D&A Session 6 - From The Stone, To The Sky

*"In the heart of the Congo, there are many sleepless nights; a vision of a bygone future returns once more to finish what it started; a grudge is a grudge, no matter how old..."*

## Table Members

* ForteNoir as the MC
* SquashDemon as Jacopo Giuseppe Dux
* Kixandra as Akamai Reyes
* Dimin as Oliver Moorland
* Elgar as Antonio Cervantes
* RedAngelAlnet as CINO Ketaminé

## Session Summary

Not long after recovering Dux and CINO from Sicily, Tony is contacted by an old friend with a timely job offer. The client beseeches Tony to find some capable friends and bring them down to Uganda within a week.

 The rest of the team follows Tony to Kampala, the political and financial capital of Uganda, where they are received by Lichtendal Heinrich, a former mercenary who has made a killing from learning to play the markets. 'Lichty' explains that a refugee crisis in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo is causing disruptions in the local labor force, and he suspects that an ongoing joint occupation of the east Congolese jungles by KoBar, M-CORE, and iLock is somehow to blame. The team is tasked with finding the parties responsible for attacking Congolese villages and putting a stop to it.

 While investigating the refugee camps, CINO and Tony find the population unwilling to talk about their experiences beyond mention of 'things in the jungles', colored in 'darkness and orange'. The pair of them, along with Knight, journey out to a number of abandoned villages to look for clues. Knight encounters an old adversary operating a new AF, and the Majesty sustains heavy damage before Knight agrees to abandon the location at the insistence of his opponent. Meanwhile, CINO discovers a series of sinkholes large enough for AFs to fit into, and joins Tony's investigation after needing the tow winch on the Hoopti to drag the Method Mask out of the dirt.

Tony and CINO journey to yet another burned-out village and discover AF wreckage alongside pieces and fragments of strange machinery that neither of them recognize. Sensing movement nearby, the pair of them surround and disable a quadrupedal drone of unknown manufacture and quickly secure ist remains just before the surrounding jungle swarms with dozens more.

Taking a break from repairing the Majesty, Dux and Knight probe the busted drone for signs of its purpose and origins. Knight discovers and deciphers the scratched-out flag decals on its body, pointing to a join German, British, and Italian design. In attempting to access the drone's WAN, he encounters a vicious anti-hacking defense and contacts OMER for remote assistance. She agrees to break its defenses remotely, but asks that Knight destroy the drone after he's gotten what the team needs from it.

Activity Logs and ReadMe files in the drone's memory age the machine itself at nearly two hundred years, and reveal a set of GPS coordinates that the drone internally refers to as a home location. Knight also discovers that the drone contains a quantum receiver, and hides this detail as he performs a full dump of the drone's operating system and memory. Ollie reads the writing on the wall and makes preparations in town to order a cache of anti-tank mines, cautious about their chances of fighting a swarm of land-dwelling anti-personnel machines.

Early in the morning, as Dux labors to finish fabrication work on the Majesty's replacement limbs, their rented hangar is visited by the pilot who wrecked the Majesty in the first place. 'Eagle', a member of the shadow organization known as the Aviary, also known to the party as 'Adler', delivers a warning to the team to stand down and abandon their orders, stating that he cannot allow Tony and the others to get their hands on their objective. In the ensuing standoff, two more Aviary agents, Cardinal and Swallow, make their entrance to secure Adler, and the team are left wondering what their opponents might really be after in the Congo.

Later that afternoon, Dux flies his UAV over the GPS coordinates provided by the drone's memory, and creates a topographical map of a run-down research base. Meanwhile, CINO and Knight co-develop a legacy ECM solution to scramble the drone's centuries-old communications hardware, and come up with the idea to use the drone's copied memory and OS to simulate its behavior in a controlled AR environment. The team determine that the drones were using underground tunnels in weak riverbed soil to move in secret, and that they utilize hijacked AFs to deal with aerial targets.

Tony takes the team back to Lichty's apartment to explain the situation, and find Lichty in the middle of packing his belongings. Lichty pays all of them in advance, citing the increased scope and scale of what finishing the job would actually entail, and tells the team that they're free to leave the region if they wish. The five reaffirm their intent to see the mission through, share a beer, and prepare to move on the hidden facility after sunset.

After packing the Hoopti with all of their resources, the team encounters a battle KoBar's jungle defense line, but declines to intervene as they rush for the drones' alleged home base. Deploying their AFs on the ground, the ancient facility is quiet; rather than discover a swarm of hostile drones, the team is ambushed by Adler, Swallow, and Cardinal, who make good on their threats.

In the ensuing melee, the five eke out a decisive victory over the Aviary's machines. Adler proposes a mutual arrangement, as the rival teams have similar agendas in the region; one of Adler's group will accompany Tony's team into the depths of the facility and secure the asset they seek, while aiding in the deactivation of the drone army. Kingfisher, another new agent of the Aviary, reveals their AF and lands near a sinkhole to accompany Knight, Ollie, CINO, and Dux into the depths of the base. Knight notices that Kingfisher bears a passing resemblance to OMER, but only in voice and mannerisms.

Adler remote-detonates his AF and hurries to the southwest sector of the base to rescue Cardinal from his ejected cockpit block, and Tony follows to offer aid. After Knight attempts to hack a door open inside the facility's underground tunnels, Tony, Adler, and Cardinal watch in shock as a massive earthquake hits the area and starts to annihilate every building at the site. Tony is forced to abandon the heavily-damaged La Mancha in order to get the Hoopti into the air in time as the ground at the site, and for several miles nearby, rises up and falls away.

A massive flying wing-style air fortress, large enough to be seen from orbit, achieves altitude and turns itself to begin a course for Uganda and the Orbital Elevator situated just north of Kampala. Adler and an injured Cardinal accompany Tony, who keeps the Hoopti in a holding pattern near the colossal aircraft. Inside, Ollie simply blows the security door open with an anti-tank mine, and the group discovers an elevator shaft. The shaft exits into a command deck, where Ollie and CINO accidentally trigger a security alert and are greeted by a voice that comes from everywhere and nowhere.

A pair of small propeller drones greets the group and projects an image of a male figure, who introduces himself as Abathur, one half of the Tyrant Wing's Gemini Circuit AI control system. Abathur explains that he has kept his other, the Tyrant, in check since the facility was abandoned after World War III, and agreed to let it deploy the drones into the Congo when KoBar, M-CORE, and iLock activity at the site gave him hope that he might be able to free himself from Gemini Circuit. Knight and Abathur jointly suppress the Tyrant, but Kingfisher extracts it wholesale from the aircraft's systems and evacuates by tossing herself out of the command deck window. Abathur halts the drones and the Tyrant Wing before being extracted from the system by Knight.

Meanwhile, Adler discusses his contingency plan with Tony, as a joint force of Congolese, Ugandan, and corporate AFs and airships approach and surround the Tyrant Wing. Tony makes peace with their impending capture and asks Adler that, in exchange for surrender, he delivers the Hoopti to a secret location. The rest of the team is met by a thirty-strong international spec ops team as they exit the elevator shaft, and everyone is taken into custody.

Two weeks later, Adler visits the team in jail and puts an offer on the table; work for KoBar for the immediate future to pay off their 'debt' to the company, or be at their mercy. Everyone accepts but Tony. Swallow arrives to accept the others into KoBar custody, and swindles Tony into servitude. The five are reunited in chains in the back of a KoBar aerial transport, and face an uncertain future together...