1: "100 Tons of Angry Bee": Our Heroes save the nation's corn syrup supply from a weirdo with a 100-tonne bee that he bugjacked from some other weirdos wielding laser cannon. Many railway cars are destroyed, and the bee has to be put down. The bugnapper, Saber, escapes, but the agents who owned the bee originally are taken in. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Warden. Exp: 2]
2: "Sing a Song of Sensilla": Fulgurite discovers some trees in a Chicago suburb covered with the same fur-like red sensilla that he has, a secret lab full of sensilla-covered plants, and his old partner Bombshell (who exploded the original raccoon) under sedation. Bombshell is hospitalized and the plants are taken to a biotech company, which is then trashed by ethical-ecoterrorist supervillains. Our heroes lure the villains to a deserted place suitable for paranormal combat. Due to a fairly basic tactical mistake on his part (hey, he was sound asleep only phases before!), Fulgurite is taken prisoner and hauled off for "decontamination" by the villains' 7000-year-old Atlantean advisor. One of the villains is captured by the remaining heroes, who plan a hostage swap. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Warden. Exp: 2]
3: "Evils of Powerpoint: Slide One": Fulgurite succumbs to differently-heroic dialogue from No-Trump, the leader of last session's opposition: "Indiscriminate spreading of the sensillae might harm the environment, and is a dangerously nonsapient act!" No-Trump and Our Heroes work together to track down the person who's spreading the sensillae, but Doc Justice, in his secret ID, is assaulted by paranormals mind-controlled by the master villain! Fortunately, his office is near the team's not-so-secret base, so he is saved from taking the fall, and Fulgurite uses pheromonal communication to sway the attackers once they're in custoday. The villain's corporate front is revealed! Fulgurite infiltrates the secret lab (complete with sensilla-bearing raccoon lab assistants) and keeps watch through the network of alien-infested plants while the rest of the team cruises the industrial park, waiting for "Peter Chevalier" to show up so he can vivisect Fulgurite. He shows! They leap! Roll credits. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Warden. Exp: 3]
4: "Hazards in the Workplace: Kerosene": Fulgurite stuns Chevalier (and the raccoons) with a pheromonal shout, but before justice can be executed, the sprinkler system in the building starts dispensing kerosene. Chevalier is abandoned while the heroes (aided by No-Trump's excellent and possibly precognitive sensory abilities) rescue all twenty-six innocent biotech office workers in twelve seconds. Fulgurite also saves the raccoons, the experimental kittens, and as much of the lab gear and notes as the raccoons can carry. Chevalier makes good his escape in the confusion, alas, but has left behind enough clues (including the kittens' memories) that his sister Priscilla can be found, and spooked into setting up a meet with him. Our Heroes follow her, Fulgurite does the pheromonal kiai again, and Chevalier is hauled off and fed into the machinery of the US justice system. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Warden. Exp: 3]
5: "Violence Always Sells": Doc Justice brings in an acquaintance of his from way back, the memory-modifying telepath Total Recall. Not being obviously evil, Total Recall is put on probationary status. Then, the police come to Our Heroes with a request for help in raiding drug lairs: not only have the riff-raff taken to toting high-energy chemical lasers, but a high-speed superhero (dubbed "The Rat" for his grey costume and gasmasked visage) beat the crap out of a SWAT team in six seconds flat and told them to take their payoffs and leave organized crime alone like good like little Chicago civil servants. The team helps clean out several crack houses and the like over the course of a day without incident, but when they hit a meth lab shortly after dark, The Rat appears and starts trashing them: he is as quick as Blue Streak and has twice the movement, can only be hit by astonishing good luck, and never misses. Only Total Recall's ability to make The Rat relive the agony of being bitten by a radioactive tropical caterpiller keeps the team from being completely wiped out in fifteen seconds or less, and permits a bare victory. When taken in for interrogation, The Rat turns out to be one of the Hivers, the people who bred the 100-tonne bumblebee that starred in session 1. The Hivers are also responsible for the proliferation of high-energy weapons at street level; apparently they need some cash, and violence always sells. Clearly, they must be Dealt With. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 2]
