Capo di Tutti Capi IV -- Information and Story Summary Thread.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Post #2053 in main thread.

“Lately all I want is you
sometimes I believe I do
fifty strings of yarn and glue
puppet master see me through
lately all I want is you
puppet master see me through

Scissors in hand a knife at my strings
an odd way to go but I seen stranger things
oh I grew the finest wings
over the water”
….Puppet Master
….Marissa Nadler


Fifth Night -- The Streets of Fatlington


Askthepizzaguy sat quietly in his personal broadcast studio, going over notes for the next broadcast. His days were always so rushed; so many things demanding his time. Still, Fatlington was in crisis and he knew that his efforts had to continue.

The attack, when it came, was a doomed effort. The plan had been simple, but straightforward, like most good plans. Two trucks would race at high speed down the road, swerve through the short picket fencing and smash into the front of the deluxe bungalow, the drivers jumping to safety. Then a trio of shooters would open up while the drivers ran behind the house to cut off escape.

It didn’t even come close to happening that way. The first truck was intercepted by a trio of cars and brought to a –literally – screeching halt. The driver bailed out and used his shotty to get a clear escape route. The second truck ran on the sidewalk and dodged the intervening cars, but couldn’t dodge the bursts of fire from the pair of .30 Browning machine guns positioned at the end of the street where it met the beach bulkhead. A pair of two-person firing teams and a BAR-man providing cover shot the second truck to a standstill. The trio of shooters never even bothered firing – they just faded away.


Lord Brennus had had a feeling of foreboding all day. Mostly, his luck had been good lately and he’d been on the committee for days now with little attention – potentially deadly attention – coming his way. Today, however, he’d been looking around a little gloomily, waiting for the other shoe to drop,
When he reached the door of his apartment building, he was greeted by a life?-sized cutout of Wiley Coyote standing in the doorway itself. He paused with his hand on the door.

“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Wile E. Coyote, Super-genius…” intoned a slightly scratchy record player.

Brennus spun around, quickly drawing a sidearm – nobody on the committee save Askthepizzaguy went unarmed in Fatlington these days – and scanning the apparently empty street for threats.

>>>Nothing?<<<

But he didn’t look up. It wasn’t ‘the other shoe’ that dropped, it was a concert grand piano freshly loosened from the pulley holding it suspended in the darkness above. With a resounding albeit discordant

>Kabong!<

The piano crushed Lord Brennus against the sidewalk in front of the apartments. The legs and body of the piano were smashed as well, but the little brass plaque above the keyboard was more or less intact. It was engraved ‘Acme Piano Manufacturing, Inc.’

A shadowy figure walked over to the wreckage, yanked the shoe and sock off Brennus’ left foot – sticking out from under the piano at an odd angle, and then used a pocket knife to remove the big toe. He then walked quickly away.

Seconds later, a pair of fedora-clad, trenchcoat wearing gunmen walked up to the wreckage. One of them had a bright yellow Victorian-era suit under his tattered trench coat and held a Springfield ought three sawed down to a pistol grip, the other more conventionally armed with a Thompson. Hearing moans from under the wreckage – poor ravaged Brennus was dying but not quite yet dead – both of them opened up on the piano and whatever pieces of Brennus were stil visible. Their clips emptied quickly.

“Do we take the other toe?”

“Nah, just one is enough as a message.”

“Cool, ‘cause I think the other foot is stuck in the bass strings.”

“Do you want to try a quick “Heart and Soul?”

“Let’s just get out of here.”


Drunk Clown had chosen to live up to his name tonight. He’d left the meeting, gone to the corner tappy and slapped a twenty on the bar, telling the bartender to kick him out when half of it was gone. At fifty cents a whiskey, that was quite a bit of liquid courage.

