Readings for the Day
St. George's Cathedral
Sunday, July 4, 2004
Isaiah 59:6-8
Their cobwebs are useless for clothing;
they cannot cover themselves with what they make.
Their deeds are evil deeds,
and acts of violence are in their hands.
Their feet rush into sin;
they are swift to shed innocent blood.
Their thoughts are evil thoughts;
ruin and destruction mark their ways.
The way of peace they do not know;
there is no justice in their paths.
They have turned them into crooked roads;
no one who walks in them will know peace.
Jeremiah 34:17-18
Therefore, this is what the LORD says:
You have not obeyed me;
you have not proclaimed freedom for your fellow countrymen.
So I now proclaim 'freedom' for you, declares the LORD -
'freedom' to fall by the sword, plague and famine.
I will make you abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth.
The men who have violated my covenant
and have not fulfilled the terms of the covenant they made before me,
I will treat like the calf they cut in two and then walked between its pieces.
City Ready to Bring In Fourth of July With A Bang
Millions of city residents are getting ready to celebrate Independence Day, complete with a fireworks extravaganza in Liberty Park. Thousands of revelers are expected to gather in the park for the event, which is one of Freedom City's most-loved American traditions.
The Mayor and several city councilmen are also scheduled to attend the event, which is being sponsored by the influential fraternal organization the Sons of Freedom. Also on hand will be more than 500 uniformed officers from the FCPD, including 48 mounted officers riding horses trained in crowd control...
Fourth of July Festivities Largest Ever
Carrying on its proud tradition of celebrating our American heritage, Freedom City organizers have arranged for the most ambitious Fourth of July celebration in memory. Headlining the primary celebration at Liberty Park will be the Boy Wonderz, with their label's owner, New Horizon Media, picking up the tab. The costumed boy band is expected to draw hordes of fans and set the stage for a fireworks display that the Freedom Metro Fire Department has spent months planning. Fire Chief Paul DuMar asks Freedonians to celebrate the holiday safely...
Freedom City Area Prisons At Capacity
The increase in crime rate and state budget cutbacks have created a severe shortage in space at many of the city's correctional facilities. The South River State Penitentiary is so overcrowded that many hardened criminals are being sent to the low-security Freedom City Correctional Facility, and may lesser offenders are receiving extremely short prison sentences. South River's official capacity is 3500 people; however, it is currently holding more than 3800 and there are hundreds more in the pipeline, says warden John Ermanos. In addition, the Blackstone Special Federal Penitentiary has received a sudden influx of super-powered offenders that they are not sufficiently staffed to handle, according to...
Rise In Area Hate Crimes Blamed On "White Power" Groups
A prominent local temple was vandalized and defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti. A gay bar in the Theatre District was set afire and suffered thousands of dollars of damage. Black youths were hospitalized after being badly beaten.
What do all these incidents have in common? The Brotherhood, a skinhead gang with ties to numerous national white power organizations, says Wilson Jeffers, a prominent community leader in Southside...
Minor Blaze in Wharton State Forest Blamed On Teen Partiers
A midweek party of local high school students in nearby Wharton State Forest turned into a minor forest fire, according to MassParks spokesman David Peters. The blaze was quickly contained with the aid of several firefighting helicopters, which dumped enough water on the blaze to extinguish it before it got out of hand. The area is temporarily off limits to hikers and bikers until cleanup efforts can be completed.
Dozen Patients Leave Providence Asylum
Twelve patients in the minimum security wing of Providence Asylum walked right out of the facility this week. In a statement by asylum director Dr. Ashley Ellis, the group of escapees are described as "delusional and confused" but not a threat to the public, and neighboring Port Royal inhabitants are asked to keep an eye out for people in hospital garb or that are otherwise behaving erratically...
The scene opens on Zom and Archangel sitting home alone while Sting Ray and Darren Stone work real jobs. Zom decides to be constructive after reading a news article about the prison shortage and goes down to DeCosta Construction and tells the boss, "Buddy" DeCosta, that he'd like contract work clearing land and making building supplies. DeCosta says that'd be great, but he needs a team of lawyers to work out some details first.
