2nd March
20:14 GMT
In the interests of reality, most of the faux-supervillains are wearing clothes which clearly distinguish them from the semi and fully professional criminals around them. This includes the final boss, who I'm
pretty sure they'll all recognise. The costumes aren't indicative for the metabots, and only
roughly indicative for the techbots, but they're
there and clearly mark out some on the villain side as higher priority targets.
In the interests of not being stupid, not all of them are costumed. Slade Wilson aka Deathstroke the Terminator might wear that natty blue and orange number but
Constantine Drakon doesn't feel the need to try
quite so hard.
With Dmitri on site they have access to KordTech's database. There
shouldn't be any difference between the files I planted for this exercise and the ones which were there anyway. Even the fact that I 'brought' the technology to the company doesn't stand out. I've been doing that a lot. And because I'm sure that Batman will check, I also added a bunch of e-mails relating to the fictional project to the server. Except… I'm not
quite sure how the Rocket Red armour's 'talk to technology' ability works. It's perfectly possible that it might just tell him that the files I added were added at a different time from what the server now thinks they were.
It's also possible that there's a truth compulsion spell which can affect machinery, but if they managed
that I'd award points for creativity and just accept it. Dmitri doing it would just be 'using an ability everyone knows he has in a really inconvenient way'. It wouldn't ruin the wargame, but it would make the investigative portion which the research team has been so invested in less valuable. This is one of the places where the villain team actually
need a win to get their preferred end result.
Not that we don't have contingencies. Ultimately, team villain can do what so many of their contemporaries do and slink off. If the Justice League thwart them but can't find them by the end of the day I'll call an end to it and… Talk about rerunning it in a couple of months.
Jordan's using what he sees through his telescope to make a construct model of the facility, and Batman's using KordTech employee files and publicity brochures to create a 3D model of the place and a register of the people likely to be there on a Saturday. The telescope was a
little clever, but Jordan's revealing his limits by not creating a construct infrared sensor. He simply doesn't understand the technical components well enough to create a construct of it. That means that the Leaguers don't know how many attackers there are or what they can do. And Dmitri is filling Mr Allen in on all of the ways the Russians found to stop speedsters with mundane technology.
Inside, the mookbots pantomime coming fully alert as the metabot with enhanced senses reports that the League have arrived. Faux-explosive harnesses fitted to the hostages bleep and twinkle, each connecting to four others in other parts of the building. While that won't
stop Mr Allen, it might well result in him inadvertently killing hostages. He
can outrun radio triggers, but it seemed reasonable to me that the villain side might
suspect that he'd struggle to do so without advanced notice to several different end points. Their mission objective here is theft, so all they need to do is delay the League members until that's done and the chance of dead hostages achieves that result nicely.
In India, there's a flash of light as the Hawks' ship is 'killed' by a cyborg monster, leaving them with a two hour wing-flight back to the nearest zeta tube. Hawkwoman and Captain Atom themselves are..
coping, picking up injuries which the GM system thinks will inhibit them further. But limiting their mobility was the main aim, and I think that Batman suspects it.
In China, xeno teams have decided not to trouble the League and are going in shooting, which… I'd complain, but that's a pretty realistic depiction of what they'd do in an actual crisis. The mook-mookbots drop pretty quickly, but the pro-mookbots are returning fire and triggering traps. Since we predicted that something like this might happen, the traps aren't 'flash, please sit the rest of the event out'. They're genuine neural shock devices that will render the attackers unconscious and paralysed for a few hours. I wonder if they'll tell the League that this happened quickly enough for it to matter.
In Japan, a superbot team manage to neutralise the alarms too quickly for the League to be alerted, and also locate and deactivate the local zeta tube so they'd struggle to respond anyway.
Slightly worried that the Sivanas managed that.
In France, Diana and Dr Balewa manage to prevent an attack on a nuclear power plant by a probot team without any injuries or damage being inflicted. Diana truth-lassos them one after the other and receives everything they know. Which isn't much as they weren't 'told' why or who, but she sends it to Batman anyway and another part of the puzzle comes together.
"Batman to Flash. I think the attackers are at KordTech to get their experimental radiation shield technology."
"Are they trying to build a nuclear bomb?"
"No. There are far easier ways to get fissionable material than this."
"That wasn't meant to be reassuring, was it?"
"KordTech isn't enriching material which could be used to make a bomb, and the fuel rods used by nuclear power plants aren't high grade enough. KordTech's shield would allow people to survive high levels of radiation exposure without lead-lined suits-."
"So they want to go somewhere highly radioactive?"
Oh, well done.
"They want to allow humans or delicate equipment to go somewhere highly radioactive. Equipment they don't have time to redesign from scratch."
"Any idea where?"
Batman looks over to where Mr Hol is already looking at nuclear waste storage sites.
"We'll look into it. The hostages come first, stopping them acquiring that data or any prototypes comes second."
"Got it. Flash out."
He says something to Dmitri, who gives him the bad news that while he can
identify anything on a data storage system he can't remotely erase it. Now things get interesting. Flash can
sort of go invisible, but it makes it hard for him to see what's going on around him and reduces his straight line acceleration for a while. With the lives of hostages on the line that isn't an option. Guy performed his traditional macho bullying routine until Jordan learned to make filaments, but it still doesn't come naturally to him and he certainly can't infiltrate a building with them. Dmitri's armour doesn't have stealth.
Huh. It's surprising how unprofessional evildoers usually are. Plenty take hostages, but most of the time they just point guns at them or put them near a single large explosive. Two veteran superheroes and a veteran soldier and they're struggling to work out the best way to proceed.
In a police station in Fawcett City, several files are manually destroyed to cover up the disappearance of an object that's already missing.
In a police station in Central City, several objects are covertly removed from secure storage. It's not the first time that store has had something appropriated from it.
In the tunnels beneath Aberrance, a mechanical thumper starts going off and triggering all sorts of alerts. They actually start the process of preparing for the public relations effect of League members arriving before they send the notification that something untoward is happening. They do actually
send it though, which is a good sign that Cranius is less bitter about our first meeting now than he was at the time.
Mr Allen
moves, and a second later Jordan
starts-. Oh, I didn't know he knew how to
make those! A construct to
disrupt electromagnetic radiation, good thinking. Mr Allen
vibrates the harnesses -that was risky, but he's been doing this for a while and I'm going to assume that he checked them before risking it- off the hostages in one frantic charge and throws them into a
box construct Jordan has waiting. They explode harmlessly and Mr Allen's already back inside punching mookbots out.
Dmitri decides to head for the server directly, meaning through the building's walls. Jordan
sticks a construct shield around the hostages, using the map to
send thick green beams through the building's corridors before the hostage-takers can 'kill' them. They fire
anyway, because that's what
everyone does. Mr Allen's run into one of the techbots, who's covered the floor around 'her' with a gel copied from the Trickster. He slows down the moment he touches it, having to vibrate at
exactly the right frequency in order to get it off.
A metabot fires a sonic blast in his general direction and he's thrown backward, being
caught in a green catching mitt as Jordan arrives and
advances under the cover of a green shield. Gel shots and sonic blasts are harmlessly absorbed, and Mr Allen is back on his feet and vibrating through a wall to attack from a novel angle, running through a toilet-.
"Watcha, Flasher."
And getting charged by a translucent mirror image of himself.