Greetings once again, folks. We've been on a pretty good roll with these so far. But having regular posts does mean these pre-game bits are less interesting because I usually have less news to report or comment on.
That said, I do hope folks are being safe with everything going on right now. In a better year, I'd probably be lamenting the month flying by after Anthrocon, preparing for running Æon at Gencon and trying to get it ready before the last minute. Here's hoping we all make it out the other side of this stronger than we went in.
And after that little downer moment, let's get to the fun stuff!
Where we left off, the krewe was taking Stephanie back to Kenneth's office. On the way there, unbeknownst to the characters, Stephanie tries to read their minds with a little bit of magic. She doesn't get anything from Kenneth, but Richard's worried about whether he'll be able to find anything that will help his geist with possible leads destroyed in the rubble of the casino and Eddy's trying to figure out how Mel escaped from the building.
They reach Kenneth's office, tucked away in a small building. The office itself looks like someone tried to cram a PI's office away in a supply closet. There's a bunch of stuff about Manny Rossi pinned up on one wall. They begin with some standard pre-talk pleasantries, as Kenneth makes it clear that this isn't an official investigation, Stephanie's not under arrest, and she can leave if she wants.
She looks over at his wall of Rossi notes and comments on how thorough his investigation is. She mentions that Rossi doesn't normally kill people himself (or personally drag people out into the desert and break their legs, either way). Normally he makes it look like an accident. Something that Kenneth did really must have gotten under his skin.
But they then move on to talking about the coins. Stephanie doesn't bother to hide her involvement in things, that she was supposed to make sure some mark from out of town took the coins. She confirms that they're cursed to bring misfortune to whomever possesses them, and that they come from the guy Mel buys them from like that. She explains that this is all part of some larger plan of Mel's, even if she doesn't know the entirety of the plan.
(She's pretty straightforward about all of this, and while she doesn't volunteer every detail of everything she knows, she doesn't waste a lot of time or energy playing coy and they know better than to push the questioning in directions where it's not going to go. This is a pretty solid scene, all in all.)
In particular, Kenneth is pissed about what this has done to Gus. It turned a guy into a murderer and will probably ruin his life at best. He wants justice for Gus as well as Sam. Stephanie says that probably the best thing for him would be to turn himself into the cops, do a little bit of time breaking rocks. Or he could owe Manny a favor and get some protection from them if Manny gets to him first. She's pretty matter-of-fact about this. Richard leans in and asks if she doesn't feel bad about what's happened.
Stephanie's response is that if she's out in the desert and sees a coyote kill and eat a hare, she feels bad for the hare but it doesn't change that sometimes these things happen in the natural order. (I forgot to write down the exact moment he does this in my notes, but I believe about now Richard excuses himself to stand in the hall before he loses it.) Kenneth's pissed, wanting to know if she only sees Sam and Gus as animals, but she's unrepentant. Kenneth convinces her to get Manny to back off a bit from Gus and give him some room to go to prison on his own terms.
She agrees and gets ready to leave and do just that. They ask about how to reach her and then she gets a little dodgy. At one point they ask if she has any sort of ID or driver's license, and she digs out a stack of ID's with her face and different names on them, flashing them at Kenneth for a moment before she puts them away. She gives them a number where she can be reached, if she happens to be near the phone. Kenneth says he suspects she'll be near the phone if they need her, and she just gives him a smile and says "Well, if it plays out like that."
When she reaches the door, Kenneth calls out for "just one more thing," and when she turns around he takes her picture with a camera, one of those big ones they had back then. She leaves after that, shaking her head to clear it from the flash, and Richard is out in the hall. He insists on walking her out of the building and uses the Dirge to whistle a tune to try and make her feel guilty over what's happened. He doesn't manage to get through to her, but she does stop and look at him and says "Interesting" before she leaves the building, suggesting she knows he tried to do something.
Back in the office, they talk about going back to speak with Gus again, and Eddy points out that it's late and Kenneth is clearly about to fall over. He suggests that Kenneth come with them back to the Crossroads Inn and stay there, since it'll be more comfortable than the cot in his office. Also, he can get a hit of plasm from the cenote in the basement. He agrees and they all head back and move the coins from Richard's safe to the basement in the hopes of keeping him ahead of any curse. But they do decide to follow up on the coins the next day.
And the next day comes!
They look up William Eisenberg, the engineer who bought those coin dies from Eddy. He lives in a suburb called Henderson, and they all hop in Kenneth's car and drive out to his house. He's a little surprised to see them, they ask if he knows Stephanie, and he remarks that he's met her in passing. He stumbles over it, but Eddy eventually asks outright if William is distributing cursed coins. William says that's preposterous but Kenneth asks if the gold is cursed. William stops and says that it isn't entirely impossible. They dance around the subject of whether curses exist, whether they believe in that sort of thing, etc. He admits he makes the coins for the novelty, and Kenneth says he's going to 'level with him.' William says if they're going to level with him, then they probably shouldn't do it on his doorstep and he invites them in.
