Session 4

For helping her the way they did, Rosa hands over six treasures from her own personal collection — decades of scavenging the wasteland, now passed on to people who'll actually use them:

• Rosa's Armor — pre-war SWAT gear, engraved and painted over with floral motifs.
• Blossom — her personal plasma pistol. Holding the trigger charges a shot that bursts into an area-of-effect explosion on impact, at the risk of overheating and burning the wielder who pushes it too far.
• Truth and Reconciliation — a double-barreled shotgun, one barrel loaded for slugs, the other for buckshot, swappable on the fly.
• Thorn — a modified scrap sword rigged to deliver an EMP jolt on a solid hit, powered by an energy cell that needs recharging between uses.
• The Poldermolen (Dutch for "windmill") — a modified weed-whacker, spinning blades turning it into a short-range slicing weapon with just enough reach to keep enemies honest.
• The Warhawk Mask — postwar tactical headwear shaped like a bird's skull, with built-in zoom and targeting assist for long-range shots.

While the rest of the party rests up, Johan goes back into the vault to finally do what Rosa asked of him — delete her genetic profile for good. On the way in, he passes something none of them noticed on the way out originally: a section of wall punched outward in a perfect circle, not broken so much as folded, like the metal had been peeled back rather than forced. Dust drifting through the opening moves wrong — too slow, hanging in the air a beat too long — and sound coming through it arrives a fraction of a second late, like it's traveling around a corner that isn't there.

He goes through anyway. On the other side, an entire cloning chamber — not the one any of the party came from, a different one — has been stripped completely bare. Nothing left behind, nothing to explain who did it or when.

By the time he makes it back to Keystone, he's woozy and off-balance, whatever that hole did to him lingering enough that he stays behind at the boarding house rather than joining the rest of the party.

The party wakes to a town already in an uproar. Geremy is crouched by the gate, trying to console a sobbing woman — her son is missing, and she's certain a Harpy took him in the night. It's not the first rumor of its kind to come out of the Black Hills, but it's the first time it's happened here, and Keystone is starting to believe it.

Elsewhere in town, a Dakota Confederation delegation has set up shop, and Doctor Marin is watching them from a distance with a look that could curdle milk. The party leaves the missing child for now and goes to see what the Confederation wants.

Their bodyguard is impossible to miss — a tall, broad-shouldered ginger man in the same style of power armor seen last session, helmet off, mohawk catching the light. The delegation's actual leader does the talking: smooth, practiced, reading less like a diplomat and more like a man who's sold a used car or two in his time. He pushes a pitch for permanent Confederation presence in Keystone — better farmland management, better protection — dressed up as generosity. Nobody's buying it, and it doesn't take long to clock exactly what kind of pitch this is.

The delegation leader catches Marin glaring at him from across the square and calls something out to her — mocking, sharp-edged, in a language none of the party recognize outright. Silas gets close enough to place it: something that sounds close to a language he picked up growing up in Montana, though he can't make out the words themselves. Whatever was said, it lands. Marin's scowl deepens and she turns and walks back inside without a word.

The party goes and asks her, plainly, what that was about — she respects bluntness more than tact, and it works.

She's Sioux, from a community that built its place in the wasteland breeding horses and bison — not some ancestral pre-war tradition, just what her people made of themselves out here. When the Confederation formed, her people joined in good faith — only to be gradually squeezed out, their breeding operations absorbed and their livelihood taken from them, until they were left destitute and dependent on the very people who'd displaced them.

The scars on her face aren't from any wasteland accident. Decades ago, she and a handful of others led a revenge attack against the Confederation for what had been done to her people. Innocent people died in it. Her own community banished her and the others responsible, scarring their faces as a permanent mark of what they'd done.

Asked if there's anything the party can do about any of it, she shakes her head. This isn't a problem a few travelers can fix — it's building toward something bigger, something that's going to come to a head between larger forces one way or another, and no amount of well-meaning help changes that math. She sends the party off with enough radiation medicine to survive a trip into Rapid City.

