Aeon D-Team S01E05 – Fun Guy

Dramatis Personae

• Eddie (played by +Ignus Pyre): 6’, 180 lbs. Outwardly disheveled looking, but his scruffy furs hide high quality gear underneath. Fairly average looking with reddish brown hair and a bit of stubble. Carries an enormous backpack but doesn’t seem too slowed by it, despite a slight limp, a pulls a trailer behind him made from the rear end of an old ford mustang. Honest, forthright and reliable, but won’t speak too much about his past. He seems to have a sixth sense for monsters and the dark fog.
• Jacob “Doc” (played by +Asta Kask): 6’, 150 lbs. Kinda lanky with leathery, weathered skin and greying hair, offset by piercing blue eyes. He’s compassionate, responsible, and very careful with his words. Dreams of building a place where metahumans can live unprosecuted. Has some healing powers. Followed by a 45 pound cat, that flies and leaves a rainbow trail behind it. Yes, really.
• Kurst “Kurt” Vetrson (played by +Antoni Ten Monrós): 6’ 4’’, 110 lbs. Wears layers and layers of clothing, but underneath them he’s anorexically thin and very pale. He always feels slightly cold to the touch, but despite the layers isn’t actually bothered by the cold. Young and usually speaks fairly coarsely. Absolutely hates wendigo. Has ice powers that he doesn’t like to use because they’re not fully under his control. Good with a bow.
• Dr. Nicodemus “Nick” Faust (played by +Hal Batty): 6’ 4’’, 180 lbs. Tall and lean. Flaming red hair, chalk white skin, and coal black eyes. Also literally inhumanly attractive, and his charms work on men and women alike. Wears a dark charcoal suit with crimson waistcoat and cravat, with a long black overcoat, even in the midst of a blizzard. Has an arrogant smile on his lips, only offset by an intensity to his eyes. Master of magic

• King the Maine Coon (NPC Ally): a huge Maine Coon cat (almost 50 lbs. and 4.5 ft long) that can fly/hover (leaving a trail of rainbow colored light), go “boneless,” shoot lazers from its eyes, ignore a structure’s ceilings and floors (but not its walls), and other more interesting abilities. He can haz cheezburger.

On the Road Again
Doc, Eddie,  Kurst, and Nick
Somewhere in North Dakota, 11° F moderate snow and light winds
January 31st, 37 AB, 5:00 pm
Unknown

Then we realise we’re out of fuel, Alexander had been concentrating non-stop to transmute a load of snow into fuel and keep it like that. We look around for any fuel and astonishingly (thank you probability dice) we find an abandoned fuel tanker at the side of the road.

We all immediately get out paranoia on, Kurst checks for traps, Faust just remains at a safer distance. Turns out it’s not trapped, but there is a small chance the whole thing will explode. Faust goes to a safer distance.

Kurst checks the driver, he’s got a hole in his head, Jacob determines this is probably the cause of death. Kurst then starts syphoning fuel while Maria sets up a sniper nest on top of the humvee. Eddie checks out the fuel and finds it’s kinda dirty, refined post-apocalypse, but it’ll work. At this point, I finally decide to be useful and find a load more fuel cans, a medical kit, and some ammo in the tanker (the magic of really high Scrounging). Eddie raids the engine for parts, (getting about $500 dollars worth).

Christopher makes us roll Freight Handling to put all this in the humvee (Like a jackass. No one ever has Freight Handling.) Fortunately, Eddie makes a convincing argument he’d have it from his previous career and gets to spend a couple of points in it.

Jacob says the driver’s final rites with Faust and Eddie joining in, Faust with a somewhat amused expression. Kurst shies away from this.

The Fungus Among Us
Doc, Eddie,  Kurst, and Nick
Somewhere in North Dakota, 7° F clear skies
February 1st, 37 AB, 5:00 pm
Minot Air Force Base

We finally pull into the military compound we were heading towards, and discover the place looks like a warzone. There’s no one here now, but it’s been stripped. Fortunately, there are still some tanks here we can grab the tracks from and attach to our humvee. We decide after much debate not to also add a howitzer.

