Champions : Return to Edge City : V Is For Visitors
A few night later, while various party members are chomping on midnight mealworm bars, doing something wizardly up in the hills, drinking at a late-night party, and so on, a fiery SOMETHING narrowly misses Fireflash as she’s flying home from university, another takes out the top of Plaza Tower, and the other half-dozen light up the rest of town like daylight before they crash into the sea. Whatever they were they’ve also dropped burning debris all along their flight paths.
Hardlight: I carefully put down my drink and dash off to change into my costume.
Fireflash: I don’t know about you but I’m definitely buzzed.
The Magus turns on the rain to control the spot fires as we converge on the Plaza - fortunately this happened at 3AM so the casualties should be limited, but we’ll still need to check for anybody still alive in the upper floors, which now have a large hole right through the building.
GM: Plaza Tower is the tallest building in Edge City.
Hero Shrew: Possibly not for much longer.
Fireflash and Hardlight are scanning the upper floors for survivors, Flux has life support armour to go in anywhere he needs to, and Scooter stays down at ground level clearing debris off the roads so the emergency vehicles can get in.
Hardlight: Oh my god, the team actually knows basic disaster relief.
Fireflash also checks with the building security if anybody was logged in as being on those floors, and to our great relief there shouldn’t be. In fact, it looks like sheer fluke has prevented any fatalities in the tower. Hardlight bubbles fires to smother them. It’s still fortunate that the city’s emergency coordination centre wasn’t actually in Plaza Tower. Hero Shrew does think to look for any debris that isn’t part of the building, but is a bit too busy to look closely.
Fireflash: Better make sure none of that debris is radioactive or toxic.
Hardlight: What the hell was this anyway? A meteor strike?
The Magus: Firewing sneezed.
Probably not a re-entering satellite - whatever they were they came in from the east, which is unlikely. And once the situation here is dealt with, we can go use the Qruiser’s submarine capabilities to find whatever they were. Although the Navy ships en route do try to wave us off. If they were Coast Guard they could actually do it. We find where they settled into the sediment, but they’re not there now. It looks suspiciously like somebody beat us to the site and moved the objects back in towards shore. There’s also a number of individuals in US Marine power armour. But since we used our police powers to declare it a police emergency, they might just be here to observe and demarcate the limit of international waters, so it doesn’t become Their Problem.
The Magus: Gosh, it’s like we need somebody who can reconstruct events of the past.
Fireflash does so, but what she gets most of is fish fleeing the scene. And five humanoid things carrying six objects back in the direction of the city. The Navy are probably going to want to know, since that implies the objects were escape capsules or an invasion force. Let’s hope that there’s lots of security cameras along the coast - and that Magus’ rain spell hasn’t stopped us actually seeing them come ashore. It does occur to Flux that we can use one of the scanning spells in reverse, to find anything in the debris that wasn’t part of Plaza Tower. Magus is impressed, and annoyed that he didn’t think of it first. It takes a while to sift through everything that isn’t a photocopier or the shredded remains of a surveillance pigeon, but we do find a shard of curiously oily metal covered in what might be blood. It may have had more blood on it earlier, but the friction coefficient of the metal is so low that most of it probably slipped right off again.
The Magus: Anybody got one of those evidence baggies we’re supposed to be carrying?
Flux: No?
The Magus: Well, I’ll put it in one of the baggies that definitely didn’t contain some of my ‘supplies’ from earlier this evening. Which reminds me, hold this, I left my summoning circle on.
We rule out that it was a local lacerated by the shard, too, so it was definitely one of the recent arrivals that was wounded in the collision.
Flux: Hag about, you’ve got a spell that hugs people, and a spell called Sugar Crash. Now all you need is a Disabling Tickle Attack. You’re like a 5-yr-old that’s been given magic.
The Magus OoC: At this point I’m pretty much a Dark Magical Girl
The Magus tries a few spells on the blood, and does determine that the visitors are invisible to his detection spells.
The Magus: Unfair - I have REASONS to be invisible to divination magic. I deal with major demonic cults!
The shard on the other hand did come from something ‘Up.’ A Ways Up.
We get two messages - one from UNTIL requesting a meeting, and one from the EC Fire Department thanking us for the assistance last night. Although carefully not thanking us for the rain spell since weather manipulation is banned by international treaty.
Hardlight: There’s some data scientist at NOAA that’s had to reset all the predictions.
