[Scenario idea] The Warehouse

[Catsmate]

This is actually my fourth attempt at posting this. Hopefully this time it works.


The Warehouse.
A scenario outline, inspired by some recent discussion over on AH.com and some odd history from my excessively bulging General Notes file.


The Warehouse is intended as the introduction to a historical or pseudo-historical adventure, the GM will need to expand or finish it. Please feel free to make suggestions along these lines.



The TARDIS beeped gently, indicating an imminent manifestation into the common universe.
Lady Theodora Fowler looked up from the book she was reading, placed a marker at the page she'd reached and closed it with a sigh. She'd really tried to understand the subject, at her companion's suggestion but despite his recommendation ("It's a classic! And written by a human too...") Noon's 'Introduction to Polytonic Etiology' wasn't for her.
Anyway Brazell would make an appearance soon and they'd be off outside again. She was getting a little cabin feverish.

........

She eagerly stepped out through the not-quite-a-door that connected the interior of the TARDIS and the exterior universe. Theo stopped after two paces, sniffing the air and tried to place the oily scent that pervaded the dark, dusty and clearly disused warehouse. Some sort of vegetable oil perhaps?

Behind her Brazell locked that not-quite-a-door and turned to join her, activating a torch.
"Unpreposessing sort place isn't it? Where exactly are we? And when?", she asked the Time Lord.
"New York City" he replied. "Near the docks. About fifteen years in your future".

She snorted in reply. "Not a place on the tourist trails evidently".
Pointing at something revealed by the light of Brazell's torch she asked. "What are they".
Looking at the metallic cylinders he was forced to admit ignorance. "I don't know. Some sort of barrels, such as your society uses to transport oil".
Not desiring another lecture on the evils of fossil fuel use, and being an unabashed fan of the internal combustion engibe, Theo tapped one of the drums and pushed against it. "These ones don't contain oil. Far too heavy and no sloshing".

Brazell seemed uninterested and had moved on, walking between the lines of barrels.
Theo thought to herself, there are an awful lot of them, whatever they hold. She followed Brazell, more because of the light he bore than because she curiously was satisfied. After that business on Selarra she was a little twitchy about things in the dark.
Remembering something she rummaged in her bag as she walked.

Hmm, three lipstick cases, an eyebrow pencil sharpener, the pocket watch she'd picked up in Victorian London, what felt like at least five earrings, three handkerchiefs, a powder compact, a few hairpins, her set of lockpicks, two cigarette lighters, a spark plug, a paper package of bicarb, a plastic tube of aspirin, a seemingly endless supply of bits of paper, assorted small change, the wallet she'd pick pocketed in 1961, her little revolver and it's pouch of cartridges, three flat, cylindrical power packs, a small notebook, her fountain pen, a pliers like tool... Ah here it was, one of the pen torches she'd grabbed during their visit to Dublin. Eighty years from now she thought, suddenly struck by the oddity of travelling in time. None of the people she'd met there were even conceived yet. Probably not even their parents.
Well except one, she grinned to herself.

She quickly shook off the feeling and switched on the tiny but extremely bright light. Feeling reassured by the light she stopped following Brazell and bent to examine the drums.
There was some text stencilled on the metal side of the drum
URANIUM ORE - PRODUCT OF BELGIAN CONGO.


The TARDIS, or whatever means the PCs use to travel in time, brings them to one of the odder bits of history. They're in a disused warehouse, actually a disused vegetable oil processing plant and warehouse, owned by the Archer Daniels Midland company on Staten Island, in the old port of New York.

• The company is still around. The warehouse isn't, a casualty of containerisation without even a plaque.

A three storey warehouse at 2377 Richmond Terrace to be exact; a scruffy waterfront neighbourhood at the southern footing of the Bayonne Bridge, bounded by the Kill Van Kull, a tidal strait that separates Staten Island from Bayonne in New Jersey.

It's September the 18th 1942; the Second World War has been going on for three years, though American involvement is less than a year old.

And yes, those drums do contain uranium ore, canary yellow carnotite from the freakishly rich deposits at Shinkolobwe in the Belgian Congo, operated by Union Minière.

