Potent Threats and Preternatural Power: Fling

“Get the fuck out,” you say to Small Paul, in response to being told the year. Or maybe you say “Excuse me?” Or maybe “Say again now?” I mean, I don’t know you. Regardless, you respond incredulously. “I’ve been dead how long?” 

Small Paul confirms the year, which is 2025. The world is now exceedingly, almost cartoonishly strange. Modern technology is phenomenal. Sure, your Service Weapon seems like a sci-fi gun, but that tracks, given where you got it, you know? Yes, you can summon it out of thin air and it’ll disappear if it’s not near you too long. Yes, it changes shape, from a high-caliber semi-automatic-like pistol into a big knife and a little multi-tool (conservation of mass be damned), and yes, it turns into a sort of Star-Trek-ass tablet computer, but all this seems reasonable considering where it came from. But there are now incredible pocket computers with insane amounts of power, which are called smartphones because they were initially fancy cell phones. You had a Motorola Razr and a fucking Discman when you were alive. These iPhones are a lot more impressive. 

A new disease, COVID, has killed a ton of people, but there’s a vaccine now, which the doctor that is part of Small Paul’s weird little band promptly gives you. (He calls himself Dib, and apparently patterns his life after the Invader Zim character of that name. You don’t know how to feel about that.) When they told you Donald Trump had been president, you reacted even more incredulously then to the year. It’s the sort of thing you’d write a joke about in a comedy movie, but all evidence points toward it being the truth. And in general, the country has gone to shit; mass unemployment, masses of homeless, a medical system stretched to the breaking point, a vast gulf between the rich and the poor. 

Most importantly to you, though, the world is apparently full of secret illegal magic, and things are getting ugly in that regard. “So there’s The Chant, which are people possessed by this sapient spell-ritual-thing; and The Rot, which are people infected by some sort of brain disease that results in them turning into hungry slime mutants or out and out slime monsters, or rather the infection itself; and The Mycelium, which is an extra-dimensional infection that resembles but is not a fungus, and turns people who eat it into fungi-people who want to kill you. Don’t worry, Bees are immune to all of those; like, the infected can kill you but you won’t get infected,” Small Paul tells you in his mildly Boston-ish accent.  

“Then there are whole packs of wendigo crawling around in the sewers. They are bands of homeless who turned to cannibalizing their fellows to survive and are now supernatural monsters because of it. Or maybe they did it just for kicks, I don’t know. Too many homeless is the problem, providing victims for all these things, but the government is so deadlocked nothing’s being done about that at all. There’s just so many out there now. And there’s the Grey Goblins, which are literal goblins and they tend to be not nice, and also they’re drug pushers.

“But all this stays secret from the general public, for which they can thank the Men in Black, or could if they knew they existed. There are multiple different groups or kinds of MiBs, and they don’t always get along, but they do always want to make you disappear if you do anything paranormal in public. Don’t. The Buzzing will probably tell you about them later. The Jailers are the ones that usually show up, and they’ll probably try to lock you up forever, but the Judges will show up if you really make a mess, and they’ll just make you dead. If you’re lucky, it’ll just be the US Government MiB, the Unusual Incidents Unit of the FBI. We know the most about them, they’re the least conspiratorial, if you believe it. 

“I mean, we can often fight them off, but that just pisses them off, and a lot of us aren’t wild about straight-up human murder. Besides, The Board wants us on the down-low anyway, not throwing powers around in front of civilians, so we’re annoying the bosses pretty much anytime we get an MiB’s attention.

“Speaking of powers, let’s get you bound to the power site.”

“Um, bound?” you say, or something to that effect. Perhaps you throw in a joke about bondage, or about being tied to a train track. I don’t know your sense of humor. 

“Magically speaking,” Paul says as he leads you from the break room to the room you woke up in, on a beanbag chair. (Tall Paul, who strikes you as a professional criminal, is not around.) “Will increase your available abilities. Give you a new weapon form or a new power, whatever you choose.”

“Why don’t we just have all the powers?” you ask, probably. It’s a fair question. Maybe Paul just brings it up himself, I dunno how you’d actually conduct this conversation. What am I, psychic? It’s part of the lore dump though, get off my back.

“Gotta earn our keep,” Paul replies. “Prove we’re not fuck-ups who’ll squander what we’re given. And preternatural powers don’t come from nothing. Power sites are full of power.” The beanbag chair is slightly to the left (you have no idea what the compass directions are here) of the center of the room, which is also surrounded by a bunch of weird instruments, radar dishes, and little antenna and weird cameras, hooked up to weird computers that looked a lot like the tablet your service weapon turns into. Speaking of which, Paul says, “Pull up your tablet, would you?” 

You pull the pocket multi-tool that was the service weapon’s current form out of your pocket, and by thinking about it hard, you transform it into a tablet. It takes a little while. Small Paul said it takes some getting used to. 

