Veto'd. You don't get to do that. You don't have the Special Assets for that. If you were a secret Men in Black government conspiracy you could have that, but you're a biohorror corporate conspiracy.
Somewhere, Hank Scorpio leans back in his chair at DERKA HQ and laughs.
[X] Special Asset: One of the men takes off his black gloves, revealing that he has eyeballs on his palms. Anna starves into the eyes, and then takes off her necklace, staring into nothing.
[X] Special Asset: One of the men takes off his black gloves, revealing that he has eyeballs on his palms. Anna starves into the eyes, and then takes off her necklace, staring into nothing.
I would say that this asset would have more obvious uses in future. Mind control's versatile! and it would be poor drama, if one of long term allies of our teenage antagonists wasn't brainwashed at least once every season...
Actually, this seems to be a show more in vein with things like Buffy and Angel more than Shonen anime. So if there's an evil power, chances are friendship isn't breaking that, and if it gets past your willpower only something drastic could break it without some sort of counter-magic.
That's my thoughts on the matter, at least. I could be completely wrong though.
[X] Special asset: One of the men takes off his black gloves, revealing that he has eyeballs on his palms. Anna starves into the eyes, and then takes off her necklace, staring into nothing.
Thinking back on the update, I'm now imagining our company probably has a pretty interesting PR department.
"Ok, Bill. You said it was a small golden amulet that "melted Dave with a ray o' divine wrath"?"
"E'yup."
"And you're sure the amulet was gold, not something else like bronze or copper?"
"E'yup."
"Alrighty then, looks like we're dealing with an amulet of Ankathor, god of miners and bonfires."
"Nancy, it seems like we're gonna need to burn a gold dust coated parakeet on the next full moon to open communications with him. I'm thinking the best we can offer are 34 virgin sacrifices. And make sure the intermediary doesn't come on to hard. Nobody wants a repeat of the Belfast incident."
[X] Special Asset: One of the men takes off his black gloves, revealing that he has eyeballs on his palms. Anna starves into the eyes, and then takes off her necklace, staring into nothing.
-> One of the men takes off his black gloves, revealing that he has eyeballs on his palms. Anna starves into the eyes, and then takes off her necklace, staring into nothing.
[X] Special Asset: One of the men takes off his black gloves, revealing that he has eyeballs on his palms. Anna starves into the eyes, and then takes off her necklace, staring into nothing.
We are not some evil anorexic conspiracy pushing teenagers to have bad body-image issues.
That's the conspiracy in the neighboring town of Ashlake.
[X] Special Asset: One of the men takes off his black gloves, revealing that he has eyeballs on his palms. Anna stares into the eyes, and then takes off her necklace, staring into nothing.
We are not some evil anorexic conspiracy pushing teenagers to have bad body-image issues.
That's the conspiracy in the neighboring town of Ashlake.
[X] Special Asset: One of the men takes off his black gloves, revealing that he has eyeballs on his palms. Anna stares into the eyes, and then takes off her necklace, staring into nothing.
And now I want to make a joke vote about Anna actually starving into the eyes, though that would be kinda obvious for what we want. Suddenly coming down with a severe case of malnutrition despite having eaten hours ago is kinda noticeable.
And now I want to make a joke vote about Anna actually starving into the eyes, though that would be kinda obvious for what we want. Suddenly coming down with a severe case of malnutrition despite having eaten hours ago is kinda noticeable.
Clearly she went out to buy food because she was starving, because she was too engrossed in reading books and skipped both lunch and breakfast. Nothing to see here, move along citizens!
[X] Special Asset: One of the men takes off his black gloves, revealing that he has eyeballs on his palms. Anna starves into the eyes, and then takes off her necklace, staring into nothing.
[X] Special Asset: One of the men takes off his black gloves, revealing that he has eyeballs on his palms. Anna starves into the eyes, and then takes off her necklace, staring into nothing.
The men back away. They're clearly scared. Anna's shaking like a leaf, but she's safe. For now. She prays under her breath. She's always believed in faeries and witches and monsters and demons. She doesn't know what these things are that look like men, but… but… but they better not come near her!
Scrambling in her pockets, she pulls out her phone.
"I'm… I'm c-calling the cops!" she says, voice shaking.
