masks-travelers-by-night

[masks-travelers-by-night]

Issue #6: Wrap-up

Editor's note: I don't have it in me to do a write-up this time around. So quick bullet points:

Lucky and Shadow Sojourn ask Dr Cross to help. She says no. She demands the Shadow’s crystal shard, but they don’t give it. They instead give their mother-energy.

Jamina asks Des Doyle for insight into what dimensional shenanigans are happening.

They meet the Beast at the top of the unfinished Neogen tower.

They trick the Beast into going right into the portal to Sgr A* they set up. Whoops!

Final fight was super quick but sometimes players are clever and schedules are tight!

[masks-travelers-by-night]

Issue #5: Jalroa Walks Free

Maria and Dr Cross step out of the elevator into a place Maria knows, at least by reputation, pretty well: the snow-crystal dimension, where Maria's people go to focus their minds and enhance their natural superpowers. Dr Cross is alarmed, but also wonderstruck, and the two of them have a heart-to-heart as they explore deeper into the dimension to see how and whether they can get back home. It does involve rather a lot of Dr Cross telling Maria what she thinks of the reckless thing they've done.

Meanwhile, in the basement of Carver House, Jamina is reckoning with the Owl-nature descending on her consciousness and integrating with her suit's systems. The transition is a rough one, and Alicia has more to deal with at that moment: as chaos unfolds around, as every imprisoned extradimensional being makes a break for it, one locks eyes with Alicia. A nondescript grey man, the sort of person to just blend into a crowd. It breathes out and pauses time. Even the Owl integration pauses, as the grey man walks up to Alicia, leans over, and whispers in her ear: "Thank you."

It then moves just past the two of them, as they stand there frozen, and they can hear the sounds of it consuming one of the other extradimensional entities, whole. It passes out of the basement and time resumes. They turn to see the red mist where some being once stood.

When Maria argues to Dr Cross that imprisoning everyone she meets in the Carver House basement isn't very ethical, Dr Cross makes an appeal to the danger posed by at least some of them, such as the monster Jalroa. A beast similar to Ring, which exists half-outside any reality it walks through, and therefore able to manipulate time, memory, and to move and act with superhuman speed, strength, and durability.

Alicia and Jamina confirm that the basements are empty, and that Jalroa has gone. They decide to look up Dr Infinity, the founder of InfiniTech, whose life Jamina once saved, for help dealing with this. Meanwhile, Dr Cross and Maria grab some snow-crystals, to augment their powers, and with the help of Maria's cousin Luminous Blossom, they get back to their original dimension. Luminous Blossom expresses real horror at the idea of opening a portal for them back to where Jalroa is, though; it has consumed whole realities before.

Dr Cross and Maria appear right at the InfiniTech gates as Alicia and Jamina do, and the whole group goes in to meet with Dr Infinity. A tall, regal secretary-bird-person from another planet, Dr Infinity is happy to see them, though she has cooler feelings towards Dr Cross. When they lay out the problem, she suggests that she can build a device that will expel all extradimensionals from Halcyon City, but the team decide that's a bad idea; at the least, it would also hit Maria.

(Illustration by Bo Moore.)

Dr Cross lets loose on Jamina, telling her that she doesn't deserve to be the Owl, and doesn't know the burden she's taking on. Jamina stands up to her, with the backing of her friends and Dr Infinity. Dr Cross storms out, snow-crystal and sorcerous powers still intact.

The team decide that they need to lure Jalroa to them with extradimensional bait, and that that will either be the ooze in the coleslaw bucket, or Maria.

Will Dr Cross mess up their plans? Will Lucky's luck strike again? Will Jalroa prove too strong? And will Cú Chulainn finally show up? Find out next time!

[masks-travelers-by-night]

Issue #4: Crash

[Editor's note: Transneptune Comics has lost the rights to Skate Rat, as Cool Rat Restaurants Inc. has seen that the character is actually popular, and exercised a claw-back provision in the contract. As such, we cannot use the character in our stories or acknowledge them, leading to a strange lacuna in the story.

Furthermore, the heirs of the original creator of Ring, a.k.a. Marcus Allen, have tied up Ring in similar legal uncertainty, and so to avoid risk, Transneptune Comics is just going to leave him out of these pages for a while. Sorry, true believers fans!

