Date 6/12/2059, Location 38.63122, 48.29418

The team drove down the hill, carefully, trying to stick to hard ground and keep the noise of the engine to a minimum. As they nosed through the darkness, Marius spied another obstacle ahead - this time a fairly simple wire fence, made up of two parallel strands, about a metre high. Aswon and Hunter got out of the truck to examine it, determining that it was exactly as it appeared after a few minutes of careful checking - presumably just a barrier to stop livestock and people from closing on the minefield. Plucking the stakes from the hard ground and laying them flat with their bodyweight allowed the truck to cross easily, then the fence was replaced to hide their crossing. Whilst doing this they became aware of the sounds of bells pealing quietly in the night, and soon Aswon's thermo-vision picked up a number of goats making their way up slope towards them. The team ignored them, and then as quietly as possible they drove down the mountainside, heading North West to intersect highway 33 to the north of the city of Raazi.

About half way down the hill, Tadibya caught a fleeting glimpse of a vehicle, to the south and heading up the slope towards their crossing point, its headlights briefly illuminating the path ahead of them before they were obscured by some terrain feature. They watched for a few minutes in that direction, but their descent and progress north prevented them from seeing the vehicle again.

Slowly they continued to progress down the slope, mostly letting gravity and inertia carry them to give them time to react to unseen obstacles and changes in terrain, and to stop the massive Russian diesel engine from revving and echoing down the barren landscape. At about 5am they made it down through the approach slopes and finally spied the highway, and drove onto the northbound carriageway. Marius gunned the engine at last and accelerated to top speed, trying to shake off accumulated muck, dirt and to clear the treads of debris.

After roughly a click north, he slowed and swung the vehicle round, and they returned to the south, heading to the city. As they closed on the city the sky started to lighten, and shapes started to appear out of the darkness - but the interposing mountains to the east delayed dawn by nearly an hour. They drove in to the city, and turned off the highway onto the old main road into the built-up area, ignoring the bypass.

As they approached the city, they became aware of a rising stench of death and decay, the smell of fetid meat filling the cabin. A few of the team turned to Tadibya and stared at her - when she noticed she exclaimed, "It's not me," with a certain amount of disgust on her face. Concerned that they may have hit a goat or sheep somehow and not noticed it over the rough terrain, Tadibya projected from her body and surveyed the outside of the vehicle. It looked fine, and there was nothing to see - but as she scanned the area from her vantage point she spotted a darkened and twisted area of the manasphere.

A roiling vortex of pain, suffering and fear created a maelstrom of mana that would severely impede her ability to perform magical acts. She flew down in front of the truck, waiting for her physical body to catch up with her astral form, and re-joined the two halves, made easy by the slow progress of the truck. After relaying the information, Kai called for a stop, and Hunter and Aswon decamped and made their way to the east, looking at the buildings between the road they were on and the main road skirting the edge of the city.

It soon became clear in the lightening sky - the area was a series of abattoirs and meat-packing plants. The stench probably came from poor sanitation and handling of the offal and blood, and the background count from the fear and suffering of the animals. Satisfied that it was no immediate danger to them, they returned to the vehicle, and continued to drive south slowly, looking for somewhere discreet to park up and wait for the call from Kai's contact.

The sky continued to lighten as they pulled into a driveway for a derelict building, dust and sand displaced under their tyres. They settled in to wait, a number of the team catching a nap after what felt like a stressful few hours. As the minutes ticked by, Kai kept checking his phone and the marginal signal, hoping for a reply from Ngo with news on their IDs. As minutes turned into tens of minutes, then hours with no response, Kai became increasingly fraught. The arrival of a battered and old police cruiser next to them did nothing for his - or anyone else's tensions... the car looked to be nearly two decades old, battered and chipped, with fading paintwork.

