Pelican Tracks -- Entry 1
Jun. 6th, 2014 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
I’m playing in an RPG! It’s been a while. For this outing, we’re using Big Eyes, Small Mouth (BESM) which is a universal game system with a focus on anime-like genres. This particular game is set in a sky-island, steampunky setting. Last Exile and Nausicaa are the big influences here. So I’m keeping a journal.
* * *
After that incident with the manifests a few weeks ago, I realized that someone had better start doing a better job of keeping track of the various ship’s logs we have on board the Patchwork Pelican. In particular, someone should keep an accurate log so that our slightly-less-accurate logs aren’t so obviously less-accurate when being perused by authorities with an eye for detail. As I’m the person responsible for the paperwork around here, that someone should really be me.
So let’s start with me. I am Beverly Whiteside, former civil servant for the kingdom of Hutom-Lis and now the Purser for the Patchwork Pelican. It may seem a bit of a step down but frankly, it beats living under occupation. In my former career I gained a reputation as man who knew how things worked and who could get things done. It helped that I could always make the proper paperwork appear when required.
This is how I ended up working with Wrench. Not his real name of course, but I’m not going to disclose it even here. For one thing, he hates it when people call him by his real name. More importantly, Wrench is distantly related to the former royal family of Hutom-Lis. He was never in any danger of ascending the throne, but in these dark days any connection to the royal family is not trumpeted about.
As you might guess, Wrench is something of a genius when it comes to all things mechanical. Bit of a prodigy actually. Could’ve gone to the Royal Academy (on actual merit) but decided he wanted to build a skyship. His family pulled some strings and got me and I pulled some strings and made sure he got the materials and equipment he required to assemble the Patchwork Pelican.
We call it the Patchwork Perlican and indeed, it uses a lot of cast-off and recycled bits and pieces but the shabby, nondescript appearance belies a rather sophisticated vessel. The ship is pressurized so we can travel below the lower cloud deck for extended periods of time (although I hope we need only do so temporarily). There’s also a cunning arrangement of scoops and tubes that we can use to restock our water tanks from the clouds or standing bodies of water which means we can travel longer or more circuitous routes as required. All this and it’s loaded with labor saving devices that allow Wrench to keep the ship running without any additional help -- except for his pet Rocky who’s rather more intelligent than most members of the aristocracy I’ve met.
So we can keep the ship running but neither of us can really fly the thing. When Wrench had completed the ship, he asked me if I could find him a pilot. I have contacts with people from all walks of life and I knew some people who said they had a pilot for us. Her name was Sanna and we sat down for an interview over a few beers at a tavern where the beer is terrible but people mind their own business. We’d barely begun our interview when news of the Shizon Empire’s invasion broke. We hired her on the spot.
Much to our relief, Sanna is an excellent pilot. She’s also clearly had some sort of military training because she has a number of weapons about her person. This is rather troubling as neither Wrench or myself are fighters. Oh, I have my sword cane and Wrench has his...wrench, but it’s mostly for show. We were a bit worried that she might jump us and take the ship. Then we discovered how much black weed she smokes in a week and now we’re not worried she’ll get angry and kill us with her guns, we’re worried she’ll be stoned out of her gourd and kill us all when she crashes the ship. After a few months, we’re still among the living and we assume that either she’s a phenomenal pilot who just goes down to excellent when high or she’s a terrible pilot who gets excellent when high. Either way, we let her do what she wants and she’s happy to fly us wherever we want to go.
For the past couple of months, that’s mostly meant smuggling people out of Hutom-Lis. The new government is not disposed kindly towards its new acquisition and folks are willing to pay a great deal for expedited egress. But now most of the high-rollers have fled and it’s getting too risky to go back looking for smaller and smaller scores. So we’re branching out and trying to find more work a bit further away from Shizon.
Which is what brought us to Wailis. We made landfall and stopped in at the airport’s local bar hoping to make contact with people looking for discreet services at premium prices. Sanna was a bit quicker off the mark than I was and was already talking with a guy about getting her stash topped off. This was a guy named Nick and before he took off to get Sanna her stuff, I did mention we were open for business. Nick told us he’d be back in a few hours so the crew settled in for some drinking and I started up a conversation with an attractive young woman…
...who turned out to be Nick’s sister? girlfriend? He wasn’t happy to see the two of us together when he returned. I managed to smooth things over (a skill born of great and unlooked-for experience) and we got down to brass tacks. Or we would have if the earthquake hadn’t struck at that moment.
