Greetings, folks. So after a couple of weeks of Starfinder, we've got a Chronicles session for you this week. John wasn't able to make it, but we pushed on and did the best we could and -- as you'll see -- left a fun situation for his Demon character to come back to.
We pick up on the day following the shenanigans at the house from the last session, with Weaver heading out to his shed where his Hallow is located after a night of recovering from the beating he took from Stills. When he gets to the shed, he notices that the door is slightly cracked. He pushes it open just a bit and someone inside grabs his arm and yanks him into the shed.
He's now in there with two guys he's never met before, one drawing a machete strapped to his back, and the other holding a gun. He panics and lashes out with his magic, using Space to squeeze both men, dislocating their arms, possibly seriously messing up an elbow or two. One of them still takes a swing at him and actually manages to leave a bit of a bruise as he turns out to be stronger than he looks. So Weaver hits them again, messing up their legs and rendering them unconscious.
He checks their wallets as he waits for them to come to, and decides to give Otis a call. Otis, however, isn't as keen as Weaver hoped on helping him dispose of his attackers -- especially when Weaver paints it like he's trying to do the Beast a favor. So Otis blows him off and Weaver goes back to waiting for the guys to wake up.
So they wake up and he tries to talk to them and they don't waste a lot of time by telling him that he's going to be food for the Hungry Shadow and they're offering him a merciful death before their god builds its 'kingdom of shadows.' They tell him outright that they're not going to leave him alone, because it's only when they succeed in killing Weaver that they'll get the eternity promised them. Admittedly, I probably could have had them explain this better, but they try to get across that dying trying to kill him and dying of old age because they failed are roughly equivalent in their eyes. Rather than have another murder attempt on his conscience, Weaver just teleports them back to one of their houses (since he has the address from their driver's licenses).
Rattled as he is by the experience, Weaver can't focus enough to properly regain mana from the Hallow, and when he leaves he sees one of Derrick's shadow owls in the tree outside. He reaches out magically and crumples it like a soda can, and leaves as it falls out of the tree.
So we jump ahead to sunset, where Weaver sees another of the owls outside his house as he leaves to go to the club and meet the others. He just flips it off and moves on. When Otis gets to the club, one of the Baddacelli from the basement, named Seth, is waiting for him and lets him know they think one of the others has been killed but he's here to show his loyalty. So now Otis has a bit of an entourage. Stills turn up at the club, no sign of Josh but everyone assumes he's busy getting stuff together at the house.
Weaver fills them in on the attack earlier, and Stills and Otis are both flabbergasted that he didn't kill them, and they come to an agreement of opinion that Weaver's probably going to die. The argument also comes up that Weaver is a little too reliant on magic, and that he should be able to defend himself without needing magic. Weaver argues that he's more than capable of defending himself without his powers, but this starts segueing into a proposed 'no powers' sparring match between Weaver and Stills, with Otis refereeing. But Weaver insists that he can still defend himself, and the others decide to drop it.
But then they get into telling Weaver that they have a house to use as their base, and a barn to use as a plan to deal with Derrick and the Shadow. Otis tells Weaver he doesn't want to know how they acquired the house, but Weaver just naturally wants to know more. After a moment's thought, he just contents himself with the assumption that someone died for it, and lets it go. The others just make sure to stress very hard that Josh owns the land legally.
And they get into the plan and how it involves setting the barn on fire, and Weaver assumes they're going to have to set the barn on fire with him inside, and they explain that they plan to do the confrontation in the barn. Otis asks Weaver he can just use his time travel stuff to jump them forward until they have all of the equipment they need, and Weaver explains that Time magic doesn't work that way. This becomes a conversation about the nature of Time magic, and the awkwardness of different tenses on when things are in the future and when they aren't. And how there are mages who can see into the future, but that's more Fate than Time.
As this is going on, Seth steps up to inform Otis that he hears something going on in the corner, as he has very good hearing.[0] Otis, his own senses enhanced with an Atavism, listens in on a Gangrel named Gerald Harrison[1] in the corner on his phone, having gotten some news about something going down at the downtown campus library a couple blocks away. Otis listens in, texts the word 'library' to Stills, and follows the vampire out, stealthily slipping into his shadow in the process. Stills tells Weaver that something's up at the library, and they head out.
