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(10/07) A Dark and Restless Tide - (A D20 Dark*Matter Story Hour)
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<blockquote data-quote="HeapThaumaturgist" data-source="post: 1689649" data-attributes="member: 12332"><p><strong>The Next Morning ...</strong></p><p></p><p>"And that's all Ted said..." Georgie paged back and forth through the email, making sure she hadn't missed anything.</p><p></p><p>They had reported the day's hapenings and discoveries last night, asking for further information on the AFT and who may have attacked Tim and Kyong at the morgue. This morning Ted had replied to their report ... and it wasn't good.</p><p></p><p>"Damnit!" Sam yelled. He paced back and forth in the "boys" room at their hotel. The whole group was gathered in that room, on the chairs, on the beds. Everyone looked angry and confused.</p><p></p><p>"What the hell did we do WRONG? THEY sent US out here to look into this *%$#, and now they want to climb our @$% for, what, finding out too much?!" Sam was livid.</p><p></p><p>"All Ted said was that we were to back off anything and anybody involved with the letters AFT." Georgie said, scrolling through the EMail again.</p><p></p><p>"Who's the AFT, though?" Tim leaned back on one of the beds. </p><p></p><p>Georgie shrugged. "Apparently knowing that would get us too involved ... Ted said some thing was going down back at headquarters we weren't going to like. Maybe we're getting shut out."</p><p></p><p>"Okay, so who were the two guys with sunglasses that disentegrated Dr. Bauer?" Tim pressed.</p><p></p><p>"Um. Ted said that we were to back off and stay away from those guys, too." Georgie reminded everyone. She tapped her screen for emphasis.</p><p></p><p>"Stay away from the AFT, stay away from the Men In Black ..." Georgie continued.</p><p></p><p>"... but we're still supposed to find out what Bauer was working on." Sam finished for her. He let out a string of cursing. "It seems like the AFT and those two Whoever-Agents are right at the damned CORE of this case. How in God's name are we supposed to investigate ANYTHING if we're supposed to keep as far away from the major players as we can, that's what I want to know."</p><p></p><p>Tim shook his head. "We can still check out Nanotecknowledgies Inc., though. Our last real avenue. The guys in black ruined the body, we can't get near the house ... that's probably the most logical place, anyway. If something he was working on got him killed, it'll probably be in his lab. Or little shop of horrors. Or whatever people who get whacked by MiBs work in."</p><p></p><p>***********************</p><p></p><p>Tim got in the passenger-side seat of the van and rapped the dashboard. "Let's roll."</p><p></p><p>Just at that moment a large white van pulled up, directly across the nose of their own van. The side of the truck had a cartoon depiction of a bunch of roses and "Hoffmann Floral and Gift" in florid script underneath.</p><p></p><p>"The hell ...?" Sam said, stepping on the breaks.</p><p></p><p>The side panel door of the van slid open and two men in white coveralls stepped out, followed by two more. Another man, with sandy brown hair and a vest, peeked out from inside the van. He looked disconcerted, perhaps a little afraid.</p><p></p><p>Sam rolled down the window. "Um. Can we help you?"</p><p></p><p>One of the men tapped a knuckle on Tim's window. Tim, too, rolled his window down. "Yea?"</p><p></p><p>"Agent Rosen?" The man at Tim's window asked.</p><p></p><p>"Um." Tim glanced at the "Hoffmann Floral" on the van. He decided not to ask who was asking. "Yea?"</p><p></p><p>"You're supposed to come with us." The agent replied.</p><p></p><p>"Actually, Dr. Nakami ASKS you to come with us." The agent behind the first corrected. He coughed and shifted his weight. </p><p></p><p>The first agent focused somewhere beyond and above Tim's head and sighed. "Ahhh. Yea ... Dr. Nakami humbly requests your presence back at headquarters." He said, resignedly.</p><p></p><p>"Um. Why?" Tim asked.</p><p></p><p>"You're not cleared for that information." The first agent replied.</p><p></p><p>"Ah. Dr. Nakami says he'll explain all of it to you when you arrive." The second added.</p><p></p><p>Sam looked the agents by his window over. His eyes narrowed. Both had rather noticable bulges under their coveralls, which were only zippered half-way up the torso. One of those bulges was very suspiciously large ... perhaps a small SMG.</p><p></p><p>"I take it Dr. Nakami is asking very nicely." Sam said.</p><p></p><p>"He is." The first agent replied. He looked past Tim at Sam.</p><p></p><p>"I imagine this is what Ted meant when he said something we weren't going to like went down at the head office." Georgi said from the back seat.</p><p></p><p>"We have another agent to fill in for Rosen while he's humoring Dr. Nakami." The first agent said. He stepped back from Tim's door and motioned him to open it. The stranger in the vest stepped out of the other van and walked forward. Tim got out and followed the white-coveralled agents, looking back once to shrug his confusion. As the other operatives and Tim piled into the floral van, everyone else got out of their own van. They stared at the new guy as Tim was driven out of the parking lot.