AEON C-Team: Season 4, Session 3 – We Got Everything You Want

Dramatis Personae

  • Henry Young aka Springheel (played by Chris D.): A hyperkinetic with superhuman reflexes that recently left one military to join another. Tagline: “What’s the point of shooting if you’re just going to miss?”
  • Hssh ̚ok-qrra ͜a ͞a’escht ̷iish aka “Hiss” (played by Emily “Bruno” S.): A stranger in a strange land, with strange people, and strange technology. At least the microwave is a good conversationalist. Tagline: “Don’t try to pronounce that with your primitive honk-box.”
  • “N.V.” (played by Josh B.): Diva, darling, shapeshifter, and spy.. Tagline: “I like killer clothes and kicking nerds in the nose”
  • J. Tyler Moody aka Magpie aka VERACITY (played by Travis E.): [REDACTED]. Tagline: “[REDACTED].”
  • Rory Cook aka Boomer (played by Will): An expert scientist and self proclaimed “doctor” with the ability to charge objects so they explode. Tagline: “Where do you want the explosion?”

Previously . . .

Last time the team took down a drug lord, impersonated him, stole his memories, form, Yugo, and raided his stash house leaving only a group of knocked out thugs in chairs with their shoes tied together. The team decides to profile one of the other targets they had, Kris the Knife. A speedster doing jewelry robberies and slit throats. There’s not much other information or patterns that can be spotted during the intelligence analysis so they search down a fence named Chester the Molester with NV being sent in to speak with him.

Taking One For The Team

“N.V.”
Chestor’s Pawn
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2017, 12:00 pm (EST)
200 W 14th St, New York, NY 10011

It’s obvious that they don’t know who NV is, so the approach is made with NV attempting to outright buy any recently stolen jewelry in the form of an early 2000s Paris Hilton debutante. Chester is suitably lecherous. With a pretty woman in his shop, Chester closes the store and escorts NV to the back room while trying to feel up the metamorph to show her his jewels. There’s an emerald there, quite fancy looking that NV seems to take a liking to. Nearly getting him suspicious, NV recovers by pulling out a wad of a hundreds that immediately switches Chester into greed mode. NV switches tacts and tries to get put in touch with someone that could steal something special in exchange for. . . something special.

NV takes one for the team. Comes back to the Subway, and takes the hottest shower possible.

Gotta Practice My Stabbing

Henry, “Hiss”, “N.V.,” VERACITY, Rory.
Kris the Knife’s Hideout
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2017, 2:00 pm (EST)
216 Manida St, The Bronx, NY 10474

Veracity takes a look at the information that NV obtained and confirms that it’s good. They actually have Kris’s burner phone number. It’s time for Hiss and Rory to work on Stingray, for intercepting and tracking down the cell phone. Hiss does a quick bit of modification and gets a cellphone detector up and running. He’s not calling anyone, but he has forgotten the first rule of burner phones: turn off the GPS tracking. It reveals that he’s currently in the slums, seaside.

Right now, the plan is to surveil the speedster while setting up a trap for the guy to steal. They either need to give him a tempting target or something valuable. They set up a surveillance point with the van full of Rory, Hiss, and Springheel inside, NV going into social mod, and Veracity moving on foot.

The building is from the 40s or 50s, the windows have been blacked out, entrances are blocked or barricaded, and there’s only one real entrance to the building. It’s obvious that the building is basically abandoned. Veracity is moving while cloaked, using his grappling gun to get into the roof of the building. A man comes out of the main door and stands there smoking a cigarette, it’s not the target. He’s got black hair, white skin, nothing like a speedster. Veracity confirms that the bystanders around are actually bystanders while the man that left the building is packing a rather large handgun.

NV takes the first move to ask the man for a cigarette. Almost surprisingly, the man pulls out a pack and shares both a cig and a light. Introducing himself as Lee, he tells NV to get out of the way because his Boss isn’t too happy. Kris, his boss, moves out the door and threatens Lee and NV with a strange bronze dagger that only NV noticed. Veracity, on the roof, manages to peek through cracks and spots ten men inside the building as NV communicates the strange knife that Kris was holding.

