Last week, our lack of Kaptain KY’s greasing influence made it impossible for us to finish defeating the Queen Bee and interrupting her plans to ship Luthor’s future exobytes back up to Brainiac, who claims them for the destruction of Earth.
True fact: there is no entity in the entire universe, outside of Earth, who does not demand Earth’s destruction. Only about half the people actually on Earth want its complete destruction; the other half only want to rule over it with an iron fist. Though forces spiritual, alien and technological join forces to crush our planet, at least there’s Team Spode, cut-rate superheroes from the slums of Austin, Toronto, Portland and New England, to King Cnut-wise, hold back the tide.
With KY along to provide both damage and power regen, Queen Bee was sent back to her heavenly hive. Somehow I ended up in a damage role instead of a controller role. I didn’t realize it until the scorecard in the end, where it clearly showed I did very little regenning of power, but a fair amount of damage. Our strategy for taking care of the turrets in the last room by having one person (me, last night) take out the turrets (good thing I was in damage role, I guess) while everyone else focused on the Queen, was successful. Having a couple extra levels probably didn’t hurt.
Next instance was Oolong Island, a sovereign nation of mad scientists. That couldn’t possibly turn out bad. Having been a haven for Intergang for many years, the native workforce had long been driven away or used for experiments. The mad scientists of Oolong Island were driven to make their own android labor force.
What could possibly go wrong?
Sir Arthur C. Clarke once remarked that a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The DCUO corollary is that all sufficiently advanced technology will be used to kill all humans. And so will magic. Where religion appears, it will be used to kill all humans as well.
On Oolong Island, the robots have decided that making cars and consumer electronics isn’t enough for them any more; they can only find satisfaction in killing mad scientists. Of course, any sane response would be to allow this to continue, since, mad scientists working on super-weapons with which to kill all humans, but for some reason, Team Spode came up low bidder on the security contract, and we were sent in to save them.
First boss was the robotic butler Jeeves (forgot actual name), whom we steamrolled after saving a bunch of scientists who were stuck pointlessly rebooting their Windows laptops, trying to recover from BSoDs.
Next up were the Metal Men. Hey, I remember this comic from when I was a kid! The Metal Men were a superhero group where the heroes were elemental avatars of Mercury, Tin, Lead, Iron, Platinum and Gold, and they could do the things their metal could do; Mercury could poison fish, Tin could keep beans fresh and so on. They were animated by little devices called “responsimeters”; it later turned out that the Metal Men had once been scientists, colleagues of the human scientist Dr. Magnus, and even later it turned out that he’s the one what done it to them. To save their lives. And then it turned out their bodies were actually still alive and that the responsimeter was a communication device.
Anyway, the mad scientists of Oolong Island were trying to recreate this tech by turning themselves into Metal Men, who would then go berserk (an inescapable side-effect of the process in the original comics, too, so gogo continuity. This is how the original Metal Men forgot they were once human). In a nice twist, as we entered a room to free more mad scientists, we would all be transformed into Metal Men until we turned off the tech.
Boss was a bigger Metal Man. Don’t remember much about the fight.
Up to this point, we thought we were doing pretty well. We were all getting couches for our lairs, too. Yay more couches. If it weren’t so inconvenient to visit someone else’s lair, maybe we’d have a chance someday to see each others’ bases, but that can never happen. Because, stuff.
In the next encounter, Mad Scientist Extraordinaire T. O. Morrow was putting the finishing touches on his Tornado Tyrant, which will turn his greatest failure into his greatest victory, with our deaths! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
He activated the Tornado Tyrant, which proceeded to kill us, turning Morrow’s greatest failure into his greatest victory. Or so we would think, but no! When we revived and returned to the room, he was still there complaining that he had not yet killed all humans!
We continued to beat ourselves against the wall of the Tornado Tyrant. We quickly realized that being next to T. T. was deadly, but nonetheless we had to close occasionally to do some actual damage, and then there were the adds and… it was a good thing that one of the mad scientists had stayed behind to repair our gear. We all made a couple visits. All to no avail; we couldn’t get past the Tyrant. We spent about half an hour collecting all the investigations and briefings we could find, then left for the night.
We all made level 21 and combat rating 16. We’re going to try for level 23 for next week. There’s another encounter in Oolong Island that we have not even seen (though we have looked through its window), so it’s likely Oolong Island will be the entire focus of next week’s meeting. Who knows, maybe we’ll get more couches.
