Session 04 - Clearing Governmental Suspicions and Plotting the First Heist

Drant: I'm meeting a friend here.

Bouncer: Oh, you've got a friend inside? What's his name?

Drant: He hasn't told me yet.

Plot points/Scenes

Clean-Up Part 2

• We decide to go forward with the “cover up the morally ambiguous shit” and invite the government in plan
• Jalan double-crit-fails an investigation check AGAIN to check around the place for out of place things, decides that one trap needs to be reset and decides to do it himself, turns out it was still activated and he sets it off but avoids damage, Fritz has to turn it back on for him now the dumb bastard
• Fritz runs a manual diagnostics check because the courier dude manually hacked into the system and overrode previously existing security commands, she wants to make sure there’s nothing potentially damaging lingering around
  • All subsystems seem to be functioning normally
  • Finds a thing in the system called Jarvis-Daemon
    • Created 1 year ago, last edited 1 week ago, last edit was done by a guy named “c0d3sm1th” 1 week ago, last read was seconds ago
    • File size 100K
  • Remembers setting alert level 11 but nothing actually happened, double-checks logs about that
    • Log file “incident report (current date)”
    • “Activating the guardians” - 5% update, update only got to about 70% before it was manually shut down
    • Probably a retcon, from when we were having a battle with the runaway courier for control of the system, nice to know it’s still an option for the future though
• Finish piling up bodies and decide to head out

The Search for the Real IRS

• Meghan tags along, Robin (our prisoner) is shackled and led around in front of Drant (we try to be kind of nice to him but he’s still kind of bitter so we’re bitter back and now he’s pouting)
• All start looking around the surrounding landscape for signs of the governmental party that was ambushed by the rogue investigators
• Drant pretty quickly spots some good signs of a trail leading off, there’s a clearing where he notices disturbed dirt in what is otherwise a pretty vegetation-thick place
• Finally realize that we never thought to ask Robin, a guy who was PART OF THE PARTY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE AMBUSH, what happened (cheeky bastard says “you never asked”)
  • Basically confirms what we thought about the ambushed party being buried here
  • Pretty shallow grave, decide to leave a single candle on top of the pile in a weak attempt to deter wildlife from unburying them while we’re gone
• Robin pretty strongly tries to get us to untie him as a sign of trust but we’re like “nah dude you were part of a cult you could still be brainwashed or something”, end up deciding that since he’s not a citizen and doesn’t have paperwork it’s probably best that he’s in shackles so we can claim him as one of our slaves

Into Town To Clear Up This Damn Mess

• Into the citadel to meet with Carissa
• Overhear a conversation between guards
  • Talking about how they wish we had a barbaric system where it’s acceptable to kill someone for their assets and very pointedly looks over at us
• Receptionist tells us how happy Carissa will be to have news of the missing party because one of her friends was in it and she wants them back safely
• Enter Carissa’s chambers
  • Four very heavily armored guards with small dagger-like weapons looking very intimidating
  • Jalan explains the situation and she seems to believe us
  • Allow Carissa to interrogate Robin - introduces himself as Jake Winthrop and tells this massive lie of how WE attacked HIM
  • We convince Carissa to bring in some magical people with lie detecting magic to have him retell the story
    • He tells half-truths and no lies, we end up having to come up with more questions to get her to believe us a little more, he’s pretty wily though and she’s not convinced
  • Carissa ends up allowing us one more chance to prove our story, but only if we turn over our weapons and are escorted in shackles by armed guard