</p><p></p><p>"So who the #$*# are you?" Sam demanded. His anger had been boiling before, it had now went to steam. "And what the @4#&* did they take Tim?"</p><p></p><p>"I'm, er, Nathan Harper. As for Agent Rosen, I don't really know. All I know is Ted called me up and told me I'd be replacing an agent already in the field ... he said I was probably the man for the job."</p><p></p><p>"And why's that?" Georgie demanded.</p><p></p><p>"Well. He asked me to tell you about how the Institute approached me ..." Nathan said.</p><p></p><p>Sam rolled his eyes. "Yea yea, something weird happened to you. You were attacked by sentient Cheez Whiz in college, right? We've heard it all because it's HAPPENED to us all."</p><p></p><p>Nathan shrugged. "He said you'd understand a little better once you heard. He said this was the best he could do about getting you the information you NEED to know, even though you're not cleared for it."</p><p></p><p>Kyong stepped up. "Tell us what attracted the Institute to you, Nathan."</p><p></p><p>He nodded. "Well, you see, in my old life I was an, ah, investigative journalist." He smiled a little. "A little heavy on the investigative, really. I worked in Houston ... there had been rumors about a local politician ... taking bribes, working with organized crime. Y'know, the usual." </p><p></p><p>Sam motioned everyone back into the hotel room.</p><p></p><p>"Anyway ..." Nathan continued, inside. "I decided I was going to bring him down. Single-handedly, y'know. 'Blow this town wide open' and all of that macho bullsh*t. I figured out his schedule, started to figure out where he met people for some of his more illicit doings, got his patterns. I started to ghost some of his usual haunts, finding myself places to hide, angles to film. One, in particular, was perfect ... a parking garage. One of those towers. At night he'd meet people near the top. Too open to set up surveilance, y'know, but not on top of the thing where people could look down from the buildings around. Anyway, I parked my car there every night for a damn month. Let him get used to it. Finally I knew he was going to have a meet, so I parked my car in the usual place and hid inside. </p><p></p><p>Sure enough, he showed up. Ten minutes later, two guys came in on foot. I had a mic set up to catch sound and my camera set up. I started recording ... and then all hell broke loose. One of the guys pulled a gun, fired. 'Cept it wasn't a gun. It was like a dart pistol or something. The politician, he goes down like a pole-axed cow."</p><p></p><p>Kyong raised her eyebrows at this point, and motioned Nathan to continue.</p><p></p><p>"At first I thought it was a silenced pistol, y'know? That they'd killed the poor bastard. But I couldn't see any blood. Then one of them walked over and pulled a little thing out of his pocket ... it was like a breath-spray or something. He spritzed it a few times in the guy's face and, well, two more people showed up. One of them looked like a homeless guy, and the other was dressed like a janitor." He laughed. "I thought I'd gone crazy. Both of the new people had guns too. It was almost comical ... until they opened fire. Not a word. They walked around a car, spotted the two guys with the air-freshener, and just opened up. Each of them took at least two rounds before they even had a chance to turn."</p><p></p><p>Nathan shrugged.</p><p></p><p>"But they did anyway. They opened fire themselves. The janitor went down, blood sprayed everywhere. The air-freshener guys weren't using their first toy then, they had pulled pistols. Before he passed out, the janitor got in one more shot. Took the guy that killed him right in the face. I saw it. Blood and bone blew out the back of his head and he fell backward. The homeless guy nailed his three more times, took one in the shoulder for his trouble. The guys with the air-fresheners had probably sucked up half a clip apiece, six or seven shots each. I figured they had vests on, but I zoomed in and there was blood all over the fronts of their shirts. The homeless guy walked forward, like he needed to be sure of them before he bothered to check his buddy. He leans over the guy he shot, gun out ... and the guy lifts his arm. Swear to God. Six or seven rounds in him and he lifts his arm right up like the damned Terminator. Fast, too. The homeless guy was quick, pulled the trigger point blank in the guy's face."</p><p></p><p>Sam and Georgie's eyebrows were up by now as well.</p><p></p><p>"Then ... they disappeared. The two dead guys. They dissintegrated, like bad-guys in a video game. Turned to black dust and started to blow away on the breeze coming through the garage." Nathan made a little poofing hand gesture. "And then, just to finish making me crap my pants, the homeless guy walks over to our politician friend ... and puts two in his head. Simple as pie, cold as the damned grave."</p><p></p><p>Sam blinked a few times and looked around.</p><p></p><p>"Well THAT explains a couple things. Sort of." He said.</p><p></p><p>"Yea. We know they can be killed." Ollie said. It was the first thing he'd said all morning.