The Tale of the Promethean Heisters

So, I've had a game I am 3000% confident would take your collective breath away. I've tried to do almost three quests now, and every time my poor scheduling and life get in the way. But, I may as well share one of my crowning moments as a GM with the best board. Figure that way, you all can enjoy what I was able to do before I finally get around to publishing it all, and can't share it in such a glorious manner as this.

We start on a colony known as "New Amsterdam." The colony had a happy little bank, small enough to be the perfect place to hold a large sum of Economium, the material that all credits in the Confederacy were based on. A group of four criminals had been assembled by their boss, the Informant, for a pretty easy job. All they had to do was break into the bank, steal a specific item, and everything else was theirs to keep. After a Charlie's Angels introduction, they cased the joint. They discover that the mark is pretty easy: they are looking for the staff of a Banker, one of the economy-cultists that oversee the flow of crystal. You take the staff, and you can have infinite money. There's enough crystal in the vault to make up for whatever they could want out of that staff, so they stick to the plan.

They call in a few favors, and the day of the heist they have a stolen flier painted like what the Bankers use so they can escape without any concern from local police. As they were setting up to initiate the heist proper, one of the crew sits at a table across from the Banker, who strikes up a conversation entirely uninvited. They joke about Black Scribes, and how shitty they are, because the Banker had managed to pull a Dennis Nedry and scream about how they had the crystal in the vault downstairs to the open air. The Scribe walked, not wanting to risk his people on a fucking idiot. Banker didn't see it that way, though, so he made light of the scenario with a stranger.

"So, friend, what is it that you do?" he asks Beast. Beast was a 6'2" man of pure muscle and a massive hammer on his back. If this weren't an Outer Colony with very lax open carry laws, people would've been alarmed. But, there were people with weapons on their hip all over the place.
"Financial transfers," Beast says as he pulls out the handgun and puts on his mask, "Now get on the god damn floor."

The crew blasts the doors to the teller's booth, cuts the silent alarm, and secures the bank. With tactical precision, the crew gets to work cleaning out the joint. Doors were secured, hostages moved into the bathrooms, shutters pulled down, and security cameras were looped to show nothing out of the ordinary. They find an AI core, which the hacker of the group tucks into his pockets with some sleight of hand. He notes it has "REPUBLIC OF TERRA SECNAV" stenciled on the side, and knows he's stolen some grade-A toy.

As the crew leave, they make contact with their employer: the mad Matryoshka. For context, this is a fucking madwoman of the highest order. In a setting with a power level closer to Halo than anything else, you have a woman who has the Eye of Terror condensed entirely in her skull. This degree of insanity is relevant later.

She meets the crew, takes the staff happily, and talks to the person who was a middleman for the crew until that moment. She asks him politely why four random chucklefucks were able to take a bank that he couldn't get into, because he has the powers to teleport along powerlines and infiltrate buildings like banks with ease.

He can't provide a suitable answer, one of the players jokes that he's a pretty shitty merc, and so she shoots him in the fucking face. She gives them tickets to her show, and says that they'll enjoy the payout. Money checks, and they bounce to the safehouse. Some minor jobs come and go, and finally the crew has their safehouse raided by the Black Scribes. Remember how they had a team on that Banker?

Turns out that they didn't enjoy the idea of four chucklefucks (the Matryoshka used those words for a reason) knocking over the bank immediately after they left put their team of four in an... Interesting predicament. The Black Scribes order them to clean out some human trafficker station, or they'll kill them right where they stand. Beast didn't care, he got to hurt people, Chains needed to fund onlining the stolen AI Core, and the other two were pretty much just in for the ride.

The station had pretty notable defenses, but nothing can really stop a suicide charge of a boarding craft that rams into an airlock, explodes the bulkhead, and then drills the requisite equipment into place for a hostile entry. The team infiltrates the station with ease, flashbanging the shit out of everything and sending Beast to blindly swing his hammer. They confront the boss of the operation, and find the man also dealt heavily in counterfeit money. They take him out, lift everything that isn't nailed down, and report to the Scribes that the trafficking was given a permanent red light.

This puts them in contact with a powerful man: a Senator from the Republic of Terra. To become a Senator in the Republic, you need to achieve a certain amount of time in military service, and achieve a certain rank. As a retired Marine Colonel, he was a bad sonuvabitch. He contacts the Crew, and says they can have their pick of whatever they want in a raid on an opposing senator's house, IF they can do it quietly and rifle up the evidence of that senator's crimes in the process.

You would think quietly going into an unguarded apartment under the threat of immediate, explosive military violence upon fucking up would be easy. The Senator was going to great lengths to leave as little security as possible. No. That's not the case. These chucklefucks had to call a mulligan on it because they got into a thirty minute fist-fight on a single stairwell.

The crew had, in infinite wisdom, fucked around on the top floor long enough to where my randomized patrol routes had guards switch locations every so many turns. They got to a stairwell and fought one guy to silently take him down. This progressed for at least a dozen turns. They take out six of the eight guards, before they progress further into the house and get caught by one of the remaining two guards. Chains readies one of his shotguns and blasts eight shots into the dead silence of night.

Yea, everyone at the table called him an idiot. But nobody called him an idiot after, in exactly the five seconds a turn is in Halo Mythic, a seven foot tall suit of power armor kicked the garage door in and put machine gun rounds through his fucking torso before using his carcass as a doormat. Speedy, the runner, hopped a fence and got shot to death by autocannons. Beast didn't know what was happening, but heard the gunshots and realized he was fucked. The party heavy, Bojack, was trying to clean a safe out. Instead, it tripped an alarm and sealed him inside. So he grabbed the building's power supply and killed himself.

I took a fifth of whiskey, and we redid that wonderful fucking train wreck of a session.

This time only two went in, and they managed to have everything else work out the same way, except nobody triggered the alarms. They discover, in a panic room in the basement, a Slavic man known as Almir. He was held by their mark because he had the ability to read alien glyphs that were found in several ruins across the Confederacy. The poor xenoarchaeologist was in a panic room grabbing himself to nudie mags and smoking high-dollar cigars when two dudes with shotguns opened the vault and took him with them. He reveals strange alien artifacts in a truck bed, and the players ride off like bandits. Several dozen arrests are made, and the Senator pays them handsomely for clearing his opposition and helping him get a bill through.

Now, the woman with the Eye of Terror in her skull? She's got a lot of irons in this fire. Pretty much every part of it has been orchestrated by her, and the party is starting to suspect it. But, she hooks them up with somebody who they like. He snorts coke, he's probably autistic, and has connections throughout the Confederacy that makes him capable of delivering illegal guns and toys to everyone and anyone that needs it. He sicks the crew on a warehouse from Duke Firearms & Accessories, a company that has "fucked up megacorporation" as a bulletpoint on their Quarterly Reports. If you can think of it, they sell it. They also have a premium line of weapons that hearken to simpler times of Old Western shootouts and Clint Eastwood.