One of them steps forwards slightly, squinting against the glow. "You don't need to do that," he says.
"Get away!"
"I got a reason you shouldn't," he says, pulling off one of his black gloves. He reaches out towards her, and then turns his palm to face her. She looks at it and…
the eye blinks
it's watching her
staring into her soul
with its three-lobed pupil
red and hateful and
ever so hungry
obey
obey
obey
obey
obey
Anna drops her phone. A trail of drool oozes from her mouth.
"That's right," the man says, all his eyes locked on her. "Now, you just get rid of that necklcae, right?"
She obeys. Hands shaking, she reaches around her neck and pulls it off. Once it's no longer on her, she doesn't even have that to protect her. All she can do is obey. And she throws it over the edge of the drop.
"That's it," the man says. He steps back and gestures to his acquaintances. "She's all yours."
The men step in. She doesn't run. She just stares into space.
There's no screams.
***
"... and in traffic news, the A31 is currently closed after an accident near Deadman's Drop. Police say that the driver is in a serious but stable condition in hospital, and have called for people to take more care when driving late at night. Current estimates say the road will reopen in six to eight hours. Back to you, James."
"Thanks, Francesca. Once again we return to our main, story, the-"
The man sitting behind the desk reaches out and turns off the radio. "Well. That worked."
The dark-dressed men in front of him shuffle nervously. "Yes, boss," one of them tries. "We didn't expect her to have the weird glowy necklace."
"And yet you showed creativity and initiative," the man says with a smile. "That'll certainly go in your records. That'll look good in front of your next promotion panel, yes?"
There's a slight relaxation from the men. They're not in trouble for losing the necklace. That's… that's good. No one likes being in trouble with the boss. He might put a black mark in your file. Or a Black Mark, which means you're going to be devoured by the ravenous spawn of Tsshassugahss.
"Do you have any more orders for us, boss?" one of the men asks.
"Oh? And why do you ask?"
A drop of sweat runs down the underling's face. "Because I...I am a dynamic go-getter who… who embraces di-diversity," he stammers out, as the others back away from him.
"Excellent! We need more of you in our organisation!" The man sits back in his very expensive and comfortable executive chair. "But no. Our company is bringing in other specialists for the next stage in my grand plan." He pulls out a pen, and uncaps it. The underlings swallow. "You can go."
They file out. And their superior sits back and writes a note.
Stage 1 - Incapacitate Ms Anna Hemmerton - COMPLETE
Stage 2 - Gain control of 102 Evergreen Gardens - IN PROGRESS
He chuckles.
Congratulations! You didn't fail!
Double congratulations! You have a significant Level 4 complication. The complication is [REDACTED]. Fun-fun.
So, your next step is to get control of the location. And here's how we use Influence. See, as a small town American conspiracy, you have influence within local government structures. In fact, a lot of your most potent power is rooted there, because while monsters that look like men in rubber suits can be beaten up by a plucky teenager, the principal harassing them and keeping them in detention is someone they can't punch without risking real serious trouble.
So, remember when you chose to have influence over local government, the school and the local bars? Yeah, those are nice big pools of dice. You want your conspiracy plans to take advantage of the civic infrastructure you control, because you're far more effective when you do that. And you'll want to expand and deepen that control to take over more of the town, because that adds breadth and depth to your conspiracy's capabilities.
Why would you not want to always use that? Well, the risk is that someone investigating an action will be able to tell that the Influence was used. After all, these organisations are public parts of the town. If you pull strings using the mayor's office, people will be able to tell that the mayor was involved. Hence, when you're using Influence, it's always a good idea to think about the PR.
You can use Influence whenever you can justify it. It's a lot easier to plan from the start about using it. You usually need time to bring it into play. Of course, some Influence will respond faster to you calling on it - for example, if you tap the police to help you defend against someone attacking one of your Assets, then a 911 call might be all you need to do. However, in general Influence works on longer time scales.
In addition, you can only use Influence when it actually makes sense. Calling on the Girl Guides to help you search for a hidden site in the woods outside town? A very good cover and way of getting more people on the ground. The Girl Guides are probably less good at planning a kidnapping, though… although there might be some possibilities to drugged cookies...