But we've got an exciting new character in store for you. Meet Alicia O'Adh, a.k.a. Lucky, who may have luck powers—it's up to you to decide if you believe in them!]

The parts of the plan are in place: Jamina and Maria have their internship at the Institute, and are all prepped to skulk around the building once they're supposed to have gone home. They show up after school, meet Mr. Quinn, get their badges, the tour, told about what their duties will be and when and where field training is. By the time they wrap up, it's dark out, and their plans to case the joint are ready to bloom.

They make their way into the bathroom to let Maria do some psychic exploration only to find Lucky, in her rainbow-patterned unitard, having slipped in through the window. Welp.

There's a bit of a stand-off—they know each other from school, they know each other from heroing around the city, but still, it's hard to totally trust someone else's motivations in this moment when you're all doing something dangerous and illicit at Carver House.

But then, just as an understanding is reached, Dr Cross herself steps into the bathroom. She recognizes Maria, she sees Lucky in-costume clearly up to something, she knows what the score is. Lucky makes a break for it out the door past her, shouting "you want me, catch me!"

Well, now the game is well and truly afoot, and Dr Cross gives Maria and Jamina withering stares, insisting they follow her, and chases after Lucky, shouting for security. Lucky makes it to the elevator, guesses how to activate the panel to go to the subbest of sub-basements, and begins to go. Jamina bolts forward, and rolls into the elevator just before the doors close. Maria stays a bit behind with Dr Cross.

In the elevator, Jamina and Lucky—or perhaps Blodeuwedd and Alicia—come to an understanding, and recognize that they're, well, on the same team. They're here to do the same thing. Lucky's looking for someone she found near the Institute who clearly needed help, then vanished. Jamina's trying to help save whatever beings might be trapped in here unjustly. Samesies.

Maria has a notion occur to her, and ducks away from Dr Cross to modify the other elevator in the bank. Getting away in shapeshifted fly-form turns out to be very hard, as among the protections that the Institute has established is a morphic field, which imposes an intense desire on shapeshifters to adopt "normal" human shapes. But she manages it, and starts to change the elevator into… well, a dimensional gate. Stick to the classics, right?

At this point, Jamina and Lucky step out of their elevator into the containment level. Endless rows of extradimensional beings stuck in glowing containment fields, as far as the eye can see. Things that beggar the senses, impossibilities (which the artists have drawn using the full range of available optical illusions) simply present before the two young heroes.

Jamina directs Lucky to try to break the security system and get the files on all these entities, so they can know who they might rescue. Lucky goes to do so with the power of luck: keyboard mashing and hoping for the best. She gets through the security, but that's when her luck fails her: she presses the wrong buttons, and every containment field drops at once.

Dr Cross waits for the next elevator and, with Maria, steps in, little knowing what the Outsider has done to it. She presses the buttons calmly, and then the doors open… and we only see the reaction shot, her eyes wide, Maria's elated, and the light of a strange new vista washing over them.

At that same instant, as soon as Dr Cross steps out of this world, the mantle of the Owl descends on Jamina. Every dimension always has one and only one Owl, and apparently when your dimension's Owl leaves, someone else is pulled to fill that role.

What will it mean for Jamina to be the new Owl? What will Lucky do about all the extradimensional entities, good and bad, now released? And where have Maria and Dr Cross ended up? Find out next time!

[masks-travelers-by-night]

Issue #3: Gym Rats

Jamina decided that they needed to get into Carver House, and that the best way to do that would be by getting an internship with the Institute for Numinous Studies. As luck would have it, there was an internship fair happening at school. There were tables there from the Institute, InfiniTech, and City Council, among others.

Councilmember Aurelia Marcus was there, actually, decrying Skate Rat and how everywhere he shows up, there's massive property damage. With a little prompting by Maria Wong (who, enraged, flew up to fix a lightbulb over the councilmember to prove that superheroes could repair things, too), Marcus lost her shit and started just inveighing against superheroes of all sorts, and insisting that they were the worst. Of course, every student present caught this on video and it was all over all the social media outlets in minutes. Marcus's handlers pulled her away before she could dig herself any deeper.

Erik felt pretty bad about the whole thing, realizing that he had been personally attacked but that he couldn't even tell his friends that this was about him.

