The episode opens with a montage:

• Neils is in his lab staring into space.
• Narsil, with a look of horror on his face, calmly says “You’re holding… a press conference.” (The calm is clearly forced.)
• Neils is in his lab moving at ludicrous speed.
• Damien is at a Press Conference being asked why he thinks Werewolves wouldn’t be good police officers, if they existed of course, by someone we all know that he knows to be a Werewolf.
• Neils is in his lab staring into space.
• At Starbucks there is a line for the Women’s Room. It sounds like someones might be in there for a while.
• Neils is in his lab staring into space. The lights are flickering around him.
• Aenaiyah walks past an elderly woman in the bathroom line at Starbucks who has a name for people who use public restrooms for personal pleasure. 
• In the basement of the sanctum there is a gathering of Mages. Rex yells for Aenaiyah and Argus to “Quit fooling around and get down here.” Aenaiyah can be heard attempting to coax her familiar, Noel, into clawing Argus’s face off.
• Neils is swearing that whatever it is, he didn’t do it.
• Aenaiyah reaches her arm into Neils’s lab, and as it crosses the threshold into the lab it looks… wibbley-wobbley.
• Neils continues to insist that this isn’t his fault as Aenaiyah goes into a spell-casting induced trance.
• A mushroom cloud.
• Aenaiyah screams “24 to 48 HOURS AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO EXPLODE!!!”

Some Mages might try to hide something like this from their Consilium. Some Mages might think that this is exactly the kind of thing that can get a cabal in trouble.

That would not be these Mages.

On the one hand, going to people with more Arcane Skills than you to fix something like this that could put a large number of people in jeopardy is the right thing to do. On the other hand, it kinda takes the fun out of it for the GM. I mean, the Arch Mages of the Consilium should have some clue as to what might be happening here. After all, if they don’t they look like they maybe aren’t as competent as they would pretty much have to be to keep a lid on a city the size of Manhattan. The problem is that I don’t want the Consilium to step in here. I want the PCs to take care of this mess themselves. After all, it is their mess. This is why I made the decision that the Obrimos Arch Master is not in town. After all, he is the guy who works at the state level in Albany so it makes sense that he isn’t around all the time, and this sort of thing really would be a Prime Arcana area of expertise.

I also wanted to let the situation develop a bit. After all, just because Aenaiyah says they have to take care of this thing RIGHT NOW doesn’t mean they really have to worry about it now. Let’s face it, we all know Aenaiyah is just a bit excitable and a tad melodramatic. And then there’s the part that I knew that they didn’t.

Well, most of them didn’t. Let me give you a bit of history:

One of my favorite moments as a player happened many moons ago playing FASA Star Trek. My brother (our GM) had Transporter Chief West (an NPC) beam my character (Chief Medical Officer Standis) and the corpse of an Andorian Ambassador (pending autopsy) beamed through the shields of our ship, instead of simply beaming us up a few levels past the blocked turbo lift and into the medical area of the abandoned complex on the planet’s surface as I had specifically requested. (The result of his rolling a critical fail on the transport.) Naturally this didn’t go so well for the former ambassador, or me for that matter. (#@%& WEST!!!)

What my crew mates didn’t know, and I was about to find out, was that the Andorian Ambassador was in fact a shape shifting alien who had taken the place of the ambassador. This shape shifter wasn’t actually dead, though it really didn’t have any warm fuzzies for our transporter chief after the beaming incident let me tell you! (DAMN YOU WEST!!)

Anyway, my character was, in truth, knocked unconscious, and being handy the shape shifting alien took her place so that it could work its way into a position of power. So now I was tasked with the alien’s mission: get the captain of the ship alone, take his place, and get the ship to take me wherever I bloody well please. And so I (the PC, the GM was no help at all) came up with this story about needing to pull medical records from the facility on the planet, and needing the Captain to come down with me so that he can enter his command codes so that I can get access to the computer. The person playing the Captain totally falls for it and away we go! (And this time West remembers to lower the shields first. CURSE YOU ANYWAY WEST!)

Meanwhile back on the ship, Security Officer Dugowski (a Player Character) has a minor injury and heads to sickbay. Not seeing my character there, he goes to the supply cabinet for the first aid kit and “Standis’s body falls out of the closet on top of you.”

Dugowski: “Wait. What? Isn’t Standis on the planet with the Captain getting some records from the station?”

GM: “Hold that thought. I have to go into the kitchen to see what’s happening on the planet with Standis and the Captain.”

Dugowski: “But… wait… BRRRRRT!” (player makes flipping-old-school-Start-Trek-Communicator-open motion while imitating the “open channel” sound.) “BRRRRRRT!”

Mind you, I can see what’s going on the other room but have cleverly maneuvered the person playing the captain so he won’t be paying attention to what’s happening in there.

The person playing the Captain was not pleased when he figured it all out moments later.

Now: back to the Mage game a decade or two later…

Enter: the person playing Neils.

You see, one of the many cool things you can do with Prime Magic is create puppets with Prime.

Sometimes these are very real looking puppets!

And sometimes a Paradox involves some kind of manifestation from the abyss.

And sometimes…

I love my job.