Invasion
The fallout from Battle Island would stretch for years afterwards. A chain reaction of consequences that would bring Humanity to the brink of extinction. Following the Trial of Dr. Rush, Senator Rand was given total control of The Lab.
Burried in the many missions, discoveries, and advances of the lab were reports about Draugr. An alien space ship in the outer solar system. Dr.Rush had sent a team there almost 20 years ago, about IGS Icarus. That team woke a sentinel in the ship's security system, it nearly destroyed the world. They were able to put it to sleep. Repeated warnings in every shred of documention stated to never return. It didn't stop Senator Rand from sending a team anyway. This was a place of power and he wanted it.
Damon Teke (sent to escape a congressional investigation) and a group of goons from The Lab were dispatched in a modified capsule to make the journey. It'd take almost a month to get there. The heroes had a chance to intercept and stop them.
In order to prevent this disaster, Elias Rush broke out of prison, assembled a team of heroes, and briefly captured an air base. The team stole an Orion Capsule and its rocket to send Thorin Tesla, Danica Smith, and Kyoko Sumida after the villains. They couldn't catch up in the ship they stole, but there was another waiting for them.
The IGS Icarus was originally reported as destroyed after its mission. This is not true. The ship was hidden on the dark side of the moon. Thorin Tesla and the others would capture the ship and its more advanced technology to catch up to and stop Damon Teke. Unfortunately, they failed.
Damon Teke had awoken the ship and its sentinel. This lead to a battle against the IGS Icarus. It seemed for a moment, that humanity would survive. Only a moment. The ship managed to signal others. An armada was coming. They wanted something on Earth.
Back on the ground, Elias Rush, Faith Valentine, Sapphire Calistar, Alex Winship, The Keepers, The Philadelphia Pack, Daniel Coroan, Burning Lands Tribe, and others assaulted The Lab. With the help of The Administrator, they took control and overthrew the facility. The resources here would be essential to fighting off an invasion.
Once the Arknaedan's attacked, the lab proved inpenetrable. There were early efforts to evacuate the city, though they were not fully successful. Elias Rush awakened Daedalus using Lorelei McKellar's telepathy to piece together his destroyed mind in the hopes that he could piece together a way to fight the aliens. It turns out that he contains the knowledge of an ancient builder and creator.
During the evacuation, Alex Winship and the heroes managed to rescue Jaiden Mori who would hhelp Daedalus in their quest for a weapon.
Meanwhile in space, the crew of the IGS Icarus would rescue Damon Teke and merge Draugr with their ship, while also gaining a new creature, one of the aliens, Inky. They headed for Earth as fast as they could. There would be a brief delay near the moon, as an Arknaedan stow away attempted to crash their ship into the moon. They were able to lure it out and defeat it.
On the ground, the heroes had been making scattered forays into the surrounding area. They had determined the aliens were weak to acid and used acid-based weapons from Jaiden Mori to fight them, though never well enough to do more than scout and raid for supplies. Until the The Keepers offered a breakthrough: a military base with alien technology.
The heroes scrambled to raid the base, though were captured in the attempt. While in captivity, they made contact with IGS Icarus, now heading to rescue them. Thorin Tesla used a barrage of nuclear warheads to blind the Arknaedan orbital fleet while they made their attack. Kyoko Sumida and Inky discovered an object of power, more deadly than anything yet-seen, though Inky struggled to communicate its importance.
Danica Smith would leave the ship with Damon Teke, using her teleportation abilities. At the time, the ship was going in excess of mach 7. Her teleportation preserves momentum. The net result was as if the compound below had been struck by an artillery shell. They blew a hole from over 100' underground, clear to the surface.
The heroes would ultimately acquire an ancient relic that could command the aliens. At first the aliens used it to assault the heroes with telepathic imagery, horrific images to distract and prevent them from utilizing the device. From here, the heroes would split up, some going into space, some remaining to defend the lab. WIth luck, they could buy time on the ground while the spaceborne crew defeated the alien command ship.
Aboard the command ship, Kirsten wore the ancient collar, enduring the horror messages. They were unable to bother her as they would the others. The conflict was different here. None of the same monsters came for the humans. Instead, simple machines, without the ooze attacked. This enabled an effective fight against those forces. They were able to drive forward and reach the command deck. There they found the alien commander.
