About a week has passed since we met Trout and his Hummingbirds and the Valkyries raided Workout Beach and killed a couple of Crocs.
The pre-session rolls started with Adele hitting her Bonefeel on 10+, so she has the option to appear where she's needed and when at some point later in the evening, and takes +1 forward, which she'll use on her Love Letter roll.
Love Letters:
Hammer decides to replace his wing-man Snake-Eyes, killed by Crocs last session, with the newest member of the gang, Satan. {Custom Move: Love Letter, Hit 10+}. After a week or so of the gang getting acclimated, everyone seems good with the choice, and there's no big fight over whatever he used to do, probably because he's the new guy.
Damson has to deal with the twins, Lars and Nils, trying to shoot up his place. {Custom Move: Love Letter, Hit 7-9}. They manage to get a few shots off before Damson darts up and punches Nils' nose into his frontal lobe. The damage to the join is mostly cosmetic, but when the smoke clears, their singer Tavi is screaming on the lip of the stage, staring wide-eyed at the sizzling stump where her entire right leg used to be.
Jones is studying in his sanctum when the Tubes start to whine with the noise of an incoming capsule {Custom Move: Love Letter, Hit 7-9} and he is surprised to see another of the strange SPECTOR-logo capsules arrive. This one has surveillance photos similar to the ones he saw of Stinky and Goldie on the Rainbow Bridge, but show some sort of huge area filled with hundreds of tubes converging and crossing into large super-tech machines. The scattered bodies of workers in clean suits lie around the floors.
Adele has been working on her project to try and move water to the SPECTOR building sprinkler system {Custom Move: Love Letter, Hit 7-9} and she manages to use some anti-gravity lifters to move some of the tanks to the new building (She advances her Sprinkler Project clock by 1 tick), but accidentally reverses gravity on the cafe for a few seconds, resulting in a big mess that sends Ruby around the bend.
As the session opens, Ruby has had enough of Damson's lenience with Adele. She's upset that her window, broken over a week ago now, has not been replaced, and demands that Damson kick her out or at least get her to contribute more. Damson talks Ruby down {Move: Seduce or Manipulate, Hit 7-9}, in part by agreeing to go and speak Adele RIGH T NOW.
Damson goes upstairs and he and Adele have a somewhat tense conversation; Damson requests that she help fix up the club and tread carefully around Ruby, or their arrangement may come to an end, while Adele reminds him that many of the Cafe's amenities, including reliable electricity, are a result of her residence upstairs.
In the mysterious Inner Sanctum of Jones the Brainer, he is perusing old yearbooks when someone knocks on his door. He's surprised because he takes care to see to it no one knows where he lives, but when he checks the peephole on his door, he sees a woman in a leather catsuit wearing a stylized mask that seems riveted to her face. She shows him an old smartphone, that still works and seems to have a large cache of Facebook data archived on it, hundreds of pictures of faces.
After a typically elaborate ruse to appear mysterious, he greets her and learns her name is Absinthe, and that she apparently represents some wealthy parties who have a job for Jones.
Jones approaches her and hugs her, trying to get insight into her thoughts {Move: Deep Brain Scan, Miss} blood explodes from the nose of her mask, and she immediately pulls a pistol and shoots Jones cleanly through the leg, perfectly placed to hobble him without crippling him permanently. She informs him that his skills are needed, so she won't kill him this time, but if he does it ever again, she will. She tells Jones that if he's interested in acquiring the pictures, he needs to meet her and her employers at a pier on the Oceanfront. She leaves, and Jones drags himself back to his room to patch himself up.
Meanwhile on the Rainbow Bridge, Gnarly has been shooting his mouth off about how it's time for Hammer to finally do something about the Stinky problem, and goes so far as to get in Hammer's face about it. Hammer cold-cocks him in the face {Move: Go Aggro, Hit 10+} and breaks his nose, causing him to blubber, blame T-Bone for putting him up to it, and forking over a taser that he found somewhere that he intended to use on Hammer.
Hammer decides to go see what Stinky is up to and heads up to the tower on top of the Bridge. Stinky is rally losing it, the blue paint is flaking off of him, he smells even worse than usual, and it looks like he hasn't been eating lately. He rants at Hammer about 'trolls' he's seen on the Bridge, and though Hammer is skeptical at first, {Move: Read a person: Hit 7-9, Is he Telling the Truth?} he realizes that though Stinky may be misinterpreting what he's seen, he's sure seen something, and it's probably pretty alarming. He gets the gang to start looking for hatches, doors, any way inside the machinery of the Bridge.
