Terminal

Empire of the Dead

<Snipped quote by Terminal>

Ghural would absolutely have one as an additional dumping ground for rotten charnel.

On another note, expect a post from me tomorrow.

@Oraculum

The Dead Seas themselves cannot continuously reanimate charnel dumped into them unfortunately, so that would basically be the same as just dumping it on the ground. Something equivalent you could do though, would to be to dump the masses/bodies of ghouls who are too damaged to continue moving into the Dead Seas. Since they they are all bound, they will exert their binding on the Dead Sea and fuse to it. Do that with a whole bunch of ghouls at once and you can get a substantial return of your investment on both - but for purely lifeless scraps and the like, best use it for meatworkers or send it to Nergthron.

Empire of the Dead

@Terminal

The profane locus is terrifying. Dead seas, however, would probably be very demoralizing to anything with the capacity to feel fear.

@Lauder

Which actually brings me to my first general question to everyone else right now:

All the Revenants Major probably have custom-made Dead Sea warforms made specifically for them to bind to. Do we have an takers on that front?

Empire of the Dead

Application moved to characters tab.

Empire of the Dead

Rixis, Locus Warden

Rixis, Locus Warden

Rank: Revenant Major

Description:

Rixis, once fair in life, has been reduced by perils, trials, and admonishments to the brink of unraveling. Little more than a tenuous and pitted spine and skull, Rixis is frequently embodied in a parade of varying Dead Seas, unshaped and streaked with grime from undulation across the barren wastes with naught but a narrow gap amidst the heap through which his dead eyes may peer. The seething mass of partially liquified necrotic flesh makes for an inelegant form incapable of most basic functions, and if not for his talent in the arcane arts Rixis would doubtlessly be a complete invalid.

Background:

Rixis was once a prominent mage, unlanded and with a tenuous, nigh-mercenary relationship with numerous petty kings in one of the more chaotic and turbulent realms of Leria. When Eagoth arrived with his undead hordes, Rixis attempted to broker with the Necromancer to retain his independency - but his scheme was foiled when his early efforts to betray the various petty kingdoms he had worked for failed, resulting in him fleeing in shame to Eagoth with little to show for it. Promptly turned into a Revenant, Rixis shamed himself further in battle when - overwhelmed with terror at the notion of true death and cessation of thought and still possessing enough independence to act willfully - surrendered and was taken captive by the forces of the living, who dismembered Rixis' body for good measure and interrogated him for intelligence on Eagoth's designs. Rixis was eventually freed, and spared dissolution when Eagoth observed that his living captors had already done enough to punish him for his callow nature and that his capability to still weave magics made him marginally more useful as a willful revenant than not. He was then consigned, in shame and mockery, to attend to one of Eagoth's failed mystical experiments in a remote, secluded area of Leria, consigned to live crippled and in squalor for the rest of eternity as an aggrandized handyman for a failed enterprise. Ambitious, but limited due to his dependency upon the immobile Profane Locus to supply him with functioning bodies time and time again as each one falls apart, as well as by his innate cowardice and shameful reputation. He is a nonentity in the politics and intrigue of the Revenants Major despite his status as an otherwise competent mage and Warden of one of Eagoth's great magical works.

Ward: Nergthron, Seat of the Locus

In the midst of the Southern Subcontinent of Leria within a central but otherwise remote mountain range lies a sizable chasm and vale, wherein Eagoth has isolated the Profane Locus, one of his great but ultimately disfavored arcane works, to deter its interference with his designs elsewhere. Nergthron is devoid of any true settlements or fortifications, and is instead rife with makeshift palisades and hutches, crudely assembled originally as a staging area for the Profane Locus when it was first set aside. Although the surface features of the vale are unremarkable, there exists extensive and impressive caverns and catacombs, painstakingly dug out by undead hands, wherein writhes an untold and gargantuan surplus of rancid, mouldering necrotic flesh - aniamted and seething in a myriad of pits and ducts, arranged in a fashion not unlike irrigation, where stilt-mounted villages and shanties of meatworkers and attendant ghouls dwell and tend to the Dead Seas. Though remote, Nergthron is centrally located in the Southern Subcontinent, allowing for ease of transportation and shipments by cart or ghouls. Scraps, flakes, shreds, and minute threads of otherwise useless decaying flesh and muscle tissue are shipped to Nergthron in massive heaps, where they are animated and congealed over time by the Profane Locus. Once newly animated by the foul energies, meatworkers then shape the animated flesh into Dead Sea Warforms to be sent to Eagoth's most favored lieutenants, or else into packages of conveniently arranged fleshworking material, animated and pliable to skilled hands to be transported all across Leria to meatworkers in every corner of the Empire of the Dead.

The Profane Locus

Midway through Eagoth's campaign to spread undeath and conquer all of Leria, he found himself being stalled and even pushed back on multiple fronts - the defenders of the living realms sweeping through his lines of the dead with such fervor and zeal, they denied him even the opportunity to desecrate the soil or animate the injured left in their wake.

Possessing abundant resources, tomes of ancient and forbidden lore, and various artifacts of note in spite of his losses, Eagoth devised a number of arcane experiments to assist in turning the tides of war back in his favor. Amongst these dark and terrible projects was the creation of The Profane Locus.

The Locus continuously desecrated the land around, and actively suffused all things that once lived with dark, animating energies. At first, the Locus seemed to be the ideal weapon - but shortly, numerous drawbacks and inefficiencies in its use became apparent, leading Eagoth to set it aside and turn to other ventures.

The Profane Locus can raise dead bodies in a fraction of the time normally required, even by Eagoth himself. These raised undead pay for this expediency however, as they are universally mindless and unbound. A consequence of the Locus fueling itself by binding and sublimating the spirits of the dead, torn from their bodies upon death. These raised undead possess only a primitive ability to sense life and a base drive to devour it, with a further need to bind them after rising in order to meaningfully direct them.

The Locus can accomplish more than simply raising bodies. Any and all tissue that once bore life will animate with time and proximity - severed limbs, scraps of skin, even mounds of disemboweled organs and viscera will all begin to writhe once suffused by the powers of the Locus. Like the bodies the Locus raises, these undead vestiges are universally mindless and unbound. Over time, with constant wear and decay, these remnants inevitably deteriorate into roiling heaps of partially liquefied, necrotic slop - which will congeal, aggregate, and form into massive undead constructs known as Dead Seas.

At first, Eagoth found great use in the Locus, especially upon the discovery that undead directly under his control would exert their binding upon any putrefied, animated masses left over by the Locus. An undead minion could be substantially bolstered by submerging it in a Dead Sea, fusing itself with the morass and simultaneously binding the whole of it to Eagoth. His meatworkers' labors were also eased considerably in the stitching and maintenance of valued bodies through the use of lesser animated tissues, adhered to choice skeletal remains already bound to his service.

Promising as the Locus was at first, it shortly became something of a nuisance and a detriment to Eagoth's schemes. Its proximity to any battlefield would interfere with his own magics, raising mindless, unbound corpses faster than he could, robbing him of many prized warriors and minds he had desired intact. The Locus would even snatch up and unmake their very spirits, denying their use as advisors and repositories of knowledge. Worse, it caused the active decay and deterioration of any undead to accelerate - causing bits and pieces of them that had loosened to animate, unbound from their own body and occasionally from within, with subsequent seething and writhing causing additional damage to their putrid bodies.

The Locus thus proved more of a liability than an asset, with the necessity of binding all the mindless undead it raised creating unnecessary tedium, and the loss of the spirits and minds of those it consumed proving harmful to Eagoth's procurement of intelligence from his raised enemies. When kept near to Eagoth's favored servants, it would slowly cripple them by animating bits and slivers of their flesh, hindering them at inopportune moments. Its more useful functions - its gradual production of Dead Seas and provision of animated tissue for the use of meatworkers - saved it from being abjured outright by Eagoth, but he banished it permanently to a more remote locale within his growing empire of the dead where its influence would not disturb his work. To this day, it is fed by an influx of shipped, necrotic tissue from elsewhere in Leria, overseen by a cabal of meatworkers and tenders who organize the reanimating flesh into pits where they may sculpt the unbound tissue into useful warforms to be commandeered by Eagoth's favored lieutenants, or else into packages of knit-kits to assist in the maintenance of more skeletal undead.

Empire of the Dead

@gorgenmast, here is an application for you. A little on the unusual side, I am entirely open to editing and reconstruction if necessary. Let me know what you think.

Rixis, Locus Warden

Rixis, Locus Warden

Rank: Revenant Major

Description:

Rixis, once fair in life, has been reduced by perils, trials, and admonishments to the brink of unraveling. Little more than a tenuous and pitted spine and skull, Rixis is frequently embodied in a parade of varying Dead Seas, unshaped and streaked with grime from undulation across the barren wastes with naught but a narrow gap amidst the heap through which his dead eyes may peer. The seething mass of partially liquified necrotic flesh makes for an inelegant form incapable of most basic functions, and if not for his talent in the arcane arts Rixis would doubtlessly be a complete invalid.

Background:

Rixis was once a prominent mage, unlanded and with a tenuous, nigh-mercenary relationship with numerous petty kings in one of the more chaotic and turbulent realms of Leria. When Eagoth arrived with his undead hordes, Rixis attempted to broker with the Necromancer to retain his independency - but his scheme was foiled when his early efforts to betray the various petty kingdoms he had worked for failed, resulting in him fleeing in shame to Eagoth with little to show for it. Promptly turned into a Revenant, Rixis shamed himself further in battle when - overwhelmed with terror at the notion of true death and cessation of thought and still possessing enough independence to act willfully - surrendered and was taken captive by the forces of the living, who dismembered Rixis' body for good measure and interrogated him for intelligence on Eagoth's designs. Rixis was eventually freed, and spared dissolution when Eagoth observed that his living captors had already done enough to punish him for his callow nature and that his capability to still weave magics made him marginally more useful as a willful revenant than not. He was then consigned, in shame and mockery, to attend to one of Eagoth's failed mystical experiments in a remote, secluded area of Leria, consigned to live crippled and in squalor for the rest of eternity as an aggrandized handyman for a failed enterprise. Ambitious, but limited due to his dependency upon the immobile Profane Locus to supply him with functioning bodies time and time again as each one falls apart, as well as by his innate cowardice and shameful reputation. He is a nonentity in the politics and intrigue of the Revenants Major despite his status as an otherwise competent mage and Warden of one of Eagoth's great magical works.

Ward: Nergthron, Seat of the Locus

In the midst of the Southern Subcontinent of Leria within a central but otherwise remote mountain range lies a sizable chasm and vale, wherein Eagoth has isolated the Profane Locus, one of his great but ultimately disfavored arcane works, to deter its interference with his designs elsewhere. Nergthron is devoid of any true settlements or fortifications, and is instead rife with makeshift palisades and hutches, crudely assembled originally as a staging area for the Profane Locus when it was first set aside. Although the surface features of the vale are unremarkable, there exists extensive and impressive caverns and catacombs, painstakingly dug out by undead hands, wherein writhes an untold and gargantuan surplus of rancid, mouldering necrotic flesh - aniamted and seething in a myriad of pits and ducts, arranged in a fashion not unlike irrigation, where stilt-mounted villages and shanties of meatworkers and attendant ghouls dwell and tend to the Dead Seas. Though remote, Nergthron is centrally located in the Southern Subcontinent, allowing for ease of transportation and shipments by cart or ghouls. Scraps, flakes, shreds, and minute threads of otherwise useless decaying flesh and muscle tissue are shipped to Nergthron in massive heaps, where they are animated and congealed over time by the Profane Locus. Once newly animated by the foul energies, meatworkers then shape the animated flesh into Dead Sea Warforms to be sent to Eagoth's most favored lieutenants, or else into packages of conveniently arranged fleshworking material, animated and pliable to skilled hands to be transported all across Leria to meatworkers in every corner of the Empire of the Dead.

The Profane Locus

Midway through Eagoth's campaign to spread undeath and conquer all of Leria, he found himself being stalled and even pushed back on multiple fronts - the defenders of the living realms sweeping through his lines of the dead with such fervor and zeal, they denied him even the opportunity to desecrate the soil or animate the injured left in their wake.

Possessing abundant resources, tomes of ancient and forbidden lore, and various artifacts of note in spite of his losses, Eagoth devised a number of arcane experiments to assist in turning the tides of war back in his favor. Amongst these dark and terrible projects was the creation of The Profane Locus.

The Locus continuously desecrated the land around, and actively suffused all things that once lived with dark, animating energies. At first, the Locus seemed to be the ideal weapon - but shortly, numerous drawbacks and inefficiencies in its use became apparent, leading Eagoth to set it aside and turn to other ventures.

The Profane Locus can raise dead bodies in a fraction of the time normally required, even by Eagoth himself. These raised undead pay for this expediency however, as they are universally mindless and unbound. A consequence of the Locus fueling itself by binding and sublimating the spirits of the dead, torn from their bodies upon death. These raised undead possess only a primitive ability to sense life and a base drive to devour it, with a further need to bind them after rising in order to meaningfully direct them.

The Locus can accomplish more than simply raising bodies. Any and all tissue that once bore life will animate with time and proximity - severed limbs, scraps of skin, even mounds of disemboweled organs and viscera will all begin to writhe once suffused by the powers of the Locus. Like the bodies the Locus raises, these undead vestiges are universally mindless and unbound. Over time, with constant wear and decay, these remnants inevitably deteriorate into roiling heaps of partially liquefied, necrotic slop - which will congeal, aggregate, and form into massive undead constructs known as Dead Seas.

At first, Eagoth found great use in the Locus, especially upon the discovery that undead directly under his control would exert their binding upon any putrefied, animated masses left over by the Locus. An undead minion could be substantially bolstered by submerging it in a Dead Sea, fusing itself with the morass and simultaneously binding the whole of it to Eagoth. His meatworkers' labors were also eased considerably in the stitching and maintenance of valued bodies through the use of lesser animated tissues, adhered to choice skeletal remains already bound to his service.

Promising as the Locus was at first, it shortly became something of a nuisance and a detriment to Eagoth's schemes. Its proximity to any battlefield would interfere with his own magics, raising mindless, unbound corpses faster than he could, robbing him of many prized warriors and minds he had desired intact. The Locus would even snatch up and unmake their very spirits, denying their use as advisors and repositories of knowledge. Worse, it caused the active decay and deterioration of any undead to accelerate - causing bits and pieces of them that had loosened to animate, unbound from their own body and occasionally from within, with subsequent seething and writhing causing additional damage to their putrid bodies.

The Locus thus proved more of a liability than an asset, with the necessity of binding all the mindless undead it raised creating unnecessary tedium, and the loss of the spirits and minds of those it consumed proving harmful to Eagoth's procurement of intelligence from his raised enemies. When kept near to Eagoth's favored servants, it would slowly cripple them by animating bits and slivers of their flesh, hindering them at inopportune moments. Its more useful functions - its gradual production of Dead Seas and provision of animated tissue for the use of meatworkers - saved it from being abjured outright by Eagoth, but he banished it permanently to a more remote locale within his growing empire of the dead where its influence would not disturb his work. To this day, it is fed by an influx of shipped, necrotic tissue from elsewhere in Leria, overseen by a cabal of meatworkers and tenders who organize the reanimating flesh into pits where they may sculpt the unbound tissue into useful warforms to be commandeered by Eagoth's favored lieutenants, or else into packages of knit-kits to assist in the maintenance of more skeletal undead.

Empire of the Dead - a spooky Nation Roleplay in time for Halloween

Interested.

Create-A-Hero: A Superhero RPG Season 3- Shattered Dimensions

Lost Haven
The Chinatown Bridge

As alien dropships, strike-craft, and bombers streaked through the atmosphere, the city of Lost Haven began to empty like a swarm abandoning an ant-hill. Untold millions of souls packing whatever belongings they deemed essential into bagages, cases, trunks, cars, and trunks and pouring outwards in droves. All of them sought to escape to the relatively safer obscurity of the surburban sprawls in the mainland, utterly convinced that the world - or at least the part of it in Lost Haven - was about to end.

It was afternoon, and the five bridges leading out of the city were all jammed packed, not only with uneven lines of countless multicolored vehicles, but also with the turbulent, clamoring streams of panicked civilians who had abandoned their vehicles in the middle of traffic in order to continue fleeing across the bridge on foot. Others, more concerned with momentary opportunity rather than the prospect of survival, had begun turning to looting whatever was left behind in the abandoned conveyances - shattered glass and even several car fires served as milestones for the path across the river.

With the evacuation proceeding so haphazardly, emergency services and the national guard had moved in to try to organize the flow of traffic and bring a semblence of order to the churning masses. Though they had been largely ineffective in that task thus far they had at least been able to protect the vulnerable, thronging masses from several alien ground assaults - though they in turn had little with which to defy the airborne attack craft periodically screaming across the sky.

Down in the waters below, a throng of ships skittered across the water, trade halted to try and get away from the city to protect the cargo and people on board. For some of the vessels, the selfless captains deemed it necessary to start ferrying the scared people off of the island Lost Haven was founded on to get them to safety. Yet despite all of the selfless people, there were a few who would be in the waters protecting the interests of others.

Several small boats moved through the waters, their origins being a few key warehouses that were located waterside. While a few of the men were busy steering the small boats to their intended locations, others were checking their assortment of assault rifles, pistols and a few of the mounted mobile turrets that they deemed to be needed at a time like this. Wearing black tactical armour, their objectives were unknown but their intent was well defined underneath concealed goggles.

"I want these waters secured!" barked Anhur, his hand clenching a walkie talkie that was on the dashboard of his boat. "The last thing we need is some assholes trying to take ground we gained from the Hounds of Humanity! And I want those bridges secured! Our interests are too important and I'll put any asshole who failed to secure those bridges in front of Dullahan himself for his foothold in the city being damaged!"

The skull-faced man rehooked the device back onto the console as he looked over the waters around the city. For him, there was only one place his boat was going. Over the past couple of weeks, the failings of not being able to locate one Kayla Mason was putting him in a bad light in Dullahan's books. While the meeting with Richard Midas came with some positive results, it wasn't enough to offset the deficit. Not while his boss's plans were still in motion. So, the next best thing was to secure the best logistical route between the docks of the city to one of the hubs of their North American operations in Crown Ridge, which was the westernmost bridge in the city.

He turns to Dirk, his second-in-command of his Lost Haven operations and leader of the Penose, "I want all of our men to secure the bridge at all cost. No asshole is to get through you or anyone here. Otherwise, I'll see to it that I beat the living shit out of you before you face the leader." While the words were harsh, the Penose leader understood the pressure Anhur was facing over the past number of weeks. He turned and began relaying the orders to his men.

Before he had finished his first sentence, he heard the tell-tale, otherworldly whine of one a nearby alien craft - looking up, he saw what appeared to be an insect-like alien gunship settle into a drift, with a large, evident weapon protruded from a hardpoint on its hull and began to blaze with incandescent light, aimed at an emergency search and rescue helicopter that had been buzzing about near the top of one of the bridge's arched support struts.

But before Anhur could even order the boat's turret gunners to take the gunship down, the tables unexpectedly flipped entirely on their own. The search and rescue helicopter swerved to angle its side towards the alien craft, and its left door retracted to reveal a tripound-mounted, heavy anti-materiel machine gun with three men crewing it. Less than a second later, the blazing alien weapon mounted beneath the gunship was showered in a deluge of exploding rounds, and the foreign craft jerked back erratically in the air as the wave machine-gun fire crashed over its hull. The craft was simply too big and too well armored for the helicopter to actually take out, but it had evidently received a nasty sting and was already pulling back up and swerving, as if to disengage even as the light surrounding its weapon fluttered and abated, shortly before going up in flames.

