Drhoz

Champions : Return To Edge City : Beyond the Valley of the DoLs
Scooter, despite having a huge stack of unspent XP, also has fewer points in Disadvantages than the other PCs.

The Magus OoC: From a certain point of view, Scooter has his life more together than anybody else in the team.
GM: Despite being the bouncer at a titty bar.

Scooter HAS been practicing some useful stuff, such as accurate Leaping, and the Disguise Skill.

The Magus OoC: That’s not Hero Shrew, that’s Normal Shrew!

Hardlight OoC: I’ll call my Skill Level upgrade ‘Slightly Less Incompetent’

GM: Scooter can get a motorised scooter: And join the Vespa Vermin.
Flux: Now there’s a motorcycle gang the city is missing.

We head to the old cemetery, intending to arrest anybody who shows up, especially if they’re VIPER agents. We have a lot of questions about the situation, including ‘If a vampire joins the Daughters of Lilith do they still have to get the fangs implanted?’.

Unfortunately, The Magus (and Scooter to a lesser degree) botch our Stealth checks at the cemetery.

Hero Shrew: Too distracted by all the free supplies available?
The Magus: No. I keep getting flashbacks.

Hero Shrew OoC: I probably should have tunneled under the cemetery and dragged them into the graves from underground.
The Magus OoC: The problem there is all the human remains.
Flux OoC: You’ll bump into something, and burst out of the ground yelling ‘OMG, I just saw Michael Jackson’
Hero Shrew OoC: Ah, so that’s why we failed the Stealth check.

The Magus having a spectacular allergic reaction to holy ground is also a problem. But it’s the way the two Daughters on guard apparently smell Scooter coming that’s the biggest issue - a bit of a surprise when they’re supposed to be basically human. Scooter attempts to get behind them by tunneling underground - and when the Daughters find what looks like a freshly emptied grave, they panic and flee for the cemetery exits. Scooter had made a successful Presence attack, by accident. Unfortunately it looks like they made a call to their boss about the unexpected zombie situation, and the meeting we were there to crash is promptly cancelled.

Flux gets to work investigating the VIPER agent’s online presence - on top of everything else, she makes an annual trip to Wisconsin.

Hero Shrew: Undersconsin!
Flux: No. We don’t want to die.

We locate and stake-out their next meeting, in a children’s playground. Happily there aren’t any kids around at this hour - that could get messy.

Flux: Honestly if there were a bunch of kids hanging around the playground at midnight I’d be more freaked out than I am with all the vampires.

We also learn that the Spinnerette network the Daughters of Lilith answer to is a bit upset by the gang’s initiative, and they’ve sent some rollerskaters that go by the moniker of The Cherry Bombs to remonstrate. There’s also a news blimp perfectly positioned to film whatever happens next.

The Magus calls up an illusion of thick fog, and the other leap into action to protect the Daughters from likely assassination. And hopefully nab that VIPER rep. The Daughters DO go down suspiciously easy when the Magus follows up with a STUN attack to stop them running away under their own steam. And then the power-armoured SWAT team show up.

GM: It’s something you need to know when dealing with this kind of security - if they don’t recognise you and you seem to be involved in whatever is going on, you’re going down to the station in cuffs. It’s called Securing The Scene.

The Magus: Their deployment vehicle is currently stuck on one of the access paths because nobody gave him the key to this bollard.

Whatever happens, it looks like we’ll need to deal with the Spinnerette Network once and for all.

The Magus: They ARE getting a little too murdery.

Happily, hitting the keyboards turns up some interesting information - such as the suspicious way the Spinnerets seem to get out of police trouble a lot faster than anybody else. It seems to be a systemic issue too - if it’s a conspiracy the entire ECPD would have to be involved. Something appears to be moving electronic records around without leaving a trace.

The Magus: Cyberpathy - or Flux is moonlighting.

Since the only thing that can protect against a cyberpath is another cyberpath, it’s probably a problem that the ECPD doesn’t have any technomancers on the payroll.

The Magus: I did find traces of another technomancer working in Edge City.
Flux: .. what?
GM: That might be the first time you’ve actually told Flux that.
The Magus: I think I mentioned in passing as part of a larger infodump. Pretty sure I added a note to the blackboard back at our base.

It is interesting to note that the Spinnerets keep their prostituion income stream entirely separate from their infobrokering.

GM: You pay for discretion.
Fireflash: What happens in Edge City stays in Edge City.

Hardlight, investigating the actual information hardware, finds some peculiar residue on the nodes.

Hardlight: .. I have no idea what this is.
Hero Shrew: Special computer grease to make the electrons go faster?

Hardlight uses his sensory suite to look at the stuff at a microscopic level - weirdly, it seems to have the same texture all the way down. Flux pokes the stuff in the base lab, but it’s not until he tests its occult properties that he gets any results.

Flux: Son of a B****.

It’s ectoplasm.

Flux: Just a minute, I need to go grab a toaster.
Hardlight: And play some music?

Apparently it’s some kind of astral residue. But not magical. Our more mystically inclined members eventually determine that somebody is making small astral portals to run their connections through. And the connections are very… spidery. As is the guardian spirit they left on duty.

The Magus: Huh. So that’s a thing.

They REALLY shouldn’t be hanging out this close to the material plane. We really need to shut the Spinnerets and their subsidiary gangs down. While rounding up their street level members might be doable, actually finding laws to arrest the leaders under might be trickier, assuming we can even get through their layers of sacrificial mooks. Perhaps we should target their unlicensed drinking establishments, preferably when they have lots of customers to scare off. Time for a montage - with lots of press coverage and all due credit to the ECPD Anti-gang Unit (their Internal Affairs and Cybercrime units are busy enough trying to figure out what the Spinnerets have done to their computer system)

Flux: With any luck there’ll be underage drinking - then we can really nail them to the wall.

It probably helps that Scooter already knew where all the illegal dives were, although he had never done anything about them. Just as well he doesn’t work at the Collar Club anymore, or retaliation would seem likely.

Despite actually catching one of the Daughters of Lilith leaders at one of the raids, they somehow escaped without anybody seeing how. Still, each lesser arrest we make provides a point to magically track back to their leadership. So it’s rather unfortunate that when we do, Cassiana and her lieutenants are lying in a pool of blood, and are covered in spiders. And the cloud swirling around the room is more spiders.

Hardlight: Magus. Please teleport me out again, Right now.
The Magus: Oh please, there’s no way they can get through your shield.
Hardlight: I’m still turning the armour way up!

Fireflash blasts the room, to kill as many of the spiders as she can, and calls an ambulance for the Daughters of Lilith, and the Port Authority Biohazard team to deal with any remaining spiders.

Fireflash: We do NOT want Brazilian Wandering Spiders spreading into California!

It’s a bit odd that Cassiana had the accoutrements of a vampire hunter when we found her - was she expecting competition? And sniffing around (literally in Scooter's case) what at first appears to be a dosshouse is actually a bolthole. We’ll probably have to wait for Cassiana to wake up to find out what she was actually up to - unless her real name Theodosia Lathrum is relevant. There was certainly a lineage of vampire hunters going by that moniker.

Fireflash: The historical Theodosia was co-emperor of Byzantium with Justinian the First.
Hero Shrew: Wife and daughter of Aaron Burr, too.
Hardlight: What?
Hero Shrew: Hey, I listen to music, ok?
Hardlight: Aaron Burr’s wife was a vampire hunter?

But what’s with all the spiders?

The Magus: The only thing that can save us now is Bee-man’s edgier cousin, Tarantula Hawk Man.

GM: F*** me, I still haven’t come up with a name for these things. Because I’m not calling them Tarantuloids.
Hero Shrew’s player: Pseudotarantuloids.
GM: They’re native to the astral plane
Hero Shrew’s player: Tarantulpas.
GM: And they’re not earth spiders because they have ten limbs.
Flux’s player: Gegenees.
GM: But those mythical six-armed giants are already in Champions.
Flux’s player: They are? Ah well - it’s about 50-50 odds with anything mythological and Champions.
Hero Shrew player: Ungolians.

According to some incredibly pretentious Victorian era occult tomes, these things are apparently scavengers that usually reside in the lower astral levels. That might explain why they seem to be sealing up the breaches in the astral veil.

The Magus: Shall we follow these cables back to their origin point?
Hero Shrew: I’m willing - just shove me through one of these holes and we’ll see what happens.
The Magus: You’re too big.
Hardlight: And probably too physical.

GM: I question the wisdom of implanting an alien energy source in your neck.
Hardlight: I keep telling you, I didn’t do it to myself! I fell down a well and woke up with it inside me!
The Magus: I heard the same story in the Emergency Department last week.
GM: Jack was nimble, Jack was quick, The doctor at the emergency department said “Jack did WHAT with a candlestick?”

The Magus can teleport us all to the Astral, which is half-full of webbing, but if anything happens to him we’re screwed. And we’re probably doomed anyway thanks to Hardlight’s Weirdness Magnet, which apparently rates as ‘Greatly Impairing’

The Magus: So, is everybody ready to fight spider people?
Hero Shrew: I am! Does that book say whether they’re edible?
The Magus: They’re Camel-spider people.
Flux: THAT MAKES IT WORSE
The Magus: I did say that unless we can find Tarantula Hawk-man we have to handle this ourselves.
Hardlight: I’m half expecting Scooter to show up in a costume with a burning can of insecticide as a logo.
Hero Shrew: That’s a good idea actually - any aerosol cans and cigarette lighters handy?
GM: … OK, sure.
Hardlight: It IS a very Scooter Solution.

The Tarantuloids (apparently called Uttu) immediately draw weapons and advance when we transition over. And we haven’t even messed with their stuff yet.

Hardlight’s Player: I try to find some spider-themed assets for Tabletop Simulator and the first thing I find is a Femboy Spider Token.
GM: Welcome to the Internet where Everything Is Awful.

The Magus: Well, I’d better try and negotiate before anybody gets set on fire… Hail, fellow sentients! What are you doing so close to the material planes?
Uttu: We Guard! You Leave!
Flux: Is it OK if we leave that way? *pointing to the direction the cable is heading*
The Magus: And who are you guarding it for?
Uttu: She!
Hardlight: Well, at least we know their assumed gender. Uh, She who?
Uttu: SHE!
Fireflash: She Who Must Not Be Named?
Flux: We seem to be having some translation difficulties…
GM: With apologies to H. Rider Haggard.
Uttu: We follow SHE! SHE provides!
Flux: Can talk to her? Uh, She?
Uttu: SHE talks to who She wishes!

The Magus intimidates them enough to at least send a message.

Hero Shrew: Does She sell seashells?
Hardlight: I’m half-expecting She to be short for Shelob.
Uttu: *in slow English* She. Says. She Will Send. Emmi-sary. Asks. Who You?
The Magus: The Magus.
Uttu: She. Says. Crap.

At least we get an address - in the middle of Spinnerets territory.

Hardlight: I pull out my freeweb device. Wait, no signal.
GM: Actually you do have a signal. What???
Flux: Ok Mr Tech Genius, before we leave, find out what the hell that’s connecting to.

The Spinnerets emissary has a fancy sword and crucifix earrings

Hero Shrew: I wonder if the earrings are significant.
GM: Probably - the powered in the Champions universe are generally pretty careful with the symbols of Higher Powers.
Hardlight: Well, I’m going to shut up and not say anything - foot-in-mouth and all. So go on you two, get talking.

The Emissary is pretty confident that the holes in the astral veil aren’t a problem, because they have a way to stabilise them. The Magus points out that that does nothing about the way the Spinnerets are rewriting police records at will. The Emissary makes an offer on She’s behalf - if we let them withdraw the connections in question (they’re not much use to She now we know about them) the Spinnerets will extend us a line of credit.

Hardlight: This is one of those moral quandaries, isn’t it.

The Magus calls the rest of us over to join the conversation.

Hero Shrew: Cool sword.
The Emissary: Thankyou.
Flux: So, Magus, I see you’re not dead.
The Magus: Did you expect me to be?
Flux: *waggles hand* eh.

The Emissary: I speak for She. I listen and She hears.
The Magus: And She occasionally swears to the Uttu.

Hardlight: I’m guessing this line of credit isn’t monetary.
The Emissary: Of course not.
Flux: My apologies, he doesn’t understand metaphors.
Hardlight OoC: No I don't understand metaphors, that’s the whole POINT of my character!

So, if we choose to ignore the murder and attempted murder of the Daughters of Lilith, or at least put it down to internal gang politics, we can at least stop the Spinnerets from messing with the ECPD data systems, and can get some favours from She in future.

The Magus: Admittedly it’s a lot harder to pin the murders on them.

The Emissary: Do we have any other business?
Hero Shrew: Are there any giant edible bugs in the Astral Plane?
Hardlight: What????
The Emissary: I don’t know.

The Magus recognises the Emissary’s weapon too - the Sword of God’s Word, that Separates Truth From Lie.

GM: I need a word, not antediluvian, that’s specifically The Flood, but basically prehuman..
Hero Shrew: Pre-Adamite.
GM: The sword is Pre-Adamite.
Hardlight: Freaky.
GM: Says the person who’s bonded to a pre-Adamite artefact.

Hero Shrew: I’d like to know which supervillains they’ve been cleaning up records for.
The Emissary: That’s confidential.
Hero Shrew: What’s the deal with Undersconsin?
Hardlight: SCOOTER
The Emissary: ...She has no information on Undersconsin.

GM: This is all worth 7 XP and two favours from the Spinnerets.
The Magus: For not burning the house down.

GM: I hope you didn’t find that too frustrating?
Hardlight OoC: No, not fighting is just as good as fighting, most of the time.
Hero Shrew OoC: Hey! Fighting is the only thing I’m good at!
GM: No it isn’t! Half the time you’re the only person who figures out what’s actually happening, because you work at street level.
Hero Shrew OoC: Eh, tell me that, I’m having increasing questions about my self worth lately.
Flux: Don’t worry, we’ll get you a cave so you can spend a few weeks brooding with the bats and getting horribly damp and s*** on. I mean seriously, that’s a terrible place for a base. And he goes and fills it with computers.
Hardlight: The first thing he installed was good HVAC.

Pathfinder: In Hell's Bright Shadow : Calling All Girls
Ayva OoC: Poor Terzo, all these women and he has no chance with any of them.
Terzo OoC: Believe me, I do not actually consider that a problem.
Civilla OoC: I should hope so, you’re my tutor.
Terzo OoC: And that’s just ONE reason.

And Ayva does have a point - between the party, most of the NPCs that are important enough to name, and Thrune’s choice of trusted minions, it seems the script for any future movies about events in Kintargo will easily pass the Bechdel Test. Unless we’re talking about Thrune anyway, but nobody cares what he has between his legs unless it’s an opportunity to remove it with something rusty.

Negotiating the Red Jills is going to be dicey, since they basically count anybody from the Basic Character Races as The Enemy. And Rajira is the only one that is clearly outside their broad definition of ‘human’, and only if she doesn’t try to hide her reptilian heritage.

Civilla: The thing is, Thrune’s agents might actually follow the rules of hospitality and parley if we were having a meeting like this - they’re Evil, but Lawful Evil. But the Jills are probably Chaotic.

Rajira: I was going to say ‘let’s wing it’, but that might offend the Strix.
Civilla: So no triggering language.
Ayva: And nothing about ‘plans being hatched’.
Civilla: You have to be careful about ear jokes around elves too - although given that of the usual races it’s humans that have the weird round ears, that’s kinda strange.

Ayva: I was going to say ‘don’t get cocky’ but there’s the bird language again.

It’s actually Rajira’s suggestion that we don’t meet at the Red Jills’ hideout, in case of Property Damage Escalating To Arson, and the gang agrees.

Rajira: Good evening - I believe we have important matters to discuss.
Scarplume the Strix: Ah yes, the Ghosts of Kintargo.

Apparently our reputation is already spreading.

Scarplume: What makes you think you can change the way the Jills do business?
Rajira: I don’t believe I can - but I believe I can give you a reason to change yourselves.

Rajira: You are a person of power and influence
Scarplume: Power that was hard-won - and you are offering…?
Rajira: An opportunity.

Rajira is persuasive enough, with the eventual intention of making Kintargo a city that won’t look down on the Tieflings simply for being born the way they are.

Rajira: Thrune has drastically under-estimated the power of this city - and its power is the spirit of the people.

Scarplume’s demand is that if we do manage to take over the city, that the Tieflings be treated with full equality and respect.

Rajira: I already do.
Terzo: Liberty! Egality! Fraternity!
Scarplume: I will take you at your word then - but if I hear one whisper that your enterprise is failing, this will not be the last you hear from me.

At least they've agreed to direct their depredations against the occupation, instead of the citizens. Civilla and Rajira are privately skeptical, and after we leave, discuss the likelihood that we’re going to have to eliminate the Jills anyway.

Terzo: Well, that went well.
Civilla: How exactly do you think that went well?
Terzo: They agreed that Tieflings need to be treated with full equality, and that Thrune’s forces are the actual enemy here. I think we have a lot in common.
Civilla: Well, we’ll hold off for now and see how it plays out.
Ayva: At least we can say we tried.

Rexus has good news too - he’s finally finished his translation of the documents we found under the old Livery. A lot of it is tactical advice for defending the city. Some deals with the Secret Order of Archivists, that Rexus’ mother worked for before she died - or rather, before Rexus thought her dead, since he now thinks she may have made it to a previously unsuspected safehouse beneath Hocum’s Phantasmagorium, a tourist-trap museum that’s been closed for well over a decade. In fact there’s a key to the building among the stuff we found.

Terzo: I’m surprised the building hasn’t been repurposed.
Civilla: You’re right - that is suspicious.
Unfortunately, there’s a bunch of Asmodean priests and zombies doing something inside the building, when one of our rebellion cells does some reconnoitering on our behalf.

Terzo: It would appear they thought the building being empty this long was suspicious too.
Rajira: Or they just want to take advantage of it.
Terzo OoC: Maybe they want to open a Starbucks.
Ayva OoC: ‘Local Starbucks Burns Down - Meanwhile Local Cafe Owner Does Roaring Business’
GM: Hell’s Rebels : The True Story Of The Kintargo Coffee Wars

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/808767700515028992/909068946462900264/tumblr_inline_o8ico2kVcn1qao8br_1280.png

Ayva OoC: The People Magazine idea for our printing press has gone through the roof. ‘What do we print in our first issue?’ ‘Well, we didn’t get a second…’

We wait until some of the Asmodean priests swap with a shift change, and jump them. Unfortunately, Rajira botches the strike, and botches the follow-up as well. Fortunately Terzo casts Sleep on the one that didn’t turn invisible and run off.

Terzo: *expressively gestures* Well, what do we do now?
Civilla: We proceed at speed - you could stand to lose a few pounds.

The invisible one is probably going to lose a few pounds too, when Civilla’s Celestial Hyena catches up with her. At least she isn’t going to alert everybody else in the building. Unfortunately, the exhibits in the Fantasmagorium didn’t include animated skunk ape skeletons - the ones that attack us are new. Rexus, who insisted on coming with us, gets himself badly mauled.

Civilla: He shouldn’t be here anyway.
Ayva: He needs training - we can afford that now.
Terzo: What, some kind of spray bottle? ‘Don’t Go. Near. The Monsters’ *squirt*
Civilla OoC: Well, at least if he gets killed there’ll be no-one to contest the sale of the estate…
Ayva OoC: But he is basically Mr Exposition

Having dealt with the White Apes of STREWTH!, we press on to one of the marine themed halls. Unfortunately, none of us have Knowledge (Nature), and none of us see a ‘Do Not Tap The Glass’ sign, so we soon regret Terzo’s curiosity about the tanks.

Civilla: Terzo, how have you survived this long in Chelliax?
Terzo: Natural Charm?
Ayva: He’s well pickled, people think he’s a gherkin.

Ayva: I’m beginning to think this building is cursed.
Civilla: Undead in the last room, undead in this one - I think you’re right.
Ayva OoC: I meant the way that since we came in here, all we’re rolling are 1s and 20s.
GM: And not the way round you need.
Ayva: This didn’t happen to us on the stealth missions.
Civilla OoC: In the stealth missions, it was the other people that needed to make rolls, not us.

Ayva: Terzo? Come here.
Terzo: Yes?
Ayva: DON’T TOUCH STUFF IN THE CURSED MUSEUM.
Terzo: I’m beginning to get that impression, yes.

Terzo: I’m not sure what the problem is, I’ve spent decades poking things I probably shouldn’t and I’m hardly likely to stop now. Although they probably wouldn’t appreciate me calling them ‘things’.

Rajira: Since we don’t want a case of crabs, let’s move on.
Ayva: Hey, a case of crabs, covered in butter, what’s the problem?
Rajira: Depends how you get them.
Ayva: Usually by paying for them - how do you get them?
Terzo: …
Ayva: … we’re talking about two different things, aren’t we?

Civilla: Rexus, if you don’t stay at the end of the party, I will ensure you are the end of your line.

The next room was an insectarium - the last person in here clearly didn’t get the memo about not touching stuff in the cursed museum.

Civilla: This place used to be a tourist trap, now it’s a…
Terzo: Death Trap?

We also find out why the Asmodeans are actually here - they’ve been stripping the building of anything showing historical facts the government of Chelliax doesn’t like. F***ing Redactors. If they’re that easily upset, they must have hated the wax museum in the next room - it certainly upset us. Whatever genius decided to set up a waxwork display of Kintargo’s more infamous serial killers REALLY shouldn’t have used the kind of waxwork guaranteed to get up and continue the subject’s career. On the other hand we can certainly blame the Church of Asmodeus for the zombies - the next lot are Rexus’ family.

Happily, we find the Redactors immediately thereafter and can register our complaints in person.

GM: The redactors call out to their commander as you storm the room, but you murdered their commander in cold blood when you first entered the building.

Terzo’s player: annoying, battery in mouse has finally gone flat
Rajira’s player: Why I prefer wired mice - However, getting the drugs to keep them wired is expensive.

Ayva: Rexus is a bit wired at the moment.
Rajira’s player: How did he get my mouse drugs?

Discovering a hidden entrance to deeper parts of the Fantasmogorium is a problem, because somebody might show up to investigate all the screaming and fireworks at any moment, and we’re already battered and exhausted dealing with the stuff in the main building.

Civilla: F*********** - if we don’t look down there now we won’t get a second chance later
Ayva: This better be a treasure room or we’re going home.

It seems to be a whole complex down here - it looks like we’ll have to camp underground for a few hours to rest, and hope the dottari don’t know about the secret stairwell (and don’t have a shift change before then). This proves optimistic, since the Redactors were apparently here to censor the collected histories of the Sacred Order of Archivists, the group Rexus’ parents belonged to. The archivists were using the Fantasmagorium - or at least, the hidden monastery in the basement - as a base of operations.

Terzo: We’ll have to take Rexus’ family down too.
Civilla: So now we’ll have to sleep in the same room as a pile of corpses - greeeeeat.
Ayva: I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff on these bookshelves to distract you.

Ayva’s player: Before we wander into descriptive text can we get some XP?

Apparently there’s a creature composed entirely of books and paper down here.

Ayva: Ok, Civilla, don’t touch any books.
Book Creature: Halt intruders!
Ayva: Okay.
Book Creature: … I didn’t expect that to work.

Apparently whatever this thing is was summoned to guard the hidden library’s books from any intruders, for at least another 12 days. That doesn’t preclude us from having a good stickybeak around, though, as long as we don’t actually touch anything. And it doesn’t stop us finding out that he was summoned by the Asmodeans to protect the Redactors while they go about their business of rewriting recorded history. The Scrivenite isn’t very happy about that. Which is probably why he’s telling us all the rules of his binding.

Ayva: But the Redactors are all-
Civilla: Shushshushshush! Theoretical question for you, what would you do if the Redactors were all dead?
Scrivenite: The ones upstairs are not my purview - I’m bound to protect the ones in the monastery. I don’t suppose any of you can cast Dismissal?
Rajira: Bit high-level for us.
Scrivenite: Darn it. I really don’t want to fight you.

Scrivenite: As long as you don’t enter the room by THAT DOOR *point point, gesture significantly* and don’t touch any of the books in THIS ROOM, *more gesturing* I’m not obliged to attack you.
Civilla: Okay, okay, I can work with this.
Ayva: What if we dress up as Redactors?
Scrivenite: Well I’ll know it’s you, now - you shouldn’t have said anything.

Civilla: I think I can get us past your restrictions with a bit of pedantry. You won’t let anybody through the door, correct? So what if I open the door, but not go through it, cast Rope Trick, have my associates enter the extradimensional space, teleport into the other room myself, and have everybody climb down again?
Scrivenite: As far as I’m concerned that will work.
Civilla: That’s all we need. I believe you’re a creature of Law? Your summoners were insufficiently precise.


The first few rooms down here contain sleeping Redactors, who sleep infinitely deeper as Rajira goes to them one by one.

Terzo: So, those rooms were empty then?
Rajira: They are now.
Terzo: I choose to interpret that positively.

The next one was actually awake when Rajira stabbed him, and tries to make a run for it - and immediately regrets it, since the rest of the party are waiting in the corridor.

GM: The Redactor stops dead - and you recognise him, Civilla.
Redactor: C-cousin???
Civilla: Cousin? You call yourself family and you’ve taken the mark of the Redactors?
Ayva: I take it that we’re not taking him alive?
Civilla: NO.
Ayva: Well then.
Rajira OoC: For one thing he knows too much.

The Redactor IS an Alazario, and the son of the mayor of the Chellish capitol.

Terzo OoC: I’ll hold off on doing anything - Civilla might be annoyed if I set him on fire.

Civilla summons a monster octopus, and stomps forward to snarl for a bit.

GM: He tries to say something but it’s kind of muffled by tentacles.
Civilla: *sigh* Let him speak.

Apparently Civilla’s cousin, Nicolo, is no happier to be here than Civilla is to see him.

Civilla: Then WHY. ARE YOU. HERE.
Ayva: Daddy dearest?
Civilla: Probably. *sigh*
GM: I’ll be quick because he’s bleeding out a HP a round.
Rajira: Two.

Apparently the Mayor has found himself in deep political trouble, and Civilla’s cousin had to join the Redactors to save the family’s reputation, despite the fact that the Alazarios as a whole are very much against destroying written history. Civilla is now regretting that she’s so family focused - mostly because we can’t leave him here alive, because being the Only Survivor would be highly suspicious. And apparently he HAS been preserving what he can.

Ayva: What’s that saying about ‘better pissing out?’

Terzo tries to patch the cousin up before he bleeds out, then we stash him in the Rope Trick dimension for the time being.

Terzo: Stabbed him rather deeply, didn’t you?
Rajira: I WAS trying to kill him.
Terzo: You with the tentacles, hold this limb tighter.

Apparently the success one of Civilla’s more distant kin had in becoming a pirate king, a few years back, inspired another Alazario to become a pirate. Unfortunately she was also a captain in the Chellish Navy, and the Mayor’s sister, and she decided to target Chellish merchant ships. Well, at least we’ll have someone to mail the cousin to.

The next room has been set up to be the ideal kind of battleground for some quite unpleasant devils. It looks like Rajira and the Chthonic Octopus will be on point - they’re certainly sneakier than the rest of us. For one thing the mollusc can detect living people through walls. Unfortunately it can’t tell WHO is on the other side of the wall, so finding Barzillai Thrune’s bodyguard, Nox, down here, is a bit of a shock. Fortunately she’s not wearing her armour, because she’s asleep. Unfortunately, her hellhound is not.

Rajira attacks Nox first, and kills her instantly with poisoned blades.

GM: She failed ALL HER ROLLS. She was supposed to be the BBEG of this chapter! There’s a whole subchapter here about her as a recurring villain!
Civilla OoC: We could always have left her as the Only Survivor

Rajira: NEED A LITTLE HELP HERE.

Civilla teleports past all the highly suspicious chains, to try and disable what she suspects is something very close to the Lament Configuration - Chain Devils are the last thing we want showing up. The chains alone are nasty enough.

Civilla OoC: Bags not being the first Cenobite. *fails the check* F***.

The head injury she suffers from a chain lashing out of the cube into her face also knocks out her last hour of short-term memory, which is going to make for some interesting conversations later. But at least Ayva succeeds in making the chains vanish.

Terzo cast Grease before the rest of the Redactor Monks show up.

GM: Why don’t these monks - admittedly Lvl 1 monks - have any points in Acrobatics?
Terzo: Because books can’t fight back.
Redactor-who-isn't-Civilla's-Cousin: Magic-users! Retreat to the Garden!
Terzo: They have a garden down here?

Ayva uses Boneshaker on one of the Redactors, which proves fatal.

Civilla: You grabbed him by the skeleton and shook him like an underpaid nanny!
Ayva: I wasn’t expecting it to actually kill him!
Terzo: I thought that was the plan - unless any more of these are your cousins, Civilla?
Civilla: *still amnesiac* What????

Retreating to the garden and preparing spells does the surviving monks no good at all, because Civilla’s octopus attacks them straight out of the floor.

We pursue, leaving Rexus to kill any Redactors we leave merely unconscious behind us.

Rexus: THIS IS FOR MY MOTHER!
Ayva: It’s OK, we can fix it later.
GM: Am I going to have to get THAT post up?
Civilla: It’d have to be True Resurrection - and at the moment Time Is Money.

Civilla follows up her octopus with a Celestial Hyena, and Terzo uses Blistering Invective on the remaining Redactors, and sets them on fire - one survives long enough to dash for the underground river.

Terzo: Get out here and fight, you craven clay-brained canker-blossoms!
Unfortunate Redactor: *on fire on top of everything else, and feeling that the rebels are being a bit unfair* We’re Asmodeans, we’re meant to be evil, what the F***

Civilla’s hyena tears out his belly.

Civilla: Well, that’s all of them.
Ayva: ah….
Terzo: Come over here, dear, you’ll want to sit down for this bit. You know how one of your distant cousins became the Hurricane King?
Civilla: Yesss, but that was hundreds of miles away, what does that have to do with these guys?
Terzo: We’re getting there we’re getting there - anyway, his example encouraged one of your closer relatives to try the same career.
Civilla: OK?
Terzo: Unfortunately she was a captain in the Chellish Navy at the time.
Civilla: What? But her brother is the mayor of - oh.
Rajira: So guess who we have.
Civilla: Her?
Terzo: No - but her nephew had to join the Redactors to protect his family. So he was REALLY lucky you were the first person he saw when he was running away from Rajira.
Civilla: Maybe you should have led with ‘Don’t worry, he’s alive?’

Apparently this place was the Archivists storehouse for Worryingly Magical Stuff. Most of said worryingly magical stuff is missing, including a necklace or amulet, a pair of gloves or bracers, and a reasonably sized rock. Rexus, happily, has a key to the secret compartment behind the shelves, however.

Meanwhile, Rajira goes to check out the garden, presumably to figure out the best place to chop up the bodies and feed them to Civilla’s Chthonic Toads. It’s not like we can just dump them all in the underground stream - that might contaminate someone’s water supply. If we can make all the bodies vanish, we can hopefully make Thrune think his bodyguard and entire order of Redactors have fled the city. A few Convincing Lies spread by the underground press should help.

In a small nook on the other side of the garden, Rajira finds a series of books that magically contain the memories and experiences of some members of the Order of Archivists. Including Rexus’ parents.

Civilla OoC: There’s a reason that we play things the way that we do. We stack our advantages because the dice can **** you in an instant.

Pathfinder: In Hell's Bright Shadow : Calling All Girls
Ayva OoC: Poor Terzo, all these women and he has no chance with any of them.
Terzo OoC: Believe me, I do not actually consider that a problem.
Civilla OoC: I should hope so, you’re my tutor.
Terzo OoC: And that’s just ONE reason.

And Ayva does have a point - between the party, most of the NPCs that are important enough to name, and Thrune’s choice of trusted minions, it seems the script for any future movies about events in Kintargo will easily pass the Bechdel Test. Unless we’re talking about Thrune anyway, but nobody cares what he has between his legs unless it’s an opportunity to remove it with something rusty.

Negotiating the Red Jills is going to be dicey, since they basically count anybody from the Basic Character Races as The Enemy. And Rajira is the only one that is clearly outside their broad definition of ‘human’, and only if she doesn’t try to hide her reptilian heritage.

Civilla: The thing is, Thrune’s agents might actually follow the rules of hospitality and parley if we were having a meeting like this - they’re Evil, but Lawful Evil. But the Jills are probably Chaotic.

Rajira: I was going to say ‘let’s wing it’, but that might offend the Strix.
Civilla: So no triggering language.
Ayva: And nothing about ‘plans being hatched’.
Civilla: You have to be careful about ear jokes around elves too - although given that of the usual races it’s humans that have the weird round ears, that’s kinda strange.

Ayva: I was going to say ‘don’t get cocky’ but there’s the bird language again.

It’s actually Rajira’s suggestion that we don’t meet at the Red Jills’ hideout, in case of Property Damage Escalating To Arson, and the gang agrees.

Rajira: Good evening - I believe we have important matters to discuss.
Scarplume the Strix: Ah yes, the Ghosts of Kintargo.

Apparently our reputation is already spreading.

Scarplume: What makes you think you can change the way the Jills do business?
Rajira: I don’t believe I can - but I believe I can give you a reason to change yourselves.

