TORG: Manhattan Knights Act 2 part 1
Second Gaming Session:
NOTE: As the game precedes we actually will start other storylines happening at the same time in other parts of the world. The Adventures in the Living Lands thus is renamed the Manhattan Knights. In the future you will have a secondary story happening in Aysle (Torg’s High Fantasy Cosm).
Manhattan Knights
Intro:
The continuing adventures in of a trio of Storm Knights in Manhattan Island, which has fallen to the invading Cosm of Takta Ker, the Living Land. To start at the beginning go to this POST.
Act 2: Bio-Dome: The Wonder and the Horror
Our opening scene picks off where the last installment ended, with the Storm Knights having just captured two cannibals, who have turned out to also be storm knights. Kimiko is in a cold rage, and can barely speak. Sasha quietly suggests that they try “it like American movie, good cop bad cop.” Kimiko only nods her accent and the two young women roust the tied-up cannibals from their stupor.
One is a sullen, and defeated, merely grunting as he kicked in the side and urged to explain himself. The other captive seems to have suffered a mental breakdown and merely worms around on the ground trying to reach and chew through the vines around his chest. What words he does speak are incoherent gibberish. They get nothing from the two. Kimiko only stares. Exasperated Sasha decides to go right to actual threats.
Sasha: We only need one of you to talk, so who’s tongue do I tear out.
Kimiko still says nothing, Sasha makes a pointed look at her (good cop stop me or ease the tension in the situation?) Kimiko bares her teeth and pulls out her submachine gun.
Sasha shakes her head, her “partner” is no help. She pulls an oversized knife out of her worn leather jacket, it would have made Rambo proud. The sullen stormer shakes his head; “Why does it matter why we did it?”
Repeated prodding produces no further response. Sasha reaches for the guy trying to crawl on the ground.
Reaction:
Sullen (Dan): “Hey you get the F@#$ away from Ricky! You hear me @$#%^! @%@^!
Sasha: “Finally we can get some answers.” She drops Ricky back to the ground, where he sobs and tries to crawl away.
Kimiko moves to keep Ricky pinned, and then decides to cock her weapon and point it at his head. Ricky stops squirming and sobbing.
It takes a while to get Dan talking. He starts out seeing only two options, and both options take away any threat from his interrogators. He knows that they will either have to kill him or they’ll have to let him go. Sasha tries to come up with a third option, but they fail. Dan blames the invasion and stress and his brother’s condition for everything. He also says it started as survival and then became a nightmare.
Sasha pulls Kimiko back to confer with Carlisle.
Conference:
Sasha: “What the F@#$! Kimiko? I said ‘good cop/ bad cop’ not bad cop/ psycho cop.”
Kimiko: “What? I thought I was bad cop… I’m very angry about the disrespect to the dead. This is worse sin. Besides you Russian, I assume this was ‘good cop.’ Don’t you all eat your dead anyway?”
Carlisle forestalls the argument and points out that Dan has a point. They can’t take the cannibals with them and executing them doesn’t sit well with him. To which Sasha points out that they didn’t have a problem with burning them out of their home and shooting all of their companions earlier.
Stalemate.
Kimiko remembers that she has more heart than anger. She decides on a new tact. Using her psionic powers, she kneels down by Ricky and decides to reach into his mind and clear it of the fear and insanity. It has a miraculous affect and the man’s eyes clear and he can speak normally again.
Ricky is still not 100% and his mind seems to have been slightly child-like even before the invasion and the nightmare of the last three months. He tells the story about how him and his brother Dan had traveled into Manhattan to go to the Museum of Natural History so he could see the Dinosaurs. But then the Jungle came and the fake Dinosaurs and Edeinos came with is and now he hates dinosaurs.
With the healing of Ricky’s mind Dan opens up a lot more and tells the story about how they had gotten trapped in the jungles and hunger led them to eat some of the wounded among their group. They grew stronger and for some reason the more primitive people around them started looking to them as leaders. Ricky quickly turned inside and stopped talking and Dan found himself caring for an automaton who used to be his brother and worshipped by a dozen cannibal cavemen as their leader.
He accepted it and soon they degraded to what the party found in Times Square.
