Double Take - Feral's notes
General Summary
September 15th, 2004
Field Leader incident log:
We're going to the Chinatown harvest street festival in Metropolis, shepherding the candy-laden students.
Somebody attacks the crowd with grenades. A city councilman's kids vanish, probably kidnapped; I point Silverwing in the councilman's direction.
We set the Three Investigators to sniping the grenades before they get too low. Calvin, near Don, throws mudballs onto grenades and fires.
Councilman Mario Yung Chi is being ?attacked? by Intergang, Silverwing reports back after (based on his dishevelment) a fight. Wonder where the hell they've been these past few years? By the time we arrive, the cops are fighting the Intergang armored guys, and Councilman Yung Chi has a note in his hand.
Oh good, Intergang has electric cage guns.{/sarcasm}
They still take a pounce mostly according to script, though.
Thunderstrike's blinding flash goes off. Glad I have my back to the center of the combat.
Amythyst fires a warning shot with Sonic Beam.
Doc reorients one of the hostile's gun, which fires a three round burst of some kind of pulse that causes the target to get a sound overload.
One of the women in the team shoots Thunderstrike with a beam that drains energy out of him; the other woman in the team shoots Amythyst with something similar-looking, which gets absorbed by the ring.
The armor feels and sounds like spiderweb as I rip it apart.
Thunderstrike goes down, exhausted but not unconscious.
Amythyst uses lightning to light up the woman who took TS out; she collapses.
I manage to get a grip on my guy's throat and intimidate him into ordering -- in Chinese! -- a stand down. The cops get to arresting. TS spots someone in a long coat running away, and points him out to Amythyst, who chucks one last lightning bolt at the vanishing figure, who stumbles but manages to keep going. Doc blows up the gun he'd taken. The energy wave coming from the explosion attacks everyone's mental synapses.
Councilman Chi is coming back. His note says: "Councilman Chi, we are tired of your interference. If you want your children back, you will personally shut down your Intergang Task Force." He rants that he's not shutting it down, the task force is important to the city. News showed him and the Commissioner starting this thing because IG was getting out of hand, esp illegal weapon shipments down at the waterfront. The councilman and commissioner got this task force going to Route Out the Crime Element In This City Caused By Intergang.
{/pose}
So far, according to news, it has been successful.
They've even occasionally followed them into Suicide Slum.
Thunderstrike goes to Suicide Slum to consult with The Shadow, who has a folder of photocopies of the police Intergang file.
They are not based in Suicide Slum. The Bowery bridge seems to be a focal point for shipping/receiving. Another place is their center of operations, perhaps near one of the older industrial complexes. They are trafficking in rather unusual weapons. This time around, they aren't trafficking in weapons or protection scams.
The councilman also has video on his phone of the kids strapped to chairs. The room is really dark with black plastic garbage bags around the kids to make it featureless. The plastic bags might be covering machinery: either a milling machine like in a steel mill for making fine parts, or a machine for making pieces for a smelter.
One of the pieces of armor I ripped off, now confiscated, smells like tar or something.
It bothers me a lot that the Intergang guys are communicating in Chinese. They used to be just another criminal organization, more corporate-oriented than the mafia or the vampires, more generically unethnic than most gangs, more high-tech than any opponent group short of Team Luthor. Their biggest weakness as a collective was their lack of long-term cohesive goals. They set up jobs to make money this month so they could expand their territory next month, they bought or deployed new toys this week so they could squeeze a rival out of a potentially lucrative deal on the weekend, their biggest plan was maintaining a chain of cheaptastic "big box" stores as a cover for black market deals so RICO investigators wouldn't look too closely at their chain of investment banks. They divided criminal enterprise territory -- some geographical, some intellectual -- with the Card Shark organization, the Midnight Syndicate, the Widow's Peak people from Blüdhaven, and the ethnic-based crime rings (mafia and tongs, mostly).
This doesn't seem quite like the same guys.
The guy directing the fight believed I'd kill him, though, so that argues for some sort of continuity.
I'll report in again after I poke at some things.
To make a long story shorter, here are some of my notes scribbled as I poked:
- armor sample -- has been recently in contact with a steel mill factory of some kind. There's a tar residue on it that contains remains of a sand compound. A lot of manufacturing steel mills have distinctive types of sand they use for processing
- searching through patent records, we suspect it's Sullivan Manufacturing, which has 3 factories in Metropolis. We set the Trio to the more useful Junior Agent task of researching the map versus those factories.
- The armor itself has similar properties to something Silver and Amythyst read about that can take a surprisingly high level of tolerance
- The place under the bridge used to be owned by a crime family that went to jail so the front went out of business. I find that suspicious, but it is in line with too many criminal habits to point hard at a particular syndicate.
- Councilman's daughter is Sara Lin Chi, 10; son is Yuan Wo Chi, 12.
- I think we're going to poke into Golden Lotus at the same time we poke into the usual InterGang stuff.
- Dragon Flower
- Hu Li Jing aka The Fox
- Oni
Finalizing report. Tired. Need food, and shower, and spouse.
I know I'm supposed to make these things tidy and cross-referenced and all ... Paul-approved because I'm Field Leader but. Sir. Please just ... if there's something I missed here, then I think I did not really get it. Ask Doc Reynolds. Shove a big crayon in Blondie's fist and make him write out a report. Doc maybe had to dig a bullet out of me and I am just really done today.
Sorry, sir.
But the summary of incident finishes like this:
We wrecked Intergang's stuff.
Really, really wrecked.
And, in proper Wyldfire tradition, it's on fire.
InterGang pointed enthusiastically at a Golden Lotus location in Chinatown. And tried to bill us. Doc billed them back.
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