Benedict Con - Humourless Repairman
Geordi Hawking - Callous Rifleman
Kaktis - Super-Strong Cactus Mutant
The Base
The party continued southeast, and passed through the small town of Gainesville, which was surprisingly unruined, and found out some more about the Safe Zone. They were heading in the right direction, as most people started their journey to the Zone from Orlando to the south, hoping that all the other refugees would provide cover from the raiders that controlled the region.
They left, and as they drove down the highway, a man with a bleeding stump on the end of one arm and a fancy ceramic vest ran out of the swamps to the right screaming for help. Kaktis asked Ben to stop so they could see what was up, but Ben just floored it because he was Callous, and getting tired of constantly helping those in need. After a while, they noticed a highway sign for ------ Military Base, and took the next exit to check for military hardware.
After getting lost a few times, the party finally arrived at a paved compound inside a chainlink fence topped with razorwire, and, going by the heavily worn "DANGER - DO NOT ENTER" signs, figured they must have found the place. The gate was open, so they drove in, and found that there were only three small one-story buildings on the base, which had been nearly overtaken by the swamps. Benedict took a look around, and found car tracks that approached the same way they did, before erratically heading off straight through the fence and into the swamp.
Ben and Geordi went in to investigate the first building with flashlights while Kaktis stayed on the mounted LMG on the Doom Buggy, and found a small guardpost, with an empty storage rack for pistols, and a set of stairs going down into darkness. They told Kaktis to come with them, and went down the stairs to a small atrium with two sets of elevator doors, one of which was half-open. Geordi tried the button to call one, but it just made a wet sucking sound as he pressed it.
The half-open door revealed an empty shaft, but the second, which Kaktis opened after a moment, had a cable they might use to climb down. Geordi tossed a pebble down the shaft, timed the fall, calculated it to be 60' deep, and figured he'd need a rope to be lowered down, as he doesn't have Climbing, so they went back up to grab theirs, but found it was only 30'. They decided to check the other buildings, as Kaktis figured that one of them must have a set of stairs.
The second building was overgrown with vines, and contained a small ruined office and reception desk. Geordi took a look around to try to find rope, and actually found some, though it was thin and frayed. Ben inspected it and determined that it would hold the Skinny repairman, but he and Kaktis would have to climb down on their own. The third building was half-collapsed, and filled with ankle-deep swamp water. There was a set of stairs down, but it was entirely submerged.
Ben tied the ropes together and then climbed down to make sure the coast was clear. He easily made it to the bottom, and arrived at a loading area, with overturned crates and pallets, and a number of loaded forklifts, one of which was pinning a skeleton, holding something in its outstretched hand, to the wall. Geordi started to climb down, but lost his grip and fell, but was only winded by the fall. Kaktis followed, but lost his grip immediately and plummeted 60' down, landing on his skull, but walked off the injury.
They spread out to investigate the loading area and found that there were three ways forward; a staircase down straight ahead, a door to the left, and a hallway to the right. Ben went through the left door, and found a blast door held open by the chassis of a non-functioning, crushed robot, which he determined to be a TASE-42 model. They were heavily-armoured, and able to perform limited thinking, but were susceptible to a strange bug: logical paradoxes could cause a CPU overload.
Not wanting to test their luck against the muderbots, they headed back and checked on the skeleton, which they discovered was holding a white keycard. They walked down the staircase and found a locked blast door and a small cardreader; Ben swiped the card, and it slowly opened, revealing that a shoulder-high pile of rubble was on the other side, though light came through the small hole near the ceiling. Kaktis looked in and saw three people wandering around a well-lit concrete room, as well as three more lying on the ground. He crawled through the opening, and said hello, which the people responded to by saying "Braaaaaaaaaaaaains" and holding their arms out in front of themselves as they shambled towards him.
Fortunately, Kaktis' armour and Tough Skin makes him pretty much zombie-proof, and was able to tear them to shreds with his claws with no trouble. This area of the complex was still lit by fluorescent tubes, so the party turned off their flashlights, and investigated the two halls out of the entryway; a green arrow labelled "REACTOR" pointed left, and a blue arrow labelled "BUNKER" to the right. They decided to check out the bunker, and soon found that someone had piled up lots of metal cafeteria tables on the walls which forced the party to walk single-file.
