It sounds like alligatorman wants multiple underlings, and we're the only ones being offered the job? Should we call up some of our incubi contacts so we can all get some cash? Ask Herbert about that I guess.
Having worked as a Henchman for several years, you know enough about how the Agency works to not have to ask. Underling level staff can bring their own crew to jobs. The agency will provide board and housing for them if needed, and offers a very reasonably priced insurance package on their lives and well being, but beyond that they would solely be your responsibility.
You could literally summon some of your more loyal soldiers within a day if needed via phone call, so you feel no need to drag them in until you know what you will be doing.
You also know that the Agency will likely assign lower ranking Mooks and Henchmen from its pool to the job. These minions might report directly to Deinosuchus or to you, depending on how the Henchman/Mook portion of the contract is structured. You suspect the later, as the Agency has expressed concern about Deinosuchus eating staff.
Yeah I don't think we really need anything. We'll probably want an officer's shell loadout just in case, but the actual work will probably be a stone shell deal. Maybe two extras in case we get roughed up?
Spare batteries are probably wise in case we go full scorched earth, but those are probably easy to carry anyway.
Filling out the form, you request that 3 Stone Shell loadout and 1 Officer's Shell Loadout, as well as 20 batteries from the open crate, be brought south for the job. This is in addition to the Officer's Shell you are currently inhabiting; At least until Cletus gets a proper base set up, you doubt the fancy hotel you will be staying at would appreciate you stomping around in the full sized 9ft tall stone body.
You make a brief call to Pete, letting him know about the job and his role in transporting the goods, before adding his contact information to the sheet and handing it back to Herbert.
"Congrats on your first underling job man... erm... dude... erm..." Awkward silence falls once more before Herbert speaks.
"Anyway, you got 48 hours to make it to Louisiana and call Cletus from the hotel... starting now. Good luck!"What does feeding on mortals entail? Can it be done in unobtrustive ways? Any lingering side effects?
Taking off from the helipad, you decide to visit your favorite New York restraunt before making the longish flight down south. It is a fast food joint only a couple blocks off Times Square. On the roof is a utility room to which you have procured the key, where you can safely lock up your Officer's Shell and access the ducts in your true form.
The ducts in this building connect to the restroom. One of those unisex deals with a door that locks. You wait, enjoying the aroma of joy and wonder from the nearby tourists, until somebody has to use the restroom. Today you get a middle-aged touristy looking Chinese Woman.
Once she locks the door, You spring from the vent above her, giving your victim a good scare and instantly raising her emotional state to suitable feeding levels. At this point she slumps over limp as soon as your black amorphous form touches her flesh, and the feeding begins. Fear isn't your favorite flavor, per say, but it brings back nostalgic memories of the old invasion days when it was pretty much all you ate.
Your military training allows you to resist the natural instinct to probe and mess with your meal's mind beyond a quick memory wipe. If too many folk exit the restroom with long term side effects, people could start looking into things and you'd hate to lose such an easy means of hunting. The woman will come around about a minute after you release her, feeling emotionally neutral and exhausted, but otherwise fine. Peter tells you that if you feed off the same emotion from the same person too many times, they may lose their capacity for the feeling you've been eating, but beyond that the woman in your grasp is at no risk unless you choose to hurt her.
Once you conclude your meal, you retreat to the vents before she can wake up. Usually when visiting this place, you stick around until a second course shows up, but you are excited to get to Baton Rouge and check out the hotel, so you return to the utility room, re-enter your shell, and lock the door behind you before taking off.
---
The hotel has a relationship with the Agency, and considers themselves 'Villain Friendly', but they still prefer more outlandish creatures such as demonic squid and gargoyles keep to the top two floors where they are unlikely to bother the regular customers. You land on the balcony, where you find your room key waiting for you, and head inside. Your large suite includes a master bedroom, bathroom, and two large sitting areas, one of which houses a hot tub. The other sitting room houses a desk, on top of which is the secure phone and a written copy of your orders.
You give the orders a quick read. Almost everything on the document is stuff you have already heard from Herbert or Morozov. The one new piece of information pertains to Henchmen; Three of them will be assigned directly to you. As little is known about the job, it is your responsibility to brief them as needed, and to do your best to prevent Deinosuchus from eating them. They will be instructed to follow your orders so long as they don't conflict with the agency's interests or bylaws.
The contact information of your Henchmen will be added to your phone as they sign up. With this in mind, you decide to wait out most of your 48 hours before calling Deinosuchus; You can pop out of your shell for awhile, enjoy the hot tub in your true form, and sample the aroma created by the debauchery of your fellow hotel guests. The Agency works fast; You will likely know who you are working with by the time you have to call, and with that information you can be more knowledgeable and confident on the phone with your scary new boss.
---
You were right to wait. Unlike Morozov in the Underling department, Steve the Henchperson Dispatcher actually likes you, and must have gone out of his way to get you a solid crew for your first job.
