Holocaust World (North America) Worldbender Simulation.

Week 5, Recovering our Equipment

We decided that, since ambush worked well once, we would try it again. But first we would try the psychological approach. The party cut off the heads of their defeated foes and, after rather a lot of shuffling back and forth, got people and things in position.

As the slaver party went trotting down the mountain road, they came to a series of heads, left at regular intervals in the middle of the road. They recognized the faces but did not seem too upset. However, the last two heads were the pirate and slaver chiefs. They were glad to see the pirate dead, but the death of their own chief took them aback.

At this point, Dr. Wu stepped out of hiding, in full armor. He pointed out the heads as evidence that we could out-fight and out-distance the slavers. He told the slavers we were prepared to do it again, but we would let them go peaceably if they just returned all the stuff they took from us, including the Cossacks.

Some of the slavers bolted. Two got their horses shot out from under them, and the third got away. The remainder talked over our proposition and agreed. A few minutes later, we had everything back.

We gave the Cossack women the horses of the slain slavers, in compensation for their lost unicorns. (Those are with yet a third party of slavers, but we don't intend to chase them.)

Then we started out again for the Sea of Desseret, where we hoped to find our robot horses at the mouth of a river. Anyway, this is the direction of the diadem segment. The Cossacks came with us, since this is the direction of the radio signal from the people they are out to rescue. (Want to bet we find the people and the segment simultaneously?)

At the river mouth, we found our horses, but also found a kegger, a small ship carrying a large barrel, four seamen, and eight slaves. The seamen were pirates, but we outgunned them so much, they just surrendered and gave us the boat. We freed the slaves.

The boat will not contain all the Cossack women, so they are sending Alexa with us (she's now a player character) and will seek their own passage across the Sea.

The kegger was picking up fresh water for the Island of Entellope, the home of the pirates (called "jackers," but the Jack Patrol doesn't like the term). We adjusted the chameleon circuit on the conestoga/ground-car to make it look like a large boulder instead of a conestoga. We parked it and told the robot horses to wait by it for us. We then got our party into the kegger and started rowing for Entellope, trying to think of a cover story that a whole town full of pirates will believe. Our best effort: "We found this abandoned kegger on the shore and decided to go into business with it. This elephant here is our rowing beast." Maybe we'll do better next week. As a point of interest, when the Naza rows, the chameleon circuit renders her as an elephant with two trunks, one on each oar.