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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 8045" data-attributes="member: 63">Chapter Three:  Clean-Up JobThe Chief assigns the group to travel to Atlanta to do a clean-up job.Businessman Harry Felton died recently, at the ripe age of 43.  He apparently was a collector of many things—exotic drinks, Greek statues, and information.  His still growing internet company now dangles from the hands of his employees, but his business means next to nothing to the BMM.  They are more concerned with the artifacts and information he kept.  While he was not magi, and his business was not magi, he loved learning about magi, and had apparently run into trouble with the Bureau several times before.  His collection grew to a nice size, perhaps more than anyone expected.  Now the Knights must clean up the estate before anyone can tell about his hobbies.The group plans to enter between guard shifts.  Once they make entry to the warehouse where he kept his collection, they’ll have probably 30 minutes to clean out the most obviously magical items, copy then delete his files on magi, and sneak out.Their companion on this mission is Keira McCormick, quarter-Elvish sorceress (3/4 African American).  She’s the leader on the mission, and so she carries the ‘key.’ Bureau keys are enchanted crystals from the Faerie World of Gaia, set into metal rods crafted on Terra.  These enchanted keys open doorways between the worlds.  There are only certain places in the world where doorways can be opened, including one by Oglethorpe House at the Savannah College of Art & Design, one in a downtown Atlanta alley, etc.  Apparently there are dozens in New Orleans, and a portal can be found nearby nearly every major religious landmark around the world, from Stonehenge and the Giza pyramids to Notre Dame and the Vatican.  Most keys simply go between the Faerie World and Earth, but some powerful keys can jump between doorways on Earth without having to make a stop-off in the Faerie World.  Keira has one of the more common keys.* * *Quick recap so you can learn the characters.  Jessie, our DM, decided that the Bureau would train us to 2nd level, just so we’d have some good abilities.   Madeline West:  Human sorcerer 2 (uses the Wild Spellcaster Template rules for potential spell failure, since her ghost, Catherine, is nervous about casting magic since she was hung for being a witch).  Madeline is a student of photography at SCAD.  Caucasian, brown hair and eyes, slender.Jenny Windgrave:  Human paladin 2.  Native American, descended from the Powhatan Indians.  Her ghost, Pataman, was born two years after the famous Pocahontas left for England.  Pataman was killed by white Christian settlers, and now his ghost disapproves of Jenny being a devout Christian.  Jenny is at SCAD to earn a theater arts degree.Chuck Tagin-Eve (we don’t know what his real name is):  Human rogue 2.  Due to a fubar on Eric’s listing of feats back in June last year, Tagin took skill focus twice and got a +20 to his hacking skill.  Even despite this mistake, Tagin’s has a +14 bonus to his Computer Use skill checks, (5 skill ranks, +1 Intelligence bonus, +3 from Skill Emphasis, +2 synergy bonus from Knowledge (computers), +2 synergy bonus from Disable Device, plus software that grants a +1 masterwork bonus).  He attends SCAD for free, having hacked himself into the school with a full scholarship and a free meal plan.  A skinny white guy who dresses unimposingly, blending into pretty much any crowd he’s in.Iscalio Maxwell:  Human Druid 2.  He’s an albino, and has a bitter streak against most traditional establishments.  His ghost is Lancaster Cornwall, who died a lunatic, thinking he was a fox.  Iscalio refuses to believe he’s bonded with a lunatic, and instead considers the ‘fox’ his totem animal.Cai Maxwell:  Human fighter 2.  Iscalio’s brother.  He owns a martial arts studio and forces his brother to exercise rigorously.  Cai is fairly quiet, and only takes action when he sees a need to.  Both Cai and Iscalio are of Italian descent.Keira McCormick:  Quarter-Elvish sorceress 6.  She carries a gun with enchanted bullets, “And no, you can’t borrow it, Iscalio.”* * *Keira leads the group out of the BMM headquarters in the Faerie World, using the key to open a door to Atlanta.The party walks through the streets, catching a taxi to the outskirts of town where the warehouse is.  They wait for the guards to call it a night, then casually walk up to the thirty-foot tall warehouse’s door.  The door has a state of the art electronic lock.  Beside the door is a numeric keypad with a small computer screen above it, and buttons for “open” and “close.” Jenny shrugs and pushes the open button to see if that will work.  The screen comes to life, displaying a message in three languages.  It looks like Greek, heiroglyphs, and some other script that looks like Arabic.  No one can translate it, but Keira claims she can cast a translation spell to see what it says.  While she prepares to cast the spell, Tagin simply walks up, somehow gets the computer screen to show the programming code, and he reprograms the door so it’ll open.  Everyone stands mouth agape as the door slides open.  They’d pretty much forgotten Tagin was there.  As they head inside, Keira says that the three pieces of text were the same riddle in three different languages.  But they didn’t have to bother answering the riddle, so all’s well.Inside the warehouse are dozens of crates; it looks like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, if on a smaller scale.  A catwalk circles the room about fifteen feet up, and a skylight illuminates the room dimly.  Keira dispatches Tagin to begin hacking a computer station in the corner, which holds a record of what’s in the warehouse.  As Tagin heads over there, Keira, Madeline, Iscalio, and Jenny climb onto the catwalk to survey the room in general.  Cai stays on the ground level to look for loose objects between the crates.Madeline casts a detect magic spell and cringes.  Almost all the crates have magic in them, way more than they planned to carry out.  They decide to take what they can, and then come back later if possible.  