Here's a log from 2 May 1999 describing the the game "Blood Harvest" that I ran for Force 10 as part of my World of the 400 Champions campaign, creeping out the superheroes (and players). The short paragraphs are because I was typing it into a chat server, so to get the full effect you should read it late at night and pause after each paragraph. Out of the 100 or so sessions I ran for UN PEACE and Force 10, this was one of my three favorites, along with UN PEACE vs. the Antarctic Nanotech Menace and UN PEACE Fort Cheer Interviews. I'm grateful to have had such excellent players.
It's August 1998, and Force 10 has four members after Choir left to advise the Pope on world affairs, or to hide in the Pope hat, or quite possibly both.
Champagne (Deb) - 16 year old girl brick, very tough, very experienced, perky. Named for being strong & bubbly. Has yet to finish a battle with her outfit intact. She cannot fly, so of course flight is what she most wants.
Glacier (Miguel) - 17 year old boy with Energy absorption powers that make him cold enough to the touch to cause damage (like liquid nitrogen), and can channel the energy with sort of a flame whip, and fly with an explosion side-effect.
Katydid (Tatyana) - 15 year old daughter of a Russian geneticist who, when ethics were being handed out, asked for a second helping of bizarre theory instead. Katydid is strong, kinda tough (but not nearly as tough as Deb), has antennae, an electrical zap, and can usually fly, except not now because her wings got torn in the previous adventure.
Shadow Lotus (Jill) - a 16 year old mail-order Ninja who may not have quite fully grasped that the reason she's so good at sneaking around is that she can turn invisible. Not at all tough or strong, and deathly afraid of bugs, which amuses Katydid a great deal.
Three episodes ago, Force 10 was captured by Black August and the Great Lakes Defenders (their arch enemies) and put in a machine to use their powers to give Soundquake his powers back and destroy Chicago as a side effect. One of the villains agreed to break them out in exchange for Force 10 getting her teammates out of Fort Cheer. A fight ensued. Most of Fermilab blew up. The PCs captured Black August (who the US has been hunting for 50 years!) and a bunch of other supervillains and took everyone to a hospital. They got scrubs because they weren't put in the draining machines in their own costumes. Note this means they also don't have their cellphones, wallets, cash, etc.
Black August is under a sentence of death in Japan, for almost getting Japan into a war with Russia, and other crimes against world peace. In the world of the 400, any crime that uses paranormal powers is a capital crime in Japan. In the US it's just a felony.
Two episodes ago, they fled the hospital for fear that Black August's team, the Seven Booted League, was going to come get him back. Force 10 called Team One (America's First Line of Defense) and were given Code Bravo-377, which allows them to requisition any US vehicle if Black August is in custody, and so they commandeered a private jet to fly them from Chicago to Fort Cheer in western Nebraska. They had to move fast because they were in no shape to stand up to the 7 Booted League.
When last we left our heroes, Force 10 was escorting the five superpowered prisoners that they had captured, from Chicago to the US prison for supervillains in Fort Cheer, Nebraska. Also on the plane were two EMTs and the pilot.
The two F-16s escorting them shot them down, and also crashed themselves, with the pilots parachuting into the cornfields.
Force 10's commandeered pilot landed what was left of their plane on an isolated highway in Nebraska, two miles outside the small town of Harvest, Population 1037.
Deb went to the town to check it out while the others were staying with the wounded. Katydid said "It'll probably be all vampires."
That didn't seem as funny after they found the town deserted, with no noise except the rustling of the abundant corn and infinite insects (August in Nebraska). Need I even mention that none of the phones they tried worked? No electricity, either.
So night fell by the time they got everyone into the town and Deb took the only vehicle they found, a truck, to go for help, while Glacier, Katydid and Shadow Lotus holed up in the general store with the 5 wounded supervillains (one critical) and 3 critically-wounded humans.
