#1 - Special Origin Issue (9/21/13)

#2 - Versus the Man (10/12/13)

#3 - Versus the Firestarter (10/19/13)

#4 - Versus the Hate Monger (11/9/13)

#5 - Versus the Drug Pushers (11/23/13)

#6 - (12/21/13)


#1 SPECIAL ORIGIN ISSUE

Bobby the Panicky Twerp and Mr. Wiley the Bus driver (Mark)

We, students of Fullerton High, are on a field trip to Sacramento.  When it came time to return, we ran into a logistical snag: They failed to count the right number of seats for students on the busses, so randomly we are selected to remain behind while everyone rides back.  Eventually a bus shows up and we get a ride back, just the 6 of us (It eventually ends up being 7 when Jeff shows up mid-scenario, and 8 when Paul shows up at dinner break; but at the start it’s 4 PCs, an NPC student and an NPC adult).  We are informed by the driver that our ride will be even longer as he’s had to go to the coast highway to avoid a road closure, so it’ll be 3 hours longer getting home.

Alexei sits at the front of the bus and reads.  Skunk sits in the back of the bus and carves things into the seats with a pocket knife.  Bobby plays games on his cell phone.  Rex sits and does nothing.  Jared performs card tricks (which Joe actually does, with mixed results).  Suddenly, Bobby shouting at his cell phone and then grabs his head.  Everyone looks around puzzled, Skunk laughs at his weird freak-out.  Suddenly, an earthquake happens.  The bus skids sideways and blocks the road we are on, which is unfortunate since we are on a section of bridge.  Even the area ahead and behind which are on land have cliffs, so it’s just not a great place.  There’s also train tracks that parallel the road and which have their own trestle.

Alexei, at the front of the bus, fails a reflex roll and bangs his head and fails his willpower roll.  Comedically, he starts gushing blood in inhuman quantities.  Defined by the GM as “Tarantino Kill Bill” quantities of blood, everything in there is getting wet.  Meanwhile at the back of the bus, skunk has made his reflex but failed his control roll, so around him the bus is dissolving (Defined by me as like when a reel-to-reel projector gets stuck and the film burns away).  Everyone in between made their control rolls but must figure out which way to go.  Most head to the front and contend with the firehose of blood, but Jared runs to the back to “rescue” Skunk from the weird disintegration, but when he comes within feet of him, his clothes disintegrate right off of him, so he runs back to the front of the bus.

Jeff shows up about now, so Custer joins the chaos.

Skunk jumps out of the open back of the bus and his footfalls are causing structural failure of the bridge, so he heads for the far side of the bridge.  Everyone else gets off the bus and heads for the near side of the bridge.  I believe it was Rex who managed to get out the front of the bus and climb to safety.  I think.  Everyone else goes out the big back opening and around the bus… However, a car has crashed into the side of the bus and becomes both an additional obstacle and a source of another NPC to worry about.  Mr. Wiley is trying to get all the kids off the bridge but Jared is climbing through the car to drag the NPC to safety.

Rex discovers his ability to control machines.  At the moment this is less important than the fact that now that Custer is here, his ability is to mimic other people’s powers, but he fails his control roll and his powers have erupted in a negative way, causing both the nearby car and bus to start moving because he has mimicked Rex’s powers unintentionally.  While the two cars mostly try to kill the characters on the bridge, everyone gets away and on to land.  Bobby is WAY down the road.  Jared tries to get him to stop by throwing illusions up at him.

On the far side, Skunk has made it to land and is causing enough of a hole in the ground that he is no longer in line of sight.  He wil eventually control his power (Corrosion) enough that stuff stops dissolving around him, but he’s a nude punker—his studs, earings, and clothes are gone.  So the nude man with the mohawk hears a train whistle in the distance.  He steals a baby blanket from a child in a car seat in a nearby car and creates an impromptu loin cloth, then has the driver pop the trunk so he can get a road flair.  He runs around the corner and manages to get to the trestle and signal to the train to stop before it reaches the rails, which is good because the next tremor caused by Bobby hits and both the bridge and the trestle are gone now!

