They (sometimes) grow up so fast

It's been a long-standing joke of Jeff's to demand that I lend him dice by tapping impatiently on the table with his finger.

Recently, my 15-month-old son has adopted exactly the same mannerism to demand that more food be placed in front of him when he's in his highchair, right down to the semi-pouty facial expression.

So I'm left wondering: is little Henry mature for his age, or is Jeff lagging way behind his?

Get me to the church on time

16 Feb 06 -

We were pulled away from our reveries about approaching demonic supervillains by a call from the Columbus suburb of Dublin, where some poor kid on a visiting basketball team got fried in the middle of a game by . . . something. Some kind of mysterious energy beam from the bleachers, apparently.

The kid had just fouled one of the home players, so we wondered if the energy blast might have come from someone connected to the foulee. We (Craig, actually) then wondered if the foulee's girlfriend might be an emerging super, and if she might have unleashed the blast accidentally.

The girl had apparently vanished by the time we arrived on the scene, so we began tracking down possible connections, scaring the crap out of her parents in the process. We learned that religion plays a big part in her life, so we worked that angle -- only to have the pastor of her church tell us that we, as supers, are "an affront to God."

Goodie. Still no sign of the girl (who, if our theory about her being a super is correct, must be going through some serious self-image issues right now), and now our feelings are hurt too.

Maybe the churchgoers will think a bit better of us once Lex Lucifer and his pals show up.

Five Devils we don't know (or was it six?)

9 Feb 06 -

We're Super again!

We've returned to IST Columbus, and for the time being our spandex alter-egos are staying around town. A mysterious woman started shouting out bizarre prophecies in her sleep on an arriving flight, so the authorities called us out to Port Columbus Airport for a look.

It turns out she's a precog (psychic predictor of the future) who has escaped from still-under-Apartheid South Africa (just as Craig did), and who has been fleeing pursuers around the world. She has also been popping caffeine pills, apparently to keep from having the very visions that she had while on the plane -- visions in which our PCs play a prominent role.

However, we share the stage in these visions with a well-known team of evil supers whose powers all carry a distinct whiff of brimstone. If Satan had a color guard, it would be these guys. They're unapologetically evil and gleefully destructive. They massacre whole towns at a time. And for some reason, they're on their way.

Yippee. Welcome to Ohio, fellas. We'll be happy to give you a brief tour followed by a long rest.

Red or White Wine When Dining on Elf?

19 Jan 06-

Well, it ended up being a little of both. We sent in eMike, our Pixie mage, to scout out the hole, thinking that his small size and stealth would allow him to recon the area unnoticed, but even stealth-hounds blow it once in awhile. He survived the discovery of an orc-fortified tunnel, and made it back out to describe it to us.

With our usual tactical aplomb, we decided to rush the barrier, with our air-mage creating a pocket vortex that protected us from enemy fire. When we got to the barrier, we found another tunnel, which led down to the actual lair part of the lair. Here we got into a fight with a bunch of orcs and their mindbreaker, a seriously freaky combination of giant spider and brainy-looking thing (sort of like an intellect devourer from AD&D with long, spidery legs).

Once they started to lose, the mindbreaker beat feet (all of them) and escaped, using a combination of invisibilty and illusion to evade us. We did find some surviving elves, in a charnel house environment where they had been serving as food for the mindbreaker. The surviving orcs didn't, in the end, and we came out as heroes and elf-friends. They even taught us the secret handshake!