The Simulacrum

On a certain lazy Friday evening, a group of unlikely characters gathered around a table, dice in hand, to play even more unlikely characters. A tale as old as time.

…

Okay, maybe that was an understatement, but it was true that my sisters' dystopian sci-fi campaign became a regular fixture in the lives of the motley crew in front of me, and not all of them welcomed my intrusion into their sacred circle.

"Ur ye serioos, Penny-gurl?" a certain Minotaur Knight griped at the other end of the table, his eyes trained on me, but I nonchalantly ignored his gaze and continued to arrange my notes behind the DM shield.

Duncan's reservations were shared by Raven Boy as well, though he was less vocal about them. The two of them were wearing the standard issue sweat suits of the Ordo Draconis, which ended up becoming a tradition enshrined in the rules over time, and now they even had standardised versions for the squires and special customized ones with insignias and crests for the Entitled Knights.

Surprisingly enough, Karukk was also wearing the same type of ensemble, if in different colours, and the elated Ichiko in his lap provided a sharp contrast with the wary Knights. Last, but not least, we had Fred and Galatea rounding out the RPG group, and they didn't seem to mind my presence at all.

"I asked brother for help…" Penny, currently sitting next to me, began to respond to Duncan's earlier question, only for her tone to abruptly turn flustered. "I-I-I mean, I asked him to help me spice up the campaign! That! To change things up a bit!"

Her insistence would've been suspicious on any day of the week, but since we were already gathered here, Duncan reluctantly nodded along.

"Aye, Ah git that, bit tis aye a bawherr sudden."

My Abyssal little sister, sitting on my other side, quickly came to the rescue.

"We… asked Leo if he'd like to DM one of our sessions a while ago, but he's been busy until lately."

"Kihihi. It's true that things have been a bit quieter than usual as of late," Fred noted with a lopsided smirk. "But are you familiar with the rules?"

That question was aimed at me, so I looked up from my notes and slightly inclined my head.

"Of course. I did my homework."

"I can't wait to show Ue-sama my cool and pretty kitsune!" the little girl at the other end of the table exclaimed with an ear-to-ear grin and threw her hands into the air, forcing the Faun serving as her seat to hold her by the waist.

"Careful, tiny. You fall off."

This kind of thing apparently happened so often that the others didn't even pay them any notice. All attention was drawn to Raven Boy instead, who absent-mindedly swirled his dice in a small paper cup to make some noise.

"Are you sure you know what you're getting into?" he asked in a neutral tone. "If you need any help with the rules, don't be afraid to ask."

"Nah, I'm good," I answered with a grin and then clapped my hands. "Is everyone ready? Can we get started?"

"Hai!" the little miko exclaimed excitedly, while everyone else nodded along, if with slightly less enthusiasm.

"Great. So, where were you when you left off?"

"The team was in the process of performing a material extraction gig at an Armytech base," Galatea told me without looking up, and while I'd done enough preliminary research to understand the lingo, Penny still felt the need to clarify things to me.

"A gig is like a quest, and Armytech is like the military, but also a corporation, and material extraction is…"

"They're trying to steal something," I uttered nonchalantly, and my knightly sister nodded along. "What's the quest hook."

"There… isn't any," Snowy explained in a mousy voice.

"It's a gig we planned out on our own," Agrawain told me, and I nodded along as if this was the first time I'd ever heard about it.

"Is that so? That's good roleplaying," I continued to speak casually while avoiding eye contact, lest I accidentally were to give the gig away. "So? What are you trying to nab? Some high-tech technoware? Or maybe some research data you want to sell to secure funds?"

"Kihihi. No, boss! We're after some experimental weaponry!"

Fred sounded absolutely gleeful, but I just nodded along with a subdued, "That's neat," and continued to shuffle my notes. Meanwhile, Penny gulped at my side and placed a hand-drawn terrain mat into the middle of the table.

"We had to end the last session early because I didn't have the battle map ready yet," she said a touch sheepishly, then hurriedly added, "Snowy made it!"

On closer look, the blueprint of a building complex was drawn on square print graph paper, and it was pretty exhaustive, including which way the doors opened, the stairwells, and even oft-overlooked small details, like sensibly placed restrooms. The whole facility was vaguely hourglass-shaped, with things like the entry hall, the cafeteria, and the business offices on one side, and the research and development laboratories on the other.