Now there’s a battle of wills.  Rex is trying to stop vehicles from moving by using his cyber-kinesis and Custer is uncontrollably making them move.  So there Jared is trying to get Bobby to stop causing earthquakes by throwing illusions at him and Alexei is trying to knock Bobby out with rocks, while Rex tries to make a car run over Custer so that he’ll stop trying to kill people with cars.  Skunk is on the far side, now cut off by lack of bridge or trestle; He’s had the train folks call for emergency help.

I think eventually everyone manages to control their powers.  The Emergency folks show up.  No one uses the word superpowers, mostly because of worry over being blamed for things.  Mr. Wiley implies this is the best move and we all think he’s right.

We get rooms at a motel not far and stay overnight.  Rex goes and uses the one computer in the place in order to set up the equivalent of a “google alert” so that if the police issue anything about us he’ll get an email telling him so.  Skunk is in a field trying to dissolve things at will.  He discovers his control is shakey, but he’s able to hold two objects and dissolve just one at will.  Any use of powers however causes any of us to get horrible headaches.

We survive the night and a bus picks us up the in the morning.  We also get a police escort since there’s now some sort of liability issue involved with us being out here far from home, they claim.

We drive a while, get lunch in a small town (whose name I can’t spell or pronounce), and one of us notices Bobby is not around.  When they find him he’s at a nearby shop staring in the window at a painting.  He’s snapped out of it with some effort, but there’s some thinking that it’s somehow hypnotic (though we keep making our saves so we can’t confirm this).  Rex is going into panic mode (which would be a good hero name for him—Panic Button.  Though that’s not as good as the suggested nickname for Alexei the bleeder… The Red Menace!).  By the way, Alexei shows no sign of injury, as if he was never hurt on the bus.

We attempt to leave town but somehow keep ending up back at the gas station, as if we’re in a loop of some sort.  The cop and the Bus driver are letting their frustration make them angry at each other.  We go out to look around.  With some investigation, the name of the artist on the painting is discovered.  Turns out more paintings in that shop cause the weird hypnosis.  Also, so does the Shell shop we pass.  The painting, by the way, is of tornado spouts.  We find the house of the artist who did those paintings and its on fire!  Emboldened by having saved a train full of people/cargo/whatever, Skunk tries to rush in to help them and is stopped in his tracks by smoke inhalation; when the firefighters show up they pull him out.  However, anyone who stares at the fire gets mesmerized by it.  Luckily is most every case at least one of us makes our save so that we can snap the others out of it, but it’s getting worse.  It’s taking longer and longer to break people out of their daze.

Rex thinks that maybe we’ll be saved by cheap sunglasses at the 7-11, that maybe their reflective properties or something will help.  We head there and cause a scene because on the way Skunk spots 3 water spouts off the shore and Alexei tries to convince the quickie mart attendant, who will have none of it and orders us out of there.  He ends up calling a cop and the cop’s spinning siren mesmerizes Skunk while the others run out of the store, except for Custer—who morphs into a display rack to hide.  I think it was Alexei who argues with an officer but nobody gets arrested.

Keep in mind, everything we do, Rex is there refusing to look up.  Fire going on? He points the hose in the general direction of the firefighters to wake them up.

For some reason we think maybe the secret is at that house that burned down.  So we go back there to gather clues.  When we get there, there aren’t really any, but a funny thing happens on the way there…

First, Rex decides to cyber-control a van.  He wants us to ride to the house with him, and some of us are willing.  Bobby is unsure.  Alexei is totally against it, feeling (quite rightly) that Rex will get us killed by being neurotic.  Skunk successfully convinces Bobby to come along.  Now we’re not very far into this trip when we encounter a man walking down the road.  It seems that he has a bit of an anomaly… in that HIS HEAD HAS A HOLE IN IT.  There’s a golf ball sized hole through which you can see way further into his head than he actually has head!  It’s bigger on the inside!  Those who can see this from our vantage make san checks try not to freak out.  The person who makes his notice check is Bobby, who gets sucked out of the van and partly into the hole.  Custer runs out of the van to help, but before anyone else can, true to Alexei’s prediction of crazy-making, Rex decides to floor the van in reverse, so we all are moved away from the problem.