Rajira: You are a person of power and influence
Scarplume: Power that was hard-won - and you are offering…?
Rajira: An opportunity.

Rajira is persuasive enough, with the eventual intention of making Kintargo a city that won’t look down on the Tieflings simply for being born the way they are.

Rajira: Thrune has drastically under-estimated the power of this city - and its power is the spirit of the people.

Scarplume’s demand is that if we do manage to take over the city, that the Tieflings be treated with full equality and respect.

Rajira: I already do.
Terzo: Liberty! Egality! Fraternity!
Scarplume: I will take you at your word then - but if I hear one whisper that your enterprise is failing, this will not be the last you hear from me.

At least they've agreed to direct their depredations against the occupation, instead of the citizens. Civilla and Rajira are privately skeptical, and after we leave, discuss the likelihood that we’re going to have to eliminate the Jills anyway.

Terzo: Well, that went well.
Civilla: How exactly do you think that went well?
Terzo: They agreed that Tieflings need to be treated with full equality, and that Thrune’s forces are the actual enemy here. I think we have a lot in common.
Civilla: Well, we’ll hold off for now and see how it plays out.
Ayva: At least we can say we tried.

Rexus has good news too - he’s finally finished his translation of the documents we found under the old Livery. A lot of it is tactical advice for defending the city. Some deals with the Secret Order of Archivists, that Rexus’ mother worked for before she died - or rather, before Rexus thought her dead, since he now thinks she may have made it to a previously unsuspected safehouse beneath Hocum’s Phantasmagorium, a tourist-trap museum that’s been closed for well over a decade. In fact there’s a key to the building among the stuff we found.

Terzo: I’m surprised the building hasn’t been repurposed.
Civilla: You’re right - that is suspicious.
Unfortunately, there’s a bunch of Asmodean priests and zombies doing something inside the building, when one of our rebellion cells does some reconnoitering on our behalf.

Terzo: It would appear they thought the building being empty this long was suspicious too.
Rajira: Or they just want to take advantage of it.
Terzo OoC: Maybe they want to open a Starbucks.
Ayva OoC: ‘Local Starbucks Burns Down - Meanwhile Local Cafe Owner Does Roaring Business’
GM: Hell’s Rebels : The True Story Of The Kintargo Coffee Wars

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/808767700515028992/909068946462900264/tumblr_inline_o8ico2kVcn1qao8br_1280.png

Ayva OoC: The People Magazine idea for our printing press has gone through the roof. ‘What do we print in our first issue?’ ‘Well, we didn’t get a second…’

We wait until some of the Asmodean priests swap with a shift change, and jump them. Unfortunately, Rajira botches the strike, and botches the follow-up as well. Fortunately Terzo casts Sleep on the one that didn’t turn invisible and run off.

Terzo: *expressively gestures* Well, what do we do now?
Civilla: We proceed at speed - you could stand to lose a few pounds.

The invisible one is probably going to lose a few pounds too, when Civilla’s Celestial Hyena catches up with her. At least she isn’t going to alert everybody else in the building. Unfortunately, the exhibits in the Fantasmagorium didn’t include animated skunk ape skeletons - the ones that attack us are new. Rexus, who insisted on coming with us, gets himself badly mauled.

Civilla: He shouldn’t be here anyway.
Ayva: He needs training - we can afford that now.
Terzo: What, some kind of spray bottle? ‘Don’t Go. Near. The Monsters’ *squirt*
Civilla OoC: Well, at least if he gets killed there’ll be no-one to contest the sale of the estate…
Ayva OoC: But he is basically Mr Exposition

Having dealt with the White Apes of STREWTH!, we press on to one of the marine themed halls. Unfortunately, none of us have Knowledge (Nature), and none of us see a ‘Do Not Tap The Glass’ sign, so we soon regret Terzo’s curiosity about the tanks.

Civilla: Terzo, how have you survived this long in Chelliax?
Terzo: Natural Charm?
Ayva: He’s well pickled, people think he’s a gherkin.

Ayva: I’m beginning to think this building is cursed.
Civilla: Undead in the last room, undead in this one - I think you’re right.
Ayva OoC: I meant the way that since we came in here, all we’re rolling are 1s and 20s.
GM: And not the way round you need.
Ayva: This didn’t happen to us on the stealth missions.
Civilla OoC: In the stealth missions, it was the other people that needed to make rolls, not us.

Ayva: Terzo? Come here.
Terzo: Yes?
Ayva: DON’T TOUCH STUFF IN THE CURSED MUSEUM.
Terzo: I’m beginning to get that impression, yes.

Terzo: I’m not sure what the problem is, I’ve spent decades poking things I probably shouldn’t and I’m hardly likely to stop now. Although they probably wouldn’t appreciate me calling them ‘things’.

Rajira: Since we don’t want a case of crabs, let’s move on.
Ayva: Hey, a case of crabs, covered in butter, what’s the problem?
Rajira: Depends how you get them.
Ayva: Usually by paying for them - how do you get them?
Terzo: …
Ayva: … we’re talking about two different things, aren’t we?

Civilla: Rexus, if you don’t stay at the end of the party, I will ensure you are the end of your line.

The next room was an insectarium - the last person in here clearly didn’t get the memo about not touching stuff in the cursed museum.

Civilla: This place used to be a tourist trap, now it’s a…
Terzo: Death Trap?

We also find out why the Asmodeans are actually here - they’ve been stripping the building of anything showing historical facts the government of Chelliax doesn’t like. F***ing Redactors. If they’re that easily upset, they must have hated the wax museum in the next room - it certainly upset us. Whatever genius decided to set up a waxwork display of Kintargo’s more infamous serial killers REALLY shouldn’t have used the kind of waxwork guaranteed to get up and continue the subject’s career. On the other hand we can certainly blame the Church of Asmodeus for the zombies - the next lot are Rexus’ family.

Happily, we find the Redactors immediately thereafter and can register our complaints in person.

GM: The redactors call out to their commander as you storm the room, but you murdered their commander in cold blood when you first entered the building.

Terzo’s player: annoying, battery in mouse has finally gone flat
Rajira’s player: Why I prefer wired mice - However, getting the drugs to keep them wired is expensive.

Ayva: Rexus is a bit wired at the moment.
Rajira’s player: How did he get my mouse drugs?

Discovering a hidden entrance to deeper parts of the Fantasmogorium is a problem, because somebody might show up to investigate all the screaming and fireworks at any moment, and we’re already battered and exhausted dealing with the stuff in the main building.

Civilla: F*********** - if we don’t look down there now we won’t get a second chance later
Ayva: This better be a treasure room or we’re going home.

It seems to be a whole complex down here - it looks like we’ll have to camp underground for a few hours to rest, and hope the dottari don’t know about the secret stairwell (and don’t have a shift change before then). This proves optimistic, since the Redactors were apparently here to censor the collected histories of the Sacred Order of Archivists, the group Rexus’ parents belonged to. The archivists were using the Fantasmagorium - or at least, the hidden monastery in the basement - as a base of operations.

Terzo: We’ll have to take Rexus’ family down too.
Civilla: So now we’ll have to sleep in the same room as a pile of corpses - greeeeeat.
Ayva: I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff on these bookshelves to distract you.

Ayva’s player: Before we wander into descriptive text can we get some XP?

Apparently there’s a creature composed entirely of books and paper down here.

Ayva: Ok, Civilla, don’t touch any books.
Book Creature: Halt intruders!
Ayva: Okay.
Book Creature: … I didn’t expect that to work.

Apparently whatever this thing is was summoned to guard the hidden library’s books from any intruders, for at least another 12 days. That doesn’t preclude us from having a good stickybeak around, though, as long as we don’t actually touch anything. And it doesn’t stop us finding out that he was summoned by the Asmodeans to protect the Redactors while they go about their business of rewriting recorded history. The Scrivenite isn’t very happy about that. Which is probably why he’s telling us all the rules of his binding.

Ayva: But the Redactors are all-
Civilla: Shushshushshush! Theoretical question for you, what would you do if the Redactors were all dead?
Scrivenite: The ones upstairs are not my purview - I’m bound to protect the ones in the monastery. I don’t suppose any of you can cast Dismissal?
Rajira: Bit high-level for us.
Scrivenite: Darn it. I really don’t want to fight you.

Scrivenite: As long as you don’t enter the room by THAT DOOR *point point, gesture significantly* and don’t touch any of the books in THIS ROOM, *more gesturing* I’m not obliged to attack you.
Civilla: Okay, okay, I can work with this.
Ayva: What if we dress up as Redactors?
Scrivenite: Well I’ll know it’s you, now - you shouldn’t have said anything.

Civilla: I think I can get us past your restrictions with a bit of pedantry. You won’t let anybody through the door, correct? So what if I open the door, but not go through it, cast Rope Trick, have my associates enter the extradimensional space, teleport into the other room myself, and have everybody climb down again?
Scrivenite: As far as I’m concerned that will work.
Civilla: That’s all we need. I believe you’re a creature of Law? Your summoners were insufficiently precise.


The first few rooms down here contain sleeping Redactors, who sleep infinitely deeper as Rajira goes to them one by one.

Terzo: So, those rooms were empty then?
Rajira: They are now.
Terzo: I choose to interpret that positively.

The next one was actually awake when Rajira stabbed him, and tries to make a run for it - and immediately regrets it, since the rest of the party are waiting in the corridor.

GM: The Redactor stops dead - and you recognise him, Civilla.
Redactor: C-cousin???
Civilla: Cousin? You call yourself family and you’ve taken the mark of the Redactors?
Ayva: I take it that we’re not taking him alive?
Civilla: NO.
Ayva: Well then.
Rajira OoC: For one thing he knows too much.

The Redactor IS an Alazario, and the son of the mayor of the Chellish capitol.

Terzo OoC: I’ll hold off on doing anything - Civilla might be annoyed if I set him on fire.

Civilla summons a monster octopus, and stomps forward to snarl for a bit.

GM: He tries to say something but it’s kind of muffled by tentacles.
Civilla: *sigh* Let him speak.

Apparently Civilla’s cousin, Nicolo, is no happier to be here than Civilla is to see him.

Civilla: Then WHY. ARE YOU. HERE.
Ayva: Daddy dearest?
Civilla: Probably. *sigh*
GM: I’ll be quick because he’s bleeding out a HP a round.
Rajira: Two.

Apparently the Mayor has found himself in deep political trouble, and Civilla’s cousin had to join the Redactors to save the family’s reputation, despite the fact that the Alazarios as a whole are very much against destroying written history. Civilla is now regretting that she’s so family focused - mostly because we can’t leave him here alive, because being the Only Survivor would be highly suspicious. And apparently he HAS been preserving what he can.

Ayva: What’s that saying about ‘better pissing out?’

Terzo tries to patch the cousin up before he bleeds out, then we stash him in the Rope Trick dimension for the time being.

Terzo: Stabbed him rather deeply, didn’t you?
Rajira: I WAS trying to kill him.
Terzo: You with the tentacles, hold this limb tighter.

Apparently the success one of Civilla’s more distant kin had in becoming a pirate king, a few years back, inspired another Alazario to become a pirate. Unfortunately she was also a captain in the Chellish Navy, and the Mayor’s sister, and she decided to target Chellish merchant ships. Well, at least we’ll have someone to mail the cousin to.

The next room has been set up to be the ideal kind of battleground for some quite unpleasant devils. It looks like Rajira and the Chthonic Octopus will be on point - they’re certainly sneakier than the rest of us. For one thing the mollusc can detect living people through walls. Unfortunately it can’t tell WHO is on the other side of the wall, so finding Barzillai Thrune’s bodyguard, Nox, down here, is a bit of a shock. Fortunately she’s not wearing her armour, because she’s asleep. Unfortunately, her hellhound is not.

Rajira attacks Nox first, and kills her instantly with poisoned blades.

GM: She failed ALL HER ROLLS. She was supposed to be the BBEG of this chapter! There’s a whole subchapter here about her as a recurring villain!
Civilla OoC: We could always have left her as the Only Survivor

Rajira: NEED A LITTLE HELP HERE.

Civilla teleports past all the highly suspicious chains, to try and disable what she suspects is something very close to the Lament Configuration - Chain Devils are the last thing we want showing up. The chains alone are nasty enough.

Civilla OoC: Bags not being the first Cenobite. *fails the check* F***.

The head injury she suffers from a chain lashing out of the cube into her face also knocks out her last hour of short-term memory, which is going to make for some interesting conversations later. But at least Ayva succeeds in making the chains vanish.

Terzo cast Grease before the rest of the Redactor Monks show up.

GM: Why don’t these monks - admittedly Lvl 1 monks - have any points in Acrobatics?
Terzo: Because books can’t fight back.
Redactor-who-isn't-Civilla's-Cousin: Magic-users! Retreat to the Garden!
Terzo: They have a garden down here?

Ayva uses Boneshaker on one of the Redactors, which proves fatal.

Civilla: You grabbed him by the skeleton and shook him like an underpaid nanny!
Ayva: I wasn’t expecting it to actually kill him!
Terzo: I thought that was the plan - unless any more of these are your cousins, Civilla?
Civilla: *still amnesiac* What????

Retreating to the garden and preparing spells does the surviving monks no good at all, because Civilla’s octopus attacks them straight out of the floor.

We pursue, leaving Rexus to kill any Redactors we leave merely unconscious behind us.

Rexus: THIS IS FOR MY MOTHER!
Ayva: It’s OK, we can fix it later.
GM: Am I going to have to get THAT post up?
Civilla: It’d have to be True Resurrection - and at the moment Time Is Money.

Civilla follows up her octopus with a Celestial Hyena, and Terzo uses Blistering Invective on the remaining Redactors, and sets them on fire - one survives long enough to dash for the underground river.

Terzo: Get out here and fight, you craven clay-brained canker-blossoms!
Unfortunate Redactor: *on fire on top of everything else, and feeling that the rebels are being a bit unfair* We’re Asmodeans, we’re meant to be evil, what the F***

Civilla’s hyena tears out his belly.

Civilla: Well, that’s all of them.
Ayva: ah….
Terzo: Come over here, dear, you’ll want to sit down for this bit. You know how one of your distant cousins became the Hurricane King?
Civilla: Yesss, but that was hundreds of miles away, what does that have to do with these guys?
Terzo: We’re getting there we’re getting there - anyway, his example encouraged one of your closer relatives to try the same career.
Civilla: OK?
Terzo: Unfortunately she was a captain in the Chellish Navy at the time.
Civilla: What? But her brother is the mayor of - oh.
Rajira: So guess who we have.
Civilla: Her?
Terzo: No - but her nephew had to join the Redactors to protect his family. So he was REALLY lucky you were the first person he saw when he was running away from Rajira.
Civilla: Maybe you should have led with ‘Don’t worry, he’s alive?’

Apparently this place was the Archivists storehouse for Worryingly Magical Stuff. Most of said worryingly magical stuff is missing, including a necklace or amulet, a pair of gloves or bracers, and a reasonably sized rock. Rexus, happily, has a key to the secret compartment behind the shelves, however.

Meanwhile, Rajira goes to check out the garden, presumably to figure out the best place to chop up the bodies and feed them to Civilla’s Chthonic Toads. It’s not like we can just dump them all in the underground stream - that might contaminate someone’s water supply. If we can make all the bodies vanish, we can hopefully make Thrune think his bodyguard and entire order of Redactors have fled the city. A few Convincing Lies spread by the underground press should help.

In a small nook on the other side of the garden, Rajira finds a series of books that magically contain the memories and experiences of some members of the Order of Archivists. Including Rexus’ parents.

Civilla OoC: There’s a reason that we play things the way that we do. We stack our advantages because the dice can **** you in an instant.

definitely quotable, that
Champions : Return To Edge City : The Right To Bear Arms
GM: You’ve actually been a stabilising influence on Edge City.
Hero Shrew OoC: Well that’s good to know. If somewhat horrifying considering I’m one of the people involved.

Hero Shrew: I really should let Sally down lightly.
GM: What????
Hero Shrew’s player: You know, my co-worker that I’ve been romantically interested in since the start of the campaign.
GM: Yes, I know who she is, but as a player are you delusional enough to think you had a chance?
Hero Shrew’s player: As a player, no, but Scooter sure is.

GM: The aliens are still a bit confused by Earth’s technology level - at least two groups have anti-grav technology but it’s not in wide usage anywhere else.
Hero Shrew OoC: While other groups still have horse-drawn vehicles.
The Magus OoC: And UNTIL even has anti-antigrav tech.

Fireflash OoC: I need to change my Psychological Limitation from ‘Show-off’ to “Only Sane Woman’
GM: Fair.

Meanwhile, Hardlight is examining the cybernetic technology released by one of his business rivals. It’s a bit puzzling, especially because he can’t find any processors in it. He’s going to need help.

GM: ‘Hey Flux, I’ve got this guy’s arm, come look at it.’
Flux: Um.

It turns out the processors are distributed throughout the entire device. And it’s trying to find connections to Hardlight’s local systems.

Hardlight: This is getting more and more like a ‘kill it with fire’ situation.
GM: It doesn’t look like Mechanon or Destroyer-tech.
Hardlight OoC: So? I don't want them getting a hold of it either!

Between Hardlight, Flux, Fireflash, the Magus, they decide to experiment and investigate by leaving it on a laptop in an air-gapped Faraday cage and see what happens. If this thing can teach itself to interface with any systems from nervous systems to laptops, it’s a pretty shocking advance in technology. Eventually they hook it up themselves, and it promptly fuses with the laptop.

Hardlight: Does it at least show up as a USB drive?

Flux recognises some of the code running as resembling the kind of thing that happens at a cyberbrain interface.

Hardlight: This isn’t hardware - it’s wetware. Dampware?

GM: The Tyrell corp have developed a cybernetic device that doesn’t count as a machine, and is therefore functionally immune to cyberpathy.
The Magus OoC: They've got a bunch of captured Cybertronians in the basement and they’re hacking limbs off them.

It’s also partially opaque to The Magus’ Magesight.

Hardlight: So, who wants to go raid Tyrell?
Flux: Raid is such a harsh word.

Magus uses his powers of Scrying to find whatever this arm may have originally been connected to. Various parts seem to be attached to citizens across the city, but one particularly large fraction of it is found in a parts bin, about to be melted down for scrap. It’s the Head and Torso of an extremely humanoid robotic creature. Poking around inside reveals Tyrell tech, but nothing known in official databases. This is likely some kind of prototype for internal use only.

Hardlight: So the question is: How the hell did a hideously advanced, damn-near-human cybernetic creature get out of an internal Tyrell lab, die, and instead of being thrown into a Tyrell furnace, end up in a recycling bin?
The Magus: Hmm - so this robot is actually dead. I wonder if it left a ghost?

Hardlight: OK, I’m going to do something very stupid.
Hero Shrew OoC: I thought that was my job.

Hardlight looks inside the robot’s head - it’s not actually organic, but the organisation has some similarity. The foam-lattice design isn’t wholly original, but it’s very very complex compared to previous examples. It certainly looks like a Tyrell design - the hardwired Laws seem to be part of it.

The Magus sits Flux down to run through the basics of Necromancy.

GM: Which the Magus seems disturbingly familiar with.

Flux also learns more about why magic-users usually work in teams. In this case, it’s to wait behind the Magus with a baseball bat, just in case anything untoward happens while the Magus is in his trance state.

The Magus: Can You Hear Me?
Hero Shrew: Yes?
Hardlight: I think he’s talking to the ghost, Scooter.

Hero Shrew: So he’s trying to summon a robot ghost. If it was a ghost robot pirate we’d have the whole trifecta.

Robot Ghost: Hello? Yes, I can hear you. Who are you?
The Magus: Hello - I’m Damien, but most people call me the Magus.
Robot Ghost: Hello. I’m Seth.
The Magus: Do you know where you are?
Robot Ghost: I think I’m dead - how weird is that?

Seth: I think I remember dying now… and it’s not easy to kill us.
The Magus: Us?
Seth: Er… can you forget I said that?

Seth seems quite concerned that his being killed will expose his friends, or possibly get somebody into trouble, since they’re not ready to be revealed. He’s initially fine that the rest of his parts got installed into various people, but then gets quite upset that it’s into biological people, especially if they have other cyberwear.

Seth: That could be bad. We’re Nexus Series. Tyrell Corp could get in trouble. We’re Nexus Series! We have an important job! We’re Nexus Series! It’s an Important Job! People could get hurt! We’ve run the projections, the city needs us!

Seth saw and recognised whoever decapitated him while he was on his mission, but they were more powerful than he expected.

Seth: Tell Dr Madox I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to die.
The Magus: Is there anybody else?
Seth: Tell my brothers and sisters. But Dr Madox can tell them.

Seth is also confused that his 55 siblings didn’t collect his remains, especially if they completed whatever their Important Job was. On the other hand, if they were killed surely their ghosts would be floating around in whatever digital afterlife Seth currently resides in.

Seth: It’s quiet here. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now. Huh. Azura was right. You people have it easy.

It’s probably highly relevant that Seth and Azura are two of the 56 children of Adam and Eve. It’s also probably relevant that Seth considers the Moreaus, created by Genesys, cousins.

Hardlight: *sigh* Why is it that Edge City has such a hard-on for creating new sentient lifeforms?
GM: Part of that is Hardlight. You have Weirdness Magnet.

One of the players is late getting to the game.

GM: It’s Saturday evening, it’s either the game he’s GMing or the one where he wears underpants inappropriately.
Fireflash OoC: At least he wears underpants.
Hero Shrew OoC: And I’m freeballing all the time.
GM: *sigh* you have no idea how hard The Rep works. Suffice to say, he earns his commission.

GM: Which of you has experience talking to dead artificial minds?
Hero Shrew: I could say me but I’d be lying.
Fireflash: I have some experience talking to college bros.

Anyway, now we have one Dr Elly Madox to investigate. Some years back she helped develop the groundwork for the modern Biochip Interface, before moving to pure robotics, and jumping ship to Tyrell. ‘Coincidentally’ the company has developed a lot of fancy tech since then. At least if we show up in our superheroic identities, the Tyrell functionaries will probably kick the problem upstairs until we’re talking to somebody that actually knows what happened. Whether those people are actually willing to tell us is another problem, of course. Happily, Dr. Madox seems willing to meet Hardlight, although for some reason he decides to take Scooter along despite the risk to property.

Dr. Madox: So, why did you want to see me?
Hardlight: I’m not sure how to say this…
Hero Shrew: ooh! Ooh! I can!
All: SCOOTER, NO.
Hardlight: We found Seth.
Dr. Madox: *goes pale* w...what?
Hardlight: One of your projects?
Dr. Madox: *through gritted teeth* Not how I would phrase it.
Hardlight: Sons?
Dr. Madox: Still not how I would phrase it. We can’t talk here.
Hero Shrew: I have to say I’m impressed - you were almost as blunt as I would have been.

Gareth explains how we found Seth’s bits, but Dr. Madox is more interested to know how we talked to him if he was nonfunctional when we did.

The Magus: This is more my area of expertise. I did a little necromancy and communicated with his spirit.
Dr. Madox: *slightly hysterical laughter* You talked to his ghost.
The Magus: Congratulations - you created life.
Dr. Madox: I don’t deserve your congratulations - we created nothing.
Hardlight: Um.

Dr. Madox explains that something degenerative infected some of her coworkers after the Genesys incident, and her cyberoid creations are their attempt to salvage something of their minds. There were dozens of Nexus series created, before their husband-and-wife templates were too far gone to be copied for more. The biblical names they somehow acquired didn’t help matters - Cain, for example, was quite upset about his namesake, and gets on quite well with Abel. Nonetheless, there are now dozens of cyberoids, immune to cyberpathy, that can easily pass for human. And that can grow and adapt.

Dr. Madox: I’ll ask you a question - how many times has Mechanon been an active threat to this city?
Fireflash: Given the implications of the question, I’ll have to guess more than we’ve heard about.
Dr. Madox: Eight. And each time it was the Nexus series that stopped him.
Hardlight: So you think Seth was killed by an agent of Mechanon?
Dr. Madox: No, Mechanon wasn’t the target of that operation - he was dealing with VIPER.

Apparently Seth’s killer was one of VIPER’s enhanced Draysha agents in a combat suit.

GM: I can’t remember how many sentient machines there are in the Champions universe. Not many.
Hero Shrew (and ROVER’s) player: You certainly couldn’t describe ROVER as sentient, given his brain ran on AmigaOS.

The GM’s adopted stray cat is being a bit demanding.

GM: This f***ing cat - she wasn’t this loud before.
Hardlight’s player: Yes she was - she was just outside.

Dr. Madox is extremely concerned that some of Seth’s parts were being used as human bionics - the Nexus series could quite easily create its own interfaces with implanted cyberbrains and interfaces, and is strongly inclined to do so. And there’s no technology Dr. Madox is aware of that would stop it growing its connections.

Dr. Madox: So these parts were effectively black market cybernetics - which begs the question why they didn’t activate during the salvage process.
The Magus: Would the damage to his brain have temporarily shut down the activity in the rest of his parts?
Dr. Madox: Hmm. Maybe. *sigh* Seth was always the gentlest of them. Was. I'm already talking about him in the past tense. You have to understand I’ve worked with these people for over a decade.
Fireflash: And you care for them. Perfectly understandable.

We agree to keep the problem quiet for now, and offer to approach the people that have had Seth’s bodyparts transplanted into them, on the condition TyrellCorp foots the bill for safer cybernetic replacements.

Hardlight OoC: Somebody is going to turn into roboAkira, but in character I’m all for this plan.
Flux: Using the Batman Solution of ‘My Superpower is Money’
The Magus: Especially since he’s getting another corporation to pay for it.

It IS a little surprising to learn that there’s been entire teams of other superheroes active in Edge City, fighting a Secret War against Mechanon, that we had no idea about.

GM: Not everybody is as flashy as you. You’re also a bit surprised that there’s a black market for repurposed robot parts as implants in Edge City.
The Magus (and Allana’s) player: Allana probably knows all about it but she’s retired.

That said, it’s rather weird that Mechanon has made 8 different covert attacks against Edge City - it’s possible he’s being excessively cautious against cybernetic enemies that he can’t control. Although an obsessive Mechanon that’s trying to figure out why he keeps failing, and why he can’t adapt against it, is not a good thing.

The Magus: He did once decide that his weakness was ‘I’m not 50ft tall’.

The Magus arranges something that will hopefully be funeral rites for a cyberoid. We’re approached by a guy that looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts - it’s the ‘Tyrell security’ guy that Scooter wanted to punch, months back, when we were dealing with a raid on one of their warehouses.

‘Security Muscle’: Ah, I hear you found my brother.
Hero Shrew: Hey, I remember you!
‘Security Muscle’: You do? I’m surprised - we only met once and we didn’t really meet.
Hero Shrew: Eh, I was itching to punch somebody and you looked like you could take it.
The Magus: He never forgets a potential target.
‘Security Muscle’: … OK. Anyway, thanks. I’m Cain.

Cain doesn’t want to tell us about exactly what he does, but does complain about the fact that when they shift to their combat form, they have to wait for their ion cannon to cool down before they can regrow their skin.

The Magus: I can see why that would be a problem - melting skin is not a good look.
Cain: Oh, I dunno - it’s useful when you’re interrogating somebody who doesn’t know you can’t do it to them.

Cain also warns us not to teleport into Tyrell Labs - the security systems are a bit proactive about anything they assume is a threat. Tyrell’s cover story to the recipients of the cyberoid parts is that they had supply chain problems and the implanted parts have components that Tyrell can’t guarantee.

GM: ‘Here take this, sign this air-tight NDA’

The guy with the eye is a problem - more work on his eye would affect his health insurance, and he doesn’t have enough medical leave left.

Flux: … theoretically, would you be averse to having the cybernetic eye removed and your real one grown back?
GM: Hardlight, you know corporate law - that would completely F*** up his insurance, since he’s on record as having a cybernetic eye, and Flux is the very definition of an unlicensed practitioner.

Of course, we can always put the eye removal down to an ‘ongoing investigation’ which would satisfy his insurance, technically, and ensure he can’t be fired for missing work. So we don’t have to arrange a court order.

Judge: I'm sorry, you want what??
Flux: I’m sorry, a raccoon made me do it.

The Magus: I presume one of us will have to inform PRIMUS about all this.
Hardlight: Bags not me.

They’re not going to be pleased that Tyrell invented a synthetic race with aggressively invasive cyberwear, and saw fit not to inform them. There’s four cyberoids waiting with Dr Madox when we come back - Cain, another man of similar build, and two women of athletic build.

GM: Oh - ‘build’. Unintentional pun.

We do need to track down and close down the parts black market, too. It’s a bit of a concern that somebody out there is running a bodymod shop without knowing if the recycled robot parts are even biocompatible. Certainly the paper trail on the eye was all faked, using pre-issued certification on eyes that failed quality assurance. We can probably guess where along the supply chain that happened.

GM: I imagine Flux is going ‘Well I’m not getting my cyberbrain installed THERE’
Flux: I’m adding them to The List.

Hero Shrew: I asked around if there was anybody who could give me a chainsaw arm, but nobody knew.
All: …
Fireflash: … why do you think you need a chainsaw arm?
Hero Shrew: It’d be cool.
Fireflash: No. No. Again I say no.
Flux: I think what happened there is that you asked them, they thought about your reputation, and pretended they didn’t know.
The Magus: There’s one person in the city who could implant a chainsaw arm in a Brick, and she’ld flick your nose for asking
GM: Two - Allana AND Dr Soma could do it, but she’s flick you too.

Hero Shrew DOES hear that the Daughters of Lilith, who have been tangling with chromer gangs lately, have been flashing extra cash around lately - they could certainly forge the paperwork.

GM: Hence my favourite Cyberpunk quote
Fireflash’s player: ‘Dead Guys Is Parts’
GM: ‘Dead is Dead, Parts is Parts, Dead Guys is Parts.’

Flux: So what’s the plan of action?
Hero Shrew: I go in and ask them if they can get me a chainsaw arm?
Fireflash: No.

Instead we get a warrant for surveillance, and Flux goes and has a cyberpathic poke around the computers of the suspect bodyshops. We learn that the brokers supplying the clinics all use the same courier service to deliver the parts. The same couriers occasionally pick up packages from the city morgue. And there are discrepancies between orders and deliveries in the form of manila envelopes. It seems almost certain that that’s the point that shenanigans are happening. Especially when The Magus’s Magesight reveals that one of the security guards still has the traces of a VIPER tattoo.

GM: He had it right up until his boss said ‘Get rid of that! We’re not in a Nest now! F***ing moron! There’s a whole range of approved snake themed tattoos that won’t raise alarm bells.’
The Magus: That said, anybody with a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ tattoo is alarming for entirely different reasons.

Hero Shrew: Well, that’s a link to Seth’s death, at least.
Fireflash: … so it is.

We can even set up surveillance from office space overlooking the VIPER courier building. Handy.

GM: You’ll have to rotate the static surveillance since all have day jobs or other commitments - even Scooter has appearances he has to make. Although The Rep is this close to getting a shock collar that Scooter will actually feel and pay attention to.

We soon confirm that they have contacts with the Daughter of Lilith, too, and can at least pretend to share some of their rather extreme sexual politics.

GM: Which is basically ‘F*** Men - It’s all they’re good for.’ But you also learn that the Daughters have had upgrades lately.
The Magus: *sigh* Of COURSE VIPER provided them with venomous fangs. I give VIPER a lot of crap, but they know how to stay on brand.

Our GM used a random name generator to come up with the company name. One of the first it produced was Viper Delivery.

The Magus OoC: We need to outsource more of our investigations to random name generators, that was much quicker.

Instead he goes with Basilisk Ltd.

The Magus: I can picture the cell leader complaining over drinks one night “It wasn’t even ABOUT snakes until that f***ing Harry Potter book come out.”
Flux: “And now it’ll just look suspicious if we deregister the name!”

We also record a mention of something called The Old Seam, which Fireflash recognises as a reference to a local cemetery some two centuries old.

The Magus: Making it new and hip compared to many of the world’s cemeteries.
GM: True, but it’s one of the rare remnants of Old Monterey.

Especially after that weather machine malfunction decades ago that turned Monterey into a disaster area ripe for complete redevelopment, long before later disasters left Edge City crippled. At least the vampire problem isn’t as bad as it could be.

The Magus: Shooting fire from your eyes is a surprisingly common ability, these days.

Having their meeting at the Old Seam is actually pretty clever.

GM: No-one is going to notice a bunch of goth chicks in a graveyard. In the early evening, anyway, before it gets so late that someone asks ‘Why are you in this graveyard’?
The Magus: Nothing good happens in graveyards at 4 in the morning.

Hardlight’s player: Sundog suggested I get a "Skill levels>With a group of similar skills" thing. Now, while I'm sure I could just get an "All Int Skills" booster for 5 points, I should probably like, make it slightly more Lore-friendly, and turn it into a cyberbrain chip...At which point I realise... I don't actually have a cyberbrain! XD
Flux’s player: You also already have hard-to-explain 'cyberware'
Hardlight’s player: This is very true. Just trying to figure out how to make something like that fit with character lore, is all. I'd rather not just have Gareth wake up one day mysteriously being able to just ‘think slightly better’...Unless it's a plot hook…. brain wooooorms
The Magus’ player: Removing the lodged crayon has worked for other patients.
Hardlight’s player: Touché!

