[b]Episode 1: Citation Needed[/b]

[b]CapeChaser Tweet-Summary:[/b] Scorpion is an international organization devoted to world conquest[1]. Scorpion is among the largest, most varied, and most feared of all organizations on the villain spectrum.

[b]Location:[/b] Scorpion maintains a network of hidden bases throughout the world, hidden in locations ranging from warehouses to penthouses to caves. However, there are rumors of larger bases, also scattered worldwide, where Scorpion trains its agents and performs its research.

Scorpion is believed to have a greater than normal presence in, and focus on, Titan City, but this may be apocryphal[citation needed]. Rumors continually circulate about a network of bases in the City[2]. Supposedly, they… afgsfds. I’m going to clear my head, bbl.
Last edit 5/29/2018 at 8:45 pm

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Cape Chaser wiki editor Rick Henshaw got up from his computer, took a drink and picked up his keys. Within minutes he was out and driving. At this time of night on a weekday, the roads in Titan City were clear enough that he could drive at his own pace, without having to wait for traffic, and that suited him fine. The drive gradually took him towards Ironport, where (rumor had it) an (alleged) Scorpion operation existed, discovered (supposedly) by a guy who’d delivered a party box of sandwiches to the wrong address. It sounded stupid, except that after talking about it online the delivery guy’s apartment was broken into and he went missing. Rick had known the guy, which made this personal - but still just the latest in a stack of reasons (many personal, some foolish) he had to want to expose and take down the international high-profile terrorist group known as Scorpion.

He parked a block away from where the (alleged) base was (supposedly) located, and immediately grumbled to himself about how tired he was of having to use words like ‘alleged’ and ‘supposedly’. He got out of the car and walked the rest of the way to the building, which was, he noted, completely inconspicuous. Not even the ‘conspicuously inconspicuous’ he’d seen on other hidden lairs before, where so much work was put into making a place look ‘normal’ that it stood out among the more natural surroundings. This building had just the right amount of wear, tear, and even some graffiti.

It also had a big problem. Rick’s eye was caught by a glint of light, and when he glanced in its direction, he saw the hero Cambion perched on a rooftop not too far away, looking the place over. Apparently, some supers had also gotten wind of the rumor, and were checking it out. As Rick watched, several other members of the Paragons gathered on the rooftop, along with some unaffiliated heroes.

“Well,” he muttered to himself, “Looks like [i]someone[/i] thinks it’s legit.” He considered this for a bit, and smiled as he had an idea. Making a full circuit of the building, he finally found the personnel entrance (he knew trying to get in through the bay door would be suicide). He took a moment to muss his hair and clothes and put on the air of someone who’s panicking before he banged on the door.

The person who answered the door was not wearing a Scorpion uniform, but there was no real reason to expect he would be; that’d be much too easy a way to give the base away, and the whole point was to keep it [i]secret[/i], after all. Wasting no time, Rick tried to get through the door, saying “Lemme in, lemme in!” in a hushed but frantic voice, occasionally glancing back at the rooftop where heroes continued to gather.

“Nobody-- hey! Nobody gets in without the password! Say it!”

“I can’t! [i]He[/i] had it!” Rick said, sounding harried but keeping it vague. Pointing across the street he continued, “Look man, the Paragons are right across the street, don’t just leave me out here!”

The doorman leaned out to look, swore, and slammed the door shut in Rick’s face. On the other side, he could be heard shouting for people to get ready, and a rising chorus of alarm could be heard, along with the sound of powerful hydraulics lifting something into place. Rick smiled and opened the door again; the door guard had been so panicked by the sight of the incoming heroes (who were even now moving in to start their raid on the formerly secret base) that he hadn’t noticed Rick slipping a gift card onto the door’s strike plate, preventing it from locking. Rick left the gift card there as he made his way inside, in case the door locked on both sides.

Inside, the base was in a panic - and not without reason, as the heroes were beginning to batter down the loading bay door already. Rick counted at least thirty Scorpion troops in their red armor, carrying guns and stylized swords; four of them were in huge suits of power armor, and all were either drinking or passing around vials of a bright green fluid. He quickly snapped some pictures of the scene on his phone as he hastily made his way down a set of stairs leading below street level, wondering just how deep the base went if it could hide so many personnel.

The trip from the utility room holding the back door to the stairs had been short, and the guards were all quite distracted, so he was pretty sure he hadn’t been seen, but he waited and listened a moment just to be sure. When nobody shouted ‘intruder’ or came after him, he decided he was safe enough for now. Making his way into the workings of the underground base, he noticed with relief that it was almost entirely deserted; almost everyone was doubtless up above trying to hold off the invaders, and Rick knew that all of the Scorpion agents who weren’t holding off the heroes would be destroying whatever evidence they could to keep it out of the hands of the heroes. Thus, wherever they were, he wanted to be.

It wasn’t long before he found two skinny men in ordinary clothes with Scorpion arm badges hard at work in an office of some sort; one was removing a hard drive from a computer, the other was pouring lighter fluid into the drawers of a filing cabinet. Neither of them paid Rick any mind as he came in, and neither noticed what he was doing until he’d already taken the weighted bottom of an office lamp and smashed it across the back of one of their heads. That one sprawled on the floor, and the other was too surprised to put up much of a fight when Rick hit him in the side of the head with the lamp. The editor, ever cautious in his judgement, hit each of them a few more times just to be sure they were down.

He could hear explosions from upstairs now, and that was his cue to leave. Glancing around, Rick pocketed the hard drive, the least soggy files from the cabinet, and a post-it note with a phone number from the desk before rushing back up the stairs and out the back of the building.

The fight was still in full swing, and had proceeded into the basement levels of the building, meaning the editor was unobserved as he made his way back to his car and drove off for home. He left the windows down as he drove, and hoped the smell of lighter fluid wouldn’t seep into his upholstery.

After he made it back to his home, he set the hard drive aside and prepared to get to work seeing if he could uncover what it knew. First, though, went back to the wiki editing window - still open from when he’d left in a fit of pique - and made a quick modification.

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[b]Location:[/b] Scorpion maintains a network of hidden bases throughout the world, hidden in locations ranging from warehouses to penthouses to caves. However, there are rumors of larger bases, also scattered worldwide, where Scorpion trains its agents and performs its research.

Scorpion is now known to have a greater than normal presence in, and focus on, Titan City[14,15,16]. Recent evidence shows a network of hidden bases in Titan City[15,16]. This is expected to change soon, however[citation needed].
Last edit: 5/29/2018 at 11:55 pm

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Written by - William 'Robin' Strickland

Discuss the Update here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/discuss-what-we-think-we-know-about-scorpion