But, the Crew is tasked with stealing whatever they can in a shadow-raid. If they can do it quiet, they get everything. They go loud, Jimmy can't pay 'em. So they find a guard, tell Beast to choke him out, and they walk the rest of the facility. My players happen to be fucking brilliant this session, and not only bring silencers, but avoid fighting the guards in stairwells! They also discover that if they transmit from a stolen walkie-talkie, the other guards can't override their transmission. So they slaughter every guard on shift, and use forklifts to steal prototype power armor, gun shipments marked off for budding colonies that need to fund their defensive garrisons, and loads of fucking cocaine.

Then they try to steal the forklifts, but they couldn't fit the forklifts down a manhole cover.

They also find a half-disassembled robot that is being used as a baseline for more prototype technology. This one seems to be using a very old OS that hard-coded sapience, but they are applying alien mathematics and engineering principles to synthesize a neural link that would make a seamless bridge between AI and Human. They steal every file about this project, and sell the robot.

Chains chuckled to himself, but never explained why.

Now, the party has to get out. They call in a bird, which picks them up. In doing so, it sets off every alarm on that side of the planet. What do they do? Beast loads his favorite toy with a 40mm thermobaric grenade, and fires it at the helipad as a bird from Duke lands. The warehouse explodes, and Speedy reveals she had been putting C4 all up and down the building while the others were taking care of the robot.

Just imagine, for a moment, being a 9-5er security guard. You know your employer's a little on the shady side, but you have to pay the bills. You maybe have a family. Then, one night, you get called in. Apparently, the graveyard shift is full of fucking dipshits that all at once stop talking on the radio. Rather than call the cops, your boss sends you in. You kiss your wife, and go. On the helipad, you see a chopper take off, and four jackasses in masks are flipping you the bird as you see one point a grenade launcher at you. You do the smart thing, dodge by dropping below the helipad. As you do so, your pelvis flies through your skull as the entire rest of the building goes off in a chain reaction that flattens the fucking building and smokes out the entire industrial district.

Out fucking standing, right?

Needless to say, this was the point I knew I had something fucking magical with this group. They were tired of stealth heists, and so we'll come back to the Matryoshka. Picture related, she's been the waifu of at least one player every game. This time, it was Speedy. Speedy wasn't a psionic, so crazy bitch wasn't into it. What she was into, though, was using the party as security for her EDM show. A test of how they would do later, she told them she would pay them handsomely if they just go to her show. She messes with her prosthetic eye, and shows a heart there. How kawaii, right?

She puts on one helluva show, the party discovers. However, she also attracts all sorts of goons that want to kill her. All she does is hack minds, make everyone into a security camera, and hoard secrets like a dragon does gold, why would anyone want to kill her? The party finds themselves expertly dodging civilians high out of their minds on neural hacking EDM music, and hearing nothing but laughter from the madwoman as bullets fly around her.

The party takes on a mech, which for those of you familiar with Halo lore, is the equivalent to a HRUNTING/YGGDRASIL Mark I Prototype. Now, for a guy in a vehicle one of these things is a problem. Four dudes on foot run into somewhat of a problem, especially when they blast it open and find it doesn't even have a pilot, and is being remote controlled. They wreck one, and as it explodes a missile rack detonates and reveals the venue had a secret passageway that the thugs were using.

Matryoshka doesn't like freeloaders, so she sends the crew after them with enthusiasm as she takes one goon by the arm and electrocutes him to death before continuing on her concert. The players come down the way and find shipping containers filled with military grade equipment, packaged and stored TOO neatly. They decide not to steal any of it, and instead follow the way out to an empty lot.

Upon exiting, the crew is told to put their hands up.

Beast, unable to ascertain where the shouting comes from, instead tells this voice to fuck itself. Immediately, he is tackled, punched ten feet into the air, and slammed into the ground by a woman who wears power fists. Speedy panics, puts her hands up, and watches a woman with flaming gauntlets begin beating the shit out of the only human Speedy had seen get into a fist-fight with a 13ft robot and win. She has an idea, however, and decides to use some slight of hand to throw a flashbang.

As she puts her hands up, she yanks the pin of a flashbang and tries to throw it at her feet. When the moment counts, though, Speedy reveals she's a fucking putz and instead just throws it behind her. She spins around to duck from what she thinks is in front of her, and it blinds her and everyone else in the lot. Three massive suits of power armor and four Republic Marines with polarized visors continue to tell her to not act dumb, and the only people affected are her, Beast, and the pink-haired woman who was beating Beast's ass. As they get cuffed, they hear a strange sound: a tape recorder rewinds.

"Hi," it asks, "¿Necesitas ayuda?"

The party comes to from the flashbang in time to see a psionic much like Beast, a Psi Assault. As the man wearing a chicken mask beats the dogshit out of the Republic Marines, the Jacket reveals himself to be an Entropist, weaponizing fear as well as physical violence. Excessive blood leaves victims, and there seems to be more machinery coming out of the power armor than should be there. When it gets to the woman, the Jacket clocks her across the jaw. She punches him in his face, and reality freezes as he plays "You need a doctor." She manages to break even with him in the ensuing fight, but ultimately retreats. Beast comes to, and begins firing grenades at her evac ship. He admits he may love that woman, and hears his missed grenades knock over other buildings nearby.

"Have a great day," the Jacket plays on his recorder.

All of the players made fun of me for a week for including Vi. I couldn't blame them. I needed an equally ridiculous cop to match their equally ridiculous shenanigans, but they were to hit levels I only half-knew I was building them to. For context, when I build a campaign I go "I want this end-goal" and the rest of it just comes organically. The short-term goals are thought of on the spot, and it all evolves from there.

We start now, on an Avanguardia colony. The name is irrelevant, what is relevant is that everyone's favorite cocaine-snorting jackass has contracted them to do something pretty fucking insane. The mark was a handful of shipping containers filled to the brim with assault droids. These droids were illegal due to a lot of bullshit that happened years prior, but the Manufacturer Clans kept them on standby in case legislation changed and they wouldn't get their shit pushed by the Republic for having them onlined.

Problem: Avanguardia has a privatized military that responds fucking instantly. On top of that, they've got some nice fleets on standby to shit on whatever tries to get onto their factories without permission. So, you may be asking yourself, how does the party intend to get there?

Feet first, obviously.

They contact a friend of Jimmy's. This friend has a South African accent and probably was at some point specops. He says that he's got a ship that can blockade run, and it's got some HEVs that will do the trick of running them past AA defenses.

"For sure!"

So they enter a slipspace jump, and come out of it full-force-forward. The pods drop, and their pilot fucking bolts. The FTL jump he makes fries the AA guns due to "space science bullshit I just don't have time to explain, so get those fuckin' droids!" and the players come out with guns blazing. They hold off several waves of private military and police assaults, eventually getting to the point where ammo is scarce.

"Right lads, you can get your own escape? Yes?"

No, they couldn't. They were up shit-creek without a paddle, and were hearing several choppers above them. So, they looked around the warehouse and realized they were holed up against a Mobile Recovery Vehicle. Not only would it hold the cargo containers, but they figured they could ram a wall with it and book it out of there. What they found after rifling through the glove box for a technical manual, was that it had a maximum speed of 28km/h (17mph). They weren't gonna run away from shit in the Elephant, but they could perhaps load all their loot on it and make due. Another assault wave came in, and they used the loot to splatter dozens of unfortunate cops.

