Heavy Metal Thunder (39 page)

Because you have survived this experience, you have
gained a greater understanding of the world. As you fight your way through this
situation you will earn
Experience
Points
, which are abstract
representations of your actual experience. When you gain enough Experience
Points (or
XP
), you will gain additional character Levels and receive
additional Stat Points, Skills, and Blood.

You start out this game of survival at
Level 1.
For surviving the situation just now, you gain
1 XP.
Be sure to record
this. When you have at least
15
XP
and
make it out of the
ghost station alive
, then you will gain one character level and the rewards
that come with it.

When you are ready to continue down the hallway,
turn to section
148
.

“
Oof
! You know what,
fellas?” you say, leaning back as you pat your stomach. “I’m full!”

“Whatever, pussy!” says Cletus, concentrating on
cramming an entire loaf of bread into his cheeks.

“Ouch! But I know you don’t mean it, Mister Cletus.”
You laugh good-naturedly, then lie down and moan as the pain sets in.

Eventually, Cletus falls into a stack of bananas he
has already peeled, crushing them all into mush. “
Gawd
,”
he bellows, “the pain!”

“Hah!” cries Buford, chunks spilling from his mouth.

“
M’stomerk
! Gonna
explode!”

“Hah ha-a-ah!”

With that, Buford proves himself the better eater
and, by extension, the better man. You nod to him submissively, an
acknowledgment of his superiority over you. While Buford struts around, proud
and in agony, you roll Cletus into a corner and take stock of what’s left of
the food.

Erase
6 Foods
from the
Narrenschiff’s
inventory.

“We kin have a rematch tomorrow,” says Buford,
hovering over his beaten foes.

“Sir, yes sir,” you mumble.

Turn to section
143
.

With your supplies in tow, you fly out to the
Narrenschiff’s
last known position. Your helm picks
it up in the distance, doggedly flying on its original course. Glad that the
engine still works, you blast toward it.

You reach the blasted ship. The dead sniper stayed
busy while you flew out to Scylla, for the ship is full of holes and broken
windows. You climb in through the shattered fore window. The ship is still lit;
its power source has not been ruined, and so you run a check of its various
systems. Everything
works,
it seems, except for the
fat mass coils in the floor and the air and waste recycling systems. You smile
grimly. No luxuries on this flight.

All of the supplies seem to be gone, sacrificed to
the hungry void. You stow the Invaders’ booty in a corner and secure it to a
peg on the wall. Strangely enough, you do find one floating can of
Sticky
Fix (bulk 2, contains 3 doses)
which you had no idea was on the ship at
all.
A gift from the gods, perhaps.
How thrifty they
are.

It will be impossible to fix all the windows and
bullet holes. The ship is now little more than an engine with a navigational
system attached to it. You will have to keep your suit sealed at all times for
the rest of your journey.

If you had any companions with you, they are all
dead. You will never see them again. Not in this lifetime, not ever.

You set a course that you hope will intercept your
Black Lance Legion ship. You tie yourself to the pilot’s chair, then
immediately fall asleep.

Turn to section
59
.

You may make a note that this section of the text is
a
Regeneration
checkpoint. Regeneration is an optional rule, the same as
a “save point” in a computer game. It exists so that if you die, you don’t have
to start over at the beginning of the game (unless you are a purist and you
want to start over at the beginning). All you have to do is make a quick note
of your current XP, current Blood if you think you won’t remember it, and put a
mark beside the items in your inventory. If you die beyond this point in the
game, you will be told to return to this section of the book so that you can
try again with the same gear and stats that you had at this point.

Turn to section
179
.

As you charge forward the smiling revolutionary
shrieks as if he’s genuinely afraid of the flying chair. You feel the rush of
victory. Then the shotgun blasts the chair into a thousand pieces, you are
blinded as your face is lacerated by a cloud of shards. Stumbling, you crash
into the revolutionary and both of you hit the ground. You feel the shotgun and
a pair of arms, so you grab on and hold, bearing your weight down into your
opponent.

As your vision clears you see the revolutionary as
he tries to wrest the shotgun from your grasp. You use the only weapon you have
left - your head - and slam it down into the man’s face. You do this over and
over, until your vision grows dim and red. Then, just before you can pass out,
you see the man’s eyes roll up into his head. You quickly yank the shotgun away
from him, point it at his face, click - then, in a flash of light and blood,
the man’s head explodes with such force that you are deafened. Below you
churns
a primordial soup of brains, bone, and even a
spinning jawbone. The worst part is that the body is still jerking underneath
you.

During your terrible battle, you lose a
bone-shattering
9 Blood.
Furthermore, part of your suit has been
shredded. If you have any
Sticky
Fix
, you must use one dose now
to fix your suit; otherwise, make a note that
your suit has been damaged.
Lastly, because of your wounds you temporarily lose
1
Strength
and
1 Dexterity.

If you have died, you may
Regenerate
by turning back to section
312
, or, if you want to
go back further, turn back to section
179
.

If you survive, then you turn and see the scared
revolutionary, eyes wide and white with shock. “Dinner is served,” you growl.
He gives vent to a mucus-curdling scream and dashes from the room.

You search the bodies of the dead and find the
following gear, which you may take with you.

