Not the best thing I've ever written, but it's serviceable.
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? Topic: Favorite Capers, Thread The Third
In: Boards ? Guild ? Private Chat
? Saletra (Original Poster)
Once again, it’s time for a new bragging rights thread.
For the newbies: Guildies like to talk about their exploits, the crazier the better. If you’ve got something you think qualifies as nuts enough for the favorite capers thread, post it here. Have at thee~!
(Showing page 3 of 120)
? The Big “D” (Veteran Poster)
We’ve heard a lot from the new kids, what about you graybeard guildies? Most of you have got to have some interesting stories from back in the day, right?
? Pyramid (N&W Acquisitions)
I suppose that’s my callout, considering I’m the grayest graybeard on the books right now.
I’ve told a lot of stories about the warehouse days in Ithaca, but they really aren’t my favorites. Some of my faves I was only just sort of there for – I got so watch Draco shoot Satan in the face, honestly one of the highlights of my career & it wasn’t my job. But my all-time favorite has to be the Titanic caper.
? Lone Gunman
@Pyramid Please don’t tell me you stole the Titanic.
? Pyramid (N&W Acquisitions)
Nah. Well, not yet anyway. Stealing the actual boat’s still on my bucket list, so maybe someday.
The Titanic caper started out as somebody at Mobius getting a weird romantic bug up their ass about playing white knight at famous historic disasters. I think the idea was something about looking good for the cameras on Zero-Zero humanitarian-wise while getting a good solid idea on how large operations could affect the parachronic balance, as the distinguished competition might say.
Mobius put out a bid, and it was luck of the draw that Flavia & I were just coming back from our honeymoon and ready to get back into the scrum. Not gonna lie, the idea had a lot of appeal to both of us: playing capital-H Hero is one of our big drivers, and rescuing people off the most famous shipwreck in the multiverse? Hell yeah we were up for that. The job was big, real big – we put together a scratch crew of about fifty people. But it went off fucking beautifully right up to the end.
(I didn’t know this until way after the fact, but there was a divide in Mobius about the whole op. A good chunk of the operations division didn’t want to farm it out to the Guild. We won, mostly anyway. Pretty sure that a couple of our guys were Mobius and not freelance, but they did the job so w/e.)
? SnakeLyfe (Malfoy’s Malefactors)
You know, I remember reading about the Titanic op during training. Something about large-scale rescue operations in the middle of historic or potentially historic events. I don’t remember anything about something going wrong at the end of the mission, though. Sure your memory’s not acting up on you, old man?
? Pyramid (N&W Acquisitions)
Har har, Dray. And here I go being all nice and talking about you gunning down the Devil.
No, if you read about it in training you were focused on the rescue part of the op, and all the bad stuff went down (no pun intended) on the salvage part.
Okay, lemmie start over:
The caper as we planned it out was twofold. The first part was rescuing the passengers and crew off the Titanic before she went under. The rescue op is where most of our scratch crew went: we ended up buying an old Liberty Ship from, oh god, I think it was Campbell? Something like that, one of those vaguely dull Mad Men-esque dystopic timelines. We figured that the Liberty Ship was big enough to hold everybody, advanced enough that we could knock together a crew that could run it and just primitive enough to pass muster as a tramp freighter to a bunch of traumatized Edwardians.
The crew was actually the easiest part, because we lucked into running into Jake Nielsen, the Flying Newfie while headhunting. You ever work maritime ops for Mobius or one of the bigger corps you’ve got a better than even chance of meeting Jake, him and his boat have been pretty much everywhere there’s water. So the Flying Newfie put together the crew and we focused on getting the timing down for the rendezvous and the salvage op.
Now scan this: the Titanic was the biggest, most luxurious liner of her day. She didn’t quite have a cargo worth millions, but there were some interesting baubles aboard worth a fair amount, not to mention collector value for more mundane stuff on Zero-Zero and elsewhere in the network. So while Jake and his guys worked with the Titanic’s crew on evacuation, me, Flavia and our own crew would go through the boat and tag everything we could for retrieval. That was the salvage op.
Jumping ahead over all the planning and waiting, the Liberty Ship is in position, ready to get Titanic’s wireless signal and charge to the rescue. We’ve got the ship on radar, we see the collision and as soon as we get their SOS we’re off. Jake pulls us up to the side neat as you please, we’re throwing open doors, extending gangplanks and soon enough we’re moving everybody off the ship.
