Upon arrival to the Happy Trails trading outpost, they found the guards in an uneasy standoff with a pelaton of Eighties. With the Khan garrison gone, the bikers clearly felt confident enough to ride openly through the park. They wanted to trade precious metals for civilised goods like liquor, soap, candy, and porn. The traders were understandably nervous about dealing with raiders, but Slim swooped in and brokered an agreement between the two factions, pocketing a healthy commission in the process.
Tension diffused, the Posse bought their penicillin and met up with Rhondie and her Buffalo Knights in the newly reclaimed Museum. In exchange for liberating the sacred site, the Rangers agreed to haul the medicine back to Refuge while the Pioneers travelled to Canyon Village. The gang wanted to meet the Kurultai's representatives and, more importantly, make contact with the Followers of the Apocalypse - the cult of doctors and scientists allied with the Khanate.
Half-an-hour down Canyon Road, Freehand whistled a warning. More of those fucking prairie dogs were posted up ahead, spying on the trade route from concealed burrows. The Pioneers were sorely tempted to vaporise them with dynamite, but were too afraid of catching the plague to risk it.
Moving further down the road, the gang winced as the skies opened and it began to rain - soaking their equipment and turning the trail to mud. Freehand nervously pointed out a muddy smear on the asphalt. It might've been the tracks of a larger group, but with the downpour it was impossible to tell. Pushing onwards, the Posse halted upon spotting a burnt-out Corvega blocking the road up ahead. So far the roads had all been clear; the Khans pushed wrecked vehicles to the roadside or crushed them flat with the heavy tracks of their steam crawlers.
Tex grumbled that this had ambush written all over it. Sure enough, an errant ray of sunshine caught something shiny in the undergrowth. The distinctive rainbow-sheen of a laser diode.
Realising their ambush was spoiled, seven tribals covered in white body paint burst from cover; screaming battlecries in a language none one spoke. The Pioneers' blood turned to ice at the sight of their attackers - despite being dressed in ragged furs and leathers, the White Legs were ludicrously well armed. Energy weapons, submachineguns, big game rifles, even flaming swords.
The Posse drew iron and combat was joined.
Slim fired his laser pistol and crippled the warband's sniper, preventing him from blowing someone's head off with his brush gun. Adam charged the Stormdrummers posted on their right flank, but was caught in dead ground and stitched up; armour sparing him from instant death. A second Thompson opened up from the left and strafed the Posse with fat .45 slugs.
The injured White Legs shoved fistfuls of deliarants into their mouths, entering berserker trances that let them ignore their broken limbs. Realising the Posse was about to be bogged down by melee attackers, Tex pushed forwards and engaged the Painmakers at point-blank range, dodging sword strikes as he took a raider's head off with his six-shooter. Freehand tried to retreat, but the Painmaker ran her through with his punch-dagger, before knocking the Tower Cap to the ground and stomping her to death. The other swordsman surged forward and impaled Slim through the chest, mortally wounding the gambler and setting his torso ablaze. Doc dragged him away from the melee; beating out the flames licking at his open wounds and administering a Stimpak.
Meanwhile, Adam finally closed with the Stormdrummers. He laid about with his bear-trap fist, mangling the machine-gunner and sending the rifleman fleeing in terror. The raider didn't make it far before the brave tackled him from behind and smashed his face into a bloody pulp.
Slim groaned in pain from his perforated organs, fumbling for his laspistol with deadened fingers. The sword-wielding Painmaker smiled as he ran him down, twirling his flaming blade with murderous intent. Then Tex fired again and the raider's head exploded. The gambler returned the favour in kind, disintegrating the injured sniper before he drew a bead on the gunslinging troubadour.
With the ground now littered with their dead and dying, the two surviving raiders cut and run. One disappeared into the brush, but Doc winged Freehand's killer with his compliance regulator before he could escape, paralysing his muscles and sending him sprawling.
Tex and Slim briefly argued over how to torture the offending raider to death, until Adam buried Freehand's axe into the man's skull. Unsure of their deceased guide's preferred burial rites, the Posse turned the wrecked Corvega into an impromptu funerary pyre. With a newfound hatred of the White Legs, backpacks stuffed with looted weapons, and nursing crippled limbs and severe blood loss, the Pioneers made haste for Canyon Village.
The Great Khans had turned the Pre-War tourist trap into the keystone of their occupation. The roads were cleared of obstacles, fortified fighting positions watched the approaches, and armed soldiers patrolled raised palisades of earth, timber, and salvaged metal. Gibbets filled with the corpses of Loggers, Eighties, and White Legs lined the central thoroughfare, a warning to any who would defy the Khanate or harm its subjects. Conscript labourers from Wyoming swept the floors, chopped firewood, maintained buildings, and cooked food for the garrison. They weren't in shackles like Legion slaves; the Khans at least paid their levies and afforded them a bare minimum of civil protections.
The Posse were met by Fia, a hard-faced New Khan given command of the Yellowstone campaign by the Kurultai. She was angered to hear the White Legs were attacking travellers on their doorstep, and cudgeled a familiar group of Old Khans into their steam crawler and onto their patrol route. Boris' old troupe complained she was interrupting their funeral rites of booze and chems, but eventually piled into their wood-burner and set off down Canyon Road. Fia then accused the Pioneers of being saboteurs on the payroll of the Rangers, manipulating her garrison into abandoning their post. But the gang put on a great show, portraying themselves as superstitious bumpkins that didn't know any better, redirecting the Orlok's ire towards the idiocy of her own men listening to the tall tales of dipshit tribals.