Flux: Just blame it on 5G.
And the first call came through immediately after we determined where the reentry capsules came from.
Phone: We need to talk.
Flux: God? Is that you?
The representative lets us know that UNTIL’s space station detected a high energy event in low earth orbit, and tracked the six pods to Edge City, but immediately lost track of whatever the pods came from.
Hero Shrew: Maybe they popped back into hyperspace after dropping them off?
UNTIL Rep: We’re unaware of any species that utilise hyperspace.
The Magus OoC: Apart from you guys, in your teleporters.
GM: A fact that is not public knowledge so his statement is still true as far as you’re concerned.
Hero Shrew: Maybe they had a Romulan Cloaking Device?
UNTIL Rep: … you do know the Romulans are fictional, right?
Hero Shrew: *looks innocent* They are?
Fireflash: Scooter, stop trolling the government agent.
The UNTIL guy is a bit annoyed that the Magus can still locate where the pods came from hours after all their space tech lost it. Us recovering that shard might help.
Hero Shrew: It looks oily, but it doesn’t smell oily. I haven’t done a taste test yet.
Fireflash: Well don’t.
Flux: It might be radioactive.
Hero Shrew: Will I get extra super-powers?
UNTIL Rep: Hmm. That’s weird. Looks like a Mandaarin alloy. They visited Earth as peaceful explorers in 99.
Hero Shrew: Well, a lot can change in 20 years - here on Earth big hoop earrings were back in fashion.
Mandaarins surprisingly, aren’t orange and sort of round, but are instead mostly human in appearance, although about 40% of them are psychic. It’s surprising that they didn’t reach out for assistance from Earth’s governments, if they were in trouble. But as one of the most advanced races in the galaxy, it’s a bit alarming that they ould need help at all.
Hero Shrew: Maybe they’re Mandaarin criminals trying to hide among the human population. Or a hunting party. Or Bounty hunters.
UNTIL Rep: What part of ‘peaceful explorers’ did you fail to understand?
We give him the debris for further study.
Hero Shrew: I’m surprised you hadn’t asked for it already. You’ve got all those machines that go ping.
UNTIL Rep: Yesssss… we have lots of machines that go ping. *aside* Is he for real?
Flux: I’m afraid so.
Fireflash: He hasn’t eaten in a while.
Flux OoC: So, aliens have invaded Earth before?
GM: Yes. One of the most famous superheroes in the world is an alien.
Hero Shrew OoC: So is one of the most famous supervillains.
GM: Yes. They often fight.
Flux failed to detect any more of the alien alloy in Edge City, when he scanned for it.
Flux: To be fair I haven’t had my coffee yet.
Building another detector is probably still wise, but we’d need to keep some of the debris.
Flux: Can we break it into two?
UNTIL Rep: It’s pretty damn tough.
Hero Shrew: Now I really want to chew on it.
Hardlight: I don’t want to find out how many types of cancer he’ll get from having it in his mouth.
UNTIL Rep: If you don’t understand their tech, it’s probably Mandaarian. They’re that advanced. In a few hundred years their entire civilization might up and leave the Milky Way.
Flux: ‘We like the physics one galaxy over’.
Hero Shrew: Well that makes it even weirder that their re-entry was so clumsy.
So on top of all this, it’s probably alarming that WorldSat have lost contact with half their satellites.
Flux: ‘ET Phone Home’
Hero Shrew: Theoretically speaking, if there was an entire alien fleet with Romulan Cloaking Devices up there, would it block radio transmissions but still be transparent to visible light?
Hardlight: Now I have to wrack my brain for ways to defeat an alien invasion.
Hero Shrew: The common cold!
Fireflash: Cut them off at the ankles - that'll defeet them.
We head over to the WorldSat building, in case the problem is at this end, and are surprised to find a very neat square hole in one of the upstairs windows. Magus’ Ghostsight spell soon determines that the building’s security personnel are alive, but unconscious, and neatly stacked against the wall, and that there are other beings crowded into and around the server room. Two of them appear to be Star Trek aliens, one is a human businesswoman with small horns, one appears to be a wolf Moreau, and one is a heavily armed and cyborged out the wazoo.
Hero Shrew: So probably not Mandaarians then.
GM: Nope - because none of them could pass for human.
The Magus: Although there’s any number of Edge City gangs they could fit into without comment.
