Hustle Baby: A Dieselpunk Crime Quest

Panau is freedom, invention, and the pushing of boundaries. Panau, gateway between the Continent and Novo Mundi! Where industrial machines refashion the world within and without, the first truly free nation on the Spine, where the staid rule of kings and emperors give way for vital men of knowledge and learning to steer the ship of state. The first to dream of true freedom, the old families of Panau say, and look where they are now. Every man a king! Every man, lord of their domain, be it in business or politics!

So they say. Truth is, there's a young Sanarran sitting in Ganso Island packed cheek to jowl with hundreds of their countrymen that just don't smell the free air of Panau. To them, the so-called free air really is just the rank stench of unwashed flesh and acrid oil smoke. They boarded the ship weeks ago on the cheapest birth. They stabbed someone for the ticket. But it was better here than in Sanar. Anything is better than Sanar.

It's a slow, miserable shuffle. Panauans don't speak the Sanarran language. They can't understand the accents of weary grandmothers and too young boys packed off to strange shores. Neither do they want to, the nameless Sanarran muses. Why should they? Their country. We just have to adapt.

"Atan," a woman behind them says, "could we exchange places? My child is-" Almost crying. Starving. They weigh inconveniences- stand in this office a bit longer, or suffer a kid's crying like a drill in their ear? The first one wins out.

"Say no more," the Sanarran says, and lets her pass. The child starts crying anyway. Black damn. This is what you get for charity. Still, the line shuffled on, and eventually they come face to face with the wine-reddened officer handling this boatload of human flesh. He makes a cursory gesture, to sit down at the bench as the officer grabs a new document.

"You," he barks. "Name." It isn't a question.
[]- "Aimar Khatri."
[]- "Ariel Khatri."

The officer snorts but writes it down. "And your sex?"
[]- "Male."
[]- "Female."
[]- "It's not your business. It's not Panau's business."

He writes it down and they feel a rush of color to their cheeks. The room suddenly feels unbearably hot at this intrusion. But then it passes. It will soon be gone, and the document will be consigned to some dark census room where no one will touch it. As good as forgotten.

"Date of birth."

"Eighth day of Setting, Year Alubaatar twenty eight."

For the first time the official shows something other than vague derision and apathy. "A civilized date," he clarifies, features sharpened into disgust and irritation. "You jimmy-plains are in Panau now, and you'll use Panau's measures."

Gritted teeth. "Fine. Third week, first day of month eight. Year a thousand and… nine?" The conversion takes a second. They're not entirely sure with this insane system.

"See? You're learning. I'll write Sanarran, and you'll tell me what you have planned out and you're free to go." The door behind him could be a portal to heaven for all you care.

[]- "I'll be looking for dockwork." Panau's harbor is a stopping point for half the world, and half the world's money flows through here. Starting in the docks will give you plenty of criminal oppertunities, but also contending with your fellow criminals and private guards.
[]- "I'll be developing the Hinter." Working in the rural areas of Panau will give you essentially free reign, but you will also have little to no resources outside of what you can steal from caravans and company storehouses.
[]- "I'll be a servant. I'm not proud." As a menial for Panau's richest, you'll come across secrets and dirty deeds they would not like to see exposed, as well as access to their manors. In addition, many of them could do with a footpad to remove their enemies.

The official nods, and drops the yellow broadsheet into a leather binder. There. Done. The Sanarran leaves for the next one to be subjected. When they step outside the full stench of Panau hits them. In the distance, almost hazy in this mid-morning mist, giant towers loom, spun out of glass and steel. The sound of the dock cranes blot out almost everything. It invites introspection.

What's Panau to you?
[]- They believe in Panau more than anyone. Panau's promise- of freedom, prosperity, it spoke to a liberated serf, free to travel the world. The village brought them a ticket, and they bidded the clan goodbye as they rode to the port, promising to return with a suit sewn with gold threads.
+ Reasonable Man (2): You have been known for your icy calm and amiable manner. Even as a child, your peers went to you first to arbitrate disputes, so you are skilled in maneuvering the shoals of interpersonal relationships. However, slights to your person are felt keenly, and each must be repaid even if it proves detrimental.
[]- Here is where they'll get richer and richer. Their uncle travelled to Panau once on business. And he returned a very rich man, and had to leave to see his investments come to fruition. The family decided that the youngest would all seek their fortunes oversees, away from the troubled homeland.
+ Head For Numbers (2): Your mind is an abacus. You can derive percentages, calculate rates, and catch irregularities in ledgers with a glance, having been trained from a young age to do so. But you feel risks keenly, being conscious of your investments. 'Adventure' is a synonym for 'disaster' in your mind.
[]- Panau used them and tossed them away. There was a khagan that Panau didn't like, there was an army they sponsored to get rid of him. But the army failed and the soldiers fled to their foreign masters, if you believe the propaganda. Now one of them is here, among the faceless many.
+ Military Training (2): Panau's finest military officers came to train General Temur's men. You learned from the best, the tactics used to clean jungles and mountains of aborigines turned to clear the port cities room by room. You excelled, aggressive, bold, and nearly fearless. Good traits for a soldier. Not a civilian.

