Dramatis Personae

• The Commander (Doug) – telekinetic super-soldier with a really angry dog (Yukio). The dog is a powerful ally (250-300 points) and very intelligent and very, very aggressive.
• Zephyr (Merlin) – Real name Murui; Shaolin Kung Fu expert and super-speedster.
• Eamon Finnegan (Kyle) – smooth talking gravity-master; a lawyer so good he can actually prove a negative.
• Ezekiel (Christian) – Techno Master, Genius, Esper, Super Archer

Dungeon Crawl Activate!

Naturally, Eamon walks up to the doors in the corridor, “to look for traps,” because that’s what you do in a dungeon and walks up close to the door to sense . . . and triggers a spear-throwing trap, which critically hits, bypasses DR, and delivers a bunch of impaling damage. His feet are crippled.

Welcome to the dungeon, we’ve got fun and games. You might try and check for traps, but you’re going to end up lame. It’s the dungeon, welcome to the dungeon . . . . we’re going to watch you bleed!

He hovers himself out of the trap zone. Zephyr goes for healing powers (it’s an opposed roll, b/c evil). It doesn’t work. I do diagnosis and find out he’s been poisoned no surprise.

We get three crit fails in a row, between us and the GM. Zephyr calls for lemon, because he’s swallowed bleach. We shoo him away. Zeke comes out “you’re all wrong about this!” and then rolls a crit success. Merlin jokes that we’re going to spend doom on him to make it a crit fail, due to arrogance.

The poison is from a flower, and is actually an extinct kyberic absorber, mixed with a hemotoxin. Zeke squanders a gizmo to create an antitoxin and vacuum pump capable of dealing with it.

Clearly what we need here is a 10′ pole. And the surface has a bunch of tents. 10′ tent poles. Convenient.

Eamon is going to hover through the dungeon. We send Zephyr to look for traps. He succeeds by 12. We figure out how to open the door, too. It responds to kyberian energy, so the Commander uses his TK push on it. It opens up . . . and reveals another door. I also push on the doors immediately to our left, and they open to reveal a room with two pillars, which begin sparking faintly as we open the door. I take a step closer, and the sparking gets even worse. I try a Disappear, step closer, and the air between the air starts to shimmer; as I step away it seems almost like I see a door.

We assume it’s a portal; I project a force shield of almost DR 50 onto Zephyr, and lightning does indeed lash out to Zephyr, but the field seems to absorb it, perhaps. A door/portal does in fact open in the wall behind the pillars.

It’s definitely going elsewhere – way elsewhere. It looks like Earth, but it’s different. A shifty, smoky humanoid shape that looks like it’s in pain steps out of the portal. Oh, crap. I decide to try wrapping him in a force field, to see if cutting him off from kyberic flows helps. Bits and pieces of flesh start to form around the shape. I figure this is maybe a good thing, or maybe I’m creating a vaettr. Flip a coin.

A few seconds later we have a naked man standing in front of us. He looks a bit like a neandertal. Hrm. We ask barefoot guy (“zero”), and he’s pretty sure he’s a remnant of a destroyed universe, stuck between universes. Things are going horribly awry here. Body parts are forming and unforming on him. It starts howling in great pain. I put it back through the door – or try to. I was not able to push it back. Fright check time, as a creature gets even bigger. It resembles the creature that was summoned that we destroyed a few adventures ago. Oh, happy day.

The Commander rushes in and strikes with his 6d6+15(2) katana. The sword cuts into it twice, and it starts decoalescing into nothingness.

Now, as I get closer, I see Cairo . . . but different. A steampunk aesthetic. A guy with funky looking glasses is looking at me through the portal; he’s mumbling at me in some language I don’t understand. Removing myself from the room doesn’t shut the portal down. A crowd starts forming; we decide to close the door. Poke my head back in . . . and the guy is standing there. He’s pushing buttons on some sort of pad.

Zeke can sense this guy is powered. He does a translator thing; he starts talking to us in English. We discuss. He’s from an alternate dimension. He says he’s encountered this lost-civilization portal tech before; it’s basically an Atlantean (in our world) tech. Supposedly in our world, the Atlanteans are the ancestors of the scions.

He thinks he can stabilize the pillar with the right stuff, which I deduce is orichalcum. I hand him the blade of my wakisashi, which is, of course, orichalcum. It stabilizes the portal . . . and the frame is a teleporter with a pre-programmed destination 100yds to our west.

Hrm. Zephyr naturally volunteers. The thing teleports him to a large room, with a sarcophagus and canopic jars.  He searches for traps, finds none, but does find the slide release for the sarcophagus. Eamon goes over to investigate and Zephyr decides to get the hell out. Eamon scans and detects a dessicated body of a man; there are items in there, plus the corpse is radiating pure kyberic energy as well.

It’s the same sort of radiation as barefoot guy (“zero”), quite literally glowing with power. I touch my crystal skull, and every living being in the area gets the same vision. A guy in robes wandering the desert trying to stop the growth of the desert. His name is Rashidi; lots of metahumans running around in ancient Egypt. The various metas were the gods and goddesses of Egypt; this one was Osiris!

I surmise that the skull might actually be the skull of a very powerful metahuman – like this guy. Orichalcum is solidified metaphysical power.

We go nuts brainstorming about stuff for a while.

We chat with our visitor from another realm, and ask him to pull a “browser history” on the pillars. He explains that yes, we’d opened a portal to The Void, the space between dimensions. When a world gets completely destroyed, whatever’s left get’s dumped into this place. There was an author back in the 20s, HP Lovecraft, who wrote stories about creatures that come out of The Void. He says he can see soft spots – lots of grass, diamond shapes (Yankee Stadium). We see underwater (the TAP?). We see bodies and a crypt and Hebrew (Jerusalem). Each of those are soft-spots into The Void.

He tweaks a crystal a few times, and we see things in The Void. What do they look like? They don’t seem to have any particular form.

We continue to brainstorm and decide that the Void is bleeding away their kyberic biofields. The void is basically the River Styx, and the strong feed on the weak.

Blue Skies? We deduce they were trying  to save the world? The PCs aren’t all buyin’ it. What about the vampires? Maybe a contagious version of the void creatures? The summoning Blue Skies were doing? To study the void creatures. Crystal Skulls might exist in all dimensions at once?

We decide we have a Nazi question, a Blue Skies CEO question, and a “The Devil” question. The Devil was a Nazi, actually. Blue Skies were a secular threat, perhaps. The Nazis were perhaps trying to subvert the Void creatures to win WW2. Lots of anti-meta hate going on, Pres Blackwell arming against the antibodies against the Void creatures . . . Blackwell is working for the Nazis? Hydra syndrome?

*******

We kinda end there.

We bandy about actionable items

• Interrogate/interview Blue Skies CEO for any info on a rival factions (Nazis, etc)
• Track down skulls
• Figure out Zero and what’s his history; why does he hate the US Govt so much
• Find out what’s going on with Arc Light’s wife, her crystal skull, and her anti-meta campaign
• Discredit Pres Blackwell since his plans seem to defeat the metahuman “antibodies” to the Void Creatures
• Research history of Atlantis and ancient Egypt (Osiris) to see what we can pull together from those clues
• Grill Rosencrantz and Legend and Basilisk about what the hell happened with the Nazis