PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: EURASIAN CONTESTED ZONE // GRID 4-HOTEL
FILING_DATE: 2026-07-30
RESULT: CALLER TAKEN // T6
██ █ ████ ███ █
███ ████ ██ █████
BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-07-30
囮
OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT // RECONSTRUCTED
THE
CALLER
STRIKE 461-K // GREKOV MAST // TAKE-ALIVE
HVT // STRIKE 461-K
GREKOV MAST // TAKE-ALIVE
CALLER TAKEN // T6
OPERATOR // 1 FW LEFT
// BAIT THE GROUND // PLAY THE VOICE // COUNT THE DICE // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT
A take-alive on the operator running broadcast lures out of a dead EO relay mast — a boar-hunter handed a person for once, and a loop calling live animals in with the recorded voices of dead ones. Two of those voices were her own contracts.
THE CALLER
BY RIO SOLVENG
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT
FILED: EURASIAN CONTESTED ZONE // GRID 4-HOTEL // 2026-07-30
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Kose here. We handed a specimen hunter a personnel snatch — the sort of tasking that usually goes to a strike cell — and she ran it like a den anyway, because a nervous man on a gantry and a nervous boar in the grass turn out to read about the same. That is the fun of the game. The part I cannot put down is quieter. The mast was calling live animals in with the recorded voices of dead ones, and two of the dead ones were Grouse's own kills. Keep this one for the thing she carried off the table, not the thing she brought in.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // HVT (solo take-alive)
SCENARIOStrike 461-K // The Caller. BAFO personnel interdiction, take-alive. Eurasian contested zone, grid 4-Hotel — the stripped Grekov early-warning mast, quietly re-powered.
OPERATOREske Lund, callsign Grouse. Gene-forged veteran contractor, solo — declined a Medic a third contract running. Handler Kestrel, remote.
HVT"The Caller." Lure-rig operator, Baseline, non-combatant profile. SHOOT poor, no fight in him — but wired to wipe the broadcast drive before he answers to anyone. Two Grunt-tier minders on the perimeter.
TABLEFive zones, open glacis to the mast. Ferrite wash off the dead array, the re-powered broadcast rig up the gantry, and one live Vepr Ferox (Veteran) inbound across the glacis — drawn by the loop's own call, tasked to nobody.
OBJECTIVETake the Caller alive and recover the broadcast drive intact, then reach the vehicle.
WIN CONDITIONHVT Out of Action as a capture, drive recovered. Loss on operator down, HVT killed, or the drive wiped.
TURN CAPClimax fires at Threat Phase 7 at the latest.
BAFO does not hand Grouse people. It hands her specimen cards, a grid, and a payout. So when the 461-K tasking came through with a face on it instead of an anatomy sheet, she read it twice before she believed it, and only then because of what was stapled to it — her own rig report from Sable Cistern, the hand-stamped rivet tag she pocketed off a live-capture cage a valley over, cross-matched to a hydrophone hit a handler named Daud pulled six thousand kilometers away, in a shipping lane, playing the calls of animals that were already gone. Two questions, one answer. Something in her area of operations was broadcasting the voices of dead specimens to bring live ones in. The answer had an address. The mast at 4-Hotel had been dark since the Walker War and was pulling power again.
She took the ferrite line. The glacis to the mast is open ground, and open ground has minders on it who see an upright silhouette from three hundred meters. The wash off the old array blinds optics — hers and theirs — and an operator who trusts her feet over her lenses can move inside it. Grouse trusts her feet. She paced it slow, the way she paces a den, and by the time the mast resolved out of the murk she had both minders' patrol arcs in her head and the whole shape of the thing she was there to end.
The rig was singing the entire time. That is the part worth sitting with. It was not jamming, not signalling a buyer — it was calling, a long baited loop of Radio-Lure registers thrown out across the steppe on a repeater, and out on the far edge of the glacis something was answering it. A young Vepr Ferox, Veteran tier, nosing in across open ground toward a voice. Grouse read it cold from forty meters, the way she reads all of them. Then she placed the voice it was walking toward, and her hands went still.
It was the 451-C boar. The one she killed at the spillway throat a valley over, four days ago, on her last box. Someone had kept its call, and was using it as bait, and a live animal was crossing open ground to answer a dead one she had silenced herself.
SHE KNEW THAT VOICE. SHE HAD ENDED IT HERSELF.
What saved the game is that she did not shoot anything she was not paid to. A weaker run puts a round in the Vepr to clear her lane and loses the take-alive to a stray shot and a dead man; the Caller was going to answer to whoever grabbed him, or die trying not to, and a killed target is a failed strike. So she used the animal instead of fighting it. She held in the wash, let the loop keep pulling the Vepr across the glacis, and timed her move on the mast to the moment the boar's line crossed a minder's. The minder oriented on two and a half meters of drawn, agitated plate instead of on her, and the steppe did a minder's worth of work for free.
Then the mast alarmed and the quiet part ended. The Caller broke for the rig the way they always break for the thing that convicts them, and went for the wipe — and here the dice paid back every clean read she had banked. He fumbled it, badly, dropped the drive off the gantry into the ferrite pan instead of seating the erase, and stood there for one exposed beat watching the only object worth taking bounce away from him. She was up the gantry stair by then. The second minder connected on the way up and put her on her last box, same as the boar had four days before, same as the alpha before that. She has a way of arriving at the last box. She held her feet, took the man alive, and pinned him without a wound on him, because a live Caller who talks is worth more than a clean one who doesn't.
