Red, Zenobia, and Leks limp back to town with a semi-conscious Malvina, a concussed Minka, and a slightly-used black Volga in tow (literally, in the latter case).
Minka will be on light duty for the next few days while her abused brain heals. The rest of the team settles in to attend to a variety of tasks around Ponikla: rebuilding their diminished fuel stockpiles, helping with the harvest, running the drilling rig, hunting, foraging, patrolling the area. But for Red, it’s time to do Science!!
After performing a field necropsy on some of the men who abducted Malvina, Red took blood samples from them. He has a microscope and some of the other makings of a laboratory, so he grabs Léonard as a lab assistant and settles in for a few days of research.
The following is a lightly-edited, low-effort copy and paste from our Discord server.
The blood of the four dead neckless mooks looks normal.
The samples Red took from the three men in black and the two creepy doctors appear to be blood to casual inspection, but under a microscope, it’s a red liquid without red or white blood cells or platelets. However, there is something in solution. It appears to be regular faceted geometric shapes with well-defined planes and edges, slightly smaller than red blood cells. The shapes are inert and a dull gray in color.
The sample of Malvina’s blood has the normal components you’d expect – plasma, red and white blood cells, and platelets. However, her blood also contains similar faceted shapes. These, however, are dark red and they appear to be independently mobile.
Red tests the samples to see which of them display the previously-observed behavior of boiling/sublimating when exposed to iron. Malvina’s blood does not have the same reaction, nor does the mooks’ blood. Running that test with the MIB blood samples under the microscope shows that the cause is the little geometric shapes undergoing what looks like extremely rapid oxidation.
Malvina is recovering rapidly but her caloric intake is about 1.5x normal and she has about a degree of fever.
Red and Léonard get together with the other PCs and the village elders (Léonard has been somewhat adopted into the elders’ ranks but this isn’t a decision he can make unilaterally). He wants to get some blood samples from other children who were abducted – but but he doesn’t want people to worry about the kids or, worse, invoke some sort of superstitious belief that they’re tainted. Léonard suggests spinning this as a routine medical exam (Minka’s probably the only other person in the village with enough medical knowledge to call bullshit) and the elders sign off on it.
All of the children’s blood samples have the same shapes in them, with the same color and behavior as Malvina’s. They’re also more prevalent – three to four times the concentration seen in Malvina. When Red pulls another sample from Malvina to compare, the number in her bloodstream has increased from what he saw the previous day.
Red: So they are replicating.
Referee: Leonard, who has been tracking the village’s food stores (you’re not in danger of starving if nothing fucks with the harvest), adjusts his glasses. “Um. Doctor. I’ve noticed something else. When you and your friends have come back from a mission wounded, you’ve also been consuming quite a bit more than I’d expect. I’d thought it was just the increased demand of, well, fighting and marching, compared to the starvation rations of the last two years, but…” he trails off and nods at the room where you’re keeping Minka under observation. “In my experience, people with concussions can’t keep food down well. And she just had second breakfast.”
Red: He’ll start with himself.
Referee: They’re in there. Slightly greater amount than Malvina’s current concentration, less than the village kids.
Red: This gets even more interesting…
Red spreads his net a little wider, testing Léonard for a baseline, then getting a sample from Stanislaw, the one kid in the village who has not yet been abducted. Léonard also has the shapes. Stanislaw does too, but his are noticeably more motile.
Red fires up a motorcycle and heads out to check on the farmers across the river; he’d promised them medical assistance anyway and this seems like a good opportunity to see if they’re a control group. One of Fryderyka’s partisans rides shotgun on the other BMW.
The farmers don’t have any history of child abduction, though a couple of them do ask jokingly if he’s seen a black Volga driven by a couple of nuns [Coolness Under Fire check to not react…]. Their blood samples, once Red gets them back to his lab, are normal. He does also note that the farmers get their water from wells on their farms, not from the river.
Red turns his attention to the river. With the additional equipment and information taken from the museum site, he has decent capability to analyze water quality. While he’s been working on blood research, he’s had Miko out gathering samples up and down the river.
The river is fairly clean… much cleaner, in fact, than he’d expect for a European river with heavy prewar industrialization. He lacks a direct prewar comparison sample (the museum project was on the Vistula, which the Pilica flows into), but he’s seeing maybe a tenth of the industrial chemical contamination that was in the Vistula’s 1996 reading.
There is one sample that Miko took on the south bank of the Pilica, immediately upriver from the ruins of Kozlowiec, that is… weird. It’s not reacting to any of Red’s chemical tests, but under a microscope, there is a weird oily-metallic rainbow shimmer to it that looks like something in solution that’s too small for his microscope to resolve clearly. That same sample has trace amounts of refined hydrocarbons – some sort of petroleum fuel.
This was a fun reveal to run, and it led to a roleplay-only session for the PCs to discuss Red’s findings and figure out WTF to do . The general conclusion is that… well, they can’t do much, and these things (Leks throws out “nanotechnology” from a bootleg movie tape he once watched) seem to be mostly beneficial. They do also discover that the… okay, call them nanites… are averse to strong magnetic fields.
Once Magda hears Red’s findings, something clicks for her as one of the village’s primary communal cooks. Whenever someone has come back from a mission injured, they’ve been eating about 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day while healing.
While all of this is happening, Zenobia sits down with Leks, Minka, and an assortment of wrenches. The black Volga offends her. She wants answers.
Other than the damage the PCs inflicted in the process of capturing it, it appears showroom-fresh despite being a 29-year-old model. It’s clean, it has no wear or corrosion, all the rubber and synthetic parts are in good condition, the tires look new. As previously noted, the tank is full of actual gasoline, not alcohol fuel. It appears to have a factory-fitted armor package – ceramic plates in the doors and the back of the rear seats, and bullet-resistant glass [Armor 2 on all facings]. There are no serial numbers on any parts and it has no registration tags.
(None of the firearms recovered from that fight have serial numbers or proof marks, either. They aren’t lasered or filed off – there are just blank spots where numbers apparently were never engraved in the first place.)