Road Trip AP - part 5

Session 3:

Dmitri's original player has dropped out to run a Spycraft campaign, because he does love his espionage games.  I gave Theo the option of dropping Dmitri and creating his own character from scratch, but he's having fun playing the hard-drinking Russian.  We gave Dmitri an extra character attribute to show how drunk he is at the moment -- each scene Theo rolls a D6, and raises or lowers it depending on whether it's higher or lower than the current score.  The bare-bones nature of the system makes it easy to customise characters that way.  What drunkenness actually means for Dmitri is something we still need to determine.

Dmitri was the original navigator, with Eve stepping in when it looked like he wouldn't be available.  The team have agreed to keep her in the role, because having a navigator who can't reliably follow a line on a map with his eyes would just be an opportunity for the GM to mess with them.  (And I would have.  Count on it.)

With the race on again in the morning, Eve and Edith decided to go to bed at a reasonable time and get a good night's rest.  George did the same because he doesn't like to stay up late.  (His player describes him as 'pretty boring'.)  The others stayed up because a little thing like the threat of disqualification wasn't enough to discourage them from playing practical jokes -- and now they owed Team Rocket for the inconvenience of having to climb out a bathroom window to avoid the police!

Chad had the beginnings of a plan involving a squirrel, and some bait to obtain one.  He needed a sturdy squirrel container to go along with it, though.  A rucksack wasn't going to do the job.  Where was he going to get something like that, this late at night?  ...It turned out that Ziggy might know a guy.  (Wong made a successful luck die roll.)  There was a Genius in Monticello who worked with animals and Ziggy kinda sorta worked with him for a while... but they didn't part on the best terms.  In fact, it was probably better not to mention Ziggy's name.  (Wong voluntarily rolled a second luck die to see what their relationship was like.  He rolled a 1.)  He gave Chad the address.  The lateness of the hour wouldn't be a problem.  This guy had to get up periodically through the night to -- you know what, that didn't even matter.  Chad and Dmitri decided to go on foot.

Eve and Edith had only been in bed for half an hour when someone knocked at their door.  Edith got up to look through the loop and found a Chinese takeaway delivery boy standing outside with an insulated transport container.  She thought about ignoring him, but he kept knocking.  "Hey, you gotta pay for this!  It comes out of my wages if you don't!"  Eve tossed her some money.  "Just sort it out, Edith.  Please."  Edith paid the delivery boy for the sweet-and-sour pork neither one of them had ordered and went back to bed.  Forty-five minutes later it happened again.  "Pablo's Pizza, gotcha Jalapeño Horror right here, thas fourteen-fifty thankyuh."  And half an hour after that.  "Bigger Belly Burgers, I got a cheeseburger stack and megafries for 'E'?"

The two of them gave up on sleeping in their room at that point.  They discussed whether Team Rocket was responsible for this outrage as well, but it seemed more like a Faster Pussycats prank.  Eve called Pablo's and ordered an all-anchovy pizza to be delivered to the Pussycats' room.  She hung a note on the door reading WE GAVE YOU THE WRONG ROOM NUMBER - PLEASE GO TO 14 (which was Arthur and Junior's room).  They bundled up whatever sheets and blankets they could carry and found a thick, leafy tree just outside the motel's property to wedge themselves into for an attempt at sleep.  As they left the courtyard, they saw that there was a delivery driver knocking on Team Alabammy's door as well (no answer) and Team Human, all wearing Batman pyjamas, had a line of drivers outside their door, where they were ranking them by height.

Chad and Dmitri arrived at the address Ziggy gave them.  It was a house in the suburbs with a discreet brass plate on the door --

H. Lucas

Exotic animal supplies

That seemed like a promising beginning.  Chad knocked on the door.  Soon they heard footsteps inside and someone was peering at them through the mail slot, demanding to know their business.  Curious to know what the man would say, Chad introduced them as friends of Ziggy's.  "Ziggy?!  Is that son-of-a-bitch with you?  I lost three years of research because of him!"

Chad assured him they were alone, and wanted to buy supplies.  Dr Lucas reluctantly let them in and led them down a hallway with several steel-plated doors (locked) to a kitchen.  He sold them a steel mesh squirrel cage and some squirrel tranquilliser (but not before opening the container and taking a deep snort of the powder it contained).  Chad got a crash-course in administering squirrel sedative.  "Shove the pointy bit of the hypo in the meaty part of the squirrel's ass and push the plunger.  It's so simple I've trained rats to do it.  Don't give Ziggy the job."

