The boys looked a bit sickly as they see the gruesome wounds on some of the men, but the engineer quickly took charge of the situation and starts issuing commands. Even the little prick Willmann who at first declared to have command was quickly silenced when the engineer pulls rank on him.

Everybody seems to have all but forgotten about Lena.

((This is your window - give me a stealth roll at +2, since nobody is paying you any mind to get back to the artillery pieces and examine them and then a Smarts roll at -4 to sabotage it.))

11:11, Today: Lena Vogt rolled 8,17 using d6+3,d6+3, rerolling max with rolls of 5,(6+6+2)14.  Stealth +2 with Thief.

Well.

But I'm not very likely at all to make the next roll with such a penalty.  I'll spend one benny on it for the heck of it.

11:12, Today: Lena Vogt rolled 1,-3 using d8-4,d8-4, rerolling max with rolls of 5,1.  one benny.

11:12, Today: Lena Vogt rolled 1,-2 using d8-4,d8-4, rerolling max with rolls of 5,2.  Derp!

((Well, you should've trained to be an engineer and not a nurse. :-)

The challenge here is to destroy the artillery pieces without making it obvious. ))


Lena made it quite easily to the guns and started to look around. What could she do to make the guns useless yet not making it obvious it had been tinkered with?

She looked around and started to get nervous. Finally, she started to turn the elevation wheel, lowering the angle, and kept turning it - until it fell off the axle. She picked the wheel up and repeated the process at the other one.

Now these guns would still be able to fire, but their effectivness would be greatly diminished.

Well, she'd done what she could.  Lena was still trying to figure out if she should light out.  She'd have to, before Arthur came back, but she had to get back to the others to not look so suspicious for now.

As she returned to the stadium/field hospital entrance, she found the engineer staying there, lighting up a cigarette. He nodded an acknowledgement as she came closer.

"Most of the men won't make it, hm?" he commented. It sounded like a question but seemed to be just as much a statement.

Lena wasn't sure she had a read on the situation, so she gave a fairly straight answer.

"I fear many will not.  I appreciate your helping us triage, our being organized is the only chance many of them have."  She leaned into the Tired Nurse persona, which wasn't exactly hard.

He shrugged and offered Lena a cigarette.
"Certainly makes more sense than putting up PAKs without ammo. Can I ask you what's your name?"

"You may."  She teased, and accepted the cigarette.  She then laughed.  "I am sorry, the little shit is rubbing off on me."

"Which little shit?", he asked and lit her cigarette.

"I'm Klaus. And you are?"

When he said that, Lena laughed.  "I am Lena.  I hope they come to transport the patients soon."  She quickly added in a very serious tone.

Klaus blew smoke through his nose.
"They better come fast. Ivan will have closed the ring around Berlin soon. Then... it's just an ever-tightening noose for all of us."

He took another drag. "What will you do, when it's over?"

"I can't imagine it will change for me.  We will need nurses.  We will always need nurses.  In the immediate future, we will especially need nurses."  Lena answered somewhat honestly.  Because really, that's the only plan she had.  She needed extraction but had no clue where to look for it.

"Guess if we're only looking at short-term, I should find employment as a gravedigger."
He flashed her a warm smile.

"All I ever wanted was to build cars. Like Daimler, or Porsche, you know? Build cars and drive them. Guess we'll have to build roads first, though."

"I am sure you will build cars some day."  Lena responded, not really sure where he was going with this other than he knew this situation was untenable, to use the understatement of the century.

He shrugged. "I don't know. Who knows what will happen when the war is over."

He took a last drag, then carefully put out the cigarette against the wall.

"If you weren't a nurse, what would you like to do?"
He smiled, awkwardly. "You could be in the movies, you know? Pretty girl like you and all..."

Lena resisted the urge to roll her eyes.  "Oh stop, you're embarrassing me!"

He asked a hell of a good question though.  What would life be if this pretend charade, of writing encoded bits on scraps and dropping them in unlikely cache boxes in strange places, taking photographs of hospital records and occasionally lifting fingerprints from patients ended?  Would they really just let her go?  Were her parents even still alive?

He raised his good arm in defeat, still smiling. "Alright, alright, forget I said anything."

Far off in the distance, the thunder of artillery could be heard, mixed with the high-pitched screaming of the Soviet Katyusha rocket artillery.
"Stalin's playing his organ again for us." His smile wavered, but he fought to keep it one, obviously trying to put on a brave face.

"Yeah I... uh... do not mean to question bigger minds, but installing the artillery here before moving the hospital seems... unorthodox."

Lena wondered if they even had the red cross displayed anywhere.  Probably not.

Klaus shrugged. "Nothing big about the minds that are at work. Some Major tells me to grab the boys and set up artillery, so I grab the boys and set up artillery. If a Captain were to come along and tell me to dismantle it, I'd have to tell him that he needs to go find a Colonel."

He pulled a piece of tobacco from his lips and shrugged again. "It beats digging a trench and filling it up again."

He took another cigarette from the pack. "Want another one? Took them off an Ami pilot. Must've been the last plane we'll shoot down in this war."

"No, thank you, but I have been trying to cut down."  That was a half truth, she was smoking more than she normally would lately and really didn't want it to become such a habit.

Klaus looked disappointed but didn't push it.

There was a moment of silence and he kicked his foot against a stone in the ground, dislodging it.
"Do you... are you... uhm..." he started and kicked the stone again.
"You must be lookign forward for your husband to come back from the front, right?"

"Actually my fiance has been stationed here in Berlin for the last few months."  Lena figured Arthur would not appreciate being referred to as a fiance, and Lena would rather hang herself than for that to be true.  She was going to add more detail, but decided not to.  Whatever he imagined would be better.

"Oh." Klaus, all of a sudden, looked like an embarrased school boy.
"Oh", he said again. "I'm, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to..." He stopped and pushed himself away from the wall. "I'm sorry." He repeated once more and walked away.

Lena breathed a sigh of relief.  She felt a little bad Klaus was so embarrassed, he didn't actually do anything wrong per se, but she really, really did not need such attention right now.  It was time to go hustle and be a nurse anyway, if she wasn't slipping out she needed to blend in.

Please commence to post in The Ruins of Berlin thread!