It's at this point that Damson arrives at the Bridge to talk to Hammer about the security situation at the Sunset, and walks into the middle of his 'Troll Hunt' prep. He agrees to accompany Hammer inside the Bridge.
Jones, meanwhile, decides to venture to the Sunset to consult with Damson, as he's heard him mention the name 'Absinthe' before, if by 'heard him mention' you mean 'read it from his mind while he was sleeping off a bender' some time ago. It turns out he's gone, but Adele is there, and Damson asks her for advice, but she's unable to shed much light on who Absinthe might be, though she is intrigued when Damson mentions the lost tech she carried with her. It's as this conversation is happening that half a dozen Croc gangers, several of them openly wearing Bane injectors show up asking, quite politely, to speak to Damson.
The Troll Hunters descend into the guts of one of the Towers, where the hydraulic machinery that raises and lowers the Bridge turns out to be grinding away to some other purpose. Hammer demands flashlight from one of the gang {Move, Fucking Thieves, Hit 7-9} but the best they can come up with an old bike strobe so Hammer makes do with that, the light flashing as they descend in stop-motion. After climbing down a ladder and into the dark, Hammer squints into the dark and concentrates hard on what a 'Troll' might look like {Move, Open Your Brain, Hit 7-9} and as the bright colors and thick lines of his Asgard-of-the-mind fill his vision, a small, scrawny being, yellow-skinned with bulbous, slitted eyes appears for a moment behind the spokes of a giant wheel off to one side.
Damson realizes that the wheel is actually periodically rotating, but hard to say exactly when because of the strobe. Not content to let the Troll just disappear, Damson times a few flashes and leaps through between rotations of the wheel {Move, Act Under Fire, Hit 10+}, followed by Hammer, who, alas, is just slightly less nimble {Move, Act Under Fire, Hit 7-9} and is forced to jam his crowbar into the wheel to keep from being squashed. Damson strips to his civvies and leaves his suit nearly folded over a handrail as they follow the creature into a crawlspace and eventually deeper into the guts of th Tower.
At the Sunset, Jones decides to take matters into his own hands and hurls one of his sickles at one of the Crocs. {Move, Go Aggro, Hit 7-9, (Back off calmly)} The one who is hit seems confused by the wound and the others state simply that now that there's been a disagreement with the Valkyries, they expect that the Valkyries will no longer be allowed in the Sunset, and that they'll be watching to make sure. Adele notices how they treat Jones with somewhat baffling deference, and seem to have some fannish appreciation of the weird mysticism he likes to spout. {Move, Read a Situation, hit 7-9 (“Who's in control here?)} She suggests that they help fix her window if they're really sincere about not meaning nay harm, so they set off to find her some plate glass {Move, Seduce or Manipulate, Hit 7-9} and promises to tell both Damson AND Hammer about their request.
Ruby, exhausted and wild-eyed, emerges from the kitchen immediately after they've left and runs at Adele, screaming abuse and accusations and demanding she leave for bringing so much trouble to her place. Jones manages to get ahold of her {Move, Sieze by Force, Hit 10+} and force her to drop the kitchen knife she was wildly flailing. Adele stops listening for a moment and tries to break the situation down into a schematic she can actually get a grip on {Move, Open Your Brain, Hit 10+} and as the bar and Jones and Ruby's body all dissolve into wire-frame design schematics, she sees plain as day the embryonic neural net inside Ruby's guts. Adele looks Ruby in the eye and simply says, sincerely, “Congratulations.” {Move, Seduce or Manipulate, Hit 10+} Ruby breaks down and apologizes, explaining how scared she is right now and telling Adele that she is welcome to stay if she swears to keep secret that she doesn't know if the baby is Damson's or Lars'.
Under the Bridge, Damson and Hammer have descended down through ducts and ladders to find a storeroom where the noise of the machinery is nearly deafening and there is actually some few inches of standing water at their feet. Damson puts a hand to the steel to feel for vibrations and listens closely as he concentrates {Move, Open Your Brain, Miss}. He sees himself and Hammer, for only a few grainy black and white seconds, before a title card reading “And then the LIGHTS WENT OUT!” appear as the strobe flickers out. Feeling their way around the room, they manage to find a storage locker with a flare gun and 3 flares. Feeling their way to the door, they open it to a tremendous din of grinding machinery and clanging metal. Hammer readies his .44 and they both close their eyes as Damson fires a flare into the room.