Another oddity regarding current events in Kintargo - there were a number of mercenaries in town when Thrune took over. But instead of hiring them, which is kind of what mercenaries are for, they’re all being held prisoner at Kintargo’s salt works. Finding out why is probably worthwhile, and hey, maybe they’ll give us a discount rate if we rescue them. It’s possible that the leader of the mercs, one Forvian Crowe, has a personal animosity towards Thrune (and hey, who could blame him) but Laria thinks they could make good recruits to the rebellion regardless of their personal opinions about the Dogf***er.

The Sallix Salt Works are built on the shoreline underneath the eastern wall of Kintargo, near the now mostly irrelevant Salt Gate in the aforementioned wall. Brine is shipped in, and boiled dry on the premises.

Terzo: That seems wildly inefficient. The fuel requirements alone are ridiculous.
Civilla: That's why they use slave labour. Like the mercenaries we’re rescuing.

The market adjacent to the salt works is mostly dedicated to building supplies and related products, but Civilla and Ayva do have a good reason to be hanging around, which is convenient - maybe we can arrange a good deal on rebuilding the Livery prior to filling the basement with armed mercenaries.

Civilla casts Ears of the City on Terzo, in order to divine details about the salt works and the prisoners. Terzo isn’t entirely happy about gathering information with magic.

Terzo: The problem with doing it this way is that I don’t get to go around a dozen different pubs and ask a few innocent questions between drinks.
Civilla: You think that’s a problem, do you? I think it’s a bonus.

Although using Ears of the City DOES ensure that nobody notices, for example, an increasingly drunk Terzo going from bar to bar asking questions.

Ayva: Or an increasingly annoyed party member with a wheelbarrow taking Terzo from bar to bar.

Apparently the previous owner of the salt works was arrested for tax evasion, and killed when he resisted. Barzillai has now seized the premises as a money-earner for the government.

Civilla: Well, at least Barzillai is honest about the nationalisation process.
Terzo: How so?
Civilla: For ‘nationalised’ read ‘stole’.

We also learn, via the spell, that Crowe and his soldiers are being worked to death because of their faith in Sarenrae, the goddess of healing. That’s the kind of thing that can get you in huge trouble should any Asmodeans find out, and that’s exactly what happened.

Civilla gets quite thoughtful about the Salt Gate - they haven’t been closed in years, since the internal mechanism has rusted stiff, but that suggests a few ideas to Civilla.

Civilla: A plaaaaaan is forming in my miiiind.

Civilla wants Terzo to Grease the gate mechanism when we leave, so we can stop pursuit. Doing anything more permanent would probably annoy Thrune and provoke another Proclamation.

Terzo OoC: So basically we need a bucket of WD-40.

Civilla: In case we are chased.
Rajira: *snickers*
Civilla: Grease doesn’t last very long either.
Rajira: *snickers louder*
Civilla: CHASED, not CHASTE. CHASED as in PURSUED.

Civilla also has to keep her footmen loyal - otherwise they’ll eventually figure out she’s up to something and might inform on her. Telling them to wait with the carriage outside the salt works and suddenly running up with a troop of mercenaries and expecting them all to fit in like it was some kind of clown car would be a bit suspicious. Instead we sneak up to the door of the salt works late at night, get the door open, and knock Thrune’s blackshirts out with Lullaby and Sleep spells.

Civilla: See? I’m perfectly good at Stealth, as long as everybody is asleep.

We silently tie the unconscious guards up, release the prisoners, and tiptoe out again without the rest of the guards in the building hearing a thing.

Civilla: And give a short prayer to Noctiluca.
Terzo: … isn’t that the demon goddess of darkness and lust?
Civilla: … I can see we’re going to have to have a conversation later.

Rajira: And nobody even saw us.
Terzo: All that effort into disguises, hoods and Oaths of Anonymity wasted.
Civilla: Not wasted, reserved for future endeavours.

GM: … well then.
Civilla OoC: That’s this party’s warcry - ‘Sorry, Not Sorry’

Civilla: I mean, it won’t be hard for the authorities to figure out what happened - all the guards fall asleep at once and wake up bound. Unless they leap to some wrong conclusions. I can picture the Inquisitor asking “So WHY were you enjoying a BDSM orgy?”
Rajira OoC: ‘And why were you letting the prisoners top you?’

It WILL make an amusing rumour to spread once we get the underground press running. Something to keep in mind for the future.

That rescue cost us one first-level spell and a cantrip. We might have time for another mission this evening, after leading Crowe and his men to the Livery basement, before the curfew even comes down. Going via the Tiefling ghetto is also convenient, given how many friends we have there after dealing with the tooth fairy problem - that makes the residents less likely to comment on the large group of half naked prisoners sneaking through the alleyways. But instead of another mission tonight, we decide instead to make sure the mercs have food, clothes, and bedding.

Civilla: It shows that we consider them important enough to put off other important tasks.

Civilla: Liria told us about your predicament.
Crowe: Ah, so that’s why you came to our aid.
Ayva: She bribed us with scones.
Crowe: Damn, we owe that curvy little vixen our lives.

At least we temporarily disrupted the salt works, but it won’t take long to replace the unfortunate workers.

Terzo: Probably with Tieflings
GM: To be honest, right now, it’s going to be those thugs.

Permanently disrupting the salt works is also a goal for the future.

Civilla: Any way to reduce Thrune’s ability to punish the populace.

And, of course, effortlessly ghosting our way in and out of the salt works will increase our Notoriety, and rescuing the Black Feather Mercenaries will make us more friends among Kintargo’s population.

But we still need to investigate the ruins of Raxus’ family home, the Thrashing Badger pub, and the Silver Star music shop, for any clues the Dogf***er’s arsonists may have left intact. There isn’t much left at the latter, and not being able to see in the dark doesn’t help. On the other hand, accidentally falling through a hidden trapdoor is quite helpful, at least in that it unearths some useful potions and scrolls.

On the other hand, having our carriage pulled over by one of the Kintargo guardsmen, especially since he’s backed up by three of Thrune’s blackshirts.

Civilla: How can we be of assistance to you fine civic-minded individuals?
Thug: I’m sure you good folk are unaware, since it only happened ten minutes ago, but this road is now a tollway. The toll is a mere five gold. Per passenger.
Civilla: Five gold? How interesting. I assume you have your Writ?
Terzo: And a receipt book?
Civilla: That too.
Thug: I have my Writ right here *hefts mace*
Terzo: *casts Lullaby* Go to sleep, little A**hole, do not cry.

All three drop to Civilla’s Sleep spell, and she orders her drivers to move the carriage on.

Civilla: We do not want to cut their throats in front of my drivers.
Ayva: So we’ll leave them there to be inevitably pickpocketed?
Civilla: Or killed by any number of Kintargo’s other residents.

Unfortunately most of the Thrashing Badger washed out to sea when the boardwalk burnt through, and it wasn’t Terzo’s local drinking hole.

Ayva: Terzo has been kicked out of most of the pubs in Kintargo.
Terzo: Rolled out of, possibly.

The Badger used to be the rowdiest alcohol dispensary in the city, but any of its regulars have moved on to other establishments. It seems likely one of the more notable regulars, the fairy dragon Vendalfek, will have moved to one of them too. Perhaps Clenchjaw’s, although the name does not inspire images of fun and harmless hooliganism.

Although given the fact that we walk in on a mass bar fight, that pauses only long to look at us come in, it might be a more enthusiastic clientele than the name suggests.

Terzo: Don’t mind us, carry on as you were.

Terzo: Well, at least if they're all so busy with their fistfight, they’re less likely to remember what we look like.
Civilla: I fear they’re going to remember us anyway. Two of us anyway.
Rajira: I’m wearing my hood over my head. But I am over 6ft and attractive.
Civilla: That’s what I meant. But Terzo is going to attract attention anyway, as they see him accompanied by the three of us and try to figure out ‘How?!’

Ayva: So we set up at the bar, wait for information to come to us, and maim anybody that assumes we’re call girls.

We claim a table that doesn’t leave our backs to the door, and order refreshments.

Terzo: A bottle of your most enjoyable wine, dear.
Barmaid: We’ve got wine, water, watered wine, or if you want something spicy, wined water.

Ayva just gets a small beer, and Rajira some hard mead.

Civilla: It’s not like we can get mint liqueur anymore.

Unfortunately Ayva also complains about not being able to get night tea, and we get told off by a neighbouring sailor.

Old Salt: Word to the wise - I know you’re new here but one of the house rules is No Politics. *to Terzo* And you, you - how’d you’d end up in the company of three buxom lasses like these? Care to share the love?
Terzo: It’s my irresistible charm, dear man - I can’t beat them off with a stick.
Civilla: Buxom? Buxom?
Ayva: I don’t recall being buxom.
Rajira: *puts an arm around Ayva* Don’t worry, you’re buxom enough for me.

GM: You settle down to enjoy your drinks. Make a Perception check.
Ayva OoC: Ah, it’s one of those bars where adventures happen.
Terzo OoC: Well we already have a hooded stranger, but they’re a member of the party.
Terzo: *fails the check miserably* This is a very enjoyable wine.

Rajira’s resistance to poison probably means she could have drunk anything behind the bar, but she's not going to get the chance. Ayva spots the lizard with butterfly wings in the rafters, laughing at the barfight. This is presumably Vendalfek. When he realises he’s been spotted, he goes invisible. Ayva Messages the fairy dragon.

Ayva: Vendalfek We Know You’re There
Civilla: FFS can you be more ominous? At least indicate we’re friendly first.

The doors of the pub swing open all by themselves.

Rajira: And there goes our informant.
Terzo: What was he doing in the rafters?
Ayva: Everybody enjoys a good bar fight.
Terzo: He probably started it.

Ayva tries a more diplomatic Message, and the dragon pokes its head back in and indicates we should follow.

Civilla: It’s nearly curfew - we should head home. Come along Terzo.
Terzo: But I’m still enjoying this wine!
Civilla:
.
Terzo: Can I get this in a doggy bag?
Ayva: Damn. First good mead I’ve had in years.
Civilla: We’re far too far south for good mead.

Vendalfek 

Vendalfek: What do you humans want, anyway? I’ve only just found a new bar to live in after your lot burned the last one down.
Rajira: Not ‘my’ humans.
Civilla: *Diplomatically remains silent, specifically about her own ancestry*

We do determine why Thrune’s agents burned the place to the ground - it probably has something to do with the Roses Vendalfek kept overhearing about.

Vendalfek: Did I live in a bar that was a secret meeting place for a society of florists?

More like Milani’s Rose of Kintargo, a rebellious cult. They were arrested by Thrune’s personal enforcers, one of whom has an ominous magic sword.

Rajira OoC: Oh great, we have an Edgelord.

Civilla: These Roses they took - fun people?
Vendalfek: Oh yes.
Civilla: And the Dottari - not fun?
Vendalfek: Definitely not.
Civilla: So, what do you think about playing a few pranks on the dotteri?

Vendalfek is agreeable, and the rebellion has a new ally. Just as well, since Vendalfek also overheard that they were planning to Doghouse one of the Roses.

Terzo: Oh dear.
Vendalfek: I’d like a doghouse - cosy.
Civilla: Doghousing involves feeding a prisoner to one of Thrune’s feral mastiffs. And they starve the dog first.

Terzo: Out of curiosity, Mr Dragon - why was the barman unconscious in the corner in there?
Civilla: He was no fun.
Vendalfek: Such a stickler for the rules.

And then there is more quiet recruiting of partisans, and smuggling funds into the Rebellion’s pockets. And dealing with the fact that the Dottari are taking an alarming interest in Liria’s coffeehouse...

Liria: *communicates by frantic eyebrow-waggling* *DISTRACT THEM!*
Civilla: Um, ah, what? *grabs Rajira and kisses her*
Rajira: *briefly startled then grabs Civilla and kisses back*
Civilla: Eep.
Terzo: *looks briefly surprised and annoyed, and mutters something about ‘alright for some’ before returning his attention to his drink*

Of course the fact that Rajira might LOOK human, but doesn’t TASTE human, and has fangs and forked tongue, might be even more distracting, if Civilla hadn’t already figured out what Rajira actually was. It distracts the male Dottari though, until their female superior officer slaps them upside the head.

Rajira: Thankyou, m’dear, but I believe it’s my set. *casts Fascinate, which fails*
GM: I’m sorry, but the slap worked and they’re concentrating on their job again.

Instead we order a pot of coffee, which will give Liria an excuse to go into the pantry and move a few sacks over the hidden door in the floor.

Civilla: Wait, no, it’s tea that Thrune has a problem with, isn’t it.
Terzo: We can always ask these nice Dottari if coffee and tea are the same thing.
Civilla: Better not - we don’t want to give the authorities an opportunity to decide they are.

Apparently somebody sent the Dottari an anonymous letter alleging unsavoury practises at the coffeehouse.

Liria: The only unsavoury things here are the muffins.
Civilla: Unsavoury practises? I’ve kept my clothes on this time.
Rajira: We’ll see if that lasts the night.

Civilla manages to convince them that somebody is wasting their time, barely - sometimes you roll low but the bad guys still roll lower. The Dottari leave.

Terzo: I trust Liria offered them a complimentary muffin.

Rajira grabs Civilla and drags her over to the bar.

Rajira: Something strong - 120 proof at least. Swill this around in your mouth before you swallow. My saliva can be toxic and I’d rather you didn’t become ill.
Civilla: I’d rather not.
Rajira: … OK.
Civilla: I mean I’d rather not smell like I’ve been swilling the kind of alcohol I usually use for cleaning purposes.

GM: Oh god, somebody gave Vendalfek coffee.
Civilla: actually we shouldn’t shut down the Salt Works - that way if anybody else gets imprisoned there we can rescue them, too.
Rajira: And some of the prisoners they send there have actually been arrested for good reasons. There’s always actual criminals around.
Civilla: True, but Thrune is employing those.

Civilla decides to take the air, with her compatriots and supposed paramour, to scout out the ruins of Rexus’ family home that we have to investigate. After all, since Terzo is her tutor and Ayva is her business partner, we actually have a good reason to be strolling around the expensive part of town. Rexus doubts we’ll find anything, but Civilla thinks it will still be worth a look. It’s certainly suspicious that the ruins of the Victocora estate are under permanent armed guard, even this many weeks after the fire. Perhaps we can stay at Civilla’s family home, so we can come back after dark without having to sneak back into the Kintargo equivalent of a Gated Community?

Civilla: Eh, it would attract attention to them and they’d ask questions. Trust me, they’d ask questions, it’s what Alazarios do. It’s one reason we’re not very popular with House Thrune.

We decide to wait until after curfew, and sneak along the alley between the city walls and the noble estates, and climb over the estate wall into the ruins. Which is a good plan, if we didn’t run into a Dottari guard patrolling the other way.

Rajira: *drunkenly slurs* Hey there, handsome.
GM: Roll to Seduce.

Dottari: What are you DOING here, woman, it’s almost after curfew! Come with me!
Rajira: Oh, I’m sure we can find something much more fun to do…
GM: You were unlucky enough to get the nice guard, and he’s actually insisting on escorting you back to your home.
Rajira: S***.

Rajira: *signals the rest of the party* Should I take him out?
Civilla: *summons a monster frog out of the ground*
Dottari: What the Hells is that! GET BEHIND ME!
Rajira: *clonks him on the head*
Civilla: Can somebody cut him in half?
Rajira: … not without getting blood all over my clothes, no.
Ayva: … Why?
Civilla: My frog can’t eat something that large. Unless we fold him double, maybe.

Terzo is rather perturbed by the murder, and reminds so during the wall-clambering and ruins search. It’s Ayva that finds the remains of a recent preparatory ritual next to the ornamental lake on the property. Apparently a witch did something here, more recently than the fire. Civilla cautiously wades into the lake and promptly vanishes with a splash, into a lake that’s supposed to be thigh deep at best. It’s now way more than 60 feet deep, and there’s something glowing blue in the depths.

Terzo OoC: So the Victocoras had a secret nuclear reactor in their pond.

Civilla: Just as well I can summon Celestial Dolphins.

Civilla and Rajira descend, and are soon spotted by somebody else swimming down here, who hurriedly swims into a side tunnel. Unfortunately there’s also a grate, which Civilla can Dimensional Slide through at least, in a search for some kind of opening mechanism. The tunnel on this slide slopes upwards.

Civilla: I’ll return to the others and get high.
All: LOL.

Sending Rajira back to the surface when they do may have been a mistake, since some kind of magical pulse boils up the shaft and engulfs Rajira while she’s on her way up. She’s turned to stone, which doesn’t make things any easier for the dolphin.

Terzo OoC: Do I need to throw some waterwings in there?

Still, Terzo and Ayva are rather alarmed by the petrification, at least until Ayva determines it will only be temporary - apparently that was a wild magic surge. So all we know is that somebody, probably a witch, was messing around at the bottom of an unexpectedly deep lake, and we have no idea who or why. Civilla has followed the zig-zagging tunnel to another grate, with a room on the other side.

GM: This is clearly a Spellcasters Only route.
Civilla OoC: And this is me. *casts Dimensional Slide again*. Was this really supposed to stop low level characters? One Halfling wizard with Reduce Person would go right through it.
GM: …. Excuse me a moment while I consult the next book of the campaign.

She’s apparently somewhere underneath the Hall of Records. She casts Pass Without Trace and Disguise Self to reduce the chance the Dottari wandering about don’t find her. Disguising herself as that Dottari officer from last night gets her out of the building without too much attention, and she dispatches one of the Silver Raven devices to let us know she’s heading to the Alazario estate. This is a relief to the rest of us, although Rajira has already seen the disguised Civilla on the road.

Terzo: Well, I must say we’re glad to see you alive - when Rajira came back up turned to stone and wrapped around a dolphin, and no sign of you, we were a bit concerned.
Civilla: Turned to stone? What did I miss?

Civilla excuses herself to write some letters to her family, suggesting they buy the Victocora estate and hinting that they should keep the lake as is but not investigate too closely.

Civilla: ‘There’s a secret back entrance to the Hall of Records? That’ll be useful when it reopens’

Civilla: There are currently two cults of Noctiluca - the ones who are wrong and the ones that are right.
Ayva OoC: I can see her followers inquiring about what happened, and when they find out, go ‘wait, she did WHAT to WHO and then WHAT????’.

GM: I just looked up what Night Tea actually is, and it’s nothing about ‘disturbing the balance of the slumbering mind’ - it’s a prophylactic.

Civilla gets a delivery while she’s writing at Laria’s coffeehouse - less a package than a bouquet. Of very beautiful roses, with a slip of paper concealed down among the stems.

Rajira: And there was me thinking I had a rival for your affections.

Perhaps predictably, it’s from the Rose of Kintargo, the Milani cult that is also planning a rebellion against Barzillai Thrune. They warn us not to act rashly, and promise to contact us soon. We recruit a team of street performers, who we call Nobody’s Fools, and put the finishing touches on the former Livery. In fact we’re just getting ready to open up when a small child runs in screaming for help.

Rajira: What’s wrong with the spawnling?
Tiefling Kid: She’s been taken!
Civilla: Who?
Tiefling Kid: Zea! The bad people! They said they're going to put her in a doghouse!

If we’re quick we might be able to intercept them before they reach Aria Park - it’s fortunate that the Livery is practically next door to the ghetto. We all pile into the carriage.

Civilla: Come along child - you get to ride in a carriage!

Unfortunately they get to the park first - the pagoda in the middle of the lily pond in Aria Park has been converted into a kennel for any of the dogs the citizens of Kintargo have been handing in for the reward. It’s also Thrune’s thug's choice of destination for anybody they decide has insulted the throne. Civilla gets her disposable cloak ready - if necessary she’ll swap costumes with Zea so the blackshirts chase the wrong person. She’ll also Summon a Celestial Dog, tell it to play Keep Away over to the east of the pond, and use that to distract the thugs. After all, they’ll certainly try and catch it for the reward, and the mortal mastiffs will probably go mental. Then the rest of us can sneak up and overwhelm the other thugs, under the cover of the borking.

Dottari on far side of pond: Hey, there’s a dog!
Celestial Dog and Mastiffs: Play? Play! Play! Play!
Dottari on our side of the Pond: What the **** is happening over there/
Rajira: *kukris them in the back*

GM: The surviving thugs all need to make Handle Animal checks.
Ayva’s player: I’ve had to walk a Saint Bernard before - these thugs might be going for A Walk.
GM: Aaaand they all failed their check.

One of the thugs invents water-skiing as his mastiff drags him into the pond, and the rest all chase off after the dogs that are supposedly in their charge. Zea can basically stroll off while they’re busy.

GM: … Good work. I basically doubled the number of NPCs that were supposed to be here, too.
Terzo: With only two spells again.
Ayva OoC: If we were playing rogues we wouldn’t even have needed that.
Rajira OoC: If we were all playing rogues we’d have Stealth Synergy and have ghosted through the entire scenario. I rolled a 1 and they STILL didn’t see me.

Ayva: And we’re home in time for curfew.
Rajira: At this rate the Dottari are going to start talking about The Ghosts.

Although trying to squeeze Zea and the kid into the carriage with the rest of us is a bit tricky - fortunately the rest of us are a lot skinnier than Terzo.

Civilla: In this group are one and a half humans.

Zea is suitably grateful for the rescue, and doesn’t know why she was targeted - it may have been a random sweep. Civilla casts Ears of the City to find out. It looks like the Asmodeans came after Zea because she’s trying to hold the ghetto together now their actual leader has gone missing. And Thrune’s troops are making concerted efforts to solve the Tiefling Problem for good.

Rajira: The Asmodeans boink devils like it’s going out of style, then try to eliminate the results.
Civilla: Welcome to Cheliax - they’re wonderfully hypocritical.
Rajira: So the next sweep team that goes into the ghetto doesn’t come back.
Civilla: I’d rather they come back - but without pants.

It doesn’t appear that Thrune actually ordered this - he doesn’t seem to care either way. The blackshirts are acting on their own initiative.

Civilla: Oh, it’s blackshirts doing the sweeps? In that case we go with Rajira’s suggestion - any sweep teams that come in, don’t come out.
Terzo: *hopefully* So we’re going to be keeping them tied up in a basement somewhere?
Rajira: No, we’re going to cut their throats and dump the bodies in a cesspit.
Terzo: …. oh.

Civilla: Perfect! We render them down as soaps and fertilizers for the rich.
Terzo: I’m going to assume you’re joking.
Rajira: No.
Civilla: Have you ever heard me joke about anything alchemical?
Ayva: You should hear the one about the alembic.

Civilla: I don’t think Terzo has quite figured out the situation he’s in. He’s definitely the softest of us.
Ayva: Every ‘smore needs a marshmallow.

Thrune: They might just be Tieflings, but taking a prominent member of their community was going to anger them. At least they left my dogs alone.

There is one possible problem looming - a Tiefling gang, the Red Jills, who would happily escalate the violence beyond any sane limit. So we have to persuade them to limit their mayhem to a level that won’t invite reprisals from Thrune.

Terzo: Oh, I know where they hang out.
Ayva: Terzo knows everyone. Sorry, every pub.

Their current lair is an old temple of Aroden, an immortal human who was the focus of a whole bunch of prophecies, but who then died mysteriously and threw all those prophecies out the window. His temples have closed up shop. So now the building is occupied by the Red Jills, who hate humans, and their leader a winged Strix, one Scarplume, who hates humans even more.

Civilla: Anybody have any ideas how we can use this? It’s sounding suspiciously like we’re walking into a fair fight. I’d rather not fight at all, obviously, but this is sounding more and more like a fair one, and that I do not like.

Civilla: I don’t think these are our kind of people - do we really want to recruit them?
Terzo: Well, the last thing we want is a circular firing squad among the partisans.
Rajira: The Revolution is for everyone.
Civilla: But these Jills are already attacking the general citizenry - we want them to focus on the actual threat.

Civilla: The Strix have a reputation as baby-snatching monsters. And I can say that because I can speak Strix….. I’m going to have to do all the talking, aren’t I.

At least our smuggling contact has done some work for the Red Jills. The Jills might also be desperate for a new fence, too. And the Strix has something in common with the tengu, too - they have wings, at least. We can organise a meet on Red Jill turf without being instantly murdered.

"ENOUGH! Begging is beneath you."
"I beg to differ."

Went to a funeral today (that "fun" part is really misleading, by the way, though it _was_ a genuine circus   ).  Did some reminiscing with friends and was reminded of this gem:
 
In this world, Monstrous are wild cards (fantasy world).  People who have dabbled "too deeply" in magic and have become twisted, deformed soulless-- and often mindless- beasts.  They are physically dangerous, spiritually dangerous, and often times magically dangerous.
 
The PCs have stumbled upon a keep inhabited by a very old dabbler in magic (which is very unusual in this world; most blow it and become Monstrous).  As they are interacting with him in his study, one of the Monstrous shambles into the room, carrying a tray with a flask of wine and several goblets.  The PCs immediately ready their weapons and position themselves for combat.  The Monstrous does not move.  It simply holds the tray out, its mouth partly agape and its unfocused eyes staring blindly ahead.  The PCs wait and wait.  Finally the start to relax.  The old spell caster is amused, chuckling softly to himself.
 
"is....  Is this thing _safe_?"
 
"From what?"
 
"I mean is it safe to have around?"
 
"To have around you?  Most definitely.  It's far stronger than you will ever be."
 
 

Horror On The Orient Express - London - Dancers In An Evening Fog
 
IN WHICH THE INVESTIGATORS EMBARK ON A INTERNATIONAL SCAVENGER HUNT AND ARE PUT OFF BARBEQUE FOR LIFE
 
The investigators have learned that their friend Professor Smith, and his manservant Beddows, are missing under highly suspicious circumstances. It’s not the only shocking news in the paper today either - another article (front page in the tabloids, naturally) claims ‘Man Dies Three Times In One Night!’. 
 
It’s a man they know, too - the Turkish antiques dealer Mehmet Makryat, or at least three similar-looking but younger men with the same name.
 
Florence Braxton-Hicks: Triplets? With very unimaginative parents?
 
The mysterious Mehmets were all found in a room at the Chelsea Arms Hotel, and according to the newspaper all had passports in the same name, had been travelling the Continent for the last few years, and had all been stabbed in the heart. Sub-lieutenant Huxley speculates wildly about the case, despite an almost total lack of actual information. Certainly the Professor seemed perturbed by every meeting with Makryat, but why was Beddows seen fleeing the house fire? He certainly appeared to be content in his position.
 
Sub-lieutenant Huxley: And how does a grievance with the Professor lead to the death of Makryat’s three identical triplet sons?
 
It becomes even more bizarre when a fourth Makyrat, presumably the original, is found burned to a crisp in the ruins of Smith’s house, only identifiable by the keys to his Islington shop and the ostentatious gold wristwatch he was wearing at Smith’s lecture the previous evening. 
 
Huxley: So we have a fourth dead Makryat.
Florence: Big family.
Huxley: This is getting well beyond weird trains. We’ve got a dead Turk who is apparently multiplying. 
 
Huxley and Flo scurry around London, attempting to keep ahead of the police, whoever killed the Makryats, and rival newspaper reporters. Using the reasonable excuse that they have to determine which books and documents were lost with the fire, Huxley and Smith’s colleagues start itemising everything left in Smith’s college office. His 1922 diary includes a lot of cryptic references such as ‘dare I return to Turkey?’ and speculation whether whatever expedition he was planning in 1923 is connected to his brush with some exceedingly unpleasant cultists thirty years ago. Huxley’s paranoia is rising fast, not least because Smith’s assistant at the University has also vanished, with signs of a struggle. Florence tells Huxley off for not reporting that last discovery to the police, before she and Alex head off to break into Makryat’s shop.
 
GM: Having just told off Huxley for not reporting a crime, you and your cousin head off to commit one. 
 
Florence manages to drag herself away from the pretty things in the antique store long enough to thoroughly search the place.
 
Alex: Do this sort of thing often?
Florence: I did tell you what I got up to at school, didn’t I? I broke out of there three nights a week, and didn’t get caught once.
 
They also pocket a few of the smaller, more portable items, while they’re there.
 
GM: Breaking and entering, and now theft
Florence: Oh darling, why stop there? If he’s cleared out, we may as well help ourselves.
 
It certainly looks like Makryat had abandoned the shop, taking his clothes, any books, and luggage with him. The only remaining documents in the store are his account books, which are tedious enough but do include an odd reference to the purchase and later sale of a custom-built toy train. The purchaser of the train apparently vanishes in a cloud of smoke shortly thereafter, but by that point Huxley is so paranoid he insists on getting out of London as swiftly as possible, and refuses to investigate.
 
Huxley and Florence do get an unexpected visitor that evening - a cabbie dropping off a desperate message from the Professor (confirmed by his use of a Macedonian ring to mark the sealing wax of the envelope). He and Beddows are in hiding at a bedsit in Cheapside, and Smith has been horribly burned in the house fire. 
 
Huxley OoC: Do I need to make a Sanity Check here? I did see burn victims during the war.
GM: And that just means you’re getting flashbacks now.
 
Beddows has apparently done what he can, and intends to smuggle his master out to a war clinic as soon as possible. But first Smith has to croak out his tale, and his warning. His home was attacked by Turkish madmen, because he and Makryat had been seeking out the pieces of something called the Sedefkar Simulacrum, last in the possession of one Comte Fenalik in pre-Revolutionary Paris. The pieces need to be gathered together and destroyed in their original location, in Constantinople, and between them they’d found some clues to their whereabouts. And evidently these madmen heard about it.
 
GM: Admittedly some of the clues are a bit thin - ‘One of the pieces might be buried somewhere in Bulgaria - bring a shovel’.
 
But assuming he survives his injuries, Professor Smith fully intends to help as best he can, using his long list of academic contacts across Europe. More practically, he also has Beddows provide a small suitcase containing hundreds of five pound notes. 
 
GM: Allowing for inflation, this is what we call a metric f***ton of cash.
 
Huxley: But why do these Turks want the statue anyway?
Prof. Smith: *seizing Huxley’s wrist with a hand greasy from the burns and the emollient cream* To possess the Simulacrum is to possess immortality… I’ve always considered myself a man of science, my friend… but the Simulacrum is evil! Evil! God help you... God help us all...
 
The Professor lapses back into unconsciousness, and Beddows explains that the Professor had chosen the investigators to accompany him on the search, and intended to explain all. Naturally, he’d planned to travel on the Orient Express, the fastest and most luxurious way to travel the distances involved. 
 
It will take a few days to arrange visas, drop points for telegraph messages, and the purchase of top-quality clothing and luggage for the trip. Florence will need to persuade her Editor to let her go, too. 
 
GM: Nellie Bly IS one of your heroes after all - it might not be Around The World in 80 Days but it’ll still be a trip to remember, and write about.
 
Her uncle is a bit reluctant to see her go off by herself, but agrees readily enough when Florence suggests Alexandria come along too. 
 
Uncle: I mean what trouble could you get into if there’s two of you?
 
The Professor’s extensive notes for the trip probably went up in smoke (or, perhaps, ended up in the hands of their attackers) so Huxley spends much of the next week at the British Museum’s Reading Room, confirming what he can about Sedefkar, his Simulacrum, and the whereabouts of any documents about same. He’s too paranoid to return to his home, too. 
 
GM: On Friday you’re left a series of increasingly anxious messages from Huxley - he’s no longer at the Library and there’s a reason for that.
Florence: Have you done anything about your clothes yet, or are you going to embarrass us on the train?
 
Formal clothes for dinner on the train had not been a priority in Huxley’s mind, because somebody left a skinned human corpse at the library, propped up where it could watch whatever he was doing. It was carrying a note, too, written in Turkish on flayed human skin. 
 
THE SKINLESS ONE WILL NOT BE DENIED
 
Naturally, medical students get the blame. Huxley thinks otherwise.
 
Huxley: I think they’re onto us.
Florence: So did you inform the police this time? Or are we going to have the police after us as well?
 
Huxley has no intention of going out by himself now, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Alex is STILL packing for the trip, would prefer to get out of London that night.
 
Florence: The Sub-lieutenant can always hide in the attic until we leave - maybe he just needs a quiet place to calm his nerves.
Huxley OoC: Probably true - I’ve already lost 5 Sanity in the last two days.
 
Huxley, Florence, and Alex depart for Paris, to discover what they can about the Comte, and whether any parts of, or documents about, the Simulacrum remain in the city. Antonio intends to travel ahead to his native Italy, to do preliminary legwork in Milan, Venice, and Trieste, all apparently destinations for parts of the statue. Hopefully he can uncover clues - the party will need all the help they can get...

Horror On The Orient Express - London - Dancers In An Evening Fog
 
IN WHICH THE INVESTIGATORS EMBARK ON A INTERNATIONAL SCAVENGER HUNT AND ARE PUT OFF BARBEQUE FOR LIFE
 
The investigators have learned that their friend Professor Smith, and his manservant Beddows, are missing under highly suspicious circumstances. It’s not the only shocking news in the paper today either - another article (front page in the tabloids, naturally) claims ‘Man Dies Three Times In One Night!’. 
 
It’s a man they know, too - the Turkish antiques dealer Mehmet Makryat, or at least three similar-looking but younger men with the same name.
 
