This entry continues the previous battles against the evil Dr. Jin. His plans seem to involve randomly setting the city on fire. But wait! That’s not it at all! This has all been a giant charade to get his hands on Bob’s prototype aircraft. The horror!

Note carefully that the Hunter character has been modified, again. Very soon he will be replaced by another. SOTC lets this happen without fanfare or GM involvement. Very nice.

B = Bob Jumper

H = The Hunter

UJ = Union Jane

O’Houlihan gives Bob a Colt .45, which belonged to his grandfather. He said something like, “You’ll need it hanging around with these two.” B, H and UJ were in the mayor’s office, again. The mayor was upset about all the fires in the city, and now homeless people had started disappearing. So there was to be an investigation. Don’t remember where exactly the next scene was; think it was “Remembrance Park” (place with statues commemorating victims of the Petrifying Wind, from previous games) near the beach and sewer entry tunnel. UJ found a shop steward who said his brother-in-law had fallen on hard times and become homeless, and recently the guy had appeared hysterically going on about how he’d seen “devils.” But the steward said his brother-in-law was a drunkard and implied that he might also be (somewhat) crazy, so “he’s not a credible witness.” The brother-in-law was a Chinese man named Lao. Somehow B, H and UJ found Lao in a bar with this big nautically-tattooed guy behind the counter spit-cleaning a glass (actual spit: only the best for my players.) All the patrons hunched themselves over their drinks. H asked if he knew where Lao was. He said he didn’t know, so H tried to intimidate him. He said, “I might know…run, Lao!” and a fifty-something guy ran for the door. They chased him and caught up with him, but only B could win his confidence (oh yes, H has Linguistics now, so he can speak Lao’s language). Lao said he thought we were leg breakers. He said he owed money to a tong and so had ran. They asked him about the devils he had seen. He said he wasn’t drunk enough to talk about that, so they had to go to another bar, which he said was better than the first. Over at least one bottle of something cheap and nasty, he talked about the devils. He said they came out of the sewers, and there seemed to be a lot of them. Don’t remember if he could describe them or not. They convinced him with more alcohol to tell whereabouts he saw them. He also said his friend Blake had gone missing, and he’d appreciate being told if he was found; said “He’s good for some rum.” Turned out that it was the exact place where the urchin kid had seen the creatures. Now, though, there was phosphorescent slime in the tunnel. They went in and eventually found the place where UJ fought the tiger guy last game. Although now there was a new, large hole with claw marks. These appeared to have been made by a large burrowing beast. B determined that the marks were too big to have been a tiger.  They entered the hole. Eventually they heard chanting and as they approached, they saw a man with white hair and a rattle doing the chanting, in front of a door with symbols on it. Also there were some frog creatures with tentacles instead of heads, who were trying to keep him from chanting. Okay, I don’t remember the sequence of the following frog thing-related events (up until the huge room with the UFO–see below), but here’s what I do remember. Eventually, the frogs were all killed except one, which escaped by squeezing into a small crack in the wall. H broke part of the wall down with his new Brickbreaker stunt. Somewhere along the line the chanter guy introduced himself as Joe Longshanks, local shaman. He said that the things were the Children of the Worm, and that (occasionally) at night they would steal some or a few of his people, and then magical wards (like the one he’d been working on) would be placed