"Our target is in the storage facility," Raven Boy chimed in helpfully and reached out to point at a segment of the map. "I guess somewhere around there?"

"According to the source material, the base of operations in question is qualified as a low-sec facility without its own dedicated response team. My probability engine reports an eighty-seven-point-six percent chance for a smooth operation."

"Really? Interesting," I noted with just a hint of a smile, causing Galatea to falter.

"Correction: Ninety-two-point-two percent. My first reading was in error. I'll attempt to bypass this fault in the future."

"Kihihi. Don't fuss about it," Fred chuckled and prepared his dice. "We're loaded up on HMSO, and they won't even know what hit them! We've got this in the bag!"

"A've aye git a ill feeling aboot this, bit if ye say sae..." Duncan continued to grumble on the side, but then Ichiko's upbeat voice pushed his concerns aside.

"Let's gooo! I want to show Ue-sama my kitsune's amazing seven-tailed water-bending magic!"

"Magic?" I asked, genuinely baffled for a second. "I thought this was a technopunk game."

"Ah, only Ichiko calls it that," Snowy told me hurriedly. "It's more like using electromagnetism to control liquids?"

"Oh, so it was in character. I've got it." I glanced across the table. "So? How do you want to go about this operation?"

"We'll gang wi' a frontal batter, 's usual," Duncan responded nonchalantly and pointed at the main entrance of the base.

"Are you sure that's wise?" I asked back, just to make sure everyone was in agreement. "While this place is comparatively low-security, it's technically still a military base. Wouldn't it be better to infiltrate it quietly from a different angle?"

My proposal fell on deaf ears, as expected.

"Don't worry, boss. We've got this!" Fred told me with a grin, and the others were in complete agreement, even if some were more reluctant than others. Snowy, in particular, had a hard time maintaining her poker face, because unlike the rest, she knew what was coming.

There was a very good reason why my sister recruited (read: pleaded and pestered) me to save her campaign slowly circling down the drain, and I was here to fulfil her request. They weren't going to like it, but again, I gave them the opportunity to change their minds and try something else, and they didn't listen, so everything after this point was on them.

"All right. It's your raid, so we'll be playing it as you want," I told them and focused on Agrawain. "How are you planning to approach this?"

"We'll do it the same way as last time," he told me, only to belatedly realize that this told me nothing and elaborate. "My character has a twelve in vehicle control, so he'll drive the party's van through the main gates and ram the main entrance."

"A gey Arnwald approach, bit hey? If it wirks, it wirks."

Duncan sounded especially giddy, finally moving past his earlier apprehensions, and he was impatiently rolling his dice in his hand. I blew out a shallow sigh and gestured for Raven Boy to get started.

"As I said, I'll drive our armored van right into the main hall of the building. Shock and awe."

"Okay then. Normally this would be a plus five check, because you're raiding a military base, but since nobody in their right mind would expect someone to do this, it's negated by the surprise modifier, so you can roll on neutral."

"Got it." He did just that, throwing his dice into a standard paper cup again. He shook it a bit and immediately slammed it into the tabletop as if he was playing Yahtzee. Once he raised the cup again, a delighted hum escaped his lips. "Two, two, six."

"That's ten, so you succeed." I took a deep breath and switched to my narrator's voice. "In the middle of the night, the loud roar of a high-powered engine breaks the silence of the facility. Before the guards could get a grasp on what's happening, the whole building shakes as your van barrels through the large frosted glass automatic entrance of the facility." I paused here to pick up an empty coke can and placed it onto the mat to represent the location of the vehicle, followed by a handful of standard tokens. "These are the guards on duty you can see. What now?"

"We'll follow standard procedure," Agrawain explained. "Duncan, Friedrich, Galatea and I take care of the enemies, while Neige hacks the system to turn off the alarms and the automated defensese. Ichiko and Karukk cover her."

"A solid base plan," I noted absently and placed more tokens onto the mat. "Here's the closest terminal, and in the meantime, more guards approach from the outside. What do you do?"

"Kihihi! I jump out of the back of the car—!"