Obviously, the safest place to be in an earthquake is in the sky so we rushed out to our ship and got her airborne. The quake was of a particularly violent nature and buildings started to crumble. One poor fool was trapped on a watch tower and Sanna, in an amazing display of her talents smoothly backed the Pelican up to the platform and the hapless worker stepped right on board.
At last the tremors subsided. We dropped off our passenger and then headed away from the airport into the city where we could see several fires and widespread damage. Flying slowly over the city we spotted a woman trapped under a piece of rubble in a burning building. Our first thought was to reverse the flow on our water scoops and spray water on the burning buildings. One very soggy engineer later, we learned that wasn’t going to work. Someone would have to go down. The problem with a skeleton crew is that the person who has to do everything that isn’t flying or engines is me. So I got on our winch and went down.
It was easy enough to free the trapped woman although her leg was broken. I spotted another unconscious man off to one side. We didn’t have any harnesses so I sent the hook back up for Wrench to hook up the cargo pallet. The woman informed me that there might be other victims in the building. The fire was really chewing up the building but it would take a couple minutes for Wrench to right things up. So I made a quick sweep of the building.
I heard some shouting and pounding behind a door blocked with debris. Together we were able to shift it and three more people came out. Things were getting desperate so I led them back to the top floor where the pallet had just been lowered. We put the two injured people, plus a child from my party on the pallet and sent it up. While it was gone, one of the other survivors dashed back into the flames to retrieve something. He came back just as the empty pallet returned.
Our winch isn’t the most heavy-duty of items and the pallet isn’t the sturdiest. With the three of us on the thing it was dangerously overloaded. I implored the man to drop his bundle but he seemed bound and determined to keep it. Luckily, everything held and we got everyone on board.
We moved the ship around the town and found a central park area where emergency stations were being set up. We off-loaded our wounded when a man came up pleading with us to help him secure the fuel depot. I wasn’t exactly sure what we could do to help, but he seemed desperate and vaguely official, so we got back into the air.
He lead us to an industrial area where flames were slowly encroaching on a building loaded with diesel fuel. Protecting the building or removing the fuel was the plan. The man believed there was a tractor there and once we got into the building we could easily haul the stuff out of danger. The building was locked up tight, but Wrench sent Rocky in through a skylight and the little bugger managed to unlock the door from his side. I’m certain there will be an extra treat or two for him tonight.
Inside, the building was littered with tools, fuel, machinery and the like. The fuel was all stored in drums next to the wall, a wall shared with another building already on fire. I looked around and discovered the tractor. I’ll be the first to admit it, I’m not really one for machines. But I hopped in the seat and managed to get it started. The man who lead us here appeared to be better suited for driving the thing and I went to help Wrench get the fuel loaded on to the large flatbed trailer.
We’d just gotten the last barrel on when Sanna came running in to let us know we were out of time. We ran back to the ship and the man drove off with the fuel. In hindsight, I know we probably did prevent a dangerous explosion but I wonder if we also inadvertently assisted a looter.
At any rate, we flew back to the park and checked in with the local authorities. As one of the largest ships in the air, we had a lot to offer but the most pressing need was airlifting the wounded out to the capital for medical treatment. This took a couple of hours and by the time we got back, things seem to have settled down and we were waved off to the airport to touch down again.
So it’s been a busy day. I don’t know if that thing with Nick will ever start up again, but I’m hoping we impressed the locals with our efficiency and quick action. Legitimate business doesn’t tend to pay as well, but it’s quiet and that’s always a plus.
* * *
A couple of quotes from the game:
Beverly (to Wrench who’s just failed to turn us in to a flying pump truck): Why are you wet?
Wrench: Nevermind.
Beverly (to the guy who took us to the fuel depot): Can you drive this thing?
Man: Yeah.
Beverly: Then get up here!
At several points during the game, you had this:
EXTERIOR SHOT: Panic, chaos, fire, screaming, running around trying to save the day.
SMASH CUT TO
INTERIOR SHOT -- PELICAN COCKPIT: Sanna, in a haze of smoke, slowly nodding to Bob Marley’s “Everything’s Going to Be Alright (Three Little Birds)”.
SMASH CUT TO
EXTERIOR SHOT: Panic, chaos, fire, screaming, running around trying to save the day.