The ooze was unable to come near Kirsten, her collar keeping it back, a perfect bubble. The fight initially began as a physical fight, a battle. There were challenges for both sides. The commander could not draw near Kirsten. None of the heroes could stray far from Kirsten. Movement and attacks were limited on either side. Almost a stalemate.
During the battle, at one point, a significant portion of material was removed from the commander by Kirsten's presence. The commander pled to be killed and to save the others. This was a massive change from where things began, with the monster seeking to destroy them. When she retreated, it once more tried to kill the heroes.
The battle seemed a war of attrition, fighting to exhaustion until Kirsten realized her access to the machines was two-way. She was able to embed a self-destruct command, leaving the heroes free to flee while the entirety of the alien armada destroyed itself. Their ships self destructed. Without them, the ground forced disintegrated, revealing the cost of this victory. Some of the infected humans below survived, others died of wounds covered by the ooze. The city lay about them in ruins.
In the aftermath of the Invasion, Philadelphia and much of the world has been ransacked and left in ruins by the aliens. Humanity has worked to rebuild, board by board. In some places, a newfound sense of unity has set in. Various divisions of the past have lost their meaning in the face of an existential threat.
One major division still remained: the political need to place the blame. Within days of the end, elements of the Army arrived to capture the lab. Dr. Rush and his workers abandoned the lab with the help of the keepers, executing what Rush only described as the 'Atlantis Protocol.' There has not been a way to reach him or the others since. During the evacuation, the lab's systems were set to destroy themselves, preventing Rand and those like him from easily abusing the technology that once stood there.
After Action Notes
Show spoiler
This event did not go as I (Archy) had intended. Whether the result of too much ambition or a stressful year (grandma in and out of hospital, covid, health stuff, etc), I am not sure. It may have been better to make this server-wide in the same manner as the post-invasion destruction of the city and segment the events into multiple plays.
The initial plan had 3 phases: Invasion, Survival, Counterattack. With more exploration of the city, the destruction, and monster-encounters planned in the second phase. The initial phase went well. Survival and Encounter were ultimately truncated into a single phase to help wrap up the event.
The following exposition was intended to occur during the event and may be brought up in future events. This is a rough set of notes typed up, typos and some errors may be present:
The aliens are... were a dying race. Many thousands of years ago, two things began to happen: 1. A plague began to spread, they lost contact with their colonies, one by one. 2. Their home system's star began to die. As conditions got worse, there were 3 actions taken: 1. Several groups were sent out to find a new home system, moving away from the direction of the plague. Each carried with them a "star seed", which is why the aliens want to get into the lab so badly. When thrown into a star, it would change that start to be what the aliens need for survival and fuel a system-wide terraforming. 2. A new colony group (the ones now invading Earth) were sent out. They did not have a home, but they had tools enough to survive while a search was carried out. 3. The home system was essentially frozen in time to preserve it, with the intention being that once a new home system was established, they would evacuate there somehow. They hadn't figured out how, but when you're so royally fucked, you do what you can in the hopes of future solutions. Rush was one of the first, a group sent out to find a new homeworld. His crew found Earth, our system, and wanted to take it. Except, even in their desperate straights, there were rules. Earth had life. They were not to take a system with developing life like that. Rush wound up fighting and killing his crew, before his conciousness was put in the computers, merging with some of the AI, and becoming a sort of sentient-ooze. A few thousand years later and ooze-rush hitches a ride back to Earth, takes over real Rush. Hides the star seed and plans for the worst. He starts readying Earth as best he can to fend off the aliens. If his crew were willing to sacrifice the world 10,000 years ago, what would his people be like now? How desperate would they be? Well, there was a complication. The colony group was infected by the plague. They didn't know it. The plague was essentially a computer virus. It infested their technology, which the entire species relied on so deeply that they could not fight back. It more or less enslaved their bodies, blocked out their minds, used them for its own purposes. These motives are not entirely clear, but it seems to want to colonize our system as was the original plan. The exact reasoning is up in the air. It may be necessary so the species can expand and consume. Maybe it wants to build an empire. The items left on Earth were from when Rush & his crew were first there. The collar used to be a controller to manage their technology. A portable interface. It isn't clear yet how it overrides the alien virus. Simply that it does. It may be that the interface itself cannot be corrupted, only relay information, and that is enough for someone to fight back. This wasn't possible for the aliens, the technology was built into their bodies. The interface for them was either a relic or a backup device in case of an internal failure or perhaps for alien/guest species to use. Which basically never happened, but you had to plan for that on a field expedition of unknown duration. The canon was knocked off the ship during Rush's initial struggle with the aliens and left where it was. Without Rush on the ship, the conciousness of his former crewmates, stored in the computer systems, was able to operate the ooze and attempt to seek revenge, resume their mission. They signaled for the fleet, unaware of the spread of the disease. ---- Ideally, at some point I'd have managed to get Kirsten talking with the alien commander. He would have tried to explain this whole thing as an incident, they needed to save his people (the ones frozen in time), an acknowledgement that the colony group may not be saveable. I suspect Kirsten would have determined it was not worth the risk, and decided to end the colony entirely, and not tell anyone about the rest of the aliens, for fear of a worse conflict. Those trapped in time would remain so. Essentially dead.