In the tumult of the evacuation, it doesn’t take much for the salvage crew to sneak off and start tagging things. We get down to the cargo hold and the ship’s vault, which is still mostly dry at this point and we’re happily tagging things and portaling them out to our standby warehouse on Mt. Nebo. We got a good chunk of the cargo out before the water finally got too high for us to work, actually.
Both sides of this operation are working perfectly, we’re grabbing minor valuables out of the ship’s interior while the last of the crew are being picked up. It’s about two in the morning which mean we had just under ten minutes to wrap up and get out ourselves. And that’s when the snakes showed up...
? Burning Sky
You’re fucking kidding me. Snakes on the Titanic? Seriously?
? The Big “D” (Veteran Member)
So you’d had it with those motherfucking snakes on that motherfucking boat?
? Bull (Garrett’s Privateers)
Damn, talk about shitty luck, @Pyramid. What the hell were snakes doing on the Titanic, of all things?
? SnakeLyfe (Malfoy’s Malefactors)
Careful now, let’s not get all hot and bothered. I’m a little surprised though. Nothing I’ve heard about the Titanic caper ever said anything about Draka being present. Isn’t that general zone out of their way?
(viewing page 4 of 120)
? Pyramid (N&W Acquisitions)
I never did figure out why there were Draka on the boat to begin with. @SnakeLyfe makes a good point: the timeline we were operating in was a good metaphysical distance from their usual stomping grounds, and you have to figure that if they were there for a specific purpose they’d have evacuated with the rest. Either way, it really doesn’t matter because we’re turning a corridor heading for our jump-out point when three drakensis leap out and block our path. At first glance it doesn’t look bad. Drakensis are stronger and tougher than the average human, but there’s only three of them versus six of us and we’ve got weapons. Not great weapons, just simple tasers disguised as antique Webleys, but enough to fuck up a snake.
And then the lights go out. The water had finally reached the generators and so much for light. Now remember that the Titanic sank on a moonless night and we’re still inside the ship, so we’re completely in the fucking dark & the drakensis take advantage. The next sixty seconds or so I don’t remember very clearly; just a lot of fists and thinking “we need to get out of here right fucking now” over and over again. Flavia gets a light spell up, one of the snakes is down (she’d lit the spell off right in his face. Fell in love all over again when I spotted that.) the salvage team managed to fend of the other and I’m flat on my ass with the third doing his best Muhammad Ali impression on top of me. And I can hear the ship start to groan, really, really loud.
Flavia takes out snake #3 since I was distracting him quite nicely, grabs me, grabs the rest of our guys and we just book it for exfil. The ship’s groans turn into screams, the deck’s shivering and you can just tell in your bones that the whole damn thing is literally about to come apart. We don’t manage to get into position, we hit the promenade deck and there’s this huge CRACK and the deck tilts: Titanic is breaking up and we’ve officially run out of time. I punch the panic button and we portal the hell out of there as the deck drops out from under our feet.
And that, children, is the story of Nepos & Wildman’s Titanic caper. We saved the day, beat up the surprise guest stars and escaped to tell the tale. The rescue operation went into the books as a success, the salvage operation was... well, to be fair it wasn’t the success we wanted (not enough people/time) but we picked up a good chunk of cargo and various sundries for auction. As for the Draka presence, I know Mobius did a few followup operations looking for nests but I don’t know how that ended up. All in all, it was a fine caper.
? The All-Seeing Eye (Intel Mistress)
Mobius put a few people into Europe and the US following Sam & Flavia’s report. They uncovered the remains of a Draka nest, probably the one the three snakes they met onboard came from. They didn’t find anything more substantial, at least the reports I have access to don’t say so. How they got there is still a mystery, but Mobius put the word out to IU just in case.
? Burning Sky
Well, that was certainly a thing. Hell of a story, @Pyramid. Do you still have any of the stuff you recovered?
? Pyramid (N&W Acquisitions)
You’d think so, but not really. Most of the stuff went to auction on Zero-Zero, a couple other places, and the take from that went to paying off the Flying Newfie and his crew. We ended up returning a few things to the original owners anonymously (The legend of the Ghost Post strikes again!) and that was mostly abandoned keepsakes, photos or stuffed animals and the like. The most we kept for ourselves was a set of the first-class china for dinner guests. I really wanted the ship’s pennant, but there was no time and no good way to do that without anybody noticing. Ah well.
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