“Point the imager at that center there and hit the Bind button.” This is easy enough. The button pops up on the touch-sensitive screen, which would be cooler if the progress of technology hadn’t figured that out since you died. That is still much more impressive to you. You hit the button. 

Suddenly, you’re falling, face first, down into the screen of the tablet, which grows rapidly bigger until it is massive, half again taller than you, and then you tumble through it and into darkness. The darkness is soft, like you’ve been plopped into a very loose, breathable pillow, or maybe breathable, dry jello, neither of which really make sense but it’s a unique experience that is difficult to describe. The darkness grows… lighter, until it’s a greyish background instead. After a moment, you feel your feet touch a floor.

Baffled, you look upwards to find two things. Above you, you could see yourself, massive, staring down at the screen. Up ahead of you, you can see what appears to be The Board’s Obelisk, but right side up, dark against the vague grey background of your surroundings. 

Nothing happens for a moment, so you walk toward the Obelisk. You approach deceptively quickly, and one of The Board’s voices echoes into your head. “Welcome/salutation. Approach/hurry-along and select/petition the available powers/weapons/members. You/they will decide how you will/can destroy/subvert our many enemies/invaders/targets/victims.”

When you are fifty feet or so away, the massive obelisk absolutely dwarfs you, like an Empire State Building times three, on its side immediately in front of you symbols flare to life in a bright blue-green glow. When you reach them, you find clusters of symbols, four the size of your head, a number more the size of your fist around each one, and two more clusters of the fist-sized ones without the larger ones in the center. “Touch/experience each power/weapon/member,” one of The Board members says in your head. 

You walk to the far left one and reach out to touch the center sigil, a complex pattern of lines, curves, and curls you’d find impossible to describe in words if asked. Right away, an experience emerges in your mind, like recalling a memory of something that never happened: 

You are in a large chamber of worked stone or maybe concrete. It is fairly dark, a glow from behind you pushing back the darkness, but not enough to illuminate the whole chamber. Your attention is focused ahead, where men shaped embers lurk in the darkness, visible because of the dim orange glow emerging from their mouth, eye sockets, ear region, and nose sockets. They begin approaching at a high speed, and one lifts what might be a handgun to point in your direction. 

You reach out a hand at a region of the floor at the edge of the light, and a chunk of it is ripped up out of it by nothing visible in a spray of dust and pebbles, and then flies at the form pointing your way with the object in its hand. The chunk of rock/concrete slams into the figure, ripping it from its feet and hurling it off into the darkness. You rapidly rip another chunk of the wall behind you; it flies to float next to your head for a moment, letting you aim better, and then you push your hand out, sending the chunk flinging into another one of the forms as the rest began to lift a variety of what were clearly firearms at the point to point your way. 

With explosive, telekinetic speed, you dash to the side as they open fire (and you then become aware, somehow, that this is a power you already possess), and then open fire in return with your service weapon as the not-memory fades. You touch several of the smaller sigils, and you are given other not-memory fragments of using this telekinetic flinging ability in slightly modified ways. They were modifications or upgrades of some sort. 

The next sigil granted a not-memory of changing the service weapon from its currently available gun into a pistol sized shotgun-like firearm and blowing away strange people and creatures made of rotten-smelling black slime and shadows with it, shredding them with its many projectiles. One of the mods turns the projectiles into lines of fire, which seem to burn the shadow creatures real well.

The next main sigil is a crazy particle beam sniping weapon, devastating to whatever it hit, but slow to charge up and fire. The last is a shield created by telekinetically grabbing every object and possible chunk of the landscape nearby and having it float between you and your enemies, gunfire ricocheting off it, always away from you, or burying itself in the objects. 

The main-sigilless mods prove to be for the magnumesque form of your weapon, and for the defensive dash power you already seem to have. 

What do you choose? 

______________________________

Powers Granted by The Board

The Board grants its agents a number of powerful preternatural abilities. A new agent begins play knowing Gameface, Evade, and one other power of their choice unlocked and can unlock the rest, as well as rank them up, by taking control of Places of Powers. Powers can be upgraded like weapon forms, again by controlling Places of Power.

Energy

Agents have an Energy Pool which is the limit on their powers. Their Energy Pool equals their Constitution score plus any positive mental ability modifiers plus three times their level. Different powers have different energy costs. After one round without any powers being used, the Energy Pool begins recovering at a rate equal to the total of your Wisdom, Intelligence, and Constitution modifiers, minimum 1, plus your level, at the end of every round in which no energy is spent. Keep track of your energy on dice that are carefully set aside somewhere. You must change your energy before your power is resolved. If you lose track of what your energy pool was at, it’s out and needs to recharge. Abilities used repeatedly over a long period of time, such as using Shatter to dig or expand a tunnel over many exploration segments, or Fling to carry an object telekinetically for long distances, instead require you to burn energy equal to the normal/indicated cost for the usage. Burnt energy does not recover until you rest and eat something, and maybe even sleep for the night. Abilities can be used at a lower rank than the maximum rank unlocked, to be more subtle or reduce energy costs.

