Embedded Files
The Transamerica Bomber Letter
Mission One // Session One
Mission One // Session One
Played June 8, 2020
Mitch's Photograph of the "Bummer and Lazarus" Plaque
The Steve Canyon Comic Strip
Mission One // Session Two
Mission One // Session Two
Played June 22, 2020
Mission One // Session Three
Mission One // Session Three
Played July 3, 2020
MIKE
Jo heads into the (very modest) lobby [of the Empress Hotel in the Tenderloin District], and Padden and Hall are there waiting. Most of the furniture in here has to date from the '40s and '50s: the scene of cigarette smoke and cheap wine is sunk into the carpets and walls. They've not called in any backup—yet—and the night manager is standing behind the "front desk" (it's behind wire mesh). No lookie-loos in the lobby, Padden mentioned on the phone their only witness was this manager. The residents are not too curious about what goes on elsewhere in the building after dark, and gunshots are not an alien sound in the Tenderloin.
"Been waiting for you on the suspect's room," Padden says, showing the key. (Not sure how Jo wants to introduce Marshall but his psych/CIA credentials give him all kinds of reason to be here. Archie less so, but I did want to check with Rob to see whether he had envisioned Archie coming into the building or not. Regardless, if Jo and Marshall want to handle investigating Frank's room we can do that now.)
On the Roger and Mitch side of things, I would like Roger to give me a Streetwise roll to kick things off. If Mitch is going to go off on his own, that's also fine, I have a rough idea of where Serendipity (and Weirdness Magnet) might land him, but I want to wait to see how Roger's roll and Marshall and Jo's investigations go before that.
JEFF
My plan is to start spiraling out around the hotel until I find something interesting, with my usual expansive definition of interesting. (Decent odds I'll get sucked into group of basement wargamers or something else useless, Mitch is aware that he's taking a risk by doing it this way.)
MIKE
Roger's quick look around the Tenderloin and old Barbary Coast on the way into the City seems to suggest not an active police presence on the streets, but a ton of SFPD wooden barricades and other crowd control elements left on the streets overnight. Curious. So here's the deal with ol' Mitch. That dérive-style perambulation he's so good at seems almost immediately to trigger something in him once his feet hit the pavement a few dozen times: not a vision of a subduction zone or the flushed feeling that happens when pyrokinesis begins to bubble up in him. He's hungry. It's 11 pm and between all the driving back and forth between Pittsburg and Livermore and the ambulance shenanigans, and Mitch realizes a body needs food. And there's really only one place to go for quick quality food at 11 pm on a weeknight in the middle of the Tenderloin. Chinatown. Mitch sort of generally wanders off, in the direction of the (more or less) brand-new, Taiwan-donated Dragon Gate.
BRANT
Marshall will trust Jo to handle interactions with the FBI agents, and will otherwise remain silent and somewhat mysterious. He can credibly give cover to whatever story Jo wants to tell them.
BILL
Roger is fully down for this. Fully on? Damn, where’s that groovy lingo when you need it? “Sweet and sour pork for me, let’s go!”
“And get me one of those German beers made in China they have. You know the one.”
Roger’s gonna walk into a neighborhood corner store, buy a pack of smokes, and start up a conversation with the clerk about what the hell parade of pigs came through what left all this crap on the street.
MIKE
The late-night corner store guy says, "You kiddin'? Tomorrow's the beginning of four days of Chinese New Year shit. Miss Chinatown pageant and parade is tomorrow. The streets are gonna be packed."
JEFF
Awesome. Chinese. Awesome.
MIKE
As Mitch walks to the nearest late-night Chinese place, he begins to see a regular, repeating, tessellated pattern of hand-pasted posters on the walls of a bunch of the buildings in Chinatown. The same flyer, Xeroxed on light green paper, bilingual in both Chinese and English, asking citizens of Chinatown to come out and demonstrate against school busing, which they say is "destroying Chinese-American culture in San Francisco and removing our self-determination to raise our children our own way." A series of neighborhood associations have signed the decree, and a series of organizational meetings and City Council meetings to demonstrate and speak up at are listed. Mitch's hunger subsides. Give me an IQ check.
<<SUCCESS>>
School buses crisscrossing the City every day now, with anger up everywhere about the busing program meant to diversify and desegregate the school system ... the realization rises to the surface and sticks in Mitch's head that Frank has to be a school bus driver. There's no other explanation for everything in his letter, the focus on a sacrifice that absolutely fits the number of kids on a school bus, everything. And this part of town, the area roughly bounded by the Transamerica Pyramid, Chinatown, the Tenderloin, and the former Barbary Coast, must have dozens on the streets every morning and afternoon. School is in tomorrow and Friday and then there's the February holiday/Washington's Birthday next week where the kids will be off for a week. If Frank is going to act to take these kids, further considering the fact that the heat is now on him, it's going to be tomorrow. The energy around here is just too much specifically pointing towards this to ignore.