Florence Braxton-Hicks: Triplets? With very unimaginative parents?
 
The mysterious Mehmets were all found in a room at the Chelsea Arms Hotel, and according to the newspaper all had passports in the same name, had been travelling the Continent for the last few years, and had all been stabbed in the heart. Sub-lieutenant Huxley speculates wildly about the case, despite an almost total lack of actual information. Certainly the Professor seemed perturbed by every meeting with Makryat, but why was Beddows seen fleeing the house fire? He certainly appeared to be content in his position.
 
Sub-lieutenant Huxley: And how does a grievance with the Professor lead to the death of Makryat’s three identical triplet sons?
 
It becomes even more bizarre when a fourth Makyrat, presumably the original, is found burned to a crisp in the ruins of Smith’s house, only identifiable by the keys to his Islington shop and the ostentatious gold wristwatch he was wearing at Smith’s lecture the previous evening. 
 
Huxley: So we have a fourth dead Makryat.
Florence: Big family.
Huxley: This is getting well beyond weird trains. We’ve got a dead Turk who is apparently multiplying. 
 
Huxley and Flo scurry around London, attempting to keep ahead of the police, whoever killed the Makryats, and rival newspaper reporters. Using the reasonable excuse that they have to determine which books and documents were lost with the fire, Huxley and Smith’s colleagues start itemising everything left in Smith’s college office. His 1922 diary includes a lot of cryptic references such as ‘dare I return to Turkey?’ and speculation whether whatever expedition he was planning in 1923 is connected to his brush with some exceedingly unpleasant cultists thirty years ago. Huxley’s paranoia is rising fast, not least because Smith’s assistant at the University has also vanished, with signs of a struggle. Florence tells Huxley off for not reporting that last discovery to the police, before she and Alex head off to break into Makryat’s shop.
 
GM: Having just told off Huxley for not reporting a crime, you and your cousin head off to commit one. 
 
Florence manages to drag herself away from the pretty things in the antique store long enough to thoroughly search the place.
 
Alex: Do this sort of thing often?
Florence: I did tell you what I got up to at school, didn’t I? I broke out of there three nights a week, and didn’t get caught once.
 
They also pocket a few of the smaller, more portable items, while they’re there.
 
GM: Breaking and entering, and now theft
Florence: Oh darling, why stop there? If he’s cleared out, we may as well help ourselves.
 
It certainly looks like Makryat had abandoned the shop, taking his clothes, any books, and luggage with him. The only remaining documents in the store are his account books, which are tedious enough but do include an odd reference to the purchase and later sale of a custom-built toy train. The purchaser of the train apparently vanishes in a cloud of smoke shortly thereafter, but by that point Huxley is so paranoid he insists on getting out of London as swiftly as possible, and refuses to investigate.
 
Huxley and Florence do get an unexpected visitor that evening - a cabbie dropping off a desperate message from the Professor (confirmed by his use of a Macedonian ring to mark the sealing wax of the envelope). He and Beddows are in hiding at a bedsit in Cheapside, and Smith has been horribly burned in the house fire. 
 
Huxley OoC: Do I need to make a Sanity Check here? I did see burn victims during the war.
GM: And that just means you’re getting flashbacks now.
 
Beddows has apparently done what he can, and intends to smuggle his master out to a war clinic as soon as possible. But first Smith has to croak out his tale, and his warning. His home was attacked by Turkish madmen, because he and Makryat had been seeking out the pieces of something called the Sedefkar Simulacrum, last in the possession of one Comte Fenalik in pre-Revolutionary Paris. The pieces need to be gathered together and destroyed in their original location, in Constantinople, and between them they’d found some clues to their whereabouts. And evidently these madmen heard about it.
 
GM: Admittedly some of the clues are a bit thin - ‘One of the pieces might be buried somewhere in Bulgaria - bring a shovel’.
 
But assuming he survives his injuries, Professor Smith fully intends to help as best he can, using his long list of academic contacts across Europe. More practically, he also has Beddows provide a small suitcase containing hundreds of five pound notes. 
 
GM: Allowing for inflation, this is what we call a metric f***ton of cash.
 
Huxley: But why do these Turks want the statue anyway?
Prof. Smith: *seizing Huxley’s wrist with a hand greasy from the burns and the emollient cream* To possess the Simulacrum is to possess immortality… I’ve always considered myself a man of science, my friend… but the Simulacrum is evil! Evil! God help you... God help us all...
 
The Professor lapses back into unconsciousness, and Beddows explains that the Professor had chosen the investigators to accompany him on the search, and intended to explain all. Naturally, he’d planned to travel on the Orient Express, the fastest and most luxurious way to travel the distances involved. 
 
It will take a few days to arrange visas, drop points for telegraph messages, and the purchase of top-quality clothing and luggage for the trip. Florence will need to persuade her Editor to let her go, too. 
 
GM: Nellie Bly IS one of your heroes after all - it might not be Around The World in 80 Days but it’ll still be a trip to remember, and write about.
 
Her uncle is a bit reluctant to see her go off by herself, but agrees readily enough when Florence suggests Alexandria come along too. 
 
Uncle: I mean what trouble could you get into if there’s two of you?
 
The Professor’s extensive notes for the trip probably went up in smoke (or, perhaps, ended up in the hands of their attackers) so Huxley spends much of the next week at the British Museum’s Reading Room, confirming what he can about Sedefkar, his Simulacrum, and the whereabouts of any documents about same. He’s too paranoid to return to his home, too. 
 
GM: On Friday you’re left a series of increasingly anxious messages from Huxley - he’s no longer at the Library and there’s a reason for that.
Florence: Have you done anything about your clothes yet, or are you going to embarrass us on the train?
 
Formal clothes for dinner on the train had not been a priority in Huxley’s mind, because somebody left a skinned human corpse at the library, propped up where it could watch whatever he was doing. It was carrying a note, too, written in Turkish on flayed human skin. 
 
THE SKINLESS ONE WILL NOT BE DENIED
 
Naturally, medical students get the blame. Huxley thinks otherwise.
 
Huxley: I think they’re onto us.
Florence: So did you inform the police this time? Or are we going to have the police after us as well?
 
Huxley has no intention of going out by himself now, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Alex is STILL packing for the trip, would prefer to get out of London that night.
 
Florence: The Sub-lieutenant can always hide in the attic until we leave - maybe he just needs a quiet place to calm his nerves.
Huxley OoC: Probably true - I’ve already lost 5 Sanity in the last two days.
 
Huxley, Florence, and Alex depart for Paris, to discover what they can about the Comte, and whether any parts of, or documents about, the Simulacrum remain in the city. Antonio intends to travel ahead to his native Italy, to do preliminary legwork in Milan, Venice, and Trieste, all apparently destinations for parts of the statue. Hopefully he can uncover clues - the party will need all the help they can get...

Horror On The Orient Express - London - Dancers In An Evening Fog
 
IN WHICH THE INVESTIGATORS EMBARK ON A INTERNATIONAL SCAVENGER HUNT AND ARE PUT OFF BARBEQUE FOR LIFE
 
The investigators have learned that their friend Professor Smith, and his manservant Beddows, are missing under highly suspicious circumstances. It’s not the only shocking news in the paper today either - another article (front page in the tabloids, naturally) claims ‘Man Dies Three Times In One Night!’. 
 
It’s a man they know, too - the Turkish antiques dealer Mehmet Makryat, or at least three similar-looking but younger men with the same name.
 
Florence Braxton-Hicks: Triplets? With very unimaginative parents?
 
The mysterious Mehmets were all found in a room at the Chelsea Arms Hotel, and according to the newspaper all had passports in the same name, had been travelling the Continent for the last few years, and had all been stabbed in the heart. Sub-lieutenant Huxley speculates wildly about the case, despite an almost total lack of actual information. Certainly the Professor seemed perturbed by every meeting with Makryat, but why was Beddows seen fleeing the house fire? He certainly appeared to be content in his position.
 
Sub-lieutenant Huxley: And how does a grievance with the Professor lead to the death of Makryat’s three identical triplet sons?
 
It becomes even more bizarre when a fourth Makyrat, presumably the original, is found burned to a crisp in the ruins of Smith’s house, only identifiable by the keys to his Islington shop and the ostentatious gold wristwatch he was wearing at Smith’s lecture the previous evening. 
 
Huxley: So we have a fourth dead Makryat.
Florence: Big family.
Huxley: This is getting well beyond weird trains. We’ve got a dead Turk who is apparently multiplying. 
 
Huxley and Flo scurry around London, attempting to keep ahead of the police, whoever killed the Makryats, and rival newspaper reporters. Using the reasonable excuse that they have to determine which books and documents were lost with the fire, Huxley and Smith’s colleagues start itemising everything left in Smith’s college office. His 1922 diary includes a lot of cryptic references such as ‘dare I return to Turkey?’ and speculation whether whatever expedition he was planning in 1923 is connected to his brush with some exceedingly unpleasant cultists thirty years ago. Huxley’s paranoia is rising fast, not least because Smith’s assistant at the University has also vanished, with signs of a struggle. Florence tells Huxley off for not reporting that last discovery to the police, before she and Alex head off to break into Makryat’s shop.
 
GM: Having just told off Huxley for not reporting a crime, you and your cousin head off to commit one. 
 
Florence manages to drag herself away from the pretty things in the antique store long enough to thoroughly search the place.
 
Alex: Do this sort of thing often?
Florence: I did tell you what I got up to at school, didn’t I? I broke out of there three nights a week, and didn’t get caught once.
 
They also pocket a few of the smaller, more portable items, while they’re there.
 
GM: Breaking and entering, and now theft
Florence: Oh darling, why stop there? If he’s cleared out, we may as well help ourselves.
 
It certainly looks like Makryat had abandoned the shop, taking his clothes, any books, and luggage with him. The only remaining documents in the store are his account books, which are tedious enough but do include an odd reference to the purchase and later sale of a custom-built toy train. The purchaser of the train apparently vanishes in a cloud of smoke shortly thereafter, but by that point Huxley is so paranoid he insists on getting out of London as swiftly as possible, and refuses to investigate.
 
Huxley and Florence do get an unexpected visitor that evening - a cabbie dropping off a desperate message from the Professor (confirmed by his use of a Macedonian ring to mark the sealing wax of the envelope). He and Beddows are in hiding at a bedsit in Cheapside, and Smith has been horribly burned in the house fire. 
 
Huxley OoC: Do I need to make a Sanity Check here? I did see burn victims during the war.
GM: And that just means you’re getting flashbacks now.
 
Beddows has apparently done what he can, and intends to smuggle his master out to a war clinic as soon as possible. But first Smith has to croak out his tale, and his warning. His home was attacked by Turkish madmen, because he and Makryat had been seeking out the pieces of something called the Sedefkar Simulacrum, last in the possession of one Comte Fenalik in pre-Revolutionary Paris. The pieces need to be gathered together and destroyed in their original location, in Constantinople, and between them they’d found some clues to their whereabouts. And evidently these madmen heard about it.
 
GM: Admittedly some of the clues are a bit thin - ‘One of the pieces might be buried somewhere in Bulgaria - bring a shovel’.
 
But assuming he survives his injuries, Professor Smith fully intends to help as best he can, using his long list of academic contacts across Europe. More practically, he also has Beddows provide a small suitcase containing hundreds of five pound notes. 
 
GM: Allowing for inflation, this is what we call a metric f***ton of cash.
 
Huxley: But why do these Turks want the statue anyway?
Prof. Smith: *seizing Huxley’s wrist with a hand greasy from the burns and the emollient cream* To possess the Simulacrum is to possess immortality… I’ve always considered myself a man of science, my friend… but the Simulacrum is evil! Evil! God help you... God help us all...
 
The Professor lapses back into unconsciousness, and Beddows explains that the Professor had chosen the investigators to accompany him on the search, and intended to explain all. Naturally, he’d planned to travel on the Orient Express, the fastest and most luxurious way to travel the distances involved. 
 
It will take a few days to arrange visas, drop points for telegraph messages, and the purchase of top-quality clothing and luggage for the trip. Florence will need to persuade her Editor to let her go, too. 
 
GM: Nellie Bly IS one of your heroes after all - it might not be Around The World in 80 Days but it’ll still be a trip to remember, and write about.
 
Her uncle is a bit reluctant to see her go off by herself, but agrees readily enough when Florence suggests Alexandria come along too. 
 
Uncle: I mean what trouble could you get into if there’s two of you?
 
The Professor’s extensive notes for the trip probably went up in smoke (or, perhaps, ended up in the hands of their attackers) so Huxley spends much of the next week at the British Museum’s Reading Room, confirming what he can about Sedefkar, his Simulacrum, and the whereabouts of any documents about same. He’s too paranoid to return to his home, too. 
 
GM: On Friday you’re left a series of increasingly anxious messages from Huxley - he’s no longer at the Library and there’s a reason for that.
Florence: Have you done anything about your clothes yet, or are you going to embarrass us on the train?
 
Formal clothes for dinner on the train had not been a priority in Huxley’s mind, because somebody left a skinned human corpse at the library, propped up where it could watch whatever he was doing. It was carrying a note, too, written in Turkish on flayed human skin. 
 
THE SKINLESS ONE WILL NOT BE DENIED
 
Naturally, medical students get the blame. Huxley thinks otherwise.
 
Huxley: I think they’re onto us.
Florence: So did you inform the police this time? Or are we going to have the police after us as well?
 
Huxley has no intention of going out by himself now, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Alex is STILL packing for the trip, would prefer to get out of London that night.
 
Florence: The Sub-lieutenant can always hide in the attic until we leave - maybe he just needs a quiet place to calm his nerves.
Huxley OoC: Probably true - I’ve already lost 5 Sanity in the last two days.
 
Huxley, Florence, and Alex depart for Paris, to discover what they can about the Comte, and whether any parts of, or documents about, the Simulacrum remain in the city. Antonio intends to travel ahead to his native Italy, to do preliminary legwork in Milan, Venice, and Trieste, all apparently destinations for parts of the statue. Hopefully he can uncover clues - the party will need all the help they can get...

Another oddity regarding current events in Kintargo - there were a number of mercenaries in town when Thrune took over. But instead of hiring them, which is kind of what mercenaries are for, they’re all being held prisoner at Kintargo’s salt works. Finding out why is probably worthwhile, and hey, maybe they’ll give us a discount rate if we rescue them. It’s possible that the leader of the mercs, one Forvian Crowe, has a personal animosity towards Thrune (and hey, who could blame him) but Laria thinks they could make good recruits to the rebellion regardless of their personal opinions about the Dogf***er.

The Sallix Salt Works are built on the shoreline underneath the eastern wall of Kintargo, near the now mostly irrelevant Salt Gate in the aforementioned wall. Brine is shipped in, and boiled dry on the premises.

Terzo: That seems wildly inefficient. The fuel requirements alone are ridiculous.
Civilla: That's why they use slave labour. Like the mercenaries we’re rescuing.

The market adjacent to the salt works is mostly dedicated to building supplies and related products, but Civilla and Ayva do have a good reason to be hanging around, which is convenient - maybe we can arrange a good deal on rebuilding the Livery prior to filling the basement with armed mercenaries.

Civilla casts Ears of the City on Terzo, in order to divine details about the salt works and the prisoners. Terzo isn’t entirely happy about gathering information with magic.

Terzo: The problem with doing it this way is that I don’t get to go around a dozen different pubs and ask a few innocent questions between drinks.
Civilla: You think that’s a problem, do you? I think it’s a bonus.

Although using Ears of the City DOES ensure that nobody notices, for example, an increasingly drunk Terzo going from bar to bar asking questions.

Ayva: Or an increasingly annoyed party member with a wheelbarrow taking Terzo from bar to bar.

Apparently the previous owner of the salt works was arrested for tax evasion, and killed when he resisted. Barzillai has now seized the premises as a money-earner for the government.

Civilla: Well, at least Barzillai is honest about the nationalisation process.
Terzo: How so?
Civilla: For ‘nationalised’ read ‘stole’.

We also learn, via the spell, that Crowe and his soldiers are being worked to death because of their faith in Sarenrae, the goddess of healing. That’s the kind of thing that can get you in huge trouble should any Asmodeans find out, and that’s exactly what happened.

Civilla gets quite thoughtful about the Salt Gate - they haven’t been closed in years, since the internal mechanism has rusted stiff, but that suggests a few ideas to Civilla.

Civilla: A plaaaaaan is forming in my miiiind.

Civilla wants Terzo to Grease the gate mechanism when we leave, so we can stop pursuit. Doing anything more permanent would probably annoy Thrune and provoke another Proclamation.

Terzo OoC: So basically we need a bucket of WD-40.

Civilla: In case we are chased.
Rajira: *snickers*
Civilla: Grease doesn’t last very long either.
Rajira: *snickers louder*
Civilla: CHASED, not CHASTE. CHASED as in PURSUED.

Civilla also has to keep her footmen loyal - otherwise they’ll eventually figure out she’s up to something and might inform on her. Telling them to wait with the carriage outside the salt works and suddenly running up with a troop of mercenaries and expecting them all to fit in like it was some kind of clown car would be a bit suspicious. Instead we sneak up to the door of the salt works late at night, get the door open, and knock Thrune’s blackshirts out with Lullaby and Sleep spells.

Civilla: See? I’m perfectly good at Stealth, as long as everybody is asleep.

We silently tie the unconscious guards up, release the prisoners, and tiptoe out again without the rest of the guards in the building hearing a thing.

Civilla: And give a short prayer to Noctiluca.
Terzo: … isn’t that the demon goddess of darkness and lust?
Civilla: … I can see we’re going to have to have a conversation later.

Rajira: And nobody even saw us.
Terzo: All that effort into disguises, hoods and Oaths of Anonymity wasted.
Civilla: Not wasted, reserved for future endeavours.

GM: … well then.
Civilla OoC: That’s this party’s warcry - ‘Sorry, Not Sorry’

Civilla: I mean, it won’t be hard for the authorities to figure out what happened - all the guards fall asleep at once and wake up bound. Unless they leap to some wrong conclusions. I can picture the Inquisitor asking “So WHY were you enjoying a BDSM orgy?”
Rajira OoC: ‘And why were you letting the prisoners top you?’

It WILL make an amusing rumour to spread once we get the underground press running. Something to keep in mind for the future.

That rescue cost us one first-level spell and a cantrip. We might have time for another mission this evening, after leading Crowe and his men to the Livery basement, before the curfew even comes down. Going via the Tiefling ghetto is also convenient, given how many friends we have there after dealing with the tooth fairy problem - that makes the residents less likely to comment on the large group of half naked prisoners sneaking through the alleyways. But instead of another mission tonight, we decide instead to make sure the mercs have food, clothes, and bedding.

Civilla: It shows that we consider them important enough to put off other important tasks.

Civilla: Liria told us about your predicament.
Crowe: Ah, so that’s why you came to our aid.
Ayva: She bribed us with scones.
Crowe: Damn, we owe that curvy little vixen our lives.

At least we temporarily disrupted the salt works, but it won’t take long to replace the unfortunate workers.

Terzo: Probably with Tieflings
GM: To be honest, right now, it’s going to be those thugs.

Permanently disrupting the salt works is also a goal for the future.

Civilla: Any way to reduce Thrune’s ability to punish the populace.

And, of course, effortlessly ghosting our way in and out of the salt works will increase our Notoriety, and rescuing the Black Feather Mercenaries will make us more friends among Kintargo’s population.

But we still need to investigate the ruins of Raxus’ family home, the Thrashing Badger pub, and the Silver Star music shop, for any clues the Dogf***er’s arsonists may have left intact. There isn’t much left at the latter, and not being able to see in the dark doesn’t help. On the other hand, accidentally falling through a hidden trapdoor is quite helpful, at least in that it unearths some useful potions and scrolls.

On the other hand, having our carriage pulled over by one of the Kintargo guardsmen, especially since he’s backed up by three of Thrune’s blackshirts.

Civilla: How can we be of assistance to you fine civic-minded individuals?
Thug: I’m sure you good folk are unaware, since it only happened ten minutes ago, but this road is now a tollway. The toll is a mere five gold. Per passenger.
Civilla: Five gold? How interesting. I assume you have your Writ?
Terzo: And a receipt book?
Civilla: That too.
Thug: I have my Writ right here *hefts mace*
Terzo: *casts Lullaby* Go to sleep, little A**hole, do not cry.

All three drop to Civilla’s Sleep spell, and she orders her drivers to move the carriage on.

Civilla: We do not want to cut their throats in front of my drivers.
Ayva: So we’ll leave them there to be inevitably pickpocketed?
Civilla: Or killed by any number of Kintargo’s other residents.

Unfortunately most of the Thrashing Badger washed out to sea when the boardwalk burnt through, and it wasn’t Terzo’s local drinking hole.

Ayva: Terzo has been kicked out of most of the pubs in Kintargo.
Terzo: Rolled out of, possibly.

The Badger used to be the rowdiest alcohol dispensary in the city, but any of its regulars have moved on to other establishments. It seems likely one of the more notable regulars, the fairy dragon Vendalfek, will have moved to one of them too. Perhaps Clenchjaw’s, although the name does not inspire images of fun and harmless hooliganism.

Although given the fact that we walk in on a mass bar fight, that pauses only long to look at us come in, it might be a more enthusiastic clientele than the name suggests.

Terzo: Don’t mind us, carry on as you were.

Terzo: Well, at least if they're all so busy with their fistfight, they’re less likely to remember what we look like.
Civilla: I fear they’re going to remember us anyway. Two of us anyway.
Rajira: I’m wearing my hood over my head. But I am over 6ft and attractive.
Civilla: That’s what I meant. But Terzo is going to attract attention anyway, as they see him accompanied by the three of us and try to figure out ‘How?!’

Ayva: So we set up at the bar, wait for information to come to us, and maim anybody that assumes we’re call girls.

We claim a table that doesn’t leave our backs to the door, and order refreshments.

Terzo: A bottle of your most enjoyable wine, dear.
Barmaid: We’ve got wine, water, watered wine, or if you want something spicy, wined water.

Ayva just gets a small beer, and Rajira some hard mead.

Civilla: It’s not like we can get mint liqueur anymore.

Unfortunately Ayva also complains about not being able to get night tea, and we get told off by a neighbouring sailor.

Old Salt: Word to the wise - I know you’re new here but one of the house rules is No Politics. *to Terzo* And you, you - how’d you’d end up in the company of three buxom lasses like these? Care to share the love?
Terzo: It’s my irresistible charm, dear man - I can’t beat them off with a stick.
Civilla: Buxom? Buxom?
Ayva: I don’t recall being buxom.
Rajira: *puts an arm around Ayva* Don’t worry, you’re buxom enough for me.

GM: You settle down to enjoy your drinks. Make a Perception check.
Ayva OoC: Ah, it’s one of those bars where adventures happen.
Terzo OoC: Well we already have a hooded stranger, but they’re a member of the party.
Terzo: *fails the check miserably* This is a very enjoyable wine.

Rajira’s resistance to poison probably means she could have drunk anything behind the bar, but she's not going to get the chance. Ayva spots the lizard with butterfly wings in the rafters, laughing at the barfight. This is presumably Vendalfek. When he realises he’s been spotted, he goes invisible. Ayva Messages the fairy dragon.

Ayva: Vendalfek We Know You’re There
Civilla: FFS can you be more ominous? At least indicate we’re friendly first.

The doors of the pub swing open all by themselves.

Rajira: And there goes our informant.
Terzo: What was he doing in the rafters?
Ayva: Everybody enjoys a good bar fight.
Terzo: He probably started it.

Ayva tries a more diplomatic Message, and the dragon pokes its head back in and indicates we should follow.

Civilla: It’s nearly curfew - we should head home. Come along Terzo.
Terzo: But I’m still enjoying this wine!
Civilla:
.
Terzo: Can I get this in a doggy bag?
Ayva: Damn. First good mead I’ve had in years.
Civilla: We’re far too far south for good mead.

Vendalfek 

Vendalfek: What do you humans want, anyway? I’ve only just found a new bar to live in after your lot burned the last one down.
Rajira: Not ‘my’ humans.
Civilla: *Diplomatically remains silent, specifically about her own ancestry*

We do determine why Thrune’s agents burned the place to the ground - it probably has something to do with the Roses Vendalfek kept overhearing about.

Vendalfek: Did I live in a bar that was a secret meeting place for a society of florists?

More like Milani’s Rose of Kintargo, a rebellious cult. They were arrested by Thrune’s personal enforcers, one of whom has an ominous magic sword.

Rajira OoC: Oh great, we have an Edgelord.

Civilla: These Roses they took - fun people?
Vendalfek: Oh yes.
Civilla: And the Dottari - not fun?
Vendalfek: Definitely not.
Civilla: So, what do you think about playing a few pranks on the dotteri?

Vendalfek is agreeable, and the rebellion has a new ally. Just as well, since Vendalfek also overheard that they were planning to Doghouse one of the Roses.

Terzo: Oh dear.
Vendalfek: I’d like a doghouse - cosy.
Civilla: Doghousing involves feeding a prisoner to one of Thrune’s feral mastiffs. And they starve the dog first.

Terzo: Out of curiosity, Mr Dragon - why was the barman unconscious in the corner in there?
Civilla: He was no fun.
Vendalfek: Such a stickler for the rules.

And then there is more quiet recruiting of partisans, and smuggling funds into the Rebellion’s pockets. And dealing with the fact that the Dottari are taking an alarming interest in Liria’s coffeehouse...

Liria: *communicates by frantic eyebrow-waggling* *DISTRACT THEM!*
Civilla: Um, ah, what? *grabs Rajira and kisses her*
Rajira: *briefly startled then grabs Civilla and kisses back*
Civilla: Eep.
Terzo: *looks briefly surprised and annoyed, and mutters something about ‘alright for some’ before returning his attention to his drink*

Of course the fact that Rajira might LOOK human, but doesn’t TASTE human, and has fangs and forked tongue, might be even more distracting, if Civilla hadn’t already figured out what Rajira actually was. It distracts the male Dottari though, until their female superior officer slaps them upside the head.

Rajira: Thankyou, m’dear, but I believe it’s my set. *casts Fascinate, which fails*
GM: I’m sorry, but the slap worked and they’re concentrating on their job again.

Instead we order a pot of coffee, which will give Liria an excuse to go into the pantry and move a few sacks over the hidden door in the floor.

Civilla: Wait, no, it’s tea that Thrune has a problem with, isn’t it.
Terzo: We can always ask these nice Dottari if coffee and tea are the same thing.
Civilla: Better not - we don’t want to give the authorities an opportunity to decide they are.

Apparently somebody sent the Dottari an anonymous letter alleging unsavoury practises at the coffeehouse.

Liria: The only unsavoury things here are the muffins.
Civilla: Unsavoury practises? I’ve kept my clothes on this time.
Rajira: We’ll see if that lasts the night.

Civilla manages to convince them that somebody is wasting their time, barely - sometimes you roll low but the bad guys still roll lower. The Dottari leave.

Terzo: I trust Liria offered them a complimentary muffin.

Rajira grabs Civilla and drags her over to the bar.

Rajira: Something strong - 120 proof at least. Swill this around in your mouth before you swallow. My saliva can be toxic and I’d rather you didn’t become ill.
Civilla: I’d rather not.
Rajira: … OK.
Civilla: I mean I’d rather not smell like I’ve been swilling the kind of alcohol I usually use for cleaning purposes.

GM: Oh god, somebody gave Vendalfek coffee.
Civilla: actually we shouldn’t shut down the Salt Works - that way if anybody else gets imprisoned there we can rescue them, too.
Rajira: And some of the prisoners they send there have actually been arrested for good reasons. There’s always actual criminals around.
Civilla: True, but Thrune is employing those.

Civilla decides to take the air, with her compatriots and supposed paramour, to scout out the ruins of Rexus’ family home that we have to investigate. After all, since Terzo is her tutor and Ayva is her business partner, we actually have a good reason to be strolling around the expensive part of town. Rexus doubts we’ll find anything, but Civilla thinks it will still be worth a look. It’s certainly suspicious that the ruins of the Victocora estate are under permanent armed guard, even this many weeks after the fire. Perhaps we can stay at Civilla’s family home, so we can come back after dark without having to sneak back into the Kintargo equivalent of a Gated Community?

Civilla: Eh, it would attract attention to them and they’d ask questions. Trust me, they’d ask questions, it’s what Alazarios do. It’s one reason we’re not very popular with House Thrune.

We decide to wait until after curfew, and sneak along the alley between the city walls and the noble estates, and climb over the estate wall into the ruins. Which is a good plan, if we didn’t run into a Dottari guard patrolling the other way.

Rajira: *drunkenly slurs* Hey there, handsome.
GM: Roll to Seduce.

Dottari: What are you DOING here, woman, it’s almost after curfew! Come with me!
Rajira: Oh, I’m sure we can find something much more fun to do…
GM: You were unlucky enough to get the nice guard, and he’s actually insisting on escorting you back to your home.
Rajira: S***.

Rajira: *signals the rest of the party* Should I take him out?
Civilla: *summons a monster frog out of the ground*
Dottari: What the Hells is that! GET BEHIND ME!
Rajira: *clonks him on the head*
Civilla: Can somebody cut him in half?
Rajira: … not without getting blood all over my clothes, no.
Ayva: … Why?
Civilla: My frog can’t eat something that large. Unless we fold him double, maybe.

Terzo is rather perturbed by the murder, and reminds so during the wall-clambering and ruins search. It’s Ayva that finds the remains of a recent preparatory ritual next to the ornamental lake on the property. Apparently a witch did something here, more recently than the fire. Civilla cautiously wades into the lake and promptly vanishes with a splash, into a lake that’s supposed to be thigh deep at best. It’s now way more than 60 feet deep, and there’s something glowing blue in the depths.

Terzo OoC: So the Victocoras had a secret nuclear reactor in their pond.

Civilla: Just as well I can summon Celestial Dolphins.

Civilla and Rajira descend, and are soon spotted by somebody else swimming down here, who hurriedly swims into a side tunnel. Unfortunately there’s also a grate, which Civilla can Dimensional Slide through at least, in a search for some kind of opening mechanism. The tunnel on this slide slopes upwards.

Civilla: I’ll return to the others and get high.
All: LOL.

Sending Rajira back to the surface when they do may have been a mistake, since some kind of magical pulse boils up the shaft and engulfs Rajira while she’s on her way up. She’s turned to stone, which doesn’t make things any easier for the dolphin.

Terzo OoC: Do I need to throw some waterwings in there?

Still, Terzo and Ayva are rather alarmed by the petrification, at least until Ayva determines it will only be temporary - apparently that was a wild magic surge. So all we know is that somebody, probably a witch, was messing around at the bottom of an unexpectedly deep lake, and we have no idea who or why. Civilla has followed the zig-zagging tunnel to another grate, with a room on the other side.

GM: This is clearly a Spellcasters Only route.
Civilla OoC: And this is me. *casts Dimensional Slide again*. Was this really supposed to stop low level characters? One Halfling wizard with Reduce Person would go right through it.
GM: …. Excuse me a moment while I consult the next book of the campaign.

She’s apparently somewhere underneath the Hall of Records. She casts Pass Without Trace and Disguise Self to reduce the chance the Dottari wandering about don’t find her. Disguising herself as that Dottari officer from last night gets her out of the building without too much attention, and she dispatches one of the Silver Raven devices to let us know she’s heading to the Alazario estate. This is a relief to the rest of us, although Rajira has already seen the disguised Civilla on the road.

Terzo: Well, I must say we’re glad to see you alive - when Rajira came back up turned to stone and wrapped around a dolphin, and no sign of you, we were a bit concerned.
Civilla: Turned to stone? What did I miss?

Civilla excuses herself to write some letters to her family, suggesting they buy the Victocora estate and hinting that they should keep the lake as is but not investigate too closely.

Civilla: ‘There’s a secret back entrance to the Hall of Records? That’ll be useful when it reopens’

Civilla: There are currently two cults of Noctiluca - the ones who are wrong and the ones that are right.
Ayva OoC: I can see her followers inquiring about what happened, and when they find out, go ‘wait, she did WHAT to WHO and then WHAT????’.

GM: I just looked up what Night Tea actually is, and it’s nothing about ‘disturbing the balance of the slumbering mind’ - it’s a prophylactic.

Civilla gets a delivery while she’s writing at Laria’s coffeehouse - less a package than a bouquet. Of very beautiful roses, with a slip of paper concealed down among the stems.

Rajira: And there was me thinking I had a rival for your affections.

Perhaps predictably, it’s from the Rose of Kintargo, the Milani cult that is also planning a rebellion against Barzillai Thrune. They warn us not to act rashly, and promise to contact us soon. We recruit a team of street performers, who we call Nobody’s Fools, and put the finishing touches on the former Livery. In fact we’re just getting ready to open up when a small child runs in screaming for help.

Rajira: What’s wrong with the spawnling?
Tiefling Kid: She’s been taken!
Civilla: Who?
Tiefling Kid: Zea! The bad people! They said they're going to put her in a doghouse!

If we’re quick we might be able to intercept them before they reach Aria Park - it’s fortunate that the Livery is practically next door to the ghetto. We all pile into the carriage.

Civilla: Come along child - you get to ride in a carriage!

