Night's Black Agents: Countdown (demo encounter)

OPENING SHOT: The sky is a gorgeous shade of blue. We're miles high, and the camera's looking down on an idyllic landscape of puffy white clouds and far-away terrain. The sun shines high in the sky overhead, a 737 airliner flies away from the camera at the top of the frame, the music swells, and --

Suddenly, something shoots past the camera at high speed, falling towards earth.

Not something. Someone. Two someones. MACE HUNTER and DR. FELIX DuBOIS plummet towards the ground, hair whipped back by the high wind, DuBois looking imperturbable and Hunter looking devastatingly handsome. Clearly, this image is going to be on the movie poster. Neither of them have on parachutes.



The camera pans down. Below them and off to the east, five other sky-divers are getting away. It's reasonable to assume that they have something that Hunter and DuBois particularly want.

The camera cuts to a close up of the two men cutting through the air. Mace Hunter sets his jaw slightly to one side as he thinks on the plan of attack. Turning his head towards DuBois he calls out with a wry smile, "Good thing we didn't waste any time with the parachutes; they might have gotten away if we had." With that he tucks his arms in straightens out in a full headlong dive towards their targets. Momentarily he drifts out of the shot.

Mace's Google Glass (as hacked by Hung-Ke) are tracking the five falling bodies, and we see it from the camera's view. The close-up indicate that there are four shorter, swarthy thugs -- Latin American, most likely. They are in free-fall formation around a woman with long black hair, amazing bone structure, tall and agile and beautiful enough to grace the cover of a magazine. She has a mobile telephone in her hands, a telephone that your team particularly needs. She is completely ignoring the on-rushing ground as she attaches some sort of device to the phone.

Suddenly the cross-hairs and data feed on the glasses shorts out, fuzzes, disappears. Irritating, and bad timing.

...and the scene shifts to suggest why.

INTERIOR, DECOMMISSIONED EX-RUSSIAN LAUNCH FACILITY.

Dull, gray, grimy, filled with outdated computers and buzzing fluorescent lights. HUNG-KE LEE sits in front of a bank of computers, with OLIVER QUINN and PERSEPHONE CARDIFF across the room. There are two Russian goons in the room with guns drawn, and a heavily tattooed seven foot tall bald gorilla of a man -- looking a little bit like the mechanic Indiana Jones fights outside of the flying wing in Raiders of the Lost Arc -- has just buried a fire axe in the monitor besides Hung-Ke's head. Sparks fly everywhere in a burst of actinic light. "You die now!" suggests the bald man in a bad Russian accent as he works the axe free.

Hung-Ke's phone gives an audio update. "45 seconds to missile launch."

Hung-Ke, if you don't get the launch codes off of the phone that sky-diving woman has -- and if you don't get them in the next 45 seconds -- the not-as-decommissioned-as-you'd-think missile is going to launch a nuclear payload into Israel. That'd be bad. People are trying to stop you, you don't have the phone yet, and time is ticking down.

What do you and Quinn do?

Kaodi said:

The camera cuts to a close up of the two men cutting through the air. Mace Hunter sets his jaw slightly to one side as he thinks on the plan of attack. Turning his head towards DuBois he calls out with a wry smile, "Good thing we didn't waste any time with the parachutes; they might have gotten away if we had." With that he tucks his arms in straightens out in a full headlong dive towards their targets. Momentarily he drifts out of the shot.

Click to expand...

The camera in the launch room zooms in on Oliver's right shoe as he slowly slips it off and slides it towards the two gun-wielding goons, aiming for a spot between the two of them. (Athletics; spend of 2; 1D6+2 = 4)

Oliver has a beatific smile on his face as he calls out to Hung "Hey...you know how I swore I would never make a shoe-bomb..."

The camera zooms in on the dark interior of the shoe, which is broken by a series of faint red flashes. (Explosives; spend of 3; 1d6+3=9)

The air shakes with the force of Ashcan's flash-bang, and the glasses worn by your strike team darken instantly to block out the worst of the dazzle. Enough noise from the explosion comes through the encrypted earbuds to make Mace Hunter and Dr DuBois wince. Ashcan looks down at his stocking foot and the shredded remains of his favorite shoes, and it's hard not to have a few regrets. Ah, well. Only a few weeks 'til retirement and all this will be behind him.

It's worse for your foes in any case. The two Russian goons stagger backwards, swearing creatively and clutching at their eyes. They have guns out, but they're waving them around blindly (by definition). One shouts "Sergei! Where are you, so we don't shoot you?"

The bruiser growls "over here," and grins at Hung-Ke with what remains of his teeth. "You and me, little typing boy. We will dance." He hefts the axe.

Meanwhile, Persephone is covering the heavy glass doors leading into this room. An elevator at the end of the hall, visible through the glass wall, goes "BING." The doors slide open and three more thugs step out. One catches your eye. It's Viktor Eschenko, Russian arms dealer and the architect of this particular deal. You've crossed paths before. Persephone, he's going to be very displeased with you.

"Ah, Cardiff." His voice is flat and annoyed, his Russian accent clipped with barely controlled fury. "So like you British to show up where you are not wanted." He raises a heavy caliber pistol, fires, and the glass immediately in front of Persephone's head bursts into a crazy fractured starburst of impact. His aim was both casual and perfect. The glass may not be bulletproof, but it is bullet-resistant -- at least for the first shot. Persephone is spattered by glass fragments but remains uninjured.

What does Persephone do?

Meanwhile...

FLASHBACK

INTERIOR, PLANE

Mace Hunter and Dr DuBois boarded the airplane surreptitiously, hot on the trail of Gregori Vilnich. This information dealer set up the deal which sold the warhead and the launch codes to Eschenko, and his encrypted phone is where he stores every bit of information he gets. The plan was simple: steal the phone, transmit the launch Abort codes, load in a virus, and slip the phone back all without him noticing. Vilnich sat down next to an utterly gorgeous woman, however, and was quickly drawn into conversation. By the time the plane was in the air, Vilnich had slipped off into a nap and the woman had gotten up to use the bathroom. Perfect timing. Problem is, Vilnich wasn't sleeping, he was dead -- and that woman just blew open an emergency exit and, along with her four bodyguards and the phone in question, leapt through the exit into the swirling emptiness outside.

There was nothing to do but follow her.

END FLASHBACK

Mace Hunter folds in his arms and dives towards his targets. The four bodyguards see him coming and fumble for firearms, although they're clearly not as experienced at sky-diving as Mace and the good Doctor are. Spinning in the air, they point their guns, but Mace and DuBois may be able to act first...

He can trash all the monitors he wants, thinks Hung-Ke to himself. I only need one - plus a CPU. But first....

The gravity knife - warm from being so close to his forearm - slips out of its harness, and the blade locks into place as it rests in his palm for as long as he needs to aim.

"Simplemente un buen tiroteo en el Sky High Corral, eh, muchachos?" shouts Mace as he wraps his hand around his pistol and flips open the snap with his thumb. "Draw steady, arm straight, and pop!" he says to himself as he draws and fires at the nearest thug.