Classic Traveller 06 - Life in an Aquarium
Date
20261029
Game Weeks
9-12
Present
Navy Starman Esperanza Klein - T
Scientist Beatriz Robinson - B
Events
It is the ninth week. We resume on the waterworld of Haradad. This session, Xia Becker is absent - presumably infatuated with the psychic institute contact he made last sessino. Scientist Robinson mets her colleage, having done nothing of note during the previous weeks on planet; Sipping coffee in the remarkably comfortable and humane mall-like atrium of their floating city their minds turn to crime. Robinson, desiring to use her computer skills to facilitate theft against 'the planet's richest man', attempts to gain employment with the revenue service. She fails, but gains a friend in a lower manager, Dale. (Unluckily, she fails to steal his access card, but fast talking avoids a scene when a colleague sees her attempt).
While on the shark-butchery floor, Esperanza Klein, now a medic and regular employee, looks up to the managers' overlooking offices to see planetary police flood into the office of the plant manager. They zip tie him and bundle him out. Absurdly and theatrically, the neighbouring offices are fully visible to the butchery floor, and the chief biologist and accountant can be seen leaning against the thin walls listening in. Klein looks around: His colleagues are too focused on not chainsawing their fingers off to notice. (This was a police encounter roll).
Tenth week. The crew obligingly pay their living expenses. Robinson pumps Dale for info, receiving random exposition about how platinum chits are used to pay offworlders - typically mercenaries, offworld consultants, and entertainers. She decides to get a job at an aquarium but is offered only a measly 750cr a month: She accepts the position of fish-feeder... Intending to steal fish and pass them to the black market, having learned there is a decadent under-culture of eating exotic marine animals.
I make up a theft heat system (roll dX each theft depending on prominence of animal under detection threshold, range of base-values from 500cr for crabs, 750cr for salmon-equivalents and so on). She succeeds in the first, stuffing a fish into her mop bucket then cooler and carrying on with her normal duties, and passing it on to Klein's contact the hairless wannabee-immortal Gabrielle Singh. Rolling on the % price trade table the pay is measly, but they decide to continue.
Klein pumps his colleagues for info: He learns the plant manager (John Garcia) is brothers to a senior Red Wolves merc, and was defiant when the police came for him. From what was overheard it sounds like pure guilt by association... Interspersed throughout the session is news from the state broadcaster: A deep sea submarine battle near the vent-cities is described, and red-tooth-painted submarine nose wreckage is displayed suspended in the water column. The security forces are praised, but a final defeat of the now-rebelling mercs is conspicuous in its absence.
As she carries out her shifts, Robinson needs to pass through protesters and counter-protestors and a mall-cop cordon to get into the aquarium: It seems the 'Sea Wolves' (highly adapted literal wolves with flippers (I guess these are just seals)) on exhibit possess political valence. She learns they are, Japanese zoo style, assigned personalities ('Bu bu', 'Fluff fluff', 'Ki ki') and plushies, and later when speaking with each group after hours that sea wolves are the symbol of a reactionary political order, advocating return to governance by the old planetary nobility. She flashes her aquarium uniform to the pro-wolves, and accepts a bribe to feed the wolves wagyu beef and film it with a camcorder. She switches the extraordinarily expensive wagyu (200cr - presumably imported from offworld?) and sells it on the black market alongside this weeks haul. I roll to see if the job was as described or if the travellers have pawned off poisoned beef onto the black market: Fortunately they have not, though that would have been dramatic. Shes reprimanded by the aquarium manager for filming but makes an excuse of being an offworlder and gets off with a few days of docked pay.
They learn stealing a sea wolf would be worth 13kcr. News reports now show the leader of the Red Wolves openly in a press conference flanked by mercs in red camouflage (insert the venn diagram here about coups, where one circle is 'news anchors wear camo', the next is 'there are tanks in the street', and the third is the army saying 'this is not a coup'): The leader is one Sir Leo Popov who is announcing his family's bid for resuming governance, as it were. Media personalities speak gravely of looming civil war. Klein learns from a front of house receptionist that the plant manager wasn't taken, as usual, in a police ground vehicle, but was bundled into an air/raft that flew immediately out a hole in the arcology glass, destination unknown. It is suddenly exposited to the players that cities on this world float into subnational confederations reflecting physically where they stand politically, to the indifference acclaim and rapture of the players.
Twelfth week. The travellers sweat in a plastic-walled cubicle of an apartment, discussing how to steal a sea wolf. In the streets of the floating arcology, the police are out in full force on segways and in compact electric wagons, though curfew or operations are not yet declared. The political atmosphere is choking, and the general population (the travellers are indifferent) await new developments and crises with bated breath.
Discussion
Zero action this session, though I was told it was fun. Was majorly flying by the seat of my pants again. I again forgor to roll for police harassment everyday like I should've, instead doing it once per week, which facilitated the cozy comfort of the players slipping into a pedestrian working routine. I also didn't roll for wildlife because they were urban, though in retrospect whatever this world's equivalent of raccoons could totally have been a factor.
For the offscreen civil war I just built off earlier events to spice things up and add a bit of a clock to events on this world so it's not just in stasis.