RUBY CITY DEFENDERS! Issue #2 - Caught between a Hammer, a Sickle... and a hard case!

Fred has had a long day. He started it driving to this city. So he did not waste any time changing and crashed on the bed in his supersuit.

Fred has had a long day. He started it driving to this city. So he did not waste any time changing and crashed on the bed in his supersuit. (Some jokers call them pajamas anyway.)

And Lightning Bullet's Thief skills allow him to pick locks and a car lock isn't all that hard.    

Old cars from the 50s had a button door lock, you just needed a wire coat hanger with a little loop, drop it down the window, get the loop over the button and lift. Or drop it down into the door frame, find the lock and lift. Watched folks do it lots of times in the 60s and 70s when I was a kid.

OOC The registration isn't completely conclusive. Fred Aster may lend it to his buddy Captain Conduit after all... Let's see what sneaky Lightning Bullet can get up to...

Dex 7 + Thief 2D + Roll(4d12)+0: 5,6,5,7,+0 Total:10 DOUBLE plus Roll(2d12)+0: 8,9,+0 Total:27 (34) vs
OV3 (door lock then glove box) + Roll(2d12)+0: 6,11,+0 Total:17 (20) +5 (EV12 vs RV3)=9 RAPs. Success.

Checking about then going in the trunk, then the glovebox after fishing about with a set of picks revealed the drivers registration.

Fred Aster. Where did Lightning Bullet know that name from?

OOC Int 5 + Roll(2d12)+0: 11,2,+0 Total:13 (18) vs
OV2 (to recall school friends. I can recall many of mine, 35 years on, and still in touch with a few) + Roll(2d12)+0:
9,9,+0 Total:18 DOUBLE plus Roll(2d12)+0: 6,7,+0 Total:31 (33) Failed.

Lightning Bullet frowned. Probably because of not having had much sleep but his brain was foggy and the name didn't mean much to him right now.

OOC I assume you put everything back as it was? You could take a sneaky peak under the mask of the man on the bunk but a) that's not very honourable and b) things could turn nasty! Does LB want to hit the sack too? I assume he turns the police scanner down. Whatever it is the Russians are doing will happen without LB and CC on the scene, clearly, but they were two against what sound to be five or six giving the police the run around...

Now having a name and being a bit tired, after being knocked out and all, Lightning Bullet decided to go upstairs and hit his bed.  He left a note on each of the two men's doors that food in the kitchen was open to them if they got hungry and that he would be back in after a rest.  He taped those notes to their doors.  Then he made sure he put everything back the way it was in Fred Aster's auto.  He unlocked the door to the stairways and locked it again behind him and dropped a crossbar over the door for good measure then went up to his own room, showered, changed and hit the hay.

ooc:  Plan is sleep a few hours and then see if he can remember who Fred Aster is when he wakes up.  Maybe his subconscious would figure it out while he slept; it has been only a few years since he graduated from college.  Get up, and see about rescuing Herr Doktor's family and get them into the hands of the government.  And of course, all plans by superheroes are totally destroyed by plans of the GM.  

CAPTAIN CONDUIT

CC wakes, and instinctively checks his mask, his costume, his surroundings. Still on the bunk. There was a note saying Lightning Bullet had hit the sack for a few hours. He glanced at the clock. It was near mid day. A quick check shows the Scientist is still out of it. He's an older man and exhausted by events of the previous evening/night.

LIGHTNING BULLET

Buzzzzzzzzzz! The alarm clock went off and Lightning Bullet groaned, turning over in his bed. He still felt tired but the sun was blazing through a gap in the curtains and he felt more refreshed.

OOC Try again. This time it's slightly harder because he failed last time. Mind you that double had a say in that.

Int 5 + Roll(2d12)+0: 4,3,+0 Total:7 (12) vs
OV2 + Modifier 2 (to recall school friends. I can recall many of mine, 35 years on, and still in touch with a few) + Roll(2d12)+0: 6,9,+0 Total:15 (19) Failed. Dice are foiling you.

No. It avoided him somehow. That name. Somebody from work? A business contact? So much had happened since he'd gotten his powers. He sighed. It would come to him. He maybe just needed more sleep. In the meantime he could employ the services of a Private Detective perhaps to find out who the owner of the car was. Maybe Captain Conduit had borrowed or stolen it from this Aster guy?

Right now there were other things to sort out. Like how to get into the penthouse 'fortress' of these mobsters and get the Scientists' family out. If they knew about the guy being in the hands of the supers his family would be in deadly peril...

Fred gets a fresh set of clothes from his car, including a hoodie and welding helmet before going to a bathroom to take a shower. Once he's cleaned and shaven if possible, he puts on the hoodie and welder's helmet to go get some grub in the kitchen.

Fred had also tried to clean his costume as best he could in the bathroom and left it there to dry. He probably also took a dump.

andyman wrote:Fred had also tried to clean his costume as best he could in the bathroom and left it there to dry. He probably also took a dump.

There's a washer and dryer down in the base. Figured it was a better place to wash one's costume so any hired help or visitor's wouldn't stumble on the costumes while in the main house.