"Roll for athletics," I interrupted Fred, much to his visible annoyance.

"Come on, boss! Seriously?"

"I've heard your character's wearing a big, bulky exoskeleton, and the ground is littered with broken glass."

"Ugh, I got it…" He grumbled, and a roll of the dice later he announced, "Hah! Four!"

"In that case, you land on your feet, ready for action."

"I aim my high-pressure HMSO cannon at the guards coming from the courtyard!" he declared proudly and rolled his dice again.

"Ah throw an HMSO grenade at this cluster o' guards," Duncan followed him up, and Agrawain wasn't far behind.

"I'm going to engage the guards closest to the terminal to clear the way for Neige's group. I aim my water gun at the closest enemy."

"Isn't your character specced for melee? How much ranged skill do you even have?"

"Only three," he told me a touch cagily. "But I put a whole lot of points into dexterity, so at Dex-minus-five, it's the equivalent of a nine. Oh, and nerve-linking adds an extra three points, so that's twelve. It should be good enough to hit them at this range."

I didn't respond to him right away, but glanced at Penny with undisguised disapproval.

"You let them nerve-link their squirt guns?"

My knightly sister only let out an awkward chuckle, so I rubbed my temple and focused my attention on the group in front of me again.

"All right. The enemy is flat-footed, so roll at neutral."

I didn't have to say that twice, and after the dice stopped, Raven Boy let out a satisfied sound.

"Heh. Five."

"That's well within range, and you hit the guard squarely on the chest. What's in your squirt gun?"

"HMSO laced with brain-stun," he told me with a grin, and I couldn't help but frown a bit.

Seeing the way the group operated, I now fully understood why Penny requested my help. But first, let's take a step back and explain what's going on here, and why these guys were using water cannons and squirt guns when assaulting a military facility.

It all started when Penny got her pocket money last month and she spent it on supplementary rule books. One of them was an additional equipment list for this particular techno-punk GRUMPS module; essentially a giant shopping catalog of weapons, tools, and other miscellaneous things the players could buy in the game. The majority of it was filled with sensible stuff (at least by the setting's standards). Guns, mines, grenades, and body armour were dime-a-dozen. For more exotic stuff, there were remote-controlled drones, cybernetic implants, and expert-programs that allowed hackers to fight in cyber-space.

Yet, despite all of these fun and flavourful gear options, the thing that completely derailed Penny's campaign was found at the very end, in the 'chemicals' section of the book. A compound called 'hyper-methyl sulfoxide, or HMSO for short, was a harmless substance by itself. It was simply a carrier; it forced the skin to absorb any chemicals that came into contact with it, so by mixing it with drugs or toxins, they would be instantly delivered into the target's bloodstream.

Not only that, but since the attack didn't cause damage, it completely bypassed armour calculations, and as long as the target was wearing a porous outfit (read: anything short of a full rubber suit), they would be instantly affected by the suffused substance on contact. The problem was that there were no limitations to this in the rulebook, and it took Fred just a few minutes to figure out that mixing HMSO with various knockout drugs to instantly incapacitate enemies in one hit was not only possible, but braindead simple.

Now, if this happened in our campaign, I would've immediately told Angie to clamp down on this, because it was just insanely abusable. If I was doing the DMing, I might let the others play with it for a while, giving them just enough rope to hang themselves with before pulling the rug out of under them, but Penny was still a bit too naïve in this regard and let the party get away with too much. She told me she tried to reel them back in later by making HMSO harder to acquire, or by beefing up the enemies they faced in the campaign to compensate, but it was too little, too late.

By that point, the party was acutely suffering from a phenomenon I called 'fireballitis'. It was the same thing that infected Ammy's character, and it could be summed up as such: when a player gets access to fireball, they will try to solve all problems and encounters with it. A big group of enemies? Fireball. Single enemy? Fireball. Locked door? Fireball. Undercooked bacon? You guessed it: fireball it is!

When that happens, the DM usually has to design encounters to punish this kind of exploitative habit, but again, Penny was trying to do that too late, and the party just got too used to the power spike HMSO provided to them. By loading it into squirt guns, grenades, and even freaking water balloons, a single hit from a brain-stun infused attack (which was a medical drug that was supposed to be administered intravenously) would result in an instant incapacitation, bypassing most armour, resistances, and level difference.