Unfortunately they get to the park first - the pagoda in the middle of the lily pond in Aria Park has been converted into a kennel for any of the dogs the citizens of Kintargo have been handing in for the reward. It’s also Thrune’s thug's choice of destination for anybody they decide has insulted the throne. Civilla gets her disposable cloak ready - if necessary she’ll swap costumes with Zea so the blackshirts chase the wrong person. She’ll also Summon a Celestial Dog, tell it to play Keep Away over to the east of the pond, and use that to distract the thugs. After all, they’ll certainly try and catch it for the reward, and the mortal mastiffs will probably go mental. Then the rest of us can sneak up and overwhelm the other thugs, under the cover of the borking.

Dottari on far side of pond: Hey, there’s a dog!
Celestial Dog and Mastiffs: Play? Play! Play! Play!
Dottari on our side of the Pond: What the **** is happening over there/
Rajira: *kukris them in the back*

GM: The surviving thugs all need to make Handle Animal checks.
Ayva’s player: I’ve had to walk a Saint Bernard before - these thugs might be going for A Walk.
GM: Aaaand they all failed their check.

One of the thugs invents water-skiing as his mastiff drags him into the pond, and the rest all chase off after the dogs that are supposedly in their charge. Zea can basically stroll off while they’re busy.

GM: … Good work. I basically doubled the number of NPCs that were supposed to be here, too.
Terzo: With only two spells again.
Ayva OoC: If we were playing rogues we wouldn’t even have needed that.
Rajira OoC: If we were all playing rogues we’d have Stealth Synergy and have ghosted through the entire scenario. I rolled a 1 and they STILL didn’t see me.

Ayva: And we’re home in time for curfew.
Rajira: At this rate the Dottari are going to start talking about The Ghosts.

Although trying to squeeze Zea and the kid into the carriage with the rest of us is a bit tricky - fortunately the rest of us are a lot skinnier than Terzo.

Civilla: In this group are one and a half humans.

Zea is suitably grateful for the rescue, and doesn’t know why she was targeted - it may have been a random sweep. Civilla casts Ears of the City to find out. It looks like the Asmodeans came after Zea because she’s trying to hold the ghetto together now their actual leader has gone missing. And Thrune’s troops are making concerted efforts to solve the Tiefling Problem for good.

Rajira: The Asmodeans boink devils like it’s going out of style, then try to eliminate the results.
Civilla: Welcome to Cheliax - they’re wonderfully hypocritical.
Rajira: So the next sweep team that goes into the ghetto doesn’t come back.
Civilla: I’d rather they come back - but without pants.

It doesn’t appear that Thrune actually ordered this - he doesn’t seem to care either way. The blackshirts are acting on their own initiative.

Civilla: Oh, it’s blackshirts doing the sweeps? In that case we go with Rajira’s suggestion - any sweep teams that come in, don’t come out.
Terzo: *hopefully* So we’re going to be keeping them tied up in a basement somewhere?
Rajira: No, we’re going to cut their throats and dump the bodies in a cesspit.
Terzo: …. oh.

Civilla: Perfect! We render them down as soaps and fertilizers for the rich.
Terzo: I’m going to assume you’re joking.
Rajira: No.
Civilla: Have you ever heard me joke about anything alchemical?
Ayva: You should hear the one about the alembic.

Civilla: I don’t think Terzo has quite figured out the situation he’s in. He’s definitely the softest of us.
Ayva: Every ‘smore needs a marshmallow.

Thrune: They might just be Tieflings, but taking a prominent member of their community was going to anger them. At least they left my dogs alone.

There is one possible problem looming - a Tiefling gang, the Red Jills, who would happily escalate the violence beyond any sane limit. So we have to persuade them to limit their mayhem to a level that won’t invite reprisals from Thrune.

Terzo: Oh, I know where they hang out.
Ayva: Terzo knows everyone. Sorry, every pub.

Their current lair is an old temple of Aroden, an immortal human who was the focus of a whole bunch of prophecies, but who then died mysteriously and threw all those prophecies out the window. His temples have closed up shop. So now the building is occupied by the Red Jills, who hate humans, and their leader a winged Strix, one Scarplume, who hates humans even more.

Civilla: Anybody have any ideas how we can use this? It’s sounding suspiciously like we’re walking into a fair fight. I’d rather not fight at all, obviously, but this is sounding more and more like a fair one, and that I do not like.

Civilla: I don’t think these are our kind of people - do we really want to recruit them?
Terzo: Well, the last thing we want is a circular firing squad among the partisans.
Rajira: The Revolution is for everyone.
Civilla: But these Jills are already attacking the general citizenry - we want them to focus on the actual threat.

Civilla: The Strix have a reputation as baby-snatching monsters. And I can say that because I can speak Strix….. I’m going to have to do all the talking, aren’t I.

At least our smuggling contact has done some work for the Red Jills. The Jills might also be desperate for a new fence, too. And the Strix has something in common with the tengu, too - they have wings, at least. We can organise a meet on Red Jill turf without being instantly murdered.

definitely quotable, that
Champions : Return To Edge City : The Right To Bear Arms
GM: You’ve actually been a stabilising influence on Edge City.
Hero Shrew OoC: Well that’s good to know. If somewhat horrifying considering I’m one of the people involved.

Hero Shrew: I really should let Sally down lightly.
GM: What????
Hero Shrew’s player: You know, my co-worker that I’ve been romantically interested in since the start of the campaign.
GM: Yes, I know who she is, but as a player are you delusional enough to think you had a chance?
Hero Shrew’s player: As a player, no, but Scooter sure is.

GM: The aliens are still a bit confused by Earth’s technology level - at least two groups have anti-grav technology but it’s not in wide usage anywhere else.
Hero Shrew OoC: While other groups still have horse-drawn vehicles.
The Magus OoC: And UNTIL even has anti-antigrav tech.

Fireflash OoC: I need to change my Psychological Limitation from ‘Show-off’ to “Only Sane Woman’
GM: Fair.

Meanwhile, Hardlight is examining the cybernetic technology released by one of his business rivals. It’s a bit puzzling, especially because he can’t find any processors in it. He’s going to need help.

GM: ‘Hey Flux, I’ve got this guy’s arm, come look at it.’
Flux: Um.

It turns out the processors are distributed throughout the entire device. And it’s trying to find connections to Hardlight’s local systems.

Hardlight: This is getting more and more like a ‘kill it with fire’ situation.
GM: It doesn’t look like Mechanon or Destroyer-tech.
Hardlight OoC: So? I don't want them getting a hold of it either!

Between Hardlight, Flux, Fireflash, the Magus, they decide to experiment and investigate by leaving it on a laptop in an air-gapped Faraday cage and see what happens. If this thing can teach itself to interface with any systems from nervous systems to laptops, it’s a pretty shocking advance in technology. Eventually they hook it up themselves, and it promptly fuses with the laptop.

Hardlight: Does it at least show up as a USB drive?

Flux recognises some of the code running as resembling the kind of thing that happens at a cyberbrain interface.

Hardlight: This isn’t hardware - it’s wetware. Dampware?

GM: The Tyrell corp have developed a cybernetic device that doesn’t count as a machine, and is therefore functionally immune to cyberpathy.
The Magus OoC: They've got a bunch of captured Cybertronians in the basement and they’re hacking limbs off them.

It’s also partially opaque to The Magus’ Magesight.

Hardlight: So, who wants to go raid Tyrell?
Flux: Raid is such a harsh word.

Magus uses his powers of Scrying to find whatever this arm may have originally been connected to. Various parts seem to be attached to citizens across the city, but one particularly large fraction of it is found in a parts bin, about to be melted down for scrap. It’s the Head and Torso of an extremely humanoid robotic creature. Poking around inside reveals Tyrell tech, but nothing known in official databases. This is likely some kind of prototype for internal use only.

Hardlight: So the question is: How the hell did a hideously advanced, damn-near-human cybernetic creature get out of an internal Tyrell lab, die, and instead of being thrown into a Tyrell furnace, end up in a recycling bin?
The Magus: Hmm - so this robot is actually dead. I wonder if it left a ghost?

Hardlight: OK, I’m going to do something very stupid.
Hero Shrew OoC: I thought that was my job.

Hardlight looks inside the robot’s head - it’s not actually organic, but the organisation has some similarity. The foam-lattice design isn’t wholly original, but it’s very very complex compared to previous examples. It certainly looks like a Tyrell design - the hardwired Laws seem to be part of it.

The Magus sits Flux down to run through the basics of Necromancy.

GM: Which the Magus seems disturbingly familiar with.

Flux also learns more about why magic-users usually work in teams. In this case, it’s to wait behind the Magus with a baseball bat, just in case anything untoward happens while the Magus is in his trance state.

The Magus: Can You Hear Me?
Hero Shrew: Yes?
Hardlight: I think he’s talking to the ghost, Scooter.

Hero Shrew: So he’s trying to summon a robot ghost. If it was a ghost robot pirate we’d have the whole trifecta.

Robot Ghost: Hello? Yes, I can hear you. Who are you?
The Magus: Hello - I’m Damien, but most people call me the Magus.
Robot Ghost: Hello. I’m Seth.
The Magus: Do you know where you are?
Robot Ghost: I think I’m dead - how weird is that?

Seth: I think I remember dying now… and it’s not easy to kill us.
The Magus: Us?
Seth: Er… can you forget I said that?

Seth seems quite concerned that his being killed will expose his friends, or possibly get somebody into trouble, since they’re not ready to be revealed. He’s initially fine that the rest of his parts got installed into various people, but then gets quite upset that it’s into biological people, especially if they have other cyberwear.

Seth: That could be bad. We’re Nexus Series. Tyrell Corp could get in trouble. We’re Nexus Series! We have an important job! We’re Nexus Series! It’s an Important Job! People could get hurt! We’ve run the projections, the city needs us!

Seth saw and recognised whoever decapitated him while he was on his mission, but they were more powerful than he expected.

Seth: Tell Dr Madox I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to die.
The Magus: Is there anybody else?
Seth: Tell my brothers and sisters. But Dr Madox can tell them.

Seth is also confused that his 55 siblings didn’t collect his remains, especially if they completed whatever their Important Job was. On the other hand, if they were killed surely their ghosts would be floating around in whatever digital afterlife Seth currently resides in.

Seth: It’s quiet here. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now. Huh. Azura was right. You people have it easy.

It’s probably highly relevant that Seth and Azura are two of the 56 children of Adam and Eve. It’s also probably relevant that Seth considers the Moreaus, created by Genesys, cousins.

Hardlight: *sigh* Why is it that Edge City has such a hard-on for creating new sentient lifeforms?
GM: Part of that is Hardlight. You have Weirdness Magnet.

One of the players is late getting to the game.

GM: It’s Saturday evening, it’s either the game he’s GMing or the one where he wears underpants inappropriately.
Fireflash OoC: At least he wears underpants.
Hero Shrew OoC: And I’m freeballing all the time.
GM: *sigh* you have no idea how hard The Rep works. Suffice to say, he earns his commission.

GM: Which of you has experience talking to dead artificial minds?
Hero Shrew: I could say me but I’d be lying.
Fireflash: I have some experience talking to college bros.

Anyway, now we have one Dr Elly Madox to investigate. Some years back she helped develop the groundwork for the modern Biochip Interface, before moving to pure robotics, and jumping ship to Tyrell. ‘Coincidentally’ the company has developed a lot of fancy tech since then. At least if we show up in our superheroic identities, the Tyrell functionaries will probably kick the problem upstairs until we’re talking to somebody that actually knows what happened. Whether those people are actually willing to tell us is another problem, of course. Happily, Dr. Madox seems willing to meet Hardlight, although for some reason he decides to take Scooter along despite the risk to property.

Dr. Madox: So, why did you want to see me?
Hardlight: I’m not sure how to say this…
Hero Shrew: ooh! Ooh! I can!
All: SCOOTER, NO.
Hardlight: We found Seth.
Dr. Madox: *goes pale* w...what?
Hardlight: One of your projects?
Dr. Madox: *through gritted teeth* Not how I would phrase it.
Hardlight: Sons?
Dr. Madox: Still not how I would phrase it. We can’t talk here.
Hero Shrew: I have to say I’m impressed - you were almost as blunt as I would have been.

Gareth explains how we found Seth’s bits, but Dr. Madox is more interested to know how we talked to him if he was nonfunctional when we did.

The Magus: This is more my area of expertise. I did a little necromancy and communicated with his spirit.
Dr. Madox: *slightly hysterical laughter* You talked to his ghost.
The Magus: Congratulations - you created life.
Dr. Madox: I don’t deserve your congratulations - we created nothing.
Hardlight: Um.

Dr. Madox explains that something degenerative infected some of her coworkers after the Genesys incident, and her cyberoid creations are their attempt to salvage something of their minds. There were dozens of Nexus series created, before their husband-and-wife templates were too far gone to be copied for more. The biblical names they somehow acquired didn’t help matters - Cain, for example, was quite upset about his namesake, and gets on quite well with Abel. Nonetheless, there are now dozens of cyberoids, immune to cyberpathy, that can easily pass for human. And that can grow and adapt.

Dr. Madox: I’ll ask you a question - how many times has Mechanon been an active threat to this city?
Fireflash: Given the implications of the question, I’ll have to guess more than we’ve heard about.
Dr. Madox: Eight. And each time it was the Nexus series that stopped him.
Hardlight: So you think Seth was killed by an agent of Mechanon?
Dr. Madox: No, Mechanon wasn’t the target of that operation - he was dealing with VIPER.

Apparently Seth’s killer was one of VIPER’s enhanced Draysha agents in a combat suit.

GM: I can’t remember how many sentient machines there are in the Champions universe. Not many.
Hero Shrew (and ROVER’s) player: You certainly couldn’t describe ROVER as sentient, given his brain ran on AmigaOS.

The GM’s adopted stray cat is being a bit demanding.

GM: This f***ing cat - she wasn’t this loud before.
Hardlight’s player: Yes she was - she was just outside.

Dr. Madox is extremely concerned that some of Seth’s parts were being used as human bionics - the Nexus series could quite easily create its own interfaces with implanted cyberbrains and interfaces, and is strongly inclined to do so. And there’s no technology Dr. Madox is aware of that would stop it growing its connections.

Dr. Madox: So these parts were effectively black market cybernetics - which begs the question why they didn’t activate during the salvage process.
The Magus: Would the damage to his brain have temporarily shut down the activity in the rest of his parts?
Dr. Madox: Hmm. Maybe. *sigh* Seth was always the gentlest of them. Was. I'm already talking about him in the past tense. You have to understand I’ve worked with these people for over a decade.
Fireflash: And you care for them. Perfectly understandable.

We agree to keep the problem quiet for now, and offer to approach the people that have had Seth’s bodyparts transplanted into them, on the condition TyrellCorp foots the bill for safer cybernetic replacements.

Hardlight OoC: Somebody is going to turn into roboAkira, but in character I’m all for this plan.
Flux: Using the Batman Solution of ‘My Superpower is Money’
The Magus: Especially since he’s getting another corporation to pay for it.

It IS a little surprising to learn that there’s been entire teams of other superheroes active in Edge City, fighting a Secret War against Mechanon, that we had no idea about.

GM: Not everybody is as flashy as you. You’re also a bit surprised that there’s a black market for repurposed robot parts as implants in Edge City.
The Magus (and Allana’s) player: Allana probably knows all about it but she’s retired.

That said, it’s rather weird that Mechanon has made 8 different covert attacks against Edge City - it’s possible he’s being excessively cautious against cybernetic enemies that he can’t control. Although an obsessive Mechanon that’s trying to figure out why he keeps failing, and why he can’t adapt against it, is not a good thing.

The Magus: He did once decide that his weakness was ‘I’m not 50ft tall’.

The Magus arranges something that will hopefully be funeral rites for a cyberoid. We’re approached by a guy that looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts - it’s the ‘Tyrell security’ guy that Scooter wanted to punch, months back, when we were dealing with a raid on one of their warehouses.

‘Security Muscle’: Ah, I hear you found my brother.
Hero Shrew: Hey, I remember you!
‘Security Muscle’: You do? I’m surprised - we only met once and we didn’t really meet.
Hero Shrew: Eh, I was itching to punch somebody and you looked like you could take it.
The Magus: He never forgets a potential target.
‘Security Muscle’: … OK. Anyway, thanks. I’m Cain.

Cain doesn’t want to tell us about exactly what he does, but does complain about the fact that when they shift to their combat form, they have to wait for their ion cannon to cool down before they can regrow their skin.

The Magus: I can see why that would be a problem - melting skin is not a good look.
Cain: Oh, I dunno - it’s useful when you’re interrogating somebody who doesn’t know you can’t do it to them.

Cain also warns us not to teleport into Tyrell Labs - the security systems are a bit proactive about anything they assume is a threat. Tyrell’s cover story to the recipients of the cyberoid parts is that they had supply chain problems and the implanted parts have components that Tyrell can’t guarantee.

GM: ‘Here take this, sign this air-tight NDA’

The guy with the eye is a problem - more work on his eye would affect his health insurance, and he doesn’t have enough medical leave left.

Flux: … theoretically, would you be averse to having the cybernetic eye removed and your real one grown back?
GM: Hardlight, you know corporate law - that would completely F*** up his insurance, since he’s on record as having a cybernetic eye, and Flux is the very definition of an unlicensed practitioner.

Of course, we can always put the eye removal down to an ‘ongoing investigation’ which would satisfy his insurance, technically, and ensure he can’t be fired for missing work. So we don’t have to arrange a court order.

Judge: I'm sorry, you want what??
Flux: I’m sorry, a raccoon made me do it.

The Magus: I presume one of us will have to inform PRIMUS about all this.
Hardlight: Bags not me.

They’re not going to be pleased that Tyrell invented a synthetic race with aggressively invasive cyberwear, and saw fit not to inform them. There’s four cyberoids waiting with Dr Madox when we come back - Cain, another man of similar build, and two women of athletic build.

GM: Oh - ‘build’. Unintentional pun.

We do need to track down and close down the parts black market, too. It’s a bit of a concern that somebody out there is running a bodymod shop without knowing if the recycled robot parts are even biocompatible. Certainly the paper trail on the eye was all faked, using pre-issued certification on eyes that failed quality assurance. We can probably guess where along the supply chain that happened.

GM: I imagine Flux is going ‘Well I’m not getting my cyberbrain installed THERE’
Flux: I’m adding them to The List.

Hero Shrew: I asked around if there was anybody who could give me a chainsaw arm, but nobody knew.
All: …
Fireflash: … why do you think you need a chainsaw arm?
Hero Shrew: It’d be cool.
Fireflash: No. No. Again I say no.
Flux: I think what happened there is that you asked them, they thought about your reputation, and pretended they didn’t know.
The Magus: There’s one person in the city who could implant a chainsaw arm in a Brick, and she’ld flick your nose for asking
GM: Two - Allana AND Dr Soma could do it, but she’s flick you too.

Hero Shrew DOES hear that the Daughters of Lilith, who have been tangling with chromer gangs lately, have been flashing extra cash around lately - they could certainly forge the paperwork.

GM: Hence my favourite Cyberpunk quote
Fireflash’s player: ‘Dead Guys Is Parts’
GM: ‘Dead is Dead, Parts is Parts, Dead Guys is Parts.’

Flux: So what’s the plan of action?
Hero Shrew: I go in and ask them if they can get me a chainsaw arm?
Fireflash: No.

Instead we get a warrant for surveillance, and Flux goes and has a cyberpathic poke around the computers of the suspect bodyshops. We learn that the brokers supplying the clinics all use the same courier service to deliver the parts. The same couriers occasionally pick up packages from the city morgue. And there are discrepancies between orders and deliveries in the form of manila envelopes. It seems almost certain that that’s the point that shenanigans are happening. Especially when The Magus’s Magesight reveals that one of the security guards still has the traces of a VIPER tattoo.

GM: He had it right up until his boss said ‘Get rid of that! We’re not in a Nest now! F***ing moron! There’s a whole range of approved snake themed tattoos that won’t raise alarm bells.’
The Magus: That said, anybody with a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ tattoo is alarming for entirely different reasons.

Hero Shrew: Well, that’s a link to Seth’s death, at least.
Fireflash: … so it is.

We can even set up surveillance from office space overlooking the VIPER courier building. Handy.

GM: You’ll have to rotate the static surveillance since all have day jobs or other commitments - even Scooter has appearances he has to make. Although The Rep is this close to getting a shock collar that Scooter will actually feel and pay attention to.

We soon confirm that they have contacts with the Daughter of Lilith, too, and can at least pretend to share some of their rather extreme sexual politics.

GM: Which is basically ‘F*** Men - It’s all they’re good for.’ But you also learn that the Daughters have had upgrades lately.
The Magus: *sigh* Of COURSE VIPER provided them with venomous fangs. I give VIPER a lot of crap, but they know how to stay on brand.

Our GM used a random name generator to come up with the company name. One of the first it produced was Viper Delivery.

The Magus OoC: We need to outsource more of our investigations to random name generators, that was much quicker.

Instead he goes with Basilisk Ltd.

The Magus: I can picture the cell leader complaining over drinks one night “It wasn’t even ABOUT snakes until that f***ing Harry Potter book come out.”
Flux: “And now it’ll just look suspicious if we deregister the name!”

We also record a mention of something called The Old Seam, which Fireflash recognises as a reference to a local cemetery some two centuries old.

The Magus: Making it new and hip compared to many of the world’s cemeteries.
GM: True, but it’s one of the rare remnants of Old Monterey.

Especially after that weather machine malfunction decades ago that turned Monterey into a disaster area ripe for complete redevelopment, long before later disasters left Edge City crippled. At least the vampire problem isn’t as bad as it could be.

The Magus: Shooting fire from your eyes is a surprisingly common ability, these days.

Having their meeting at the Old Seam is actually pretty clever.

GM: No-one is going to notice a bunch of goth chicks in a graveyard. In the early evening, anyway, before it gets so late that someone asks ‘Why are you in this graveyard’?
The Magus: Nothing good happens in graveyards at 4 in the morning.

Hardlight’s player: Sundog suggested I get a "Skill levels>With a group of similar skills" thing. Now, while I'm sure I could just get an "All Int Skills" booster for 5 points, I should probably like, make it slightly more Lore-friendly, and turn it into a cyberbrain chip...At which point I realise... I don't actually have a cyberbrain! XD
Flux’s player: You also already have hard-to-explain 'cyberware'
Hardlight’s player: This is very true. Just trying to figure out how to make something like that fit with character lore, is all. I'd rather not just have Gareth wake up one day mysteriously being able to just ‘think slightly better’...Unless it's a plot hook…. brain wooooorms
The Magus’ player: Removing the lodged crayon has worked for other patients.
Hardlight’s player: Touché!

Another oddity regarding current events in Kintargo - there were a number of mercenaries in town when Thrune took over. But instead of hiring them, which is kind of what mercenaries are for, they’re all being held prisoner at Kintargo’s salt works. Finding out why is probably worthwhile, and hey, maybe they’ll give us a discount rate if we rescue them. It’s possible that the leader of the mercs, one Forvian Crowe, has a personal animosity towards Thrune (and hey, who could blame him) but Laria thinks they could make good recruits to the rebellion regardless of their personal opinions about the Dogf***er.

The Sallix Salt Works are built on the shoreline underneath the eastern wall of Kintargo, near the now mostly irrelevant Salt Gate in the aforementioned wall. Brine is shipped in, and boiled dry on the premises.

Terzo: That seems wildly inefficient. The fuel requirements alone are ridiculous.
Civilla: That's why they use slave labour. Like the mercenaries we’re rescuing.

The market adjacent to the salt works is mostly dedicated to building supplies and related products, but Civilla and Ayva do have a good reason to be hanging around, which is convenient - maybe we can arrange a good deal on rebuilding the Livery prior to filling the basement with armed mercenaries.

Civilla casts Ears of the City on Terzo, in order to divine details about the salt works and the prisoners. Terzo isn’t entirely happy about gathering information with magic.

Terzo: The problem with doing it this way is that I don’t get to go around a dozen different pubs and ask a few innocent questions between drinks.
Civilla: You think that’s a problem, do you? I think it’s a bonus.

Although using Ears of the City DOES ensure that nobody notices, for example, an increasingly drunk Terzo going from bar to bar asking questions.

Ayva: Or an increasingly annoyed party member with a wheelbarrow taking Terzo from bar to bar.

Apparently the previous owner of the salt works was arrested for tax evasion, and killed when he resisted. Barzillai has now seized the premises as a money-earner for the government.

Civilla: Well, at least Barzillai is honest about the nationalisation process.
Terzo: How so?
Civilla: For ‘nationalised’ read ‘stole’.

We also learn, via the spell, that Crowe and his soldiers are being worked to death because of their faith in Sarenrae, the goddess of healing. That’s the kind of thing that can get you in huge trouble should any Asmodeans find out, and that’s exactly what happened.

Civilla gets quite thoughtful about the Salt Gate - they haven’t been closed in years, since the internal mechanism has rusted stiff, but that suggests a few ideas to Civilla.

Civilla: A plaaaaaan is forming in my miiiind.

Civilla wants Terzo to Grease the gate mechanism when we leave, so we can stop pursuit. Doing anything more permanent would probably annoy Thrune and provoke another Proclamation.

Terzo OoC: So basically we need a bucket of WD-40.

Civilla: In case we are chased.
Rajira: *snickers*
Civilla: Grease doesn’t last very long either.
Rajira: *snickers louder*
Civilla: CHASED, not CHASTE. CHASED as in PURSUED.

Civilla also has to keep her footmen loyal - otherwise they’ll eventually figure out she’s up to something and might inform on her. Telling them to wait with the carriage outside the salt works and suddenly running up with a troop of mercenaries and expecting them all to fit in like it was some kind of clown car would be a bit suspicious. Instead we sneak up to the door of the salt works late at night, get the door open, and knock Thrune’s blackshirts out with Lullaby and Sleep spells.

Civilla: See? I’m perfectly good at Stealth, as long as everybody is asleep.

We silently tie the unconscious guards up, release the prisoners, and tiptoe out again without the rest of the guards in the building hearing a thing.

Civilla: And give a short prayer to Noctiluca.
Terzo: … isn’t that the demon goddess of darkness and lust?
Civilla: … I can see we’re going to have to have a conversation later.

Rajira: And nobody even saw us.
Terzo: All that effort into disguises, hoods and Oaths of Anonymity wasted.
Civilla: Not wasted, reserved for future endeavours.

GM: … well then.
Civilla OoC: That’s this party’s warcry - ‘Sorry, Not Sorry’

Civilla: I mean, it won’t be hard for the authorities to figure out what happened - all the guards fall asleep at once and wake up bound. Unless they leap to some wrong conclusions. I can picture the Inquisitor asking “So WHY were you enjoying a BDSM orgy?”
Rajira OoC: ‘And why were you letting the prisoners top you?’

It WILL make an amusing rumour to spread once we get the underground press running. Something to keep in mind for the future.

That rescue cost us one first-level spell and a cantrip. We might have time for another mission this evening, after leading Crowe and his men to the Livery basement, before the curfew even comes down. Going via the Tiefling ghetto is also convenient, given how many friends we have there after dealing with the tooth fairy problem - that makes the residents less likely to comment on the large group of half naked prisoners sneaking through the alleyways. But instead of another mission tonight, we decide instead to make sure the mercs have food, clothes, and bedding.

Civilla: It shows that we consider them important enough to put off other important tasks.

Civilla: Liria told us about your predicament.
Crowe: Ah, so that’s why you came to our aid.
Ayva: She bribed us with scones.
Crowe: Damn, we owe that curvy little vixen our lives.

At least we temporarily disrupted the salt works, but it won’t take long to replace the unfortunate workers.

Terzo: Probably with Tieflings
GM: To be honest, right now, it’s going to be those thugs.

Permanently disrupting the salt works is also a goal for the future.

Civilla: Any way to reduce Thrune’s ability to punish the populace.

And, of course, effortlessly ghosting our way in and out of the salt works will increase our Notoriety, and rescuing the Black Feather Mercenaries will make us more friends among Kintargo’s population.

But we still need to investigate the ruins of Raxus’ family home, the Thrashing Badger pub, and the Silver Star music shop, for any clues the Dogf***er’s arsonists may have left intact. There isn’t much left at the latter, and not being able to see in the dark doesn’t help. On the other hand, accidentally falling through a hidden trapdoor is quite helpful, at least in that it unearths some useful potions and scrolls.

On the other hand, having our carriage pulled over by one of the Kintargo guardsmen, especially since he’s backed up by three of Thrune’s blackshirts.

Civilla: How can we be of assistance to you fine civic-minded individuals?
Thug: I’m sure you good folk are unaware, since it only happened ten minutes ago, but this road is now a tollway. The toll is a mere five gold. Per passenger.
Civilla: Five gold? How interesting. I assume you have your Writ?
Terzo: And a receipt book?
Civilla: That too.
Thug: I have my Writ right here *hefts mace*
Terzo: *casts Lullaby* Go to sleep, little A**hole, do not cry.

All three drop to Civilla’s Sleep spell, and she orders her drivers to move the carriage on.

Civilla: We do not want to cut their throats in front of my drivers.
Ayva: So we’ll leave them there to be inevitably pickpocketed?
Civilla: Or killed by any number of Kintargo’s other residents.

Unfortunately most of the Thrashing Badger washed out to sea when the boardwalk burnt through, and it wasn’t Terzo’s local drinking hole.

Ayva: Terzo has been kicked out of most of the pubs in Kintargo.
Terzo: Rolled out of, possibly.

The Badger used to be the rowdiest alcohol dispensary in the city, but any of its regulars have moved on to other establishments. It seems likely one of the more notable regulars, the fairy dragon Vendalfek, will have moved to one of them too. Perhaps Clenchjaw’s, although the name does not inspire images of fun and harmless hooliganism.

Although given the fact that we walk in on a mass bar fight, that pauses only long to look at us come in, it might be a more enthusiastic clientele than the name suggests.

Terzo: Don’t mind us, carry on as you were.

Terzo: Well, at least if they're all so busy with their fistfight, they’re less likely to remember what we look like.
Civilla: I fear they’re going to remember us anyway. Two of us anyway.
Rajira: I’m wearing my hood over my head. But I am over 6ft and attractive.
Civilla: That’s what I meant. But Terzo is going to attract attention anyway, as they see him accompanied by the three of us and try to figure out ‘How?!’

Ayva: So we set up at the bar, wait for information to come to us, and maim anybody that assumes we’re call girls.

We claim a table that doesn’t leave our backs to the door, and order refreshments.

Terzo: A bottle of your most enjoyable wine, dear.
Barmaid: We’ve got wine, water, watered wine, or if you want something spicy, wined water.

Ayva just gets a small beer, and Rajira some hard mead.

Civilla: It’s not like we can get mint liqueur anymore.

Unfortunately Ayva also complains about not being able to get night tea, and we get told off by a neighbouring sailor.

Old Salt: Word to the wise - I know you’re new here but one of the house rules is No Politics. *to Terzo* And you, you - how’d you’d end up in the company of three buxom lasses like these? Care to share the love?
Terzo: It’s my irresistible charm, dear man - I can’t beat them off with a stick.
Civilla: Buxom? Buxom?
Ayva: I don’t recall being buxom.
Rajira: *puts an arm around Ayva* Don’t worry, you’re buxom enough for me.

GM: You settle down to enjoy your drinks. Make a Perception check.
Ayva OoC: Ah, it’s one of those bars where adventures happen.
Terzo OoC: Well we already have a hooded stranger, but they’re a member of the party.
Terzo: *fails the check miserably* This is a very enjoyable wine.

Rajira’s resistance to poison probably means she could have drunk anything behind the bar, but she's not going to get the chance. Ayva spots the lizard with butterfly wings in the rafters, laughing at the barfight. This is presumably Vendalfek. When he realises he’s been spotted, he goes invisible. Ayva Messages the fairy dragon.

Ayva: Vendalfek We Know You’re There
Civilla: FFS can you be more ominous? At least indicate we’re friendly first.

The doors of the pub swing open all by themselves.

Rajira: And there goes our informant.
Terzo: What was he doing in the rafters?
Ayva: Everybody enjoys a good bar fight.
Terzo: He probably started it.

Ayva tries a more diplomatic Message, and the dragon pokes its head back in and indicates we should follow.

Civilla: It’s nearly curfew - we should head home. Come along Terzo.
Terzo: But I’m still enjoying this wine!
Civilla:
.
Terzo: Can I get this in a doggy bag?
Ayva: Damn. First good mead I’ve had in years.
Civilla: We’re far too far south for good mead.

Vendalfek 

Vendalfek: What do you humans want, anyway? I’ve only just found a new bar to live in after your lot burned the last one down.
Rajira: Not ‘my’ humans.
Civilla: *Diplomatically remains silent, specifically about her own ancestry*

We do determine why Thrune’s agents burned the place to the ground - it probably has something to do with the Roses Vendalfek kept overhearing about.

Vendalfek: Did I live in a bar that was a secret meeting place for a society of florists?

More like Milani’s Rose of Kintargo, a rebellious cult. They were arrested by Thrune’s personal enforcers, one of whom has an ominous magic sword.

Rajira OoC: Oh great, we have an Edgelord.