Archangel decides that the truth must out and calls up Amy Feng to offer her an exclusive interview with The Redeemers! Or at least one Redeemer and his dino-buddy. Archangel and Zom meet her at the Starbase Coffee on 36th in Midtown. Initially wary because she's kidnapped by sickos on a frequent basis, Amy warms to the characters when they start telling her that the "fire" in the news was really a big white power rally with supervillain complement that was broken up by AEGIS and covered up by the Feds. "Can I get this on camera!?!" she asks.
The characters accompany Amy and Ben, her cameraman and news van driver (a new one since the mall incident), out to Wharton to check out the site. They note that the entire clearing is being leveled by bulldozers before a park ranger shoos them away. Amy is pleased that there's an obvious cover-up taking place, and interviews both characters on camera about it. Archangel makes sure to call out White Knight by calling him a "little wussy-boy" in the interview.
Amy relates to the characters that another story that "stinks to high heaven" is the Providence Asylum breakout story. All twelve escapees haven't even been seen since they left. Archangel does a little research and finds out that Providence Asylum is one jacked up place, with Indian burial grounds and Howard Phillipses and much craziness and spooky vibe. And that they are looking at upgrading it to treat super-crazies. They head out with the thought that it must be a whole nest of mind-controlled insane supervillains, picking Stone up along the way.
When they get there, they discover that though the old mansion looks spooky from a distance, it is nicely landscaped with a professional-looking business office on the front of it. They go in and tell the receptionist they want a tour. She refers them to the director, Dr. Ashley Ellis, who looks a lot like Julianne Moore. The heroes lay down a story about being graduate students and wanting to apply Six Sigma methodologies to the insane, and can they see the maximum security ward now. Using the kind of Sense Motive that only a criminal psychiatrist can muster, she asks the group to tell her what they're really there for before she calls the cops. They confess to being superheroes looking to find the escapees. After orderlies wrestle them all to the ground and inject them with 100 cc's of Thorazine (jk), Dr. Ellis calls ADA Sissman and checks out their story. He vouches for them so she tells them that she suspects Samuel (Adams) Marshall of being behind the escape, which was all of generally innocuous people in minimum security with grounds privileges. She shows the heroes his file; he did three tours in Nam and retired from the Marines as a Master Sergeant and explosives expert. He went on to get a Ph.D in Chemistry and worked for the same company, Winston Arms, for the last 30 years, most recently heading up their chemical weapons division before being let go. He was arrested for threatening his wife with his trusty M-16 and subsequently resisting arrest. He was found to be a wacko with delusions and poor anger management and sentenced indefinitely to the Providence Asylum some 5 years hence. His wife died in an accident while he was awaiting trial. He had seemed to make a lot of improvement over the last several years and this had lots of privileges at the asylum.
The heroes headed out to the graveyard where his wife was buried, and Stone, using his "detect valuable unsupervised objects" skill from his gangbanger days, finds Marshall's Bronze and Silver Stars resting on her headstone. "He's been here!" declares Archangel and Stone. "Whut?" asks Zom. Near a bare footprint they find a matchbook for Millenium, a young rich people club in Midtown that Darren tried to sneak into years ago.
Next, they go to the local Winston Arms office in a lavish skyscraper in downtown Freedom City. They are greeted by the CEO, Hugh Price. The police have already warned them that Marshall is at large. He tells them that Sam was always a hard worker but that they had to let him go because he was becoming increasingly erratic. He declined to discuss what projects Sam was working on since they were mostly contracts for the DoD. He does graciously give the players a catalog of their consumer line of weapons.
Running out of leads, the heroes clean up and head to Millenium. It's after dark on Saturday, July 3, so the place is already bumping. Chicks that look like models in little dresses wave their arms on the dance floor under a watchful DJ. A circular bar dominates the front part of the club, with tables in back - it's all very Replacement Killers (I have Crystal Method and Tricky playing in the background in homage). They ask around, and Darren queries a regular who says he saw Marshall there right after opening a couple days ago. He wandered around for a while like he was looking for someone then left.
