Forgive me if this part of the post is brief -- I can't think of anything big to announce, nothing huge coming up, anything like that. I will point out that we have John back this session, so that's something. Other than that, let's just get to it!
We pick up where we left off, in Weaver's kitchen in the middle of the night. Weaver says he'd offer something to Otis or Stills, but Otis stole all of his food. Otis points out that he stole it to keep someone alive 'so he can meet a fate worse than death.' Someone, I think Weaver, asks if he deserves it. Otis shrugs and goes "Eh."
So Weaver looks out the window to see if the shadow owls are still in the tree outside his house. He spots one of them, and Stills goes out to try and shoo it away. It just stares at him. He chucks a rock at it, and it flies away, and he announces that it's gone. Then he spots the other one, shrugs as he did technically get rid of the one he was trying to get rid of, and just goes back in.
Weaver mentions that he's tired and needs to get some sleep. Stills offers to tuck him in, in a way that leads to a lot of vampire-related double-entendres and uncomfortable jokes about using vampire fangs to pierce certain private places.[0] Weaver just throws Stills out of the house, and the vampire then goes off and melds with the Earth in one of the parks. Otis leaves shortly after, after Weaver directs a conversation about Otis' more vampiric attributes in that direction.
So we jump ahead to the morning, where Alice thanks her colleagues via email for covering for her for a day, and then Alice becomes Josh and heads to Weaver's place with coffee and donuts.[1] On the way over, he spots a shadow owl in the tree and makes a note of it, but pretends he doesn't see it. Weaver's pretty bleary-eyed when he opens the door, but the food is welcome since Otis cleaned out his kitchen. Josh heads insides, spots the blood and urine-soaked newspapers still on the floor of the living room, and is a little concerned.
He asks Weaver if he got a puppy or something. Weaver says that Otis has the 'puppy,' then explains what the puppy is in this context (Derrick's cultist Floyd). Weaver then fills him in on what happened at the library... and then, well...
Josh: "How was the librarian? Did he help?"
Weaver: "Well, um, about that..."
Josh: "Did Otis eat him? Please tell me Otis didn't eat him!"
Weaver: "Oh God, if only Otis had eaten him."
So yeah, Weaver gets into that story. He's not too terribly worried, because the guy's just a human. Josh argues that Weaver needs to build some sort of special 'murder room' to send people into, maybe one with spikes, if he's going to keep teleporting people at the slightest provocation. Weaver counters that maybe he just needs an incinerator.[2]
This segues into a conversation about Weaver's teleporting capabilities, how far he can teleport them, etc., because he needs to get better at teleporting someone into instant death if he's going to do it at all. Because if he's going to kill someone, he needs to be sure that it takes. It comes up that Weaver has bad luck teleporting cultists, because of the Mountain God cultist that Weaver teleported out of Derrick's basement, whom Otis then had to kill to cover it up. Weaver eventually says that if Josh doesn't drop it, he will build a murder room just to teleport Josh into it.
Weaver goes to get cleaned up, while Josh heads out to get his laptop and start covering his digital tracks -- he doesn't want anyone to go looking for a possibly-missing librarian and then find out about the appointment they set up. After Weaver's clean and dressed and Josh has cleared as much as he can during that time, Weaver takes the demon to the room where he put the collection of books he took from the librarian.
Weaver says he needs to go out and do something (he wants to hit up his hallow for some mana), but in the meantime offers to speed up Josh so he can dig into the books and continue the research that Weaver started. Josh accepts the offer, is sufficiently 'buffed,' and boosts his own skills as well.
Weaver leaves and Josh takes advantage of the opportunity to swiftly cover the rest of his digital tracks in a matter of minutes. Then he starts in on the research, and Weaver's notes give him a head start on the research.[3] He manages to learn more about the spirits of things that can't exist, or don't exist any more, or shouldn't exist (building off of what Weaver learned last session). He learns that the Unshaped have traits similar to an ancient type of spirit from old legends called a Pangaean, something primal that mostly resides in the physical world and is almost always naturally solid. When Unshaped are summoned into the world, it's done through a ritual, and usually a living (or undead) vessel of some sort. The ritual and the vessel and the circumstances 'shape' the entity, giving it a form in which it can exist. The archway and the spike in the tunnels, somehow, seem to take the place of the ritual, but Derrick has always been the vessel.
