Chuck, Tim (GE Smith), Bruce (Goat Gulgusskun) and Ernest (Liz Blessing) all meet up early to catch a Hellboy matinee. They return full of enthusiastic stories of clockwork Nazis and slimy cthulhoid monsters. Paul (Bob the Saurk), Billy (Mister Yong) and Chris (Caleb Kagan) saw the movie yesterday and are very much in agreement. Chris offers, "What's up with a Heaven that has tentacly things hanging from the sky?" Billy suggests that Rasputin would have been much more impressive if he weren't wearing sunglasses and dressed as if he were going to head off to a Rave afterwards. Everyone notices that the BPRD had all sorts of mystical shit just lying around, without even a couple of guys with machine guns available to keep an eye on it. Paul comments, "Rasputin should have gone walking out with an armload of stuff, shouting, 'This is just like my birthday! I don't even know what half of this stuff does!'"
Ernest and Billy engage in a ritual battle with chains to decide which of them will run a one-shot next. Billy puts up a valiant struggle, but Ernest finally strikes him down with repeated strikes to the head. Ernest will run a Feng Shui one-shot after Prodigal Suns ends, and then Billy will take his turn.
Tim rather shamefacedly admits that he forgot not only his dice, but also his pencil and his character sheet. Chris reassures him, "But at least you managed to remember your pants." Tim scowls as Chuck hands over the stats for one of the bodyguards.
We join our heroes as they trek their way back out of the Flesh-Eating Jungles of Sternvaal. With all concern of black ops and demlux tribals banished through last session's overwhelming application of gunfire, the group's thoughts turn towards larceny. Mister Yong asks the others, "So, are we going to steal the black ops' ship?" Liz Blessing very patiently explains, "They just showed up on a commercial liner! They don't have their own ship." Mister Yong persists, "So? We need more ships for the good fight. We could just kill the crew and take the ship anyway!" Liz, her voice assuming the tones normally used to teach simple things to small, stupid children, tries to dissuade Mister Yong by explaining, "But if we're just going to kill people and steal ships, there are a lot of other ships out there." Mister Yong completely misunderstands and exclaims, "Now you're with the program!" Liz rolls her eyes and does her best to ignore the psychic as he bounces up and down in excitement.
The characters conclude that they might not be able to go back to their own rented truck, as the Alpha Centauri Internal Security team may have booby-trapped it. Caleb Kagan decides that the best way to deal with this impasse is to interrogate the captive. He brings Goat Gulgusskun over to do what he can. Goat cracks his knuckles, then cautions Caleb, "Stand back, I'm going to use the Mind Probe!" Caleb rather skeptically responds, "But that looks like a bowie knife!" Goat rather cheerfully replies, "Yes, but there's a special technique I use with it." Caleb, still unsure of the situation, asks Goat, "Do they go through a radical personality change afterwards?" Goat rather negligently responds, "You could say that..." Caleb Kagan finally prevails upon him to stand back and use only mundane interrogation techniques.
After listening to Goat blithely discussing performing a field lobotomy, the captive is very cooperative. He reassures Caleb Kagan that they didn't even find the characters' truck, let alone booby-trap it. Caleb confirms this statement by giving him the honor of turning on the ignition. Sadly, there is no explosion. The characters conclude that the agent was telling the truth.
On the drive back, Representative Joshua Cabal suggests that the prisoner should be handed over to him as a material witness for the impending impeachment trial. He also (unsurprisingly) offers the character the use of one of his bodyguards, an earnest-seeming fellow named Lester Bildmore. The characters agree to hand both Representative Cabal and the prisoners over to Colonel Striker's mercenaries. This allows the characters to keep a lower profile, and gives Colonel Striker a bit of well-deserved positive publicity. As an aside, the characters ask the Colonel if he's got any tips about killing voniri. He claims they bleed just like everyone else.
