Chicago:Sessions:20050604

June 4, 2005
GM: Bill S.

The date is Saturday, June 4, 2005. At five minutes past eleven A.M., Megan Starling’s cellphone rings. The caller is Earl Grimes. He says, “I just want to tell you about my latest adventure.” Then he invites her to dinner. “It’s not another train ride, is it?” she asks lightly. “Not another faerie encounter?” She mentions that she’s attending a carnival-type fundraiser for the Irregulars at 1pm, and Earl says he’d like to go with her.

At Team Infinity HQ, John Whitetop is checking police and other crime reports. The name Peter Smith catches his eye. A woman on a train reported seeing “a little person flying around.” She saw other (full size) people talking together as well; the only name she caught was Peter Smith. Then the entire train went dark, and when the darkness went away, she was the only person on the train. She thought it might have been a kidnapping or something. She had reported this to the police a few months ago, but apparently the cops weren’t taking her seriously. The woman gave her name as Kathleen Smith.

Around noon, Travis Burton (who, in his identity as Troublemagnet, declares, “It’s my job to catch the Mafia when they step out of line”) gets a call from an official of the Montarelli family, who asks him, “Why are you torturing us?” Slightly taken aback, Travis responds, “I’m sorry, you must be mistaken. I’m sure I’d remember torturing you.” Montarelli relates that a guy in a black suit had walked into a safe house, picked up a man without touching him and smashed him against a wall, and pulled out a flashlight and sliced another man’s arm off with its beam. The guy collected all their guns and money into a sack. The next thing the Montarelli men knew, they had been staring into space for several minutes, and the intruder was gone. Travis: “Sounds like someone’s impersonating me. I don’t like that.” He obtains the safe house address.

Travis calls HQ and files a report with Whitetop. “There’s a reasonable chance this is a trap.” There’s some guy out there in a black suit with what might be a force sword, possible telekinetic, might be able to turn invisible and/or teleport, could perhaps be a mage rather than a psion. Whitetop enters these parameters and kicks off a database search of known metahumans. A few minutes later, the computer returns a list. The only person on the list who isn’t dead or in jail is Earl Grimes.

Travis arrives at the safe house, which is of course vacant now. The mounting brackets for the external security cameras are empty. Nothing much remains inside except a TV monitor and a DVD player. There aren’t any bloodstains. Travis removes a disc from the player. Travis walks slowly through the house, scanning for psychic impressions. In one place he “sees” a man seemingly stuck to the wall; Travis turns around and sees someone dressed as Darth Vader. There are shouts and curses in the background, and one Montarelli man goes for his gun. Vader brings out his lightsabre, swings once, and the man’s arm flies off.

Travis verifies with Whitetop that this “Supers World” does have Star Wars, then calls back the Montarelli official. “My outfit looks nothing like Darth Vader’s!” The official replies, “The guy described you.” “I don’t have a lightsabre!” The official confirms that the disc, containing security videos, had been left in the safe house deliberately.

Travis flies off to HQ. He replays the video recordings. Darth Vader extends his hand, a guy flies back against the wall. After the robbery, Vader simply walked away. The inhabitants of the safe house simply sat staring blankly for ten minutes. Whitetop forwards information about Vader to the HQs of the Justice Patrol and the Irregulars.

Earl enjoys wandering around at the carnival. Some of the Irregulars – Firefly, Magna Dwarf, Stalker – mingle with the crowds. Several times either Megan or Reg Myers mounts the dais to make an announcement or give away another prize.

Mid-afternoon, after the carnival starts winding down, Earl meets back up with Megan. He wants to see the new Star Wars movie. Megan’s willing to see it again, but points out, “Earl, you haven’t yet told me about your latest adventure.” “Well, I went to Dallas, then I went to Hell.” He’ll tell her his story after the movie.

Back at TIHQ, Carla logs a report over the police band of a disturbance at an office building where “some joker dressed as Darth Vader” broke into a safe. Travis flies out immediately; Whitetop runs to the garage.

As he nears the area, Travis’s Danger Sense goes off. What look like two large arrows are flying toward him. He raises his TK shield, then sees two more arrows coming. All four arrows – which are homing in on him like tracking missiles – are making a strange “chomp chomp” sound. To try to throw them off track, he flies straight up and drops a fragmentation grenade. The grenade explodes, and the arrows scatter like a disturbed school of fish. Over the headset he warns Whitetop, “Watch out for the guided missile arrow things!”

Whitetop sees one of the arrows flying in his direction. He drives around a corner of the building, but the arrow turns with him. “Carla, I think you’d better send some help.” Heeding Whitetop’s call, Sly begins running uptown from her South Side patrol, and Valmont responds also.

Whitetop slams on the brakes. The arrow strikes his windshield, but rather than breaking through or bouncing away, the shark’s mouth painted on the arrowhead animates and starts chewing through the glass. Whitetop rolls into the back seat.

