Aeon Campaign S3E4 – Ambush in the Jungle

Orichalcum for Sale?

We start with 500 lbs of orichalcum, enough for us to all retire comfortably, for those who don’t have (nigh) infinite sums of money already (cough Arc Light cough).

So a few days roll around and Blue Skies is quietly panicking over the loss of well over a billion dollars. Well. Over. 

Grandfather Tokugawa is finally through customs, but it’s going to take a week or more to fix up the sword. 

We pick up wanting to go after The Engineer, a gadgeteer who could reverse engineer just about anything, but in particular he is the guy who can re-engineer the orichalcum refining equipment. He’s wanted in the US, and General Legend gave us permission to go to South America and get him out. Extraordinary Rendition for the, um, win. But that will seriously damage Blue Skies’ long-term ability to make super-suits and other kyberian tech.

We get flown out to sea to land on an enormous amphibious-looking ship which is definitely not a helicarrier. It looks really advanced. But totally not a helicarrier. We get transferred to a V22-like craft (it’s a V44!), and then travel about 10 hours to South America.

We arrive as fresh as we can after a long time on a military transport, and hook up with a scout that has been looking over this base for quite a while. He’s a military operative who knew the original Arc Light. He also knew The Commander, but there are few special ops that don’t know him.

We transfer to a small boat headed upriver. Uh-oh. Alien vs Predator action. And I loved him in Wall Street.

We’re going to hike from river to village, and then hump up to the village; Shawn’s . We start into the woods, and find that the local guerillas are trying to set up an ambush for us. How cute (Shawn crits on his first Roll20 game roll ever. Go Shawn!).

We start off by having our operative Billy sneak up behind a guerilla and roll a crit to the neck with a Neck Snap, rolling max possible damage, about 40 points of injury. Snap. Dead. Poof.

He’s going to move to secure the area by himself because he doesn’t know our capabilities yet. 

With Observation-31, there’s not much The Commander misses, and he sees both Billy and the ambush. The rest of us all make decent Per/Obs rolls, but only Zephyr and The Commander really see what’s going on. 

Billy takes out two more with shots to the legs, but they go into shock and die. He then crits again for a rapid-fire burst to three close targets on the top of the roof, and takes out two of them. He’s using a suppressed rifle, so there’s now five down, and no one the wiser.

Zephyr’s up now, for the rest of us. He notes that there are six fodder types, plus a loincloth-clad fish-man to our rear. He runs clear into their midst, leaping jump-kicks one in the knee (because we seem to be doing a lot of that), and then moves on to kick the next-nearest guy to the east. He gets a boot to the head (yah yah!) which actually kills him. Boom. Dead.

Billy’s up; he actually misses as the guy dodges out of the way. Then moves over to the far building, with all four targets conveniently in a line (“They were excited”), but doesn’t actually kill them all.

The Commander drops one decisively with a three-round burst to the vitals, and Yukio starts to savage a guy on the south end of the fight.

The fish-guy closes the distance ridiculously fast, and grabs The Rat Queen stunts dissolution, and turns into a giant pile of rats. She crits, and instantly turns into a pile of rats. So fish-man now has a fistfull of rats, but disappears beneath the muddy water.

The Rat Queen runs after the bad guys. Eamon senses the fish-guy, and grabs him with TK.

The Commander and Billy each take fire – ineffective fire – from bad guys. Some one goes full auto on Yukio, and hits once. Billy takes fire again, and he dodges again, as does The Commander. Someone tosses a grenade at Eamon and Arc Light, but Eamon power-blocks it and grabs the grenade with his TK. Someone runs up to our Kung Fu master and tries to butt-stroke him. He does a grabbing parry. Murui does a grabbing parry and then squeezes the trigger on the rifle, shooting the guy in the head, and then he kips up.

Billy goes upside someone with his friend, Thomas A. Hawk, and hits for 3d6+8(3), taking off both the guys legs, and then throws the weapon at the nearest guy, spending karma to make it a crit. Dead.

The Commander shoots a guy three times in the chest (out), and then steps forward and stabs a guerilla who is holding a villager hostage in the eye, with predictable results.

We’re down to the fish-man and three normals.

Yukio rips up another soldier, taking him out and then sprinting after the last guy, who is standing near Zephyr.

Fish-guy tries to grab Arc Light, who electrifies his suit to thank fish-guy for his trouble for 41 points of Feel the Bern. 

Eamon shoves the grenade down fish-man’s throat. Oh, my – he’s grenade fishing. 

The last guy on the south bank tries to shoot Zephyr; but he’s close enough to parry the gun. He grabs him on his turn, and Judo-tosses him into the water. No one left hostile on the south side of the river. 

Billy Waugh shoots twice, doing some bullet-bending and taking out two folks. Our fish-man is trying to retch out a grenade. Arc Light puts his hand over his mouth to prevent it . . . and rolls a 3. He does damage and there’s an internal explosion on the way. 

We interrogate the last guy – the only survivor – and luckily he speaks English. Eamon crits. We get ALL THE EXPOSITION.

The guy’s boss had a vision we would come, they got some money from some local white-guys. So they’re patsies, but directed patsies. The were supposed to murder-hobo us at the behest of the local warlord – El Jefe Huaca – who fancies himself a priest of the old (Incan) Gods, but they do seem to listen.

We turn over the prisoner to the local villagers.

Billy knows that Blue Skies’ base and the guerilla base are in opposite directions, and they’re three days away. Between Billy and The Commander, we’ve got two of the best point-men on the planet. We can also go at a very good clip, making 1.2 mph through the jungle while moving “slowly” enough to search and bringing our spec. The Rat Queen can do counter-tracking as a disperse entity. 

We decide to give us two 14-hour stretches to the foot of the mountains, then fly us all up via TK. We decide that Eamon is going to start carrying glitter dust. “Think happy thoughts.”

We make a ridiculous set of rolls. Zephyr runs up the cliff, the rest of us fly up with Eamon’s help in a place that no one ever climbs.

He shows us the map for next time and we end there.

***** ** ******
We’re given a week to come up with a plan. We immediately start talking about throwing the helicopter off the cliff. Surfing down the mountain on disassembled radar dishes.

But this is a Blue Skies facility, so we can count on metahuman opposition.

So we need to make a plan. We’re good at that. Yeah.