The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, episode 1

• 10th August 2011

Pren­tiss cuts a rug; April takes the cereb­ral approach.

Played

16th June 2011.

Dramatis Personae

* Play­er absent.

Plot

Lon­don, April 1889.

It had been a quiet winter for the Min­istry and the mem­bers of the team were largely free to pur­sue their own agen­das: Pren­tiss had returned to pro­fes­sion­al racing, Lady Ant­o­nia had been tak­ing advant­age of the vari­ous hunt­ing oppor­tun­it­ies and Miss Sharpe had been attend­ing a vari­ety of sci­entif­ic demon­stra­tions and talks. Gath­er­ing for their reg­u­lar team meet­ing in mid-spring, they were con­cerned to notice their num­ber sub­stan­tially reduced. They knew that Dr Pleas­ant had been called away on Min­istry busi­ness and Marsh had not been seen since the events at St Paul’s, replaced by Agent Andrews, but the unan­nounced absence of Cap­tain Cur­ruth­ers was a surprise.

They decided to invest­ig­ate and made their way to the Captain’s lodgings in Isling­ton. Per­suad­ing the door­man to let them in, on the pre­text of being con­cerned friends, they approached his door, find­ing it closed and locked. They knocked and there was no reply. As they were try­ing to fig­ure out wheth­er they should break in – and how – there was a cry of “Oi! Whatchu thing yer doin’?” and they found them­selves con­fron­ted by a scruffy young man. Once they had con­vinced him they were friends of Cur­ruth­ers, he allowed that he was a friend of the miss­ing man, name of “Pinky”. He took over lock­pick­ing duties from Miss Sharpe and got them into the lodgings in seconds.

The flat was a mess: fur­niture was over­turned, shelves and draw­ers were emp­tied and vari­ous empty hooks on the walls seemed cor­res­pond to pic­tures, exot­ic weapons and oth­er dec­or­a­tions on the floor.

As they invest­ig­ated fur­ther, they real­ised that this was not the res­ult of a burg­lary, but of a hur­ried pack­ing. Pren­tiss found a copy of Brad­shaw’s rail­way timetables and noticed a num­ber of pages miss­ing; Miss Sharpe was able to deduce that they all related to routes from cent­ral Lon­don to the south, pos­sibly to Croy­don Aerodrome.

As they were pon­der­ing this, the door slammed open and two brawny thugs burst in, appar­ently intent on may­hem. The team reacted quickly and instinct­ively: as Andrews tripped the first attack­er, Miss Sharpe drew, activ­ated and fired her Orgon­at­or, badly burn­ing the oth­er at point-blank range. Pren­tiss grabbed a chakram from the floor and, try­ing to use the unfa­mil­i­ar weapon as a hand blade, slashed the floored man across his chest and throat, killing him instantly.

With the battle over in seconds, Miss Sharpe pro­duced her latest inven­tion, Sharpe’s Neur­o­fuzzy­con­trol­ler, designed to deduce the thoughts of a cap­tive tar­get, and tried to use it to inter­rog­ate the burned thug, but was unable to get more than impres­sions of pain.

Notes

As the first of a new arc, the first half of this ses­sion was taken up with cre­at­ing the new char­ac­ter (an orphaned gang­ster protégé of Cur­ruth­ers named Pinky) and the expendit­ure of exper­i­ence for the exist­ing char­ac­ters. As we were miss­ing two reg­u­lar play­ers, Andrews (who fea­tured as an ally in some of the earli­er epis­odes) was rein­tro­duced as a char­ac­ter for drop-in players.

The ini­tial plans for the even­ing were based around Cur­ruth­ers receiv­ing dire news from Myso­re in India, then gath­er­ing the team to help him sort it out. Unfor­tu­nately, the play­er was then absent, for­cing a major rethink. The “burgled” apart­ment was his idea, although it was inten­ded that the play­ers would be on an air­ship fol­low­ing him by the end of the even­ing: tim­ing did not allow this to transpire.

The battle was fol­low­ing Ray­mond Chandler’s clas­sic advice, but I think every­one was amazed by how quickly it ended. This is one of the things I love about Sav­age Worlds, although it can be annoy­ing if the battle is your main event for the evening…