And of course, using your Special Asset at the same time as you tap Influence will get you very large dice pools, but will risk your Influence being linked to your Special Asset. The big dice pools will also leave you more vulnerable to consequences. And if that happens, your enemies will know to attack your Influence to weaken your control of it.
So! Time to get control of that bookshop!
(Once again, I remind people that failure to provide reasoning for your votes halves your voting weight)
Choose your mooks
[ ] Write-in: How are you planning to use your mooks to get ownership of the place? Are they dodgy lawyers here to scam her into signing it away? Are they thugs intimidating her in the hospital? Are they a sleazy person who she's known for a while who works for the company who's going to give her bad advice?
(Base pool 3 dice, Difficulty 2)
Getting your hands on the Site
[ ] Write-in: Use your influence over the local civic government in some way to help you get your hands on the site. Planning permissions, pulling strings behind the scenes, whatever.
(+6 dice if justified)
[ ] Write-in: Use your influence over the school in some way to help you get your hands on the site.
-> This is probably quite hard to justify as I couldn't think up any prompts - and here we have a limit on the use of Influence
(+4 dice if justified)
[ ]Write-in: Use your influence over the local bars in some way to help you get your hands on the Site. Overheard rumours of financial troubles, making suggestions to someone she drinks with to get them to support the attempts to buy out, whatever.
(+2 dice if justified)
[ ] Let's just keep it on the down low. Send someone to make an offer (or an "offer") for the bookshop.
(Just use your base pool)
In fact, a lot of your most potent power is rooted there, because while monsters that look like men in rubber suits can be beaten up by a plucky teenager, the principal harassing them and keeping them in detention is someone they can't punch without risking real serious trouble.
Local government using the power of eminent domain to seize her store and the general area for redevelopment, perhaps? With Ms. Hemmerton's injuries encouraging her to accept the Fair Market Value price...
Or maybe just create some noise about the City Council looking into it to encourage her and neighbors to accept the more generous offers of a Black Goat subsidiary.
Nooooooo! We wanted that necklace! Didn't we? Oh, well.
Mooks:
[ ] Write-in: I'm thinking building inspectors or lawyers, for either (made-up) building code violations or seizing-with-reasonable-recompense...
Civic Government Influence
[ ] Write-in: Eminent domain is one way to go about it. Depending how old the bookshop is, could we get an inspector in to declare some kind of architectural fault that's very very expensive to repair?
I think an important question is how we are justifying our purchase of the site.
Obviously, we want control of it for the ley-line, but that isn't exactly something we can just come out and say.
If we're going to play the Eminent Domain route by pulling the strings of the municipal government, we could have it be an ostensibly 'Public' building, run by volunteers from a nonprofit subsidiary of our company because something something capitalism works better small government something.
If we come up with the right angle for this, we could actually turn this into a show of corporate social responsibility: We build a civic center to improve the community, and we make a generous payment to help out a poor, unfortunate woman who had been in an accident and is no longer able to run her business. That will require some significant PR efforts, of course, but it could work.
The only question is what sort of thing we're going to actually do for the face of it. For now, I think we should expend some effort in spreading our influence with the School, so I'm going to go with a Boys and Girls Club/Public Indoctrination Center.
[X] As a shining example of corporate citizenship, it is your duty to enrich the local community whenever you have the ability. You will encourage the local government to seize the bookstore and surrounding land under eminent domain, and then 'Partner' with them in order to develop it into a new Boys and Girls Club- Staffed by your own people, of course.
Would something like this work? Also sorry, but the given voting format confused me.
[x] Anna's old friend Bart, owner of a local pub drops by for a sick visit. Real shame that accident. But listen An, it's a sign. Running that bookstore by your lonesome, driving around at ungodly hours of night, maybe you're getting too old for this? Now calm down An, calm down. I know you love those books. How's this. I'll take the bookstore off your hands for a good price, I've been thinking of setting up a brewery to add some variety to what I serve, and it seems a good place for that, and I have some connections, good people, who'd be willing to take good care of your babies. Set them up with all the works, an underground, refrigerated library. So whadda ya say darling?
Use local bar connections.
Reasoning: The least likely to point suspicion at us, provides a neat cover for what the property is being used for (and helps us to explain and explosions that might happen), and I like the idea of the local barkeep being part of the sinister conspiracy, so he might as get in on the groundfloor of the quest here.