They say that God takes care of drunks and fools, and Clown went on to prove it. As he stumbled from the bar, headed to his Buick – he was entirely too drunk to walk – when the gunman opened up on him from across the street.
Clown made for the only piece of cover nearby, the trashcan in the ailey behind the tappy. Darkness shrouded the back of the alley behind D.C. as he huddled behind the dumpster. His pistol was out, but he doubted he could hit anything further away than the building he was leaning on.

Sirens started wailing and the fire from across the street stopped. The whole time, the darkness behind Clown stayed quiet…and empty.


Bow-wow-wow had stopped at ‘Max Schmelling’s Joint’ for a hamburger and a malted after the meeting. He’d put away two of the burgers and felt like doing a little howling at the moon. As he stood to leave, the windows of the café burst as a fusillade of gunfire hammered through.

Onomatopoeia-man stopped slug after slug, as did the table, the storefront and several patrons. Five Tommies, all with the 100-round drums, made for a lot of lead in a short while.

Bow-wow-wow staggered back behind the counter, pushed there by repeated hits. Despite the armoring of his coat and extra armor vest, too many slugs had hit him in too many places. He was a dead man walking. Not realizing this, and in virtually no pain as a result of the adrenalin, Bow-wow-wow made it out the back door in a vain attempt to escape his fate. Doubly vain, since he was greeted by a sextet of shotgun blasts.

“Good thing we didn’t wait by the elevator after all. We’d have missed our share of the fun.”

None of the eleven shooters were stopped. Seven patrons and one waiter were killed, and another four persons wounded, during the shooting spree.


Two pairs of shooters opened up on edse as he idled at the red light.

Edse had just stopped the car when someone behind him in his blind spot shouted

“Ishmael’s revenge!”

and started hammering away. Three other gunmen chimed in and the shots shattered windows and caromed off the armored sides of the car. edse hunkered down and slammed his foot on the accelerator, racing through the intersection blindly to avoid the deadly hail of gunfire. All it would have taken was one car stopping in front of edse to prevent his escape and sooner or later the firepower – even by ricochet – would’ve got him. Instead, edse made good his escape.


Slysnake had skipped the meeting and stayed a little longer at Mercy Hospital. Sure, he had survived against the odds, but he still felt like crud. He hadn’t taken three steps out of the hospital when a masked man wearing a commisar’s hat grabbed him by the arm.

“Tuh-vor-eesh, nyet! You come vith me for ze safety, ja?”

’Der Commisar’ shoved the bewildered slysnake into the back of a panel truck, shut the door and locked it, then hopped into the van and drove quickly the four blocks down to the boardwalk. The driver turned to slysnake, rattling around in the empty back of the van.

“No man lives forever. Duz-vee-doinya.”

The driver slammed the door as he left the van, hopped the railing and dropped into the sands below. At that very moment, the PIAT launched by his partner struck the back of the van, blew through the sidewall, and messily ended slysnake’s pain. Third time pays for all, as they say…whoever THEY are.


Suburban Plankton shook his head, trying to clear the fuzz from his thoughts. All he remembered was a sharp pain in the back of his head and then nothing. He looked around.

>>>Windy…dark….decorative railing…..off to his right was a big red sign saying MERCY + a few blocks away and up a broad….Atlantic avenue?<<<

He realized he was dangling between two trench-coated men just about the time both men started jogging toward the decorative balustrade of the Penthouse atop the Hotel Abbatoir. By the time he thought

>>>Struggle!<<<

His murderers were already lifting him as they threw him across the railing and off into the night. The two at the top were puzzled by the lack of a scream.

>>>This is really gonna hurt…<<<

The two killers stared down at the broken body, cradled by the light of a streetlamp.

“You missed.”

“The lamp was an impossible target, you jerk.”

“That’s why I gave you five to one. You owe me two bucks.”

Killer one dropped a card with the outline of Alaska and the legend ‘Seward’s Folly,’ thenpaid killer two – a crisp Jefferson – and both of them made their way off into the dark Fatlington night.