But, when they got a break and revved the machine up, it couldn't break the wall. Beast had a solution: a grenade! He loaded the weapon, spun it on his finger, and fired the round at the wall. It gave, and the Elephant surged to its top speed. The party was accosted by three gunships, all blaring at them that if they stood down they would be brought in peacefully.

Four people gave middle fingers at the gunships, and all swung heavy weaponry skyward to obliterate the gunship. When it went down, it crashed into the warehouse and knocked the building over.

"Well, I was thinking we'd just make him go away, but I'll take it!" Beast shouted.

Chains was piloting the Elephant, and got a blip from the AI he finally booted up saying he would like what he found there. This AI will be handled later, but for now...

The Elephant slowly approached the cliff. It came to everyone's attention that they were flying off to their deaths instead of being caught by the cops, which they all agreed was the best way to go.

Beast closed his eyes, and swung on the top turret to stretch his arms out and say "Don't ever let go, Jack!"

Bojack told him to shut his fucking mouth.

Were those the last words? Of fucking course not. That'd be too easy.

The Gunrunner screamed into their ears that they were totally good, that they were GODS AMONG MEN AIGHT?! and that NUFFING WOUDL GO WRONG if they just flew off the cliff.

NUFFING!

The Elephant teetered on the edge of the cliff, the last bit of forward momentum struggling to happen as if even Speedwagon was afraid. And there was a brief moment in time where the players at the table all thought "this is where we die. Good campaign!"

The falling sensation terminated, no character looked forward as they fell, for fear of seeing death (and hearing me describe it in vivid detail). They all opened their eyes, and felt their stomachs get jerked in random directions as the ship bolted into space and then into slipspace. The Gunrunner howled in laughter, snorted three lines of coke, and said they were the "best fookin' madmen I'VE EVER. HAD. THE PLEASURE. OF WORKIN'. WITH!"

The party was excited, each Heister was able to walk out with enough money to retire. Not that any of them fucking would, they were addicted to this lifestyle, the adrenaline, the praise, the infamy... All of it spoke to them in ways that mere mortals would never experience.

There was... However, some extra loot the party found.

When they rescued Almir, they had found strange artifacts. They'd decoded them with Almir's help, and found out that these artifacts held secrets to technology at least thirty years ahead of where humans were. AT LEAST. So, you put uplifting technology in the hands of bank robbers and what do they do with it? They make tools to rob banks.

The AI Core was onlined, and Chains went to great lengths to ensure it would be the best bank robber's assistant he could ask for. He wanted it to do e-commerce jobs, and make him filthy rich on the side, but as it activated, it had other plans. Breaker-77 was born, after seventy-six failed attempts to compile the AI finally came together. What was born was an AI with something called "Pinocchio Syndrome."

What these datacores had in them was the secrets to zero-point energy, and advanced robotics principles. They found four more datacores in the Avanguardia warehouse, and these cores had advanced application principles for energy field containment, and a few neat tricks for field manipulation. Energy shields were something humanity had figured out, but lasers? That was hard. Something just wasn't connecting for laser weaponry to be a thing.

But, with the right amount of insanity, alien technology, and a robot fascinated with Al Capone and the movie Scarface, anything is possible.

The "Vault-Cracker" Laser was born the same day Breaker-77 had a body worth a shit. Remember how I said Avanguardia had droids on the off-chance robots were legalized?

That wasn't happening ANY fucking time soon thanks to this development.

The crew was contracted by a new contact. This man was known only as The Director. He ran the United News Network, a media empire that monopolized all forms of media and diversified itself to make every cent it could. However, The Director had a problem! He was in a lot of debt. However, he had the charity to make up for that debt, he just needed something "GOT DAMN AWFUL" to happen to those he owed money.

The Bankers had a homeworld, the First Celestial Holding Company. You hit that, you hit the fucking motherload. It was the biggest bank, so massive that you could get away with hitting a portion of it and call yourselves record-breakers. The kind of "GOT DAMN AWFUL" the Director needed was an entire vault to be cleaned out.

Our party couldn't keep it in their pants long enough to clean the vault, because Speedy decided to walk in before the group could case the place with one goal: go Loud.

She walked through revolving doors wearing a mask and a bullet-proof vest, turned to a guard, and blasted him away on a sunny Tuesday morning.

"I'm gonna roll a Charisma test to convince the other Guard that he slept with my wife."

I had something magical this fucking session, and it wasn't spirits that would ease the stroke I had upon hearing that.

"You said this is a progressive future! Lesbians are a thing in space!"
"I mean, yes but-"

Bojack's player was normally fairly quiet. He would cut up, have a good time, but he rarely had anything that had a lasting impact. He just preferred to let his characters do the talking. But, this ONE TIME, he made an exception and brought up a point that any other time would have made me so fucking proud that I inspired.

"Yes, you see, this IS a progressive future, so you also have to factor in the possibility that the guard was gay, and thus wouldn't sleep with your lesbian wife."

As my eyes rolled into the back of my head, I began throwing dice across the table to try and recover my sanity. Apparently I let the dice decide, and when I came to it was the vague inclination to voice out Guard 2's reaciton to Speedy's failed Charisma test. (Five degrees of failure is pretty fucking impressive in Mythic.)

"But Bob was gay!"

And then everyone started shooting Speedy.

She ran faster than the bullets just enough to hide behind a bench, and the rest of the crew said in the van "Well, Speedy's fucking dead."

The Director chimed in: "If you boys go n' fuck this up, I'll have yo' fuckin' heads snatched up and sent to the Informant in a fuckin' CIGAR BOX!"

The party rethought their options.

Breaker-77 was on this heist as the stranger 5th, but he was eager to please. He had an idea: use the escape van as an entry. The First Celestial Holding Company had sealed its revolving doors with security shutters that were one meter thick steel, on the entrance and exit.

Simply put, the van was going to blow a hole in the wall, and the party would jump out like a boarding party wearing masks and telling people to eat that dirt.

Breaker got behind the wheel, cracked his knuckles, and said: "I want you gentlemen to know I have NEVER driven a car before."

So, in a move that my players were irritated by but it was one of those "I'm the GM here we're going to make this work because fuck you Speedy is an idiot" moments, the van obliterates the revolving doors and their shutters. The party comes out, and establishes their role as alphas on the bank floor quickly. Since they couldn't case the joint, there was no ability to cut alarms or anything. Fuck it, they were doing it live!

"You boys! Progenitor's BOWELS, MAH BOYS!" the Director laughed, "You are the kinda fuckin' idiots that make me a lot of ratin's!"

"You're filming this?!" Chains asked.
"Of course!" the Director guffawed in the way his thick, Nawleans accent allowed him to, "What kinda media mogul do y'fuckin' take me for?"

So the party set up shop. They endured several police assaults, but found themselves in trouble: the stairs. Beast had his grenade launcher that could collapse the stairwell as they dropped down, but Chains had another idea. He had a satchel charge he'd blown money on, and god dammit he was gonna use it.

