Greetings, programs, with this post we wrap up Digestif and my Chronicles of Darkness game for now. We may or may not return to one or more of these characters in the future, who knows, but for now we've come to a good stopping point, which is great because I need a brief break.
Unfortunately, we had to wrap this up without John, because his work schedule has been a massive problem and he's basically said he's going to be effectively out for a while. As this plot's been one solid session away from completion for a while (and I've been holding off to try and get the whole group together), with his permission we've moved on to get it over with rather than just tread water story-wise when we don't know exactly when he'll be back.
And on that cheery note, let's get to it.
So where we left off, Otis, Stills, and Weaver were on their way back from kidnapping someone from a Crassus McMansion outside Pittsburgh. It's about 3:30am, and sunrise is in just a couple of hours, so they've really only got so much time to screw with him right now. Stills wants to just wrap up for the night and get a fresh start after sunset. And since Stills sleeps in the earth with Protean and Otis doesn't have anyplace good or safe to stash him, they foist him off on Weaver. Stills figures that as long as Weaver keeps him bound and gagged and away from any sort of communication device, he should be fine. Otis suggests cutting or burning out his tongue, but Stills says he really wants the option of putting the guy back after all this is done.
Weaver's not happy about any of this plan, as it wasn't made clear from the start he'd have to be the one to babysit this guy. Otis and Stills call him out for always complaining when they ask him to do something, and Weaver argues that he'd just appreciate a 'please' every now and again. Otis points out that he doesn't get a 'please' when he gets asked to randomly disappear a corpse, and because they've always assumed that Weaver is committed to being helpful, they don't have to put as much effort into asking.
But regardless of whether or not this argument is going anywhere, they're at Weaver's house now. Stills wanders off and Otis takes off for home, leaving the mage with the Crassus. Weaver just dumps him in a closet where there's nothing in there that he can break too badly.
As Weaver turns around, having locked the closet door, there's a man standing in the hallway. The man's light-skinned African American, possibly of mixed heritage, and he wears a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat, giving off kind of a Bass Reeves vibe. The man introduces himself as Ted, and Weaver pegs him for a vampire. Ted explains that he was just on his way out, having come in to speak with Alberto about some things, and hopes he isn't being a problem. He then pulls out a notebook and asks Weaver a couple of questions about the Derrick situation -- specifically, his recollections about the assassination attempt on Alberto and the duel between Derrick and Alberto's childe in the club. He makes it clear he's just confirming some details he's already heard.
They have, at one point, this exchange:
Weaver: "This is about vampire politics, isn't it?"
Ted: "'Vampire politics' is redundant."
But after he's checked his notes, Ted compliments Weaver's home and politely takes his leave. Weaver gets drunk and passes out on his couch so he's not too far away should something go wrong with the Crassus in the closet.
Weaver wakes up about 4pm, hearing the Crassus (whose name they haven't gotten, by the way), banging against the closet door. He shrugs it off and goes to absorb mana from his shed. By the time he gets back, an hour later, the closet door's been busted open and the guy's on the floor, his blindfold having come off. He smells like piss for reasons that should be obvious. He snarls and curses Weaver through the gag. Weaver gets some rope and ties him to a chair and uses Mind magic to force him to calm down and get some sleep.
We jump ahead to sunset. The Crassus is awake and pissed. Otis gets up with the sunset and he can feel that tonight's the night, that the demonstration of his power is ready to go -- he's got plans to actually create a vampire to prove that he (or at least his Horror, Camazotz) could be one of the originators of all vampire-kind. In fact, he checks on his collection of frozen heads and his prospective victim Floyd, who's gone mad in the lair and is mostly catatonic with bouts of giggling and gibbering at this point.
Meanwhile, Stills wakes up in a park next to a hockey rink in town, and decides to feed by ordering food from a local Chinese place. He considers drinking from the driver, a guy named Benny, and leaving him alive, because he's in the mood to maybe train up a sidekick or something. But in the end, his baser nature gets the better of him and the now-drained Benny winds up weighed down by rocks on the bottom of a creek reservoir in the park. Stills finds a text on his phone from Weaver making it clear that he's done with babysitting, so Stills 'borrows' Benny's car and drives it over there.
Nobody answers the door, and suspecting that something is going on, Stills breaks the doorknob and goes in. He finds Weaver and the Crassus in the kitchen, and Weaver is eating in front of him, taunting him. Stills takes the gag out of his mouth and talks him down from his rage and feeds him the Chinese food he ordered. The Crassus is surprisingly friendly to Stills, much chattier. He's still obviously angry about the situation, but he's much more personable to Stills than he was to Weaver -- even to the point of being a lot more understanding about the kidnapping.[0] When Weaver mentions it, the guy just looks at him and points out that Stills didn't make him piss himself in a closet. He threatens to carve Weaver's face off, and offers to let Stills keep it if he fucks it up because this whole kidnapping gets his hands shaking.