Edse had switched cars and made it to his brownstone in the lower town. On Pacific, rather than Atlantic, his place was a little quieter and in a less “touristy” neighborhood than most. Tonoght, however, there were a few visitors.

The man stepped out from behind a stoop several doors down, just as Edse, finished locking his car. His gleaming black hair was slicked back with Bryl Cream, his long dark trench coat criss-crossed by bandoliers of shells like some kind of Hollywood Mexican bandit, and he had a shotty.

The look may have been cheesy, the gun was not. Deftly , the greaser gunman spun cocked the 1887 and fired at edse. Edse, noticing the movement, ducked. They went back and forth that way for several rounds. Edse, would sprint and duck just as he heard the lever cock, while the bandito would move up a couple of steps while loading and then fire again. Edse made it to his front door, slamming it open.

Almost as quickly, edse came back out the door, reeling from the impact of multiple .30 caliber rounds at close range. Some shots from the four hidden shooters had penetrated his armor, others had hammered home where no armor covered him. He staggered on the steps and then collapsed when Mr. Bryl Cream slammed a load of double ought into the small of his back. His would-be killers made good their escape, but didn’t pause to make sure edse had died.

Arriving moments later, Commissioner Fermanagh – heading out to a pub after having a ‘chat’ with the missus – leapt from his vehicle and staunched the bleeding. An ambulance was called and got to edse just in time. He’d lost a good deal of blood, but because of the armoring he had managed, just barely and with a little luck, to survive. He would no doubt be laid up for a day or so, just to recover.


Erebus had managed to keep himself out of trouble – until tonight.

Tonight some quirk of behavior – too quiet, too distracted? – at the meeting had madwe him a target and five avenging attackers converged to do him harm.

It started, as so many attacks did in this town, with bursts of gunfire as the target masde his way from the parking lot to his door. Erebus reacted quickly by sprinting for cover. He found himself in a corner, tight behind a trash dumpster. He had hard cover, was firing back to keep the other shooters heads down a bit, and he could already hear police sirens heading towards the scene.

That’s when the chap with the PIAT launcher stood up. He was 30 yards away with a clear line of fire to the area behind the dumpster – which would contain the resulting explosion right on top of Erebus. Instead, the PIAT went >click< and did nothing. The shooter re-triggered the device and again, got nothing. Despite checking and re-checking before the mission, the PIAT was a dud and would not fire. Sometimes, it is better to be lucky than good.

With the sirens closing, the attack team made off into the darkness. Erebus had lived through it all without a scratch – and with a healthier respect for a little planning.


Psychonaut was heading home after a long, hard day, when he turned the corner and saw that the road had been blocked by barricades. He wasn't aware of any new construction or road work being done, so he carefully slowed to a stop and got out of his vehicle to investigate. Not only was the road blocked off but the next intersection as well. In the middle of the intersection, there was an overturned car, with the glowing Mizza Mut car topper laying right beside it, the outer casing smashed. Unsure what to make of the scene, and worried someone might be hurt, Psychonaut approached the car, only to find it was unoccupied. He gripped the object in his hands as if his life depended on it.

Something was wrong.... there were scattered stacks of pizza boxes arranged in a circle around the car, and there were wires running out from each one of those boxes, leading to a nearby building. It was a trap! Psychonaut looked up and saw a man in a trenchcoat sliding down a long rope which had been hanging over the intersection, and he quickly dove out of the way.

"Going somewhere, mister Naut?" shouted the man in the trenchcoat and fedora, as he stood in the center of the street, holding a device with a trigger. It could very well have been a detonator.

"Who... are you?" replied Psychonaut.

"Who am I, mister Naut? Why, I am the vigilante cleaning up the streets of Fatlington. I am the greatest superhero of all time. I am the avatar of justice. The bringer of decency. I am the next Captain America, the first, last, and best hope of Fatlington. And you are nothing more than a common lurking criminal, and I will be the end of you!" said the man in the fedora. Psychnaut noticed that the man was also wearing some kind of goggles, probably to protect against explosive forces.

