Ai - Experienced Tech
Axe - Mutant Hulk
Cap'n Chang - Lucky Nomad
"Lieutenant" Vaolt - Mutant Trooper
Day 98:
In the morning, the Wizard gave Chang a panic button which would summon him in an emergency, and then disappeared. The party asked around the village to find out about who was in charge of the Takahashi Machine and were directed to a small hut. Nobody answered their knocking, so the party barged in to find an old man sleeping under a blanket on a chair.
He was woken up, and informed by Ai (via the hacked nannybot which could translate) that the "County Inspectors" were here to "transfer the Takahashi Machine to another facility", and he offered to lead them to it. The old man stood up to a surprising height of 7' as the blanket fell away to reveal massive cybernetic limbs, before heading off to the factory with the "inspectors" in tow.
They made it with no problems, and arrived in an empty, dusty room on the ground floor of the factory, with the machine set into a wall, from which Ai and the old man, Wang Chun, removed the 30lb main chip. As they finished and the old man turned to leave, Axe, Chang, and Vaolt smashed his head into a pulp from behind, and an alarm sounded.
Though it wasn't clear whether the alarm was from the chip being stolen or the old man being killed, the party panicked and abandoned their plan, exiting the factory through a hole in the wall which Ai made with the demoleculizer. Using Chang's sense of direction, they headed to the motor pool, only to find it guarded by 6 of the orb robots armed with machine gun turret arms.
Chang hit the panic button, and two of the robots were hit by jeeps piloted by no one as a third came to a stop in front of the party and they piled in, shoving the translator nannybot in the back. Chang, after figuring that a jeep was like a sort of land boat, took the wheel and gunned it around the backside of the factory and towards the village, but was spotted by the samurai robots on guard when they rounded a corner.
By using the civilians as cover, Chang was able to avoid the hail of plasma fire and sped out towards the dome, unsure of whether they'd be able to pass through at all. Fortunately, a hole appeared at ground-level just long enough for them to get through before slamming shut once more, and they received a radio message from the Wizard. He told them to just make a run for it and take the hovercraft, as he would be unable to catch up, and that Chang's stuff was in a robot.
The robot in question, one of the orbs, came rolling down a hill in a cleared area, and Chang quickly disembarked to grab the gear just as a pair of hover-tanks emerged from the dome. Chang jumped back in the jeep, floored it, broke line of sight without being incinerated, and evaded a bit of blind mortar fire until they were fully out of range.
The jeep continued on, arriving shortly at the river crossing where they had encountered Nessy, the plesiosaur robot. This time, there were a pair of sumobots blocking the good bridge, so Chang was forced to go up on two wheels and cross the old, rickety, wooden bridge which barely held, only doing so through sheer Luck.
The jeep was far faster than their walking speed, and they soon passed the abandoned bunker they had spent the night in before rounding a corner and spotting a chest-high steel barricade in the distance. It was manned by a group of robots; two chrome skeletons with rifles, two skeletons with no visible weapons, a steel samurai, a small flying rotodrone, and a robot with a giant lance. Chang slammed on the brakes and brought the jeep to a stop before the robots could see it, and the party came up with a plan.
Ai hastily built and gave to Vaolt a grenade which would send out a signal that said "I'm an enemy jeep! Please shoot me with mortars!", and, while Chang shot at the robots as a distraction, destroying two, Vaolt snuck up and threw it just behind them before running away. The barricade, and the robots, were blown to pieces, and the party got back in the jeep.
As they were going over the rubble, however, they noticed that the steel samurai was still moving, though crippled, with only one arm and no legs. Axe got out to fight it, and fell for the lance robot's clever girl trap, which gave it all the time it needed to ram the jeep with its plasma lance, blowing out a tire and tearing a door to shreds.
Chang floored it, careful not to ram the samurai which would only damage the jeep further, while Axe rocket jumped at the lancer as it drew a power axe which hummed with energy. Chang and Vaolt finished off the Samurai with gunfire after it threw its (unpowered) sword at the back of the jeep, just as Axe collided with the lancer, and, in a flurry of blows, both of the robot's hands were disabled and it dropped the axe, and Axe was sent flying 5m down the road and a plume of dust shot up.
