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.
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| 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.