Civilla: These Roses they took - fun people?
Vendalfek: Oh yes.
Civilla: And the Dottari - not fun?
Vendalfek: Definitely not.
Civilla: So, what do you think about playing a few pranks on the dotteri?

Vendalfek is agreeable, and the rebellion has a new ally. Just as well, since Vendalfek also overheard that they were planning to Doghouse one of the Roses.

Terzo: Oh dear.
Vendalfek: I’d like a doghouse - cosy.
Civilla: Doghousing involves feeding a prisoner to one of Thrune’s feral mastiffs. And they starve the dog first.

Terzo: Out of curiosity, Mr Dragon - why was the barman unconscious in the corner in there?
Civilla: He was no fun.
Vendalfek: Such a stickler for the rules.

And then there is more quiet recruiting of partisans, and smuggling funds into the Rebellion’s pockets. And dealing with the fact that the Dottari are taking an alarming interest in Liria’s coffeehouse...

Liria: *communicates by frantic eyebrow-waggling* *DISTRACT THEM!*
Civilla: Um, ah, what? *grabs Rajira and kisses her*
Rajira: *briefly startled then grabs Civilla and kisses back*
Civilla: Eep.
Terzo: *looks briefly surprised and annoyed, and mutters something about ‘alright for some’ before returning his attention to his drink*

Of course the fact that Rajira might LOOK human, but doesn’t TASTE human, and has fangs and forked tongue, might be even more distracting, if Civilla hadn’t already figured out what Rajira actually was. It distracts the male Dottari though, until their female superior officer slaps them upside the head.

Rajira: Thankyou, m’dear, but I believe it’s my set. *casts Fascinate, which fails*
GM: I’m sorry, but the slap worked and they’re concentrating on their job again.

Instead we order a pot of coffee, which will give Liria an excuse to go into the pantry and move a few sacks over the hidden door in the floor.

Civilla: Wait, no, it’s tea that Thrune has a problem with, isn’t it.
Terzo: We can always ask these nice Dottari if coffee and tea are the same thing.
Civilla: Better not - we don’t want to give the authorities an opportunity to decide they are.

Apparently somebody sent the Dottari an anonymous letter alleging unsavoury practises at the coffeehouse.

Liria: The only unsavoury things here are the muffins.
Civilla: Unsavoury practises? I’ve kept my clothes on this time.
Rajira: We’ll see if that lasts the night.

Civilla manages to convince them that somebody is wasting their time, barely - sometimes you roll low but the bad guys still roll lower. The Dottari leave.

Terzo: I trust Liria offered them a complimentary muffin.

Rajira grabs Civilla and drags her over to the bar.

Rajira: Something strong - 120 proof at least. Swill this around in your mouth before you swallow. My saliva can be toxic and I’d rather you didn’t become ill.
Civilla: I’d rather not.
Rajira: … OK.
Civilla: I mean I’d rather not smell like I’ve been swilling the kind of alcohol I usually use for cleaning purposes.

GM: Oh god, somebody gave Vendalfek coffee.
Civilla: actually we shouldn’t shut down the Salt Works - that way if anybody else gets imprisoned there we can rescue them, too.
Rajira: And some of the prisoners they send there have actually been arrested for good reasons. There’s always actual criminals around.
Civilla: True, but Thrune is employing those.

Civilla decides to take the air, with her compatriots and supposed paramour, to scout out the ruins of Rexus’ family home that we have to investigate. After all, since Terzo is her tutor and Ayva is her business partner, we actually have a good reason to be strolling around the expensive part of town. Rexus doubts we’ll find anything, but Civilla thinks it will still be worth a look. It’s certainly suspicious that the ruins of the Victocora estate are under permanent armed guard, even this many weeks after the fire. Perhaps we can stay at Civilla’s family home, so we can come back after dark without having to sneak back into the Kintargo equivalent of a Gated Community?

Civilla: Eh, it would attract attention to them and they’d ask questions. Trust me, they’d ask questions, it’s what Alazarios do. It’s one reason we’re not very popular with House Thrune.

We decide to wait until after curfew, and sneak along the alley between the city walls and the noble estates, and climb over the estate wall into the ruins. Which is a good plan, if we didn’t run into a Dottari guard patrolling the other way.

Rajira: *drunkenly slurs* Hey there, handsome.
GM: Roll to Seduce.

Dottari: What are you DOING here, woman, it’s almost after curfew! Come with me!
Rajira: Oh, I’m sure we can find something much more fun to do…
GM: You were unlucky enough to get the nice guard, and he’s actually insisting on escorting you back to your home.
Rajira: S***.

Rajira: *signals the rest of the party* Should I take him out?
Civilla: *summons a monster frog out of the ground*
Dottari: What the Hells is that! GET BEHIND ME!
Rajira: *clonks him on the head*
Civilla: Can somebody cut him in half?
Rajira: … not without getting blood all over my clothes, no.
Ayva: … Why?
Civilla: My frog can’t eat something that large. Unless we fold him double, maybe.

Terzo is rather perturbed by the murder, and reminds so during the wall-clambering and ruins search. It’s Ayva that finds the remains of a recent preparatory ritual next to the ornamental lake on the property. Apparently a witch did something here, more recently than the fire. Civilla cautiously wades into the lake and promptly vanishes with a splash, into a lake that’s supposed to be thigh deep at best. It’s now way more than 60 feet deep, and there’s something glowing blue in the depths.

Terzo OoC: So the Victocoras had a secret nuclear reactor in their pond.

Civilla: Just as well I can summon Celestial Dolphins.

Civilla and Rajira descend, and are soon spotted by somebody else swimming down here, who hurriedly swims into a side tunnel. Unfortunately there’s also a grate, which Civilla can Dimensional Slide through at least, in a search for some kind of opening mechanism. The tunnel on this slide slopes upwards.

Civilla: I’ll return to the others and get high.
All: LOL.

Sending Rajira back to the surface when they do may have been a mistake, since some kind of magical pulse boils up the shaft and engulfs Rajira while she’s on her way up. She’s turned to stone, which doesn’t make things any easier for the dolphin.

Terzo OoC: Do I need to throw some waterwings in there?

Still, Terzo and Ayva are rather alarmed by the petrification, at least until Ayva determines it will only be temporary - apparently that was a wild magic surge. So all we know is that somebody, probably a witch, was messing around at the bottom of an unexpectedly deep lake, and we have no idea who or why. Civilla has followed the zig-zagging tunnel to another grate, with a room on the other side.

GM: This is clearly a Spellcasters Only route.
Civilla OoC: And this is me. *casts Dimensional Slide again*. Was this really supposed to stop low level characters? One Halfling wizard with Reduce Person would go right through it.
GM: …. Excuse me a moment while I consult the next book of the campaign.

She’s apparently somewhere underneath the Hall of Records. She casts Pass Without Trace and Disguise Self to reduce the chance the Dottari wandering about don’t find her. Disguising herself as that Dottari officer from last night gets her out of the building without too much attention, and she dispatches one of the Silver Raven devices to let us know she’s heading to the Alazario estate. This is a relief to the rest of us, although Rajira has already seen the disguised Civilla on the road.

Terzo: Well, I must say we’re glad to see you alive - when Rajira came back up turned to stone and wrapped around a dolphin, and no sign of you, we were a bit concerned.
Civilla: Turned to stone? What did I miss?

Civilla excuses herself to write some letters to her family, suggesting they buy the Victocora estate and hinting that they should keep the lake as is but not investigate too closely.

Civilla: ‘There’s a secret back entrance to the Hall of Records? That’ll be useful when it reopens’

Civilla: There are currently two cults of Noctiluca - the ones who are wrong and the ones that are right.
Ayva OoC: I can see her followers inquiring about what happened, and when they find out, go ‘wait, she did WHAT to WHO and then WHAT????’.

GM: I just looked up what Night Tea actually is, and it’s nothing about ‘disturbing the balance of the slumbering mind’ - it’s a prophylactic.

Civilla gets a delivery while she’s writing at Laria’s coffeehouse - less a package than a bouquet. Of very beautiful roses, with a slip of paper concealed down among the stems.

Rajira: And there was me thinking I had a rival for your affections.

Perhaps predictably, it’s from the Rose of Kintargo, the Milani cult that is also planning a rebellion against Barzillai Thrune. They warn us not to act rashly, and promise to contact us soon. We recruit a team of street performers, who we call Nobody’s Fools, and put the finishing touches on the former Livery. In fact we’re just getting ready to open up when a small child runs in screaming for help.

Rajira: What’s wrong with the spawnling?
Tiefling Kid: She’s been taken!
Civilla: Who?
Tiefling Kid: Zea! The bad people! They said they're going to put her in a doghouse!

If we’re quick we might be able to intercept them before they reach Aria Park - it’s fortunate that the Livery is practically next door to the ghetto. We all pile into the carriage.

Civilla: Come along child - you get to ride in a carriage!

Unfortunately they get to the park first - the pagoda in the middle of the lily pond in Aria Park has been converted into a kennel for any of the dogs the citizens of Kintargo have been handing in for the reward. It’s also Thrune’s thug's choice of destination for anybody they decide has insulted the throne. Civilla gets her disposable cloak ready - if necessary she’ll swap costumes with Zea so the blackshirts chase the wrong person. She’ll also Summon a Celestial Dog, tell it to play Keep Away over to the east of the pond, and use that to distract the thugs. After all, they’ll certainly try and catch it for the reward, and the mortal mastiffs will probably go mental. Then the rest of us can sneak up and overwhelm the other thugs, under the cover of the borking.

Dottari on far side of pond: Hey, there’s a dog!
Celestial Dog and Mastiffs: Play? Play! Play! Play!
Dottari on our side of the Pond: What the **** is happening over there/
Rajira: *kukris them in the back*

GM: The surviving thugs all need to make Handle Animal checks.
Ayva’s player: I’ve had to walk a Saint Bernard before - these thugs might be going for A Walk.
GM: Aaaand they all failed their check.

One of the thugs invents water-skiing as his mastiff drags him into the pond, and the rest all chase off after the dogs that are supposedly in their charge. Zea can basically stroll off while they’re busy.

GM: … Good work. I basically doubled the number of NPCs that were supposed to be here, too.
Terzo: With only two spells again.
Ayva OoC: If we were playing rogues we wouldn’t even have needed that.
Rajira OoC: If we were all playing rogues we’d have Stealth Synergy and have ghosted through the entire scenario. I rolled a 1 and they STILL didn’t see me.

Ayva: And we’re home in time for curfew.
Rajira: At this rate the Dottari are going to start talking about The Ghosts.

Although trying to squeeze Zea and the kid into the carriage with the rest of us is a bit tricky - fortunately the rest of us are a lot skinnier than Terzo.

Civilla: In this group are one and a half humans.

Zea is suitably grateful for the rescue, and doesn’t know why she was targeted - it may have been a random sweep. Civilla casts Ears of the City to find out. It looks like the Asmodeans came after Zea because she’s trying to hold the ghetto together now their actual leader has gone missing. And Thrune’s troops are making concerted efforts to solve the Tiefling Problem for good.

Rajira: The Asmodeans boink devils like it’s going out of style, then try to eliminate the results.
Civilla: Welcome to Cheliax - they’re wonderfully hypocritical.
Rajira: So the next sweep team that goes into the ghetto doesn’t come back.
Civilla: I’d rather they come back - but without pants.

It doesn’t appear that Thrune actually ordered this - he doesn’t seem to care either way. The blackshirts are acting on their own initiative.

Civilla: Oh, it’s blackshirts doing the sweeps? In that case we go with Rajira’s suggestion - any sweep teams that come in, don’t come out.
Terzo: *hopefully* So we’re going to be keeping them tied up in a basement somewhere?
Rajira: No, we’re going to cut their throats and dump the bodies in a cesspit.
Terzo: …. oh.

Civilla: Perfect! We render them down as soaps and fertilizers for the rich.
Terzo: I’m going to assume you’re joking.
Rajira: No.
Civilla: Have you ever heard me joke about anything alchemical?
Ayva: You should hear the one about the alembic.

Civilla: I don’t think Terzo has quite figured out the situation he’s in. He’s definitely the softest of us.
Ayva: Every ‘smore needs a marshmallow.

Thrune: They might just be Tieflings, but taking a prominent member of their community was going to anger them. At least they left my dogs alone.

There is one possible problem looming - a Tiefling gang, the Red Jills, who would happily escalate the violence beyond any sane limit. So we have to persuade them to limit their mayhem to a level that won’t invite reprisals from Thrune.

Terzo: Oh, I know where they hang out.
Ayva: Terzo knows everyone. Sorry, every pub.

Their current lair is an old temple of Aroden, an immortal human who was the focus of a whole bunch of prophecies, but who then died mysteriously and threw all those prophecies out the window. His temples have closed up shop. So now the building is occupied by the Red Jills, who hate humans, and their leader a winged Strix, one Scarplume, who hates humans even more.

Civilla: Anybody have any ideas how we can use this? It’s sounding suspiciously like we’re walking into a fair fight. I’d rather not fight at all, obviously, but this is sounding more and more like a fair one, and that I do not like.

Civilla: I don’t think these are our kind of people - do we really want to recruit them?
Terzo: Well, the last thing we want is a circular firing squad among the partisans.
Rajira: The Revolution is for everyone.
Civilla: But these Jills are already attacking the general citizenry - we want them to focus on the actual threat.

Civilla: The Strix have a reputation as baby-snatching monsters. And I can say that because I can speak Strix….. I’m going to have to do all the talking, aren’t I.

At least our smuggling contact has done some work for the Red Jills. The Jills might also be desperate for a new fence, too. And the Strix has something in common with the tengu, too - they have wings, at least. We can organise a meet on Red Jill turf without being instantly murdered.

definitely quotable, that
Champions : Return To Edge City : The Right To Bear Arms
GM: You’ve actually been a stabilising influence on Edge City.
Hero Shrew OoC: Well that’s good to know. If somewhat horrifying considering I’m one of the people involved.

Hero Shrew: I really should let Sally down lightly.
GM: What????
Hero Shrew’s player: You know, my co-worker that I’ve been romantically interested in since the start of the campaign.
GM: Yes, I know who she is, but as a player are you delusional enough to think you had a chance?
Hero Shrew’s player: As a player, no, but Scooter sure is.

GM: The aliens are still a bit confused by Earth’s technology level - at least two groups have anti-grav technology but it’s not in wide usage anywhere else.
Hero Shrew OoC: While other groups still have horse-drawn vehicles.
The Magus OoC: And UNTIL even has anti-antigrav tech.

Fireflash OoC: I need to change my Psychological Limitation from ‘Show-off’ to “Only Sane Woman’
GM: Fair.

Meanwhile, Hardlight is examining the cybernetic technology released by one of his business rivals. It’s a bit puzzling, especially because he can’t find any processors in it. He’s going to need help.

GM: ‘Hey Flux, I’ve got this guy’s arm, come look at it.’
Flux: Um.

It turns out the processors are distributed throughout the entire device. And it’s trying to find connections to Hardlight’s local systems.

Hardlight: This is getting more and more like a ‘kill it with fire’ situation.
GM: It doesn’t look like Mechanon or Destroyer-tech.
Hardlight OoC: So? I don't want them getting a hold of it either!

Between Hardlight, Flux, Fireflash, the Magus, they decide to experiment and investigate by leaving it on a laptop in an air-gapped Faraday cage and see what happens. If this thing can teach itself to interface with any systems from nervous systems to laptops, it’s a pretty shocking advance in technology. Eventually they hook it up themselves, and it promptly fuses with the laptop.

Hardlight: Does it at least show up as a USB drive?

Flux recognises some of the code running as resembling the kind of thing that happens at a cyberbrain interface.

Hardlight: This isn’t hardware - it’s wetware. Dampware?

GM: The Tyrell corp have developed a cybernetic device that doesn’t count as a machine, and is therefore functionally immune to cyberpathy.
The Magus OoC: They've got a bunch of captured Cybertronians in the basement and they’re hacking limbs off them.

It’s also partially opaque to The Magus’ Magesight.

Hardlight: So, who wants to go raid Tyrell?
Flux: Raid is such a harsh word.

Magus uses his powers of Scrying to find whatever this arm may have originally been connected to. Various parts seem to be attached to citizens across the city, but one particularly large fraction of it is found in a parts bin, about to be melted down for scrap. It’s the Head and Torso of an extremely humanoid robotic creature. Poking around inside reveals Tyrell tech, but nothing known in official databases. This is likely some kind of prototype for internal use only.

Hardlight: So the question is: How the hell did a hideously advanced, damn-near-human cybernetic creature get out of an internal Tyrell lab, die, and instead of being thrown into a Tyrell furnace, end up in a recycling bin?
The Magus: Hmm - so this robot is actually dead. I wonder if it left a ghost?

Hardlight: OK, I’m going to do something very stupid.
Hero Shrew OoC: I thought that was my job.

Hardlight looks inside the robot’s head - it’s not actually organic, but the organisation has some similarity. The foam-lattice design isn’t wholly original, but it’s very very complex compared to previous examples. It certainly looks like a Tyrell design - the hardwired Laws seem to be part of it.

The Magus sits Flux down to run through the basics of Necromancy.

GM: Which the Magus seems disturbingly familiar with.

Flux also learns more about why magic-users usually work in teams. In this case, it’s to wait behind the Magus with a baseball bat, just in case anything untoward happens while the Magus is in his trance state.

The Magus: Can You Hear Me?
Hero Shrew: Yes?
Hardlight: I think he’s talking to the ghost, Scooter.

Hero Shrew: So he’s trying to summon a robot ghost. If it was a ghost robot pirate we’d have the whole trifecta.

Robot Ghost: Hello? Yes, I can hear you. Who are you?
The Magus: Hello - I’m Damien, but most people call me the Magus.
Robot Ghost: Hello. I’m Seth.
The Magus: Do you know where you are?
Robot Ghost: I think I’m dead - how weird is that?

Seth: I think I remember dying now… and it’s not easy to kill us.
The Magus: Us?
Seth: Er… can you forget I said that?

Seth seems quite concerned that his being killed will expose his friends, or possibly get somebody into trouble, since they’re not ready to be revealed. He’s initially fine that the rest of his parts got installed into various people, but then gets quite upset that it’s into biological people, especially if they have other cyberwear.

Seth: That could be bad. We’re Nexus Series. Tyrell Corp could get in trouble. We’re Nexus Series! We have an important job! We’re Nexus Series! It’s an Important Job! People could get hurt! We’ve run the projections, the city needs us!

Seth saw and recognised whoever decapitated him while he was on his mission, but they were more powerful than he expected.

Seth: Tell Dr Madox I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to die.
The Magus: Is there anybody else?
Seth: Tell my brothers and sisters. But Dr Madox can tell them.

Seth is also confused that his 55 siblings didn’t collect his remains, especially if they completed whatever their Important Job was. On the other hand, if they were killed surely their ghosts would be floating around in whatever digital afterlife Seth currently resides in.

Seth: It’s quiet here. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now. Huh. Azura was right. You people have it easy.

It’s probably highly relevant that Seth and Azura are two of the 56 children of Adam and Eve. It’s also probably relevant that Seth considers the Moreaus, created by Genesys, cousins.

Hardlight: *sigh* Why is it that Edge City has such a hard-on for creating new sentient lifeforms?
GM: Part of that is Hardlight. You have Weirdness Magnet.

One of the players is late getting to the game.

GM: It’s Saturday evening, it’s either the game he’s GMing or the one where he wears underpants inappropriately.
Fireflash OoC: At least he wears underpants.
Hero Shrew OoC: And I’m freeballing all the time.
GM: *sigh* you have no idea how hard The Rep works. Suffice to say, he earns his commission.

GM: Which of you has experience talking to dead artificial minds?
Hero Shrew: I could say me but I’d be lying.
Fireflash: I have some experience talking to college bros.

Anyway, now we have one Dr Elly Madox to investigate. Some years back she helped develop the groundwork for the modern Biochip Interface, before moving to pure robotics, and jumping ship to Tyrell. ‘Coincidentally’ the company has developed a lot of fancy tech since then. At least if we show up in our superheroic identities, the Tyrell functionaries will probably kick the problem upstairs until we’re talking to somebody that actually knows what happened. Whether those people are actually willing to tell us is another problem, of course. Happily, Dr. Madox seems willing to meet Hardlight, although for some reason he decides to take Scooter along despite the risk to property.

Dr. Madox: So, why did you want to see me?
Hardlight: I’m not sure how to say this…
Hero Shrew: ooh! Ooh! I can!
All: SCOOTER, NO.
Hardlight: We found Seth.
Dr. Madox: *goes pale* w...what?
Hardlight: One of your projects?
Dr. Madox: *through gritted teeth* Not how I would phrase it.
Hardlight: Sons?
Dr. Madox: Still not how I would phrase it. We can’t talk here.
Hero Shrew: I have to say I’m impressed - you were almost as blunt as I would have been.

Gareth explains how we found Seth’s bits, but Dr. Madox is more interested to know how we talked to him if he was nonfunctional when we did.

The Magus: This is more my area of expertise. I did a little necromancy and communicated with his spirit.
Dr. Madox: *slightly hysterical laughter* You talked to his ghost.
The Magus: Congratulations - you created life.
Dr. Madox: I don’t deserve your congratulations - we created nothing.
Hardlight: Um.

Dr. Madox explains that something degenerative infected some of her coworkers after the Genesys incident, and her cyberoid creations are their attempt to salvage something of their minds. There were dozens of Nexus series created, before their husband-and-wife templates were too far gone to be copied for more. The biblical names they somehow acquired didn’t help matters - Cain, for example, was quite upset about his namesake, and gets on quite well with Abel. Nonetheless, there are now dozens of cyberoids, immune to cyberpathy, that can easily pass for human. And that can grow and adapt.

Dr. Madox: I’ll ask you a question - how many times has Mechanon been an active threat to this city?
Fireflash: Given the implications of the question, I’ll have to guess more than we’ve heard about.
Dr. Madox: Eight. And each time it was the Nexus series that stopped him.
Hardlight: So you think Seth was killed by an agent of Mechanon?
Dr. Madox: No, Mechanon wasn’t the target of that operation - he was dealing with VIPER.

Apparently Seth’s killer was one of VIPER’s enhanced Draysha agents in a combat suit.

GM: I can’t remember how many sentient machines there are in the Champions universe. Not many.
Hero Shrew (and ROVER’s) player: You certainly couldn’t describe ROVER as sentient, given his brain ran on AmigaOS.

The GM’s adopted stray cat is being a bit demanding.

GM: This f***ing cat - she wasn’t this loud before.
Hardlight’s player: Yes she was - she was just outside.

Dr. Madox is extremely concerned that some of Seth’s parts were being used as human bionics - the Nexus series could quite easily create its own interfaces with implanted cyberbrains and interfaces, and is strongly inclined to do so. And there’s no technology Dr. Madox is aware of that would stop it growing its connections.

Dr. Madox: So these parts were effectively black market cybernetics - which begs the question why they didn’t activate during the salvage process.
The Magus: Would the damage to his brain have temporarily shut down the activity in the rest of his parts?
Dr. Madox: Hmm. Maybe. *sigh* Seth was always the gentlest of them. Was. I'm already talking about him in the past tense. You have to understand I’ve worked with these people for over a decade.
Fireflash: And you care for them. Perfectly understandable.

We agree to keep the problem quiet for now, and offer to approach the people that have had Seth’s bodyparts transplanted into them, on the condition TyrellCorp foots the bill for safer cybernetic replacements.

Hardlight OoC: Somebody is going to turn into roboAkira, but in character I’m all for this plan.
Flux: Using the Batman Solution of ‘My Superpower is Money’
The Magus: Especially since he’s getting another corporation to pay for it.

It IS a little surprising to learn that there’s been entire teams of other superheroes active in Edge City, fighting a Secret War against Mechanon, that we had no idea about.

GM: Not everybody is as flashy as you. You’re also a bit surprised that there’s a black market for repurposed robot parts as implants in Edge City.
The Magus (and Allana’s) player: Allana probably knows all about it but she’s retired.

That said, it’s rather weird that Mechanon has made 8 different covert attacks against Edge City - it’s possible he’s being excessively cautious against cybernetic enemies that he can’t control. Although an obsessive Mechanon that’s trying to figure out why he keeps failing, and why he can’t adapt against it, is not a good thing.

The Magus: He did once decide that his weakness was ‘I’m not 50ft tall’.

The Magus arranges something that will hopefully be funeral rites for a cyberoid. We’re approached by a guy that looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts - it’s the ‘Tyrell security’ guy that Scooter wanted to punch, months back, when we were dealing with a raid on one of their warehouses.

‘Security Muscle’: Ah, I hear you found my brother.
Hero Shrew: Hey, I remember you!
‘Security Muscle’: You do? I’m surprised - we only met once and we didn’t really meet.
Hero Shrew: Eh, I was itching to punch somebody and you looked like you could take it.
The Magus: He never forgets a potential target.
‘Security Muscle’: … OK. Anyway, thanks. I’m Cain.

Cain doesn’t want to tell us about exactly what he does, but does complain about the fact that when they shift to their combat form, they have to wait for their ion cannon to cool down before they can regrow their skin.

The Magus: I can see why that would be a problem - melting skin is not a good look.
Cain: Oh, I dunno - it’s useful when you’re interrogating somebody who doesn’t know you can’t do it to them.

Cain also warns us not to teleport into Tyrell Labs - the security systems are a bit proactive about anything they assume is a threat. Tyrell’s cover story to the recipients of the cyberoid parts is that they had supply chain problems and the implanted parts have components that Tyrell can’t guarantee.

GM: ‘Here take this, sign this air-tight NDA’

The guy with the eye is a problem - more work on his eye would affect his health insurance, and he doesn’t have enough medical leave left.

Flux: … theoretically, would you be averse to having the cybernetic eye removed and your real one grown back?
GM: Hardlight, you know corporate law - that would completely F*** up his insurance, since he’s on record as having a cybernetic eye, and Flux is the very definition of an unlicensed practitioner.

Of course, we can always put the eye removal down to an ‘ongoing investigation’ which would satisfy his insurance, technically, and ensure he can’t be fired for missing work. So we don’t have to arrange a court order.

Judge: I'm sorry, you want what??
Flux: I’m sorry, a raccoon made me do it.

The Magus: I presume one of us will have to inform PRIMUS about all this.
Hardlight: Bags not me.

They’re not going to be pleased that Tyrell invented a synthetic race with aggressively invasive cyberwear, and saw fit not to inform them. There’s four cyberoids waiting with Dr Madox when we come back - Cain, another man of similar build, and two women of athletic build.

GM: Oh - ‘build’. Unintentional pun.

We do need to track down and close down the parts black market, too. It’s a bit of a concern that somebody out there is running a bodymod shop without knowing if the recycled robot parts are even biocompatible. Certainly the paper trail on the eye was all faked, using pre-issued certification on eyes that failed quality assurance. We can probably guess where along the supply chain that happened.

GM: I imagine Flux is going ‘Well I’m not getting my cyberbrain installed THERE’
Flux: I’m adding them to The List.

Hero Shrew: I asked around if there was anybody who could give me a chainsaw arm, but nobody knew.
All: …
Fireflash: … why do you think you need a chainsaw arm?
Hero Shrew: It’d be cool.
Fireflash: No. No. Again I say no.
Flux: I think what happened there is that you asked them, they thought about your reputation, and pretended they didn’t know.
The Magus: There’s one person in the city who could implant a chainsaw arm in a Brick, and she’ld flick your nose for asking
GM: Two - Allana AND Dr Soma could do it, but she’s flick you too.

Hero Shrew DOES hear that the Daughters of Lilith, who have been tangling with chromer gangs lately, have been flashing extra cash around lately - they could certainly forge the paperwork.

GM: Hence my favourite Cyberpunk quote
Fireflash’s player: ‘Dead Guys Is Parts’
GM: ‘Dead is Dead, Parts is Parts, Dead Guys is Parts.’

Flux: So what’s the plan of action?
Hero Shrew: I go in and ask them if they can get me a chainsaw arm?
Fireflash: No.

Instead we get a warrant for surveillance, and Flux goes and has a cyberpathic poke around the computers of the suspect bodyshops. We learn that the brokers supplying the clinics all use the same courier service to deliver the parts. The same couriers occasionally pick up packages from the city morgue. And there are discrepancies between orders and deliveries in the form of manila envelopes. It seems almost certain that that’s the point that shenanigans are happening. Especially when The Magus’s Magesight reveals that one of the security guards still has the traces of a VIPER tattoo.

GM: He had it right up until his boss said ‘Get rid of that! We’re not in a Nest now! F***ing moron! There’s a whole range of approved snake themed tattoos that won’t raise alarm bells.’
The Magus: That said, anybody with a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ tattoo is alarming for entirely different reasons.

Hero Shrew: Well, that’s a link to Seth’s death, at least.
Fireflash: … so it is.

We can even set up surveillance from office space overlooking the VIPER courier building. Handy.

GM: You’ll have to rotate the static surveillance since all have day jobs or other commitments - even Scooter has appearances he has to make. Although The Rep is this close to getting a shock collar that Scooter will actually feel and pay attention to.

We soon confirm that they have contacts with the Daughter of Lilith, too, and can at least pretend to share some of their rather extreme sexual politics.

GM: Which is basically ‘F*** Men - It’s all they’re good for.’ But you also learn that the Daughters have had upgrades lately.
The Magus: *sigh* Of COURSE VIPER provided them with venomous fangs. I give VIPER a lot of crap, but they know how to stay on brand.

Our GM used a random name generator to come up with the company name. One of the first it produced was Viper Delivery.

The Magus OoC: We need to outsource more of our investigations to random name generators, that was much quicker.

Instead he goes with Basilisk Ltd.

The Magus: I can picture the cell leader complaining over drinks one night “It wasn’t even ABOUT snakes until that f***ing Harry Potter book come out.”
Flux: “And now it’ll just look suspicious if we deregister the name!”

We also record a mention of something called The Old Seam, which Fireflash recognises as a reference to a local cemetery some two centuries old.

The Magus: Making it new and hip compared to many of the world’s cemeteries.
GM: True, but it’s one of the rare remnants of Old Monterey.

Especially after that weather machine malfunction decades ago that turned Monterey into a disaster area ripe for complete redevelopment, long before later disasters left Edge City crippled. At least the vampire problem isn’t as bad as it could be.

The Magus: Shooting fire from your eyes is a surprisingly common ability, these days.

Having their meeting at the Old Seam is actually pretty clever.

GM: No-one is going to notice a bunch of goth chicks in a graveyard. In the early evening, anyway, before it gets so late that someone asks ‘Why are you in this graveyard’?
The Magus: Nothing good happens in graveyards at 4 in the morning.

Hardlight’s player: Sundog suggested I get a "Skill levels>With a group of similar skills" thing. Now, while I'm sure I could just get an "All Int Skills" booster for 5 points, I should probably like, make it slightly more Lore-friendly, and turn it into a cyberbrain chip...At which point I realise... I don't actually have a cyberbrain! XD
Flux’s player: You also already have hard-to-explain 'cyberware'
Hardlight’s player: This is very true. Just trying to figure out how to make something like that fit with character lore, is all. I'd rather not just have Gareth wake up one day mysteriously being able to just ‘think slightly better’...Unless it's a plot hook…. brain wooooorms
The Magus’ player: Removing the lodged crayon has worked for other patients.
Hardlight’s player: Touché!

Wrapped an adventure with the youth group a couple of hours ago.  We had a two-session adventure playtesting a conversion of Judge's Guild's old "Break In at Three Kilometer Island" (now renamed Kilowatt Island, for aesthetic reasons, and a tweaked character roster to include at least one character actually capable of carrying out the goal of the "break in."  Not sure why the original had neither powers nor gadgets to actually pull that off....).
 
At any rate, it was a smashing success, though I will have to finish the write-up of it to include a couple of on-the-fly tweaks that had to be made for Players reluctant to actually look _inside_ of buildings...      I love Players; I really do.
 
I opted to this adventure for a number of reasons, not the least of which was I nabbed the main villain decades ago, redecorated her and gave her a few quirks that have made her quite popular with Players over the years (Lord Liaden: she is one of those who is a villain _only_ because of her methods type characters, and is in fact the very one I had in mind when I posted the comment on the other thread a few days ago).  I took the name, extended the schtick-- why not just go ahead and convert the whole adventure, right?      
 
Skip all the way toward the dramatic showdown: the two-pronged assault has baffled the Players (not sure why; possibly because there has never before been a session where splitting the party actually made _sense_, so of course it's the one time they just couldn't bring themselves to do it.   
 
As Helen is making her getaway (sans Asmodeum and sans henchmen, no less), Kinetica has managed to use her superspeed and her desolidification to get into the rocket, and suddenly realizes that she is alone: her teammates are busy with villains as the rocket takes to the skies, and will soon be moving too fast for even Magnificent to catch it.  Kinetica makes her way cautiously to the nose of the retro-50's styled escape vehicle, nervousness of her Player making her insanely overcautious.  She finds her way into the control room, directly behind Helen who, without turning around, calls out jovially enough.  "Welcome aboard, Hero!  You're remarkably tenacious; you should be proud."  Helen then slowly spins around in her chair, her hands laid flat on the arms of the chair.  "Very few people have ever gotten this close to capturing me.  How does that make you feel?"
 