6: "Evils of Powerpoint: Slide Two": Information gleaned from The Rat's sordid little brain points to his Hiver cell's safehouse, so Our Heroes (less Warden, out of action due to being drenched in cough syrup from the meth lab) strike! Half the cell has already scattered like the proverbial illuminated blattidae, but the remainder are lying in wait. Fulgurite fills the safehouse with ball lightning, which works pretty well until the high-energy chemical laser explodes. That concludes the fight pretty well, but only panicked use of alien symbionts and illegal military combat drugs saves the Hiver goon who was holding it at the time. Since the Hivers are all on pheromone-enhancing camaraderie drugs, there is no trouble tracking down the cell leader Brandon, rifling through his brain, erasing his memory of being captured, and following him to his meet with "Sandy", the representative of higher management. Then Sandy spots Total Recall looking through Brandon's eyes, explodes into a quintet of possibly-false images, confuses everyone, engages in a brief mind-to-mind duel with Total Recall, and vanishes. Bummer. Back at the office, Doc Justice (in his cover ID as Julius Rice III) is investigating his numerous subsidiaries to find out more about the urban assault vehicles that Brandon's cell didn't get because "Doc Justice stole them". Police Sciences Corp gets forcibly reorganized after the audit determines that they were selling high-energy chemical lasers overseas with no questions asked. In an apparently separate incident, Dr Terman suddenly left his job at the Alar Group (the research wing of the organization) for a new job at Shirow Corp (the D in R&D), also part of the Rice Superhero-Industrial Complex. When tracked down, he is glad to come in and give a PowerPoint presentation about the giant horseshoe-crab mecha. Total Recall goes looking for undisclosed facts, and sets off the psychic boobytraps left in Terman's mind by gothgirl mentalist Inquisitor. Most of the traps are disarmed, but the altered state of consciousness that was running Terman for the past year vanishes along with all those memories. Major bummer. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 3]
7: "Doc Injustice Against the Chicago Merc": Breaking
News: "Wandering anti-globalist crusaders Democratic Monster have taken
over the Chicago Commodity Exchange trading pit, to get media attention for
Doc Justice's denunciation of Julius Rice's economic crimes against women
and minorities!" Confused, Our Heroes nonetheless prepare a plan to
liberate the hostages and financial data, and implement it. They really
only use one tactic (hit Warcry, DM's leader
and scary teleporter, as hard and fast as possible until she is not a
problem any more) but it's not a bad one. Warcry gets pounded on until she
teleports out to find Total Recall's body in its riot vehicle full of cops,
and the cops delay her for a few seconds until Blue Streak and Fulgurite
can show up to put her down. The remainder of DM is substantially
lower-power, and gets captured pretty quickly. The hostages are fine, but
DM's geeks had some quality time with the computers, so the financial data
must be discarded as tainted. You win some, you lose some. There is just
barely time to hunt down the last few DMers before speeding off to
investigate an attack on Titan Industrial PolluChemicals
by what turn out to have been gigantic
mechanical trilobites: the mecha stolen from Shirow Corp! Sadly, the
trilobites have made good their escape. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc
Justice, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 3]
8: "19.2 Tons of Robot Trilobites!": Mysterious dog-puncturings at a beach are discovered by Fulgurite and Blue Streak to be the work of giant dragonfly larvae; the appropriate authorities are brought in to clean them up before Chicago is infested with ten-tonne dragonflies. The tycoon at the head of the commercial empire of which Titan Industrial Chemicals was part sets up a meeting with Julius Rice, to which he shows up with a woman in a straitjacket and suicide watch tag (his "mindripper", who Total Recall, playing stenographer, perceives is providing mental defense to the tycoon), and a tiger (also mentally defended). The purpose of the meeting is to disclose the threatening faxes apparently from the trilobite people, targeting four more components of the tycoon's empire for destruction. Preparations are prepared, but in the time before they can come to fruition, Our Heroes stake out the four businesses with just their native superpowers. Sure enough, the trilobites show up to destroy the algae farm, and are only trivially impeded by the heroes. Warden manages to break a couple of spines off one, but no one else can scratch them, or even get tracers onto them, and the trilobites take out everyone except Warden with ease. Before being crushed, Total Recall scans the mind of one trilobite pilot (who serves the Lady of the Lake out of pure love); after he recovers, he mind-scans Lake Michigan looking for that mind, and gets a good fix on physical location before another mentalist jams him. Research determines that the trilobites are hangared aboard the container ship Silurian Maiden, and plans are laid to produce a legal excuse to have the US military use heavy antitank weaponry on the trilobites. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 2]
