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DATA LOSS // LOG 03: The Long Walk to the Power Grid
The dark depths of the Mines sound like a good place to get trapped like a rat, so I’m betting my fresh clone skin on the surface. I turn my back on the yawning mine shaft and start down the cracked dirt road toward the Plant. In the distance, the massive, fenced-in power refinery looms against the bruised sky, humming with enough high-voltage current to make the hairs on my arms stand up.
But like the graffiti warned, you don't just take a stroll in the Outskirts without paying the toll.
TRANSITION: THE DIRT ROAD (HAZARD)
I’m about halfway to the refinery gates when the ground beneath my bare feet begins to violently shudder. It starts as a low, rhythmic thumping that rattles my teeth, rapidly building into a teeth-grinding roar. The earth fractures fifty meters ahead of me, bursting upward in a geyser of rocky debris and rusted rebar.
Out of the dirt rises the Tunneler Mech. It’s an absolute unit of industrial malice—a segmented, armored centipede-like machine bristling with hydraulic diamond-tipped drills where a face should be. Sensor nodes flash a hostile, piercing crimson light right at me. It tracks vibrations, and my desperate sprint down the road just rang its dinner bell.
There's no cover out here, and I can't outrun it. But I've still got that heavy, broken half of an iron pipe I looted from the worker. I'm going to use my TK implant to hurl the heavy pipe chunk as hard as I can into the wreckage of an old car chassis way off to the left. If I can make enough noise over there, I can trick its acoustic sensors into striking the car while I dive into a nearby drainage ditch to hide.
Janse is trying to execute a clever, distracting stunt using telekinesis to avoid a fatal encounter. This relies on the Will skillset (Janse has a d8). Because I'm executing a risky, desperate maneuver to divert a massive threat, the GM doesn't apply a hindrance, but a failure here means getting crushed by a multi-ton drill.
Rolling 1d8... Result: 3 (Setback)
The GM Renders the Verdict: A 3 is a Setback. The distraction works, but the escape is far from clean.
I focus my mind, locking onto the jagged metal pipe and launching it across the road. It slams into the rusted car chassis with a resounding, metallic *CLANG*. The Tunneler Mech instantly reacts, its massive drill head snapping toward the sound. It lunges with terrifying speed, completely obliterating the car in a shower of sparks and shredded steel.
But the shockwave from the mech's violent strike tears up the road, sending a spray of sharp concrete shrapnel flying right toward my ditch. I dive for cover, but a jagged piece of debris slices deep across my thigh. I manage to crawl out of its sensory line of sight into the shadow of the refinery's perimeter fence, but I am bleeding, injured, and my movement will be hindered until I can find a way to patch this up.
ROOM 2: THE PLANT PERIMETER (INFO & ENCOUNTER)
Dragging my bleeding leg, I slip through a tear in the massive chain-link fence and collapse against an auxiliary terminal. A cracked holo-display blinks with a looping text log fragment:
RE-ROUTE TERMINAL // LOG ERROR:
"...couldn't shut the power off even if we wanted to. DUMAH won't let us. The thralls are burning through the capacitors..."
Before I can even process who or what "DUMAH" is, a sharp mechanical bark cuts through the electronic hum of the station. I look up. Patrolling the courtyard is a dog-sized Utility Bot. It looks like a mechanical hound built out of industrial scrap, and instead of jaws, its head is a roaring, blue-hot plasma welding torch.
It smells the fresh blood on my clone suit. It sparks, revs its torch to a blinding white heat, and starts charging down the catwalk straight at me.
I'm backed against a high-voltage transformer, my leg is mangled (hindered), and I don't have a weapon. But I do have that canister of corporate Repair Gel in my pocket. If I can time it right, I can try to spray the quick-hardening gel directly into the bot's plasma torch nozzle as it lunges. If it hardens instantly, the back-pressure might explode the torch or short-circuit its head.
If you're interested in playing 2400 Data Loss, you can find it here.
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