The skull-faced man, seemingly unfazed by the appearance of the alien craft, looked on. Dirk already began to order his men to fire at the lone ship. As the men fired, the rounds from the rifles seemed to only put dents into the hull of the craft. It was when the turret began to whir to life and fire that the rounds punched through whatever metal the ship was made of, thanks to the weaponry used to damage any bullet-resistant meta that came to the warehouses The Eye owned. The short burst of fire from the turret was enough to cause smoke, though the initial burst from the helicopter had probably weakened the armor enough for the rounds to penetrate.

While the men of the Penose concentrated on the alien craft that was at hand, Anhur's gaze remained trained on the helicopter that was in the area. While seeing emergency helicopters wasn't a new sight for him, especially in this city, one search and rescue with some heavy firepower was new. With his time in the underworld being extensive enough, he knew something was up. He reached for one of the spare rifles on the boat, but remained unresponsive as he waited to see what was to happen next.

Watching carefully, he noted as the helicopter completely ignored the alien craft as it started to careen towards the water-line - another irregularity given standard airspace regulations and practices - and instead pulled in close to the top of the bridge's suspension arch. Men from within the helicopter jumped out - bearing small, bundled packages of some kind, their exact details hard to make out until Anhur brought up the rifle to get a better look at them through its scope.

He realized what the packages were at the same exact moment the radio cracked to life and a nearly panicked report from one of the other boats came through.

"Boss! We found something really bad at the base of one of the support columns for the bridge! Bundle of plastic explosives, has a fail-deadly detonation mechanism-"

Through the scope, Anhur could clearly see the tell-tale coloration and irregular moulding of packed plastic explosives - and that some of the men were also carrying and preparing modern arming pins. From street-level, their activity probably looked completely innocuous - not even the national guard had probably realized anything was amiss yet. But he did.

"Target the helicopter!" he roared, pulling the trigger to let off a burst of  bullets towards the men at the base of the columns. "Don't let them get away!"

On the sound of the orders, just as one of the men on the bridge fell to the ground dead and another clutching his leg, the men on the boat began to fire at the remaining men on the top of the arch. The turret moved its machine gun towards the helicopter and began to rain bullets at it with deadly precision. Any men that managed to escape the helicopter before it went down, he was certain to get answers from them. Not on his watch that they were going to pull this shit on him and get away with it.

"-looks like some kind of secure receiver. Hardware isn't signal compatible. There's gonna be somebody nearby with a detonator for this boss - and maybe other explosives if they want to bring the whole bridge down." The voice over the radio finished. Through the scope of his rifle, Anhur watched as four survivors from the helicopter on top of the arch pulled out of view from sea level and retreated towards the median of the structure. The wreckage of the helicopter - riddled with massive, jagged holes, engulfed in flames and disintegrating into pieces - fell towards the water below.

As soon as the boat reached the base of the column, Anhur stormed over to where the bomb was placed. Looking at where the helicopter was with a few of the remaining survivors jumped out of, he turned to the explosives. The plastic that lined the explosives did, indeed, have a mechanism that could set them off. Over the sound of the screams, alien craft and nearby shots, the bomb would probably be difficult to deactivate without any time.

"We're gonna need to call in pros to dismantle these things boss. Think we either need to get our hands on the detonator or start pulling everything we've got away from the bridge. No telling how many more of these things are lying around." The radio-caller growled with resentment, hands clenched into tightly bound fists from pent up, impotent rage.

Anhur wasted no time in beginning to scale the bridge to where the survivors were. He was already at the top by the time a few of the Penose realized he was not with them and began to follow. Once on the walkway of the bridge, his eyes scanned for any unusual activity, ready to take pursuit of the men who left the helicopter.

He was not left waiting long. The top of the bridge was a traditional box-capped arch, with a roofed maintenance hall in the middle and several meter-boxes for emergency and night lights interpersing the surface - abundant cover. Not even a few moments after he pulled himself up onto the top, two of the survivors from the helicopter rose from behind two power junction boxes, armed with SMGs, and started to throw a hailstorm of bullets in his direction.

On first sight of them, Anhur began towards them, only taking cover once the bullets started to fly towards him. Using the rifle he brought with him, he began to fire back between the break of the bullets. While the weapon was good enough to scare most people, he knew he was more effective if he was up close and personal. Using the rifle in short bursts, he started to move closer towards his targets.

Hearing one of the gunmen swear at his steady and efficient advancements, he saw the two unfortunately wise up and start exchanging rudimentary hand signals - they went from firing at him in tandem and began to alternate bursts. That was not optimal - but they were falling for a predictable blunder. Having already vented at him the moment he had appeared, they had forgotten to conserve their ammunition. At least one of them would be running out of ammo, right about...

He heard one of them audibly swear again in tandem with the sound of an empty magazine clattering to the roof of the bridge.

Smiling at their unfortunate precidament, it was at this moment that he struck. Leaping out of cover, it didn't take long for him to close the gap to the men. He slid low towards the nearest man. Using the heel of his hand, he drove it straight into his stomach. Using the momentum of his burst of speed, he launched himself towards the other. His other hand curled into a fist and rammed towards the other's neck.

His knuckles glanced off the raised edge of the gunman's weapon as they sprung backwards on the spot - though thankfully, their weapon's magazine was empty too. Even as his accomplice collapsed into a writhing ball of terrified anguish and left gasping for breath on the roof of the bridge, the second thug dropped their emptied weapon onto the ground and pull what looked to be a surplus army knife from a holster at his belt. Getting his first good look at both of the men, Anhur could immediately tell they were both amateurs - the one presently pulling a knife on him even looked a little familiar. Both of them were local muscle or mercenaries of some kind, and while some of their gear was evidently on loan - like the machine gun from the helicopter and the SMGs they had been using - everything else about them was shoddy and simply boring.

Anhur let out a sigh of disappointment. "And I thought you guys were going to be a serious threat to my men down below." Shaking his head, he raised the rifle in his possession and shot the knife-wielding mercenary. With the other one incapacitated, he turned to look for the other two men as the Penose started to reach the area.

"Secure him. I want to interrogate him later." As the men followed his orders, he began walking in the direction that he thought the other two were heading. S s

He ducked briefly into the roofed corridor - no sign of them, but - there. At the other end there was a rapelling line tied to the end of a catwalk. Looking down, he could barely see the form of somebody making their descent on it through the obstruction of the catwalk and various criss-crossing girders. To get a decent shot he would have to stand right where the line was tied-

A glint in the dark was his only warning, but just enough of one, as the sniper's bullet whizzed past his head and buried itself in the corridor wall. Hunched in the dark at the opposite end of the corridor was the third survivor, armed with a high-powered rifle and crouching behind an overturned steel locker.

As soon as the shot echoed in the corridor, Anhur ducked behind one of the upright girders. He growled at the predicament, but the person who was on the rapel line was his main target. No doubt the men before and the sniper were there to slow them down so the figure could escape far enough to detonate the explosives.

After a moment passed, the skull-faced man turned the corner, rifle raised. Firing a couple of shots at the steel locker, he began to advance. If the other men were anything to go by, the sniper should also be an amateur mercenary. As he closed the gap to where he got a glimpse of the line, the rifle clicked once to indicate the empty clip. While still out of range for him to hit him with his fists, he was close enough for one thing. Unclipping the rifle, he threw the weapon at the sniper like a hatchet - the mercenary was too distant to really be able to hurt them with it, but Anhur had closed the distance enough that his opponent was forced to raise his rifle to deflect the thrown weapon, momentarily distracting them and putting them off balance - leaving them exposed.

Another opportunity came as Anhur had planned. Grabbing a knife from his belt, he flipped it and threw it towards the sniper as they were exposed. he instantly ran and vaulted over the railing, grabbing the rope as he quickly descended down the rope to catch with the runaway. Said party was close to the ground, but evidently judged that falling would be too debilitating to let them fight back if Anhur followed suit - the mercenary below unsheathed a combat knife from a belt-holster, clamped it between their teeth, and started climbing back up towards Anhur. The skull-faced man saw this and carried on sliding down, feet falling first to hit the mercenary when the gap closed. His target shifted precariously on the line, taking the blow to the chest rather than their head - and immediately let go with one hand to snatch at the knife again and slash at Anhur's leg. He gritted his teeth as the knife bit into his leg, but he closed the distance to get into contact as his free hand palmed the mercenary's head. The mercenary reflexively lashed out to stab directly at Anhur's arm as he did so, but was too late to actually impede contact. Seizing the opportunity of being in close contact, Anhur looked down to see the detonator. With a devilish look in his eyes, he moved his arm out of the way of the incoming knife and ripped the detonator off of the mercenary's belt. With the threat now secured, he looked at the scared mercenary.

"Looks like it's a one way stop for you. But don't worry, we'll make sure that we'll find whoever hired you and -"

The mercenary, evidently uninterested in entertaining a lengthy monologue despite being evidently terrified, proceeded to throw a left hook with his free hand at Anhur's head. Recoiling at the hook, Anhur swung back and kicked out at the mercenary with both feet at their torso. This drove the air straight from the mercenary's gut, causing all four of their limbs to lose grip on the line - sending them plummeting towards the end of it, until the safety catch on their belt caught them, suspending them belly-up and spread-eagle, hanging ten meters off of the surface of the bridge, a teeming throng of civilians shouting in indifferent panic as they looked on. With nothing else left to do, the skull-faced man sighed as he began to quickly ascend to the catwalk.

Halfway back up the line, a sudden chiming sound came from the detonator - looking down to it, Anhur could see that the head of a stop-watch appeared to have been adhered to the side of the detonator, right below the safety cap - and from the look of its digital read, the countdown had just reached zero. Nothing appeared to have come of it though - so perhaps it had just been a margin timer, something there to instruct the holder when they should detonate the bombs -

In the distance, to the Northeast and over the river, there was a chattering sequence of explosions across the Sicily bridge - Anhur watched, suspended from the rapelling line, as the neighboring bridge's support columns, suspension cabel anchors, and central archway were engulfed in luminous bursts of light, followed by occluding hazes of smoke. Distant, keening reverberations of shearing metal filled the air as the whole superstructure slowly collapsed in on itself. The whole process of the bridge falling to pieces and into the water - with thousands of torn up and fiery pieces of debris from vehicles and electronics caught in the blasts falling from its crumbling throughfair like ash from a pyroclastic cloud - took the better part of perhaps forty-five seconds.

Watching on in horror that his assumptions about the helicopter were right but the scale of what happened, Anhur gritted his teeth in anger and began to quickly climbed to the top. Once at the top, he quickly walked over to the dead mercenary, the knife lodged in their throat, and ripped the knife out. His knife now back in hand, he turned and walked back towards the rapelling rope and looked down to see what the man on the line was doing.

Which was evidently nothing - he appeared to be unconscious, or else too exhausted to try and recover from his predicament. Although from the looks of things, some of the bystanders below were already trying to stand on top of the parked vehicles beneath him to try and reach up towards him. Even if he did not move on his own, he would not remain there for long.

Anhur looked on. On the one hand, the bridge was secured from a potential disaster and there was already a mercenary in their possession that the fate of the mercenary down below was inconsequential. On the other hand, he remembered what he saw just a moment ago with the other bridge. Dullahan would not be happy and the people responsible for this would see this as a victory. No, Anhur knew what he needed to do.

He needed to send a message to those responsible.

Turning back to the dead mercenary, his eyes spotted the sniper rifle and ran to grab it. Grabbing another bullet from the dead man's belt, he loaded the rifle and walked back to the edge. Leaning over the edge, he aimed the rifle at the mercenary's chest and fired down below. The shot tore straight through the mercenary's armor and out the other side, losing velocity and tumbling harmlessly onto the ground thereafter - followed almost immediately by a spray of viscera and dripping blood from the dead man's torn up cavity. From street level, the sight must have been terribly poignant and ominous.

Anhur caught sight of several people raising cameras and phones to snap shots of the body where it hung suspended in the air, still dribbling guts from the wound he shot in it. He had a feeling he would be seeing it from their point of view in the next publication that got around - or at least in the next airing of the local news. Satisfied that the message would be seen by those responsible, he returned back to the catwalk and began to walk back to the Penose he left behind, shouldering the sniper rifle as he grabbed his thrown one in the process.

Create-A-Hero: A Superhero RPG Season 3- Shattered Dimensions

Lost Haven
East-Side Tenament Housing

Galen swore as the entire room rumbled and dust poured down from the ceiling in thick curtains as the tell-tale sonic boom of an alien strike-craft streaking by overhead caused the entire tenament to shudder.

"Fucking aliens..." He muttered, steadying himself against the nearby wall before moving on. The housing complex he was in was somewhat run down, but not unusually so for that area of the city. What really stood out was the silence - where normally such an area would be filled with the ambient sound of children, pets, and occasional shouts or loud thuds of shifting furniture, the entire building was eerily quiet.

Although this was almost to be expected in the midst of the alien invasion with nearly everybody with two working brain cells to rub together evacuating from the city, the reign of silence in the tenament was ordinary here. If not for the cleaners who occasionally dusted and swept the hallways and the frequently changed-out lighting, the place could have been mistaken for being empty.

Galen walked down the main hallway at an unhurried pace, softly muttering to himself as he counted down the doors, approaching the one he was looking for. Reaching it, he raised his hand, hesitated for a moment, and then knocked in an unusual sequence - twice, pause, five times rapidly, pause, once, pause, and finally a solid, louder, solitary thump at the very end.

After a short pause, Galen saw the telltale hint of the peep-hole's slide being pulled back as the occupant peered out at him. A moment later, with a series of rattling chunks and clicks, they undid the door's superfluity of locks and cracked it open, leaving the door still secured with a jam and two chains.

"What's the call?" The occupant said, still standing out of view behind the door itself.

"Shipping just picked up the title to a new warehouse in the French Quarter at 5426 Moore." Galen said steadily. "We sent in two guys earlier to sweep through the place and clear out any indigents, maybe give them another place to stay if you catch my drift. Only they never came back."

"Well shit. Anybody we know?"

"Not sure, I didn't get there names, just a call. Been told to get four more guys down there to check the place out."

"The fuck for? If the last two who went there are MIA isn-"

"Boss says it's been happening all over the place. People going missing and the like, all because of the Martians and the evacuation and it keeps going on. And just in case they did get in trouble, that's why we're sending FOUR of you. So get a crew together, get some heat, and go check the place out."

"Blazing?"

"No! For all we know the other two are just laid up in a hospital or buried under rubble or something. If you find anybody bring them in. If you find the other two's corpses do whatever you like."

"Whatever. I've got a paper and pen, what's the new number today?"

"0074-192-9047."

"Alright. Me and the boys will take an early lunch and then head out. I'll set the message for around three or something."

The door shut then, and the occupant began relatching and securing all the locks as Galen mentally scratched the conversation off of his lengthy to-do list and went on his way.

---

888888888888

---

5426 Moore Blvd.
Not Too Much Later...

Before four of the men sent was what most would call a dilapidated shithole of a warehouse. It stood at four stories and what held together its filth stained windows that barely lit the interior even during the day, were long metal walls of now rusted aluminum. A shorter building with thick steel doors jutted from the huge husk that even from here it could be seen that part of the roof had collapsed inward after years of neglect. Why their boss would bother to buy such a piece of crap was beyond many of them. Having not come into contact with anything particular unusual moving towards the warehouse, they approached with the kind of caution one only gets when one is told that two of their fellow goons somehow lost contact in a spooky abandoned warehouse. That is, pistols raised and quietly.

Various points of red pin prick lights focused on these four very unfortunate men. Sending raw sensory input to Little Lo who for all intents and purpose was command, who bounced back an order to "Kill them." Due to previous orders, this would have to be done without the traditional method of latching onto a mans face and detonating so violently that only the back of the skull remained. So, they were restricted primarily to tranquilizers and sliding their metallic feet over the goons' necks until an artery was finally sliced open, or to using lethal injection of Lo's toxic sweat to cause cardiac arrest and possible brain damage. Combat data gathered from the previous encounter suggested the latter course of action.

One drone clambered down the split rusted remains of a storm drain, before suddenly loosening its grip to  lunge onto the back of one startled goons head. He felt a thin prick and the drone leaped off, scurrying into the lower half of the drain.

"The fuck was that?" he shouted.

"The fuck was what Tommy?"

"Something just latched onto my head and pricked me with somethin'!"

Another felt a prick to their ankles, and saw a small spider drone rapidly moving away. He lifted his pistol, fired, and hit it dead on target, splintering the drone to fragmented shards of sparking steel. This didn't stop the last two from getting multiple injections to the wrist, ankle, and calf. This caused them to, within a minute, scream in agony, because in cases of multiple injections, hosts to the toxin experienced painful waves of nerves firing off like christmas trees far, far earlier. They fell to the ground, slowly losing the ability to move, their twitching and spasming movements soon silenced and mouthed screams witnessed by the two soon to not be survivors.

The first who had been injected pulled a burner phone from his jacket. He unfolded it and creased inside was a slip of paper which had the Galen's number on it, which he crumpled and threw away - he had forgotten to throw it away like he should have.

Elsewhere, Galen's own burner phone rang while he was in the middle of a belated lunch inside one of the tenament apartments. Spitting out a hunk of a half-chewed roast sandwich, he dropped the rest of it on the table in front of him and snapped open the phone hurriedly. He was not supposed to receive calls on it, ever, unless it was a life or death emergency - which this presumably was, or else it was going to become one if somebody had called it for shits and giggles.

"Talk to me." He choked out, still partly clearing his mouth of morsels.

Tommy said with some effort, "There were these spider robot things, I think they injected us with some kinda poison? I don't know how long we got, but after we smashed and shot a few, they scattered off back into the warehouse."

"Shit." Galen subvocalized. "Alright, get out of there, go to the harbor clinic, we basically own the place. Break your phone now before you go, remember to get the card too."

"You sure the clinic can deal with this?" Tommy could hear his heart pounding and it felt like it would nearly go through his chest.

His only answer was the clicking sound of Galen hanging up on the other end of the line - and doubtlessly breaking his own phone immediately thereafter as well.

Tommy cursed tossing his phone to the floor and stomping on it, then kicking one of the small sphere bodies of the spiders against the rusted face of the warehouse. Ricky, having been standing by patiently and losing feeling in his left arm, let him have this one. Besides, the robotic freaks had left.

Of course they hadn't. They'd merely crawled through a skylight and clung there, some going inside to drain jars of Lo's toxic sweat and refill their stocks. They moved silently, until the moment they could pounce, focusing on any exposed artery.

Tommy remembered something. That piece of paper, he'd have to find it and rip it up before he went to that harbor clinic. He saw it, lying on worn planks six feet from where he stood. He took a step forward and was nearly brought to the floor by first the pain of infection in both of his ankles posterior tibial arteries, but also a solid impact to the back of his head. This drone rubbed two of its legs together and a arc of electricity jutted between each. It brought this down on his head, which caused his final twitching, spasming collapse, his skin slowly fading to a sickly yellow as the toxin did it's own work.

---

888888888888

---

Not Too Far Away...

Lo flipped through drone camera streams, over and over and over again, making absolutely, deadly sure, that every single thug who had tried to enter what she was quickly realizing she thought of as her territory, was absolutely, one hundred percent, dead. She didn't even feel safe enough to leave her desk.

Little Lo chimed into comms, "Ok, Lo, look, I think that was all of them. I'm guessing they sent four because if two doesn't work, you just send two times the original number. It's how it works. So they're probably going to send eight or something, or maybe get some guys to sort of scope the building. Point is, we have two options."

Lo interrupted, "Yeah, I know, we literally have the same brain. We either leave or we convince them it 100% absolutely isn't worth coming to take this place."

Little Lo added, "That they own, legally. Because they bought it."

Lo scoffed, "Yeah probably with drug and gun trafficking money. They sent armed thugs to check out a low HPI warehouse during an alien invasion. They are absolutely not clean, even if they send cleaners. Can you send more drones over for patrols? Maybe we can catch them and convince them we're something stupid like a mass ai intelligence network."

Little Lo sighed, "Yes, I think I can do that. Also, you mean skynet right?"

