After our hard-won victory over the Supreme Justice last week at the South Gotham Courthouse, where the game kept presenting that alert as the “daily double” every week, we wondered if we’d be forced to do it again this week for the best rewards.
The game, though, has tuned itself to the needs and desires of Team Spode, and wasn’t going to send us back to the Bailiff just quite yet. Stryker’s Island was the alert of the day.
Gotham sends its super-powered villains to Arkham Asylum, which does an astonishingly poor job of keeping the inmates from escaping and laying waste to the city. Metropolis stashes the worst of its worst in Stryker’s Island (not to be confused with New York City’s Rikers Island, because Metropolis is DEFINITELY NOT supposed to be New York City in disguise).
Team Spode was enjoying the electric night life of Center City when Oracle’s call came over the Spode-o-Phone. Trouble at Stryker’s Island. All the competent super groups busy. It was time for the Team of Last Resort to take to the skies once again, to do once more the jobs that other teams won’t.
The Rogues had gotten loose at Stryker’s. These four villains — Weather Wizard, Captain Cold, Heat Wave and Mirror Master — had discovered that Stryker’s keeps all their supervillain gear in good condition, ready for use, at Stryker’s itself. Because keeping crooks and their weapons together in incarceration is cutting edge rehabilitation science. The Rogues escaped, got their weapons, and Stryker’s went into emergency lockdown.
Emergency lockdown, Stryker’s Island-style, which means that all cells were immediately UNLOCKED. Seriously. This is a thing that happened.
The Rogues’ escape wasn’t the worst part, though. Gorilla Grodd was incarcerated there, and even though he was kept sedated, the psychic weight of his presence was turning everyone mad, including the prison staff, who happily joined with the now-freed prisoners to fight us as we tried to bring the _ense petit placidam_ to an uncaring facility.
Captain Cold wanted to freeze us all into balls of ice that could be thrown at villains. We tried to throw each other at Heat Wave to see if he’d melt them, but no such luck. Tossing the frozen did seem to break their hold faster. Mirror Master created dozens of weak illusions. Weather Wizard kept us off balance with winds. We took down Captain Cold first as Lord Spode was offended at someone who would misuse ice powers so blatantly. The others soon fell.
Gorilla Grodd was having trouble keeping his astral body within his physical body, and we had to alternate fighting one and then the other until both fell.
And that was that. First time through the instance, total success.
The night was still young, so we went to Coast City and had some fun with Red, Green and Yellow lanterns in the forms of Atrocitus, Kyle Rayner, and Crazed Amon Sur. When we finished, we confusingly got a cut scene courtesy of Green Lantern Hal Jordan, who was not part of the instance, and I don’t know why he was there.
Ended the night a few hundred marks up. I should have enough marks to buy any Tier 2.5 stuff I’m missing, but it might be time to start saving for the super expensive Tier 3 stuff. After all, we’ve just managed to complete the last two Tier 3 alerts we’d been missing; it’s a long road from here to the next tier. Spode and Sting are somewhere in the 80s for CR; I’m 65, KY is 61.
