Our second full session, in which we learned what it was like to have our asses completely handed to us. The fight at the core of it did have a bit of "klunk" to it, but this was largely the fault of the players, who had split themselves up into multiple locations during the preamble. Poor Bluestreak... he had to run around and get everyone to the scene of the action. Good thing running Mach Eight makes that a little more possible.
Legs makes an initial attempt to contact the Artificer, but keeps it quiet from his teammates. Meanwhile, Gauss continues to investigate things back at the harbour, and comes to the conclusion early on that the harbormaster was bribed, but interestingly, it was with cash -- indicating that the briber is either local or inexperienced, possibly both.
Johnny (Psydekick) doesn't wake up until noon, but when he does, it's all about bad dreams. Seems he's had a vision of Legs getting the crap kicked out of him by men in "cop blue" powered armor. It being Johnny, Legs takes it with a grain of salt and trucks on. Around this time, Legs gets a contact back from the Artificer, naming a time and place to rendezvous, at 5pm that night.
Then a professor from Johns Hopkins drops by the garage, asking after Legs. Turns out his wife was involved in the car accidents yesterday (issue #1) and Bluestreak saved her. He is very grateful, and it turns out that his lab is one where the INS has brought one of the APCs (and its cargo) to -- he offers the chance to investigate this, to Legs, as his lab assistant, as a way of paying the Stringers back. When's it happening? 5pm. Legs agrees.
And then he promptly calls Gauss, tells her to bring her lab outfit; she shows up shortly, ferried by Bluestreak. The plan, as Legs outlines it, is to send Gauss to the lab to investigate, while Legs runs down "a few street angles to this thing" (he doesn't mention the Artificer, with good reason). Johnny will maintain a telepathic link between him and Gauss while this goes on.
Legs then asks Bluestreak to gather the others together -- himself, Fuego, and Nuke -- and have them check into this vision Johnny's had; otherwise, stay on alert, and be ready for anything. Status quo.
Gauss heads off to Johns Hopkins. Johnny hangs out in the garage. Legs gathers himself together for the appointment that evening.
The remaining trio gather at a local bar to discuss their game plan. They order beer, wings, and chat about Johnny's vision. Long pause. "Hm." Long pause. "Anyone got any ideas how to investigate this?" Long pause. "I wonder what Gauss is doing." (Gauss is the team's super-detective; she's a junior league Batman with magnetic powers.)
Cut to:
Gauss shows up at the professor's office, startling him a little, but blending in quickly. She gets to the lab with him, eventually, and sees what they've got: the car opened up, and the loot on the tables. The loot is a set of black rectangles with apertures and tabs and optical interfaces and the like. They look like they're supposed to be plugged into something, and they're very advanced. Possibly the Artificer's work, Gauss wonders? The thought gets transmitted to Legs, who doesn't entirely cover his unsurprised reaction.
Cut to:
Back at the bar, the trio decide they can't really do anything else but be alert; there's a discussion about trust and faith and teamwork which results in Nuke deciding to go keep an eye on Legs from the air. Pretty easy to do for a guy with flight and telescopic vision. The other two go to a stakeout point atop a skyscraper to watch the city (and the game).
Cut to:
Legs rendezvous with a water taxi in the harbor, which goes out a ways on the water before the driver cuts the engine. He turns around. "Leo," he says. "Blake," Legs says. It's the Artificer, Blake White; they begin to chat. Blake asks Legs if he's reconsidered the offer of employment; Legs defers. They start to tentatively exchange information, painting a picture of the events of yesterday, and more or less identifying White as the broker of the technology being shipped, if not the creator.
Back at the lab, all hell breaks loose; one of the walls caves in and -- you guessed it -- five guys in cop blue powered armor stride in. Gauss drops her cover and throws up a magnetic forcefield to protect the civilians as the armored men shoot taser beams and missiles around the room; the forcefield holds, but Gauss has a hard time getting a lock on the armored figures -- they're magnetically shielded, and their circuitry runs on optics.
Johnny hits the panic button and Bluestreak and Fuego head to the lab to see what can be done. Nuke drops down to Legs and asks if he wants a lift; Legs says Nuke should go on ahead, and continues his conversation with White. It turns out that the modules are meant to be plugged into powered armor, granting powers to the user. Oh great.
Bluestreak gets the injured out of the lab, while Fuego transforms into his giant ifrit form. One of the armored men shouts out "Crap, that was Bluestreak!" and plugs in a particular module. Gauss starts to nail that guy with her magnetically-propelled darts, and does manage to pierce the armor, a little. Fuego, meanwhile, gets fired upon by another armored man -- it's a net trap, and a strong one at that! Entangled, Fuego drops, unable to act.
Bluestreak heads back to pick up Johnny. Legs, who has picked up enough information from the telepathic link and from the Artificer, contacts Bluestreak (Johnny has the team in full telepathic contact for at least a little bit) and warns him that the armored men probably have something in play which specifically targets speed powers. The armored men continue to plug in modules, gain powers, and get sniped at by Gauss and INS agents, to some and no effect, respectively.
