[UA] Sunshine Cab Company

[Michael Athey]

NOTE: This is my first post to the list. Its a cross-posting from RPG.net, but I figured I'd try going to "the source" with this for more feedback. Hope you like it...
 
So, this is how it went down... 

Frank Wild was a regular nobody with a wife and an ugly dog and a house in the Hollywood Hills and a job at a car dealership. His boss' nephew was always stealing his commissions and his wife was always making fun of him in front of her circle of cigarette hag friends while the dog was having accidents all over the carpet and going to the vet for a very expensive skin condition. 

Frank didn't hate his life, though. He just didn't feel much of anything anymore. He would wake up and go to work and come home and get drunk and then go to sleep, only to do the same damn thing the next day, like a monk in a very street monastary. 

Then one day, for the Hell of it, Frank took a cab ride. 

Instead of ending up in Vegas for a weekend bacchanal as he'd planned, he ended up in the House of Renunciation. Room of Second Chances, to be exact. Turns out he'd achieved some kind of Zen state of Apathy, and it'd gotten the attention of the Room and its agents. He was the PERFECT subject for the Room to fiddle with. So, without knowing what the fuck was happening, Frank ended up stepping out of the cab in a pocket universe twenty years before he'd made all the bad choices that put him in his non-existence of a life. 

Frank came out of the pocket universe as an Urbanomancer who owned a cab company in a completely different city. It wasn't exactly the life of a movie star or a multi-billionaire, but now he had a Purpose. The purpose? To give other losers a Second Chance. In fact, he figured he might as well give everybody a Second Chance. 

Frank got to work using his cabs as ritual magick tools, tapping into the desperation of the passengers and drivers alike, getting progressively bigger charges from clever things like simply having his cabbies go around the city streets in very specific patterns (spelling out "Gimme another chance" took a while, but resulted in a whole neighborhood getting revamped). 

Then, Frank managed to really mess with things without meaning to. However he managed it, his attempt to give the world a Second Chance only affected the city and only in two weird ways; first, Frank's name went bye-bye. Second, the city's name went away, too. Frustrated, he realized almost nothing else had changed for the better. Now the Dispatcher wants a third chance at bat... 

A whole city losing its name didn't go unnoticed. The Sleepers, in particularly, want to know what's going on. They've sent many agents into the town, trying to pin down the cause of the whole mess. They were looking in all the wrong places for the last few weeks, though, annoying a few Dukes who didn't have anything to do with it. 

Meanwhile, a Max Attaker needed to go to the mall. So they took a cab. A cab driven by one of the drivers for the Dispatcher's Sunshine Cab Company. They realized that they were in a piece of weird mojo pretty quickly, but freaked out and blabbed about it to their friends in the cabal. Being Max Attak, it wasn't very hard for the Sleepers to pick up on rumors of a cabbie doing weird shit around (and to) the city. Unfortunately, being Max Attak, their stories were conflicting, full of "extrapolation", and generally untrustworthy. 

Now the Max Attaker cell is trying to hide out from all the mean spooky men trying to pull the correct story from their confused, exciteable heads. Maybe somebody's already died. Whatever the case, they're scared and on the run. 

The Dispatcher has recently got some new hires for his third attempt at a Worldwide Second Chance. For the purposes of the spell, he needs losers, and that's what he's got; ex-cons, junkies, drunks, conspiracy theorists, geeks who live in mom's basement - the castoffs and nobodies of the City. He's pretty sure he's got the spell formula right this time, and by sending these bunch on the right errands at the right time, he's pretty sure they'll be the unwitting vehicles of the ritual. He's almost certain it'll work this time... 

The House of Renunciation would be able to tell him, better though. Trying to open up a Room to the whole world is an intriguing idea, but they've already seen the side effects of what the Dispatcher's up to. Every time somebody gets a Second Chance, they become less defined as a person. If EVERYTHING gets a Second Chance - dinosaurs mating differently, Dewey Defeating Truman, New Coke catching on, the world could suddenly become Brand X across the board. 

**** 

The Losers are the PCs, of course. Its up to this band of slackers, hose-jobs, and misfits - does the Dispatcher get them to do the Ritual? Do the Sleepers track him down and put a bullet in his head before this happens? Do they grab for a Second Chance at the risk of hitting the "reset" button on Reality? 

All this and more - with the Sunshine Cab Company. Songs by Tom Waits. Costumes by Bob Mackie. 




So...whaddya think?



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