9: "Loose Trilobites Sink Ships": After due consideration, the plan to bring soft-brained normals with big guns into range of the villains' mentalist is scrapped. Doc Justice is still in the hospital and unable to provide guidance, so the final plan is to just bust in all at once and start trashing trilobites while they're sitting idle with the hatches open; sneaking in before charging would probably just give the trilobites time to start up and become invincible. Fulgurite has the bright idea of enlisting Bombshell's aid, since she can make explosions on the other side of impenetrable barriers, and the game is afoot! Fortunately, the Silurian Maiden has her hatches open because she appears to be about to offload a trilobite into a truck; unfortunately, there are multiple supervillains in attendance, including Inquisitor, Saber, and one who gets dubbed "Latte Lad". The ship is wrecked and sinking after mere seconds of combat, and several agents have to be carried to safety after absorbing paranormal attacks, but Total Recall commandeers one of the trilobites and Warden, Bombshell, and Blue Streak damage one of the others and destroy the third. All the supervillains escape, but this is considered a minor issue next to the termination of the Trilobite Menace. It turns out that Saber used his bizarre fluidic technology to make the trilobites for the Lady of the Lake, allegedly a mermaid who emerged from suspended animation to find that humans were despoiling her once-beautiful lake. Blue Streak, who fell unconscious in the burning trilobite, joins Doc Justice in the hospital. [Present: Blue Streak, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 3]
10: "A Daring, If Crazed, Rescue": Blue Streak is still recovering from bad drug interactions, but the rest of the team goes to the city's Fall Ball, atop the Sears Tower, to network with the movers and shakers of Chicago. Doc Justice goes in his secret ID as Julius Rice III, since Doc Justice is known to be still hospitalized (illegal drugs are probably involved), everyone else in some semblance of their hero ID. Fulgurite springs Angel (of Democratic Monster) from jail to take her to the party. Things go well even though Mancuso (the tycoon from session eight)'s daughter is secreting Hiver pheromones, as is the man escorting Priscilla Knight (Chevalier's sister). Total Recall even gets a dance with Suicide Watch. Then Diamond, wearing Club as a dress, shows up and latches onto Fulgurite, refusing to give him up for even one dance with Priscilla because dancing with someone wearing a claymore for a corset is probably not what he should be doing. Fulgurite goes to investigate, finds out that Priscilla's Hiver date has one of the triggers, arranges a mindlink through Suicide Watch (Total Recall's powers are jammed by the broadcasting equipment on nearby floors) to get more details of the bomb, and then the Bee Girls Blue, Chance, and Diva and their Hiver squads burst in through the windows! Fulgurite zaps the electronics in the bomb, then Warden grabs Priscilla and leaps out the window. The mayor gets seized by the Hivers, Fulgurite gets blinded by being turned blue (as does Angel) but manages to avoid being beat on by the Hiver martial artists and even does a bit of damage to them, Diamond and Club take out many of the Hivers, and Total Recall gets his powers back when Doc Justice's date shuts off power to the transmitters. Doc Justice is accused of being Saber, traitor to the Hive, and blown out the window, but not before grabbing the parawing he had prepositioned behind the bar. Doc Justice recovers and rides the updraft to the top, where the Hivers are loading the mayor onto their dragonfly gunship, and performs a daring if crazed rescue. Total Recall convinces the Hivers it's time to pull out, and as they dive the dragonfly from the top of the tower, Warden meets them ascending on his pedal-powered helicopter, boards the dragonfly, and suggests they land before he dismantles it. They succumb to overwhelming reason. [Present: Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 3]
11: "No Rest for the Wicked": Total Recall finds out what the Hivers at the Sears Tower knew: the exploding-corset plot and the mayor-kidnapping-and-brainwashing plots were unconnected (heresy & schism, perhaps?), the Hivers hate Fulgurite specifically for subverting their pheromonal dominance hierarchy, and their weapons deals went though Doc Ares, a collector of and dealer in exotic weaponry. Having blown his cover to the mayor, Doc Justice publicly admits to his formerly-secret ID, so only Total Recall and Warden are inconspicuous enough to pose as drug dealers worried about the pyrotechnic loon that's been blowing up crack houses and arrange a meet with Doc Ares. The power-armored villain seems to accept their story (and the suitcase full of cash), but after leaving it is