Cold Case

[BoloOfEarth]

I was inspired by a news story one of my players sent me. Basically, a suspect in a murder case decades ago, acquitted in court back then, became a millionaire and died in mysterious circumstances very recently. This got me thinking -- how would the players in my game deal with a vigilante who played judge, jury, and executioner in "cold cases" like the original murder?

 

The name Cold Case seemed a natural for the character, and of course this points to cold and ice powers. My current concept is a police detective's widow, a relatively low-powered mutant who hid her powers all her life. But now, she feels her late husband won't fully rest in peace until the killers in his cold cases are brought to justice, so she's using her powers to "close" the cases.

 

What I'm looking for is inspiration on how she might creatively use cold and ice powers to either kill her victims in ways that won't be so obvious to investigators, as well as using powers in other ways. What I've got so far:

 

• Projecting ice "bullets" that would melt inside the body, leaving no real evidence. At first, it might make the players think someone is actually using a gun, rather than projecting mini ice spikes.
  
• Ice slicks to cause car accidents in rarely-travelled areas. Also icing windows to blind the driver, or ice-locking the car's wheel at a vital moment (just before a sharp turn).
  
• A "cold snap" inside a person (Penetrating RKA) to damage or stop the heart or cause instant blindness.
  
• The same internal "cold snap" to make locks brittle enough to break easily.
  
• Giving a dead body a "chill" to drop body temperature, causing the time of death to be estimated incorrectly.
  

 

Are there any other ideas some of you creative folks might have? Could the "cold snap" disable alarms, or would it likely trigger them immediately?

 

Her powers should still leave some clues for the heroes to find and follow (water from melted ice, damage to muscles and blood vessels indicative of intense frostbite, etc.). What other clues might they find?

 

I figured the late police detective had a partner, and the players might initially fix on him as the vigilante. What other possible suspects could I introduce to muddy the waters?

 

Many thanks in advance for any ideas you might have to help flesh out this character.

[Opale]

Re: Cold Case

 

She could freeze the air inside someone chest, suffocating them, or even the liquid someone is drinking asit runs down his/her throat

She could create car explosions by freezing instantly a warm engine

 

You can think to Tracy Strauss from Heroes too, who has cold control power aswell as been able to transform herself into water.

[Ockham's Spoon]

Re: Cold Case

 

What a cool concept; I have to spread some rep around before tagging you again though.

 

If Cold Case uses ice bullets, the forensic lab is going to realize that the bullet doesn't match anything they have ever seen, which could be a tip-off

 

Try this for a scenario. Cold Case kills someone with an ice knife (it melts leaving no murder weapon), but then she rapidly cools the body so that the forensic guys get the time of death wrong, giving Cold Case a solid alibi at the supposed hour the victim was killed. But one of the heroes tracking the vigilante killings finds solid evidence (witness, video camera, or computer log-in time or something) that the victim was alive until just minutes before the body was discovered. The logical conclusion is that killer had some way to chill the body. The other bit of evidence is that the chilled body did not bleed out as much as one would expect for a knife wound on a warm body.

[CoreBrute]

Re: Cold Case

 

If you've ever seen Dexter, the main villain of the first season used an ice truck to carry his victims around. So if the victims are found far away from the location of death, but quite clearly frozen, the police might look for a refrigerated truck, rather than just a normal van which was momentarily cold inside.

 

If it's winter time, you could get a victim to walk over the frozen lake. But due to your villain's powers, the lake defrosts and he falls into the water, before she freezes it up again so he can't escape. After investigating the lake, the heroes find dozens of trapped bodies under the solid opaque ice. Perfect way to ditch a body (even if the heroes can talk to ghosts, the ghosts will probably think it was a freak accident and not realize it was super powers).

[BoloOfEarth]

Re: Cold Case

 

She could freeze the air inside someone chest, suffocating them, or even the liquid someone is drinking asit runs down his/her throat

She could create car explosions by freezing instantly a warm engine.

 

Repped, and thanks.

 

I really like the drink idea. I'm imagining one of her victims suffocating in the middle of a crowded bar*, supposedly from an ice cube lodged in his throat. One of the player character heroines is an EMT -- she could be on the scene and do a tracheotomy to bypass the ice blockage, buying the guy a few more days before Cold Case finds a different way to take him out. That could be what tips the heroes off that something is awry.

 

*And the second PC heroine owns a bar, where another PC hero works. Yes, this has definite potential.

[BoloOfEarth]

Re: Cold Case

 

Try this for a scenario. Cold Case kills someone with an ice knife (it melts leaving no murder weapon)' date=' but then she rapidly cools the body so that the forensic guys get the time of death wrong, giving Cold Case a solid alibi at the supposed hour the victim was killed. But one of the heroes tracking the vigilante killings finds solid evidence (witness, video camera, or computer log-in time or something) that the victim was alive until just minutes before the body was discovered. The logical conclusion is that killer had some way to chill the body. The other bit of evidence is that the chilled body did not bleed out as much as one would expect for a knife wound on a warm body.[/quote']

 

Also repped, and thank you for the other evidence. I hadn't thought about the slowed rate of bleeding.