Proving Innocence

• Finding the Ambushed Team
  • Drant/Jalan/Fritz are in shackles and weaponless, Robin is free to roam
  • We mention that the bodies are just off the path over here, Carissa says she’s not comfortable with us just marching off the beaten path, we ask how she wants to do it then
  • She puts a mask on Robin and he immediately falls unconscious, she tries to put a mask on Fritz, who allows it with a truckload of stink-eye, but she succeeds on a constitution saving throw to resist the worst of the effects of the gas - basically she’s limp and motionless but able to hear/see everything happening nearby
  • Carissa thinks about putting a mask on Jalan but looks at the other two unconscious and instead throws him a couple of coins saying “thanks for bringing me your friends.” He is confused.
    • Drant leads Carissa and some guards to the pit, Fritz/Jalan/Robin and two guards remain by the road
  • They dig up the pit, all bodies are there, mage that came with us raises dead and asks questions (questioning confirms the story we told, from our perspective at least, Carissa is only half convinced)
    • Except Carissa’s one friend, whom he resurrects (after some exposition that necromancy (and magic in general) doesn’t seem to work so well anymore) but this resurrection works, she’s super weak and Carissa hugs her lovingly but she’s alive[.ul]
    • Carissa heads back to the road, says “I’m surprised you didn’t slit their throats, I told you to do whatever you wanted with them”, then takes the masks off Robin and Fritz
• Into the Power Plant
  • They decide to trust us enough to unshackle us and let us show them around
  • Open the control room and they seem very impressed with Fritz’s construction (which is actually almost entirely ancient Dwarven but don’t tell them that because the LAST time we told them that they tried to confiscate the entire factory on the grounds that it was already there hence we had no claim to it) and says she should go work for the Lord Emperor
    • F (sarcastically): “Yes yes, all hail the Lord Emperor.” (J agrees)
    • C: “That sounded very insincere.”
    • J: “Us Drow are always sincere”
    • C: “...that also sounded very insincere.”
    • J: “Ah, woe, me and my foreign tongue”
    • Jalan then inadvertently signs himself up for a pretty thorough background check because “fOrEiGnEr?!! Does it have the proper PAPERWORK??”
  • We pretty effectively talk our way out of all of the potentially incriminating things
    • (of the generator)
      • Drant: “It’s practically screaming with power.”
      • Fritz: “(Drant you’re pushing it)”
    • (of the conveyor belt of shackles)
      • J: “Those just aren’t in use”
      • F: “we haven’t figured out their mechanical purpose yet”
      • C: “Why is there blood on them?”
      • F: “We haven’t figured out their mechanical purpose, we’re smart enough to know they work great for the purpose of restraining someone who’s trying to kill you”
      • C: “and exactly who tried to kill you?
      • *gestures pointedly to the pile of bodies*
    • (of the ramshackle-looking furnace (ramshackle-looking because of the sound absorption panels))
      • they comment that it looks very complicated and they’re impressed with Fritz’s handiwork, Jalan says it’s very unstable, which Carissa immediately questions because the generator worked perfectly for hundreds of years, Fritz saves it by saying the radiation-containment system is the unstable part, the generator is fine, but the longer we linger here the more likely it is that we’ll get radiation poisoning (power plant was unmanned for a reason - it killed all of its maintenance workers with unchecked radiation so we had to develop a system to ensure it wouldn’t happen again)
      • (DM is impressed with the recovery because that could’ve been baaaaaad)
  • We open the cryochamber and convince them that the chambers are not in use but if we manage to get them in use we’ll put them on our tax forms (lol nah)
  • they ask if they’re all empty, we admit there’s a flux suit in one of them but it’s not disarmed so it’s dangerous and we put it in there for containment
    • They ask if they can take it, or even better the whole cryo-chamber it’s stored in, with them for study, we never say yes and I don’t know if this ever got resolved
    • Court mage makes some comment “hey, with those shackles out there and these cryo-chambers clearly designed to hold humans, you know what I think this place would be great for?”
    • J: “a prison? Way ahead of you”
    • Court mage: “I like this guy”
• Investigators take their leave
  • Jalan gets handed a business card that says he’s under internal investigation for citizenship
  • Court mage takes a liking to Fritz and is impressed with her work and suggests they get drinks sometime to talk, she seems unenthusiastic and he seems hurt
    • (damn, we’re doing great at ruining potentially friendly relationships today)
  • Carissa gets Robin to confess to lying to government officials about his first story and he is convicted of lying to the government (I mean he already confessed to killing and impersonating the government but hey if they can get him on a technicality it’s cool by me), they leave us in good faith but promise to investigate Jalan’s foreign standing with the government and get back to us soon

