The World In The Aftermath (Formerly A World Less Magical)

[Davies]

Protius


When Antaeus tracked down Protius, in the city of Freeport, Texas, he was almost as hard to find as Aeolia had been, despite the fact that there'd been far more sightings of the water marauder. Eventually, the two elementals met each other, and after a relatively short fight, they agreed to sit down and discuss matters like civilized gentlemen. Protius told the story of having been Wayne Manderville, a boat owner and occasional practitioner of the relatively young hobby of scuba diving. While diving in the Gulf, he'd encountered a strange pattern on the seabed that had blinded him with a brilliant light, transforming him into a liquid creature who flowed out of his wetsuit and up towards the surface.

Antaeus found it easy to persuade Protius to abandon his career of slightly criminal mischief in Freeport and join him and the other members of the Primal Pattern in the Institute. The aquatic lunatic was a frequently disruptive presence on the team, often questioning the strategies that Antaeus devised -- sometimes to the team's benefit, but often just to be contrary. He was also fond of engaging in trickery of their opponents, and of their allies, often coming up with frankly juvenile pranks. The only member of the Institute he never played jokes on was Selkie; despite what his teammates thought, their relationship was never actually romantic, just straightforwardly friendly.

Or at least, as straightforwardly as he could be. In the nineties, once again, Richard Lawson undertook some research into Protius' background. He found records of a Wayne Manderville resident in Freeport in 1960, but no evidence that he'd ever owned a boat or a set of scuba equipment. He'd been a pool hustler and multiple time loser. While he had disappeared in 1962, the last verifiable sighting of him had been more than a week before the origins of the Primal Pattern.

Lawson argued that Manderville had actually been Protius, as his background would explain why someone who'd supposedly owned his own boat demonstrated no particular familiarity with seamanship -- not knowing the definitions of port and starboard -- as he did during a 1967 case. The most likely explanation of his origin, in Lawson's view, was that he'd annoyed someone after winning (or losing) a particularly important game, who then drowned him on the same day as the other Primal origins. But there was no proof of any of this, obviously.

Regardless, his fate was the same as the rest of his teammates, boiled into steam and then dispersed by a wind blast from Stardust. Tiny puddles of unusual liquid were discovered on the ground surrounding the site of his demise, and recovered by the scientists who also gathered Antaeus' and Phoenix's remains. Selkie claimed that enough of Protius' consciousness survived in his steam state that he was able to help her in some unexplained manner, but offered nothing but vehemence as evidence that had happened.

Protius -- PL 9

Abilities:
STR 2 | STA 2 | AGL 2 | DEX 1 | FGT 4 | INT 1 | AWE 2 | PRE 1

Powers:
Transformed Form: Visual Concealment 4, Limited, Only in liquid; Elongation 8; Immunity 12 (life support, water effects); Permanent Insubstantial 1; Movement 2 (Slithering, Sure-footed); Protection 8; Regeneration 8, Source (Water); Swimming 7 (60 MPH) - 52 points
Water Control: Array (20 points)

• Drowning: Progressive Affliction 10 (Resisted and Overcome by Fortitude; Dazed, Stunned, Incapacitated), Grab-based - 1 point
• Water Blast: Ranged Damage 10 - 20 points

Advantages:
Close Attack 3, Daze (Deception), Favored Environment (water), Improved Initiative, Power Attack, Taunt.

Skills:
Close Combat: Unarmed 4 (+8), Deception 6 (+7), Expertise: Streetwise 8 (+9), Perception 4 (+6), Ranged Combat: Water Control 6 (+7), Stealth 6 (+8).

Offense:
Initiative +6
Unarmed +11 (Close Damage 2)
Water Blast +7 (Ranged Damage 10)
Grab +7 (Strength or Dodge 10 plus Fortitude 10)

Defense:
Dodge 8, Parry 8, Fortitude 7, Toughness 10, Will 6.

Totals:
Abilities 32 + Powers 73 + Advantages 5 + Skills 17 + Defenses 19 = 149 points

Complications:
Thrills--Motivation. Inhuman Appearance. Trickster. Vulnerability (anything that boils water also damages him, freezing attacks also Hinder, Immobilize and Paralyze him.)

[Davies]

Okay, taking the weekend off, spending today watching the first two eps of WandaVision and s4 of Carmen Sandiego. Back on Monday with a bunch of Institutionals who aren't the same story written four times, then some first age villains, led up by the Wickedest Man in the World.

[RainOnTheSun]

It's looking like PL 9 is the average for a "super" in this world.

[Davies]

It's looking like PL 9 is the average for a "super" in this world.

Pretty much. If I were going to run a campaign here, I'd start at PL 9, 135 points, as with these guys.

