The New Age - Play Report Roundup 1

I've fallen behind on my New Age play reports. Rather than try to remember precise details and give a blow-by-blow of each sessions, I'll be writing up vignettes of interesting moments. 

This is only half of what I intend to write, but considering this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for over 2 months, I thought I'd at least get something out.

Junji Ito

JESSE woke up. Blearly staring at red light of the motel alarm clock, it was 12:07am. Noises from outside had awoke him, so he strapped on his duty pistol and stepped out into the fresh Nebraska air, concrete walkway still soaked from last night's rain. A trio of highschool aged teens were crowded around his bucar, smoking cigarettes they were obviously too young to have purchased legally.

The punks leered at the marshal as he walked up and told them to stop leaning on his car, not bothering to confront them about the illegal smokes. The teens grinned at him and obliged, jumping off the hood and circling around the vehicle. JESSE tensed up when he realised they were deliberately flanking him. He opened his mouth to tell them to knock it off when he finally noticed it. 

The blood on their hands.

The trio drew weapons and jumped the marshal, slashing his chest and arms with hunting knives. He staggered away - his kevlar vest sparing him from the worst of the knife attack. He tried to draw his sidearm, but they grabbed his arm and started wrestling for control of the gun, laughing maniacally. JENKINS barged out of the motel room with a hastily donned tactical vest and gasmask, pitching a canister of tear gas into the melee. The teens screamed in agony, dropping to the ground scratching at their face and eyes. JESSE staggered away coughing, before radioing the sheriff's department and demanding Kaufman get down here.

It didn't take J-Cell long to figure out where the blood had come from. The trio had robbed a nearby convenience store and tortured the cashier to death. Torn his eyes out and smashed his nasal cavity in; giving the mangled corpse a crude resemblance to a one-eyed cyclops. The teens laughed all the while, between streaming tears and snot, as the deputies hauled them off to county lockup.

Blair Reynolds

The NEMESIS project, the secretive research program run by the Great Plains Cruciform Array that MJ-12 was so interested in, had a secret benefactor. By pulling some financial records found in Stan Arnold's office the Agents realised the GPCA's original angel investor - Perry Branden - had a sudden change of heart two decades later and began piling hundreds of thousands into the array again. All in exchange for them pointing their world-class radio telescopes at a very particular area of the Kuiper belt.

J-Cell decided to pay the reclusive millionaire a friendly visit. Flying out to Lincoln, they drove out to his isolated hobby farm a few hours north of the city. The gate was rusted and the fields overgrown. Spotting something in the fallow wheat, J-Cell dismounted their vehicles to find dozens and dozens of bovine skeletons littering the farmland. Disturbingly, the cattle's bones showed clear signs of skillful dissection with incredibly sharp implements. 

Unlike the surrounding lands, the mansion itself was in perfect condition. A detached garage held an expensive luxury car, strangely left totally unsecured. The Agents knocked on the door and were eventually greeted by a dripping wet Perry Branden. The eccentric investor was dressed in a damp suit and walked barefoot, leaving sticky footprints all over the floor. An awkward conversation revealed the billionaire had "friends" staying upstairs that had encouraged him to fund Dr. Neals' research and give him instructions on the NEMESIS project in the form of a strange old book they had provided him. These friends were also the ones that had made his millions in the mining industry, gifting him the locations of rare earth mineral deposits throughout the American midwest.

JEAN made an excuse to go upstairs and use Branden's bathroom. Inside she found a slimy bathtub with a telephone set up next to it, and a large rack of clean pressed suits - identical to the one Branden was currently wearing. Suspecting something was amiss, the maladjusted CIA officer promptly walked downstairs, pulled out her pistol and blew the billionaire's head off. 

The Agents made the usual preparations to burn down the mansion, but decided to explore upstairs first. More abandoned rooms - what little furniture remained was covered in dust sheets. Though strangely enough, there wasn't any dust to be found. Eventually, they discovered the pulldown ladder to the mansion's attic. Scanlon volunteered to go first, but found the trapdoor was stuck. With a bit of pushing, it eventually gave way in a shower of gross paper-like substance, like the interior of a wasp's nest. 

Disturbed but not dissuaded, the spec ops goon pulled himself into the attic. He got a single shot off before the thing was on top of him, slashing his face with razor-sharp pincers and trying to drag him into the darkness. Unable to traverse his LMG, Scanlon pulled the pin on a flashbang and tossed it deeper in the room. An ear-splitting bang deafened him and his assailant - the creature released him and he went toppling down onto the floor below. The rest of the Agents unloaded into the ceiling, and the attic-dwellers responded in kind by blind firing blasts of eldritch energy.

The Agents grabbed the stunned Scanlon and made for the staircase. Branden was waiting for them, a mutilated smile on his mangled face as the protomatter slowly regrew his lost head. "Leaving so soon?". With an awful buzzing noise, three disgusting fungal crab things apported into the air around their inhuman servitor, blinking the flashbang's afterburn from their multifoliate sensory organs.

The combat became general, laser beams exchanged with hand grenades and bursts of rifle fire. The Branden-thing was put down early by an instance of blue-and-blue; one of the Mi-Go blinded by the flashbang accidentally stabbing him with a syringe of mystery goo. The building soon caught ablaze after an Agent rammed the late Branden's luxury car into the wall, igniting its fuel tank and the manor's gas line. The Agents managed to put down two of the Fungi from Yuggoth without sustaining any casualties on their side, fleeing the burning building and firing ineffectually at the remaining bug as it rapidly retreated into the stratosphere.

The blaze soon spread to the abandoned cornfields surrounding the estate. The Agents, bloodied and battered, loaded up into their vehicles and made a getaway.

Before someone noticed the smoke.