This session picked up immediately after the previous one, in which the PCs had returned from finding the museum storage site only to learn that Malvina, one of the teenagers “rescued” from the PKP railyard, was missing. At the beginning of the campaign, I’d asked my players to give me three problems the village was facing. One of those was:
Something is taking the children.
Because of the village’s size, the table had tweaked that to recurring abductions from which each kid eventually returned with no memory of what happened while they were gone. This hadn’t appeared on screen since the campaign began, but Malvina and Jacob’s addition to the village gave me a great opportunity to bring it to the surface…
The team splits up [because three of the players who were present last time couldn’t make this session]. Pettimore and Miko set out to canvas the woods to the south. Magda stays in the village to organize a defense and to see if anyone saw or heard anything. Ellis, of course, has already jumped off on his infiltration mission to Tomaszów Mazowiecki. This leaves Minka, Red, Zenobia, and Leks [in play] to check the village’s north side.
Starting from the hostel, which was the last place anyone definitely saw Malvina, Leks begins looking for tracks. After about half an hour of stumbling around in the dark, he finds some of her hair and a few threads from her hoodie snagged on some thornbushes. That leads him to intermittent tracks which curve northwest through the woods, then back to the southwest. Following the tracks takes the team to the crossroads east of Ponikla, where the dirt road splits off down to the river and the flooded ruins of the spa village of Kozłowiec. There, they find more tracks: two sets of men’s dress shoes and the tires of a wheeled vehicle. It looks like a car pulled up (coming from the direction of Kozłowiec), two men got out, Malvina walked up and got in, and the car drove away to the west.
Also of note, the tires appear factory-new. There’s no wear evident.
This is the point at which Zenobia, being a native Pole who spent most of her adulthood in Warsaw, recalls several variations of an urban legend in which child abductions are linked to a black Volga sedan. Do the tire marks look like they could have come from a sedan? Yes. Yes, they do.
The team walks back toward Ponikla along the darkened dirt track, scanning for other evidence. The village’s westernmost inhabited home is that of Kaja and Miroslav, who the PCs met and recruited during their first exploration of the area. The glow of firelight comes through the curtains, and as the PCs approach, Miroslav comes out to meet them. They inquire about anything odd he might have seen or heard the previous night, and he tells them that he and Kaja did hear an engine and see brake lights in the distance. At the time, they assumed it was Zenobia or one of the other PCs doing something with one of the village’s vehicles… but it’s further evidence of hinkiness.
At this point [I was really expecting the PCs to set off in pursuit, but] the consensus is that there’s very little to be gained by attempting to track tire marks in the dark. The team heads off to bed to grab a few hours of sleep before heading out at first light. Red and Minka both have awful dreams in which they’re restrained and paralyzed, but still conscious, as a masked surgical team begins cutting on them…
Early in the morning of July 15, the UAZ-469 rolls out of Ponikla, heading west. Zenobia is driving. Leks has mounted his spare PK on the pintle. Minka and Red are scanning the forest on either side.
No one in Ponikla has much cause to regularly travel west, and none at all in the past week. Thus, it’s easy to track the tire marks from whatever vehicle presumably carried Malvina away. About three kilometers out, it turned south at a crossroads. From there, the dirt track continues roughly south, turning into an old paved road just before passing through one of the ghost towns that dots the map out here. The team is somewhat familiar with this place from local patrols: a few collapsed and burned-out buildings, a couple of intact but thoroughly-looted shops and restaurants, and about a dozen uninhabited homes.
They park the UAZ on the north edge of town and walk in, weapons ready. Leks and Red are ranging about thirty meters ahead of Zenobia and Minka when Red catches a flash of movement in the ruins to his left. It’s just enough to negate the ambush, and the fight is on!
It’s a tougher fight than the team has experienced up to now. The opposition is four men with no necks, cheap suits, and unbreakable morale. Everyone takes some hits. One climbs onto the roof of the restaurant and rushes Zenobia’s sniping position, forcing her to use her rifle like a spear before shooting him point-blank in the face. Red’s M4 jams, so he pulls his axe and closes with his nearest opponent. Minka charges another and takes a shotgun blast to the chest which her armor can’t quite stop. She sledgehammers him to death – and his fall clears the line of fire for his teammate to put a burst into her head. She drops.
[ This was the first time so far that I’ve put a PC down with damage. Thankfully, the critical roll was “only” a concussion, not a permanent injury or an insta-kill. ]
Zenobia rushes to Minka’s aid. Red drops his adversary mook, only to be set upon by two more men who burst out of the adjacent building. These guys wear black suits and fedoras and carry Glock 18 machine pistols, with which they immediately open up, catching Red with a nasty arm wound. Leks dashes in, pulling his shotgun as he does so. Zenobia also converges, with Minka staggering close behind her, and the fight turns into a confused melee.