A/N: Next two posts reserved for the character sheet/misc lore and the mechanics. Uh, feel free to ask anything about the setting.

ARIEL KHATRI
Description: You. A Sanarran soldier from General Temur's Army of the Free, which was crushed months before she washed up on Panau.
Traits
Military Training(2): Panau's finest military officers came to train Khagan Temur's men. You learned from the best, the tactics used to clean jungles and mountains of aborigines turned to clear the port cities room by room. You excelled, aggressive, bold, and nearly fearless. Good traits for a soldier. Not a civilian.

Mechanics

All rolls will be resolved using a pool of d6 dice, with the highest number being the final result. Rolling a 6 means you've succeeded, and a 5 is a success at a cost. In opposed rolls by another entity, the one with more 6's win, while a tie is a success at a cost.

There's four sources of dice- character Traits, racket Specialties, equipment Assets, and Manpower. The first three have a maximum dice pool of three, so if you commit a character with a Trait of 2 in a task, have a relevant Speciality of 1, and further commit an Asset of 3, you can roll 8 dice. Manpower is not limited this way- you can commit as much Manpower to any action as you have Manpower, but if a one is rolled then that tick is taken away permanently.

Character Traits are loose descriptors of specialities with a narrative drawback. Anyone who has a Trait is a major character and will be your lieutenants. Ex:

> Arsonist (2): This character is especially good at any sort of chemistry relating to making flammable explosives. However, without burning something in the last few weeks they feel particularly antsy.

Racket Specialties: Rackets are criminal operations you run. Specialities are side benefits of owning one, on top of the regular money they make you. Ex:

> Meth Lab (1): This lab produces amphetamine of questionable quality. Still, you give them to a body and they'll forget what pain is. Handy for a fight.

Equipment Assets: These are items that are either purchased with Funds or created by someone with a relevant Trait. Some Assets such as guns have a limited number of times they can be used before you have to purchase extra charges. Ex.

> Automatic Abacus (3): A handy mechanical computer. You'll never have to worry about being shortchanged on goods, as long as your clerk is loyal. They are loyal, right?

Your gang as an organization has three universal statistics- Funds, Heat, and Manpower. Funds is how much money you have at any give time of the week, calculated by adding all the Funds of each discrete racket you have. Heat is similar, but it's a representation of how much attention you draw from the police. Too high and a lieutenant might be arrested, or a racket closed. Manpower is an abstraction of how many hangers on you have at any given time. They don't depend on rackets, but each racket has a Manpower requirement- without it the racket becomes defunct and no longer produces money.

In addition to their Manpower requirement, rackets require a character with a trait to take charge of it. Without one, they will only produce one Fund, but retain their Heat and Manpower statistics.

Here's an example of a racket:

> Loan Sharking: (Funds: 3 Heat: 1 Manpower: 2/2) A collection of thugs directed by accountants to shake down idiots who make poor fiscal decisions.
Speciality: Pressed Labor (1): If they can't pay you in cash, you'll take their labor. There's always someone you can force into doing your scutwork.

Finally, there's Scores. Scores are miscellaneous items you get from heists, robberies, and other daring and illegal activities. They can be converted for a set amount of Funds, but this will also increase your Heat for the next turn by their given amount. Ex:

Family Jewels (Funds 5 Heat: 4): Some rich family's emeralds. Your family's now.

Panau slowly comes to life in the weeks of toil that characterized Ariel's days. It is divided, characterized, dominated by the Canal that runs through the middle, bottlenecking half of the world. She slept in a cheap apartment block of a building. It was a little expensive, but the landlady kept it in good shape. The pipes never leaked, the walls didn't have a speck of mildew on it. It was a bit of an odd place, though. It smelled like sickly sweet incense and at the dead of night Ariel was frequently woken up by her neighbors screaming to high heaven with their boyfriends. Goddamn daily occurrence. She was often tempted to lodge a complaint but she was too tired to move at night.

Her pay was never consistent, except for the fact that it was low. Each captain, each company, had their own rates. If you didn't like them you could go and starve, and some days she did, curled up in a back alley counting rocks as her stomach turned in on herself. There are always more of you zigs, one spat at her when she declined. Ariel left that corner fantasizing about murder, and how hard it would be to get away with it.