Jalan’s In Trouble

• Jalan collapses in a corner and starts crying that they’re going to kill him
  • Fritz: “No, they won’t kill you…...well if you try to run before the investigation is over they will totally kill you, yeah.”
• Fritz remembers that for people who run from the government, things generally don’t end up well - a nameless group just sort of shows up and people just end up dead (goddamn Ghost Squad bullshit I knew that was a bad idea)
  • J: “So you remember when we first met? When I ran into you. I was running away from somebody else.”
  • F: “Well I kinda figured that, the only reason you ever run is to run away from something. If your crime wasn’t that bad, you could probably get off easy. If you did some bad shit, you’re dead. What’d you do?”
  • J: “I kinda sorta opened a line of credit directly to the crown…..for about 5 million coins….”
  • F: “HAAAAAAAA, bro you’re fuckin’ TOAST!”
  • J: “Hey, if I die, you die too, you’ve gotta help me out.”
  • F: “.......oh yeah.”
• Drant offers the information that Jalan will only be incriminated if he has some official documentation labelling him as a fugitive, and that we could probably ensure that he appears innocent in their investigating by destroying/stealing any incriminating paperwork
• We decide to sneak into the citadel and confiscate any incriminating paperwork, luckily it’s late-ish on Friday night so we’ve got a few days of flexibility before business-day processing actually begins

Making Plans

• Plan 1
  • Drant has a brilliant idea to use our spider bots and start mass-producing them and sell them to people until they’re completely integrated into society as cleaning bots who nobody pays attention to and then we disguise Drant as one of the robots and send him in
    • ……..that’s good and all. If we had 12-18 months and an assembly line. But we don’t. Sooooo
• Plan 2
  • Remember that mage that tried to get drinks with Fritz? He works in the building we need into, he’s probably got keys or at least intel. What if she takes him up on drinks after all?
    • J: “And then we get really drunk and kidnap him!”
    • D: “What exactly is the advantage of us getting drunk to kidnap him?”
  • Decide to just get him drunk, get him talking, get him to pass out, steal his keys and continue onto step 2.
  • Step 2 is getting into the building, so we need to find some building secrets
• Plan 3
  • J: “Or we could just set the city on fire, burn the whole thing to the ground and run-”
  • F (immediately): “NO”
  • Plan 2 it is

