible ink on it. It was tricky to chase and catch the page, but she caught it. It read:
"July 11th is the day! Commonwealth hero Fynn Wolf will be arriving to speak to the village and present you with a valuable gift. Support your community and don't miss this one-time event. Electromagnetic devices such as radios or intense magnets will not be permitted at this event."
Lex knew that Fynn Wolf was Mouse's birth name, whatever it meant for a Gen 3 Synth to have a birth name. All of the Mouse-style Synths, like the one called Brook they had met in Jax, thought of themselves as Fynn Wolf. Members of The Puppetmaster's Vanishing Point organization had claimed that the Fynn Synths were all coming from someone called The General who was based out of Harrison Lake in Michigan. Morag theorized that this General or one of their Fynn clones had gathered the free Synths of Numan and enslaved them with their Institute radio control frequencies. Whatever the case was, they were gone now.
The Party were about to head back to the airship, when Morag realized something. If there were graves in Numan, they probably once contained Synths. Those Synths would have Synth Components, still operational and accessible with the right technology. Morag asked the group if they thought it was ethical to dig up the graves and take the Synth Components. They decided that because they were doing it to investigate and hopefully rescue or avenge the people of their village, the dead Synths would probably approve. The Party spent the next few hours disinterring the graves in teams of two. After their labour, they had three coffins, each of them with old humanoid remains a Synth component inside. Patch examined the remains medically and determined that one Synth had been badly injured, their spine broken, but had been carefully attended to for years before dying. Another died of disease, and the third was indeterminate. But it seemed like all three had died before the town was abandoned and all three had been part of a thriving community.
With no way to access the arcane technology of Institute Synth Components, they returned to the Ms. Man. When they reached the loading ramp, Okonkwo and Gorog were at the entrance waiting for them. There was a quickly painted apology banner, a small table with punch and cookies Gorog had made with the word "SORY" spelled in frosting. Scribe Okonkwo explained that they had asked Lancer Wieck to help, but it was outside of her job description. Patch explained that he had asked the crew to set up the treats in order to break the tension and heal the bonds between them. Scipio explained that he wasn't angry with them, he had just hoped to clear the Mount Zion plant for Linda, and thought they had the force to do it. The Party drank some punch, ate cookies and talked politely as the airship lifted off again. They talked to Gorog a little and the Super Mutant porter admitted that they liked to read Grognak comic books when they weren't shoveling various materials. Linda revealed that she had a replica Grognak's Axe, and showed Gorog. They were astounded and noted that if the Party found any Grognak comics in the waste, to share them right away.
The airship made its way toward Wally Wabash World, where it was said that one could make contact with The Enclave and get an invitation to Betsy the Triumphant's headquarters at Americus, Indiana. They directed the airship at Turkey Run, a forested area nearby. As the ship floated along, Patch couldn't help but remember another time, long ago when he was on a different mission for the Midwest Brotherhood...
The year was 2198, the final day of the Calculator War. The Gravestone Cathedral sacrificed their god Plutonius to open the great doors of the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD bunker. The Warrior, champion of the Midwest Brotherhood of Steel, and her Paladins had thrust into the complex, shooting their way through a sea of The Calculator's robotic warriors. The second wave of troops had it easier, but there were still plenty of killer robots around every corner. Patch Radam and the rest of Charlie Company had a terrible day. Eleven floors of the structure had to be cleared one room at a time. By the end of the day, they had lost 6 of their 10 members.
But the end of that day came. The end of almost a year of fighting wave after wave of The Calculator's robots. Charlie Company had lost so many soldiers that Patch barely knew the names of the soldiers around him. It had taken the combined efforts of all the various peoples of the Midwest to finally achieve victory. The exhausted and battle-hardened soldiers barely knew what to do with themselves. A Knight-Corporal announced that he had been shot and, in the excitement, hadn't noticed. Sure enough, the young man had a plasma burn on his leg. Patch was the unit's only medic, and so he attended to the wound right away.
A technician stumbled into the room, looking for an officer. The young man was one of the Reavers, the strange Kansas tech cult which had only joined the fight in this last leg of the war. The unit's sergeant pointed the Reaver toward Patch, as the doctor held the official rank of Knight-Captain. The technician explained that The Warrior and her elite fighters were down in the lowest levels. They had destroyed The Calculator's physical body, an insane mass of hybrid brain tissue and computer parts. The paladins were rigging the whole Cheyenne Mountain to collapse in on itself. But his team had discovered the software component to The Calculator. The technician held it in his hands, a metal box, perhaps three feet by three feet - the mind of The Calculator. The Warrior had given an order that all of The Calculator's parts should be destroyed, but being a Reaver and worshipping technology, the technician wondered if it was ethical to destroy this item. After all, it was only the software component, completely harmless if it wasn't plugged into an adequate computing system.
