Breakout

 Continuing the NSC mini-campaign.

EPISODE 2: BREAKOUT

CAST

Busy, a 13 year old child and the only friend of Mongo the megaraptor.

Paragon the Laser Swordfighter from another planet, who is renting a room from Busy's oblivious parents.

After the team's other members stopped a handful of super-apes from hurting too many innocent bystanders at the art museum, they tracked a baboon with laser eyes back to its origin point: a hidden lab complex deep in the wetland preserve.

Busy and Paragon rode to the lab on Mongo’s back and scouted out the complex from the safety of the treeline. The whole area was surrounded by a 12” fence capped with razorwire. The tallest structure was a guard tower crewed by two security guards equipped with AR-15 rifles and a radio. The next tallest looked similar to a factory or warehouse from the outside, followed by a motorpool building with four wide bay doors, and finally an L-shaped one-story building like the ones in strip malls.

They both agreed that they should try to sneak in rather than going in hot, but with no clear plan on how to do that, Paragon boldly approached the guard tower trying to knock it down with a telekinetic blast, but was immediately spotted and shot. Shrugging off the injury for now, he attempted a telekinetically assisted leap to the guard platform, but was shot again in midair and ended up clinging to structural beams halfway up the tower.

Meanwhile, Busy and Mongo were circling the complex to smash through both the fence and the west wall of the factory building to find themselves in some sort of testing lab with gym equipment and target dummies. A thick glass wall separated them from a hallway running the width of the building. A door swung open across the way and more armed guards started streaming out, so Mongo smashed his way through the glass wall and bit one of the guards in half at the waist as he fired ineffectually into the ceiling. Mongo then tail-whipped another guard that was moving to flank him.

Outside, Paragon got shot again. Climbing out of the guards’ arc of fire, he took a second to get his second wind, then swung up onto the platform and cut one of the guards down with his laser sword, then telekinetically threw the other off the tower to his death. Alone at the top of the tower, Paragon watched the farthest bay door open and a giant robot walk out with thunderous pneumatic steps—Artillery MK I.

Artillery Illustration by Boson Au

Thinking quickly, Paragon leapt down while half-dragging and half-swinging his laser sword behind him to cut down the tower while also slowing his descent to avoid injury. With a final slice to a load-bearing steel beam, he brought the tower down on Artillery’s processing unit. The broken robot collapsed, smoking and sparking, unfired crew-served weapons sticking up at awkward angles.

In the testing lab hallway, Mongo killed another armed guard and ran back out the hole he’d created in the wall when he entered, employing a stick and move strategy. The guards followed. He ran across the complex under fire and Paragon joined Busy on his back before they turned to charge past the guards and smash through the east wall of the warehouse to find rows upon rows of stacked cages, each containing a super-powered primate and equipped with a device to suppress the animal’s power.

The heroes immediately set to work freeing the primates, slicing through cages and ripping off doors. The newly freed test subjects were smashing their way out of the warehouse and into the swamp as the guards caught up with the team, but Paragon telekinetically threw a mandrill with ice-breath at them, turning one of them into an ice sculpture. The two remaining guards decided they’d had enough and got the fuck out of there.

Having dealt with all immediate threats, Busy and Mongo went to investigate the L shaped building while Paragon checked out the unexplored office in the warehouse. There was a nameplate on the office door: Dr. Sarah Tonin. And on the second line: Director of Operations. The desk was locked, but not laser-sword proof, so Paragon had no trouble finding her research notes. Apparently an experimental drug called FantoMax III had been injected into the subjects as embryos. Every subject that survived gained a seemingly random superpower, which was then carefully measured over time.

Busy and Mongo found themselves in an embryonic lab, where they grabbed a gorilla embryo and a tray full of FantoMax samples, one of which Busy slipped into his own pocket for later experimentation. An interior door was labelled “Growth Acceleration,” and Busy went in. A dizzying mess of cables fed into a 10’ wide pod at the center of the room, shaped something like an upside down pinecone or beehive. With no hesitation whatsoever, he stepped into the pod and had Paragon activate it from a terminal at the other side of the room. A few seconds later, a 23 year old Busy stepped out, still wearing clothes that he'd suddenly outgrown. With no idea how they’d explain this (or the caged gorilla they were bringing home with them) to Busy’s parents, they grabbed Sarah Tonin’s computer and left.

THE END FOR NOW. 