Upon reaching the starport, Bob the Saurk launches into a three-day overhaul of the Blue Lady. He explains to the others, "Anyone could have messed with it while we were gone. By the way, I need to work on my Defense skill, so I'm going to change the ship around so blasts of superheated steam shoot randomly out of the walls."
Liz Blessing estimates that it will take 49 days in hyper to make it from Sternvaal to the Voniri homeworld. She plots a course with several stops at inhabited systems along the way to cut down on the navigation difficulty and to allow the characters to update their NewsNets in case there are any important developments. Like, for example, an all-out Anzani attack on the Voniri homeworld.
Fifty-something long, boring days later the Blue Lady drops out of hyper near the Voniri Free Trade Zone. The so-called Zone is actually an outsystem station build into a fifty-mile diameter asteroid. The voniri started out simply mining the thing for minerals and radioactives, but when human trade traffic started to build up in their system they towed it out to orbit a trans-plutonian rockball on the outskirts of the system and set it up as a permanent way station and neutral meeting point.
The characters can see that there are hundreds of ships in dock. All of them are overshadowed by the massive shape of the Anzani hive ship docked on one side of the asteroid. Liz Blessing looks up from the Blue Lady's navigational display and asks the others, "So, let's say we steal some stuff from the Anzani and maybe kill a few of them. Don't they have the firepower to just destroy the whole asteroid rather than let the likes of us escape?" Mister Yong replies, "Well, yes. We should dock on the other side of the station, and keep the cameras rolling as we run for our lives."
The voniri keep the Blue Lady in a holding queue for four hours before providing docking instructions. Getting a berth far from the Anzani ship turns out to be no problem: most visitors are eager to get a berth near the big alien ship so they can get a better view. Docking fees run Cr 250/day. The characters pay for ten days docking up front.
During the interminable wait for docking permission, the characters hold a debate on the best way to identify Anzani changelings. Liz Blessing suggests checking out political figures who are championing the Anzani cause. She points out that just finding a changeling is only half of the process. The other half is unmasking the creature on national television.
Goat Gulgusskun wonders, "Could I force a shapeshifter to change shape with my freaky psychic Healing powers?" Liz does her best to calm Goat's unrealistic hopes by telling him, "I think we'll have to stick to killing them." Goat suggests that he should wander all across the station, using psychic insight to try and detect changelings. Liz and Mister Yong point out that they saw a lot of psychics around acting as psychic detectors in the casino they hit, and suspect that the Anzani might have some people doing this sort of thing. Goat might be able to spot changelings, but might get himself vanished in the process.
All this talk of psychic shapeshifters starts to make Bob the Saurk nervous. He makes himself a tinfoil hat.
The characters venture out into the corridors and vaults of the Voniri Free Trade Zone. The entire place is built as a series of concentric rings. The docks and industrial zones are outermost, with a thin skin of slums immediately inside. The upmarket sections of the FreeTeeZee are closer to the center of the asteroid, clustering around the machinery core. The whole place looks like a series of mall concourses lined with shops and residences. And everywhere the characters look there are posters proclaiming the sagacious and far-sighted leadership of Senior Administrator Miskulthrig.
The characters quickly learn that the Anzani have a formal Legation Office near the central core of the station. They maintain a permanent presence to talk to trade delegations and diplomats from across the ICPA. All of the characters instantly conclude that this arrangement is perfect if the Anzani wished to make a practice of replacing diplomats and trade officials with changelings.
Liz Blessing asks around to find a good place to stay. Several locals point her towards the Hy!Aaa!tt-Ry-Jyuncie hotel. She is amazed to find out that the place is actually a branch of a native voniri company over three hundred years old with no relationship to any similarly named human hotel operators.
