AEON B2-Team: Season 8, Session 8 – On the Verge of Something Unseen

Dramatis Personae

  • Amar Gupta aka The Iron Sikh  (played by Christian): Brick. Taxi Driver. Ass-Kicker. Sikh. Tagline: “Being a man of faith means to live it.”
  • Amie-Belle T. W. Lee aka Whisper (Played by Curtis): Cold War era super-soldier/spy that got put in the Freezer, because she got poisoned. After getting thawed out and cured she tried to back to work, and was given an “adjustment period”. Uncle Sam called 2 years later, with work… because once you’re in, you’re in for life. Tagline: “In and out without a whisper.”
  • Beauregard K. “Bo” Ratnam aka Wirerat (Played by Brice): Technopath, inventor, and hacker. He specializes in co-opting enemy systems and tech assets. Tagline: “Nice tech – I’ll borrow that.”
  • Rafe Hanlon aka Nyx (played by Chris D.): An umbrakinetic petty thief still on work release several years later, on his way to becoming a true agent and hero. Tagline: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
  • Vincenzo L. dePrezzo aka Threshold (Played by Rory): Doctor, Mathematician, and Scientist (yes, capitals) and Spatial Manipulator. Threshold can bend space like a pretzel, teleport, obliterate things, and has extraordinary senses. He’d rather be in a research lab than fight. Better known for his work with Doctors Without Borders, the United Nations, and disaster relief than famous battles. Tagline: “I can be there in a snap!”
  • Derrick K. Ratnam aka Legerdemain (NPC Ally): Spin doctor and media liaison for Project VANGUARD. Twin to Bo. Tagline: “Well, actually that’s not how it happened…”
  • Layla A. de Blackburn aka Nox (NPC): CIA-trained child assassin all grown up to be Daddy’s Little Monster. Maybe a little mad. Argues with her shadow often. Tagline: “No, we shouldn’t do that…should we?”
  • Stainless Steel Rat aka “Sir” (NPC Ally): Bo’s best friend and assistant. A sentient drone in the shape of a stylized shiny metal rat mindlinked to Bo. Specialties are rapid repair construction and modifications. Imagine if K-9 and R2D2 made a baby and it looks a bit like a rodent. Tagline: “Repairs and upgrades in progress.”

Previously . . .

After cooking, Whisper gets a call and has to move out. Lynch is still tied up with Christmas lights in the closet. With around 3-4 hours to go until the 24 hour deadline, Threshold calls to work with Wirerat, who is still suffering from brain damage, asking for his aid in creating a large kyberic bomb using the negatively charged orichalcum shards. He shares his notes with Wirerat on how the reactors work. Wirerat reluctantly agrees and calls for SSR to do a sanity check on Threshold’s mental state which isn’t given a glowing review. Still, they keep going with the project while pulling Prodigy into the mix as well. Prodigy isn’t entirely sure that it’s a good idea that they’ve got and they should try not to blow up Manhattan.

Oh, Yeah. It’s All Coming Together

Nyx, Threshold, and Wirerat
Old FDNY Engine 299/Ladder 152 Building aka New Base
 Saturday, May 9th, 2020, 0430 hours (EST) 
61-20 Utopia Pkwy, Fresh Meadows, NY 11365

She tells him that she’s known people far smarter than him that have tried to solve the problem that he’s been working on and they’ve failed. She isn’t too happy with his can-do attitude or the fact that he still feels that he’ll have been right even if it ends up blowing up most of New York. All she can think is that she’s going to die, and that she’s too young and that she hasn’t even gotten laid yet. Threshold admonishes her that she’s too young to be thinking about that, she’s not even thirty yet. His response just sends her to go find some coffee to drink while he gets Wirerat to start manufacturing things.

Nyx, meanwhile, keeps moving and goes on patrol as there’s not much else for him to do. He finds a strange scene of a woman with the sides of her car ripped open and the tires are slashed. Taking a look around, he notes that there’s places in the street where the street has been torn up into gravel, like mole mounds. A quick ping of Shadar tells him that there’s definitely something moving under the ground, though it’s too dark for him to tell what it is. Unable to ignore the bait in front of him, he warps over into her car, tells her not to panic and shifts her away into one of the nearby buildings. Only a couple seconds later, what looks like a large star nosed mole pops out of the ground the size of a large dog bursts from the ground and starts slashing at the car again.

A quick shadow binding later and it’s stuck, a good look at it shows that it doesn’t even have legs, just pseudolimbs that split into tendrils when they’re not pretending to be legs. Thinking about it for a moment, he teleports the creature back to HQ right onto Threshold’s couch since it’s safe to assume that with Threshold being occupied, his office, and therefore his couch, is unoccupied and therefore is a safe place. Radioing in the find that he warped into the office, he then follows the tunnels below ground to try to find if there’s any more of them down there, but find nothing nor even a starting point. Shrugging it off, he moves back onto patrol.

Wirerat has been working on Threshold’s device for a good half hour alongside the others with Threshold babbling confusion nonsense in his ear, making it very hard, if not impossible, for Wirerat to actually build what Threshold wants built. Arguing about the mathematics between them and Wirerat suggests that Threshold may have some moderate brain damage. Wirerat alerts Nyx that it’s unlikely for Threshold’s invention to be built, which gets several emoji’s in response. Wirerat says it’s not impossible to be built, but there’s many technical problems to deal with and he says that he’s not going to try with those problems still there and tells SSR to stop him from using the fabricator while Wirerat is distracted.