So we’re off to a good start. Our plan is to do a short 3-4 session game and then either quit, keep going or do something else. I’m hoping that by committing to a short game arc, we wind up actually playing more than we would have if we made some open-ended commitment.
later
Tom
I’m playing in an RPG! It’s been a while. For this outing, we’re using Big Eyes, Small Mouth (BESM) which is a universal game system with a focus on anime-like genres. This particular game is set in a sky-island, steampunky setting. Last Exile and Nausicaa are the big influences here. So I’m keeping a journal.
After that incident with the manifests a few weeks ago, I realized that someone had better start doing a better job of keeping track of the various ship’s logs we have on board the Patchwork Pelican. In particular, someone should keep an accurate log so that our slightly-less-accurate logs aren’t so obviously less-accurate when being perused by authorities with an eye for detail. As I’m the person responsible for the paperwork around here, that someone should really be me.
So let’s start with me. I am Beverly Whiteside, former civil servant for the kingdom of Hutom-Lis and now the Purser for the Patchwork Pelican. It may seem a bit of a step down but frankly, it beats living under occupation. In my former career I gained a reputation as man who knew how things worked and who could get things done. It helped that I could always make the proper paperwork appear when required.
This is how I ended up working with Wrench. Not his real name of course, but I’m not going to disclose it even here. For one thing, he hates it when people call him by his real name. More importantly, Wrench is distantly related to the former royal family of Hutom-Lis. He was never in any danger of ascending the throne, but in these dark days any connection to the royal family is not trumpeted about.
As you might guess, Wrench is something of a genius when it comes to all things mechanical. Bit of a prodigy actually. Could’ve gone to the Royal Academy (on actual merit) but decided he wanted to build a skyship. His family pulled some strings and got me and I pulled some strings and made sure he got the materials and equipment he required to assemble the Patchwork Pelican.
We call it the Patchwork Perlican and indeed, it uses a lot of cast-off and recycled bits and pieces but the shabby, nondescript appearance belies a rather sophisticated vessel. The ship is pressurized so we can travel below the lower cloud deck for extended periods of time (although I hope we need only do so temporarily). There’s also a cunning arrangement of scoops and tubes that we can use to restock our water tanks from the clouds or standing bodies of water which means we can travel longer or more circuitous routes as required. All this and it’s loaded with labor saving devices that allow Wrench to keep the ship running without any additional help -- except for his pet Rocky who’s rather more intelligent than most members of the aristocracy I’ve met.
So we can keep the ship running but neither of us can really fly the thing. When Wrench had completed the ship, he asked me if I could find him a pilot. I have contacts with people from all walks of life and I knew some people who said they had a pilot for us. Her name was Sanna and we sat down for an interview over a few beers at a tavern where the beer is terrible but people mind their own business. We’d barely begun our interview when news of the Shizon Empire’s invasion broke. We hired her on the spot.
Much to our relief, Sanna is an excellent pilot. She’s also clearly had some sort of military training because she has a number of weapons about her person. This is rather troubling as neither Wrench or myself are fighters. Oh, I have my sword cane and Wrench has his...wrench, but it’s mostly for show. We were a bit worried that she might jump us and take the ship. Then we discovered how much black weed she smokes in a week and now we’re not worried she’ll get angry and kill us with her guns, we’re worried she’ll be stoned out of her gourd and kill us all when she crashes the ship. After a few months, we’re still among the living and we assume that either she’s a phenomenal pilot who just goes down to excellent when high or she’s a terrible pilot who gets excellent when high. Either way, we let her do what she wants and she’s happy to fly us wherever we want to go.
For the past couple of months, that’s mostly meant smuggling people out of Hutom-Lis. The new government is not disposed kindly towards its new acquisition and folks are willing to pay a great deal for expedited egress. But now most of the high-rollers have fled and it’s getting too risky to go back looking for smaller and smaller scores. So we’re branching out and trying to find more work a bit further away from Shizon.
Which is what brought us to Wailis. We made landfall and stopped in at the airport’s local bar hoping to make contact with people looking for discreet services at premium prices. Sanna was a bit quicker off the mark than I was and was already talking with a guy about getting her stash topped off. This was a guy named Nick and before he took off to get Sanna her stuff, I did mention we were open for business. Nick told us he’d be back in a few hours so the crew settled in for some drinking and I started up a conversation with an attractive young woman…
...who turned out to be Nick’s sister? girlfriend? He wasn’t happy to see the two of us together when he returned. I managed to smooth things over (a skill born of great and unlooked-for experience) and we got down to brass tacks. Or we would have if the earthquake hadn’t struck at that moment.
