Dramatis Personae

Previously . . .

When we last left off, the team had just traded with John Shuler, an old man with a shopping cart. They traded off all the scrounged booze for the location of a time bubble that’s about four miles from their current position. The bubble looked in the process of coming down, though he didn’t explain how he knew that information. Terra is working on fortifying the area and creating a second water filtration system while Stitch is keeping lookout with Kenneth.

Taking Deluge along, they start towards the water’s edge for the time bubble. It’s going to take the team about three hours to get there, though Finn is loaded down with his gear keeping him from being stealthy. Along the way, they encounter four dead bodies, looking rather freshly dead, savaged by an animal of some kind. Claws that rend, teeth that gnash, terrible wounds on the bodies, there’s soft tissue having been eaten. They gather what gear they can and load it onto the flatbed.

Keep Slipping Into the Future

Bone Daddy, N0va, and The Ghost
Former Vtec Labs, Inc.
Day 6, 9:00 am
212 Manida St, The Bronx, NY 10474

Continuing on they get to the time bubble location, there’s a nearby field which looks like it had a building on there and bulldozed. The building has a courtyard with several new looking cars and a gasoline tanker. Covering the facility is a rather multi-hued soap bubble. Ghost touches the bubble, injuring his hand, one of the fingernails on his hand looking rather long. The bubble seems to heave and then return to its location. It seems to have retracted several inches. Bone Daddy creates a bone javelin to throw into the bubble, it disintegrates into dust several yards on the other side of the bubble. It made it through, but didn’t get too far.

Deluge, throwing some water in, just causes it to mist on the other side. While it hasn’t retracted further, the bubble seems unstable with colours swirling one way and then different colours the other ways with it rippling. A quick gander, it looks like there’s other survivors gathering around the edge of the clearing where the time bubble is located. Around 25 are set to run with one having set up a firing position on a nearby building, seeming to be waiting for the bubble to pop.

One rather large man approaches them with rather badly dyed red clothing, either dyed on purpose or from the blood of his enemies. He tells the three to leave since it’s their location and they were there first. Knowing that their normal diplomat is gone, Finn steps forwards and offers the man a lemon drop, eliciting a rather happy reaction. Finn offers more to the rest of the man’s crew, calling forwards another 5 men. Finn outlines that it would be easier for them to split things if they team up together rather than having a free for all, something that the man, Ryan Shepard, seems to consider so far. He warns the group that there’s men on nearby rooftops, with firing lines on them.

Another man yells from the crowd calling Shepard an asshole only to get a finger in return. Shepard’s Flock is rather heavily armed with LBV and tactical gear. Ghost tries to shift off into invisibility, though Shepard’s eye manages to catch sight of Ghost turning invisible. Shepard raises an eyebrow at the non-invisible teammates. Finn just offers him another lemon drop and explains that if they get in then things will be nice and simple and easy, if they don’t get in. . . Well there’s going to be a fight on their hands. Shepard agrees, they’ll split it 50/50 after things are over and they’re in there. Shaking each other’s hands, Shepard and his flock start firing into the crowd at the same time as the bubble bursts.

With the outside crowd taking cover in buildings at the outskirts of the clearing while the team climbs the chain link fence and flops over onto the other side. They move into location seeing soldiers inside, several strange figures, and some kind of tentacle-y monster. Time seems frozen for a moment before the gunfight starts. Finn hears chatter over the National guard radio before broadcasting to alert them that backup is coming from behind as the group charges into the building.

The tentacle monster heads towards the strange figures dressed in futuristic body armor and wielding energy weapons. The armor looks almost organic, chitin almost. One of the strangers attacks the weird tentacle thing while the rest attacks the Natural Guards, taking one down. The Guard leader fires on the run, striking one of the Strangers twice. Bone Daddy approaches with a shout that he’s here to help, electing responses of joy from the guard. Ghost moves forwards, drawing his firearm. Finn tries to figure out what to do, attempting to take remote control of one of the weapons of the strangers but missing in the darkness. The Guardsmen fire off several rounds hitting the strangers.

The tentacle monster attacks a retreating stranger while Deluge gathers water. One of the strangers hit the tentacle monster while the rest fire again into the Guardsmen, hitting several. The leader puts another two rounds in a stranger’s head, killing him while Bone Daddy keeps moving into melee range. Finn hears the guard trying to call in air support, but no response back is heard. The tentacle monster feasts on one of the strangers while they fight back.