The aliens are... were a dying race. Many thousands of years ago, two things began to happen: 1. A plague began to spread, they lost contact with their colonies, one by one. 2. Their home system's star began to die. As conditions got worse, there were 3 actions taken: 1. Several groups were sent out to find a new home system, moving away from the direction of the plague. Each carried with them a "star seed", which is why the aliens want to get into the lab so badly. When thrown into a star, it would change that start to be what the aliens need for survival and fuel a system-wide terraforming. 2. A new colony group (the ones now invading Earth) were sent out. They did not have a home, but they had tools enough to survive while a search was carried out. 3. The home system was essentially frozen in time to preserve it, with the intention being that once a new home system was established, they would evacuate there somehow. They hadn't figured out how, but when you're so royally fucked, you do what you can in the hopes of future solutions. Rush was one of the first, a group sent out to find a new homeworld. His crew found Earth, our system, and wanted to take it. Except, even in their desperate straights, there were rules. Earth had life. They were not to take a system with developing life like that. Rush wound up fighting and killing his crew, before his conciousness was put in the computers, merging with some of the AI, and becoming a sort of sentient-ooze. A few thousand years later and ooze-rush hitches a ride back to Earth, takes over real Rush. Hides the star seed and plans for the worst. He starts readying Earth as best he can to fend off the aliens. If his crew were willing to sacrifice the world 10,000 years ago, what would his people be like now? How desperate would they be? Well, there was a complication. The colony group was infected by the plague. They didn't know it. The plague was essentially a computer virus. It infested their technology, which the entire species relied on so deeply that they could not fight back. It more or less enslaved their bodies, blocked out their minds, used them for its own purposes. These motives are not entirely clear, but it seems to want to colonize our system as was the original plan. The exact reasoning is up in the air. It may be necessary so the species can expand and consume. Maybe it wants to build an empire. The items left on Earth were from when Rush & his crew were first there. The collar used to be a controller to manage their technology. A portable interface. It isn't clear yet how it overrides the alien virus. Simply that it does. It may be that the interface itself cannot be corrupted, only relay information, and that is enough for someone to fight back. This wasn't possible for the aliens, the technology was built into their bodies. The interface for them was either a relic or a backup device in case of an internal failure or perhaps for alien/guest species to use. Which basically never happened, but you had to plan for that on a field expedition of unknown duration. The canon was knocked off the ship during Rush's initial struggle with the aliens and left where it was. Without Rush on the ship, the conciousness of his former crewmates, stored in the computer systems, was able to operate the ooze and attempt to seek revenge, resume their mission. They signaled for the fleet, unaware of the spread of the disease. ---- Ideally, at some point I'd have managed to get Kirsten talking with the alien commander. He would have tried to explain this whole thing as an incident, they needed to save his people (the ones frozen in time), an acknowledgement that the colony group may not be saveable. I suspect Kirsten would have determined it was not worth the risk, and decided to end the colony entirely, and not tell anyone about the rest of the aliens, for fear of a worse conflict. Those trapped in time would remain so. Essentially dead.
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