"Like I have made a bad idea, and I really need to figure out how to stay safe!"
 
Helen smirks and laughs just a bit.  "You know you'd actually be a lot safer six feet to your left..."
 
"Okay.  Thanks!"  [moves six feet to the left]
 
The entire rest of the group, OOC :"REALLY?!  Really?  Did you _really_ just do that?!!"
 
Helen:  "There...  Isn't that better?"  [presses a button and Kinetica _whooshes_ through the floor and out of the ship, plummeting toward the waters of Lake Campaign from 80,000 feet]  "_I_ certainly think it is."
 
 

HORROR ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS - PRELUDE
 
 
IN WHICH THE INVESTIGATORS GO TRAINSPOTTING, WITHOUT BENEFIT OF HARD DRUGS
 
*****
 
In 1204, a great city burns, and something inhuman preys on the people hung from the city walls. In 1922, a kindly professor has asked two of his friends, and a trustworthy journalist, if they could undertake an overnight expedition to Darkest Surrey. 
 
He’s being very mysterious about it too - not saying why he wants them to be on a certain country train platform hours after dark, just that they have cameras ready and that they’re not to compare notes until after they’ve recorded all their individual observations. Assuming anything actually happens. 
 
The investigators are -
 
Brian Randall Huxley, formerly a junior medical officer on HMS Fearless, traumatised during the so-called Battle of May Island where British submariners were sliced to pieces by the propellers of escorting warships. Post-war he has a lucrative consulting contract in the budding pharmaceutical industry, and uses it to fund his love for archaeology and ancient history, using back channels to import antiquities from Egypt and Tunisia. 
 
Antonio Gusto Masiero, an Italian airman of some renown, who arranged transport for Professor Smith to a number of his more remote digs, after the War. In 1922 he travelled to London to see the new planes and visit his dear friend, where they would discuss future travel prospects.
 
Florence 'Flo' Victoria Braxton-Hicks, of an Australian grazier family, who went into journalism with the approval of her parents, on the condition she do so somewhere where it wouldn’t embarrass the family. London fits the bill nicely.
 
 
Antonio’s player: This Prof. Julius Smith - is he a real person?
GM: No, purely fictional - which is just as well in Call of Cthulhu.
 
The three agree to assist the professor, make their plans for travel, equipment and accomodation. Flo’s tomboyish cousin Alexandria ‘Alex’ Braxton will be tagging along to make up the numbers
 
Antonio Gusto Masiero: I’ll go with Florence.
Florence 'Flo' Victoria Braxton-Hicks: Miss Braxton-Hicks if you don’t mind - we’ve only just been introduced.
Brian Randall Huxley: My, these Italians work fast.
 
There’s a pub in Stoneley, but no rooms. At least they have beer, and food, not that it’s likely to impress Antonio and Flo, both of whom have lived on the flavours of the Continent.
 
GM: British Cooking - boil it until it stops struggling. 
 
They also find out why the Professor sent them to the village - apparently there’s a ghost train every year. And any number of variations on the tale, especially about the woman that supposedly comes out to meet it. Alex encourages the tall tales, fueled on beer. The others at least try to stay sober, and unspoiled in their expectations, although Flo of course is recording everything in her notebook.
 
GM: What do you want for dinner? There’s two choices -  both of them are stew
 
GM: The locals don’t seem very interested in going to see the Ghost Train? Why would they when they can stay in the pub and tell stories about it instead. There’s beer and a fire and stew.
 
Leaving Alex rugged up and passed out in the car, the trio prepare for their vigil - Huxley even puts a few pieces of gravel on the tracks to see if they are disturbed by the passage of this supposed Ghost Train.
 
Florence: Yes, nothing like risking a derailment.
 
And a little after nine in the evening, a train actually appears - out of thin air, and faintly luminous. Antonio and Florence are deeply shocked, and her half-frozen fingers certainly don’t help with the photos. Huxley takes more photos of his own face than of the train - which fades rapidly from existence the moment Antonio tries to step aboard.
 
Florence: *curses a blue streak in Italian*
GM: You’ve been sworn at by a lot of women, Antonio.
Huxley: My, these Italians work fast.
 
Huxley is convinced it’s a hoax, or that they were fed drugs and the tall tales at the pub primed the form of the hallucination. Antonio and Florence are much more unsettled. Flo even drops the camera as she was trying to take the last few shots. 
 
Huxley: Have I been eating some kind of hallucinogen?
GM: It must have been in the stew.
 
The trio (and desperately hungover Alex) return to London in the morning.
 
GM: Antonio feels the stab deep in his soul when they tell him he can’t get coffee in rural Surrey. 
 
But the Professor seems very pleased with their results, and invites them to the Challenger Trust Banquet-Lecture at the Imperial Institute on New Years Day, where he promises to reveal all.
 
Prof. Smith: Did you get any more photos?
Florence: Do you have any idea how cold it was? What is wrong with this country???
Huxley: I give up Professor, you got us, how did you do it? Where did you hide the projector? Well done old man.
 
On the other hand, the Professor isn’t quite so cheerful when they see him in the interim - in fact whatever meetings he was having with a mysterious Turkish gentleman have been leaving him distinctly perturbed. He also wants Antonio’s advice about travel in the rural parts of Eastern Europe, in preparation for some large trip in the first quarter of 1923, and asks if he’ll be available to accompany him on the trip. Antonio, of course, agrees.
 
The after-dinner lecture is certainly amazing, when it happens - Professor Smith is right back in his old form, discussing, of all things, hauntings like the Ghost Train. Smith hopes that one day, whatever mysterious other dimensions that ‘haunts’ drift in and out of, will be accessible to mankind and the sciences. 
 
But that mysterious Turkish gentleman (identified as one Mehmet Makryat, owner of an antiques store in nearby Islington), turns up just as the lecture is finishing and the Professor is doing the rounds of the tables. When the staff let him in, he urgently whispers something to the Professor that leaves the man shocked and not a little frightened. He asks the trio of investigators to come by his house the next afternoon - apparently he has a lot to tell them.
 
He won’t get the chance - as the trio open their papers over their breakfast eggs, they all see the headline that the Professor’s house burned to the ground overnight, and that he and his manservant Beddows are missing.

"It is I, Collateral Damage Man!!" as we break into a mansion to liberate a captive there.

Regarding a building burning out of control: "Not my problem. I only set a small fire."
 
"This is why fire safety is so important in the home!"
 
"That is 28 points worth of **** You to the face."
 
"DPS barbarian is best barbarian."
 
"I'm dying Squirtle."
 
"Dash it all, man - It's not a potion of coiffure!"
 
"I'm gonna open this door like a dumbass. To specify: I'm not perceiving, investigating or hesitating just walking right in."
 
Bad guy adjacent to fire is hit with the Grease Spell. DM rules that the oil is very flammable. Bad guy goes to stop, drop and roll. "I'm gonna throw ball bearings in that area to keep him from getting up from prone."
"Oh damn, oily ball bearings."
"Oily on fire ball bearings."
 
"These demon mosquitoes are not polite like the last ones."
 
"Pork chop sandwiches!"
 
Bitterly and passive aggressively: "Weh weh weh. Can't burn any buildings down. Weh."
 
"Oh, hang on, I was standing on top of someone."
"Oh, that's where she went!"
 
 
 
 

Champions : Return to Edge City : V Is For Visitors
A few night later, while various party members are chomping on midnight mealworm bars, doing something wizardly up in the hills, drinking at a late-night party, and so on, a fiery SOMETHING narrowly misses Fireflash as she’s flying home from university, another takes out the top of Plaza Tower, and the other half-dozen light up the rest of town like daylight before they crash into the sea. Whatever they were they’ve also dropped burning debris all along their flight paths.

Hardlight: I carefully put down my drink and dash off to change into my costume.
Fireflash: I don’t know about you but I’m definitely buzzed.

The Magus turns on the rain to control the spot fires as we converge on the Plaza - fortunately this happened at 3AM so the casualties should be limited, but we’ll still need to check for anybody still alive in the upper floors, which now have a large hole right through the building.

GM: Plaza Tower is the tallest building in Edge City.
Hero Shrew: Possibly not for much longer.

Fireflash and Hardlight are scanning the upper floors for survivors, Flux has life support armour to go in anywhere he needs to, and Scooter stays down at ground level clearing debris off the roads so the emergency vehicles can get in.

Hardlight: Oh my god, the team actually knows basic disaster relief.

Fireflash also checks with the building security if anybody was logged in as being on those floors, and to our great relief there shouldn’t be. In fact, it looks like sheer fluke has prevented any fatalities in the tower. Hardlight bubbles fires to smother them. It’s still fortunate that the city’s emergency coordination centre wasn’t actually in Plaza Tower. Hero Shrew does think to look for any debris that isn’t part of the building, but is a bit too busy to look closely.

Fireflash: Better make sure none of that debris is radioactive or toxic.
Hardlight: What the hell was this anyway? A meteor strike?
The Magus: Firewing sneezed.

Probably not a re-entering satellite - whatever they were they came in from the east, which is unlikely. And once the situation here is dealt with, we can go use the Qruiser’s submarine capabilities to find whatever they were. Although the Navy ships en route do try to wave us off. If they were Coast Guard they could actually do it. We find where they settled into the sediment, but they’re not there now. It looks suspiciously like somebody beat us to the site and moved the objects back in towards shore. There’s also a number of individuals in US Marine power armour. But since we used our police powers to declare it a police emergency, they might just be here to observe and demarcate the limit of international waters, so it doesn’t become Their Problem.

The Magus: Gosh, it’s like we need somebody who can reconstruct events of the past.

Fireflash does so, but what she gets most of is fish fleeing the scene. And five humanoid things carrying six objects back in the direction of the city. The Navy are probably going to want to know, since that implies the objects were escape capsules or an invasion force. Let’s hope that there’s lots of security cameras along the coast - and that Magus’ rain spell hasn’t stopped us actually seeing them come ashore. It does occur to Flux that we can use one of the scanning spells in reverse, to find anything in the debris that wasn’t part of Plaza Tower. Magus is impressed, and annoyed that he didn’t think of it first. It takes a while to sift through everything that isn’t a photocopier or the shredded remains of a surveillance pigeon, but we do find a shard of curiously oily metal covered in what might be blood. It may have had more blood on it earlier, but the friction coefficient of the metal is so low that most of it probably slipped right off again.

The Magus: Anybody got one of those evidence baggies we’re supposed to be carrying?
Flux: No?
The Magus: Well, I’ll put it in one of the baggies that definitely didn’t contain some of my ‘supplies’ from earlier this evening. Which reminds me, hold this, I left my summoning circle on.

We rule out that it was a local lacerated by the shard, too, so it was definitely one of the recent arrivals that was wounded in the collision.

Flux: Hag about, you’ve got a spell that hugs people, and a spell called Sugar Crash. Now all you need is a Disabling Tickle Attack. You’re like a 5-yr-old that’s been given magic.
The Magus OoC: At this point I’m pretty much a Dark Magical Girl

The Magus tries a few spells on the blood, and does determine that the visitors are invisible to his detection spells.

The Magus: Unfair - I have REASONS to be invisible to divination magic. I deal with major demonic cults!

The shard on the other hand did come from something ‘Up.’ A Ways Up.

We get two messages - one from UNTIL requesting a meeting, and one from the EC Fire Department thanking us for the assistance last night. Although carefully not thanking us for the rain spell since weather manipulation is banned by international treaty.

Hardlight: There’s some data scientist at NOAA that’s had to reset all the predictions.
Flux: Just blame it on 5G.

And the first call came through immediately after we determined where the reentry capsules came from.

Phone: We need to talk.
Flux: God? Is that you?

The representative lets us know that UNTIL’s space station detected a high energy event in low earth orbit, and tracked the six pods to Edge City, but immediately lost track of whatever the pods came from.

Hero Shrew: Maybe they popped back into hyperspace after dropping them off?
UNTIL Rep: We’re unaware of any species that utilise hyperspace.
The Magus OoC: Apart from you guys, in your teleporters.
GM: A fact that is not public knowledge so his statement is still true as far as you’re concerned.
Hero Shrew: Maybe they had a Romulan Cloaking Device?
UNTIL Rep: … you do know the Romulans are fictional, right?
Hero Shrew: *looks innocent* They are?
Fireflash: Scooter, stop trolling the government agent.

The UNTIL guy is a bit annoyed that the Magus can still locate where the pods came from hours after all their space tech lost it. Us recovering that shard might help.

Hero Shrew: It looks oily, but it doesn’t smell oily. I haven’t done a taste test yet.
Fireflash: Well don’t.
Flux: It might be radioactive.
Hero Shrew: Will I get extra super-powers?

UNTIL Rep: Hmm. That’s weird. Looks like a Mandaarin alloy. They visited Earth as peaceful explorers in 99.
Hero Shrew: Well, a lot can change in 20 years - here on Earth big hoop earrings were back in fashion.

Mandaarins surprisingly, aren’t orange and sort of round, but are instead mostly human in appearance, although about 40% of them are psychic. It’s surprising that they didn’t reach out for assistance from Earth’s governments, if they were in trouble. But as one of the most advanced races in the galaxy, it’s a bit alarming that they ould need help at all.

Hero Shrew: Maybe they’re Mandaarin criminals trying to hide among the human population. Or a hunting party. Or Bounty hunters.
UNTIL Rep: What part of ‘peaceful explorers’ did you fail to understand?

We give him the debris for further study.

Hero Shrew: I’m surprised you hadn’t asked for it already. You’ve got all those machines that go ping.
UNTIL Rep: Yesssss… we have lots of machines that go ping. *aside* Is he for real?
Flux: I’m afraid so.
Fireflash: He hasn’t eaten in a while.

Flux OoC: So, aliens have invaded Earth before?
GM: Yes. One of the most famous superheroes in the world is an alien.
Hero Shrew OoC: So is one of the most famous supervillains.
GM: Yes. They often fight.

Flux failed to detect any more of the alien alloy in Edge City, when he scanned for it.

Flux: To be fair I haven’t had my coffee yet.

Building another detector is probably still wise, but we’d need to keep some of the debris.

Flux: Can we break it into two?
UNTIL Rep: It’s pretty damn tough.
Hero Shrew: Now I really want to chew on it.
Hardlight: I don’t want to find out how many types of cancer he’ll get from having it in his mouth.

UNTIL Rep: If you don’t understand their tech, it’s probably Mandaarian. They’re that advanced. In a few hundred years their entire civilization might up and leave the Milky Way.
Flux: ‘We like the physics one galaxy over’.
Hero Shrew: Well that makes it even weirder that their re-entry was so clumsy.

So on top of all this, it’s probably alarming that WorldSat have lost contact with half their satellites.

Flux: ‘ET Phone Home’
Hero Shrew: Theoretically speaking, if there was an entire alien fleet with Romulan Cloaking Devices up there, would it block radio transmissions but still be transparent to visible light?

Hardlight: Now I have to wrack my brain for ways to defeat an alien invasion.
Hero Shrew: The common cold!
Fireflash: Cut them off at the ankles - that'll defeet them.

We head over to the WorldSat building, in case the problem is at this end, and are surprised to find a very neat square hole in one of the upstairs windows. Magus’ Ghostsight spell soon determines that the building’s security personnel are alive, but unconscious, and neatly stacked against the wall, and that there are other beings crowded into and around the server room. Two of them appear to be Star Trek aliens, one is a human businesswoman with small horns, one appears to be a wolf Moreau, and one is a heavily armed and cyborged out the wazoo.

Hero Shrew: So probably not Mandaarians then.
GM: Nope - because none of them could pass for human.
The Magus: Although there’s any number of Edge City gangs they could fit into without comment.

Fireflash and Hardlight plan to fly in the hole and target the pastrolling wolf-morph, while the rest of the team teleport in and gang-cape the cyborg. The Magus will teleport straight back out, taking the security guys with him.

Hero Shrew: Just making sure he IS a cyborg right?
Fireflash: That’s what the Magus’ spell says. So no dismantling.
Hero Shrew: But putting extra right angles in his limbs won’t be as much of a problem?

Unfortunately one of the bad guys has Danger Sense, and stun+entangle grenades. And some sort of sealant gun that glues Scooter to the floor.

Hero Shrew: What the h*** did they spray me with, starship glue??
GM: Yes. That’s exactly what they sprayed you with.
Hero Shrew OoC: I’m frustrated - I want to hit people, the team wants me to hit people, there’s people RIGHT THERE I can hit, and here I am stuck to the floor.

It might help us if we knew what they were saying, but of course we don’t speak Alien and they seem unwilling to compromise. Some of the associated gestures don't seem very flattering. Fortunately the Magus teleports back into the building and gives the rest of the team some much-needed assistance in the form of police-approved comas. Various other four-colour pyrotechnics ensue, which is only to be expected when 10 superhumans get together and immeadiately start swinging. Wolf-guy, who got blown out an upper-storey window, uses an Entangle grenade on himself to reduce the damage from his imminent argument with gravity. Hardlight hurriedly creates a giant green glowing catcher’s mitt, anyway. Quite a bit of damage is done to this floor of the building, and the various participants, but with the exception of the steel being ripped out of the walls by Flux to try and entangle the aliens, and the fact that one of the aliens appears to be bleeding out, none of it looks like it’ll be lasting. Quite a few thankfully non-loadbearing walls do get turned into confetti, however.

Scooter finally breaks free of the starship glue and takes considerable pleasure out of punching the cyborg in his carbon-nanotube kidneys. It’s at this point the cyborg finally decides to speak English. He points at the alien currently unconscious underneath him.

Cyborg: If This One Does Not Pilot Ship Down It Will Crash Into City.
Hero Shrew: *skids to a halt* It would have been nice to tell us that EARLIER.
Hardlight: I told you guys we should have tried to talk to them first!
GM: You guys are making me think of a Miley Cyrus song.
Fireflash’s player: Which one?
GM: Wrecking Ball.

Hero Shrew: We are going to get so many dirty looks…
GM: It’s just as well two of you guys have Repair spells.

Champions : Return To Edge City : Silverfish Bait
Fireflash is out patrolling one evening when she spots some suspicious midnight furniture removal. Or possibly cow-tipping, with trucks.

Hardlight: Was there a football game tonight?
GM: That’s actually a good question.

Fireflash flies over to the possible drunken hooligans, who are shaking and yelling at a truck with dark windows, and asks what is going on. They take one look at her and run off. She knocks on the van and asks if everybody inside is okay, whereupon the rear doors open and somebody says ‘We will be!’. It’s another attempt to catch Fireflash, by the Doomtroopers.

One might ask why Fireflash is out patrolling alone if this kind of thing keeps happening, but as the GM points out, Fireflash is the only member of Quadrant that can be trusted not to turn a basic patrol into a disaster. And there is also the problem that if Scooter, say, is trying to keep up with her, he’d keep running into buildings and passing traffic.

It would probably help if we’d set The Magus up with a link to the Crime Computer too, but we keep forgetting. It would certainly help co-ordinating the response of the rest of the team, and whether it would be faster for us to converge on Fireflash’s position ourselves, or have whoever is at the base and has the keys to the Qruiser come pick us up.

By the time Flux gets there, he’s in time to see Fireflash being loaded into the back of the van, but instead of driving off in it the Doomtroopers rappel up to their invisible helicopter.

Flux: The package has been collected.
Hero Shrew: Well stop them getting away!
Flux: Scooter, we had a meeting about this, we let her get captured then we follow them back to their base.
Fireflash: Please tell me they’re not having this conversation over our unsecured comm channel.

By the time the rest of us get there, there’s smoke coming out of the back of the van. Scooter pulls the doors off the van, revealing a circle of melted electronics and no Fireflash.

Flux: Tracking teleports is a pain.
Hardlight: We planned for this, remember.
Flux: I know, but now we have to go get the Magus because we forgot to key him into the Crime Computer AGAIN and he hasn’t got any of the push notifications.

At least we have three different ways to track her - one tracker that’s only there for ARGENT to find, one active-on-demand tracker that the one we hope they don’t look for, and a lock of her hair we can track magically if we have to.

Hero Shrew: And hopefully they haven’t dipped her in Nair(™)
Flux: It doesn’t work like tha- actually that’s a good point. But why would they depilate her if they don’t know about magical tracking?
GM: To have more places to attach the electrodes.
Fireflash: Ow.

Flux: It’ll take me an hour to set up my magical tracking device, but if we get the Magus here it’s five minutes of wiggling.

GM: I can’t wait to hear your explanation of all this to the Magus.

The Magus is suitably impressed by a plan so half-assed that most of us had forgotten the details. Although in Scooter’s case that probably took under 24 hours.

Flux: Sorry we didn’t give you the log-in earlier. Or the low-down.

The Magus does suggest we at least LOOK like we’re investigating the remains of the van, before he does his stuff. Apparently Fireflash isn’t that far away - somewhere at the south end of Edge City’s medical center.

Hero Shrew: Just point me at whatever you want me to punch.
Flux: No, no, no punching yet. I want negative punch.
Hero Shrew:... what, hitting myself?

The Magus can tell she’s underground, in some kind of sensor equipment, and on an IV drip. He can also tell there’s some large blocks of Edge City opaque to magevision, which will probably bear later investigation, but ARGENT or whoever paid to kidnap Fireflash aren't keeping her in one. He can also see what he presumes is a roomful of cloning tanks.

Flux: Who needs a tunneling machine when we have a giant shrew.

Flux OoC: I can think of one major problem with our tunneling equipment - most mining machines don’t need to surface regularly and say ‘I should have taken that left at Albuquerque’.
Hero Shrew OoC: Hey, that rabbit cut Florida off from the mainland.
Flux OoC: … true. You still need a Disguise skill of at least 30.
GM: Nah, just a deep understanding of his opponent’s fetishes.

The Magus also points out that we should have the police cordon off the building before we go in - ARGENT is an illegal organisation in the US, but we can probably guarantee they’ll have the ARGENT logo on all the stuff in their secret base. They have a strong internal corporate culture, and presumably don’t make their employees pee in bottles. Of course, timing will be everything - we can probably also guarantee they’re listening to all police band communications. Probably best that we use teleportation to organise the police back-up, and then teleport our team into the sewer entrance and sweep in from there.

Of course the moment we teleport in the pressure sensors in the floor go off - they might not have defenses against teleporters specifically, but this just proves they don’t need them.

Hardlight: Scooter, punch those doors in.
Hero Shrew: I thought you wanted Negative Punch? *punches them out of their frames anyway*

The ARGENT staff in the dormitory are a bit surprised to see us - they’re still in their underoos. But we can hear machinery somewhere nearby starting up.

Hardlight: That better not be an army of Fireflash clones.

The security staff we’ve just surprised do have instant-armour-deployment hatches above their bunks, although they at least look embarrassed at having transformation sequences.

Hero Shrew OoC: Doesn’t bother me - now they’re in armour I can hit them as hard as I like.

ARGENT Mook: *thinking* Out of all these supers that guy is the only one that stands out. Magus looks... Normal. I don’t trust that. *Shoots Magus*.

As it happens it’s Hardlight who forgets how fragile humans can be, and blasts one of the as-yet-unarmoured mooks most of the way through a wall.

Hardlight: Oh S*** oh S*** oh S***
Flux OoC: You’re rolling GREAT for once.
Hardlight: I just did that in front of Hero Shrew!
Flux: We had a meeting about that sort of thing - I ignored most of it, but still.

We soon run into somebody attempting to flee the complex, carrying an unconscious Fireflash. He seems a little perturbed to come face-to-face with the rest of our team.

Evil Scientist: Ah. This is problematic.

It’s probably even more problematic that any reinforcements from the room with all the tanks have to deal with the Magus-summoned tentacles holding the door shut. Or rather, holding the pieces of the door in place. Flux adds his own Entangle attack.

GM: It looks WRONG.

The things coming through the door seem a bit wrong, too - despite the various unnatural senses available to the party, it’s not clear whether they’re robots, cyborgs, or just armoured humans. They’re certainly tougher than the armoured mooks. And it would appear there were a lot of them in those tanks we detected.

Flux: Who wants to tell Fireflash that she snores?

Hardlight revives an understandably annoyed Fireflash, who flies off to apply a therapeutic beat-down.

Hardlight OoC: Well there’s your two page spread for this issue.
Fireflash OoC: Actually, what are you wearing?
GM: Not your costume.
Hardlight OoC: Well, it’ll be fine, unless we’re published by Image.
GM: If we were published by Image this scene would be on the cover.
Flux OoC: And you’d be nude.

One of the new bad hits the Magus most of the way down the corridor - he was extremely fortunate there wasn’t a wall behind him, or he’d have ended up like that mook Hardlight accidentally left coughing up internal organs. Another tries to do the same to Hardlight, who frantically preserves the integrity of his cervical vertebrae by throwing up a forcewall that deflects the punch. At least we find out that at least one of these new bad guys are female, or perhaps just programmed with female voice files.

Bad Gal: Irregular.

They actually hit Hero Shrew hard enough to knock him out. That is alarming. He has a skull like a cinder block. Fireflash suggests a tactical retreat, but the Magus points out that these things, whatever they are, would slaughter the police waiting to apprehend anybody leaving the building. Although judging by the EM spikes Flux can detect from another chamber, a bunch of the Evil Scientists got their emergency teleporter working and are escaping that way. Bad luck for the rest of the staff that didn’t get there in time. Whatever ARGENT came up with when they were creating these guys, they’re certainly highly dangerous, even when they limit themselves to non-lethal attacks.

And then the sprinklers go off. As the only one not wrapped in armour, or force fields, he’s the only one that notices the ‘water’ tingles. And smells weird.

Hero Shrew: What does cerebrospinal fluid smell like? I think it might be mine.

It’s actually scrubbing the complex of DNA evidence. The tanks in the big room were also being purged, but Hardlight gets there in time to stop the program. The contents are all identical clones of a woman we don’t recognise, with cyberbrains installed to ensure total obedience and custom knowledge sets. And it looks like ARGENT were repurposing an old Genesys lab, which will annoy Scooter when his brain stops rattling. It would further seem that ARGENT were planning to use these clone cyber-amazons as replacements for the Doomtroopers when their contract expired.

It’s pretty horrendous, actually. Flux is appalled by the theft of free will, for a start, and Fireflash wants to know exactly why they needed her in captivity again. At least we caught one of the scientists.

Fireflash: You will now tell me everything.
ARGENT Scientist: No I won’t.
Fireflash: *blasts a hole through the wall next to his ear* I wasn’t asking.
Hero Shrew: How come she gets to kill people, I don’t.
Flux: I’m just going to turn off the cameras… we’re going to be in so much trouble.

Apparently he genuinely can’t tell us where the computer records are. Or where his boss is.

Fireflash: I find that difficult to believe.
ARGENT Scientist: That’s because you’re… I mean I’m not surprised.

Fireflash: Take this useless POS away before I do something obscenely violent.
Hero Shrew: Notice that she didn’t say ‘that I’d regret’.
Hardlight: I’m just staying very quiet and out of her way.

There’s still a room half-full of clone bodies that hadn’t woke up yet, before Hardlight shut the room down.

Hardlight: Do we know any AIs that want physical bodies?
Flux: WE ARE NOT GOING THERE.

Hero Shrew: Well, at least we got our Fireflash back
Flux: Did we though? She might be a clone.*pokepoke*
Fireflash: Quit poking me!
Flux: It’s her. A clone would have slapped me.

The Magus: I’m going to go invent a spell that turns cyberbrains into real brains so people stop being immune to my mental powers.
Flux: The mage’s answer to technology, everybody.

Champions : Return To Edge City : A Slow Week
There’s been a break-in at one of the LowellTech warehouses. The entire building got cleared out before anybody got here. They left an electronic signature on the looped footage, but also, oddly, an ‘I Was Never Here’ field. It’s not surprising that the Crime Computer missed it, because it really only responds to actual people in danger, but something is clearing affecting the more unusual sensory abilities we have available.

The Magus and Flux do rig a tracking spell, and recover the stolen goods, but Hardlight’s impatience means we botch the chance to arrest anyone.

Hero Shrew: And because Hardlight did a Leroy Jenkins the bad guy got away?
The Magus: We didn’t even SEE the bad guy.
Flux: By the time we found out that we could have found out it was too late to find out.

Although Scooter does have news about a new player in Studio City - this Moreau goes by King Tiger. He’s a student of the Shaolin temple, and has been attracting students. Apparently he’s a bit pissed to have missed an invite to that martial arts tournament. He’s also been speaking out against Madam Lil and Colin as representatives of the community.

GM: The problem isn’t that he’s vocal, it’s that he’s vocal and people are listening.

It’s certainly true that the prostitution at the Collar Club and Madam Lil’s establishment is either illegal or legally problematic, but King Tiger dislikes the tone set by having a brothel owner and a pimp represent the community, more than the legal aspects. He wants to be the Zoo’s face himself, and promote closer relationships with the neighbouring Chinatown. The growing rift it’s provoking might be a problem.

Hero Shrew: I feel a need to protect Colin - he gave me a job. That proves he has good judgement.
The Magus: This King Tiger might have a point.

Although King Tiger turns out to be a good name, since he’s 10 foot tall and can bench-press 6 ½ tonnes. He’s also clashed with Wild Kingdom a few times.

Flux: I’ll put a tick in the positive column there.

Flux: As long as he doesn’t start anything, I say we don’t get involved.
Hero Shrew OoC: I’m more concerned about the growing rift in the tiny Moreau community, but Political Awareness does not feature prominently on Scooter’s character sheet.

So we ask The Rep for advice, which is as bad as you might expect. Being Pro-Colin can also be construed as being pro-prostitution and pro-explotation. A public stance of being anti-King Tiger could still work, however. As usual, we feel the need for a shower when we’re done.

Hero Shrew: I should tell Colin privately that I’m on his side. If a five minute conversation with The Rep is any indication, I really don’t want to get involved in politics full-time.

There’s more Moreau kids on the way too - the contraceptive implants are really starting to fail. And it also appears some Moreaus were engineered for accelerated maturation.

Hardlight: Are variously-shaped prophylatics going to be required in future? I should do some research. … I just said that out loud didn’t I.

The Magus and Flux do figure out how to dismiss that depressed Chinese Demon that’s been hanging the Zoo back to the Hells, who bows and hands them a note with a written character and old Chinese coin before vanishing. The character is ‘debt’ - apparently getting him out of a contract that he could not complete means he owes us a favour.

Pathfinder: The Mummy's Mask : Moist
Zenobia: Do the psychopomps seem annoyed about us nearly accidentally killing them in that fight?
Nemat: They don’t have faces, it’s not easy to tell.
Zenobia: They have middle fingers.

Hopefully we won’t run into these particular psychopomps when we eventually die - that could be awkward.

Nemat: You have to feel sorry for Anubis now that Pharasma is the god of death. She probably calls him ‘Noob’.
Onka: ‘Please, you’re a goddess, act like one’
Nemat: ‘Aw, does someone want a bellyrub?’

Nemat: The whole point of these boats is to do a non-linear dungeon in a linear fashion.
GM: You paid to get railroaded.

The GM describes an apparently innocuous room.

Asrian OoC: I detect a ‘but’ coming up.
GM: A big but.
Zenobia OoC: And I cannot lie.

It is, of course, set up as an elaborate trap. Which we can avoid by going through the wall. It turns out the chamber beyond is yet another memorial to somebody who tried to stage a coup against Hakotep - two brothers who only failed because they got too distracted arguing about which of them should be crowned afterwards. We’re supposed to decide who deserved it - which is obviously another trap. Of course, the entire level is a trap - most parties would have entered this crypt first, and thus faced the banshee etc a few experience levels earlier. And our precautions would have made us immune to this trap anyway.

The boats split us up, going down different tunnels.

GM: You’ve got time-
Zenobia: For a quick snog?
Asrian: Now is not the time, dear.

There’s a few statues with gems inside their fanged maws.

Zenobia: It’s like they never heard of Mage Hand.

Or, for that matter, Immovable Rods. Or maybe they did, because it’s another Phantom Trap. Although given the grinding noises elsewhere in the crypt, they appear to control SOMETHING down here. Possibly opening the door for a giant undead crocodile, or similar. But then we can use Control Water to drain the entire next section of the crypt.

Nemat: Never fight on their terms.
Onka: ‘That undead shark looks very unhappy. And we’re flying over it anyway.’

The thing that IS in here looks a bit perturbed that we removed all its advantages. We’re more shocked that Nemat doesn’t recognise whatever it is. Onka recognises it as a kind of aquatic Div.

Onka: It’s a Div - where’s Asri- oh, she’s attacking it already.

Asrian really, really does not like Divs.

Nemat: We don’t need to fight him - he’s going to suffocate.

And if he’s Bound to the room, he can’t even flee to where there IS water. In the end it doesn’t matter - Nemat Dismisses it back to its home plane before Asrian can decapitate it, or Zenobia throw a Tangleburn Bag at it.

We do the usual - sabotage the control pyramid and crash the rest of Hakotep’s flying pyramid fleet, and bug out. It's time to go after the Forgotten Pharoah, Hakotep I, himself.

Champions : Return to Edge City : The Landscaper Caper
Last session we prevented the kidnapping of an oddly-fireproof landscape gardener.

Flux: We’ll keep an eye on her, in case there are shenanigans.
Hero Shrew: No shenanigans in this town. Unless we’re responsible.