Lo said, "Sky what?"

Little lo added, "Wait, you haven't seen Terminator 2?"

"No, definitely not. Saw season 2 episode 13 of the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but only the part where the girl in the white dress is cutting that guys throat open and just keeps going."

"What...no. Ok find a copy, start watching it, skip to about 26:37, that's the part where Arnold Swarzeneger explains to a young John Connor that skynet or whatever took over the future and are sending robots back in time...anyway don't include the time travel part. Just do a hal 9000 impression, add some distortion in the audio, and really jack up the line level. I know you'll figure it out."

Lo, like god intended, pirated a copy of Terminator 2 and watched it with great interest. Little Lo had sent a powerpoint presentation, illustrating how, exactly, she should enjoy several major scenes in the movie. These included the famous bike chase, conveyer belt scene, and the penultimate scene where The Terminator gives a thumbs up as he dissolves in molten metal. Lo had of course barely read this, as it was fairly exhaustive and written with clinical precision. She was worried Little Lo might be diverging a bit too much.

She skipped to the scene at 26:37. Sarah Connor and what she presumes is called The Terminator are mid conversation.

"Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self aware at 2:14 am eastern time august 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."

"Skynet fights back."

"Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in russia."

She rewinds back to scenes where The Terminator is fighting some other Terminator, and thinks that, she's probably got the gist of it. She wanted to watch the rest of the movie later, there was just something about stupid american action movies that she couldn't resist. But, now was not the time. Now all there was to do, was wait.

Create-A-Hero: A Superhero RPG Season 3- Shattered Dimensions

People of Interest

Nailtooth

NAME:
Neil Macintyre

ALIAS:
Nailtooth

SPEECH COLOR:
"Don_t mind _{the t}ee_th."

ALIGNMENT:
Villain

STATUS:
The nominal leader of the city-wide Human Trafficking Network based out of Lost Haven, known as Oubliette.

IDENTITY:
Known underworld quantity, contact, and person of interest. The sort of guy the FBI would be closely investigating if not for the implicit connections he leans on that make his business model possible.

PERSONALITY:
Nailtooth cuts an affable, teddy-bear demeanor that compliments him being built like a bear. He is very quick to lean on and present with his disability and easy-going countenance to make people underestimate him. Underneath the surface, Nailtooth is not a man who gets mad - he gets even. He is therefore notorious for his casual and unaffected behavior when it comes to killing others - he is the type of person to laugh along with a joke made at his expense and buy a round of drinks for everyone in the room, just to shoot the offending party as they raise glasses. Easily liked by most of the people he meets up until he sends them running with casual acts of egregious and disproportionate violence, he has built up a cult of personality around him by people in awe of his effortless combined charm and ruthlessness - whilst everyone else who knows about him keeps a wide berth. While this behavior has afforded Nailtooth with a reputation as a remorseless, unhinged killer, Nailtooth is a generous and fast friend to those who can navigate the mine field of his temperament - a group of people largely comprising other lunatics and serial killers.

OUTFIT:
Nailtooth wears a standard, irregular assortment of civilian attire. However, he is known to regularly wear a custom-tailored flight jacket with a fur inner-lining and collar. He also has a somewhat hard to see piercing, reminiscent of a nail-head, that juts from the bottom of his jaw.

ORIGIN:

The Injury

A story Nailtooth is pleased to share with his inner circle is the story of how he got his characteristic injury and dentures. As the story goes, he used to be another faceless, nameless goon in the private army of some European gang, up until he annoyed his boss a little more than was advisable. The man shot Neil through the floor of his jaw with a nailgun, piercing through the base of his mouth, through his tongue, and partially up into the roof as well - permanently impairing his speech, and serving as the root cause of a severe infection that would require Neil to have major reconstructive surgery.

Reportedly, this unknown boss (Nailtooth is remarkably coy when it comes to identifying them) then made the unprecedented decision of entrusting Neil with greater responsibilities upon his recovery. Wanted already in four different countries, Neil had little recourse and a pressing desire to continue breathing - and impressed his employer with his commitment in spite of his injury and its source, using his disability to charm and intimidate rivals, deter investigation, and trick enemies into underestimating him. As time passed, the urban legend of the man who had a nailhead stuck through the bottom of his jaw who ruled the streets began to grow and spread.

("I_ts ac_tuall_y jus_t a pier_cing I ha_d ma_de _spe_cial." He has been known to confide to those close to him.)

Years later, when it seemed like Neil might potentially rise to become the gang's second in command, he received a payoff from the boss and was told, "Fuck off and make a name for yourself somewhere else. You're clearly you're own man now."

When asked whether Nailtooth ever made something out of his old boss, he is just known to give an easy smile with his chrome-plated dentures and casually change the topic.

TYPE:
Normal - Unpowered, Baseline Human

SCALE:
City

CAPABILITIES & EQUIPMENT:

• VIP Status

Nailtooth is well connected and has greased quite a few palms to make Oubliette possible. He knows the names of every Magistrate and Judge in the city and where their children go to school. He has a pack of dirty cops and unscrupulous lawyers on speed dial, and investigations by the FBI against him and Oubliette have a history of being 'recalled and reassigned.' Barring outright and egregious exposure of his crimes, trying to pin and stick anything to him legally is a forlorn hope. Moreover, several dangerous individuals benefit substantially from his business and make it their business to keep him safe. Even starting trouble in his general vicinity can result in a number of hitmen erupting out of the woodwork to protect their interests.

• Polychrome Psyche

Nailtooth is hard to read and gauge, even telepathically. He demonstrates zero behavioral variation when playing cards or shooting somebody in the back, and his anger is glacier-cold and nearly imperceptible. In particular, it is difficult to tell whether or not he is lying, given how ambivalent and unreliable his current mental state is as an indicator of what he actually intends to do.

• Overtime Overkill

Nailtooth has no regular assortment of weaponry he prefers - in his own places of business and safehouses he has veritable armories, and is not afraid to use them to the fullest extent possible. He has zero compunction about using a grenade launcher when a knife could get the job done, and he has little issue with escalating a situation by calling in for backup with specialized weaponry if need be.

ATTRIBUTES:

Height: 1.98 Meters, though with a significant hunch that makes him look shorter.
Weight: 140 Kilograms, quite a lot of it muscle.
Strength: Exceptional but Human strength. He could nearly pass for a professional strongman.
Mobility: Standard.
Intelligence: Standard.
Fighting Skill: Untrained, but brutally strong and with zero inhibitions.

RESOURCES:
Nailtooth is the leader of a city-wide Human Trafficking Network known as Oubliette. He has bodyguards, custom-tooled weaponry, hitmen and dirty cops on speed-dial, and even access to a few esoteric trinkets. He also has deep pockets - he would not make the fortune 500, but he could bid earnestly at upscale auctions.

WEAKNESSES:
Nailtooth is merely Human. His power is manifest in affluence, influence, and people he has under his thumb.

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:

• Tribal Mountebank - Professional killer apparently on Nailtooth's pay.
• Charis - Powered muscle and indentured servant of Oubliette and therefore Nailtooth, raised from a young age as a criminal soldier.

Tribal Mountebank

NAME:
Tribal Mountebank

ALIAS:
N/A

SPEECH COLOR:
"Hello there, my newest darling."

ALIGNMENT:
Villain

STATUS:
A professional killer within Oubliette.

IDENTITY:
Tribal is a relative unknown. He is a common fixture of Nailtooth's coterie but nobody has ever been able to positively determine what his exact responsibilities within Oubliette are. It is openly speculated by other members of Oubliette that he's a wetworker, but even within the organization it is uncertain.

PERSONALITY:
Tribal is apparently a sap at heart. He is quiet, polite, and fond of frequent and elaborate romantic gestures. A shameless flirt and apparent lech, he always has a new sweetheart or supposed soul mate every other month that he has swept up into some whirlwind romance - whether they be willing or coerced victums, or otherwise. Regardless of their interest, after a time they are consequently never seen again. An extremely private man except with those he is presently courting, few have any lingering interest in determining what his true demeanor is like, lest they risk vanishing into thin air under mysterious circumstances one day. He does not speak much and always has an easy smirk on his face.

OUTFIT:
Tribal wears an irregular assortment of ordinary civilian attire, usually comprising fine silk shirts and tailored slacks along with a full-length dark coat. Less immediately evident is the full-coverage, articulated ballistic armor he wears underneath his everyday wear.

ORIGIN:

The Man Who Was Not There

Tribal Mountebank does not exist. He is not a citizen of any country, has no criminal record, and is only known of in a small circle of enforcement agencies due to his constant proximity and association with Nailtooth. He has no apparent dayjob, no bank account, pays no taxes or bills, and seemingly has no permanent address. Insofar as can be determined, Tribal Mountebank just magically appeared out of thin air on day.

Surveillance and photography depicting Tribal date back only six years, with no trace of him prior - leading some to speculate he is another one of Oubliette's indentured unpersons, trained and intended to be a killer ghost in the system from a young age - that he does in fact have an identity, but that it is lost in the churning sea of historical missing persons who were never found.

TYPE:
Normal - Unpowered, Baseline Human

SCALE:
City

CAPABILITIES & EQUIPMENT:

• Advanced Ballistic Armor

Tribal wears a trim, next-generation full-body coverage suit of articulated ballistic armor made from non-Newtonian reactive fibers and ceramics underneath his everyday clothes. The material is light and flexible, but momentarily strengthens in response to impressed force. It is rated to stop convention small-arms munitions, is completely insulated against electrical shocks, and is fire-retardant. The suit's exotic material makeup is extremely susceptible to chemical wear, and is known to completely immobilize the wearer for several seconds when subjected to a full-body shockwave, such as from an explosive. Like traditional protective suits, the reactive materials have reduced efficacy over time when the same area is exposed to repeated instances of force and trauma. Finally, the suit has sacrificed mass and bulk in order to achieve a slim profile, and cannot stand up to especially violent impacts such as from high-velocity, armor piercing munitions. Such weapons still do not reliably kill through the suit, but will usually sunder most of the contact-site material as well as rupture and degrade the surrounding materials to the point of uselessness.

• Blackout Predator

Other than the sound of his beating heart, Tribal can walk and even run (a slow run - not a full-on sprint) so silently that he is completely imperceptible to standard Human hearing even at point blank range. He also has training that allows him to assemble and disassemble weaponry or operate machinery by feel while blinded or in complete darkness, as well as to navigate most environments and locate and combat hostiles under similar conditions.

• Abyssal Mind

Tribal's mental state, if telepathically apprised, shows signs of deliberately conditioned maladaptive schemas that have encoded most of his memories and thoughts with a surreal and paradoxical filter of warped thought. Additionally, his emotional spectrum is evidently stunted with a limited range - the only things he seems capable of feeling are fear, anxiety, ennui, apathy, and lust. His projected demeanor is an evident front.

• Marksman

Tribal is an accomplished Marksman, capable of reliably hitting targets with reflexive snap-shots at ranges in excess of 2 kilometers while standing - assuming he is familiar and comfortable with the rifle being used.

• Swordsman

While Tribal has advanced training in hand to hand combat inclusive of multiple martial disciplines, his true capabilities lie elsewhere. Although he rarely has excuse to exercise his talent, Tribal has exceptional swordsmanship skills, blending multiple blade styles including Fencing, Kendo, Knife-Fighting and HEMA. He rarely carries any actual swords with him due to them being difficult to conceal, but he frequently carries knives and is practiced at facing victims armed with melee weapons in turn.

• Pocket Guillotine

Tribal's favored weapon is an unconventional blade called the Pocket Guillotine, which resembles a box-cutter. The handle is loaded with single-use extending blade cartridges. In operation, the cartridge extends a mechanically collapsed molecular blade at high-speed whenever the handle is triggered, which is immediately electrified and super-heated. The heat and electrical charge that shoots up the length of the blade while it extends is so potent that it briefly causes the edge to wreath itself in a plume of ionized plasma. While rated to cut through steel girders almost effortlessly, the materials the blades are made from cannot withstand the coursing energies for more than half a second at most - and even if they could, the capacitor built into each cartridge would not be able to sustain the discharge of energy. Each blade extended from the handle in this fashion invariably disintegrates half a second after extension, and thereafter the handle has to be loaded with a new cartridge. It should thus come as little surprise that Tribal largely uses the Pocket Guillotine in conjunction with his Iado training to take victims by surprise, killing them in a single stroke before they can even react, with the murder weapon flash-vaporizing any spilled blood, cauterizing the injuries, and then disintegrating after the fact.

ATTRIBUTES:

Height: 1.83 Meters
Weight: 81 Kilograms
Strength: Honed but Human strength. A professional wrestler could overpower him.
Mobility: Wired Flesh and Bones. Has reflexive agility is close to the Human pinnacle.
Intelligence: Standard
Fighting Skill: Competent hand-to-hand combatant, exceptional melee capability with bladed weapons, exceptional marksman capable of long-distance reflexive snap-shots with rifles.

RESOURCES:
Tribal has implicit access to Oubliette's armories as a member, but his exotic armor and weaponry betray access to a more advanced and sophisticated source of munitions and equipment that he collects at what appear to be prearranged dead-drops. He clearly cannot replace his preferred loadout overnight, but he has otherwise rapid access to replacements.

Weaknesses:
Tribal, behind his next-generation armor, exotic weaponry and honed reflexes, is just a man - and even his armor does not allow him to outright ignore conventional weapons.

Supporting Characters:

• Nailtooth (Neil Macintyre) - The leader of Oubliette, and presumably Tribal's employer.
• Charis - A victim of Oubliette turned powered child soldier and professional muscle for the organization.

Charis

NAME:
Charis

ALIAS:
N/A

SPEECH COLOR
"Hey there, Coffin Stuffer."

ALIGNMENT:
Villain

IDENTITY:
Unknown Persona Non Grata. She would be subject to deportation if only anybody knew her country of origin.

PERSONALITY:
Off-work, Charis can nearly approximate a normal, if brusque and abrasive routine and behavior. During work, which she enjoys immensely, her brutality and psychotically perverse indulgence of violence emerges. Having been raised and trained for her current occupation and having no legitimate life to fall back on otherwise, it is no surprise that she has emotionally built herself up in the context of her employment, where she enjoys the most power and personal freedom. In the quiet hours of her free time, when endeavoring to blend in with a society she can never truly join, she can adopt a façade of normalcy - with evident cracks and hints as to her true nature.

OUTFIT:
N/A - Wears a standard unfixed assortment of civilian clothing.

ORIGIN:

The Prize Panther

Charis was born with her powers, which she was capable of using reflexively even from a young age - which was what attracted the attention of her abductors, who sold her to a trafficking network known as Oubliette that shipped her overseas, shut inside a fire-suit locker. Destined to be sold as either a child soldier in some third world country or as a lab rat, she was spared such a fate when it was decided the trafficking business would benefit from having cultivated 'product' to act as living exemplars of what could be offered to those with the necessary wealth and moral flexibility. Charis was trained from a young age to act an an enforcer and muscle for Oubliette, and received a diverse amount of training in martial arts and the use of various weapons. She was also educated in battlefield tactics, bodyguarding, security, and accounting - affording her a crooked, practical education devoid of more nuanced academic merit. To this day she continues to work for Oubliette as an undocumented person, with no civilian cover, having been conditioned to be emotionally invested in her work and to have no other practical recourse.

SCALE:
City

TYPE:
Kinetic Energy

CAPABILITIES & EQUIPMENT:

• Power: Kinetic Modulation

  Charis can accelerate and decelerate any kinetic force in proximity to herself to a degree proportional to its velocity and current delta V. The higher an affected force's velocity, the greater the effect can be in either direction, and forces already accelerating are easier to accelerate, while forces already decelerating are easier to decelerate.
  
  The range of this ability is effective within a three meter radius of Charis and must be consciously maintained, in addition to being reflex-dependent. A bullet can still hit her just fine if she is not maintaining the field, especially if she is caught unaware. While the field is up however, it can act as a powerful pseudo-shield.
  
  Although Charis can maintain the field indefinitely with concentration, breaks and distractions to her focus will prevent its ongoing use. As a result she often uses it in short, flickering bursts, especially during pitched combat where she often has to pay attention to several other things at once. The field is also uniform in effect - it either accelerates or decelerates everything moving through it, not both. The upper limit of its effect is also completely divorced from the concepts of mass, gravity, inertia, and momentum, meaning objects like falling steel girders, meteors, catapult boulders, and other large, heavy objects are still likely to kill her even after passing through her field. Its effect is most powerful against small objects with relatively low mass, such as bullets. It is most effective against fields of energy with high amounts of directed force but little coherent mass. Naturally, it barely works at all on slowly moving objects, and not at all on stationary objects.
  
  The practical uses of this field include slowing down bullets to less-than-lethal velocities, or accelerating projectiles to give them more stopping power. She can dampen blows in melee combat while increasing the impact of her own, run faster and jump further or higher, fall at feather-speed, and can ruin a Speedster's day by having her entire personal space act as an abrupt tripwire.

• Ballistic Armor

Charis sports some sleek-looking ballistic armor (not the pictured individual). She does not wear it at all times and is intended to act as supplemental protection on top of her power. It is unpowered and mundane beyond its clearly sophisticated craftsmanship.

• Bloodmist Pistol

Charis' weapon of choice is a custom-made hand-pistol. It fires shotgun-spread gas-propelled flechettes in 12-round bursts. The pistol has a built-in intake and motor that allows it to compress oxygen into an integral canister, which is mixed with hydrogen from ampules in the vane of each flechette and then ignited for the weapon discharge. Both the weapon and its ammunition, due to their exotic designs, doubtlessly originate from a specific supplier. On top of the pistol having an integral suppressor, the fired flechettes are subsonic munitions, making the weapon almost soundless in operation. Charis can also accelerate flechettes after they have left the barrel, past the sound barrier while still producing a reduced acoustic report. It is an extraordinarily messy weapon that can reduce unarmored targets to strewn heaps of messy viscera, and it has the benefit of being able to penetrate through traditional ballistic and Kevlar vests, although notedly it has difficulty penetrating solid ceramics and metallic armor if the flechettes are not accelerated through Charis' field.

• CollaBo

Charis possesses a collapsible Bo-staff. She does not always carry it with her since even when collapsed, it is somewhat difficult to readily conceal.

ATTRIBUTES:

Height: 1.77 Meters
Weight: 72 KG
Strength: Human Standard
Mobility: Human Standard
Intelligence: Substandard academic knowledge - never attended school. Above average practical intelligence.
Fighting Skill: Exceptional martial artist with specialized training in hand to hand combat and with multiple weapons.

RESOURCES:
Numerous contacts in the criminal underworld, ready access to slush funds and illicit weaponry in Oubliette's armory, with the means to procure exotic weaponry and equipment with time.

Weaknesses: Charis' power does not alter her baseline physiology, leaving her effectively identical to a baseline Human in terms of strength and resilience. Due to never having attended school, she is largely ignorant of a large amount of otherwise everyday, academic information.

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:

• Nailtooth - The leader of Oubliette, Charis' nominal sort-of employer.
• Tribal Mountebank - A professional killer who possibly works for Nailtooth.

The Wailer

NAME:
Tracy Guiomar

Alias:
The Wailer

SPEECH:
"I do not have the time or nerves for your drama right this second, ok?"

ALIGNMENT:
Unaligned

IDENTITY:
Has been listed as legally dead for more than six years.

PERSONALITY:
Tracy Guiomar is the proverbial man on a mission, if said man was somewhat of a coward and had crippling anxiety. He is most generously described as energetic and vigilant and most accurately described as being twitchy and paranoid. He bluffs frequently and often, and instantly turns into a bootlicker if that fails. In general he behaves as though he has a proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over him at all times - he does not want to do what he is doing but is compelled by do-or-die circumstances. He is of a dour and melancholy disposition, distant and terse, as well as risk and violence averse. When cornered or believing he has no alternative however, he is capable of the most desperate of actions...