When he gets there, Custer decides to use his power duplicating ability to duplicate the guy’s head-hole.  They now BOTH have holes in their heads and Custer is trying to suck the guy into his, but we’re all subject to the pull if close enough, which Skunk now is.  He gets pulled into both holes, so he’s being trapped by both!  This was serious damage from the strange grinding of the hole, but we retconned it a little bit later (It’s a new game and I could easily have turned on my defensive power as a free action).  The battle of the suck-heads concludes when Custer sucks the stranger into his head!  But there’s a problem… he’s failed a control roll of the new power with a BOTCH.  This means he picks up some taint!  In fact, his new aberration is… a permanent hole in his head!  A PERMANENT HOLE IN HIS HEAD!  He’s a circus freak now.

How did we end up with the map?  Oh yeh… I believe it was when we returned to the art gallery, we found a painting that was of the town in which we were trapped and it seems to be one big vortex.  The rotation of it seems to center around the area behind the gas station, on a small island in a pond.

We go that way and find some paddle boats which we can use to cross the pond in duos.  Naturally, there are whirlpools all over the pond.  Skunk & Custer get across quickly, then the others arrive and one of the paddle boats is sucked under once we get out.

On the island is something that looks like a maintenance shack.  It’s locked so Skunk dissolves the door knob and we go in.  Inside are standard maintenance room equipment:  a mop, bucket, broom, and two kids who are coiled together.  Rex tries to pry them apart.  Upon making contact with them he gets the distinct impression that he can escape the vortex now if he tried.  However, instead of relaying that he immediately shouts, “It’s a trick!  PRY THEM APART, PRY THEM APART!”  and tries again, this time with the help of Custer, who also gets the same impression but heeds the warning of Rex and continues pulling.  PRY THEM APART PRY THEM APART!  A third joins in… Either Jared or juvenile delinquent Julio maybe?  IT’S A TRICK!  PRY THEM APART!  Skunk joins in and gets the same feeling that he could now escape.  He and Julio decide to beat-feet out of there.  Alexei, the strongest of us, joins in the prying and with enough people they get them apart.  When their connection is severed, they scream as if something is lost forever and the world returns to normal.  The sound of water spouts tearing through the town halts.

We get back across and get the fudge out of town.

We are 2nd level, 35 Power Points (15 for 1st level, 15 for 2nd level, 5 from the scenario).  We have 1 Hero Point which should now be restored.


#2 VERSUS THE MAN

A lot of stuff happened and I definitely am light on details this time.

Before we arrive back at the school we do a brief stop off for more food.  Fortunately this town does not experience the same weird looping as last game.  As we’re driving, some of the players suddenly notice a person who wasn’t on the bus before, or was she?

It seems that when we got on the bus, Amber was one of the original folks who had to take the “special” bus with us.  But when the insanity broke out, everyone lost track of her and ultimately forgot she was even there.  What’s more, she claims she’s been with us the whole time and that we wouldn’t respond to her or see her.  This problem has worn off now.  It seems she can make things “unnoticeable”.  Objects, people, etc.

Mr. Wylie tells us before we arrive back at the school that we would best be served by being quiet about our abilities.  Most of us were made paranoid (or were already paranoid) against the government so we figure we’ll restrain ourselves.

Our families are not happy about the general treatment of us by the school.  It turns out it was a pricy trip (some of us were subsidized otherwise it never would have happened).

Rex goes online and finds the police report which mentions all of us by name.  He substitutes some classmates names with ours.

We meet as a group at Carls Jr. and discuss things.  Do we become superheroes?  Do we stay secret?  Do we commit crimes? (Okay, nobody said that one but I was thinking it.)  We then go out and test the powers by finding a neighborhood that is victim of the real estate market.  We sneak into the empty lot beside an empty house, and do some power testing.  Skunk destroys a rock, Jared turns invisible (a new power for him).  Amber tries to make a rock become unnoticed, but botches the roll.  Now this would have been a big problem except that luck boy (Julio) happened to be present and he used his luck to give her a reroll.  She blew that one too—with a 1.  So he spent more points and this time she made the roll.  Wanting to do the invisibility thing too, Skunk tries to split his atoms apart but instead of going invisible he can flow through things, like walking through a chain link fence.

When we head home, most of us missed our notice roll and wind up coming into our houses and encountering two government agents who want to find out about what really happened.  They seem to know more but aren’t being that specific about it.

We have a late gathering, but the only ones that show are Rex, Jared, Skunk, and I think—one other.  Alexei didn’t answer, Amber didn’t answer, Bobby (npc) didn’t answer, Julio keeps having to step out (Paul is working off and on).