Patch spoke calmly to the Reaver technician, politely asking to see the box which contained The Calculator. Once he had the artifact, he moved across the room, set a Pulse Mine against the device, and erased The Calculator forever. The Reaver watched with a mixture of shock, horror and acceptance. After months of war and the thousands of deaths, it had to end...
They reached Turkey Run just after nightfall. The area had been a game reserve before the Great War, catering to rich Hoosiers who paid good money to hunt wild turkeys every autumn. The area was remote and hadn't been picked over much by salvagers. There were a series of upscale cabins which might still have valuable items 240 years later. The Party disembarked from the airship and began to search. Not long into their looting, they could hear loud buzzing from all around them.
They found themselves surrounded by the glowing carapaces of a swarm of Greater Stingwings. Morag had dealt with these creatures before in the Hatchie Forest of Tennessee, and knew that the critters were easily felled, but their brutal stingers were tipped with extremely toxic venom. The Party maneuvered to kill, stun or disable as many of them as possible. But there was a dozen of the creatures, driven suicidally mad with territorial instinct. Each party member stalled at least one of the bugs, but two made their way closer and attacked Scipio. A stinger buried itself in his leg, injecting a gargantuan dose of venom into his bloodstream. The legionary stopped breathing and fell to the ground. Morag tried to clear the Stingwings from around him, but only managed to kill one of three.
Lex saw the situation going badly and decided that they needed to leave. She roused the powers of her Vault 40 DNA and reached into the minds of the insects, convincing them that there was delicious carrion far to their north. The Stingwings flew away at top speed and Lex warned the party that they needed to leave immediately. Patch hit Scipio with a rejuvenating Stimpak, Linda picked him up and they fled.
It was the second time they had retreated in one day. The second time someone in the Party had been injured to the edge of death. While Andy waddled back to the ship, he scooped down and picked up a set of Stingwing wings - another addition to his ensemble...
Next Session: SESSION 73: GOD BLESS AMERICUS
Next Session: SESSION 73: GOD BLESS AMERICUS
Players: The Fellowship of the Doing the Things, Andy, Arminius, Lex Garridan, Linda, Morag, Patch Radam
September 6th, 2317
(Adventure Day 136)
Linda scooped up Morag in her arms and headed back to the Ms. Man airship. Morag was alive and breathing, but still badly hurt by the deathclaw's attack. Covering their back carefully, Scipio scooped up a deathclaw's hand. With his trophy, he left the Mount Zion nuclear plant and returned with the others. Scribe Okonkwo lowered the airship, let them aboard, and then lifted up into the sky. Patch rushed to Morag's side, healing her wounds and giving her an emergency dose of antidote. The party was safe for the moment, but it had been a close call for Morag.
Linda's holy work for the Children of Atom not finished. The nuclear reactor, a receptacle of Atom's blessed Glow, was still tainted with wild deathclaws. She insisted they return. Scipio noted that he, Linda and Morag alone had killed four of the beasts. Morag had only been injured when the deathclaws were able to close the distance. With more fighters, they would have better odds. Lex and Patch disagreed. Seeing Morag carried in half-dead, with tales of radiation and deathclaws left them wanting to leave. An argument ensued, carrying on until Scribe Okonkwo made his way up the ship from the engine room to the bridge. The Master Scribe wondered aloud who the captain of the ship actually was, as they didn't seem to have a clear leader. The Midwest Brotherhood of Steel staff of the ship preferred Dr. Patch to be captain, as he was a Midwest Brotherhood officer and war veteran. Andy watched the complex scene unfold. Patch called for the airship to move on, deciding that the nuclear plant was too dangerous.
Linda was upset that they were abandoning Atom's cause. She implored them not to leave. Lex watched the argument go in circles. Then she took action. Somehow employing her modified Vault 40 genes, she reached into Linda's mind and puppeteered her into agreeing to go. The mentally dominated Linda went to her room to lay down. Scipio left the bridge, having nothing more to add to the conversation. Lex, having used her powers on her friend, left to be alone as well. A tension hung throughout the ship. Okonkwo directed the ship towards the ghost town of Numan and they were on their way.