So he threw it.

There was a moment at the table where I interrogated him about how much he knew of satchel charges. He knew they blew in one direction, and that you would usually set them to get the blast at a specific angle.

He insisted he was throwing them.

Several randomized directions later, he managed to not kill the entire party in three separate tosses of the satchel charges. He collapsed every stairwell, until he got to the basement where the vault was, and he threw a satchel that created a sunroof on the third basement floor.

Yea, he apparently was saving the big ones for when it would be the dumbest to use!

Needless to say, the party was unaware that Breaker-77 was a robot until a cop was on him. His right arm lowered the assault rifle and revealed mechanisms that unfolded into a strange device: it blasted an orange hole in the cop's torso, and the crew was frozen in some degree of shock.

The police pull back, but they hear on the communication lines that the Republic is overhead and that every orbital defense is aimed at them. The Republic has Admiral Hayman overhead, which the players recognize as a "take no shit" kinda bitch.

"BELLATOR are ready to drop, ma'am."
"No. Let the Bankers send their mercs, we're going to keep an eye on this. An orbital strike is too much."

The players shit a brick as a HEV comes down. They open up, knowing an Emperor Arms Commando is coming down: these are basically Starcraft Marines that are on cocaine and fling explosives like darts.

They all pour fire into the pod, but find themselves staring at an occupied HEV.

"I was going to kick the door out and put it in your ass, but I guess I'll just have to use my fucking BOOTS!"

Breaker is reminded that he has a rocket launcher on his back by Chains, and he fires both tubes. The Commando goes down, and the party rejoices. But, there is another problem.

How in the actual fuck are they getting the loot?

"Boys, I have a solution! Go into the vault, find yourself the control console, and punch in zero, zero, six, three. Y'all will enjoy it!"

They had to carve their way in, but once they had, finding the console was easy. They punched the code in, and heard mechanisms within the vault's walls whir.

"Oh, and fellas, mah understanding of these schematics there are devices to secure you all. It's gonna get bumpy."

The party find themselves inside a vault with multiple floors, and realize it's a three-story cubic block of metal. Untold trillions of credits worth of Economium is underneath them, and they are probably the closest to never needing or wanting they're ever going to get.

The machine launches struts through the air, and the Director begins to explain that the Bankers would build around these massive vaults, dropping them on planets and then starting to build the structure. The need for pulling these vaults out of collapsed terrain was so apparent that they made a lattice of structures that would allow them to use spacecraft to pick up and move these vaults.

However, they never had people inside the vault when they moved it, though, so the Promethean Heisters (a name the media had called them) were doing a world first!

A frigate zipped along the ground, and abused the no-fire zone to not get shot-down to snatch the vault. It launched spaceward immediately, and got into the atmosphere without any challenge. However, once it was clear of leaving debris in the civilian centers, the orbital installations obliterated the ship.

There is something about physics, that the party was privy to. When an object is in motion, it stays in motion until acted upon by an outside force. They were careening through space, what shredded remnants of atmosphere existed barely transmitted their screams of terror as they approached a space station.

There's a song that is relevant here.

"L O D E S OF E M O N E"
"WHAT'S THAT SPELL?"

The vault slammed into the space station, and it careens through a dozen spacecraft. A small terminal connects to the vault, sealing an atmosphere within.

"LOADSAMONEY!"

The Heisters were panicking, but what they were pressed on was finding a young man poking his head in, in what would end up being his worst mistake.

"Hello?" the young man asks.

A short interrogation later, the man introduces himself as Royce Arnolds. The Heisters toss him a shard of economium, tell him to enjoy his road trip, and to run very, very far.

"Royce Arnolds?" the Director asks, "Fourteen thousand credits, each, for him."
"Make it twenty-eight thousand, and you've got a deal," Chains counter-offered.
"You are worth my respect, you piece of shit, deal. Don't you ever show your face on Media again, you rat bastard!"

Royce is abducted. The party sends Breaker-77 to steal oxygen tanks and masks for when the vault is launched off the station. They had no way to actually DO IT, but Royce says he knows someone who could do it, and gets on the phone.

Breaker meanwhile finds himself at a general goods store for the station. He fires his assault rifle, with explosive rounds, into the ceiling, and howls in laughter. The people in the store panic and start handing him money. He takes a cash register drawer, and throws it back at the poor kid behind the register.

"I don't need your money right now, I've got a vault fucking full of it, I need your fucking OX cans and masks! IN THE FUCKING BAG!"

A woman cries, asking why he's doing it. She'll give him anything.

"I don't... Wait, is that pearl necklace from Earth?"
"Y-yes?!"
"Give me that."

Breaker considers himself the best Bank Robber as he returns to the Vault, and empties about fifteen oxygen tanks and eight masks.

"I'm the fucking BEST. Say it!"
"No, fuck you," Chains spits.

The favor comes in, and latches onto the vault's support struts. It throws the vault out of the station, and everyone screams until it slams into a luxury yacht. The yacht immediately hits slipspace, and they are greeted by the Director himself. He walks in on his cane, snatches Royce by the arm, and pays out.

The Director laughed heartily, and paid out to the Matryoshka as well. There was one final heist that the crew was being set up for, and it was a culmination of so many overarching plans; however it would lay down one final plot months after and set up on one hand a tragedy without equal and on the other hand an emergency that had no precedent. But, for the Promethean Heisters? It was nothing but money.

An Ode to Greed would not suffice.

The Milburn family was a powerful family of Dominion, a planet that was a tourist trap built to emulate the cut-throat politics of Pre-Promethean nobility. On this planet, was untold riches. It was a mark that, thanks to the Republic of Terra recently securing ownership of the planet, was tantalizingly out of reach. But, the favors they'd pulled set them up for this job.

The Gun Runner had secured the assault droids be bought by the Milburns as "service bots" for a massive party. The Senator personally requested the Matryoshka play a show on Dominion, one of many voices asking for it, the Black Scribes making connections to ensure that nobody looked to far into all of these connections.

Finally, the Director bought the Crew their tickets to get into the party of the year, the Milburn Annexation Ball. The MAB was a party built by nobles for nobles, and all of the big-name players would be there.

Anyone with any degree of money would be there, and the Republic would have a vested interest in everything going just fine. The Promethean Heisters had their work cut out for them, but the prize was worth every risky roll of the dice, every "Hit me" call, and every spin of the roulette.

In short, the Heisters were groomed for the Heist of the Century. As they got there, they found some strangely familiar faces playing poker. A Republic Marine Corps Captain was at the table, surrounded by... Strangers that weren't so strange.

After some discussion, the Crew meets stars.

They chat it up with their colleagues in grand theft, and the Ocean's Crew reveal to them that this captain is -fucking awful- at poker, but he's got way more money and balls than sense. Using a bit of a coded language, the Heisters admit that they were the ones who cleaned the First Celestial, and the groups hit it off.

They set up one extra con for the Heisters: cleaning this Captain's bars off his uniform. What Chains noticed, however, was that the uniform was unique to most Republic officer uniforms. It has base-jumping gear, a grappling hook included. On top of that, it has a high-tech helmet and the man is guarded by two riflemen.

