Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-1734134-20161215223926/@comment-1436455-20161216174947

The lights suddenly transitioned to a stark, cold aqua-pink combo as the door opened with a perfunctory sci-fi hiss. In walked a Barstar blonde in a powder pink designer suit with truly intense shoulder pads. She bore the typically plastic, blindingly white Barstar smile and thousand-yard stare. “Gentlemen,” she said with with a lilt halfway between sultry and questioning “Mr. Bagge will see you now.” She led them down a corridor lined with marble busts and potted plants. “I’m contractually obligated to inform you that Mr. Bagge’s office is clearly demarcated with a ‘do not cross’ line. Anyone who crosses will be summarily vaporized. Likewise, any sort of gunplay or other violence or ‘shenanigans’ will be met with extreme force.”

She led them down some twists and turns until they reached a strangely stark, pentagonal atrium, blank concrete with entrances at each side. A blackened bronze statue of a bare-chested man in shorts with boxing glove covered hands raised high stood in the center of the room. From three of the other entrances, identical blonds leading other groups arrived simultaneously. “We hope you have a productive dialogue with Mr. Bagge,” the women said in unison before exiting the way they came. The final doorway, the only one which remained closed, suddenly opened with a familiar hiss. “Come on in fellas, just finishing up.”

Douchard Bagge’s office seemed rather barren, given his reputation for excess. It was quite large, with a vaulted ceiling, and uncomfortably cold with a vague taste of ozone. A black-and-yellow warning line cut across the floor partway in. Bagge himself was dressed in a tracksuit with a towel draped over his shoulders, lifting some gleaming osmium-platinum barbells that were easily 90 kg each. As people filed in, he carefully put the weights down on the floor. A small square surrounding them suddenly depressed into the floor, taking the weights down into darkness and the gap was covered with an automatic panel. A similar arrangement brought Bagge’s desk up from some unseen depths. It was a single piece: a thick, mostly unworked slice from the base of some colossal tree. An antique 3M period Jacobsen Egg Chair, bright red, sat behind it. Bagge walked towards his desk, not breaking his stride even as a rectangular box of black steel suddenly shot up from the floor in front of him. He entered and it shut behind him, there was a hum and a blast of mist that was ejected from barely perceptible vents, and Bagge was soon walking out the other side: clean, coiffed, and now dressed in a sports coat with slacks, red sneakers without socks, and a graphic t-shirt of some unknown vintage. He made it to his chair and plopped down with a contented sigh.

He leaned forward, peering at the assembly at the far side of his office and steepled his fingers. “Spiuq QR. It’s the ahh, ‘crown jewel’ of the Fringe. The local PDF was having some issues requiring more than your standard issue lasgun, and the situation was a bit too fluid to wait fifty years for the Munitorum to figure out how to respond. Enter me, your humble and patriotic purveyor of high quality weapons and sundry. I got them several tons of munitions for their little problem. Except exposure to something fancier than a sharp stick must have given someone on that rock a bright idea, as there’s now a massive insurgency tearing the planet apart. I don’t deal with traitors, so I want those guns back. I’ve got some worthier customers in line for them. In the spirit of competition encouraging best effort, I’ve had you all assembled in different groups. This is by design: only one group is going to get paid for retrieval. The prize? Thirty-three and a third percent of the value of the remaining munitions in store credit or thrones with yours truly. Alternatively, you could destroy the whole shebang, I mean, I won’t pay you for that but you’ll have kept some dangerous weapons out of the hands of traitors. When we’re done here each team will be inserted in a different settlement. Latest intel had them in loyalist hands, but again, situation is fluid. They’ve been moving the cache around, hence dropping you around like jacks. Oh and one more thing, there’s still loyalists on Spiug QR, so don’t rattle their cages or get them exterminated. Dead men make for poor repeat customers. Any questions?”