Voiceover by Defrag Pandemonium

LUNA-1 has a capacity of 150,000 occupants. Do you know how many people currently live here? 210,000. And the number is rising every day. Have you noticed that our water tastes just a little bit like shit? It’s because the treatment facilities weren’t built to keep up with this much waste. 80 years ago, the oxygen concentration in our artificial atmosphere was on-par with Earth’s at sea-level. Year-over-year, they thin it out a little bit more, because there’s too many of us. If they don’t ration the oxygen we’ll consume it all faster than it can be replenished. Our diets are getting poorer, our public amenities are deteriorating, our living quarters are getting more cramped, alleviated only by the fact that the rich and powerful are gradually abandoning us, leaving their pleasurehouses and six-star resorts and luxury offices free to reclaim as housing. Well, “free.” I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how expensive rent is getting.

To the extent that the capitalist model of economics can be said to function at all, it functions on one core axiomatic assumption: that work is plentiful, and labor is proportionately scarce. That there is more work to do than there are hands to do it. And like any scarce resource, those that want it must pay a premium.

Even on Earth, within the various megacities that bleed the planet’s resources dry, automation makes labor common. Down there this can be somewhat offset through expansion, through the creation of more work to do, and while the numbers still don’t add up, at least it’s a pressure valve that allows the decline to be slow; the cities will probably be destroyed by wasteland raiders before they reach a true crisis point of labor deflation.

But up here? What expansion is possible? Our glorious city is circumscribed; expanding its borders by a single inch is laughably expensive. Our mining operations already produce more Helium-3 than we can use, more than the occasional cargo shuttle can bring to Earth. There’s a finite cap to how much work can be done, and yet the populace keeps growing, keeps consuming more and more resources. Did you know that Eidolon predicts this dome will be uninhabitable within 20 years? That if things continue apace, we’ll suffocate each other simply by living here? You probably don’t know that; they keep things like that secret from us peasants. 

You could try to escape before then; a shuttle back to earth only costs 1.2 billion credits, after all. Of course that’s before you factor in the immigration costs, if you can find a nation-state down there that isn’t too busy dying its own slow death to naturalize a new citizen. There’s always the option to stow away, if you think you can avoid the Rat Hunters and you’re confident that your bodyweight won’t sabotage the precise fuel calculations that make space travel possible.

Or, if food and power expenses have kept you from pinching your pennies, if you don’t like your odds against terrestrial tyrannies or the vacuum of space… well then, my friend, there is one other option available to you.

You join me.

And you fight.

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The dome of LUNA-1 has been soiled over the years. The rim at the ground-floor has been painted with layer after layer of graffiti, and above that the glass has been caked in grime and pollution. The city’s optimized efficiency is an unbelievable feat of engineering even eighty years after its construction, but no system is without waste, and that waste has accumulated layer-by-layer on the surface of the glass hemisphere that guards its inhabitants from the vicious emptiness of the lunar surface. There is budget only to clean the very top of the dome, preserving the awe-inspiring view of the earth for only the city’s elite. For everyone else, their homeworld has been reduced to a brown and blurry smear seen through filthy glass.

Under this soiled sky rises the STARSCAPE RESORT, a luxury hotel only a few blocks southeast of the Eidolon building. It might even have a true view of the untainted night sky, if not for the neverending streams of drones flying overhead. Once the single most expensive vacation spot in the known universe, the Starscape Resort was abandoned over 40 years ago, when even those rich and famous desperate for conspicuous displays of wealth could no longer justify the cost of spending their holiday on the moon. On Earth, it would’ve been demolished decades ago. Up here, that option is simply too expensive; importing the raw materials for the building cost over 10 trillion lunar credits in today’s money, and recycling them wasn’t feasible. Moreover, the city’s air filters wouldn’t be able to compensate for the amount of dust and debris that a demolition operation incurred; bulldozing a 10-story highrise would wreak havoc on LUNA-1’s already poor air quality for decades.

So, instead, the building sat empty for years, save for the occasional squatter chased off by the police. Until one day, bank accounts shifted, money slid through dark networks, and ownership was transferred to a shell corporation that could never possibly be traced back to its true owner, DEFRAG PANDEMONIUM, the anonymous leader of the GLITCH MOB, a growing movement of dissidents and hacktivists dedicated to sabotaging and overthrowing Eidolon, the de facto government of LUNA-1. The Glitch Mob’s recruitment materials present them as a group of ideological revolutionaries seeking to liberate the moon, and while many of the rank and file may be true believers in the cause, those higher up the chain know the truth: LUNA-1 is the single most expensive asset ever produced by the human race, and that makes seizing control of it the heist of the century.

GLITCH MOB has just launched its first open attack against Eidolon, sabotaging their Undrtow beta test by hacking their network and attacking their QA team. The Mob’s vanguard force is scheduled to meet now in the penthouse of the Starscape in order to review the progress of the current mission. 

Which one of you is running late to the meeting?

____________________________

Whoever is running late will need to deal with MONGREL MYXOLIDIAN, the man that’s guarding the door. He is a goofy Jason Statham send-up, an earthborn mercenary from The Great British Bakeoff, the slang term for now fully desertified Great Britain. He will demand a password for anyone to get by him. The password is “one small step for man.” He’ll have some snide commentary for whoever he has to interact with.

The encounter could theoretically escalate, but ostensibly he’s on the party’s team. Still, I need at least some brief combat info handy.

MONGREL MYXOLIDIAN & RAY OF SOLAR

CRASH 0: Mongrel will threaten their opponent with his bowie knife; this must be proven ineffective.

CRASH 1: His bowie knife is actually RAY OF SOLAR, his Eidolon. A thin layer of a special film  on the knife’s surface can catch the light in such a way that when it’s reflected at a target, it flashes subliminal messages to hack their cybernetics and begin inducing an intense sunburn. To the target, this feels like being blasted with a powerful UV ray; the target must disarm Mongrel.

CRASH 2: Defeat.

Upstairs in the penthouse, the rest of the party is waiting, along with Defrag Pandemonium, who’s video-conferencing in. Caligula Magnesium, the member of the team who was assigned to carry out this attack, is currently at the Moonshot, a cyber-cafe across town. When the party has had sufficient time to introduce themselves to the audience and build some initial rapport, he’ll call in, reporting that the operation has flamed out; his USB device was located and destroyed. Too late, he will realize that by calling back to base, he has provided a network line straight to them, allowing them to be attacked by

DARYL BRONY & TENSION RISING

CRASH 0: TENSION RISING can make anything it hacks more dangerous, pushing electronics out of their safe tolerances. Anything electrical will begin to short out, arcs of electricity attacking the party. The party must find a way to isolate Brony’s eidolon from their local network.

CRASH 1: Daryl will begin infecting the party, much like Magnesium infected the VGM team. Their Eidolons will go haywire and react in violent and uncontrollable ways; TENSION RISING must be expelled from their personal cybernetics.

CRASH 2: Daryl finds his way into RAY OF SOLAR. The simulated blasts of UV rays cause every networked device to overheat itself, doing its best impression of melting under the heat of the sun. RAY OF SOLAR must be disconnected or disposed of, TENSION RISING must be destroyed, or Daryl Brony must be neutralized.

CRASH 3: Defeat.