Arion 1-14: Barflies

"I don't go around gratuitously shooting people and then brag about it in seedy space rangers' bars." - The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Hollis Highport, 1105 Week 52

Hollis: A370642-C NS De Ni CsIm GG

Major Sheng and Mr Osheen have recovered by now, but Cori and Officer Muhammed are still healing and on light duty, which Karagoz and the Port Authority have both interpreted to mean "not going slumming in seedy starport bars looking for rumours".

"Can I be the bad cop?" Mr Osheen asks, a little too eagerly for Arion's liking.

"Easy, tiger," he replies. "Let's try being nice first. We can always turn nasty later, it's a lot harder to row back from that." Mr Osheen subsides, grumbling.

"You never let me have any fun."

"Only two weeks ago you ate a ganger."

"Consumed his bodily fluids for nourishment," Osheen corrects. "He started it. And I needed to rehydrate after he blew a hole through my abdomen. And you didn't so much let me, as not notice in time to stop me."

"You're in a hole," Sheng advises Arion. "Stop digging."

Choosing a likely bar, Arion leads them inside and starts buying drinks and asking questions about local gangers, rumours of Ine Givar and Zhodani involvement, and so on.

"You didn't hear it from me," one local ruffian explains, "But a friend of a friend tells me the Ine Givar have taken over the local dock unions. You pay a surcharge, and your ship and crew don't get mysteriously damaged. Not a good time to negotiate, though, some Imperials got into a fight with them and killed one of theirs. They'll want payback." He looks at them with bleary eyes, connecting some dots.

"Wait... people are saying they had a grey-skinned alien with them. Looked a lot like him," the ruffian concludes, nodding at Mr Osheen.

"Oh him?" Arion says. "That's my gunner. You may recognise him from such hits as 'I was an Alien Mercenary' and 'Blood-drinkers of Hollis'." And that's the end of co-operation in that particular bar.

They emerge, poorer but wiser.

"What now?" asks Major Sheng.

"Well," says Arion, "I'm starting to think we're not dealing with a Zhodani spy ring, just some local smuggling and extortion. Anyone can say they're Ine Givar, and claim the Consulate are backing them up. Whether they are is a different matter. So I say we start by finding out from Karagoz what he wants out of this mess, and then try to negotiate with the dockworkers' unions. I don't know if any of this is worth killing for."

GM Notes

At the end of episode 13, I asked myself what should happen next, and decided the logical next step is for Our Heroes to do some Networking to find out more about who attacked them. According to Interstellar Rebels, which I'm using as the adventure generator, you may only Network once per mission, probably because it gains you an automatic Victory Point and otherwise you could just Network until you got to 10 VP and won the mission. Nonetheless, I'm the GM here, and I say I can. So there.

A roll of 1, 3 on the Curveball Table tells me things go ahead as planned, but I think it's about time to pull in the second subplot, which was represented by the battery charging icon. (I find words on an oracle table much easier to deal with, frankly, but the icons are what this product uses for subplots. Completely out of ideas for that, I roll on the Complex Question oracle and get 2, 1; Communication, I decide to check intensity as well, and get a 1; extreme reversal. So this reads "extreme miscommunication". I decide that means these guys may not be spooks or terrorists at all, just pretending to be for some purpose.

Arion's Wealth has grown back in the intervening weeks, so he spreads some of it around to get a +2 on his dice roll (his Wealth drops to d4), and rolls a 17 thanks to Aces; adding the +2 takes that to 19, success and three raises. That's worth a few tidbits, and I decide to roll on the Complex Questions table for each success and raise; I get Revenge, Prevention, Health and Property. The outcome of that, you see above; it all came together quite nicely, I think.

Current score: Arion 8, BBEG 2. First to 10 wins.

Next time: Social Conflict with the Ine Givar.