Deathwing!

With a giant shadow-pterodactyl between them and the Nexus (see last session), the Scrap Pile dove in and attacked.

It didn't take long to figure out that, being made of darkness, Deathwing was really hard to hurt with physical attacks (like Land Shark's fists) but was vulnerable to light. Disco was all set. Magi took a moment to adapt his flame vents to burn brighter in the visible spectrum at the expense of heat.

As they dodged beak-strikes and continued to wear away at the creature, Professor Hemm was drained by a tail-swipe and seriously injured. As he lost consciousness, he was transformed into a fiendish yellow and green man-beast who spoke in rhyme, the Goblin. Luckily, Goblin was formidable in hand-to-hand combat and proceeded to tear into Deathwing. Disco finally cranked up his searing aura and flew directly into Deathwing's heart, dispersing it.

The shadowy remnants of Deathwing's body reformed into human-sized shadow mantas, which renewed their attacks, but the team was able to eventually destroy these as well.

This left them in charge of the undefended Nexus, but Professor Hemm, who was carrying the Pillar of Universes and had been expected to activate it, was gone. In his place was unpredictably violent Goblin. It took some cajoling and some Disco-magic (which almost backfired because Goblin had his own ideas about how you treat people you like) to get the Pillar away from him.

Magi then had to improvise a ritual, but succeeded spectacularly with a rhyme of his own. The Nexus was sealed. The inter-dimensional war had, for the most part, been cooled to suspicious animosity and the portal through which their misdirected energies were passing was closed. Except for the small matter of Baron Karza being in charge of a space station orbiting Earth, the day was saved.

Oh, and we played on Tom's (Capt. Scrappy/Torpedo/Goblin) birthday, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY/ELVISMAS, TOM!

Putting Out the Fire

(...with gasoline)

Magi's mega-fireball (last issue) blasted a hole in the Warmaster's tower, melting antennae and equipment and setting the top floors ablaze. A swarm of Qthraqi rooks mobilized immediately, so Magi dove for the cover of the entrance he had just created.

Blue Shift and her Ultra Agents took advantage of the chaos to mount their own assault. The other Scrap Pilers, apprised of the situation by Disco, were none too pleased. Disco wasn't far behind Magi, but it was far enough that, when he got there, the clashing forces of Ultra and the Warmaster were between him and the burning tower. Land Shark, following Magi's suggestion, began tunneling his way there. Professor Hemm prepared to teleport directly to Qth-raq.

Magi was finding his way down to where the Warmaster was coordinating the evacuation and rallying his troops. Disco used a light show to bring the spirit of love to several of the clashing troops around him. Land Shark was tearing up the streets. Magi found his enemy with only a few guards and the two squared off, but the fight was interrupted by the Professor's force field. Magi, not to be deterred from his long-awaited revenge, phased into another dimension with the intention of returning directly beside Qth-raq.

The Professor, having seen Magi use this stunt before, teleported himself and the Warmaster back to Kilroy's camp and continued to make the case that they were all being manipulated by the Azrak cult, partly by having Kilroy describe the attack on his world that had brought him here, including the fake Qthraqi rooks. Kilroy also confirmed that they had nothing like the samurai robots seen stomping Houston.

Land Shark, meanwhile, had just arrived at Qth-raq's tower when Magi returned from his dimension jump. Finding no sign of the Warmaster, Magi convinced the somewhat simple-minded Land Shark that the best thing to do would be to dig a tunnel under the tower. This, of course, collapsed the entire thing. The rest of the team found Magi and Land Shark taking selfies on the rubble. Disco was so mad that he threatened to leave the team unless Magi was expelled.

After breaking up a fight and getting everyone to agree to work together long enough to stop the war, Professor Hemm brought the Scrap Pile back to Earth to make sure nobody invaded the 80sVerse because of the robot stuff and to help liberate Houston. As Torpedo trashed the robot HQ and the army prepared to move in, they heard Kilroy's "rock and roll!" battlecry as a portal opened and neo-roboto units poured through to help destroy the samurai robots. In fairly short order, the remains of Houston were returned to human control.

Convening with a circle of occult academics from all around the Beta-Tripod metropolitan region, Professor Hemm and Magi determined that the best way to reinforce the frayed dimensional barriers would be to construct a "Pillar of Universes" artifact, complete with guardian homunculi, and activate it at a central nexus in subspace, creating a kind of space wall to shore up the cosmic infrastructure.

Plunging back into subspace, the Scrap Pile made their way to the nexus, only to find circle of cowled "dire sorcerers" defending it.

The sorcerers pooled their powers to create an enormous pterodactyl made of solid shadow. Terrified of their own creation, they shouted, "abandon the Nexus now or face Deathwing, the Devourer of Souls," cast another spell, and disappeared.

