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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Golden Bee" data-source="post: 9481871" data-attributes="member: 7041055">Vienna waits for no one!”I will avenge my brother’s death!” screamed the younger Unger. His forehead turned crimson when the tampon hit him in the face. Odd jobs are part of life when you run an international security service. So when a descendant of Napoleon sends you to help her mentor, Sigmund Freud, you jump on the Orient Express and do it.Of course, the Express goes from Paris to Vienna via Munich. And if you’re a hated foe of the Reich, it’s best to handle all your problems nonviolently. Even if confronted by the brother of the megalomaniac your company killed last week. Then, you should work as a group.Ivanova hit the officer with a feminine product, Thaza stole his pistol, and Aldous pointed out a flaw in the man’s psychology (a combination of corpulence and cowardice). JP invited him to take a swing… making sure to guide the man’s fist into an electric table lamp. The German spent the rest of the journey recovering in his room.***Austria 1935 was an intriguing, fascist place. The ruling Vaterländische Front was anti everything: communism, Nazism, capitalism… they liked Austria, Catholicism and that was about it.Of course, the quartet arrived on the anniversary of a failed coup. The streets were busy as they went to the Central Café, hoping to meet their elderly contact, the father of psychology.Unfortunately, there was a huge campaign event nearby, and Captain Ivanova couldn’t help herself from offering a few words, shouting down a speaker demanding that the state work harder against Nazi infiltration. For example, the SS officer holed up at the local hospital. Her yelling was successful, earning her praise from the crowd, which was awkward because she wanted to discreetly return to the team’s mission.Also painful was a series of migraine headaches people had been experiencing in the city. Allegedly they were gas leaks, but JP’s investigations turned up nothing of the sort. And the gas workers’ union, many of which were communists, confirmed that the leaks were just a government excuse. So who exactly was putting all the weird glass devices with antennas on the telephone poles? But that would have to wait.The mission to recruit Sigmund went well, aided by the charisma of Tango the parrot. There was a complication as the group exited the café… A local gang of toughs was following them, and a sniper tried to take off Freud’s head.Thaza sprang into action, scampering up the side of a building towards the source of the shot. Bingen, unobtrusive butler, shooed a flock of pigeons. The flapping birds created more cover for civilians. The captain, master provocateur, grabbed an umbrella from the Café and drew the sniper’s fire. The umbrella was a wise move: whoever was firing put a metal slug through it, inches from the Russian’s torso.The ‘local talent’ clobbered Josiah P. Diamond as he tried to escort the 79-year-old Austrian neurologist. He weathered the blows, getting a few bruises but no lasting damage. [They needed to re-roll an attack, though, and when you do that in fate, you have to invoke an aspect… And theirs was “local communist thugs.”] The captain doubled back, drawing on her name recognition as an inspirational Soviet explorer.Thaza cut a nationalist banner and swung into the sniper’s window… only to find the room abandoned. She dashed down the hall, and heard broken glass from her right, diving down… But when she got to street level, there was a brick. The shooter had used it as a distraction and snuck through the rally. The police and military showed up, and the heroes made themselves scarce.***Resistance HQ was in an iron nail factory. They were the ones who had hired the ZSS. And they did need Dr. Freud for a very special patient… One kept under strict military lockdown at the Wien-Aspern airfield.The resistance had a rat, which was revealed when the police showed up at their base. The resistance leader wanted to shoot the man, but Thaza was more practical. “There’s a lot of nails here, and I bet we can find some explosives…”Then, chaos. The police threw teargas into the windows. Bingen returned the canisters with a Jai Alai paddle. “What can I say, I heard they played it here.”A skylight broke, and someone lassoed Freud from above. The cat-burglar-raised-by-apes cut him free, and replaced him on the line with the nail-bomb-wearing traitor. The results were gory and effective.The group fled to safety, joining the local communist faction on a river barge, led by loyalist Alexander Bauer. Introductions were made, and plans were hatched. It turned out the captain knew absolutely anyone who was anyone at the airport-turned military base. There was a brief infiltration, and the party, plus their pinko contact, Alexander Bauer, found themselves in the bowels of the base. But the creature who was causing the psychic phenomenon wasn’t a child or test subject… It was far stranger.Backwards, bilateral hands. two faces, the ability to scuttle across ceilings. Despite advice, Dr. Freud made contact with the thing… And dove into its alien mind. The government was torturing it, using it as a weapon and building amplifiers all over the country. But it was a peaceful creature. It just needed extraction to its saucer, which was being held in Hangar Three.Of course, there were some obstacles, like the Austrian security forces. And a smoking robot called Smokebot (defeated by unplugging it). Most obnoxious was the sniper, who luckily chose JP as her target. She put a 7.62 mm bullet right through his chest cavity… to little effect. Even though he had a much happier disposition since his time with the mad scientists of Marshall College, he was still a hard man to kill.Semya responded to the sniper with a very rude gesture, infuriating the woman. Bingen, butler to the stars, used himself as a psychic conduit to focus the alien creature’s power, sending the opposition flying.Things were aces, until fellow traveler Bauer wanted to hijack the spaceship to the soviet gulag Science City Eight. Thaza O’Rourke knew where her bread was buttered. She distracted the commie, allowing the creature to return to its people, and her to get paid.Unfortunately, everyone returned to their home, which left JP no time to share his name for the case, “Tell me about your mothership.”</blockquote>

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