to drive them back/keep them away, but somehow they’d gotten past the wards, and because it’s always dark in the sewers, they were more bold about attacking people. He thought some new thing was stirring them up somehow. H managed to kill the escaping creature, but not before it made a piping noise. This turned out to be a call for help from more frog creatures, who eventually turned into about thirty creatures who split up to attack each one of the party. (One group attacked B and Joe together, and Joe gave B a Companion bonus). One of the creatures was bigger than the others so H attacked that one. It was a long and Fate Point-diminishing fight, but the frog things were all killed. Joe led the way onward deeper into the tunnels. On the way saw alienesque murals depicting worm history. The murals gradually got cruder the deeper they went. Arrived at these two big doors with marble carvings of strange guard-like creatures. It was locked, but they managed to figure out the mechanism and open the doors. Inside was an immense, bigger-than-a-coliseum-size room with pools with glowing fish. There was a UFO sitting inside. Also there was a woman who turned out to have a mechanical body. She was next to a giant worm. The worm seemed weak. She gestured, and a guy who looked like the fire samurai from the first game concerning Dr. Jin appeared. This guy, however, could change his arms into various weapons. He turned them into blades, and attacked. B, like a blur, ran for and entered the UFO. At this point Joe sort of disappeared, on account of we all forgot about him (but the GM says he actually was still there, but sneaking around or something). The woman was able to touch the worm and cause it to summon frog things. The frog things went to help the samurai guy, who, it was somehow revealed, was called Unkillable (U). H attacked U. UJ attacked U’s frog minions. UJ eventually started doing a block to keep the minions off H. B was able to figure out that the UFO had a weapon, and how to use it, and he fired it at the woman, but she managed to get the worm to summon more frogs to shield her. H began attacking U’s armor. Eventually B lasered all of the frogs protecting the woman, so she compelled the giant worm to throw itself against the UFO, which caused it to die. She entered the UFO. When the worm died, the remaining frogs left. UJ started helping H bash U’s armor. U was extremely tough. It took the longest time just to make a hole in the armor; most of the armor-attacking part of the fight only managed to dent it. The woman surrendered to B in exchange for her life. She said she was called the Unblinking Eye (UE) (she had one glowing eye). B fired the laser at U. UJ and H managed to get out of the way, but there was a big old shock wave and UJ was thrown into some sewage and had to struggle onto a dry surface and get helped up by H. H went to see what had happened to U. There was nothing left of him but one foot. H and UJ entered the UFO, and B figured out how to fly it out of the room through a hole. It turned out that UE & U were the last of Dr. Jin’s seven demons, although she was now free of his control (something about how she’d been a pawn, and he told her that if she survived, she would be freed). (Ha ha ha, such trusting players.) She had been acting as a sort of administrator for him. She said that he did all this to distract some heroes while he went to steal a prototype aircraft called the X-5, which as related in the last game, is B’s plane. So B flew to the X-5’s airfield, but it was taking off with a yellow glow. Jin had modified it somehow. B chased it very high into the atmosphere, or maybe it was the beginning of outer space, because these meteor things began trying to hit the UFO. UE said, “Master, he wants this.” (That is, he meant to lure the UFO/the party up here.) B was able to evade the meteor things, but Jin managed to escape.