A grating scream that sounds like fingernails being dragged over a blackboard immediately goes up as they merge into a large room where the heavy gears and chains once used to raise and lower the bridge have been re purposed to stamp sheet metal into crude weapons: axes, sword blades, hammers, attached to broom and shovel handles, maybe a few baseball bats. There are some 4 or 5 dozen 'trolls' here, working assembly-line fashion among haphazard piles of the weapons overseen by what looks to be a squat and blading old man in an old municipal worker's jumpsuit wearing some kind of super-tech visor or goggles. He immediately flees through a door behind him as a couple of the trolls next to him pull down dark goggles and hurl themselves at Hammer and Damson.
Hammer unloads his pistol into the thickest part of the crowd to try and clear a hole for Damson {Move, Go Aggro, Hit 7-9, (Barricade themselves firmly in)} causing most of them to dive behind machinery or huddle against the walls to get out of the way. Damson hurls himself through the scrum towards the Trolls' supervisor and tries to catch him before he gets through the door {Move, Act Under Fire, Miss} only to have the door slammed shut behind him by one of the creatures as soon as he's through, plunging him into darkness.
Hammer gets up the ladder and slams hard into the door {Move, Go Aggro, Hit 10+} and is rewarded with the crunch of rusty old hinges and the shattered glass sound of the troll menacing Damson being crushed by the door. Using another precious flare, the duo manage to spy the razor wire that has been hastily pulled across the corridor at ankle level and avoid it. Emerging into an ancient control room with several possible exits {Move, Read a Situation, Hit 7-9 (Where's my Best Escape Route?)}, they elect to climb the access ladder to a hatch in the Tower to get out.
At the Sunset, Ruby tells Jones that in all the craziness she forgot that Tavi has been asking after him. She survived getting her leg burned off, but has been deeply depressed and seems to have lost any interest in music. Jones visit her and she immediately brightens, saying she was worried that no one would even want to look at her any more with her injury. Jones offers her drugs to help with her pain that he mixes into the drink Ruby has gone to great trouble to prepare for her (which he refers to as a 'Roofie Lahsi') and she happily invites him into her bed, saying that she never would have been able to had the disaster not burned away her fear. Jones cannot help but see into her mind as they join {Sex Move, (As Deep Brain Scan), Hit 7-9, (Gain 1 Hold+1 for Receptivity Drugs)}. He sees that she is vulnerable because of her infatuation with him, and that she lives for the approval of crowds; if she can't get it by dancing, she'll probably try some other way... Jones resolves to try and help her and asks Adele if it's possible to create a new leg, which she readily agrees to try.
Outside, the Crocs return with a large, carefully-cut plate glass window with 'Smutty's Barber Shop' emblazoned across it and tell Ruby they've negotiated with the barbers for her to have it. Jones' sickle remains embedded in the arm of one of them and he appears to be annoyed, but bears it. Another Croc proposes a date to Adele (she politely declines) before they leave, satisfied that she'll pass on their warning.
Hammer and Damson emerge from the bridge halfway up the Near Tower, Hammer with a dead Troll tucked under his arm, as he promised Stinky. Hammer demands a ladder of some kind {Move, Fucking Thieves, Hit 7-9} but all one can come up with a gun that shoots a bat-shaped grapple attached to a line up towards them. Hammer tries to slide down it {Move, Act Under Fire, Miss}, but he's too heavy and crashes to the deck of the bridge {2-Harm, negated by armor; Harm Move, Miss)}. Damson elects to simply clamber down the side {Move, Act Under Fire, Hit 10+} and alights, mostly naked, to the vocal appreciation of Juke and Loose, two of Hammer's more voracious/voluptuous Valkyries. He descends briefly back down to retrieve his suit before Hammer has the hatch locked and then demands that every opening they can find be sealed.
Drafting Bullet, Dice, Shit Head, Juke, and Satan, he mounts up and rolls over to the Sunset to get Adele to look at the dead Troll, already starting to decay upon exposure to sunlight with a sulfurous rotten-egg stench. Adele takes a few moments to handle the body and examine it with her various esoteric super-tech sensors {Move, Things Speak, Hit 10+ (What has been done most recently with this, What words have been said near this, Who made this?)} and sees the creature being born out of a super-tech looking vat of molten goop of some sort from the chopped-up and broken bits of other similar creatures, stirred about until it coalesces and emerges, gasping and fully formed, to be put immediately to work. She sees a crisp heat-outline of the squat little man, ranting about having found his birthright after decades of searching and how he'll achieve what his grandfather never could when the world was full, thanks to his new army.
Damson, sensing that people are acting a little odd even under the circumstances, studies Adele's body language {Move, Read a Person, Hit 7-9 (What's Your Character Really Feeling?)} and, even as Ruby shares her news with everyone, quietly understands what she's leaving out...