"You're wrong about that, mister Guy."

"Guy? There's no Guy here. Are you ready to face your inevitable death, mister Naut? This trenchcoat is not what it appears. It is lined with only the finest reinforced steel mesh, armor plating, and layers of insulation. I could detonate these explosives and incinerate you instantly, and not get a single scratch on me."

"Oh yeah? What about your face?"

"What about my face? What are you getting at?" shouted the trenchcoat man.

"The coat might survive, but your head wouldn't. You haven't really thought this through, have you? Unless your fedora can withstand an inferno and somehow also protect your exposed face, you're about to blow your own head off, wiseguy."

"Hey! I'm not a wiseguy! So what if I did some things before I graduated high school, my record has been expunged! And another thing, I'm far more bulletproof than you might imagine! And I'll prove it to you right now!"

>click<

>click…click<

"Hmm... the uh, trigger seems to be malfunctioning. No matter, I can do this the old fashioned way. Ever seen a chicago typewriter, Mister Naut?" the man reached into his coat and drew a Thompson sub-machine gun.

Psychonaut quickly reacted, raising his hand, aiming directly between the eyes of the 'vigilante', and squeezed the trigger. The results were immediate, and overpowering.

"Gah! My eyes! The goggles do nothing! You've blinded me! Stop shining that flashlight in my eyes, you gutter-dwelling scumbag! I'll open fire!"

"Askthepizzaguy???" asked Psychonaut incredulously. "Just what in the heck do you think you're doing?"

"Saving Fatlington from scum like you! Oh blazes, I can't see anything... and my gun's jammed. I'll get you Psychonaut, if it's the last thing I do! You haven't seen the last of the Neutral Avenger!"

"Yeah, whatever, see you at the meeting tomorrow, Pizza." said Psychonaut as he calmly walked away.

"Hey, come back here! I'm not finished with you yet! Darn this detonator... I thought it had a 5 second fuse.... or was it fifty seconds? I can't remember...."
Psychonaut got back into his vehicle and drove away, just as the stacked boxes of explosive-laden pizzas finally exploded. But the charges were far, far too small to be deadly. Nothing more than common fireworks. Askthepizzaguy was covered in a shower of cheese, sauce, pepperonis, and bits of the cardboard boxes. Even worse, his fedora blew away in the explosion. Askthepizzaguy would later go home and hide under his couch, crying like a little girl.



09:14AM, Thursday, 3 November 1951
The Executive Meeting Room (Small Ballroom)
Fatlington Convention Center
Fatlington, New Jersey


“…and so another bloody night comes to an end. It wears on a man, it does, seeing so many good folks cut down….”

Fermanagh took a moment to review his notes and get the maudlin out of his voice.

“We’ve got more post-mortem investigations for you.”

“The committee’s second lynch choice is hard to evaluate.” Subotan initially appeared guilty to our evaluators, but further review found that the evidence against him was related to a case four years ago in Asbury Park – a case that had already been solved. That evidence had been edited to look as though Subotan were part of it and guilty as sin, but one of the investigators had worked that case and knew that it simply wasn’t true – someone had planted it. We are unsure what was going on there or why. They were able to determine that Subo’ was a minor criminal – a wiseguy – but there was no apparent connection to any mafia activity. In fact, he was rumored to have been working WITH a completely inoffensive name, sometimes known as Cal King, who was confirmed as a townie with a bit of an aggressive streak in him – not unlike several of you sitting here I suspect. Still, we hope that this sacrifice will have served our long term goal.”

Fermanagh grimaced as he looked at his notes, visibly disturbed.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, citizens, but Fatlington was well and truly corncobbed by the killings that night – and I lost two of my best detectives. Yes, that’s right, El Barto and TinCow were both detectives on the Fatlington Police clandestine squad. Both men had brilliant careers and were trying to sift through the names involved to help us bring about justice. They will be missed and our flags are all going to half-mast as of this moment.”