There are more than two thousand drums, containing about 1,250 tonnes of the stuff. After refining the ore  will yield about four hundred and fifty tonnes of uranium metal, destined to be about three-eights of the fuel for the reactors of the Manhattan Project.
The drums have been in the unguarded warehouse for about two-and-a-half years.

More to come (technology permitting).

Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?

[Catsmate]

The Warehouse - part 2.
When we left her, our intrepid heroine, Lady Theodora (‘Theo’) Fowler, had just found that the hundreds of oil drums filling the New York warehouse in which she and her Gallifreyan companion, the Time Lord Brazellamantleg, have arrived contain uranium ore.

Now to those of us from the twenty-first century this would be a cause for concern, possibly panic depending on our knowledge of radioactive decay. Unfortunately for her, Theo's secondary education was supplied by a girls boarding school in the more depressing wilds of Norfolk, and was terminated abruptly, and without parental approval, by the Great War anyway. She's highly skilled in many areas but knows nothing of ionising radiation and radioactivity.

"Brazell", called Theodora to her companion, who'd noticed her absence and turned to watch her antics, "is uranium valuable?" .
"Uranium?". His pronunciation of the single word was sharp, even urgent.
"Yes, uranium. These drums are labelled uranium ore".
He swung around to examine a drum, leaving her in near darkness, the spot illuminated only by her penlight.
She sighed and walked carefully in the dim light to join him.

When she'd covered the short distance, cautiously given the irregular floor, lack of light and her own rather unsuitable footwear, she was he'd used his technix to open the lid of the drum. In the illumination of his torch it's contents were revealed a bright yellow sand.

"What is the stuff?" she asked.
" Carnotite" he replied "a complex oxide of uranium and vanadium"
The answer, while undoubtedly correct, was unhelpful.
"And that means, what exactly?" She'd learned how to extract information from her stoic fellow traveller.

Brazell had returned the technix to his waistcoat and produced a larger box like device. He didn't deploy for some moments as he tapped tiny controls on the device and studied a tiny display.
"Uranium is a heavy metal, uncommon and little used in your time. It's radioactive, the atoms that make it up are naturally unstable and break apart turning into atoms of different elements. It gives off tiny particles that can injure you by damaging your cells". His answer partially satisfied her.
"Is it dangerous?", Theo asked seriously.
"Not really, not of itself. However one of the elements formed when uranium atoms break apart is a gas called radon. We've been breathing it since we arrived here.
Theodora shivered. She'd seen poison gases in action during her ambulance service. A horrible example of human ingenuity.
"But are we in danger?" she pressed the Time Lord.
"Not if we return to my TARDIS soon and use the services of the auto-doc". His flat answer was surprisingly reassuring. "The effects of small amounts of radiation aren't quick to manifest".
"Let's go". Theodora was decisive. The drums could wait.
Brazell nodded, pocketed the device he'd used to study the yellow sand and turned the light on the path pack to their TARDIS.
Suddenly there was a crack bang sound from behind them.



Radiation. The word conjures up all sorts of feelings in my generation, who lived under the shadow of nuclear war for so long. An invisible, unstoppable, silent killer from the popular media of the seventies and eighties¹.

The reality, as I learned in school and college is more complicated.
However radon is nasty, a very dense, short lived as that can be inhaled and emits ionizing radiation within the body, also leaving it's own radioactive decay products in the lungs (or as dust). It's a significant cause of lung cancer.

Even when you're not wandering around in a warehouse where hundreds of tonnes of uranium have been generating radon for two years.



Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?




¹ The War Game, Protect and Survive, Threads and When the Wind Blows

[Catsmate]

And finally, some notes on our protagonists, Brazell and Lady Theodora Fowler. They're not stat'd as they're still incomplete notes.
They were inspired by the excellent Kerry Greenwood's mystery novel Death Before Wicket.

The Stoic and the Libertine.