They paid and left to begin the trek back to the motel, only to have a van screech to a halt next to them.  The side door opened and Team Alabammy leapt out.  Faced with the choice of grappling the commie they drank with or the dude who baked them hash brownies, they picked the commie.  The twins grabbed Dmitri and tried to drag him into the van.  He knocked one of them on his ass with his bottle, a move they were completely unprepared for.  Chad waded into the fight and with his steroid-enhanced muscles, he landed a heavy punch on Jimmy, who toppled back into the van.  Seeing how quickly the fight had gone against his team, the twin still on his feet decided not to face two-on-one odds and backed away.  The two WTFers heard Jimmy's plaintive voice ask "Did you get the brownies at least?" as the van accelerated away.  Dmitri's bottle was the fight's only casualty.

Back at the motel, they collected Ziggy and went hunting squirrels in the woods behind the buildings.  Between Chad's bait and Ziggy's lubricant making an inescapable trap, they were able to bag and drug a big squirrel.  There was leftover sedative and more room in the cage (Mila rolled a 3 for number of doses), so they stalked and captured two more.  Another big one, and an average sized squirrel.  Stage one of the plan was complete.

The next stage was to find out where Howard and Samantha Long were.  Team Rocket's co-leaders weren't staying at the hotel with their driver and navigator and they were the targets for retribution.  Ziggy had the idea of downloading a phone app to make his voice sound like a child's, and call around the better hotels in Monticello, asking to be put through to Mummy and Daddy Long's room.  The rolls went well and he got connected, finding out which hotel was theirs.  When Samantha answered, he turned the app off.  "Hello, this is One Lucky Horse's Ass Takeaways.  What's your address for delivery please?  I have an order of sweet and sour pork for you."  Samantha wasn't amused.  "You must be joking, we don't eat that American crap!"  She hung up.  WTF concluded that maybe Rocket wasn't behind the fast food deliveries to the motel, but they still had to pay for their deeds.

The final stage of the plan was to feed the squirrels some of Chad's steroids, coat them with Ziggy's lubricant and inject them with some Red Bull stolen from Edith to counteract the sedative.  Chad, Dmitri and Ziggy each took a squirrel and synchronised their watches.  Chad headed in to the centre of town, where his climbing wall skills made scaling the side of the hotel easy.  The squirrel was just starting to revive and under the effects of the steroid it was intensely angry.  He just managed to get it in through the window before it snapped at his fingers.  There was a rage-filled screech from the animal, then crashing and banging.  The light came on and there were two voices swearing in Chinese as Chad descended the wall and legged it at top speed.

Ziggy broke a Team Alabammy window and hurled his squirrel inside before tucking and rolling to slip away.  There was furious barking for a moment, then a crash and it changed to a whimper.  He ducked as he heard gunshots and someone shouted "Look out, that sqwerl's gone rabid!"  There were more shots and furniture breaking, then Alabammy came spilling out into the courtyard where they formed up into a defensive line facing the doorway.

Dmitri took the regular-sized squirrel and tossed it into the Faster Pussycats' room.  There was a moment of quiet, which was broken by angry chittering.  Then the lights came up, there were screams and the sound of the room being overturned.  Risking a glance in through a window, he saw three of the Pussycats trying to fight the squirrel with stiletto heel shoes.  Maggie was aiming a raygun, but having trouble drawing a bead on the fast-moving rodent.  Dmitri knocked on the door.  "Ladies, is some problem?  Can help?"  There was a buzzing sound and a circular piece of door the size of a coin disintegrated.  He ducked fast.

Ziggy stepped inside one of the Team WTF rooms and made sure the blinds were fully closed, then started flicking the lights on and off and shouting.  "Ahh!  It's a squirrel!  Catch it, someone!"  With any luck, Team Human would get the blame for this.

Soon after, the police arrived again.  Everyone except Team Human was in the forecourt by this point, standing in their sleepwear and listening to the enraged squirrels wrecking things in their motel rooms.  The two police officers were just deciding that this was an animal control issue and not their problem when Chad's steroids began to wear off and the two squirrels shrank back to ordinary tree rats and forgot that they'd been fighting angry.  There was a blur of brown fur and things got quiet in the motel again.  The cops shrugged and left and the racers were left to clean up.  It doesn't seem likely that anyone's going to get their security deposit back.

As a sequel to the evening's events, Eve and Edith were both woken in the early hours by a distressed 'Mooooo', quickly getting closer.  They both had their hair ruffled by the breeze as an airborne cow hurtled past, close enough to knock a cloud of leaves off their tree.  They watched in amazement as it swept in low across the forecourt and smashed straight through their room's front wall.  There were a few moments of relative quiet, only disturbed by the tinkling of glass shards dropping out of the shattered window and the cow staggered out onto the concrete.  There was a blue light from above it and it mooed in protest again as it was whisked up into a clear night sky.  A pulsing light directly over the motel whizzed away at impossible speed and disappeared in the darkness.