The leader uses a grapnel gun to swing on top of the warehouse shelving. Bone Daddy questions the logic of charging at a tentacle monster before he drops his bone weaponand instead readies his firearm. Ghost fires his rifle at the strangers, most of the rounds bouncing off the armor, but the stray rounds actually kill the stranger that is in the clutches of the tentacle beast while Guardsmen roll grenades through the warehouse stacks. The tentacle beast decides that Bone Daddy looks delicious and moves to bite him, though his tough boney exterior protects the soft crunchy interior from the bite.

Since it’s now apparent that there’s someone there, the strangers fire at Ghost hitting him with a lot of burning damage that knocks Ghost out and sets him on fire. The leader takes a few shots from above the Strangers, causing one of their heads to explode like a ripe melon. Bone Daddy fires a shot into the tentacle monster’s body and chops at it with his axe. Finn fires his plasma rifle for the first time, lighting up the tentacle monster leaving several burning holes in the wall behind it.

The grenades explode knocking out the final stranger as Bone Daddy gets bitten by the tentacle monster. The leader commands the rest of the guards to clean up before firing on the tentacle monster. Bone daddy fires his pistol again, only for the beast to dodge out of the way before scoring a hit with the bone axe. Finn fires off another blast of rounds, making it crispy while the Guardsmen fire on it. The leader swaps his weapon around and fires on the tentacle, striking it with two shots and finally killing it.

Men are getting medical treatment which Bone Daddy ties to help with. . . Tries.

The leader is Tyler Moody, Agent Veracity, who was trying to suss out what is going, having gotten split up into multiple people, he’s the last one, number 22. Gotten involved in a Black Fog situation and fighting with Strangers and a Remnant. As far as he knows, it’s in the mid-2020s and he’s been fighting against the dimensional invasion. A comment coming around that they need a casualty evac, but unfortunately they’re a few years away from that being an option. Finn asks them if they’ve ever heard of a Time Bubble as Veracity attempts to put together information on who their back up ended up being.

They ask what is going, where the MAPs team has been for the past 10 years and where Veracity and they have been for the past 20 years. He deduces there’s some kind of temporal distortion going on. Veracity gets his questions answered. That it’s a real horrible apocalypse. They determine what’s going on and if he is trying to want someone to grab half of the stuff in there. It doesn’t matter too much to him so they look for what they want to salvage.

Peeking out, Finn sees that Shepard has killed and piled everyone to one corner and is going through them. Meantime Finn determines that the guns aren’t too keen to be controlled by anyone but the strangers, no matter how many lemon drops he offers and the armor just self destructs melting the body. It’s a pale, pale body with long hair and pointed ears and cat-like eyes. Inside the building is a lot of electronics, along with power banks, inverters, and solar panels on the roof. They grab what they can, decide to split it with Shepard, not needing the tanker full of gasoline that would only make them targets, same as the trucks and forklift.

Aftermath

Veracity and the surviving national guard leave in the Humvees they had to go back to base, or what might be left of it.

The MAPs team, on the other hand, get Shepard to follow them back to the Transistor warehouse, parking the cars into the bays for the fire department and EMS station on the same block and closing the doors to keep them concealed before posting watch.

After Action Report (GM)

Today’s session the PCs got to see one of the weird things about the future: temporal bubbles. The people of the dark future of AEON don’t know if it’s manmade or a result of dark fog, but some locations in the no-go zone (and throughout the city for that matter) are temporally separated from the rest of time. This separation lasts for a random amount of time. This makes them troves to survivors – if they can get to them. The PCs struck a deal with a street gang to split the profits of whatever they found 50/50. The combat was a nice mix of craziness and one PC went down the count (The Ghost), while the rest stayed back and let the National Guardsman/Strangers duke it out. Overall, a good session and the PCs now have lots of trade goods.

Other Notes

This was a 3 hour session. We only had 3/5ths of the team and I didn’t want to get TOO far ahead.

Soundtrack

“Tiny Bubbles” by Dan Ho
“War Pigs” by Black Sabbath
“Fly Like an Eagle” by Steve Miller Band