Fling

As an action, the agent telekinetically grabs a nearby object, ripping chunks of earth, stone, metal, wood, or concrete out of the ground and nearby structures if necessary. With the same action, the agent can fling it directly at an enemy or obstacle from its existing position, forcing a Save vs. Hazards or inflicting damage based on the strength of this power. Otherwise, the object is pulled to the agent, potentially hitting creatures or objects on the way, forcing the same save. Either way, unless the object was destroyed as part of hitting something, it stops to hover near the agent. The object will move with the agent, but the agent may not use the Attack, Aim, Go for the Kill, Fight Recklessly, Use a Preternatural Power (except for Fling), Cast a Spell, Covering Fire, Stealth, or Grappling actions while Fling is active in this manner, and the agent only moves at half speed. Another action can fling the object at a target, granting a save penalty equal to Fling’s rank, due to the benefits of aiming. An object may have additional effects when flung at an enemy, depending on its nature. A large enough object might well be able to target multiple enemies near each other. Energy Cost: 4 + rank used. Targeting: Save vs. Hazards if Flung if one action is spent, with a penalty equal to Fling Rank if a second action is spent. Effect: [1+ Rank]d6 on a failed save plus an additional effect. Half damage on a success, no additional effect. Rank 1: Flings small objects, up to perhaps the size or weight of a heavy ball bearing or several coins together. Range: Short Effect: If the target’s Save vs. Hazards fails, it must make a Save vs. Stun must be made to avoid being staggered, causing them to only get a single action their next turn. Rank 2: Flings somewhat larger objects, perhaps up to the size or weight of a baseball. Range: Medium Other: If the target’s Save vs. Hazards is failed, it must make a Save vs. Stun to avoid being staggered,, causing them to only get a single action their next turn. Rank 3: Flings objects up to the size of a basketball or the weight of a shot put. Range: Medium Other: If the target’s Save vs. Hazards is failed, it must make a Save vs. Stun to avoid their choice being Stunned until the end of their next turn, losing all their actions, or knocked prone and staggered. Rank 4: Flings objects up to the size and weight of a sturdy chair, microwave oven, or big-screen television. Range: Long Other: If the target’s Save vs. Hazards is failed, it must make a Save vs. Stun to avoid the Flinger’s choice being Stunned for one round, losing all their actions, or knocked prone and staggered. Also starting at Rank 4, you may use other powers while holding an item telekinetically at the ready. Rank 5: Flings objects up to the size and weight of an easy chair, loveseat, or table. Range: Long Other: If the target’s Save vs. Hazards is failed, it must make a Save vs. Stun must be made to avoid being Stunned for one round, losing all their actions, and knocked prone. Fling Upgrades: -Fling Energy Efficiency: Reduce the energy cost of Fling by one per instance of this upgrade taken.

-Catch Projectiles: As a reaction, use Fling to catch projectiles moving slow enough for the agent to see (eg grenades, rockets, thrown knives, etc) and launch them back at an enemy, using normal attack rules for the projectile caught rather than Fling’s rules. Add Fling’s rank to any attack rolls and apply as a penalty to any saves.

-Fling Enemies (Requires Catch Projectile): Fling can be used on enemies themselves. Any enemy without remaining grit and with flesh dice equal to or below your Fling rank can be targeted; it must make a Save vs Magic or be grabbed up by your power, becoming a projectile like any other for your Fling ability. The creature takes damage equal to your Fling rank automatically when it makes impact after being flung. Reduce damage by 1d6 if you hit another creature as normal.

-Fling Large Enemies (requires Fling Enemies): You may now Fling creatures with Flesh dice of up to twice your Fling rank. Targets hit by them (but not the creature themself) takes damage equal to their flesh dice if it is higher than your normal Fling damage.

-Fling Large Objects: Increase your Fling size limit by one Rank, and increase the damage die size of Flung objects by one per time this upgrade is taken. Going past rank 5 allows the flinging of objects up to the size of a heavy desk, then a compact car, and then a pickup truck, and then a semi-truck tractor. That’s about it, though the dice size can go to d20.

-Fling Accuracy: Enemies now take minimum twice Rank damage and must Save vs. Stun with advantage or suffer the Other effects even on a successful Hazards save.

-Fling Speed 1: Enemies take an extra -2 on their Hazard and Stun saves.

-Fling Speed 2: Increase extra the Hazard and Stun save penalty to be equal to Rank.

-Multi-fling: As an action while an item is being held at the ready, you may grab another object to bring to the ready. With another action, both items may be flung at the same or different targets. If at the same, the target may take disadvantage on the save for one object for advantage against the other.

Notes: Probably too complicated. This is essentially game-design fan-fiction of powers from Control.