Deb left right away instead of waiting for morning, because the 3 humans that had been badly injured in the crash, and Soundquake, who had been badly injured in the fight they had captured him in, really needed to get to a hospital. Lotus had some paramedic training, and they had lots of EMT gear salvaged from their plane, but she's a 16-year old girl, not trained hospital staff. There wasn't enough room in the truck to carry 8 people on hospital gurnies.
Among the prisoners was Black August, a small middle-aged Japanese man who has the strength and powers and memories of everyone who died in the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast. Even unconscious, he casts 60,000 shadows. This is not reassuring when all the power is off and you're huddled in a small store lit only by a kerosene lantern with conversation nearly drowned out by the roar of the insects in the fields. Sometimes Katydid could see some of the shadows were in different positions than Black August was in.
Before dark fell they had done a little exploration, and it looked like everyone had just left in the middle of whatever they were doing a couple of months ago and vanished. Food left on the tables, etc.
During the day they had spotted fires burning from where the two F-16s had crashed, but those fires had burned out by nightfall. Near dusk, and then just after dusk as Deb was leaving in the truck, they heard horrifying screams from far away, somewhere out in the Corn.
They did not wander out into the Corn at night to investigate.
Deb drove off in the truck, and a few miles outside town hit a patch of corn husks and slid off the road. Suddenly, the insect noises stopped, and there was a rustling from the Corn, as though something... huge... was moving nearer.
That's where last week's episode ended.
At the start of this week's episode, we started at the general store, as the three heroes got more and more worried over the deteriorating condition of the patients. Black August is a doctor (among many other things) but no WAY were they going to wake him up to help.
Black August hates the US. A lot. He sunk a US aircraft carrier, and the PCs had just captured him as part of foiling his plan to destroy Chicago. He's also very strong, and if he woke up when Champagne wasn't there, the heroes would be in very bad trouble. He used to be insane, which made him less scary.
A few miles outside town, Deb got out of the truck, and went back to look what had caused her to skid.
The road was filled with corn-husk dolls, tied with cornsilk.
She had the feeling something was watching her from the Corn.
Deb dragged the truck back on the road, checked that it was OK, and drove off quickly.
Harvest didn't appear on the map they had found at the store, so Deb turned north and west at each crossroads, in the hopes of eventually running into a highway. The corn was growing right up to the edge of the road, and was high enough so that at night, even under the almost-full moon, it was like driving through a tunnel of corn.
Eventually she spotted a dark house looming near the road, so she decided to stop and see if they had a phone. She parked the truck so its lights shone towards the front of the house and waded through corn taller than she was to reach its front porch. The corn grew all the way in the yard, right up to the porch.
No lights.
Deb went up to the door and knocked. "Hello!" No answer. The door was ajar, so she pushed it open and looked in. The lights from the truck cast shadows of corn into the hallway.
Deb stood in the doorway with the shadows of corn stretching into the hallway. Flashback: back in May Deb had driven her Miata from Los Angeles (where she was born) to Chicago (where Force 10 is based) accompanied by Pandora, Goldenwatch's Precog. Somewhere in Nebraska they had encountered Corn Silk Woman, a villain of Goldenwatch's, who had escaped from Fort Cheer and was walking beside the road. They subdued her and took her back to Fort Cheer.
Deb reflected uneasily that Harvest might well be located between Fort Cheer and where they picked up Corn Silk Woman, and that the dates that people had vanished about matched May...
Meanwhile back at the general store, Glacier decided to go outside and see what the strange noises were, promising not to go into the Corn. His cold field made the bugs a non-issue for him, and his flame power meant that he wasn't scared of no corn monster.
He went outside. Katydid joked "You know, he's never going to come back."
Ten minutes passed.
Thirty.
Katydid and Lotus exchanged nervous glances, but they 1) didn't want to send another person out alone, and 2) VERY VERY much did not want to leave just one of them alone with the prisoners.
While waiting, Katydid (who can lift a couple of tons, proportional strength of a bug and all that) pushed the shelves against the back door, to clear an area in the middle of the store so they could watch both all the prisoners AND the front door.
An hour and still no Glacier.
From far away, there was an agonizing scream.