OUTFIT:
Irregular assortment of worn civilian clothing.

ORIGIN:

A Wailing Specter, Lost at Sea

Tracy Guiomar was declared missing, presumed dead more than six years ago when the German planet-class naval research vessel, the Valknut, was lost at sea amidst an oceanic storm. At the time he was nothing more than an accountant being shipped overseas to a new desk job as a corporate liason in Europe. He was declared dead shortly thereafter, along with the rest of the crew and passengers aboard the Valknut - but now, he has seemingly returned from the dead. He is a paradoxical figure - dressed in rags, but sporting exotic weaponry and unusual, valuable cargo. Desperate and driven by mysterious necessities, woe be to those that awaken the terrible, earth-sundering power housed within him.

POWER:
Street => Escalates to City

TYPE:
Resonant Energy

CAPAIBILITES & EQUIPMENT:

• Thespian Education

Tracy has a formal education as an actor - and though that proverbial ship has sailed in his life, his ability to improvise and project his presence and demeanor in a room have served in well since those days. Tracy can adopt a wide variety of roles and project convincing emotional and characteristic airs - assuming he does not break down and panic mid-role.

• The Leaden Spear

  Tracy carries what looks to be an utterly unique, hand-tooled machine pistol. Engraved on its barrel is the designation: 'Leaden Spear Mk. II' . While resembling a conventional machine pistol, it has no slide, ejection port, or safety, and its hammer is nonfunctional and possibly present purely for aesthetic purposes or else to assist with sighting. The pistol fires singularly unique .44 caliber rounds with unconventional integral casing in 12-round magazines. Each bullet houses a hollow chamber with gyroscopic stabilizers and a resonant acoustic emitter. The casing itself, instead of housing solid propellant, appear to be hollow heat-sink chambers lined with traces of nuclear isomers, that is launched from the barrel along with the bullet itself, and how exactly they are fired remains a mystery. Each shot is utterly silent despite the absence of a suppressor, while the rounds themselves are subsonic.
  
  Upon impact with a target, the interior gyroscope in each bullet calibrates the resonance emitter inside of the bullet, which then releases a forward-facing, cone-shaped resonant shockwave of force that degrades the structural cohesion of the impact site. Each bullet uses a seemingly and impossibly intricate combination of gyroscopic force and structural feedback from the deformation of the bullet's shell to precisely calibrate the necessary resonant frequency needed, allowing each bullet to severely weaken and disintegrate various physical substances from concrete, to ballistic vests, chunks of flesh and bone, and even solid titanium in a small radius around the impact site.
  
  The bullet's shell then invariably crumbles and hardens around the acoustic emitter, which lodges inside the target and begins to emit a continuous, resonant frequency specifically attuned to Human nervous tissue and gray matter. In a number of surviving victims shot by one of these bullets where the projectiles were not promptly removed, acute onsets of spongiform encephalitis and necrosis ensued, leading to brain damage, hemorrhaging, and death. This effect manifests irregularly and not at all in certain victims, and possibly correlates in likelihood to the number of bullets lodged inside the body at once. What is consistent between victims however, is the auditory sensation of a wailing, keening shriek akin to physically and mentally crippling tinnitus that wracks the body while a bullet is lodged inside a wound - or even while simply holding a bullet directly in contact with skin. Victims who survive being shot are almost universally shortly crippled and left writhing in agony from the unbearable wailing resonating within their body.
  
  The bullets fired from the pistol are impossibly intricate in design, and have possibly all been hand-crafted - though given how many magazines Tracy carries with him, they either had too much time on their hands or there is an automated machining table churning the stuff out somewhere. Each individual bullet would cost more than $3000 apiece to have custom-made just from the materials used, let alone the impossible hardware built into each bullet shell and casing. Given Tracy himself is evidently a baseline Human, how exactly he got his hands on them is a mystery.

• Conspicuous Duffel

Tracy carries with him a duffel-bag heaped full of magazine reloads for the Leaden Spear. Being searched or caught with these would definitely make things awkward.

• The Tamper-Proof Case

  The briefcase looks to be made of polished, gleaming chrome. It has no hinges that you can see, both its halves appear to be adhered to each other without any external fixtures. Both halves are smooth with rounded edges, and look to have been molded as single whole pieces. The only evidence they even come apart is a single thin seam separating them bilaterally, with faintly raised edges where the two halves come together. The seam itself is so thin and finely pressed together, it is actually hard to tell it is there. If your attention were not specifically drawn to it by the raised edges on either side of it, it could be easily overlooked.
  
  Set in the middle of one of the halves' sides is what must be the locking mechanism - some kind of round display panel and tactile interface the size of a palm. It displays what looks to you to be a bog-standard RGB color wheel, with extremes around the edges and white towards the center. Right in the middle of the wheel is a raised dial, with a red arrow indicating that it can be twisted along its side, and an inscription of tiny red lettering on the top that says 'Press Me.' A second, smaller display panel the size of a small LED above the color wheel seems to display the current color selected.
  
  On the other side of the case is a small plaque engraved with a message.
  
  

  Hello! I am a tamper-proof case!
  
  I have an equivalent explosive yield of thirty-six (36) kilograms of TNT!
  
  I have no signal compatible hardware, you cannot hack me!
  
  I am hardened against ionizing radiation, you cannot degrade me!
  
  I am water and airtight, you cannot flood me with any liquid or gas!
  
  If you attempt to breach my exterior, I will explode!
  
  If you attempt to insert any object into my seam, I will explode!
  
  If you attempt to interface with my locking mechanism, I will explode!
  
  If you attempt to scan my interior, I will explode!
  
  If my integral thermometer raises or lowers more than a hundred degrees past room temperature, I will explode!
  
  If you drop me on the ground accidentally I will forgive you, but if you drop me from a high place I will explode!
  
  If I am opened by any means without selecting the right color via the locking mechanism, I will explode!
  
  I can only be opened by using the locking mechanism to select the correct color, and pressing the button!
  
  If you press the button with the wrong color selected, I will not explode, but you will still regret it!
  
  Whatever could be inside me? The possibilities are tantalizing! Dream of me when you are sleeping!

  Tamper-Proof Case

• The Wailer's Cry

  Whenever the Tamper-Proof case is taken more than five meters away from Tracy, the surgically installed hardware inside his skull activates. This creates an audible, keening, wailing shriek that perpetually reverberates inside of Tracy's body, growing and crowning in intensity when Tracy is facing in the direction of the case and as he comes back into proximity of it, until he returns within ten meters, at which point the device shuts off. At a distance of more than a kilometer the wailing is barely perceptible to those around Tracy, even though to him it will have all the intensity of an underworld symphonic orchestra. Within a kilometer, the wailing sound becomes drastically more and more audible to those in the area, escalating from the volume of a tornado siren, then an air-raid siren, and eventually becoming acutely painful to listen to.
  
  During this period, Tracy will also be surrounded by a one-meter thick bubble of auditory occlusion, completely muffling and muting most sounds originating from outside the area of effect. The field of sonic occlusion is so powerful is actually slows and retards the passage of physical objects, causing most projectiles and attacks to drastically slow and lose power as they move through it.
  
  Also during this period, by pressing on the metal pad seated in the roof of his mouth Tracy can cause the device to unleash a devastating shockwave of sonic energy in a sphere around him, powerful enough to make concrete and steel disintegrate within a ten meter range and completely repelling and destroying most ordinary physical projectiles, dispersing most gasses, and is even capable of extinguishing fires.
  
  Both the occluding field as well as the shockwave become inactive while Tracy is within a five meter range of the Tamper-Proof Case. The physical toll exacted on Tracy's body by the unceasing sonic resonance coursing through him, the flood with adrenaline and cortisol and the resulting lack of sleep, likely means each instance of the device activating takes a year or more off of Tracy's life expectancy.
  
  If Tracy's vitals flatline for more than five minutes, the device will explode with an equivalent explosive yield of thirty-six kilograms of TNT.

ATTRIBUTES:

Height: 1.77 Meters
Weight: 52 kg
Strength: Frail due to malnourishment.
Mobility: Borderline superhuman nervous reflex and reaction time.
Intelligence: Standard.
Fighting Skill: Nonexistent.

WEAKNESSES:
Tracy is a baseline Human whenever within five meters of the Tamper-Proof Case with all the vulnerabilities that entails. When more than five meters away from the Tamper-Proof Case, the occluding field that surrounds him and the sonic shockwave he becomes capable of unleashing make him substantially more dangerous and resilient, but he will still effectively be a baseline Human behind the occluding field. Bladed melee weapons, oxygen deprivation, darkness, and a variety of other approaches will remain effective. Additionally, Tracy is both violence and risk-averse under most circumstances, and if bluffing his way through the opposition does not work he has a tendency to fall back onto begging and bootlicking before resorting to actual conflict.

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:

• The Technician - The mysterious individual who tortured Tracy, and ostensibly designed and installed the sonic hardware inside of his skull, as well as the Mk. II Leaden Spear.

Groups of Interest

Oubliette

NAME:
Oubliette

ALIGNMENT:
Villainous

RENOWN:
Known underworld element. Not commonly known of in Civilian circles.

ICONOGRAPHY:
N/A

UNIFORMS:
N/A

AGENDA:
Oubliette is a Human Trafficking Network. Their aims are to obtain, transport, and sell people as prisoners and slaves to anybody with deep enough pockets and few morals. Beyond that they care mostly about establishing territory, asserting influence, and control.

ORIGIN:
Oubliette rose to prominence perhaps twelve years ago when its leader, Neil Macintyre, arrived in Lost Haven and managed to unify the disparate gangs and cliques otherwise relegated to small-scale kidnapping and extortion and smuggling by buying out their leadership. Pulling on criminal contacts from Europe, he was able to establish illicit overseas trade routes that allowed Oubliette to stick its foot in the door and start turning a profit, and making a name for itself as the organization to go to for trafficking of live people in Lost Haven. Even if they have nothing to do with undocumented and missing persons being moved through Lost Haven, they receive a cut and provide logistical support for each deal as a way of maintaining and asserting their control over the market within the city. Since their paltry beginnings, Oubliette has grown into a well-connected and prosperous criminal kingdom within the city.

TYPE RANGE:
Oubliette 'procures' and 'ships' a diverse number of victims, including powered individuals with a wide range of capabilities. Oubliette's meta-range thus encompasses everything save for the Mystical and outright Supernatural.

SCALE:
City

MEMBERSHIP:

• Nailtooth - Founder and leader.
• Charis - Victim of Oubliette, raised as a child soldier to be Oubliette's professional muscle and living model product.
• Tribal Mountebank - A professional killer. More associated directly with Nailtooth than with Oubliette specifically.
• Several hundred various individuals - muscles, bookies, faces, etcetera - living in and around Lost Haven and in odd spots overseas.

INFLUENCE:
Oubliette has a number of useful local connections, including with the local police department as well as the Courts. They know where powerful people live and where their children go to school. They have a number of hitmen and cleaners on standby, dirty cops on their pay, and even have enough clout to have Federal investigations 'recalled and reassigned.' Combined with their dealings with other criminal enterprises, within Lost Haven they are difficult to deal with and root out - and dangerous to cross.

RESOURCES:

• Harborfront Warehouses - Warehouses near shipping and loading areas where the workers and supervisors are on the take.
• Safehouses - More than a dozen secure and discreet sites where Oubliette keeps product, armories, reserve cash, and isolated systems where they manufacture and process forged documents.
• Tenancies - Oubliette owns a sprinkling of entirely legitimate tenancy housing around the city. They use this to house a number of their men, employees, and contractors - and occasionally move product through them as well.

Wishing Well

NAME:
Wishing Well

ALIGNMENT:
Villainous

RENOWN:
Obscure Urban Legend/Unheard Of outside of Intelligence Circles

ICONOGRAPHY:
A water well with a noose where the bucket and chain should be.

UNIFORMS:
Non-Newtonian Next-Generation Ballistic Armor with a trim profile. Identifying insignia detailed on the back, breast, and shoulder.

AGENDA:
Wishing Well is an obscure terrorist agency best known for its obscurity. Their agenda is completely unknown. Refer to their Interpol Dossier.

ORIGIN:
Unknown.

TYPE RANGE:
Wishing Well makes predominant use of baseline Humans with a small number of powered assets, though the exact range is unknown.

SCALE:
World

MEMBERSHIP:
Unknown. Interpol speculates there are at least five distinct and active cells of between four and a dozen members each presently.

INFLUENCE:
Little to none. The telltale sign of Wishing Well's influence inside of another agency is a pattern of destructive behavior followed by complete collapse. Interpol speculates they have little interest in asserting control over external agencies.

RESOURCES:
Unknown, although Interpol's analysis indicates they may have sophisticated manufacturing capabilities that enable them to be self-sufficient and resupply themselves with advanced, military hardware regularly.

Interpol Dossier on Wishing Well

Wishing Well is a collection of affiliated but independent terrorist cells which are speculated to have been active for approximately twelve years as of this date. They are suspected of perpetrating upwards of hundreds of separate, discrete terror actions inclusive of assassination, asset theft, bombing, communications tampering, false-flag operations, infiltration, kidnapping, sabotage, and numerous lesser disruptive actions across the entire world and all seven continents, including Antarctica (refer to action report 12TA871155).

Wishing Well's ideological cause, nation/s of origin, and approximate membership remain unknown to this day - Wishing Well operatives have been captured alive in the past, but they operate in disparate, clandestine cells that maintain tight and stringent operational security that precludes most efforts to discern their agenda. It is speculated that Wishing Well operates using a three-layered hierarchy. The first being Wishing Well's core members, the only individuals in regular communication with other cells and core members, who ultimately define and direct the organization as a whole and who instruct and delegate tasks to all members in the second layer. The second layer is an intermediate and small collection of Wishing Well's standard operatives, numbering perhaps between four and twelve in each cell, possessing advanced combat training with multiple weapons and martial disciplines and a zealous dedication. These operatives are often given delegated instructions by Wishing Well's core members and expected to accomplish them independently and without explanation beyond simplified success and failure parameters. The third, bottom layer is made up of temporary and disposable muscle usually comprised of local criminal elements, commonly dealt with indirectly by the second layer and unaware of the true nature or identity of their employers.

Due to either the innate flexibility or lack of an ideological core, Wishing Well operatives appear capable of assuming and accurately depicting various faiths, beliefs, and political views when necessary for operational security, without apparent discrimination or particularity except as required by operational security. The aims of their terrorist activities are obscure; they never announce or claim responsibility for any given act, and suspected Wishing Well terrorist actions are also nondiscriminatory and lacking in particularity. They are suspected of having targeted a diversity of other groups of interest including other terrorist agencies, and their true aims are difficult to discern. Their terrorist activities appear to coincide with asset theft that is either involved or adjacent to the activities themselves, and may be theft of convenience or else in furtherance of some obscure design.

To date, the following assets are suspected of having been stolen by Wishing Well, confirmed by way of capture and interrogation of at least one operative involved with each theft. This list is nonexhaustive.

-Industrial-grade nanolathes & extruder components (see action report 12TA84430).
-Multiple NM matrix containment array components (see action report 12TA851129).
-Multiple military and industrial-rated rectenna manifold components (see action report 12TA851163).
-One Naval Destroyer of the UN Peacekeeping Navy (see action report 12TA871155).
-Multiple ansible system components (see action report 12TA89269).
-Multiple ansible encryption & decryption system components (see action report 12TA90749).

As should be apparent, Wishing Well asset theft operations are highly sophisticated and organized, and are usually successfully despite location, number of opposing agents, and presence of security measures. They appear familiar and well-versed in the expeditious and covert transportation of advanced machinery and electronics. During the affairs of 12TA90749, Wishing Well revealed an involved familiarity with UN Peacekeeping Navy protocol and security; the stolen Destroyer assumed a heading that did not match what was reported to satellite-relayed traffic control. Its black-box, emergency transmitters, and asset-denial systems all simultaneously shut-down less than two hours after departure and prior to emergency alerts being raised. The vessel failed to arrive at its expected destination point, vanishing from GPS monitoring after passing through an oceanic storm. Initially thought to have been lost at sea, the Destroyer's removed name plate was later mailed to Interpol HQ in Lyons, France. Considered an unsolved mystery for more than four years, Wishing Well's involvement with the Destroyer's theft was revealed during the enhanced interrogation of a captured operative who expired shortly after revealing they had been personally present at the time.

The various forms of technology and systems assets present amongst the vessel's hardware exceed the breadth of this dossier, but suspected Wishing Well asset theft activity has not appeared to deviate in interest from hardware and systems inclusive of those present in the stolen vessel. This would suggest that Wishing Well may not have been interested in the ship itself, may have a greater need for certain materials than the Destroyer could supply, or that the operation was conducted of convenience rather than necessity. It also suggests that Wishing Well possesses technology, technical knowledge, and expertise that is at least equal to that of the UN Peacekeeping Navy in terms of quality if not quantity.

Specific knowledge of Wishing Well, inclusive of its name, is known of only due to careful dragnet analysis of online forum topics, questioning of known third-layer Wishing Well accomplices, and a single near-successful infiltration attempt of a Wishing Well cell. Despite Wishing Well's clandestine nature, growing awareness of its existence amongst the international intelligence community coupled with frequent contact between Wishing Well operatives and local criminal elements has resulted in the proliferation of their existence as something approaching an underworld urban legend. Few criminal agencies accept or are aware of the existence of Wishing Well, and those that do inevitably have a decided lack of interest beyond possible interference with their own activities. Only the most fanatical of criminal elements, namely other terrorist organizations, commonly afford Wishing Well any serious consideration due in part to Wishing Well's nondiscriminate tendency to attack and disrupt other terrorist organizations. The most coherent and credible digital references to Wishing Well available take the form of black-ops urban legends and myths posted on a variety of niche online forum communities, with little in the way of citation or evidence beyond hearsay, presenting Wishing Well as figurative bogeymen akin to the Illuminati.

Local criminal elements employed by Wishing Well rarely have direct contact with their operatives, though it is not unknown for operatives to co-opt criminal leadership elements or else pose as them, and thus directly interact in a limited capacity with local underworld elements. Commonly, such coopted or suborned criminal elements will be unaware of the true affiliation of such operatives. Analysis into the possible number of criminal agencies that might secretly be controlled by Wishing Well has concluded that their agenda is far too erratic and unstable for such a trend to be likely; most if not all criminal agencies co-opted or suborned by Wishing Well inevitably demonstrate erratic activity inevitably leading to their collapse. Wishing Well has little evident desire to infiltrate and control other organizations in the long term.

Approximately four years ago, an Interpol asset in the form of a young war-orphan was approached by a Wishing Well operative who entered into a mentorship relation with the asset, during which they appeared to be appraising the asset's suitability for recruitment. During this period, the suspected operative divulged a number of surreal oral stories (refer to database entries: International Folklore; Four Thieves, Grave Digger, Wishing Well), and particular lines of questioning as to the asset's beliefs and desires, as well as arranging several confrontational scenarios and encounters without the asset's knowledge. This is all believed to have been part of an elaborate and obscure screening process, which ultimately proved to be effective. The operative abruptly abandoned the asset and attempted to flee the region some time after contact, requiring immediate intervention of discretely arranged assets to intercept. Enhanced chemical-assisted interrogation conducted upon the operative was only marginally successful, as the Operative was revealed to have limited practical knowledge of Wishing Well's agenda. While the locations of several safehouses were extracted, these sites were all abandoned upon investigation.

Although Wishing Well is a small agency, its operations are uniformly destructive and apathetic as to the loss of human life, nearly impossible to anticipate in advance, and difficult to deter or prevent. It is theorized that their limited membership and numbers may permit for an organized dismantling of the organization if it could be successfully infiltrated, but given their irregular recruitment and screening methodology, planting such an infiltrator amongst their ranks will likely prove to be difficult. Suborning or otherwise turning captured operatives may prove to be more effective, although to date such captured parties have proven singularly recalcitrant. . .

