TOPIC: [R3] Timezero / The One Black Stain

TimeZero – Session Three / Part Two (14/05/2015)

The ancient gatehouse of Fort Belvedere loomed large in the cracked windscreen of the NOCS van.

“Brace yourselves back there.” Matt called, flooring the accelerator.

“Against what?” muttered Red, glancing around the sparse interior of the stolen vehicle. It didn’t even have doors anymore, let alone any seat belts.

The van crashed through the gates, ripping them from their hinges with a squeal of rusty metal. Gravel crunched beneath the vehicle’s tyres as Matt applied the brakes. The rest of the team clambered out and began looking for cover in the overgrown garden. Red dragged de’ Valfierno whimpering from the van and shoved him to the ground. Matt and Waverley clambered up onto the roof of the gatehouse and watched the police vehicles approaching. Unexpectedly, the lead car silenced its sirens and turned back towards the city, the rest of the convoy following suit. Matt listened to the radio from the stolen NOCS van and discerns that the police have been ordered to withdraw.

Something else was coming.

The first two Triad hitmen landed lightly on the crumbling walls, their gravbelts humming quietly. Glowing night-vision goggles cut through the dark foliage, picking out the Time Guard agents hiding in the bushes. The assassins opened fire with advanced laser weapons! Mordecai spent a moment aiming then shot one in the head. The bullet shattered the gunman’s visor and left a large hole in the back of his skull. The second killer used his gravbelt to bunny hop along the battlements. Waverley tackled him and managed to unbuckle his gravbelt during the scuffle. The hitman leapt from the wall, expecting to soar majestically through the air – instead he fell to his death. Embarrassing.

Two more Triad gunmen landed in the gardens and advanced on the low wall that Red, Miss Green and de’ Valfierno were sheltering behind. A tachyon grenade landed beside their position, slowing time to a crawl. The assassins approached at a leisurely pace, stepping around the abandoned NOCS van and levelling their weapons. Matt Finish hit the detonator that he rigged earlier and blows them both to hell. KABOOM!

The timegate opens and Red slings de’ Valfierno through. The rest of the team follow.

To be continued….

TimeZero – Session Three / Part Three (14/05/2015)

Upon their arrival at TimeZero, the team hand de’ Valfierno over to Frank Tavistock for interrogation. Hopefully, the Italian’s insider knowledge of Triad operations can be used to foil the evil organisation’s machinations throughout history. Frank congratulates the team on their success and encourages them to enjoy their downtime before the next mission. Previously, retired operative Alf Egilson invited the team to join him on his authentic Viking stag night. The team happily take Alf up on his offer and head to the costume warehouse to get dolled up in fur and boiled leather. Unwilling to be excluded on grounds of her gender, Miss Green hooks a false beard over her ears to disguise her feminine features. The revellers pass through the timegate into some snowy corner of Scandinavia, 812AD. Alf leads the group into a smoky mead hall, bustling with sweaty, muscular Viking men. The stag night commences with a drinking competition which Matt wins, out-drinking burly Viking warriors twice his size! Flush with victory, Matt accidentally spills the drink of a hulking brute propping up the bar, kicking of a chaotic brawl! None of the team are grievously wounded, but many are nursing bruises and black eyes upon their return to TimeZero the following morning.

Soon thereafter, the team are briefed on their next mission. Several scientists associated with the creation of the first atomic bomb have been abducted from the timeline by persons unknown. The team are dispatched to America (1942) to enrol at the University of California, where they can keep an eye on Julius Robert Oppenheimer, who taught their prior to being recruited to the Manhattan Project.

Red and Miss Green are still young enough to enrol as students. Waverley and Mordecai join the campus faculty as the new sports coach and art history teacher. Matt finds employment among the university’s janitorial staff.

