Desparate Circumstances, What have your characters survived? Options

[imperialus]

We've all swapped stories about characters doing dumb stuff to get them killed, or causing millions of dollars of property damage but how about some stories where your characters managed to walk (or drag themselves) away from a fight that they probably should have lost.

My own happened about a year ago. I was playing a mage/face who specialized in manipulation spells. The way the campaign was structured, using Blakkie's Clout rules made it so that money was always very tight. We were fairly experienced runners but it was still almost impossible for us to make significant purchases cash on the barrel. Typically if you wanted a new toy you either had to steal it or get a Johnson to give it to you in exchange for service in trade.

At any rate we were running in Hong Kong and needed a boat. I don't remember the exact plan that required it but I do recall it involving blatant acts of piracy. Anyhow the rest of the team was busy trying to gather up other stuff we needed so I went to get a boat. I went to the shadier docks and looked around for a boat that looked seaworthy belonging to a captain that it looked like I could take. Upon finding a boat Blakkie described the boat and the captain as looking like "an Asian version of Relic and his boat". (for those who don't know Relic was a character from the show The Beachcombers). Being born in 81, I'd forgotten what an unpleasant man Relic was, so I tricked him into taking me out for a cruise at which point my plan was to mob mind him once we were clear of the harbor and tell him to take a long walk towards shore while I put my pirate hat on and went back to shore in my boat.

Unfortunately for me Relic was some ex special forces nutjob who was very protective of his boat. My mobmind failed, and he realized I'd tried to use bad ju-ju on him so he did the only reasonable thing when you are within arms reach of a hostile mage, he started hitting my poor unarmed body 3 mage, over and over again. I ended up defaulting to clubs and fending him off with an oar while I called a fire spirit that I had bound previously which eventually managed to kill him. When I pulled into the natural harbor where I was supposed to meet the rest of the team over an hour late and 9 different shades of black and blue, basically sitting 2 boxes short of a full physical damage track, one box short of a full stun damage track. I couldn't even heal myself because my dice pools were so low.