Looking For Meekaal
It's late November. A few days have passed.
A text message requests we meet up. Gemma has need of us.
We meet at the Penthouse, and the projector makes a strange noise as it comes down. Then the phone rings. Piper pushes a button the projector turns off. We discuss the mechanics of the projector. It came down on its own? But then it still had to be answered. What if we didn't want to take the call?
Gemma clears her throat and says she has a bit of an emergency. The other team, composed of Koi, Radiance and Sanctuary has disappeared.
Meekaal was another member, and he had gone to China to investigate a plague on his own, as he has healing powers and could deal with it. He went missing after an initial report that the city was deserted, and so did the other team, when they went to try to find him.
It's a long trip to China. Could have gotten there faster by door.
We land in the neighboring city of Panzhihua. An official tells us in broken English that we're cleared to proceed.
Piper drives us out of the city in a rental, and beyond that we make our way via teleportation and flying door.
We reach the outskirts of the city where the plague is. There's a quarantine with military checkpoint, but we don't see anyone aside from the guards, along with some possibly manned tanks.
The strange thing we do notice, however, is a strange sphere sitting between two buildings. It looks like the surface might soft, and it's very strangely flesh-toned.
Piper makes her way into the city with Aaron and I, while Legion turns into the very shadows, and makes his way on foot.
We reach a building overlooking the strange sphere, and we notice that it is strangely pulsating, as if it's a strange and very alive creature. A flesh egg, perhaps.
In the streets below we can also here the sound of clicking mandibles and clinking of carapaces. Sure enough, the sounds are coming from monstrosities of a various sort. Some of them have strange masses of muscles, and some are wrapped in strange carapace armor. There's also strange purple colored dogs running around the building.
We can also see a strange fleshy altar, much like the one we saw in Louisiana.
Aaron rips off his shirt, and a only a short moment later, we notice the creatures below have suddenly become agitated.
We watch and suddenly a cloud of darkness zooms out of nowhere, with one of the strange dogs launching itself at it.
Ah, it must be Legion. Apparently he didn't avoid detection completely.
We join the fray, and soon dispatch many of the creatures. Legion spots a light orb in the sky, and points it out. Piper throws a light bolt at it, and Aaron flies up and hits it. It explodes.
We return to the fleshy egg, which still has a group of creatures surrounding it, and we notice one of the windows in the building darkens. Aaron charges the group, and takes a bone spear to the chest, but the spear shatters.
My door protects us from the attacks being rained down upon us from the shadow, and as soon as Legion smashes the fleshy altar in the entrance to the building, the darkness dissipates.
With great team work, we kill the two creatures who had been raining attacks upon us.
Aaron touches the giant orb.
It's squishy.
Aaron punches it.
Shockwaves reverberate from the impact point and it shakes, and the flesh peels off, revealing an obsidian layer underneath, engraved with many latin looking words.
The obsidian remains unmoved, until we combine our attacks, and then it shakes violently. The remaining fleshy layer explodes, and then the spheres blinks out of existence, with the latin text remaining just a moment before fading away as well.
Where the sphere once stood now stands a man who is vaguely familiar to us.
His name is Sanctuary.
He's Mexican and bald and has a kind face and blue eyes and he's 42 years old and his name is Alberto Swerze.
He's extremely glad to see us, and explains he made the orb to protect himself from the flesh. He's not sure where the others were at, but he knows the military was doing more than keeping quarantine. He thinks the military base is probably the best lead for where his companions are. It's half built into the mountain side, several miles from here.
We let Sanctuary lead the way.
The bunker is well identified by the plume of smoke coming out of it.
We approach, and discover the bunker doors have been torn clear off, and the entrance is littered with bodies.
We venture into the thick smoke, and Legion sends one of his weird minions in to investigate forward.
It seems the bunker had shared a similar fate to the city we had just left, complete with weird fleshy things and mutates soldiers. But Legion's minion gets the fans working, and the smoke dissipates.
The sound shakes slightly as we enter. Piper starts glowing a little.
The mutated soldiers are warped and twisted into a visage of fury and sorrow. some have been turned to ashes and others have been ripped to pieces.
There's a stairs down, and and an elevator. We take the stairs. You're not supposed to take the elevator during a fire.
We check the first floor down, and fight mutated soldiers, which we quickly dispatch.
There are other people here, who seem to be little more than scared scientists. Legion uses one of his strange shadow creatures to get a translation of what they are saying. Apparently the scientists only know a little more than what we do, but they do point us to a security terminal, which shows footage of a really large guy tearing the bunker doors off.
At least we know what we're up against.
Another one of the scientists, in very broken English, indicates the big guy is at the bottom level.
We fight our way down to the sixth floor, which happens to be on fire.
Everything rumbles and shakes, and we turn the corner to see a much large area, which looked like it had been a lab of some sort.
The final door leading down has been melted into the door frame, but I wrench it off and we head down.
We see the muscular big man, sure enough, 16 feet tall with dark skin and green eyes. His head is bald and he's scared from head to tall.
There's also a guy who seems to be literally on fire.
Aaron charges him, and the flaming guy seems to be excited. The big guy pins Aaron, and the firey guy explodes on the pair.
Piper knocks the guy guy out.
Another fire thing flies out of nowhere and explodes on Piper, and the big guy gets back up, except he's a lot less big now.
It seems he can't do anything but whine about his predicament. He was just wrecking the place, why did we have to stop him.
Aaron threatens him, but Piper lightens his emotions. Neither seems to have a significant effect on him.
Sanctuary keeps an eye on the not-so-big guy, while we investigate the door on the other side of the room.
It's made of solid steel, and has a keypad, but it doesn't matter, because Piper decides to tear the door off with her telekinesis.
The room beyond is large, and the only thing inside is a walkway suspended in the center of the room that leads to a chromatic sphere. The edges of the room are too dark to see.
Piper tears the door to the sphere off too, and millions of red rose petals fly out of it, as sharp as blades.
Inside a figure floating.
Sanctuary knows this person. It's Meekaal, he yells to us.
Meekaal's wings unwrap from himself, and we notice that attached to his head is a strange pulsating growth.
We attempt to subdue him to no avail. He pulls a Staff of Asclepius which shimmers with golden light from nowhere, and flies up the stairs past me.
Meekaal flees to the outside, and we give chase.
Piper gets to him first, and I reach him not long after. He absorbs his blows as if we're gnats.
Meekaal suddenly flies upwards at great speed, and I hop on my door and give chase. I don't see him, but he spots me and hurtles out of nowhere into me, before continuing on towards the ground.
I fly down towards him and grab him, and Aaron flies up from below and punches the strange tumor on his head.
It explodes with an icky mess, and Meekaal goes unconscious.
We bring him back to the ground, and consider what to do next, but we have no idea where the remaining two members of the lost band are.