Episode Two: Oh, No... Not T.H.E.M.!

Scene One: Men in Suits

• descrip/stats for "laptops"
• T.H.E.M. application form
• sample T.H.E.M. business card

There are some men in suits wandering around campus again, but this time they're not escorting anybody. If the PCs confronted the gray-suited men from Episode One, they may notice that these seem to be the same guys, or at least the exact same style of suits, tie-tacks, etc. One guy is sitting in the coffee shop typing sort of idly on a laptop. He has his back to a wall, so there's no way to subtly check what he's doing. If anyone tries to look, he'll hit the screen saver and ask if he can do anything for them. Another guy is doing more or less the same thing in the Student Union. There's a red and blue van parked outside with another suited guy sitting behind the wheel. The guy in the van will behave the same as the laptop guys. If they come up with some good idea to check the screens that you can't realistically block, they're running some arcane looking software - switches, dials, graphs, numerical matrices, that sort of thing.

After observing for a while, and conferring a bit with the guys using the laptops, some of the men will start approaching students with clipboards. The PC's will all be individually approached. The men say they're recruiters for an employment agency and are looking for college students. The clipboards have application forms on them. They also ask for anyone who fills out a form to schedule an interview within the week. Whether or not a student agrees to apply or go to an interview, the person with the clipboard will try to get a student to take a business card or one of their "freebies" (pens, key-chains, highlighters, etc.). (keep track of the freebies, they'll be relevant later, in Scene 4).

If anyone tries to check up on them, they will find that Student Affairs is aware of the group's presence and have authorized them to recruit on campus. Mind you, this is the same office that lets the CIA recruit on campus, too.

Scene Two: The Interview

• Sample Job Application
• Sample Evaluation Form

If any of the PCs made an interview appointment, decide to follow someone to an interview appointment, or investigate the address on the business card, they will find themselves at a tall office building in downtown Hellenback. The T.H.E.M. office is on the eighth floor.

Interviewees spend a few minutes in a waiting lounge filling out a job application form and are then are called one by one for id photographs. They sit in a little photo booth for a minute or so and then go into the back office for an interview. The interviewer is almost annoyingly chatty, asking a lot of questions that don't seem especially relevant. If asked about what kind of jobs are available, he will be extremely vague. Applicants are encouraged to keep the pen, which, naturally, bears the company logo.

If PCs break in at night, or otherwise arrange to be in the office while nobody else is there, they will find the file cabinets locked. The keys to the file cabinets are in the (locked) center drawer of the receptionist's desk, with a key-tag labeled "files". The key to the center drawer is in the bottom of a pencil filled mug on top of the desk Frighteningly enough, these general key locations are very common. Should you ever need to break into an office - you've got a better than 50/50 chance of finding what you need by checking either the pencil cup or a magnet on the cubicle light in the secretary's desk for the desk key and then either the top center or top right desk drawer for all of the other keys to the department.)
Almost equally frightening is the fact that you also have a very good chance of finding all of the passwords you need either in the little pullout surface on the desk or in a binder overhead called "Desk Diary". And let's not even get into the people who write their login and password on a Post-It™ tacked to the front of their monitor.) (with a key tag labeled "desk" (this key also opens the other drawers in the desk). Other keys from the same drawer have tags reading "John's office", "copier" and "booth" (they open, respectively, the back office, the photocopy machine and the main panel on the photo booth.) PCs can, naturally, just attempt to break or pick the locks if they fail to find (or fail to look for) the keys. The furniture (including file cabinets) is just standard office stuff, nothing's been rigged or anything.

The file cabinets contain, (aside from some really boring financial stuff, office supplies, etc.), hanging files on everyone who filled out an application, arranged alphabetically. There are four different colors of folders, blue, green, yellow, and red, and some of the folders have little Post-It(tm) flags on them. There are extra blank folders in the back of the "W-Z" drawer. Most of the folders have an interview schedule form in them. Anyone who has been in for an interview also has the application form in loose, and an "Interviewer Evaluation Form" and photo stapled to the inside of the folder. There are some lines on the back of the photo that look kind of like bar codes. On a basic Perception check, a PC may notice that their Evaluation Form doesn't describe them very well, as if the interviewer simply filled in the check-boxes at random. Some of the forms also have doodles in the margins. If none of them interviewed, they may discover this on the sheet of someone they know, with a penalty to their roll. On a good Bureaucratics (or possibly Cryptography, Statistics, etc.) roll, PCs will be able to figure out that there is some sort of color coding with the folders and flags, but not what the pattern is. If more than one PCs interviewed, they will not necessarily have the same coding applied to them.

