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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Golden Bee" data-source="post: 9542858" data-attributes="member: 7041055">Sad to see no new posts in a week. Let me fix that.ROSE-COLORED CITY… OF DEATH!“This is a very nice train,” said the Jade Jaguar, “but sometimes criminal stooges like to exit at speed. Wouldn’t happen to you, right?” A few rows away, a sheep bleated. Nobody looked up.Devika Velyapur is an amazing character to play. She started completely humble, as the secretly skilled sidekick of an incompetent master thief.  But because of being in the campaign the longest, she's had achievements that knocked humility right out of her.This is most pronounced when she meets other children. Her standard of achievement is "world-class in at least one skill set, and probably several”. So when 11-year-old Anizah burst into the Cairo office and said her mother Najah was kidnapped, then immediately started pigging out on the ice cream, Devi had contempt.  That all changed when the girl showed a locket of her absentee father… Rafe Lancaster!Unfortunately, Rafe couldn't be reached due to the time difference, and the mother who could confirm paternity had been kidnapped. So Devi gathered the people she was having lunch with, and set out to solve the case and clear her mentor’s name before another girl would be running around the Lancaster estate.We had a record this time: a fourth new player had chosen to play Sister Ynez, electrical genius nun. This was the shyest portrayal ever, but Empathy and Crafts are very useful in solving mysteries and dealing with action set pieces. Rounding out the squad were a returning Trudy Truman, aussie journalist, Tácito Uriel Velasco, and butler Aldous Bingen.When the party really gets going, they're hard to stop. The initial investigation led to Transjordan, and the archaeological site at Petra. India's richest girl didn't like being condescended to by the country’s British administration, so the ZSS visit to the site was…unauthorized.Definitely not how Devi would've acted when Lord Simon was around!(She later pranked Trudy by loudly begging her not to horse whip Anizah for sneaking onto their jet, earning disapproving looks from everyone in the souk. Having another kid around is a gas.)The quintet had excellent luck in the latter half of the case. A scuffle with Bedouin tribesmen proved that hit-and-run tactics are much more effective when your side has a car. And both their infiltration of the ritual site and defeat of the erstwhile god were accomplished in four actions each. To wit:Sister Ynez analyzed. Trudy blathered to distract the djinn-haunted host.Tácito grabbed the man's mask.Devi wrapped her own protective amulet around the dazed human archaeologist. And she strode out, proving not even evil spirits could keep pace with a teenage goddess.(As for the paternity angle, it turns out the girl was the daughter of Rafe's wheelchair-bound brother Andy. As an orphan, Devi felt it was her place to lecture the mom about returning to America and reuniting their family. Humble at the start, but arrogant till the end.)</blockquote>

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