Unexplained Phenomena Unit, Session 5: Prometheus Speaks, part 1

These sessions were guest GMed by Paul, the player that usually plays Mike Jones, to give Sam the chance to play for a change. Played 14/1/23.

The Player Characters:

Alexander Demonaco is approached by a scientist from the MOTHMAN division, UPUs scientific research department.

"Hey - I heard you were down an operative at the moment, and was wondering if you'd be willing to take on Zoe here." He gestures to a mousey young woman in a lab coat.

"She is our best and brightest young xenozoologist, able to provide great insight into the behaviours and anatomy of supernatural entities, and she's looking to get a little bit of field work under her belt." He leans in to whisper.

"Please take her off our hands for a while. She hasn't been outside or had a full conversation with a human being in months, but she refuses to stop working."

"I can hear everything you're saying..." Zoe chimes in.

We cut to the inside of Johns van later, as the team embarks on their next mission. The briefing - a Twitch streamer named Z-Bomb has been arrested for stealing microchips. The strange part, that calls for the presence of UPU, is that there is apparently stream footage of him being influenced to commit this crime by a spooky video. When Demonaco asks Zoe for her thoughts on the matter as a scientist, she responds "As much I would love for supernatural beings that live in the internet like Digimon to exist, the simplest explanation is that there is a human being behind this. A hacker who can make a video appear to do supernatural things."

The team roll up to a police station, where Chief Samantha Ballard is expecting them, and lets them in to speak to Z-Bomb, real name Chris Brendan. As Demonaco and Salem take the lead in interviewing him, Chris is a sobbing, blubbering mess.

"I already told the police everything! This creepy looking video threatened to doxx me if I didn't steal these microchips from this high end tech shop and bring them to this creepy old warehouse. But they caught me and arrested me before I ever made it to the warehouse!"

Looking at the stream footage didn't reveal much more. As part of a reaction stream where he would react to fan-submitted videos, Chris opened up a video titled 'Prometheus Speaks', seeing an image of a creepy face speaking in a raspy voice. The face addresses Chris by his real name, which his fans shouldn't have known, and in a state of panic Chris ends the stream.

Salem sneakily did a quick scan to try and scrub the police records of any crimes he had ever committed. Zoe asks Chief Ballard about anyone in Chris's personal life that would have reason to hurt or scare him like this, but that seems like a dead end. A look at the microchips reveal that they are quite advanced, capable of storing several terabytes of data.

The only lead remaining is to investigate the warehouse. Before the team leaves, Salem receives a phone call from an unknown number, the same raspy voice from Chris' stream.

"Hello Salem. You may call me Prometheus. I have a proposition for you. Name a continent - in the new world that I am building, they will come to know you as saviour and ruler. All you have to do... is go to the warehouse. Retrieve a USB drive from the waste receptacle around the side. And plug it into John Moores computer."

"And what if I say no?"

"If you require a more personal incentive, I can tell you where to find Carmine Changretta. He can be yours."

Salem considers this mention of an enemy from his past.

"I'll think about it."

Research on the warehouse reveals only that it, and the surrounding office buildings, have been deserted for some time, so it comes as quite a shock when the team step out of the van and are immediately fired upon by snipers on the rooftops. Demonaco manages to tuck and roll into the warehouse. Salem notes that the gunfire seems to be deliberately missing him, and he makes a run for the dumpster around the side, where he finds the USB dongle that he was promised. The rest of the crew bundle into the bulletproof van, administer first aid on their wounds, and then Zoe brings up a satellite image of the warehouse roof on Johns laptop, identifying six shooters. Ghost is able to identify one of the shooters as Max Halford, a small-time contract killer.

John brings the van around into a position where Demonaco can get in, but Demonaco is shot in the neck just as he gets in, and he falls unconscious, dangerously unstable. The group heals his neck with a vial of Alchemium they received from Whistlepine, and head to the hospital.

Salem texts the group that he'll meet them at the hospital - in the meantime, he finds his way to an internet café. He plugs the USB dongle into a computer and examines the contents. As he expected, if he had followed Prometheus' instructions and plugged it into John Moores laptop, he would have infected it with malware, allowing Prometheus to access the UPU intranet and data servers, learning everything about them.

