Big City, the Bronx. Investigation Day Two, 12:30am
After the heroes made peace among themselves, they staged a play-fight for the benefit of their captives. Sentinel, Grey and Archer (and any PCs who care to) got into the act and it seemed like they pulled it off. Photographers’ flashbulbs popped the whole time. Then, show over, our heroes retreated to their respective corners and got back to work.
Slingshot placed a business card inside Spider Girucci’s leather jacket and said over the thunderstorm, “You're a bright guy. You know that making friends gets you much farther than making enemies. I'm a patient man. Don't lose the card, I only give it once."
Girucci took it out, looked at it and then at Slingshot with his face still hard as a silver dollar. Then it softened. His mouth moved like it tasted something it liked. He nodded slightly and disappeared into the waiting sea of NYPD blue for booking.
Slingshot (and any PC heroes who care to join him!) headed out to the crime scene of Nanite’s murder (continued below).
Forester and Kairos were greeted by CHESS Director Grey. “Back already, huh kid?” he smiled at the troubleshooting trickster as they shook hands.
Agent Drake informs the pair that Vanguard is sponsored by the federal government but has autonomy of action, including their membership roster. “And yer right, Kairos,” added Grey, “that don’t mean they’re above the law.”
Tomorrow, when there is a break in the investigation, Drake and Vanguard will take Forester and Kairos through membership rights and responsibilities, including security clearance access. For now, Drake gives them CHESS wrist communicators that scramble messages between Vanguard and CHESS. “Welcome aboard,” he said a little flatly.
Later, Grey approached Sentinel, lit a cigar and said, “You’re in the thick of things now, but at some point you might plan a process for training new members. Yer roster’s in chaos, and you need to settle it down fer Vanguard’s own good. A team leader might help too, while yer at it, kid.”
Sentinel contacted Ajay onboard the CHESS omni-carrier who told him: “Look. A few phone calls ordering people to lay low could explain the severe drop off in internet buzz on Big City. We’ll see how long it lasts.”
Ajay’s team found a deed on the “target house” and have begun tracking down the owner, who has no criminal record or CHESS file.
Ajay reports that CHESS has files on The Octopus, and reads it to Vanguard over the communicators:
“Classified Confidential
Code Name: THE OCTOPUS
Aliases: Unknown
Affiliations: The Sinister Sea Squadron (Shark, Crabman, Electric Eel, Aquanaut, Killer Whale, Jellyfish) who were apprehended by the Freedom Force in 1983 and never reformed.
Known Extranormal Abilities: Immense strength, mollusk-human hybrid physiognomy, four tentacle-like arms, can breathe water as easily as air.
Gender: Male Height: 6’ 5” Weight: 300lbs Age: Unknown Hair: none Eyes: black
Unusual markings: Green skin, noseless, octopoid appearance.
M.O.: Intimidation, muscle
Imprisoned from 1983-1995 for piracy, assault and battery, theft.”
After the heroes made peace among themselves, they staged a play-fight for the benefit of their captives. Sentinel, Grey and Archer (and any PCs who care to) got into the act and it seemed like they pulled it off. Photographers’ flashbulbs popped the whole time. Then, show over, our heroes retreated to their respective corners and got back to work.
Slingshot placed a business card inside Spider Girucci’s leather jacket and said over the thunderstorm, “You're a bright guy. You know that making friends gets you much farther than making enemies. I'm a patient man. Don't lose the card, I only give it once."
Girucci took it out, looked at it and then at Slingshot with his face still hard as a silver dollar. Then it softened. His mouth moved like it tasted something it liked. He nodded slightly and disappeared into the waiting sea of NYPD blue for booking.
Slingshot (and any PC heroes who care to join him!) headed out to the crime scene of Nanite’s murder (continued below).
Forester and Kairos were greeted by CHESS Director Grey. “Back already, huh kid?” he smiled at the troubleshooting trickster as they shook hands.
