Attacks against Pax Artificium happen once every week or so. Lately, the attacking monsters have been getting bigger and badder, until three weeks ago, they just stopped.
Session start: Saturday, June 4, 2033 – 1800 hours – downtown Pax Artificium
Jack
Jack is at Angels nightclub, working as head bouncer as usual. He hears near-simultaneous gunshots coming from the back room, followed by many screams, as people flood out the doors in a mob, trying to leave the club. The emergency exit alarms sound as people exit through every possible avenue. Jack investigates, locking two stray customers in a room for safekeeping. Jack sees monsters on the street, then returns to the room where he had locked the people. Upon opening the door, the people are not there, but instead there are two more monsters, which attack him! He immediately locks one back into the room, and fends off the other.
He goes to his apartment on the second floor to check something on his computer. Then, just as he is engulfed by an expanding wave of white light emanating from the city's center, he is thrown him out his window to the street below.
Daniel
Daniel was about to lose his job at the university, but was then hired at Pax University, a more "progressive" institution. The semester has just ended, and he is celebrating with some of his graduate students, by throwing a small get-together at his house.
One of the grad students asks Daniel if he's every really "watched people," and starts explaining some weird stuff he's seen (a guy who sits perfectly still for minutes on end when no one is buying anything from his newspaper stand), but is interrupted—
The doorbell rings. Door-to-door missionaries answer his door. "Mr. Miller?" one asks. When he responds in the affirmative, the other one says, "God have mercy on our souls," and stabs him with a knife. His grad students drive the men off, then call an ambulance for him, and he is on his way there when the city is attacked. A strange, burrowing monster leaps through the concrete street and crashes into the ambulance, toppling it. The medics present are dead, and Daniel is unconscious in the back of the ambulance, near Pete's alley...
Buck and Liam
Buck is a current member of the Pax Artificium city council. He is the leading candidate for the first elected mayor of Pax Artificium (election to take place in April, 2034). He is part of a tour of the skylift happening at 1800 hours.
After the completion of Pax Artificium, Liam moved there to begin work on the next big Magitech project: deployment on the moon. The first step was designing and building a geosynchronous space station, and a connecting skylift between Pax and the satellite. Today is maintenance day for the skylift on the ground level (it runs on a 12-day cycle: five days from Pax to the station, one day of maintenance on the station, five days from the station back to Pax, and one day of maintenance on the ground).
Liam is meeting with Mr. Masterson and several others in the afternoon to assist with giving a tour of the skylift and explain some of the technology behind it. They meet, and the tour begins.
As they enter one of the overlook decks, there is a rumbling. Liam recognizes it as being the skylift's engines! Liam and one other engineer go for the emergency stop, but the homeless man who started the lift tries to stop them, gibbering about "escaping the danger," then runs out of the room.
The homeless man sees Buck, points and shouts, "YOU!" and tackles him. They go crashing out one of the windows (something that shouldn't be possible, due to the extremely thick plexiglass). They fall, then land, Buck on top. The homeless guy is dead. Buck is unconscious, near Pete's alley. The lift seems to be impossible for Liam to stop. He and the others are going inexorably upward. If he can't stop the lift, they'll die from decompression due to the broken window. From high above the city, he sees an expanding white light engulf the city below...
Crazy Pete
A homeless man, Pete is currently sitting in an alley outside of Angels. An ambulance comes careening down the street, but a monster smashes forth from the concrete and barrels into the ambulance, toppling it. Then two men fall from the sky. One of them is his friend Bob, who is dead. Buck is badly hurt.
Pete, bemused, drags the bodies of Bob, Buck, Jack and Daniel (from the back of the ambulance) together. Just as he's got them all in a neat row, a glowing white door he's never seen before is present in your alleyway. Crazy Pete feels strangely compelled to go through, and bring "the others." Pete tosses Bob through the door, saying, "It's heaven, Bob! You're going to heaven!" Before he can do the others, though, a man in a golden coat and thick glasses stumbles into the alleyway and throws up. He looks up, sees the door, and says, "No!" Then passes out as well. The door disappears.
A helicopter flies overhead, and lands outside the alley. Several figures in Magitech uniforms leave the copter and wake the man in the golden coat, who then instructs them to take Pete into custody, along with all the unconscious people.
Everyone awakens in nicely furnished rooms, and a guard appears, requesting that they follow him to a conference room. In that room, the man from before enters, and introduces himself as Dr. Cid Arthur, the head of Magitech Corporation.