Digestif: Reading is FUNdamental (CofD)

So before we get started, I want to remind anyone who's reading this that the Kickstarter for the first pair of Trinity Continuum books is up and running! I actually worked on the Trinity Continuum: Aeon book and also even ran a few playtest sessions some months back so I know what I'm talking about when I say this game's going to be amazing. (That said, the odds are good that if you're reading this, you've already heard me go on at length about the game and the KS, or even attended one of my playtest sessions, but I'm covering my bases here.)

And as I don't think I have anything more to add, here we go!





So we left off last time with Derrick and Otis retrieving a book from his stash of occult lore and gear and bringing it back to the club. The book in question has a lot of history and lore belonging to a cult to something locally known as the 'Mountain God,' which has popped up in my games before. It's obviously something that's been copied and recopied from older books over time, with illustrations from older 'editions' cut out from old pages and attached to the book. Weaver flips through it and discovers that across the margins of various pages there's a bunch of High Speech[0], enough to serve as a grimoire with a couple of Prime rotes related to ley lines. This leads to a brief discussion as to roughly what a grimoire is.

Weaver, intrigued, uses some Time magic to speed himself up and he starts reading the book in a blur, pacing around the room but zipping back and forth like a hummingbird from the perspective of the other characters. He learns a lot of valuable information (also, in the process, catching Bryan up on some of the lore I've established for my setting, and here's several highlights:

• As long as humans have lived in the area, there have been cults to something colloquially as the 'Mountain God,' some entity that live beneath the Appalachian mountain range.
• The Mountain God's energies are suffused throughout the region, and there are those who try to tap into the power for personal gain or what have you. (there are those within the cult who believe that coal is inherently magical and mining it is a blessed act because it lets you share in the Mountain God's power) The Mountain God sometimes makes its influence known directly, often by possessing and/or animating the dead. It's particularly active during certain configurations of ley lines.
• The currently-organized manifestation of the cult formed the same time as the university, and they were the ones who dug the tunnels beneath the town, finding an excuse to get closer to their supposed deity for occult purposes. Also forming with the university was a group called the Brotherhood of Appalachian Protectors, who wished to keep the Mountain God bound and oppose the actions of its followers. 
• The portal in the tunnels, which was discovered by following whispers coming from the Mountain God, is believed to serve as a conduit to its realm, and energy can be sent to it to appease it or drawn from it. The segments of the spike down there that can be rotated can configure the portal to reach out to specific other dimensions -- absolutely none of which sound pleasant.
• The "Blood of the Age of the Dread Ones" can be used to activate the portal or fix it in certain configurations, and other configurations can be empowered by performing various rituals and sacrifices. But even aside from that, if left to its own devices, the gradual shifting of ley lines will sometimes reconfigure the portal the same way that wind will turn a weathervane.
• The cult also has horrifying, blasphemous rituals of their own, and the book actually contains a ritual where they can open a crack in space and travel from point A to point B at unnatural speeds, because they're passing through a realm of sorts not unlike the Upside Down from Stranger Things. The ritual requires stuff like "ingesting a plant fertilized by the body of someone who was buried alive," and stuff like that. He doesn't pay enough attention to study the ritual enough to recreate the ritual, but he knows it's there.[1]

So by now, by the time he's studied the book enough to know all this, about an hour and a half has passed (in which he's performed what would be four hours' worth of research to a normal person). Weaver asks if he can borrow the book to study further, and offers to owe him a favor in exchange. Derrick says it's not a problem, as he's made his own copy of the book so Weaver can just keep the one he has rather than simply borrow it (he still wants that favor, though). Weaver, misunderstanding, says that he needs the original copy Derrick retrieved. It turns out that's the copy he's holding, but he's just given away that the original copy is something special and valuable, so Derrick now ups the price to three favors. Weaver begrudgingly accepts. Weaver jokes about just taking off with the book and pretends to unsuccessfully teleport out, and the joke lands about as well as you can expect.

While this conversation is going on, Otis uses his Needs Must Atavism to mark Weaver, making sure he can track him at all times just in case. Weaver, being a mage, senses what Otis has done and tries to intimidate him into taking the mark off. Otis refuses and says he couldn't if he wanted to. Weaver also insists that he could take it off himself, and Otis just shrugs and challenges him to do just that since provoking that reaction from Weaver is just what he was looking for in any case.

