EVENT #1

[space_aces]

SURVIVAL OF THE FASTEST

Dropping a set of coordinates in the logs of every Privateer space ship with no further elaboration or explanation is a way of delivering a lead that only SUPERBIA would do. What awaits at the site of the coordinates is not a civilization, nor an unpopulated rock, but a planet-sized tourist trap: The Dayton Entertainment Platform, the host of the biggest space ship race in the tri-galaxy area, the Mobius Prix.

For a place where everything is happening, none of it seems to matter for a treasure-hunting Privateer. The coordinates may seem like a total non sequitur, or a passive aggressive suggestion from SUPERBIA to take it easy. Until one starts hearing the rumors that the prize for winning the race was carved from a piece of Fortuna itself...

1

Now This Is Podracing

The Möbius Prix is an utterly ruthless affair. Anything goes, with the only rule of the race being no weapons. If a Privateer wants a closer look at that trophy, they can consider entering the race and winning it for themself. Fast space ships have an advantage (advice that could have come from the mouth of Herlock Sholmes.) But speed isn't the only factor that matters here...

Space ships don't worry about terrain per se, but the race track passes through difficult space with a claustrophobic amount of obstructions that require an ace pilot's skills and intuition to traverse. The track also goes through the territory of nasty creatures, including a pack of Triple Helix Hammerjaws during their mating season. Good luck dealing with an aggressive male Hammerjaw that thinks you're what's between him and getting laid. On top of all that, the racers will start to notice some less than natural obstacles. Mines that blow up passing vehicles, tripwires that can catch a speeding space ship, and laser turrets aimed at the track, it seems some racers don't heed the No Weapons rule as long as it isn't on the ship itself.

2

Changing Hands

It's not just the competitors that have a vested interest in the outcome of this race. Intermingled with the spectators are gamblers, sweating while watching the results of their bets. No matter who wins, a lot of money is going to be exchanged in the end. Maybe try to cash out on a bet yourself, if one has a lot of faith in your fellow crewmate.

Just like on the track, people play dirty here as well. In the shadows, one might catch some suspicious looking characters lurking around. Following them will lead to one finding some tough looking guys conspiring together, with race fixing being an especially alarming keyword. Those death traps on the race track are not so inexplicable now.

It's common knowledge (to the point that locals will find you a bit naive for not knowing) that the race is a front for vast transactions of money among the local criminal empires. Investigating a bit deeper will reveal the involvement of a specific organized crime family, The Belladahlias. A lot of snooping around (whether through intelligence or arm-twisting) will disclose that the winner is rigged to be a certain ship, the Polar Star. That last tidbit will come at the cost of attracting the attention of large, suspicious followers dressed in black. Ruh-roh! Let's hope you're as fast on your feet as behind the wheel.

3

Fast Food

Those with less of a need for speed are free to leisurely enjoy the splendors of Dayton. Attractions include rides, entertainers, and plenty of the Largest in the Tri-Galaxy Area and Smallest in the Tri-Galaxy Area of miscellaneous objects.

Dayton is practically half-shopping mall half-race course, with countless sellers attracted to the planet with dreams of extracting money from tourists. Omnipresent is the amount of merchandise centering around the Mobius Prix, each vendor promoting their racer of choice. T-shirts, water bottles, fans, balloons, anything you can slap a face on, it's being sold. When in Rome, why not do as the Romans do, and sell merchandise with a crewmate's face on it? Supportive AND profitable!

If any of the goods catches your eye, however, prepare to have to open your wallet wide. The Rat Race might be as brutal as the space ship tournament. Everything on Dayton is sold with massive price gouging, including the most overpriced hotdog you will ever see. If it's just food SUPERBIA will probably allow you to write it down as a living expense, but it's the principle of the thing.

Comments

[futuradelita]

Adela overheard that. She pressed her back against the wall, tapped her earpiece for a (flickering) display to show on her right eye. Whatever. She went in, gun raised at the source of the sound, coming around the janitor's closet. It was probably some clerk that hid as soon as he overheard intruders... or a gunman waiting for his shot.

Okay. Adela held her breath and stood next to the door, back against to the wall. she slung the door open with her gun raised, and rapidly turned to flank while aiming at the potential threat inside. Only to see a bumbling companion with a mop. Green silhouette.