While Liz checks in at the Hy!Aaa!tt-Ry-Jyuncie, Lester Bildmore heads out to wander the streets alone for a couple of hours ("What kind of training have you been through, men?" [in unison] "Redshirt training!"). The hotel staff confesses that she cannot get two sets of adjoining rooms: ever since the Anzani Legation opened, they have been solidly booked. Liz agrees to pay Cr 3000 per night for two non-adjoining suites. Lester eventually shows up and finds out that the hotel has thirty channels of voniri porn available. He resolves to never leave his room. The other characters pile into the suites. Liz makes sure that the dirtiest members of the crew are in the other suite, by which she specifically means Bob.
Liz Blessing gathers up Lester Bildmore and heads over to talk to the Anzani. She is unable to talk to any actual Anzani. Instead, she has a conversation with a human secretary whose job seems to involve telling visitors that the Anzani Legate is unable to meet with them at this time. The secretary informs Liz that the Anzani trade delegate will contact her when an appointment slot opens up. Liz offers the marginally convincing story that she is a trade representative from Aetna, and can be contacted at the Hy!Aaa!tt-Ry-Jyuncie.
Liz envisions bringing Bob the Saurk to meet with an Anzani trade representative: "Do you mind that I brought my sniffling crazed killer warthog? He's covered in bugs, and he's carrying a fire extinguisher. We keep him around in case there is violence. Or bugs. Or fire."
The next day, the characters spend the day shopping for clothes. Liz's goal is to make everyone else look not quite so much like criminals and perverts. She spends the rest of her time searching out parties with heavily diplomatic guest lists. Goat Gulgusskun spends most of his day trekking through the corridors scanning random people to see if they are Anzani shapeshifters. He finds nobody.
Liz finally manages to learn about a private party featuring some important guests. All the civilized-looking characters go. And Goat, because the others need him to do the psychic stuff. And Bob, because he looked so sad at the idea of being left behind in the hotel.
At the door, the maitre'd asks Liz, "What can I do for you?" Liz proceeds to try and bluff her way past him. She explains that she leads the Aetna Trade Delegation, and that they are here on important mineral rights negotiations. The maitre'd asks, "Where the hell is Aetna?" Goat proceeds to mindwash the maitre'd... Aetna is a very important place... The maitre'd's expression relaxes. His eyes drift to look at a place some distance beyond the far concourse wall. He murmurs, "Oooh... Aetna is a very important place..." They have very good mineral resources... "Oooh... And their mineral resources are very good..." Here is the invitation you are looking for... "Thag you very buch..." The characters push past the man into the party.
Caleb Kagan takes a glance back at the poor fellow and suspects that the maitre'd is going to be obsessed by Aetna and its mineral resources for months. He guesses that the man probably end up naming his first child "Aetna" and his second child "Mineral Resources."
Liz cautions those characters without the social skills of a hamster to just sit down and stay quiet. She heads out into the crowd to mingle and gossip. Goat moves off after her, using his psychic tricks to find anybody who doesn't appear to be the correct species. Mister Yong does his best to keep Goat in range just in case someone twigs to what he's doing. All of them notice a row of bored-looking bodyguards standing against one wall. Caleb Kagan captures some little pastries. He comes back to Bob the Saurk with a plate full of little squirmy things. He tells the saurk, "I like these! They squeak when you bite them. Then it turns into a piercing scream." Liz urges Goat to pay attention to people who aren't eating, because the secretary at the Legation said Anzani don't really like human food.
Mister Yong hears a couple of guys talking about a possible agreement between Grumman-Daimler and Fujisonysan to take out ICBM. The ICBM guys seem to be getting too many cozy contracts with the Anzani. Lester Bildmore hears a waiter admitting that he whizzed in the coffee. Goat hears that a rep from Vogelheim has a meeting with the Anzani ambassador tomorrow morning at 09:00. Goat quickly scans the Vogelheim trade rep. Goat concludes that the guy is human, and in pretty good health, though he should take it easy on the Triple-Choco Bombs at breakfast.
