A Fistful of Crecibles/Session 5

Having secured the employment of Shiqun, Aristom hatches a plan: He will use his newfound allies to betray Jimmy McKeough and capture him. To do this, he asks Tucker's help in securing a mine site to lure him to. Happy, Tucker directs him to the Salazar Quicksilver mine, one of the most terrible places on Telrion to be sent to as a Kobold. The Salazar deposit is made of very weak rock, making mining quick, but the ore is so low in quicksilver by volume that the McKeough's force the kobold slave miners to burn the rocks and put them through a complex condenser which extracts the quicksilver from the vapor in the air.

Shiqun does her part and makes sure that Jimmy is nearby. Tucker offers a few of his better rabble rousers to go along and incite a general rebellion, including his new Lieutenant, Jerry. When Isra suggests that she could pose as a seller of Kobolds with Tucker's boys as the product, they initially refuse in anger. Things get tense as Isra begins to threaten the kobolds, but Pelvis, sensing a need, played an incredible rendition of *The Marseille* (A famed song among revolutionaries everywhere) which inspired the kobolds to go through anything for their cause.

They enter the camp together and are led to the mine's hotel/office, where Isra is met with a mine manager and his halfling scribe. She kills both and the guard outside, quietly. She then proceeds to murder everyone downstairs preparing a reception for Jimmy, including a DJ, whose last moment is a massive record scratch as Isra claws him apart. Satisfied, Isra reshackles the kobolds and they move on to assault the guardhouse, where Isra slashes the door guard while the kobolds immolate everyone inside with dynamite.

Taking this as the signal, Pelvis and Ivory Hands move out of their cover, Ivory hands blasting apart a machinegun nest before showing Pelvis (a halfling) that there is an unused mining mech laying in a shed they passed. Pelvis pilots the mech, takes a box full of dynamite and chucks it into the main barracks of both the kobolds and their overseers. Pelvis, unfamiliar with the mech, swirls around out of control, accidentally making a motion much like that of a shotput thrower and tossing the dynamite into the barracks, where Ivory hands shoots it to explode. It blows a bit of the roof off, and Ivory hands enters, shooting a guard handing out guns to his fellows, causing the guns to fall through the hole in the floor to the waiting kobolds. Having accomplished the arming, he proceeded out.

Isra, meanwhile, took the perhaps unwise decision to wallrun up the side of the guardpost and try to slice up the occupants of the gun nests on the roof. She managed to get rid of one gun crew, but slipped and fell over the machinegun and found herself caught in a spray of fire from the other one. Hit very badly, she tumbled over the side with one of the corpses and let Sallah snipe the remaining crew. Seeing this happen, Aristom moved to intimidate the other guards, which he did spectacularly, causing them to abandon their post and blow it up as they left. By this point, Jerry had organized the other Kobolds, and commandeered the mining rig, which Pelvis had just barely gotten to swing to a halt. Arming as many kobolds as he could and sending them around to incite a riot in the mines, he proceeded to drill though the thick doors defending the mine itself.

Isra, meanwhile, one arm blown off by the machinegun, had been feasting on the flesh and blood of her many victims, which allowed her to regenerate her arm. Ivory Hands investigated the refinery part of the mine, freeing the kobolds and rigging its boilers to explode with a pile of dynamite. The quicksilver vapor is so toxic that the kobolds can barely stagger out. The initial fight over, Ivory hands takes the time to reconcile the now incredibly bloody and terrifying Isra with Pelvis. After a rocky start, the recalcitrant Isra agrees to work with Pelvis and Pelvis agrees (after being offered part of Isra's share) to work with her.

Around 45 minutes later, Jerry and his Kobolds break the mine doors and rush in, storming the mines and liberating many of their brethren. 15 minutes after that, Jimmy arrives. He is accompanied by far more than Shiqun and her guards; Two trucks, an armored car, and an armored personnel carrier, each packed to the brim with McKeough soldiers. Aristom decides to take the APC first. Isra used her stealth powers to hide, but an excellent spot roll by the driver allowed him to make an attack. He missed, but Isra also failed to latch onto the vehicle, and as she was left in the dust. An armored mech hopped out the back and prepared to do battle with her.

Meanwhile Aristom attempted one of the trickiest shots thus far, going to shoot out the axles of the APC. At first he missed, reminding him of his current limitations, but soon after he was gratified by his success, blasting the front axle apart with a little help from Pelvis (who killed the driver) and his battle guitar. The APC went careening into the processing plant, which exploded killing or injuring all inside the vehicle.

Looking back over at the other end of the battle, however, things were not so good. The Kobolds had set up several stolen machineguns, but all but one of them had been knocked out of commission. Sallah was engaged in a vicious sniper duel with the head hunter of the McKeough's, a man named Peter van Kreuger, a famed big game hunter. When Pelvis looked over to see how his fight was going, he saw him knocked unconscious by one of Peter's shots. Desperate to save Sallah from soldiers approaching his position, Pelvis first tried to bury them by causing a lanslide by shooting rocks. When this failed, he resorted to the most annoying song he knew. Turning the distortion on his amps up to 11, he played the *Badgers Badgers Badgers* song at full volume, getting the attention of Sallah's would be pursuers.

Meanwhile, Isra was locked in combat with a mech. Slashing at it, she once again tripped over herself and found herself face to face with a machinegun and a drill, which knocked one of her arms off once again. Furious, she slashed the pilot to pieces
but she failed to notice the dead-man switch. The mech exploded, knocking her unconscious and blowing the other arm off. Bleeding incredibly fast with no arms left, Isra looked sure to die. But Aristom, quick thinking as always, rode over to her and started feeding her blood packs from his cooler as she lay there. Realizing that he was no good at healing, he propped her up against the cooler, slashed open all the blood packets, and, using her own arm (tenderly skewered through her) to keep her from slipping in, placed her so that she naturally drank from the blood-filled cooler. Isra faded in and out of consciousness, drinking and enjoying it when she could; it took every drop to stabilize her.

Meanwhile, Aristom went over to Jimmy's car and taunted him. Buff, muscly, and extremely battle high, Jimmy leapt out of his car and tackled Ivory Hands' horse to the ground. But before he could get to Ivory Hands, he shot Jimmy in the leg. Jimmy made one last attempt to throw himself onto Ivory Hands, to no avail. He flopped down and Shiqun's ladies quickly pinned him with their lances, serving him up to Ivory hands using their spears like chopsticks. Pelvis finished off the last of the McKeough guards, but a parting shot from Peter nearly killed him as he finished his solo
Too exhausted to pursue, Peter's motor was all they heard as he drove into the distance.

Jimmy's chauffer meanwhile informed Ivory hands that he was, in fact, a reporter for the *Daily Telranian* and interviewed Ivory hands about the fight at the mine.
He had apparently gone deep for an expose on the McKeough's but is happy to have stumbled into the scoop of the decade instead. Flushed with success, Ivory Hands and company moved Jimmy to a secure location and began interrogating him while Jerry and the Kobolds decided what was to be done with the mine.