Beast resolves to beat the captain senseless, and if he loses, he'll mask up. He tells the rest of the Crew and the Ocean's Crew to be ready for shit to go loud. Everybody splits, and the crowd begins to form around Beast and the Captain.

Matryoshka's Folly Poker is a unique variant of Poker: Jokers are included, Royals Wild, and a unique hand is the Matryoshka's Hand. It stands on a Dead Man's Hand as the best hand in the game, and requires two jokers and three queens. You can Wild into any hand BUT that one.

Beast is dealt two Queens, and smiles. The Captain calls.

Beast calls.
Danny drops.
Captain calls.
Beast calls.

All fold but Beast and Captain.

The Captain is out of chips, but Beast had more. He throws a keycard on the table.

"What's that worth?"
"It's priceless, just fold."
"Fucker," Beast says, "How many chips do I need to call you on?"

A number is given.

"Hold?" the dealer nods. Beast smirks as he recognizes the assault droid that had been dealing cards. Beast flips his off-shore account over, and gets as many chips as he can afford. He comes in with one fist-sized chip, tosses it in the pot.

"Call."

The dealer begins flipping cards.

An 8, a 9, and a Joker were on the table.

A burned Queen.
A flipped Queen.
A burned 4.

Beast reaches his hand across the table, and says "I want you to know, Cap, that either way we had a great game tonight."

His free hand goes to his pistol, as a Joker is flipped.

"SIKE!" Beast shouts, scooping the chips and the keycard to him. The two guards pulled out weapons, and insisted that they couldn't let him walk with that keycard. After some argument, Beast managed to get Admiral Hayman herself to come down to the Casino and take the card from him personally. He looked to the card, and wondered aloud:

"What is this even to?"

The guards point to a statue in the center of the casino, a massive upscaled suit of power armor. The BJORNSTAD Mk3, in shining glory. It held a machine gun, and had a small missile rack standing over its shoulder.

"Breaker," Chains said, "Can you pilot one of those?"
"I'm already hacking it."
"Actually," Beast walks away from the guards, and brings the keycard to Breaker.
"This... Yes. This is good." Breaker accesses the mech, and returns the keycard.

The crew was in position, ready to go loud. They were just waiting for the Admiral to come down.

"Fellas," the Matryoshka chimes, "If you go loud while Admiral Hayman is down here, you're gonna get BELLATOR dropped on you. Go now, she gets stuck upstairs and we're safe!"

The crew nods to one another, the Ocean's crew books it, and the statue in the center of the casino begins powering up. As it powers up, Chains jumps up on top of the display and climbs its leg to get to the cockpit.

Nothing says "GET ON THE GOD DAMN FLOOR" better than a two-story robot with a machine gun and bleeding-edge electronics.

I started this way too late in my night. I'll finish this up tomorrow after my classes, feel free to comment on it in the meantime!

I definitely want to hear people's thoughts.

>redid the session
Nah you are a faggot, wipe is wipe

Bump.

The players were dealing with shit, I was tired, and the 30min fistfight was a nightmare. I gave them one mulligan for the entire campaign, and they did it on a stealth job. From there it was back to usual stuff. One has a kid, the other was juggling his jobs, it all boils down to a rough session of characters acting out of character to do some of the shitf that ultimately got them killed.

I'll update later today

le bump

Now, we're at the meat and potatoes of the campaign. The rising action, the climax that has her ripping your hair out, it all boiled down to one bass drop from the Matryoshka, who had been performing on stage the entire time this was going down.

"Deep breaths, across the crowd!" she howled, "And now," the petite woman drew a tommy gun and mimed along the giant fucking robot in the center of the casino floor as it spun an arm around and loaded a fresh drum of 1.6in slugs that were fed through a magnetic accelerator to dispense hot death.

The music halted for a second, and everyone on the casino floor watched in awe as the massive machine dropped from the display and fired half its magazine into the glass ceiling, dropping shards of a grandiose stained glass image of Prometheus all around it.

"DONACDUM!" the Matryoshka cheered, firing her tommy gun wildly, and the robot pointed at the massive crowd of now-terrified patrons before adding its own little quip. The voice of Breaker-77 was filled with the kind of joy that true adrenaline seasons sadism with, and Chains found a neural interface link that was an easy fit for his own neural implants.

"Everybody, get on the god damn ground! We are the Promethean Heisters, and this is OUR fucking casino!"

Several members of the crowd revealed themselves to be Republic Marines, and engaged the Heisters immediately. The assault droids in unison disarmed them and subdued them, using zipties to secure them as effective hostages. The Crew began posting up on various vantage points, searching for the entrance to the casino's vault. Problem was, they found it under the island bar that the mech was on.

What does two stories of ass-kicking robot do when it has something covering its target?

It holstered the machine gun, and grabbed the island bar by its base to hoist it into the air. Now, at this point, every Republic Marine and Drop Trooper in seven lightyears was mobilizing.

Full. Force. Forward.

What the crew quickly discovered was that the BJORNSTAD Mk3 Armor System, known as XRXES-1, had one very unique feature.

Chains and Breaker-77 were entering into a state similar to Pacific Rim's "drift," in fact they were experiencing a phenomenon that prior to this armor system had turned humans into vegetables and driven AI mad. The advances in technology from all of those datacores had already been put to use for one project, and that was the BJORNSTAD MK3 Project. The prototype was on display, and it was meant to be a trap of sorts. See, the Milburn Casino was THE place to hit, and at a party the size of the Milburn Annexation Ball was bound to cause SOME kind of trouble. The local Black Scribes Cell (a previous campaign that was only tangentially connected to this one) had a tip that SOMETHING was going to happen. They prepared one likely spot, the Republic prepared another.

But, the trap was found, disarmed, and hijacked by probably the most insane Heister and his equally troublesome AI. So, the first test-run of the BJORNSTAD MK3 Program was underway.

Problem, though, as you can imagine, was that it worked astoundingly well.

A Drop Trooper landed, kicked out his pod door, and charged the mech. A Drop Trooper is nothing to scoff at, imagine Tychus Findlay, just slightly more refined in tactics and strategy, and add about seven more to a squad. This one Drop Trooper rallied four broken squads into one, and opened coordinated fire on the mech.

And then the mech launched a fucking bar at them.

Of all the casualties inflicted, "Death by Slot Machine" was probably the worst one to fill out, and more than likely the worst way to get an early retirement. But, approximately fifteen Drop Troopers were knocked over by flying slot machines, forty six normal Marines were killed by roulette tables, and a craps table was the cause of destruction of a gunship roughly equivalent to the Vulture from Halo Wars.

Not even counting the XRXES-1's weapons yet!

The Crew entered into full chaos, with everyone earning a spot of glory. Speedy had ran through and cleaned out every register in the shopping mall above, taken down twelve ODST-equivalents, and outran a Drop Trooper.

Beast had taken down two Drop Troopers by himself, and was confronted by a small army of soldiers armed with psionic riot shields and his lover, the Enforcer. She jumped him after he obliterated the phalanx, and the fight was on. While Breaker and Chains danced and flung casino games at people, Bojack used his lightning machine gun to hose anybody trying to interrupt Beast and the Enforcer's spat.

