Llyarden

More like years of neglect rather than decades (even though the cloister has indeed been unused for a couple decades), but there wasn't any sign of the dust being disturbed.

November 1st, 0340UTC

An hour and a half after the four of you had received The Call, you are in the Zeta Force bases in Holland and Kansas. Security was light on your arrival - or, well, it seemed light, although you'd all know that by the time you got to the locker room, you'd already been subject to a half-dozen biometric scans, some obvious (fingerprint and iris) and some less so - voice pattern recognition when you get to the 'reception,' gait matching as you're led through the facility. To say nothing of the psychological checks; while you are escorted through the building you're expected to know the way and keep pace with the guard escorting you, and various high-fidelity scanners will be feeding your movements and even more biological data like heart rate and pupil dilation through an artificial-intelligence-powered scanner (it was a source of great amusement in Zeta Force when 'AIs' became a big thing earlier this year, since they'd been using more advanced versions for a dozen or so years, including a few developmental actual AIs.)

In any case, you eventually arrive at the locker room - a term that in no way does justice to what you see before you. One entire wall is taken up with a live feed from the other Zeta Force base, so Edward, Kalee and Uma can all see Adam and vice versa, with a faint Zeta Force logo superimposed faintly enough to not hide anything behind it but visible enough to make it clear that the near-perfect-resolution screen is actually a screen and not just a second part of the locker room. (There may have been one or two issues with green agents faceplanting into the screen.) Laid out neatly on tables and in cabinets in the centre of the room are your respective gear, along with a few more conventional tourist-y possessions, including your fake IDs, and on the far wall are the lockers for your civilian-life possessions.

Also present on the live feed, despite not actually being in either locker room, is a man dressed in a dark suit, clutching a Starbucks coffee cup. (How he got a Starbucks into whichever facility he's in is anyone's guess; handlers have strange ways and means). "Welcome," he begins, without much preamble. You all know the drill by now; you change into your ZF-supplied clothes, check and stash your gear, and everything belonging to your civilian life, right down to underwear, is deposited in the lockers. (There are small private rooms for changing arrayed near the doors you came in by.) "We've been alerted to a potential zombie outbreak in a small town in the north of Cameroon. So far we're light on specifics; the call came from a former survivor of another outbreak who evidently knew we have emergency lines tapped worldwide, but the information they provided was limited. The previous incident was #3641, a mission in Kenya that was successfully contained after reaching Beta Phase with at worst a Grade-I mutant zombie. However, the caller claimed it was 'worth than before.'"

"Nonetheless, this mission will be beginning in Alpha Phase. Transport has been arranged from the Africa headquarters to the site, and you'll have access to a local jeep once you touch down. A couple of other things to bear in mind - first, the location is near Bénoué National Park, so be cautious of toxified animals. Second, we also believe that there's a private military company in the same area. Whether or not they're connected to the zombie outbreak is unclear, but as they most likely are in control of the town, be careful about engaging them."

Okay, from the top:

How do these aspects sound?
High Concept: High-Minded Goo Hero
Trouble: Everyone Deserves A Chance
Aspect: Former Sidekick of The Codger [a renowned hero who was retired even before he got a personal forcefield power that effectively manifested as super-strength/speed and flight, only he could exert his powers through his walking cane; he finally re-retired at the age of 92, a couple years before the current in-game time] (so she still has a lot of heroic knowledge from her time as a sidekick, but also Codger's enemies might come after her or she might be taken as being 'just' a sidekick instead of a hero in her own right)
Second Aspect: Puts The 'Super' In Superhero (ie, her powers are very strong, but if in a situation where she can't use them she's barely more competent than a random civilian)

And...okay I completely misunderstood how many stunts we were getting. In that case...
- Telekinesis + Telekinetic Might
- 'Energy' Blast
- Slowing + Stop
And...can I take Psychologist (a non-power Stunt) as well without using up refresh?

EDIT: Oh, as for the colour of the slime, I figure it's different colours depending on what properties it has. So maybe the strong bouncy slimes are pink, the sticky slowing slimes are blue, and the hard, compressed slime is green? Or something? Always super vibrant colours though.

Okay, info time! Sorry again for the delay. *hopes he hasn't forgotten any important plot points during the interim...*

Yeah, I've just had a busy/stressful week. I'll try to post later today or tomorrow.

Sorry, the past week has been a bit chaotic for me. I'm going to try to take a look at this when I get back from work today.

Yeah, apologies for the delay, anxiety has been rough the past week or so. Will try to post today or tomorrow.

Never really done the whole Fate thing, so let me know if any of this doesn't work...

High Concept: Former Sidekick turned High-Minded Hero
Trouble: Everyone Deserves A Chance
Aspect: Encyclopedia of Supers Knowledge
Approaches: Forceful +3, Flashy +2, Quick +2, Clever +1, Careful +1, Sneaky +0
Powers: Her 'power suite' as a whole is the ability to create super-strong sludge that she can manipulate (which she calls bubbles because it sounds nicer).
- Telekinesis + Telekinetic Might (although her bubbles have to be supported by something and can't just float mid-air, but they can stick to other surfaces - not sure if this actually counts as some sort of flaw/drawback that would let me get more enhancements since there don't seem to be rules for that).
- 'Energy' Blast
- Slowing (via sticky sludge)
Refresh 2 (?)

