The Hungry God

Session 08 - Earth's Last Stand

Guy LeFleur sat down with Boss Voss to wrestle with the most daunting task any of them had ever faced: planning the defense of Earth against an approaching celestial devourer. Boss Voss laid out everything they knew about the entity, which the scientists had taken to calling the Hungry God. On a distant, now-dead planet called Terra, a previous civilization had made the catastrophic mistake of funneling all of their meteor-granted power into a single champion, who defeated the old Hungry God only to become the new one. That new entity had then turned on the planet and consumed every living thing, leaving only the giant bugs behind — not out of mercy, but as a sustainable harvest, a seed crop to be reaped again on a future pass. The juice, as they called the meteor-derived energy, acted as a beacon, drawing the entity across the stars toward whatever planet it had seeded with power.

Guy pressed for every detail he could extract. The entity was estimated to be roughly twelve feet in size when curled within its meteor, traveling faster than light, and was expected to arrive in approximately one week. The group theorized that after a century of hibernation inside the rock, it would arrive starving and potentially weakened — much like a bear stumbling out of its den in early spring, angry and desperate. Guy proposed a bold idea: open a portal and lure the entity through it using the most heavily powered individual as bait, then seal the portal behind it. He also raised the possibility of using the juice extraction procedure — the painful, magnetized-fragment process the scientists had developed — directly against the entity itself, draining it of its power rather than killing it outright, since killing it seemed to be exactly what allowed it to jump into a new host.

While Guy was deep in strategic deliberation, Ronnie had been pulling on a very different thread. He had tracked down the desk of a facility scientist named Jimmy Johns, only to learn from a colleague that Johns hadn’t been seen since Miller had come by to speak with him. Ronnie kicked in the door to Johns’ apartment and found it ransacked — the unmistakable signs of someone who had packed and fled in a hurry. In the trash, he found the charred remains of blackmail photographs. The conclusion was immediate: Miller had been blackmailing Johns, and once Johns had served his purpose, Miller handed over the evidence and told him to disappear, leaving Johns to look like the guilty party. Along the way, Ronnie also confronted Xander at Paul’s bar, slamming his head onto the counter and extracting a confession that Xander had sold portal technology to the Chinese for a hundred million dollars — technology that had almost certainly allowed a Chinese operative named Tan Zang to escape the burning bug hive. Ronnie extorted fifty million dollars from Xander on the spot in exchange for silence, and the two shared a drink before the matter was considered closed between them.

Ronnie brought his findings to Sammy, and together they made their way to Miller’s apartment. The moment the door opened, Ronnie kicked it in. Miller tumbled across the room and, in a desperate last move, drove a syringe of stolen juice into his own arm before anyone could stop him. Ronnie answered with a single brutal knee strike to Miller’s head, and Miller crumpled to the floor, unconscious before he could make use of whatever he had just injected. Ronnie zip-tied him, and when Jens and Guy arrived moments later, the situation was already contained. Security was called, and Miller was dragged down to the RD3 facility and locked in a holding cell while Boss Voss was summoned to meet them there.

In RD3, the scientists set up the extraction chair and drew the juice back out of Miller’s unconscious body. When he was revived with smelling salts, he was defiant at first, demanding millions of dollars and immunity in exchange for the location of the stolen syringes. He revealed that he had replaced every real syringe in the facility with fakes, hiding the genuine ones under his bed — a staggering security failure that sent Ronnie into a cold fury directed squarely at Boss Voss. Ronnie began a methodical and brutal interrogation, breaking Miller’s leg and peeling off his fingernails with a knife while Boss Voss offered only the most performative of objections. Miller broke before Ronnie reached the last finger, confessing that the syringes were under his bed and that he had blackmailed Jimmy Johns using compromising photographs to facilitate the theft. His plan, he admitted with genuine conviction, had been to inject himself with all of the juice and fight the Hungry God himself — certain he would succeed where the champion of Terra had failed.

The interrogation was interrupted by a phone call on Ronnie’s cell. He put it on speaker, and a voice on the other end promised destruction in retaliation for the death of its children. Ronnie, entirely unmoved, pretended to place a Chinese takeout order before telling the caller that the Boss Voss campus was right next to Area 51 and they were welcome to come find them. The call was traced and analyzed, and the scientists soon pieced together the full picture: the Chinese had used the stolen portal technology to access Terra, attempted to weaponize the giant bugs, and instead had the bugs turn on them. The Hive Queen, communicating through a mind-controlled scientist, delivered a chilling message — in the memory of the hive, this was not the first time their planet had been devoured. The Hungry God had visited Terra before, consumed everything, and deliberately left the bugs alive to repopulate the world for a future harvest. The bugs were not random survivors. They were livestock.

The mood in the room shifted entirely when Brittany, who had come to the facility with Igor, approached Jens and attempted to use her power to summon one of her dimensional counterparts. Instead of a living woman, a skeleton holding a camera appeared, collapsed into a pile of bones, and left the camera behind. Jens picked it up. When the footage was reviewed, the room fell silent. The recording showed a battle at the Boss Voss campus — the party, surrounded by dozens of Brittanys, fighting a three-legged, three-armed creature wielding a sword. The Dragon engaged it first and was badly wounded. Guy used his speed to rush the Regenerator across the field to heal him. Sammy grew to thirty feet and seized the entity in his hands, but it exploded, costing Sammy both of his hands. As the creature fell, a portal opened beneath it and deposited it directly into an electrified bear trap near Ronnie. Ronnie tore it apart in a rage — and then his eyes turned red. He pulped The Dragon. Sammy, having recovered the entity’s sword, grew to enormous size and cleaved Ronnie in two before decapitating himself. The last figure standing was the Regenerator, whose eyes also turned red. He screamed, and everyone within range lost all the flesh from their bones. The camera dropped. Brittany fainted.

When she recovered, the party began pulling alternate versions of Brittany from across the multiverse to gather intelligence. One arrived who had lived through a successful version of events, and she confirmed what the footage had suggested: the electrified bear trap had worked to subdue the entity, and the juice extraction procedure had been the killing blow — draining the creature of its power before it could jump to another host. She also confirmed that the entity would first seek out the mutated anglerfish and the bear before making its way to the facility, feeding on their power to grow stronger. Jens used his ability to draw energy from the building’s electrical systems to keep Brittany’s strength up, allowing her to summon version after version of herself from timelines where the plan had succeeded or failed, building a comprehensive tactical blueprint. The Regenerator quietly rolled up his sleeve and revealed a zombie bite from his wife, admitting that most of his power was being spent just to hold the infection at bay — and that this infection might be the one thing the Hungry God could not survive.

With the blueprint in hand and three weeks before the entity’s arrival, the party set their priorities. Teams would be dispatched to deal with the mutated fish and the bear’s remains, cutting off the entity’s early feeding opportunities and ensuring it arrived as weak as possible. The juice would need to be carefully redistributed among the right people in the right order. The electrified bear trap would need to be built and positioned. And somewhere in the back of every mind was the quiet, unresolved question of what to do about the Regenerator — the man who might be both their greatest weapon and their most dangerous liability. The world had one week. The plan was fragile, the variables were many, and at least one version of the future had already ended in catastrophe. But for the first time, they had something that looked like a path forward.