Count Down To Doomsday (TMNR) - Episode 19 - Not how you fly a plane

 Seraphina settled Carm down and sent him back to the ship before heading back to the RAM base to help the others. In the weapon room, Seraphina meticulously packed a pallet or two of the Doomsday weapon materials in preparation of moving them to the ship. 

The desert runners helped the adventurers load the weapon parts onto a troop carrier while buzz did preflight inspections. With the parts loaded and the troop carrier ready to fly, the adventurers got onto the back with the equipment and Buzz took off. Moments later, Buzz flipped the plane upside down and then crashed it into the wall of the base, causing it to catch fire and break in half. The wreckage of the ship slid down the wall and landed in a heap of slag.

The adventurers climbed from the wreckage before it completely turned to molten metal and glass as it burned into the sand next to the facility. Tuscan assured them that RAM often booby trapped things and they were lucky to be alive. Buzz agreed that must have been the problem while Alex mentioned that Ron the Swan would never have let that happen. Tuscan asked if the wise Swan was available to check the other planes for issues, which left Buzz salty to say the least.

The adventurers decided that the weapon parts were sufficiently destroyed and so headed back to the rocket to rest a bit before making their exit window. As they took off, Scott.DOS explained that NEO had been trying to get a hold of the group for around a day. At 11 PM, the Maelstrom rider rendezvoused with the Heat Death, and Buzz expertly docked the ships together. The two soldiers came across looking for their money, and when the transaction was complete, Seraphina offered the men some food. The RAM soldiers seemed excited at the prospect of a real meal and eagerly accepted the invitation. 

During the next two hours, the soldiers and the adventurers made small talk and enjoyed one another’s company. The Soldiers headed back to the Heat Death and brought out two cases of very nice beer they had confiscated from smugglers and a good time was generally had by all. While they partied, Max sneakily stole the money they paid the soldiers back and eventually the two ships parted ways amicably. 

Once clear of the closest Martian orbit, they sent a tight beam to Salvation. NEO explained that the Maelstrom rider was the closest crew to a priority extrication. One Jason Dupre was currently believed to be being held in a Radium mine prison that RAM operated in the vicinity of Hygia. Dupre had very important information that took a lot of effort to get, so NEO desperately needed their assistance retrieving him. The adventurers agreed to help and so headed off toward Hygia. 

When they arrived near Hygia, they had no trouble finding the mine and started to try and figure out how to gain entry to it. Buzz hailed the station and attempted to get the mine to believe that the Maelstrom Rider had technical problems and needed an emergency dock. 

The mine radioed back and explained that the Maelstrom rider was listed as a pirate vessel and that there were no facilities to help them here. Having lost the argument, Buzz instead expertly parked the Maelstrom Rider on the dock doors. Seraphina attempted to step out carefully to try and manually open the docking bay doors, and tripped on the way out, spiraling off into space. 

Alex executed a slingshot maneuver collecting Seraphina and putting her back on the doors, where Searphina easily operated the emergency mechanism and opened the doors, letting Buzz put the ship into the bay. Once inside, they collected themselves and to the music of the Klaxon alarm, they walked through the doors of the mine. To their right there was a sign for dormitories, to the left a sign for the workshop and ahead a sign indicating hallway A. 

Alex headed for the dormitories with Seraphina and Max right behind him. Buzz stood behind to watch their backs, which was fortuitous because the door for Hallway A opened and three RAM combat robots walked into the room. 

In the dormitory area, three men with rocket rifles came out of rooms, so Max threw a chaff grenade into the open area between the adventurers and the RAM soldiers. This had the effect of making the soldiers run for cover, except one who drew a cutlass and charged Alex.

Alex quickly dropped the man attacking him, while Buzz shot at the robots to no effect before diving into the dormitory room, leaving Max with their back to the open door. The robots shot Max almost to death, before Alex had a chance to run into the hallway and destroy one of the robots. Max, half dead, threw a grenade into the hallway at the remaining two robots, but missed and almost exploded Alex. Seraphina took the grenades back from Max and then carefully put one near her feet, before closing the door, which destroyed the remaining two robots. 

With the RAM soldiers hiding, and the robots destroyed, the group took stock of their wounds and thought for a moment on how to proceed next.

Count Down To Doomsday (TMNR) - Episode 18 - One after another

 Seraphina had to head back to the village to stay with Carm who had found himself too uncomfortable with the desert runners. Alex meanwhile had found his way back to the village and was told that the group made their way to the RAM fortress. 

Once Alex met back up with the group, they continued their infiltration, avoiding guards for a while, but there ended up being too many of them. As the adventurers continued, they executed each ill-fated soldier that found their way into the path of the adventurers.