Krieger-Colt Pump-Action Shotgun
(Shotgun, bulk 3)

3 Shotgun Shells (1 bulk)

Enforcer Automatic (Handgun, bulk 2)

5 Handgun Bullets (bulk 1)

Stellar Corp Law Enforcement Uniform
(bulk 1
, damaged and bloody)

Steel Baton (Mace, bulk 2)

When you are ready to hit the all-you-can-eat buffet
(and scoop up some XP), turn to section
260
.

You grip your spear with both hands and drive it
forward, aiming for the deconstructor’s mouth.

You must now compute an abstract number that will
determine the outcome of the battle. This number is your
Ground Combat (or 1
G Combat)
added to your
Strength
stat. If you have the
Weapon Proficiency:
Hand-to-Hand
skill with a
Spear
, add 2 to this number.

If this number is 3 or less, turn to section
60
.

If this number is 4 or more, turn to section
271
.

“
Yuh
huh,” you mutter, nodding
again and again.
“Ship!
Of course.
Please?”

She smiles, rewarding you with the sight of perfect
white teeth all laid in neat rows. “My knight in black armor,” she purrs. She
leans forward ever so slightly and her
moundy
-round
orbs push out against her dress, handfuls begging to be ripped off her torso
and eaten. “My name’s Zelda,” she says as she passes you and enters the ship.

One of the guards leaves his post to follow her, but
she leans out from the doorway and says tenderly, “Please don’t bother me for a
moment, boys, I have to take a dump.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says the guard, shyly.

Make a note that
Zelda
the
Lady
has joined you.

Turn to section
82
.

Your jetpack flares to life and you swoop around the
silent, massive
lifeform
.
Fields of
slender tentacles sway beneath you, and thin blue streams glisten in your helm
light.
You even pass by what appears to be a cluster of frozen white
flowers, still and corpse-like in the dark of space. The landscape is both
serene and sinister. You pass by a great hole torn into the creature’s skin,
dark and large enough for a man to fit inside.

Before you can decide what to do next, you feel
something like a vice clamping shut on your leg and you jerk to the side.
Jarred, you swing about and see a thick grey tentacle wrapped around your leg.
It is far, far longer than the others, and before you can put into words the
unfairness you feel at this cheap ambush, the tentacle begins to drag you down
to its shorter brothers, all of which are bunched together and coiling about in
anticipation.

If you have a gun and want to blast the tentacle,
turn to section
581
.

If you have a hand-to-hand weapon and want to use it
against the thing, turn to section
101
.

If you want to try and wiggle free and fly out of
its range, turn to section
343
.

Aggression gels in the air, thick and hot. “You know
what,” says the lawman, “I think maybe I’m just gonna do my job, if that’s
alright with you. If it isn’t alright with you, I can either arrest you along
with these other scum-bags, or you can leave now.”

“He’s not leaving,” says the smiling revolutionary,
gesturing toward you. “Nobody,
nobody
, gets out of here alive.”

Deflated, your spirit sinks: You temporarily lose
1
Will
and
1 Charisma
from your stats. You realize that you are
trapped in this insane asylum, forced to continue this dance of death. No easy
way out.

If you have a gun, you can show the lawman you mean
business and draw it on him by turning to section
258
.

If you have a gun, you can switch tracks and even
the odds by drawing it on the revolutionaries by turning to section
242
.

If you want to backpedal and try to talk the
revolutionaries out of whatever they’re doing, turn to section
572
.

If you really want to flip the script on them, you
can try to haul ass out of the all-you-can-eat buffet by turning to section
273
.

You realize that the lights and the sound are
calibrated to disorient the human nervous system. Though you would like to
further explore the room, you know that you will not be able to hold out for
very long against this
psy
-weapon. You back out of
the chamber and shut the door behind you. (You gain
1 XP
for holding out
as long as you did.)

Turn to section
239
.

You aim and blast the sides of the deconstructor.
You hear the whine of pierced metal as your bullets slap into the beast.
Suddenly sparks shoot up from a blasted steel panel and a great chunk of the
deconstructor slides off and into the void. Far away, you hear a series of
explosions, and the other deconstructor crashes into your own; most likely, the
guard has just used his grenades. Your deconstructor grinds against its dead
brother, trying to draw clear of it and continue on, however hobbled it may be.
Just then your line snaps loose from the wall and you fly toward the machines -
and, worse yet, towards the vacuum from the breach in the wall. By some
terrible stroke of luck, both good and bad, your head slams into the damaged
area of the deconstructor, sending up a ray of sparks and stars in your vision.
You are thrown free of the dead machine. It shuts down, slides backwards. You
slide across the floor and wall, sucked in by the outrushing wind.

Just as you slide near the gap, the ruined hulks
screech to a halt in the ruined hallway, plugging up the hole from which they
came. The hole is sealed such that the tornado in your ears because a thin
whine of escaping air. You drop to the ground, exhausted.

You rise and stumble over the wreckage. You see the
guard, alone, crawling toward an open doorway. You join him and the two of you
collapse in a new hallway, bodies wracked by adrenaline.

You lose
4 Blood
from the terrible battle,
but you gain
3 XP
for destroying the deconstructors. You check your
inventory: Somehow, in the rush of the battle, you have lost
one item
(your pick, but the item must be of at least 1 bulk, so losing 1 bullet won’t
suffice).