The team spend several weeks settling into their new cover identities. Mordecai (aka Professor Johansson) strikes up an unlikely friendship with the neurotic Professor Oppenheimer. Matt is mopping in the library when he detects the distinctive aura of a timegate being opened in the vicinity. The screams begin a few moments later as an enraged anklyosaurus appears among the stacks. Matt draws the dinosaur’s attention away from the fleeing students by banging his mop and bucket together. The anklyosaurus objects to this frightful racket, dips its scaly head and charges toward the noisy janitor. Matt rolls out of the way at the last possible moment and laughs triumphantly as the stupid lizard trundles back through the open portal from whence it came.

Meanwhile; suspecting that the rogue dinosaur was intended as a distraction, the rest of the team converge on the lecture theatre where Professor Oppenhemier is holding forth on the merits of theoretical physics to a crowd of bored students.

To be continued….

In case of uncertainty, the TimeZero game is still going ahead tomorrow night. I know Antidog will be absent, is anyone else expecting to be absent?

TimeZero – Part 4 – 21/05/2015

Mordecai interrupts Professor Oppenheimer’s lecture and convinces the physicist that his life is in peril. Unfortunately, he is too late. The doors to the lecture theatre burst open and four hulking, reptilian warriors lumber into the room (if you’ve seen ‘The Toy Story that time Time Forgot’, they look just like the battlesaurs). They spot Oppenheimer cowering behind his desk and gesture menacingly. Panic ensues as the student’s rush for the exits. The sakra/battlesaurs seem content to let them go, their beef is with Oppenheimer. Mordecai grabs the professor by the collar of his coat and manhandles him towards the fire escape, but the sakra cut him off. Mordecai draw his pistol and shoots the nearest lizardman in the face. The bullets bounce off its armoured hide and a scaly claw swipes the gun out of Mordecai’s hand. A second lizardman slings Professor Oppenheimer over its shoulder.

Matt and Red fight their way through the crowd of students. Red is wearing nothing but a bedsheet, wrapped around his naked torso like a toga. Matt is still disguised as a janitor and brandishes his mop like a staff. Matt tackles the creature carrying Oppenheimer and clobbers it with his mopstaff while the professor escapes. Red throws his sheet over another sakra and punches it in the face with a fully charged energy bracer while it is disorientated. Several female students in the crowd swoon.

After defeating the sakra, Red and Mordecai escort Oppenheimer to his office, leaving Matt to tidy up the anomalous bodies littering university grounds. Oppenheimer is having trouble processing recent events, so Mordecai injects him with lethe serum and extracts him to TimeZero for safe keeping.

The team brainstorm why the sakra might be kidnapping scientists from the Manhattan Project and stumble upon a grim hypothesis; they must be building a bomb with which to destroy the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs – preventing their extinction and irreversibly altering the evolution of mankind. Just like in the film ‘Armageddon’! Since Oppenheimer is the only person in the room with even the slenderest hope of disarming an atomic device, Tavistock orders the team to take him with them into the Jurassic Period.

Suspecting that the sakra will mount a formidable defence, the team are authorised to carry heavy firearms and provided with a tricked out jeep to drive. Red hops behind the wheel and steers the vehicle through the timegate and into the age of the dinosaurs! Giant insects buzz noisily through the prehistoric flora and the humidity is oppressive. A range of smouldering volcanoes rises over the dense jungle canopy. Hanging over the landscape, dominating the sky is the asteroid that would bring such calamity to the dinosaurs. A calamity that the team must ensure comes to pass at all costs. Yeah, f*ck you dinosaurs.

The team set off, driving recklessly through the tangled prehistoric jungle. A triceratops lumbers out in front of the speeding vehicle and Red doesn’t see it in time to stop. CRUNCH! The bonnet crumples with the force of the collision and the unfortunate triceratops collapses onto its side in the middle of the trail. Miss Green slides out of the passenger seat and sets to healing the injured herbivore. Red curses the delay and the futility of saving a dinosaur that is going to be killed by a great big space rock in the near future anyhow. An infant triceratops watches the process with concern for its mother. Matt watches the infant triceratops hungrily, wondering what it would taste like baked into a pie.

