Once Snik relays his professional opinion, you decide to head back to the front entrance and attempt the original plan. As a group, you stand in line until you reach the two vesk bouncers. For a moment, they look at your group very skeptically - eyes particularly lingering on the sarcesian and the android. But when you present your tickets, they both shrug and wave you in.
----
You make your way down a dimly lit but slickly furnished hall, following the sounds of the music. You turn a corner a see a dimly lit riot of neon color, gyrating bodies, and vaporous fumes of myriad kinds. ♪♫ The music pounds, rattling your skull as you enter the club. ♪♫
The main dance floor of Kosmos extends almost eighty feet from north to south. Two raised bars, tended by clearly augmented verthani, rest within raised platforms in the northwest and northeast corners, while two large vesk guard a door in the middle of the northern wall. Two identical androids with glowing blue collars tend a central bar, which serves as the main drinking station. Throngs of verthani and a handful of other species fill the dance floor, and the 10-foot ceilings barely rise two feet above most of their heads. A large stage covers the southern section of the room, flanked by ramps leading up from the east and west sides. From the stage, a southern door is guarded by an intimidating vesk who stands under a sign marked “Dressing Room.” A double door marked “Fire Exit” lies in the middle of the eastern wall, and the club entrance is the sole door along the western side.
|
Once the team makes it past the bouncers, Hermena gives her fellow Starfinders a sidelong glance as if to say, huh, I guess that worked...
Once inside, she scans the club's interior for potential enemies while keeping up the facade of a personal bodyguard. She nods towards the back and bends over to "whisper" as best she can among the din. "The Dressing Room has the fewest guards. Basalt, you think you could create a distraction that may let someone slip by?"
Troy looks around the hazy dancefloor, but sees little more than gyrating bodies. He notices a couple of verthani go up to the central bar, get drinks while making rude gestures at the pair of passive androids, then cackle and head back onto the dancefloor with drinks in hand. He doesn't see anything suspicious.
|
|
"I will try the door left of the stage. I might be able to... sneak inside."
Troy casually walks to the door left of the stage. He looks at Basalt who is now speaking to the two androids. He waits for Basalt to create a distraction.
Finally, at the most opportune moment he then tries to open the door without being seen.
Basalt is greeted by the two androids at the bar giving sudden and identical smiles. "Welcome to Kosmos!!!~" They have to basically yell out their greeting to be heard over the pounding music, but even then you can tell their voices are blindingly bubbly. The one on the left starts with "I am Kosmos-13!-" and the one on the right smoothly continues with "-And I'm Kosmos-14!", after which they resume speaking simultaneously with "Can we get you something with a kick to start you off?"
At Basalt's question, their eyes go wide. Kosmos-13 leans forward to speak more privately to Basalt. "Hey, not so loud, mister. You want to get us scrapped?" She taps her collar with a long fingernail. "The collars are there to get us to behave. If the big boss doesn't like something we're doing, he can freeze us in place remotely from a computer in his office. And let's not talk about the pain." Kosmos-14 continues with "And talking with people about stuff that isn't business counts as something the boss doesn't like." From their tone, both clearly detest this arrangement, but are helpless to do anything about it.
----
Between the music and the flashing lights, there's plenty of distractions to be had even without Basalt's help. Troy easily slips past the vesk guard and into the backstage area. This large room is filled with racks of clothing, musical instruments, and some sofas for the musical acts to relax on before they go out on stage. There's a door to map-north that appears to lead into a hallway connecting the backstage area to the offices.
Meanwhile, Burn carefully eyes the patrons and vesk guards. He sees that each of the guards has a laser pistol and a survival knife at their hips and no heavier armament. Some of the guests are unarmed, but most have basic small arms on their person. No one seems to be carrying heavier gear. Probably because it'd make it hard to dance. Burn also notices the vesk watching Hermena carefully. She really stands out among the clientele here.
As far as Snik knows, the collars are controlled remotely and accept encrypted signals only. Since they don't have general purpose wireless links, they aren't easy to hack remotely. It would be difficult but possible to hack them locally, and also possible to hack their remote control system.