Adela immediately lowered her pistol with befuddlement.

"Qué chingados are you doing here?"

[funnylittleclown]

"Likely the same thing you are doing."

He dodged past the gun, quickly leaving the friendly mop alone in its closet, as he joined Adela in the hall.

"I'm relieved to see you aren't one of those large men with the laser pistols. One comes by here every few minutes or so. I think he must be on some sort of patrol route. We've a short while before he comes again."

[futuradelita]

More people were paranoid about this whole race. Good. SUPERBIA definitively picked the right ones for the mission.

Adela clicked the lock back and returned her pistol to her holster. It was a good time to share information, all in all. Her attention would turn to the paperwork and computers.

"I saw some of them patrolling and reporting every so often," Adela nodded. "I moved in when I saw a window and nobody looking at me. This office is too guarded. Even for a race."

And indeed, if the Doctor was right, they had little time to work with. As much as Adela tried to grab and run her eyes through the files, most of what she saw were documents regarding gains and expenses for different departments, as well as management for some of the materials requires for the race and the festival.

They were useful, but they did not tell the whole story. She turned towards the terminals.

"Don't suppose you know how to hack on a short notice?"

Adela's best hopes was that bureaucrats here would be like the ones of her world. Which would type '1234' as a password.

[funnylittleclown]

"You've a very sharp eye to notice that."

Most of the gamblers hadn't or why else would they still be placing their money down on the tables? Or maybe they though the extra activity around the office was just to protect the chips. Ridiculous!

Those consoles had taken the Doctor's eye the moment he had snuck into the room, only hiding had kept him from them this long. With danger averted he stepped up to them, pressing levers and hitting buttons like the machine was his very own.

"If its a simple binary code I'll have it in no time. Have you found anything in those papers?"

He typed out a few more lines of code, twisted a dial, and gave the console a little rap on its side when it wasn't behaving. When all else failed that never did!

"Oh, here's something... It looks like a blueprint."

For a laser turret.

[futuradelita]

Adela was getting her hands on some documents filing plutonium and magnetic mechanisms for the creation of exotic matter when the question came. Steel and materials for construction, that she could understand, and even a few fission reactors for energy, but as soon as she noticed a lot of 7.62mm AR rounds being singled as 'safety assets', Adela realized there was something weird in--

"Binary?" Adela rose her eyes from the document, raising an eyebrow, "Qué tu hackeas past ones and zeroes with some high tech stuff or what--"

But then, when the machine granted access to the Doctor without any trouble, and gave absolutely all info they needed, the strangest thing in her galaxy happened: Adela stood quiet. Her mouth remained open, speechless, as she came forward to the screen.

"En la torre."

The tanned woman walked slowly towards the screen. Lens for focusing light and radiation, aiming systems designed not for personal defense, but to melt through hull, and energy coming straight out of the fission materials she just found.

Adela rose the papers she just read. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. She handed over the paper files to the doctor.

"It's not the only thing out there," she muttered, "they have invoices for anti-armor ammunition and a lot of armored material. Since when does a damned race need that many guns?"

[funnylittleclown]

"Yes, quite... computers of this sort are very sophisticated idiots."

And for him it had been a very simple thing to maneuver around their system. This PC was practically a DOS machine compared to some of the computers he had run into out there in the galaxy and he puffed up like a proud peacock at her surprise at its sudden fall. The Doctor did enjoy showing off how clever he was.

"Wait a moment," The Doctor shuffled through the papers looking for the very thing he was about to ask after, "Did you say safety assets? There was a file in there with that name!"

Back at the keys he punched in 'safety assists' to have any file with those two words appear near the top of the page and he opened the first one. A PNG file that displayed the schematics of a spacecraft. The Polar Star. On its nose were two devices clearly labeled safety assets that looked a great deal like modified AR15s.

"Oh... that can't be good. Isn't that one of the racers?"

[futuradelita]

"Sí, buncha stuff about it being supposedly for security," she leaned forward to grab another accounting document, which was even worse. That one had area-denial explosives to be detonated in space, space mines, to trigger upon detection of heat signatures within its vicinity.

"For all they said about all weapons being forbidden," she took a second look at the machine the Doctor took over as if it was nothing, "seems they want their stuff to be packed to the brim as well."