The narrow hallway came to a crudely-dug, water-filled ditch, across which lay an open concrete room which featured many sleeping bags and backpacks, as well as a gleaming silver vending machine. The ditch was covered with a child's rubber raincoat, and Kaktis, after noticing that the water was hot with his Infravision, tried jumping across, only to slip and fall in, revealing the raincoat to have been propped up by sleeping bags. The water was electrified, and Kaktis was mildly electrocuted, but scrambled out the far side.
Geordi scoffed and grabbed a metal bench seat from the rubble on either side of the hallway, lay it across the gap, touching the water, and walked across, only to be shocked because metal conducts electricity. Ben just jumped the ditch without falling in. They ransacked the area and found some armour-piercing .22 rounds, but little else, and then investigated the silver machine. A small logo proclaimed it to be a product of Takahashi Corp, and, after some trial and error, Geordi got it to produce a cardboard bowl containing a small, gelatin-like cube.
He and Kaktis ate some, and agreed that it tasted like bugs and grass ("Just like Mom used to make" -Kaktis). They proceeded down the hallway on the far side of the room, around a corner, and found a grisly sight; a large pile of bones in a concrete room lined with scattered bunks, the walls pock-marked from bullet holes and explosions, with some intact bodies strewn around the room.
Kaktis noticed that some of the bodies were still warm, stopped the others, and went in to fend off the zombie ambush, which he did with ease until the last zombie managed to bite his neck. In retaliation, Kaktis bit the zombie's neck, and, after resisting the urge to vomit, decapitated it with his teeth. Geordi pulled out the geiger counter and figured out that there was no radiation here, but traces of it in the other direction (IE, towards the reactor).
They searched the bunks and found a cache of 5.56mm rounds, before proceeding down the darkened tunnel further into the facility, where Kaktis tripped over a shoe-lace tripwire and took a .44 to the chest. Ben took the gun that had fired the round, but found its magazine empty. At the end of the hall was another blast door with a cardreader, and again, their card opened it.
The door was thick, and inside was a cramped living space, with 7 skeletons sitting around a table; 6 had been shot in the head, and there was an empty revolver lying on the table in front of the other. They tossed the room, and found a knife, a black keycard on the skeleton that hadn't been shot in the head, and a nice set of armoured boots, which Ben claimed. Having arrived at a dead end, they doubled back to check out the reactor.
Once they made it back to the entrance and around a corner, they found several dozen milk crates facing up were arranged on the ground in an erratic pattern. Kaktis took one and found that it was stuck, but ripped it free, revealing glue residue underneath it. The crate had a bunch of sharp metal bits, either knife blades or what they figured to be sharpened bits of table, and after a brief look confirmed that the others had similar caltrops, Kaktis cleared a path by ripping a row of crates free, one of which contained a severed foot.
Beyond was a hallway where the lights flickered, making everything look like stop-motion, with paths splitting off to the left and right, as well as straight ahead. They marched straight forward, and got halfway down when they heard the telltale moaning of "braaaaaaaaains" and went back-to-back. A large swarm of zombies descended on them from both sides, and Kaktis dove into the fray while Ben and Geordi took what shots they could before being overrun.
Kaktis pureed the zombies that tried to grapple him, and Ben was able to avoid being grabbed, but Geordi was forced to the ground where he was bit repeatedly in the neck. After discovering that zombies were seemingly unaffected by torso shots, Ben landed enough headshots (in close combat, in poor lighting) to take out his group, just as Kaktis finished off the other side. There were still the zombies eating Geordi to deal with, so Kaktis tore into them, killing them all but badly wounding Geordi in the process. They gave him a NanoBoost (one of two they had on them, though they had 5 more in the car) and settled in to rest.
Notes:
XP was 3, MVP was Geordi as the random result of a three-way tie.
I'm surprised that after all the trouble they went to get more rope, they didn't actually make a harness for Geordi to be lowered down.
Geordi and Kaktis both crit-failed the Climbing rolls down the elevator shaft, but Geordi used Luck to just fail instead.
Everybody was surprised that the base hadn't been looted. Maybe it has been.
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