Session 2

Cliff wondered if the control console had any more information about the bunker, so I asked it. Sure enough, it had a full schematic map of the place and gladly showed it to me. I could make out a Hangar, Maintenance bay, Barracks (where we were), Medical Bay, and an Armory on the main floor. There seemed to be a security checkpoint just inside the main entrance, which was on the floor above us. The Power Room was under us. I asked the control panel what sort of access I had. It informed me that I currently had full read access to the terminal, and so it could tell me everything about the bunker, but I couldn’t make any changes to settings.

While I explored the console, Cliff examined the members of the scavenging team. Apart from Deon and Jarrad, everyone else was unconscious. Anya had two broken hips, and her left leg was fractured. Gary had a compound fracture on his right leg, and seemed to have suffered lower spine damage. Ann didn’t seem hurt, but Cliff couldn’t immediately say why she was knocked out.

John, Finnick and Keats joined Cliff, Lenka and me in the barracks. After Cliff and I explained what we had found, we decided to see if we could access the Medical Bay and move the injured scavengers there before Cliff attempted fixing them up.

Lenka, Cliff and I went out into the passage and walked over to the Medical Bay. We saw that the Armory door had a red light over it, while the Medical Bay door’s light was green. I asked the door to open, and it politely obliged. Cliff checked on the state of the medical equipment, and found that most of the drug and supply cabinets were empty. He did find some clean scalpels and other operating equipment, and the operating table itself seemed to be in good condition.

I tried opening the door leading into the Canteen. It opened easily as well, and we saw some tables, chairs and a vending machine with sealed packets of some sort. Finding nothing that we could use as a stretcher, Lenka and I decided to go explore the main entrance area upstairs. Cliff asked John and Finnick to carry Ann into the Medical Bay so he could examine her. The first thing he did was peer into her mouth and check the state of her teeth. He didn’t say what he could divine about her life, but from the state of one of her cracked molars, he could tell that she had recently suffered severe blunt trauma. Upon examining her some more, he discovered some clotted blood on one side of her head.

Upstairs, Lenka and I found a locked gun cabinet, and a heavy machine gun facing the main entry door. The door seemed really heavy-duty and was very solidly shut. I tried asking it to open, but it bluntly refused. We turned our attention to the gun cabinet, and Lenka tried very hard to pick the lock, but years of neglect had rusted the mechanism completely, and it wouldn’t budge at all. She then tried to bash the lock with her club, but didn’t do much damage on her first swing. Frustrated, she swung at the lock with all her might and popped it clean off the door. Tucked away inside were several plastic-wrapped boxes of ammo, and a wooden crate. Inside the crate we found disassembled assault rifle that was put away for long term storage. As Lenka packed the gun and ammo into her backpack, I picked up a handful of sand that was spilling from decayed sand bags, and put it in my pocket. We realized that we could use the top lid of the crate as a makeshift stretcher, and took it downstairs with us.

When we got to the Medical Bay, Cliff was starting on Anya’s leg. After a botched first attempt, he got it re-set fairly well on the second try. He then quickly stitched it and tied it up in a splint. Meanwhile Finicky rigged the crate’s lid into a decent stretcher, and we used it to carry Anya out, and then carefully brought Gary into the Medical bay. Cliff managed to immobilize Gary’s back and did a great job with his leg. He felt confident that the leg would heal well, and Gary would be able to walk without a limp, provided the back injury didn’t cripple him. While the rest of us carried Gary back to the barracks, Lenka was able to jimmy the lock on the vending machine, and found that the packets inside were MREs (high-grade military rations). We figured some of them must have expired, but most of them were still edible.

Next, we headed over to the maintenance bay. Since I had already opened the door once, I expected it to open again when asked. But instead, it rudely informed me that it was locked for security reasons, and would not budge. Finnick and I together managed to hot wire the door open. Immediately, a loud voice informed me of a “Security breach on Level 2”, and I relayed the message to the others. Looking inside, we saw that the Maintenance Bay was set up for servicing a helicopter drone of some sort, although we saw no trace of the drone itself anywhere. Finnick felt confident that he could fix Bessie with all the tools and equipment in here, and eagerly got started. Lenka helped him by clearing off the trees and mud that had fallen in with the truck.

Cliff and I went back to the Barracks where Cliff checked on the patients, and I tried to calm down the base. Talking to the console, I asked it to turn off the alarm, but its only response was - “Security Breach, please dispatch security personnel to Level 2”. Next, I asked it to tell me what was in the armory, and it listed out the contents: 150 5-inch explosive shells and 20 anti-personnel chemical weapon shell for the main gun, along with 3000 rounds of ammo for the heavy machine gun upstairs. Not wanting to step into a room with 100 year old bio-weaponry, we opted to try and access the power room in hopes of turning off the alarm from there.

Walking down stairs, I asked the Power Room to open, but it had the same response: “Locked for security reasons”. Not wanting to hurt the base any further, I climbed back to the main level, and walked over to the Maintenance Bay door, in hopes of shutting off the alarm from there. Alas, my access-level was not enough, and I couldn’t turn off the alarm. Looking around the room for inspiration, I spotted some cranial implants on the electronics bench. I wasn’t sure how the others would react to this discovery, so I decided to not tell them immediately. We talked about what to do next. The others wanted to try and hot wire the Power Room door, but something told me we shouldn’t be antagonizing the base anymore. Besides, It was getting close to 3 in the morning now and I was feeling really tired. I decided to lie down on the floor of the Maintenance Bay and take a nap.