She blinked, and gave him the sheet she last saw the name. Then the other. And another. Jesus. AR15's, HMGs for rotary positions, mines, lasers to melt through steel, and more she leaned over to screenshot with her pad. Throughout all of those documents, whatever was not set for the race itself, was given to their beloved darling.

The Polar Star.

"Hijos de su puta madre," Adela hissed, "not only are they cheating they're trying to get us all killed."

Adela straightened and quickly shuffled to grab as many of the documents as possible, stuffing whatever she could in her coat, with some beneath her hat.

"We need to get everything we can," Adela's voice became hurried, "the others need to hear about this before the races begin."

[funnylittleclown]

"One man's cheating is another man's 'security'."

This was all very damning evidence and he helped where he could to gather up the papers she had already given to him and hand them back in some sort of order so that they might not be dropped. The computerized information was a tad more difficult as he had to search around in a few desk drawers for a disk that the information could be copied onto. In the end he didn't bother with one or two files, he took as much of the database as the disk would hold. They could sort out the important bits later.

"I'm not sure we will be able to make it back to the racers before the flag is dropped. We'll be cutting it close..."

The disk was collected and slid down into a pocket.

"And that guard will soon be on his way back here."

[futuradelita]

"Chingado," Adela hissed... then looked at the documents. then at the rest of what was left here that couldn't be transported. It would be a shame if this all was set on fire, and it lost all registries of payments between all crime lords, potentially starting a war of debts among them.

In fact, it would be a shame of all of these accounting records went to shit, due to a woman that specialized in destroying accounting registries thanks to personal experience during a revolution.

"New plans," Adela grinned with the malice of someone holding a molotov cocktail.

"Plan one: If we get rid of all records and set this all on fire," she pointed at an electronic contact, "we'll get rid of the problem of having people tracking us. After which we'll have a different problem."

She then walked quickly with chaotic energy as she checked the files she took.

"Plan two... if we happen to find the locations of some of these obstacles, and oh so happen to throw them directly at the Polar Star, we are not putting guns on our ships to win, are we?"

[funnylittleclown]

From his limited experience this building hadn't really been designed with fire safety in mind. That long hallway they had just come down for example would be fun to run down with the flames licking behind them and there were all those gamblers out in the main room whose lives might be placed in danger too. He did have to think about them as well. But uh... there was a PA system. Maybe if he proposed a slight alteration to the plan as the rest was something he could get behind.

"What if we give a warning to those out in the main hall first so that they have the chance to get out before we start burning anything? It will bring every guard in the place right to this office but... maybe there is a back way out. We might slip out the loading bay with the plans for the Polar Star while the main hall is still evacuating."

They could still use the information they had gathered against the Polar Star. Cheating like that, with such deadly force, it would serve them right if some of their little traps were turned back on them.

[futuradelita]

"Shit."

Adela stopped walking the moment the Doctor reminded herself of the collateral damage. In turn, her chaotic mind was leashed back by her empathetic mind. She gritted her teeth, eyes going back and forth between the documents, the door, and the noises outside of the offices.

"We really have to use that information," Adela reminded herself, "we can't waste the chance we have to take information, as well as sabotaging what they have..."

Then, she listened. A warning to get everyone out, setting everything on fire, and then escaping some way back. Her mind ran around hijacking a small vessel for it. She tried to look for anything to warn people. A fire alarm, a tactical relay for a false warning, or...

She notices a microphone on one desk. It was packed to the brim with post-its regarding announcements, public and private keycodes, sales to do, voices to make, among other things.

Adela stared at it. Then turned to the Doctor.

"Wanna do the honors?"

[funnylittleclown]

How handy that whomever usually made the announcements happened to have such a bad memory. But looking through the postits it was easy enough to find the code that would allow anything spoken into the microphone to be projected into the hall where all of the gamblers were still busy losing their money. Surely they wouldn't mind the excuse to get out with some of their pocket change still intact.

"May I have your attention? Attention! Please! This is not a drill! I repeat, this is NOT a drill! All persons must leave by the main doors or the emergency exits. Proceed to the parking area in a calm and orderly manner. I repeat this is not a drill! A fire has been reported in the building. Please exit, immediately!"

The message having been send he gave Adela a little smile as he flicked off the microphone.

"That should do it I think. If you can manage the fire I'll keep a watch at the door for the guards."