Spirits of Conquest (Part 1)

The year is 2028, after a successful election democracy has been usurped in the USA. Reformed in the fires, the military branch of the US government resurfaces as the First American Christian Forces. This new army was equipped with fanaticism and loyalty as it furiously burst from American shores. Within a few short years its global reach morphed into an iron fist, and its sights focused on the few remaining alliances. With such unprecedented expansion and supremacy, something was happening deep behind the public eye.

Vaiden Strider, Codename: Recluse, spider power set, homeless petty thief but wants to help people. OP's character

Jackson Brute, Codename: Goliath, ex-mafia, strong but not too bright, loves his grandma, character of friend "Sly'

The Arachnomancer, sorcerer also with spider powers (totem), Doctor Strange always ignores his phone calls, character of friend 'Nate'

Carter Montgomery, Codename: Flicker, phase\teleport power sets, 16 year old "genius", character of friend 'J'

Narrator (DM) is my brother, we'll just call him DM.

The first session begins with Vaiden and Jackson on the hunt for Brimstone Mafia members. They've become brazen recently, and the police ignore them due to their strength and the way they mostly damage poor communities. The team was working on narrowing down the location of a shipment dock used by the Brimstone Mafia when they received a sudden message from the New York Sanctum. Having never been there they were confused, until the message revealed an undisclosed item was stolen from the Sanctum. Strange had tracked it to a shipping dock in Eastern New York, and was sending a sorcerer "who fits well with your team" to meet them at the dock. They arrive only to be met with what Vaiden described a "knockoff strange in a party city spiderman mask" and to the spiders surprise, a young lad with enigmatic powers. Without many options the four agreed to work together to bust this crime ring.

Three goals were set; find the destinations these shipping containers were meant for, search the containers for the stolen sanctum relic, and uncover the head of the operation. With these goals in mind the team split up according to a plan. Flicker will search a ship currently resting in the dock, The Arachnomancer will use his astral form to search the shipping containers, and the two spiders will sneak into the warehouse to gleam what info they could from the systems there. An imperfect, but solid plan. Or so we thought.

As soon as it is set into motion the Arachnomancer thinks it would be a better idea to follow the three guards patrolling the dock and eavesdrop on them. While they do hold continuous casual conversation, the only thing picked up here was that the guards were just hired goons, and they seemed to have qualities of superhumans. But this did not discourage the Arachnomancer, he stuck to them like molasses and forgot his main objective.

Over on Flicker's side of things, he was having trouble entering the boat. He didn't want to alert anyone, but could not decide the best way to hide. After teleporting onto the top of the boat, he was able to peek inside and see a restroom he could quickly phase into from above. But, he didn't check the restroom before phasing all the way in, and landed right in front of a scared worker on the toilet. Now would have been a good time to dip, or maybe phase into a lower deck to hide. Instead, Carter decides he will simply phase into the wall in front of him. Which, to his misfortune, lead into a break room. This break room had 3 occupants enjoying their mafia gifted lunches. Carter can't turn invisible, just phase. Everyone in the break room draws their holstered weapons as they watch a teenager walk straight through a wall into their break room. Carter let's out a meek "Hi" before turning to phase through another wall.

At this point, the flustered bathroom goer has come out and alerted his superiors. Alarms begin to blare, and the teenager has very limited time to find what he is looking for. His pivot saved him as he phased through another wall, and this time ended up phasing inside of a mafia personnel in the hallway. The personnel is panicking as someone is going through their own body, and Carter is just trying to get to the door on the other side of them. His blind leaps finally pay off, and he finds himself in the captains quarters with shipping manifests opened on the desk.

Now, let's go back in time just a few minutes, before Carter startled an entire ship of mafia while apparently trying to be sneaky. The Spiders are perched right outside of the warehouse on the dock. They believe their teammates are performing competently. Eyeing the outside, they spot a wall with bad camera coverage and scale it to reach the roof. Atop the roof, there are multiple skylights to peer through. Vaiden recounted the items being packaged, drugs, weapons, contraband, the usual. But in each shipment, strange collar-like devices were packaged. "Sometimes, I wish I was a photographer or a journalist. I could take pictures of this shit and document it." Vaiden chuckled before waving his hand for Jackson to follow him. They made their way over to another skylight. Under this one, storage racks were stocked full of various sized crates. "Thats a lot of product," Jackson remarked. As he was admiring the work, he ducked a little, and noticed the managerial offices at the north end of the warehouse. "Good fucken lookin', my guy!" Vaiden exclaimed ad he hurried across the roof.

The Recluse leaned over the edge of the tall building. At the bottom corner, he could see a stair and ramp that lead to large double doors. He shook his head in dissatisfaction and peered over the other side of the corner. There was a single door with a small set of stairs leading to it. "I bet thats the big dog entrance right there," and without warning he crawled down the side of the building. Jackson, having worked with Vaiden enough, was short to follow. A tiny rectangular window was featured in the center of the door, which revealed a shred of office space and two occupants. "Its locked," trailed Vaiden in a disappointed tone. His accomplice simply moved the spider back with his massive hand. Mr Brute took a second to assess the room. Raised his left hand in a count down, and did his best version of a controlled destruction on the door. With lightning reactions, the spiders followed the door off its hinges and came in slinging. Vaiden's webs grabbed the far wall and flung him over the occupant furthest from them. As he cut through the air above the office worker, he caccooned them in webbing. Unfortunately for the other man, Jackson dealt with him. Mr Brute has rather unusually sized webslingers. They fit on his tree trunk wrists as gauntlets would, and the webs they emit are much larger than average. The office man sat in his chair was flung head over heel with extreme force as Goliath's webs connected to his face. He was instantly rendered unconscious at contact.

