Mr. Riddle's Third Favor

Never When City

Game Details	Never When City (Game), Character Creation, Skills, Origins, Mantles, Advancement, Special Rules, Creatures, Quotes Page
Player Characters	Corvus, Melvin, Ormod, Jacob
Major NPCs	Thë Lörd Hëlmüt, Mr. Riddle
Major Locations	Never When City
Factions	The Empire, KHO, Grand Khanate, Cult of the Unraveler

Mr. Riddle calls in his 3rd favor with the players. He's been holding onto this one for a while.

He has a contact in a KHO controlled timeline that has run afoul of the powers that be. This contact doesn't yet fully understand the temporal nature of the universe, but has disrupted KHO plans enough that they are tasking an Earaser Squad to deal with the problem. Mr. Riddle has been doing what he can to disrupt KHO's hunt, but at a certain point his action only draw more attention, and he's judged that at this point the smart move is to remove his contact to safety.

However, it's more complicated than that. From Mr. Riddle's perspective, the contact has already provided vital activities, but from the contact's point of view those action haven't happened yet. Mr. Riddle essentially needs the contact rescued, but also exposed enough to the dangers and weirdness of the true temporal universe that he will accept it.

He charges the player with locating his contact, verifying his identity with a portable bioscanner, and then delivering to him to second contact with a ship, whose location will only be unlocked form the scanner with a successful scan of the contact.

Red Fox Rescue

The players arrive in 1970s Michigan at a road side restaurant called the Red Fox where they locate their target in the phone booth exactly on time. It turns out to be a younger version of Mr. Riddle; also know as Jimmy Hoffa.

The players fight off a group of KHO Erasers, and then a second group arrives in a black sedan.

UFO Crash and Tripod Attack

The Second Eraser Squad has just enough time to open the car doors when a UFO crashes out of the sky on top of them. The car and the KHO Erasers are utterly destroyed. At the bottom of the crater a massive tripod climbs out of the wreckage and immediately attacks the players and Mr. Riddle.

A running high-casualty chase ensues down the interstate, past a military base and onto the Detroit Airport tarmac. The tripod proves to be highly durable, but not so durable that Ormod can't smash it's armor plating off with a planet on a stick.

The Man Behind the Tripod

With the armor smashes off, the internal core of the Tripod War Machine proves to be cyberneticly augmented African head in a jar complete with gray dreadlocks. Also, a strange glowing pink crystal which was clearly the tripod's impossibly powerful energy core.

The players managed to trick the machine into falling into a fuel tanker, setting off an explosion that the de-armored tripod couldn't survive.

Moby Dick Reference

With it's containment jar smashed and the life support fluid draining away, ]the head in the jar finally speaks, quoting Moby Dick:

"For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."

Then he let out a crazed laugh as he activated the system's self destruct sequence. The impossibly potent energy core overloaded and exploded.

The players survive, but are left confused and in some cases fairly injured. Mr. Riddle didn't want them about this. In fact when they return to Never When City, he takes the scanner he gave them and pulls up an encrypted database of key points in his personal timeline, and finds several variations. Not the least of which is that the version of him the players had known had been forced to abandoned his wife, but the version they rescued ended up coming back to collector her a few years later.

Mr. Riddle had to admit, the players had discharged their duty, going above and beyond what his prior version had assigned them to do. They had fulfilled their duty and no longer owed him any favors.