GURPS Special Forces

Story

Characters

World

Reference

Session 05 - Deep Sea Fragments and Desert Swarms - Wrap-Up

Narrative Recap

Ronnie crossed paths with Xander in the corridor on the way to the briefing room, catching a glimpse of a Chinese area code on Xander’s phone screen before Xander handed him a spent meteor fragment to trade to Igor and sent Ronnie on his way. The tension only grew when Guy LeFleur was confronted by Miller, a rival operative who promised to expose him before storming ahead. Ronnie filed the phone detail away in the back of his mind, saying nothing to the others — especially not to Guy, whose loose lips he trusted about as far as he could throw him.

The conference room was already full when the team arrived. Boss Voss stood at the head of the table alongside a second suited team: Jenkins, Miller, Thompson, and a woman who had shaved her head entirely to fit her helmet — a bald Brittany, smiling directly at Sammy. She wasted no time making her presence known, clapping her hands and shimmering into eight identical copies of herself, all staring Sammy down and demanding to know if she was the only one. Sammy, with admirable composure, replied that he supposed she was now — and just like that, seven of her vanished.

Voss then laid out the full picture of what the team was up against. He described a distant civilization called Terra, a world much like Earth that had been visited by meteors, gained powers, and was then attacked by a massive flying space creature — something like a whale crossed with a squid. The bones of the beast had been found on Terra’s surface, enormous and unmistakable, suggesting the Terrans had managed to kill it. The working theory was that they had siphoned all their meteor-granted powers into a single individual to do it, effectively creating something close to a god.

The briefing turned to the immediate mission: three meteor fragments had fallen into the North Atlantic Ocean, and the team needed to retrieve them before anyone else did. The first fragment rested at a manageable fifty meters down, but Jens quietly analyzed the available data and estimated the second would be at one hundred meters and the third even deeper. Two mini-submarines had been prepared — compact, heavily armed vessels with mechanical retrieval arms and laser turrets — and the plan was simple: Team Jenkins would handle the shallow fragment while the party pushed east toward the deeper ones.

After a long flight out over the Atlantic, the team boarded their sub and descended into the cold dark water. Ronnie took the pilot’s seat with surprising confidence, threading the vessel through the currents while the others manned the turrets and surveillance systems. It wasn’t long before their sensors picked up the second fragment — and a Chinese submarine parked nearby, apparently unaware of their approach. Guy slipped into the mechanical arm controls and, with careful precision, closed the claws around the fragment just as the enemy vessel launched a torpedo. Ronnie threw the sub into a hard evasive roll and the torpedo screamed past harmlessly.

What followed was swift and brutal. Sammy opened fire with the sub’s beam turret, obliterating the enemy’s top gun in a single devastating shot. Ronnie drove the sub vertical, then sideways, keeping both turrets trained on the fleeing vessel as it tried to accelerate east. Shot after shot tore through the enemy hull until the pressure of the deep ocean did the rest — the Chinese submarine crumpled and imploded, leaving only debris and six suited survivors scattering in all directions. The party secured their fragment and pressed on without a second glance.

The approach to the third fragment site was darker and stranger. Sensors picked up two more Chinese submarines ahead, and something else — something massive lurking behind them. As the party drew closer, a bioluminescent light bloomed in the black water, hypnotic and beautiful, dangling from the head of an enormous anglerfish. Jens was transfixed, completely lost to the glow, and could do nothing but stare. Ronnie dove the sub past the distracted enemy vessels and Guy snatched the fragment from the seafloor with the retrieval arms. Then the anglerfish bit clean through the rear of one of the Chinese subs.

The creature turned its attention toward the party’s vessel, charging through the water at terrifying speed. Sammy lined up a shot and fired directly into the creature’s eye. The anglerfish screamed off into the darkness, wounded and retreating, while the remaining Chinese submarine took heavy fire from the party’s turrets before it too was left crippled and sinking. The team surfaced with both a charged fragment and a spent one, flew back to base, and handed everything over before collecting a well-earned forty-eight-hour pass.

The party chose to spend it in Las Vegas. They rode motorcycles through the Nevada desert, and about thirty minutes outside the city, three of them noticed a cloud of dust rising behind them — a half-dozen giant insects in pursuit. Jens calmly planted a remote mine on the road, waited for the bugs to close the distance, and detonated it without breaking stride. Bug limbs rained across the highway. Ronnie, who had been focused entirely on his riding, heard the explosion and glanced back to find nothing but smoke and debris. He said nothing, but his opinion of Jens quietly improved.

Vegas welcomed them with open arms. Ronnie booked the honeymoon suite at The Bellagio — leopard skin rug, heart-shaped bed, mirror ceiling, the works — while Guy, Jens, and Ronnie hit the casino floor with serious money and serious intent. Guy went on a staggering run, doubling his winnings again and again until casino security materialized behind him like a wall of expensive suits. Ronnie responded by stuffing thousand-dollar chips into their breast pockets and patting them firmly on the chest. They thanked him and stepped back. Ronnie walked away with a tidy sum of his own, though he noticed that a security guard near him seemed to falter and grow pale for a moment before recovering — a side effect of Ronnie’s peculiar habit of drawing energy from those around him.