Jared has decided he wants to talk to the feds.  He sets up a meeting at the carls jr (our HQ), and winds up signing on.  He mostly just wants to be a hero with a badge.  Rex decides he wants to follow suit and sets up a similar meeting at the same place and also joins.  Skunk just calls them and gives a “Yeh” (and hangs up).  Later, he’s the only one who bothers to find out how much we get paid (100k annually).  Jared had to be convinced by his brother to do it (also his brother wasn’t making his bills on time).  Alexei joins after getting concessions that his mom will not be left in the care of his grandfather.  Amber joins… I’m not sure why.  Probably to get away from her mom.  Bobby was a wuss, so he folded faster than superman on laundry day.

Julio was not present for the “signing on” portion of the program so he’s just grandfathered in somehow.  Custer doesn’t show up until later in the evening.

We meet the teachers, the instructors, learn all kinds of good things, and are then tested.

For graduation day we’re put on a raft and we’re supposed to yank some helicopter crash victims out of the water.  The only problem is that something doesn’t want us to complete our exercise in the normal way.  The helicopter, which is not really disabled, becomes disabled when something pulls it under the water.  It’s under attack by a massive, somewhat mutated shark.  Skunk manages to hit the shark 3 out of 4 times with his M16, however only one of those hits actually hurt it.  Rex drives the boat right up to the helicopter.  Alexei has jumped in to help, but the shark has decided he looks delicious and tries to eat him.  First bite was a miss, but the second one has the misfortune of happening with Julio present, so when it tags him, Julio unlucks the shark, lessening the harm.  Amber has jumped into the water and pushes one of the men back toward the boat and dove down to get the other one.  The two guys nearby on the raft (other faux-victims) pull their raft up next to us so that we can get out together.  We reach into the water to yank Alexei out and succeed on the second try, hauling him into the boat and speeding away, whereupon the feds drop some live artillery on the shark, rendering it to pieces.

It’s possible that the preponderance of Novas (us) may have drawn something.  What we know is that the shark was mutated, but it wasn’t a Nova; we think that maybe someone with powers like ours created the shark.

We do a week of home time, with little of note.  Alexei stays behind at the academy.  Incidentally, our school is one of four that we know of, and the only one that deals with minors.

We got 3 more points to spend on skills, abilities, combat stats, and feats only.

Our next mission is that as trainees we head to a compound in Texas (where they’re all in love with dying), and we’re supposed to hang out and observe, but when gunfire breaks out and our agent has no idea what to do next, we lobby to help and he relents.  We storm in there, even with an agent trying to wave us off.  Skunk breaks a hole in the wall.  Rex goes in, Jared goes in while invisible, but pretty much anyone who goes in is having trouble breathing due to the tear gas.  Eventually everything is handled, but I can’t say that we did exemplary.  In fact, the agent will later be fired for letting trainees with powers go do their thing.


#3  Versus the Firestarter

First off, sorry you couldn’t make it Alan.  Hope you’re feeling better.

We start off with a training exercise.  This time we’re broken up randomly into teams:  Julio & Rex vs. Peter & Custer.  So Luck & Mechanical Control vs. Power duplication/Possession & Corrosion.  We get sidearms and a few select things upon request.  A few people requested flashlights.

We do initiative and then rush into the room which is a fairly low-tech danger room.  It ends up having two machinegun turrets, some walls for cover/obscurement, and a couple random items lying around:  In the good guys end (Peter & Custer) is a grenade, while at the bad guys end, considerably further away from their door (determined randomly) is an autofire weapon.

We come in, fortunately the turrets aren’t doing much damage when they get a shot.  Peter gets the grenade and upon seeing spotting Julio (who is about to pick up  the SMG), throws the grenade and this the area but it doesn’t mark anyone.

Forgot to mention these are paint weapons, not live weapons.  Also, we have these wrist trackers that show dots for where other people are in the room.

Rex uses his mechanical abilities to mask his true location, and also to take control of the machine gun turret on one side of the room.  Custer keeps trying to possess Julio, who is alternately either making great resistance rolls, or using his luck on rerolls.  Eventually Julio manages to tag (but not disable) Custer.  The two continue their struggle around a corner when Rex kills the lights.  Peter takes an intuitive leap that the tracker devices on the arms probably also relay the person’s own location to the others, so he takes his off and leaves it.