It couldn't be that hard, she concluded after a brief meal of goat cheese on flatbread from a countryman selling real good food (cumin lamb, tripe noodles, not that saucey crap the Panauans favored) out of his front doorstep. The wardens were few and far between and they seemed more interested in thievery and thuggery. There were so many alleyways, so many buildings under construction. The sewers were plentiful. Ariel passed by a gun store every bleary morning and she had a niggling feeling that the back door wasn't locked.

When the clouds cleared she could see all the way up to the mountains. The vertebrae of the Spine, that single thin strip of jutting land that circled the world north to south, dominated the sky. There was a curious feeling of being trapped, hemmed in by the city that spilled from the apathetic mountains into the sea.

She got over the mountains quick after someone told her that the rich people lived there. The religious discomfort was replaced by a sense of vague irritation fostered by the feeling that the condescending coin khagans and their glass walled manors sneered down at her. Come to think of it, they never did come down to the canal. They were felt invisibly, by the nervous chatter of the overseers. Mr or Ms. such and such will be furious if you do not meet quotas! No lunch break! Get to work!

It was backbreaking. Little pay for so much work. The orders came fast and sharp and she could barely understand them. When she didn't her pay was docked. If she slacked even a little, to catch her breath moving the boxes and bags of… things? her pay was docked. Docked, docked docked. And then when the sun sank beneath the waves she crawled back to the sickly sweet scented tenement hall and sunk like the sun beneath the sheets. Again and again and again.

The job was so easy that trained monkeys could probably do it. The ships came in with crates and parcels. Cloth and iron and hardwood came in, were loaded on horse drawn coaches or stored in giant warehouses by the rapidly soring muscles of the longshoremen. What came out were finished things like machine sewn dresses, electric lights, and in one case, a giant iron engine as tall as she was. That one took ages to load up properly and nearly broke her back.

Her only solace was the blue dollars she got. Five Panau rial a week. One of those rial would go to Ms. Agarwal for rent. Two more just for food. And the remaining two rial were stored up for a meaningless tomorrow. Who was she kidding? What was she expecting, scrimping and saving like that? A manor up in the mountains? Ha. So one evening, she brought a sukkah pipe and a bottle of hard liquor and smoked and drank herself into a pleasant stupor. The next day she woke up groggy. But for a moment she forgot about the pain. And that was good. Even the fucking overseer, last in a long line of many, was somewhat more bearable.

The days were not good but they passed well enough, even if it was at the bottom of a bottle, and sometimes facedown in a back alley. Those days she spent in the company of Batzorig Monkhbat, a gambler and a fellow drunk. They played cards and drank to the homeland and sang songs to the great plains, whatever that meant. It was better here, in Batzorig's lists and lists of late night bars than the tenement building that smelled like rotting fruit.

She had a sneaking suspicion that Batzorig was never as drunk as he made himself out to be. When they bet money Batzorig always acted like he was keen on staggering over, and then when the pool was full up he revealed some winning hand or another. Sometimes the other gamblers took offense but Ariel was always the one to finish those fights.

One night, as she staggered back to the Agarwal tenament, Monkhbat drunkenly turned to her and said, "atan, my atan, ye ever tire of this shite, you come find Uncle Bats. I'll set ye up. Always need me a hardy lad."

"I'm a woman," Ariel said.

"Hardy lass," he corrected himself. He slapped her shoulder and faded into the misty night. Ariel shook her head and staggered back into the building. A headache built in her skull. That was some rough stuff. Ms Agarwal was blocking her way in the narrow hallway. She didn't look too happy.

"Ms. Khatri," she greeted her in a smoker's voice. "You look wiped."

"Yeah."

She looked away for a second, then sighed. "Well, this is as good a time as any. Ms. Khatri, you are weeks behind on rent."

"Oh." There wasn't much else to say.

And the thing is, she really did look sorry. "As I see it, Ms. Khatri, you have two options. You either have a hundred and fifty riel in your pocket right now, or some stroke of good fortune will give you that money in the next three days."

"That doesn't seem likely," Ariel agreed. "I s'pose I'll be packing up, then."

"Ah-ah." A thin finger waved like a lure. "I have a proposition for you."

"Huh?"

"There's a pimp, Tavish. Not Sanarran. He's making trouble for my girls." The words jangled in Ariel's spirit-sodden mind. The connections were made, but slowly. "I would take it as a personal favor, and if he would find his legs broke and what-not."

"This is a whorehouse," Ariel finally said.

Ms. Agarwal looked surprised. "You didn't notice?"

[]- Find Batzorig. She's been his ertsaz muscle for his card hustles. She needs something back.
[]- Kill Tavish. Lady gives orders, lady gets results. Just one guy. Easy as breathing.
[]- Rob a night coach. How hard is it? No guards, dead of night. It's the selling that's the hard part.