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Coincidence… I Think Not
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.”
I Don’t Feel Tardy
Class was indeed about to begin, but who was about to get schooled? A ranting madman holds Aenaiyah and several others as a captive audience to his lecture on the dangers of city life. Argus stands behind him, invisible for the moment, and a quick switch to Prime Sight shows him that Aenaiyah’s fellow students are Sleepers. Someone will have to get them out of there before anything inexplicable happens.
Enter our second Acanthus Mage and friends. With a quick twisting of Fate she chooses a path that leads to Aenaiyah and Argus. That she has a sympathetic connection to both of them doesn’t hurt any, simply follow the Fate line!
Eventually the others arrive. Argus holds his action, waiting for a good moment to strike (he was smart like that once upon a time!), and eventually it arrives. He steps out of of sight range of the Sleepers present to drop invisibility, as the newly arrived Neils erects a Forces Wall between the lunatic and his victims. Argus steps out with gun drawn, and badge prominently displayed.
“Stop right there, FBI. Get your hands up where I can see them, now!”
(Or something to that effect)
At which point all hell breaks loose.
The madman whirls on Argus, who is standing directly behind him to draw his attention away from the kidnappees, a clever move. His plan works, and more than that it screens the tentacle that lashes out of the man’s chest at Argus’ throat.
Fortunately the Sleeper witnesses blew their WITS+COMPOSURE rolls. Apparently they were distracted by the young girl who wandered over to untie them. They hadn’t been well tied (apparently I roll a lot of rocks) and she managed to get them loose. She then used her Direction Sense merit to lead them back to the platform and away from the fight.
And what a fight it was!
Argus stuck to his service pistol for his first attack so as not to reveal Magic to Sleepers. The Flesh Intruder (though they did not have that name for it yet) lashed out with more tentacles (it has several attacks per round) and did a lovely job of poking holes through our favorite Guardian. Sadly, not lovely enough.
Nokoni was able to patch Argus up, while Neils “I Don’t Need No Stinkin Veil” of the Free Council hurled some Celestial Fire at the creature. Molly the Mastigos punched it in what was left of its brain, while Rex showed off his skill with a nail-gun-walking-cane.
The creature, not one to go quietly, got some more lashes in before finally being subdued by fire. The Mages quickly conferred and decided that burning the body utterly would be best. Before they did that though, they looked for any information they could find as to who this man had once been. There wasn’t much to go on. Rex was able to make brief contact with his ghost, but only enough to know that the man had in fact been a police officer. He was just far too gone to find out more than that.
This will bear further investigation, as soon as Aenaiyah stops screaming at Argus for waiting so long to untie her.
Mass Transit Abomination
With the club issues settled the Mages had a few days of peace before the next bit of news arrived via their favorite conspiracy paper “Sick Sad World”.
It seems that women in the city were being kidnapped, but only for a few hours before being let go. It was exactly the sort of odd situation that surely no good could come of. Sounds like a job for… the Mage PCs Who Had Not Yet Come Up With a Cabal Name! (Not very catchy, is it?)
With the Stars (in alphabetical order):
- Aenaiyah: Mysterium/Acanthus
- Argus: Guardian of the Veil/Obrimos
- Marissa: Apostate/Acanthus
- Molly: Apostate/Mastigos
- Neils: Free Council/Obrimos
- Nokoni: Adamantine Arrow/Thyrsus
- Rex: Free Council/Moros
Through a combination of obtaining police reports (Argus) and twisting fate to stumble upon newspaper articles (Marissa) the group manages to track down a few of the kidnapping victims’ names and addresses. They decide to split the list while interviewing the formerly kidnapped women. Aenaiyah and Molly pose as a journalist (Aenaiyah actually was one before her Awakening) and journalism intern looking for some additional information for a newspaper article that they are writing on the mysterious kidnappings. Argus flashes his FBI badge to talk to some of the others in a more official capacity with Rex as his partner. Neils and Nokoni argue about who will be keeping an eye on Marissa (she is only a child after all), meaning that neither one of them was actually paying any attention when she wandered off to get ice cream. Ultimately they found her and bought her a Wii to keep her busy while the others brought back the information they had obtained from the victims. It seems that each woman was grabbed in the area of a particular train station in the city. This station is conveniently located next to a bar, which is probably where the women were targeted. Oddly enough, each of the women tell a similar story – the kidnapping was a weird sort of “Scared Straight” scenario in which they were kidnapped, brought to a disused subway tunnel, and ranted at regarding how unsafe it is for young women to be alone in the city at night.
If only the Mages knew a woman with shocking purple hair and a slutty wardrobe who might be kidnapped at a bar…
Oh! Hello Aenaiyah!
And so the plan is set. Aenaiyah will go to the bar, where she will hopefully be approached by the kidnapper. Sounds like a great plan to me! Oh, and Argus will turn invisible and follow her when she gets dragged off. :::yawn::: When “last call” is made and still no kidnapper approaches Aenaiyah (she can tell that the random drunks trying to get lucky just don’t have the necessary Fate aura to be the kidnapper), they think the evening might be a loss…unless… the kidnapper might not actually approach the women at the bar, he might just follow them down to the train platform. And so Aenaiyah, with invisible Argus in tow, heads down to the platform where she is promptly kidnapped and dragged away.
She is dragged through the maze of tunnels to a disused area where a couple of other women are tied up waiting for the arrival of the evening’s final student.