Once the injured dinosaur has been restored to good health, the team continue their journey. Sometime later, they hear someone calling for help in a terrible American accent. A human scientist in a filthy labcoat has clambered into a tree to escape a pack of vicious velociraptors. The team gun down the hungry predators and rescue the man, who introduces himself as Professor Robert Serber, another of the missing scientists from the Manhattan Project. He explains how he managed to escape from the pens where the rest of the scientists are still being held. He can direct the team back to the sakra prison camp and hops into the jeep beside Oppenheimer.

Some hours later, the jeep gets a flat and Red pulls over to the edge of the trail while Matt changes the tyre. Something roars in the undergrowth and a second creature bellows in response. Two T-Rex erupt from the jungle and bear down on the group. Red struggles with the engine while Miss Green screams in his ear. In the back of the jeep, Matt and Mordecai open fire, whilst the two physicists quiver with trouser soaking fear. Red throws the jeep into gear and races off, the two T-Rex in hot pursuit. Serber shrieks as a pair of monstrously strong dinojaws snap shut around his waist and lift him out of the jeep. The chase continues across a grassy plateau as Red swerves between the trunk-like legs of several startled brontasaurus…es (?). On the other side of the herd, the ground gives way to a black lake of bubbling tar! Red spins the wheel at the last moment and avoids driving headlong into the sticky mess, but the T-Rex are not so lucky. Tripping over one another, the two hungry dinosaurs tumble into the tar and are sucked down to their doom.

The sakra prison camp is located on the opposite side of the tar pits. One half of the camp detains a workforce of brutish Neanderthals, the other half holds the dinosaurs that the sakra train as mounts and sentries. The team use their rocket launcher to blow a hole in the dinosaur pens and sew chaos while they rescue the remaining scientists from the prison camp.

To be continued….

TimeZero – Session Five / Part One (21/05/2015)

Having just blown a huge hole in the fence enclosing the sakra’s prehistoric petting zoo, Matt Finish melts back into the jungle. He and Mordecai have been tasked with babysitting Professor Oppenheimer, while the rest of the team assault the prison camp and rescue the rest of the missing science squad. The sakra re-purpose their patrols to the task of rounding up the escaped dinosaurs, leaving naught but a token force to hold the camp. Red kills the headlights and ram raids the front gate at top speed, mulching an unfortunate sentry beneath the jeep’s monstrous tyres. The camp is laid out in a spiral around a wide, yawning pit in the ground - a pit over which the missing scientists are being dangled! A villainous lizardman sporting a top hat and handlebar moustache cackles maniacally as he slowly lowers the boffins to their doom!

Squalid cages line the arena, each and every one of them crammed with hooting, roaring Neanderthals. Waverley throws himself from the back of the jeep and elbow drops a surprised sakra. The former wrestler picks himself up and boots another hostile into the pit. The crowd goes wild! Waverley takes a moment to bask in the adoration of his new fans.

“Oh yeah! I’m the best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be!”

Meanwhile, more sakra are flooding into the arena, blasting away with their suspiciously Stargate-esque staff weapons (apparently they’re call Ma’Tok Staffs, thanks Google!). The jeep takes a couple of hits and the engine begins to grumble and smoke. Red and Miss Green bail out and take cover behind the winch mechanism, ignoring the scientists’ frantic pleas for salvation. The team are outnumbered and things are beginning to look grim – until Miss Green decides to unleash the Neanderthals from confinement. Having been enslaved and generally treated poorly by the sakra, the brutish cave men are all too eager to get some payback on their ophidian overseers! The tide of battle changes and the sakra are overwhelmed! Needless to say, the Neanderthals ain’t in the prisoner takin’ business, they’re in the lizard killing business! And cousin, business is a-boomin’!

It also transpires that the enemy of Neanderthal man’s enemy isn’t necessarily Neanderthal man’s friend. The cavefolk be all up in the team’s grill - until Red hops back into the jeep and inserts Matt Finish’s home-made cassette of classic rock anthems into the tape deck.