So we can move on to the rest of the game:  Julio’s luck runs out and by Custer’s flashlight, Peter crits Julio in the forehead with a paintball.  They then narrow down where Rex is until he’s bottled up in a corner.  Rex puts up a noble effort by deploying the room’s built in smoke system to obscure his movements, then flees out the exit, shouting “Kobyashi Maru!”

The bosses declare it a draw, since the goal was to capture one and take the other out.

We get a mission right away.  This one involves a potential young Nova in LA.  There was a fight in school, one girl appeared to age (temporarily) and then someone reported it.  The “aged” girl is back to normal now.  We are to assess the situation, and if it’s really a young nova, recruit her.

There’s a lot of discussion as to how to proceed.  Ultimately, we end up going into the school.  Peter takes the lead.

Did I mention that “Skunk” is now going by Peter?  Since he has to keep removing the piercings, he’s sticking with tattoos in mostly non-visible areas, and he’s shaved off the Mohawk.  “The era of Skunk is dead,” he says.  It’s time to move on to another phase of my life.

The Principal cooperates, getting us the Vice Principal, who broke up the fight.  He saw that the girl looked kind of haggard, as he put it, “Like a meth addict”.  She got better though, and her suspension has ended.  The other girl, the possible nova, is not back yet.  The “victim” is not at all cooperative in questioning.

We go to the home of the “victim” and Julio takes the lead and they don’t want to talk with us.

We go to the home of the Nova and Peter takes the lead and we discover that she’s fled, but only done so within hours.  A search of her room finds a letter which is signed by Elijia, her brother.  We don’t have any record of her having a real life brother, just foster siblings in several homes, but this one is using the same last name, so they’re blood.  The foster mom gives the name of the girl’s best friend, Courtney, and her phone number.  So we have to phone numbers to triangulate Courtney’s and Shinya (the suspect).

We triangulate them to a known hangout of hers:  Citywalk.  Both phones are in the same place, but there’s only Courtney.  After checking the area, we hit upon the idea of calling Shinya’s number in order to see where the phone is.  Sure enough it’s in the other girl’s purse.  We masked as an 800 number so she just looks at the phone then ignores it.  We end up calling Courtney’s number and Custer decides to try and impersonate one of her contacts from the contact list which Rex cribbed from her phone.

Problem is, that particular contact may have had no association with the friend (Shinya) because Courtney seemed confused by this friend of hers calling and asking about another friend.  She’s spooked enough to hang up and cross the park.  She gets to Universal Studios and continues through the gate.  We get there and with his ID, Peter is authoritarian enough to get him, Julio, and Custer through the gate.  Rex is hanging back with the other two feds (the two adults who are charged with giving us advice when asked).  Rex elects to buy a ticket and go in so that he can appear unconnected to any of us.

Ultimately, the way we get in is irrelevant.  Courtney spots Shinya and shouts for her.  They meet up and talk, then Shinya scans the area and spots us and starts running.  About now we see smoke!

It’s 2008.  What event happened in 2008 at Universal?  The fire that took out part of the amusement park!  Peter and the senior agents discuss options and the senior agents try to do some crowd control while the four super-types chase Shinya inside the “King Kong: The Ride” soundstage.  When asked by the agents if we thought the nova was responsible for the fire we see nearby, Peter says, “No, not as far as we can tell.  It was burning before she got there.”  Which is true and false.  It wasn’t her who set it, but it WAS nova activity…

Shinya seems to be able to manipulate emotions.  She turns and shouts in fear and causes the trams full of people to flee.  And with the trams in the way, some of us have to cut through the faux jungle.  Julio opts to jump onto the top of the tram and go over the canopy.  Peter goes insubstantial and filters right through everything running full speed.

First one to pursue into the next room is Custer, who is promptly set on fire by… Elijia!  Shinya’s twin brother it seems (from deep research) was split from her at birth and lost in the system.  As a separate foster child he broke away from the system and has been on his own for quite a while, but still communicating in secret with his sister.  It seems he has FIRE POWERS, which he uses to promptly set the entire attraction on fire, starting with Custer.  Rather than stand in the area and burn, Peter blows past everyone while insubstantial and catches up to the sister, whom he fails to tackle, but successfully stuns with a stun-gun, keeping her down for a while.