Do you know how to post pictures on RPG boards?:

Sample Post

Earth
North Atlantic
German Naval Research Vessel Valknut
Six Years Ago...

Tracy shivered and sniffed wretchedly in his bunk, curled in a fetal ball and with his guts churning like ravenous, spined worms. One of the other passengers had been coming in and out of their cabin and out to the deck, repeatedly and on end approximately every ten minutes - and left the doors open every single time they left, letting frigid ocean wind howl down through corridor and into the cabin. Every single time, the odious woman would slam the door open, splashing thin sheets of water all over the floor, and obliviously begin babbling directly at Tracy about every stray and errant thought that had visited her since she had last terrorized him in her nasally, high-pitched voice, often standing directly by his bunk for several minutes on end to chatter rhetorical diatribes at him even after she had retrieved whatever miscellaneous tool from her pack. Evidently there was a nearby oceanic storm brewing that everyone was studying like it was some undiscovered cryptid. Normally Tracy might have had the nerve to indicate he was trying to sleep, but between his pulsating intestines and the biting cold from the wind blowing into the cabin he could hardly think straight or summon the fortitude needed to protest.

All Tracy wanted was to try and get some sleep, or at least lull himself into a fit of furtive torpor that would allow him to escape the wracking agony of his spasming gut - but time and time again, he hauled himself out of his bunk to shuffle morosely over to the cabin door in order to quietly shut it before haltingly hauling himself back up to his resting place to pursue slumber. It was the middle of the day as well, with thick rays of indifferent sunshine beaming through the cabin porthole, which did not help even remotely. So much for the supposed oceanic storm.

Minutes ticked by. Tracy's breathing began to even out and he began to warm as his body heat pooled within the blankets and banished the cold. His mind began to drift away from his churning stomach and for a half a moment, Tracy thought he might have blissfully dozed off.

The other passenger - whose name he really did not know, something dumb that started with B, maybe Bianca - had thrown open the cabin door again and was now unreasonably shaking at him, causing a new nail of anguish to drive through his abdomen with every light push and obliterating any chance of sleeping yet again as another draft of freezing air rolled into the room.

"Tracy, come on, you've got to come see this! Nearly everyone is out on the deck, it's headed right for us!"

Tracy's eyes dragged themselves across the far wall of the cabin - the porthole was dark. In the span of a minute the sun had vanished.

"I don't really think I should be going out during a storm-" He began.

"No, that's not it. Tracy - there are lights!"

And so Tracy dragged himself out of his bunk and down the hall and onto the deck, where most of the other passengers and a good chunk of the crew ha gathered, leaning near the railings and upper balconies, some with cameras or recording with their phones - as the piercing rays of light beaming out from the roiling thunderheads above drifted across the shifting waves and bobbing hull of the Valknut from above. Tracy blinked in disbelief as he took everything in, and began to process the excited murmurs from around him.

"-aliens!"

"-irst contact-"

"-the sea god!"

"-cient Atlantean ship-"

'Glad to know so many trained scientists still hold onto vestiges of traditional beliefs.' Tracy sardonically thought to himself. His eyes narrowed as he tried to get a good look at the lights above. It was hard to see exactly what they were emitting from, but from the silhouettes and the way they were undulating in their movement made it seem pretty apparent - to him at least - that they were just bog standard high-powered search lights. Maybe they were mounted on helicopters - though the heavy cloud cover above seemed too coherent, and he definitely could not hear any chopper blades.

There was a dull, booming sound, like a distant cannon being fired, and suddenly a massive harpoon shot down from the clouds above, pierced straight down through maybe-Bianca's head and body where she stood next to Tracy, causing ruptured viscera, shattered bone fragments and scraps of ruined, blood-mottled clothing to scatter in every direction. The harpoon pierced straight through her and tore into the deck plating, extending a triad of barbed clamps with a mechanical whine. Tracy fell flat on his rear, front and face splattered with gore as he looked on and upwards in shock - following the length of wound cable linking the harpoon to...something, up above in the clouds. He thought, for a moment, he caught glimpse of a silhouetted outline in the clouds - of something massive.

As he looked up, there was a rapid stutter of muffled explosions, and amidst the terrified screams of passengers and crew reacting to the first fired harpoon, five more descended from the nebulous mist above to spear into the Valknut. One of the more hardened crew-members regained their composure and ran back inside the ship - returning moments later with a fireman's axe even as the whirring sound of motors began to echo down from above. With a heaving grunt and a wide swing, he chopped at one of the cables connecting the giant harpoons to the vehicle above - and was forced to drop it with a panicked cry as a surge of arcing electricity leapt between the cable and the axe-head, before grounding into the deck of the ship - but not before the raw, coursing power that had discharged into the axehead set part of the wooden haft on fire.

Moments later, black rappelling lines descended from the cloud cover, and decidedly Human figures in black fatigues and armor broke through the cloud layer, rapidly trailing down along the lines to land on the Valknut's deck. One of them landed right besides Tracy, still lying prone and in shock on the deck, and was gracious enough to daze Tracy into stunned senselessness by slamming the butt of their rifle into his face.

The dull, muted ringing in Tracy's ears muffled the ensuing deluge of screams and gunfire that followed. Fading in and out of consciousness, all that could occur to Tracy was that somehow, his roiling gut actually felt much better.

---

888888888888

---

Unknown Dockside
One Year Ago...

"No, I think you can go tell your boss to fuck himself."

The next thing Tracy knew, he was being hammered in the face by the dealer's grapefruit-sized fist, hard enough to send him stumbling off the pier to fall, flailing, back into the motor-boat he and the others had arrived in. He slammed head-first against one of the raised seats and agonizingly tried to pry himself back up off the floor as the now intimately familiar sound of gunfire started to rattle off back up on the pier itself. A shallow wave of water splashed itself across Tracy's face as a bullet-riddled body tumbled into the water next to the boat, followed by another - and then as he finally began to blink the pinwheeling stars from out of his eyes, the two surviving thugs that had been provided as muscle leapt into the boat and had shoved off, one of them steering and revving the motor to its limit while the other provided desperate covering fire.

All Tracy could do was sit back, drenched in water, his mouth open like a goldfish. He had overplayed his role - he had doubled down when he should have let it stand, and now the deal was ruined and they were two warm bodies short. Tracy blearily cast his gaze towards the two survivors, and realized - with a dread chill stealing across him as he did - that Walker was not with them. He had been one of the bodies falling into the water.

They were going to kill him.

---

888888888888

---

The Phantasmagoria
Two Days Later...

"You know, Tracy, I have to admit I underestimated you."

Tracy, handcuffed to a metal chair between two thugs and with an IV drip already hooked into his arm nearby, sweat profusely as the speaker shut the bulkhead down behind him as he entered the room.

The other man was on the shorter side - even shorter than Tracy himself - and had a deceptively lanky appearance, with bare arms on display under the rolled-up sleeves of his white jumpsuit that bristled with cords of muscle. He had a mane of dark, slicked-back and spiked hair and a wide soul patch framing his narrow, somewhat bony and angular face. He wore a pair of welding goggles over his eyes even now, but the rictus grin on his face made his mood evident.

"I could have sworn I reminded you every time I've seen you for the last few years that if you slipped up even once, I was going to torture you and then all of your worthless friends and co-workers in front of you and then toss you them all one-by-one into a scrap grinder, followed by you."

The man approached the stainless steel table across from Tracy and set a black tool-case across the surface, unlatching it and popping it open to reveal rows of sharp, pointed implements neatly arrayed in both halves. Reaching down to his toolbelt, the man carelessly unclipped and slid a multitool and a cordless hand-drill across the table as well.

"I wasn't expecting you to actually try and rough it out! I figured you were going to eventually try to break and run! And even after that fiasco at the port, rather than try and make a break for it by diving over the side, you actually came back. Willingly. Knowing what I was going to do to you...or well, the gist of what I was going to do to you..."

The man turned and boosted himself to sit on the tabletop as he finally turned to stare at Tracy through his welding goggles. "You've got an awful lot of nerve for a gutless coward. Of course, now I've got the real measure of you...just as terrified of your own guilt as you are of the idea of me quartering you with a hacksaw. Normally that might be useful. Normally I might think I'd be able to make better use of you..."

Tracy sucked in a nervous breath.

"But in demonstrating that you fucked everything up and also got Walker killed. So I'm gonna try and go for a compromise instead here. I'm going to ruin you, and if you survive..."

With a burst of speed fueled by panic and desperation, Tracy leapt to his feet, swung the back-end of his chair against one of the guard's legs and head-butted the second in the gut, driving the air from the man's lungs and causing him to back up, hunched over and wheezing for air as his friend swore repeatedly and stumbled over, clutching at his legs with a grimace. The IV needle tore from Tracy's arm as he haphazardly started ambling for the bulkhead door leading out of the room.

He came short when the man in the jumpsuit clotheslined him from the side, knocking Tracy down onto the steel hull and then delivering a series of kicks to his gut and across the face for good measure. He then grabbed Tracy by the hair of his scalp and dragged him over to the table, where he raised Tracy's head before slamming it down onto the hard surface. With the entire room oscillating and turning different colors in Tracy's vision, he barely even processed the two thugs regaining their composure and approaching to hold him in place.

"Look what you went and did. Knocked the IV loose. That was how I was going to administer the anesthesia." The man in the jumpsuit tutted as he picked up the hand-drill and experimentally pressed the trigger, eliciting an electrical whine as the drill-bit began to rev and spin. "Now we have to do this the fun way. Protip for you, the more you move, the more this is going to hurt."

The man craned his head to match Tracy's orientation and treated him with another rictus grin as he pressed the drill bit against the side of Tracy's head.

"So feel free to go crazy."

---

888888888888

---

Some Time Later...

"Jesus christ. How is he not dead?"

"It looks like they used something to seal the hole they put in his skull."

"Then why the fuck did they not also stitch together the everything they did to his scalp?!? And what the hell is going on in his mouth?"

"Look, I used to be a nurse, this is...this is really bad, but he can recover from this. We need clean, sterilized bandages and maybe some duct tape. I'm honestly more worried about the hole in his mouth. We need actual antibiotics for that or that is going to become inflamed and probably get infected, and that will definitely kill him."

"Alright, got it, so we need sterilized bandages, duct tape, antibiotics, would you also like some gold bullion and flawlessly cut diamonds while we are at it?"

"Calm down, we can...we can probably work something out with the guards..."

"Setting aside the entire issue of that, how long would he need to recover?"

"Well, assuming there's no lasting brain damage that we can't see? Puncture wounds start to heal at around three weeks. Maybe in a few months he might have skin over that spot again..."

---

88888888888

---

Present Day

Tracy winced as his cell door crashed open and harsh, intense light pierced into his vision, now long-adapted to complete darkness. He did not resist as he was bodily hauled up by two men in black fatigues and dragged out of the small room and through a number of hallways, before eventually being lead into a large interior workshop. Machining tables, lathes, metal-working extruders, and a variety of heavy machinery crowded the workfloor, and in the middle of it all was a somewhat cleared out space where the man in the white jumpsuit had arranged what appeared to be a combination conference table and breakfast nook, with stray, emptied bottles of alchohol, cans of motor oil, half a dozen disarrayed tool-cases and what looked, disconcertingly, like plastic explosives littering the surface.

"Ah, if it isn't that guy! Whatever your name is!" The man in the jumpsuit fired a pair of fingerguns at Tracy nonchalantly. "And how are we feeling this morning?"

Tracy, knowing better than to not answer, tried to summon up a response and ended up hacking out a rasping, heaving series of coughs from his parched throat instead.

"Always good to hear, lot of that going around." The man in the jumpsuit nodded sagely as he pointed to a nearby chair, which Tracy was forcibly seated in by his escorts.

"Now that we've reconfigured the parameters of your wetware into something marginally more useful, and assuming we still have a hard bead on that charmingly archaic guilt complex of yours - we've got a job for you. Catch!" The man picked up a large metallic case from the table and bodily tossed it to Tracy. He feebled raised his arms and just barely managed to grasp at it as it hit him, though it would still have fallen onto the floor if one of the men in fatigues had not steadied it for him. Now clutching the object to his chest, Tracy squinted with his eyes, still adjusting to the light, and took it in.

It appeared to be a briefcase made of polished, gleaming chrome. It had no hinges he could see, both its halves appearing to be adhered to each other without any external fixtures. Both halves were smooth with rounded edges, and looked to have been molded as single whole pieces. The only evidence they even come apart was a single thin seam separating them bilaterally, with faintly raised edges where the two halves came together. The seam itself was so thin and finely pressed together, it was actually hard to tell it was there, especially with his bleary vision. If his attention was not specifically drawn to it by the raised edges on either side, he could easily have overlooked it.

Set in the middle of one of the halves' sides was what must have been the locking mechanism - some kind of round display panel and tactile interface the size of his palm. It displayed what looked to him to be a bog-standard RGB color wheel, with extremes around the edges and white towards the center. Right in the middle of the wheel was a raised dial, with a red arrow indicating that it could be twisted along its side, and an inscription of tiny red lettering on the top that said 'Press Me.' A second, smaller display panel the size of a small LED above the color wheel seemed to display the current color selected.

On the other side of the case was a small plaque engraved with a message.

Hello! I am a tamper-proof case!

I have an equivalent explosive yield of thirty-six (36) kilograms of TNT!

I have no signal compatible hardware, you cannot hack me!

I am hardened against ionizing radiation, you cannot degrade me!

I am water and airtight, you cannot flood me with any liquid or gas!

If you attempt to breach my exterior, I will explode!

If you attempt to insert any object into my seam, I will explode!

If you attempt to interface with my locking mechanism, I will explode!

If you attempt to scan my interior, I will explode!

If my integral thermometer raises or lowers more than a hundred degrees past room temperature, I will explode!

If you drop me on the ground accidentally I will forgive you, but if you drop me from a high place I will explode!

If I am opened by any means without selecting the right color via the locking mechanism, I will explode!

I can only be opened by using the locking mechanism to select the correct color, and pressing the button!

If you press the button with the wrong color selected, I will not explode, but you will still regret it!

Whatever could be inside me? The possibilities are tantalizing! Dream of me when you are sleeping!

Tamper-Proof Case

"You're going to be playing courier for us once again. You will be delivering that to a certain somebody. And hey, good news - no adult supervision this time! We're trusting you to do this all on your lonesome!" The man in the jumpsuit announced with all the countenance of a proud and doting father. "Oh and by the way we will definitely torture and murder all of your worthless associates if you try to run or do something stupid like rat us out. And then we'll probably package and donate their ground-up body parts as meat to homeless shelters and soup kitchens."

Tracy stared blankly at the man in the jumpsuit, who crossed his arms expectantly and looked back. "Well?"

"WhuACK-" Tracy hacked up again. "Whuagh...who am I...delerghering it to?"

"Glad you're onboard. That go-get-em attitude will take you places, whats-yer-name." The man in the jumpsuit smiled. "Listen carefully. Going to have to say this a few times and have you repeat it back to me to make sure you've memorized it."

The man in the jumpsuit cleared his throat, and then spoke. He went on for a moment. Tracy's eyes widened in disbelief.

"...What?" He croaked.

"Geez, KEEP UP will you? I said -" And the man in the jumpsuit repeated the segue, word for word, doubtlessly having memorized it himself. "Now repeat that back to me."

Tracy open and closed his mouth, once. Then, squirming in his seat somewhat and clutching at the case in his lap almost as if for support, he opened his mouth and immediately fell into a coughing fit.

"Not even close." The man in the jumpsuit tutted.

"I could...use some...some water to clear my-" Tracy tried to say. Before he had even finished his sentence, the man in the jumpsuit reached for a half-emptied bottle of vodka and hurled it directly at Tracy's head. Tracy flinched and reflexively lifted the case to block it, with the bottle shattering on impact and the vaguely antiseptic stench of the alchohol spreading through the air as the vokda spilled over the case and him.

"There you go, bet you're feeling better already. Now, this time, I'm going to say that all one phrase at a time and you'll repeat after me, alright? So -" He spoke the first phrase. Tracy halting repeated it back to him. They went on that way until they had reached the end.

"Now repeat all that back to me." The man in the jumpsuit demanded flatly.

Tracy haltingly attempted to comply. He flustering got caught up on the fourth phrase, requiring the man in the jumpsuit to correct him after casually throwing a pair of pliers at his legs - after which Tracy started over, and although he hoarsely stumbled over a few words, he managed to reach the end.

"There we go! Clear as mud I trust! Now of course, since we will be sending you out on your own, we've got a few toys for you, and - well, it's not that we do not trust you not to lose the case - but we absolutely, definitely, completely do not trust you not to lose the case. We actually have a bit of a betting pool going on how long it will take you to lose it, but never fear! We have given you the tools to find it if that happens." The man in the jumpsuit snapped his fingers, and one of Tracy's escorts abruptly yanked the case out of his grasp and tossed it out and along the floor of the workshop. Tracy simply watched with a puzzled look as the case slid across the floor - and then...

Dawning on him like a the gates of hell shuddering open, a keening, piercing wail blossomed within Tracy's head. A resonating shriek, like a banshee with an angle grinder polishing off the edge of one of his femurs while a hurricane filled with nails in the midst of an avalanche descended on them. It was more than simply an unpleasant, undulating sound. It was a hollow, pitted sensation that felt like mites were burrowing into his bones. He could feel his organs individually warbling inside of his chest, could sense his blood curdling in his veins. Without wasting any time, he immediately fell out of the chair and began to dry heave drool and spit onto the floor, wretching up his empty guts repeatedly as his skull and eyes began to throb in response to the unrelenting clamor of the wail that was making his skin itch. A scant instant later, the faint tinge of copper flooded his mouth and a driving, biting pain began to corkscrew through his throat and along his spine while a mountainous, bass rhythm began to ebb in and out of his chest cavity. This, was hell. Even having a power drill taken to his head without anesthesia had been nothing compared to this. There was less raw, concentrated physical pain - instead it was a menagerie of dulled physical suffering distributed across every remote micron of his body and unbearable mental fatigue. He could feel his Heartbeat fluttering erratically in response to the *sound*, jacking up until it was pulsing as fast as a hummingbird beat its wings, adrenaline and cortisol shooting through every vessel in his body like rocket fuel.

Slowly, convinced that the entire world was ending, with the lights in the room seeming to brighten and dim in bursts and surges while his vision rocked and trembled, Tracy raised his head and looked over to where the case had fallen. The man in the jumpsuit crouched over it, beckoning Tracy over like a dog. Fetch!

Dragging himself achingly across the metal floor, with tiny cavities in his teeth and spots in his bones suddenly highlighted and punctuated with fiery clarity by the noise from within, Tracy inched closer and closer to the case - and then...

It took a moment to realize the wailing had stopped. The pain did not vanish. Every cell in his body did not immediately cease throbbing with exquisite anguish. The sound of his cerebrospinal fluid seething and boiling inside of him did not instantly abate. Draping himself across the case, Tracy simply lay still for - minutes? Hours? As he slowly came down from his reality of demented, buzzing static.

After a time, he finally flinched when he heard an audible snapping sound in one of his ears.

"Aha, there we go. Welcome back to naptime." The man said, slapping Tracy across the back - causing him to heave up nothing but mucous and spittle again. "If the case ever gets more than five meters away from you, that will start up. The feedback induction should align itself in the direction of the case and let you know what direction to go in."

Tracy simply stared straight ahead, his entire body shuddering violently.

The man in the jumpsuit let out a sigh of exaggerated exasperation. "Now now." He chided. "What do we say?"

"Wuhlp..." Tracy try, nearly biting off his numbed tongue. He tried again. "..Wuh...why...?"

The man in the jumpsuit laudged, stood up, brushed a stray bit of spittle off of his chest, and then treated Tracy to a healthy kick across the face.