As the endless night dragged on, there were ... sounds... from outside.
Running footsteps. Sounds of dragging. Sometimes the insect noise stopped, and they could hear the wind rustling the corn. The wind, that must be it.
Katydid noticed that while Black August was still prone and profoundly unconscious, his shadows were now mostly of people kneeling, watching the front door.
Back to Deb.
Deb entered the dark house slowly. There was enough headlight illumination filtered through the corn that she could make out shapes of furniture and doorways.
So she crept down the hallway.
Outside, the bugs had fallen silent.
At the end of the hallway she went through a door and felt a counter, so she must be in a kitchen. Good! Kitchens have phones. She felt her way along the counter. Something sticky!
Jam.
She hoped.
She found the phone.
No dial tone here either.
The little bit of light from the truck's headlights stopped suddenly, and she had the sudden feeling that there was something in the house with her. Something BIG.
She leapt at the doorway to the kitchen (to catch whatever it was as it was coming in to Get Her), but umm, well, adrenalin... she went through the wall into the pantry, smashing a lot of jars and getting covered with preserves and such.
Realizing that the truck's headlights had gone out, she ran to the front door, opened it by tearing it off its hinges since she was in a hurry, and raced through the corn to the darkened truck.
Something had switched off the truck's headlights, and lying in the driver's seat was another corn husk doll.
She tossed it, and tried to start the truck.
Grrrrrrr.
Grrrrrr.
It caught at last, and she got back on the road and got the heck out of there.
She followed her "Turn west or north" rule until the truck ran out of propane, about a mile outside the town of Alliance, Nebraska.
There's something comforting about being INSIDE something on a dark creepy night, as opposed to running down the road alone in the night, but Champagne can run 30 miles an hour, so she ran into the small town, and knocked at the first door she saw.
An old geezer with a shotgun came out to greet her.
Note that she was in hospital scrubs, smeared with goo, and in general quite a mess. But she managed to convince the shotgun-wielding farmer that she needed help, and he called the town Sheriff and Doc, who came out with their shotguns.
The 3 old guys went to a corner and whispered among themselves. Deb mentioned she's come from Harvest, Nebraska. They went pale.
They wanted to wait for dawn, but Deb insisted, and got her way.
They took the Sheriff's truck. He drove, and the Doc sat in the shotgun seat, with his shotgun clutched so tightly his knuckles were white, but Deb could see his hands trembling anyway.
Deb was in the middle, a bit cleaned up by the farmer's wife.
As they went down the dark road, two huge eyes loomed from the darkness!
Just reflections of the headlights from the truck Deb abandoned at the side of the road.
They did not stop to look at it.
They did not stop for Anything.
They took various twists and turns and about an hour or so later, as the sky was lightening in the east but before sunrise, they reached Harvest, Nebraska. The Sheriff and Doc looked straight ahead the whole trip. Not to the left. Not to the right. Straight ahead, the whole trip.
The Doctor and Sheriff were plainly terrified, but they pulled up in front of the general store.
Inside the store, Shadow Lotus was invisible but wrapped in cheesecloth (to keep the bugs off). Katydid and Shadow Lotus were soooo glad to see Deb again!
There had been no further sign of Glacier. Discussion ensued. Should they go search for him in the Corn?
The patients needed attention. You could pass 5 meters from Glacier in the Corn and not see him. There are thousands of acres of Corn.
They decided that the 4 critical patients (Soundquake and the 2 EMTs and the pilot) would go back right away in the truck with the Doctor, with the Sheriff driving. They will drive back to Alliance and call for an ambulance or medical evac or whatever, then return for our 3 heroes and the 4 remaining supervillains.
It's decided that sending Black August off without a superhero escort, even though he is deep in a coma, is just begging for trouble.
(Dialogue from the previous game: Kid Thunder of Team One is briefing them on Fort Cheer: "Since the breakout, there's an armored regiment camped out guarding it until they can make repairs. Without Orion or Black August, the Seven Booted League would have no chance of breaking in.")
