We finished up the adventure from last week this evening. The heroes had been working on various projects while in the City of Angels: Cointreau auditioned his way into the villain/romantic competition role in a movie based incredibly loosely on the exploits of the Sky Rats in the Adriatic. He had done an excellent job, but had also had a dalliance with the leading lady, who is also the girlfriend of big time director Alexander Korda! Once he’s done with the picture, he’s probably going to find himself  blacklisted. Meanwhile, Post and O’Bannon got jobs on the film doing aerial stunt work, including a recreation of the “final battle between Cointreau’s “Moroni” and the Sky Rat “Sky Captain” played by Cary Grant. The battle, however, was much more real that they thought — the assistant director of photography was the son of the man O’Bannon shot down in the very battle their denouement is based on! he armed the other stunt pilot’s planes for real and only some tricky flying by the aviators.

Veitch and Zelansky had had working with the Boston Project on several of their schemes — from trying to uncover the mysteries of the Eye of Shambala, to working on their reverse engineered version of an Atlantean flying saucer (the result was a jet-powered craft with strange telluric repulsion units) and small “mini-fighters” — a cross between an glider, a motorcycle, and a fighter plane. (The players really latched on to these!)

After Veitch raced in one of these “Dogfish” to rescue his friends, and the villains were shot down, most of the team was scooped up by the LAPD’s “Red Squad”, which moonlights at protecting the people of the Boston Project. The team eventually wound up back at Project’s headquarters, hidden under the Goodyear Airship Factory in Huntingdon Park, where they get interrupted by alarms and a frantic call over the intercom for guard to get to Lab B. The lab with the Eye of Shambala!

They arrived to find OSI guards being gunned down by a pair of monks carrying some kind of futuristic energy weapons! A dozen more were advancing toward the characters, protect two monks that had grabbed a hold of Zebulon Edward Koenig — a once-colleague of Nikola Tesla who was stranded in the Hollow Earth until he was rescue by the Los Angeles mission in 1993. Since then, he has been working to reverse engineering the saucers with his daughter Erha. There followed a spectacular kung fu/gun battle between the players and a few OSI agents and the blue gi-wearing monks of Shambala…but where did they get the weapons!?! Eventually, they were able to cut through the bad guys, but only as Koenig was tossed through the Eye to who knows where.

Veitch had a momentary vision of what was on the other side — a futuristic-looking city in ruins…then Morana compelled him to close the Eye. Koenig was essential to the Boston Project, but this also represented a sharp escalation by Queen Morana. Where did she get those guns — some form of heat ray — and why take Koenig. (He has a familiarity with the equipment…she needs him to reproduce or repair them?) Zelansky’s conclusion: she has gone back to the Second Earth, to Atlantis! He uses all of his bureaucratic pull to get permission from the OSI to mount a rescue mission, supported by a company of US Marines armed to the teeth. They can fold the wings of the minifighters, so they’ll have the Dogfish as air support.

Two days later, they go through the Eye, but Veitch’s concentration on their destination wavers for just a moment… When they come through the gate, it is into a flat, dry, reddish-brown plain. The air is incredibly thin, the sky purple with a weak sun and two moons! They also walked out onto steps and the surprsie causes them to tumble into the new environment like people bailing out of a clown car. When the Dogfish are pushed through they pitch off their landing gear and roll over some of the men, useless!

The Eye they came through is much larger, and seems to act as a gate to a large walled city. As the Eye closed, they could now see the streets of the city and the strange buildings. Zelansky could swear that whenever he looked away, the buildings shifted or changed. Despite the obvious danger they are in, he is elated…

“We’re on Mars!”

And this gave me the chance to finally bring the starts of the rocket corp/ rocket rangers/ planetary romance aspect of the campaign to bear. I’m planning on using some of the material from Revelations of Mars, though I’m not certain if I’m going to use their aliens, or the ones from Space:1889 (which I have a preference for…)