While flying, Morag visited Linda, who was despondent. Having her mind dominated was confusing and waking up in her room with no one around reminded her of Caesar Altus's betrayal in Flagstaff. The Heroes of St. Louis had successfully turned the election of a new Caesar and things seemed to be going well (see: SESSION 32: THE REMAINS.) And then, in an instant, a grenade fell at Linda's feet. When she had awoken, she was in a wagon train heading to New Orleans, and most of her friends were gone. Waking up confused in this new airship was a shock. And she had failed Atom's call. Morag did her best to console Linda, reminding her that they were going to Holy Toledo to do the most important task for Atom, a task which would never be completed if they were killed in Mount Zion. Beau did his best to add some comforting words but was nearly incomprehensible.
The airship reached the area over Numan in the mid-afternoon. After surveying, it was clear that the site had been abandoned for fifteen years. There weren't even any significant roads or trails through the ghost town. It was said that the place was once home to over a hundred Institute Synths who had left Boston looking to start over again. But one day, nearby folk noticed that the town had been abandoned. The Midwest Brotherhood had sent investigators and found no answers.
It was getting to be dinner time, so the crew waited before touching down. Just as promised, Lancer Wieck had cooked a hot meal at 17:00. As this was their first day on the ship, it was an elaborate dinner with a variety of dishes. After the disagreement on the bridge, the meal was a little quiet, but it was the first good food they had had since Braxton's dinner at the outset of the war.
The Party all disembarked from the Ms. Man and examined the abandoned town of Numan. At every turn, they saw well-made structures meant for permanent habitation. The Synths who had come here had poured concrete, planted crops and even set up a full pump system for the town well. They clearly intended to stay here for a long time. Scipio and Linda broke off to search the area for salvage and found a small cache of goods someone had recently hidden there. Morag discovered three graves next to the old town hall. And when Lex examined the headstones, she could still make out the faint outlines of a lantern shape: the official mark of The Railroad. It was said that the Commonwealth Railroad organization had gathered all of the Institute's Synths and "Reset" them with new personalities so that they could live free, but Morag was starting to have doubts.
There were a few old pieces of paper blowing around the town hall, and Morag spotted one which still had some legible ink on it. It was tricky to chase and catch the page, but she caught it. It read:
"July 11th is the day! Commonwealth hero Fynn Wolf will be arriving to speak to the village and present you with a valuable gift. Support your community and don't miss this one-time event. Electromagnetic devices such as radios or intense magnets will not be permitted at this event."
Lex knew that Fynn Wolf was Mouse's birth name, whatever it meant for a Gen 3 Synth to have a birth name. All of the Mouse-style Synths, like the one called Brook they had met in Jax, thought of themselves as Fynn Wolf. Members of The Puppetmaster's Vanishing Point organization had claimed that the Fynn Synths were all coming from someone called The General who was based out of Harrison Lake in Michigan. Morag theorized that this General or one of their Fynn clones had gathered the free Synths of Numan and enslaved them with their Institute radio control frequencies. Whatever the case was, they were gone now.
The Party were about to head back to the airship, when Morag realized something. If there were graves in Numan, they probably once contained Synths. Those Synths would have Synth Components, still operational and accessible with the right technology. Morag asked the group if they thought it was ethical to dig up the graves and take the Synth Components. They decided that because they were doing it to investigate and hopefully rescue or avenge the people of their village, the dead Synths would probably approve. The Party spent the next few hours disinterring the graves in teams of two. After their labour, they had three coffins, each of them with old humanoid remains a Synth component inside. Patch examined the remains medically and determined that one Synth had been badly injured, their spine broken, but had been carefully attended to for years before dying. Another died of disease, and the third was indeterminate. But it seemed like all three had died before the town was abandoned and all three had been part of a thriving community.
With no way to access the arcane technology of Institute Synth Components, they returned to the Ms. Man. When they reached the loading ramp, Okonkwo and Gorog were at the entrance waiting for them. There was a quickly painted apology banner, a small table with punch and cookies Gorog had made with the word "SORY" spelled in frosting. Scribe Okonkwo explained that they had asked Lancer Wieck to help, but it was outside of her job description. Patch explained that he had asked the crew to set up the treats in order to break the tension and heal the bonds between them. Scipio explained that he wasn't angry with them, he had just hoped to clear the Mount Zion plant for Linda, and thought they had the force to do it. The Party drank some punch, ate cookies and talked politely as the airship lifted off again. They talked to Gorog a little and the Super Mutant porter admitted that they liked to read Grognak comic books when they weren't shoveling various materials. Linda revealed that she had a replica Grognak's Axe, and showed Gorog. They were astounded and noted that if the Party found any Grognak comics in the waste, to share them right away.
