Dramatis Personae

• Chad “The Chad” H. Ramirez (NPC): Demigod of Cupid. Surferbro. Good guy. Not really a great combatant. Guess he’ll die. Tagline: “Whoa.”
• Cosmos aka The Management (Adelphin’s Ally): Cat and hotel manager. No, really. He’s got keys to everywhere, but is still a cat. Tagline: *Forgets to cat*.
• Rui Qui (Adelphin’s Ally): Theogenic Demigod. Hacker, magician, and entrepreneur. The team’s backup fighter and sneaker. Tagline: “Reality is just another simulation to be hacked.”
• Siv (NPC): Demigod of unknown parentage. Not a big talker. Doesn’t understand modern-day and was obviously raised in another dimension. Tagline: “. . .”

Previously . . .

At some point in time that no one knows, the opponents have discovered that something has changed in their surroundings and started moving.

Three Little Demigods

Adelphin Jean-Baptiste, Liam O’Shea, Mitzidu Ito, Suveer Patel, & Yannis Papadopoulos
City Athletic Boxing
Sunday January 15th, 2012, 1500 hours
3401 S Sammy Davis Jr Dr, Las Vegas, NV 89109

Adelphin waits for Rui to break the skylight and follows him through down to the floor. Liam bursts through the backdoor with a booming yell of “Oh yeah!” and around the front of the raised office. One of the demigod opponents, Garret, activates an aetheric power. Suveer bursts through the skylight on top of one of the cultists, dropping the man prone. Mitzidu, realizing that the location is a bit high up, hesitates before running over to the next skylight over. The Chad jumps down onto the boxing ring and hurts his knees on the landing. Yannis keeps observing the situation since it changed unexpectedly. The cultists perforates The Chad with numerous rounds, “killing” him. Suveer also gets several rounds aimed at him, also getting shredded despite dodging to cover, crippling his left arm in the blast. Adelphin barely manages to dance away from the barrage aimed at her while Rui barely manages to avoid the dodged rounds. Attacking Liam, he doesn’t get the shield in the way fast enough and takes half a magazine from an MP5, his legs and bleeds out on the ground. Several more rounds manage to barely miss Suveer.

Rui moves and slices through a cultist’s skull like a Tarantino movie. Adelphin gazes upon Garret, temporarily killing him as he’s still a demigod. Liam lies there bleeding more. Suveer rolls away underneath the ring. Mitzidu runs further, changing back to his human form, jumping onto the boxing ring landing on Chad’s body. Yannis moves behind another Demigod, Paul, the magic-user of the three and gets killed by the backblast of unintentionally absorbing energy from the demigod. Suveer keeps dodging attacks and Liam keeps getting shot at on the floor taking more and more lead to the body. Mitzidu then gets to avoid being shot by several cultists.

Rui raises his hands and as swords appear, he slices through two more cultists that were targeting Suveer. Adelphin animates the dead bodies that Rui just created, rising the next second. Suveer grabs the man he landed on and drags him underneath the mat. Mitzidu slips off the ring and slices into one of the cultists’ necks, killing them. The remaining demigod, Mary, strikes at Mitzidu’s weapon arm but he manages to parry it before dodging several rounds from more cultists. Adelphin dodges a shot from the tower while the one being attacked by Suveer fails to get the gun up to hit Suveer in the guts.

Rui’s swords carry him up into the office where he’s planning on taking out the snipers. Adelphin’s zombies turn and open fire on the cultist on the stairs, killing them, before giving Garret a coup de grace, absorbing his power and knocking herself out. Suveer punches the cultist that he’s got pinned in the nuts twice, making the man wish he was dead. Mitzidu is between two cultists and a demigod and strikes twice at the demigod with rather mixed results, Mary’s parry disarming him before a counter attack which Mitzidu steps back from and gets shot at and dodges all rounds again. A cultist damages one of the zombies while Liam gets more bullets unloaded into his chest. Rui gets several rounds fired at him but defends admirably. The zombies fire back at their assailant, clipping him with a few shots.

Rui slices through the two snipers with ease as Suveer throws the man he’s got a hold of at Mary’s legs, killing the man and knocking Mary over. Mitzidu’s dropped sword returns to his hand as he steps back and strikes at the two cultists, slicing through their necks. Mary does an acrobatic stand to her feet and rushes at Mitzidu with an overhead strike that misses. The cultist fires into the zombies to little effect while the one targeting Liam reloads again. The zombies fire again, managing to kill the cultist trying to kill them.