Class is now ready to begin!
In Other News:
Right about now you’re probably asking: “What about the people who went off to find the Werewolves in Central Park? “ If you are, you are not alone in this. Aenaiyah and Nokoni were asking that too…repeatedly… while I was attempting to stall.
You see, I knew something that they didn’t. I knew that the Werewolves didn’t happen to be in Central Park right then and there. I knew this because their GM IMed me so.
This is a parallel campaign. While my table of Mages busied themselves retrieving a grimoire in France, the table of Werewolves had problems of their own to deal with back home in NYC. A group of Azlu were operating an illegal nightclub in a “place-that isn’t”, existing only in the Spirit Realm and only being accessible for a few nights out of every month. (They were running a module called “Parlor Games”.) Nokoni, being a Thyrsus Mage, is aware that Werewolves play an important role in protecting the physical world from threats attempting to reach through the Gauntlet and tells his fellow Mages so. As a result the Mages are afraid that perhaps someone left that body at the edge of the park in an attempt to cause trouble for the Werewolves of the city. In reality the Werewolves found the body hidden in the truck, about to be disposed of by servants of the Azlu, and one of the less responsible Wolves decided that if they posed the body in the van they could draw out the murderers and deal with them. This happened early on in the second session.
As an amusing side note: at the start of the third session one of the Werewolf players asked if that particular decision made the news, and when their GM started shuffling through her papers to find a handout he knew that no good could come of it.
And so, when my Mage players asked yet again: “So, what about the folks who went to Central Park? Have we made contact with the Werewolves yet?” I had no answer for them. The Werewolves were chasing down an Azlu who had bolted from the fight last session and the combat that followed was taking longer than the conversations at the Mage table. Eventually I was forced to just own up to it. I told them “The Werewolves aren’t at the Park just yet.”
Aenaiyah: “Well, why can’t we just skip ahead until they are at the Park?”
Me: “Ummmm…”
Aenaiyah: Gives me the stink-eye
Me: “I’m not sure when they are going to get there yet. I’m trying to find out.”
Aenaiyah: “What do you mean you’re trying to find out!?”
Rex: “Wait-a-minute… these Werewolves we’re trying to make contact with… they wouldn’t happen to be…” points thumb towards the other game table, “those Werewolves, would they?”
Me: Shrugging in a non-committal manner “Maybe?”
Hilarity ensued.
Who Let the Dogs Out?
The Mages have a mystery on their hands. They have a body in a van, and it has drawn a great deal of attention from the mundane world. Not only is the well read though little believed conspiracy rag “Sick Sad World” reporting on this, major news outlets are reporting on it too. This is exactly the kind of thing that draws the attention of Hunters, which makes it precisely the type of thing the Guardians of the Veil are supposed to prevent from happening.
What follows, right after a certain purple haired Brit gets asked a few questions about who she is and why she’s in the city, is lots and lots of research.
WHO LET THE DOGS OUT
A ‘Sick Sad World’ Exclusive Story!
According to this article distributed by an anonymous press (download the PDF at the link above!) some art students from The Cooper Union were witness to the events of the previous evening. Both this article and the previous one, MONSTER IN MANHATTAN, seem to indicate the presence of Werewolves at the club. The van’s headlights were shining on a symbol carved into a tree that is consistent with a Werewolf Territory Marker. The thing is, the body that was found in the van doesn’t look like it was killed by a Werewolf. Werewolves aren’t exactly known for sucking the insides out of a body while leaving the candy shell intact.
Somebody must be trying to call out the city’s Werewolves!
The Mages decide that the best thing to do is split the party. Having noticed the sidebar about the “NBC Production Employee sent home after Wild Ravings”, one group (including resident FBI Agent on Sabbatical Argus Guille, and Moros Mage Rex) will be heading to the station’s offices to track down this employee and talk about what happened. One group: Mastigos Molly, Free Councillor Neils, and the Acanthus child Marissa, is heading off to the college to talk to the students who drew the artwork. The third and final group, Thyrsus Nokoni and the newly met Acanthus Aenaiyah, are off to Central Park to see if they can be not torn apart by the city’s Werewolf community.
At the TV station Argus abuses his FBI credentials to have a chat with the production manager who sent the employee home. She informs him that the employee was working on a story about illegal casinos operating in the city. It takes a while to get inside of one, or even track one down. They move around a lot, and don’t operate every night. He had finally gotten in, without smuggling in a camera because he knew he would be searched, when something happened that drove him totally over the edge. His manager’s suspicions involve drugs. She doesn’t believe he was deliberately taking any, but perhaps the operators of the casino were drugging the gamblers to loosen their wallets. Maybe her guy just had a bad reaction to something that they used. At any rate, she can give the FBI agent her employee’s home address, but obviously she can’t guarantee that he’ll be there. She advised him to see a doctor, but doesn’t know where he actually went after leaving the office.
At the college our intrepid Mages have little problem tracking down the artists they are looking for. Neils, being an academic, knows his way around a college campus and how to chat up the students. Molly, being a Mastigos Mage, can read minds. It’s a pretty potent combo in this situation. The fact the the law enforcement type didn’t tag along doesn’t hurt. The students are more than happy to talk about what they saw. “It was freaky man, they were like… Werewolves or somethin’. Pretty crazy. I mean… I know I was a little high… but this picture is like totally accurate…”
Mage Mistress 