Taking another quick shower and then shaving, grabbing a balanced breakfast of eggs, cereal, toast and juice, Max Dane headed downstairs to the Think Tank, shifting into his Lightning Bullet persona after he removes the crossbar from the door. He then goes to see where everyone is. He follows the smell of food from the kitchen to find Captain Conduit there and no sign of Herr Doktor.

"Morning Fred," he says casually as he goes to get a cup of coffee from the electric coffee pot, watching CC out of the corner of his eye.

"Good late afternoon. By the way, we can't stay here all day. We've got to meet up with DarkRaven at the precinct tonight. What do you want to do about the Nazi? If he's even still here."

"We have two priorities," Lightning Bullet says, sipping his coffee, a bit disappointed that Captain Conduit didn't rise to his "slip of the tongue". "One, save the Doktor's family. I have doubts he went through the De-Nazification process after WW2, so he needs to be turned over to the government. Second, find and capture those dang Commies who hit the bank earlier today."

"And Dark Raven is dead! So how can we meet up with him?"


ooc: Memory is a bit blurry but I think LB went down and unconscious BEFORE Dark Raven showed up. If he did see Dark Raven before going unconscious then change the above line to ...

"What time are we meeting him and where in the precinct?"

"I agree with number one. For number two... wait, it was the Commies at that bank last night? You should have let us go. As for DarkRaven, the new DarkRaven, he's the guy who teleported your alter ego to the roadside where I found you. Or you found me. Whatever."

Fred does not know that LB actually slipped out on his own and ended up in the exact same place Captain Conduit asked DarkRaven to bring him.

Some information on Denazification gleaned from the Internet:


Denazification is the term used to describe the process of removing Nazis and Nazism from public life in Germany and across occupied Europe following the fall of the Third Reich.

After the war, Germany was split into four zones of Allied occupation. These were: North East Germany (controlled by the Soviet Union), South East Germany (controlled by the United States), South West Germany (controlled by France) and North West Germany (controlled by Great Britain). Each zone of occupation carried out the denazification process differently.

In October 1946, the Allied Control Council announced five categories of Nazis, each of which were dealt with separately:

Major offenders (to be sentenced to life imprisonment/death)
Activists, militarists and profiteers (up to ten years imprisonment)
Lesser offenders (probation for up to three years)
Nazi followers and supporters (surveillance and fine)
Exonerated individuals (no punishment)
Denazification took place within all layers of German society, government and administration, including in the economic sphere, culture, judiciary and government. For example, libraries were purged of Nazi publications and some former Nazis were removed from public positions.

Denazification was difficult and complex, and never fully completed. The developing Cold War meant that Britain and America felt that West Germany was a useful ally against communism and the Soviet Union, and therefore the Nazis that remained in their positions in society were viewed as less of a threat than communism. On top of this, even the process of establishing who was and who was not a Nazi was challenging and often relied on citizens providing information about themselves.

The first German chancellor of the new republic, Konrad Adenauer, who came to power in 1949, was opposed to the process of denazification. Adenauer instead opted for a strategy of integration – integrating old Nazis into the new republic in order to move forward.

Ultimately, many of those involved in Nazi activities were not punished and retained their personal and professional positions, and much of the wealth plundered by the Nazis was not immediately returned to its rightful owners.
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About 8.5 million Germans, or 10% of the population, had been members of the Nazi Party. Nazi-related organizations also had huge memberships, such as the German Labour Front (25 million), the National Socialists People's Welfare organization (17 million), the League of German Women, Hitler Youth, the Doctors' League, and others. It was through the Party and these organizations that the Nazi state was run, involving as many as 45 million Germans in total. In addition, Nazism found significant support among industrialists, who produced weapons or used slave labour, and large landowners, especially the Junkers in Prussia. Denazification after the surrender of Germany was thus an enormous undertaking, fraught with many difficulties.

The first difficulty was the enormous number of Germans who might have to be first investigated, then penalized if found to have supported the Nazi state to an unacceptable degree. In the early months of denazification there was a great will, especially among the Americans, to be utterly thorough, to investigate everyone and hold every supporter of Nazism to account; however, it turned out that the numbers simply made that goal impractical. It soon became evident, too, that pursuing denazification too scrupulously would make it impossible to create a functioning, democratic society in Germany, one that would be able to support itself economically and not become a burden on the victorious nations.
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The denazification process was often completely disregarded by both the Soviets and the Western powers for German rocket scientists and other technical experts, who were taken out of Germany to work on projects in the victor's own country or simply seized in order to prevent the other side from taking them. The U.S. sent 785 scientists and engineers from Germany to America, some of whom formed the backbone of the U.S. space program.

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Operation Paperclip

So what happened after the fall of the Nazi regime and the end of WW2? What happened to all the Nazi’s; were they punished for the crimes they committed, leaving aside the puny soldiers of the regime, the top scientists that developed the aircrafts and weapons systems were of great interest to the US. They foresaw the upcoming Cold War and wanted to gain an upper hand. Operation Paperclip was the codename under which the US intelligence and military services extricated scientists from Nazi Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. The project was originally called Operation Overcast, and is sometimes also known as Project Paperclip.