Fireflash and Hardlight plan to fly in the hole and target the pastrolling wolf-morph, while the rest of the team teleport in and gang-cape the cyborg. The Magus will teleport straight back out, taking the security guys with him.
Hero Shrew: Just making sure he IS a cyborg right?
Fireflash: That’s what the Magus’ spell says. So no dismantling.
Hero Shrew: But putting extra right angles in his limbs won’t be as much of a problem?
Unfortunately one of the bad guys has Danger Sense, and stun+entangle grenades. And some sort of sealant gun that glues Scooter to the floor.
Hero Shrew: What the h*** did they spray me with, starship glue??
GM: Yes. That’s exactly what they sprayed you with.
Hero Shrew OoC: I’m frustrated - I want to hit people, the team wants me to hit people, there’s people RIGHT THERE I can hit, and here I am stuck to the floor.
It might help us if we knew what they were saying, but of course we don’t speak Alien and they seem unwilling to compromise. Some of the associated gestures don't seem very flattering. Fortunately the Magus teleports back into the building and gives the rest of the team some much-needed assistance in the form of police-approved comas. Various other four-colour pyrotechnics ensue, which is only to be expected when 10 superhumans get together and immeadiately start swinging. Wolf-guy, who got blown out an upper-storey window, uses an Entangle grenade on himself to reduce the damage from his imminent argument with gravity. Hardlight hurriedly creates a giant green glowing catcher’s mitt, anyway. Quite a bit of damage is done to this floor of the building, and the various participants, but with the exception of the steel being ripped out of the walls by Flux to try and entangle the aliens, and the fact that one of the aliens appears to be bleeding out, none of it looks like it’ll be lasting. Quite a few thankfully non-loadbearing walls do get turned into confetti, however.
Scooter finally breaks free of the starship glue and takes considerable pleasure out of punching the cyborg in his carbon-nanotube kidneys. It’s at this point the cyborg finally decides to speak English. He points at the alien currently unconscious underneath him.
Cyborg: If This One Does Not Pilot Ship Down It Will Crash Into City.
Hero Shrew: *skids to a halt* It would have been nice to tell us that EARLIER.
Hardlight: I told you guys we should have tried to talk to them first!
GM: You guys are making me think of a Miley Cyrus song.
Fireflash’s player: Which one?
GM: Wrecking Ball.
Hero Shrew: We are going to get so many dirty looks…
GM: It’s just as well two of you guys have Repair spells.
Hardlight: I carefully put down my drink and dash off to change into my costume.
Fireflash: I don’t know about you but I’m definitely buzzed.
The Magus turns on the rain to control the spot fires as we converge on the Plaza - fortunately this happened at 3AM so the casualties should be limited, but we’ll still need to check for anybody still alive in the upper floors, which now have a large hole right through the building.
GM: Plaza Tower is the tallest building in Edge City.
Hero Shrew: Possibly not for much longer.
Fireflash and Hardlight are scanning the upper floors for survivors, Flux has life support armour to go in anywhere he needs to, and Scooter stays down at ground level clearing debris off the roads so the emergency vehicles can get in.
Hardlight: Oh my god, the team actually knows basic disaster relief.
Fireflash also checks with the building security if anybody was logged in as being on those floors, and to our great relief there shouldn’t be. In fact, it looks like sheer fluke has prevented any fatalities in the tower. Hardlight bubbles fires to smother them. It’s still fortunate that the city’s emergency coordination centre wasn’t actually in Plaza Tower. Hero Shrew does think to look for any debris that isn’t part of the building, but is a bit too busy to look closely.
Fireflash: Better make sure none of that debris is radioactive or toxic.
Hardlight: What the hell was this anyway? A meteor strike?
The Magus: Firewing sneezed.
Probably not a re-entering satellite - whatever they were they came in from the east, which is unlikely. And once the situation here is dealt with, we can go use the Qruiser’s submarine capabilities to find whatever they were. Although the Navy ships en route do try to wave us off. If they were Coast Guard they could actually do it. We find where they settled into the sediment, but they’re not there now. It looks suspiciously like somebody beat us to the site and moved the objects back in towards shore. There’s also a number of individuals in US Marine power armour. But since we used our police powers to declare it a police emergency, they might just be here to observe and demarcate the limit of international waters, so it doesn’t become Their Problem.
The Magus: Gosh, it’s like we need somebody who can reconstruct events of the past.
