The Mages don’t have much to go on, but they know that the person with the tentacles sprouting from his chest used to be a police officer, and they sorta know what he looked like before he turned into something with tentacles. Whatever happened must have happened recently. It was time to scan the papers and call in some police contacts.

As an FBI Agent, Argus knows a few officers of the law. He’s able to track down some information on people who had gone out on medical leave recently, one in particular who looks like a promising candidate. This particular individual wound up in the hospital after a brutal fight during a “domestic dispute” call left him with a punctured lung. Punctured lung… surgery on his chest… tentacles coming out of his chest… I believe we have a winner!

It is at this point that I must let you all in on a little secret. One of the folks from a long-ago game group of mine is an ambulance driver. One of the folks at this Mage table was part of that group, and is a lung doctor. It was impossible for me to pass up the opportunity of having both of them show up as NPCs at this juncture: getting the man to the hospital and then giving him a lung transplant. The beauty of this was in letting the lung doctor (he plays Argus) explain to himself how the surgery went. It’s a wonderful way to make sure that those annoying player-types don’t question your lack of knowledge on a subject like lung tranplants!

And so, Argus’ player explained to Argus the successful lung transplant, and then Argus tried to convince his player to give up the identity of the person whose lung was inserted when Argus’ player knows full well that he shouldn’t be handing that information out to just anyone.

It only now occurs to me that this may have been when I broke Argus’ player.

While Argus and his player argued with himselves?… each other?… themself?… other members of the cabal tried to find out more about this domestic dispute.  As it turned out, the couple in question had been engaged to be married, and things had been going quite swimmingly. Sure, there were some tense moments involved in planning the wedding because of dealing with the families, but nothing all that unusual. The bride-to-be joined a gym in order to lose those last few pounds before her final fitting, and to help herself relax. She was studying Qui-Gong at this new place that opened up recently in China Town, not far from where she worked. Ironically, it was a couple of weeks after starting the classes that the blushing bride started to get… twitchy. “I always thought that kind of thing was supposed to help people relax”, her fiance said, “but this time not so much.” Their final fight got vicious, and a neighbor called the police. When the officer arrived the husband to be let him in. He simply didn’t know what else to do. The woman he loved was having some kind of psychotic break and he couldn’t handle it alone. She needed help. She attacked the officer, and they fell into a glass table. He wound up with a large glass shard sticking out of his chest, she wound up with one slicing her throat open. She was pronounced dead on the scene. The officer was alive, but his lung was collapsing.

In the kind of quirk of fate that can only happen in the World of Darkness the woman and the officer had the same blood type. She was gone either way, and she was listed as an organ donor, so the fiance told them to transplant her lung into the officer. It was the fight with her that caused his injury, and in saner times she would have wanted to put that right.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I think I do have a flyer from the dojo sitting around here somewhere… yes… on the computer desk. Sure you can have it. I certainly don’t want it.”