Now things start to get weird.

Greetings,

For today’s adventure we were joined by a new player. Bob Jumper is a master pilot with an experimental aircraft and a Flash Gordon flair. Those of you who GM regularly will note subtle changes in my world as a new player’s goals are injected into my previous designs.

UJ – Union Jane

H – The Hunter

Bob – Bob Jumper

A strange semicircular cloud has appeared over San Francisco. Detective O’Houlihan(O’H) approaches UJ and H with a summons from the mayor (Sunny Jim). So, they go to his office. They find there as well Bob Jumper, an ace pilot, ladies’ man, and adventurer (also of the Century Club). The mayor tells him that they want a pilot to investigate the cloud, and they need a really good one because of all the flying concrete debris from the destroyed Etheropia. The mayor also says that an explanation is needed for all the unsavory occurrences in the city lately, and that he doesn’t have one, and that’s when he reveals the journalists. They flash annoying camera bulbs, and ask H how many people he’s killed. At first he gives them a cold stare, but then he says, “What business is it of yours?” UJ tells them that the city is going to be attacked by a Chinese crime boss who calls himself Doctor Jin. Bob tells them that basically they’re wasting valuable time because the cloud has to be investigated, and our intrepid heroes manage finally to get out of the mayor’s office with their reputations intact. O’H says that there was an incident that he wanted to call attention to, and which he couldn’t pin on UJ and H because they were at the press conference. Police had gotten a call, and found 16 bodies of The Dawn Fist tong members. UJ asked to see the crime scene. UJ, H and Bob all went. The bodies were in a building with no windows and only one door. There were oddly shaped long glass shards on the floor. The bodies had claw marks from a tiger, and there were claw imprints of a lizard on the floor. This was determined by H. It appeared that the people had been brought into the building and then killed when something very heavy had crashed through the roof (the building had two or three more stories) and killed them all. There also turned out to be secret rooms with more bodies in them. One of the rooms opened onto a sewer passage. The party goes in, and hears sobbing. It turns out to be an Asian woman who by her dress seems to have been a cigarette girl for the Dawn Fist’s gambling parlor. Bob calms her down, and gets a police translator named Rosie. Rosie says the woman keeps saying “The tiger came out of the darkness, and it walked like a man” or something. Bob and H go to Bob’s plane, an experimental, well-armored plane with guns called the X-5, to go check on the cloud. UJ goes to find a map of the sewer system at the library. Bob and H find near the cloud a roughly humanoid thing with dragonfly-like wings (out of character: The Brother of the Wind = demon #2 of 7). H jumps onto it, while Bob shoots at it. H then tries to pull its wings off. He successfully pulls one off and realizes he is above the city; way above the city. Bob flies the X-5 in an attempt to catch H as he falls. The creature lets out a cry, and a Chinese dragon appears (out of character: King of the Storm, demon #3 of 7). It sends lightning Bob’s and H’s way. Meanwhile, UJ locates a map at the city planner’s office after meeting some helpful people at the library. She finds the sewer section from the last adventure with the Axe Gang, and sees that the whole sewer system is connected. She finds a place with a manhole entrance where she thinks a man-tiger could be hiding. She’s escorted there by a police officer assigned by O’H to keep an eye on her because “I don’t trust her.” She enters and finds a stash of money littering the floor. Then she hears a metallic growl and is attacked by the huge tiger man (out of character: Lord of the Hunt, demon #4 of 7–moving right along aren’t we?). Meanwhile, H tries to jump onto the dragon and ends up stuck on its tail. Bob has to catch H, again. Bob points out that this is new for him. He usually only catches damsels in distress, but he’ll make an exception for H. The X-5 gets damaged by dragon lightning. Bob has H pilot the plane (which he does amazingly well for someone without the Pilot skill) while Bob makes his repairs in mid-air. They shoot at the dragon some more. H tries to jump on the dragon again. The dragonfly man finally hit the ground, out of commission. H ended up falling onto/into a building. By now they’ve helped set fire to and otherwise damage a number of buildings. They eventually kill the dragon. I think they even caused it to fall apart. (Metal and armor rain down onto the unprotected streets.) The dragon, the dragonfly man, and, as it’s eventually revealed, the tiger man were part clockwork machine, like the “fire samurai” from the last adventure (obviously these were three of Dr. Jin’s seven “demons”). It is discovered that hidden up in the cloud there was a balloon craft with the remains of another clockwork/organic creature. The creature was putting this yellow stuff into the air that had something to do with/was causing the cloud. After the dragon’s demise the clouds above the city became normal again. Somewhere along the line Bob flies through a building, which was cool. Somewhere else along the line he also informs H about the parachutes under the seats, which H notes would have been a big help a little while ago when he was falling. Bob says, “We’re not done falling yet!” The plane is again damaged, but he has to land to fix it. Back in the sewer UJ and the tiger man beat on each other. The tiger man eventually decides to vanish into shadows, and UJ with her crappy Alertness can’t find him (oh yes, she got a flashlight from O’H) until he jumps her from behind. Eventually she beats him up so bad that he ends up trying to crawl away towards the ocean. Bob lands the X-5 at an airfield where he gets people to help with repairs. UJ hauls the tiger man up out of the sewer and tries to take him to the police station. She finds the old Chinese guy who was the interpreter in the last game and asks him to ask the creature where Jin is. At first the guy doesn’t want to ask, but he relents. The creature surprises them all and says in English, “He is already here,” and dies. A ticking sound is heard from the body. UJ yells “Run!” and “There’s a bomb!” It so happens that Bob’s nearby, and that he has the Aspect “Throw Me the Bomb.” Thankfully, he disarms the bomb, and the city is saved, for now. But as H kept saying, “The press is going to eat us alive!”

The power of SOTC is again revealed as a player can drop in without so much as a character sheet and integrate into the story almost seamlessly. Bob Jumper also took my adventure into a more sci-fi dieselpunk direction than I had originally intended, as will no doubt be seen in future installments.

Be well.