The party's hopes of an easy victory were shattered as the lancer's ruined hands fell away and 2' long spikes protruded form its wrists, but Axe charged it anyway, while the dustcloud blocked the view of the rest of the party. The lancer stabbed Axe repeatedly while nimbly dodging and parrying his axe, and soon hit him hard enough to trigger his berserker state.
After plinking a handful of bullets off of the lancer, and realizing that Axe was as likely to kill them as the robot without the Wizard here to inject him with the anti-rage nanobots, Chang floored it and sped off down the road. As he did so, the lancer turned and jumped after them, landing on the back of the jeep. Vaolt tried to shoot it, while Chang fumbled a Fast-Draw and dropped his sawed-off, and, after a few stabs to the torso were ineffective, it stabbed Vaolt thrice in the neck, sending him berserk as well.
Axe rocket jumped after the clusterfuck on wheels only to pass out midair, just as Ai managed to finally ready a battery for the demoleculizer and removed the lancer's entire body. Vaolt passed out before he could do anything dangerous, and, after picking up Axe's body, Chang continued down the road, passing through the village of nulls. Though they were forced to slow down, and ran many over, Chang saw a group of steel jaguars off in the distance, and was confident he had made the right choice.
They made it to the coast without further issue, and, with Axe now having regenerated sufficiently to carry Vaolt, boarded the hovercraft, just as a large explosion detonated further inland, likely at the null village. With the Takahashi Machine in hand, they set off back to New Hong Kong. Once outside of Japanese waters, Pandaborg contacted them to let them know that it would clear their path back, and asked them not to abandon it. Ai promised that she wouldn't.
Day 120:
Thanks to the hovercraft's greater speed, and Pandaborg's influence, they made great time on the return trip, but discovered on arrival that New Hong Kong was mostly empty. There were scorch marks and bullet holes all around the docks, and what people were around were cagey. Uncaring, the party headed to meet with Jin Yao and get their rewards.
They were surprised to discover that he was absent from the council chamber, and had apparently passed away from a heart attack shortly after hearing of his son's death at the hands of the party, though he had, with his dying breath, forgiven them. The council then explained the situation: since the party had left, the Anti-Mutant League and the Rainbow Warriors had triggered a civil war between mutants and non-mutants.
The council had sided with the AML, and all mutants had been exiled from New Hong Kong. With the Takahashi Machine failing, and public perception of mutants poor due to the conflict, they had decided to suspend food shipments to focus on maintaining control of the Ark. Now that the party was back with a working chip, however, they would have to vote on whether to resume shipments, or continue to have closed borders.
They voted, and immediately came to a 4-4 tie. After some brief arguments, one of the councillors had the bright idea to give the party one (collective) honourary council seat, to split the vote. Axe said that he didn't care about anybody else, so long as he had food, while Ai was repulsed by the idea of refusing to help the needy (especially when she knew that all survivors were mutated to some degree, making the civil war a farce).
Chang announced that the best way for China to prove its glory was to continue the economic dominion through food, and insisted that the Taiwanese would win otherwise. He also offered to lead the council permanently to show them the proper way forward, but was politely ignored. After much thought, Vaolt remarked "Share the food, share the peaches, share the love, man", and the issue was settled; the shipments would resume.
Epilogue:
The party returned to the vault they had discovered on the abandoned island north of the Philippines, and Ai used the demoleculizer to open it. Inside were two rooms: an armoury, and a cryo-tube holding a bald white man, controlled by a computer with an English interface. Ai was able to open it eventually, and the man stepped out, introduced himself as Sergeant Stone Cold Steve Austin, US Army, and offered to join them in this crazy world until he could find something better to do.
Ai took over the Wizard's research, found the cure to the berserker nanobots afflicting Axe and Vaolt, and endeavoured towards immortality.
Axe headed back to the Philippines to kill more stuff.
Chang retired to New Hong Kong, though he kept the hovercraft, and partnered with Chung O'Flannery to run a shipping/smuggling operation.
Vaolt did a ton of drugs.
Notes:
Our carefully thought-out plan fell apart almost immediately, largely because I was trying to get people moving.
Vaolt went berserk, but he should have died; crit failure on a death check from those neck stabs.
Campaign MVP was Vaolt, because he had the most memorable failures (lighting himself on fire with a molotov, dropping a pistol and killing someone, starting the game with no equipment because he forgot to buy any).
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