Fireflash does so, but what she gets most of is fish fleeing the scene. And five humanoid things carrying six objects back in the direction of the city. The Navy are probably going to want to know, since that implies the objects were escape capsules or an invasion force. Let’s hope that there’s lots of security cameras along the coast - and that Magus’ rain spell hasn’t stopped us actually seeing them come ashore. It does occur to Flux that we can use one of the scanning spells in reverse, to find anything in the debris that wasn’t part of Plaza Tower. Magus is impressed, and annoyed that he didn’t think of it first. It takes a while to sift through everything that isn’t a photocopier or the shredded remains of a surveillance pigeon, but we do find a shard of curiously oily metal covered in what might be blood. It may have had more blood on it earlier, but the friction coefficient of the metal is so low that most of it probably slipped right off again.
The Magus: Anybody got one of those evidence baggies we’re supposed to be carrying?
Flux: No?
The Magus: Well, I’ll put it in one of the baggies that definitely didn’t contain some of my ‘supplies’ from earlier this evening. Which reminds me, hold this, I left my summoning circle on.
We rule out that it was a local lacerated by the shard, too, so it was definitely one of the recent arrivals that was wounded in the collision.
Flux: Hag about, you’ve got a spell that hugs people, and a spell called Sugar Crash. Now all you need is a Disabling Tickle Attack. You’re like a 5-yr-old that’s been given magic.
The Magus OoC: At this point I’m pretty much a Dark Magical Girl
The Magus tries a few spells on the blood, and does determine that the visitors are invisible to his detection spells.
The Magus: Unfair - I have REASONS to be invisible to divination magic. I deal with major demonic cults!
The shard on the other hand did come from something ‘Up.’ A Ways Up.
We get two messages - one from UNTIL requesting a meeting, and one from the EC Fire Department thanking us for the assistance last night. Although carefully not thanking us for the rain spell since weather manipulation is banned by international treaty.
Hardlight: There’s some data scientist at NOAA that’s had to reset all the predictions.
Flux: Just blame it on 5G.
And the first call came through immediately after we determined where the reentry capsules came from.
Phone: We need to talk.
Flux: God? Is that you?
The representative lets us know that UNTIL’s space station detected a high energy event in low earth orbit, and tracked the six pods to Edge City, but immediately lost track of whatever the pods came from.
Hero Shrew: Maybe they popped back into hyperspace after dropping them off?
UNTIL Rep: We’re unaware of any species that utilise hyperspace.
The Magus OoC: Apart from you guys, in your teleporters.
GM: A fact that is not public knowledge so his statement is still true as far as you’re concerned.
Hero Shrew: Maybe they had a Romulan Cloaking Device?
UNTIL Rep: … you do know the Romulans are fictional, right?
Hero Shrew: *looks innocent* They are?
Fireflash: Scooter, stop trolling the government agent.
The UNTIL guy is a bit annoyed that the Magus can still locate where the pods came from hours after all their space tech lost it. Us recovering that shard might help.
Hero Shrew: It looks oily, but it doesn’t smell oily. I haven’t done a taste test yet.
Fireflash: Well don’t.
Flux: It might be radioactive.
Hero Shrew: Will I get extra super-powers?
UNTIL Rep: Hmm. That’s weird. Looks like a Mandaarin alloy. They visited Earth as peaceful explorers in 99.
Hero Shrew: Well, a lot can change in 20 years - here on Earth big hoop earrings were back in fashion.
Mandaarins surprisingly, aren’t orange and sort of round, but are instead mostly human in appearance, although about 40% of them are psychic. It’s surprising that they didn’t reach out for assistance from Earth’s governments, if they were in trouble. But as one of the most advanced races in the galaxy, it’s a bit alarming that they ould need help at all.
Hero Shrew: Maybe they’re Mandaarin criminals trying to hide among the human population. Or a hunting party. Or Bounty hunters.
UNTIL Rep: What part of ‘peaceful explorers’ did you fail to understand?
We give him the debris for further study.
Hero Shrew: I’m surprised you hadn’t asked for it already. You’ve got all those machines that go ping.
UNTIL Rep: Yesssss… we have lots of machines that go ping. *aside* Is he for real?
Flux: I’m afraid so.
Fireflash: He hasn’t eaten in a while.
Flux OoC: So, aliens have invaded Earth before?
GM: Yes. One of the most famous superheroes in the world is an alien.