They were keenly aware that they were in trouble. But that's trouble, and if Black August woke up near Fort Cheer but not under anyone's control, that would be Trouble. Force 10 had healthy respect for the concept that no matter HOW bad things are, they can ALWAYS get worse.
Things got worse.
The truck departed around 6am. The sun had risen.
They figured it would be back in two hours.
A loooong two hours ensue.
Deb decided to spend the time exploring. She set out into the Corn.
She planned to go to the nearest farmhouse that's not in the town itself, a couple of miles out. She took her bearings from the sun, but it's easy to get lost in the corn, which is taller than she is.
She can, however, leap 8 meters in the air. So now and then she lept straight up, and corrected her path. She was very much hoping something Big will jump her, so she could beat the snot out of it.
Nothing jumped her. She reached the house. The door was unlocked, and the corn had grown all the way to the porch.
On the door marked in something sticky and clear that's dried, but was visible because it reflected differently in the morning sun, is a figure. A cross with an upside down V attached to the bottom of it.
She went in. The house showed signs of sudden abandonment.
On the kitchen table were more markings in the dried sticky clear fluid: six figures, half of them plusses, half of them three lines radiating from a center.
Deb is not the team genius. The team genius moved to the Vatican. (They SOOOO wanted Choir (their 8-year old minishoggoth genius) with them for this run, because 1) She's a genius, and 2) She can talk in her dreams to Network, who could have called for help for them. Maybe.)
Deb went upstairs, and in the children's room she discovered another cornhusk doll, lying on the pillow.
In the parent's bedroom there was a cornhusk doll lying on the bed, and another kneeling beside the bed, husk arms tied together in prayer.
Deb Got The Hell Out of There.
She figured it's shorter to cut across to the road, then run back to town along that.
On her way back along the road, at around the one mile mark, she came upon a cross made of lumber at the side of the road.
On the cross was an Air Force pilot's jumpsuit, stuffed with corn husks.
At the feet of the cross were 11 corn husk dolls.
Deb stared at the dolls. One of them had tiny wings, like Katydid's.
Deb counted on her fingers. 4 heroes, 3 humans, 5 supervillains.
Deb ran back to the general store, where Katydid was vastly relieved to see Deb had not vanished into the Corn, too. Deb sketched the table drawings from memory. Katydid thought maybe it was a map!
The truck should have been back by now.
Maybe they were delayed. You know, had to get more gas, or more shotgun shells, or had to stop to deal with a medical emergency on the way, or were looking for flamethrowers. Who knows?
More time passed.
Ugly thoughts. Maybe the Sheriff and Doc couldn't summon the courage to come back, even in daylight.
There was not enough kerosene to keep the lamp going all night again. They so did NOT want to spend a night in the dark, in the store, in the town, in the Corn.
They speculated on the meaning of 11 dolls and 12 of them. Someone pointed out Glacier was missing. They all wished they hadn't thought of that.
The thought of burning the fields is raised, but they weren't really dry enough to burn that well yet; in September they would have been. The two fires started by the F-16 crashes had burned out, rather than spread. And Glacier had their only fire powers.
They decided that searching for Glacier was still a bad idea.
They decided that waiting for the Sheriff to come back was now a bad idea.
Deb figured a way to tie the four gurneys together so she could carry them awkwardly. The weight was nothing but it was very unwieldy, like a big sheet of cardboard. A sledge using the wheels from the out-of-gas motorcycle would have been clever. Choir probably would have thought of that. They did not. Deb thinks with her Strength. Except when she's planning with her invulnerability.
They figured they could move at about 6-8 mph for practically forever. So they calculated and figured it must be around 10am now, and if they moved out briskly, they could walk to Alliance by about nightfall. If they waited any longer, they would be walking along the road at night.
They left as soon as they realized that.
So Katydid carried 50 kilos of water and Deb carried 400 kilos of supervillain and Lotus carried all the bug spray she could carry, and they left town.
August in Nebraska is hot. They walked and sweated (except Deb) and thought unkind thoughts about the Sheriff.
