B-Team: The Deep Blue

Expedition

Amidst the chaos of the search for Discord, the remaining members of the B-team are called in by Zero and Bo to help them with something: There's been a sighting of Dr. Oslac Quade, and Blue has gone missing.

It's a rainy day in Bathala city and the B-team are all busy about their various daily errands when a group message comes through from Zero, their interim teammate for the past few weeks, asking them to meet him at Vigilant Tower as soon as possible. Noting the obvious urgency in his message, the team quickly convenes, meeting at the tower to find Zero sat with a girl they don't recognise. Zero quickly introduces the team to Bo, field leader of the Vanguard, and his personal friend.   Introductions are made and Bo quickly reveals to the team the reason that she'd asked Zero to get the team together: three days ago the pair had been investigating a sighting of Dr. Oslac Quade, with Blue, but after telling the two teenagers to stand down and continuing the investigation alone, he's not been seen since.   The heroes are shocked and ask for more details, with Bo and Zero explaining that, as per Rue's request  , Blue and Brainiac had put out a Vigil level alert for Quade alongside the one already out on Discord, meaning that any sightings of either would be reported directly to the team. Following a tip, Blue took the young heroes to Bella Cuisina, an italian restaurant in the edge of the Administrative district, where the doctor had apparently been seen having lunch recently. The trio spoke with the proprietor, Gregor Deluca, and got the opportunity to look at the restaurant's security footage. It was upon watching the tape and seeing him at lunch with a woman that Blue decided to send the two teenagers home, taking the rest of the investigation upon himself and refusing to elaborate any further.   The B-team are naturally concerned and quickly decide to follow in Blue's footsteps, making their way over to Bella Cuisina and speaking with Mister Deluca. Bo explains to the man that they'll need to look at the security tapes again and he takes her, Rue and Pagan to the back office, where an old CRT television is set up to view the tape. Rue is barely able to stomach watching the tape of what is undoubtedly Oslac Quade having a pleasant lunch with a woman wearing a Century uniform.   Frank takes a look at the tape and, while he doesn’t recognise her, he knows that the black uniform she’s wearing is reserved for facility directors and higher-ranking agents of the group. He snaps a photo of the monitor and sends it to his handler, asking her to find out who exactly she is. Rue takes a moment outside, and the others watch as the woman pushes a small package over the table towards Quade before the two depart, heading to the parking lot where she drives away on a motorcycle, and he gets into a car with an unidentifiable dark mass moving around in the passenger seat.   Emma sends a message to her friend Grace in The Bathala City Police Department with the car’s licence plate number, asking her to look it up. The team finally watch the more recent footage where Blue, clearly in a state of distress, storms out to the parking lot and takes a few pictures of the motorcycle’s tyre tracks on the ground before getting into his own car and driving off.   It’s not long before Emma and Frank get responses to their queries. Unsurprisingly, Pagan is told that the car had been reported stolen several days prior and has yet to show up, and Warp is informed that the woman in the footage is Dr Miranda Strand, a ranking member of the Century Group, but that any further information about her is classified. He points out that the woman has been seen with a known criminal and asks her to see what she can do. Meanwhile, Rue has recovered from their shock and decides to give Brainiac a call, hoping that the psychic hero might be able to shed some light on Blue’s whereabouts. She says that she had no idea there was a problem, with Blue often going missing for a few days while deep in an investigation, but she looks up the tracker placed in his car just to be safe, finding that it’s been parked at an address in the seafaring district for several days now.   The team quickly makes their way towards the address given by Brainiac, the day’s traffic thinning out considerably as they leave the busy part of the city and head towards the all-but-abandoned docks. They find Blue’s car parked up near a few of the remaining businesses in the area, and decide to ask around to see if anyone’s seen the famous hero. At the same time, Frank gets a call from Lithium, the head of the Century group, who wants to know why he’s looking into Dr Strand. He explains to her what they’ve seen and that she’s clearly doing something untoward in addition to her Century work. Lithium is convinced and officially sanctions Warp and his team to investigate the matter on behalf of Century, agreeing to give him whatever information he needs.   Lithium explains that Dr Strand is the director of a secret underwater facility in the Bathala City bay called Oceanlab Octopus, where they conduct geological research as well as some investigation into superpowers. It’s one of the few facilities under the Century banner that is operating with much of its original Schurk Industries staff, and Strand has been running the place for the past eight years, having been given a lot of slack to conduct business down there as she sees fit. Sending him a message with a set of coordinates, Lithium expresses a particular concern by the image on file. Apparently, it matches the one that Frank had sent the group but, according to employee records, Strand is supposed to be in her sixties, while the image is of a woman in her early thirties. She tells Frank that Strand has no known powers, but he and the team should be careful as they aren’t entirely sure what she could be up to down there.   