Of course, we blunder into so many shenanigans it’s amazing we’re not in a Pokemon episode. Although that idea does have us complaining about the completely insane economy in the Pokemon universe, and the question of where they get their meat from. It’s from Pokemon.

GM: Farfetch’d carries his own garnish, for crying out loud.

The cybernetically enhanced canines are about 18 months old, but despite being intelligent enough to talk probably aren’t Steiner’s work - the upgrades are too crude.

Hardlight: You rescued Landscaper? Funny name for a superhero.
Fireflash: No, an actual landscaper.
Hardlight: Why were you rescuing a landscaper?
Flux: Why wouldn’t we, they’re worth rescuing.
Hardlight: Indeed, it’s not like she was a lawyer.
Fireflash: ….. Or an accountant?
Flux: Hey, accountants are worth rescuing, they know where all the money is… I know she’s giving me A Look, I can hear it.

Oddly enough, the cars that the bad guys were stacking were stacked very nearly indeed. Minimal damage, which is impressive for somebody wearing powered armour. Most of the cars in the pile are shiny and new. It's also impressive that he managed to lift an older car that was notorious for outweighing a lot of trucks. That was no standard powered suit.

Flux: I’m surprised the other cars aren’t flat.
GM: Oh, it was on the bottom of the stack.
Flux: Well thank god for that.

In fact, Hardlight’s scan of the pile reveals that the Grubecker has been heavily modified, and is even HEAVIER than it was originally. Checking with the police reveals that the vehicle was once involved in a super fight, and had its density permanently altered, and was reinforced further afterwards. Whoever owns it owns a piece of superhero history, but also must have an appalling petrol bill. Whoever was wearing that Rumblesuit has strength that rivals superhumans. And one of them was apparently using plasma technology when they set the landscaper’s apartment on fire. And their armour is a sophisticated ceramic.

Hero Shrew: We can always ask our contacts in Dysprosium Dawn if they know who’s working on technology like this.
GM: It always amuses me when you think you have a good relationship with Dysprosium Dawn.
Fireflash OoC: We don’t.
Flux OoC: We just shake them down for information sometimes.
GM: Or they decide it’s easier to get us to do the hard work.

We should probably have a look in the empty house across the street, where the cyberdogs came from. Apparently they dug their way up from an underground utility tunnel, and spent a few days watching the landscaper’s home and planning the kidnapping. There’s definitely something they knew about the landscaper that they know and we don’t. We should go keep an eye on her, at least while she’s being kept for observation at the hospital. The veterinary cybernetics angle is also worth investigating - some of the upgrades to those cyberpuppies, like the hemoglobin and retinal variants, are very new.

Fireflash: We should visit them, as a group.
Hero Shrew: Oh?
Flux: Must... resist… spaying and neutering joke…
GM: To be fair, it’s not thinking with that head that gets him in trouble.

Finding out who the cyberpuppies originally belonged to is more difficult - their microchips were removed, probably at the same time they had a bunch more added. Although six Dobermans going missing should have come to somebody’s notice.

GM: You attract some attention at the Laguna Complex, probably because you’re a pretty well-known superteam now, and you’re with that new guy.
The Magus: I have a sudden urge to show up with a different face every week.
Flux: Don’t, or you won’t get into our base.
GM: Facial recognition tech makes no sense in a setting with shapechangers.

The vet agrees that the six dogs should have been chipped - it’s certainly a legal requirement in California - but if they’re going to sic them on a team of superheroes to cover their escape it’s unlikely the perps were very concerned about chipping laws. And the address is a fake.

On the other hand, the vet has done the same modifications to a pair of pitbulls, for the same people, and we didn’t see any pitbulls earlier.

Hero Shrew: Well, at least we have something in our favour - they don’t let dogs into hospitals.
Hardlight: Remind me to get a sticker for Scooter - ‘Emotional Support Moreau’
Flux: That is unimaginably racist.
Hero Shrew: And I’m not good for anybody’s emotions!

Tracking down where the perps got the money for the operations is going to take longer. We do get one address and name in Marsden, which we connect to one Rumble, who we last heard of during the thing between the Booster and Juicer gangs. This latest escapade DOES seem like something he’d get involved in. He certainly loves his cybernetics, as his police record confirms. On the other hand, nobody has seen him since the Juicer exodus.

New Occupant: You think he might still be alive? That B**tard owes me $500!
Fireflash: If we find him, we’ll be sure to let him know.

The creditor in question lets us search the house for any items we can use to track him down - old hair brushes etc have been thrown out, unfortunately, but we DO find a small package stashed in an air vent, containing an earlier FreeWeb device and memory chips. But Flux can confirm the device never connected to a network, ever. And the chips are encrypted.

It’s probably a bad idea for Scooter to hang around the hospital - as the others keep telling him, he’s the most conspicuous member of the team, at least since Allana eft, and Allana at least had two major distractions.

Hero Shrew:*sigh*I just want to be useful.

Flux and the Magus working together to create a tracking spell to locate Rumble will probably be more useful - they certainly have an ample supply of crystallised chicken blood. Hero Shrew is driving the mages around town as we try to triangulate on a moving target, when a woman jumps out of an upstairs window. She’s probably just as surprised when we all pile out of the Qruiser. But not as much as those power-armoured goons that emerge after her. At least that makes it more likely that Rumble is one of the goons we’re after. The other two, apparently, are codenamed Pillage and Takedown. The former has a deadly plasma field, and the later an assortment of entangling and stunning weaponry, at the very least.

The usual exchange-of-multicoloured-light-until-somebody-wins ensues. One of the Magus’ spells is apparently called Sugar Crash, and is as dangerous as it implies, and would be better described as Hypogylcemic Shock. Scooter leaps into the fray, and overshoots so badly he gets intercepted mid-air by Rumble.

Hero Shrew OoC: I hesitate to compare him to a Patriot missile.

Hero Shrew gets punched most of the way back up to the Qruiser. And then the woman that’s the focus of all this attention throws Scooter straight back into the fray. Scooter is rather shocked to find himself neatly placed right in the middle of the street.

Fireflash: Yeet!
GM: This ability is called Get Back In There!

Hero Shrew: So, this one is called Takedown? Nice that he comes with instructions.*leaps into the air and suplexes the guy several yards into the pavement*

Rumble does some swift calculations of his new odds, especially since his other colleague is semiconscious with his plasma sheath burning a hole in the ground, and surrenders.

Rumble: I give.*lands on roof, which collapses under the weight of his armour*
Hero Shrew: You owe your old flatmate $500.

The woman, Tanya, insists she’s fine, despite the fact she jumped from a second-storey window, and claims to have no idea why the goons tried to kidnap her, less than a day after they tried to kidnap the other woman.

The Magus: I can’t fault their work ethic

Fireflash: Why are you after this woman?
Rumble: Takedown said to.
All:*look at the crater with unconscious goon*

Flux: Is that your house, or are you going to have problems?
Tanya: It will be fine, I have understanding with landlord - he does not cause me trouble, I do not crush his head like swallow’s egg.

The Magus: Do you want me to wake him up, now we have him out of his armour?
Hero Shrew: And if we need to we’ll put him back in the armour and I’ll suplex him again.
GM: That would be against police procedures.

Cyberkinetically interrogating their brain implants is legally dubious too - but nothing stops Flux ransacking their powersuits for useful information. Which helpfully includes files on their two targets - the landscaper, apparently, is a minor hydrokineticist. And Tanya apparently has high-end low-profile military cybernetics. The files also list Tanya as being of possible interest to The Cabal, but doesn’t say which group calling itself a cabal that refers to. But according to Rumble, the Cabal supplied the powersuits, tailored to their proportions. They’d even told Takedown that they’d need somebody like Rumble to do the job.

Flux realises that the Cabal must be a new faction in Dysprosium Dawn.

Flux:*sigh* We leave them alone after the zombie thing and they start making powersuits.
GM: To be fair they weren’t responsible for the zombies - they were responsible for AUGMENTING the zombies.

It also seems likely that the suits were specifically designed to counter our team - it's just their bad luck that we didn’t pair off the way they predicted we would. We might not be much closer to figuring out why these particular women were targeted, but we may have stopped an incipient supervillain group getting started.

Champions : Return To Edge City : Whacking Day
Hardlight OoC: Why didn’t any of us get the Magus’ contact details?
Hero Shrew OoC: We didn’t realise he was a PC

Hero Shrew: Maybe we need to project the Magus-signal on some low clouds?
GM: And what exactly is the Magus-Signal?
Hero Shrew: A searchlight with a big ‘M’?

A few days later the Shrew-Computer alerts us to break-ins at Saints Row and Peon Place, hangouts of two gangs we haven’t interacted with much.

Hero Shrew: *surfaces from a pile of BugBurgr wrappers* H-wuh?

Hardlight: To the Qruiser!

He’s quite pleased that he gets to use the holographic lights and sirens on the Qruiser.

Hardlight: Whee-OOOOwhee-OOOOwhee *etc*

GM: I still have no idea how to involve the Magus in this.
Flux OoC: Just pull the Coincidence Lever, he happened to be nearby.

There are a bunch of likely bad guys, in distinctive green and gold armour.

The Magus: It's like the Australian Cricket Team, gone bad.

Hero Shrew: So, do these guys have to worry about Testicular Irradiation?
Fireflash: No, they don’t use that shield technology anymore.
The Magus: Not that they’ve been informed. ‘My nuts feel warm, do your nuts feel warm?’
VIPER technician: That’s our new Nutwarmer Technology, don’t worry about it.
Hardlight: And some VIPER mad scientist is crowing about his plan to make sure all VIPER members have serpentine children, and how it’s finally complete.
Fireflash: Actually, that DOES sound like something VIPER would do.

Hero Shrew: If anybody happens to spot the vehicle they came in, let me know and I’ll flip it.
Flux: How will we know it was their vehicle?
Hero Shrew: It’ll be the one that’s advertising something snake-related on the side.

Unfortunately they’re not the pushovers that VIPER agents used to be considered. They also have some rather effective weapons.

Hero Shrew: How far could I throw that truck?
The Magus: Don’t damage civilian vehicles.,
Hardlight: We might have police powers but we don’t have immunity to insurance companies.
Flux: It will be difficult to claim it was reasonable damage if you pick it up and throw it.

Scooter doesn’t end up throwing the truck, but Hardlight does end up unconscious underneath it anyway. Scooter has to jump across the street, into a position effectively surrounded by the bad guys.

Hero Shrew: I would have to say this puts me in a bad place.
Fireflash: Perhaps. Conversely, it’s put all of them into a bad place.

One of the VIPER agents unwisely flies within arm’s length of the team brick.

Hero Shrew: Well, let’s give him a big Hero Shrew welcome *punches out his teeth, and the rest of him across the street* Let’s hope VIPER membership includes good dental care.
GM: It does. It’s one of the selling points - EXCELLENT medical plan.

They’re also smart enough to know when to surrender, while the rest of the bad guys we didn’t know about make their escape. At least they didn’t get to use their hoverdiscs, since we stuck them to the ground with their own glue gun. It appears they were raiding the different gangs for advanced technology. At least we can have all the unconscious gang members arrested for possession of illegal tech. The VIPER agents also all have a cyber-implant we don’t recognise - one stamped with the VIPER logo, and that Flux determines acts as a fact-checker for your brain. Basically, a cybernetic Mental Defense. At least with the Magus and Flux working together, we can locate more of the implants - some over in a Dysprosium Dawn hangout, and some underneath a building in Billington. Dysprosium Dawn are a bit annoyed that VIPER have stolen their tech again, when Flux inquires.

Time for a quick search warrant. Especially since VIPER are classed as a terrorist organisation. Happily, Flux can hide the entire team from cameras and other electronic surveillance.

Fireflash: Magus, while I have a chance to ask, are you intending on staying in town?
Magus: For a while, yes.
Fireflash: In that case I’d like to extend an invitation to join the team.
Magus: I’ll think about it.
Hardlight: We just need you to fill in this paperwork.
Fireflash: No no, we don’t have paperwork - registering with PRIMUS, on the other hand, THAT requires paperwork.

Fireflash exercises one of her new abilities - Retrocognitive Photon Tracing - to try and see how the VIPER guys got into the target building. It doesn’t work, which is odd. The obvious access - stairs and elevators - and probably trapped, or at least more secure than the upstairs cameras that are studiously ignoring us.

Hero Shrew: OK, just want to double-check before we go in - if they have armour I can hit them as far as I like? What if they don’t have armour, but do have powers?
Fireflash: Hit them as hard as you like. But if they have guns, just smush the guns.
Hero Shrew: Got it *cracks knuckles and grins happily*
Hardlight: “Colt .45. Semi-automatic. Play-doh.”

The Magus can teleport most of us in, although Hardlight will have to come down the stairs, since the Magus’ Door Of Shadows hurts him.

Flux: It’s like going through a Resistor *shudders*

They might not be able to see us on the cameras, but they might notice the secret door opening. And the fact that half the walls down here are transparent doesn’t help.

Hero Shrew: They certainly like their open plan layout, don’t they?
GM: This base is nicer than yours.
Fireflash: I assume that warrant you got was a No Knock?

The glass walls means we almost immediately come face-to-face with one of the armoured agents. He seems a bit surprised to see Scooter prowling down the corridor. At least glass walls won’t even slow Scooter down. The concrete ones don’t slow Flux down much either, as he blows out a wall to let Hardlight in.

Fireflash: Those of us with police powers, remember to say as much before you smash someone.
Hero Shrew: ON THE GROUND! THIS IS THE COPS! *Smashes two walls to pieces on way to the bad guys*
Fireflash: REGISTERED SUPERS! SURRENDER OR BE OBLITERATED! *blinds a roomfull of mooks*
Flux: At least I don’t have to admit I’m a cop now - I’d feel dirty.
Hardlight: Surrender Villains! You are under arrest for suspicion of terrorism!
Magus: Tremble before the generally adequate might of Hardlight.

They surrender, but not before warning their superiors and self-destructing their SERPENTINE Network node.

Flux: That’s a pity.
GM: Nobody has ever managed to decrypt the SERPENTINE Network, but they still take the precaution of destroying compromised connections because of, well, people like you, Flux.

Still, some of the equipment they had set up to produce those cybernetic implants wasn’t networked to SERPENTINE, so the specs they used to produce the hundreds they’ve made so far are still on the hardware.

Hardlight: Hint hint, Flux, hint!
Flux: I thought this was a crime scene and I shouldn’t start looting it.

At least we’ve stopped every VIPER agent suddenly getting access to all kinds of cybernetic Addies.

Flux: Can you imagine getting awesome snake powers? And not being able to do anything with them because everyone will assume you’re working for VIPER?

We also find a big pile of stuff they’ve already stolen from Edge City’s gangs, including a bunch of old Iron Guard armour technology that Humanity First somehow got their hands on, in alarming quantity.

Of course, it’s also entirely likely that the local VIPER cell leader in Edge City was never here, since he’s smart enough to trust his underlings to run their own sub-cells around the city.

GM: I mean, look at this place, this is actually a nice place to work!

Sudden good news! Two of the nodes are depowered, not actually wiped yet! If Flux is very careful, he might be able to get useful info off them before they self-destruct. It looks like VIPER had been reverse-engineering some advanced vehicles. It would certainly explain some of the stuff we’ll be auctioning off later.

GM: There’s a handful of Cyberpaths on the same level as Menton is among Telepaths.
Hero Shrew OOC: And they HAVEN’T been assassinated by the Ultron rip-off?
The Magus OOC: One of them IS the Ultron rip-off. And the other is his crazy girlfriend.

We should probably get some proper computer databases installed in our base.

Hero Shrew: It won’t upset the mechanical owl, will it?
Fireflash: Well, if it does he has ways to express it.
Hero Shrew: It’s not like he’ll throw up in our beds.
GM: Well, if he does, it’s probably indicative of some bigger problem.

Flux does go tell Dysprosium Dawn that they should go public with their anti-cyberpathy implant, before VIPER start selling their knock-off stolen version. We might have discovered where some of the interesting tech that went ‘missing’ after that big supertech raid that we instigated got to.

One the other hand, it would appear that one of the VIPER agents that we didn’t catch was working on improving the scanner technology demonstrated at that illegal supertech convention, and he was also vain enough to be driving a high-end colour-change sports car around Edge City. The latter isn’t illegal, as long as you inform the authorities of each colour change - he wasn’t - and driving a completely ordinary vehicle around town would be much less conspicuous anyway, even if he was switching license plates to fake being the others of the same make in SoCal. Using the automated license plate reader records for the city and the driver registrations of the legit drivers the team was able to isolate the common locations for those cars and where VIPER Agent Garry was going.

So we got a warrant for his apartment. Magus then used Garry’s hairbrush to find out he does his work in a small workshop and cabin in the woods - the hunt is on!

Fireflash: We’ll land a bit away and go in one foot so we can surprise him.
Hero Shrew: No smashing our heads through the door and saying ‘Heeeere’s Johnny!’?
Fireflash: He might have a superblaster and blow your head off.
Flux: And that’s assuming he didn’t electrify his door like a sensible person.

Hero Shrew does think to grab the first aid kit out of the Qruiser, just in case, until the GM points out that we never included one in the price of the vehicle. Which is a problem, since as a registered law enforcement vehicle it’s obligated to carry one. We should get onto that.

Hero Shrew : *opens the kit - there’s a few band-aids at the bottom and they’re expired*

GM: Most modern horror takes place in the woods.
Hero Shrew: What are the odds that a VIPER agent would have a basement full of monsters under his cabin.
GM: Pretty low - that’s more of DEMON’s bivouac.

Although it does look like Garry has been practising with a Pulson Blaster, judging by some of the trees he’s been shooting at.

Flux: Well, I’m going Invisible To Cameras, because why wouldn’t I.
Hero Shrew: Maybe he’ll mistake me for a bear.

Hero Shrew and Flux circle around to approach the building from behind. Hopefully he isn’t listening in on radio frequencies.

Hero Shrew: Want me to go ‘Cawcaw! Cawcaw!’ over the communicators when we’re in position?

Hero Shrew: So, who’s moving up first?
Magus: We’d much rather have them shoot at you, than us.
Hero Shrew: Fair enough.

Sneaking around the cabin and sheds suggests Garry is busy welding more armour onto a pair of Big Armoured Suits. They seem a little primitive, technology-wise.

GM: The Mk.I Iron Man suit looks better than this.

Fireflash: Surrender! You are WILDLY outmatched.

Garry goes down without much of a fight. Pity we can’t say the same about the robots. Of course, since Scooter has gone through two walls already, without the excuse of being blasted back through any, it’s debatable which side is doing more damage.

GM: Property Damage, your name is Hero Shrew.
Hero Shrew: Is it really a wall if I can just walk through it?
Magus: Brick-type superheros aren’t allowed to make that argument.

Fortunately Dee and Dum aren’t very bright - one of them even shoots at its own feet after it gets Entangled. It's an educational experience all round, really - for example, Flux discovers why it’s a bad idea to teleport through a Tesla Powerwall, and Hardlight is having trouble keeping Garry trapped in a force bubble. And it turns out that the Tweedlebots are Tyrell domestic robots, extensively modified to get around their hard-wired Three Laws. Not a simple problem - even dressing a homeless person as a robot stopped working the moment the robot realised that wasn’t oil leaking out all the holes. He’s had to install a suite of VR overlays in which Garry is the last human and everybody else is an enemy robot. Scooter has been doing some charity work to occupy his time and improve his reputation - mostly in the construction part of things.

Hero Shrew: Habitats for Inhumanity.

At least the construction industry in Edge City isn’t as hostile towards the superstrong as it is in other parts of the country. And there’s always an orphanage that needs building somewhere.

Hero Shrew: Just doing my bit to support the sidekick industry.
The Rep: I need to put a muzzle on my client. We’d cop less flak having him muzzled then we do if we don’t.

But it looks like there’s going to be a need for more construction in the near future, since a trio of guys in powered armour are trashing a building and stacking cars on the other side of town.

The Magus uses Dark Majesty to try and intimidate the antagonists. It does more to unnerve Flux.

The Magus: Morning All. Are you REALLY sure this is what you want to be doing? It hasn’t worked for anybody else.
Bad Guy P: Uh. Um? Could you stop the fire spreading too far, please?

It would appear that the damage he’s been doing is his attempt to stop the fire he started from spreading to the rest of the city block.

Bad Guy T: RELEASE THE HOUNDS!

There are now a half-dozen cybernetic attack dogs to complicate the next few minutes.

Hero Shrew: Is PETA likely to complain if we do the same thing to cyber-mastiffs that we do to the usual villains?

Admittedly, flinging them around in a residential neighbourhood presents all kinds of different problems. The bad guys attempt to flee, hoping the hounds will keep us occupied.

Bad Guy: Later people, Elvis has left the building.

GM: No matter what happens, the Rep loves Magus.
The Magus: Because it’s much simpler to spin stuff when we’re invisible to cameras.

Scooter manages to leap right through a brick wall.

Hero Shrew: That’s unfortunate - because I wasn’t actually meaning to do that, this time.
Little Old Lady Inside The Building: Tea? *privately thinking ‘This f***ing city’*

The cyber-mastiffs really were a very good distraction - a genuine threat to any civilians that came out to see what was happening in the neighborhood. It’s just as well we dealt with them all before anybody could get bitten in half. It’s also just as well that the Magus spent most of the fight putting the fire out, because there’s a person in a steel net inside the building.

GM: It’s probably why the bad guys were trying so hard to put the fire out when you arrived ‘S*** s*** S***, we’re supposed to be catching this person alive’.

The woman in question is a landscaper, and has no idea why any supervillains would want to kidnap her.

Hero Shrew: Just as well we showed up when we did, then. And put the fire out too, of course.

Although it IS slightly odd that she wasn’t even singed in the out-of-control fire.

Hero Shrew: Well, we should have you checked out by the paramedics when they get here. We don’t want to find out you had smoke inhalation and die of an asthma attack overnight.
Jadwiga Jaworski: *nods vigorously* Yes, we don’t want that.

We wait for the police, firefighters, and animal control to arrive.

Cyber-mastiff: Good Girl? I’m a Good Girl.
Flux: .... Now I feel bad. I just punted one through a fence and into a tree.

The enhanced attack dogs are three male and three female. By coincidence it was the males that went after the Magus.

Hero Shrew: Clearly they know who the biggest bitch in the party is.
Flux: ...the one day Hardlight isn’t here.

Scooter, on the other hand, dealt with the other three.

GM: He did a lot of bitch-slapping. hmm. not sure why that merged the two posts into one - the VIPER-related sessions were supposed to be one post, and the cybermastiffs seperate

Pathfinder : The Mummy's Mask - The Floor Is Lava
The Path of Fire naturally includes some lethal conditions and cunning traps, some of which we only avoid by being paranoid f***ers.

Onka: We push the iron golems, they slide into the lava, and they’re not a problem anymore.
Zenobia: Until they climb back out now glowing with a red heat.

Zenobia: Note for the future - don’t be on this level when we crash the pyramid.

Zenobia: Asrian wait - even if we free these slaves, how do we get them past the lava?
Asrian: We fly them out, swiftly.
Zenobia: … Good point.
Onka: We’re going to leave them outside?
Zenobia: With the giant scorpions?
Nemat: One problem at a time!

Onka: I hope this isn’t another one of those ‘screw with good people’ traps because those are starting to s*** me.

Nemat: They’re all dead.
Zenobia: *looking down at the one I’m trying to feed water to* But we were only in here two minutes!
Asrian OoC: They’re all dead, Dave.

And another trap requires a depth of knowledge about ancient artificers guilds.

Zenobia OoC: Who would have guessed that watching so many episodes of Antiques Roadshow would be useful.

Asrian has to disable room after room of traps.

Asrian: I’m good, I’m good.
Zenobia: As far as I’m concerned you’re perfect.

GM: Just give me a moment to grab some popcorn.
Nemat OoC: Well THAT doesn’t bode well.

The inhabitant of the next room is a bit surprised to see us - possibly because the room was well-hidden, but more likely because we came through the wall. Whoever employed him to sit around here presumably paid for some kind of fire resistance as well, since the floor in here is also lava.

On the other hand, he also has a lot of friends.

Zenobia: So, are we negotiating with these ones?
Nemat: NO.
Imhetef: Finally, after all these centuries, FRESH BLOOD!
Nemat: Yeah, there was never going to be any talking with this guy.

It also looks like this guy was an Inquisitor once, which is guaranteed to irritate our version. He starts walking towards us - on molten lava.

Onka: That must be some amazing Fire Resistance.
GM: No, just some very good shoes.

Fortunately Asrian shakes off the compulsion to walk forward into the lava.

Zenobia OoC: Asrian isn’t into Domination.
Asrian OoC: Asrian is a top.

She then casts Dispel Magic on Imhetef’s boots. He looks briefly surprised, before sinking into molten rock with all his protections suddenly removed. And when he turns into a swarm of bats, they promptly fry as well. Zenobia adds insult to injury by Channelling Positive Energy, which his Channel Resistance completely fails to stop. And then he sinks deeper into the lava.

GM: There are now crispy-fried bats floating on the lava. Why did I have him walk across???
Onka OoC: He knew the slippers worked. Until suddenly they didn’t.
Zenobia OoC: He was overconfident. And then he was on fire. And then he was dead.

And then it’s time to hole up, patch a few minor wounds, level up, and send Onka out shopping with teleport and to fabricate more magical items in his Hyperbolic Time Chamber. It helps that Nemat has been carefully collecting the remains of all of the undead we’ve been killing over the last few months - the undead dust will be a useful ingredient in arrows of greater undead slaying. A few crossbow bolts designed to destroy constructs will also be handy - Hakotep is quite fond of constructs. Zenobia can help with some of the spellcasting Onka needs.

Onka: Bring a book.
Zenobia: Certainly. It’ll be the Book of Sarenrae.
Onka: And sandwiches. Don’t forget sandwiches - this is going to take a while.

Unfortunately, the controller of the Earth level is a Div known as Kaahbek, Sedeb Ianew, Eater of Woe.

Asrian: Tell, me, how would you say ‘Eater of Feces’ in Ancient Osiriani?
Nemat: Please don’t.
Asrian: I’m not going to say it to the magic door, I’m going to say it to his face.
Zenobia: Look on the bright side, maybe you’ll get to say it to him as often as we need to chant it here.
Nemat: Actually, if I chant Kaahbek and you chant Eater of Feces that fulfils the door requirements and satisfies us at the same time.

Unfortunately knowing how to pronounce his names and titles helps us not at all once we’re actually inside the Div’s domain, although it does help us translate the boasting of some long-dead alchemist. Of course, being the kind of party that just rushes in would be much worse, and probably fatal.

Asrian OoC: Whereas WE are archeologists.

I mean, a team of professionals like ourselves is less likely to stroll up to a mysterious barrier, and see if it’s edible. It’s not often we get to meet the craftsmen that created the tomb chambers either, such as the pair currently arguing about who is the better painter.

Zenobia: Shall we ask if they want a third opinion?
Craftman: *Looking up* You aren’t authorised to be in this area! You invite a taste of the whip!
Nemat: Excuse me for asking an odd question, but what year is it? I think we’ve encountered some strange magic.

They call for their boss, who doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy that will be earning any workplace awards any time soon.

Hussef Daat: Shirking your duties again! *kicks a painter* And what of this lot? Do you require encouragement to labour? Kneel, and submit!
Zenobia: I have an alternative suggestion - take yourself to the summit of this pyramid, emplace yourself thereon, and swivel.

Zenobia expresses her concerns about the workplace conditions by casting Holy Smite on Daat and his Barbed Devil associates, and roasts and blinds both.

Nemat: That will hit Asrian too.
Zenobia: Yes, but it only harms the evil, and Asrian is good. In fact, she’s excellent.
Asrian: That might change what Daat does next.
Zenobia: Will he need help getting to the top of the pyramid?

Unfortunately his retaliatory Fireball kills his employees.

Zenobia OoC: What a pity they didn’t have protection against unfair incineration.

Further along we can hear the cheers of a crowd - and gladiatorial combat arenas were hardly unique to the ancient Romans. Admittedly the Romans didn’t have huge golems in their arenas. It’s also rather odd that the three people that are about to be smashed by the golems are the same three craftsmen we saw in the previous chamber, before they got toasted. Just as well Onka can assume control of one of the large constructs, Nemat can catch the last in Chains of Light, and Zenobia can get the attention of one of the more unpleasant ones before it eats the slaves

Mentu-Nebef: What is the meaning of this! Who dares interrupt the punishment of these slaves?
Zenobia: *sigh* Our names would mean little to you. However, I must say this - my training in the worship of Sarenrae has taught me much of patience, and of forgiveness of the failings of others. But for the last month I have watched people I care about putting themselves in more and more danger, and your master endangers my adopted country, and I have a wedding to plan. So you will sit down, and you will shut up, or I, personally, will jam this sword up your dick.

Of course, that will take about 3 rounds to say, so it’s possible Zenobia’s monologue will be interrupted by exploding golems. At least she’ll have a nice backdrop for her threat.

Nemat: *hums the 1812 Overture*

The golem Onka is puppeting is doing an AMAZING number of Critical Hits.

Zenobia: That must be a very well-constructed golem.
GM: Perhaps you can keep it after the fight.
Onka: It won’t fit through the doors (and I’ve been thinking about it).
Nemat: Besides, we were going to make our own by splitting off parts of our souls.
Zenobia OoC: Look how well that worked for Voldemort.

Mentu-Nebef: ENOUGH! *tearing the cartouche amulet from around his neck and throwing it to the ground in front of Zenobia* There! You have earned your passage! Now return to whatever hole you crawled from!

Nemat: OBVIOUSLY he’s referring to the secret tunnel in the floor we used to get into this level.
Zenobia: OOOOH, I just assumed the ‘hole you crawled from’ was a personal insult.

The next few chambers are variously suspiciously nice or just wildly suspicious. Once again, our skill as archeologists and professional mantra of ‘identify and record everything before you touch anything’ proves invaluable. The next person we encounter appears to be a horribly burned priestess, who claims she was enslaved by the Sky Pharoah after he banned the worship of Osiris.

Zenobia: That DOES sound like something he would do.

Of course she’s lying, as Nemat can easily tell.

Nemat: Here’s a hint - Don’t lie to an Inquisitor.
Zenobia: Well we don’t know WHY she’s lying, she might just be embarrassed. *turns back to the ‘Priestess’* You can tell us the truth, you know, we might be surprisingly understanding.
Asrian: Darling I love you but sometimes you’re too trusting for your own good.

The Priestess reveals her true form.

Nemat OoC: Apparently somebody decided Ursula the Sea-witch was too fat and not ethnic enough.

Nemat gets rid of her with his first spell.

Nemat: I am so done with all this - I just want to find the Sky Pharaoh and apply the beating.
Onka: No no, he belongs in a museum.
Nemat: He belongs in the ground - there’s at least 3 gods that want a word with him.

We sabotage another flying pyramid control system, and trash more of the Sky-Pharoah’s fleet.

Zenobia: I’m just amazed the Pharoah hasn’t taken more of an interest - he MUST know we’re in here by now. We’ve even been taking time for naps.

The last level of the pyramid is presumably going to be water-themed. Just as well we know the spell Life Bubble, which would protect us against being underwater, extremes of temperature, pressure, and poisonous gases.

Zenobia OoC: Ideal if we ever wanted to make a field trip to a Black Smoker.

To get in the last crypt we need to slake the thirst of the resident demon. Onka recalls that blood is a suitable libation. But we don’t have any bottles of manticore blood or random animal corpses left.

Asrian: *sighs and rolls up her sleeve*
Zenobia: *whimper*
Onka: I just heard an unhappy gnoll noise and I don’t like it.
Zenobia: I used to be a butcher and now I’m a healer - I can cut somewhere safe!
Asrian: That’s why I’m handing you the knife.
Nemat: Hold on, I’ve got some Unholy Water at the bottom of this backpack.
Onka: Oh right, you can use that instead of blood.
The Rest of the Party: *give Onka A Look*

The crypt is all canals, complete with creepy funeral barges, with even more creepy ferrymen.

Zenobia: At least I don’t need to use the Collapsible Bathtub as a raft.
Nemat: I still have this Swan Boat token.
Asrian: And we still have Overland Flight.
Onka: And Life Bubble - we could just walk on the bottom of the canal.

We decide to pay the psychopomps anyway, and pile into two of the boats.

Onka: And the lovebirds in the other boat? Hey, we could have had Asrian and Zenobia in the Swan Boat.
Nemat: I’ll let them use it for the wedding

It’s entirely too easy to find the control pyramid, although it’s embedded in ice. Alarm bells are ringing - metaphorically, inside our heads. There’s apparently still no response to our rampage through the rest of the pyramid. We assume that this one has to be a fake and go looking for the real thing. Maybe it’s in the room commemorating the Pharoah’s sister-in-law, who was fed to crocodiles after attempting a coup.

Zenobia: What a charming family.

Although we have a suspicion that ‘fed to the crocodiles’ might mean ‘sealed inside this crocodile statue’. The Banshee and her handmaidens are a more immediate concern, especially since the former nearly kills Zenobia with her screech, and the latter seem inordinately eager to get inside the party members.

Nemat OoC: Well, you do hear a lot of rumours about the nobility and their handservants.