Manhattan Knights Act 5
Welcome to the continuing story of Three Storm Knights in the game of Torg Eternity, the backgrounds of the heroes can be found HERE, and the very first post in the Series can be found HERE. More information about the game can be found HERE.
ACT 5: The Aftermath
The last Act ended with the Manhattan Knights returning to the Alien Dome, having just rescued nearly a 100 enslaved people. They had also accomplished half of their main objective, which was to discover what had happened to the previous 2 groups to enter Manhattan. They have recovered 2 of the 4 survivors and know the whereabouts of the missing men, and they have the full story of what happened to the lost members of the teams.
Scene 1: Settling In
The group takes a full day to relax in the Domes after all the violence of the last few days [last three posts]. Many of the refugees are starting to like the “feel” and nature of the Domes, and the sense of security. The bulk of them wish to settle into the vacant houses.
Half the servitors set to making the environment more human friendly and set to getting the agri-domes cleared out to restart the farms. The other servitors get the internal and external security measures re-activated. Progress on the Dome continues, it is growing stronger very quickly and the servitors will have clones of their original bodies finished soon.
With the day off, Carlisle starts to rebuild his lost hunter’s coat [massive armored trenchcoat that is both armor and status symbol among monster hunters]. Kimiko joins the servitors in setting up the security measures and integrating the humans.
Sasha is intrigued by the cloning process and takes one servitor aside and asks if he can analyze her DNA vs one of the cavemen and see if there is something that makes Storm Knights. She has the inkling of a plan to try and genetically create storm knights.
Scene 2: The Lion
After relaxing for a full day, the trio get back together and take a census on how many people want to leave the Domes and go to the Brooklyn HQ. They also need to get ‘Texas’ and ‘Longshot’ back to base. But first!
The Lion.
Texas has told them [see last POST] that Doc Sinclair mentioned hiding a powerful artifact (the team’s second objective) and some paperwork somewhere in or around a large cat. As it happens, merely a handful of miles away from the Dome a statue of a lion rests on a massive plinth. The team and Texas decide to take a few hours to go check on the statue, with the thought that this will give Longshot time to gather people who don’t want to stay in the dome.
Heading out:
Leaving the Dome, the party passes through a small thick copse of trees and then emerge on the vast grassy plain that has replaced Central Park. The lion rests on a massive stone base, nearly five feet high, the four sides of the plinth have massive brass plates bolted into the concrete. The plates list veterans lost in various wars who were born in the City. A trio of original central park trees cast a small amount of shade around the lion but otherwise it stands out as a massive landmark among the tall grasses.
Carlisle stops at the plate at front of the plinth. The bolt at the bottom right hand side of the plate has cracked and broken the concrete. Carlisle crouches down and touching the bolt he finds that it turns in his hand, widening the crack.
C: “I think there is something here.” He starts turning the screw faster working the gap open.
Mistakes were made.
The other three people spread out, keeping eyes out on the horizons for anything. Sasha pauses as she notices something in the corner of her eye. Turning back toward the Dome and the line of trees, she sees a figure break from cover and start running toward them at a very fast pace. Within 10 seconds the figure has covered over 100 meters and as he reaches back, she notices he is about to hurl at javelin toward them.
Trusting that the extreme range will more than protect them, Sasha activates her psionic talents, amplifying her awareness to a superhuman level, she registers a 5th heartbeat among the four of them. She screams about the javelin and everyone reacts at the same time.
Time in the jungle has turned all of them into rather paranoid thinkers. Kimiko whips out a bio-blaster [a gun from the Dome that has replaced her lost SMG]. The weapon originally filled her with revulsion, but now she doesn’t even notice the needles piercing her palm and feeding off her blood. She sends a wild salvo of shots toward the running figure, to no avail.
Carlisle doesn’t bother to even get out of his crouched position, he wrangles his home-made carbine around and shoots it one-handed. Also wildly missing the figure.
Texas, the man who is in the direct line of the Javelin merely drops to the ground and rolls into the grass.
Ballistic Geometry
Everyone is scrambling and shouting and over reacting, but only Sasha and Carlisle actually notice that Javelin was thrown five feet OVER Texas’ head. The javelin stops with a meaty “thwack” in mid-air next to the Lion and the air ripples and an invisible target becomes visible.
The Edeinos standing atop the plinth is over seven feet tall, he is obsidian black save for a patch of white scales on the right side of his face. Reaching for Carlisle and hissing at the javelin that has knocked a hole in the saw edged scales that cover his lean body, this is Ebon Claw, one of the Hand of Tusk.
Turned from his attack by the javelin strike the assassin misses Carlisle by a hair as he lands beside the old man and his claws cut through the brass plate on the plinth.
