Misfits - Behind the Scenes

[AccidentalRob]

New York City, 1984.

We started the session in a transition scene. The heroes has escaped La Guardia airport and had made their way into a warehouse area to the east of the airport grounds. Lucky enough to find a warehouse that hadn’t seen use in some time, they managed to get into the dirty, dark building and decided to take a breather, gather their wits and decide what to do next.

Unbeknownst to them they were being observed – a young homeless man had made the warehouse his flophouse and was watching them from the shadows as they discussed the night so far. Madison did not reveal that she saw her driver (who had come to get her) get shot by a group of Sentinel agents at the airport. She was panicking however, and only wanted to go home. As they argued, the homeless man, Leon, made his presence known. This only served to panic Madison further. Mark, the telepath, gathered some of Madison’s surface thoughts and asked her what “Briarwood” was. This put Madison into a fugue state, and while Nathan watched over her to make sure she was okay, the others discussed more sensitive matters with Leon, who seemed to have an idea of what was going on.

Nathan found a letter in his pocket, slipped there by his wife earlier on the plane. It asked him to trust her and to bring the others to Times Square the next night, to a deli, where they could talk and she could give them some answers.

Finally, the elephant in the room was brought up – they all had special abilities (Nathan railed against the use of the term “special”). With Mark questioning them all, Nathan, Brody and Leon all revealed their powers to him. Brody was able to leap great distances and seemed to have the agility and reflexes of a feline. Nathan was stronger and more durable than most, and when his blood got pumping he couldn’t be hurt by conventional physical means. Leon revealed that demons spoke to him and had taught him the dark arts of sorcery and claimed to be training him for something. Mark didn’t reveal his powers, but Leon surmised that it had something to do with mind-reading.

Madison had settled down by now, the fugue state being brought on by stress and the shock of a stranger knowing about Briarwood, a dark place from her childhood. She finally convinced the group that if they were going to stay together, that they should at least get somewhere cleaner than a warehouse.

They moved east into Astoria and found a hotel to stay at. They were shocked that there wasn’t a single news item on the hijacking, nor of the flight of fugitives from the airport. The next morning there were still no reports about it. Madison, against her better judgment, called home and spoke with her father and (to Madison’s surprise) her mother. The call was strange, filled with odd clicks, tension and too-long pauses in the conversation.

The group got something to eat and laid low until the evening before heading into Manhattan to meet with Jennifer, Nathan’s wife and part of Project Sentinel. At the deli where she asked to meet, they found her waiting and sat down. She was surprised to see Leon Walker, but when she learned his name she realized who he was – the offspring of a experimentee who had gone off their radar years previously. Jennifer explained that Project Sentinel was simply supposed to be an oversight agency, charged with tracking and reporting on those who had undergone experiments, as well as the offspring of those people. She was trained at a young age to be a field agent, and had been placed to watch Nathan Collins. They fell in love and married, which was not part of the plan but worked well enough for the Project. She hinted that there may be people in the lives of the others that were spying on them, but she didn’t know.

Jennifer and a handful of other Project Sentinel agents had realized that the Project was switching from a passive to an active role, and she feared for the well-being of her husband, as well as the lives of any others being tracked by the Project. Their first step was to protect a group of post-humans (what she referred to the heroes as), bring them into the fold, and recruit them to help track down others who were under the threat of Project Sentinel.

At that moment, armoured vans pulled up to the deli and armed agents swarmed out, brandishing pistols. Patrons in the deli panicked, and Brody, who had already been acting as a vigilante for a while now, burst into action and kicked a chair into the oncoming agents, tripping them up. Leon cried out strange words and up out of the floor rose a collection of shadowy, shambling horrors that surrounded the agents, distracting them and causing more panic. Mark attempted to link the minds of the group together to help them work better as a team, but the strain was too much and the psychic backlash burned into his mind. Madison, creeping along behind the long deli counter, got close enough to the agents to bio-shock two of them badly enough to knock them to the floor, and stagger a third. Nathan started corralling people out of the deli through the kitchen and into the back alley. Gunfire erupted as the agents finally got over the shock of these people attacking them – one agent putting himself out of action when his own bullet ricocheted back into his weapon, badly injuring his hand. Another still was knocked out of the action when he attacked Leon, who distracted the agent with a burst of black energy from his fingertips. The agent, terrified, missed his shot and was knocked to the ground by the black arrow. Madison was injured when a bullet grazed her arm.

Having enough of this, Brody leaped into they fray in an attempt to take down the final agent, but the man’s body armour absorbed the blow. This shocked Brody to no end, and finally the agent was taken down by another black arrow from Leon’s fingertips.

With the agents all down and out, the heroes regrouped. But it wasn’t over yet.

[AccidentalRob]

Session (Issue?) Three is tonight. The heroes will (most likely) take on the first super-powered opponents of the game.

The highlight I'm looking forward to? An action scene on the roof of an abandoned power station while July 4th fireworks rain down on their heads from a malfunctioning launching mechanism mounted on a barge in the Hudson River.