Kogaha the Butcher!

Time for another installment of your friendly neighbourhood Morat fighting alongside pathetic spindly humans!  I have to admit that I'm a bit behind on writing this, and that we've played one extra time since my Morat last got to roll around in the Human Sphere, but better late than never!

Brightest exposure is best exposure

Last we left off, the group had gathered in what seemed to be a Shasvastii ship, totally without knowing it.  Someone in our assembly (the constantly drugged-out Nomad programmer) suggested that the ship take us to "the guy with the desk", so the obviously-AI (or pseudo-AI?) vessel responded by rocking into space and depositing us near some commerce building on Svarlheima.

Now, Svarlheima is cold, and nobody in the group hails from a cold climate.  So we basically trudged 50-60 feet through freezing weather, wrapping ourselves in coats and armour and whatever else we had, and entered a totally sterile building.  By totally sterile, I don't mean medically sterile...I mean completely and utterly plain, with a receptionist who didn't even seem to register that there was a hulking alien in the assembly.  Instead, she handed us some laughable forms to complete, and suddenly we were all employees of this madcap company.  It was at about this time that Kogaha the Morat started throwing around the term "pitiful wage-slave", and it became his go-to when speaking of humans for most of the mission.

We needed to get up to floor 23 to check out this guy's desk, because apparently it was some sort of insanely-important task that Lucy (the hyper-"helpful" ship) would not leave without completing.  Accessing the 23rd floor (apparently the levels were levels of promotion) would have taken ages, but our enterprising programmer hacked into the system and gave us all 23rd-floor status on our new company IDs.

Pretty much everyone in there was one of these...

A few things became apparent really quickly.  First, none of the humans cared about a potentially-hostile alien walking through their building.  Second, they all seemed to be really focused on "promotion", whatever that was (they didn't seem to know any details).  Third, they were all grossly pale and really unresponsive to pain.  So ok, maybe there was a good reason for us to be here...plus the GM kept prompting us to make Vigour rolls (health checks), and when anyone failed, they felt like they needed to get "promoted".  Kogaha himself never succumbed

After a few small "incidents" (read: bashing the heads of a few staff-members on their desks, maybe causing a fatality...), we discovered that the pitiful wage-slaves would be automatically promoted if the office above theirs was vacant.  So much for hard work, right?  Needless to say, this irritated and angered Kogaha the Morat, but he was driven by curiosity to discover what sort of malevolent mastermind could establish and sustain such a system.

All this time, we'd been harassing a human named Roland, who was blissfully ignorant and oh-so-wanting a promotion.  After thumping him one or twice, Kogaha thought he was dead...but apparently the desk-jockey was made of better stuff.  Once the guy in the next office had been thoughtfully annihilated by another member of the party, Roland was summoned DOWNSTAIRS - apparently the headquarters-hideout of the illustrious MANAGEMENT.  We followed him into the elevator, as he didn't seem to care.

So, turns out Management was some sort of insidious plot to make the pitiful human wage-slaves mill about in the basement until they were called.  We took a while to poke at them, and then something started to shoot out of the thick crowd at us.  One of the group (a tough-guy mercenary from Corregidor) ducked behind the elevator, only to be grabbed by two large aliens that Kogaha knew to be Chaksa slaves!  The mercenary gave out a shout just before being grabbed, so the stalwart Morat went to investigate - since clearly the rest of the pathetic humans could surely handle even more pathetic humans doped to the gills.

That was an incredibly flawed assumption (they ended up killing 75-100 humans in the crowd before finding the sniper), but that's ok because Kogaha was busy chopping Chaksa into kindling with his powered axe i.e. explosive CCW.  By the time he'd finished rescuing the so-called "tough guy" from Corregidor, the others had begun to give chase on what had revealed itself to be a Tohaa sniper.  With an astounding burst of speed, our resident drug-quaffing programmer reached his escape pod just after he did, leveled her chain colt, and...well, let's just say the Tohaa creature wasn't going to be moving very fast after that.  The Corregidor tough guy, seeking revenge, finally made it to the pod as well, and dug his pistol snugly under the Tohaa's chin, looking him in the eye as he blew his brains out.  I have a feeling this will be a thing.

In the end, it turns out that the Tohaa were using some sort of drug to render humans more pliable, and were essentially using the human wage-slave as test subjects for a wide variety of experiments.  We recovered some sort of strange plant-life that was all-but-screaming "take meeeeee!" on a chemical level, and we even hauled Roland along just in case we needed him.

Roland's new home

Turns out that we didn't really need him, and what a human crew-member innocently suggested as "let him go" turned into a sharp shove into the snowbank, followed by a closed spaceship door.  Such weird creatures, these apes without fur to protect them in harsh climates.

Off we zoomed, with MJ the programmer cradling the plant (she has a very addictive personality...), left at the ship's mercy as to where things would end up next.