Apologies for the gap, there. All of the weekend tabletop gaming got put on hold for a couple of weeks while one of my players recovered from having his gallbladder removed. But this past Saturday, we finally had a proper Requiem session again.
Previously, the coterie of vampires took some info from a contact and went in search of answers. They found instead more questions, confusing spirit-things that can launch lightning at them, a mysterious phone number, and a fresh load of anger to direct at the contact in question.
Speaking of which, where we come back to our protagonists, they'd taken their own trips to feed (Humfrey being the only one to cause a scene, having bludgeoned someone unconscious in a bar bathroom in the process) on their way to the meeting spot. They met up at a bar -- and newly-declared Elysium -- called 'Chemical Reactions', run by a barely-competent Carthian club rat named Leland* (whom Derrick named as his Herald because Leland knows everyone and it's an excuse to keep an eye on him), to basically figure out what to do about Billy. Derrick and Matthew wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt that it might have been an accident and lure him out to a scenario where they could try and figure out if he was trying to get them killed. Humfrey, however, is certain it had to be deliberate and he wants the group to set a trap with themselves as bait, deliberately appearing vulnerable and seeing if he tries to finish the job. Derrick, a one point, wanted to call Barbara and get her take on it but Humfrey doesn't trust her in the slightest.
In the end, they decide to call him and offer him a cash bonus for the tip he gave them. He tells them he has some more intel for them as well, and they agree to meet at a local bar. They met him down there, more than ready to figure out if everything was a trap or not.
They were not ready for the glowing yellow eyes he greeted them with.
Turns out it's Billy's torso that got splattered all over that hotel room wall, and after staking that vampire for the coterie, the strix that's been poking around town has been possessing Billy's corpse ever since.**
The conversation that ensued was... delightfully (to me) tense. The public setting kept the coterie mostly polite, while the strix tried to make nice. He pointed out that not only did he do them a favor delivering Donald staked like that, but that Billy was actually not to keen on the people he answered to working with vampires and had been planning some sort of betrayal of his own. (though the intel that sent them after the weirdness in the PRT station was entirely its way of amusing itself) But after that, everyone got to the meat of the matter: What does this particular strix want?
Short answer: It's not sure. It's very old and occasionally gets distracted, and its memories are patchy. It did tell them, though, that the tunnels beneath the campus they'd been looking for did actually exist and there was something it wanted down there. And for whatever reason -- again, not sure -- it needed these vampires from Charleston to get that thing. It wanted to be up-front about that.
It was also up-front about the fact that it knew that telling them about this meant that they could decide to pack up and leave Morgantown, convince the Carthians to return to Pittsburgh, and just let it sit there, impotent. Which is why it told them that if they did so, by the next sunset the streets would "run ankle-deep with the blood of these brightly-colored prey animals." (referring to the college students in town) But the way it so casually talked about what it wanted and playfully described ways it could toy with them or wreak havoc if they made a scene nearly drove Derrick to frenzy. Humfrey spent a good chunk of time doing the math in his head to determine whether or not they could maybe deal with this thing now and just kill any witnesses. (The bar wasn't exactly that full at the moment, but there would have been maybe a dozen people to kill or memory-wipe.)
The strix insisted it could be reasonable under the right circumstances. As a gesture of good faith, it even offered to abandon Billy's body wherever they'd want; it could be left with colleagues, wrecked on a 'suicide' attack on an enemy, or just walked into the river, or whatever. They told it they wanted Billy dropped off at the morgue.
I wish I'd thought to write down exactly what Derrick said when he said it, because it was good, but let's just say he made it clear in no uncertain terms that he wasn't going to be cooperating with it in any way.
But in the end, they agreed to leave more or less peacefully, as a group, with the strix in the middle so it couldn't attack anyone or make a run for it. But once they got to the door, Derrick drew upon his Khaibit abilities to coat a knife with shadow using Pseshkf, and stabbed it in the back (mostly to get a blood sample, which Humfrey said tasted mostly like human blood but had an odd tang to it). It let out an unholy, avian shriek and abandoned Billy's body right there.
So, y'know, screams, panic. The vampires made a run for it and started making calls to the appropriate flunkies to cover their asses with the police. They called various contacts, pre-emptively explained themselves to the Prince (who's under the opinion that if something violent and panic-inducing happens, it's not an issue unless people saw blatantly-vampiric things in the process), made sure a vampire with access to the morgue was there to deal with the body, and so forth. They also put out the word to arrange a gathering of the local vampires, while also sharing some of the blood from Derrick's knife with the werewolves they know to see if they can do anything with it (since as far as they know, the werewolves know a thing or two about spirit creatures). Derrick is starting to slightly regret taking charge.
And while gathering themselves and considering their options (also discussing circumstances under which they declare the city a lost cause and flee), they remembered they had the mysterious phone number they found at the PRT station. They called and got a college professor named Frank, who'd seen them poking around the station and knew about the weirdness in the basement. He wanted to know what their deal is***, and then upon meeting the coterie everyone basically discarded the "let's awkwardly circle each other and dance around the fact that we're pretty sure that none of us are human" trope that I've seen happen in something like 80% of the WoD games I've been a part of.
They explained (well, more like 'blurted out') that they're vampires, and he took a calculated risk (as in 'is it worth potentially compromising my Cover to deal with these people') and let on that he's a supernatural creature that some people refer to as a 'Demon,' and that he used to be like Maria (the thing in the PRT station). He didn't give them the full spiel about the God Machine or even actually call it that, just that he used to serve an 'unknowable horrible thing' (which Humfrey thinks is just some mad scientist building robot people) and is now hiding from it. He also let them in on the fact that he was also the janitor that Matthew Dominated into leaving.
But he explains that he's been poking around the weird electronics in walls of Woodburn Hall**** that seems to be able to trap spirits and strix (according to the vampires) and shield anyone inside from the God Machine's scanners (according to Frank). As they both have an interest in figuring out how that works for their own purposes (as well as a way to make it portable or reproduce it), they've agreed to combine some of their efforts in the future, trading information and favors back and forth and all that.
We wrapped up for the session about there, especially with the vampires' heads reeling upon finding out that the world's just a little bigger than expected.
Also, as an aside, sometime in the next few days I'm going to put up a post linking to some fiction I've written in this particular setting, and some other stuff. But I wanted to go ahead and get this out before I got too distracted from it.
*-- Due to this being a setting I've used before in games (combined with a love of worldbuilding), I'm aware it's pretty dense with a big cast of NPCs. At some point I'll sit down and post a little guide to the non-player character cast for reference's sake.
**-- Well, technically, he was possessing him when he got shot, but then he jumped into the vampire, staked 'himself,' and then popped back into the corpse and walked out.
***-- Somewhere out there is an alternate universe where Frank is a player character investigating some vampire NPCs he found poking around his stuff.
****-- This is a thing that first came into being during the Hunter LARP I ran years ago. Long story short, some mad scientist built stuff into the walls of the building that let people use it as a prison for ephemeral beings.
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