As they reach the library, there's a crowd gathering out front. There's a fire alarm going off, but no sign of smoke, but there's at least one broken window they can see. The cops are keeping everyone back until the fire marshall shows up. Stills slips into Obfuscate to sneak in, and Otis teleports into a shadow he can see inside.
Otis winds up on the second floor, where he gets glimpses of a fight going on between a pair of vampires -- one of whom wears a black feathered cape off his shoulders, and the other is Doris, a Nosferatu known to lair in the library. Stills comes in through the ground floor, following a trail of destruction and the noise up to the second floor. Weaver finds a spot from which he can teleport into the library, ending up in that side-room where he'd been doing research just a couple of days ago, and also heads upstairs.
There's a trail of destruction, broken tables, broken chairs, shelves shoved over, books scattered everywhere -- both downstairs and upstairs. The vampire attacking Doris, as the group shows up, manages to pull down a shelf onto her and pin her down. Otis immediately charges in and hits him as hard as he can with the Nightmare "Behold, My True Form," overwhelming the guy with the raw psychic might of his Horror. That leaves him reeling enough that Stills comes in, punches him hard enough to do that 'slow-motion rippling' thing, and the guy goes down and the feather cape dissolves into thin air. They help Doris out from under the shelf, with her thanks, and before they sneak back to the club in various versions of supernatural stealth, she grabs another vampire that attacked her, this one with a wooden chair leg shoved through her chest.
So with various powers (Obfuscate, Mind magic, etc.), they sneak back to the club. They decide to start with the guy that Otis and Stills dropped, but he's in torpor and they don't want to have to find someone whose blood is potent enough to wake him. So Weaver uses Time magic to 'rewind' the damage he's taken with Temporal Summoning to wake him up temporarily. And this works, and he wakes up, and he insists that he and his associate just went to talk to Doris about joining Derrick's group, and 'she just went crazy and attacked him.' Doris almost attacks him at that, but keeps it together. Barely.
Stills lashes out at him with his Beast to soften him up emotionally, and gets him to admit that they were to try to recruit Doris -- and, failing that, feed her soul to the Hungry Shadow. Stills tells him that he chose the wrong side. The vampire tells him he doesn't know how powerful the Shadow is, and that any vampires that resist what's coming will feed it, and Stills puts him back into torpor -- and when the Time spell wears off and the earlier damage comes back, it all heaps on him to kill him off, leaving a fresh-ish corpse (as he hadn't been a vampire very long).[2]
Stills pins down the other vampire, a woman, and pulls the stake free. She notices Weaver first and remarks on the obviously failed attack, as she knew an attempt was to be made. She tells the group that the ghouls are offered eternity if they complete their task, and despite the others' assumptions Derrick isn't just going to kill them -- he'll just deny them the Embrace until they succeed. So they'll keep coming after Weaver until he's dead or they are. There's bickering on what to do about her, about the ghouls that Weaver didn't kill, and she decides to take advantage of a chance to deck Stills.
Otis, at that, decides to open the way to his Lair. He warns them to grab onto something and draws her into it. She tries to escape his Horror, and she struggles against it, but he attacks her back and manages to completely subdue her, whereupon he drags her back to the Heart of his Lair to finish her off and feed.
This leaves Weaver and Stills at the club, and Stills realizes that he needs to feed. So he heads out to the trails to find a suitable victim, and shortly afterwards, while he's out, he gets a text from Otis saying he's back out in the world and they meet up.
But during that, Weaver decides to go home... but on his way out of the club, notices Bill in the parking garage rummaging through the trash -- the same Bill they encountered in the club before. Weaver asks what it's up to, and Bill tells him, in his usual monotone, that a 'co-worker' may have been destroyed and it's looking for evidence of such a thing -- it pulls out a ball of melting gelatinous goo when it says this -- and trying to figure out what happened.[3] Weaver, not knowing about the encounter with the angel (because nobody told him), asks if he can help, and Bill says 'unless you can rewind the natural flow of time to view the past.' Weaver, unable to resist the temptation, says he needs something that belonged to the co-worker, and Bill produces a hat from the garbage and hands it over to him.
