Sandflies Think Myles is Pogie Bait
Last Friday night’s “mission” (read: massacre) was supposed to be straightforward: scout the Sandflies’ base, swat some bugs, and bask in our tactical brilliance. Instead, we demonstrated the kind of coordination usually reserved for penguins on roller skates.
Dave, in his most commanding “trust me, I know what I’m doing” tone, declared:
“Land out the front, we will assault through the main entrance.”
Myles landed nearby.
Zaph went solo through a side entrance and died.
Craig… landed at a side entrance and immediately ran away.
Yes, reader, the plan lasted a whole three seconds. A new record.
Enter the Beast
In the debrief, Dave decided the problem wasn’t us (ha!) but our lack of synchronized arrival. The solution: build a four-person assault thopter.
Cue research montage.
Materials required: Duraluminium (which nobody can pronounce, so we renamed it “Dura-num-nums”).
Recipe: 1 aluminium ingot + 500 ml water + 4 Jasmium crystals = 1 Dura-num-num.
Assault thopter cost: 450 Dura-num-nums.
Translation: “enough grinding to make an MMO developer blush.”
Craig was unleashed as the designated murder-hobbo, draining the blood of every scavenger he could find to keep our water economy afloat. The man has single-handedly put Red Cross out of business.
Mining Jasmium, however, required venturing into the radiation zone. Enter: iodine pills, rad suits, and Dave forgetting to wear them. His glowing corpse was later recovered by a buggy that can mine radioactive rocks but cannot drive itself out of the zone without Dave.
After many deaths, upgrades, and one awkward “buggy abandoned in a glowing puddle” incident, Dave finally brought home the motherlode. And lo! From the forges of madness emerged The Beast—a four-person assault thopter with a personality issue.
She was:
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Too wide for the hangar doors.
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Too heavy for the roof.
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Too thirsty (three medium batteries per fill).
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Too mocked by the other thopters (“no rockets, just storage”).
Dave insisted: “She’s not big, she’s just space-challenged.”
Pogie Bait Myles
On her maiden voyage, The Beast carried all four of us in glorious formation. We infiltrated a Sandflies camp by following a convenient trail of corpses (not ours, shockingly), hunted their leader in an Imperial test station, and Myles discovered his true calling:
Pogie Bait.
Every shielded Sandfly ignored the others and sprinted straight at him like moths to a very stab-able flame. The first twenty deaths were hilarious. The next twenty were just administrative.
After skewering the Red Scorpion and redecorating the desert in arterial crimson, we reported back to our Atreides handler. She promptly sent us back because we’d forgotten to pick up some notes. Naturally.
Adventures in Arakeen
Flush with victory, we flew The Beast eastward… only to discover the game doesn’t let you take passengers into the world map. So, four proud warriors trudged back to base and re-did the whole trip solo in our scout thopters.
In Arakeen, we banked, shopped, drank, and conducted Very Important Diplomatic Talks™ (read: pub crawl). Then home again.
The Great Cactus Scan
Next mission: scan under a giant cactus. We burned half our fuel just reaching the thing, only to discover scanning must be done on foot. And we forgot the scanner.
Craig nobly volunteered to fetch one, returned, and—after dropping thirty kilos of useless junk on the ground—handed it over. The scanner finally beeped, the quest log advanced, and we were off again chasing “information” and “ambushes,” aka filler content.
After Action Notes — from “Mr. Pogie Bait”
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Upgrade your gear. Standard sword (6 damage) ≠ sufficient.
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Why isn’t the entire base on the same level? Seriously. Whose idea was five hangars?
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Stop calling The Beast big. She’s sensitive.
Next week’s prediction: Dave will “accidentally” remodel the base again, Craig will get lost in a hole, Zaph will sigh audibly at us all, and Myles will die repeatedly while being used as premium-grade bug bait.
The Sandflies couldn’t design it better themselves.