"Because you were sent here just to suffer." He declared cheerfully. He then motioned to the men in fatigues.

"Get him on his way. Give him the duffel on the table and everything in it, it has some old junk I can bear to part with. You know where to drop him off."

---

888888888888

Lost Haven Harbor
Present

Tracy stared helplessly as the motor-boat that had dropped him off began to pull away from the pier, leaving him there, dressed in his old, tattered clothes with a suspiciously stained duffelbag and the comparatively gleaming and pristine case.

"If I were you, I would work fast." One of the men in the boat called out. "There's no real deadline, but you still probably only have until he starts running out of patience. Come back here once you're done if you know what's good for everyone involved."

The boat pulled away, and began to head back out to sea.

Tracy turned and, tears streaming down his face, took in the view of the City of Lost Haven.

This was where he would die.

Create-A-Hero: A Superhero RPG Season 3- Shattered Dimensions

People of Interest

Nailtooth

NAME:
Neil Macintyre

ALIAS:
Nailtooth

SPEECH COLOR:
"Don_t mind _{the t}ee_th."

ALIGNMENT:
Villain

STATUS:
The nominal leader of the city-wide Human Trafficking Network based out of Lost Haven, known as Oubliette.

IDENTITY:
Known underworld quantity, contact, and person of interest. The sort of guy the FBI would be closely investigating if not for the implicit connections he leans on that make his business model possible.

PERSONALITY:
Nailtooth cuts an affable, teddy-bear demeanor that compliments him being built like a bear. He is very quick to lean on and present with his disability and easy-going countenance to make people underestimate him. Underneath the surface, Nailtooth is not a man who gets mad - he gets even. He is therefore notorious for his casual and unaffected behavior when it comes to killing others - he is the type of person to laugh along with a joke made at his expense and buy a round of drinks for everyone in the room, just to shoot the offending party as they raise glasses. Easily liked by most of the people he meets up until he sends them running with casual acts of egregious and disproportionate violence, he has built up a cult of personality around him by people in awe of his effortless combined charm and ruthlessness - whilst everyone else who knows about him keeps a wide berth. While this behavior has afforded Nailtooth with a reputation as a remorseless, unhinged killer, Nailtooth is a generous and fast friend to those who can navigate the mine field of his temperament - a group of people largely comprising other lunatics and serial killers.

OUTFIT:
Nailtooth wears a standard, irregular assortment of civilian attire. However, he is known to regularly wear a custom-tailored flight jacket with a fur inner-lining and collar. He also has a somewhat hard to see piercing, reminiscent of a nail-head, that juts from the bottom of his jaw.

ORIGIN:

The Injury

A story Nailtooth is pleased to share with his inner circle is the story of how he got his characteristic injury and dentures. As the story goes, he used to be another faceless, nameless goon in the private army of some European gang, up until he annoyed his boss a little more than was advisable. The man shot Neil through the floor of his jaw with a nailgun, piercing through the base of his mouth, through his tongue, and partially up into the roof as well - permanently impairing his speech, and serving as the root cause of a severe infection that would require Neil to have major reconstructive surgery.

Reportedly, this unknown boss (Nailtooth is remarkably coy when it comes to identifying them) then made the unprecedented decision of entrusting Neil with greater responsibilities upon his recovery. Wanted already in four different countries, Neil had little recourse and a pressing desire to continue breathing - and impressed his employer with his commitment in spite of his injury and its source, using his disability to charm and intimidate rivals, deter investigation, and trick enemies into underestimating him. As time passed, the urban legend of the man who had a nailhead stuck through the bottom of his jaw who ruled the streets began to grow and spread.

("I_ts ac_tuall_y jus_t a pier_cing I ha_d ma_de _spe_cial." He has been known to confide to those close to him.)

Years later, when it seemed like Neil might potentially rise to become the gang's second in command, he received a payoff from the boss and was told, "Fuck off and make a name for yourself somewhere else. You're clearly you're own man now."

When asked whether Nailtooth ever made something out of his old boss, he is just known to give an easy smile with his chrome-plated dentures and casually change the topic.

TYPE:
Normal - Unpowered, Baseline Human

SCALE:
City

CAPABILITIES & EQUIPMENT:

• VIP Status

Nailtooth is well connected and has greased quite a few palms to make Oubliette possible. He knows the names of every Magistrate and Judge in the city and where their children go to school. He has a pack of dirty cops and unscrupulous lawyers on speed dial, and investigations by the FBI against him and Oubliette have a history of being 'recalled and reassigned.' Barring outright and egregious exposure of his crimes, trying to pin and stick anything to him legally is a forlorn hope. Moreover, several dangerous individuals benefit substantially from his business and make it their business to keep him safe. Even starting trouble in his general vicinity can result in a number of hitmen erupting out of the woodwork to protect their interests.

• Polychrome Psyche

Nailtooth is hard to read and gauge, even telepathically. He demonstrates zero behavioral variation when playing cards or shooting somebody in the back, and his anger is glacier-cold and nearly imperceptible. In particular, it is difficult to tell whether or not he is lying, given how ambivalent and unreliable his current mental state is as an indicator of what he actually intends to do.

• Overtime Overkill

Nailtooth has no regular assortment of weaponry he prefers - in his own places of business and safehouses he has veritable armories, and is not afraid to use them to the fullest extent possible. He has zero compunction about using a grenade launcher when a knife could get the job done, and he has little issue with escalating a situation by calling in for backup with specialized weaponry if need be.

ATTRIBUTES:

Height: 1.98 Meters, though with a significant hunch that makes him look shorter.
Weight: 140 Kilograms, quite a lot of it muscle.
Strength: Exceptional but Human strength. He could nearly pass for a professional strongman.
Mobility: Standard.
Intelligence: Standard.
Fighting Skill: Untrained, but brutally strong and with zero inhibitions.

RESOURCES:
Nailtooth is the leader of a city-wide Human Trafficking Network known as Oubliette. He has bodyguards, custom-tooled weaponry, hitmen and dirty cops on speed-dial, and even access to a few esoteric trinkets. He also has deep pockets - he would not make the fortune 500, but he could bid earnestly at upscale auctions.

WEAKNESSES:
Nailtooth is merely Human. His power is manifest in affluence, influence, and people he has under his thumb.

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:

• Tribal Mountebank - Professional killer apparently on Nailtooth's pay.
• Charis - Powered muscle and indentured servant of Oubliette and therefore Nailtooth, raised from a young age as a criminal soldier.

Tribal Mountebank

NAME:
Tribal Mountebank

ALIAS:
N/A

SPEECH COLOR:
"Hello there, my newest darling."

ALIGNMENT:
Villain

STATUS:
A professional killer within Oubliette.

IDENTITY:
Tribal is a relative unknown. He is a common fixture of Nailtooth's coterie but nobody has ever been able to positively determine what his exact responsibilities within Oubliette are. It is openly speculated by other members of Oubliette that he's a wetworker, but even within the organization it is uncertain.

PERSONALITY:
Tribal is apparently a sap at heart. He is quiet, polite, and fond of frequent and elaborate romantic gestures. A shameless flirt and apparent lech, he always has a new sweetheart or supposed soul mate every other month that he has swept up into some whirlwind romance - whether they be willing or coerced victums, or otherwise. Regardless of their interest, after a time they are consequently never seen again. An extremely private man except with those he is presently courting, few have any lingering interest in determining what his true demeanor is like, lest they risk vanishing into thin air under mysterious circumstances one day. He does not speak much and always has an easy smirk on his face.

OUTFIT:
Tribal wears an irregular assortment of ordinary civilian attire, usually comprising fine silk shirts and tailored slacks along with a full-length dark coat. Less immediately evident is the full-coverage, articulated ballistic armor he wears underneath his everyday wear.

ORIGIN:

The Man Who Was Not There

Tribal Mountebank does not exist. He is not a citizen of any country, has no criminal record, and is only known of in a small circle of enforcement agencies due to his constant proximity and association with Nailtooth. He has no apparent dayjob, no bank account, pays no taxes or bills, and seemingly has no permanent address. Insofar as can be determined, Tribal Mountebank just magically appeared out of thin air on day.

Surveillance and photography depicting Tribal date back only six years, with no trace of him prior - leading some to speculate he is another one of Oubliette's indentured unpersons, trained and intended to be a killer ghost in the system from a young age - that he does in fact have an identity, but that it is lost in the churning sea of historical missing persons who were never found.

TYPE:
Normal - Unpowered, Baseline Human

SCALE:
City

CAPABILITIES & EQUIPMENT:

• Advanced Ballistic Armor

Tribal wears a trim, next-generation full-body coverage suit of articulated ballistic armor made from non-Newtonian reactive fibers and ceramics underneath his everyday clothes. The material is light and flexible, but momentarily strengthens in response to impressed force. It is rated to stop convention small-arms munitions, is completely insulated against electrical shocks, and is fire-retardant. The suit's exotic material makeup is extremely susceptible to chemical wear, and is known to completely immobilize the wearer for several seconds when subjected to a full-body shockwave, such as from an explosive. Like traditional protective suits, the reactive materials have reduced efficacy over time when the same area is exposed to repeated instances of force and trauma. Finally, the suit has sacrificed mass and bulk in order to achieve a slim profile, and cannot stand up to especially violent impacts such as from high-velocity, armor piercing munitions. Such weapons still do not reliably kill through the suit, but will usually sunder most of the contact-site material as well as rupture and degrade the surrounding materials to the point of uselessness.

• Blackout Predator

Other than the sound of his beating heart, Tribal can walk and even run (a slow run - not a full-on sprint) so silently that he is completely imperceptible to standard Human hearing even at point blank range. He also has training that allows him to assemble and disassemble weaponry or operate machinery by feel while blinded or in complete darkness, as well as to navigate most environments and locate and combat hostiles under similar conditions.

• Abyssal Mind

Tribal's mental state, if telepathically apprised, shows signs of deliberately conditioned maladaptive schemas that have encoded most of his memories and thoughts with a surreal and paradoxical filter of warped thought. Additionally, his emotional spectrum is evidently stunted with a limited range - the only things he seems capable of feeling are fear, anxiety, ennui, apathy, and lust. His projected demeanor is an evident front.

• Marksman

Tribal is an accomplished Marksman, capable of reliably hitting targets with reflexive snap-shots at ranges in excess of 2 kilometers while standing - assuming he is familiar and comfortable with the rifle being used.

• Swordsman

While Tribal has advanced training in hand to hand combat inclusive of multiple martial disciplines, his true capabilities lie elsewhere. Although he rarely has excuse to exercise his talent, Tribal has exceptional swordsmanship skills, blending multiple blade styles including Fencing, Kendo, Knife-Fighting and HEMA. He rarely carries any actual swords with him due to them being difficult to conceal, but he frequently carries knives and is practiced at facing victims armed with melee weapons in turn.

• Pocket Guillotine

Tribal's favored weapon is an unconventional blade called the Pocket Guillotine, which resembles a box-cutter. The handle is loaded with single-use extending blade cartridges. In operation, the cartridge extends a mechanically collapsed molecular blade at high-speed whenever the handle is triggered, which is immediately electrified and super-heated. The heat and electrical charge that shoots up the length of the blade while it extends is so potent that it briefly causes the edge to wreath itself in a plume of ionized plasma. While rated to cut through steel girders almost effortlessly, the materials the blades are made from cannot withstand the coursing energies for more than half a second at most - and even if they could, the capacitor built into each cartridge would not be able to sustain the discharge of energy. Each blade extended from the handle in this fashion invariably disintegrates half a second after extension, and thereafter the handle has to be loaded with a new cartridge. It should thus come as little surprise that Tribal largely uses the Pocket Guillotine in conjunction with his Iado training to take victims by surprise, killing them in a single stroke before they can even react, with the murder weapon flash-vaporizing any spilled blood, cauterizing the injuries, and then disintegrating after the fact.

ATTRIBUTES:

Height: 1.83 Meters
Weight: 81 Kilograms
Strength: Honed but Human strength. A professional wrestler could overpower him.
Mobility: Wired Flesh and Bones. Has reflexive agility is close to the Human pinnacle.
Intelligence: Standard
Fighting Skill: Competent hand-to-hand combatant, exceptional melee capability with bladed weapons, exceptional marksman capable of long-distance reflexive snap-shots with rifles.

RESOURCES:
Tribal has implicit access to Oubliette's armories as a member, but his exotic armor and weaponry betray access to a more advanced and sophisticated source of munitions and equipment that he collects at what appear to be prearranged dead-drops. He clearly cannot replace his preferred loadout overnight, but he has otherwise rapid access to replacements.

Weaknesses:
Tribal, behind his next-generation armor, exotic weaponry and honed reflexes, is just a man - and even his armor does not allow him to outright ignore conventional weapons.

Supporting Characters:

• Nailtooth (Neil Macintyre) - The leader of Oubliette, and presumably Tribal's employer.
• Charis - A victim of Oubliette turned powered child soldier and professional muscle for the organization.

Charis

NAME:
Charis

ALIAS:
N/A

SPEECH COLOR
"Hey there, Coffin Stuffer."

ALIGNMENT:
Villain

IDENTITY:
Unknown Persona Non Grata. She would be subject to deportation if only anybody knew her country of origin.

PERSONALITY:
Off-work, Charis can nearly approximate a normal, if brusque and abrasive routine and behavior. During work, which she enjoys immensely, her brutality and psychotically perverse indulgence of violence emerges. Having been raised and trained for her current occupation and having no legitimate life to fall back on otherwise, it is no surprise that she has emotionally built herself up in the context of her employment, where she enjoys the most power and personal freedom. In the quiet hours of her free time, when endeavoring to blend in with a society she can never truly join, she can adopt a façade of normalcy - with evident cracks and hints as to her true nature.

OUTFIT:
N/A - Wears a standard unfixed assortment of civilian clothing.

ORIGIN:

The Prize Panther

Charis was born with her powers, which she was capable of using reflexively even from a young age - which was what attracted the attention of her abductors, who sold her to a trafficking network known as Oubliette that shipped her overseas, shut inside a fire-suit locker. Destined to be sold as either a child soldier in some third world country or as a lab rat, she was spared such a fate when it was decided the trafficking business would benefit from having cultivated 'product' to act as living exemplars of what could be offered to those with the necessary wealth and moral flexibility. Charis was trained from a young age to act an an enforcer and muscle for Oubliette, and received a diverse amount of training in martial arts and the use of various weapons. She was also educated in battlefield tactics, bodyguarding, security, and accounting - affording her a crooked, practical education devoid of more nuanced academic merit. To this day she continues to work for Oubliette as an undocumented person, with no civilian cover, having been conditioned to be emotionally invested in her work and to have no other practical recourse.

SCALE:
City

TYPE:
Kinetic Energy

CAPABILITIES & EQUIPMENT:

• Power: Kinetic Modulation

  Charis can accelerate and decelerate any kinetic force in proximity to herself to a degree proportional to its velocity and current delta V. The higher an affected force's velocity, the greater the effect can be in either direction, and forces already accelerating are easier to accelerate, while forces already decelerating are easier to decelerate.
  
  The range of this ability is effective within a three meter radius of Charis and must be consciously maintained, in addition to being reflex-dependent. A bullet can still hit her just fine if she is not maintaining the field, especially if she is caught unaware. While the field is up however, it can act as a powerful pseudo-shield.
  
  Although Charis can maintain the field indefinitely with concentration, breaks and distractions to her focus will prevent its ongoing use. As a result she often uses it in short, flickering bursts, especially during pitched combat where she often has to pay attention to several other things at once. The field is also uniform in effect - it either accelerates or decelerates everything moving through it, not both. The upper limit of its effect is also completely divorced from the concepts of mass, gravity, inertia, and momentum, meaning objects like falling steel girders, meteors, catapult boulders, and other large, heavy objects are still likely to kill her even after passing through her field. Its effect is most powerful against small objects with relatively low mass, such as bullets. It is most effective against fields of energy with high amounts of directed force but little coherent mass. Naturally, it barely works at all on slowly moving objects, and not at all on stationary objects.
  
  The practical uses of this field include slowing down bullets to less-than-lethal velocities, or accelerating projectiles to give them more stopping power. She can dampen blows in melee combat while increasing the impact of her own, run faster and jump further or higher, fall at feather-speed, and can ruin a Speedster's day by having her entire personal space act as an abrupt tripwire.

• Ballistic Armor

Charis sports some sleek-looking ballistic armor (not the pictured individual). She does not wear it at all times and is intended to act as supplemental protection on top of her power. It is unpowered and mundane beyond its clearly sophisticated craftsmanship.

• Bloodmist Pistol

Charis' weapon of choice is a custom-made hand-pistol. It fires shotgun-spread gas-propelled flechettes in 12-round bursts. The pistol has a built-in intake and motor that allows it to compress oxygen into an integral canister, which is mixed with hydrogen from ampules in the vane of each flechette and then ignited for the weapon discharge. Both the weapon and its ammunition, due to their exotic designs, doubtlessly originate from a specific supplier. On top of the pistol having an integral suppressor, the fired flechettes are subsonic munitions, making the weapon almost soundless in operation. Charis can also accelerate flechettes after they have left the barrel, past the sound barrier while still producing a reduced acoustic report. It is an extraordinarily messy weapon that can reduce unarmored targets to strewn heaps of messy viscera, and it has the benefit of being able to penetrate through traditional ballistic and Kevlar vests, although notedly it has difficulty penetrating solid ceramics and metallic armor if the flechettes are not accelerated through Charis' field.

• CollaBo

Charis possesses a collapsible Bo-staff. She does not always carry it with her since even when collapsed, it is somewhat difficult to readily conceal.

ATTRIBUTES:

Height: 1.77 Meters
Weight: 72 KG
Strength: Human Standard
Mobility: Human Standard
Intelligence: Substandard academic knowledge - never attended school. Above average practical intelligence.
Fighting Skill: Exceptional martial artist with specialized training in hand to hand combat and with multiple weapons.

RESOURCES:
Numerous contacts in the criminal underworld, ready access to slush funds and illicit weaponry in Oubliette's armory, with the means to procure exotic weaponry and equipment with time.

Weaknesses: Charis' power does not alter her baseline physiology, leaving her effectively identical to a baseline Human in terms of strength and resilience. Due to never having attended school, she is largely ignorant of a large amount of otherwise everyday, academic information.

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:

• Nailtooth - The leader of Oubliette, Charis' nominal sort-of employer.
• Tribal Mountebank - A professional killer who possibly works for Nailtooth.

The Wailer

NAME:
Tracy Guiomar

Alias:
The Wailer

SPEECH:
"I do not have the time or nerves for your drama right this second, ok?"

ALIGNMENT:
Unaligned

IDENTITY:
Has been listed as legally dead for more than six years.

PERSONALITY:
Tracy Guiomar is the proverbial man on a mission, if said man was somewhat of a coward and had crippling anxiety. He is most generously described as energetic and vigilant and most accurately described as being twitchy and paranoid. He bluffs frequently and often, and instantly turns into a bootlicker if that fails. In general he behaves as though he has a proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over him at all times - he does not want to do what he is doing but is compelled by do-or-die circumstances. He is of a dour and melancholy disposition, distant and terse, as well as risk and violence averse. When cornered or believing he has no alternative however, he is capable of the most desperate of actions...

OUTFIT:
Irregular assortment of worn civilian clothing.

ORIGIN:

A Wailing Specter, Lost at Sea

Tracy Guiomar was declared missing, presumed dead more than six years ago when the German planet-class naval research vessel, the Valknut, was lost at sea amidst an oceanic storm. At the time he was nothing more than an accountant being shipped overseas to a new desk job as a corporate liason in Europe. He was declared dead shortly thereafter, along with the rest of the crew and passengers aboard the Valknut - but now, he has seemingly returned from the dead. He is a paradoxical figure - dressed in rags, but sporting exotic weaponry and unusual, valuable cargo. Desperate and driven by mysterious necessities, woe be to those that awaken the terrible, earth-sundering power housed within him.

