Previous Post Hatman's smart, dividing up the teams the way he did. CSFB! won't annoy him quite as much, Vizh and Icy have similar personalities, Yuki can smack Al B Harper on the back of the head when he misbehaves, etc. Good thing Vinnie is just moderating the thing, since he would be able to cheat shamelessly with the help of Liu Xi. She's clever enough to bring the maguffins to her rather than searching for them. Which can be frustrating for the WNC, and incur their wrath (she's not particularly afraid of their wrath, but Visionary likely is). Though it's entirely possibly she already has one of them. Or that someone we know does - who said they all have to be hidden somewhere? Meanwhile I wonder how many of the peripheral friends of the Legion will be trying to stack the deck in their favor?

> Hatman's smart, dividing up the teams the way he did. CSFB! won't annoy him quite as much, Vizh and Icy have similar personalities, Yuki can smack Al B Harper on the back of the head when he misbehaves, etc.

Well, Hatty's an old hand at dividing his team to get the best possible combos. As I recall he was deputy leader back during the Rakshasa Challenge and in Finny's absence at that point he was effectively team captain. When it comes to sporting-type events Jay just comes into his own.

> Good thing Vinnie is just moderating the thing, since he would be able to cheat shamelessly with the help of Liu Xi. She's clever enough to bring the maguffins to her rather than searching for them. Which can be frustrating for the WNC, and incur their wrath (she's not particularly afraid of their wrath, but Visionary likely is). Though it's entirely possibly she already has one of them. Or that someone we know does - who said they all have to be hidden somewhere?

The maguffins are all well protected against the easy forms of cheating because otherwise both sides could do it. The WNC was founded by Madame Symmetry of Syncronicity, after all, and now she's actually one of the Triumvirate. But anything she tries is likely to be blocked by Lisa and vice verse. The maguffins protect themelves or are protected against cosmic-type interference. So the WNC can't head back in time to get the maguffins yesterday and the Shoggoth can't just make timespace rifts to their locations and so on.

As we'll see though, the race is level because while the WNC have access to some nasty abilities and huge resources the first part of the scavenger hunt is to actually find the damn objects; and Hatty's stacked his team with a detective, an archscientist, a librarian, a Shoggoth, and Visionary, all of whom have finding-stuff specialisms or experience of one kind or another.

I also wanted the teams the way they are so I can tell a different kind of hunt story in each of the five locations. It'll keep things from getting repetitious. I've lined up some very special guest villains too.

> Meanwhile I wonder how many of the peripheral friends of the Legion will be trying to stack the deck in their favor?

Quite a few I'd imagine, but then again the opposition will be doing the same for themselves, as we'll see. For the purposes of this story and to prevent it running into multi-part epicdom we'll probably have to just assume all the things the Juniors or the Abhumans or the Purveyors of Peril are doing in the background. I've resisted throwing in too many cast to try and tell a quick fun chase story. If we're lucky we might get a quick input from the Laundry of Doom cast before the end.

Of course, anyone wanting to offer a tie-in might note that the occult underworld is probably involved in some heavy side-betting that could be a story in its own right.