"Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison for oneself." - The Prisoner
Hollis Highport, 1105 Week 52
Arion enters the interview room, with Karagoz watching through the one-way mirror and advising him through an earpiece. The first of the three prisoners is waiting for him with a surly expression, handcuffed to a raised bar on the desk.
"Are you the good cop or the bad cop?" he sneers.
"Yes," Arion replies pleasantly.
"I've got nothing to say to you," the prisoner goes on.
"Well, suit yourself, but I need to make my pitch anyway. Here's how it is. You and your friends gunned down two members of the Scout Service and one member of the Port Authority. And they were all my friends. And you ruined my best jacket. So the best I can offer you is a choice of who gets to deal with you; the Scouts or the Port Authority. I don't mind telling you, they've both made me some tempting offers. So, you can tell me nothing, in which case I'll decide; or you can tell me something useful, in which case you can state a preference."
"Get him to expose his right forearm," Karagoz says in Arion's ear. "I thought I saw something." Arion weighs up the idea of simply asking him, but instead snatches the man's hand, pulls it forward, and holds it as steady as he can while the man rages.
"Good enough," says Karagoz. "You can let him go now."
"What's wrong with you, man?" the prisoner demands as Arion releases his arm.
"I haven't got the time or the crayons to explain it to you. What's your answer? I've got another two to see before lunch."
The prisoner responds with a suggestion which only one of the Six Races would be anatomically capable of carrying out, and then probably wouldn't want to.
"All right then, I'll let you know where you're going later on. Or maybe I'll lie about it."
The second prisoner remains stoically silent throughout their brief and one-sided conversation.
The third explains that if he says anything, they'll kill him.
"Who'll kill you?" Arion asks.
"Them," the prisoner replies, unhelpfully.
"You can tell me," Arion cajoles. "It'll be our secret."
"No," the man replies. "They'll know. They always know. They're everywhere." A thought occurs to him. "You could be one of them, testing me to see what I'll give up."
Deep in thought, Arion leaves the last prisoner and meets up with Karagoz.
"What was that about the arm?" he asks. Karagoz shows him an image from the interview room's camera.
"See that?" he says, indicating a blurred shape in pale skin on the darker tones of the forearm. "Ghost image. You sometimes get them when a tattoo is lasered off. Recognise it?"
"No".
"The tattoo was an Ine Givar sign."
"Well, that's in bad taste, but it's not illegal."
"No. So why does he want to remove that tattoo, but not any of the others?"
"Hmm. The last guy said 'They always know'. Do you think we've stumbled on an Ine Givar cell with a Zhodani ringleader?"
"Maybe. Have to do some more digging."
"How are we going to gather intelligence on mind readers?"
"If I tell you, that's two minds they can read to get the answer instead of one." Beginning to understand Karagoz's reticence, Arion sighs and changes topic.
"What do you want me to do with the prisoners?"
"Throw them to the Port Authority. Whoever gets them, picks up the tab for looking after them. I need to conserve operating funds."
Mechanics: Social Conflict
Arion and company left the last encounter with three prisoners to interrogate, so I decided to run a Social Conflict with each round representing an interview with a different prisoner. Everyone likely to be involved has Persuasion d6 or Spirit d6, so it's a crapshoot who wins.
Round 1: Arion rolls Persuasion d6 and a Wild Die, and gets a 5; the prisoner rolls Spirit d6 and gets a 3. Arion succeeds thanks to the Wild Die, which I usually interpret to mean by luck rather than skill, so acquires one influence token.
Round 2: Arion 4, prisoner 4; as it's an opposed roll and the defender has met or exceeded the attacker's roll, he successfully resists.
Round 3: Arion 5, doesn't like that so spends a Benny to reroll and gets an 11; the prisoner rolls well, but not quite well enough; 10. That's a second token for Arion.
Ending the third round with two tokens means Arion gets the minimum support possible, which I interpret to mean he learns which organisation is behind his troubles. According to Interstellar Rebels, no VP for us as we scored less than 4 tokens. Bah. We're still on Arion 7, BBEG 2.
GM Notes
I have heard that when Marc Miller runs Traveller at conventions, he will often use PCs stripped down to characteristics and careers, with PCs resolving tasks by rolling a characteristic or less on 2d6; the player chooses the characteristic, but can't use that one again until he has used all the others.
It was tempting to expand on Interstellar Rebels by saying that the scenario couldn't repeat one type of scene challenge until all the others have been used; by the time I thought of that, I'd already used combat twice, but otherwise I've used everything except Social Conflict, so here it is.
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