There is nothing unusual about the photocopy machine. Feel free, however, to make the PCs paranoid about not finding anything. Optionally, if any of the PC's try to make copies of anything they find, you can require that any PC who does not have "PS: Secretary" make a INT roll at -1 to successfully make a legible copy without breaking the machine Fine... you laugh now... You should see some of the stuff I've been called in to fix. (e.g., causing a paper jam, tearing the originals, etc.).

There seems to be more stuff inside the photo booth than you'd expect for something that just takes pictures. A PC with good enough technical knowledge should be able to identify some sort of very sophisticated scanning device. It will not be clear exactly what the machine scans for, but its output is in the form of a bar code, printed on the back of each photograph.

The back office contains a desk, and two interviewee chairs. The drawers are not locked. They have paper, pens, extra "freebies", a trashy paperback novel, and what seems to be the leftovers of a bag lunch. Except for a wad of gum at the bottom, the trash has been emptied.

If the PCs are careless enough to set off the alarms, the city police will arrive in about half a hour, with sirens on. Any PCs who cannot elude the police under these circumstances are pretty darn pathetic.

Scene Three: Green Firefly, Again

• character description of Green Firefly.

As the PCs are going about their business, particularly if they split up, one or more of them will encounter Green Firefly from Episode One. He will try to get one of the PCs alone and try to kidnap him/her. It doesn't really matter much to the plot whether he succeeds or fails.

If he succeeds, or fails and gets away, proceed as in the next scene.

If the PCs manage to capture him, he will maintain a stoic silence until threatened in any way, at which point he will insist "It was T.H.E.M.! T.H.E.M. made me do it!". (Feel free to get into a little "Who's on First" gag with this.) Give English majors and anyone who has noticed the T.H.E.M. logo before a perception check to realize that this isn't just bad grammar (provided they need the hint). He doesn't know who T.H.E.M. is, just that he was picked up shortly after going to a really promising job interview and they poked him and used a lot of flashy lights. He was given the description of a few of the PCs and told to bring any them in he could "for the Glory of T.H.E.M.". - or else. PCs with the appropriate knowledge skills or mental abilities should be able to figure out that he's been brainwashed (what little brain he has to wash).

Scene Four: T.H.E.M. That Go Bump in the Night

• maps of THEM installation.

The next night, however late it takes for at least some of the PCs to go to bed, some of those distinctive red and blue vans pull into the dormitory parking lot. Men in black jumpsuits will sneak into the building, equipped with lock-picks and sedatives and try to kidnap anyone who (a) went to one of the job interviews and put down his/her real name or (b) took one of the T.H.E.M. "freebies" (they're really sophisticated homing devices). Their mode of operations is to pump sleeping gas under the doorway and then go in and carry off whoever they wanted.

Any PC successfully sedated and carried off will wake up in Scene 5. If the PCs engage the attackers, they will flee into their vans and drive off at breakneck speed, shooting (with silenced guns) at the PCs to discourage pursuit (like that ever works). The vans will drive off into a secret door in the side of a hill a few miles out of town.

If all of the PCs are captured, just skip right to Scene 5. If any of them are still loose, they're probably going to want to rescue the others (make sure you grab a DNPC or two, in case the PCs get recalcitrant). If they managed hot pursuit, you're fine. If they didn't, they can find the secret location by tracking the assets of the "employment agency", beating it out of Billy Ray (who's running about loose), or any other idea that seems plausible.

The installation itself is underground. It can be entered either through the concealed entrance on the side of the hill or via a few ventilation shafts. The captured students are being held in individual cells on the fifth floor (that is, basement level five - since there are no aboveground floors, the floor numbers just count down in depth).

Scene Five: The Great Escape

The captured PCs will awaken in a bare metal walled 10 foot by 10 foot room containing a cot and themselves. There is a vent in the center of the ceiling, but it is too small for a normal person to fit through. The slots in the vent covering are about one inch wide and three inches long. There is a single door with no window and no handle on the inside. The doors are controlled by an electronic locking mechanism. Characters who carelessly apply electric or magnetic powers or badly placed brute force may actually destroy the lock and make it impossible to pick later. On the other hand, if they're careful, they might also manage to spring the doors. Also, if all else fails, sufficient physical damage will break the doors. Especially if there are no external PCs to mount a rescue, adjust the amount of needed damage so that at least one of the PCs will be able to escape. Otherwise it'll be an awfully boring scene, won't it?
GM: What are you doing?
PC: I'm staring at the wall.
(Five minutes pass.)
GM: What are you doing now?
PC: I'm... staring at the other wall.

Scene 6: Mop-Up

With any luck the PCs have congealed as a team by now.

Marginalia