The Stoic.
Brazell, or to be complete Brazellamantleg, is a Time Lord in his second incarnation, the ‘owner’ and operator of a heavily modified and upgraded TARDIS Type 29S in which he departed Gallifrey some time ago.
Now in his second incarnation, a radically different personality from his first, who’d rebuilt the long obsolete and decrepit TARDIS (think ‘boy racer’ crossed with vintage car fanatic)

Personality.
• Stoic. Remain calm and composed under all circumstances.
• Appears older and more experienced; possesses a natural air of authority.
• Gentlemanly, Victorian/Edwardian manners; polite and tolerant but expects polite behaviour from others.
• Somewhat disturbed by the excesses of his previous incarnation. Especially his flamboyant departure from Gallifrey.
• Plays the 'long game'. Plans and organises.
• Can stare down a Cyber-leader
• Fascinated by clocks and other devices to measure the passage of time.

Details.
• Expert player of 4D chess, played on a truncated icosahedrons. Carries a holographic gameboard with him.
• Master of Ek Wan: an obscure but highly effective unarmed combat discipline
• Expert fencer with the Volen; a telescopic close combat weapon that expands from a short rod to a 90cm flexible rod carrying either a disruptive vibration or a neural shock. Not at all bad with a conventional or enhanced blade or a simple stick either.
• Carries a Vajira: 'magic wand', tool, weapon, healing, information
• Walking stick
• Various gadgets


The Libertine.

I haven’t taken anything seriously since 1918.

Men. Can't live without them. Yet you can't hit them with an axe.

All renegade Gallifreyans need a companion or two and Brazell acquired his current specimen while sojourning in a Terran university in the 1920s. Or perhaps she acquired him…

Miss, or rather Lady, Theodora (‘Theo’) Fowler¹ is a young and exuberant member of the minor aristocracy in her twenties who was masquerading as a student while investigating a spate of odd incidents in the college for a wartime friend turned Don.
She’s very much a child of her class and era; strong willed, sexually adventurous and far tougher than she looks (having spent much of the Great War pulling boys and men out of shellholes as part of a volunteer ambulance unit in France; she joined aged fifteen after running away from boarding school).

Perhaps libertine is a little hard, but Theo does enjoy bedding pretty boys (and men). she’s no ordinary aristocrat, she can fly a plane, drives her own car (a Hispano-Suiza) and sometimes wears trousers. However, while displaying bohemian panache, she manages also to maintain style and class.

Her father is the unexpected holder of a very minor marquessate (a marquess), the six people between the son of a black sheep member of the family sent off to 'the colonies' while Victoria still occupied the throne, and the title having died in and around the Great War.
She joined a French women's ambulance unit during WWI, receiving a medal for bravery and a French war pension. She then worked as an artist's model in Montparnasse after the war. Independent, wealthy, spirited and possessed of an uninhibited style that makes everyone move out of her way and stand gawking for a full five minutes after she walks by.

After solving that particular mystery, and discovering what Professor Brazell was really hiding in his office, she invited herself into his TARDIS with her usual panache (and several cases but not, alas, her Hispano-Suiza²).
Since then they’ve travelled and her already broad outlook has been expanded even further. Though she’s still not sure about showing her knees.

No couturière is going to actually expose the knee, the ugliest joint we have.

She habitually carries all manner of useful stuff, including a cigarette case (Theo no longer smokes and the case is more than it seems³), holder and lighter (with a flame that can cut metal), an LED torch, a small digital camera (to document her travels and adventures), flask of spirits and more.
She’s rarely unarmed, having retained her original .38 revolver (with gold and pearl accents), derringers and .25 Beretta (the Model 418), and acquired a range of other weapons (mostly of the small, discreet and concealable type).



1 Who’s luckily unencumbered by a maid, adopted daughters, a small dog or a black cat with a thunderstorm phobia. Other universes may vary.

2 Though she later acquired an Imperial Scout Service grav-bike. Which is even faster...

3 The edge of the lid, which is covered when the case is closed, has a strip of hyperdence material sharpened to an edge finer than any razor and there is a length of flexible (and similarly enhanced) saw-wire concealed inside. While the cigarettes in one side of the case are normal, those in the other feature knock-out drugs, magnesium flares, flash-bangs, and irritant gas or smoke pellets. The inner lid is mirror smooth for signalling and other purposes.