A mile outside town, they came to another cross by the side of the road (facing outwards).
There was a second pilot's jumpsuit on it, stuffed with corn husks. At the foot of the cross was a single corn husk doll, male.
They stared at it and looked at each other. Nobody said anything. They resumed walking.
Many miles later, at the first T intersection that Deb had turned at, they saw skidmarks going off the road.
They found the Sheriff's truck, having crashed into the cornfield. The doors were open. There was no one inside it. No one in the back.
There were trails into the Corn as though two people had run into it, but after a few meters the trails and footsteps ended.
They saw a glitter and found a shotgun in the corn as if it had been flung. It had not been fired.
There was not even a suggestion that they search for anyone. If they had Choir, she could have tracked them by scent, but Choir was safe in the Vatican thousands of miles away. They wished they were with her.
Although now they had a truck. Deb pushed it back onto the road, they got in, and drove away.
Not looking to the right. Not looking to the left. Just looking down the road in the endless tunnel of corn on the hot August day, turning west or north at each major intersection.
They noticed at some point that nearer Alliance, the corn was a respectful distance back from the road, as it should be, but they didn't notice just when the transition point was.
In the afternoon they finally reached Alliance and immediately called Fort Cheer and identified themselves, and got instructions to clear a landing field for helicopters at the school's football field.
There was mild recrimination about why Deb hadn't called Fort Cheer instead of just coming back with the local sheriff, but not much, because Deb was feeling pretty guilty about the Sheriff and Doctor.
Fifteen minutes after their call, there was a flight of F-16s over Alliance, and inbound choppers like a scene out of Apocalypse Now but without the Ride of the Valkyrie. While gunships and F-16s circled overhead a slick landed and disgorged a squad of Army Rangers who secured the perimeter.
A second slick landed and they hustled everyone aboard. It took off, the Rangers returned to their slick, everyone headed to Fort Cheer.
When they'd last seen Fort Cheer a month ago, parts of it were in ruins from a partial breakout which Force 10 and UN PEACE stopped, although a few supervillains got away, including Orion.
While repairs were underway, an armored regiment had encamped around it. Tanks were dug in, artillery placed, the corn had been cut down for miles around and kill zones laid out. Coils of concertina razorwire to slow down speedsters. Claymores. 120mm smoothbore cannon.
The nearby airbase that was trashed had been restored, and the sky was swarming with air cover.
The slick landed and the comatose supervillains were handed off to Fort Cheer's staff. Fort Cheer personnel and US Army personnel debriefed the PCs. The heroes were thanked, and offered a flight back to Chicago.
The heroes suggested returning to Harvest. The Army guy didn't seem to care. The prison lieutenant seemed very nervous. He turned them over to a US Marshal, from the branch of the Marshal Service responsible for retrieving escaped supervillains. (Which is a really sucky job, because in the World of the 400 there are no force field belts or blasters or supertech available to humans.)
The heroes privately discussed among themselves the idea of grabbing a silo and nuking the town, but only as a joke. Mostly.
They learned from the Marshal that part of code Bravo-377 that they had requisitioned the plane under is that if it looks like the plane is going down in an uncontrolled area, that there's authorization to shoot it down. The US really hates Black August. He sunk an aicraft carrier!
So that explained why the second F-16 shot at their plane as it was going down, but not why the first F-16 shot at them (and the second F-16 then shot the first F-16 down).
The US Marshal got very pale as they described what they'd seen, and firmly turned down their offer to go back and find out what was going on in Harvest.
He told them about the 14 Silent Towns, places where Something had happened, and nobody lived there anymore. He reminded them to never mention the Silent Towns to anyone, ever. And thanked them for their service.
The PCs found a phone in the Operations Center, the one with "President" and "Team One" on the speed dial. They thought about calling the President, since they HAD saved his life once, but they were working for the Secret Service at the time, so it was pretty much their job. So instead they called Team One and talked to Tsunami.
As soon as they mentioned the phrase "silent town" a recorded voice came on the line "This call is being terminated for national security reasons" and cut the connection.