Elijia is burning people alive and trying to get to Peter because he just attacked his sister.  Meanwhile Custer and Julio are trying to take him down.  Rex is controlling the environment (as much as you can control a burning soundstage) and trying to get people to safety.

Peter manages to use Shinya as cover, knowing that the overprotectiveness of Elijia would keep him from harming her, and Custer manages to possess him!  But only in spurts.  When it becomes his turn again each time, Elijia reasserts control.  He instructs us to knock him unconscious when he gets control.  Problem is the place is burning down and he’s still inside so we can’t knock him out in there.  After the agents take control of the girl nova, Peter goes back in after the prone/possessed Elijia, but winds up failing his safe and goes down with injuries.  Julio brings the firehouse around and keeps us from burning to death and everyone is dragged to safety.

Fireboy is taken away and not heard from again.  Angry Girl, it turns out, is a healer and empathy.  Rex, Julio, and Custer make friends with her and get her inducted into the program (Peter hangs back at Rex’s suggestion since he’s the one who shocked her with a taser for a while).  She is now the on-call healer, though she will not be allowed in the field because of her psych profile.  She will however be allowed into Rex’s pants… she seems to have a crush on the chubby geek with the computer skills.

As the evening wound down we went out on one more mission:  In a factory in Kentucky, someone has showed up with one or more weapons and possibly accomplices and is shooting citizens and keeping captives.

We’re brought in to gain entrance.  Since Custer can mimic, he accompanies Peter who takes the lead.  Peter turns insubstantial, goes down through the vent system and enters a storage room that is adjacent to the exterior and since no one is in there, he corrodes and opening to the outside so the other heroes can get in.  When he tries to peek out under the door, one of the assailants fires at him (missing) and demands we stay back… He saw Peter in the brief moment he oozed out under the door to look around.  Now that we have a general location, Peter goes up through the vents again and out through another area so he can be across the hall.  With the enemy focused on the other door, he is able to see where he is and that there are others there.  Custer uses the mimicked insubstantiality to come out of the room and then solidify and possess the guy, which he does successfully.

He announces that he’s Custer, and that brings a second assailant.. the brother of the first.  He can’t figure out what’s going on, but then he doesn’t have to because Peter pops around the corner and blasts him with a single round from an MG, badly injuring him.  At this point the third suspect sees them from way across a second larger room and goes berserk.  Hulk berserk.  He hulks out and rushes us because he’s a nova and he’s overcome with anger.  Peter blasts him with the entire clip from the MG and it does little-to-nothing.  In fact, I think it did nothing, and then Julio’s luck made him reroll his save and he actually took some damage.

Custer gets the possessed guy to the storage room and temporarily loses control of him, but then Rex with his MG manages to keep him holed up… at least for a few seconds until he decides to run for it back into the factory because he can hear his buddy ripping the place up, but Rex takes him down with a shot.

Custer gets control of the berserk guy.  At that point the GM declares this a win!

No deaths (at least not once we arrived), and all 3 suspects in custody.

This again was based on a real life event with a nutcase taking over his former workplace.

When I left, Mark was detailing some outside events that were happening, like the UN getting into the supers game by creating a team of novas with flashy superhero names.  Our org doesn’t like that this UN group has jurisdiction inside the U.S. as well as everywhere else in UN countries.


#4  Versus the Hate Mongers

Mark asked that I remember the dates that things happen.  Not too likely, since I don’t really take notes and I’m rarely near my game stuff when I write these.  I will however mention that it’s early 2009 and most of this game takes place in the Feb-Apr range.

In addition to factions we’ve already seen (The UN super-team, the firefighter in NY, etc.), there are a few “costumes” popping up, and ultimately a guy who says we superpeople are NOT people, we are our own individual nations with our own rules.  Our agency doesn’t like him much.  But then, who do they like?  Just us, because we go right along with them.

Speaking of which, they need us in Newport Beach.  It seems there was a fundraising event for Dana Rohrabacher (sp?), a decidedly anti-Nova politician, and someone has shown up on the scene demanding… well… so far, nothing.  But he has hostages and he is extremely buff.  He’s a nova who calls himself Geryon.  We are dropped at the scene and as we get the tactical layout from plans, he sends out the one person he has allowed inside… a reporter.  Said reporter comes out and is about to deliver a message when someone breaks a window back at the oceanfront building where the hostage situation is taking place, and hurls a head out, which tags the reporter.  The head is that of the congressman.  It’s on!  The cops fill the place full of bullets, taking out two bystanders.  By the time we breech, the villain has dropped out of sight and winds up breaking the building away from its foundation and causing it to tilt back into the ocean.  While we’d like to continue going after him (and do try), there are civilians who need saved.  Julio saves two, Peter saves one, and the rest probably die from either building debris or drowning.