 

I plan to misdirect as much as possible. For instance, one of the victims might be a restaurant owner or manager, and be found in the kitchen. Time of death is obviously off, so the heroes search the walk-in freezer in vain for evidence the body was hidden there.

[BoloOfEarth]

Re: Cold Case

 

If you've ever seen Dexter, the main villain of the first season used an ice truck to carry his victims around. So if the victims are found far away from the location of death, but quite clearly frozen, the police might look for a refrigerated truck, rather than just a normal van which was momentarily cold inside.

 

If it's winter time, you could get a victim to walk over the frozen lake. But due to your villain's powers, the lake defrosts and he falls into the water, before she freezes it up again so he can't escape. After investigating the lake, the heroes find dozens of trapped bodies under the solid opaque ice. Perfect way to ditch a body (even if the heroes can talk to ghosts, the ghosts will probably think it was a freak accident and not realize it was super powers).

 

No, I haven't watched Dexter (though I do live in a town with the same name). Hmmm... a refrigerated truck. I wonder if any of the players will think of that.

 

The game is set in Chicago, so one of the victims might go ice fishing during the winter (though probably not on Lake Michigan, maybe elsewhere in the area). Or perhaps she lures him onto a frozen lake on a snowmobile, then weakens the ice in front of him, causing him to take an impromptu swim... then re-freezes it to lock him in. Someone finding a guy frozen halfway through the ice... that has possibilities.

 

Oh, and repped for the idea. Thank you.

[BoloOfEarth]

Re: Cold Case

 

I'm thinking of Cold Case hiring a mentalist to help her establish each victim's guilt before she does her thing. (The heroes might dig up a notice on V-bay to that effect, if they think to look. Regardless, when they finally nab her they'll uncover reports from the mentalist on each victim's guilt.) I may also try to tie in Cold Case's victims' demise with *their* victims' original deaths. For instance, the guy in the bar might have drugged / date-raped women, and one ended up dead but the cops didn't have enough evidence to convict him. So suffocating on his own drink might be seen as fitting. (Another body part of his, severely frostbitten, might be an amusing clue, too.) If a killer dumped his late wife's body in a lake but the police never found it, him ending up frozen in a lake would be appropriate. It will be a way for the heroes to figure out the different deaths are related.

 

Even though she's doing wrong, taking the law into her own hands like that, I'd like to make her at least moderately sympathetic to the heroes to see how they handle her. I don't want the climax to be a super-powered smack-down (at least of her). I'm considering one of Cold Case's victims being a friend/relative of a supervillain, so he figures it out and gets his buddies to seek revenge, with the PC heroes caught in the middle. [i'll admit it -- that provides a fight for the combat monster players, with plenty of roleplay opportunity for the drama players.]

[Cygnia]

Re: Cold Case

 

What are your players' moralities like (As opposed the PCs)?

[Opale]

Re: Cold Case

 

yw !

[BoloOfEarth]

Re: Cold Case

 

The players are more shades-of-gray than their characters and the current campaign, though they have let that darker attitude bleed into their characters on occasion. An example is under the spoiler tag, if you're interested.

 

 

The most recent occurance involved Electrocutioner, who once threatened a female hostage and, when the heroes made a move and unfortunately failed to stun him, he killed the hostage right in front of them. After the fight and Electrocutioner's escape, Styx vowed to kill Electrocutioner, and the other players were pretty much in agreement. And when they learned that Electrocutioner regenerates -- including the resurrection adder -- they threw him through a magical portal into an alternate dimension, and then destroyed the portal, though they seriously discussed taking him up in their spaceship and tossing him into the sun.

 

 

I have set things up before where villain A was going to get trashed by villain team B, and the players' attitude was to let team B do what they wanted, then mop up the survivors.

 

If I paint Cold Case as too sympathetic (her victims are all sociopathic murderers/rapists/etc. who got acquitted on technicalities), I could see the players possibly wanting to turn a blind eye to her activities. I'd want some of CC's victims to be that way, but others less so. (Perhaps one of the cold cases is the murder of someone involved in a DUI vehicular homicide, and the suspect was the father of a kid killed in the crash, but the cops couldn't prove he did it. So if she goes after that dad, is she really any better than him?)

 

Hope that answers your question.

[Cygnia]

Re: Cold Case

 

Could it be possible that she targets a victim who is/was actually innocent? Circumstantial evidence may have pointed to him but he actually wasn't responsible for the crime/it actually was an accident?

[BoloOfEarth]

Re: Cold Case

 

Could it be possible that she targets a victim who is/was actually innocent? Circumstantial evidence may have pointed to him but he actually wasn't responsible for the crime/it actually was an accident?

 

I'd have to remove the idea of using a mentalist to determine guilt, which actually (from a GM perspective) might be better, as Cold Case would be making judgements based on partial or biased data. How the heroes would know she went after the wrong person is another matter.

 

I suppose one idea would be if a cold case was actually solved by the police, but she didn't know that and went after the wrong suspect. This would be a lever the heroes could use to talk her down from what she's doing, but that seems to make it almost too easy for the heroes.