But by this point it's between 1:30-2:00 in the morning, and Otis suggests to Derrick that they should go out and 'get something to eat.' So they're talking about breaking for the night, and they go over what they've found so far, and Derrick decides to explain the "Blood of the Age of the Dread Ones" reference in that book. In particular, the "Age of the Dread Ones" refers to a time when there was a clan of vampires called the Julii, which were active during Rome and wiped out by the strix afterwards. And that Derrick and Humfrey can trace their lineages back to vampires who lived in Rome, and that's why the strix he ate tried to lure vampires from Charleston to Morgantown in the first place, to use their blood to open the portal a certain way.

Even with the late hour, Derrick has contacts within the occult community and makes a couple of calls to try and see if he can find out anything more about the current iteration of the Mountain God cult, or some info on the 'Brotherhood of Appalachian Protectors.' He manages to find out that while they suffered something of a setback a couple years ago, there is still a branch of the cult locally. He can't get the name of the leader, but he does get the name of a foreign graduate student who's joined the cult and keeps most of their library, a mid-level member named Asif Saud Hadad. Also, as it turns out, the 'Brotherhood of Appalachian Protectors' is another name for the Mountain Line Preservation Society.

But Derrick wants to find Asif and see what he knows. He, Otis (hiding out in Derrick's shadow), and Josh head out to one of the dorms that's still open post-graduation. (Weaver decides to go ahead and head home, where he begins working on trying to remove the mark that Otis put on him.) So they go into the dorm where there's someone sitting at the front desk, and Derrick makes a show of asking the guy if Asif is living in the building. The desk employee looks him up in the school's directory and determines that Asif doesn't live there. So then Derrick uses Dominate to mesmerize the guy and asks for Asif's address since he has it up. He then tells him to forget he was ever there, and the group leaves. Once they're back in the car, Otis takes it upon himself to take the card that Derrick wrote Asif's address down on and on the back puts Weaver's address, in case Derrick needs it.

So they head to the Asif's address, where he's renting an apartment of the second floor of a small building. As they get out, Josh starts looking for possible security cameras (there are some in the neighborhood, but none pointed the group's way). Otis takes him aside and makes it clear that he heard them talking about planning to drink a guy's blood while they're out and about. Josh says he hadn't, that he was paying attention to the security systems, but Otis recognizes that he's being deliberately obtuse. But in the interest of making sure they're not having a problem, he wants to make sure they're on the same page. Josh says he does in fact know what's going to happen.

The three of them head up to his apartment and Derrick, carrying Otis with him, uses Obtenebration to teleport through the window. He unlocks the door to let Josh in, and they sneak into the sleeping Asif's bedroom. They check his wallet on his nightstand to confirm that it's him, and Derrick proceeds to feed on the sleeping grad student enough to physically weaken him. Otis, keeping an eye on things, makes sure to warn Derrick off before he takes too much, but he finds his own unnatural hunger sated by being part of an admittedly-simple hunt. Then they notice that Asif has many, many books -- a number of them normal books on history and the occult and the like, but a number of what appear to be genuine tomes.

To get everything back to his car without being noticed, Derrick opens up a portal through the shadows and the group carries the books out to his car that way without obviously hauling several boxes of books up and down the stairs outside. Josh also swipes his laptop. But they now have enough of the guy's occult library that they can't actually fit everyone in the car without having at least one of the others hiding out in Derrick's shadow. As they leave, Derrick snaps his fingers to undo what's left of the shadow tunnels, but it poofs into what looks like a cloud of smoky feathers.

While all this is going on, Weaver is off to the side, concocting a modification of a spell to break sympathetic connections to remove the hunting mark that Otis has left on him. Otis feels the effort but in his currently-gorged state, can't bring himself to care enough to fight back and the mark breaks. And as he himself had pointed out before, he was more interested in Weaver's reaction than anything else.

So they get back to the club and Josh offers to help with the research, and Derrick lets him take a stack of books. Josh and Otis start in on doing a bit of research as Derrick makes plans to slumber for the day, and before he does so gives Asif some of his blood to begin the process of enslaving him.

The next day, Jakob Cooke at the library has gotten back to Josh and they begin emailing back and forth to set up a time where they can discuss the possible use of his library (they manage to work out a time in a couple of days). Josh also makes plans with Weaver to go over what they have already, after his secondary cover, Alice, gets off work.

And with those plans made (and research rolls to be performed), we left it off there for the night.


[0]-- Long story short, sort of a 'true language of magic' thing, which only Awakened Mages can understand.
[1]-- For those of you with the old Second Sight supplement, this is a modified version of the "Dread Voyage" ritual from chapter 4. Yes, that's right, it's that sort of cult.