The airship made its way toward Wally Wabash World, where it was said that one could make contact with The Enclave and get an invitation to Betsy the Triumphant's headquarters at Americus, Indiana. They directed the airship at Turkey Run, a forested area nearby. As the ship floated along, Patch couldn't help but remember another time, long ago when he was on a different mission for the Midwest Brotherhood...
The year was 2198, the final day of the Calculator War. The Gravestone Cathedral sacrificed their god Plutonius to open the great doors of the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD bunker. The Warrior, champion of the Midwest Brotherhood of Steel, and her Paladins had thrust into the complex, shooting their way through a sea of The Calculator's robotic warriors. The second wave of troops had it easier, but there were still plenty of killer robots around every corner. Patch Radam and the rest of Charlie Company had a terrible day. Eleven floors of the structure had to be cleared one room at a time. By the end of the day, they had lost 6 of their 10 members.
But the end of that day came. The end of almost a year of fighting wave after wave of The Calculator's robots. Charlie Company had lost so many soldiers that Patch barely knew the names of the soldiers around him. It had taken the combined efforts of all the various peoples of the Midwest to finally achieve victory. The exhausted and battle-hardened soldiers barely knew what to do with themselves. A Knight-Corporal announced that he had been shot and, in the excitement, hadn't noticed. Sure enough, the young man had a plasma burn on his leg. Patch was the unit's only medic, and so he attended to the wound right away.
A technician stumbled into the room, looking for an officer. The young man was one of the Reavers, the strange Kansas tech cult which had only joined the fight in this last leg of the war. The unit's sergeant pointed the Reaver toward Patch, as the doctor held the official rank of Knight-Captain. The technician explained that The Warrior and her elite fighters were down in the lowest levels. They had destroyed The Calculator's physical body, an insane mass of hybrid brain tissue and computer parts. The paladins were rigging the whole Cheyenne Mountain to collapse in on itself. But his team had discovered the software component to The Calculator. The technician held it in his hands, a metal box, perhaps three feet by three feet - the mind of The Calculator. The Warrior had given an order that all of The Calculator's parts should be destroyed, but being a Reaver and worshipping technology, the technician wondered if it was ethical to destroy this item. After all, it was only the software component, completely harmless if it wasn't plugged into an adequate computing system.
Patch spoke calmly to the Reaver technician, politely asking to see the box which contained The Calculator. Once he had the artifact, he moved across the room, set a Pulse Mine against the device, and erased The Calculator forever. The Reaver watched with a mixture of shock, horror and acceptance. After months of war and the thousands of deaths, it had to end...
They reached Turkey Run just after nightfall. The area had been a game reserve before the Great War, catering to rich Hoosiers who paid good money to hunt wild turkeys every autumn. The area was remote and hadn't been picked over much by salvagers. There were a series of upscale cabins which might still have valuable items 240 years later. The Party disembarked from the airship and began to search. Not long into their looting, they could hear loud buzzing from all around them.
They found themselves surrounded by the glowing carapaces of a swarm of Greater Stingwings. Morag had dealt with these creatures before in the Hatchie Forest of Tennessee, and knew that the critters were easily felled, but their brutal stingers were tipped with extremely toxic venom. The Party maneuvered to kill, stun or disable as many of them as possible. But there was a dozen of the creatures, driven suicidally mad with territorial instinct. Each party member stalled at least one of the bugs, but two made their way closer and attacked Scipio. A stinger buried itself in his leg, injecting a gargantuan dose of venom into his bloodstream. The legionary stopped breathing and fell to the ground. Morag tried to clear the Stingwings from around him, but only managed to kill one of three.
Lex saw the situation going badly and decided that they needed to leave. She roused the powers of her Vault 40 DNA and reached into the minds of the insects, convincing them that there was delicious carrion far to their north. The Stingwings flew away at top speed and Lex warned the party that they needed to leave immediately. Patch hit Scipio with a rejuvenating Stimpak, Linda picked him up and they fled.
It was the second time they had retreated in one day. The second time someone in the Party had been injured to the edge of death. While Andy waddled back to the ship, he scooped down and picked up a set of Stingwing wings - another addition to his ensemble...
Next Session: SESSION 73: GOD BLESS AMERICUS
Report Date
27 May 2023
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