Using his TK, Travis grabs hold of an arrow and crushes it. It emits a high-pitched squeal, then stops moving. However, the other two arrows chasing him increase their velocity and are now flying faster than Travis.

Just as the arrow finishes chewing through the glass, Whitetop fires his laser rifle straight down its “gullet”. The arrow screams as the laser bores a hole clean down its length. Whitetop rolls out of the Humvee, scanning for more arrows.

The remaining two arrows are now moving even faster, but Travis is able to grab them with TK and smash them together. He flies down and starts asking bystanders, “Did anyone see which way Lord Vader went?” Witnesses report stormtroopers dispersing in different directions. Whitetop checks with the cops on the scene and learns that the items stolen from the safe included money, jewels, and a ring of unknown material (an artifact recovered from an archaeological dig in England). Sly arrives on the scene and plucks the arrow out of the Humvee’s windshield. Carla notifies Reg Myers, “Whitetop wants you to call the police and see if they have had other problems or sightings” of Star Wars themed miscreants; Reg learns that relatively harmless acts of mayhem have been going on for about a month.

As they leave the movie theatre, Earl asks Megan, “Hungry?” “Starving.” “Let’s get dinner. You drive, okay?”

Shortly after they are seated, Megan notes with amusement that four young men dressed in Star Wars stormtrooper costumes enter the restaurant and are shown to a table. They are carrying their helmets rather than wearing them.

Earl begins his tale. “The Boss called me. The Dallas team needed my help.” This is the first time Megan’s heard of Enigma, and “as far as I know, there isn’t an official superteam in Dallas.” Earl tries to explain that this Dallas is in another dimension, and the team is a group of people who work for Enigma, but these people aren’t metahumans – except that one of them is a mage and another is “psychotic… er, psychic.” “I assumed they were fighting a cult that was trying to summon demons.” But it turned out that a devil had figured out a way to lure Earl to Dallas, by kidnapping a private investigator who was a member of the Dallas team. This devil’s interest in Earl goes back to the events of March 2004, when in a secret pentagram beneath Chicago, Earl had locked a demon in place while the elf Thaemon and others generated and channeled energy to destroy it. Struck by the backlash, Earl had been caught by Megan and Travis as he collapsed, saying hoarsely, “We just slew a demon prince.” “My words must have been the last thing they heard,” Earl speculates, “but instead of ‘we’ they heard ‘I’.” Rather than a prince, however, the demon that had been destroyed was a valued minion of the devil Azael, who sought out Earl to extract revenge. Earl thinks he’ll be going back to Hell, once Azael realizes he was bamboozled.

Earl’s story has raised many questions in Megan’s mind, but she puts most of them away for later, realizing Earl’s need to talk. Earl tells her he felt that talking about it to someone outside of Team Infinity would help him, and it has, a little.

Megan notices a fellow dressed as Darth Vader striding over to join the stormtroopers at their table. He is carrying his helmet under one arm. He has a handsome, youthful face and longish blond hair. A few minutes later, Earl grasps Megan’s arm and points – the waiter at Vader’s table is now suspended a few feet in the air, while Vader smirks. Megan excuses herself from Earl and walks over to the stormtrooper table as the waiter is being lowered to the floor. She lectures Vader against using his power in such a dangerous, uncouth manner. “Vader” gives his name as Thurston Howell IV (at which Megan mentally rolls her eyes), and when he learns that she is Megan Starling, his attitude becomes a tad less insouciant. “I don’t want to go head-to-head with the Starling clan – at least, not now.” Megan returns to her table and later overhears Howell talking about “shark bolts.” When Howell and his party leave, Megan slips over and exchanges one of the Federal Reserve Notes he paid with for one of hers.

Just as Earl is suggesting that they go to Megan’s place, Carla phones him. He tells her about the Darth Vader and stormtroopers at the restaurant, and Carla brings in Reg on three-way. Earl relates how Vader had pulled a waiter off his feet. Carla notes that three really is a person named Thurston Howell IV. He’s a gadgeteer from New York, 23 years old, who has made quite a bit of money from his inventions, many of which he has sold to the government. His company is called The Fourth.

Reg phones their DMI liaison. “This is Reg Myers of Team Infinity. Find out for me about Thurston Howell IV, the company he runs, the things he’s building for the government, anything he could have turned into power armor. I need to know NOW. Talk to you in a few minutes.”

Sly queries, “Who do we know who could make magic gizmos?” Travis replies promptly, “Earl.” Sly points out, “Earl’s been out of town for a month.” Whitetop asks Travis, “Who did you make mad?”

Using his psychometry, Travis reviews the robbery. He sees Darth Vader rip the safe open with brute TK. The ring, he senses, is an item of power and very old.

At Megan’s townhouse, as she’s changing clothes, Earl phones Travis who says, “Hi, Earl. Busy with the faeries again?… Hell? You get all the choice assignments, don’t you?” Earl: “You might need my help eventually.”