POWER:
Street => Escalates to City

TYPE:
Resonant Energy

CAPAIBILITES & EQUIPMENT:

• Thespian Education

Tracy has a formal education as an actor - and though that proverbial ship has sailed in his life, his ability to improvise and project his presence and demeanor in a room have served in well since those days. Tracy can adopt a wide variety of roles and project convincing emotional and characteristic airs - assuming he does not break down and panic mid-role.

• The Leaden Spear

  Tracy carries what looks to be an utterly unique, hand-tooled machine pistol. Engraved on its barrel is the designation: 'Leaden Spear Mk. II' . While resembling a conventional machine pistol, it has no slide, ejection port, or safety, and its hammer is nonfunctional and possibly present purely for aesthetic purposes or else to assist with sighting. The pistol fires singularly unique .44 caliber rounds with unconventional integral casing in 12-round magazines. Each bullet houses a hollow chamber with gyroscopic stabilizers and a resonant acoustic emitter. The casing itself, instead of housing solid propellant, appear to be hollow heat-sink chambers lined with traces of nuclear isomers, that is launched from the barrel along with the bullet itself, and how exactly they are fired remains a mystery. Each shot is utterly silent despite the absence of a suppressor, while the rounds themselves are subsonic.
  
  Upon impact with a target, the interior gyroscope in each bullet calibrates the resonance emitter inside of the bullet, which then releases a forward-facing, cone-shaped resonant shockwave of force that degrades the structural cohesion of the impact site. Each bullet uses a seemingly and impossibly intricate combination of gyroscopic force and structural feedback from the deformation of the bullet's shell to precisely calibrate the necessary resonant frequency needed, allowing each bullet to severely weaken and disintegrate various physical substances from concrete, to ballistic vests, chunks of flesh and bone, and even solid titanium in a small radius around the impact site.
  
  The bullet's shell then invariably crumbles and hardens around the acoustic emitter, which lodges inside the target and begins to emit a continuous, resonant frequency specifically attuned to Human nervous tissue and gray matter. In a number of surviving victims shot by one of these bullets where the projectiles were not promptly removed, acute onsets of spongiform encephalitis and necrosis ensued, leading to brain damage, hemorrhaging, and death. This effect manifests irregularly and not at all in certain victims, and possibly correlates in likelihood to the number of bullets lodged inside the body at once. What is consistent between victims however, is the auditory sensation of a wailing, keening shriek akin to physically and mentally crippling tinnitus that wracks the body while a bullet is lodged inside a wound - or even while simply holding a bullet directly in contact with skin. Victims who survive being shot are almost universally shortly crippled and left writhing in agony from the unbearable wailing resonating within their body.
  
  The bullets fired from the pistol are impossibly intricate in design, and have possibly all been hand-crafted - though given how many magazines Tracy carries with him, they either had too much time on their hands or there is an automated machining table churning the stuff out somewhere. Each individual bullet would cost more than $3000 apiece to have custom-made just from the materials used, let alone the impossible hardware built into each bullet shell and casing. Given Tracy himself is evidently a baseline Human, how exactly he got his hands on them is a mystery.

• Conspicuous Duffel

Tracy carries with him a duffel-bag heaped full of magazine reloads for the Leaden Spear. Being searched or caught with these would definitely make things awkward.

• The Tamper-Proof Case

  The briefcase looks to be made of polished, gleaming chrome. It has no hinges that you can see, both its halves appear to be adhered to each other without any external fixtures. Both halves are smooth with rounded edges, and look to have been molded as single whole pieces. The only evidence they even come apart is a single thin seam separating them bilaterally, with faintly raised edges where the two halves come together. The seam itself is so thin and finely pressed together, it is actually hard to tell it is there. If your attention were not specifically drawn to it by the raised edges on either side of it, it could be easily overlooked.
  
  Set in the middle of one of the halves' sides is what must be the locking mechanism - some kind of round display panel and tactile interface the size of a palm. It displays what looks to you to be a bog-standard RGB color wheel, with extremes around the edges and white towards the center. Right in the middle of the wheel is a raised dial, with a red arrow indicating that it can be twisted along its side, and an inscription of tiny red lettering on the top that says 'Press Me.' A second, smaller display panel the size of a small LED above the color wheel seems to display the current color selected.
  
  On the other side of the case is a small plaque engraved with a message.
  
  

  Hello! I am a tamper-proof case!
  
  I have an equivalent explosive yield of thirty-six (36) kilograms of TNT!
  
  I have no signal compatible hardware, you cannot hack me!
  
  I am hardened against ionizing radiation, you cannot degrade me!
  
  I am water and airtight, you cannot flood me with any liquid or gas!
  
  If you attempt to breach my exterior, I will explode!
  
  If you attempt to insert any object into my seam, I will explode!
  
  If you attempt to interface with my locking mechanism, I will explode!
  
  If you attempt to scan my interior, I will explode!
  
  If my integral thermometer raises or lowers more than a hundred degrees past room temperature, I will explode!
  
  If you drop me on the ground accidentally I will forgive you, but if you drop me from a high place I will explode!
  
  If I am opened by any means without selecting the right color via the locking mechanism, I will explode!
  
  I can only be opened by using the locking mechanism to select the correct color, and pressing the button!
  
  If you press the button with the wrong color selected, I will not explode, but you will still regret it!
  
  Whatever could be inside me? The possibilities are tantalizing! Dream of me when you are sleeping!

  Tamper-Proof Case

• The Wailer's Cry

  Whenever the Tamper-Proof case is taken more than five meters away from Tracy, the surgically installed hardware inside his skull activates. This creates an audible, keening, wailing shriek that perpetually reverberates inside of Tracy's body, growing and crowning in intensity when Tracy is facing in the direction of the case and as he comes back into proximity of it, until he returns within ten meters, at which point the device shuts off. At a distance of more than a kilometer the wailing is barely perceptible to those around Tracy, even though to him it will have all the intensity of an underworld symphonic orchestra. Within a kilometer, the wailing sound becomes drastically more and more audible to those in the area, escalating from the volume of a tornado siren, then an air-raid siren, and eventually becoming acutely painful to listen to.
  
  During this period, Tracy will also be surrounded by a one-meter thick bubble of auditory occlusion, completely muffling and muting most sounds originating from outside the area of effect. The field of sonic occlusion is so powerful is actually slows and retards the passage of physical objects, causing most projectiles and attacks to drastically slow and lose power as they move through it.
  
  Also during this period, by pressing on the metal pad seated in the roof of his mouth Tracy can cause the device to unleash a devastating shockwave of sonic energy in a sphere around him, powerful enough to make concrete and steel disintegrate within a ten meter range and completely repelling and destroying most ordinary physical projectiles, dispersing most gasses, and is even capable of extinguishing fires.
  
  Both the occluding field as well as the shockwave become inactive while Tracy is within a five meter range of the Tamper-Proof Case. The physical toll exacted on Tracy's body by the unceasing sonic resonance coursing through him, the flood with adrenaline and cortisol and the resulting lack of sleep, likely means each instance of the device activating takes a year or more off of Tracy's life expectancy.
  
  If Tracy's vitals flatline for more than five minutes, the device will explode with an equivalent explosive yield of thirty-six kilograms of TNT.

ATTRIBUTES:

Height: 1.77 Meters
Weight: 52 kg
Strength: Frail due to malnourishment.
Mobility: Borderline superhuman nervous reflex and reaction time.
Intelligence: Standard.
Fighting Skill: Nonexistent.

WEAKNESSES:
Tracy is a baseline Human whenever within five meters of the Tamper-Proof Case with all the vulnerabilities that entails. When more than five meters away from the Tamper-Proof Case, the occluding field that surrounds him and the sonic shockwave he becomes capable of unleashing make him substantially more dangerous and resilient, but he will still effectively be a baseline Human behind the occluding field. Bladed melee weapons, oxygen deprivation, darkness, and a variety of other approaches will remain effective. Additionally, Tracy is both violence and risk-averse under most circumstances, and if bluffing his way through the opposition does not work he has a tendency to fall back onto begging and bootlicking before resorting to actual conflict.

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:

• The Technician - The mysterious individual who tortured Tracy, and ostensibly designed and installed the sonic hardware inside of his skull, as well as the Mk. II Leaden Spear.

Groups of Interest

Oubliette

NAME:
Oubliette

ALIGNMENT:
Villainous

RENOWN:
Known underworld element. Not commonly known of in Civilian circles.

ICONOGRAPHY:
N/A

UNIFORMS:
N/A

AGENDA:
Oubliette is a Human Trafficking Network. Their aims are to obtain, transport, and sell people as prisoners and slaves to anybody with deep enough pockets and few morals. Beyond that they care mostly about establishing territory, asserting influence, and control.

ORIGIN:
Oubliette rose to prominence perhaps twelve years ago when its leader, Neil Macintyre, arrived in Lost Haven and managed to unify the disparate gangs and cliques otherwise relegated to small-scale kidnapping and extortion and smuggling by buying out their leadership. Pulling on criminal contacts from Europe, he was able to establish illicit overseas trade routes that allowed Oubliette to stick its foot in the door and start turning a profit, and making a name for itself as the organization to go to for trafficking of live people in Lost Haven. Even if they have nothing to do with undocumented and missing persons being moved through Lost Haven, they receive a cut and provide logistical support for each deal as a way of maintaining and asserting their control over the market within the city. Since their paltry beginnings, Oubliette has grown into a well-connected and prosperous criminal kingdom within the city.

TYPE RANGE:
Oubliette 'procures' and 'ships' a diverse number of victims, including powered individuals with a wide range of capabilities. Oubliette's meta-range thus encompasses everything save for the Mystical and outright Supernatural.

SCALE:
City

MEMBERSHIP:

• Nailtooth - Founder and leader.
• Charis - Victim of Oubliette, raised as a child soldier to be Oubliette's professional muscle and living model product.
• Tribal Mountebank - A professional killer. More associated directly with Nailtooth than with Oubliette specifically.
• Several hundred various individuals - muscles, bookies, faces, etcetera - living in and around Lost Haven and in odd spots overseas.

INFLUENCE:
Oubliette has a number of useful local connections, including with the local police department as well as the Courts. They know where powerful people live and where their children go to school. They have a number of hitmen and cleaners on standby, dirty cops on their pay, and even have enough clout to have Federal investigations 'recalled and reassigned.' Combined with their dealings with other criminal enterprises, within Lost Haven they are difficult to deal with and root out - and dangerous to cross.

RESOURCES:

• Harborfront Warehouses - Warehouses near shipping and loading areas where the workers and supervisors are on the take.
• Safehouses - More than a dozen secure and discreet sites where Oubliette keeps product, armories, reserve cash, and isolated systems where they manufacture and process forged documents.
• Tenancies - Oubliette owns a sprinkling of entirely legitimate tenancy housing around the city. They use this to house a number of their men, employees, and contractors - and occasionally move product through them as well.

Wishing Well

NAME:
Wishing Well

ALIGNMENT:
Villainous

RENOWN:
Obscure Urban Legend/Unheard Of outside of Intelligence Circles

ICONOGRAPHY:
A water well with a noose where the bucket and chain should be.

UNIFORMS:
Non-Newtonian Next-Generation Ballistic Armor with a trim profile. Identifying insignia detailed on the back, breast, and shoulder.

AGENDA:
Wishing Well is an obscure terrorist agency best known for its obscurity. Their agenda is completely unknown. Refer to their Interpol Dossier.

ORIGIN:
Unknown.

TYPE RANGE:
Wishing Well makes predominant use of baseline Humans with a small number of powered assets, though the exact range is unknown.

SCALE:
World

MEMBERSHIP:
Unknown. Interpol speculates there are at least five distinct and active cells of between four and a dozen members each presently.

INFLUENCE:
Little to none. The telltale sign of Wishing Well's influence inside of another agency is a pattern of destructive behavior followed by complete collapse. Interpol speculates they have little interest in asserting control over external agencies.

RESOURCES:
Unknown, although Interpol's analysis indicates they may have sophisticated manufacturing capabilities that enable them to be self-sufficient and resupply themselves with advanced, military hardware regularly.

Interpol Dossier on Wishing Well

Wishing Well is a collection of affiliated but independent terrorist cells which are speculated to have been active for approximately twelve years as of this date. They are suspected of perpetrating upwards of hundreds of separate, discrete terror actions inclusive of assassination, asset theft, bombing, communications tampering, false-flag operations, infiltration, kidnapping, sabotage, and numerous lesser disruptive actions across the entire world and all seven continents, including Antarctica (refer to action report 12TA871155).

Wishing Well's ideological cause, nation/s of origin, and approximate membership remain unknown to this day - Wishing Well operatives have been captured alive in the past, but they operate in disparate, clandestine cells that maintain tight and stringent operational security that precludes most efforts to discern their agenda. It is speculated that Wishing Well operates using a three-layered hierarchy. The first being Wishing Well's core members, the only individuals in regular communication with other cells and core members, who ultimately define and direct the organization as a whole and who instruct and delegate tasks to all members in the second layer. The second layer is an intermediate and small collection of Wishing Well's standard operatives, numbering perhaps between four and twelve in each cell, possessing advanced combat training with multiple weapons and martial disciplines and a zealous dedication. These operatives are often given delegated instructions by Wishing Well's core members and expected to accomplish them independently and without explanation beyond simplified success and failure parameters. The third, bottom layer is made up of temporary and disposable muscle usually comprised of local criminal elements, commonly dealt with indirectly by the second layer and unaware of the true nature or identity of their employers.

Due to either the innate flexibility or lack of an ideological core, Wishing Well operatives appear capable of assuming and accurately depicting various faiths, beliefs, and political views when necessary for operational security, without apparent discrimination or particularity except as required by operational security. The aims of their terrorist activities are obscure; they never announce or claim responsibility for any given act, and suspected Wishing Well terrorist actions are also nondiscriminatory and lacking in particularity. They are suspected of having targeted a diversity of other groups of interest including other terrorist agencies, and their true aims are difficult to discern. Their terrorist activities appear to coincide with asset theft that is either involved or adjacent to the activities themselves, and may be theft of convenience or else in furtherance of some obscure design.

To date, the following assets are suspected of having been stolen by Wishing Well, confirmed by way of capture and interrogation of at least one operative involved with each theft. This list is nonexhaustive.

-Industrial-grade nanolathes & extruder components (see action report 12TA84430).
-Multiple NM matrix containment array components (see action report 12TA851129).
-Multiple military and industrial-rated rectenna manifold components (see action report 12TA851163).
-One Naval Destroyer of the UN Peacekeeping Navy (see action report 12TA871155).
-Multiple ansible system components (see action report 12TA89269).
-Multiple ansible encryption & decryption system components (see action report 12TA90749).

As should be apparent, Wishing Well asset theft operations are highly sophisticated and organized, and are usually successfully despite location, number of opposing agents, and presence of security measures. They appear familiar and well-versed in the expeditious and covert transportation of advanced machinery and electronics. During the affairs of 12TA90749, Wishing Well revealed an involved familiarity with UN Peacekeeping Navy protocol and security; the stolen Destroyer assumed a heading that did not match what was reported to satellite-relayed traffic control. Its black-box, emergency transmitters, and asset-denial systems all simultaneously shut-down less than two hours after departure and prior to emergency alerts being raised. The vessel failed to arrive at its expected destination point, vanishing from GPS monitoring after passing through an oceanic storm. Initially thought to have been lost at sea, the Destroyer's removed name plate was later mailed to Interpol HQ in Lyons, France. Considered an unsolved mystery for more than four years, Wishing Well's involvement with the Destroyer's theft was revealed during the enhanced interrogation of a captured operative who expired shortly after revealing they had been personally present at the time.

The various forms of technology and systems assets present amongst the vessel's hardware exceed the breadth of this dossier, but suspected Wishing Well asset theft activity has not appeared to deviate in interest from hardware and systems inclusive of those present in the stolen vessel. This would suggest that Wishing Well may not have been interested in the ship itself, may have a greater need for certain materials than the Destroyer could supply, or that the operation was conducted of convenience rather than necessity. It also suggests that Wishing Well possesses technology, technical knowledge, and expertise that is at least equal to that of the UN Peacekeeping Navy in terms of quality if not quantity.

Specific knowledge of Wishing Well, inclusive of its name, is known of only due to careful dragnet analysis of online forum topics, questioning of known third-layer Wishing Well accomplices, and a single near-successful infiltration attempt of a Wishing Well cell. Despite Wishing Well's clandestine nature, growing awareness of its existence amongst the international intelligence community coupled with frequent contact between Wishing Well operatives and local criminal elements has resulted in the proliferation of their existence as something approaching an underworld urban legend. Few criminal agencies accept or are aware of the existence of Wishing Well, and those that do inevitably have a decided lack of interest beyond possible interference with their own activities. Only the most fanatical of criminal elements, namely other terrorist organizations, commonly afford Wishing Well any serious consideration due in part to Wishing Well's nondiscriminate tendency to attack and disrupt other terrorist organizations. The most coherent and credible digital references to Wishing Well available take the form of black-ops urban legends and myths posted on a variety of niche online forum communities, with little in the way of citation or evidence beyond hearsay, presenting Wishing Well as figurative bogeymen akin to the Illuminati.

Local criminal elements employed by Wishing Well rarely have direct contact with their operatives, though it is not unknown for operatives to co-opt criminal leadership elements or else pose as them, and thus directly interact in a limited capacity with local underworld elements. Commonly, such coopted or suborned criminal elements will be unaware of the true affiliation of such operatives. Analysis into the possible number of criminal agencies that might secretly be controlled by Wishing Well has concluded that their agenda is far too erratic and unstable for such a trend to be likely; most if not all criminal agencies co-opted or suborned by Wishing Well inevitably demonstrate erratic activity inevitably leading to their collapse. Wishing Well has little evident desire to infiltrate and control other organizations in the long term.

Approximately four years ago, an Interpol asset in the form of a young war-orphan was approached by a Wishing Well operative who entered into a mentorship relation with the asset, during which they appeared to be appraising the asset's suitability for recruitment. During this period, the suspected operative divulged a number of surreal oral stories (refer to database entries: International Folklore; Four Thieves, Grave Digger, Wishing Well), and particular lines of questioning as to the asset's beliefs and desires, as well as arranging several confrontational scenarios and encounters without the asset's knowledge. This is all believed to have been part of an elaborate and obscure screening process, which ultimately proved to be effective. The operative abruptly abandoned the asset and attempted to flee the region some time after contact, requiring immediate intervention of discretely arranged assets to intercept. Enhanced chemical-assisted interrogation conducted upon the operative was only marginally successful, as the Operative was revealed to have limited practical knowledge of Wishing Well's agenda. While the locations of several safehouses were extracted, these sites were all abandoned upon investigation.

Although Wishing Well is a small agency, its operations are uniformly destructive and apathetic as to the loss of human life, nearly impossible to anticipate in advance, and difficult to deter or prevent. It is theorized that their limited membership and numbers may permit for an organized dismantling of the organization if it could be successfully infiltrated, but given their irregular recruitment and screening methodology, planting such an infiltrator amongst their ranks will likely prove to be difficult. Suborning or otherwise turning captured operatives may prove to be more effective, although to date such captured parties have proven singularly recalcitrant. . .

Do you know how to post pictures on RPG boards?:

Sample Post

Earth
North Atlantic
German Naval Research Vessel Valknut
Six Years Ago...

Tracy shivered and sniffed wretchedly in his bunk, curled in a fetal ball and with his guts churning like ravenous, spined worms. One of the other passengers had been coming in and out of their cabin and out to the deck, repeatedly and on end approximately every ten minutes - and left the doors open every single time they left, letting frigid ocean wind howl down through corridor and into the cabin. Every single time, the odious woman would slam the door open, splashing thin sheets of water all over the floor, and obliviously begin babbling directly at Tracy about every stray and errant thought that had visited her since she had last terrorized him in her nasally, high-pitched voice, often standing directly by his bunk for several minutes on end to chatter rhetorical diatribes at him even after she had retrieved whatever miscellaneous tool from her pack. Evidently there was a nearby oceanic storm brewing that everyone was studying like it was some undiscovered cryptid. Normally Tracy might have had the nerve to indicate he was trying to sleep, but between his pulsating intestines and the biting cold from the wind blowing into the cabin he could hardly think straight or summon the fortitude needed to protest.