The black-clad men don’t seem interested in negotiation but the team’s superior numbers eventually tell. One drops; Red and Leks wrestle the other one into submission and tie him up, at which point he… dies.
With a sudden growl, a black Volga bursts out from behind a building on the south side of town! The team unloads into it. The driver attempts to run down Leks, but miraculously misses the Estonian despite his prone position in the middle of the street. Leks spins in place and rakes a burst from his MG3 across the vehicle’s rear tires. The Volga spins out into a pile of rubble. The team approaches cautiously, finding a third black-clad man slumped behind the wheel, bullets from Minka’s AKM stitched across his upper chest. It doesn’t look bad enough to have been fatal, though. Like the tied-up man, he appears to have just… stopped living.
The building where the Volga was parked demands examination. It’s a boarded-up shop. They make their way to the back door. Leks is about to kick it but Zenobia waves her lockpicks in front of his face. The lock yields to her tender ministrations and Red enters. He dodges back as a scalpel cleaves the air in front of his nose!
The two masked men fight with desperate aggression but little skill. The team’s axe, shotgun, sledgehammer, and hatchet quickly put them down.
Searching the building, Red finds Malvina. She’s unconscious, strapped to a table with IVs in both her arms. Both lines feed into a large steel apparatus with no external controls or markings. It looks like it’s circulating her blood through the machine. Red disconnects her and the device immediately begins emitting smoke. He kicks it out the window just as it bursts into magnesium-brilliant combustion.
Looking around the room, Red finds a set of surgical instruments and some unlabeled glass drug vials. He also notes that the head of his axe and Minka’s sledgehammer are both… smoking? On closer examination, the blood of the creepy doctors is boiling off. Some quick tests show that this happens on contact with iron or steel…
The team consolidates their loot and the bodies of the fallen while keeping watch over Malvina as she slowly struggles back to consciousness.
Taking a look at the opposition, the four goons are all of a type: large, burly, neckless. There’s a vague family resemblance among them, possibly all cousins. They’re all dressed in the same cheap suits, but equipped with guns that have… well… screen presence, for lack of a better word: an MP5K, a G3KA4, a Steyr AUG, and a Saiga-12. Each also carries a Walther PPK and a pearl-handled switchblade.
The three men in black suits are all of a type, too – with far more mutual resemblance. They’re completely hairless, nearly identical, and lacking navels. Each has a Glock 18.
The two “doctors” are also eerily-similar, though with different features than the black-clad men. They also lack navels.
The clothes, the weapons, the features… Red’s impression at this point is that these guys are exactly what he would expect if he told a prewar Hollywood director and propmaster to give him some Eastern European organized crime goons and a squad of men in black straight from UFO folklore. The whole situation, in fact, is eerily reminiscent of a fourth-season X-Files arc.
Red improvises some non-steel surgical implements from broken glass and other scrap materials. With Leks’ help, he conducts a couple of field necropsies and collects blood samples from each of the foes. The four goons appear human. The men in black and the “doctors” are… mostly human on gross examination, but their digestive tracts are completely empty and their genitals appear non-functional. Leks gets the whole thing on Betamax, thanks to the team’s earlier find of a CBS News video camera.
While Red and Leks are getting their hands bloody, Zenobia is getting hers dirty. The Volga’s existence profoundly offends her. She hauls the dead guy out of the driver’s seat and starts checking it over. Aside from the very recent damage, it appears to be fresh off the showroom floor. It has no serial numbers and no registration tags, and it looks like there’s some up-armoring of the body panels and glass. Also, it has a full tank of gasoline – something she hasn’t seen in at least two years.
Malvina regains consciousness. She’s weak, hungry, and dehydrated, and has no memory past walking out of the hostel and seeing a light in the woods. Perhaps that’s for the best. She’s also running a couple of degrees of fever and it looks like her body has been burning fat and calories at an accelerated rate.
Red has a lot of lab work ahead of him, but right now, his top priority is his patients. Zenobia takes the UAZ back to Ponikla to siphon fuel into the OT-64, then brings the APC back to the crossroads town so Red can move Malvina and Minka to his clinic on improvised stretchers. Leks gathers up the weapons, casting an acquisitive eye on the Saiga (and a couple of the Glock 18s find their way into people’s holsters too).
As the team pulls out, Leks tosses a road flare onto an alcohol-soaked pile of timber and bodies.
Despite nearly killing Minka, this session was a lot of fun to run. This sets up some downtime research that will answer a couple of long-standing questions for the team while prompting a few more.
Meanwhile, in Kalisz, the U.S. 5th Infantry Division has an appointment with destiny.