Weaver uses Postcognition to view the recent event (which, if you need a refresher, is in the last post for this game), and asks Bill what will happen if Bill finds out what happened to his co-worker. Bill said that it would have to report that person to the PRT[4] and the PRT would take up the task. It was, at that point, undergoing special emergency maintenance to prepare for that task. The task, he comments is 'retribution.' Weaver then tells Bill that he didn't see clearly who it was that did it, but if he finds out he'll let it know. He wishes Bill luck (Bill says it doesn't need luck), and warns Bill that whomever killed the other Bill was 'pretty godly,' and they should keep that in mind.[5] So then he makes a big show of walking off... at which point he takes off for the trails to warn Otis.
Meanwhile, down on the trails, Otis observes as Stills finds a crazy homeless guy who thinks that Stills is a reptilian shapeshifter, and feeds on him. Weaver catches up afterwards and tells them what just happened, and Otis and Stills decide they want to deal with this problem now.
They head for the nearest PRT station, where they find racks and heavy curtains blocking the view of the track with signs warning off lookie-loos. Stills sneaks in in Obfuscate with Otis in his shadow, and Weaver hides with Mind magic. They see strange devices, each about the size of a large dog, running up and down the tracks, sending arcs of electricity everywhere. There's a security guard there with a flashlight in the pocket of her uniform shining ahead of her. Stills, experimentally, tosses a quarter onto the track where it's blasted away at high speed, scorched and half-melted, and lodges into a wall near the security guard's head. She looks around and notices Weaver, seeing through his mental cloak.
She tries to warn Weaver away, and he immediately uses Mind magic to try and impersonate Bill. But he fails, Bryan elects to make that a dramatic failure, and in addition to the beat he earns winds up with his emotional responses dulled. The guard tries guiding him back to the entrance, when Stills pops out of Obfuscate and kicks her onto the track.
Stills, unaware of the true nature of this security guard, is completely unprepared for how she reaches out and reshapes the arcs of electricity around her. She gets up, her arms spread wide as she holds it off, and tells Stills "It's time for you to leave" before she blasts him. Otis pops out of his shadow, cranks up "Behold My True Form" as high as it can go, and overwhelms her, sending her staggering back onto the track, completely disabled and spasming.
Bill shows up to ask what the group is doing there, and it warns them that the PRT is coming.
Specifically, the Powered Retributive Transformer.
The group asks if it's coming soon, and Bill nods and just says 'soon.' Then the electricity drains away like it's going somewhere. They ask Bill if the P.R.T. is dangerous, and it says "Only if you're one of the rogues or you killed my co-worker." They decide to jump on Bill and tear him apart, and it's not long before he completely dissolves into glowing mist. They finish off the security guard as they wait for the P.R.T. to show up, just to get a look at it.
There's a hum coming from the distance, a glow running along the tracks, getting closer. It's close, and a machine coalesces out of the energy -- what can only be described as a humanoid robot constructed from the pieces of a PRT car. It raises an arm, reshaping itself into an energy cannon, ready to smite the intruders. Weaver's already taken off. Stills dives to the side as it punches a neat, burning hole in a metal post. The group decides that it's best to get the hell away, as they've officially bitten off more than they could chew.
And we left off there.
[0]-- I'm aware this is a bit "The ST handing the players a story hook," but I'd had plans for the session based on John's attendance and had to resort to a Plan B as a result.
[1]-- Another character from the Requiem LARP I ran some time ago.
[2]-- Stills loses Humanity from this, by the way, but decides to take a bane to not suffer degeneration from 'impassioned killing.' As a result, the sound of crying children can ward him off or even damage him.
[3]-- This particular angel doesn't have much in the way of cover, and is not heavily programmed for interaction with supernatural individuals. So often times, when outright asked questions about the supernatural or its true nature, it'll answer because it's not smart enough to lie.
[4]-- The PRT is, as the acronym suggests, a people-mover that gets folks around to different parts of town, particularly in service to the WVU campus. It was intended as a prototype of such systems in other cities, but never caught on (and the administrators still think that it's still possible to catch on).
[5]-- I think Weaver meant that in a 'better not mess with this guy' sense, but I could be wrong.
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