Hermena's menacing appearance keeps eyes off Snik as the ysoki tries to slip out the doors to map north towards the offices. While he manages to escape the attention of the vesk guard, he notices at the last moment that the set of double doors is marked 'fire escape' and has an alarm rigged to it.
----
Meanwhile, Troy continues his search of the off-limits sections of Kosmos. He pokes his head into two meeting rooms with nothing of particular interest inside, then continues towards what the floor plan labeled as a storage area.
The storage room is filled with large shipping crates and some vesk sized steel blocks with transparent fronts - storage pods. Troy peeks inside and sees that each one contains a single unconscious android, each one with a slowly blinking blue collar around their neck. They appear to be in some kind of statis. The crates on the other hand are filled with plastic wrapped packages labeled with various strange and exotic names like 'Lifebloom', 'Maid's Mind Milk', 'Steven's Starshot', and so on.
----
Back on the dancefloor, Kosmos-13 hesitates to answer Basalt before furtively pointing towards the fire exit that Snik approached. She drops her voice to the lowest level yet "He's got an office that way, with a terminal that controls the collars. One ex-employee made it in there a few weeks ago."
|
|
Troy sees the unconscious androids and hesitates. Then he reminds himself of the importance of the mission and presses on.
Unaware of what his teammates are doing he carefully moves down the hallway.
Troy sees a door to the right and puts his ear to the door. Before he opens the door Troy wants to make sure that the room is empty.
Listening in to the door, Troy's sensitive hearing picks up the hum of computer equipment, but no sounds of anyone inside. He lightly jiggles the handle and realizes that the door is held shut by a fairly simple physical (non-electronic) lock.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"I know. Lerecti made it out. Stay ready, we're going to try to do the same for you." Basalt winks before blurting out 'drunkenly', "Now give me another drink you rusted bucket of metal!" He goes up to a vesk bouncer and shakes his finger at him. "You call this a club? Back in the dwarf-hold we had clubs. They were made of wood and metal and they bashed heads in good. And drinks! You call this watered down multi-colored cup of crap a drink? A drink should have a good head of foam, be a little bitter, and burn on the way down. It should add hair to your beard."
|
Burnham wheels after Basalt and follows in his wake. "Mr. Stonepeak! Mr. Stonepeak! " Catching up, he shrugs at the vesk and shakes his head. "When he drinks I have to guard him from himself."
He uses Basalt's body to hide the fact that he slides his sword up and down a little in its scabbard, just to be sure it will draw freely.
The two androids look uneasy but hopeful at Basalt's confident assertion. They nod and deftly mix him a drink. At being berated, both easily and sadly quite naturally adopt a meek posture and apologize for their actions.
Basalt's boisterous and cantankerous attitude draws the attention of plenty of club goers and most of the vesk guards. Burnham's bodyguarding helps to lower their tension and the risk that you might get thrown out of the club a bit too early.
Snik easily disables the fire alarm by slicing through a key wire in an exposed strip running along the edge of the door. With the vesk bouncers all occupied by the sight at the center of the dance floor, he silently slips past and into the back hallway with Troy.
----
Troy wiggles a piece of wire from his engineering kit in the lock and it clicks open. As Snik arrives, he swings the door open to reveal an office that contains several small workstations, a desk, and a well-stocked bar. A larger main terminal sits on a desk at the northern end of the room. Two doors lie on the western wall to connect the room to the hallway (one of which you came through). Paintings of various creatures, augmented in grotesque ways, line the walls. A door on the eastern wall is blocked off by an open and empty blocky storage pod. Two doors frame the northern wall, flanking the desk on either side.
Snik wakes the computer terminal from safe mode only to see an elegant looking login screen. His first attempt to hack in through the security is met with an angry buzz from the terminal and a message >UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED. DISCOURAGEMENT SUBROUTINES ACTIVATING...<
After the message, nothing obvious happens, but you have a feeling that further tampering risks some kind of countermeasure.