[RainOnTheSun]

If. ahem

[Voltron64]

It's looking like PL 9 is the average for a "super" in this world.

Pretty much. If I were going to run a campaign here, I'd start at PL 9, 135 points, as with these guys.

For me, it'd be PL 10, 150 points, campaign outline being PCs are all recruited by Argus to take down the Combination, overall campaign style being the MCU as written by William Gibson.

[Davies]

The Meteor


To those who first witnessed him rescuing the Enterprise, a prototype supersonic transport constructed by Lockheed, in 1960, he must have seemed like the American Dream of that Space Age come to life -- a square-jawed, steely-eyed hero, quick to smile and quicker on the draw with his high-tech shooting iron. And, on top of all that, he was the brilliant creator of his own space ship, the living embodiment of the idea that simple human ingenuity would take everyone to the stars. To many, the Meteor seemed almost too good to be true.

They were right; he was. Even at the start, there were those who saw holes in his story, most notably the civilian name he gave -- Richard Swift -- and his absolute refusal to let anyone examine his spaceship. One of these early skeptics, Lieutenant Jerry Lawson, would plague Meteor throughout his career in the 90s, and it was with some hopes of vindicating his father that Lawson's son, Richard, began studying the history of the first age of heroes and publishing his research on the subject. He was never able to solve the riddle that Meteor posed, but his speculations came surprisingly close to the truth.

His real name was Bzz Tirgal (a family name which does, coincidentally, derive from a word for 'lightyear') and he was born on the planet Chirab sometime in the early 1920s. Chirab is a world whose best days are far behind it, and many of its children leave each year to seek their fortunes out among the stars. Bzz was one such, finding his way into a career as a self-employed scout shortly after he saw his twentieth year*, making money through the discovery of resources and the sale of the rights to same to organizations better equipped to exploit them. In the course of these adventures, he became an excellent pilot and proficient hand with an electrolaser, or zap gun.

The costs of his operation were greatly reduced when he discovered, on one planet, a dying space traveler who passed him the Power Prism that the latter had used, urging him to use it to good purpose. Not fully trusting the Prism, he used it as an inexhaustible fuel supply for his ship instead of as a weapon and armor. His reluctance to employ it as it was meant to be employed was mostly caused by his knowledge that it hadn't saved its previous owner, and he expected that using it in that way would just attract unwelcome attention. That said, he often found himself feeling guilty that he was using such a wonder for such a banal purpose.

The nearest his journey was supposed to take him to Earth was a pass through what Terran astronomers know as the Alpha Centauri star system, which he visited in what Terran historians knew as 1958 -- just as the hyperspace wave front from an event, roughly two years in the past, moved through it and disrupted many of his ship's systems. Surviving and making repairs, Bzz decided to investigate what had caused the event, out of curiosity and a sense of self-preservation, as well as some concern for the welfare of whatever life might be found in the system that had produced it.

He arrived in the Sol system not long before a second event occurred with a comparable disturbance to hyperspace. This time he was prepared, though, and better able to analyze the phenomenon. Something had arrived in the orbit around the third planet of the star, and Bzz decided to take a closer look at that planet. (His focus was on the planet, and so did not at that time discover the other alien spacecraft in hiding around Earth's moon.) Bzz was startled to find a species much like his own; it was almost like looking through a time-viewer at Chirab's past, for better or worse. A lot of what he saw disturbed him, and he was surprised to feel a sensation that he'd never felt when considering alien life -- sympathy.

And so, he joined the nascent paranormal culture, posing as a brilliant rocket scientist of Terrestrial origin, who'd invented his own space ship, and naturally set out to use this wonder to overcome criminals, as one apparently did. Most of his colleagues in the Institute suspected that he must not be telling the whole truth, but their apparent belief was that he had been hired to act as the public representative for the actual inventor of his ship. Regardless, he was well-respected by the general public, especially after he assisted in dealing with the earliest Martian raids, and even more so after he handed the Soviets a black eye by defeating their super-soldier, Chelovek-Meteor ("Meteor Man") and forcing (actually just persuading) him to change his alias to Krasnaya-Kometa ("The Red Comet".) The Meteor never told anyone that his name was actually a pun, as the word 'miitiyar' in the language he grew up speaking actually mean 'crazy individual'.

Never chosen as the leader of the Institute due to the suspicions about him, the Meteor nonetheless served as one of its mainstays right up until the end. He didn't directly confront Stardust during the Battle of Vietnam, instead using his ship to ferry as many civilians as possible out of the mad titan's way. In the aftermath, his critics had a field day with asking why he hadn't used his ship's weaponry to assault Stardust, and his responses seemed poorly considered and inadequate. His popularity at an all-time low, Bzz ultimately chose to leave the system, ostensibly to pursue Stardust.