The others wandered into the Hangar to see if they could open the blast doors. Lenka climbed up to the door to get a better look, and spotted a lever of some sort on the opposite corner. She quickly climbed over to it and saw that it was a manual override for the blast doors. As soon as she pulled the lever, alarms and flashing lights went off throughout the base, and a loud voice in my head announced, “Security breach! Security breach! Canadian infiltrators suspected! Anti-captive mechanisms engaged. 30 minutes to self destruct.” I woke up with a start, and remembered to grab the cranial implants before rushing out to the Hangar and telling the others what I was hearing. I then went to the console and tried to turn off the alarm. To my surprise, I succeeded (sort of). The voice now told me, “Countdown halted. Thermal tracking activated on the main gun. Scanning for Canadian activity.”

We took a moment to regroup, and then sprung into action. Cliff, John and Keats started getting the patients ready for moving them out of the bunker. Lenka, Finnick and I went to the basement and hot-wired the door open. Being wary of “anti-captive mechanisms”, we carefully examined the room from the outside. Lenka saw a red spot on a wall just inside the door, and we figured out that it was a laser trip wire of some sort. Lenka easily ducked under the waist-high laser and enter the hot and humid room. Determined to help her define the trap, Finnick followed her in. Together they disabled the small directional mine besides the door, and Lenka stowed it in her backpack. I entered the room, and found no way of controlling the large turbine inside. Exploring a bit more, we found a crawl space under the flooring that seemed to lead deep into the power generator. We decided I should try to crawl through and try to find a way to shut off the power. Lenka and Finnick ran upstairs to open the armory, while Cliff came down to the power room to keep me company. Before I crawled down the access shaft, I decided to tell Cliff about the implants I found. He was very interested in examining them with me when we had more time on our hands.

The armory door proved easy for Lenka and Finnick to hot wire. They saw several rack containing corroded artillery shells, that were oozing a clear liquid of some sort. Some of the racks had bio-hazard symbols on them. There were also several boxes of corroded machine gun ammo. The most interesting thing in the Armory was the robotic arm in the center of the small room. It looked like a loading mechanism for the main gun, and a digital display over the arm read “1 round loaded”. They ran back down to tell us what they found, just as I reached a manual override panel for the nuclear reactor. We decided it would be bad to completely turn off power, and instead opted to slowly bring it down from 50% to see what happens. At around 25%, the voice announced, “Low power. Low power. Non-essential functions suspended. Facility compromised. Facility compromised.” We decided things might get worse if we lower the power any more, and I started to crawl back to the Power Room.

Finnick ran back up to the Armory to try and detach the robotic arm, which he thought would be a great addition to his machine shop back home. Failing to detach it several times, he finally decided to just disable it so that it would stop loading the main gun. Cliff volunteered to climb up the shaft and see if he could trigger the gun. Either way, we could then safely evacuate. When he got to the top, he jumped around a bit to see what would happen. There was a thunderous boom from far above us, followed by a louder boom very close to where Cliff was standing, followed by less loud but very colorful cursing from Cliff. As he climbed down, Finnick walked into the Hangar and informed us that the loading arm was really disabled, and the gun main gun was essentially useless. As if to confirm this news, I heard a new alarm in my head, saying, ”Target engaged. Main gun malfunction. Still detecting hostile activity. Requesting reinforcements from Albany. ETA 6 hours.” Cursing our luck, we quickly decided what to do next and split up for our tasks. Finnick and John went to fetch Lisa, and Cliff slowly climbed back down into the Hangar and recovered. Lenka and I went up to the security level and managed to open the main doors of the bunker. Peering into the darkness outside, we realized that the doors led into a cave. We could barely make out a large dark shape next to two smaller dark shapes. We shined our lights on the shapes and saw a bear and two cubs. Thankfully they were asleep. Not wanting to risk waking up the bears and getting into a fight, I decided to go back down to the main level and help the others prepare for evacuation. Lenka however was not afraid of anything, and managed to sneak past the bears and came out of the cave about a hundred feet away from the hangar doors, slightly up the mountain. Not seeing anything useful around, she just walked down to the Hangar doors and climbed down.

Finnick and John stumbled around in the dark for a while before reaching the camp where we’d left our truck. Without wasting any more time, they quickly got into Lisa, and drove back to the bunker. With careful driving and expert guidance from John, Finnick managed to get the truck right to the edge of the Hangar doors without setting off any mines. We had 3 hours left before reinforcements were due to arrive, and we had no intention of being here when they did. I constructed a turbo charger for Lisa, just in case we needed an extra boost to escape. Meanwhile the others set up the winch and pulled Bessie, the patients and the MREs we’d found up to the surface. In about an hour, we got everything loaded, installed the turbo charger and left.

We made a quick pitstop at the campsite to pick up the equipment there, and finally started for Spier Falls just as dawn was breaking. We only had an hour left, and we kept our eyes peeled for trouble since there was a good chance that we’d run into the enemy reinforcements heading our way. We assumed the reinforcements would be military robots, and we really really did not want to meet them. However, the journey home was surprisingly uneventful. Finnick did a great job driving us back and we reached home without any sign of robots or any other enemies.

We obtained schematics of the base and explored the whole place. We patched up the scavenging team as best we could in the Medical Bay. By hot wiring doors and manually overriding controls, we triggered several alarms in the bunker, which caused several defense mechanisms to to activated. We managed to defuse most of the defenses, and only Cliff sustained minor injury. As a last resort, the base requested reinforcements from Albany, and we assumed military robots were on their way. Not wanting to meet these reinforcements, we loaded Bessie (the pickup truck), the patients, and the supplies we found (a machine gun, ammo, MREs, and some cranial implants) into Lisa (the big truck) and booked it back home. We managed to avoid trouble, and got back to Spier Falls Dam without incident.