Two policemen got out, pulled their nightsticks from the footwells and gave the truck a curious look. One of them approached the truck, swinging his baton idly while his breath misted in front of him, while the other rested on the front of his own car, blowing warm air into his hands. The first approached the truck, tapping on the window with his nightstick, his arm at full extension to reach up to the high cab. Marius cracked the door open carefully, letting in a draft of cold air and looked down at the policeman.

"Papers, VISA?" the cop called up, looking at the obviously European face of Marius. Marius looked down at the policeman and took a considering breath.

"Sorry, what papers do you want?"

The cop frowned, and interrogated him again, wanting to know who they were, and what they were doing here. Trying to ignore the quiet chanting from the back as Tads cast an invisibility spell on a blanket to cover their collection of guns and illicit material. Marius reeled off the story, explaining that they were with 'Doctors without borders', and they were a bunch of medical students and interns, all volunteers here to provide medical care, travelling to the south to help people. And, most importantly, the regional director had their passports and travel documents as he was organising the trip.

The cop frowned, and again asked about papers, rubbing his fingers and thumbs together. Thinking he wanted to collect an "administration fee", Marius pulled out a few hundred of the Azerbaijani currency and passed it down to the cop, who examined it quickly, then passed it back to Marius without taking any. His frown deepened and he returned to the car, calling out to his colleague that the truck was not legal.

Just as he was reaching for the radio in their car to call in the incident, Tadibya pointed her finger out of the truck, and channelled mana into a blast of mental energy. Both cops collapsed to the ground instantly and the team piled out of the truck, collecting the bodies and stashing them in the back of the truck quickly before anyone spotted them. They moved the car around behind their truck, hoping that it would be less visible to other people and raise less suspicion, but left the window down so they could hear the radio.

It all became quiet again, until the bells rang out to the south, sounding for a few minutes. People appeared from all of the houses around them, wrapped up warm against the biting winds from the south west, and hurried south into the more built-up areas. About thirty minutes later, they returned to their homes, and shortly afterwards there was another small exodus - all male, and all heading towards the slaughterhouses. It grew quiet again, with Kai checking his phone, almost as if he could will it to ring. The minutes crawled by, the town quiet and deserted before once again there was more movement - this time women and children, heading in to the centre of town, and then once again silence descended.

The radio in the police car crackled to life, a bored sounding voice calling.

"Rhabar, are you coming back in?" Hunter dived over to the car, keyed up the microphone and clenched his jaw, altering the shape of his face a little and tried to do his best impersonation of the policemen.

"Not yet, just checking something out, be about an hour." The voice at the other end confirmed, then cleared the channel, and Hunter returned to the truck. Another twenty minutes passed, and a female came out from one of the houses, and walked over to the police car, looking into the cabin. As she stood up, her confusion was evident, and she spent a minute or two calling out around the building, and checking the car, before she shrugged and returned to her home.

The team decided it was time to move, papers or not, and after removing the radio from the police car, they pulled out to head into the town centre. Looking through the policemen's effects they found two poor quality sets of ID, two aging pistols, knock off designs of Sig Saurs with two clips of ammo each, and a few notes of the local currency. Driving into town they saw a few houses with trees, bushes and other growth in their gardens - obviously carefully tended and specifically grown, as greenery always cut off at their borders and the ground returned to the scrubby arid land that made up the surrounding areas.

As they reached the roundabout at the centre of town, a second police cruiser pulled out of a side street and started to follow them. Just as they did, Kai made another call to Ngo, finally getting through. He explained that they were a little "pressed for time" and were ready to pick up the papers, and she passed over the details to make contact with Saeed Shirazi in the supermarket to the south west of town.

As he finished the call, he was informed of their tail, and the team had a quick chat - they obviously couldn't go grab their papers with a police tail, but on the other hand they didn't actually want to hurt them. They couldn't really expect to lose them in a town this small, especially not when they had a massive lumbering military vehicle against the police officer's smaller, faster and more nimble car, along with their local knowledge. Shimazu suggested that Hunter get back on the radio, calling in as "Rhabar" again, saying they were pursuing a vehicle on highway 33 that had refused to stop, and asking for backup.