All Tracy wanted was to try and get some sleep, or at least lull himself into a fit of furtive torpor that would allow him to escape the wracking agony of his spasming gut - but time and time again, he hauled himself out of his bunk to shuffle morosely over to the cabin door in order to quietly shut it before haltingly hauling himself back up to his resting place to pursue slumber. It was the middle of the day as well, with thick rays of indifferent sunshine beaming through the cabin porthole, which did not help even remotely. So much for the supposed oceanic storm.

Minutes ticked by. Tracy's breathing began to even out and he began to warm as his body heat pooled within the blankets and banished the cold. His mind began to drift away from his churning stomach and for a half a moment, Tracy thought he might have blissfully dozed off.

The other passenger - whose name he really did not know, something dumb that started with B, maybe Bianca - had thrown open the cabin door again and was now unreasonably shaking at him, causing a new nail of anguish to drive through his abdomen with every light push and obliterating any chance of sleeping yet again as another draft of freezing air rolled into the room.

"Tracy, come on, you've got to come see this! Nearly everyone is out on the deck, it's headed right for us!"

Tracy's eyes dragged themselves across the far wall of the cabin - the porthole was dark. In the span of a minute the sun had vanished.

"I don't really think I should be going out during a storm-" He began.

"No, that's not it. Tracy - there are lights!"

And so Tracy dragged himself out of his bunk and down the hall and onto the deck, where most of the other passengers and a good chunk of the crew ha gathered, leaning near the railings and upper balconies, some with cameras or recording with their phones - as the piercing rays of light beaming out from the roiling thunderheads above drifted across the shifting waves and bobbing hull of the Valknut from above. Tracy blinked in disbelief as he took everything in, and began to process the excited murmurs from around him.

"-aliens!"

"-irst contact-"

"-the sea god!"

"-cient Atlantean ship-"

'Glad to know so many trained scientists still hold onto vestiges of traditional beliefs.' Tracy sardonically thought to himself. His eyes narrowed as he tried to get a good look at the lights above. It was hard to see exactly what they were emitting from, but from the silhouettes and the way they were undulating in their movement made it seem pretty apparent - to him at least - that they were just bog standard high-powered search lights. Maybe they were mounted on helicopters - though the heavy cloud cover above seemed too coherent, and he definitely could not hear any chopper blades.

There was a dull, booming sound, like a distant cannon being fired, and suddenly a massive harpoon shot down from the clouds above, pierced straight down through maybe-Bianca's head and body where she stood next to Tracy, causing ruptured viscera, shattered bone fragments and scraps of ruined, blood-mottled clothing to scatter in every direction. The harpoon pierced straight through her and tore into the deck plating, extending a triad of barbed clamps with a mechanical whine. Tracy fell flat on his rear, front and face splattered with gore as he looked on and upwards in shock - following the length of wound cable linking the harpoon to...something, up above in the clouds. He thought, for a moment, he caught glimpse of a silhouetted outline in the clouds - of something massive.

As he looked up, there was a rapid stutter of muffled explosions, and amidst the terrified screams of passengers and crew reacting to the first fired harpoon, five more descended from the nebulous mist above to spear into the Valknut. One of the more hardened crew-members regained their composure and ran back inside the ship - returning moments later with a fireman's axe even as the whirring sound of motors began to echo down from above. With a heaving grunt and a wide swing, he chopped at one of the cables connecting the giant harpoons to the vehicle above - and was forced to drop it with a panicked cry as a surge of arcing electricity leapt between the cable and the axe-head, before grounding into the deck of the ship - but not before the raw, coursing power that had discharged into the axehead set part of the wooden haft on fire.

Moments later, black rappelling lines descended from the cloud cover, and decidedly Human figures in black fatigues and armor broke through the cloud layer, rapidly trailing down along the lines to land on the Valknut's deck. One of them landed right besides Tracy, still lying prone and in shock on the deck, and was gracious enough to daze Tracy into stunned senselessness by slamming the butt of their rifle into his face.

The dull, muted ringing in Tracy's ears muffled the ensuing deluge of screams and gunfire that followed. Fading in and out of consciousness, all that could occur to Tracy was that somehow, his roiling gut actually felt much better.

---

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---

Unknown Dockside
One Year Ago...

"No, I think you can go tell your boss to fuck himself."

The next thing Tracy knew, he was being hammered in the face by the dealer's grapefruit-sized fist, hard enough to send him stumbling off the pier to fall, flailing, back into the motor-boat he and the others had arrived in. He slammed head-first against one of the raised seats and agonizingly tried to pry himself back up off the floor as the now intimately familiar sound of gunfire started to rattle off back up on the pier itself. A shallow wave of water splashed itself across Tracy's face as a bullet-riddled body tumbled into the water next to the boat, followed by another - and then as he finally began to blink the pinwheeling stars from out of his eyes, the two surviving thugs that had been provided as muscle leapt into the boat and had shoved off, one of them steering and revving the motor to its limit while the other provided desperate covering fire.

All Tracy could do was sit back, drenched in water, his mouth open like a goldfish. He had overplayed his role - he had doubled down when he should have let it stand, and now the deal was ruined and they were two warm bodies short. Tracy blearily cast his gaze towards the two survivors, and realized - with a dread chill stealing across him as he did - that Walker was not with them. He had been one of the bodies falling into the water.

They were going to kill him.

---

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---

The Phantasmagoria
Two Days Later...

"You know, Tracy, I have to admit I underestimated you."

Tracy, handcuffed to a metal chair between two thugs and with an IV drip already hooked into his arm nearby, sweat profusely as the speaker shut the bulkhead down behind him as he entered the room.

The other man was on the shorter side - even shorter than Tracy himself - and had a deceptively lanky appearance, with bare arms on display under the rolled-up sleeves of his white jumpsuit that bristled with cords of muscle. He had a mane of dark, slicked-back and spiked hair and a wide soul patch framing his narrow, somewhat bony and angular face. He wore a pair of welding goggles over his eyes even now, but the rictus grin on his face made his mood evident.

"I could have sworn I reminded you every time I've seen you for the last few years that if you slipped up even once, I was going to torture you and then all of your worthless friends and co-workers in front of you and then toss you them all one-by-one into a scrap grinder, followed by you."

The man approached the stainless steel table across from Tracy and set a black tool-case across the surface, unlatching it and popping it open to reveal rows of sharp, pointed implements neatly arrayed in both halves. Reaching down to his toolbelt, the man carelessly unclipped and slid a multitool and a cordless hand-drill across the table as well.

"I wasn't expecting you to actually try and rough it out! I figured you were going to eventually try to break and run! And even after that fiasco at the port, rather than try and make a break for it by diving over the side, you actually came back. Willingly. Knowing what I was going to do to you...or well, the gist of what I was going to do to you..."

The man turned and boosted himself to sit on the tabletop as he finally turned to stare at Tracy through his welding goggles. "You've got an awful lot of nerve for a gutless coward. Of course, now I've got the real measure of you...just as terrified of your own guilt as you are of the idea of me quartering you with a hacksaw. Normally that might be useful. Normally I might think I'd be able to make better use of you..."

Tracy sucked in a nervous breath.

"But in demonstrating that you fucked everything up and also got Walker killed. So I'm gonna try and go for a compromise instead here. I'm going to ruin you, and if you survive..."

With a burst of speed fueled by panic and desperation, Tracy leapt to his feet, swung the back-end of his chair against one of the guard's legs and head-butted the second in the gut, driving the air from the man's lungs and causing him to back up, hunched over and wheezing for air as his friend swore repeatedly and stumbled over, clutching at his legs with a grimace. The IV needle tore from Tracy's arm as he haphazardly started ambling for the bulkhead door leading out of the room.

He came short when the man in the jumpsuit clotheslined him from the side, knocking Tracy down onto the steel hull and then delivering a series of kicks to his gut and across the face for good measure. He then grabbed Tracy by the hair of his scalp and dragged him over to the table, where he raised Tracy's head before slamming it down onto the hard surface. With the entire room oscillating and turning different colors in Tracy's vision, he barely even processed the two thugs regaining their composure and approaching to hold him in place.

"Look what you went and did. Knocked the IV loose. That was how I was going to administer the anesthesia." The man in the jumpsuit tutted as he picked up the hand-drill and experimentally pressed the trigger, eliciting an electrical whine as the drill-bit began to rev and spin. "Now we have to do this the fun way. Protip for you, the more you move, the more this is going to hurt."

The man craned his head to match Tracy's orientation and treated him with another rictus grin as he pressed the drill bit against the side of Tracy's head.

"So feel free to go crazy."

---

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---

Some Time Later...

"Jesus christ. How is he not dead?"

"It looks like they used something to seal the hole they put in his skull."

"Then why the fuck did they not also stitch together the everything they did to his scalp?!? And what the hell is going on in his mouth?"

"Look, I used to be a nurse, this is...this is really bad, but he can recover from this. We need clean, sterilized bandages and maybe some duct tape. I'm honestly more worried about the hole in his mouth. We need actual antibiotics for that or that is going to become inflamed and probably get infected, and that will definitely kill him."

"Alright, got it, so we need sterilized bandages, duct tape, antibiotics, would you also like some gold bullion and flawlessly cut diamonds while we are at it?"

"Calm down, we can...we can probably work something out with the guards..."

"Setting aside the entire issue of that, how long would he need to recover?"

"Well, assuming there's no lasting brain damage that we can't see? Puncture wounds start to heal at around three weeks. Maybe in a few months he might have skin over that spot again..."

---

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---

Present Day

Tracy winced as his cell door crashed open and harsh, intense light pierced into his vision, now long-adapted to complete darkness. He did not resist as he was bodily hauled up by two men in black fatigues and dragged out of the small room and through a number of hallways, before eventually being lead into a large interior workshop. Machining tables, lathes, metal-working extruders, and a variety of heavy machinery crowded the workfloor, and in the middle of it all was a somewhat cleared out space where the man in the white jumpsuit had arranged what appeared to be a combination conference table and breakfast nook, with stray, emptied bottles of alchohol, cans of motor oil, half a dozen disarrayed tool-cases and what looked, disconcertingly, like plastic explosives littering the surface.

"Ah, if it isn't that guy! Whatever your name is!" The man in the jumpsuit fired a pair of fingerguns at Tracy nonchalantly. "And how are we feeling this morning?"

Tracy, knowing better than to not answer, tried to summon up a response and ended up hacking out a rasping, heaving series of coughs from his parched throat instead.

"Always good to hear, lot of that going around." The man in the jumpsuit nodded sagely as he pointed to a nearby chair, which Tracy was forcibly seated in by his escorts.

"Now that we've reconfigured the parameters of your wetware into something marginally more useful, and assuming we still have a hard bead on that charmingly archaic guilt complex of yours - we've got a job for you. Catch!" The man picked up a large metallic case from the table and bodily tossed it to Tracy. He feebled raised his arms and just barely managed to grasp at it as it hit him, though it would still have fallen onto the floor if one of the men in fatigues had not steadied it for him. Now clutching the object to his chest, Tracy squinted with his eyes, still adjusting to the light, and took it in.

It appeared to be a briefcase made of polished, gleaming chrome. It had no hinges he could see, both its halves appearing to be adhered to each other without any external fixtures. Both halves were smooth with rounded edges, and looked to have been molded as single whole pieces. The only evidence they even come apart was a single thin seam separating them bilaterally, with faintly raised edges where the two halves came together. The seam itself was so thin and finely pressed together, it was actually hard to tell it was there, especially with his bleary vision. If his attention was not specifically drawn to it by the raised edges on either side, he could easily have overlooked it.

Set in the middle of one of the halves' sides was what must have been the locking mechanism - some kind of round display panel and tactile interface the size of his palm. It displayed what looked to him to be a bog-standard RGB color wheel, with extremes around the edges and white towards the center. Right in the middle of the wheel was a raised dial, with a red arrow indicating that it could be twisted along its side, and an inscription of tiny red lettering on the top that said 'Press Me.' A second, smaller display panel the size of a small LED above the color wheel seemed to display the current color selected.

On the other side of the case was a small plaque engraved with a message.

Hello! I am a tamper-proof case!

I have an equivalent explosive yield of thirty-six (36) kilograms of TNT!

I have no signal compatible hardware, you cannot hack me!

I am hardened against ionizing radiation, you cannot degrade me!

I am water and airtight, you cannot flood me with any liquid or gas!

If you attempt to breach my exterior, I will explode!

If you attempt to insert any object into my seam, I will explode!

If you attempt to interface with my locking mechanism, I will explode!

If you attempt to scan my interior, I will explode!

If my integral thermometer raises or lowers more than a hundred degrees past room temperature, I will explode!

If you drop me on the ground accidentally I will forgive you, but if you drop me from a high place I will explode!

If I am opened by any means without selecting the right color via the locking mechanism, I will explode!

I can only be opened by using the locking mechanism to select the correct color, and pressing the button!

If you press the button with the wrong color selected, I will not explode, but you will still regret it!

Whatever could be inside me? The possibilities are tantalizing! Dream of me when you are sleeping!

Tamper-Proof Case

"You're going to be playing courier for us once again. You will be delivering that to a certain somebody. And hey, good news - no adult supervision this time! We're trusting you to do this all on your lonesome!" The man in the jumpsuit announced with all the countenance of a proud and doting father. "Oh and by the way we will definitely torture and murder all of your worthless associates if you try to run or do something stupid like rat us out. And then we'll probably package and donate their ground-up body parts as meat to homeless shelters and soup kitchens."

Tracy stared blankly at the man in the jumpsuit, who crossed his arms expectantly and looked back. "Well?"

"WhuACK-" Tracy hacked up again. "Whuagh...who am I...delerghering it to?"

"Glad you're onboard. That go-get-em attitude will take you places, whats-yer-name." The man in the jumpsuit smiled. "Listen carefully. Going to have to say this a few times and have you repeat it back to me to make sure you've memorized it."

The man in the jumpsuit cleared his throat, and then spoke. He went on for a moment. Tracy's eyes widened in disbelief.

"...What?" He croaked.

"Geez, KEEP UP will you? I said -" And the man in the jumpsuit repeated the segue, word for word, doubtlessly having memorized it himself. "Now repeat that back to me."

Tracy open and closed his mouth, once. Then, squirming in his seat somewhat and clutching at the case in his lap almost as if for support, he opened his mouth and immediately fell into a coughing fit.

"Not even close." The man in the jumpsuit tutted.

"I could...use some...some water to clear my-" Tracy tried to say. Before he had even finished his sentence, the man in the jumpsuit reached for a half-emptied bottle of vodka and hurled it directly at Tracy's head. Tracy flinched and reflexively lifted the case to block it, with the bottle shattering on impact and the vaguely antiseptic stench of the alchohol spreading through the air as the vokda spilled over the case and him.

"There you go, bet you're feeling better already. Now, this time, I'm going to say that all one phrase at a time and you'll repeat after me, alright? So -" He spoke the first phrase. Tracy halting repeated it back to him. They went on that way until they had reached the end.

"Now repeat all that back to me." The man in the jumpsuit demanded flatly.

Tracy haltingly attempted to comply. He flustering got caught up on the fourth phrase, requiring the man in the jumpsuit to correct him after casually throwing a pair of pliers at his legs - after which Tracy started over, and although he hoarsely stumbled over a few words, he managed to reach the end.

"There we go! Clear as mud I trust! Now of course, since we will be sending you out on your own, we've got a few toys for you, and - well, it's not that we do not trust you not to lose the case - but we absolutely, definitely, completely do not trust you not to lose the case. We actually have a bit of a betting pool going on how long it will take you to lose it, but never fear! We have given you the tools to find it if that happens." The man in the jumpsuit snapped his fingers, and one of Tracy's escorts abruptly yanked the case out of his grasp and tossed it out and along the floor of the workshop. Tracy simply watched with a puzzled look as the case slid across the floor - and then...

Dawning on him like a the gates of hell shuddering open, a keening, piercing wail blossomed within Tracy's head. A resonating shriek, like a banshee with an angle grinder polishing off the edge of one of his femurs while a hurricane filled with nails in the midst of an avalanche descended on them. It was more than simply an unpleasant, undulating sound. It was a hollow, pitted sensation that felt like mites were burrowing into his bones. He could feel his organs individually warbling inside of his chest, could sense his blood curdling in his veins. Without wasting any time, he immediately fell out of the chair and began to dry heave drool and spit onto the floor, wretching up his empty guts repeatedly as his skull and eyes began to throb in response to the unrelenting clamor of the wail that was making his skin itch. A scant instant later, the faint tinge of copper flooded his mouth and a driving, biting pain began to corkscrew through his throat and along his spine while a mountainous, bass rhythm began to ebb in and out of his chest cavity. This, was hell. Even having a power drill taken to his head without anesthesia had been nothing compared to this. There was less raw, concentrated physical pain - instead it was a menagerie of dulled physical suffering distributed across every remote micron of his body and unbearable mental fatigue. He could feel his Heartbeat fluttering erratically in response to the *sound*, jacking up until it was pulsing as fast as a hummingbird beat its wings, adrenaline and cortisol shooting through every vessel in his body like rocket fuel.

Slowly, convinced that the entire world was ending, with the lights in the room seeming to brighten and dim in bursts and surges while his vision rocked and trembled, Tracy raised his head and looked over to where the case had fallen. The man in the jumpsuit crouched over it, beckoning Tracy over like a dog. Fetch!

Dragging himself achingly across the metal floor, with tiny cavities in his teeth and spots in his bones suddenly highlighted and punctuated with fiery clarity by the noise from within, Tracy inched closer and closer to the case - and then...

It took a moment to realize the wailing had stopped. The pain did not vanish. Every cell in his body did not immediately cease throbbing with exquisite anguish. The sound of his cerebrospinal fluid seething and boiling inside of him did not instantly abate. Draping himself across the case, Tracy simply lay still for - minutes? Hours? As he slowly came down from his reality of demented, buzzing static.

After a time, he finally flinched when he heard an audible snapping sound in one of his ears.

"Aha, there we go. Welcome back to naptime." The man said, slapping Tracy across the back - causing him to heave up nothing but mucous and spittle again. "If the case ever gets more than five meters away from you, that will start up. The feedback induction should align itself in the direction of the case and let you know what direction to go in."

Tracy simply stared straight ahead, his entire body shuddering violently.

The man in the jumpsuit let out a sigh of exaggerated exasperation. "Now now." He chided. "What do we say?"

"Wuhlp..." Tracy try, nearly biting off his numbed tongue. He tried again. "..Wuh...why...?"

The man in the jumpsuit laudged, stood up, brushed a stray bit of spittle off of his chest, and then treated Tracy to a healthy kick across the face.

"Because you were sent here just to suffer." He declared cheerfully. He then motioned to the men in fatigues.

"Get him on his way. Give him the duffel on the table and everything in it, it has some old junk I can bear to part with. You know where to drop him off."

---

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Lost Haven Harbor
Present

Tracy stared helplessly as the motor-boat that had dropped him off began to pull away from the pier, leaving him there, dressed in his old, tattered clothes with a suspiciously stained duffelbag and the comparatively gleaming and pristine case.

"If I were you, I would work fast." One of the men in the boat called out. "There's no real deadline, but you still probably only have until he starts running out of patience. Come back here once you're done if you know what's good for everyone involved."

The boat pulled away, and began to head back out to sea.

Tracy turned and, tears streaming down his face, took in the view of the City of Lost Haven.

This was where he would die.