Quoted By:
[1/3]
Casting aside the bag of garbage used to partially-obscure the dead drop, you withdraw the bag containing the goods you needed for the next step. You needed to slip into the general population of the city, get the lay of the land, and settle in. This was where the Reconnaissance team did some of the lifting for you- Citizens in Combine-occupied cities were known and catalogued by number, heavily tracked, and counted at several points in the day. You withdrew and set aside a standard Citizen jumpsuit, a basic all-weather garment issued to every human under Combine rule. It's clean, which you appreciate deeply after wading through the stagnant decades of European sanitation infrastructure. You note the number on the nametag, your new identity. <span class="mu-s">#493357</span> This number was how you were to be housed, fed, worked, and eventually discarded. Setting aside the folded jumpsuit, you find a few papers on top of the rest of the contained goodies, the first one with <span class="mu-i">"DESTROY AFTER READING"</span> scribbled boldly on top of a few lines of shorthand. You read this first one intently.
<span class="mu-i">"you are 493357, your apt just upstairs to the right for ez access to drop. 3 neighbor apts vacant as of 4/6. assigned machine shop 7 shift 3.</span> <span class="mu-r">last malign't exposed by loy'st #312212 fn Lucas, avoid or term.</span><span class="mu-i"> courier evr 2 weeks. viel gluck</span>
Well, now you know what happened to the last guy. It would've been nice to have more identifying information on this loyalist. The other two papers are radio codes and frequencies for the current two week block until the next courier hopefully comes up the tunnels with the new set. Radio, despite being your passion, was a dangerous technology to rely on in occupied areas. The Combine Metropolitan Police Forces are perfectly capable of using direction-finding equipment and are constantly scanning for rogue broadcasts from the uninformed or unwary. That being said, if there was a time-sensitive message that needed to get out of the city or an urgent order that needed to get in, short radio transmissions were still the best solution. A basic radio set was, naturally, the next set of items to be discovered in the bag. Nothing like what you used to mess with pre-War, but still enough to set up a proper station.
The last item was a gun, a worn, open-top revolver that wouldn't have been out of place in an old Western, loaded with five bullets and with its' hammer sitting on an empty chamber. No extra bullets were in the bag. This was a courtesy more than anything, in the case of discovery there was already enough here to condemn you to a fate worse than death. The idea was to put the first bullet into your radio set, use the next three bullets to aid you in an escape, and put the final bullet into your brain if you couldn't.
