Session 2

Still standing on the unfinished face of Eisenhower, the party hears strange bird cries drift up from the trees below — familiar-sounding, somehow, but none of them can place it, not even Silas.

A new voice reaches them first: a girl crawling up out of the cave beneath them, soaked and smelling of smoke. Birdie. She woke alone in her own cloning chamber, unable to clear the vault's trials without a group — and when the stress got to be too much, her pyromaniac streak took over. She set a fire. It tripped the sprinklers, the sprinklers opened the doors, and she walked out the back way everyone else had to earn.

Surveying the landscape: the mountain, a wrecked visitor center, a rubble ramp down, and below, on its side, the remains of the party's own old school bus — the one that brought them here as kids. Someone tried to make a home in the wreck once; long abandoned, rotting into the hillside.

Inside the bus: rusted metal boxes and a rotten mattress. Cheesesteak finds a crowbar in the mattress, handed to Birdie for her strength. She pries open the first box: a 9mm pistol, given to Petra. Petra scouts a hidden cache near the bus, finds a key and some bottle caps, opens the second box: a utility knife, given to Zendaya. The party heads east down the road, hugging the treeline.

A horned rabbit the size of a terrier — a jackalope — bursts from the brush and freezes. Birdie's ranch instincts almost calm it, not quite; it charges, and she finishes it with one clean crowbar swing. Geiger counters flag the meat as too irradiated to eat, fresh out of the vault as they are. Silas tries to skin it for a trophy hat, but the mutation's warped the underlying bone structure and the hide comes apart in his hands — they keep just the antlers.

Before they can leave, they find what the jackalope was actually running from: a four-foot mutant chicken, dinosaur-boned, screeching down from a low branch. A perception check reads it right — it isn't hunting them, it's furious they got between it and its meal. They toss it the jackalope carcass; it takes the offering and vanishes back into the trees.

The road bends and a fence line comes into view, with a watchtower standing over it. Cheesesteak climbs a tree to scout: a town beyond the fence, a handful of buildings, and a rifle-armed silhouette in the tower.

Bishop and Johan approach alone. The guard is a kid of maybe fifteen, Wes, voice cracking as he shakily orders them to halt. Bishop plays up Johan's injured leg — not entirely a lie. An older voice calls down from inside the fence — Geremy, who climbs partway up, spots their vault suits, and asks the obvious question. The party tells the truth. He has them turn around, checks that both suits carry matching numbers and are clean, and takes that as confirmation enough. Satisfied by their answer about what they're after, he opens the gate, checks them for weapons (a BB gun and a metal stick draw nothing but a laugh), and waves the rest of the party through.

Inside the fence: a small, ordinary-looking farming village, gardens and people going about their day (Geremy's own hand-labeled map dates it 2284). The party recognizes buildings here and there — the same ones they passed on the bus, which to them feels like it was only a day ago. Two hundred years have done nothing to soften how strange that is.

Geremy asks what the party needs, offers what medical help he can, and admits the town's in a rough spot — trouble with a group called the Coyotes. "Not animals; a people," he clarifies. He mentions the name more than once alongside talk of "following the Star," which seems to be as close as he gets to stating a personal code.

Pressed further: Keystone trades food to the Coyotes for caravan protection. The town's been two months behind on its end of the deal, and the Coyotes have held a caravan back as a result — one carrying medical supplies Keystone badly needs. He doesn't excuse the Coyotes for it, but he doesn't pretend the town's blameless either.

Pressed further still, Geremy lets something slip he clearly hadn't meant to: the mayor's been quietly working to get Keystone closer to the Dakota Confederation. To Geremy, that reads as signing away the town's independence, and he's plainly unhappy about it. He also mentions an old woman in town named Rosa, another vault survivor, implying she's been a fixture in Keystone for a long time.

Geremy pronounces it "Key-stun." He walks the party to Doctor Marin's clinic.

Marin is thin, sharp-featured, middle-aged, with three near-perfectly straight scars down the left side of her face. She clocks the vault suits immediately, and something crosses her expression — not fear, not disgust, but the look of someone bracing to deliver bad news.

Before anything else, she names her price for treating Bishop's leg; Geremy quietly covers it. With Bishop patched up, Marin explains there are known complications with the cloning process — she's seen them firsthand, treating Rosa for years — but she doesn't have the equipment to run the analysis here. Part of what she'd need is sitting on the caravan the Coyotes are holding.

Geremy leads the party to Rosa's door. She looks elderly — closer to sixty, but weathered to eighty — jaundiced, most of her hair gone, one visibly deformed leg under the blanket. Frail, but still sharp. She recognizes the vault suits on sight. Then she sees Johan and freezes, speaking rapidly in Spanish. Petra translates: Rosa is calling him mi amor. My love.

Gently pressed, her story comes out. She emerged from a vault about forty years ago with four other clones. Two died within weeks from cloning complications. A third lasted a few years before succumbing as well. Rosa and an earlier clone of Johan survived together in the wasteland for fifteen years — married the whole time — until he was killed by super mutants near a football stadium south of Rapid City. She asks, if the party ever finds themselves out that way, whether they might look for his wedding ring, left behind with his body. (New quest: A Ring for Rosa.)