Agent Drake informs the pair that Vanguard is sponsored by the federal government but has autonomy of action, including their membership roster. “And yer right, Kairos,” added Grey, “that don’t mean they’re above the law.”
Tomorrow, when there is a break in the investigation, Drake and Vanguard will take Forester and Kairos through membership rights and responsibilities, including security clearance access. For now, Drake gives them CHESS wrist communicators that scramble messages between Vanguard and CHESS. “Welcome aboard,” he said a little flatly.
Later, Grey approached Sentinel, lit a cigar and said, “You’re in the thick of things now, but at some point you might plan a process for training new members. Yer roster’s in chaos, and you need to settle it down fer Vanguard’s own good. A team leader might help too, while yer at it, kid.”
Sentinel contacted Ajay onboard the CHESS omni-carrier who told him: “Look. A few phone calls ordering people to lay low could explain the severe drop off in internet buzz on Big City. We’ll see how long it lasts.”
Ajay’s team found a deed on the “target house” and have begun tracking down the owner, who has no criminal record or CHESS file.
Ajay reports that CHESS has files on The Octopus, and reads it to Vanguard over the communicators:
“Classified Confidential
Code Name: THE OCTOPUS
Aliases: Unknown
Affiliations: The Sinister Sea Squadron (Shark, Crabman, Electric Eel, Aquanaut, Killer Whale, Jellyfish) who were apprehended by the Freedom Force in 1983 and never reformed.
Known Extranormal Abilities: Immense strength, mollusk-human hybrid physiognomy, four tentacle-like arms, can breathe water as easily as air.
Gender: Male Height: 6’ 5” Weight: 300lbs Age: Unknown Hair: none Eyes: black
Unusual markings: Green skin, noseless, octopoid appearance.
M.O.: Intimidation, muscle
Imprisoned from 1983-1995 for piracy, assault and battery, theft.”
Meanwhile, Lightning Strike (and any PC heroes who cared to join him!) continued interrogating the captives from The Octopus’ crew.
(Note: For now, if you go with Slingshot, you can’t join Strike, and vice versa. Thanks)
Spider Girucci, Sheeney McGonkle and Bull Marr won’t rat even to Lightning Strike. And The Shivering Kid had nothing more to give. But in time the last one, Clemmons, who was wanted as a ‘person of interest’ in an old murder, spills his guts in exchange for CHESS-arranged amnesty and witness protection. He’ll need it. He gives up the Five Bosses!
They are:
Poker Face, the conman gambler whose sweet talk fooled three polygraph tests and four juries! He controls all gambling in Big City!
The Octopus, this human mollusk’s tentacles extend throughout the underworld! He controls the protection rackets, muscle and enforcement.
Dexter Sinister, the bipolar psychopath whose skin exudes a powerful pharmacological chemical that replicates the effect of any drug he chooses! Sinister controls the entire drug trade of Big City!
Femme Fatale, no man can resist her charms! Fatale runs all prostitution in Big City!
The Cat, deadly fast, cruel and blessed with nine lives, the Cat is a master thief who runs all fencing operations. It’s said he gets a piece of everything stolen in Big City.
Save Octopus, there are no NYPD or CHESS files under these names. Poker Face must have had an alias if he had been hauled before judges and juries.
Old Paint Clemmons, his face sick with sweat and fear, also gives up the following info:
The target house and everyone in it belongs to The Octopus.
“The Gang War started over a month ago when someone iced Femme Fatale’s lieutenant, Whisper. No one knows who did it. Whisper was Fatale’s muscle, see, on accounta she’s just a frail. She figured the other four bosses were making a move on her. That opened up all the old wounds between ‘em and they started in with the lead telegrams. Fatale’s a regular blueblood and she was shopping in Paris when the Whisper hit went down. She’s back now and out for blood.”
Morgue turned up a week or so ago. It’s rumored that he’s an old gangster come back to life off the slab! It’s the Big Sleep for anyone he touches, and he sees the current strife as his chance to maybe replace one or more of the Five Bosses!