Obviously, the safest place to be in an earthquake is in the sky so we rushed out to our ship and got her airborne. The quake was of a particularly violent nature and buildings started to crumble. One poor fool was trapped on a watch tower and Sanna, in an amazing display of her talents smoothly backed the Pelican up to the platform and the hapless worker stepped right on board.
At last the tremors subsided. We dropped off our passenger and then headed away from the airport into the city where we could see several fires and widespread damage. Flying slowly over the city we spotted a woman trapped under a piece of rubble in a burning building. Our first thought was to reverse the flow on our water scoops and spray water on the burning buildings. One very soggy engineer later, we learned that wasn’t going to work. Someone would have to go down. The problem with a skeleton crew is that the person who has to do everything that isn’t flying or engines is me. So I got on our winch and went down.
It was easy enough to free the trapped woman although her leg was broken. I spotted another unconscious man off to one side. We didn’t have any harnesses so I sent the hook back up for Wrench to hook up the cargo pallet. The woman informed me that there might be other victims in the building. The fire was really chewing up the building but it would take a couple minutes for Wrench to right things up. So I made a quick sweep of the building.
I heard some shouting and pounding behind a door blocked with debris. Together we were able to shift it and three more people came out. Things were getting desperate so I led them back to the top floor where the pallet had just been lowered. We put the two injured people, plus a child from my party on the pallet and sent it up. While it was gone, one of the other survivors dashed back into the flames to retrieve something. He came back just as the empty pallet returned.
Our winch isn’t the most heavy-duty of items and the pallet isn’t the sturdiest. With the three of us on the thing it was dangerously overloaded. I implored the man to drop his bundle but he seemed bound and determined to keep it. Luckily, everything held and we got everyone on board.
We moved the ship around the town and found a central park area where emergency stations were being set up. We off-loaded our wounded when a man came up pleading with us to help him secure the fuel depot. I wasn’t exactly sure what we could do to help, but he seemed desperate and vaguely official, so we got back into the air.
He lead us to an industrial area where flames were slowly encroaching on a building loaded with diesel fuel. Protecting the building or removing the fuel was the plan. The man believed there was a tractor there and once we got into the building we could easily haul the stuff out of danger. The building was locked up tight, but Wrench sent Rocky in through a skylight and the little bugger managed to unlock the door from his side. I’m certain there will be an extra treat or two for him tonight.
Inside, the building was littered with tools, fuel, machinery and the like. The fuel was all stored in drums next to the wall, a wall shared with another building already on fire. I looked around and discovered the tractor. I’ll be the first to admit it, I’m not really one for machines. But I hopped in the seat and managed to get it started. The man who lead us here appeared to be better suited for driving the thing and I went to help Wrench get the fuel loaded on to the large flatbed trailer.
We’d just gotten the last barrel on when Sanna came running in to let us know we were out of time. We ran back to the ship and the man drove off with the fuel. In hindsight, I know we probably did prevent a dangerous explosion but I wonder if we also inadvertently assisted a looter.
At any rate, we flew back to the park and checked in with the local authorities. As one of the largest ships in the air, we had a lot to offer but the most pressing need was airlifting the wounded out to the capital for medical treatment. This took a couple of hours and by the time we got back, things seem to have settled down and we were waved off to the airport to touch down again.
So it’s been a busy day. I don’t know if that thing with Nick will ever start up again, but I’m hoping we impressed the locals with our efficiency and quick action. Legitimate business doesn’t tend to pay as well, but it’s quiet and that’s always a plus.
A couple of quotes from the game:
Beverly (to Wrench who’s just failed to turn us in to a flying pump truck): Why are you wet?
Wrench: Nevermind.
Beverly (to the guy who took us to the fuel depot): Can you drive this thing?
Man: Yeah.
Beverly: Then get up here!
At several points during the game, you had this:
EXTERIOR SHOT: Panic, chaos, fire, screaming, running around trying to save the day.
SMASH CUT TO
INTERIOR SHOT -- PELICAN COCKPIT: Sanna, in a haze of smoke, slowly nodding to Bob Marley’s “Everything’s Going to Be Alright (Three Little Birds)”.
SMASH CUT TO
EXTERIOR SHOT: Panic, chaos, fire, screaming, running around trying to save the day.
So we’re off to a good start. Our plan is to do a short 3-4 session game and then either quit, keep going or do something else. I’m hoping that by committing to a short game arc, we wind up actually playing more than we would have if we made some open-ended commitment.
later
Tom
