RECAPS

Game One (05/20/20)

Game Two (05/23/20)

Game Three (05/27/20)

Game Four (05/30/20)

Game Five (06/03/20)

Game Six

 

GAME ONE:  LET THERE BE FREAKS

Our unusual gang, constructed of the friends and associates of Sonja (Alan) gathers in San Luis Obispo.  During the evening we head to a nearby restaurant to dine and that’s when hell breaks loose.  It starts with the power going out.  Then it’s noticed that cell phones and watches are unpowered.  First thought of some of us is an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) such as that of an Atomic Boom, but that wouldn’t drain batteries, and all batteries seem to be dead.

We go outside and start to head up the street toward the Best Western, since the restaurant can’t cook anything for us.  About then people start to do whacky things.
First up is Ben (Paul), who inexplicably and suddenly changes into a swarm of bees, leaving behind his clothing in a heap.  As we’re trying to figure that out and recover from it, Mel (Jeff) picks up a car and throws it at another car!  Like a chain reaction, PC after PC proceeds to briefly express their powers in a kind of mindless and somewhat destructive fashion.  Ritchie (Joe) effortlessly flips the closest person, Sonja (Alan) onto her back before he just fades into the darkness in ninja-like fashion.  Ken (Evan) runs around the entire building multiple times at superspeed, shredding his clothing since it’s not attuned to him and can’t handle the friction.  Sonja finds herself able to teleport in short bursts all around the parking lot, Mickey (Darren) lashes out with his tongue and grabs a trash can 10 feet away and pulls it back into his mouth effortlessly since his mouth has suddenly expanded in size to accommodate it, and the trashcan is gone.  Pete (Jim), I believe also turned into bees?  What are the odds?... Well, in this case pretty good since his ability is to mimick other people's powers, so he mimicked the first one he saw.

Anyway, in each case after a round we revert to normal and then after that we realize that we can now control these abilities.  We try to make for the nearest place, the Gym or the Best Western, but before we get there we see a plan come crashing down out of the sky and land in the middle of the city.  Ken, who is convinced we are on drugs, despite the fact that everyone is seeing the exact same hallucinations, wants us to keep away from it but everyone heads that way, some a little more gung-ho than others.

Once there, Sonja starts teleporting people out of the way, Mel lifts large pieces of wreckage, everyone helps where they can, Mickey swallows an injured person and regurgitates them on the sidewalk in a safe area.  Pete is a city councilman and takes charge of the scene, ordering people around and organizing.  Eventually we get he herd of injured up the street to a “safe zone” away from the wreckage, near a hospital.

We go back to the hotel, talk, and then end up going out on patrol in case people are injured.  This is mostly fruitless as it turns out most people are already home locked up safe and those who aren’t are in their cars and are terrified of us.  Why?  Because we’re walking around in ski-masks and scarves procured from a local store (after hours).  As a result we’re a terrifying gang of masked people, and some use their powers outwardly, adding to the confusion of those we are trying to help.

We end up going back to the hotel for the night and trying again the next morning.  Councilman Pete finds out from the mayor that nobody knows what’s going on or why/how this happened.  The mayor points out that we’re not far from a nuclear plant.  So he and a few others are teleported up there by Sonja to investigate the plant.  An exceptional diplomacy roll nets him information that he’s not able to share with the rest of us as he’s sworn to secrecy.
Forgot the dreams!  The night after we patrolled we each had a dream with varying feelings about the situation.  A voice called to us telling us to come join.  It seems to be further north of where we are, we get a sense.  Virtually everyone saw it as being a friendly voice.  Two of us (who rolled really well) got more of a sense that of creepiness from the voice.


GAME TWO: 

We gather and discuss what to do next, then spread out.

Ken and Mickey go to the university (with stops at the admissions office, the Chancellor's home, and the physics building) and find a professor so he can help answer some of our questions.  He wants a lift to the nuke plant, so we bring him.

Ritchie (while invisible) and Pete go visit the Mayor to relay information in whatever limited capacity they can given that Pete is prohibited from saying much.

Sonja goes to rescue her parents, whom she convinces to get far away from the plant.  She shows them her new powers then teleports them to safety.

Mel and Ben go shopping.

We regroup, discuss whether we're showing powers or not and decide people need to know what we do.  Many of us opt not to use masks.  The group of us take the Mayor and Professor to the Plant where they discuss some things with the authorities, in particular the fact that generators just don't work the way they're supposed to.  However, shapechanging Pete becomes a generator and is able to actually produce electricity.  He is moved to the pump room to help get the water online for a while and when he powers up, suddenly the lights go on.  And our cell phones start working.  Seems that whatever took place has stopped.  Interestingly, it's 7:21 at night, exactly the same time as when the problem first happened, so it may just have been cyclical, or it might legitinately have been fixed by an application of Peter Power.