“None of the Five Bosses want war. Bad fer business. They’ll patch it up.”
Meanwhile, Slingshot slung himself through the rainy night back to Brooklyn, to the tenement that held Nanite’s dead body.
Slingshot found black vans parked out front and an active crime scene being run by CHESS.
Yellow tape, chalk outline, forensics men, scanners, cameras, with Nanite in the center of it. Any hero present who had met Nanite before, saw that she seemed more robotic now.
The heroes were prevented from searching the crime scene, for fear of inadvertently damaging evidence. No crowbar had been found, and CHESS wants Slingshot’s full story.
Doc Rocket eventually emerged from the room, pulling off ultraviolet goggles and thick gloves to greet the heroes. Inside the gloves was a thin web of diadem circuitry. The old white haired Brit leaned on his cane and said sadly: “She was a marvel of technical engineering. Cause of death appears to be a sudden, complete and unexplained loss of all electrical energy within her system.”
When this info was relayed to the team still in the Bronx, Lightning Strike found those words disturbingly familiar.
Doc Rocket continued: “Nanite apparently had full time wireless internet access within her central processing unit… or brain.
“I’ve recovered a small fragment of her history files and discovered that she had been tracking someone via traffic and security cameras around New York City. None of the images I’ve recovered reveal more than a silhouette. Male. Tall. His movements indicate he was stalking Nanite, and her interest in him indicates she was aware of it. She lost him from time to time, but had identified an address where she could often pick up his trail again.”
The address is a building is in a section of Hell’s Kitchen licensed for light industry. By now it was 3am. The rain wasn’t stopping.
OOC: Replies/ Actions everyone?
Thanks!
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GM’s Private Message to Lightning Strike:
Two things:
1) Nanite's mysterious cause of death reminds Lightning Strike of the similarly unexplained power loss that triggered the explosive chain reaction that killed his wife and created him!
2) After interrogating the Shivering Kid, Strike finally got a good look at the NYPD detective in charge through the downpour. It's his uncle, Hank Archer! Hank and Strike’s father, now deceased, had a falling out when he was a kid that he never fully understood. Strike hasn't seen him in decades, but recognizes him now! Hank Archer's been on the Big City police force for 24 years and every one of them shows.
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Forester:
DURING THE MOCK BATTLE ... Forester watches from the sidelines. Afterward, he tells Grey, "On my first government assignment I got paired up with Slingshot. Now I'm finding out about some guy named Archer. It's getting harder and harder for an arrow-slinger like me to carve out his own niche."
Grasping his bow in one hand, Forester jests, "If Catapult Kid and Dart-Gun Girl show up, I'm taking another leave of absence."
DURING THE CHESS BRIEFING ... Forester tells the group, "That fencing Cat sure sounds like the feline felon that Marksman warned me about--which means there might be some metaphysical slant to this mess ... possibly with ties to Asia. But what's up with all these bad guys brought back from the dead?
There's Cat, Morgue, the Over-Men of SKULL... Do super-villains have a monopoly on reincarnation, or do they just keep getting booted out of the spirit world?"
Action: Forester requests permission to do a focused search of CHESS computer/clippings files for evidence of connections between Cat (and the other Five Bosses, if time allows) and any Asian organizations with mystical/metaphysical leanings. How about any modus operandi that suggest real/mythological animals totems?
AT THE CRIME SCENE ... Forester accompanies Slingshot and contemplates the cybernetic corpse of Nanine, the heroic healer they had met on their last mission. "May you rest in peace," he says softly as he faces her remains. "Enjoy the ride."
Action: While fully following all police instructions, Forester does his best to investigate the Nanite's corpse and the surrounding area for markings/signs that might suggest mystical/occult activity.
If other heroes/agents follow Doc Rocket's lead, he'll accompany them to the uncovered address.
