Wushu Skidoo

No response. She looks down at her feet, through the wreck of the orbital weapons platform, and watches the Beijing super-city blossom like a flower not-so-far beneath her. "They're waiting until the last second," Skip pipes in on a private channel, echoing her thoughts from the safety of his stolen space plane. "Don't worry. I got this one."

Pregnant seconds pass as the platform begins to shake itself apart. Then, Skip blasts out from under the fireball and heads straight for the interlopers! Their collision-avoidance system kicks in and sends them reeling away... too far away to catch up before the platform explodes and Free Radical descends upon the Forbidden City in a literal blaze of glory...

Happy April Fool's Day! In honor of this sacred holiday, we return to the Age of Infocalypse with a new narrative structure and a trio of truly epic pranks. In the Datarchy future, bigger always means better!

Epic Fool

It's the future, bitches! We've got cars that fly themselves, augmented reality on tap, computers embedded in everything, and a monstrous pop culture that changes faces faster than a hydra in a wood chipper. (That means really, really fast.) Riding the wave of personal fame is a full-time job. Celebs and cykos risk life and limb to pull off bigger and crazier stunts, and they employ a rogue's gallery of ciphers, cryptos, creeps, and crashers to make it all happen.

Every April Fool's Day, the best and craziest pranksters get a personal invitation from a woman named (wait for it) April. She orchestrates epic stunts: pulls together all the resources, intel, and media attention. The trick is that everybody gets the same mission and they all have to compete with each other to pull it off. It's the Grand Prix of pranking!

The Strangelove Special

Your mission: Ride an orbital weapons platform as it crashes back to earth! You'll have to hijack a space plane, fly it to the right coordinates, bypass the satellite's defenses, and then use the plane to push it out of orbit. Then, all you have to do is hang on until it disintegrates in the atmosphere. If you time it right, the explosion will be truly spectacular, an awesome backdrop for an unforgettable landing.

Let's tackle those one at a time. Space planes are relatively common; there are plenty of commuters living or working in low Earth orbit. Either buy a ticket or steal one from its hangar. You'll need a crasher to actually fly the thing and a cipher to help you duck the aerospace tracking grid. Throw in a few interceptor drones and that's chase sequence numero uno.

You'll need a crypto to hack into the orbital weapons platform's cyber and disable its formidable self-defense systems. April will provide a few useful encryption keys, but it won't be a walk in the park. This is a great time to bring in a competing team of pranksters; counting the platform's cyber and combat drones, you've got yourself a three-sided fight scene.

Next stop: atmo! A ride like this could take several hours, so feel free to skip to the interesting parts. Bring in yet another competing team if you like the idea of a high-velocity fight scene in and around a burning, twisted wreck. Otherwise, an inconvenient equipment malfunction could provide an opportunity for technical stunting. In the Datarchy future, people use "hover-chutes" to reduce their inertia and survive falls from their flying cars or mile-high apartments; I'm not sure how you'd save a diver with a broken hover-chute, but there you are.

Finally, the big bang. After the platform explodes, the divers need to land in a dramatic and thematic location. I recommend The Forbidden City, Christ the Redeemer, or Chennakesava Temple. A legion of camera drones will already be on-site, streaming events live to thousands of feeds. Take your bows... and the run for you lives, 'cuz the authorities will be on you like botnets on an unpatched server. (If you picked Christ the Redeemer, let the mighty robots of Project Cassandra off their leash!)

Hot Potato

Nobody steals things, anymore. It's not worth the hassle. There's no way to unload merchandise of any real value without the transaction getting traced, so why bother? For fun, is one reason; to show the authorities that they're getting lazy, is another. In this case, all of the above plus this: April said so.

Your mission: Steal a priceless McGuffin and play a high-stakes game of keep-away with the authorities and other pranksters! The item in question isn't really important, as long as it can be easily carried and passed between people. Step one, steal the damned thing. Step two, split into two teams and stage exciting chases, escapes, and hand-offs all over town. Step three, maneuver another team into getting caught with the potato still in their hands. You win!

The theft can be a simple smash-and-grab or a more elaborate heist, but the goal is NOT to get away clean. You want to be chased. If another team beats you to it, you'll just have to steal it from them. I highly recommend setting this mission in Brazilia, so you can bring in the crime-predicting forces of Project Cassandra. They won't know what's about to happen, not exactly, but they'll be on the scene and looking for trouble.

Now for the good part. Split your heros into two teams and stage a series of increasingly dramatic chase sequences. These come in two varieties: parkour-style foot chases and flying car chases. Each sequence should end in a hand-off to the other team. Eventually, a competing team of pranksters will have to intercept the McGuffin, but let the would-be receivers handle getting it back. (In other words, if you were involved in the last chase, let someone else take the next one.)

A few suggestions:

• Parkour chase through an indoor environment like a mall, park, or casino.
• Flying cars through traffic; retrieving the McGuffin means hijacking enemy vehicles.
• Parkour or car chase through a mile-high construction site.
• Hover-chute free fall chase down the side of a building!

Here's the tricky part. The winning team is the one who had the hot potato right before the team that gets caught with it. That means you have to lure your competitors into an inescapable situation and then let them swipe the McGuffin. If they manage to escape (i.e. because they still have some Chi), they'll try to do the same thing to you on the next round. On it goes until somebody runs out of Chi and gets left holding the bag, um... potato.

Raising R'yleh

Atlantis Rising was one of the most spectacularly mistimed ventures in the history of failure. It was a mobile resort that could raise and lower itself from the ocean depths. Construction was barely complete when the Blackout Wars broke out. The cost of energy spiked, which rendered Atlantis Rising impossible to operate at a profit. For decades, it sat at the bottom of the Persian Gulf, just off the coast of Dubai.

It's been recently purchased by a South American drug baron who is having it moved to Ecuador via the South Pacific... right through the path of a luxury cruise liner and very near the coordinates of Lovecraft's fictitious, sunken city. Best of all, the resort includes a gigantic, free-moving statue of Poseidon. It's just too damn good to pass up!

Your mission: Hijack an underwater resort and stage the awakening of Great Cthulhu! Once you've gained control of the vessel, you'll have to move it into position and alter the Poseidon statue to look like a cephalopod (I'm sure you'll think of something), while repelling attacks from rival teams. When the cruise ship sails by, surface the resort and make with the mechanical fists of fury!

The hijacking is a bit more complicated than you might expect. The resort has no cyber and it's not connected to the global Net. It's systems are 100% mechanical and dumb as bricks, so hacking won't get you very far. (On the other hand, the personnel operating those systems are wired to the gills. Hack their augmented realities all you want) Also, they're making most of the trip submerged, so you'll have to board underwater.

Liven up the tedious moving-into-position and giving-Poseidon-a-make-over segments with a healthy dose of attacks by rival pranksters. If they can't take over, they might settle for vandalism. Create side-goals for staying on course and keeping those tentacles securely attached to Poseidon's face.

Okay, it's show time. Bring the resort to the surface and let the cruise ship's cameras get a good look at you. Then, bring Poseidon in for his close-up and start wrecking up the joint! Incidentally, it might be a good idea to have one or two people infiltrate the cruise ship and disable its security systems. Nor would it hurt to hack into the tourists' cyberspecs and make them see a few star-spawn or deep ones. (You can't have everyone operating the giant robot for an entire scene! This ain't Voltron.)

One more idea: A team from Tokyo just happens to have a robotic Godzilla on their hands and they've decided to crash the party. (The atomic fire breath may or may not be an illusion.) Don't let them steal your spotlight!