decided that Doc Ares is a Bad Person and must be taken down. Once the carnival the arms dealers use for cover is shut down for the night, Team Justice moves in and, despite a few alarming moments, takes down Doc Ares and his goons with little difficulty. It turns out that Doc Ares is Thomas Gill, one of the people who vanished from Ricecorp during the Trilobite Affair, and Saber, in his "Julius Rice III" identity, set him up in business. Gill even had lunch with him, and sends him mail at his offices in the Sears Tower, prominently labelled "Saber Enterprises". D'OH! Investigation revealed that not only was a big black guy named James Rice employed by Saber Enterprises, but the CEO looked a lot like Inquisitor with a business suit and without the makeup. Hmm.... Team Justice prestige and J W Rice III money get the heroes surreptitious after-hours access to the Saber Enterprises offices, which prove to smell like Inquisitor. Ah-HAH! Unfettered by the constitution, Team Justice (plus Angel) bursts into Inquisitor's and Saber's luxury apartments (conveniently in adjacent apartment towers, with line of sight between them). It's hard to be mean to Inquisitor even when she's curled up asleep with her stuffed mammoth, and Saber is just plain crazy, but they can't stand up to six superheroes meting out a righteous smackdown. In the aftermath, it is revealed that Saber is Doc Justice's illegitimate half-brother. What a bastard! [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 3]
12: "Playing With Fire": With Saber's perfidy curbed for the moment, the next order of business is Pyro Boy, whose pyrotechnic assaults on drug dealers have been burning down entire city blocks. Police investigation has determined that he is using real fireworks, and is probably behind the recent rash of break-ins at fireworks factories. Rice Foundation influence is used to close down one of the three factories in the Chicago area, extra security is installed at another, and the team stakes out the most likely target. Sure enough, Pyro Boy and two henchwomen (the Pyrovixens) come roaring over the wall on motorcycles. The Pyrovixens' thermite chains and Pyro Boy's several-hundred-meter-radius firework of doom are somewhat disconcerting, but the villains are fundamentally human inside their armor, so it's not long before justice triumphs. Pyro Boy turns out to be a disgruntled police officer, who blames all the failures of CPD to rid the city of drug dealers on the Hivers, who (he claims) have infiltrated the police and other city departments. Blue Streak and Fulgurite go downtown to talk to Internal Affairs, and sure enough while in CPD Central, Fulgurite smells Hivers! He localizes the pheromones to the desks of a group of six undercover officers led by Sandra Crowe, whose picture looks quite familiar. Crowe's superiors insist that she's a real police office doing real undercover work, but Team Justice isn't convinced. Fulgurite arranges to meet Crowe at a safehouseboat, and she has good explanations for everything, including not being affected by his pheromones. He's still suspicious, but there's not much to be done. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 2]
13: "I Hate Illinois Nazis": Investigation reveals that Orogenics, Inc is funded by Regulon LLC, part of Mancuso's sordid corporate empire. This may or may not be related to the fact that their prototype Mole Machine has been stolen. Patrick Winston, Orogenics's founder and mad scientist, has no idea why someone would steal it, and all the guards know is that they were bribed to not notice it being stolen by nice young men in grey suits and brightly-colored ties who said they needed it to save the world. Asking around the neighborhood where a "giant earthworm" tunneled up through some elderly gentleman's garden gets descriptions of similar nice young men and the license plate of their truck, which turns out to be a Regulon company vehicle. A Regulon employee tries to take the fall for signing it out, but Total Recall determines that it was actually Anna Mancuso. The team spends some time tailing her and staking out her apartment, but she does nothing unusually suspicious. Finally, as Fulgurite is accosting her in a public place and accusing her to her face of being a Hiver, trouble breaks out at the Chicago Art Institute, just down the street, and he takes off to avert it. The trouble is that Ultraviolet Rae and the Spectrum Boys have taken over the Institute, and if Julius and James Rice don't present themselves in one hour, "The Banquet" by Magritte gets fed into a shredder. No one wants to take James out of his cell, but the threat to irreplaceable cultural treasures gets Warden (in Doc Justice's armor) bringing Doc Justice (in prison garb) to the Institute while Saber is stashed in a nearby armored car, heavily sedated. Before they reach the door, however, people on skateboards, wearing p atriotic gorilla masks and brandishing welding torches, burst from the crowd, Psyche and Swastika reveal themselves, and "James Rice" is under attack! The rest of Team Justice is standing by for just such a circumstance, though, and interfere well enough to let Doc Justice and Warden get into the Institute and behind a Spectrum Boy's forcewall. Swastika and Psyche are dangerous opponents, and Psyche discovers and nearly kills the real Saber before they can be put down, but they are defeated and Blue Streak whisks Saber to the nearest hospital. Meanwhile, the ruse has worked long enough for Doc Justice to get into the armor given by Ultraviolet Rae to "her good buddy, Saber", meaning he has some protection when UV Rae shoots him in the head with a megajoule-class laser. (Ow.) Things are looking bad, since Total Recall is the only functioning superhero on the outside and he can't get in, but then Warden gets his hands on Rae and it's all over; the two Spectrum Boys waiting in the invisible Mole Machine in the basement are easily cleaned up and the entire rainbow taken into custody. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 4]
14: "Menace from the Stars": As he delivers the badly wounded Saber to the doctors at the nearest hospital, Blue Streak notices strange insect-related phenomena. Suspecting Hivers, he calls for backup and Fulgurite flies over to investigate. The hospital is in fact a nest of Hivers, as demonstrated by the strike team that pops out of the woodwork to blow up most of the admin wing before being put down. When Blue Streak gets back to the OR, he finds the doctors sewing mind control grubs into Saber's wounds. That villainy is quickly subdued, however, and everyone returns to Justice Central to be on hand for a secret meeting between Doc Justice and Sovereign about Ultraviolet Rae. Of course Doc Justice is willing to hand UV Rae over to Sovereign, and in exchange Sovereign is willing to sign autographs for the rest of the team. However, when Fulgurite enters the room, Sovereign attacks! Everyone is very surprised, and even more surprised to not be instantly vaporized! Then, Doc Justice's minion relaxes her shapeshift and reveals herself as No Trump, just as Team Bridge bursts in and they arrest Sovereign in the name of the Universal Truth. Since Sovereign is by this point showing all the symptoms of a massive systemic infection, the ten paranormals working together are able to take him down. No Trump claims that Sovereign is an alien von Neumann machine, that Fulgurite's sensillae are a weapon against such, and that the appearance of paranormals on Earth is an immune response on the part of the planetary ecosystem. Fulgurite retreats so that Sovereign doesn't die immediately, and moral debate ensues at length. When Team Justice declines to kill Sovereign (who after all has saved innumerable lives and been an actual paragon of virtue), No Trump and her team leave in a huff. Fulgurite moves to another room, and the rest of the team prepare themselves to apologize. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 3]
15: "No Rest for the Wicked Comma Dammit": Sovereign comes around, and Our Heroes attempt to apologize and also get his side of the story. He cops to being an alien von Neumann machine by birth, but maintains that he is by choice a human, and the best one he can be, which accords with what Total Recall found in his brain. He also mentions that No Trump has a habit of making paranormals who annoy her vanish, which (since he is opposed to killing) significantly lowers her credibility in many eyes. Everyone agrees to keep Sovereign's secret, and he leaves. The fate of the Earth now as decided as seems possible at the time (and the small sample of Sovereign's tissue in the hands of Top Men), Team Justice turns their attention to the Hive, which has infiltrated an alarming number of public institutions in the Chicago area, including the prison system. This must be stopped! After a bit more inconclusive detective work, the team agrees that they are all fairly certain that Anna Mancuso is the leader of the Hive and Magnus Mancuso is in it up to his slimy neck, so they burst into the Mancusos' penthouse suite and seize them. Magnus is protected by Suicide Watch and her tiger, and proves to be a physical match for Total Recall himself. Finally the tiger gets thrown from the 25-story building and Warden grabs Magnus and busts (not entirely intentionally) through the floor moments before Suicide Watch would have shredded his brain. The other three heroes have some trouble with Anna, who turns out to be able to shrink to minute size and still fire full-sized shells from her bazooka, and her naked water elemental gigolo, but finally Fulgurite zorches her and all her ammo cooks off. Total Recall peeks into their sordid little minds and determines that yes, this act of jackbooted thuggery was justified after all. With the head gone, the body of the Hive can be more or less peaceably dismantled. [Present: Blue Streak, Doc Justice, Fulgurite, Total Recall, Warden. Exp: 3]
This file was last modified at 1333 on 06Mar03 by trip@idiom.com.