Contract #4: Formula 42

[GM Nick]

A swirl of silvery mist issues forth from the door seam, coalescing about Max's ankles.

[John]

Max dances quickly away from and kicks at it, thoroughly creeped out and quickly climbing the meter toward panic.

[GM Nick]

The doors swing open, revealing a vast expanse of the same glittering mist.

[Stephen]

Val peers warily through the shimmering fog, rifle at the ready, flicking through his various vision enhancements in the hopes of finding one that can pierce the veil. He inclines his head to one side without taking his eyes of the fog and speaks quietly to the orkish lab tech.

"Any of this look familiar, 'mano?" He hopes the lab tech will have some explanation, but in his bones he's certain he won't.

[GM Nick]

The ork squints into the miasma.

"This uh... this might be element 31... I've read reports about it, but I can't say for sure. There must have been a failure in the containment system."

[John]

Max looks at the ork with some alarm and asks,

"What the frag is element 31?"

[GM Nick]

"BioDrive discovered a number of strange minerals in an abandoned copper mine in the Mojave desert. They seem to be new elements, at least since the awakening. Element 31 is one of them. It's supposed to be non-toxic..."

[John]

Max leads,

"... But... ?"

[GM Nick]

"It plays havoc with the link between our plane and the astral plane."

(( All spells cast within the fog automatically have their force doubled but their drain value is tripled. ))

[Stephen]

Val shakes his head nervously, suppressing a shudder.

"I'm sure I don't know what the frag that means in any practical sense, but I'm sure I don't like the sound of it at all."

[John]

Max looks at Val and shakes his head before gathering himself and stepping slowly over the threshold into the room. In all his life, the elf has never kept a more keen or cautious watch on his surroundings than he does in this instant.

[GM Nick]

The team slips through the doors, warily training arms in every direction. Disconcertingly, there seem to be no walls in this room. The fog stretches on forever in every direction. A steady bass-line and chorus of ripping guitar chords is the only sensation that penetrates the stillness of the seemingly-infinite storage area.

[John]

Max's footsteps are small and tentative. Rather than picking his feet up and stepping forward, he instead slides his boots across the floor in twelve inch installments. His shotgun sweeps the room over and over again as the tries to make any kind of sense of the engulfed and unnatural expanse of the storage space. He keeps expecting to trip over something or kick at some unseen item only to have it skid out of his way, but that moment seems never to come. The stillness of the air and the blaring intensity of the sound create a kind of numbing, entrancing effect. It would be meditative if it weren't so fraggin' creepy.

The elf comms to the team so they'll be able to hear one another,

<I'm going to move in a straight line. I want to find the wall so we have a reference point for this place.>

[GM Nick]

"You know, the element could be causing a--"

The ork assistant promptly begins clawing at himself and screaming.

"The flames! The flames!"

He hurls forward through the mist and out of sight before anyone can move to restrain him.

[Drew Buddy]

"Drek!" Doc hisses.

He resists the urge to chase after the man. Something caused the assistant to do that, and he suspects that something is right here in the room.

< Be ready for an ambush! > he comms.

[John]

Max reaches for the technician as he flails into the veil of fog, the ork just escaping his fingers. Swirls of mist bloom and twist in his wake as the fog parts and then rejoins itself as the sound quickly covers his cries of terror; the room swallows the man whole as if he had never been at all. Without thinking it through, Max runs after him into the unknown distance-- Doc's wise council lost in the suddenness and impulse of the moment.

[GM Nick]

The blaring sonance of Johnny Nuclear's Chernobyl Baby tapers off. In its place, a voice--one that sounds as though it comes from every direction simultaneously.

"Hello, friends. Are you friends? No. Not friends... enemies. Does it matter? You can't imagine. It's like being fused to existence itself. The energy is... overwhelming. I hope you enjoy my mind. This is my mind, now. I was just thinking Johnny Nuclear and, poof, here it is. An illusion spell, maybe? I'm not even sure anymore."

[Drew Buddy]

Adams swings his rifle around the room, unsuccessfully searching for the source of the voice.

"Who are you?" He calls out.

[GM Nick]

"I've forgotten what they called me. I am here, with the element now. You can call me 31, I suppose. How fitting. Would you like a demonstration of it?"

Doc senses an object coming towards him through the haze.

[Drew Buddy]

Adams starts slowly backing away.

"Uh, no? Definitely no. Um, thanks, though," he replies to the presence.

[John]

Max swipes at the fog in front of him and gradually comes to a running stop, having unsuccessfully pursued the hallucinating ork. Cut off from the team, Max's anxiety is slowly on the rise. Yelling out, Max cries,

"What's with this fraggin' fog?! I can't see a thing! Doc, where are you?!"

[GM Nick]

The ork assistant emerges from the mist and marches towards Doc. His eyes are glassy, vacant. His lips move, not quite in sync with the disembodied voice.

"This meat puppet is so fragile. Watch him dance like a toy..."