In a fight that would have fit into an episode of RWBY for how much the two were bouncing around the game floor, the two exchanged insults. At one point, Beast confessed that he was into short-haired women that could put up a good fight, and he spotted a blush.

So, when the final blows were traded and she was unconscious on the floor, he hoisted her over his shoulders and put her with the rest of the loot. He wasn't a barbarian, no, but he knew that if they weren't beating the shit out of one another, he might be able to get some play. His goal was using her ability as an Enforcer to have him "taken in" as a consultant for her, get in her pants, get Republic citizenship, and get out of this heist scott-free.

He'd done some reading on Enforcers, and found out that they could pardon criminals under certain circumstances by granting them Republic citizenship. Republic citizenship meant minimum income, the ability to go out in public, and MAYBE a chance at retirement.

Plus, he thought the Enforcer was hot, so whatever.

The Admiral made a personal call to the Promethean Heisters.

"What in the FUCK are you doing on my planet?! I will drop the BELLATOR this fucking instant!" she screamed.
"Nuh-uh-uh, didn't say the magic word," Beast laughed, "You come down here, I give you the key to the robot, and all's good. Remember? That was our deal!"

The Admiral was supremely pissed, and over open comms began making the request to her superiors, the Admiralty Board.

For the Republic of Terra, in wartime and emergency scenarios, the President would sit back and allow the Admiralty Board full executive control over the Republic military forces. This was for a good reason: while the Presidency required notable military service and a minimum rank of O-6, he was there to tend to peacetime when he could make long-term decisions that had time. In peacetime, the Admiralty Board were there to be his cabinet.

When four psychopaths steal trillions of credits worth of money AND an equal amount of military technology? Emergency protocol. The Admiralty Board take over.

"Requesting permission to deploy Asset: BELLATOR, as per Post-Plague War Directive 47!" she shouted.

Silence.

"Negative, Admiral, your request is denied. Further damage to civilian assets at this juncture is unacceptable."

"WHAT?!"

For context, the BELLATOR are to this setting what a Terminator Space Marine would have been to Halo. They're an eight-foot-tall and three-foot-wide suit of metal that sports starship quality shielding, can think twice as fast as a normal human, bench-press cars, and elbow-drop fucking tanks.

The Heisters laughed openly, and hurled all sorts of insults at the Admiral, who the Matryoshka teased was stuck in a spaceport terminal because they were afraid of losing her to the emergency happening on the planet.

So, the crew was breaking the rules, and they were going to get away with it. After an hour of sheer chaos, the Crew managed to secure their getaway. One benefit to having earned favor with the Director was the ability to have way too many news choppers overhead. Considering there were two other crews doing shit before the Promethean Heisters started, there weren't many air superiority assets in place.

And so escape was a frigate with dropships launching to secure all the loot, including the XRXES-1.

Now, a heist isn't ever complete without a last-stand. A pièce de résistance, and that came in from some Top Gun motherfucker in a Vulture with way more balls than sense. It began peppering the escape dropship that would secure the XRXES-1 with autocannon fire. It deftly dodged a flying craps table, and Chains felt a subsystem online once he started hallucinating the HUD of the mech in his own vision.

Remember how I said those datacores had all sorts of secrets in them? The Republic could easily have done something fucking awesome, like attach some kind of mega laser ass-kicking beam to this robot. But no, they went with something tried, true, and defiantly Human in nature.

Chains' player found the part of this mech's sheet that I coyly called "FTTIP MDS," and he saw that its damage section was blank. He asked me why it didn't have a damage modifier, and reached for a few d10s.

I shook my head at him, and explained the acronym: "Fuck That Thing In Particular Missile Delivery System."

Four missile racks unfolded from a back panel on the mech, and a "FUCK IT FIRE EVERYTHING" button was pushed by Chains. If you can imagine a freeze-frame of a Vulture gunship with an A-10 paintjob (the tiger maw on the front and everything), firing 120mm autocannons into a robot that unfolded four missile racks that were capable of utilizing a hyperspace backpack to reload as they were depleted, you'll get halfway to what this MDS did. Now, say you have a five pound jar of BBs for an airsoft gun. You unscrew the top and kick it down a flight of stairs.

That's how many missiles just blew this Tom Cruise motherfucker into next year.

He had backstory and was supposed to dog the players' escape, making this Heist have an epic finale where he would probably come close to killing the party by just outsmarting them.

How's the saying go? "I've yet to meet man who can outsmart bullet?" Missiles are smarter than that, Tom Cruise found out.

And so, the Promethean Heisters went down in fucking history. The Milburn Casino was a smoking fucking heap of architecture, a Captain was hanged for treason and conduct unbecoming an officer, his family's citizenship revoked, and above all?

The XRXES-1, the most advanced piece of military equipment currently revealed to the public, was in the hands of a bunch of adrenaline junkies that had only didn't slaughter civilians because cleaner costs cut into their pay.

But, I'm sure you're wondering why I'm still posting like this. The answer is, they had one more heist. You see, they found a puzzle in all of the heists. Each thing pointed to something else, and it took a few months of compiling evidence and pretending to go good with the Enforcer (oh yea, the entire crew got pardoned by the way because Beast dicked her down like nobody's business), but Chains and Breaker finally broke a code they didn't know was there.

A rabbit hole opened up, and the Matryoshka messaged Chains telling him to dive in. He'd like what he found.

The Crew abruptly leaves the Enforcer in the dark, steals the mech they "turned in" as a show of good faith to the Republic (again), and they make way to an uncharted planet beyond Human territory. It was a frozen shithole, covered in mountains that make Everest look like anthills. But, the puzzle led Breaker-77 to believe that these aliens they'd stolen all manner of secrets from were holding some truly great treasure on this world. They were dead anyways, so who cared?

Breaker-77 nervously laughed when Chains brought that up.

He revealed to the crew overall that the "Others" were never confirmed dead, just that nobody had ever found proof they were alive. Breaker was nervous, so he onlined the XRXES-1 and brought it planetside. They marched up massive cliffs and discovered a circular mountain range that centered a temple of sorts.

A ziggurat, with all signs pointing to a quiet and warm resting place for someone VERY important.

Gotta dip for a bit. Gimme like an hour, I'll wrap this up in a few extra posts after.

Our intrepid bank robbers decide that, of all the things they could do, pulling some Indiana Jones shit was the ideal course of action. So, they begin a trek that would redefine what the Confederacy of Mankind was.

They found simple puzzles, leaps of faith, and a massive crypt that had thousands of statues of strange, avian warriors holding spears. At the center, the statues knelt around a single cryogenic pod. Within was something horrifying: a human, standing at nine feet tall, and having a body that appeared to be chiseled marble.

Breaker read an engraving on the metal at the base, and his stunned silence was interrupted by one phrase.

"Prometheus."

The figure that was the basis of a widespread religion within the Confederacy wasn't just a metaphor for Humanity's intellect, it was a real thing. The beautiful murals began to make sense.