Suddenly Goat gets a flash of "Not Human!" An instant later he realizes that the Anzani shapeshifter he detected is also a psychic and has probably made him. Goat walks casually towards the buffet, then sends a telepathic message to Liz pointing out the shapeshifter. Liz decides that there is a tremendous attraction to just doing the guy right here in front of a lot of diplomats. She tells Lester, who volunteers to be the triggerman and picks up Liz's holdout piece. Liz explains that she would try to talk up the guy, but fears that he will use his gnarly psychic powers to see that she knows he isn't human. She decides to use the otherwise-innocent Caleb as the dupe. She reflects that he'll be really surprised when Lester walks up and caps the guy, but them's the breaks. Liz and Mister Yong stand by for backup.
After the hit, Lester will go to the used bookstore four sections down and look at art books. The others will rejoin him there.
Liz uses her various arts to make Lester look a bit different, then heads over to butter up Caleb. She tells him, "You see that guy over there? The guy in the magenta and viridian suit? I heard him talking about the Anzani delegation. Could you go over and chat him up? I tried and I wasn't getting any warm vibes off him."
Caleb walks up and rather drunkenly tells the suspected Anzani, "Uhh... I'm from Aetna and wanna talk ter ya about mineral resources..." Suddenly the infiltrator lunges at Caleb in a desperate attempt to use him as a human shield. Lester comes in and shoots the Anzani in the lungs. Caleb flings himself away and pulls out a pistol. Things fall apart so fast people get hit by the fragments. Mister Yong and Goat start sending psychic attacks at the Anzani to try and stop him long enough to help Lester get another good shot in. Goat even burns an Emergency Die. Neither of them makes an impression on him.
Caleb gets a really strong impression that Lester just went batshit insane and needs to be put down. He shoots Lester dead in a single shot. Liz is so stunned she doesn't get an action. She mourns, "I had this really cool plan! If Caleb had crapped in my purse I couldn't have been more surprised!"
Goat learns the beautiful experiences of negative psychic juice points as he mentally compels Caleb to juice the alien. Caleb spins, shoots and misses. Mister Yong rather desperately attempts to impale the Anzani on a banister.
Just when things don't seem like they could get much worse, screams of "Mad saurk! Mad saurk!" ring out from the door as Bob the Saurk rushes towards the Anzani. Bob trips over a fleeing diplomat and kisses linoleum.
Mister Yong finally manages to get a telekinetic hold on the Anzani. He hurls the shapeshifter into a banister hard enough to jar teeth.
Then Bob the Saurk comes on the scene and starts chopping. He didn't bring along his custom vibro-ninja sword, and finds that this makes cutting apart Anzani shapechangers really hard. The Anzani tries to flee up the stairs, but Mister Yong blocks his way by bending the banister over. And then Bob the Saurk cuts the Anzani down.
Bob hauls down the Anzani's corpse and yells, "Look! An alien!" A terrified onlooker screams, "Which one?" The dead Anzani appears to be wearing some kind of bio-morph suit, but was carrying a human-made gun. The creature is thin with huge black eyes.
Caleb jumps down from a table, puts his gun down and asks, "Bob? What happened? Lester just went crazy!"
Liz Blessing runs outside and does her best to spread both the news and the panic. She does her best to spread the correct rumors by limiting her screams to two-word responses: "Anzani spies! Anzani shapeshifters!"
Mister Yong herds the others towards the back door telling the others, "Everybody out! Liz got us into this mess, she can take care of herself!"
The characters make it back to the Blue Lady, where Caleb leaps to the sensor console to check out what local law enforcement has going down. The police think that a deranged Marine named Lester Bildmore gunned down an innocent man in an upscale club. They don't mention any accomplices, which makes the characters think that the authorities are planning on wasting the characters on the QT.
Liz shows up somewhat later than the other characters, having taken a quick side trip to a local news station to offer her own version of the story. From there she learns that the dead man was supposed to have been a trade official from Dante.
The session ends with the characters huddled in the Blue Lady, making plans to storm the Anzani Legation. Each character gains three experience points and one Genre Point.