[Drew Buddy]

Adams watches the ork warily, letting his rifle fall to rest on its sling, and putting his hand on his submachine gun.

[John]

Max fumbles his way through the fog in an attempt to make his way back to the group, but the elf has gotten significantly turned around.

[GM Nick]

The ork gropes out towards Doc with clumsy, swinging blows.

"Join me."

[Drew Buddy]

"Sorry, chummer, I'll have to pass," Doc replies, depressing the trigger on the SMG and sending a group of stick-n-shock darts at the orc.

[GM Nick]

Ranged Combat (Doc)

[Automatics (6) + AGI (9) + Smartlink (2) = 6]
6 2 5 3 3 2 2 4 1 6 5 4 5 2 4 5 1
[REA (3) = 1]
1 6 2

Damage Resistance (Assistant)

[BOD (2) + Armor (1) = 0]
1 2 3

(( 13S DAMAGE! ))

The ork falls to the ground, wracked with spasms as the stick'n'shock rounds deliver their non-lethal charges.

"You've come for the element! You have come to steal it from me!"

[John]

Max trains in on the sound of the gunshots and makes a run for the source, arriving out of breath and frazzled to see the ork unconscious or dead on the floor. His voice is strained as he says,

"I think we should get the frag out of here!"

[Stephen]

Val cocks his head to one side and whispers quietly to Sinjin, "How is it that we always seem to piss off everything and everyone who's very essence just screams 'don't piss me off'?"

Fearful though he might be, some distant part of Val realizes that a month ago he wouldn't have been capable of such glibness at a time like this. The thought skims the surface of his consciousness, and is gone before he can fully embrace it.

Val hears Max's muffled voice calling through the thick fog. "Best idea I've heard all day, 'mano," he replies as he turns and begins to take a step. Val realizes with mounting horror that he's lost all sense of direction in the blinding miasma, and can't be sure which way the team came in from.

[Conway]

Sinjin smiles at the decker's growing confidence, remembering a time when just carrying all the necessary gear seemed a fair challenge for him. He was right though...its seemed no matter how careful their insertion, they were always one eggshell away from a drekstorm. A very thin and crumbly eggshell.

"Right....Val can you upload me an imagelink of the 2D mapping software you drew up? With this visibility, we may have to resort to dead reckoning to get away from here.

Switching between thermal and sonar vision, Sinjin tries to locate the source of the fog, hoping it will lead him to the elusive "31."

[Drew Buddy]

Adams kneels beside the incapacitated assistant, and checks his vitals. The shock rounds won't kill him, but he still doesn't envy the man.

Pulling the faceplate on his helmet back down, he looks around the immediate area in ultrasound, trying to pick out the rest of the group.

[GM Nick]

"I tire of you little insects. Prattling on with no idea what it's like to be this... connected."

Five identical silhouettes converge on the team from a 180 degree arc. It's an elf--garbed in the same getup that the other eco-terrorists have been wearing. He floats several feet above the floor, arms spread akimbo. No gas mask covers his face, just an insane grimace.

"Now! Cease to be!"

[ Max = 51 ]
[ Doc = 47 ]
[ Val = 47 ]
[ Mirror Image = 42 ]
[ Mirror Image = 38 ]
[ Mirror Image = 36 ]
[ Mirror Image = 33 ]
[ Mirror Image = 31 ]
[ Tyros = 29 ]
[ Sinjin = 25 ]

[John]

Max's movements fail him for a split second before he raises his weapon and fires a burst at the elf in the center of the advancing line.

[Stephen]

Val calls up the 2D schematic in a transparent AR window visible only to him. His heart begins to beat against his ribcage more quickly than it already was. The small, color-coded blips representing each of the team member's PANs are there, but they flicker wildly and lurch around the blueprint in seemingly random patterns. Val focuses on his own PAN, fighting rising panic as the software tells him that he's near-simultaneously in the ruins of the security center, stuck in the center of a 4-foot-thick blast wall more than 200 yards away, and floating in midair 10 yards outside the building of their current floor. He shuts down the window before the visuals can give him a seziure.

Val shakes his head quickly in Sinjin's direction. He opens his mouth to reply, but the words are drowned out by the skull-crushing voice which seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, followed quickly by what can only be Marlowe discharging a burst of AV rounds.

[GM Nick]

Ranged Combat (Max)

[Shotguns (8) + AgI (10) + Smartlink (2) = 4]
2 2 2 2 1 3 3 1 4 5 3 1 4 3 5 5 2 2 6 3

Ranged Combat (Max)

[REA (7) = 1]
4 6 1 1 3 3 4

Damage Resistance (31)

[BOD (6) + Armor (4) + AP (-4) = 2]
3 4 6 1 6 1

(( 10P DAMAGE! ))

The mirror image flickers, but doesn't quite dissipate, seeming to barely hold together.

(( You can destroy the mirror images, they just have 12 condition monitor boxes. ))