It became obvious that we were attracting a lot of attention and were
likely to be attacked soon.  A visitor showed up; we allowed her in
because she was alone and talked with her.  She discussed dreamers,
prophecy and the sword, and reacted rather sharply to us knowing about
the scourge and various fourth age scripts.  Eventually we let her go
down to the sword room; she cast a spell using something that looked
suspiciously like threadweaving which made bits of the sword writing
glow to confirm its authenticity.  This apparently convinced her that
we were genuine.  She removed an illusion disguise, and now claimed to
be a local fixer, associated with a group of people who had been
involved with magical research and were now mostly shadowrunners and
the like, and offered to do information trading.  We agreed that this
was a good idea, and set up a secure communications arrangement and
showed her out.  (I vaguely recall that 'her' became 'him' when the
disguise dropped, but not sure).  I believe we will be contacting her
soon, but info exchange seemed less important than safety at the moment.

Tensions were rising in the area, and it seemed that an attack was
imminent.  So, we sent two people Tom (==<ariel>) and Dana (==<merry>)
to the embassy to attempt to contact the Tir Tairngre ambassador
early.  Partway there they were stopped by a cop, who ordered them to
get in his car, stunned them, and drove off with them.  Since this was
an obvious prelude to an attack, I hit the panic button to summon the
elven rapid reaction force, and called the cops to deal with rescuing
Tom and Dana, and Melody called the Mafia to rescue them in case the
cops were too slow.  And we told the elven rapid reaction force to
also dispatch someone, just for overkill value.

The guy holding Tom and Dana called to offer to exchange them for the
sword, and I said no and hang up.  He calls back and chops off one of
Tom's fingers and repeats his demand, and I tell him they've got more
fingers and hang up.  In response, a group attacked our HQ; one troll,
and a bunch of orcs and dwarves.  Gunfight ensued between them and the
elves, with us occasionally getting a shot in; Dargo (==<iago>) and
Jonathan (==<jusin>) guarded the sword in the basement.  A large
heavily armed/armored troll ventured down and lost the gunfight with
Dargo.  A couple dwarves wandered down, and Dargo toasted them.  An
orc came down, doing funky things with smoke, waved his hand in the
air to stop bullets, and similarly said "Hey! I'm an Adept or
something similar!".  Dargo failed to kill him, due to his rocket
launcher blowing up and his bullets bouncing off the air; eventually
he grabbed Dargo's leg and did something that stunned Dargo.  Jonathan
came out and KOed the orc, but while we weren't watching, Dargo
unstunned and drew the sword.

Short but moderately epic swordfight ensues between Dargo and
Jonathan, resulting in Jonathan being wounded; Dargo runs off, and
gets nailed by a stunner, throwing the sword as he falls.  A couple of
orcs try to pick it up, and get toasted by a stunner and what is left
of Jonathan's sword.  Melody goes down to execute the orc in the
basement, in hopes that killing him will unbrainwash Dargo, while
everyone else guards the sword, now embedded in a wall.  The firefight
winds down.

We talk to the ambassador (who called during the fight).  We give his
people the sword and talked for a bit.  We agreed with the 'cop' to
let the last three of his attackers survive in exchange for Tom and
Dana.  Elana (==<thista>) goes around healing people, and tranqs Dargo
while we debate how to deal.  We discover that killing someone who
cast 'mindswap' is a Bad Idea, and run down to check to see if the Orc
adept is really dead.  Luckily, melody is wimpy and he appears to have
survived.  Of course, he kinda looks like Menk, so he may be rather
slippery...  We tie him and Dargo to stretchers, deactivate Dargo's
arms, and leave them unconcious.

Oh, and the basement was flooding, so Elana and Jonathan hammer the
sword back into the portal.  We cleverly fail to look in astral to see
if any horrors seeped through.  Some of the elves depart with the
sword; we initially decline their offer to relocate to their embassy,
but on more inspection of the amount of heavy weapons fire that hit
the building, we decide we will be needing to leave.

Run wraps up with Tom and Dana in docwagon hospital, Dargo unconcious,
and the rest of us about to deal with packing up the building to
relocate.

Lessons/Suggestions:

1) People keep telling us we are important, and that there are things
only we can do.  This is neat, but important people have a horrible
tendency to get assassinated.  Everyone should work on combat skills,
even if just defensive ones -- even if you only intend to cower under
a table when the shooting starts, combat reflexes and dodging are
great to have.  I have a drone that will be happy to do some basic
combat drills with you to practice dodges, and Jonathan can train you
in more funky things.

2) People are a bit stressed over, well, everything.  Please keep an
open dialog with the party psychologists, me, Tom (<ariel>) and Peter
(<tmack>), since it would suck to have you all go nuts now.

3) We need a designated "party spokesman", or perhaps a hierarchy of
"foo is spokesman, bar is when foo isn't around, then baz, ...".
Having both Melody and Peter talking to the guest was suboptimal,
since it meant we were giving out twice as much info as if one person
had dealt.  Having me doing the negotiating with the terrorists and
the ambassador was even more suboptimal, since eventually someone will
want to know more about me...  I'd like to remain our ace in the hole
for as long as possible, especially against the elves should they
eventually backstab us.

4) Similarly, we need a subtle hand signal for "hey, spokesman, shut
up now" so that non-spokesman people can let the spokesman know when
they are about to say something that should remain secret, or agree to
something that the rest of us don't like.

5) Posting a list of skills/abilities you have would be nice, so that
next time we send a couple of people off somewhere we don't
accidentally send off the two people that have skill foo which we then
need.

As always, comments or clarifications are welcome.