Aysylum week 7

(a writeup for the Asylum game)

After their rough landing within Area 51, the group use Gisueppe's excellent disguise & infiltration skills to get into the Hangar, where they witness a US army general arguing with a UN brigadier over the source of the recent energy discharge that blacked out the Pacific seaboard; Paul Battersby recovers enough to steal a look at the map, while Brigadier Winifred Bambera of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce becomes convinced (after some memory manipulation) that Jerome is an alien time-traveller who has helped in similar situations... They board the shuttle again and take off , looking for some kind of heat signature left by the weapon and arguing over whether the people responisible for the weapon will be friends, enemies or something else...

Tracking the clues to Las Vegas, Lyndon taps the communications of the weapon-owners and asks for parley; they set down in the car park of the Luxor, after leaving Paul on top of the Hoover Dam, armed with mass-conversion grenades and instructions to blow the dam if called upon to do so, in order to cut the weapon off from its 'starter motor'. It turns out that the weapon owner is none other than Frankie Johnson, the Earth-based operator of the underground railroad, who is securing his position from interference by the home planet, Euai. Having allied himself with another alien faction, the Cerrevans, he has fused Euain C-60 tech with Cerrevan bio-tech to create defences on Earth that should drive the Enforcers and the Artist Regime back home again; moreover, he has agreed with the Cerrevans to breed a slave-warrior race here on Earth, using the Humans as the subjects of a vast genetic engineering program! (Nathaniel turns out to be a first generation result of this program!) This slave race will conquer Euai on behalf of the Cerrevans, in retaliation for a war they lost to the Euians decades ago; Frankie invites the group to join his plan and be free to rule the Earth alongside him and the other 76 surviving Euain fugitives!

Giuseppe, Jerome and Lyndon have decided that, whatever they once were, they are now humans, so they lure one of Frankie's Cerrevan allies into the shuttle, where they kill him and take off, silmultaneously ordering Paul to blow the dam! They then land the shuttle again very quickly, taking out a second Cerrevan; Bob, however, seems to have accepted and even embraced his past and sides with Frankie, promising him all his technical know-how in return for a slice of the pie. Frankie and Bob make a run for Frankie's HQ underneath the Paris hotel/casino after Bob sabotages the shuttle; Nathaniel, Jerome and Giuseppe make it out, but Lyndon has to use the emergency ejector, which lands him in the fountains outside the Bellagio, just in time for the Elton John waterdance! Whilst Nathaniel decides to get away from all this weirdness and steals a car, Giuseppe and Jerome consider their next move: Giuseppe's powers are blocked and stunted by security protocols put in place by Frankie just in case his business partner should ever turn on him.

Getting out of the fountains, Lyndon makes a desperation move, calling up the Enforcers back on Euai via the bone, pretending to still be an undercover agent! He gets them to transport him back to Euai, a risky move without the mothership, but he survives and recommends immediate immolation of Las Vegas via mass-conversion of the bone! Sadly, Frankie blocks this trick and he and Bob head to the site of the bone in order to redirect the energy of the bone detonation back to Euai; just as he does this, Lyndon transports back to Earth on a suicide mission to trigger the bone detonation by setting off a smaller explosion next to it! The Bellagio, Bob, Frankie and Lyndon (oh, and a few hundred tourists and casino employees) are wiped from the universe for good, but an even larger detonation hits the enforcer HQ back on Euai... Jerome, Gisueppe and Paul will have a breathing space of at least 7 years before the Euains can make it back to Earth, time enough to move into Frankie's base and take over the railroad. With 76 rogue Euains out there, 2 US government agencies after them and the Cerrevans still somewhere in the background, it looks like they will have a lot on their hands...

Quote of the Night (OK, this is vain of me, but will anyone deny it?): In regard to the tracks and imprints made on the desert sand as small pieces of the Artist Regime's mothership crash to Earth... 'They're the prints formerly known as Artists'