At this, Darren heads to the restroom to look for bombs, where he finds Zom doing God knows what. They are interrupted in sticking their hands into every available crevice in a public restroom by a commotion from down the hall. They look out and see several old guys wearing some hospital garb and Army jackets chaining the back fire door shut; another two come out of the women's restroom, chasing squealing rich girls out of it into the main club area. In front, a half dozen more march in through the front; a bouncer attempts to intercept them and is knocked through the air with superhuman strength by one of the geezers! They block the front door with a railroad tie.
The fight is on. Stone and Shaper make short work of the four in the back hall (though one of them, yelling "Charlie in the trees!" takes a while to subdue), and Shaper turns the rear door into water. Archangel starts fighting with the ones out front. They're all hopped up and exhibiting inhuman strength, speed, and toughness. Two more, one in a wheelchair, move into the DJ booth, take the DJ hostage, and start talking over the microphone about how everyone should follow orders and not get hurt. Archangel dazzles a batch of them, heads over and liberates the DJ, and smashes the mouthpiece's wheelchair. A bunch of them grapple him and bear him to the ground for a good Rodney Kinging.
Shaper herds people out the back exit while Darren Stone, covered with tile and porcelain from the bathroom, begins clobbering aged veterans. He and Archangel batter their assailants into unconsciousness; the last one has a seizure. The wheelchair guy has levered himself back up to the microphone and is issuing demands about veterans' healthcare. "We will not be forgotten!" Two of them have gotten into the bar and throw Molotov cocktails at Archangel and Shaper, who are both immune to fire and thus unimpressed. Shaper closes them up by turning the bar into a hemisphere. Archangel tries to heal the seizing guy but he's hopped up on the same drug the Nazi skinhead was in Issue 2. When they unseal the bar they find two vets and three bartenders blissfully floating in 6 inches of booze.
The cops show up, everyone goes downtown. The heroes correctly identify their assailants as vets from some VA hospital; they all have numerical written orders on them, Dirty Dozen style ("Four - bar the door!"). Captain Maddicks from the STAR squad growls at them some. They head down to the VA hospital to look for clues. There are already cops there investigating; the PCs lock onto a guilty-looking orderly and rough him up till he talks. A guy (he ID's Marshall from the photo) came in the other day and gave him some "medicine" to give to the vets; he said it was stuff they needed that their benefits didn't pay for. "You bought that?" asks Stone. "Well, he also paid me $500," admits the orderly. "But he did it before and it didn't make them freak out!"
The heroes investigate this claim, and apparently a month ago, well before the escape, someone looking like Marshall and signing the guest sign-in book like Marshall showed up and paid the same orderly to slip medicine to the men. He visited for some time with one of them who seemed to be an old Marines buddy (wheelchair guy).
Puzzled, the heroes head to bed. Archangel flies off to circle the asylum. On circle #382, he spies a car parked in the woods nearby. He creeps nearby and wakes up Stone over communicator shard to run the plates. Stone replies, "What do you mean 'run the plates'? I don't even own a TV!" He walks to the pay phone on the corner and calls Zom to "run the plates." After some time, Zom understands, but also has no idea how to do it. He calls Amy Feng (it's about 2 AM at this point) and after being hung up on as a crank caller a couple times manages to convey that he's a Redeemer and they need plates run. Stone leaves to go help Archangel, which is a shame because in a couple hours when Amy gets back to Zom and he tries to call Darren, a corner pay phone rings mournfully in Southside. Drug dealers and hookers circle it eagerly.
Anyway, Stone goes to the car and introduces Archangel to the investigative technique of opening the doors and looking around. The car is obviously hotwired, there's an asylum gown stashed under the seat, and it's obviously been in the woods for weeks. When they finally decide to call Zom, he tells them the car was stolen three months ago, and offers them excess drugs and hookers.
The heroes await the opening of the asylum on this fine July the Fourth morning...