And, it turns out, he always would have been. When he ate that strix, because of how the spike was configured he was linked to the place where the Unshaped came from and made himself a vessel. It becomes clear that the summoning had begun and couldn't have been stopped. But the time and the place and the circumstances have such an effect on the entity's form -- if it had been summoned into a swamp, it'd become a swamp monster. Under other circumstances, the group could have engineered a scenario to give this thing specific weaknesses, but Derrick's choice cut that off. But fortunately, him calling the question so soon meant it hadn't had as much time to 'cook' and so it's not as powerful as it could have been. Notes and annotations in some of the books imply connections between the Unshaped and something called an Idigam, but the stack of books set aside for the Unshaped research don't dig into that too much.
Weaver comes back an hour and a half later with a couple more mana in his system and waits for Josh to finish reading and blurring. He starts going through the notes that Josh has made summarizing his findings while Josh spends a few minutes bolstering the security of Weaver's wireless network.
Then there's a knock at the door. Weaver goes downstairs and looks out the peephole to find out that it's a pizza guy. He didn't order a pizza, nor did Josh. While he frets over what to do, whether this is a trap, Josh insists on answering the door. The guy gives Josh a pizza and heads back to his car, and Weaver watches him go from upstairs.
Josh brings in the box and opens it up to reveal a Hawaiian pizza and a cheap smartphone in a plastic baggie. There's a voicemail from a blocked number on the phone. While Josh enjoys his first Hawaiian pizza, Weaver listens to the message from a digitally-scrambled voice:
"I have the librarian. He's safe, but thanks to my generosity you don't have hit squads coming after you in retaliation, nor does your detective friend know what you did. I basically own you. I will call you on this phone when I need you to do things. If you do not do them, I'll give the hunters what they need to come after you. Or maybe talk to the detective. We'll see. I'll be in touch."
So Weaver is freaked, even to the point of threatening to break Josh's leg if he keeps going on about how much he's enjoying the pizza. He asks if Josh can find out where that phone call came from, and Josh says that'd take a while and be a bit of a project. But in the short term, they do decide to clone the phone so Josh can tinker with the original (after popping the SIM card) while still allowing Weaver to get any calls from the blackmailer. He drives to the next town over to buy an identical phone for that purpose and sets it up. On the way back, he stops somewhere to hit Krispy Kreme for more donuts.
We jump ahead to sunset. Otis and Stills both wake up to find a message from Weaver on their phones. Otis goes to the local Eat n Park. Stills wanders the trails for someone to feed on. He drains the guy entirely, then hits his head on a rock and dumps him into a creek to make it look like he fell, hit his head, and drowned.
Weaver and Josh go to meat Otis at the Eat n Park. Otis asks Weaver what happened, because Weaver looks like hell. Weaver tells them what happened and Otis begins grilling him on if he saw the guy, did he see the guy's license plate, can't he just 'magic up' the last person to handle the phone, and so forth, and Weaver doesn't have great answers. Otis also asks Weaver what he'll do if they ask him to kill a guy. Josh steps in to say that they'd have to know Weaver's no good at killing people, so they wouldn't ask him to do that. Weaver, as retaliation, volunteers Josh to pay for everyone's food, and everyone jokes about how much they're going to order so he has to pay for as much as possible.
After the veritable feast ordered arrives, Stills shows up. They tell him about the blackmail and he thinks it's hilarious, and immediately begins grilling Weaver about all of the stuff Otis already asked him. Weaver, annoyed, just asks Josh to tell him, but Stills says he was listening from the corner while invisible. He puts on a 'scary face' to basically send the message that everyone else in the room -- including the waitress -- knows it's in their best interests to ignore the conversation going on at the table.