It is in Kansas.

November 1st, 0202UTC

Kalee

When you're about halfway through your sausage, you get a phone call from a number you don't recognise. "Hello," says a pre-recorded voice on the other end, "this is Kidd Insurance and Solicitors, in responding to your recent query, please remember that you will be billed for our time unless you call back to be informing us otherwise."

Adam

Just after you check your watch, you get a phone call from a number you don't recognise. "Hello," says a pre-recorded voice on the other end, "this is Orion Blockchain Technologies, just calling back to thank you for your investment sizeable. Please be calling us if you have any further questions."

Edward

Fortunately, the ring of your phone is loud enough to be heard even over your newly-increased-in-volume movie and the din outside, although you don't recognise the number. "Hello," says a pre-recorded voice on the other end, "this is King Transport Ltd. We've been received your package and will be taking the agreed upon amount from your accounting shortly. Please let us know if you are wishing to change your order."

Uma

Mercifully, your phone gives you an excuse to not have to take part in the party - at least for a few seconds - as you get a call from a number you don't recognise. "Hello," says a pre-recorded voice on the other end, "this is Foxglove Cosmetics, and thanking you very much for becoming a platinum member of our subscription servicing. Please call us back if you have any questioning about your new subscription."

All

As your respective 'spam' calls disconnect, you know that processes will be springing into action to bring you to your nearest Zeta Force headquarters, and from there to the site of a potential zombie incident. By tomorrow, you could be anywhere on the globe, everything on your person connecting you to the lives you are currently living tucked carefully away in a locker.

You've all committed to memory the routes you will be taking to get to your respective destinations, but you are given a few minutes' grace to disentangle yourselves from your civilian lives before you have to be on the move.

I thought I'd asked this before but apparently I forgot - what's Kalee's codename?

Yes, you are. (Unless you're on holiday / on a work trip for your 'day job' or something, I guess.)

November 1st, 0200UTC

While it is undeniably easier to cover up zombie apocalypses as Halloween pranks gone wrong, those same Halloween pranks gone wrong tend to lead to calls to the police - either real but misinformed or just as pranks - which in turn means a lot of work for Zeta Force's many intelligence operatives.  It also means that when there actually is a zombie incident, it tends to be a lot harder to get the populace at large to act sensibly and save their own skins, instead of, you know, walking up to the zombies and asking for a selfie.  (Allowing that to happen is one of the 'how not to be a ZF agent' examples that y'all were shown when you were being trained.)  And, of course, it becomes difficult to tell the difference at a glance between people in zombie costumes and actual zombies.  The zombie toxin detector can do so, of course, but practically speaking if you're close enough to get a sample from someone, you can probably tell whether or not they're a mindless undead or not anyway...and you've probably also had your hand bitten.

All told, to Zeta Force agents, Halloween has roughly the same connotations as Friday 13th does to the wider world - very few agents would actually say that it's worse than any other day, but certainly people can get a bit superstitious around that time.

So far, though - at least if you track your time by UTC - Halloween has come and gone without any incident, allowing you to enjoy your day-to-day lives outside of Zeta Force.

Where are you and what are you doing?

24 minutes ago, Morphling said:

Don't suppose I could buy my twin SMGs (plus accessories and reloads) with one signature gear point?

Hmm...I'll say if they're identical, sure.

Up to you all to decide. Any of you might have been on a mission with any of the others.

You'll have access to corporate accounts/credit cards, with funds appropriate to your identity (and by extension the level of Wealth you have.)

You get transported internationally by Zeta Force itself, so you don't need to worry about concealing your equipment through customs. You might want some means of hiding particularly obvious/unusual equipment when you're actually on a mission, though (before things get serious enough for you to break out the big guns).

As for transportation, I figure ZF will probably provide some sort of mundane transportation appropriate to the area for just, like, getting you to the site of the potential zombie outbreak (because they can't very well drop you directly into the area without it being real darn obvious). If you want to actually have a vehicle for actual action scenes (so to speak) then yeah you'll need to buy one, although GURPS is not exactly great at vehicles since I don't think they ever updated the big vehicles book for 4e.

Your false identity comes with some appropriate identity documents (and government documents like passports are added to the relevant databases); the reason it's described as very basic is that except for showing up on the right databases it's just a veneer. None of the information would be verified if someone did anything more than a cursory check - your false identities have no birth records, the companies they apparently work for don't exist, their home address either belongs to someone totally unrelated or doesn't exist at all, etc. Zeta Force generally figures that during and following a zombie apocalypse, tracking paper trails is probably going to be fairly low on the list of priorities (and in practice they basically control any subsequent official investigations anyway and can quietly remove any lingering traces of their agents.)