They decided this was their best option, and called it in - cutting off the cry for help half way through the last sentence, being rewarded almost immediately by the car behind them pulling a U turn, turning on the siren and speeding to the north, leaving the team to proceed south west, looking for the supermarket. They found it nestled in some low-rise housing, with a tiny car park and faded "sale" signs written in Farsi in the window.

The stock looked old and dusty, and the shop felt run down and a little grubby. A few flies buzzed off the 'fresh' meat as they entered and passed the counter, and a sales clerk who was idly stacking shelves greeted them with an automatic wave, that again turned to confusion as seeing "outsiders". Kai asked to speak to Saeed, and the sales clerk babbled something at him and disappeared into the back.

A youngish man appeared, and greeted Kai warmly, his eyes widening a little when Kai said the recognition words - "I wonder if you'd like some geometric artwork for your store." He asked Kai to get his shopping, and disappeared into the back for a minute. Kai and Shimazu trawled the store, looking for edible foods to take with them for their journey. When Saeed returned, he met them at the till, and looking at their small bag of food stuffs said "Please, there is so little here, let these be my gift to you." Kai blinked, a little surprised, and slowly reached for the bag. As he did so, Saeed's body language changed slightly - Kai realised that he'd made some kind of social error, and wasn't acting "correctly", so he stopped and said that he really should pay for them. Saeed seemed to relax a little, but again said that the items should be a gift to them both. Kai's reached for the goods again, and again saw the change in body language that said "wrong!", and his mind blanked, and he suddenly didn't know what to say.

The unexpected elevation to team leader, the stresses of the border crossing, the run in with the police, the strange shaman who grew antlers, the blonde goose-stepping German, the African with lion delusions, the enigmatic Japanese dude and not least bizarre –so far – the English ork... it all must have been a bit much. He dimly heard Saeed offer for a third time to let them have the good for free. What kind of madness was this? Next Saeed said that if Kai really insisted on paying, then the groceries came to no more than 100,000... Kai checked the Azerbaijani currency he was carrying, realising that he didn't have anywhere near a hundred thousand in that, and there was no credstick reader in here... shit. He had no local currency to pay for anything.

Shimazu spoke to Kai in Mandarin Chinese, suggesting they call in the others, and offer to pay in the smuggled optical chips of top release films and movies. Brilliant! He made a call to the team, who had been circling the area, looking for a good place to drop the unconscious policemen off at where they would be out of the way, but safe - or as safe as they were going to get. They got the call and dumped the policemen in a garden they had found, underneath several large bushes, then turned the truck around and headed to the market. They met with Kai and Shimazu round the back of the store, handing over the bag of chips. Kai in turn took the bag and showed it to Saeed, who admired the quality of the packaging, realising that these were originals, and not even first generation knock-off copies. He took the bag, saying that this should cover most of the cost, and he would speak with their mutual contact for the rest.

Kai seemed sick of the negotiations by this point, agreed, and took the envelope of IDs with him - one each for Marius, Tadibya and Aswon. He, and Hunter as obvious metahumans would have to stay hidden as far as possible... They left the market hurriedly, heading south east towards the main road, and found a garage on the intersection. They'd burnt about 200km worth of fuel since they last topped up, so they decided to fill the tanks up to give themselves as much flexibility as possible. Before filling, Marius went into the kiosk, making sure they would take their money.

Inside they found that here too, there was no electronic cash register, no credstick reader, no matrix access line. The till was an old fashioned mechanical affair. He pulled out his Azerbaijani notes again, and showed them to the attendant - who firmly and unequivocally refused them. It appeared that Iranian Riall was all he would take. Back in the truck they used the marginal signal they had to run a quick search - it appeared that Nuyen wasn't legal tender anywhere in Iran, and it was only authorised to change at the border crossings, on entry. The team exchanged looks, and realised that the pittance of pocket change from the policeman wasn't going to get them very far at all in their journey through Iran...