Weaver starts in how, with Josh's help, they've got a lot of info about the unshaped. And for some reason, Josh immediately asks Weaver if it's his magic that makes him a coward, like if his skill at teleportation makes him more inclined to run or the other way around. Stills starts in on how they need to track down the pizza delivery guy and trace the phone back.
Weaver cuts that off to get back on task about the research. He and Josh share what they found, including about how the attempt they made before to kill the Hungry Shadow was a step in the right direction -- bringing this thing down will involve combining multiple vampiric weaknesses.[4] Otis is still certain that he can take this thing on his own, and he takes some ribbing (particularly from Stills) about how his ego is going to get him killed. Otis points out that's big talk from a vampire who could potentially live forever. Stills then goes into what it normally takes for a vampire to live forever -- mostly keeping their head down -- and that because he took a job, for reasons he's not going to get into, he might have to go into a place that's going to get him killed regardless.
At one point, Josh gets up and goes to the waitress to order a milkshake because she refuses to approach the table, and returns with a few milkshakes while they get back on the subject of the blackmail and Stills agrees to help Weaver track down his blackmailer in exchange for some favors.
So Weaver gets the original phone back from Josh and goes out to his car to do some magic on it, using Space to reach out and figure out its sympathetic connections, looking for who bought it. He gets an image of of a tall, skinny man with black hair. He then traces that back and tries to figure out where that guy works -- he gets the image of a gas station down the hill from a nearby Walmart. He also connects the guy to a red-haired woman who got him to buy the phone, and then he traces her back to an office in a nearby plaza.
Meanwhile, Otis asks Josh to help check his car for bugs, to find that there aren't any.
So now that Weaver has a lead, he goes to take everyone to the office in question. Otis, however, goes elsewhere -- he can track Jakob, and proceeds to trace him to a shitty fleabag motel in Fairmont.
So while he's driving out there, Weaver and the others go to the office space Weaver found. There's no sign on the door or anything, and he didn't see any company logos in the office that he glimpsed. Stills wonders why he's there, and Weaver figures he can probably get in unseen and snoop around. So he picks the lock, vanishes from sight, and slips in.
The front room of the office is empty. There's a phone on the desk and a computer. There's some chairs but the only furniture that's seen any use is the chair at the receptionist's desk, where Weaver saw the redhead. He goes into the back and finds a number of empty hallways. No furniture or anything. He goes back outside and reports that this is a front company.
Elsewhere, Otis arrives at a motel room where he knows Jakob Cooke is. He finds a spot where he can teleport into a shadow inside and watches the man, no worse for wear aside from the healing cuts and bruises from his escape, lay back on the bed and read quietly for a little while. He gets tired of waiting and steps out of the shadow to introduce himself. Jakob panics and gets off the bed to put it between himself and Otis. Otis says he knows the wizard that put Jakob in that basement. Jakob doesn't remember how he got down there, but he does remember escaping from the vampires. Otis wants to know what's going on and threatens him, and Jakob flees into the bathroom.
Otis follows, and when he gets in there Jakob is uneasily pointing a gun at him. Otis talks Jakob into revealing that he went to a hunter friend of his by the name of Brady Koerner[5], who made a few calls and took him to the motel to hole up for a while while he took care of it. Otis wants to talk to Brady, but Jakob is reluctant to give him Brady's number and Otis doesn't want Brady to have his number. Jakob offers to call Brady from the motel room's phone and put him on, and Otis talks him into giving him the gun. Jakob takes the clip out and hands the gun to Otis, and then makes the call.