Frank thanks Lithium for her help and rejoins the group, having found themselves a potential witness in the form of Archibald, a local fisherman who tells the group about having rented one of his boats to Alec on the day he’d gone missing. He tells them that the hero had chartered the vessel for a week and so he hadn’t thought anything was amiss, but is able to show them the GPS signal for the boat about five miles out from the dock, at a location that matches the coordinates given to Frank for Oceanlab Octopus. With the information they need in hand and the weather quickly getting worse, the team decide to charter another boat and some diving equipment and proceed to follow Blue’s trail into the bay.   It takes about an hour for the team in their tiny vessel to make their way to the coordinates, finding the boat that Blue had taken anchored and vacant on the choppy waves. Mercy flies over and finds a few of the hero’s personal effects, jacket, shoes, wallet, but no sign of the man himself. Zero takes it upon himself to investigate the seabed, swimming down in his octopus form and coming across the camouflaged but vast shape of the facility in question. The place is vast, and seemingly built directly into the sea floor, but never more than a single storey in height, with various airlocks and emergency pods ready to be jettisoned in case of emergency. He sees no obvious entrance through which the team can infiltrate the base, but is able to squeeze his way through the ventilation system to get a look inside. He sees the station’s pump room, including two agents who seem to be playing with some sort of slime creature, letting it crawl across their arms before pushing it into the hallway where a number of others can be seen, seemingly filling the base.   Zero quickly returns to the team and informs them of what he’s seen, the collective soon deciding to make their way into the base via one of the airlocks given the lack of available alternatives. A few of the team hitch a ride on Zero, having taken an orca form, and the group makes their way down to the nearest airlock. Mercy and Warp make quick work of the bulkhead, pulling it open and allowing the team to file in, closing it behind them and beginning the fairly slow process of pumping water out of the room. A few minutes later, the airlock is finally cleared and the door opens in front of them, bringing them face-to-face with Dr Miranda Strand herself and a squad of Century agents equipped with various technological devices in place of weaponry.   Warp shows off his Century credentials, but Strand is still not convinced. She’d heard nothing of his visit and is especially wary of someone deciding to force the airlock on a highly classified facility, regardless of their identification. She insists that the team surrender themselves for holding and questioning, assuring them that it’ll just be until she can get word from the mainland and confirm his story. To Frank, that option is out of the question, a position that’s solidified when Rue whispers to him that they can smell Blue, certain that he’s been around there recently. He maintains his position, offering unsuccessfully to stay in the airlock until they work it out, but soon decides to test her honesty with a few choice questions: What she was doing with Quade, and where Blue is now. Finding her answers unsatisfactory at best, Frank orders his team to “take them down” and a fight breaks out.   The team soon realise that in place of any conventional weaponry, the Century agents in Oceanlab Octopus have been outfitted with various apparatuses that mimic the effects of several archetypal superpowers and, while the Director escapes the area, calling in a security lockdown for the base, the team are forced to contend with agents using pyrokinetic, telekinetic, cryokinetic, electrokinetic and telepathic powers. The ensuing brawl requires the combined efforts of both the B-team and the Vanguard, but they soon emerge victorious, leaving them alone in the locked-down room as a voice emanates from the PA system, “Intruders in Sector 1!”   With that out of the way, Emma takes a moment to sweet talk the door separating them from the areas labelled “Security” and “NET interface Installation and Maintenance”, and Rue quickly brings the team up to speed with what they’d known about the device from a previous adventure  with Suplex. They also take a moment to pick up the blob creature that seems to be undulating around the room, noting the very familiar scent of the thing. Emma’s conversation with the door goes well, and she is soon able to convince it that it’s more than what its programming says it is, and with the support of friends, it can prove it. With great effort, the door overcomes its nature and opens for them, finding a dear friend in Pagan during the effort.   The team quickly make their way down the hall, deciding to hit the security room first, as the NET interface department may take a little longer to search. They make quick work of the guards inside and soon find themselves opening a prisoner cell to find Blue in his amorphous form, seemingly missing a large chunk of his total biomass. They try to ask him what happened to him, but it appears he’d lost some of himself both physically and mentally and is suffering from a significant deficit in his memory as a result. As Rue returns the slime they’d picked up earlier, Blue has some of his memories returned to him, becoming able to recognise Warp at least, but the team soon come to understand that they’ll need to collect all the slimes that have escaped in order to return Alec to his old self.   