</p><p></p><p>*************************</p><p></p><p>((Some game notes. Tim and Nathan are the same player. He asked if he could change out his character. He was hoping that he could pressure Ollie's player into changing PCs too, as Ollie has no applicable investigative skills and is entirely combat-oriented ... and so tries to create combat where there is none, because he's bored. Needless to say, it didn't work. There was a very good reason to pull Tim, though, so I wrote it into the story flawlessly and replaced some clues they'd missed with Nathan's backstory, which the player got to tell in-character at the table. Very nice.))</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="HeapThaumaturgist, post: 1689649, member: 12332"] [b]The Next Morning ...[/b] "And that's all Ted said..." Georgie paged back and forth through the email, making sure she hadn't missed anything. They had reported the day's hapenings and discoveries last night, asking for further information on the AFT and who may have attacked Tim and Kyong at the morgue. This morning Ted had replied to their report ... and it wasn't good. "Damnit!" Sam yelled. He paced back and forth in the "boys" room at their hotel. The whole group was gathered in that room, on the chairs, on the beds. Everyone looked angry and confused. "What the hell did we do WRONG? THEY sent US out here to look into this *%$#, and now they want to climb our @$% for, what, finding out too much?!" Sam was livid. "All Ted said was that we were to back off anything and anybody involved with the letters AFT." Georgie said, scrolling through the EMail again. "Who's the AFT, though?" Tim leaned back on one of the beds. Georgie shrugged. "Apparently knowing that would get us too involved ... Ted said some thing was going down back at headquarters we weren't going to like. Maybe we're getting shut out." "Okay, so who were the two guys with sunglasses that disentegrated Dr. Bauer?" Tim pressed. "Um. Ted said that we were to back off and stay away from those guys, too." Georgie reminded everyone. She tapped her screen for emphasis. "Stay away from the AFT, stay away from the Men In Black ..." Georgie continued. "... but we're still supposed to find out what Bauer was working on." Sam finished for her. He let out a string of cursing. "It seems like the AFT and those two Whoever-Agents are right at the damned CORE of this case. How in God's name are we supposed to investigate ANYTHING if we're supposed to keep as far away from the major players as we can, that's what I want to know." Tim shook his head. "We can still check out Nanotecknowledgies Inc., though. Our last real avenue. The guys in black ruined the body, we can't get near the house ... that's probably the most logical place, anyway. If something he was working on got him killed, it'll probably be in his lab. Or little shop of horrors. Or whatever people who get whacked by MiBs work in." *********************** Tim got in the passenger-side seat of the van and rapped the dashboard. "Let's roll." Just at that moment a large white van pulled up, directly across the nose of their own van. The side of the truck had a cartoon depiction of a bunch of roses and "Hoffmann Floral and Gift" in florid script underneath. "The hell ...?" Sam said, stepping on the breaks. The side panel door of the van slid open and two men in white coveralls stepped out, followed by two more. Another man, with sandy brown hair and a vest, peeked out from inside the van. He looked disconcerted, perhaps a little afraid. Sam rolled down the window. "Um. Can we help you?" One of the men tapped a knuckle on Tim's window. Tim, too, rolled his window down. "Yea?" "Agent Rosen?" The man at Tim's window asked. "Um." Tim glanced at the "Hoffmann Floral" on the van. He decided not to ask who was asking. "Yea?" "You're supposed to come with us." The agent replied. "Actually, Dr. Nakami ASKS you to come with us." The agent behind the first corrected. He coughed and shifted his weight. The first agent focused somewhere beyond and above Tim's head and sighed. "Ahhh. Yea ... Dr. Nakami humbly requests your presence back at headquarters." He said, resignedly. "Um. Why?" Tim asked. "You're not cleared for that information." The first agent replied. "Ah. Dr. Nakami says he'll explain all of it to you when you arrive." The second added. Sam looked the agents by his window over. His eyes narrowed. Both had rather noticable bulges under their coveralls, which were only zippered half-way up the torso. One of those bulges was very suspiciously large ... perhaps a small SMG. "I take it Dr. Nakami is asking very nicely." Sam said. "He is." The first agent replied. He looked past Tim at Sam. "I imagine this is what Ted meant when he said something we weren't going to like went down at the head office." Georgi said from the back seat. "We have another agent to fill in for Rosen while he's humoring Dr. Nakami." The first agent said. He stepped back from Tim's door and motioned him to open it. The stranger in the vest stepped out of the other van and walked forward. Tim got out and followed the white-coveralled agents, looking back once to shrug his confusion. As the other operatives and Tim piled into the floral van, everyone else got out of their own van. They stared at the new guy as Tim was driven out of the parking lot. "So who the #$*# are you?" Sam demanded. His anger had been boiling before, it had now went to steam. "And what the @4#&* did they take Tim?" "I'm, er, Nathan Harper. As for Agent Rosen, I don't really know. All