We have another dream of up north.  Some also become aware of a child who is frightened and calling for help.  He seems to be saying something like "Don't tocuh me".  When we awaken only about 3 of us saw the kid and Pete was one so he shapeshifts into it, we snap a picture, and now we have an image of what the kid looked like.

We head north in an RV and just before we reach Cambria we are stopped by a cop.  He gives our driver, Mel, a creepy vibe, but he lets us go.  As we drive through Cambria we begin to realize whatever we're looking for is in that town since we start to sense it's behind us when we reach the north side, so we double back.  We have lunch and look around, and some of us are randmly getting hte creepy vibe off of various people, like the waitress, someone walking their dog, etc.

As we prepare to continue onward out of town to find a suitable camping place, our TV gets a flat.  There's no cell service nearby, but Sonja defeats that by teleporting a ways and making the call for help from there.  We go get something to eat and as we sit around the table,   Ken begins to suddenly feel a wave of creepiness where he for a moment feels like part of a hive mind, but shakes that off just as he tries to bring Pete into the same hive mind.



GAME THREE:

All Characters present

In the diner, Pete freaks out because Ken touched him and both were for a moment part of an enormous hive mind and both did not like it.  “We need to get out of here” is the information passed to us, which causes a little bit of delay with the “Uh… why?”

A waitress comes by to see about our behavior and touches Mickey, who promptly fails his save and is swept up into the hive mind… which is kind of peaceful and nice.  So he wants to help out by trying to touch others, something it turns out he’s not very good at.

Some folks have rolled out of the restaurant and are discovering that everyone outside has started to converge on the area and is trying to “help” them.  Mel has to make multiple saves due to all the contact but is doing fine…for a while… with his hand clap of doom knocking everyone over, etc.  But standing in the middle of a mob it was only a matter of time.  When he has a hold of Mickey for too long he eventually succumbs and now the two of them are trying to “help” the group out.
A likely misunderstanding in meaning leads to a near murder.  As everyone is playing keep-away from Mel & Mickey, someone asks the GM if we know the source of the touching.  He says the waitress, meaning that she’s the one who touched someone and got this started.  So Ken takes it upon himself to speedster into the diner and cap the waitress with a gunshot to the head.  It makes no difference on the actions of those, we’ll call it “infected” for lack of a better term.  The hive mind continues.

As the non-infected PCs run away from the diner, and someone attempts to first-aid the dying waitress, now everyone gets a sense that Ken is a murderer.  Didn’t help that when the two infected PCs were outside he took a shot with his pistol and the head of one of them (and missed).  Thing is, now they’ve got a slight inclination to kill him rather than capture him unless they feel they can “convert” him to the hive mind safely. 

And Mickey decides that since they can’t get the PCs to come back to them, they know where the RV is, maybe they should go to the PCs.
Sure enough, when the PCs form a plan and begin to scatter, Ken goes back to the RV and is grabbed and infected by Mel.  After short time, he and Mel both break out.  It’s a little longer before Mickey breaks free.

When they all rendezvous again they know a few things now:  The kid from our dreams is of great interest to them; They control virtually all of Cambria’s citizens; The gap between saves to break their grip on you gets longer (bumps up the time scale) after each failed save.



GAME FOUR:

Forgot to mention last recap that we were trying to use the physicist and his machinery to try and detect the kid’s “brainwaves” or somesuch by loading that stuff into a plane and flying over town at a low altitude, but nothing was detected.

The police are now looking for us.  Seems the Cambria PD has put out an all-hands on us as accessories, and Pete is wanted for Murder.

So we figured out where the kid was!  This involved school yearbooks.  There’s only one middle school in the area and when Sonja went to the school in search of a yearbook she encountered one of the hive mind, who recognized her and knew her name.  Now that she found out what we were looking for we had to go on a different tactic.  That became “Kids will have the yearbooks, we just need to find one” but since we don’t know where they live we had to try a third iteration, which was “Where does the principal live?”  Sure enough this time we managed to get that information and burgle the house (teleporter style) and get the yearbook.
Unfortunately there are 8 kids who could be the one.  So this is a matter of searching around and finally spotting the kid.  Sonja teleports into his room, sees him, and teleports out.  Then she realizes that now that she’s raised the alarm she needs to grab him now, so she ports back in and then has to contend with the Dad and older brother.  The dad grabs the kid and runs but gets chased down by Sonja, who teleports away with the boy after a considerable struggle, mostly because the kids resists pretty well.

