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.