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.