Still able to defend himself, and convinced that the team are friendly, Blue elects to join them, and the team make their way to the confidential storage room next door. They find a number of old Schurk Industries documents and an altogether more disturbing discovery: a hermetically sealed coffin bearing the name of Dr Miranda Strand and filled by the body of an elderly woman. The team aren’t sure what to make of the discovery, and quickly come to the conclusion that the Miranda Strand they spoke to is some sort of imposter. Nevertheless, they decide to continue the NET interface department, in hopes that they’ll gain some more information about the type of work going on in Oceanlab Octopus.   The NET interface department features an operating room, doctor’s office and records room. There, the team finds out that the device has been surgically installed into every member of staff at the lab and allows them to remotely interface with the technology around the installation. It appears that Oceanlab Octopus was some sort of testing ground for the device, with Dr Strand taking an especially keen interest in the new technology. Looking further through the documents, they come to the realisation that Dr Strand used the device to, in essence, save a copy of her own mind and lay it over the top of another unwitting test subject. They show Blue the picture of Strand meeting with Quade and he confirms that the body used was Shade, his old friend from the early days of his career.   With greater urgency to take down Strand and hopefully reclaim Shade, the team hasten their search of the facility, picking up more slimes as they go and returning them to Blue. They face more resistance as they explore the place, but refuse to be hindered, and soon make their way into a room labelled “The Pit” which, as the name would imply, features an unfathomably deep hole dug directly into the bedrock. There doesn’t appear to be any equipment actually aimed at the depths, and Mercy decides to fly down in order to investigate, returning a moment later, shuddering with the sheer sense of foreboding that turned him back.   Unsettled, but with more important things to be getting on with, the team leave The Pit for now and return to the search, picking up the last few slimes in the “support zone” of Oceanlab, with Blue pulling Rue aside and revealing that he’d tangled with Quade before, much to their surprise. He couldn’t say why he’d not mentioned it before, but remembering that the Doctor had kidnapped Indigo back in 2018. Before they’re able to discuss the matter further however, a loud crash shakes the facility, and the PA system announces that “Subject B has escaped containment”, drawing the team back over to the research zone.   The team make their way to one of the facility’s major labs to find a number of agents forming a firing line behind some overturned furniture and watching as something big begins to dent the sealed door from the other side with remarkable force. The lead agent, an older man with a similar combat-ready apparatus as the rest, argues that they shouldn’t be there, but is quickly reminded of his bigger concern as the door gives way and a pair of agents are eaten whole by a gigantic version of Blue’s amorphous form.   A fight breaks out between the combined forces of century and the heroes against the creature, with the team making every effort they can to rescue the agents being slowly dissolved by the blob. The battle is a tough one, with multiple century agents being knocked out, Warp’s suit suffering significant damage and Mercy briefly falling before being healed up by Pagan and managing to finish off the creature.   In the wake of the fight, the head agent identifies himself as Richard Strand, husband of their target. The team ask him about what happened with Shade and quickly grow enraged as he calls the hero a criminal and refers to superhumans generally as gutter-trash who need to be locked up, studied, and neutralised for the good of humanity. This line of rhetoric gets him punched in the face by Zero and quickly flung across the room by Rue. Alec tells them that they really don’t need to live down to his expectations, but doesn’t feel like arguing when Rue says they were just acting like the gutter-trash they are.   The team soon make their way into Dr Strand’s office, finding it unexpectedly empty, but it doesn’t take long for the team to find a secret passageway in the bookcase, leading them to a final octagonal room covered wall-to-wall in machinery, with Strand herself in the centre, a large helmet over her head and connected to the entire room. The team soon realise that the room is linked to all the agents wearing NET devices, and if they destroy it, the backlash may kill all the innocent agents, but the device also allows Strand to channel all the copied powers of the various agents around the facility.   A fight breaks out, with Strand throwing gouts of flame and electrical bolts at the team as they work to sever the connections between her and the rest of the facility, her powers weakening with every strike. Soon she calls out for the device to activate “Drain Mode”, reinvigorating her and giving her a massive power boost as it begins to sap the agents of their strength and vitality. She launches a massive fireball at the heroes, doing serious damage and upsetting the structure of the room, causing a few leaks to spring in the walls. Seeing the seriousness of letting the whole room collapse around them, the team refocus their attacks and soon Dr Strand is wrenched free of the helmet and knocked out.   Following the battle, Warp quickly patches up the cracks and makes his way into the office to report back to Century HQ. The story is long, and a full crew is soon dispatched to help clean up the mess and take the appropriate people into custody. Blue thanks the team for their work, expressing his hope that with the help of Century and Dr Robert Mawnay, they may be able to remove the version of Strand that has been laid over Shade’s true self and bring her back to reality. The team soon leave Oceanlab Octopus with many questions left unanswered, but a sense that they’ve done some good and that it’s now time to prepare for their trip to the tomb of the family Thompson.