Just what happened in the next quarter of a century remains a mystery in space. Sometime in the late 90s, his ship returned to Earth, without being detected, and came to rest in the Amazon jungle, where it would eventually be found by Victor Furtado. Ironically, just as Bzz Tirgal used it in a different way than its previous owner, so too did Victor choose to use it in a way different from Bzz's use -- in both cases, because it didn't seem to have worked out all that well for them.

The Meteor -- PL 9

Abilities:
STR 2 | STA 3 | AGL 4 | DEX 5 | FGT 6 | INT 2 | AWE 2 | PRE 2

Powers:
Born Spacer: Movement 1 (environmental adaptation [zero-g]) - 2 points
Space Suit: Radio Communication 3; Flight 5 (120 MPH); Enhanced Flight 4 (1000 MPH), Only in microgravity; Immunity 10 (life support); Impervious Protection 6; Senses 5 (direction sense, distance sense, infravision, radio, ultravision); Removable (-10 points) - 38 points
Translator Circuit: Comprehend Languages 2 - 6 points
Zap Gun: Array (12 points); Easily Removable (-5 points)

• Blaster Setting: Ranged Damage 6 - 12 points
• Stunner Setting: Ranged Affliction 6 (Resisted by Fortitude; Dazed, Stunned, Incapacitated) - 1 point

Advantages:
Defensive Attack, Equipment 18, Evasion, Improved Defense, Improved Initiative, Precise Shot 2 (Ranged/Concealment & Cover), Quick Draw, Ranged Attack 3, Set-Up.

Equipment:
9 points of equipment as needed.
Spaceship: Size Huge; Strength 10; Speed 13 (air/space); Defense 8; Toughness 10; Powers: Arsenal (20 point Array: Ranged Damage 10, Move Object 10); Radio Communication 3; Concealment 2 (radio); Movement 2 (space travel 2) - 81 points

Skills:
Acrobatics 3 (+7), Athletics 5 (+7), Close Combat: Unarmed 2 (+8), Deception 8 (+10), Expertise: Galactic 6 (+8), Perception 9 (+11), Ranged Combat: Zap Gun 4 (+9), Technology 4 (+6), Vehicles 7 (+12).

Offense:
Initiative +8
Unarmed +8 (Close Damage 2)
Blaster Setting +12 (Ranged Damage 6)
Stunner Setting +12 (Ranged Fortitude 6)

Defense:
Dodge 9, Parry 9, Fortitude 5, Toughness 9/3, Will 6.

Totals:
Abilities 52 + Powers 54 + Advantages 29 + Skills 24 + Defenses 14 = 173 points

Complications:
Responsibility--Motivation. Power Loss (Zap Gun, must be periodically recharged in spaceship); Secret (alien.)

[Voltron64]

...Not what I expected, I can tell you that much.

[Davies]

Surprise is good for you. Keeps you on your toes.

[Voltron64]

Surprise is good for you. Keeps you on your toes.

I admit, I expected a Green Lantern-type, not...a Senior Scout player rcharacter from Traveller.

[Davies]

Surprise is good for you. Keeps you on your toes.

I admit, I expected a Green Lantern-type, not...a character from Traveller.

Or Captain Comet, or Space Ranger, or Tommy Tomorrow, or Captain Future, or ... also note Move Object in the Spaceship's weapon's array.

[Voltron64]

Surprise is good for you. Keeps you on your toes.

I admit, I expected a Green Lantern-type, not...a character from Traveller.

Or Captain Comet, or Space Ranger, or Tommy Tomorrow, or Captain Future, or ... also note Move Object in the Spaceship's weapon's array.

I'm aware of that too, I was referring more to his background as interstellar working stiff in his mid-30s.

[Davies]

A more traditional Power Prism user is in the offing, but you'll have to wait a while.

[RainOnTheSun]

Despite his anger over this, Carl adapted fairly well, and started to look into joining the Ultimate Wrestling Federation instead. But his time there was every bit as frustrating, as he kept getting booked as a heel instead of the babyface that he wanted to be, and going under for people who were weaker but more appealing to the crowds than he was. He never got the opportunity to push his limits.

I'm curious about the UWF. Is it a major thing? Is it popular? Are there enough super-strong mutants (Hyberbodies?) to go around?

[Davies]

It's popularity fluctuates depending on peoples' overall attitude towards the superpowers, and yes, it's a fairly small-scale promotion, about the size of something like Combat Zone Wrestling. I'd say there's been a max of maybe between 12 and 18 fighters on the roster at any given time. Not all are super-strong -- and it's rare for those who are to have more than about STR 7 -- some are noted for preternatural stamina or agility, Regeneration, or useful body modifications (high-lubricity skin [+5 to Acrobatics to escape grabs], for instance.) Then there are the guys who bring their own pyro.