I know is Ted called me up and told me I'd be replacing an agent already in the field ... he said I was probably the man for the job." "And why's that?" Georgie demanded. "Well. He asked me to tell you about how the Institute approached me ..." Nathan said. Sam rolled his eyes. "Yea yea, something weird happened to you. You were attacked by sentient Cheez Whiz in college, right? We've heard it all because it's HAPPENED to us all." Nathan shrugged. "He said you'd understand a little better once you heard. He said this was the best he could do about getting you the information you NEED to know, even though you're not cleared for it." Kyong stepped up. "Tell us what attracted the Institute to you, Nathan." He nodded. "Well, you see, in my old life I was an, ah, investigative journalist." He smiled a little. "A little heavy on the investigative, really. I worked in Houston ... there had been rumors about a local politician ... taking bribes, working with organized crime. Y'know, the usual." Sam motioned everyone back into the hotel room. "Anyway ..." Nathan continued, inside. "I decided I was going to bring him down. Single-handedly, y'know. 'Blow this town wide open' and all of that macho bullsh*t. I figured out his schedule, started to figure out where he met people for some of his more illicit doings, got his patterns. I started to ghost some of his usual haunts, finding myself places to hide, angles to film. One, in particular, was perfect ... a parking garage. One of those towers. At night he'd meet people near the top. Too open to set up surveilance, y'know, but not on top of the thing where people could look down from the buildings around. Anyway, I parked my car there every night for a damn month. Let him get used to it. Finally I knew he was going to have a meet, so I parked my car in the usual place and hid inside. Sure enough, he showed up. Ten minutes later, two guys came in on foot. I had a mic set up to catch sound and my camera set up. I started recording ... and then all hell broke loose. One of the guys pulled a gun, fired. 'Cept it wasn't a gun. It was like a dart pistol or something. The politician, he goes down like a pole-axed cow." Kyong raised her eyebrows at this point, and motioned Nathan to continue. "At first I thought it was a silenced pistol, y'know? That they'd killed the poor bastard. But I couldn't see any blood. Then one of them walked over and pulled a little thing out of his pocket ... it was like a breath-spray or something. He spritzed it a few times in the guy's face and, well, two more people showed up. One of them looked like a homeless guy, and the other was dressed like a janitor." He laughed. "I thought I'd gone crazy. Both of the new people had guns too. It was almost comical ... until they opened fire. Not a word. They walked around a car, spotted the two guys with the air-freshener, and just opened up. Each of them took at least two rounds before they even had a chance to turn." Nathan shrugged. "But they did anyway. They opened fire themselves. The janitor went down, blood sprayed everywhere. The air-freshener guys weren't using their first toy then, they had pulled pistols. Before he passed out, the janitor got in one more shot. Took the guy that killed him right in the face. I saw it. Blood and bone blew out the back of his head and he fell backward. The homeless guy nailed his three more times, took one in the shoulder for his trouble. The guys with the air-fresheners had probably sucked up half a clip apiece, six or seven shots each. I figured they had vests on, but I zoomed in and there was blood all over the fronts of their shirts. The homeless guy walked forward, like he needed to be sure of them before he bothered to check his buddy. He leans over the guy he shot, gun out ... and the guy lifts his arm. Swear to God. Six or seven rounds in him and he lifts his arm right up like the damned Terminator. Fast, too. The homeless guy was quick, pulled the trigger point blank in the guy's face." Sam and Georgie's eyebrows were up by now as well. "Then ... they disappeared. The two dead guys. They dissintegrated, like bad-guys in a video game. Turned to black dust and started to blow away on the breeze coming through the garage." Nathan made a little poofing hand gesture. "And then, just to finish making me crap my pants, the homeless guy walks over to our politician friend ... and puts two in his head. Simple as pie, cold as the damned grave." Sam blinked a few times and looked around. "Well THAT explains a couple things. Sort of." He said. "Yea. We know they can be killed." Ollie said. It was the first thing he'd said all morning. ************************* ((Some game notes. Tim and Nathan are the same player. He asked if he could change out his character. He was hoping that he could pressure Ollie's player into changing PCs too, as Ollie has no applicable investigative skills and is entirely combat-oriented ... and so tries to create combat where there is none, because he's bored. Needless to say, it didn't work. There was a very good reason to pull Tim, though, so I wrote it into the story flawlessly and replaced some clues they'd missed with Nathan's backstory, which the player got to tell in-character at the table. Very nice.)) [/QUOTE]
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