This entity, this Prometheus, came down to Earth and sought to bring Humanity the secrets his race had discovered and held true in hopes of unifying Earth. Suddenly, Breaker-77 made an off-hand remark that chilled the Heisters to the bones.

"Y'know, their language is a lot like Ancient Greek."

The Heisters had enough upon hearing that, and figured someone would pay them tons of money for it. No defenders had come to stop them, so they decided to take Prometheus. But Breaker was uneasy; Chains told him to break a statue to ease his concerns.

Breaker made a fist, and hit the top of a statue with it. The statue sank, and an alarm went off that sounded like the squawks of a parrot. He panicked. Chains inquired what was going on seven times, but Breaker developed tunnel vision and ripped a spear from one statue to stab the base of the first. Another siren.

"Uh, guys, we've got a problem!"
"Get the cryopod, let's get out of here!"

As the Heisters came out, they saw a golden ship rip through space and cripple their stolen ship. So, Beast's player asked me a question.

"So, I still have the Admiral's number, right?"

When a player asks me a question like that, I feel a little bad. Why? Because I anticipated that. This session they were in was to be an epilogue, a trailer of sorts to the next campaign I would run, the one I've yet to run. You see, that golden ship touched down with terrible quickness. It was silent, and when it landed thirty individuals walked down a ramp and were flanked by one that stood in brilliant gold armor with blue accents. They noticed wings were tucked in front of it to make a sort of cloak, and that it had arms on its sides much like their own.

If I were to choose a song for the following scene, it would be "Walking With A Ghost" by Kadebostany. You see, the Promethean Heisters were given this name by the Matryoshka very early on in their careers, when she gave each of them masks. These were small details I told them but they never really focused on as much as I would have liked. These masks were based off heroes of the era that rebuilt Mankind from the ashes of nuclear war, the Prometheans. These heroes were... Something else.

Beast was the face of Franklin, a former security guard who became a pillar of martial prowess and defended the city of Principium through two wars.

Bojack wore the face of the Progenitor, whose dogged determination saw to the foundation of Principium, the first city of the Promethean Era. He spoke little, but his deeds spoke for him, and when his gun barked the world listened.

Speedy wore the mask of Vivienne, a free-running base jumper whose agility allowed her to see threats far before they became relevant to Principium and Man as a whole, and she was always able to outrun any danger.

Chains wore the face of an infamous machinist who was instrumental in rediscovering the secrets to cold fusion. According to some less popular versions of the myth, he found help from an unknown source, one that conspiracy theorists thought HAD to have been aliens.

Those very aliens looked at Chains, exiting the XRXES-1.

Beast was on the phone with Admiral Hayman, and the conversation went something like this:

"Mayday, mayday, I repeat, this is the ECNS Mary-Lou under heavy fire, unidentified vessels are attacking us! We have been forced to make an emergency landing on an unidentified planet, coordinates attached!” Beast spat.

“Who the Hell are you, and how do you have this frequency for this kind of call?! Where is the crew of the Mary-Lou trading vessel?” Admiral Hayman replied curtly.

“That’s not relevant, ma’am! What is relevant, is we are under attack by unknown hostiles, they are not Plague and they are most definitely not human!”

“Mary-Lou, this is Rear Admiral Alexandria Hayman, High Admiral of the Republic of Terra’s Forward Line. We are moving to your location. If you are who I think you are, I want you unmasked and ready to surrender to the authorities the moment the dust settles.”

“Ma’am we-”

“That’s enough. Masks off, weapons down, you will be brought in. Watch the skies, the Forward Line has been drawn.”

Breaker and Chains established a shaky first contact. The alien spoke, its squawks not translating well. Chains knew Breaker could talk it, he'd gone into speaking tongues before. He knew that he could understand it, because SOMEHOW that Slav was speaking to Breaker with it from time to time, but what little Chains knew couldn't handle the delicate first-contact.

Eventually, Chains said "Put your weapon down, we come in peace."

The eagle-like creature cocked its head, pointed at its own gun, said "Down," and pointed to the ground. Translation wasn't easy, but the bird just chose a sound and emulated it. Chains realized it thought "down" was the word for gun.

"Breaker, tell him what I'm trying to say, please?"

Breaker was panicking. He had been anxious about these creatures the entire time, the Others were thousands of years old. He asked himself: "What would Al Capone do?"

"YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE, COPPERS!"

Breaker-77 was a very smart AI. So smart, in fact, he qualified as a "Smart AI." What this meant was that he was as close to a human mind as coding could get, so close that his code was drawn from a brain scan. Not a fine enough scan to create a clone of someone, no, just enough to get the circuits to fire like neurons do. This meant that, of all the things a brain would allow, Breaker-77 could experience fear. What does a multilingual robot do when it meets the things it just assumed were dead the whole time?

Well, it screams a lot. English, Spanish, a little Italian, but mostly the language of the aliens it knows. So suddenly First Contact goes from "Please put your weapons down" to "YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE" and a wall of suppressing fire. The aliens respond by firing lasers at him, to which he panics even MORE.

"CHAINS THEY HAVE LASERS!"
"BREAKER WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!?"
"LASERS!" [/incoherent bird shit]

Breaker charged the line of birds, stomped the ground enough to cause a bit of a tremor that stunned them, and swept his fist through their squad. He proceeded to do this to the rest of the birds, while the leader charged Beast. It drew a blade of metal, and pointed it at Beast's hammer.

"Oh, let's dance," Beast chuckled, cracking his neck. He charged psionic energy in the head of the hammer, and swung. The bird snapped a finger and dissipated the energy, then caught the hammer blow with its shoulderplate and rolled it off.

Beast was suddenly very impressed.

The two had a Duel of Fates while Speedy and Bojack began desperately trying to support Breaker, who at this point was in such a panic he barely noticed more slipspace signatures entering the system.

These birds had a complicated relationship with their neighbors, an angry bunch of space lobsters. See, the space lobsters were taking a DEUS VULT approach to the birds, and heard there was combat. Two birds with one stone, eh?

Well, what happened was several ships exiting orbit, and Breaker saw them as enough of a threat to stop flinging birds like ragdolls. Through some miracle, he hadn't actually killed any of them. Chains finally got words out of him, when he froze and told everyone to get into the crypt.

"Breaker, why? What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"Okay, so the Others are technologically advanced compared to us. But you know what? They fear this other race. A lot. Enough that their AI is calling for a full-retreat."

Breaker snatched Chains into his cockpit, reloaded the chain gun, and booked it up the ziggurat. Beast looked to the incoming ships, then back to his opponent, and both nodded to one another and gave short bows. They would resolve this later, Beast interpreted. He then grabbed Bojack and Speedy by their arms and dragged them up the stairs.

The birds called for reinforcements, which came. The second aliens engaged them, and ground forces were deploying from dropships all over the planet. None of the Heisters were able to see anything, but Beast spotted an Other being launched up the stairs. He snatched his hand up, caught the bird by its hand, and he heard a deafening crack as its arm rotated out of the socket and snapped. He looked at it, and saw it was quickly going into shock and dying.