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Sentinel:
‘Later, Grey approached Sentinel, lit a cigar and said, “You’re in the thick of things now, but at some point you might plan a process for training new members. Yer roster’s in chaos, and you need to settle it down fer Vanguard’s own good. A team leader might help too, while yer at it, kid.”
Sentinel thought about it for a moment and said, “We do need to get recruiting and training process in place. This has been your show from the beginning in recruiting us to assist, but we really should have some official guidelines in place. When this is over I’d like to get access to the files regarding Freedom Force’s training and recruitment process. That would be a start. And perhaps we’ve got files going back to the Liberty League’s affiliation with the government and how they worked it too.
I don’t know if my current security clearance would get me this stuff, so perhaps you can arrange for access to those sorts of files.
“Grey, we also need to know what is expected of us and our true scope of authority in assigned investigations. I spoke up at the scene to prevent a bigger mess at the time, but I was making it up as I went along, and we should be better than that.
“It would also be nice to gain access to information on the profiles you have on other extranormals. You and Drake both seemed comfortable enough to offer membership to Kairos, so I assumed you knew about him as you did the rest of us, but despite my “hobby” of keeping tabs regarding the super-community I’ve never heard of him; and if I’m assuming wrong and you don’t have a dossier on him and his activities, then we jumped the gun offering official status and we should have just offered for him to work for us for the duration of the mission, until we can learn more.”
Sentinel thought for a second about the personalities of the heroes of Vanguard, “A team leader … well, maybe the Freedom Force protocols can help to sort that out too, but you are right.” And Kirk for the first time began to think that this “team effort” was all a lot more complicated than he expected.
In the back of his mind too, he couldn’t help but thinking about the fact that anytime heroes were publicly active, there was always an official government affiliation of some sort, the Liberty League, the Freedom Force, and now Vanguard … and he began to think about those years in-between the League and the Force, and he wondered what the government was doing regarding extranormals during those years … and if there was more to things than the public ever knew …
Meanwhile, Lightning Strike (and any PC heroes who cared to join him!) continued interrogating the captives from The Octopus’ crew.
At this point Kirk decides to stick with Strike and the interrogation team to see how the interaction between the personalities go (especially after his recent actions regarding that whole situation)… after hearing that Doc Rocket was on the scene of the murder he felt confident that nothing would be missed. Also he figured he’d have access to the computer systems back at Chess/Vanguard headquarters to follow-up things further. This would be his choice unless Slingshot specifically requested his presence – if none of the other heroes offered to accompany him then Kirk would make the offer to go accompany Slingshot because team members have to support one another.
‘Doc Rocket continued: “Nanite apparently had full time wireless internet access within her central processing unit… or brain.’
Upon hearing Doc’s report about the wireless internet access Kirk immediately accessed the Chess computers (if he ended up accompanying Slingshot he would do this upon his return) and sent out a message in a sub-routine program meant to circulate around the internet with the majority of it’s access area to bounce around the servers and computers around the New York area and its local surrounding vicinity. He sent this message in basic machine language, figuring that most of the systems out there would ignore it, being geared to the higher levels of computer language and that his intended recipient would be very alert to such a coded message…
“Nanite, this is Sentinel, a teammate of Slingshot. We met a couple of weeks ago during the 'rescue'. You need the assistance of friends you can trust. Contact us so we can help.”
An artificial intelligence with wireless internet access that was “killed”, Kirk didn’t believe that for a second; his search for Nanite had begun.
Although Kirk’s gut told him he was right, given that he didn’t know the relationship of Slingshot and Nanite at this point, but did notice his attention to her upon their “meeting”, the time at Chess together, and now, he chooses to keep his suspicions about her being alive and having transferred her consciousness before the ‘death’ of her body to himself for the time being so as not to get Slingshot’s “hopes” up for no reason; he also thought that perhaps Slingshot knew more about Nanite than he was saying …
‘Cause of death appears to be a sudden, complete and unexplained loss of all electrical energy within her system.” When this info was relayed to the team still in the Bronx, Lightning Strike found those words disturbingly familiar.’