Considering Valros's rather awkward greeting to the rest of the group, one might have expected him to be even more baffled by the clockwork man pouring their drinks from his hand and the telepathic kitten. Strangely, though, he seemed relatively unbothered by the oddities - or, at least, no more bothered than he had the presence of the far more normal waitress who'd delivered their food, giving an awkward "Thank you," to Martin before being distracted by the cat scrabbling up his leg. He paused for a moment before a massive grin spread across his face. "Hello!" he murmured softly to it - it probably couldn't entirely hear him over the noise of the tavern, although it was perhaps debatable whether or not it needed to hear him verbally.

After a moment's thought, he tried to get the attention of the waitress. "Um, Bess?" He did speak slightly louder, although it certainly wasn't a full-blown shout, so in the absence of that he raised a hand instead. He would have gotten up and gone back to the bar directly rather than take up more of the waitress's time, but obviously since there was a cat sitting on his lap he was stuck in place for the forseeable future. Either way, once he managed to catch the attention of one of the inn's staff, he gestured slightly to the cat on his lap and then to Bolt's little meal. "Could I get a small thing of meat as well, like that? I seem to have made a friend."

Tentatively, he reached down to stroke the kitten's head with one finger - only to jump slightly as Killian's magic suddenly poofed the cat clean, and looked at his own hand briefly. "Oh, uh, if you wouldn't mind. I wouldn't want to be petted by something with a wet hand if I'd only just got clean and dry."

(Barring further interjections, he would eventually get around to trying his Korova Cream.)

Sorry for the delay, the past week and a bit have been very busy IRL and also full of wasps.

@VennDygrem @Laird Ichofox Are Zella and Roth doing anything now you're at the cloister? I thought Zella at least was planning on sending a shadow in to look around...

Valros Arcana

That's fine.

Almost done getting things ready, hopefully should be able to start tomorrow or the day after.

Valros was a little caught off guard by the...exuberant...welcome he received from the group. He wasn't going to turn his nose up at the offer of a seat, though, and so once he'd paid his dues at the bar, he picked up his box again and slipped it under the offered chair, mumbling their names to himself to help memorise them and then shaking Killian's hand - the half-orc would probably notice that Valros was very gentle, as though the man's hand was a delicate flower he was trying to avoid crushing. "Uh, I'm Valros. I don't have a house or...anything. Nice to, uh...nice to meet you all?"

It was...somewhat hard to tell whether he'd noticed anything about Lucrezia's words and was just trying to ignore them, or whether they'd gone completely over his head. He certainly didn't seem bothered by her fangs. The levitating ferret, on the other hand...that definitely did catch his attention, and he let out a quiet "Aww..!" before remembering himself and clearing his throat awkwardly - fortunately for him, his blood-red skin made it hard to tell whether he was blushing.

You did, but it's easy enough to fix.

Anyway, now that we're all here, a couple of things - first off, to answer the question in the other thread, yes, your threads can be de-privated now. Second, and more importantly, I'm going to spend the next couple days going through peoples' mechanics in detail, checking stuff and so on, so hopefully we can get underway on the 31st.

In the interests of that, if you've got a GCS character sheet, please attach it to your thread.

Thank you all for applying and making this a difficult decision (:p); my selected players are as follows:

- @cbenny playing Edward Klein
- @Morphling playing Kalee Sturgell
- @Rudra playing Adam Wong
- @Zelphas playing Uma Lamasha

As the four adventurers settled in, the door swung open behind them as another drenched figure stepped into the inn, closing the door behind him and tugging down the hood of his oilskin to look around, two large, spiralling horns visible even if the rest of his features were somewhat hidden in the dim light of the entryway.

In truth, Valros had arrived barely after the other four, although the storm had concealed them from each other - and he'd been somewhat delayed for a few minutes by trying to shepherd the little feral kitten somewhere warmer and drier, which of course had only got him even wetter.

Without leaving the entryway, he carefully took off his oilskin and folded it, doing his best to avoid dripping too much water on the floor, holding it in one hand and slinging the small chest that he seemed to carry everywhere with him back over his shoulder with the other, the wrapped-up sword clattering slightly against it, before making his way over to the innkeeper, trying his utmost not to stare too much at the barmaids. Once the innkeeper had run through the list of options, Valros paused for a moment to consider. "Uh, can I have a room for the night, some stew, and...uh, a mug of the cream...stuff?" He didn't really feel like a cold beer given the bitterly cold weather he'd just had to go through. "Oh, um, do I need to pay for the stabling and...things?" It was at this point that he realised that when one hand was holding his oilskin and trying to keep it away from everyone, and the other holding the rest of his belongings, he didn't have any free hands with which to actually pay for everything he'd just ordered. His tail half twitched towards the chest before he changed his mind and carefully set the box down, pulling out his coin pouch with his newly-freed hand and setting it on the bar, awkwardly rummaging through it until he managed to find the right coins.

As Valros turned around and looked around for somewhere to sit, it was probably blatantly obvious to the four adventurers - and, indeed, to everyone else in the bar - that the tiefling was not particularly used to travelling. Most likely it was only his height and bulk that had discouraged would-be bandits marking him as an easy target.