Threshold, disappointed and annoyed at Wirerat, packs up everything and heads to his own lab while Wirerat tries to figure out the likelihood of things exploding if Threshold continues and the signs point to yes. Wirerat attempts to figure out some way to try to minimize the damage, creating the device with his technopathy. He somehow manages to make it work this time, and in doing so he realizes that weaponizing it won’t be as easy as Threshold thinks it might be as they’d need to remove certain limiters. Alerting, Threshold in the midst of him drawing his designs which he accepts he won’t be able to build within the next hour or so leading to him to have to accept Wirerat’s inferior desk-sized model.

Threshold isn’t happy with it as he wanted more of a shaped charge to try to limit collateral damage rather than go full radius. Looking over it, Threshold accepts that Wirerat has created a working kyberic energy generator that uses orichalcum to pull energy from the vacuum of space at the expense of the orichalcum. Accepting that it’s able to be used, Threshold assembles the team to go over the plan.

Basically lure him in with a decoy of a chair that Erebus wanted to use and cause an explosion to knock out Erebus’s powers which then they’ll take out. He warns them it may also take out the powers of other darkness manipulators in the area but they’ll also lose their abilities within the next couple hours if he isn’t taken down. The problem, however, is that they know that Lynch is possessed and Erebus sees and hears what Lynch can which makes getting the bomb to him being rather difficult. Talking to HQ lets them know that anyone that’s gone straight up against Erebus has died. Wirerat says to use Lynch for misinformation and misdirection, perhaps allowing Lynch to escape and steal the device.

Asking Nox some questions, she tells Wirerat that Erebus thinks that he’s smarter than everyone. Nyx asks if they’ve got any of the orichalcum foil left and why they don’t just wrap up the negative orichalcum in it as it seems like it gets burned away with each use. So, if they use the wrapped negative orichalcum in the old machine rather than the new one, then he might fall for it and use it on himself only to get drained moments afterwards. The question now is how to get it to Erebus. Nyx volunteers himself, he’ll talk to Lynch and therefore Erebus, Threshold can stay outside the door and fine tune the device by observing Lynch and Erebus’s possession using the secondary biosignature coming from Lynch.

Nyx enters the closet where he notes that Lynch looks very festive and ticked off with fully black eyes. Nyx asks the obvious question, how’d he get Lynch. Apparently he was worried about Nyx, but he wasn’t able to get into Lynch’s memories to see why he’s so fond of someone so insignificant. Nyx can’t help but agree, he’s just a petty thief and Erebus then asks why Nyx is speaking with him, and Nyx tells him simply, he wants out of the darkness before the time is up. Erebus just laughs at Nyx, claiming that his very presence is a crime against Erebus, that his powers go against his will, and that worst of all, she likes him, referring to Nox. Nyx asks why he’s suddenly both significant and insignificant, to no good reply from Erebus other than he’ll eat Nyx’s soul. Nyx asks him to just let him go, they’ve got the amplifier and they’ve been failing to miniaturize it. At that news, Erebus perks up, summarizing what Nyx wants. An hour to get someone out of the city and to let him go in exchange for the amplifier, Erebus asks if Nyx really thinks that’s what it’s worth when Nyx suggests just calling it a head start instead. Laughing, Erebus accepts it and they agree to meet where Frank’s Franks is located before withdrawing from Lynch.

Aftermath

With Erebus gone, Nyx greets Lynch and fills him in quickly, but not before getting a Glowworm light and snapping a photo of Lynch in the Christmas lights. He gets them together in the conference room, asking a few questions about the device, making sure that it was completely tuned to Erebus’s signal and then asking if a demonstration may help Erebus trust him, knowing that he’d been touched by the Night Shift but only the fact that they’d seen Grue’s memory and the darklings. He suggests getting with Nox to learn what else they could do, he could fake being empowered by the amplifier and then try to trick Erebus to get into the negatively charged orichalcum.

There’s less than an hour to go before the meeting.

After Action Report (GM)

We’re in the process of wrapping up the first part of the season for B-Team and it’s been ups and downs here and there, but it’s also been pretty good. Rory is the first PC to (in world) understand kyberic physics to the degree that he does. That’ll be a pretty hefty Unusual Background at the end of the season I think just because it’ll include how to smelt orichalcum, kyberic reactors, power amplifiers and nullifiers, and a lot more. It could change the face of my campaign world to be honest…which means it will need lots and lots of thought. You don’t want to invalidate the balance you make in your games as a GM when designing, but if the player’s can’t affect anything then it’s not roleplaying. You’re telling a story to a semi-captive audience. But there are compromises that can be made.

Nyx was the practical one yet again – which is amusing in and of itself. My brother was absent – he wasn’t feeling well – but I had him go off and do some spy stuff for his character’s reason to be missing. Beau was Beau – but in a really great way as he sort of figured out how to make a kyberic accelerator…just a small one. For now.

Another really good session.

Other Notes

Bonus Report from Rory.

Soundtrack

“Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones

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