The Old Place reeked of rust and decay, its crumbling walls scarred by decades of war and neglect. Once a slum, now a battleground, its skeletal frame echoed with the clash of steel and the guttural roars of the Gammarauders. The Iron Society’s hunting party, cloaked in their ash-gray armor, had come for Rojak, their motley firearms glinting under the sickly green glow of a fractured sky. But the players—ragtag mercenaries turned heroes—fought with feral precision, their blades and blasters cutting through the hunters’ ranks. By the time the dust settled, more than half the Society’s party lay broken on the cracked concrete, their ambush thwarted by the players’ relentless counterattack. Rojak, the Purist they’d been sent to capture, cowered behind a rusted vat, his eyes darting like a trapped animal’s.
The Mutationists of the Iron Society fared no better. Six of their number sprawled lifeless, their twisted, misshapen bodies torn apart by the Gammarauders’ savage strength. Amid the chaos, the players caught sight of the Mutationists’ leader—a towering figure in tattered military fatigues, his presence commanding even in retreat. His eyes glowed with an unnatural sheen as he rose into the air, propelled by telepathic flight, another comrade clinging desperately to his back. The pair vanished into the smog-choked sky, while on the ground, the remaining Mutationists fled, scrambling over rubble toward the distant hills. Their retreat left a bitter tang of ozone in the air, the residue of their unnatural powers.
Rojak saw his chance in the aftermath, slipping away from the carnage with the stealth of a man who’d dodged death before. But Paul Best, the players’ sharp-eyed tracker, wasn’t fooled. His nose twitched—something about Rojak’s nervous sweat smelled of betrayal. With a lunge, Paul tackled the Purist, pinning him to the ground. Rojak’s protests were shrill, his claims of innocence drowned out by the clatter of his own gear spilling across the floor. The players bound his wrists with scavenged wire. Any trust in this one has now completely eroded.
Among Rojak’s scattered belongings, a polished book caught their eye. Its black leather cover was worn, but the title was unmistakable, penned by a twentieth-century despot whose name was a curse even in this broken world. The players exchanged grim looks—Rojak was definitely not worth the trouble. The book was damning proof of his treachery, a thread connecting him to the Knights of Genetic Purity’s twisted ideology. Whispers passed among the group: Rojak wasn’t just a coward—he was a tyrant’s best cabana boy.
They dragged him to an abandoned tenement on the edge of the Old Place, its walls sagging under the weight of time. Inside, the air was thick with mold and the faint glow of microscopic flakes of decaying isotopes. The players huddled in a shadowed corner, their faces lit by a flickering chem-lamp. Rojak knelt before them now in handcuffs, his breath shallow, his eyes pleading. Paul cracked his knuckles, while Mordecai sharpened a blade against a whetstone, the sound deliberate and menacing. The interrogation was about to begin, and in the silence that followed, the question hung unspoken: would words alone break Rojak, or would they carve the truth from him with something sharper?
