Foundry:Trouble In Paradise (ST-HA4QUWNST)

"[Ico] Trouble In Paradise" (ST-HA4QUWNST) is the second of three missions in the Amargosa series. The [Ico] tag in the title identifies this mission as part of Tales from the Frontlines: An Iconian War Anthology.

Unlike previous mission series by this author, Amargosa is presented as three separate standalone missions, as they do not form a single overarching storyline; they merely share a common MacGuffin and a few other, minor plot elements. The Amargosa title itself is used only informally by the author; none of its three missions include it in their own titles.

Risian floaters are usable during the island scenes, but powerboards are not.

"Trouble In Paradise" was the winning entry of the inaugural ZEFilms Foundry/RP Challenge in August 2015.

Historical context
This mission takes place in the year 2410 during the Iconian War, between Cryptic-authored missions "House Pegh" and "Time in a Bottle". It is also meant to coincide with the start of the Risian Lohlunat Festival, whose 2015 edition began between the publications of those two missions.

Plot summary
The player's ship receives an incoming message from the Risian Hospitality Association, inviting the player and his/her crew to partake in Risa's Lohlunat Festival. The personal invitation, while gracious and eagerly accepted, strikes the player as odd - usually the Risians just send a representative to Earth Spacedock to promote the Festival. It turns out that someone has left a message for the player with instructions to deliver it only upon his/her arrival at Risa. When the ship arrives, the player receives a cryptic text message signed "F.D." - whom the player takes to be the notorious Section 31 operative Franklin Drake, last seen in Admiral Quinn's office after having apparently goaded the Iconians into sending their Heralds to raid Spacedock with the lure of falsified information regarding something called the "Amargosa Project".

Drake's message directs the player to Risa's "Classic Island", a sleepy place nowadays since the new Suraya Bay resort (the site of the Lohlunat Festival) opened. The player assembles an away team and beams down, then proceeds to question the vacationers on the beach. Though none have seen anyone resembling Drake, one Denobulan reports a strange incident, in which the island's usually docile feather monkeys attacked and chased him. The team explores the island to investigate, and soon discovers that the crazed monkeys are actually holograms, which seem to be guarding something at the top of the hill - which turns out to be a subspace transceiver antenna, presumably to facilitate communications with a hidden base somewhere on - or underneath - the island. Recalling the cave directly beneath the hill's summit, the player descends, enters the cave - and sure enough, soon discovers a hidden passageway leading to a research and development lab built into an underwater rock formation. Here, the player comes face to face with Franklin Drake.

Drake gets right to the point: Section 31 has developed a weapon capable of bringing the Iconians to their knees. It's a trilithium warhead based on the device invented by Dr. in 2371, augmented with a molecular phase inverter provided by the Romulan Star Navy, enabling the device to pass through the hull of the Andromeda Dyson Sphere, and evade detection by the huge Herald fleet contained within, en route to the star at the sphere's heart. This is, as it turns out, the Amargosa Project referenced in Drake's planted disinformation; however, in order to dissuade anyone from attempting to steal or duplicate this weapon after the war, Drake has crafted an elaborate cover story that the Sphere-killer is actually the legendary, obtained from over 200 years in the future.

By targeting the Andromeda Sphere, Drake hopes to cripple the Iconian war effort, literally in one blast - and he asks the player to do the honors. The player asks Drake to run a simulation of the Sphere-killer in the lab's test chamber first, but the simulation is interrupted by Devidian intruders. (The Devidians had also assisted the Heralds during the aforementioned Spacedock raid; Starfleet believes the Iconians recruited them as servitors for their time-traveling abilities, which the Iconians themselves lack.) Their attack is easily repelled, but almost immediately followed up by a much larger Elachi assault force, suggesting that the Devidians managed to alert their Iconian masters to the Sphere-killer. Meanwhile, unidentified (but presumably either Iconian or Elachi) ships in orbit have begun bombarding the island with energy weapons. Remembering that there are civilians on the island, the player's team beat a hasty retreat from the lab just ahead of its destruction, and return to the surface to look for survivors.

The entire island is ablaze, and the usually clear azure sky turned a ghastly orange-gray overcast with smoke and ash. Unable to contact the ship due to subspace interference, the player's team must make their way back to where they beamed down, fighting off Elachi and Herald ambushes along the way. When they reach the beamdown point there are no civilians, only more Elachi, so all that's left to do is return to the hilltop transceiver and try to get a stronger signal out to the player's ship. The team make the climb up the hill again, facing more Herald attacks, including a Harbinger awaiting them at the transceiver. When they finally re-establish contact with the ship, they learn the vacationers have already been safely evacuated there and the attacking enemy ships have been defeated - but more are on the way.

Returning to the ship in orbit of Risa, the player and a few Risian Guard vessels engage several Elachi warships. Soon a much larger Iconian force arrives - but so do several squadrons of Starfleet, KDF and Republic Militia ships, who've come for the Festival but now provide additional reinforcements against the assault. Once the Iconians are finally defeated, the ship is hailed by a runabout leaving the system. It's Drake, who says he has the Sphere-killer with him and will arrange to have it hidden well enough that the Iconians, or anyone else, can never find it. The player is not surprised to learn that the Tox Uthat was hidden, and eventually destroyed, on Risa in the past; evidently Drake found Risa such an effective hiding place for his lab that he saw fit to hide the device itself there too. Fortunately, the Iconians were only targeting the island and left the rest of Risa untouched, so the Lohlunat Festival is still on.

Objectives

 * Blessed Lohlunat
 * Approach Risa
 * Working Vacation
 * Talk to vacationers on beach
 * Concurrent objectives:
 * Talk to Arazim
 * Talk to Creph
 * Investigate crazed monkeys on hill
 * Approach apparatus
 * Disable holoemitter
 * Scan apparatus
 * Go to cave entrance
 * Enter the cave
 * Look around
 * Examine hidden device
 * Open door into tunnel
 * Where Lies Become Legends
 * Continue down tunnel
 * Perform palmprint scan
 * Enter Section 31 lab
 * Find Franklin Drake
 * Concurrent objectives:
 * Talk to Kalinak
 * Talk to Danozeb
 * Talk to Drake again
 * Go to conference table
 * Begin inhibitor simulation
 * Defeat Devidian spies
 * Defeat Elachi raiders
 * Escape lab via forcefield tunnel
 * Run across the tunnel
 * Reach the other end
 * Retract forcefield tunnel
 * Go back up cave tunnel
 * Keep going
 * Get to the door
 * Open door leading back to surface
 * Paradise Burning
 * Contact your ship
 * Exit the cave
 * Return to beam-down point
 * Defeat Elachi
 * Reach hilltop transceiver
 * Reconfigure frequency to match your combadge
 * Defeat Harbinger
 * Contact your ship
 * The Cavalry Cometh
 * Defeat Elachi squadrons
 * Defeat Herald assault fleet
 * Defeat Herald reinforcements
 * Concurrent objectives:
 * Answer U.S.S. Pax Federatica
 * Answer U.S.S. Snelling
 * Answer runabout