“Nobody wants him! They just turn their heads!”

Black Sabbath blasts out of the stereo. Red revs the jeep’s engine and flashes the high beams on/off. The cavemen are suitably awed and prostrate themselves before this terrifying metal demon.

“Nobody helps him! Now he has his revenge!”

“Now that’s what I call rock music!” Red jokes, “Y’know, on account of this being the stone age....”

Even the Neanderthals groan.

To be continued....

TimeZero – Session Five / Part Two (21/05/2015)

Waverley flexes his pro-wrestler muscles and cranks the scientists out of the pit. They introduce themselves as Hans Bethe, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Edward Teller and Klaus Fuchs. They are able to confirm that the sakra forced them to construct a functioning atomic device. The weapon is primed and ready to be launched at the K-T asteroid bearing down on the planet. Fortunately, the scientists know of a secret way into the sakra’s volcanic silo. The lava tunnels beneath the slumbering mountain lead into the base from below – BUT it’s also where the sakra have been dumping the radioactive run-off from their experiments. The team consider the alternatives, which extend to lassoing a couple of wild pterodactyls and riding them to the smoking peak of the volcano. The team prepare to get their spelunk on.

The team (plus their entourage of scientists and new caveman friends) ride the cage/platform down to the bottom of the ominous shaft. Bloodstains lead off into the dark tunnels. This strange parade of time travellers follow the trail of gore and half-eaten viscera and it’s not long before they get ambushed by a tribe of twisted, albino cavemen (mutated into Gollum-ish horrors by their exposure to radioactive waste). The team make short work of the pitiful mutanderthals and are slapping each other on the back when Edward Teller points out that both Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Hans Bethe were dragged off during the chaos.

The mutanderthals haven’t gone far. They’ve taken the two captured scientists to a crude altar overlooking a lake of glowing green (and probably radioactive) goo. Red hits the power button on his grav-belt and strafes the altar with machine gun fire, creating a ragged path through the gibbering congregation. Miss Green and Waverley charge into this bloody opening in the mutanderthal ranks! The pale, eyeless freaks howl with zealous fervour as a huge, two-headed, mutant plesiosaur breaks the surface of the radioactive pond. Hans Bethe screams as he is snapped up by one of the monster’s two heads. He is gulped down whole and spends the next few minutes being painfully dissolved by the plesiosaur’s corrosive stomach acids. The second head eyes Maria Goeppert-Mayer hungrily. Waverely sweeps her up into his heroically muscular arms and fixes the plesiosaur with his most manly stare.

“What?” he demands, “You wanna’ be the man? Then you gotta’ beat the man!”

Red hoses down the plesiosaur with a burst from his rifle. The mutant dinosaur responds by spewing a gutful of acid (and half-digested scientist) over the gravity defying pirate. Red spirals out of control and ends up clinging to one of the beast’s serpentine necks! He unbuckles the grav-belt from around his waist (causing his own trousers to fall down, but he hasn’t the time to worry about that right now!) and wraps it around the plesiosaur’s throat. Cranking it up to full power, he effectively throttles one of the beast’s two heads! The second head vomits radioactive slime over Miss Green and the two scientists hiding behind her skirt (Teller & Fuchs), reducing all three to an unsightly pile of partially melted skeletons, bones all muddled up together in an acidic puddle of green slime.

Holding Maria Goeppert-Mayer in on arm and cradling his shotgun in the other, Waverley steps up and unloads both barrels into the plesiosaur’s last head. BOOM! BOOM!

Red leaps from the beast's back as it slowly sinks into the goop from whence it came.

“Now that was an ordeal,” he quips, brushing bits of the late Professor Bethe off his jacket, “A prime-ordeal, get it? Primordial? Come on!”

The remaining members of the team spare a moment to reflect on the sudden/senseless death of Miss Green.

“She died the way she lived....” Red observed thoughtfully, “In a sticky mess.”

To be continued....