The spiders didn't waste a second of their newfound reign. Jackson claimed a door that appeared to lead to the rest of the employee facilities, while Vaiden found his mark in the executive office. It was small, for an executive office, but the air of importance still filled the room. He sat at the desk and woke the computer, which promptly asked for a password. His eyes scanned for a sticky note, a piece of paper, anything that could have a password written on it. He found nothing. Tapping his fingers to fight the desperation, his thoughts raced. He looked down at the keyboard and flipped it over, under it, written in sharpie, was a string of mixed numbers and characters. The Recluse laughed to himself as the string granted him entry. But it was cut short as he viewed the most horrendously crowded desktop he had ever seen. Fuck that, he thought, and plugged in a thumb drive. Instead of digging through it under duress, he dropped the entire desktop onto his thumb drive. Meanwhile, Jackson had grown bored of watching the empty employee hall and decided to sneak around the wider builder. He found himself in a document storage room at the end of the hall he was watching. As he was pouring over filing cabinets to find any useful information on the facility, the door at the factory facing end of the room began to creep open.

As soon as the employee came through the door Goliath's palm gripped her head like a baseball. He pulled her into the room and pinned her to a corner on the ceiling with his webslingers. Eventually someone will find these people, he thought to himself. As soon as the thought finished, he found an inventory sheet of the wares that passed through the facility this quarter. Just as a smile crept across his face, alarms sounded all over the entire property. Spider-sense screaming, Jackson flew to the room he last saw his partner in. Vaiden was already there, "What did you do!?", he yelled.

"What did you do!?" replied Jackson.

Another tingle shot through their brains, directing them towards the docks. The men nodded at each other, and retreated back the way they came. It is here we return to the Arachnomancer, who has spent this entire time still following the patrol unit in his astral form. He has learned nothing, he has ignored his objective, he realizes neither of these things. The only thing that broke him from his self assigned task were the dazzling sounds of alarm sirens erupting across the property. Startled, he decided it best to return to his body. His teammates greeted him along with the physical realm. The spiders shared what they had found, but the other half of the team was shy coming about. "So, both guys who can just move through shit fucked up?" Before the crescendo of retorts had time to build the spider-sense gripped three quarters of the team's minds. A presence had just launched itself fifteen feet in the air, rattling the web of senses ferociously. "Four targets! Rail six, container four!"

The voice rang tall in midair, alerting the other two pieces in his unit. In the backdrop of night he was nearly undetectable, only coming into vision as his reentry into the floodlights bathed him. He landed behind a derailed shipping container, and safe from the heros' line of sight he launched it at them. It flew with the grave of weightlessness, betraying the immense weight behind it. Flicker phased his body in preparation, The Arachnomancer pulled himself to safety with his web amulets, but Recluse and Goliath stood firm. The container dropped ever closer, without so much as a drop of fear. Goliath flexed, and ripped the container from the air effortlessly. A primal roar reverberated from his lungs and the container bolted from his hands at twice the speed it had before. The moment Goliath's palms left the container, Recluse clung to it. As it twirled its way back to the sender, the spiders revealed their hand. Recluse slung a net of webbing, and dismounted the container with a graceful somersault. The guard was entrapped in the web net, and the shipping container came down to meet him. "How dare you make a fool of Tyranoskull!" The anger seeped from the webbed netting. The guard, now known as Tyranoskull, was so massive the storage container rolled off of his trapped body. Without missing a beat, Recluse fired another web net, targeting one if the other remaining guards. He was pinned without a fight. "You can keep this up and end up like your friends," Vaiden's wisecracking was cut off. The last remaining guard threw her helmet to the floor, eyes beaming red. Her muscles contracted and that same burning red energy moved from her eyes to her legs, catapulting her higher than Tyranoskull had jumped earlier. She reappeared above Recluse, her knee dropping down on his back with unimaginable force. The container they were on cratered, at its epicenter Recluse laid limp with the powerful woman standing over him.

Rage enveloped Goliath, and the Arachnomancer saw an opportunity. A 2 foot wide right hook was barreling towards the woman's face not a moment later, at the same time an icey surprise brewed behind the woman. Jackson's fist connected to the woman's face, if she weren't a mutant its likely it would have been liberated from her shoulders. The strike knocked the woman prone, and before the stars left her eyes, an eighty pound block of ice collided with her stomach before becoming ephimeral once more. Defeated, the woman mimicked Vaiden's defeat. Jackson lifted the smaller spider to his feet, who rose at a shakey and unsteady pace. Recluse attempted to protest, but Jackson packed the woman into his webbing, intent on interrogation. The team fled the scene before the other two guards could break from their captivity.

Next stop, The Nest