Bluestreak races back and deposits Johnny, but waits outside, to give Johnny a chance to nail the one with the dampener. But he gets impatient and races in -- straight into a speed dampening field that robs him of his powers -- he does his bionic man slow motion act for a bit.
Nuke breaks into the lab behind the forcefield and helps evacuate the citizens, then charges on through at the speed dampening guy -- but as soon as he hits the field, he's robbed of his flight, and lands -- but uses his baseball instincts to skid, trying to tackle another one of them -- but they dodge, using jet-boots. Nuke starts to right himself, taking another swing, but the armored man is just too quick within the field.
Johnny drops the telepathic link and tries to work his way through the mental shielding on the suits to blast one of the baddies, but is confounded. Back in the harbor, Legs has seen enough -- the Artificer revealed himself to be a hologram, and then turned into a surveillance view of the lab fight -- and tells the Artificer to teleport him there, in exchange for a week of Legs' time "sometime this year". The deal is made, and Legs is teleported to the scene of the fight.
During this time, one of the foes has managed to encase Nuke in ice -- extreme cold, Nuke's weakness! (He's powered by atomic fire, just like his uncle Max.) Nuke's powers start to fail, he starts to weaken...
And Gauss nails the stasis field device on the opponent. Bluestreak, who was struggling, suddenly gets his speed back -- and seriously overshoots, racing far out of the building.
Legs bounds in and tries to snag the ice/cold device off one of the guys, but it proves to be too firmly attached to the armor. The armored men launch, then, beating their retreat; two of them, one glowing gold, one glowing blue, encase the lab buildings in domes of appropriately colored force. The inner blue one begins to contract, and they take to the air. Fuego, now free, melts the ice off of Nuke, who does his best to shake off the effects, though he remains weakened for a time.
Johnny tries to pierce the blue shield, but is shocked and knocked back; he tries to reach out beyond with his psychic senses, but they are blocked by the gold shield. Gauss targets the blue shield and creates a weak point in it, which Nuke, Legs, and Fuego all hit in tandem, weakening it (Legs is mildly affected by the shock effect, and Nuke and Fuego are not at all.)
On the opposite side, Bluestreak attempts to pierce the field, but cannot; so he opts to track the flying men. After a time, they stop midair, change modules, and disappear.
Johnny, unaware of this, sends out a mental illusion of the forcefields having gone down, in an attempt to lure the armored men back. Bluestreak is affected by this illusion, as it turns out, and races back -- and smack right into the forcefield. He knocks himself out. "I wouldn't'a tried it that way," comments Legs, on the opposite side.
Legs, Nuke, Fuego, and Gauss continue their assault and, ultimately, break the force bubble before it can contract too much further. Bluestreak is wakened, and he accelerates his metabolism to recover from the damage.
Johnny picks up on the presence of one more mind than he can physically see and account for in the room... It's in the clean room, where one final module remains (they'd been planning on taking it apart). Legs has Johnny create the illusion of the module still being there, while he snags it for himself -- he'll do a better job of investigating it than the INS, he tells himself. That done, Johnny and Nuke go further into the room, trying to track down that extra mind.
Nuke turns on his x-ray vision to confirm Johnny's indication: yep, there's someone on the floor, in the corner, invisible. Nuke gestures at them; they don't respond. He walks over and picks them up, and the invisibility falls away. It's the professor! And around his neck is a big yellow old-style "cartoon" bomb with a quickly diminishing fuse and a smiley face on it: the calling card of the Trick.
They try to put out the fuse. It doesn't work. Nuke, unable to work out a plan quickly, simply hunches down over the bomb while Johnny encases it in a forcefield. The bomb goes off, tearing through the forcefield and launching Nuke up through the roof of the lab, the building, and some hundred meters or so into the air -- he just barely retains consciousness, his costume shredded (in front) -- and achingly floats his way back down to the ground.
The professor is revived, and it turns out that he has no wife and no idea what anyone is talking about. It isn't until later that the whole picture is pieced together.
The team reassembles back at the garage, where a disposable cellphone awaits Legs -- a line to the Artificer. He calls up; Gauss taps in; they have a three-way chat about the module, and the Artificer, in addition to showing a keen interest in Gauss, provides an electromagnetic sequence that will disable the failsafes on the module. Turns out the module is built for psi and magecraft interference. Potent stuff.
It ends with Nuke stepping outside while Legs discloses who he's been talking with, a determination of a power signature that Legs and Gauss may be able to use to track down the armored men, and the chilling realization that the false professor who had visited the garage had to have been none other than Legs' long-time nemesis, the murderer of his brother -- The Trick.
When Gauss isn't too sure about letting Psydekick play telepathic relay switch in her head...
Psydekick: Get open minded, babe.
After the fight, it's time for the after school special lesson-we-learned... not:
Psydekick: So we need to be less trusting.
Legs: That's the lesson you're going to take from this?! Not 'We need better teamwork?' Or, 'I shouldn't go around convincing my speedster friend that there's no wall in front of him?!'
Exposure to Psydekick is bad for the biological clock:
Gauss: I can feel my maternal instinct shriveling and dying right now.