After the gunfight is over, Ellis finds a quiet place to interrogate the East German prisoners.
He learns that the band was all East German deserters. All were former conscripts; several had done prison time. They’d been operating in the area around Warsaw (north of Ponikla) until about a month ago, but a new warlord up there has been going join-or-die on local communities and bandits alike. They didn’t want to be part of something that organized again (let alone a minor part of it), so they headed south.
They did not seem to have a long-term plan. In fact, Ellis observes something that looks almost like a conditioned aversion response to questions about the future or detailed history. They literally seem incapable of recalling specific details of the war or the pre-war times, and similarly incapable of planning more than two steps or two weeks ahead. This is consistent across all four of them, even though he’s kept them separated and questioned them individually.
They admit to having shaken down the refugees but not taking anything from them – simply because they had nothing the Ossis considered worth stealing. They do not seem penitent, openly see the native Polish population as an exploitable resource, and will likely attempt to escape if they see an opening. Ellis assesses them as semi-feral.
After he shares his findings with Leks, Leks quietly agrees to handle disposal. The men are too dangerous to release and there aren’t resources for holding them indefinitely.
Magda enlists the help of Ewalina and Maciej the Brewer [both player-contributed Ponikla NPCs; Ewalina is a former high school chemistry teacher, Maciej is the village’s lead mead-maker] to bash together a small still from the community’s supply of spare parts. A few days’ work yields a working still. They start the first batch of methanol brewing.
Zenobia and Minka go to work on the OT-64, which was in lousy mechanical shape when the team acquired it. They manage to patch up the damage Leks did to its hydraulics and transmission. The breached armor is another matter – they’ll need welding gear to provide more than a temporary fix or to restore the lost points of armor. Without that, the vehicle is only amphibious for a matter of seconds.
The OT-64 is now at Reliability 4/5. They seem to have forgotten about the UAZ-469, which is still sitting at Reliability 2/5.