“Nor does it get any better from there. Xenoneb was a Fatling townie, reputedly hunting Mafiosi in a vigilante team. He is not known to have had mafia connections. Saints preserve us, but Arjos was the FBI Agent in Charge, working in Fatlington convertly at the behest of Hoover himself. Yes, damn it, I know what that means – three of our detectives were killed in the same evening and at least one of those at the hands of the mafia.”

Fermanagh looked as though he would say something more, but then he just waved Generalhankerchief to the podium. A grim committee settled down to the business of the day.



OOC

Day Six, lynch votes only, begins:

Phase ends:

Remember, do NOT edit a post with a vote in it; post the change in a separate post.


Attacked: a completely inoffensive name (n2), Ameranth (n3), Askthepizzaguy (n1, n2, n4, n5), Cahoma (n2), Cecil XIX (n3), Chaotix (n2, n3), Craterus (n3), Drunk Clown (n4, n5), Earthling (n1), edse (n5), El Barto (n2), Erebus (n5), Ishmael (n4), johnhughthom (n4), Master Necromanver (n2), Montmorency (n2, n4), Psychonaut (n5), Raskolnikov (n1), Sasaki Kojiro (n4), scottishranger (n4), Secura (n3), Slash and earn (n1), slysnake (n1, n3), Suburban Plankton (n4), taillesskangaru (n3)

Wounded: edse (n5), Lord Brennus (n3), Slysnake (n1), Tratorix (n4)

Killed = 14: Ameranth (n4), Arjos [FBI Detective] (n3), Bow-wow-wow (n5), Captain Black Adder [townie] (n1), El Barto [Detective] (n3), ELITEWARMAN8GINGYBREADMENMILK [townie] (n2), Lord Brennus (n5), Lord Winter (n4), Moros [luca] (n2), Pharoah [townie] (n2), slysnake (n5), Suburban Plankton (n5), TinCow [Ddtective] (n3), Xenoneb [Townie] (n3)

Lynched = 5: Earthling (d2) [townie], a completely inoffensive name [Townie] (d3), Subotan [Wiseguy] (d3), Major Robert Dump (d4), Ishmael (d5)

Wogged = 3: cpdwane (n4), Master Necromanver (n4), taillesskangaru (n4) …probably more soon.

Added = 1: Autolycus (d4)

Active:

AggonyKing, Andres, Askthepizzaguy, Autolycus, B Ray, Backwards Logic, Beefy187, Believer, Beskar, Bestrfcplayer, BillMc, BSmith, ByzantineKnight, Cahoma, Camikaze, Cecil XIX, Chaotix, Choxorn, Clitsome, Craterus, Crazed Rabbit, DaveShack, dcmort93, Death is yonder, Diamondeye, Diana Abnoba, Double A, Drunk Clown, edse, Erebus, Frozen In Ice, fubbleskag, fyremarble, GamezRule, GeneralHankerchief, gibsonsg91921, gnarley Charlie, God Emperor, Guiri, hero di classic, Ibn-Khaldun, Ironside, Issaikhaan, Jarema, J.D., Johhog, johnhughthom, Jolt, Kagemusha, kennigit, Khazaar, Krill, landlubber, LazyMcCrow, Lewwyn, Memnon, Monk, Montmorency, Neri, Nictel, Nightbringer, Niklas, O!TheLastDays!, Peasant Phil, Populous Romanus, Psychonaut, qlphz, Raskolnikov, Renata, Riedquat, Robbiecon, Romanic, Sasaki Kojiro, Scienter, scottishranger, Secura, Seon, shlin28, Sigurd, Silver Jan, SisterCoyote, Skotsko, slash and earn, Sprig, sturmhauke, Thefluffyone93, The Stranger, Tratorix, ULC, Visorslash, White_eyes:D, Winston Hughes, woad&fangs, Xehh II, Yaropolk, Zack