T-Bone Junction
[distant sounds of swearing in the background]
LILITH: Um… hi there… Roland's log. Lilith here. So… we're up in T-Bone Junction right now, and, uh… well… Okay, we're up shit creek without a paddle at the moment.
MOREDCAI: Man, I ain't never heard Roland swear that much. I don't think I even know what language some of those curses are.
BRICK: I am learning so much, and it is glorious.
LILITH: Right, so, I guess I should explain. It's been a few weeks since the Jakobs Cove incident. We've mostly just been hanging out, doing missions and stuff, competing for the top prize in Moxxi's Underdrome WHICH I TOTALLY WON BY THE WAY!
MORDECAI: Hey, Moxxi picked who she picked, Lils. No use complaining about it.
LILITH: Yeah, whatever! Anyway, we got a message asking us to come out to T-Bone Junction because something was happening out here. Next thing we know when we arrive we find out that the Crimson Lance, the guys who tried to open the Vault and kill us all, are planning to land an entire army on Pandora to secure it, and their primary targets? Us. So yeah… not a good situation.
ROLAND: - with a goddamn skag!
MORDECAI: You, uh… you finished buddy?
ROLAND: [panting] Yes… I'm done. Lilith, you can hand me back my echo now.
LILITH: Here you go.
ROLAND: Thanks. Okay… so it's not all bad, thankfully. Turns out we have an ally to help us deal with the Lance this time. A defector, one of the Lance's Crimson Assassins, a team leader in fact. Goes by the name of Athena.
ATHENA: I thought I told you not to use my name in any communications.
ROLAND: This is a personal log, Athena, not something I plan on sharing with anyone. If the Lance were to get their hands on this we'd have much bigger problems. Like the fact that I'd be dead and likely locked out of the New-U System.
ATHENA: Very well, but I will hold you to that. Athena out.
MORDECAI: Man, is she always that serious?
ROLAND: Crimson Assassins are raised from birth to do one job and one job only for the Lance; follow orders and kill targets. They don't have much in the way of social skills as a result.
LILITH: That sucks.
ROLAND: Compared to some of the other things the Lance gets up to, it's surprisingly tame. Anyway, she left the Lance in time to warn us of what's coming, and we'll be working with her to cripple their invasion plans and give Pandora a fighting chance against what's coming. But first, we had to rescue Athena after she got captured by bandits.
BRICK: Bandit prisoners.
ROLAND: I'll get to that. Anyway, to give a brief rundown of what we did today, when we arrived Scooter asked us to help him gather parts for a new vehicle, called the Monster, which should have enough armor to withstand fire from the Lance long enough for us to do some damage back to them. While we did that a local asked us to take care of the spy drones hanging around T-Bone Junction, which was easy enough once I calibrated my echo to localize their radio sources.
LILITH: Hey… are we gonna talk about that shrine thing I found down in the lower levels of the junction?
MORDECAI: I don't know, do you want to talk about it?
LILITH: I feel like I should, but at the same time I really don't want to.
ROLAND: Let's not. That's a bit too personal and creepy to discuss in a recording. Anyway, once the Monster was complete Scooter sent us to go meet with Moxxi at her bar down in the Deep Fathoms, but to get there we had to break through a Crimson Lance blockade.
MORDECAI: Are the elemental troopers new?
ROLAND: Somewhat. I remember there were plans on the books for implementing the idea, but nobody had gotten around to it when I left. The ones we fought at the blockade were all shock elemental, so our shields took a serious battering the whole time. Luckily we all had enough healing techs available to counteract the damage.
MORDECAI: Your scorpio turret is a life-saver man. Literally.
ROLAND: You're welcome. Once we pushed through the blockade we got a message from the leader of the Crimson Lance division coming to the planet. My old C.O. General Knoxx.
LILITH: You know… he seems like a nice guy. I mean, relatively speaking. What's he doing with the Lance?
ROLAND: He's a career man, been with them all his life. And while yes, he is more reasonable - by which I mean practical - than most of the Lance, he's not a good person. He's done his fair share of war crimes too. He's just more polite about it.
BRICK: I like him. I want to share a drink with him before I punch his teeth out.
ROLAND: We made our way to the Fathoms and met up with Moxxi, but unfortunately we were too late. Bandits had broken in and ambushed the pair of them, capturing Athena and taking her off to the north to be held hostage. Apparently Moxxi knows the guy who runs the prison where they took her, an ex-husband of hers named Mister Shank.
LILITH: Sounds like a swell guy. Also, did any of you guys know Moxxi was Scooter's mom?
MORDECAI: That still blows me away man. Moxxi doesn't look nearly old enough to be his mom.
MOXXI: Ah, thanks for the compliment, sugar.
MORDECAI: Anytime babe.
ROLAND: Anyway… Scooter gave us access to a suped up version of the Runner, which he calls the Racer now, which Moxxi said would let us access the prison out in the Sunken Sea. We had to break through two more blockades on the way out there, the first made up of pyro troopers and the second of corrosive troopers, as well as fight through a long forward operating base set in the tunnels along the road. Lots and lots and lots of Lance to kill.
BRICK: So much boom, so much glory. I'm enjoying this.
LILITH: Hey, Roland, what's the deal with these energy core things that Marcus is having us gather?
ROLAND: I'm not sure. They're different from the power cores that I used during my time with the Lance. Have different effects as well. Now, once we arrived at the Sunken Sea, we didn't immediately head out for the prison. We had a few other tasks to do first.