Hero Shrew OoC: So is one of the most famous supervillains.
GM: Yes. They often fight.
Flux failed to detect any more of the alien alloy in Edge City, when he scanned for it.
Flux: To be fair I haven’t had my coffee yet.
Building another detector is probably still wise, but we’d need to keep some of the debris.
Flux: Can we break it into two?
UNTIL Rep: It’s pretty damn tough.
Hero Shrew: Now I really want to chew on it.
Hardlight: I don’t want to find out how many types of cancer he’ll get from having it in his mouth.
UNTIL Rep: If you don’t understand their tech, it’s probably Mandaarian. They’re that advanced. In a few hundred years their entire civilization might up and leave the Milky Way.
Flux: ‘We like the physics one galaxy over’.
Hero Shrew: Well that makes it even weirder that their re-entry was so clumsy.
So on top of all this, it’s probably alarming that WorldSat have lost contact with half their satellites.
Flux: ‘ET Phone Home’
Hero Shrew: Theoretically speaking, if there was an entire alien fleet with Romulan Cloaking Devices up there, would it block radio transmissions but still be transparent to visible light?
Hardlight: Now I have to wrack my brain for ways to defeat an alien invasion.
Hero Shrew: The common cold!
Fireflash: Cut them off at the ankles - that'll defeet them.
We head over to the WorldSat building, in case the problem is at this end, and are surprised to find a very neat square hole in one of the upstairs windows. Magus’ Ghostsight spell soon determines that the building’s security personnel are alive, but unconscious, and neatly stacked against the wall, and that there are other beings crowded into and around the server room. Two of them appear to be Star Trek aliens, one is a human businesswoman with small horns, one appears to be a wolf Moreau, and one is a heavily armed and cyborged out the wazoo.
Hero Shrew: So probably not Mandaarians then.
GM: Nope - because none of them could pass for human.
The Magus: Although there’s any number of Edge City gangs they could fit into without comment.
Fireflash and Hardlight plan to fly in the hole and target the pastrolling wolf-morph, while the rest of the team teleport in and gang-cape the cyborg. The Magus will teleport straight back out, taking the security guys with him.
Hero Shrew: Just making sure he IS a cyborg right?
Fireflash: That’s what the Magus’ spell says. So no dismantling.
Hero Shrew: But putting extra right angles in his limbs won’t be as much of a problem?
Unfortunately one of the bad guys has Danger Sense, and stun+entangle grenades. And some sort of sealant gun that glues Scooter to the floor.
Hero Shrew: What the h*** did they spray me with, starship glue??
GM: Yes. That’s exactly what they sprayed you with.
Hero Shrew OoC: I’m frustrated - I want to hit people, the team wants me to hit people, there’s people RIGHT THERE I can hit, and here I am stuck to the floor.
It might help us if we knew what they were saying, but of course we don’t speak Alien and they seem unwilling to compromise. Some of the associated gestures don't seem very flattering. Fortunately the Magus teleports back into the building and gives the rest of the team some much-needed assistance in the form of police-approved comas. Various other four-colour pyrotechnics ensue, which is only to be expected when 10 superhumans get together and immeadiately start swinging. Wolf-guy, who got blown out an upper-storey window, uses an Entangle grenade on himself to reduce the damage from his imminent argument with gravity. Hardlight hurriedly creates a giant green glowing catcher’s mitt, anyway. Quite a bit of damage is done to this floor of the building, and the various participants, but with the exception of the steel being ripped out of the walls by Flux to try and entangle the aliens, and the fact that one of the aliens appears to be bleeding out, none of it looks like it’ll be lasting. Quite a few thankfully non-loadbearing walls do get turned into confetti, however.
Scooter finally breaks free of the starship glue and takes considerable pleasure out of punching the cyborg in his carbon-nanotube kidneys. It’s at this point the cyborg finally decides to speak English. He points at the alien currently unconscious underneath him.
Cyborg: If This One Does Not Pilot Ship Down It Will Crash Into City.
Hero Shrew: *skids to a halt* It would have been nice to tell us that EARLIER.
Hardlight: I told you guys we should have tried to talk to them first!
GM: You guys are making me think of a Miley Cyrus song.
Fireflash’s player: Which one?
GM: Wrecking Ball.
Hero Shrew: We are going to get so many dirty looks…
GM: It’s just as well two of you guys have Repair spells.