Behind it, enters a monster that could easily have passed as a demon. Towering over Beast, it bore a massive warhammer like Beast's, and its arthropod origin was shown on its exoskeleton, which clicked its mandibles rhythmically.

It bubbled and cooed something akin to language, before Chains panicked himself. Beast drew his hammer, and Chains began pouring his own psionics into it. As an Entropist, he was able to force fear responses. What the Crew found out though, was that this titan of a lobster didn't have a fear response.

What it did do though, was hijack Chains' forced telepathy and learned to say one thing to the Crew.

"Pathetic APES!"

The monster howled, and grabbed Breaker's arm to rip it off with a heave of its torso. The lobster took a swing from Beast, and spun on its heel to swing its own hammer with its second set of arms. The monster caused a sizeable impact, and then launched the severed arm into the XRXES-1's cockpit. Chains popped it, and leaped out while the monster was distracted, and began doing whatever he could. He tried to force it to fear him exclusively, but again, no fear response. Instead, it simply tossed Beast aside by his throat and launched its hammer at Speedy and Bojack, incapacitating them. It marched to Chains, and laughed slowly.

"You, you are truly insolent. How dare you stand up to me! I am a divine Proktari!" Chains recognized it was speaking with telepathy of its own, and began to panic. However, he saw Breaker's crippled XRXES-1 dragging itself with one arm to the monster.

"In fact, after I defeated your machine, you could even say that I am a go-" The one functional arm of the XRXES-1 was snatched around the monster's torso, pinning its posing arms to its body and Breaker stood up to hoist the monster at one of the many pitfalls the Crew had dodged to this point.

"I'm going to say you're a little fucking bitch," Breaker spoke on his loudspeakers before launching the lobster into the darkness of the crypt. The mechanisms of the mech gave way, and with a small explosion the leg servos gave out before the XRXES-1 powered down.

"ECNS Mary-Lou, you better have your ass an LZ for evac. It's hot, and I'm about to make it a lot hotter."

Chains saw on his HUD that Republic of Terra assets were in system, more specifically, the Republic Forward Line. Where ever the Forward Line was drawn, dawn would break.

Of course, when you're a criminal in every known star system, seeing hundreds of ships from the faction that probably wants to publicly execute you... It's needless to say the Crew had very mixed emotions.

Bojack cheered at the sight, nonetheless.

"Ma'am," the Crew heard on an open human frequency, "There are two distinct designs of ships. We aren't exactly hidden, they are just ignoring us."

"Weapons, I want you to know that they assaulted a Republic Merchant Navy vessel, the ECNS Mary-Lou. Even if it was stolen, they still broke the laws. And, I'm pretty upset that I'm being ignored. Ready our main cannons, direct all ships to fire at these vessels," Admiral Hayman spoke.

"Those are the flagships! Wait, you want me to relay this targeting order?" The Weapons officer was excited at first, and quickly realized that they were starting one helluva fight.

"Of course. Send the aliens a message, and scare the bank robbers downstairs. Deploy the BELLATOR. I don't care what the Admiralty Board says, I'm not playing with these things."

"Ma'am," another voice spoke up, "The BELLATOR are already dropping."

“Admiral, this is BELLATOR Praeses Pater, temporary Field Commander of OPERATION: FIRST CONTACT. I land in tee minus thirty seconds. Two sets of hostiles fighting, and I can’t really decide who I’m sending home in a body bag. You want chicken, or seafood tonight?”

"Tough call, BELLATOR. Normally, I’d say surprise me, but we have many more ships bearing similar transmissions to the lobsters attacking us. Pardon me; Weapons, full charge, target that flagship and bring it down now! Do not hesitate! Praeses! I trust you’ll bring me a full fucking seafood buffet! Churchill out!”

“Understood! Alright boys, you heard the lady! We’re having a fish fry. Save the eagles!”

At this point, the bank robbers were quantum shitting in the nth dimension. Understandably, considering what they knew of BELLATOR before.

They watched at the foot of the ziggurat as a falling star landed, and they were able to see the monster of machine and metal in a three-point stance over one of the birds, which it just reached in front of itself in pure awe.

The instant seemed to span hours.

As you can imagine, the players felt very, very small all of a sudden. So Chains interrupts the moment by shouting, in the same way someone goes "Oh heavens I left the oven on," that he yanks Breaker-77's chip from the ruined mech. The BELLATOR they were staring at, that the WORLD was staring at, is tackled by one of the Proktari monsters. It wrestles the BELLATOR to the ground, before the BELLATOR regains control of the situation. He lifts the Proktari up by its shoulders, and slams it to the ground. Before it can recover, the BELLATOR drops a massive boot through its skull. The birds cheer, and find allies in the humans.

Breaker, meanwhile, begins to explain that there's something very, very ironic in the BELLATOR saving a bird-thing. After, of course, calling Chains a dipshit for nearly forgetting that a fried mech does not equate to a fried AI Core.

You thought he was dead, too? So did my players until Chains remembered.

As the Crew watch their evac ship come down, they see in the distance five shooting stars slam into the ground, and from these stars emerge large steel bulwarks. They each launch a panel forward before opening and revealing a mech very similar to the XRXES-1. Each of them sports drastically different weaponry, and they wait for the one in the center to stomp its way ahead.

The dropship lands, and Chains makes a point to refuse to go without his hard-earned loot. He stole a fucking body, and if he couldn't sell it, what was the fucking point?! The dropship pilot argues, but Admiral Hayman diverts from the fight just long enough to interject.

"Get me that fucking cryopod, Captain!" she snaps, and the Promethean Heisters work with the crew of the dropship to pull a massive fucking cryogenic pod into the Churchill's cargohold, as well as the wrecked XRXES-1. Upon making it upstairs, the Crew find that it's the only thing that doesn't get them arrested and executed on site.

That, and the Enforcer wants to beat Beast's ass herself.

And in that, the Promethean Heisters may or may not have retired.

From the humble origins of knocking over a single bank, they impressed a deranged pop-star enough to have set them up for heists of increasing risk, audacity, and of course, reward. They, as a group, defeated just about every security measure placed before them, and earned themselves spots on the same lists as dictators, tyrants, and necrotic horrors as "Republic's Most Wanted."

They field-tested the BJORNSTAD MK3 Prototype uninvited, and greenlit the project in such a way that it changed forever. Originally, the BJORNSTAD MK3 was going to be just taller than the pilot, but well, when the upscaled -prototype- kicked more ass than Mark McGrass, the Republic of Terra was impressed enough to make them all that huge.

The Crew didn't quite retire, though. Rumor has it, that their former employer, the Informant, has scorned them. Easily the most sensational thieves in recent history, the Promethean Heisters brought back evidence that Humans exist as they currently do through alien intervention. Those same aliens were... Encouraged to explain themselves.

A First Contact Skirmish born from sheer greed, the Heisters have made a point to loot anything that isn't nailed down in the name of finding the elusive Informant, and getting him back.

But, that's a tale yet unwritten, and I've told this one out. I hope you all enjoyed it!

Was this in halo mythic?

>I've had a game I am 3000% confident would take your collective breath away.
Interest lost