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A line-up of the Lab Mice, detailing their appearance without clothing, in their bodysuits, and in their tactical body armor.
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The Lab Mice: Henchmen par Excellence for Champions
Characteristics and Point Totals
| 13 | STR | 3 | 3 | PD | 0 | Primary characteristics | 63 | ||
| 18 | DEX | 24 | 3 | ED | 0 | Secondary characteristics | 17 | ||
| 13 | CON | 6 | 4 | SPD | 12 | Skills, powers, and abilities | 145 | ||
| 13 | BOD | 6 | 6 | REC | 0 | Total | 225 | ||
| 18 | INT | 8 | 30 | END | 2 | Disadvantages | –125 | ||
| 14 | EGO | 8 | 30 | STUN | 3 | ||||
| 18* | PRE | 6 | |||||||
| 14 | COM | 2 |
Skills, Abilities, and Powers
| * Normal PRE is 13; five points of PRE are added when wearing tactical hard-suits and thus are subject to obvious inaccessible focus limitation | |
| Armor (tactical hard-suit): 15 PD and 15 ED, obvious inaccessible focus | 30 |
| Duplication: 225 points base, 8 identical duplicates, may not recombine | 60 |
| Energy blast (CPAW): 5d6 energy, variable advantage (+1/2 maximum), obvious accessible focus, no knockback, does not work in vacuum, does not work under water, eight twelve-shot “clips” (power cells) | 25 |
| Mind link: up to eight other Lab Mice with Mind Link at a time | 12 |
| Running: +1" | 2 |
| Swimming: +1" | 1 |
| Skill (sign language): fluent conversation | 2 |
| Skill (teamwork): 18– | 13 |
| One of these advantages may be selected for energy blast: | |
| Affects desolidified | |
| Area effect: | one hex |
| Armor-piercing: | cuts unhardened defense in half |
| Autofire: | five shots |
| Damage shield: | 5d6 versus successful hand-to-hand attacker |
| Explosion: | –1 damage class per hex radius |
| Indirect: | attack originates from any location, fires away from attacker |
| Invisible power effect: | insensible to one sense group |
| No range penalty | |
| Penetrating: | inflicts a minimum of one point of Stun per Body rolled; negated by hardened defenses |
| Trigger: | trigger effect can be changed each time the power is used |
| Or two of these advantages may be selected: | |
| Difficult to dispel: | treated as double active points to resist Dispel (may be selected twice) |
| Increased maximum range: | five times normal range (may be selected twice) |
| Indirect: | attack always comes from same location, fires away from attacker |
| Personal immunity: | attacker cannot be affected by own power |
| Time delay: | delay must be set at time of use |
| Trigger: | trigger effect is the same each time power is used |
Disadvantages
| Hunted (federal authorities): 11–, more powerful, non-combat influence, seeks to imprison | 25 |
| Hunted (player’s/referee’s discretion): 8–, as powerful, seeks to imprison | 10 |
| Normal characteristic maxima | 20 |
| Physical limitation (no voicebox): frequent, greatly impairing | 15 |
| Psychological limitation (ruthless): common, strongly committed | 15 |
| Psychological limitation (loyal and obedient): very common, moderately committed | 15 |
| Reputation (ruthless and professional): 11– | 10 |
| Public identity | 10 |
| Unluck: 1d6 | 5 |
Growth Paths
For higher-point campaigns, here are some suggestions for expanding the capabilities of the Lab Mice.
- All sorts of nifty little gadget-based powers could be hung on the tactical hard-suits. Limited Life Support, Enhanced Senses, Flash Defense, and additional Armor are some good possibilities. In most cases these will be obvious inaccessible foci.
- Other gadget-based powers could be added, as appropriate for a small, highly trained entry team. One might be a bandolier of grenades—attacks based on obvious accessible foci on charges. Flash-bangs (Flash covering two sense groups, vision and hearing, perhaps coupled with a Presence attack), smoke (Darkness with area effect and persistence), and sleepy-gas (Energy Blast with no normal defense, explosion, and persistence) are some good possibilities.
- Consider adding appropriate tactical skills, such as martial arts, to the Lab Mice themselves. These would include anything one might design into elite military or paramilitary operatives, such as one might find in SAS, GSG-9, or SEAL teams.
- If the other direction is more appealing, considering striking the unluck first, then a hunter, or even both hunters. The remaining disadvantages are intrinsic to the character concept, though, and probably should be retained.
Character Description
If any single word sums up the Lab Mice, that word would have to be professionalism. Their powers, equipment, and cool discipline under fire make them far more dangerous than they might at first appear, even to superheroes much more powerful than any one of them. Despite the fact that they are completely mute, they are suitable for a variety of roles in any super-criminal organization, whether concentrated as an entry or support team or dispersed as cadre or officers for lower-point agents.
Physical Appearance and Equipment
The Lab Mice are just that: five-foot-tall anthropomorphic female mice. Their short, glossy white pelts cover most of their bodies, except where one might expect bare skin to show through, such as fingers, palms, toes, soles, and tails, among other places. Their physiques combine a svelte slenderness with well-rounded hips and rock-hard muscles—though the latter are not immediately apparent thanks to the softening effect of the fur.