So, what happened when Penny got fed up and tried to crack down on the strategy? The party started ignoring quest hooks and began planning their own heists to secure more HMSO and the drugs to put into it. That sounded silly already, but then while browsing the catalogue Duncan discovered a, I kid you not, 'military-grade super-soaker' developed by Armytech for riot control, and when Penny refused to let them buy them on the black market… well, we've got the current session, where a party of grizzled, cybernetically enhanced super-mercenaries were breaking into an army base… to steal a bunch of high-tech squirt guns.

Since at this point things were completely off the rails, Penny finally swallowed her pride and asked me for advice, which I was happy to provide. At least until the full scope of the problem was revealed to me, at which point it became obvious that a more direct intervention was necessary, which led us to the current situation.

In the meantime, Agrawain's character successfully took down a guard in one hit, while Fred mopped up the people coming in from the outside. Again, if it was a confirmed hit, the target went down, no questions asked. No wonder they were so confident about rushing the facility like this; this whole HMSO strategy was wildly overpowered. Of course, there were always ways to counter it.

For example, Penny started throwing automated turrets and robot dogs at them during the last session, yet Snowy could not only counter them with her hacking, but something like that was, counter-intuitively, the worst way to handle this situation. Doing it that way was guaranteed to result in an arms-race and things getting increasingly more ludicrous, with HMSO-filled sprinkler systems and everyone fighting fully sealed power armour suits and whatnot.

I refused to go down that route. A good tabletop RPG wasn't supposed to be some spiteful contest between the DM and the players trying to screw each other over, but a game of jolly cooperation for the sake of everyone's shared fun. Yet, from time to time, it was necessary for the DM to get a bit more 'heavy handed', to show the boundaries that the players may skirt but should never cross. And my hand was going to be heavy indeed.

"How is hack?" Karukk inquired, and so I gestured for Snowy's attention and handed her a note.

My Abyssal sister gingerly took it from me, and after reading it, her brows rose high in surprise.

"There are no automated defenses in the building, only the alarms."

"Really?"

Fred sounded incredulous, and Raven Boy shared his sentiment.

"Check again."

"That course of action is wasteful," Galatea stated emphatically and jerked her head in my direction. "My analytical engine suggests that Grandmaster never prepared any."

"Maybe, but…" Agrawain mulled it over, but by that point I was ready to move things along, so I made a few rolls behind my DM screen for show.

"While you were dealing with the guards in the atrium, the rest of the facility got alerted."

"Och, stoatin. Howfur mony mair ur comin'?"

"None to the atrium," I answered calmly, making Duncan's brows shoot up in surprise.

"Whit? Then whit ur thay daein'?"

"Falling back to more defensible positions here, and here," I told him, and placed a few more tokens onto the mat. "Also, they pulled the fire alarm, so all the fire doors are closed and locked, meaning here, here, and here." I picked up a few spare erasers and other doodads and used them to represent the blocked doorways.

"Neige, can you hack them open?" Agrawain asked the obvious question, but I already thought of that, and she shook her head while showing off the previous note I gave her.

"They're on a different network. I'd need another access point."

"Which is here," I told them, placing another token at the other side of the facility.

"Tch." Duncan clicked his tongue and turned to the other Knight. "Whit noo? Dae we break through?"

"We don't have much choice," he responded sourly, and so the second battle began, with the whole group throwing themselves against the guards holed up at the second defence line.

Of course, the fight was still one-sided, bordering on unfair. Due to how the system worked, the players getting hit by actual bullets was only considered a minor annoyance, especially since Karukk was a dedicated medic who could quickly patch them up mid-battle, while the defenders getting hit by a squirt or a water balloon were instantly taken out of the fight. Yet, that was just the beginning.

"The remaining guards fall back to the only corridor connecting the two halves of the base to make their last stand."

"Hey! That's dishonorable! Stand and fight!" Ichiko fumed in the back, and the rest of the group were also visibly annoyed by the pace of the battle.

"This isn't about honour. These are just run-of-the-mill contractors guarding this place for a paycheck. They aren't going to fight you to the death."

"Why no surrender?" Karukk inquired with a tilt of his head.