Rui jumps from the office behind the man unloading into Liam. Suveer blasts from under the ring, aiming for Mary’s legs, bringing her down and crushing both legs beyond recognition. Mitzidu sheathes his sword and moves to The Chad as Rui knocks his cultist out via magic. Mary gets disarmed, violently, as Suveer pops her arm joints.

The Chad can be seen as regenerating quite a bit, with Mitzidu casting healing spells on Chad to speed things up and then goes to heal Yannis and heals his wounds but is still physically gone with no sign of waking up. Mitzidu heals up Liam using quite a bit of energy from his reserves and his sword’s reserves waking him up. Liam comes around, cursing in a rather vivid Irish brogue and asks Rui how hard it would be to wake up the man. It’d be easy to do so, and while Liam doesn’t care about waking him up, he still brings his foot down on the cultist’s knee, disintegrating it.

Suveer investigates Mary while Adelphin considers the people around after she wakes up. Mary is at least the offspring of Apollo and has been around for at least half a century and is a very good swordsman. Liam removes his bloody shreds as he moves towards the back to try to find the person that they rescued. Informing her that almost everyone in there is dead, and asked who everyone in there is. The kitsune says that they’re most likely Spartans, the Olympian’s black bag ops, the ones that get called if the Olympians want to do something without direct interference. A quick look over the gunman reveal the same Spartan Lambda tattoo on everyone.

Suveer asks if he wants Mary to relieve her burden, but she’s as cooperative as ever. He tells her to say hello to Apollo and then chops her head off with her own sword. He only absorbs a portion of her power and stays standing unlike Adelphin or Yannis. Adelphin looks over Yannis and tries to cast a spell to regenerate his FP waking him up. Investigating the office, they find absolutely nothing, it was just a normal business that they took over for the day. Adelphin takes the identifications from the dead bodies to use later. Mitzidu and Suveer investigate Mary’s sword that is magical, but doesn’t know what sort of effects it has.

Aftermath

Mitzidu and Adelphin call in a cleaner to clean up the crime scene, getting Adelphin’s bellhop, Lynch, to get the gym cleaned up as he’s someone in-house. He’s impressed that they took out a group of Spartans and asks if she minds if he sells some of their body parts. She acquiesces, except for the two zombies and the one person that they’ve got hog tied which they’re taking home.

Mitzidu speaks with Maki, the kitsune, asking how she got captured. They jumped her while she was in the process of heading back home and quickly bound her with magic. She still isn’t too sure what happened or how she got out of her bindings but is quite happy that she was rescued as everyone gets back to the Karnival Hotel. Liam is ready to get some drinks while Suveer wants something to eat, having already eaten the sandwich below his seat in the car. They stop by for some food on the way there.

Back home, the zombies get put in with the rest of Adelphin’s army and they move to send Maki back towards Tokyo via Mitzidu using her energy to fuel a gate spell sending her home. She bows quite deeply to Mitzidu in respect and he responds in turn.

After Action Report (GM)

The first combat of the new campaign was everything I hoped it would be: brutal, fast, and efficient. Two PCs “died” (all demigods have Unkillable with the only way to destroy them is to take their heads/destroy their brains or destroy their heart). Liam died just through terrible luck of the dice. I offered the player to use some of his aethera points (i.e., impulse points) to reroll his terrible HT roll that resulted in his death, but he felt for roleplaying reasons it was actually better if he didn’t. Gotta respect that choice. Most PCs would rather participate then spectate. Yannis died because he opted to kill a demigod and was affected by something I had kept secret from the players: killing another demigod might knock you unconscious and will almost certainly fatigue you depending on how much of their power was absorbed. Yannis absorbed almost all of it and went down from that. Adelphin faced a similar problem but she knew what she was getting into and made the choice to kill the demigod and absorb their power. This knocked her unconscious. This left two PCs and one NPC fighting the remainder of the bad guys and for a while it looked like they might lose. It certainly kept the PCs on their toes and I really enjoyed how dramatic it turned out to be. Felt like a movie fight with all that that entails.

Other Notes

Bonus report here.

Soundtrack

“The Payback” by James Brown (opening song)
“One Little Victory” by Rush
“Vengeance” by Zack Hemsey (closing song)