Not far outside Keystone, the party finds bodies on the side of the road — several of the Coyotes, including Mary, dead. Tire tracks and skid marks at first glance point to the Confederation, but a closer look tells a different story: talon marks from something with an eagle's build, and clear signs the bodies were run over well after they'd already died. Every pocket and satchel has been stripped clean — except for one bag of Buffout and Jet, left sitting untouched in the grass nearby. Whatever happened here, it wasn't a clean fight, and somebody wanted it to look like something it wasn't.

Rapid City itself is a ruin, decayed and war-torn, but far from dead — vegetation has clawed its way back through the wreckage, and the wildlife that's moved in with it is anything but friendly.

Near where the hospital should be, the party hears it before they see it: a flat, robotic moo. A Protectron built and painted to resemble a Jersey cow stands nearby, quadrupedal, watching them. Cheesesteak works out that it'll answer yes-or-no questions with its movements — one step or moo for yes, two for no — and through that, they learn it goes by "Ushi," and that there's "one friend" waiting inside.

Ushi leads them into the hospital, where every security system is already slashed apart and dead ghouls are scattered across the floor — someone got here first, and they did not go gently. Ushi brings them to the back of the building, where they find that someone: a battered, hunched figure running on bare minimum power, a knight-class Assaultron with a horsehair plume. Her signature laser eye is dark, broken.

The moment they get close, a device on Ushi's back starts beeping and flashing red. The Assaultron — Yojimbo, she tells them — reads it instantly: something's coming, and it's coming for her. Ushi produces a spare energy cell and hands it over, enough to get her back on her feet, though nowhere near full strength.

Someone thinks to ask Ushi if it can fight. It answers with a confident moo, horns twisting forward into charge position. They arrive fast: a sister knight-unit (Queen's Knight), a Sentrybot, a Protectron, and one of the fused, 360-degree Hydra units.

Queen's Knight reaches the party first. An attempt to slip past unseen fails when it spots Petra and charges, and the two trade blows back and forth as the Hydra closes in from the other side, its screech ringing out without ever quite landing the debuff it's built for.

While that fight rages, Bishop and Birdie peel off to search the building as the Protectron stalks down a side hall. Bishop finds a sealed container with something moving inside — a test chimp, feral and half-ghoulish, trapped for two centuries. He lets it out, and it launches straight at the Protectron, doing real damage before Birdie manages to calm and command it with her gift for animals, turning it fully to the party's side.

The search doubles as a scavenger hunt for parts, and it pays off — Petra finds a fusion core and gets it to Yojimbo just as the Sentrybot rounds the corner to join the fight. Ushi tanks through the worst of it, its heavy plating soaking hit after hit while the party wears Queen's Knight down to a finishing shotgun blast. Silas keeps up a steady rifle from a distance throughout.

Then it's the Sentrybot's turn. Zendaya takes a hit of Jet, closes the gap, and lets loose with her EMP blade for a devastating hit while Yojimbo, finally back to full strength, tears in alongside her. Cheesesteak finishes it from an overgrown ledge above, a plasma shot from his pistol sealing it. Birdie rallies the chimp with a rousing bit of encouragement, pushing it to a final burst that finishes off the Protectron before it turns and rejoins the rest of them.

With the fight over, Yojimbo helps the party piece together what they came here for — a genetic resequencer, assembled from parts scavenged during the fight. But the moment it's whole, she carries it outside and holds it aloft. A Harpy descends out of nowhere and takes it from her hands before anyone can react.

A second Harpy arrives right after, leaving behind a note written in strange, almost scriptural language — an invitation, addressed to all of them, to come to a place called Wonderland Cave.

Pressed for an explanation, Yojimbo doesn't dodge the question. She was contracted, she says, to retrieve exactly that kind of technology, for something called the Ark — she doesn't know or particularly care what it's for, this is just the kind of work she and Ushi do, bounty hunting and fetch-quests and the occasional bodyguard job across the wasteland. As for why the rest of Elizabeth's forces were hunting her down: she abandoned the Neon Queen's compound at The Observatory in the Black Hills, and that makes her a defector worth chasing.

The session ends there — the Ark named for the first time, the Observatory placed on the map, and an invitation to Wonderland Cave waiting to be answered.