Jamina took advantage of Maria's display to get Alonzo Quinn, the representative from the Institute, really interested in her and Maria. In fact, Alonzo began to get obsessed: he is just a few notches short of wanting to dissect Maria.

At this point, Erik felt a rising sense of panic, as his rat-sense went off. All the rats were fleeing from something big, powerful, hungry, and rat-like, but not-a-rat. He still couldn't tell his friends, and so he fled, out to his locker. Maria, concerned, followed, and he was able to convey enough to convince her to evacuate the gym. She pulled the fire alarm, and the evacuation happened in an orderly fashion.

Maria and Jamina re-entered the gym, where they found the thing that had been coming: a nine-foot-tall rat-monster, imbued and inter-fused with the inter-dimensional ooze that Jamina had unleashed at Carver House. They could feel its hunger, and so Maria ran off to get all the food they could, and Jamina stayed to hold its attention. This involved punching, and it retaliated by showering the entire gym in acidic ooze, breaking the ceiling, destroying the floor, and making the whole space a hazard.

Erik felt the fight, and despite not getting his entire costume on, ran in to protect Jamina from the acid. She saw his face, and realized that her old friend Erik was her cool new friend Skate Rat. All things considered, she took it well, and reminded him to get his mask on. She knows which side his secret identity's buttered on.

Maria returned with enough cafeteria food to buy them some time, as the Oozrat gorged itself. The plan was to use Maria's people's dis-integrator (not disintegrator) to separate the rat from the ooze. Their contact, Luminous Blossom, may have something to say about this reliance soon.

They managed to dis-integrate the ooze ("Coleslaw Ooze") and the rat ("Ratt Damon"), and capture the one and free the other. They then decamped to the restaurant across the street from the school and decompressed a bit; it's clear that they've gotta be more careful about unintended consequences, and that there are bigger, badder things out there that they have to be aware of.

To enable Erik to have some more time (still unknowing that he is Skate Rat), Maria decided to make a holographic replacement for him, so that he could do the work he had to at the family store, and still be part of their study group. What was that about unintended consequences, again?

Will they get into Carver House? Will they get out again? Will InfiniTech's Dr. Infinity hear about the events at the school? And will the holo-double cause some trouble?

[masks-travelers-by-night]

Issue #2: Incident at the House on the Hill

After the incident at the diner with the interdimensional frost demon, the gang decided that they needed to lay a little low and attend to every-day concerns. That is, until Allen showed up with some vital information: he had determined who the Owl was in this simulation. Every simulation, you see, has an Owl, a figure dedicated to observing what happens by night, in the shadows. And the Owl is probably vital to helping him stave off the Hunters and avoid getting caught. Because if he gets caught and dragged out of the simulation, boom, that's the end of the simulation and therefore the end of the world.

No pressure.

Of course, he had to wait until Erik had made it back to Ingebretsen's Scandi Specialties to help his family restock all their cheese for the big sale, because Erik, their poor dear friend, has no superpowers and can't be dragged into this nonsense.

So Shadow Sojourn, Blodeuwedd, and Ring head up to Carver House, the old Victorian mansion on the hill, to try to get the attention of the Owl, who Ring thinks is Dr. Mary Cross, director of the Institute for Numinous Studies at Carver House. They sneak into the gardens after nightfall, go to the big fountain, and Shadow tweaks the fountain to redirect cosmic energy flow and rip a hole to another dimension. Blodeuwedd poses as a scared mundane civilian, and Ring observes from the shadows. To protect their identity, Shadow also assumes the shape of the frost demon.

The dimensional rip forms, Blodeuwedd screams, and field agents, research agents, and Dr. Cross herself come rushing out. Cross directs the efforts to stop the demon and shut down the rift, but Shadow takes matters into their own hands, and decides to break into Dr. Cross's mind to uncover her secrets. This was a mistake: if anyone has powerful mystical wards against mind-reading, it's Dr. Cross. Shadow is trapped in a psychic hall of mirrors, and the agents shut down the dimensional rift.