LILITH: Always more to do, always people to help.
MORDECAI: Always money to earn.
BRICK: Always stuff to kill. We live a good life.
LILITH: You know, I kinda agree.
ROLAND: We were asked, by Mister Shank, ironically enough, to go blow up a power line harvester that some bandits were using to steal power from the prison. I actually considered not doing this one, since the prison having low power could be a boon when we assault it, but I was convinced to do it because one, Shank was offering absurdly good money for an easy task, and two, I didn't think the tactical advantage was going to be that substantial.
LILITH: Spoilers, it wasn't.
BRICK: Lils, what did I tell you about spoilers?!
LILITH: It was a joke Brick!
ROLAND: We also went around killing more bandit patrols, because of course we did, and dealt with a supermassive drifter named Skyscraper. Oh, I should mention about drifters, they're large insect like creatures that walk through the sea-sands and spit gobs of acid at anything that gets too close. And they are terrifying.
MORDECAI: It's cause of how quiet they are man! I swear, every other animal on this planet you can hear coming from meters away, but the drifters are dead silent! It's creepy as hell!
ROLAND: We also found this friendly midget in a shack fishing for, well, fish. And no, he wasn't grenade fishing either.
BRICK: Peasant, doing it the boring way.
ROLAND: He was pretty chill for a midget, asked us if we could turn some pump valves to give him access to some purple juice that flows through the region. I know better by now than to ask where the juice comes from, so we went and did what he asked. Turns out all the other midgets in the area had the same idea and were defending the pumps with their lives.
MORDECAI: So you're not the least bit curious what this purple juice is?
ROLAND: Not at all. At all. Anyway, once that was done we finally tried to break into the prison. The prison itself was up on a rock shelf about a hundred meters above the sand-floor, so Moxxi had us jump the prison walls in a racer off the roof of her first ex-husband's house. It was surprisingly epic.
LILITH: Yeah, especially with Brick hanging on the front bumper and jumping off onto a bruiser to tear his arms off. Brick, A+ for badassery.
BRICK: Thank you, you're too kind.
ROLAND: The prison itself wasn't that much different from assaulting any other bandit settlement, just with the bandits wearing prison clothes and chains instead of their outdoors gear. We found another claptrap, though this one wasn't damaged so much as locked in a wheel clamp, which I did not let Brick try to remove by using his grenades.
BRICK: It would have been fine. We could have just fixed him up like all the other claptraps we repaired.
ROLAND: Ha ha, no. Anyway, we made our way through until we met Mister Shank in the showers and killed him. He had an unusually strong shield and was using Athena's teleporter to make the fight tricky, but between the four of us he really didn't stand a chance.
LILITH: Moxxi actually got really sad when she found out we killed him. I guess being ex-s for that long didn't take away all the attraction from when they were together.
ROLAND: From there freeing Athena didn't take much longer. We gave her back her teleporter and she warped out of the prison. Though I'm surprised she had enough range to go all the way back to T-Bone in one trip.
ATHENA: Doing so requires precise knowledge of power requirements, distance calculation, and careful consideration of necessity. In this case, I couldn't risk being found anywhere along the way to the Junction, so I had to go straight there. As it is I overloaded my teleporter and it will require several days to be repaired.
ROLAND: Ah, that explains a few things. Anyway, once she was free we left the prison after freeing the claptrap.
MORDECAI: Who got himself caught in a magnet trap only a few minutes later.
ROLAND: I wanted to get him out, but the others said I'd done enough, and he was in prison for a reason, or something like that. We left the prison by jumping off the broken road in a monster, then drove back along the roadway towards T-Bone. We did pause along the way though to deal with a rumor the friendly bandit told us about, and we found out it was true…
LILITH: WHO IN THE FUCK OF IT THOUGHT BRINGING SLEDGE BACK TO LIFE WITH A TURRET FOR A HEAD WAS A GOOD IDEA?!
MORDECAI: Midgets?
LILITH: EVEN FOR THEM, THIS SHIT IS FUCKED GUYS!
BRICK: I have seen many things in my life, and killed most of them. And that was in the top five most disturbing things I've ever killed. Just below the Destroyer.
ROLAND: [sighs] Yes, it was Sledge, or rather what used to be Sledge, with a gatling turret in place of his head. I have no idea how they made this bastardization of cyber-necromancy to work, but they did, and we killed it. Thank the Angel for that.
LILITH: Look, guys, I'm a nice girl, you know? I want to do nice things, help people out, all that stuff. BUT I SERIOUSLY WANT TO MURDER EVERYONE WHO HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS RIGHT NOW, WHAT THE FUCK!?
ROLAND: Lilith, I'm pretty sure we already slaughtered all the midgets responsible when we were clearing the pumps. Relax. Justice, such as it is, has already been served.
LILITH: [deep breaths] Okay… okay… I'ma… I'm going to go over there and just… chill now.
MORDECAI: Man, I wish ice element weapons existed. She needs one right now.
BRICK: I heard they're working on that up on Elphis.
MORDECAI: Seriously? That's cool. Heh.
BRICK: Heh.
ROLAND: Anyway, we're back in T-Bone now. We're resting here for the night after rescuing Athena. Tomorrow we're going to get to work on our plan to ruin the Lance's campaign here on Pandora by blowing up all of their weapons and gear. After we've had a chance to loot it for ourselves.
BRICK: Hells yeah.
ROLAND: This is Roland, signing off.