Dr. Agent David Trentmen - FBI Agent and former Medical Doctor
Juan Estevez - DEA Agent and former Undercover Cop
Victor Blue - FBI Intelligence Analyst and Hacker
Jack Plisken - CIA Agent and Cleaner
22/12/19 Back at the Arizona Inn
After the failed raid on Raytheon, the party regrouped and did some research online. Victor looked into any off-site backups they might have had, while everyone else checked if anybody else had seen the tentacle man. The backups were out of state, but Victor figured he could hack in and got to work. The others found grainy pictures of tentacle man from a conspiracy forum. One dated 18/12/19 had him entering a building they were able to ID as US Foods Stock Yards Meat, which matched an address in Tuscon, so David, Jack, and Juan drove out to the commercial district in his DEA SUV to take a look.
Recon at the Meat Yard
Jack scoped out the facility to check for guards and cameras, and crit failed; he found that whoever was working here were elite security. It may have looked like they were just walking in random aimless patterns in no specific interval, but in reality that was just to lull any would-be burglars into a false sense of security. Juan suggested that the guards might not be expecting someone to come in via the roof, and so the group climbed up on top of a semi-truck, then ran along the container to the roof, where they lockpick-gun'd a roof-access door open.
Cold air blew out, and they walked down onto a darkened catwalk which to the ground inside of a refrigerated room with meat on hooks. They searched for signs of tentacle man, and Jack found the body of a man, frozen by this point, and called the others over. David examined the corpse more closely, and determined time of death to match date and time from the photo, and that it was missing the same organs as Corey Edwards. However, this body had been moved, possibly in an attempt to hide it, while Edwards' had been left in broad daylight.
Juan grabbed his phone and unlocked it using the corpse's fingerprint, revealing his name to be Mitchell Armstrong (Juan: "What a fool, didn't he know that federal agencies can compel you to open biometric locks? Even when you're dead?"). Jack disabled the SIM card, so the phone couldn't be tracked, and they left via the roof, avoided the guards, got back in the car, and drove back to the Arizona Inn.
Hackerman
Victor finished hacking into the off-site Raytheon backups, and searched for more intel on Angelina Lucas, the guard who had disappeared. There was clear proof that Raytheon had "disappeared" her, but her files were suspiciously blank, and she and all of her coworkers had their employment status marked as "Terminated". He then looked into the projects that had been worked on on the 11th, which may have caused the electrical disturbances.
Of specific note was a skunkworks team set aside to work on "advanced technologies". He found a heavily-redacted incident report involving an experiment on "Object 1" and "Object 2", where Object 2 had released a powerful narrow-band signal which had caused "minor" electrical disturbances in the surrounding area. Object 2 was then placed back into storage. As he mulled over this new intel, the rest of the party made it back to the hotel room.
"Planning"
The party settled in and argued over what to do next. Victor mentioned the new intel on the Objects at Raytheon, and reiterated that the tentacle man probably had something to do with the Mi-Go. Juan scoured through Armstrong's phone and found an e-mail between him and Edwards regarding a shipment of meat (enough for several hundred people) to El Charro Catering on the 28th, which connected the two victims.
They wondered if tentacle man was trying to consume large amounts of meat, which led to jokes that David was an alien, followed by David announcing he was going on a "diet" ("Only one McChicken a day, no fries, and diet coke"). Juan argued they should investigate the "Meatstery", while Victor wanted to check in on the Raytheon higher-ups, but eventually Jack and David sided with Juan.
23/12/19 Oops
By the next morning, news of both the Edwards and Armstrong murders had hit the news, while conspiracy social media was abuzz with grainy pictures of their DEA SUV parked outside US Foods Stock Yards Meat last night. Turns out that having a bunch of paranoid conspiracy cranks taking pictures of suspicious goings on isn't always a good thing. At least the plates weren't in-frame...
El Charro Catering
With the intent of finding out what the meat order was for, David and Victor went into El Charro Catering's office, posing as a model and his assistant. David tried to schedule catering for a gala on the 28th, the same day as the order, and when he was informed that they were already busy that day, got increasingly pushy and demanded to see their records to buy out the other party until he was kicked out by the secretary. While she chased him out, Victor took a look at her computer and noted that the event on the 28th was the Arizona Livestock Show.
Some googling into the show found that the man behind it was one Gabriel Harris, but nobody could find any other connections between him and the other victims. With that lead run down, Victor called in a favour from his brother, Charlie Blue, and got them assigned to a definitely real FBI case looking into a possible serial killer connected to the power surges originating from Raytheon Sierra Vista Fields. Also, terrorism.
Raytheon Fields... Again
David and Victor flashed their badges at the security guards and the group were brought inside the facility with an escort, who Juan was able to talk into leaving them on their own. They set up a makeshift interrogation room, and brought in the chief researcher of the "Object 2 Project", Priscilla Tiernan, while Victor gained access to all the Raytheon files and started searching for things of note. When asked about Object 2, she claimed it was classified and clammed up.