So Otis talks to Brady (I didn't exactly copy down a transcript of the conversation, but here's some highlights). There's a little bit of threatening, some posturing on both sides. Brady is concerned about Jakob, and when he found out what happened, he called a few people who said they'd get the wizard in line. Otis is pissed that Weaver's being blackmailed, because he's working on something important for the city and doesn't need this distraction. Brady asks what they're dealing with, and upon finding out that it's weird he rattles off some of his own experiences and says 'try me.' So Otis tells him about the Hungry Shadow. Brady agrees that he'll make a few calls and at the very least he'll see if he can get Weaver some breathing room while this crisis is going on, and he says he should be able to help if it comes to it (and he gives Otis his number). So they come out to something of an agreement there and Otis leaves Jakob in peace.
Back in Morgantown, Weaver tries to use magic to find the woman he saw at the office, using the office as a sympathetic tie. But something goes wrong with the magic and instead of just seeing the woman from the office, he gets a brainful of an elaborate bureaucratic machine of obfuscation[6] tied to the place and is overwhelmed and a little brain-scrambled. Otis calls to inform them that he's probably taken care of the problem, but Weaver's freaking out so Stills picks up the phone. After Otis, on his way back to town, hangs up, Stills decks Weaver a couple of times to try and straighten his mind out, but winds up knocking him unconscious in the process. They go to take the unconscious Weaver back to his house and on the way, Stills informs Otis as to what happened.
In the back of the car, Josh is trying to deal with the beating that Weaver took and does some suspiciously-solid first aid, using Alice's medical skills. Stills certainly takes notice of that. But Weaver wakes up to find a text on his blackmail-phone saying he's got a month's respite and the they can renegotiate later.
Otis finds out about the text he calls Brady back, pissed that Brady was only able to deliver on the minimum he promised. Brady says to give him time, and that he only has so much leverage over the party doing the blackmail. Otis insists on knowing why Brady unleashed something he couldn't control, and Brady corrects him -- he doesn't have as much control over the situation as Otis thinks, and that he was left with the option of either calling someone to rein in Weaver or to let hit squads of dangerous hunters come after him and let someone who doesn't deserve it get hurt. He didn't 'unleash' anything, but there are forces more powerful than him. He points out that the local hunters like Jakob, and after what Weaver pulled there are people who wouldn't have any issues with killing him and hiding the body. And it's suggested that Weaver might be safest if he left town after all this. So they just kind of leave off on that stalemate.[7]
Otis gets back into town and heads to Chemical Reactions, where Leland gets his attention and takes him down to the end of the bar. There's a vampire who came down to Pittsburgh to help them out -- Duncan Rush, the vampire that Derrick made into a Khaibit, offering to help take Derrick down.[8]
And we leave off there.
[0]-- For the record, the only one really uncomfortable with the jokes is me, it's not like anyone's terrorizing the group. It helps, a bit, that Stills' and Weaver's players are married.
[1]-- We don't get into where Josh has been, but I'm assure that John is working on something.
[2]-- While I'm not so egotistical to assume that this is the case, there is a part of me that honestly wonders if they're having this conversation just to fuck with me.
[3]-- I should point out that the unshaped are a semi-original creation of mine -- there's a lot of parallels with stuff currently in the system, some of which I openly reference.
[4]-- My notes are actually a little shaky on exactly when he did this, but at one point John resolved Josh's Inquisitor Agenda condition to get a hint and a beat to process the research into a firm conclusion about what it might take to kill this thing.
[5]-- Brady Koerner is a character from my Hunter LARP some years back -- if you've followed this blog for a while or dug back through the archives, you may or may not recognize him from some of the stories I've written in this setting over the years. He's a retired cop who's been hunting monsters for over 40 years. He's lost a step or two, but he's still regarded by those in the know as probably the most dangerous hunter in the tri-state area.
[6]-- I should point out that I'm being colorful; there is nothing God-Machine-related to this.
[7]-- This is a conversation that Sean and I wound up playing out after people went home and spliced back in. It started as sort of a hypothetical 'when Otis hears about this, he'll say this' thing and just wound up becoming the conversation.
[8]-- Duncan Rush is another of my Hunter LARP characters, a former hunter who became a vampire and lurked around the community helping out for a long time before people found out what he was and he fled town. He's been back a few times, though, including towards the end of the Morgantown Project.
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