Sasha is the first to get her wits about her and she grabs the Edeinos with her telekinesis and she tries to throw him straight up into the air. Ebonclaw manages to grab a hold of the lion as he flies up into the air, as such he is not “launched” into the air, so Sasha doubles down on her grip and holds him off the ground.
Anti-climactic but Funny
Ebonclaw curses and screams, the words are in his own language but a few are in English… he curses Greymane, “F#@* humans”, hummies with powers, Greymane was laughing… is all they can figure out.
Carlisle gets to his feet and takes a shot at the assassin, but even floating in the air the edeinos scales prove to be thick armor. The bullet merely displaces a handful of scales. Kimiko tries her bioblaster and it has even less of an effect.
Texas pulls out a Webley revolver and takes a moment to aim and places a bullet square in Ebonclaw’s eye, only then he doesn’t. “Dammit! I think that there lizard is a storm knight hisself, he just changed the reality of my shot!”
Sasha: So what do we do? I can’t hold him forever.
The running figure has slowed but is still walking toward them, he is another edeinos with a long cloak and two more javelins in a quiver over his shoulder.
Finish HIM!
Ebonclaw turns toward Sasha and screams something in his own language at her, the tone and body language is more than enough to let her know that he is threatening her, but the lack of understanding makes her merely shrug.
She taunts him back and squeezes with her telekinesis and that seems to break his will. He is properly cowed.
Carlisle opens the bolt on his gun and jams in an armor piercing round. He raises the gun in a smooth motion and pulls the trigger more from feel than from actually sighting the weapon. He blows a hole the size of a softball through the edeinos and the body goes limp, bleeding out into the air. Sasha drops the body to the ground.
The approaching edeinos stops in his tracks and in broken English, “Thank you all for not shooting me, was warning, very good.”
Scene 3: Ghost.
All save Kimiko turn to the newcomer and move closer to him, weapons lowered but still in hand. Kimiko steps forward, draws her electric katana and takes Ebonclaw’s head in a single swipe.
Ghost: Am Ghost, am friend sent from Whitetail. Watching you long time, you are mostly good of heart, do much brave things and many fights. Whitetail offers you invitation to visit tribe.
Ghost’s skin is mostly pale but like a chameleon he can shift the color of his skin, thus disappearing into the trees and land around him.
Carlisle: You’re the guy who waved to us before, warned us when Blunt’s men would have come upon us.
Ghost nods, he pulls a fetish from a pouch at his side, knotted cords and beads hanging from a massive saber-tooth fang. He hands the fetish to Carlisle and points at it, “Friend sign of Whitetail.”
Kimiko: We could visit this Whitetail tribe when we get back from headquarters.
Carlisle: But first we shouldn’t forget why we’re here in the first place.
The Plinth
Carlisle crouches back down and works the loose screw and broken concrete until he creates an opening big enough to reach into. Within the hollow plinth he finds a bundle of papers wrapped around a long hard object, and tied off with a handkerchief.
Carlisle unwraps the bundle, the papers are completely covered in very neat writing and in the middle of the package is a foot long red and blue veined crystal. It glows lightly and the raw possibility energy within it is discernable to any storm knight.
Sasha asks for the crystal so that she can read it with her psychometry. She handles it for a moment and then reads the last emotions to imprint on the object. She can sense that there is a long and deeper history to the crystal rod, but she pushes these feelings aside, they are swamped in horror and fear.
The reading:
She pushes past all of the fear and finds Sinclair, finds his more normal… more human fear and reads the last moments before the stone was placed in darkness.
Sinclair was worried, afraid, and alone. He was thinking that hiding the stone was a final FU at someone… unknown who. Before he placed the stone into his notes, he touched the lion statue and charged it with enough energy that it would remain a hardpoint resistant to the living the Living Land for at least a few more months. The power in the stone is immense and it can be used for mundane things like charging a battery, running electricity in house or car, and various similar purposes. Other theories are in the notes. The only reason Sinclair was alive at the lion statue was because when he was wounded the stone provided the energy to allow him to change reality and take away his wound.
After that the thoughts get more confused and are overwhelmed by the deeper past of the stone. Sasha shakes away the visions and wraps the crystal back in the papers.
S: Alright these papers are very important and this stone is immensely powerful. We need to get back our people and see about getting all of this sorted.
Texas: Agree. Let’s see if Longshot got the refugees ready to go.
End of Part 1
We’ll go deeper into the past of the Rod, at least as much as Sinclair wrote about it in his few weeks of ownership of the rod. We then have a quick trip back to Brooklyn and a change up in team objectives.
