Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH Part Eight

Bleakbane Plays BATTLETECH, Part Eight:

So. The choice of where to go boiled down to the 1.5 skull travel contract to Linhauiguan or 1-skull Joppa (which was a trade hub and also a black market planet).

After a lot of debate, Mylassta decided to risk it and go to the former.

As she got out of medbay, Lynessa noticed Alarhan arguing with the techs. Alarhan was insisting something was wrong, but they couldn't find anything. Alarhan told Lynessa she'd been having a recurrent nightmare about her internal organs necrotising and exploding out and trying to infect everyone. The med-techs were dismissive, putting it down to one too many horror films - but Lynessa had heard of Undead that did work exactly like that and Alarhan was not one to get upset about nothing. Lynessa ordered the med-techs to take another look - and they found a massive cyst, which they had to immediately remove. Lynessa personally checked it for necrotic emanations but found none; she incinerated it with a holy blaze and ejected out the dust for good measure as a precaution.

Lynessa visited Alarhan; she was in the bed next to Scarlet, who was still recovering and the whole clique was floating around. (Poppy had been cooking with what she could find and might have overdone it a touch because Summer had insisted on helping.)

Alarhan was immensely relived and with the weight off her mind, became even more reliable than she was before, which was basically impossible, since the dictionaries were arguing about whether it should be "dependable" or "reliable" whose definition should just be picture of Alarhan.

Payday:

"Darius?"

"Yes?"

"If you nag me one more time about the finances that you think I'm not keeping such a sharp eye on, I swear to Azurella, I will lock you in a room with Summer after we've spent twenty-four hours feeding her with nothing but coffee and sugar."

Darius swallowed. "Y-yes, commander."

Mylassta cringed. This may have been a big mistake. There was ONE 2-skull mission at Linhauiguan; the rest were 2.5 or even 3 skulls. Most TERRIFYING of all was there was a 2.5 skull training mission, which Mylassta had a horrible feeling she'd be going on...

Oh, well, nothing for it but to first do their 1.5 skull battle contract... Lynessa reclaimed the Enforcer and Mylassta climbed back into the Blackbeam.

The enemy lance was a Panther, Kintaro and a pair UrbanMechs.

The lance leg-capped the Kintaro - more from habit, given they were only getting 2/11 salvage at max - and took the others out easily, without an damage, for once.

And this allows them to finally complete a Kintaro!

Lynessa thought hard about what to do with the Kintaro. She seriously considered the Coil-M, but in the end, decided to make it into a more armoured version of the their Javelin (which could then be sent to storage). It was duly fitted with jump jets, two LRM 5s and a ++LRM 10 (this being the best mix of number of missiles verses heat) and three tons of ammo, and the rest of the tonnage on armour.

They actually had a Javelin 10A in storage, so that got sold and that at least brought them above the threshold for the next payday.

Mylassta sighed. She was going to have to do this, wasn't she...? At least she'd increase her gunnery to 9 before they started.

And on checking the contract, the newbs would still be in the Commandos and UrbanMechs on a 2.5 skull mission, no freaking way.

Lynessa concurred, three light mechs with idiot pilots would force Mylassta to be fighting Azurella-knew-what largely singled-handedly, it wasn't worth it. (And it would have been unpaladinly to go in and get the idiots slaughtered, no matter how much they deserved it...)

2-skull capture base, then, same line-up as before. (They'd probably need to transit anyway after this while everything that got horribly damaged was repaired...) Summer switched to the Raven; hopefully, the ECM would give them a bit of an edge and would make it easier to deal with the inevitable turrets...

No, no turrets, and of COURSE it was a lance of two Locusts, a Firestarter and a Javelin (and so REALLY not ideal for the Raven Fair) and OF COURSE one of the Locusts head Mylassta in the HEAD.

AGAIN.

They occupied the base, only to be jump by two more Javelins (close enough one was IMMEDIATELY able to move into the Raven Fair's ECM range) a Trebuchet and a Griffon.

Crap.

The Enforcer was pounded (again) and the enemy destroyed the AC 10 ammo (though there was only a couple of rounds left). Mylassta, in annoyed desperation, aimed for a headshot on the Trebuchet and manged to get a single hit. Lynessa backed the hell off and took a pot-shot at the Trebuchet with her single large laser.

FINALLY!

(That's the first sodding one I remember getting on a regular shot for bloody AGES!)

Actually, the Raven Fair was coming into its own here, as it forced the Javelins to waste action running forward - and Mylassta proved that with two sequential precision shots, they COULD headcap enemy mechs!

Moderate damage but nothing as bad as some previois missions.