Ring is overcome with a vision of what will happen next: Shadow cuffed and taken down into the sub-basements of Carver House, stored among all the other artifacts and aliens from other worlds that have ever come here. Catalogued and studied and denied their humanity. He can't let that happen, and signals to Blodeuwedd. Blodeuwedd triggers the second use of the dimensional rift fountain to open up a distraction portal, to anywhere, and draws the agents' attention to a hellish ooze dimension, while Ring speeds in with super strength and speed to steal Shadow away.

Shadow meanwhile decides to barge through the mirrors and just make it to the center of the labyrinth, to confront Dr. Cross in her own mind. Dr. Cross sits there, on a throne-like chair decorated with owl feathers, and interrogates Shadow. Shadow sees the truth of Dr. Cross's mind and motivation: to protect this dimension from any and all incursion by any means necessary. When they see this truth, Dr. Cross expels them from her mind with great force. Blodeuwedd, Ring, and Shadow consult on all that they've learned.

Erik sees the strange lights and such happening up at Carver House from Ingebretsen's store and longs to go see what's happening. He feebly tries to give his dad an excuse, but his dad sees through the lies and all-but-grounds him. They're going to have a Talk about his bad-influence friends, too. But before they can, his friends show up and give him a rundown of all that happened, and just wish that Skate Rat could have been there.

Will Skate Rat ride again? Will the ooze dimension present further problems? Will the Owl hunt them in the night? And will they see just what she is keeping in the basements of Carver House?

[masks-travelers-by-night]

Issue #1: Brain Freeze

A little while ago, the retired Golden-age supervillain Gearmaster launched an attack on Infinitech Labs, surprising everyone, especially Dr. Infinity, the star superhero of the city and founder of Infinitech Labs. She was so take off-guard, in fact, that it fell to a group of teens, there on a school trip, to protect her, stop Gearmaster, and save the day. Their teacher, Mr. Rene Moore, was sadly lost in the fight, infected by the very cyborg virus that Gearmaster may have been there to take.

But now, complexities of their victory notwithstanding, these same teens have gotten together and decided that they deserve celebratory milkshakes and pancakes at the diner on 50th.

So Skate Rat (the coolest skateboarding rat-psychic you've ever met), Shadow Sojourn (a.k.a. Maria Wong, the weirdest interdimensional WWOOFer you've ever met), and Blodeuwedd (a.k.a. Jamina Jones, the smartest steampunk cosplayer/power armour designer you've ever met) get together (leaving their friend Ring, a.k.a. Allen Marcus, who had other things to attend to) and order their much-deserved pancakes.

It's about this moment when an interdimensional frost-demon bursts out of the walk-in freezer at the diner and starts demanding a worthy opponent to champion this dimension.

Naturally, no other superheroes are around, and the kids know how this goes: if you don't get a hero right away, just keep harming innocents until one comes. So they step up to the challenge.

Or, at least, they try. Turns out that they're neither operating like a team, nor prepared to fight what may as well be a jötunn. And so the diner is nearly leveled, burned, and quickly filled with rats, while the frost-demon finds no one worthy of his time.

The team comes together, though, and demands his attention with judicious use of fire extinguishers, insults, and sick skateboard tricks. Once he's good and angry, he breaks all the water mains and locks himself in an icy thunderdome with Skate Rat and Blodeuwedd. Skate Rat's skate tricks and Blodeuwedd's energy-absorbing power armour help them hold the line, but Shadow Sojourn is left outside, because they were examining the dimensional rift left in the walk-in.

Shadow Sojourn realizes that they need to demoralize the frost-demon and make him never want to come back to this dimension, and to that end, a little alien tech and some more taunts get him to see that Shadow Sojourn can and will collapse the gate, stranding him.

One they've done so, he admits defeat, with the note that they are worthy, but also the most annoying champions he has ever fought. Shadow Sojourn offers him a ride back his dimension in their alien craft, the one that looks like Meow Wolf on the inside, and a porta-john on the outside ("The TURDIS," cracks Skate Rat).

On the right back from the Frost Dimension, the team tries to be good to each other, but they're really bad at it, and bruised egos and shake confidences from the fight leave everyone feeling even more like a mess by the time they're back in their own world.

Will they learn to work as a team? Will Blodeuwedd's fears that this is not the only incursion happening around the city be borne out? Will Skate Rat keep his daily life going smoothly? And what has Ring been up to?