After some investigating, it seems like the buildings were pulled in on themselves. We go our separate ways with Eddie going to work on the truck, Kurst to patrol for Wendigo, Jacob to look for supplies, and Faust to do whatever it is Faust does.

While working on the truck, Eddie sees an image of his little boy, coming up to ask him to play. He turns to his son, reaches out to stroke his cheek. Then, heart breaking, he turns away, knowing this can’t be real.

Jacob sees his wife, and his house, she’s sat painting in her usual spot. He tells himself it’s not real, and head outside. Then feels a hand on his shoulder, and looks up to see his wife offering him a glass of lemonade. He goes back inside with her, to rest.

Kurst watches Jacob come outside, hears him talking to himself, and realises something is wrong. He follows them into the building and sees Jacob slumped on the ground. Suddenly a frond whistles past his head. He looks up and sees a strange fungus clinging to the ceiling.

We cut to Faust, who suddenly recognises a smell that’s been lingering here since they arrived. An occult fungus. He quickly begins creating an antidote for its spores, but he’s missing a vital ingredient, a nodule found in the fungus itself.

Kurst carries Jacob outside, while over at the humvee, Eddie begins to feel tired and fall asleep. Kurst cries out for help. Faust hears him, but, being Faust, ignores him, continuing to work on the potion. He also sees Richard get dragged under the humvee, followed by some colorful flashes and meows.

Hearing a slithering behind him, Kurst begins to run towards Faust, still carrying Jacob. He dumps him at my feet, and turns to see a strange oozing creature sliding towards him. He power stunts for area effect, then slams a freezing binding on it. It rolls a critical success to resist, but he spends two Karma to beat it. His tattoos glow blue, and the temperature around him drops as ice begins to creep over the fungus.

Faust gets up from his potion and thanks Kurst for delivering the final ingredient to his lap. He holds out his hand for a knife, and Kurst hands him a strange, golden one.

Faust strolls over to the creatures and, rolling a 3, manages to cut out the nodule without getting so much as a single speck of fungal ooze on his pristine suit. He flicks the nodule off his knife, catches it with a spark of magic and sends it into the potion, before tossing the knife back to Kurst. He then pours the potion into Jacob’s mouth.

While this is going on, Eddie wakes up to find King licking him all over. He walks over to wear Faust is standing, and absent-mindedly places a fungal slime-coated hand on my shoulder. While he looks down at Jacob and berates him for not having enough control over his cat.

Without moving, Faust coldly tells Eddie to look 45 degrees to his left and asks him what’s the problem with what he sees.

‘What?’

‘Your hand. My shoulder. Covered in slime.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll get it out, I have cleaning equipment.’

(He really does, Eddie is ludicrously prepared)

While the coat is magically protected, the ooze is also magic, so it will stain if not cleaned properly.

Meanwhile, Jacob is having a very heartfelt moment about how he had to have his wife torn away from him again. Faust is far more concerned with the state of his coat.

Eddie goes back to work on the truck, while Kurst and King go around killing remaining slimes. Faust stays by the truck and lets Eddie know what he’s doing wrong, but he roll a 4, so for once it was actually wrong.

Kurst is hungry, so Faust pulls out 5 sets of MREs from magical extradimensional storage, and he wolfs them down.

Not having spent a single point of Karma thus far, Eddie decides to spend it all to put the tracks on the humvee in just 20 hours, while somehow making the whole thing bigger.

We manage to scrounge up a few more fuel cans, along with some miscellaneous bits and pieces.

During all this Maria has found, and packed an SUV with a load of stuff. She gives us a radio, plus a map dotted with notes telling us about various Crucible bases we can stop at for supplies. She then drives off into the sunset with Alexander to get him to a clone tank.

Before we drive off ourselves, Kurst uses a spray-can to write plague on the side of one of the buildings, and hopefully, stop anyone else from putting themselves in danger. We finish there.