Super Phreak is an old hand, having henched for over 50 years. A wealthy trust funder who only dabbles in villainy for his own amusement, Winston Grey only works a job or two a year, so having him on your team is a huge honor. It is rumored that he turned down promotion to Underling a half-dozen times because he didn't care for the notoriety. A skilled hacker, gadgeteer, and social engineer, his work name dates back to the 70's when messing with phones (or Phreaking) was the pinnacle of disrupting technology.
While you have never worked with Super Phreak before, your other two henchmen are people you know and work well with. Alice Cho, better known as the Eco-Terrorist antihero Zero-E, and the half-fey trickster Ginger Brogue were your regular partners before your recent promotion. You can only think of a handful of jobs you did in which you were not partnered with at least one of the pair. With the possible exception of Pete, you cannot think of any human you are more fond of than them.
Alice has always gone out of her way to be your friend. In awe of hell's clean energy sources, it is her most profound hope that one day demons will again invade the earth, and that she may fight alongside the invaders. You have encouraged this friendship by giving her a single demon battery, which has powered her Zero Emissions Motorcycle for over five years and still has about 70% charge. Although she is proficient in firearms and explosives, Zero-E is most infamous for her Windmill Katana, an energy blade that allows her to punch above her weight class and cut through most things that lack magical protection.
Ginger Brogue is a magic user, and although he is not particularly powerful when compared to other spellcasting heroes and scoundrels, it is the breadth of talent that most find impressive. He understands the basics of almost every school of magic, and always seems to have just the spell to help out in a given situation. Unlike Alice, it was you who took the effort to befriend him; As a practitioner of geomancy, he is one of the few beings aligned with the agency capable of doing harm to your stone shell, so you made a point to stay on his good side. So far your efforts have been rewarded with snippets of his backstory; He is actually South African, and only puts on a ridiculous stereotypical Irish charade that includes a full leprechaun costume because he feels it makes him more marketable as a short, half-fay, alcoholic, spellcaster.
Satisfied with your crew, you finally pick up the phone and call Cletus. It rings once... twice... four times... eight. Then he picks up.
"This Daydream?""Yes boss." You answer. His voice is faint and static-tainted. You get the feeling only one party to this conversation is speaking over a state of the art secure skullduggery-grade cellphone.
"Good. Listen up. Your first job is to find me a recent copy of something called the USDAGC. No more than four months old. It is a top secret government document. You probably got to prowl around government agency offices in Washington DC or somthin. Be loud about it if you have to. There are enough Incubi running around in Stone Shells that it will be tough to trace whatever shit you get up to back to me. You understand me?""Yes sir.""Good."You hang up the phone without fielding any further queries. In part because the contract mentioned that Deinosuchus didn't want underlings asking questions, but also in part because you don't feel the need. You were aware that Cletus was a loner, but your very brief discussion just now showed exactly how uninformed and out of the loop he is. The Universial Spreadsheet Documenting Artifacts in Government Custody (USDAGC or DAGC for short) is indeed a government document you
could find at the pentagon, but procuring a copy wont necessarily require a high level act of villainy.
Every aspiring Villain, and even many aspiring heroes, has had a copy to drool over at some point. The document serves as a master list of every notable piece of equipment ever confiscated from a monster, scallywag, or metahuman by the government of a UN member nation. The list includes as detailed a description of each item as possible, and a 22 digit location code for each. The codes are what prevents anybody from just tracking down whatever artifact they please; Some are too vague to be useful, indicating things such as 'no longer in government custody' or 'within the continental United States', and others are state secrets with their meaning only known to a select few.
Because the codes provide security, the document itself doesn't require any sort of super-high level clearance. Any agency, be it military, law enforcement, research lab, or museum, that handles relevant artifacts likely has somebody on staff who can access the document. You have a copy back on your computer in Detroit that is five or six years old. A quick google search reveals that someone leaked the entire thing to the web 11 months back. It shouldn't take too much effort to get an up to date version.
It would probably be poor form to throw your boss under the bus, but if you were to go to New York and tell the staff members at the Agency who like you that the legendary Deinosuchus is dumb enough to hire an underling level being simply to procure the DAGC, somebody there could likely get it for you.
Likewise you could delegate the task to Super Phreak. Nabbing a low to mid-level clearance document such as the DAGC should be trivial for a hacker and social engineer of his caliber. The thought of letting your henchman do all the work while you take a few days off to enjoy your signing bonus is indeed tempting.
Also tempting is just humoring your boss, and acquiring the document the hard way. Violence and manipulation are both fun, and Deinosuchus might be more impressed if your efforts to get him the document make the news. You could pick and shake down any major museum or big city police department in the civilized world, go far enough away from the deep south, and nobody will likely connect the dots between the heist and whatever bullshit the cabalistic gator-man might have you get up to next.
How do you plan on acquiring the Document?
If you intend to go about it the easy way, is there anything you would like to do with your spare time and signing bonus?
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Topic: (SG) Underling, a Supervillain Game (Read 4080 times)