After a bunch of soldiers came looking for the men who had died, eventually the base became alerted to the fact that a group of infiltrators was making trouble within the walls. As the alarm blared, the adventurers made their way to the second floor, where Tuscan had mentioned there was a high probability the control center was. 

The adventurers used one of the extra large freight elevators to ascend to the second floor and as they arrived, there were two guards who died fairly easily. The room had a number of doors leading off of it, but only one was large enough to have equipment carried through it, and so that was the one the adventurers decided to go through. 

After a moment of looking around, the adventurers entered the next room with a door large enough for equipment, and proceeded to kill the group of technicians and soldiers who seemed to be protecting a large equipment array. 

A few minutes of examination showed the equipment array was a larger scale laser assembly that modeled the small scale assembly of the doomsday weapon found in the asteroid base. There was a lengthy discussion about the potential to just destroy the base by overloading the laser, but Tuscan was resistant to this idea, knowing there were a number of prisoners in the facility that should be rescued first. 

As the group continued to argue, Tuscan and Alex headed off to try and find the control room. Eventually, the adventurers decided wholesale destruction of the base was not the best idea, and so while Max and Zaphod tried to figure out how to dismantle and destroy the weapon, Tuscan and Alex found their way to the control center. 

In the control center, Alex and Tuscan killed the technicians and the soldier captain that were there before Tuscan opened the doors to the base and released the prisoners from the prison. The chaos that ensued was over in a few short minutes, with the desert runners overrunning the base and killing anything that resembled RAM personnel. 

Alex witnessed a number of desert runners killing women and children, and when he commented that this was not a good look and made the desert runners no better than RAM, Tuscan mentioned that RAM had glassed two desert runner villages; he was past wanting to be better than them and was more interested in eliminating them.

Max and Zaphod determined there were a number of irreplaceable parts of the laser array and Buzz rallied a few desert runners to help remove them and get them stacked in a corner for transport. 

Max spent some time investigating the control center and discovered there were a number of communications with some coordinates to a general area of the Venusian lowlands. Apparently this facility was a test facility and final equipment and lenses were waiting to be delivered and tested here. The Venusian facility was behind schedule to do some issues with the locals, and so technicians from this base were headed to Venus to assist the project.

Eventually the group determined that RAM reinforcement would not be there until two days later, and so decided to loot a little bit and get ready to move the Doomsday Weapon parts back to the Maelstrom Rider.

Count Down To Doomsday (TMNR) - Episode 17 - How to Protect a town from Robots and Soldiers

 The Adventurers watched the situation tensely, and after a few moments, Atha indicated that the group should join Tuscan and her in the main building. The adventurers decided it was a good idea to follow.

Once inside, Zaphod made a menace of himself as usual, while Carm ate everything he could get his mouth on. For their part the desert runners produced mounds of local cuisine while the whole group talked.

Max attempted to convince the desert runners that they needed to evacuate due to what was perceived as an imminent laser attack from the base. Seraphina asked about the robot in the center of the city and was told it was a remnant from a previous RAM raid. Seraphina suggested that the robot could be transmitting the location of the town and targeting information to RAM. 

Atha, deferred to Seraphina’s wisdom and after delivering a speech about how the Desert runners will outlive the rest of Mars and because they know the plight of an engineered species, Atha agreed that they would help NEO to do whatever they came to do in the RAM base. With all of that being said, the adventurers were confused when the Desert Runners refused to leave the town insisting that they wait until the laser attack, if it was coming. 

In the time spent waiting, Seraphina extracted the brain of the robot and Alex took it with him into the desert to the North, assuming that they were right about targeting information. The time of the laser attack came and nothing happened in the town or in the desert to the North. 

As the group sat and waited for what they believed to be imminent death, everyone heard the troop carrier ships coming from the RAM base. Tuscan and Atha rallied the troops while the adventurers prepared in whatever way they could. 

Zaphod spent the battle in the main hall trending any wounded that were brought in. On the walls, the desert runners and Buzz laid down fire on the approaching RAM soldiers and robots, while Max rigged the doors to the back end of the town to explode. 

Seraphina spent time with the Desert Runner quarter master making quick repairs to cross bows and fashioning more armor piercing bolts in the first few minutes of the fight before heading out into the main alley to see what she could scavenge off the downed robots.

After a few minutes of intense conflict, RAM, seeing they had been bested, retreated to their ships and flew back to their base in defeat.

The adventurers spent a bit of time cleaning up the town and then rallied with Tuscan, who would lead them to the tunnels leading into the RAM base.

Once inside, the group spent a few minutes looking around before killing a soldier silently and getting ready to continue infiltrating the base.