That evening, the group met Rick Harrison and his associate Igor at Medieval Times for dinner and jousting. Jens arrived wearing a crown of ten chained beer cans around his head. Ronnie stole a pinwheel from a child in the audience, and Jens used sleight of hand to steal a pinwheel from another oblivious child to give to the first as a replacement. Rounds of Caribou — a potent Quebecois blend of red wine, whiskey, and maple syrup — were ordered for the table, and the green knight won the day to much cheering. During a quiet moment away from the group, Ronnie slipped Igor the spent meteor fragment and received in return $500,000 and a small piece of paper bearing a complex master password — one that granted root access to every power suit in the program, including the ability to remotely disable them. Ronnie memorized it carefully and said nothing to anyone.

He also laid out a collection of alien artifacts recovered from Terra and offered them to Rick Harrison at a million dollars apiece. Rick’s eyes lit up. The deal was still being discussed when every phone at the table buzzed simultaneously — mass casualties in Los Angeles, something tearing the city apart, a powered individual called The Dragon already on the scene. The news rippled through the stadium crowd, but it was the screaming from outside that made the party move.

The parking lot of Medieval Times had become a slaughterhouse. Dozens of nine-foot-tall insects — armored, six-legged, and hungry — were tearing through tourists and luxury cars alike. A group of Brittanys was already there, firing into the swarm and screaming Sammy’s name with a fury that rivaled the bugs themselves. Ronnie shifted into a cold, methodical combat mode, picking off insects one by one with precise shots to their central eyes. Jens climbed to the roof for a vantage point. Sammy fired explosive rockets into clustered groups of the creatures, and Guy sprinted to the valet stand, grabbed a fistful of keys, and commandeered a Lexus with the full intention of driving it directly into as many bugs as possible. The fight had only just begun.

Memorable Moments

Brittany claps her hands and shimmers into eight identical copies of herself, all staring down Sammy and demanding to know if she is the only one.

A tense and surreal moment during the briefing that left the entire room confused and unsettled

“Well, I see eight of you, so I’m a little… I don’t know how to answer this.” — Sammy

Sammy’s deadpan response to eight copies of Brittany simultaneously demanding to know if she is the only one

Sammy fires the sub’s beam turret and scores a devastating hit on the Chinese submarine, dealing over 100 damage and causing it to implode under the crushing ocean pressure.

A climactic moment in the underwater battle as the party systematically dismantled the enemy vessel

Jens becomes completely mesmerized by the bioluminescent lure of a massive anglerfish lurking behind the Chinese submarines, losing his action for the turn.

The party’s first terrifying glimpse of a meteor-powered deep-sea predator in the pitch-black ocean depths

Sammy fires a precise turret shot directly into the anglerfish’s eye, causing the massive creature to veer off in agony and flee into the darkness.

A clutch shot that saved the party from a monstrous deep-sea predator that had already destroyed a Chinese submarine

Jens plants a remote mine on the desert road and detonates it as a swarm of giant bugs runs over it, sending bug limbs flying through the air while Ronnie rides along completely oblivious.

Jens calmly handles a bug pursuit while Ronnie, who failed his perception roll, had no idea anything was happening behind him

Guy LeFleur goes on a massive gambling winning streak, doubling his money repeatedly to over $700,000, before Ronnie bribed the casino security guards who came to watch them with thousand-dollar chips.

A night of high-rolling that drew increasingly suspicious casino security before Guy simply paid them off

Ronnie secretly exchanges the spent meteor fragment with Igor at Medieval Times and receives $500,000 and a master SHA key password granting root access to all power suits, allowing remote disabling of any suit.

A covert transaction conducted under the cover of jousting entertainment, giving Ronnie a significant tactical advantage over his teammates

A swarm of dozens of nine-foot-tall insects descends on the Medieval Times parking lot, attacking tourists, just as a group of Brittanys arrives furiously yelling for Sammy.

The session ends on a chaotic cliffhanger combining a monster attack with Brittany’s rage at being abandoned

PC Carry-Forward

Ronnie Vint (Ant)

Guy LeFleur (Timmah)

Sammy Castaneda (Jay S)

Jens Hartmann (Sean)

What Carries Forward

Unresolved Threads

Player-Stated Intentions

World State

Keeper Checklist

Quality Notes

Reconciliation Context

Reconciled: 2026-05-17

GM Decisions

Consequences

Salvageable Prep

Connections

Session 05 - … Session 05 - … Brittany Giant Anglerf… Igor Lt. Nash Miller Rick Harrison Thompson Xander Deep Sea Frag… Adrian Voss