Despite David's failed psychoanalytical advice, Juan successfully interrogated Priscilla and convinced her to tell them more. On 27/11/19, they had received two artifacts from South America and began working on them; Object 1 was briefcase-sized, while Object 2 was the size of a filing cabinet. The experiment on 11/12/19 had been a follow-up from 05/12/19, where they had discovered that the two Objects could emit a narrow-band signal at each other.
The experiment on the 11th had been to see whether Object 2 could be made to emit this signal without the presence of Object 1, and this succeeded; however, after doing so, Object 2 released a massive energy spike, which is what overloaded the grid. Object 1 had been shipped off to another site (she wasn't sure where) for further analysis, but Object 2 was still in the basement.
Juan took the other agents aside to mention that the DEA case he had been working as cover had involved two drug-runners smuggling in artifacts from South America that matched the descriptions of Objects 1 & 2. Hopefully, they could find more info on Object 1 through his contacts. David figured Priscilla was hiding something, so Juan asked her more kindly for any information that could help, and she broke.
She explained how after the experiment on the 11th, her coworker, Chris, got a strange look in his eye and left for an hour before showing back up. The next day he had called in, claiming to need sick leave for several weeks. Lately, she had been hearing strange noises at night, like the fans of the computers were screaming at her. Even stranger, all of the security guards had been replaced starting the next day.
Victor pulled up the employee file for Chris, aka Christopher Maddox, and ran his photo through some face recognition software to compare it to Tentacle Man. It wasn't certain, but it looked like a match, so he grabbed Chris' home address so the party could go pay him a visit later. With Priscilla's clearance, they were able to access photos of the Objects: both were a series of sleek, metallic tubes folding in on themselves impossibly. They were definitely "alien" tech, but Victor had no idea what they did.
Object 2
They asked Tiernan to see Object 2, and she granted them permission. The party rode an elevator down to the sub-basement, then suited up in paper suits and PAPRs to enter the clean room housing Object 2. Another researcher led them into the clean room, and as they headed towards the sealed box in the center, the party looked around for any structural weaknesses; ideally, they had decided, they would burn Object 2 and then collapse the building with explosives.
David determined that the research bunker had been built to survive nuclear blasts (thanks to a crit fail), so, unsure of their next move, the agents proceeded to the box, and after some hesitation, Juan opened it. Inside was Object 2, as they had seen it in the photos, but it was glowing. Juan slammed the lid shut, and as the researched stammered out "wait, why is it glowing?", Juan was already halfway out of the room.
The researcher radio'd someone asking what to do, and was told evacuate immediately, so the others followed suit. They all stripped off their PPE in the prep room as the lights dimmed and the visual sirens on the walls started to flash, followed shortly by an evacuation alarm. That wing of the sub-basement was locked down, and the party took the elevator back up.
Victor looked at the security cameras down in the clean room, and saw that the box was still as they had left it. He made sure to copy over the footage of them opening the box for inspection later, and then the agents went to Maddox's desk to look for signs of him being an alien. Victor hacked into his personal computer, but found nothing of note. His email mentioning sick leave seemed hastily written, but didn't say anything obvious like "I'm an alien!" in all-caps.
The Search for Tentacle Man
The agents left Raytheon, and Jack called a contact to get a bunch of guns and explosives, aka "the full van", to destroy Object 2 at some later time, but was only able to get a rifle and body armour on such short notice. The team drove back to Tuscon for him to pick up his gear, while Juan got his own guns out of the SUV. Loaded up, the party drove back to Sierra Vista to check in on Christopher Maddox' apartment.
Victor insisted on staying in the truck, but the others got out with their chosen weaponry (Juan and David went with just pistols, but Jack, ever the psychopath, brought his battle rifle under a trenchcoat), went around the side of the apartment building, and lockpick gun'd their way in. They made their way up the stairs and to Maddox' apartment without being spotted, and Juan once again opened it with the lockpick gun.
Jack took point, and went through the door and into the unlit apartment, Juan following slightly back while David stayed at the door to "cover the hallway". He checked a door on the left which opened into a kitchen with nothing out of the ordinary, and continued down a bit to a door on the right. As he got closer, an increasingly foul stench filled the air, a dull thumping noise came through the wall, and his teeth began to hum.
Jack kicked the door open, revealing the room beyond. It was covered, floor to ceiling, in a pulsating, glistening mass of flesh coated in wriggling cilia, while clouds of spores swirled through the air. Jack closed the door, went to the kitchen, disabled the smoke alarms, and then started a fire using the oven and some phonebooks. The agents rapidly descended the stairs to the lobby and back to the side-entrance they had used.
David found the water line for the sprinkler system, and they punched a hole in it, then pulled the fire alarm and left. While the agents drove away, confused residents spilled out of the building as plumes of thick black smoke billowed from halfway up the tower.
Notes:
Every PC agrees that Aliens did 9/11.
"[Insert player character here] is an alien!" is this game's biggest running joke. Eating suspicious amounts of food? Alien. Admitting weakness? No human male could do that, you're an alien. Know something about aliens? Thanks, alien.
When asked by the GM what we wanted to do with the artifact, Juan and Victor simultaneously responded "burn it". Fire has never let us down!
To quote Jack: "I deliberately didn't take Demolitions, because I figured we'd never use it".
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