The house is a pretty clean, standard ranch-style. The only thing that stands out is a bookshelf that is loaded with books on science, chemistry, and alchemy.
And now comes the levelling, where Kenneth says that William is connected to these cursed coins somehow and he has to figure out how they fits into the investigation and what's going to wind up in his official report. Having buried the lead, Kenneth officially introduces himself and produces his FBI credentials. He wants to know about the gold's properties and William says he theorizes the gold may be infused with an unusual form of radiation with ill-understood properties. He mentions he worked around the Trinity test (though he seems a little young for that)[0], and winds up having to explain some of the theories on what radiation can do to the human body and how it can make people sick. (I actually had to stop and think about what people did and didn't know about radiation sickness back then, which probably came across pretty naturally for a character with scientific inclinations forgetting he's dealing with laymen) Richard wants to know where the gold came from, and William thinks about that for a moment before he just tells them outright...
He makes it in a lab.
They insist on proof, and he says it's a long, boring process. They insist they've got time. So he leads them to a back room in the house, with a door with four locks on it. He opens it up and they're hit with a very unpleasant smell as he leads them into a little private lab. So as they watch, he produces a brick of what might be lead and starts melting it, breaking it down, applying various chemicals and processes to it. At one point he puts some shards of what might be glass or jagged crystal into the pot, and pours in some caustic substance from an unmarked metal canister using tongs to handle it. Richard asks about the glass, which William explains is a form of fulgurite, sand fused by incredible heat like lightning or certain explosions.
The whole thing takes a couple of hours, and is boring as hell, and Kenneth talks about the fact that William is just making gold and bringing it into the world and all that, like it isn't some miracle. William comments that he can't do it on any industrial scale, and he's still refining the process as he's, well, refining the gold. Kenneth slaps him for that pun and he gets back to work.
Eventually William pours molten gold into a mold to make a gold bar. He says that he and some associates make the coins elsewhere, as they're all experimenting with the process on their own time. The krewe asks if he isn't worried about inflation, about injecting money into the economy, but he doesn't seem to think they're doing it on a large enough scale to really have any impact. Kenneth argues this is debating counterfeiting, as he's creating wealth and money from basically nothing, and William says that what he does is akin to finding wood in the desert and carving fine furniture from it which now has value (which, while not an entirely accurate metaphor, does hold up given that gold is still something we apply an arbitrary value to). But they go back on forth on this, and Kenneth wants to know why the coins have the properties they do, and argues that it's irresponsible to be distributing coins that could be putting people in danger. William concedes that is a debatable point, but he doesn't know the exact reasons for the properties but he's working on it.
The group asks who his other associates are, and he suggests they take the conversation back to the living room. Kenneth says that's a good idea, as the lab has a lot of volatile things in it. William asks if Kenneth is threatening him, and Kenneth just says he's not here in any official capacity but he wants to know how and if William can make all this right. William admits he doesn't have a good answer for that. William locks up the lab and they head back to the living room.
Richard asks if he can have that gold bar William just made for his own experiments. William offers to sell it to him, at a discount since he now knows it's not real gold, and they haggle, but the price is a a little high for Richard's budget and he says he'll think it over. Eddy quietly 'claims' the house with the Boneyard haunt because he suspects we're about to reach the portion of the conversation where a fight's going to break out and he wants to make sure William can't escape.
Eddy then uses the Boneyard to mess with William and inflict the Guilty condition on him. As he's doing that, Kenneth takes out his flask to take a drink and puts it away, only then to produce it and offer William a drink to be polite... after switching his flask for the one containing the concentrated memory of Sam's death. William, unaware of what he's about to drink, drinks it and Kenneth is quick to catch it when William goes into a trance and the flask inevitably dramatically drops from his fingers.
William breaks down as the memory ends, and Kenneth demands to know what he's going to do to make this right. William doesn't know what, and Kenneth tells William that he's not going to let an atom of that gold out into the world unless he knows he's fixed what's wrong with it. He can't prosecute William for this, but the gold is killing people and Kenneth does answer to a higher authority that will see justice done. William, tears streaming down his face, says he'll do whatever he can, and Kenneth storms out.
Richard asks William to go ahead and share the names of his associates now that he knows what he knows, and the alchemist is so worn down that he gives in and gives them names and numbers. Eddy lets the Boneyard drop and they all leave.
On the way back into town, Richard suggests that Mel might have been planning to use that cursed gold to magically rig the roulette wheel, and Sam was just a test subject to make sure the coins 'worked.' So the concern is that Mel killed a guy just to prove he could give someone bad luck, and given his past that hits Richard on a personal level. Eddy is also worried about how many restless dead something like this could create.
And we more or less leave off there, with a brief off-camera montage of the krewe menacing the other alchemists into keeping their damned gold to themselves, and then the group is planning to go after Mel.
[0]-- It's worth noting that while the characters are not described in explicit detail or even named in the book, William is my interpretation of a character mentioned in the core book for Promethean: The Created, 2nd edition. Lemme know if you find it for free internet points!
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