Launch Code 2

Structure

Exposition

Tony's House o' Ribs!

Half of our Masked Avengers are going to the "Language of the Birds: Occult and Art" closing night cocktail party. It takes place at the NYU Steinhardt School's Department of Art and Art Professions, located in the East Village. Guest artist Bryn Oh will speak on the evolution of symbolic and ritual mythology in the virtual world, where every participant becomes “metahuman” in an experiental sense. They hope to gain information on or even from Professor Rita Wright, anthropologist and archaeologist. Is she connected in any way with the mystery down on Frat Row?

The other half of the team are en route to a live appearance of a band called "Slavic Soul Party". Among the fans of this particular jazz quintet may be the college students who made several perplexing purchases at apothecaries in other cities! The venue is a coffee shop called Rise and Grind, conveniently located near the parking garage under Tony's House of Ribs.

Components

Hooks

Clue for Nathan Bourne

Things you might have overheard at the cocktail party:

quantum nonlocality ceases to provide reliable measurements at the scale of massy particles, but tachyons are mathematically established to have IMAGINARY mass which makes them eligible for entanglement….

(This person sounded kind of pretentious.)

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Clue for The Shadow

Things you might have overheard at the cocktail party:

although we could easily apply this mechanism to other mediums by accounting for Batholomew's Hyperbole and then factoring out any other potential interference from the gateway cotermination boundaries

(If she talked any faster it would be WAHwahWAAAHWah! It's like she expects people to cut her off before she finishes explaining her idea. Or maybe she's a theoretical engineer in a room full of abstract scientists?)

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Unassigned cocktail party clues:
relativity of time

Things you might have overheard at the cocktail party:

… because time is moving faster as close to us as the ISS orbit …

(This speaker sounded like he was trying to figure out the most ridiculous statement that would keep the other three people in his conversation group nodding along.)

This is Dr. Roger Davies, and he got totally mind-screwed by The Shadow for reasons that became hilarious

Things you might have overheard at the cocktail party:

‘aether' may have been a mistranslation of the ‘fabric of space-time' concept

(Imagine Sam the Eagle lecturing Rizzo the Rat, and that's about how this line was delivered.)

quantum theory of ghosts

Things you might have overheard at the cocktail party:

sympathetic relationship between various energy states as influenced by cyclic psychic knots commonly called “ghosts”

(This speaker is excited, and pretty sure she was on to something. Two people in her group seemed to be on board, but the third was listening only in order to poke holes in the theory.)

people talking about Dr. Roger Davies

Things you might have overheard at the cocktail party:

… the brain is too wet and hot an environment for entanglement to be possible, ergo that idiot Professor ….

(Boy they sound mad!)

Relations

Protagonists

Trenchcoat Brigade

• Chameleon
• The Shadow
• Psypher

Guest starring Sahara

Neutrals/Bystanders

Notes contributed by Agent Chameleon:

• Bob Megalos is a student of interest for Professor Wright because she thinks he has focusing problems.
• Professor Wright has received repeated job offers from Bio-Investigations Limited. Offering her middle six figures.

Notes contributed by The Shadow:

Person of interest at event:

Name: Dr. Roger Davies
Background: From Stamford U in Connecticut. Teaches an undergrad class, mid-term requires analysis of ‘lesser artifacts'. Aboriginal N.Amer cultures. Working on second doctorate.

Notes:
Complaining about nothing reasonably priced to point univ students at to ‘prove themselves'. Uses Zuni artifacts on the test. Uses the “Ram” artifacts. Low-quality. From Zimbabwe. “White stone” possibly alabaster or marble representing “the East” in Zuni culture.

Uses Zuni fetishes as potentially a way to open the door for him to lead an expedition to southeast asia / china region to perform a dig to support his theory.

Used him to lure Rita Wright close, allowing Bourne to lift her phone to search while Rita Wright argued with Roger Davies over theory.

Davies has met Wright before. Professionally disagree, and have argued before.

Adversaries

• Tar Pit
• The New Purple Gang
• PPZ a.k.a. Psi Phi Zeta

Backdrops

Encounters

Sahara and Psypher are going to Rise and Grind, the here today gone next month coffee shop where Slavic Soul Party is performing. The vehicles they want to spot are in a nearby underground parking garage. NOTHING INTERESTING HAPPENS IN THE PARKING GARAGE! I hope. Because I never did get out a map.

Two doors down is a franchise location for Tony's House of Ribs. Have a nice list of viscous liquids in bulk that are at that restaurant:

• barrel or keg of rib sauce, may contain honey, may contain molasses
• industrial strength dishwasher (machine) detergent
• machine grease
• ketchup and mayo, again in vats or minikegs
• chocolate sauce
• batter
• milkshake mix (first Joey needs to break the bags open with a different body)

The band themselves are not culprits. If approached in a non-hostile way, a RAP on a 6/6 gets that they did a limited run of the bumper stickers last year because that's all they could afford to print at the time, but now they have plenty of fresh new ones. (The one on that van was weatherbeaten.) 3 RAPs, they did not keep a LIST of who bought them, but most of the people who bought those bumper stickers are repeat attendees in the audience.

An off-duty cop is doing bouncer duty at the front door. Her name is Sandra Carpenter and she looks a lot like Lucille Ball. If you show her your ID and prove you are 22 or older, she will stamp your hand with some very cool holographic ink that flouresces when alcohol touches it.

Of course, some dirty deals are going to happen in the alley behind the place. Relevant stats:

• The New Purple Gang
• Tar Pit

if somebody detectives their way to 5 RAPs or more on a roll vs 8/8, the metahuman crime guys dress well. They wear purplish suit vests, like bartenders at those really fancy nightclubs? Only these have little yellow hearts on them that glow under a blacklight. There aren't many of them, and they have an accent like they're from Philly or something. You know. They say “wooder” instead of “water”. Not Boston or Jersey, that's for sure

if somebody detectives their way to 5 RAPs or more on a roll vs 12/12, being PERSUASIVE or Charismatic instead of SCARY, this particular gang member thinks the REAL problem is the latest round of the metahuman drug is too cheap for good business. Steel Breath, Silent Dreams, whatever, now we got "StarGate" on all the uni campuses and it's supposed to give you a new view of the universe. So it's probably a psychoactive or something? Because MDMA is not going to lose its market share any time soon, anybody knows THAT, why somebody gotta keep trying to invent the wheel here? Stupid college chemists, man, I heard that's how the Scarecrow got his start down in Gotham.

MEANWHILE!

The Shadow and Agent Chameleon are going to that cocktail party slash symposium thing. People are dressed somewhat elegantly, dressy-business instead of normal university wear. Wait staff are white tie. Bits of sentences that might be overheard in any passing conversation:

(see Hooks)

They are trying to spy on Professor/Doctor Rita P. Wright of New York University. They think she is the secret ringleader/instigator for PPZ. She is not. If led down the right primrose path, she has been concerned about two of her students recently who seem to be obsessing on a sort of Universal Theory of Ancient Superstition. Which she actually thinks is bunk. The closest you get, she says, is the indicators in artifact and language of a root religion, sort of an Ur-religion, that is either Ancient Mesopotamian or a precursor of same. She pointed them at Sumerian studies such as http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/ but Bob Megalos more or less blew that off. He wanted voudoun and metahuman theory to fit.

Plot type

Chapter 2: preliminary fact finding

Parent Plot

Launch Code

Related Characters

• Agent Chameleon
• Psypher
• Sahara
• The Shadow

Related Organizations

• Trenchcoat Brigade