"Keep sharp, kids, we got another live one today. Goddamn, I hate when FORCE drops their pet monsters off in the city like this! How the hell are we supposed to maintain OPSEC when there's a goddamn acid-spitting space octopus hanging around the pawn shop?" The Lieutenant continued to curse and grumble as he brought the van to a halt and threw it in park.
"Oh, shit..." Maria breathed, and pointed.
Shimmering into view were a number of figures in glittering, iridescent carapace armor, marching in unison, rifles at the ready. FORCE troopers were back. And with them...
"Oh god, oh fuck, what is that?" Becky said, gagging. Behind the FORCE troopers shambled a pair of hulking monstrosities, gangly arms nearly dragging on the pavement, rudimentary heads lolling, featureless except for a pair of unseeing eyes and a lipless mouth lined with chisel teeth.
The Lieutenant cursed again.
"FORCE brought some backup. Higher ups call those 'shock troopers' for lack of a better name. Dumb as shit but savage in hand-to-hand combat. Keep back and keep your guns up."
***
I haven't gotten any games in this month, so it was time to get moving - especially since I've got a long weekend this weekend. And it's been more than two months since my last game of Majestic 13, which is frankly unacceptable. So I got the table cleared off and set up for my next mission - a Special Mission, since my team had reached a rating of 6. This time we're back in an urban environment (the Last Liners' forte), facing off against five FORCE Troopers and two FORCE Shock Troopers - which I've chosen to interpret as 'roided up, maybe genetically altered FORCE aliens, with reduced mental capacities but boundless aggression and sharp claws to match. They don't have the armor that the stat block lists, but maybe it's sub-dermal implants? Either way, I'm using old RAFM "Ghasts" from their "Call of Cthulhu" line to serve as them.
As always, Special Missions have their terrain and deployment predetermined. I realized I was doing it wrong previously by not rolling up a secondary mission - this time around it's "Gear Collection," with two tokens in the centers of the enemy side board quadrants, each of which give the figure picking them up +1 damage for the rest of the game.
For the first turn, the FORCE troopers had an initiative penalty, allowing all five of the Last Liners to act before them, spending the first turn spreading out into cover - and Maria reached the first of the gear caches. Unfortunately, once the aliens activated, things went to hell quickly.
As FORCE spread out, Hank, Becky and the Lieutenant all got shot with their plasmonic rifles, with Hank taking a critical hit. The Shock Troopers then pounced on Becky and Hank, eviscerating both of them almost immediately.
The Lieutenant took a pot shot at the Shock Trooper that had mauled Hank, then fell back to another cover point. Meanwhile, Maria called in a drone strike on the FORCE soldiers, and Sarah-Jane, sniping from cover, took a shot at the Shock Trooper standing over Becky's body. The FORCE troopers began to spread out, moving into positions to better gun down the Last Liners.
The two Shock Troopers converged on the Lieutenant, but failed to land any hits on him! He ducked and darted to another cover point, applying first aid to himself. Maria got out of the FORCE troopers' line of fire and Sarah-Jane kept sniping; staying in cover spared them both a few hits from the plasmonic guns.
One Shock Trooper spotted and followed the Lieutenant, while the other wandered off, into Maria's field of fire. She squeezed off two shots at it before it took notice and charged her.
Astonishingly, both the Lieutenant and Maria managed to kill their Shock Troopers - only to be knocked out of action by the post-mortem shockwave that FORCE's troops release!
Sarah-Jane continued to snipe at the FORCE Troopers from cover, and between the damage they took from the drone strike on turn 2 and her rifle, she managed to take out three of the five troopers before the clock ran out.
Moving into the post-game phase... Ouch. Four agents put out of action means four rolls for survival. While Hank got the All Clear, the Lieutenant, Maria and Becky were not so lucky.
The Lieutenant came out with a traumatic brain injury, reducing his Dexterity from 16 to 10.
Maria II lost her left arm at the elbow. She's stuck using only pistols going forward.
Becky has PTSD, and will have a -2 modifier to all rolls for the next game.
On the plus side, the Last Liners successfully requisitioned a high-powered sniper rifle for Sarah-Jane. Sarah-Jane's current hunting rifle is being given to Becky to give her a little more firepower, and Becky's pistol is going into the team's storage unit.
***
Hank wheeled the Lieutenant's wheelchair into the room. The old man looked smaller and grayer than he'd ever looked before, the side of his head shaved to allow the doctors to suture the wound FORCE had given him. The rest of the team was already there; Becky's hands shook as she lit a cigarette, and Maria contemplated the thin jointed steel prosthetic where her left arm had been.
"Hey Becks, light me one if you don't mind." The Lieutenant's voice was thin and weak.
"Smoke 'em if you got 'em, right?" Maria laughed bitterly.
Sarah-Jane said nothing, just looked out the window, one hand resting on the first aid kit she never went anywhere without. She'd been a veterinarian before all this - a healer. Now her days were spent dealing death and hiding from retribution.
"How much is Majestic gonna take out of us?" Hank asked, shoulders slumping. "I mean hell...I've died, Maria's died, we've all been shot, stabbed, clawed, sprayed, injected... When have we given enough to this fight?"
"How much is Majestic gonna take?" The Lieutenant took the cigarette from Becky gratefully. "How much you got for them to take, kid? Because it's everything we have and then some until FORCE is kicked off the fuckin' planet."
"You know, meeting you might have been the worst thing that's ever happened to me," Maria said suddenly.
"I get that a lot," the Lieutenant replied somberly. "Hell...for what it's worth, I'm sorry you kids have been dragged into this. None of us deserve this shit."
Maria contemplated the prosthetic silently for a moment.
"They'll clone me again if I die, right?" she asked.
"Sure, as long as they can get a viable clone."
"My next clone won't be missing an arm, right?"
"I don't like where you're going with this, Maria." Hank interjected.
"Somebody give me a gun," Maria said with a grim smile.
"How about we don't traumatize each other further, yeah?" Hank said. "Don't do FORCE's work for them. Make those fuckers earn every drop of blood we spill."
No comments:
Post a Comment