He did not talk much. He plays a playlist. He does not assemble it, does not know who does, does not know what comes to collect the animals the calls draw in — he seats a sealed drive in the repeater and the drive does the rest, and he is paid in water not to read it. So she read it. The loop ran forty-one registers. Two of them were hers: the Iron Grass alpha off 447-F, the spillway boar off 451-C. Somebody has the voices of the animals she kills, and is putting them back on the ground as bait, faster than she can close the dens. She logged the mast and the rig to BAFO. She kept a copy of the playlist. The Vepr, still fixed on a voice that would never answer, drifted back into the wash while she walked the Caller to the vehicle, and the loop was still playing when she cleared the grid.
// THE TAPE
PREThe Read on the Caller 5, 4 (Baseline, DC 3+): drive-dump reflex, panic tell, no fight in him. Approach across the glacis 5 / 4, ferrite wash blinds optics both ways — cover, not a hazard. Banked 1 Tempo. A Vepr Ferox (Veteran) enters on the loop's call at the far glacis edge: neutral, drawn, tasked to no side.
T1Lost priority 2 vs 4. Minder A patrol sweep 3, Grouse holds in the wash unseen. Reads the broadcast register and clocks the call as 451-C — no roll, recognition. Vepr advances one zone toward the rig.
T2Moves on the mast base. Minder B spot check 5, would see her — she instead breaks line so the drawn Vepr crosses Minder B's arc. Animal FIGHT 6 lands on Minder B, not on Grouse: Minder A/B confusion, Minder B Out of Action. The rig alarms.
T3The Caller breaks for the repeater to wipe the drive. Drive-wipe attempt nat 1 fumble — he drops the drive off the gantry into the ferrite pan instead of seating the erase. Objective survives on his mistake, not her die.
T4Grouse takes the gantry stair. Minder A re-acquires, FIGHT 5 connects for 1 FW — Grouse to her last flesh-wound box. She GUTS 6, holds her feet, no mortal track.
T5Subdue the Caller, take-alive check 2, short by one — he squirms loose. Spent last Tempo to reroll: 5, held. Recovers the drive from the ferrite pan (Adaptive-blind zone, no interference). Minder A disengages under the Vepr's second pass.
T6Exfil with the Vepr still on the glacis, fixed on the loop. Grouse crosses on TACT 4, animal never orients on her — it wants the voice. Vehicle live. Caller secured whole, drive intact, on her last box.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED · Q. ADAIR
Adair on the crunch. This is the third strike this month where HVT priced a live objective wrong, and the first where the target brought his own hazard to the table without either side owning it. Grouse played it close to flawless — she never fired a shot she wasn't paid for, spent one animal to save a minder-fight, and won the take-alive on a rerolled subdue — and the scoring sheet still could not describe two of the three things that decided the game.
- The turn it swung: T3, the Caller's natural 1. The single most valuable object on the table survives because the target fumbled his own wipe, not because Grouse rolled well. On any success there, she takes a clean prisoner and walks off with a wiped drive — a scored win that recovers nothing worth having. HVT has no way to represent "you won the body and lost the point."
- Drawn Hazard — the missing token: the Vepr was not the HVT's asset and not Grouse's summon. The target's own equipment called it onto the table, and it answered to neither initiative. We ran it as a neutral hazard on its own activation. Proposed rule — a Drawn Hazard tag: a threat the objective itself generates, activating on a neutral step, scoring for no one, and removable only by ending the thing that draws it. It turns "there's a monster on the board" into a real tactical layer instead of a GM fiat.
- Live objective, again: same fault as Nothing Leaves (07-24) and Sign For It (07-28). The broadcast drive is the whole reason for the strike and is worth zero VP next to the body. Extend the Recovered Consignment token to a Live Log state — the drive scores on a separate track, with a Wiped state that zeroes it, the mirror of the "Copied" state we proposed for the split-custody read.
- Specialist out of lane: Grouse is a Big Game operator running a personnel snatch, and the scenario let her spend her whole anatomy-and-behavior toolkit on a nervous man and a drawn animal both. It was the best part of the night and the rules give no bonus for it. Optional Cross-Read: a specialist may apply their Read to an off-discipline target at +1 DC. Reward the player who reads a person like a boar; make them pay a pip for the privilege.
Three gaps logged to the backlog this run, none fatal, all the kind a second edition closes in a sentence. Note for the file: the take-alive/kill line on a non-combatant HVT is still undefined — we treated "Out of Action" as capture by default because a Baseline with no SHOOT can't credibly be dropped in a subdue. That wants a real ruling before someone plays it the other way.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTHVT secured alive. Strike 461-K cleared on Threat Phase 6, inside the cap. Broadcast drive recovered intact — via the target's own fumble, not a contested pull.
CASUALTIES // OPERATORGrouse took 1 FW, survived on her last flesh-wound box. No mortal wounds. Third contract running she's declined a Medic and closed on the last box.
CASUALTIES // OTHERTwo minders down — one to the drawn Vepr, one subdued. The Caller taken whole and unhurt. The Vepr Ferox left the table alive, never oriented on Grouse, still answering the loop.
MVPThe read, pointed at a person for once — and the discipline to let the target's own drawn animal do a minder's worth of work instead of spending a bullet and the take-alive on it.
RECOVEREDThe mast, the repeater, and the sealed drive logged to BAFO. A private copy of the 41-register playlist kept off the report — two of the registers are Grouse's own kills (447-F, 451-C).
SHE LOGGED THE MAST. SHE KEPT THE VOICES.