Crank Botwhisperer and Noriko Tan-Shai

It turns out that convincing a door to open is not the same thing as convincing it to be discrete about it. Everyone in the facility knew Dr. Tan-Shai had escaped, and it wouldn’t be difficult to learn that Crank Botwhisperer was also free. They needed to get out of there, and they needed some sort of weapon to do that. Neither has the scrounging skill (thanks 5-point Fudge), so they roll against a default of Poor for Terrible and Fair results. Crank Botwhisperer finds a single blaster pistol lying around (because why not?) but no armor and no key cards. He keeps the blaster since Dr. Tan-Shai has no combat training.

Crank Botwhisperer now has ODF +4 with a Fair skill level with his blaster pistol.

To escape, they need to sneak around the area and ambush a guard with a key. Dr. Tan-Shai has a default of Poor stealth, so she uses three actions to follow from a distance hoping to avoid getting discovered and rolls an Fair result.

Crank attempts to sneak around, spot a lone sentry and blast it. He rolls Good stealth, Great perception and Great blaster pistol. He manages to locate a lone sentry undetected. Since the sentry is unaware, Crank’s shot is uncontested, so he gets a relative degree of +3 for a total ODF of +7. The sentry has medium-heavy armor for a DDF of +3. Were this sentry not a single mook, this would result in a Hurt wound. Since this is a mook in story element combat, we can say the bot goes down. Crank takes the key card and gives Noriko the sentry’s carbine.

Noriko Tan-Shai now has ODF +5 with a Poor skill level with her blaster carbine.

While they took out a single sentry and managed to obtain a key card, their position is now evident. They are now in a chase. They can attempt stealth to avoid getting spotted. If they get spotted, they can attempt to blast their attackers but will need to defend against any attacks.

Their Crank and Noriko roll Fair and Abysmal stealth respectively. Crank attacks a sentry with a roll of Fair while Dr. Tan-Shai rolls Poor. Crank grazes the sentry for mere scratch while Noriko misses entirely. Crank rolls a Good defense and evades the sentrys’ attacks while Dr. Tan-Shai rolls a Poor defense and is hit by a stunner for an incapacitated result.

Crank attempts to retreat and climbs into an air duct with a Legendary result and manages to make his escape.

Retrospective

We learned that non-combatant characters don’t make particularly effective combatants even against mooks. This is unexpected. An ambush from a basically non-combatant was effective, but that is also not particularly surprising. Crank Botwhisperer got lucky and managed to avoid getting hit. Even a graze could be serious due to his small scale.