Sideways Through Subspace

First, let's talk a bit about Subspace. I came up with this by grooving on a bit of Fantastic Four trivia. When it was first introduced (FF #51), the Negative Zone was called Subspace. Consistent with conventional sci-fi usage, Lee & Kirby's Subspace was a between dimensions kinda place, a means of getting somewhere, or at least that's what Reed was hoping. Somewhat less conventionally, although entirely sensible, was the fact that it was a weird and terrifying place.

Marvel never really developed Subspace as a means of getting anywhere else, though. Before long, it was the Negative Zone, more a cosmic ghetto for psychotic aliens than the funky hyperspace it started out as. That being the case, I thought it would be fun to take some of the elements of Subspace as it was originally presented, give it my own spin (more of that below), and feed the Scrap Pile to it.

A bit of a rewind from last session: Our heroes weren't hurled directly into Dimension Q. Instead, they found themselves floating in the void. Torpedo, who had gone back to Earth to deliver Deathbird to the authorities, wasn't with them. There was no sign of the space station or any of the ships or supervillains that had been around it. The Earth glowed with searingly bright blues and greens, casting weird colors on the surrounding objects. The sun was a black sphere surrounded by a corona of dark tendrils.

Not far away, they saw Professor Hemm (or, as Disco said, "that guy with the bad hair"), who they had previously consulted on extra-dimensional issues, poking around without a space suit. The Professor flew over to them and explained that they were in Subspace. Any object with a large gravity well, like the Earth or even the Moon, would tear them apart because of the way gravity from the material universe interacts with Subspace and because their bodies here were adapted to occupy hyperspatial dimensions.

Subspace was peppered with asteroids, though, many of which were occupied by strange and deadly life forms that had found their way here from material space and somehow managed to survive. Orbiting closer to the deadly echo of Earth (and, presumably, other bodies with a gravity field strong enough to reach into Subspace) was a belt of xenoliths, transdimensional stone extrusions of other realities. The Professor had made his way into Subspace through one of these, and, with Magi's help, could probably locate one that could take them to Dimension Q.

Deciding to spread out to avoid missing anything, they got out a long rope and split into two teams. Disco and Land Shark took one end of the rope while Magi and Hemm took the other. What could possibly go wrong with that plan? As they floated carefully toward the Xenolith Belt, Disco and Land Shark saw a cool-looking asteroid off to the side, with domes and tubes connecting it to smaller asteroids, and something flying around it. Disco flashed a rainbow strobe at their teammates and the two of them let go of the rope to check it out.

A little closer, and they saw spotlights waving around in the dark, one of which found its way to them. Shortly after, a group of winged figures (and one with a rocket pack of some kind) started to head for them. Calling Magi and the Professor to help, they got ready to fight. Their enemies were four reptilian creatures with cybernetic enhancements (reptovors) and one borged-up guy bristling with weapons (a devastator). The Scrap Pile's opening move was for Disco to try a "fastball special" using his flight to accelerate Land Shark at their opponents. That didn't work out as well as it might have. Still, Disco was the only one who got knocked out in the fight, and they did eventually defeat the aliens. Or natives, I guess. Whatever.

Down at the Xenolith Belt, they found their portal rock, snagged it, and hopped on. Once there, they found a group of three hooded figures chanting over a cluster of crystals growing out of the rock. Professor Hemm recognized the chant as ancient black magic used by a half-forgotten cult known only as Dire Sorcerers.

Disco, already back in action, flew around and cranked up his light show to eleven, mesmerizing the sorcerers into a dazed reverence. The only information they provided was that they were trying to wear down the dimensional barriers. Then Disco introduced them to his friends and fellow deities, the rest of the Scrap Pile. Overcome with terror at the presence of so many gods, the sorcerers cringed and vanished.

That left our heroes free to move on to Dimension Q, which they did.

Mayhem on Mount Galahad

Following up on the lead from their seance, the team took the Scrap Van south and arrived at Mount Galahad State Park early in the afternoon. In the parking lot, they noticed a family of four (two adults, two kids), all apparently blind, each with their own doberman to lead them. Instead of taking the trail, the family wandered off into the woods. After a quick aerial reconnaissance by Disco, revealing only the bald stone mountain and the thick canopy of trees around it, the Scrap Pile decided to be thorough and take the trail.

Along the way, Magi sensed something otherworldly and, eccentric recluse that he is, just wandered off without telling anyone. By the time the rest of the team noticed, he was long gone, so they split up to look for him, leaving Land Shark on the trail as a reference point.

Magi followed his nose (metaphorically speaking) towards the dimensional interface he had sensed. Before he got there, he spotted the blind family picking their way through the trees, still guided by their doberman companions. When they stopped moving, he froze and tried to stay quiet, but it soon became clear that they had detected him. Turning their eyeless faces his way, the form of each hiker blurred and merged into that of its canine counterpart, finally settling on the image of the wraith hounds the Scrap Pile fought in Ontario.