"Because they still have to do their jobs, don't they? They may not be able to stop you, but they can still stall you."

At this point they should've asked 'For what end?' here, but nobody thought that far ahead. Instead, the third battle commenced, with Fred leading the charge and breaking down the guards' hastily erected barricades, then the rest of the battle unfolded the same as last time, with each guard falling after just a single solid hit.

"This is simultaneously too easy, and too annoying," Raven Boy griped with a squint aimed at me. "What are you scheming?"

"Scheming? Me? What gave you that preposterous idea?" I asked back with the innocence of a newborn lamb, but he clearly didn't buy it. "Oh, but speaking of annoying, because you took too long, the guards activated the emergency protocols, and a blast door is slowly lowering here." I placed a cheese puff into the mat to symbolize the new obstacle. "If you don't hurry up, it'll close, and then you'll have to figure out a way around it."

"Ugh."

Of course, they managed to get it done in time, but it was only when they were on the other side that they discovered a new problem.

"Wait, hold on! If this closes, then how do we get back to the car?" Ichiko asked the obvious question.

"Ah aye hae a tae o' sha' charges oan me," Duncan proposed. "Ah'll juist blaw it up."

"Setting up the explosives will take a while. Are you fine with that?" I asked with a poker face and he nodded along without any hesitation.

"Aye. Ah will juist bade behind 'n' dae th' skill check 'n stuff. Tis nae lik' we're a' wantit fur th' combat 'ere."

"Good point." Agrawain turned to the others. "Karukk, Ichiko. Stay behind and watch his back. Neige, you come with us and we'll try to get to the second terminal."

"O-Okay…" my sister agreed meekly while discretely eyeing me, and only breathed sigh of relief when I flashed a reassuring smile at her.

What followed was yet another defensive battle in the main hall of the laboratory wing, and while the combat was easily mopped up as usual, the team eventually stopped trying to find the second network access point. Mainly because I had the guard keep blocking off the hallways and harass them with hit-and-run tactics, much to Agrawain's chagrin.

"This is not how a proper encounter should go!" he complained between combat rounds.

"What? Do you expect these minimum-wage guards to just stream into a room without a plan and rush your cybered-up characters with their dinky little sidearms and batons? Would you want to try that with the in-universe equivalent of a mercenary SWAT team?"

"Maybe not that, but…" he continued to gripe, only stopping while it was his turn, and then once the man he targeted went down, he added, "This feels unsatisfying."

"Does it now?" I asked with a veiled hint of schadenfreude. "I'll take your words to heart then."

"Ah, just a moment…" Snowy said, raising her hand to get everyone's attention. "I found the location of the goods. It's here."

She pointed at the corner of the building, and the androidess spoke up right away.

"I propose that we quickly secure the target and exfiltrate as soon as possible."

Agrawain and Fred didn't argue, and before long, they were in the storage zone.

"Check the place for traps," Raven Boy demanded, the Snowy answered.

"There's none."

"Turrets?"

"I… told you there are none in the building."

"Mines?"

"According to prior analysis, mines already fall under the 'traps' heading," Galatea chimed in. "I will look for the items directly."

"Roll for perception." She didn't make it, but Snowy did, so I slipped back into the narrator's voice. "In the corner of the enormous storage hall, filled to the brim with heavy wooden and metal crates piled onto industrial shelves, you find what you came here for. It's an unassuming gunmetal grey metal box with the letters HPLDS-13 painted onto its sides and top with thick, angular red letters. The lid is tightly shut, and the contents are protected by a state-of-the-art cryptographic lock."

"That's it," Raven Boy spoke with a touch of impatience. "Neige, can you open it?"

"Proposition: Let's not waste time with it, and just take the whole crate," Galatea advised and gestured towards Fred. "According to my calculations, grandmaster's armored exoskeleton should be able to carry it."

"Kihihi. Good idea. I roll a strength check!"

He, naturally, made it. In fact, this session hadn't seen a single failure so far, let alone a critical one. Maybe that was part of the reason why Agrawain was feeling so antsy, but for the moment, I held my cards close to my chest and waited for the right moment to spring the jaws of the trap shut.

Soon the whole party merged again at the partition door, with Duncan in an especially good mood.