JEFF
Mitch spins around and rushes in the direction of Roger and the hotel at a dead run.
BILL
Jo doesn’t have creamy jade green eyes, does she? Checking for a friend.
LEONARD
Crystal blue, sorry to disappoint.
Jo is basically going to give the feds a line about how these people with her -- who it's doubtful they would believe are ASA -- are an inter-agency task force, and strongly imply that it's a pretty high-security-clearance situation. If they buy this, she'll tell them to hang loose and keep anyone from gunking up the crime scene, and she'll take Marshall upstairs to the target's room to turn it out. We should grab anything of obvious interest, and she'll more or less use her intuition to suss out if anything we find is worth doing a psychometric scan of.
MIKE
All right. Marshall and Jo head up to the fourth floor to Frank's room. The hallways of the Empress are, if possible, even more dire than the lobby was. Just a heavy stink of humanity, booze, vomit, and piss. The sconced lights flicker in the hallways; behind the doors occasionally one can hear the grunt and squeak of presumed prostitutes and johns, or a drunk screaming with the DTs. Jo walks up to room 405, she's got the key in her gloved hand and she goes to unlock the door. Jocasta, give me a Listen roll at a -6 to your skill, Marshall, give me an Observation roll at a -2 to your skill.
<<SUCCESS, SUCCESS>>
As Jocasta turns the key in the lock, she faintly hears (while Marshall clearly hears) an unmistakable, ominous "click" from behind the door. From the faint reverberations Jocasta felt in the key (she's no safecracker, but it was clear), this click seems to have been triggered by the lock opening. The two of you aren't certain, but it seems like there might be some kind of trap or trigger connected to the lock/doorknob combination of Frank's room.
BRANT
Marshall closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.
LEONARD
Jo steels herself against the door, exercising every ounce of body control she has. She tries to remain extremely calm, breathing at a reduced tempo, and hisses to Marshall, "Get Padden and Hall. Tell them we need an EOD team here as quick as they can come."
BRANT
Marshall will head downstairs and convey that message to Padden and Hall. Then he will get on the two-way and see if he can hail Roger.
MIKE
Jo needs to stay absolutely still. But this stressful situation might lead to a flashback. @Leonard, give me a Flashbacks roll, looking for anything but a 6 or less. If you pass that roll, give me a Body Control roll with no penalties. If you fail that roll, give me a Body Control roll at a -5 to your skill. Marshall heads downstairs as quick as possible and tells Padden and Hall to get the bomb squad. Not a problem, no roll required, given Marshall's charisma and Jocasta's authority. They go out to their car to radio FBI HQ and Marshall heads to his car to radio Roger. Mitch heads back to Roger's car, parked outside a late-night corner store, at top speed on foot. Roger's having a cigarette when two things happen simultaneously: Mitch appears from around the corner back from Chinatown in an awful hurry, and Marshall's voice comes through on the two-way in his car. And over in Pacific Heights, Archie slumps home after a long 14-hour day and ... I dunno, makes himself a cup of Postum.
LEONARD
Ugh, prepare to scrape a well-meaning but traumatized woman off the walls: passed the Flashbacks test (rolled a 15), but failed the first Body Control roll by 1 point (rolled a 14) and failed the second Body Control roll at -5 by four (rolled a 12). No idea if Combat Reflexes will be of any help here but they're probably my only hope. Please remember me as someone who died proving that taking methamphetamines is a bad way to prepare for standing perfectly still
MIKE
Oh, sorry, I should have said that second Body Control roll was if you failed the FLASHBACK roll. So you only failed one Body Control roll by one. Whew! Now, luckily, all you needed to do was avoid the critical failure on the Body Control roll to avoid any sort of ... being plastered onto the walls, but here's the upshot of the regular-level failure: you are literally going to have to stand here and keep the key in precisely the same position until help arrives. You don't trust your own nerves and ability to de-trip this. You're going to need expert lockpicking and demolitions help to extricate yourself.
But yeah, a few more beads of sweat drip down Jocasta's normally steely face than might ordinarily be there. All those years of meditation and alpha wave control is crumbling slowly in the face of imminent possibly explosive danger.
BRANT
If Marshall is able to raise Roger on the radio he is going to inform him of the situation and ask, “What’s your background in, um, disarming door-based boobytraps or explosives?”
BILL
"Jesus Papa. (you aren't seeing him crossing himself). Let me grab a bag, and I'll be right there."
LEONARD
"Hmm," thinks Jocasta, reaching down into a hidden reserve of dan tien. "Well done, Menos. You've added another important life experience to your résumé. Oh and look! All the men have abandoned you again."
Mission One // Session Four
Mission One // Session Four
Played July 13, 2020
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