Travis’s Danger Sense alerts him again, and he warns Sly and Whitetop, “You might want to back up.” A powerful magnetic force grabs his artificial hand and pulls him toward the floor. Travis realizes he is somehow reliving what happened to the safe. He removes his hand and it sticks to the ground. He picks it up with TK. Using psychometry on the arrow Sly retrieved, he sees a stormtrooper firing it from a specially-made crossbow. When fired, the arrow grew larger and the painted shark head became animate.

Earl and Megan teleport to TIHQ. Reg meets them there. From Reg’s photo of Thurston Howell IV, Megan identifies him as the “Darth Vader” with whom she spoke in the restaurant.

Reg phones Sal (Sally Cheese) Montarelli. $65,000 in cash had been stolen from their safe house. The Montarellis have frequent business dealings in New York.

Carla turns up more information. TH4’s father was a New York contractor (now retired in Florida) who is a huge fan of the TV sitcom Gilligan’s Island. TH4 graduated from MIT. Travis logs on to an MIT message board; there’s a mention that TH4 had recently sold some invention to the government for big bucks. Reg phones a superteam in Florida, the Miami Five, and asks them to send someone to interview TH4’s parents, Charles and Lovey Howell. TH4 is not registered with the DMI; is this perhaps a military coverup? Reg wants to find proof that TH4 has metapowers. Megan checks hotel registrations across Chicago, but none of them record a guest named Thurston Howell IV.

The DMI liaison contacts Reg. TH4 was working on several government projects, including a mind control gas, some kind of electromagnetic field, and some other sort of energy field (“We’re still working on it”) that he was trying to narrow into a beam.

Since he may be Darth Vader’s target, Travis will fly around downtown to try to attract his attention. Megan goes with him.

Firefly pages Warpath. “We need your help.” Magna Dwarf ran into “some nut in a Darth Vader costume” and got thrashed. “Four guys in stormtrooper costumes made a piñata out of him.” Warpath dons his armor and takes off on a powerful motorcycle. As he approaches the scene, he spots two stormtroopers in the shadows. Suddenly, Warpath and his motorcycle are frozen and being lifted up into the air. There’s also a strange buzzing sound in his headset. Warpath manages to switch on his armor (which resembles an old Iron Man torso). He sees a stormtrooper aiming some kind of slugthrower at him. Then he feels himself lifted off of his bike, as if by some kind of tractor beam. Suddenly the beam shuts off (and the buzzing stops) and Warpath lands on his feet. The stormtrooper fires three times; the first two shots reflect off his armor, and the third knocks him back a bit. Warpath throws his axe over his shoulder, yelling, “Dance for me, Fred!” As he slams into the stormtrooper, Warpath calls out that he’s under attack and gives his location, near Irregulars HQ. Earl and Sly head for the teleport pad.

Fred hits a stormtrooper (ST4), but the blade bounces off the armor. Warpath feels himself being held again. He turns, nocks an exploding arrow, and fires, but the arrow moves very slowly. Warpath transforms into Thunderbird and flies upward against the tractor beam.

Sly faces a stormtrooper (ST1) who throws a grenade at her, but by the time it lands she’s no longer there. ST2 fires at her, but the slugs ping off of her business suit. She fires twice with her blaster rifle and ST2 falls.

Thunderbird, who is being pulled out of an alley (“Where’s a dumpster when you need one?”), returns to human form and grabs at ST3. Sly whirls and charges ST1; he leaps at her and she jumps right over him.

Sly fires twice, striking ST1. Travis arrives; Megan spots Darth Vader crouching in a very dark alley, and causes electricity to dance around him so Travis can see him, too. Warpath feels the tractor beam release; he slams ST3 and grabs his rifle. Travis’s Danger Sense goes off just before something grabs him.

Sly aims at ST4, at whom Fred is continuing to whack away. Warpath becomes Thunderbird again and starts to fly. Megan hurls lightning at Vader. Travis sees Vader grimacing; he wears the stolen ring on his finger. Travis uses TK to crush the device Vader is holding, which resembles a 2” disk; as he does so, the tractor beam releases.

Sly shoots ST4 in the leg; he falls down. Megan attempts to Confuse Vader. Using TK, Travis spins Vader around. Vader raises his hands and says clearly, “I surrender.” Travis orders him first to remove his gloves (which have some complex circuitry built into them) and the ring, then the rest of the costume.

As he cuffs him, Travis reads confusion in TH4’s mind. “Why am I here? This isn’t New York… We flew in to see Star Wars… We’re staying on my jet…” The four stormtroopers are volunteer servicemen, one from each of the main branches. They had all accidentally gotten a facefull of an experimental gas, which apparently made them delusional. The Marine’s brother had once been assaulted by some Montarelli goons, which is why the safe house was attacked (though it doesn’t explain how they knew where it was). The Air Force captain, who had mage potential, had seen the ancient ring on a news report and wanted it, so they cracked the safe.

The police arrive and take Thurston Howell IV and the other four men into custody. The next day, when Reg phones police headquarters to check on their status, none of them are there. Government agents had swept in and retrieved them.

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