After he eats, Stills proceeds to get him cleaned up -- and in the shower, notices that he's covered with about a dozen-ish tattoos of screaming faces. Stills asks if the faces are people he's killed, and the guy shrugs and says "Most of them died, eventually." Stills is a little impressed at this point. After the shower and the chance to use the bathroom, monitoring him and keeping his hands bound at all times, they volunteer Weaver to loan him some clothes. The Crassus offers to go commando so he doesn't have to wear Weaver's underwear.
Eventually Otis leaves his lair, and now that he has signal he has text messages from Weaver and Stills at this point. He heads over to Weaver's place and finds the Crassus cleaned up, in fresh clothes, and ungagged in the kitchen with Weaver and Stills. Otis demands to know why he's like this, but any explanation just segues into explaining to the Crassus why they kidnapped him in the first place. They explain they need his blood, and he's says that if they'd just asked from the start he would have sold it to them. But at this point, he'd be fine with just giving it to them and getting a ride home. Stills points out that he'd have to be blindfolded for the drive home, to which the Crassus shrugs as best he can. Then he takes a look at Otis, squints a bit, and asks if he's a ghoul because he's alive but there's a vampiric vibe to him. Otis tells him he's going to spare the complicated explanation. He also offers to get what they need to get the guy's blood from the hospital where he works.
While he's off doing so, Otis, Stills, and Weaver have a text conversation where he makes it clear that this guy's seen their faces and at this point they basically have to kill him for safety's sake. The others grimly agree.
Otis comes back with what he needs to draw and temporarily store the blood, and he does the procedure himself because he actually attended med school, once upon a time. At one point during the process, Alberto pops up stairs to see what's going on, as he can smell the blood. Before he heads out to feed, he mentions to Weaver that he hopes that Ted wasn't a bother, so now Weaver has to explain to the others who Ted is.
Eventually it becomes clear to the Crassus that the group is taking more of his blood than they said they needed, and that something has gone horribly wrong. He kicks back to smash the chair on the floor, freeing one arm while the other is still strapped down to the chair where they were taking his blood. But before he can do anything, Otis moves in and uses his Atavisms to bite off the Crassus' head (and ripping out most of his chest in the process). He uses Gaping Maw to consume the body and deposit it into his lair while Weaver throws up into the sink.
So now everything's a huge mess. There's blood everywhere. Stills had plans to put the Crassus' dead body and Benny's in his car and fake an accident to dispose of both (no, I don't know when 'put the Crassus back' became 'use him to get rid of Benny's car') so he's going to have to figure out a Plan B. He explains that he was going to make Benny his sidekick, explicitly referencing Short Round in Temple of Doom, and Otis exasperatedly asks "NOW you watch movies?!" But then he killed Benny by accident anyways and now the car's a problem.
And then there's a bit of a conversation about how Weaver's going to have to clean up this mess, and that segues into how he can clean up the mess later because they're running out of time to deal with the Hungry Shadow.
Conveniently, Josh calls.[1] He's managed to acquire and set up the lights they need for the showdown with Derrick and the shadow owl much earlier than expected. He asks what else they need, and they explain about the blood and binding runes they're already ready to put together. So we fast-forward to the barn, where Josh boosts his abilities and perfectly draws the binding circle. They discover, going over Duncan's notes, that the binding circle would actually make it unnecessary to set the building aflame as they'd originally intended -- which pleases Stills to no end, I tell you what.
Weaver proceeds to summon Derrick. But it takes some effort, like Derrick isn't quite the same person he was a few weeks ago. But Derrick arrives, shadowy smoke pouring out of his eyes and his mouth as he speaks with an unnatural reverberation -- the Hungry Shadow has hollowed him out.
Otis remarks that he's looked better, and the entity looks at him and tells him he's still the weak, false god he was a week ago. Otis lunges at him and the fight begins as the Hungry Shadow emerges from Derrick's body, shadowy tendrils connecting him to the hollowed-out vampiric shell.
Over the course of the battle, Stills unleashes the full fury of his Nightmare before unleashing the full fury of his fists. Otis makes it behold his true form, striking at it with the force of his will, while Weaver warps time and space around it to slow and hurt it. It strikes back, infusing pure entropy into Otis' body to damage and decay his flesh. But after Otis takes a big chunk out of it, it draws the rest of Derrick's strength and flings him against the wall, the tendril cracking like a whip. Then, to show Otis the 'true power of a god,' it pours the pure bliss of oblivion into his brain, slowing him down. The others, still pounding everything they've got into it with magic and fists, slowly destabilize its form until it's like punching pudding.