"Ye aren't gonnae hawp it, bit while ye wur stowed, ah rolled twa critical successes! Ah didnae even need thaim; this wis a piece o' cake."

"Kihihi! Things are going smoothly, aren't they?" Fred quipped and took a sip from his store-brand energy drink. "Let's get these puppies back to the base, and then I can upgrade my Biomechanical Exo-Suit with even more firepower. Or… waterpower? Eh?"

"I would like to register that I got the joke, but I did not find it funny."

Only Galatea responded, but he dismissed her with a 'Bah!'. Meanwhile, Duncan finished setting up the detonator.

"Ahll right, mes amis! Get behind cahvair, ahnd get ready fahr ze boom!" the big guy exclaimed in the day's first (and only) attempt at talking in character, and after a quick countdown, I rolled for the result. Or pretended to do so, but they didn't need to know that.

"With a deafening boom, a series of small explosions ring out as the perfectly placed explosives dislodge the blast door. After a long beat of comparative silence, accentuated by the groaning of metal, there's a second boom as the heavy metal hits the floor, kicking up dust and debris in the process. The way is clear ahead of you."

"Move out, and be ready for anything," Agrawain said sternly, and it was time for me to finally drop the clueless ack and allow myself a well-deserved grin.

"Speaking of that… khm… The moment you enter the other annex, you suddenly find yourselves surrounded by multiple red laser sights trained on your team, clearly visible due to the fine dust the previous explosion kicked up."

"Ambush! I knew it," Raven boy exclaimed and didn't wait for me to finish my narration before throwing down his dice. "I activate the Pre-Emptive Algorithms of my Wired Reflexes and shoot at the closest enemy at… Hah! Three! That gets me an extra attack roll on another target at plus two, with a roll of… ten. Close enough!"

He looked at me provocatively, but I was currently too busy placing the tokens representing their team and the enemies surrounding them onto the map. Once I was done, I turned to him and continued where I left off in my narrator's voice.

"Despite the poor visibility, your quick reflexes allowed you to hit two targets before they had a chance to pull the trigger. You shot the first target in the chest, and the second one in the leg." I paused meaningfully to build some tension. "Unfortunately, both were entirely ineffective."

"What? Why?"

"Are they robots?" Fred asked, sounding both startled and intrigued until I shook my head.

"No. They aren't robots." I took a deep breath and switched tone again. "Once the dust settles, you realize that you're looking at a full squad of Armytech's elite techno-hunters, all dressed in completely sealed haz-mat outfits from head to toe and carrying HPLDS-13s in their hands, filled with HMSO."

"Oh shit. This is gonna suck," Agrawain whispered, and he was right on that one.

The battle was, in many ways, the same as all the ones before. It was quick, only lasting two rounds, and anyone who got hit was immediately taken out of the fight in one shot, regardless of armour or saving throws… except this time, it was the party on the receiving end of the HMSO beatdown.

"Uuu! This is unfair!"

Ironically, Ichiko's completely gimmicky cybernetic fox-girl lasted the longest out of the whole team, thanks to her ability to control and redirect water streams. Still, it only took one failed roll for her to be knocked out like the rest, so she continued to pout and glare at me.

"It is, isn't it?" I responded light-heartedly, much to the party's annoyance.

"Great. A total party wipe." Agrawain emptied his coke can in one go and crushed it afterwards. "I guess that's the end of this session, huh?"

"What are you talking about?" I said, brow raised high. "We only just got started!"

"Started with what…?"

While he was still confused, I swept the terrain mat off the table. I didn't replace it with anything, but just tented my fingers and slipped into the narrator's voice once more.

"Four hours and thirty minutes later, you awaken in a featureless white room, deep in the bowels of an undisclosed black site owned by Armytech HQ. You are all sitting on simple metal chairs, with your wrists and ankles cuffed using the company's proprietary three-layered crypto-wafer lock system. The cuffs also temporarily cut the link between your nervous system and your technoware, disabling all of your cybernetics and your network connections."

"Well, that's convenient…" Fred muttered, but I didn't pay him any heed and continued on unabated.