Magi fought the hounds, aided soon by Disco and then the rest of the team. Of the newly deforested battlefield, Land Shark said, "They needed picnic grounds."

As they moved on to the mountain, it became apparent that the entire area was sparkling with windows to other worlds, no doubt accounting for many of the UFO sightings and other legends surrounding Mount Galahad. At the mountain, they found two armored super-humans blasting a wraith hound to ash. Each wore a glowing crystal. After some conversation, it came out that one of them, now called Bludgeon, used be Grasshopper. He and his compatriot, Scalpel, had been rescued and saved from their impending dissolution by "a great man" known as Covenant.

Image borrowed from The Great Game - Click to Check it Out

Hiding their skepticism, Magi and Land Shark joined the two Covenant fans in opening and exploring one of the mountain's many portals to search a crashed space ship for equipment that was supposed to help them become fully human. Magi quickly determined that the equipment they were looking for was actually more portal-access equipment. Magi surveyed the bizarre crash site and then asked Land Shark to trash it.

Meanwhile, Disco and Torpedo watched two winged men in black armor swoop onto the scene and demand that they vacate the area because they had claimed this mountain in the name of Warmaster Qth-raq.

The fight at the crash site moved outside as well, and, in the free-for-all, Bludgeon and Scalpel escaped while the two winged legionnaires both went down, partly because of Magi's berserk assault.

Magi, not much cheered by the victory, gathered up a number of components and went to work on some secret project.

Disco Inferno

Having read through the Clown's research notes, the team realized that they needed to get Magi to take off the gauntlet he had taken from the alien raiders. He had been showing signs of heavy dependence on it, and had even been sleeping with the device still on his hand. He was, at first, unwilling, and even managed to fend off a tough-love punch from Torpedo. After they convinced him to test his own mental defenses, however, he was able to shut out the gauntlet's impulses and realize what was happening. Taking the glove off sapped so much energy that he immediately lost consciousness. After a day in the hospital, however, he was almost himself.

The team still had a lot of Clown pages to discuss. To do that, they needed a meeting hall. After getting some financial support from the parent group, they proceeded to tunnel under an old garage and have a base built underground. While several of the chairs were still those awful foldy things, they were still able to put together a relatively high tech base complete with big round meeting table.

Going over the notes, they discussed several possible concerns, one of which was that Nightmare Pixie sounded really scary. Magi noted several possible connections to his enemy, Warmaster Qth-raq of Dimension Q. Also, one of the entries was just a bunch of song lyrics. What they settled on, though, was something that looked like a realistic short term goal that might actually help some people. The Clown had mentioned a massacre committed by Sarana. They had a date for this event, and the likelihood that it would have happened close to the Ocelot Bay facility.

While records of events in the lawless wastes of Ontario were hard to find, they did discover that a group of young hikers had gone that way and never returned. The report gave them a good idea where to look, so they piled into their captured boat, despite Land Shark's suggestion that they just drive around the lake, and headed out to follow their trail.

Eventually, they found the exterminated town described in the Clown's notes. The massacre had happened almost ten years ago, so the corpses were mostly skeletons and the place was collapsing into ruin. Exploring the town, they discovered that the skulls had all been marked with a star, reminiscent of the star tattoo around Sarana's left eye. The only life was a pack of dobermans that watched them for a few minutes and then wandered off.

North of the town, they found the camp grounds where the corpses of the hikers from Beta City were. Suspecting that some occult connection had been made, they set up a bonfire to cleanse the skeletons. On their way back, as it was getting dark, the five dobermans met them on the road and refused to let them pass.

When the team attempted to go on anyway, they transformed into shadowy humanoids with odd circuit patterns glowing on their flesh. The fight was tricky, because the hounds had the ability to become intangible at will. One of them stunned Magi early on, overwhelming him with an otherworldly chill and taking him out of the fight.

Once defeated, the hounds melted into a black ichor and faded away. Free of obstructions, the Scrap Pile proceeded to gather the bodies and burn that mutha down. While the bonfires burned, they took some time to try and figure out what kind of poison gas Sarana used to kill everyone. Eventually, they thought to review the security cameras from the various places that used them. They discovered that, in fact, it had only appeared to be a sudden affliction because of Sarana's combination of stealth and super-speed. In fact, she had killed them all with her sword.

Coming home with a case solved, the team was rewarded with comfy chairs all around. They settled in and discussed their next move. Eager to discover what sort of invasion from Dimension Q the Nightmare Pixie was covering up, Magi wanted to investigate her background. The others, more than a little concerned about going anywhere near that particular villain, were in favor of pursing Deathbird and the Cult of Azrak in Beta City.  No final decision was reached.