As long as Tagin takes care of the files, no one will notice that anything’s missing.Madeline directs Cai to open a particular crate, walking along the catwalk to stand above it.  Keira follows, leaving a gap of about 20 feet between Madeline/Keira and Jenny/Iscalio.  Right as Cai pries off the top of the first crate, a dark shape falls from the ceiling onto the catwalk, silently.  It’s the size of a large lion, with wings on its back.  Iscalio calls for everyone to look out, getting his scythe ready.  From the tip of the druid’s metal staff, a flash of green light emerges, solidifying into a scythe blade.  Likewise, Jenny activates her weapon, and a wooden shaft materializes from a wide spear-head she was carrying.The sphinx on the catwalk turns and looks at them, then looks back to Madeline.  It has a woman’s face, with wide eyes and a confused expression on it’s face.  Staring at Madeline and Keira it riddles:  “Voiceless it cries,Wingless it flutters,Toothless bites,Mouthless mutters.” Since none of the Knights have ever read The Hobbit, they are out of luck.  Madeline shrugs and guesses, “An old guy with no teeth?”The sphinx shakes her head, and growls.  “You cannot destroy my master’s work.”Keira and Madeline back off, and just as the Sphinx is about to pounce at them, Jenny stabs it in the flank with her spear.  The sphinx turns and bats at her with a claw.  Jenny falls back into the railing of the catwalk, but Iscalio slashes at the lion paw with his scythe.  The sphinx crouches to spring on him, when a gunshot fires out.  Keira’s magic bullet strikes the sphinx and explodes in a small fireball, knocking the creature forward.  Confused at the attacks from both sides, it flaps into the air to escape, then drops onto Keira, flattening her.Tagin, tapping idly at the keyboard glances over his shoulder and shakes his head, grimacing at the disturbance.  He draws his gun and fires a shot blindly over his shoulder.  The bullet hits the sphinx in the side, causing the creature to give out a howl of pain.Jenny tries to reason with the creature, saying that it’s master is dead, and that they’ll bring her to someplace safe.  The sphinx refuses to accept that her master is dead—she’s gone a bit nuts, just waiting in this quiet, lonely warehouse—and so, enraged, she charges at Jenny.  Jenny leaps sideways over the railing, trying to snag a grip on the ladder on her way down, but instead she misses and crashes into one of the crates.Cai, armed with a shotgun and a katana, is too far away to use his sword, and afraid that the scatter of the shotgun will hit his brother if he tries to shoot.  Instead, Cai begins tearing through one of the crates to try to find something to use against the sphinx.  Madeline yells for Iscalio to run, and she shoots a crackling bolt of magic at the sphinx.  Ignoring the minor wound, the sphinx leaps off the catwalk to follow Iscalio as he clambers down the ladder.  In mid-air, the sphinx drops past Iscalio and slashes across his back, knocking him off the ladder to land in a crate beside Jenny.As the sphinx lands, Cai holds forth an amulet, commanding the sphinx to stop and obey him.  When the sphinx ignores him, he shrugs and drops the amulet, then lays out a blast from his double-barrel sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun.  Unfortunately, the blast mostly misses the sphinx, and instead shatters a crate.  The sphinx, about to disembowel Jenny, turns and growls at Cai, shouting that no one can destroy the master’s treasure.  It pounces upon Cai, knocking him to the floor.Keira shoots another fireball bullet, but misses, the explosion destroying a large pile of crates.  Meanwhile, Iscalio is slashing at the sphinx, trying to avoid it’s backward kicking, and Jenny is trying to shout for the sphinx to stop, believing it’s simply confused, not evil.  Sighing, Tagin finishes copying the files, and with a few keystrokes he formats the hard drive, then gets out of his chair to walk up to the sphinx.Cai, at the edge of unconsciousness, tries to blast the sphinx with his shotgun, but she knocks his weapon away and the blast goes wide.  As scythe slashes wear at the creature, and a few small darts from Madeline’s hand crossbow pepper the sphinx, Keira tries to reload with normal ammo so she won’t incinerate Cai with a successful shot.Tagin walks up and fires two rounds into the sphinx’s shoulder and forehead.  The creature slumps to the ground.  Tagin tells Cai to get up, and then the hacker pulls out a switchblade knife to slit the creature’s throat and end it’s suffering.  Jenny tries to stop him, saying she can heal the creature enough for it to survive for a little while, but Keira waves her off, saying they’d have no way to get the sphinx discreetly back to the Faerie World.  Tagin kills the sphinx with a quick and quiet apology to Jenny.Everyone gets a little angry with Jenny that she was going to save the life of a creature that had attacked them.  When trying to explain herself fails, she instead simply heals Cai’s wounds as best she can.  Keira tells them to get whatever magic they can carry, quickly.  If someone finds the sphinx’s body and all this mess in here, they’ll want to know what’s up and they’ll check out the crates.  Keira decides to torch all the crates, including the sphinx’s body.They get all they can carry, a few items apiece (to bring back to the Bureau, not to loot), but when Cai tries to open the door again, it won’t budge.  Tagin shrugs, sheepishly explaining that he had only programmed it to open from the outside, forgetting that they’d need to get out again once they closed the door.  And he can’t rehack the system, since the keyboard is on the outside.  Keira orders Tagin to go out through the skylight and open the door from the outside, but just then one of the smoldering crates catches fire.  The smoke sets off the sprinklers, drenching the room.  They guess correctly that the fire department will arrive soon, so they all head out through the skylight.  They manually (using a katana) cut the water line so things will burn better, and on their way out Keira fires off three more fireball bullets to set the place ablaze.As the fire trucks appear, the Knights slip away into the streets of Atlanta, to return to the Bureau.</blockquote>

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