"There are multiple armed guards in the room wearing bleeding-edge military power armour, and as soon as it's confirmed that all of you are awake, in walks a blocky dark-skinned man with short-cropped grey hair and a scarred face. One of his eyes was replaced by a technoware implant, giving off an ominous red light as he looks over you.

He says, 'Well, well, well. If it isn't our infamous group of troublemakers in the flesh,' as he sits down on a considerably more comfortable chair facing you. His tone is dry and his movements are plain and efficient, yet there's also a sense of dark humour in his one remaining fleshy eye."

"I ask him what he wants," Agrawain started, and as usual, he didn't bother with the actual 'roleplaying' part of the RPG.

"He looks at you mirthlessly and links his fingers in front of his chest. 'I amMichael Alyn Pondsmith, vice-president of Armytech, and you… You've been causing quite a stir as of late, haven't you?' he says, his voice dipping into a lower register. 'Robbing MedTech ambulances and clinics for HMSO and brain-stun, and then brazenly using the combination in your little skirmishes with both the police and the… less lawful elements of Daytown. You must have thought you were awfully clever, discovering these brand-new applications of HMSO, weren't you? You see, you stuck your noses into the hornet's nest without ever realizing it.'"

"What is he talking about?" Fred asked, but Galatea chided him to quiet down.

"Hush, Master. Listen."

"Fine, fine…"

I waited for the intermezzo to finish and then continued with, "He tells you, 'Did you really think that nobody thought of HMSO's military applications before you? It's the industry's best-kept open secret, you see, and we'd like to keep it that way. It's something like an ace in the hole. But you see, it would hardly have any impact if you street-folk started using it everywhere, now would it? And so, we're at an impasse.'

He pauses meaningfully and looks each of you in the eye in turn.

'Fortunately for you, I like your ingenuity. You spotted an opportunity and went for it, full sprint. It was foolish, but the admirable kind of foolishness, you see. I have a soft spot for folks who like to test their limits, and I can see potential in you. Potential to be useful to me, that is, so I decided to visit you in person and offer you a… job might not be the right word, you see. How about, a… mutually beneficial agreement?'"

I waited for a beat to see if anyone wanted to interject, but they were all waiting for me to continue, looking about as interested in the game as I'd seen them since we sat down here, so I cleared my throat.

"'You're already well-versed in the daily comings and goings of Daytown's dirty underbelly, including the HMSO black market. I can give you two choices: you may either act as our proxies, suppressing the trading and usage of HMSO among the more unsavoury elements of the street, or you can just… disappear. And I don't mean that figuratively.'"

"I recommend we take the deal," Galatea responded right away.

"Me too," Snowy joined in, and after a long beat, the Faun also raised a hand. "Karukk also agrees."

"Hold your horses! We don't even know who this is or…" Agrawain tried to object, but one more hand was raised next to him. "Duncan?"

"Coupon it, we dinnae hae a choice in th' maiter, 'n' Ah dinnae wantae mak' a freish character. Ah lik' this funny Frenchman naaw."

"If Karukk-san agrees, then I agree too!" Ichiko raised her hand as well, and since they were outnumbered, Fred and Raven Boy also soon caved in.

I wasn't surprised by this outcome, since I architected it from the beginning. Snowy was obviously in on the gig, and we managed to secretly recruit Galatea as well. She was annoyed by the squirt guns taking away all her opportunities to fire her in-game arm cannons, so it didn't take much effort to convince her to play along. Finally, Karukk would predictably follow Snowy's example out of a deeply ingrained sense of loyalty, so we could rely on him being predictable without having to officially recruit him into the scheme. As always, so long as one controlled enough variables, orchestrating a small plot like this wasn't all that hard.

"Fine, but I want you to know that I don't like being railroaded like this," Agrawain grumbled, but I only beamed at him with a nice, good-natured smile.

This was but yet another step in the long dance between DM and players. Sometimes, you had to let them loose to create their own fun. Sometimes you had to reel them back in before they broke the setting or the story. And sometimes, on a rare few occasions, you had to grab them by the throat and force-feed them a plot hook for their own good, whether they appreciated it in not.

Sure, this made me look like a hardass, but I was only DMing this one session for them, and doing this would make Penny look better and her sessions go much smoother afterwards. At times like this, it was a big brother's duty to make a small personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good, and it was all in good fun anyway, right?