The bad guy gets away.  Bosses aint happy.

Stuff happens in the world.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate the detail, I just appreciate it short-term.  Come game write-up, I can’t remember who was causing trouble where in the world.  I could never remember history and I’m doomed to repeat it.  Algebra too.

Hate is the new style.  There’s a hate monger who is going to make a public appearance in San Francisco.  This one is a real bastard and has decided to go to the place where he can stir up the most trouble.  The incident with Rohrbachar stirring up trouble is enough to get us  appear and watch for trouble.  After all, if this guy is ripped apart he becomes a martyr for whatever half-assed cause he’s backing this week, which we suspect may be anti-Nova.  At the very least he’ll be anti black, gay, and everything else.

Day before the event, we’re in the city and scoping things out when a bank robbery happens.  We, along with our two liason officers, head to the bank.  Speedy Alexei gets there first and goes around the far side because there’s a door on the opposite side and Peter goes in through a vent, but holds because there are two guys and a civilian is in their line of fire.  That turns out to be a bad choice as one of the gunmen finishes shoots him before leaving.  (He lived though, thanks to a lucky 20 roll so he saved.)  Peter rushes the shooter and misses a tackle.  Custer takes possession of the other one and mind-controls the second one.  Meanwhile, outside the rest of the group are moving on the others.  One is in a getaway car outside and two go to join him.  Initial attempts to get them to surrender fail.  Jared makes an illusion of a row of SWAT officers along the roof.  Julio puts his gun right up to one of them that’s outside the car.  They were planning to make their getaway but fail, when… (I’m trying to remember what caused them to give up) I believe it was failed saves versus the intimidation of a line of cops, and possibly some re-rolled saves due to Julio’s unluck.

That evening we get to meet the hate monger.  Jared attends invisibly because he’s black and doesn’t want the baggage of dealing with the baggage of this guy’s reaction.  The guy is not a fan of Julio or one of the two senior agents (as both are Hispanic).

Our plan: Custer and Alexei will be with Worth (Professor Worth is the guy we’re protecting.  His followers call themselves The Worthy.)  Jared will be in the crowd of ethnic protestors.  Peter, being bald and tattooed, will be in the crowd of counter-protestors.  Julio will be outside doing something somewhere.  (Gotta love my level of detail!)  When the shit comes down it starts as looting.  We ignore that because our goal is protecting Worth.  Next up is a sniper.  Custer takes control and makes him back away from the edge.  Alexei, who is in the car with Hitler Jr., becomes perturbed that no one is going up to get the sniper.  Most of us already have assignments and sense this guy is probably not the main event so we maintain cover, so Alexei runs up and captures him and holds him for the cops.

The next obstacle is an angry mob of minorities.  They descend on the vehicle, unintentionally harming Jared but intentionally harming Peter, who looks like he needs a beating.  It’s not long into this siege that a figure in the classic white Klansman’s outfit (the “White Knight”) arrives in the air and starts using his laserbeam eyes on the crowd.  Now there should be TONS of damage to them, except that Julio keeps jinxing him and boosting the crowd’s saves, so this guy just can’t get any luck.  Peter whips out his taser, the only weapon we ever need, and manages to bring him down to ground level.  There is then a war for possession of the WK’s soul as Custer keeps trying to control him.  There’s several rounds of alternating between him being stunned and un-stunned,  before he’s properly controlled.

Currently in custody are the White Knight, the independent rooftop shooter, and Professor Worth for conspiracy.  Worth had something interesting to ask before things went down.  He asked Alexei if he had anything to do with the botched raid on the cult group (last game).  Ironically, I believe he picked the one guy who wasn’t present.


#5 Versus the Drug Pushers

Fewer details than recent write-ups.  It turns out when I can’t hit things I stop remembering details.  It’s probably a defense mechanism.