She also mentions why she came back to Keystone after his death: to try to erase their genetic profiles from the vault's records. The tunnel back in had already caved in by the time she tried. Her health has kept her here ever since.

The party goes looking for the mayor's side of the Coyote situation. His office is cluttered, chaotic, and he's visibly stressed — thirty-five or so. Petra's perception catches two things: a syringe half-hidden under a stack of papers, and a document he tries to cover as they walk in, corner still visible — an emblem of an eagle skull wreathed in red, white, and blue feathers.

Digging further, the party learns the office of mayor in Keystone isn't elected, it's inherited — some explanation for how someone this unfit for the job ended up holding it. He pushes hard for a simple answer: don't negotiate with the Coyotes, just kill them from a distance. A perception check reads him clearly: he isn't just being reckless — he seems to be actively working to force a conflict between Keystone and the Coyotes, not avoid one.

While he talks, Petra lifts the syringe unseen, and Bishop leans on his "senator's son" background to smooth things over, walking the mayor down to agreeing the party will "handle" the Coyotes. Geremy outfits them with two pipe rifles, two pipe pistols, and some armor. Examining the stolen syringe afterward, the party can't identify it, but it's clearly postwar manufacture — and still full.

Another mention of the Star from Geremy sends the party up to the church on the hill — scrap-built but clearly cared for, topped with a fused, multicolored blob of glass. Inside, an open roof lets light pour through the glass, scattering color across the room. The priest greets them eagerly and leads them outside to a cone of arranged steel bars. He has Silas stand at the center and sight down where they converge — and there, faint in the morning light, a single star.

The priest calls it the second Star of Bethlehem, believes it marks the spot of Christ's return, though he admits he doesn't know why it chose this place. He'd pay dearly for a telescope to see it better, and mentions rumors of an observatory somewhere out in the Black Hills.

With the deal struck, the party leaves through the east gate and follows the road for hours until the top of a roller coaster comes into view — Rush Mountain Adventure Park, the Coyotes' territory. Cheesesteak scouts from a tree: three or four figures moving below, weapons unclear, a possible lookout in the Ferris wheel (or just a crow).

The party splits up: Cheesesteak and Silas take the parking lot with rifles as snipers; Zendaya, Birdie, and Petra hold back in the grass, hidden; Bishop and Johan approach the front, running the same playing-hurt play that worked at the watchtower.

An unseen Coyote on a rooftop gets the drop on them first, orders them to stop — they comply. Bishop sells the knee injury, and the guard calls over his boss: Mary, a big, muscular woman who sets a machine gun on a car hood, aimed at them. She asks the same questions; Bishop and Johan add that they were treated poorly at Keystone and that Keystone's crops didn't look like they were doing well (not quite honest) — both details land. She sends someone for a leg brace for Bishop.

Mary lays out her side: Keystone's two months behind on food, the caravan held as back pay, not malice — she'd rather return the medical supplies, but a deal's a deal. When the party notes the resistance seems to come from the mayor specifically, Mary perks up — the last time the Coyotes approached Keystone, someone in the watchtower opened fire on them. Told the tower's currently manned by a kid named Wes, she recognizes the name — the mayor's little brother. That confirms it for her: this isn't the town's grudge, it's the mayor's. She asks the party to deal with him, kill or otherwise.

Bishop and Johan agree. Mary hands over a case of medical supplies as a good-faith gesture. As the two leave, Mary and her people walk them to the park's edge, forcing the rest of the party to scatter and hide unseen, keeping the lie about their numbers intact.

Evening, back at Keystone's gate: Geremy, reassured by the medical-supply case, isn't fully convinced about the mayor until Petra produces the stolen syringe, claiming she found it in his office. Geremy brings in Doctor Marin, who instantly recognizes it as high-end Jet with open distaste, connecting it to a mark she'd already noticed on the mayor's arm. Between this and the Coyote situation, the town is done trusting him.

The party finds his office empty. Petra spots him up on the roof, pacing, high, muttering about something he calls "Harpies." Mid-pace, he stumbles and falls — right onto Johan, who tries and fails to catch him. The mayor's neck snaps on impact. He's dead instantly. Petra photographs the body as evidence. Geremy gathers food to send back with the party as a peace offering.

At the park, Mary reacts to the photo with open delight, asking to keep it to hang over her bed — and releases the rest of the medical supplies, including the high-end sequencing equipment Marin needs.

Marin runs the sequencing on each player. The verdict: 2% genetic drift, the kind that will need real medical attention down the line. She points the party toward two possible sources of that help — the Dakota Confederation, or the Khans.

Geremy sets the party up for the night in an old abandoned house near the fence. As they settle in, a silhouette appears high in the trees on the other side of the fence — a figure with strange, bright reflective eyes. It vanishes into the branches the moment they see it. Session ends here.