Rory does some snooping and finds that they’ve got some internet being pipped into the building, a DSL line of some kind. He hacks into their internet to see if they’re doing anything. Just watching porn and pirating materials. Veracity calls Kris the Knife, he seems somewhat sane at the moment, but rather agitated. Taunting the man and hanging up, they get Rory to explode the doorway. Charging it for a second to a one second delay to allow him to get away from the explosion. The door goes off like a bomb, hurting the men inside.

Kris runs out, looking for an opportune moment to shoot people. Springfield, still in the van, quick draws his rifle and waits until Kris has moved towards someone and exposes a weak point before he fires. NV, having shifted into his war form, exits the alley and roars out. Hiss activates her shoulder cannon and lets fly with a high rate of fire that the speedster dodges. Rory pulls a pistol and tries to aim while the men are flowing out of the building. Kris moves across the street and stabs NV in the vitals twice. Henry blows the window out of the car blowing away the speedster’s hand, the dropped knife speeds into the van after Henry, managing to bat it away with his rifle before evading it, diving through the window, springing back off the railing, and ending up in a defensive position on top of the car.

Hiss’s shoulder cannon blasts him in the knee, burning it before Hiss herself jumps off the van and onto NV. Veracity, having taken the time to aim, hits Kris with a shot from his Electrolaser, though Kris is still up. Rory attempts to determine the best place to detonate the building but isn’t able to in the heat of combat, so instead he grabs a shuriken and throws it into the back of a man, causing him to explode and rips up his back.

The knife returns back to Kris’s hand and he starts to heal his hand and knee, Henry seeing this decides that discretion is the better part of glory and flips off the car, prepping for defense. Hiss preps for a net launcher to try to disable the speedster while Veracity fast draws his silenced pistol and takes two shots at his vitals, but he’s still up. Rory grabs another couple shurikens and threatens the men to drop their weapons or suffer the consequences. They don’t want to tangle with a ninja as they drop their weapons and flee.

Kris draws more life into himself while NV tries not to bleed everywhere.  Hiss’s cannon manages to remove Kris’s leg and the net launch covers Kris entirely. Rory runs across the street while Henry keeps a bead on Kris in case he manages to get out of the net. Hiss attempts to create a kyberic disrupter from her laser cannon, spending some time to do that while Veracity fires another couple shots into his vitals. Rory throws a shuriken at Kris making him explode and knocking him out. The knife flies in front of Rory demanding it wields him. NV attempts to talk to the knife while he passes more blood, it asks to call it Lord and Master. Feeling confident that he can handle it, NV takes the knife. It tries to convince NV to stab people while NV gives fashion lessons to the knife.

Aftermath

Veracity loots their hideout, full of laptops, cellphones, and guns. They manage to find the cache on a table along with other items as NV is directed to some files taped underneath a chair by the knife. It’s a dossier on multiple other supers, an old Blue Skies document. They load things into the van along with Kris, now with his leg grown back, into the van. NV, refuses to hand the knife off to Veracity and is immediately tranquilized by Hiss. The Knife is picked up by Veracity who is able to block out the cries of stabbing people.

Once back, they lock Kris into one of the holding cells that has experimental metahuman blocking abilities while suggesting that they give Chester a surprise by confronting with NV in Kris’s shape and knocking him out and dropping him off for the police.

After Action Report (GM)

I gave Travis (as team leader) some dossiers by his commanding officer of things he “might want to look into” given the nature of the splintered AEGIS his character is effectively in command and under little oversight. They opted to take down a speedster committing murders and thefts – an old friend from B-Team, Kris the Knife with his magical murder knife. Overall, they were smart and approached the situation smartly, there was at least one instant where I was for sure at least one PC (Josh) was going down, but his character’s “war-form” is super sturdy and survived two strikes directly to the vitals with a 5d impaling attack. There was a momentary instant were I thought Enhanced Time Sense allowed you to dodge against snipers (which is what Veracity was doing), but it wasn’t in the Basic Set – I set it aside for sake of gameplay. (It was in Martial Arts – you get an active defense against attacks you theoretically couldn’t be aware of thanks to the effects of ETS.)

The combat lasted a bit longer than I would have liked because of player indecision at a few points, but it was a tough battle the PCs mostly came out whole. The bit where the PCs were talking to the demon knife were pretty hilarious too.

Other Notes

None.

Soundtrack

“Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns and Roses (Opening Song)
“Mack the Knife” by Bobby Darin (Combat Scene)
“Click Click Boom” by Saliva (Closing Song)

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