Last game we were dropped in to a high school with intent of ferreting out the source of a drug called MITE, which activates the (mumble mumble) gland, the same gland that activated our superpowers.  We left off at a party.

We spread out and start checking things out.  One of the guys mentions that there will be “something special” at midnight.  Jared mind reads him and discovers that one of them will be bringing the drug.  Come midnight, Julio and Peter are out by the pool, waiting for something to happen, and the Jared and Alexei are on the roof with the jocks, who are popping tabs of something.  The jocks promptly turn into uber-jocks… freaks with incredible strength, resilience and jumping ability.  So naturally a fight breaks out between us and them, while everyone else is either too wasted to run away immediately or flee like lemmings.  Cops show up to help break things up.

Their preferred maneuver is to pick up and throw an opponent.  In most cases it’s either a cop, who becomes badly injured when he hits a wall, one of us—who wind up on the other side of the house and have to run back.  Two more jocks have erupted inside the house and are knocking cops through the front of the building.

All I know is… for this entire fight, and pretty much the entire night… either I couldn’t hit, or when I did hit, the opponent would make their damage save.  So Peter’s purpose in this fight was to take hits, which he did.  Jared tried numerous gambits that involved making illusionary police, SWAT members, and various others show up to confuse the opponents, with mixed success.  Julio has to luck/unluck a few saves for folks.  Honestly, I’m not sure how we won this.  I think some of it was illusionary bullets… Oh yeh, part of it was that Jared confused them—he made some of them look like cops so they’d start attacking each other.  I know Alexei was doing stuff, besides being knocked over the roof, but I can’t remember what; I think it was guns and fisticuffs.

The biggest problem in this fight was that the house started to come down after taking structural damage (from people being knocked through it).  Julio managed to luck one victim into surviving.  Fatalities for the fight were two cops who got pulped.

The organization is not happy.  What we get out of this is the source of the drug, which is a factory.

So we do a factory siege.  The ill-conceived plan (my fault for that) was that Rex would cause the cameras around the door to loop, Peter would teleport up there, and go under the door and let an invisible Jared in.  It’s ill-conceived because naturally someone will be at the doors and see him.  Had I done like at previous sieges and gone in through a vent or something I could have scouted first.  So naturally, the guy just inside the door sees Peter and it starts immediately.  Fortunately for Peter, they have a tough time trying to hurt him.  The door is unlocked now and the team takes a while to come in but once they do they also start to draw fire, as does the horde of illusionary police men created by Jared.  There are lots of automatic weapons, including guys on a catwalk firing down.

A guy in the distance is opening a crate.  Again, Peter should have teleported directly to him (but I forgot he was out there) so he arrives a round after the guy has ingested some of the MITE and turned into another freakish brute.  It’s a long and ugly fight that ends with the last guys surrendering after the brute is taken down.

There’s a guy who pretends like he was being held prisoner there, but he’s exposed as a fraud.  He can’t hide from Jared’s telepathy: He was there running things.  We find out from him that the source of the stuff is a guy in an apartment.

This is where probably our toughest fight to date takes place.  We breech and apartment and find the source of the chemical unconscious on a bed.  As we search the place, three more folks show up:  A girl with two swords and a gun, a guy with swords, a pistol and an automatic weapon (slung), and a third, more buff guy.  They inquire about what we’ve done with the other guy, and naturally a fight breaks out.

First blood is drawn (quite literally) when Alexei rushes the big one and kicks him over the balcony.  The Earth speeds up to meet him and he becomes a fine, paste riddled with bone shards.  The remaining guy is a speedster who does flurries of punches on groups of people within a radius of him.  And the girl does sword attacks and uses a feat (I had purchased ten minutes earlier) for causing opponents to hit each other.  Alexei neutralizes the guy for a while when he gets a hold of him.  Then Joe suggests that Mark use the girl to attack Alexei so she can free her friend, so that’s what happens.  Julio takes a nasty shot and narrowly avoids dying, though he is bleeding to death.  Peter couldn’t hit the ocean if he was standing in it.  Alexei puts a bullet through the girl’s superhero-gland and she’s gone.  I think the other guy went down from an illusionary grenade?  Or was that the guys in the earlier scenario?  I’m confused.

Turns out these guys were extracting the drug from the guy in the next room whom we’ve already secured.  Julio had stashed him under the bed for safe keeping. 


#6