Troy searches the room for the tablet fragment, but finds no sign of it, nor any containers that could house it. Perhaps its not in Kosmos after all? Or perhaps Bogdin has a more secure location in here to keep it safe?
Troy looks over the storage pod blocking the way to the external door. The pod is extremely heavy, but there's nothing locking it in place on this side. There doesn't seem to be any way to slip past it either.
Snik taps away at the console, earning himself another angry buzz before finally managing to bypass the login page and its associated protections. The terminal's screen changes to display a menu of options. Among them, the following five options seem the most potentially useful:
The terminal also details in vague terms a dizzying array of shady business dealings conducted by Karelite Bogdin. Fencing smuggled and stolen goods and the delivery of "docile laborers" chief among them. The information here has clearly been kept threadbare in order to not give away any important contacts.
|
"Troy, lookout for a safe. Maybe Listen for the click?"
Snik then chooses the option for releasing the safe. When he is done with that he attempts to connect the interface to his Datapad.
Through his comms "Okay everyone I have access to the dance floor and collars. I can probably cause some real chaos. I can control the fog machines and strobe lights. We are still looking for the tablet though."
Indeed, there seems to be no response to Snik's toggle of the "Release Locks on Safe" function.
Troy opens the two remaining doors from Bogdin's office. One opens to a hallway leading to a small conference room that smells of spilled alcohol. A quick look around the conference room reveals no obvious hiding places for a safe. The other door from Bogdin's office leads to a large storage room with shelves on all four walls. Troy scans the shelves, which are mostly decked out with creepy knickknacks and unusual looking art, until he spots a sturdy steel crate whose side has swung open. It seems this is actually the safe in question, disguised to mislead potential looters. However, with Snik's hacking, the safe's door is already open, revealing a pile of papers and a small stone tablet!
Now all that's left is to get out.
Burnham notices that all of the vesk bouncers/guards have a clawed finger extended, touching a contact on their earpieces. They look rather uncomfortable, possibly because of whatever they're hearing on their miniature comms.
Troy pokes his head through the fire door and into the dance floor in time to spot the vesk bouncers looking rather alarmed. As you all hurriedly put your plans into motion, you notice that the vesk are scanning through the crowd for... something. They have hands on their weapons, so it looks like they're expecting trouble.
Then just as Basalt calls for REVOLUTION!, Snik activates the fog and deactivates the collars in quick succession! A mass of fog billows out from concealed generators within the stage, sending the vesk straight into action! They spring towards the most conspicuous members of your group first - Basalt and Hermena. But as they do, the crowd of club-goers seem to realize something is terribly wrong, and they erupt into a chaotic mess of shoving, screaming and outright panic.
You take to the fog on the stage to avoid the vesk amid the confusion, and see half the bouncers getting swept along by a stampede toward the sole exit from the club.
As you take in the scene and look for an opportunity to dash for safety yourselves, you see a heavily augmented verthani approach from the western entrance. As the two remaining vesk spot him, they rush to his side - pushing club goers aside in the process.
The verthani raises a hand and the pounding music in the club abruptly stops. He fixes beady black eyes on the fog and calls out "You damned thieves, don't pretend you're not in there! You'll regret crossing Karelite Bogdin!!!" He points at the fog, head turning towards the vesk at his side. "Kill them!"
---
-
|||| INIT ||||
Troy
Burnham
Basalt
Hermena
Snik
Bogdin
Vesk Blue
Vesk Green
Bold are up
Troy finds himself overwhelmed by the flashing lights, while Hermena endures the strobing. Bogdin and one of the vesk similarly pull through ok by covering their eyes, but the nearest of the vesk bouncers stands there dazed. Snik dashes forwards and delivers a swing of his tactical baton that bounces off the vesk guard's armor.
|||| INIT ||||
Troy (dazed 2 rds)
Burnham
Basalt
Hermena
Snik
Bogdin
Vesk Blue (dazed 2 rds)
Vesk Green
Bold are up