Wow, good salvage this time! Three pieces of Griffon (it was either that or three pieces of Trebuchet and the lance had no pieces of either, so might as well go for the one they hadn't got) and one piece of Firestarter (to make a new mech) for selection.

(Naturally, the RNG did not give me a piece of Javelin 10N of the two, which could have finished off another one, but a piece of 10A, of which there was none...)

With the Enforcer damaged, it seemed like it might be a good point to leave the system for better pastures. Lynessa bought a couple of arm mods, planning to equip the Enforcer with a few, so when it was forced to melee (like when it ran out of ammo), it would at least be a little bit better at it.

Hmm. 17 day’s 1-skull travel contract back to Detroit (which was in the right direction... Or 16 days to Joppa.

Oh dear, the local pirates now didn't like the Paladins. Surprising it took this long, but it would probably only take a mission or two to rectify if they could...

The Detroit contract was a destroy base in the jungle. Joppa it was!

They was a reasonably amount of pennies, so Lynessa had Farah also start on the second training module.

The mech repairs and Kintaro outfitting completed...

... so Lynessa had the four arm modules they had installed on the Enforcer, upping its melee damage by 20 and melee stability damage by 10.

Somehow, a fire started in the barracks. Pseekie was concerned the only way to extinguish the fire was to vent the pod... But Poppy found an old fire extinguisher. Lynessa sent them in to put it out (really, where was the flame-proof demon girl and ice-mage and the speedster when you needed them Scarlet, Alarhan and Summer!) The pair dealt with the fire with minimal damage, and were both feeling decidedly more confident about themselves, much braver afterwards.

Farah reminded Lynessa that those power conduits really did need a good fixing properly, so this sort of thing didn't keep happening.

Day 316, it happen. Darius came up to the lounge, where Lynessa was quietly reading a book. "We're almost completely out of cash," he said, despite there being 707993 cbills in the accounts and only 467150 expenses.

There was a sudden dead silence. Lynessa very slowly put her cup down and looked up from her book.

"Oh snap," said Darius.

"Vey, be a dear and fetch Summer would you?" Lynessa said, in her most even, polite tone. "Poppy, fetch the coffee and sugared confectionary stores, please; Alarhan, yes, good girl, stop him running away..."

They arrived at Joppa.

Lynessa checked the Black Market.

Oh, GOODNESS. If they could scrape together a spare million cbills, there was a single piece of Cyclops 10-Z which would allow them to COMPLETE IT.

(Another million would give it a stupendous communications array...)

There were no missions for the pirates (so no chance to improve their standing again, so they wouldn't be suffering a 20% price hike on the black market) and there were no less than FOUR ambush convoy missions, two defend base missions and a solitary battle.

Wow, this was going to get tedious fast...

Battle first, then, for maximum cash. Summer swapped back to the Shadow Punch, and they were ready to go.

Enemy lance was a Commando, a Jenner, a Spider and a Crab. As they knew they wouldn't get any decent salvage, the squad levelled the with CT kills without issue.

Summer increased her tactics to 8.

Lynessa elected to do the first defend base mission for max cash for expedience. (She wasn't going to bother with the other, which was a low-pay half-skull contract against pirates.)

The enemy was a swarm of light mechs and vehicles, including a couple of packrats with ECM. One of the Locust manged the damage the IS of the Enforcer (of course), but the mission was completed without any base damage.

(The locust wouldn't have done that if the game hadn’t decided to lie when it said Mylassta had a firing position where she moved and thus couldn't actually take it out.)

Putting the stomp into big stompy mechs.

Still, that brought the lance's pennies up to 2 million. so 1.3 million went on that last Cyclops part because DAMMIT, Lynessa wanted a better command mech!

Well, the command system was probably not worth it, since the Cyclops already had a computer system in the head, and that gave the whole lance +1 initiative!

Lynessa had a good look to see what she could do.

After a very long time, she sighed.

"Mylassta?" She said. "Looks like you get a treat. When we leave this system, we're stripping the Blackbeam down, and the Cyclops will be your mech!"

Mylassta's squeal largely defied physics saying it couldn't be heard in space, and Lynessa was severely glomped.

But that seemed like the best option. Putting two large lasers and four medium lasers (two +5 damage ones, including one that Lynessa had just bought), plus a couple of heat sinks and the Blackbeam's heat bank and thermal exchangers, plus four newly-bought assault jump jest would allow the Cyclops to fulfil the Blackbeam's mission profile, speed and jump capability, with having massively more armour. And, at the moment, multiple laser-death seemed the best way of head-capping, so it just made sense for Mylassta to get it.

We shall leave Mylassta squealing with delight for today!