There weren't any other outgoing lines at Fort Cheer. (One of the prisoners there was Mr. Lightning, who can escape down wiring. Although at this moment he was in an intensive care ward in New York City, having gotten badly chewed up during the escape attempt a month ago.)
So the remaining three members of Force 10 were escorted politely out and handed to a guard in a car to drive them to the airbase for their complimentary flight home, along a road with the corn cleared back a hundred yards from it on either side for a fire zone.
Note that Force 10 had heard UN PEACE speculate that the US has conducted breeding experiments on the prison population at Fort Cheer.
So at this point they had all been up for something like 50-60 hours straight, with not much food and zero sleep. Even with superhuman endurance, they were pretty wasted.
The guard stopped at the Dairy Queen (or maybe a Tastee Freeze) in Crawford, Nebraska, on the way to the airbase, and treated them all to whatever they wanted from the menu. Katydid had a dozen hamburgers. Nobody had corndogs.
Deb borrowed some change for the phone, then decided instead that she wanted to go to Alliance. She didn't say why, but probably to apologize for getting the Doc and Sheriff vanished.
The Guard said no way, he could lose his job for that. Deb spoke about Duty and doing what's right and Sacrifice and other things that Middle America still holds sacred, and the guard said "Fuck it, I'll take you."
So by then it was getting on towards dusk, and off they went towards Alliance, Nebraska.
About halfway there, they encountered a military roadblock. Two Hummers, one with a .50 machine gun, the other with some kind of a tube (anti-tank rocket) and six soldiers. The officer at the roadblock wanted them to turn back. Deb got out. The officer stepped back and the solders manned the Hummers' weapons. The officer told Deb to get back in the car. Katydid and Lotus got out of the car.
The officer said very loudly "Last warning. Get back in the car!"
Deb got back in the car. She's bullet proof, but Katydid is only lightarms-proof, and Lotus is very squishy-soft.
Their guard driver started breathing again, and turned around and got the hell out of there. He'd called in when they diverted after the Dairy Queen (or Tastee Freeze) to say they'd be a bit late, and called in again with an ETA update after they turned back from the roadblock.
The gate to the airbase was guarded by a tank and much ancillery hardware (the previous month in the breakout, Express had done a fullspeed movethrough on ALL the planes at the base, doing something like a quarter-billion dollars damage. Was NOT going to happen again.)
So the three of them, with no Glacier, got on the plane and flew home to O'Hare airport, getting there at 2 in the morning when it was mostly shut down. They walked through empty, darkened halls, with just a few cleanup crews and that sort of thing. They took a taxi home and Deb got in through the skylight to find enough money to pay him.
Katydid called Miguel's parents (one's ex-CIA, the other's ex-KGB) to break the news to them.
The three of them, finally, slept.
Lotus woke up to find Deb & Katydid had been turned to corn husks, and went to the Dojo where she teaches to find all of them had been turned to corn husk dolls.
And woke up screaming from the nightmare.
Miguel's parents said they'd call Katydid back, but never did. Katydid called Miguel's parents a couple of days later, and their number was disconnected.
Katydid called her Mom (currently conducting research in Columbia) and her Mom agreed to send someone up to take samples during her wings' healing process.
They made plans to write various members of UN PEACE to tell them about Silent Towns. They didn't trust the phones anymore, but still trusted the US Mail. Mailed from random mailboxes. Or via email.
They realized that they didn't have any investigative resources. Choir did all that for them, when she was on the team. They'd burned their bridges with NEST and the Secret Service and the FBI and everyone in government that they've ever worked for.
They never saw Glacier or Soundquake again, or the Doctor or the Sheriff or the others.
The players said they had a great time, even though they were creeped out.
One of the players had to leave the campaign because he just had a child, so his character vanished into the cornfields.
I highly recommend Stephen King's short story "Children of the Corn", and the movie was pretty good too. I rented the movie in between episode one and two but that didn't change anything. There's a bit of "One for the Road" as well.