Its only been a little over 3 months since the invasion started. THREE Months!
Moving On:
After some heated arguments the party decides to free the brothers and give them directions to the hardpoint in Brooklyn. Sasha gives them a final threat/warning; stating that she would be able to find them anywhere they went and that they had one chance for redemption. They could be Storm Knights and thus bring hope back to the world or they could be monsters.
Kimiko insists that they gather all of the scattered bones and human remains and give them a burial or a burning before they go. If they complete this act of contrition then she would approve their redemption. Dan and Ricky comply and then leave the party.
The trio then argue over the finer points of how they plan to handle interrogation in the future and Kimiko and Sasha discuss the differences in their cultures and upbringing. It is decided that they will cut north and hit what was once Central Park.
Scene 2: Central Park and the Dome:
Moving past Times Square the jungle proves to be impossibly thick and the party finds it extremely slow going as they have to cut their way through thick vines. They lose their sense of direction for a while and then suddenly step out in a wide path in the jungle.
While overgrown and completely made of vegetation its resemblance to a road is all too clear. It is nearly a mile-long straight path, almost a tunnel with thick canopy overhead. Their joy at finding a clear and easy path is overshadowed by Sasha; “Did you hear something?”
Kimiko notices a movement and sees a dinosaur, whispering; “That’s a dino over there.”
Sasha has better eyes and sees it clearer, “Is like raptor? Wait I saw this movie, behind us!”
Raptor Attack:
Sasha is correct as two Raptors attack from the rear while the decoy one in the front also rushes in. Warned by the Russian psychic Kimiko countercharges into the two ambushers, drawing her electric katana and thumbing the power switch. She does a sweeping slash and cuts both beasts, but only scratches their thick hide.
Sasha uses her telekinesis to swing a clump of debris at the lone charger from the front. The debris hits it square in the face and the dino staggers, trips and rolls across the ground. Opening it up to a shot from Carlisle, the monster hunter proves how apt his name is as a single shot from his carbine kills the raptor.
Kimiko finds herself standing between two slightly wounded beasts, they tear into her powered armor and she dances through their slashing talons. The frustrated beasts roar and one of them is distracted by a telekinetic strike from Sasha. The hit does little more than turn the beast’s attention. In that single second Kimiko becomes a wild flurry of strikes and hits both raptors. The dinos are slain.
In only a matter of seconds, less than half a minute, the three most cunning animals in the jungle have met three of the hardest Storm Knights on Manhattan.
To the Dome:
Emboldened by the fight the party moves down the wide lane and out into the new Central Park. There are no longer any buildings to the east or west of Central Park, they are gone as are the roads. As far as the eye can see to the east, west and north stretches a plain of tall grass. Way off in the north there are what appear to be mountains raising where Washington Heights should be. Funnily one of the mountains looks like a massive cat, but that is an issue for a far later date.
Before them and dominating their field of vision is a dome that is more of a sphere, it is a mile across and equally as high, with for smaller domes attached around it and a massive lozenge-shaped building jutting out toward them. Black, bony looking growths form the base of the sphere and appear like long fingers cupping the thick smoky translucent material that makes up the surface of the dome. Within this smoky ‘glass’ a high-rise city awaits.
The nearest side dome, one of the smaller four bubbles attached to the main is cracked asunder and a riot of jungle and vines are growing through the mess.
Carlisle: “I would hazard this is no normal city and that those side pods were once greenhouses. The front building is probably a… suburb I believe you call it?”
Sasha: “More like a block house to me.”
To Boldly go…
Stepping out into the grasslands they close the distance toward the lozenge-shaped building, two massive doors clearly in the side of the building. 300 meters from the outer edge of the dome the grass withers away and dies and the soil beyond is a rocky and ashy waste.
Our heroes pause at this clear line and tentatively reach out. As storm knights they can feel the change in the air, this line marks entry into a hardpoint. They will be stepping out of the Living Land and into where ever that Dome came from, for it is not of Earth.
They are also concerned about the massive heavy twin-linked machine guns with advanced optics and the bodies that have decayed around the doorway.
END part 1, see you all next week.