Otis recovers from his moment of rapture and snarls at it "I think you're confused as to what is divine. Mortals die." before he sinks his teeth into it, his teeth meeting in the middle as he bites all the way through the Hungry Shadow's corpus. It explodes into a shadowy paste that hisses and sizzles and dissolves, unable to escape the binding circle and just fizzling away into the air, completely eradicated.
Derrick's body lays against the side, effectively in torpor, his eyes staring at nothing. Stills checks his phone to confirm that he hasn't received any orders to bring Derrick in alive, so he finds a rusty shovel and Otis records him decapitating Derrick, killing him.
Derrick's left behind an old, desiccated corpse, as he was not yet 'dissolve to ash' age. As the group had originally planned to burn the barn anyways, they decide to throw together any evidence they've got in there (though they forget about Benny's car) to burn in the barn to get rid of it.
The group heads back to Chemical Reactions, where Leland rushes them upstairs because there's an important Invictus guy there. They go up to find Humfrey having a word with Ted. Upon Humfrey's subtle acknowledgement that this guy is important enough for the group to listen to, they explain that the Derrick situation is dealt with and Otis shows him the video. Ted mentions that he was about to have Derrick brought in alive, but now that's not an issue. Though he does regret going to all of the trouble of an investigation just to have the results cut off like this. He explains that he couldn't have necessarily had Derrick killed, but the Invictus didn't look kindly on those who would attempt to assassinate an elder over a matter considered to have been already resolved via duel.
Stills just wants to know if he's going to get paid for the bounty on Derrick, and Ted offers to take up that obligation. He asks if Stills prefers cash or account transfer, and when Stills opts for cash, Ted has Humfrey get Leland to bring his satchel where he fishes out a few stacks of wrapped bills and sets them down. He also offers some admiration for Stills' skills and efficiency in this matter and says he may be in touch later with an offer to upgrade his station.
After that, we settle into a full-blown epilogue victory lap for those present.
Later that night, after the bar's closed, Otis holds a demonstration for the vampires of the city. He has Leland darken the room, and he opens up his Lair and unleashes a Horrorspawn[2] he's been brewing. He also brings Floyd into the room and suffocates him with a bag. At the moment of Floyd's death, the Horrorspawn flies at his body, like a clot of oil, and flows into his body. And then Floyd gets back up, his sanity still shaky but he's coherent enough to recognize there's something wrong with his lungs and he can't hear his heartbeat. (He's effectively what Requiem 2nd Edition terms a revenant) Those vampires who haven't already accepted Otis' power begin to at least acknowledge when he says he may be the latest incarnation of one of the vampire clans' progenitors.
And a little later, as everyone shuffles back to their homes, Weaver has a visitor at his front door. It's Barbara McCoy. She's replaced the doorknob that Stills broke earlier, and tosses him the keys to the fixed lock. She also explains that she's cleaned up his kitchen for him. Then she makes it clear -- she doesn't like him. She doesn't like what he's done, she doesn't like wizards in general, and reveals that she was the one blackmailing him. She wants him out of town, after what he tried to do to that librarian. Weaver, who's been planning to leave town anyways, is fully fine with that. He asks her to give him a week to settle some affairs first.
She says if he's not gone in a week, she'll tip off the hunters as to who and where he is. If he's not gone in two weeks, she'll tell his fellow mages what he did. He agrees.
He then heads inside to find Alberto getting ready to leave, as with Derrick gone and his cult lacking a powerful patron, the Badacelli can now reclaim the tunnels for themselves. He tells Weaver that if he wishes to return for lessons, he'll be welcome in the tunnels, and Weaver appreciates that, and gets ready to get some proper sleep.
And I'm spent. Fade to black, run credits. This plot is done.
If there's any followup or anything regarding John's character, I may post another update, but for the moment this story is thankfully over.
When we've had more time to sort out the details, I'll talk about what we'll be playing next on the non-Starfinder nights. Later!
[0]-- It's worth noting that the Crassus has also pegged Stills as a vampire and knows how to deal with vampires. So he's kind of reverse-Good Cop/Bad Copping Stills and Weaver, not quite playing them against each other yet, but making inroads there.
[1]-- John asked me to have his character involved in some capacity or to have the God-Machine's forces kidnap him or something. Rather than leave another loose end to deal with later, I went with the former.
[2]-- This is literally what it sounds like -- Otis' Horror, the 'core' of his Beastly nature, has produced offspring that Otis plans to use to create a vampire, in much the same way the strix created the Julii once upon a time.
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