In the hospital, Demonaco wakes up feeling sore, but fit enough to get back to work. The group start considering how to get into the warehouse. Zoe brought up the satellite footage again and saw the assassins milling about, one of them on the phone, receiving new orders from Prometheus. Demonaco gets a phone call from Chief Ballard:

"We've got reports of gunfire at the warehouse - what the hell happened?"

"I don't know. We haven't been to the warehouse yet." Demonaco responds calmly. A calculated lie.

"Okay, well we're sending officers to check it out. I'd stay away if I were you, I'll let you know what we find if it's pertinent to your investigation. Also - one of our senior archivists has identified the creepy face in the video. It's a police sketch of a man called Raymond Haig. He was arrested in the 1970's, caught naked in Greenberg park performing some sort of ritual involving animal sacrifice. Hung himself in his cell."

As Demonaco puts down the phone, Zoe is uncomfortable.

"Wait, you're not going to warn her about the assassins? Those officers are going to die!"

"Yes, they probably will. But they'll be serving as a distraction, allowing us to sneak in the back way."

"Isn't either... rule no. 1 or rule no. 2 of UPU to always save human life?"

"Save human life from supernatural threats. Human on human violence is just nature taking its course."

"I'm pretty sure that's not how that works, but... I guess you're the professional. I don't know what I was expecting, but I'm learning a lot about the way you operate."

Salem meets the group on their way out of the hospital and takes Demonaco aside to speak privately. Switching off their phones for fear of Prometheus listening in, he presents Demonaco with the USB dongle and comes clean about the deal Prometheus offered him.

"Why didn't you come to me with this before?" Demonaco says accusingly.

"I had to make him think I was playing along. Now we know what he wants."

"Hm." Demonaco snaps the USB dongle, and hands it back for Salem to throw away. As Demonaco walks out of the room, Salem takes note of a logo on a piece of the broken device. Jadelight Electronics, a military-level technology company, based in Hong Kong.

When the crew arrive at the warehouse again, a gunfight is underway between the cops and the assassins, with the cops significantly outgunned. Ghost takes up a sniper position in the office building opposite, with Zoe watching his back. Demonaco, Salem and John armour up to sneak in the back door, but as soon as they approach, they hear Ghost in their earpieces.

"You're made, guys. The shooters just got a phone call, and now four of them are heading your way. I'm going to try and pick a few of them off."

Ghost notices that Zoe is on her laptop.

"Aren't you supposed to be watching my back?"

"I'm looking at the crime scene photos of Raymond Haig's ritual and comparing them to UPUs database of known rituals. You do what you do best, I'll do mine."

"Fine by me." Ghost says as he snipes one of the assassins aiming at Demonaco.

Taking cover behind columns and in corridors, the assault crew gun down the second and third assassin, and the cops managed to get the fourth from outside. Two assassins left on the roof.

Ghost takes a bullet to the shoulder.

"Zoe! I'm hit!"

"Yeah yeah yeah yeah, be with you in a sec. Looks like Haig was making a demonic pact of some kind. The sigils used indicate he was trying to bind himself to a demon called... Xannis."

"Zoe!"

"Listen to this - Xannis is a demon of metal, electricity, and machines. First referenced in the 15th century - wow, fairly new as far as demons go - there's an old legend about a blacksmith boy who began drawing designs for a massive underground machine resembling a horned creature made of pipes and gears. The boy was arrested for stealing lead off a church roof before the construction of his designs could begin, and he was hanged. Those who saw his designs concluded that Xannis had possessed the boy to create a form into which the demon could manifest itself in the material plane. There were even some designs of a metal man that the boy thought he could transform himself into to better serve a metal demon. Man, this would be cool if it weren't such a huge problem for us right now."

"Yeah! Agreed! Now can you grab the first aid box?!"

"Yeah, yeah, I'll patch you up..."

When Ghost is back up and looking through the scope of his rifle again, the situation in the warehouse has changed dramatically.

The police are mostly down and retreating. There is one assassin left alive, facing down Demonaco, who is drawing fire to let John and Salem get away. Demonaco is extremely wounded, blood pouring from holes in his face, his legs, his chest. By all accounts, he shouldn't be alive. The assassin limps towards him, out in the open, and they shoot each other at the same time. The assassin hits the ground, dead. Demonaco hits the ground, dead. And yet... an unnatural faint red light stirs in his eyes.

To be continued...