Their heads, however, are their most distinctive features. Jet-black scalp hair is cut moderately short, with wings sweeping around the nape of the neck and bangs brushed to a point between the eyebrows. The ears are large and oval, able to swivel or twitch when not confined in a helmet. The face, with its short, faired-in muzzle, neat little nosepad and mouth, and large all-black eyes, can be surprisingly daunting, especially in the steady, solemn non-expression the Mice habitually adopt.
When not in armor, the Lab Mice normally wear satin-black zip-up body-suits with integral boot-soles, thumb stirrups, and mandarin collars. An identifier numeral is printed on the front of the left thigh and the back of the right shoulder. The Mice themselves do not seem to care which body-suit or armor each individual is wearing; the Mouse wearing suit number four today might wear suit number two tomorrow. They also seem to lack any concept of body shyness, evincing the same matter-of-fact attitude toward nudity that theater actors might display while backstage.
The armored hard-suits they wear when on the job are satin-gloss black and brutally functional-looking, with little ornamentation other than a few small operational stencils and a large identifier numeral on the chest and back. They are not powered armor, though they do contain Bungee-cord-based pseudomusculature to balance their own mass, making them highly responsive to the wearer’s movements. They are designed to allow for the addition of new equipment as budget and mission parameters allow, such as electronic sensory and information systems.
Psychology
Though their personalities are functionally identical, the Lab Mice are individuals; they are not a mass mind. However, each is constantly aware of the others, and consensus is quickly and easily arrived at when necessary. Being mute, they normally communicate with others by sign language, especially tactical hand signals, or by typed or written text. Should a mentallist eavesdrop on their running half-conscious mental commentary to one another, he or she will find they tend to think in pictures and sensory impressions rather than in words, though they are capable of doing so when the situation demands it. Moreover, they prefer to tag people with descriptive labels rather than using names.
The Mice are noted above as being “ruthless”, “loyal”, and “obedient”. However, they are not cruel or gratuitously violent, nor do they follow orders blindly. Cruelty or excessive violence not only take time and attention from the mission at hand, but can result in stronger resistance than they might expect otherwise. They also take a professional pride in being able to strike and withdraw quickly and cleanly and in using their initiative to improvise in the face of unexpected developments and accomplish the mission anyway. Ruthlessness, for them, simply means that they tend toward the most effective and efficient method of meeting their goals, whatever that method may be. Their obedience focuses more on accomplishing a goal than on hewing to a set of instructions: they function better when told what to do rather than how to do it.
When not carrying out missions, they may be employed in other functions—for instance, training or performing basic maintenance on their equipment, or acting as laboratory assistants, majordomos, or body servants (such as valets or dressing maids) for their superiors. They are not merely a matched set of grim, humorless automatons, though. Off duty, they are more than willing to enjoy some of the finer things in life their work brings them. They are connoisseurs and sensualists rather than gluttons and hedonists, and show their enjoyment mostly in small, neat flourishes—disciplined even in their pleasures, and always alert.
Background
The motivations and history of the Lab Mice would be murky to most characters, since the Mice avoid inquiry into either. For most campaigns, the most plausible origin is that they are the result of highly sophisticated genetic engineering and artificial maturation techniques, followed up by intensive training regimes. Who created them and why is left to the individual referee to decide, for obvious reasons. One of the Hunted disadvantages is likewise open for the player or referee to designate.
In any case, their master (or mistress) should be selected with an eye toward compatibility. The Lab Mice are probably trusted and well treated, or they would not remain the finely honed instrument they are. As well, that master villain should value precision, ability, and initiative in his or her senior minions—the sort of character that might bemoan the difficulty of finding good help and who runs a tight ship. A supremacist of some sort, or simply someone that wants to run the world for its own good, could work well.
Operating Procedure
The Lab Mice are, essentially, a master villain’s equivalent of a crack combat team, such as one might find in the British military’s SAS or the U. S. Navy’s SEALs. They use small-unit tactics, crisp fire and maneuver discipline, and perfect coordination to engage superbeings or overwhelm agent-class opponents. However, as written, they are somewhat fragile defensively, and care should be taken to minimize exposure to powerful attacks when possible.
For offensive weapons, they carry small CPAWs—charged particle accelerator weapons. These are, in effect, “lightning guns” that fire beams or pulses of energetic electrons. They are not as powerful as the typical attack power used by many superbeings, but they are capable of tremendous tactical flexibility. When firing at a brick, for instance, they can make the beams armor-piercing; a martial artist or speedster might instead find himself at the center of an explosion.
If they are part of a supervillain group, their best role would be as the “hands and feet” of the group, carrying out the vital secondary tasks of an operation while the more powerful villains run interference for them. As part of an agent group, they could serve as a spearpoint assault team, followed up by lesser agents, or as scouts or stiffening elements. The latter use, however, may strip them of one of their most useful tactical attributes: the ability to coordinate attacks on a moment’s notice. Ω
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