Assuming Kirk was with Strike at this point and especially if Kirk notices some sort of recognition on Strike's face:
Sentinel turns to Strike, "We're the closest to being experts here with an energy attack like this, and given it was electrical in nature, and that I've seen some of your quick scientific thinking in action, I'd say you'd know more about this than me ... any ideas on who or what may have caused done this?"
Kirk searches his memory about supers out there ... anyone fit the profile for this sort of attack? Has he read anything of similar nature occurring elsewhere?
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Slingshot:
At the Interrogation:
Girucci took it out, looked at it and then at Slingshot with his face still hard as a silver dollar. Then it softened. His mouth moved like it tasted something it liked. He nodded slightly and disappeared into the waiting sea of NYPD blue for booking.
Knowing that he was making a deal with a hardened criminal didn't sit well with Scott, but this could possibly turn out to their advantages. He spoke the truth the whole time. His mission was to rid the criminal world of the Superhuman element. So if he made a few deals along the way to reach
his goal, then so be it. He will cross that bridge when it showed up.
At Nanite's crime scene:
Scott knew that his mandate was to find Morgue and Skin Deep, possibly tag a few more Supers in the criminal underbelly of the city. Nanite wasn't a team priority, but she was for him. With that in mind, he arrived at Nanite's apartment.
It was late. He had had a long day. Seeing that his access to the investigative site was blocked didn't help his mounting temper. Thankfully Doc Rocket came to meet him and the others with him.
Doc Rocket continued: “Nanite apparently had full time wireless internet access within her central processing unit… or brain.
Scott absorbed the information slowly. He didn't know much about how computers work, but he knew enough about this crazy world he lived in, not to mention scifi books. He saw a glimmer of hope. Unbeknownst to him, Sentinel had come to the exact same conclusion. It took him a moment before he spoke, "Doctor, If I could make a request, could you please leave her body as intact as possible? And return it, whole, to the Vanguard HQ when you are done with your research?"
If he objects, Scott will be firm/adamant about this.
Slingshot committed the address to memory and also jots it down in his communicator. He thanked the Doctor for his cooperation and his help. He thought of the busybody neighbour. He took a glance in the alley to see if she was awake.
If she is, Scott will go down to question her. He will put on his most affable demeanor.
If she's not, he will proceed to the address. Depending on the locale, he will wait from a roof top with his frame and head glued to the brickwork and hidden in the shadows (there's got to be something good about being tar looking).
He'll try and deform any telltale signs of a human shape so he doesn't attract attention. and lie in wait for two hours (I'm guessing 3 am). If no luck, he'll go to HQ for some sleep (assuming nothing else happens in the meantime) and gets back to the busybody for 9am.
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Lightning Strike:
After the interrogation is complete LS turns to the Chess agents and Sentinel and says, "It appears the five bosses are at a bit of an impasse. Either four of the bosses or an outside agent views the Octopus as the weak link. Further interrogation may lead us to other safe houses of The Octopus so that we may hit the attackers before they strike. We should plan a surveillance exercise as soon as possible."
In addition, LS suggests finding out the circumstances behind Whisper’s death. It may lead to another extra-normal.
LS turns his attention to Sentinel and the Nanite investigation. "This electrical drain seems familiar to me. When power is drained from one location it must be transferred to another which means we have to find that point and work from there. If I were a believer in coincidence I would chalk up the fact that the address she located was in the Light Industry district but since I don't we should narrow are search to that area first."
Later, LS will try to research if other power losses/surges have been observed elsewhere in the city, specifically looking to see if there is a consistent pattern of losses in a certain area in synch with surges in a different area.
To Hank Archer: After interrogating the remaining thugs LS walks up to Archer and attempts to speak to him outside of the general throng. "I understand you may be the one good cop on the force. I could use a contact on the inside who understands the war we are fighting. If there is any way we can contact one another without raising red flags, it is in our best interests to do so."