With suspicions deflected, the Posse asked Fia if the Followers were around - they needed medicine for their village up north. They groaned when she explained they were further south; she'd turned them away from the front lines after the White Legs killed a humanitarian worker. If the Pioneers wanted medical attention, they'd have to seek them out themselves. Although if they needed a shipment of antibiotics, she had some mercenary work that needed done. Gesturing to the dead raiders in gibbets, she offered 1,000 scrip for the eradication of the White Legs, Eighties, or Loggers. Wipe out a second hostile tribe, and she'd send up an armoured caravan full of medicine to Refuge, free of charge.
The Posse were sorely tempted by the offer. The Eighties and White Legs were both tribes of murderous assholes who could hardly complain about being killed wholesale. They decided to head down south and meet up with the Followers anyway, especially after Fia mentioned one of their microbiologists was researching ways to destroy the Prism in West Yellowstone. After selling their looted equipment, patching up their injuries, and busking for free room and board, the Posse set off down Grand Loop Road.
Their travel was uneventful, aside from another seasonal rainstorm and a Khanate patrol passing them on the road. Encouraged by the lack of hostile creatures, the gang decided to indulge in some prospecting. Most of the park was already picked over, but Slim was born-and-bred PX'er and scavenging was in his blood. He picked out a promising convoy of Pre-War vehicles by the roadside and the Posse set to stripping them for valuables. The old gambler hadn't been wrong, they made out with an armful of ammunition, a sweet new leather jacket, and even a box of US Army fragmentation mines. A herd of Tanaka began circling above as the Posse finished looting, waiting to swoop once they left the protective cover of the vehicles, but Slim abused the infinite range and ammunition of his new Recharger Rifle to pepper them with lasers until they fled.
The next friendly settlement was the Logger's old village on the shores of Yellowstone Lake. It was a beautiful lakeside community, consisting of log cabins finely joined and beautifully decorated with sealing, varnish, and carvings. At least it had been before the Scabs moved in. The immigrant labourers had turned the idyllic village into a den of scum and villainy, leaving trash everywhere, using Hook Tender's longhouse as a brothel, and converting the Logger's shrine to various tutelary spirits into a moonshine still and Chem lab. The tribals might've been violent lunatics, but the Posse began to understand their grievances with the rival woodcutters.
The gate guard was utterly useless, more interested in securing first dibs on trade goods than protecting the community from intruders. The Pioneers entered the brothel, eager to purchase some useful drugs and locate the two targets the Loggers wanted them to assassinate. They found Betty easy enough, she ran the whorehouse and by extension, the entire town. The pimp was an ex-Van Graff bruiser from New Reno, the Biggest Little City in the wasteland, and toted an advanced plasma pistol from her enforcer days. Slim felt bad about planning to murder her - he and her came from very similar backgrounds; wasteland punks who'd graduated from petty mercenary work, to organised crime, to an early retirement in pimping and drug smuggling. Though the brothel was able to pick up broadcasts from the Shark Club's lounge singers, Betty still offered the gang a free hit of Mentats after Tex organised a live music performance for her patrons. Doc also took the opportunity to buy some of her homebrew Stimpaks, having used some of his during the White Leg ambush. For his part, the nineteen year old Adam turned beet red as a shirtless woman walked past him.
With their first target ID'd, the gang set off to find Foy. He was hard to miss, being the only man among the Scabs wearing a Yao-Guai as a hat. The foreman stood shirtless, his suit of kevlar-backed chainmail slung over a nearby chair, steadily working his way through a pile of firewood. He was utterly disinterested with talking with some random wastelanders, but Tex managed to get him talking about his background. The man was a Bearkiller, a militant tribe from the Willamette Valley in Oregon. He'd left his homeland to find his fortune in the wasteland, but had avoided California due to the NCR's federal protections on Yao-Guai as their national animal. He was honour-bound not to remove his sacred bear headdress, and wasn't interested in having to dismember angry game wardens every few miles. So he'd struck East instead, joining up with the Khans as a lumberjack foreman for a healthy paycheck.
Tex tried to awe the Bearkiller with stories of his own travels and proud martial history as a cowboy, but the woodcutter wasn't impressed. He called himself a vaquero, but had never ridden a horse in his life. Even if he had, it wasn't anything to write home about: up in Oregon, they rode elephants. The Posse laughed at his tall story until the tribal dropped his pants with a grin, proudly showing off his bowed legs from a lifetime in the saddle. He extolled the virtue of the great shaggy mutants with tentacles for noses, useful both for hauling lumber and as living siege engines.
Deciding discretion was the better part of valour, the Pioneers postponed their assassination plot in favour of resting up and seeking out the Eighties' camp in Pelican Spring the following morning. If they could betray the bikers to the Khans, they'd make a massive sum of scrip out of it. Then they could cash in a favour with the Rangers, find out where the White Legs were, and reinvest their reward money into sufficient weapons to wipe out the troublesome Men from Salt Lake. Doc and Slim even floated the idea of using destruction of the raider tribes as an excuse to get the Scabs to throw a party, then poisoning them using the same method they'd assassinated Boris with.
Nosebeast...
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