Of particular interest were scientists specialising in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine. These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler’s Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats also disqualified them from officially obtaining visas. An aim of the operation was capturing equipment before the Soviets came in. The US Army destroyed some of the German equipment to prevent it from being captured by the advancing Soviet Army.

The majority of the scientists, numbering around 1400, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, Fort Bliss, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missile and ballistic missile technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program. Werner von Braun, who is known as the father of the American Space Program, was a long term Nazi and good friends with Hitler. Now this man built the V-2 Rockets with Jewish slave labor, everyday they’d execute five slowest workers in front of other workers to incentivise them to work harder. After the war Americans got him into their country to Huntsville, Alabama where he built the Saturn 5 rocket, the “proudly American rocket” that got US to the moon. Some of these engineers and scientists were involved in the vaccine development for the German soldiers that’d protect them from biological weapons, they were involved in war crimes such as the concentration camps, but what happened, happened.

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ooc: I imagine any scientists or technicians that might have been involved in developing superpowers would have been a part of Paperclip in our world.

OOC Thanks for the update on 'Paperclip'. This particular Nazi Scientist (and the others he referred to, all with their own take on creating the 'Ubermensch' for the Nazis) will most likely have fallen between the cracks, being so top secret there were very little in the way of records on their work to protect against saboteurs and spies.

Lightning Bullet moved over to a radio and flicked it on.

"...erdays' daring raid on the bank on the US National Bank on Hayes street. Seven police officers remain critically ill in hospital whilst tellers and customers at the bank were 'shocked and appalled' by what were described as Five Red Garbed Villains with terrible, miraculous abilities! Eye witnesses report cars being tossed around, fire breathed from a mouth and objects moving without visible means. The Police Commissioner, Willard Talbot, declared that they would 'leave no stone unturned to catch these reprehensible crooks!' but would answer no further questions. It is understood the FBI is involved and Hayes Street remains closed today with traffic diverted down 7th and Audley whilst shops and businesses have been ordered to remain closed for the forseeable..."

Lightning Bullet clicked it off.

It seemed the Russians they encountered at the diner had sent a message.

WE can do whatever we like, and nothing you can do can stop us!

The question was, where and when might they strike next? The two heroes glanced at one another and then at the ajar door where the soundly sleeping Schmidt was still spark out. They were after Schmidt.

The pair of heroes didn't need to be the world's greatest detectives to figure out the Bank job was something to draw them out...

"Alright, we save the Herr Doktor's family tonight, then we go after those blasted Commies and show them that this city, this country is ours and that they are not welcome here," Lightning Bullet says after snapping off the radio.

Captain Conduit thinks for a moment. "Why not send the Russians after the mobsters and kill two birds with one stone? It'll be a nice distraction. We can then slip the family out of there right under their noses."

Lightning Bullet thinks about it for a moment then grimaces.

"Sounds like what you are saying is that we make a kidnapped family as bait for a trap, without their knowledge or permission. Doesn't sound very heroic to me. Sounds more like what a villain would do, if they had our families, loved ones or friends and wanted to take down a rival gang. Plus, we don't know where the Commies are or how to direct them to the hotel these folks are being held at, and would endanger innocents at that hotel too. Bad enough if our attempt to save them goes south and results in innocent folks there being harmed. I really want us to try to sneak in and then sneak out with the family, get them safe and then round up the crooks."

"How do you plan on exfiltrating a family? I think the only way we can do it with NiteRaven's teleportation and darkness powers. We port in , make the place dark. NiteRaven ports out the family to our cop friend's precinct and voila... Navi Nerd will no longer have a reason to return to the mobsters."

"Night Raven can teleport? Didn't know that. Or cast darkness. I was knocked out before I saw much of what he did," Lightning Bullet replies. "So we talk to him, see if he can do it and then form our plan to rescue them."

"Yep." Captain Conduit then quietly goes to check and make sure the German is indeed still in bed.

"Then it looks like our best option to save these folks," Lightning Bullet replies. "Probably take us 30-45 minutes to get to the precinct so we should leave early and find a nice place to hide before trying to make contact. I have locks on every exit and no way for Herr Doktor to contact the outside world, so we can probably leave him to his own devices here. Just a real basic chem lab he can play with."

Admin wrote:OOC Ok so it's early afternoon. You have until just before 10pm to get opposite the Precinct house to meet Darkraven and Conway (who's probably picked up another ulcer whilst he struggles with the paperwork over the diner mess).

Lightning Bullet can lock the Doctor up, leave a note telling him to stay put etc. You have about 8 hours to kill and could probably benefit from more sleep if you intend to pull an all nighter.

Fred Aster/CC may benefit from actually spending a few hours doing his job so he can put money on the table whilst Max Dane may have appointments to keep/business meetings to attend to ensure the healthy nature of his pocket money fund stays intact.

Or you can patrol, talk more, however you wish to play it. In any case I can assume a few things and zip time along if required.

If Fred hadn't had enough sleep, then he would not have woken up and eaten. Can we just say it is evening after we rested? This is why Captain Conduit said "Good late afternoon."