Barrel Of Monkeys

The Longshot City campaign I'd been posting about until I fell off a couple months ago is still going, but I had to step back and cut it down to one session per week instead of the three I'd been running. The accumulated campaign lore that I haven't posted anything about here has gotten to be way too much to give anything proper context.

HOWEVER. I have recently started running a separate mini-campaign every other week on the New Save Collective server, and I've been writing session reports for it. Here's the first one:

EPISODE 1: BARREL OF MONKEYS

CAST:

Jebediah the Powersuit. Jeb built himself a suit of armor that flies and shoots rockets in his basement workshop. 

Gideon the 45th the Brute Cannon. Gideon tampered with his own DNA to give him increased strength, durability, and the ability to produce kinetic blasts. This also happened in Jebediah's basement.

(They haven't named their team yet but a theme is clearly emerging)

The Longshot City Art Museum. Opening day of a traveling exhibition called "Occult Americana." Our heroes are there simply because that sort of thing is cool. Little did they know they wouldn't have time to check out the installation.

Shortly after they arrived, a group of six workers in matching overalls pushed through the crowd to deliver a comically oversized wooden barrel in front of the reception desk and left. Gideon immediately walked up to the barrel and examined it. When he realized no one else seemed to have noticed the barrel, he tried knocking on it. Something inside knocked back.

The barrel exploded in gideon's face as a speedster gorilla, a baboon with heat vision, and stretchy capuchin leapt out.

First the capuchin reached up and pulled himself onto the top of a massive glass tornado sculpture made up of thousands of tiny shards of mirrored glass. It looked like it was going to fall onto a crowd of civilians, but Jebediah flew over in time and used the strength granted by his suit to right it.

Meanwhile a brawl was breaking out between Gideon and the gorilla, and Gideon was not doing well.

At this point the baboon was charging up for a blast of heat vision aimed at a pair of little girls. A man jumped in front of them to shield them from the blast. He surely would have been doomed if Jebediah hadn't intercepted the heat vision blast with a rocket-propelled grenade, throwing the monkey tumbling over the reception desk.

Having pummeled Gideon nearly to death, the gorilla caught sight of an extensive display of medieval weaponry up on the second floor interior balcony, particularly a 17th century halberd, and went running up the stairs for it. Jebediah managed to hit him with a well-timed energy blast, knocking the ape off the stairs. Then the gorilla tried to escape, but jebediah knocked him out with a an armored flying punch to the jaw.

All this happened within one in-game minute of the barrel exploding. The crowd was finally starting to thin out at this point, but the man and two girls were unmoving, frozen in place by the unfolding trauma.

The unmistakeable sound of shattering glass rang out from the direction of the traveling exhibit accompanied by what sounded like a miniature jet engine.

Jebediah and the baboon got into an energy blast duel, with both attacks meeting in the middle like a reverse tug of war. Jebediah gained the upper hand and tackled the monkey, beating on him while mounted on his chest like an MMA fighter, but the beast caught Jebediah by surprise with an energy blast that sent our hero flying.

The baboon got away while Gideon was getting his second wind, preparing to rejoin the fray. Meanwhile the capuchin had climbed up into the orrery hanging well above the reception hall, and was causing havok up there. A blue-green stone sphere, larger than a man and depicting Uranus, fell. It was positioned directly above the man and what the players were by now assuming must be his daughters. Gideon shot it out of the air with a massive blast of kinetic force before it could hurt them.

Another minute passed. Our heroes could now hear the sound of gunfire, at least two different calibers, from the direction of the Occult Americana exhibition, accompanied by the same jet engine sound as before.

Curious, our heroes poked their heads into the traveling exhibit hall. They saw one security guard bleeding but alive on the ground and another crouched down and shooting upward at Rocketman, a notorious art thief and prominent socialite. He was wielding a gold-plated L
uger in one hand and carrying his prize, a hand mirror with a very particular history, in the other.

Rocketman Illustration by JeCorey Holder

Gideon and Jebediah gave each other a look, instantly agreeing without words that this guy looks fucking cool and probably deserves the mirror. They simply let him get away.

They did manage to kill the stretchy capuchin, but not before it pulled down a massive bronze relief directly onto the head of the man who'd been protecting his daughters.

As the police sirens started to get closer, our heroes made their escape in jebediah's geo metro. When they got to their hideout, the girls popped out of their hiding place in the back seat and yelled "surprise!" so it looks like the team has a pair of adopted daughters now.

THE END FOR NOW