Gathering Information on the Capitol Building

• Fritz remembers there’s a library with some potentially useful information
  • Fun side notes: nonfiction/fiction are mixed up, so all of these far-fetched tales of Lord Emperor Ragnar’s adventures (like killing an ancient dragon with his pinky, or assisting in the creation of an airship of nuking doom, haha was that us) are labelled as nonfiction, while stuff like rumors of a “new pantheon” is labelled as fiction
  • Looking into blueprints/architects/contractors who were responsible for the construction of the building, decide to talk to some lowly grunt who just worked on the building versus a higher-up who designed it (grunt is easier to deceive/buy out)
• Pick out one builder in particular and scope him out
  • Decide to try to scam him into unwittingly giving us information
    • Jalan suggests that Drant (as a freaky bug thing) just out of nowhere attacks the builder on the streets at night and Jalan swoops in to save the day and strike up a conversation
      • D: “oooor maybe we don’t beat me up”
      • J: “but I have to swoop in as a savior, then he’ll feel obligated to talk”
      • D: “or maybe I go up to him looking threatening and you “scare” me away”
      • J: “but that’s no fun”
  • Lives in a kind of homely/modest neighborhood, has two daughters, goes to bed with his wife
    • J (dejected): “Well we’re not gonna scam him tonight, looks like it’s time for some torture”
• Jalan thinks of finding the building’s janitor, Luck says it’s in the same neighborhood we’re already in
  • Got a nice garden, someone’s inside, Jalan sneaks up
  • Janitor is happily sitting at a table, humming and scribbling on some paper with different colored ink, like a comic book kind of thing
    • J: “It’s Friday night, does nobody in this town drink”
  • Janitor as if on cue puts on his coat and heads out, to a burlesque show, Jalan doubles back to his house and breaks in
    • Lots of books, even a self-help book titled “how to make more friends” (aww), a book on gardening, some surrealist art, “How To Cook With Mudcrab: A Poor Man’s Guide To Eating Healthy”
  • Jalan thinks that striking up a conversation about gardening could be useful
    • J: “Hey Drant! Make friends with this dude over gardening.”
    • D: “I don’t know anything about gardening. Besides, you think he’s desperate enough to be friends with me? I’m a bug. A literal bug.”
    • J: “I mean we’re all kind of weird...I mean, I’M beautiful, but people tend to get jealous of my beauty, so…”
    • *silence*
    • J: “ooooooor you pretend to attack him and I’ll swoop in, beat you up, and save the day.”
    • D: “why do you have this urge to dominate me all the time”

Pimping Out Fritz

• Drant heads to The Slipper Room burlesque club, a bouncer immediately denies him entry
  • Drant: “I’m meeting a friend here”
  • Bouncer: “Oh, you’ve got a friend inside? What’s his name?”
  • Drant: “He hasn’t told me yet.”
  • Bouncer: “You’re friends with a person you don’t know the name of...do you even know the meaning of ‘friend’, bug?”
  • Drant: “I know you people like gold for some reason, you want some gold?”
• Drant bribes the Bouncer for 100 gold (the equivalent of $1000 so yay for sending the bug with no concept of monetary value to bargain), starts talking up the janitor
  • Janitor (name Stan Riverson) replaced the last guy about 1 year ago, who got executed for apparently embezzling shit from the offices (drops a hint about some safe that’s kept in the building)
  • Janitor sadly tells of how he’s not that happy and how he visits this club all the time and has been for a long time searching for happiness and all of the girls know his name by now, and how he’s basically a fly on the wall at this point
    • Drant: “Ha. Fly.”
    • *awkward silence*
    • Drant: “Fly. Because...I’m a bug?”
    • Janitor: “Yes we’ve established this.”
    • *awkward silence*
    • Drant: “I’m not very funny either”
    • Janitor: “yes I can tell”
  • Janitor starts on about how he cleans everything in the building, even the places a lot of people aren’t allowed in, and lets on that since he’s been there a year, he has a special access key (rock?) that lets him into restricted places easier, something about like DNA identification?
    • Some doors have a time-lock, you have to start the unlocking progress and leave it for awhile
    • At nights there’s like one guard patrolling each hallway
    • Some doors have multiple layers of security to different areas, including time locks and passcodes
    • Drant: “Can I ask another favor? I have a friend who’s looking to get into the janitorial business…”
    • Janitor: “Janitorial business? Is she looking to replace me??”
    • Drant: “Replace? No! She’s got an interview somewhere else but doesn’t want to go in without any experience, so I was hoping you could let her in and show her the ropes a little bit when nobody’s around.”
    • Janitor: “If I do this favor for you, could you do one for me? …...I was hoping you could get her to go on a date with me sometime.”
    • Drant: “That’s what I was going to suggest! Oh, but she’s a halfling though” (Fritz in the background: “gnome!”) “I don’t know if you’re into that sort of thing”
    • Janitor: “Oh, no, I’m not picky, I’m just looking for companionship.”
    • Jalan in the background: “On tonight’s episode of Pimp Out Your Friends….”
  • Level up! level 4!

Plot type

Session

Parent Plot

Act 1: Just Your Normal, Everday, Morally Ambiguous Power Company