Overheard at the Safehouse

Handout — Player Character Intel

You’ve found a vantage point above the old auto shop’s bay floor — up in the rafters near a rusted chain hoist, screened by a hanging tarp and enough shadow to keep you invisible. Your read on this place is thorough. Whatever you missed, it wasn’t much.

The layout: The old service bay has been stripped and reinforced — firing slits cut into sheet steel over the windows, modern maglocks retrofitted to the roller doors, camera housings (dark — offline, maybe deliberately) bolted at both corners. Crates of gear are stacked along the west wall, mostly opened and emptied. In the center of the floor, someone has chalked and taped down what is clearly a ritual circle in white and silver. The circle is easily nine meters across, littered with candles, small brass bowls of something aromatic, and cabling that looks like it’s feeding something you cannot identify. Five figures in MCT-branded arcane coveralls kneel at its edge, eyes closed, murmuring in low unison — the ritual is live, and has been for a while, judging by the wax pooled at the candle bases.

Near the circle, watching the ritualists with a proprietary sort of patience, stands an elf in a sharply-tailored MCT security uniform — Lieutenant insignia on the collar, sidearm holstered but not adjusted since he arrived; he hasn’t expected to need it.

Off to one side, by a folding table with a coffee urn and a disassembled rifle laid out on a cloth, two more MCT contractors are talking. Their voices carry just enough.

• A troll, broad even by troll standards, three chevrons on his armor — Sergeant. Tusks filed smooth, a heavy weapon (looks like a modified machine gun, half-stripped for cleaning) laid across his knees. His name patch reads KRETSCH.
• An ork, lean, single chevron — Private — pacing more than sitting, checking and rechecking a sidearm he’s already checked twice. His name patch reads DOBRY.

The Conversation

KRETSCH: (not looking up from the weapon’s receiver, voice a low rumble) Twelve hours. Twelve hours we’ve been sitting on this ice-box, Dobry, and you know how much of that went into anything you or I could point a gun and use?

DOBRY: (still pacing) None. Zero. All of it — (gestures at the circle without really looking at it) — all of it went into that.

KRETSCH: All of it. And what’d we get. No drone support. Not one bird in the air, not one ground unit, nothing. You believe that? A hand-off job, and command couldn’t spare us a single Aztechnology knock-off Optic-II.

DOBRY: Wouldn’t matter if we had one. No hacker on the roster either. So say we did get eyes in the sky — who’s flying it? Who’s watching the feed? Not me. I couldn’t hack a vending machine.

KRETSCH: (snorts, sets down a component) Heavy weapons are “adequate.” That’s the word the requisition officer used. Adequate. I asked for an assault cannon and a support gunner and they gave me adequate.

DOBRY: You know what this crew should be. Twice the size. Easy. Minimum. You’ve got — what, six of us for the handoff, total, counting the mages? For a package this hot?

KRETSCH: Six. And half of those six are still busy chanting in a circle instead of covering a door.

DOBRY: (shakes his head, lowers his voice but not by much) This whole posting’s amateur hour, Sarge. Somebody upstairs is spending the whole budget on candles and chalk and hoping real hard nobody with a gun shows up.

KRETSCH: (grim chuckle) Yeah. Real hard. That’s the plan.

The elf’s head turns. He’s heard every word of it — or enough of it — and he’s already crossing the floor toward the pair before Kretsch can pick the machine gun back up.

ASHFORD: (sharp, clipped, not shouting but carrying) Sergeant. Private. Is there something about the operational plan you’d like to raise with me directly, or would you rather keep workshopping it over the coffee urn?

KRETSCH: (straightening slightly) Sir. We were just —

ASHFORD: You were just complaining. I heard you. Let me save you the trouble of finishing, and you can listen instead. (he doesn’t wait for a reply) The intel package on our counterparties says they lean magical — heavily. Spirits, sustained spells, and at least one confirmed operator running mind-control effects on soft targets. Read that again in your head if you need to. Mind control. Do you understand what that does to a security detail with no astral cover?

DOBRY: (quieter now) …No, sir.

ASHFORD: It walks them out the front door and hands over the cargo themselves. That’s what it does. Now — as for what you two keep asking for. No drones. No hacker. “Adequate” cannons. Correct. Because the entire profile of the threat we’re facing is arcane, and against an arcane threat, your conventional toys buy us nothing. What buys us something is that circle you keep sneering at.

ASHFORD: (gesturing back toward it) That ritual is a null zone keyed to our corporate orthodoxy — it will hobble their casters’ effective force, possibly to nothing, the moment they cross the threshold. And in the same working, it is stacking a reciprocal bonus onto ours. So while you two are back here counting chevrons and wishing for a rigger, our mages are about to walk in here stronger than anything this crew is going to face today — and theirs are about to walk in blind.

ASHFORD: So. Sergeant — finish reassembling that weapon. Private — holster that pistol before you put a round through your own foot. And both of you find something productive to do with the next hour, because I will not have “amateur hour” be a phrase anyone associates with this detail. Are we clear?

KRETSCH: Clear, sir.

DOBRY: Clear.

Ashford holds the look a beat longer, then turns and walks back toward the circle without another word. Kretsch waits until he’s a few paces off before muttering something under his breath and going back to the machine gun. Dobry holsters the pistol, glances once toward the circle, and says nothing else.