So what now?  We’re camping somewhere and need to interrogate the kid.  So we need a room and end up tracking down a cabin with no one in it and using that.  The kid is completely shut down and won’t talk.  Finally we decide the best way to get the kid to calm down and open up would be to take the guy with the best Charisma and who is a shapeshifter and have him change into a kid and pretend to be another kid we abducted.
During friendly interrogation we get the following information:

·         His dad is not his dad.  Somehow he knows the guy who is acting like his dad is not him.
·         His mom got injured in a card accident around the time we had our blackout/power upgrade.  She’s in the hospital.
·         Everyone except he and his brother “act weird” ever since the incident.

We come to the conclusion that “Mom” is at the core of this.  She’s likely from her comatose state controlling all these people.  Some more investigation yields that she is not at the hospital, but that makes sense.  And now the rest is supposition:  She had the accident and was brought home from the hospital, since she loves her kids more than anything.  Then without warning, around the time that we came to town, she got moved out again.  She was moved to the police station and is held there in the middle of the station surrounded by ten officers with guns who are likely doing nothing but wait for us to arrive, since we have a teleporter.

Incidentally, “she” contacted Sonja, leaving a message on her phone that she wants her son back.  When Sonja tried to get her to release everyone in exchange for the kid, she stopped answering, so that’s as far as that went.

So current status is that we have the kid, we don’t have a good plan for popping in without getting annihilated by gunfire, but we know where she is. 



GAME FIVE:

What do we do?  We've got the kid... we've got threats to turn the kid over to his mother or else... we've got the police from most municipalities looking for us...

There's a long talk about killing/not killing Carol Malloy, the woman with the hive-mind powers.  There's another long talk about how to get in and abduct her.  We talk about inflicting drug use on the hive, bargaining with Carol, and ultimately we dcome up with a plan.

The plan is for Sonja to teleport Mickey into the room... he swallows her and all of her medical equipment, then she teleports them out via a few hops since bringing people with her shortens things a bit.  This sounds great in theory but there are a few problems:  For one, she's easily swallowed but not easily "held down".  Her will save is such that not once, not twice, but at least 3 times she forces her way out of his stomach.  Two of those times he just reswallows her.  One of those times we're IN hte ambulance outside the police station where Carol was, so that was cramped.  But this long thought out yet still somehow haphazzard plan manages to work well enough to get us away from there with her.  And since she's out she can't transmit location info back to them.  The hope was that making her "extra-dimensional" would cause them to revert to normal due to lack of contact but that was not the case.

We reunite her with her son, Kevin.  Pete (disguised as Rick, the other abducted child) tries to pry information out of Kevin about if he has powers and the like but near as we can tell, his only powers are 1) resisting his mom's absorption, and 2) seeing people who are under her influence.

We are loath to kill her though I think most of us were starting to think it may very well be the ONLY way to eliminate her.  But we take a flyer and try to get medical advice about awakening a coma patient, from doctors and the like.  It turns out that they only want to give advice when they can examine the patient.  Also, it seems that while the hive mind has reached out and touched some of our family members, they have not overrun everywhere yet.  San Francisco seems to be still independent.  It's finally determined that mabye surgery is the only way out of this, via medical rolls + spending hero  points for inspiration.

But an intersting thing happens while our medical advice-seekers are in the hospital waiting area:  They catch news on the TV that a chemical spill has caused the routes to and from the "affected" area to be cut off.  Does this mean there's someone on our side?

Phones get reactivated, calls to FBI returned, and it turns out they seem to believe our story, mostly because  of things they've already encountered.  We tell thema about Carol and how the onlyl way to save her is to have robotic surgery on her brain, avoiding all physical contact (since even Mickey's brief out-of-stomach contact with her caused him to have to make a save).  Partly due to exhaustion of running all of the permutations of what's going on, we agree to turn her over to them and they do indeed get their best and brightest to work on Carol, restoring her to functioning properly.  And when she awakens she says she's had the "Weirdest dreams".  And similarly so have all the people she'd been controlling, including our relatives.

It seems no one is hauling us in and the APBs are cancelled.  Those of us who have been absorbed at one point or another realize what we've lost out on... a lifetime of peace and understanding.  Some of us will need therapy for that probably. 

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GAME SIX: