Oh crap, two of these in a single month. Been a while since I managed that.
So yeah, back with my coverage of my Geist game, which for the moment I'm calling 'Sin City' (because sin-eaters). If you need a refresher on the cast, the first entry is here. I can't really think of any additional commentary to add here, other than to hope everyone's safe and wearing their masks.
And awaaaaaay we go!
Where we left off, the krewe had just left the El Cortez hotel with some leads to follow up and a glimpse at a now-vanished Reaper across the street. It's evening by now, the last slivers of sunlight creeping across the desert sky.
Appropriately, the group heads for the Sunset Speakeasy just a few blocks away. Kenneth is a little concerned about going in because, in his words, he looks, smells, and tastes like a fed (because, as a reminder, he is one), and he's worried about putting people off depending on how rough/shady of a bar this is. Eddy and Richard go in instead, while Kenneth hangs out across the street to "smoke a Lucky Strike, like my doctor recommends."
The interior of the bar isn't especially fancy or dingy, pretty middle-of-the-road as these things go. Not terribly packed but most of the tables are at least occupied if not full. Eddy heads for the bar and passes some cash to the bartender to find out if he knows where Gus is, and finds out that he's apparently hiding out in the back room. The bartender mentions that Manny Rossi (one of the local mob bosses) isn't happy, and when Manny isn't happy, people who upset him tend to have accidents.
Eddy goes out to update Kenneth, who then dramatically flicks his cigarette away and goes in with the others to confront Gus in the back room. Gus is sitting alone, nursing a beer, miserable and worried, and he freaks out at the sight of them because his first assumption is that they're working for Rossi. Then he suspects they're cops. But they ask him what happened, and he tells them. He insists that it was an accident, that he's hit guys a bunch of times over the years and none of them have died before.
Kenneth off-handedly mentions the coins but Gus doesn't seem to know anything about them. The group is pretty certain that someone made sure that Sam was given those coins, possibly to get him killed. Eddy asks Gus if he's recently seen anyone running Three-card Monte or anything similar that seemed really sketchy. Like, sketchy by 'Vegas street hustler' standards.
And one does come to mind that he'd seen earlier that day, a woman in a fancy green dress running a Follow the Lady game near where he worked (which, incidentally, is near where all this went down). She was working alone, which especially stands out. He tells them roughly where she was. Eddy suggests that he lay low, and Gus says that's not a problem. He's a little more scared of Manny than the cops. But prison sucks, and he figures he can at least negotiate with Manny if he gets caught. But they go to follow up on that lead, and on the way out Kenneth buys Gus a drink.
Once they're outside Kenneth mentions that he was going to try and talk Gus into turning himself in when Eddy suggested he lay low instead, and they go back and forth on that a bit. It doesn't become a full-blown argument, but there's clearly a difference of opinion there.
They follow Gus' directions to find the spot and Kenneth uses Memoria to try and conjure up an image of when Sam passed by and acquired the coins. He has some trouble at first, but Eddy pulls out a flask full of some ghostly spirits to help him top off his plasm and Richard uses the Dirge to give him a boost to try again. And this time Kenneth gets an exceptional success and conjures up the magical hologram of what happened.
They see the woman in question with a guy watching as she tosses the cards around with a small pile of cash to serve as the winnings. Sam comes up and watches over the guy's shoulder as he loses to the game even though it's painfully obvious which card is the correct one. So Sam, confident he can beat this, steps up to try. Now this is normally where the person running the game starts playing it 'for real' now that the shill has instilled in the mark a false sense of security... except she doesn't. Kenneth takes a close look since they can observe the event without disturbing it, and she still plays really easy and deliberately loses to Sam. And he scoops up a bunch of cash, including the gold coins. There's also a watch in the pile, which he tips to her. He then leaves, and another tourist comes up to play, whom she blows off and packs up. The shill comes back and she tips him a gold coin and takes off down the alley behind her.
What the krewe isn't sure about is what the point was of all this. After all, there are far easier ways to kill someone than to dump a bunch of possibly-cursed coins on them and let some accident happen. Kenneth posits that perhaps you can't simply give the coins away and they must be taken, and the point was to foist them off on an unsuspecting stranger. Eddy, meanwhile, finds a phone booth, digs out some pocket change, and starts making calls to try and figure out who the woman is and where she can be found. He manages to get her name, Stephanie Edwards, and finds out that she used to work at a casino called Bacchus and is currently working for Mel Stash. She's just a local courier who tends to hang on the arms of gangsters at big functions. But it stands out that things keep coming back to Mel.
Kenneth suggests that they go down to Mel's place now, because confidence is the name of the game today and they should let it ride.
(And yes, I did give Sean a beat for that little bit of wordplay)
So they arrive at the hotel to find that it seems to be closed and work finished for the day, but some of the lights are on. Eddy calls upon the power of the Boneyard to 'claim' the hotel as his and looks into it, sensing two living people and a ghost in an office towards the back. He shifts his perceptions back there and sees Mel and Stephanie in the office talking to a ghost that's an average-looking guy they've never met before. Yes, they can both see him. And the ghost is freaking out because he can sense that the Boneyard has claimed the building. Mel seems to be able to sense it as well, and Eddy realizes that Mel feels a little strange -- he's not a sin-eater, but it seems like he straddles the line between life and death.
Eddy tries to keep them in the office while he and the others coordinate an ambush, but Mel steps up to the door with what appears to be some sort of dull metal coin and chants at it in some language that Eddy can't understand at all, and his hold on the place weakens just long enough for them to come out of the office. So now they're freaking out, Eddy's calling Mel a witch, and Richard takes issue when the appropriate term should be 'warlock').
Meanwhile, inside, Mel, Stephanie, and the ghost decide to split up and go find who's screwing with the hotel. Mel goes to the basement, Stephanie goes up the stairs, and the ghost goes to focus on the lobby and casino area as he then produces the mask they saw on the Reaper earlier and he puts it on, suddenly becoming enveloped in an earthen armor with dust coming off of it. (The visual effect of the dust is much like the Bride in Kill Bill after having escaped from being buried alive.) So now they're giving Richard grief over not knowing that Mel is some sort of magic-user and apparently has a Reaper working with him.
They decide to focus on the Reaper first, as the biggest threat to the ghosts under their charge. So they had in as Kenneth uses the Beast Key to unlock the Rage, channeling the power to fight the Reaper and manifesting ghostly bear paws in the process. He charges at the Reaper while Richard and Eddy throw tools at him with the Marionette. Kenneth manages to barely sink his claws into him but he does indeed hurt him, but the Reaper swings back and decks him pretty hard. They go back and forth with him, but the Reaper's armor is just too much for the ranged attacks and one-on-one he's outmatching Kenneth.
Kenneth, out of desperation and fear for his life, unleashes the Skinwalker. His geist (which, again, has a coyote's skull with rattlesnake fangs for a head) detaches from his body, letting out an unearthly roar and taking with it the Rage powers that Kenneth had manifested.[0] Kenneth collapses from sudden weakness, and it flings at the Reaper with inhuman claws. It tears at the Reaper with a fierce, feral savagery, shredding it until it breaks down into a pile of dirt, pulverized rock, and plasm. It dissolves away to reform elsewhere... at which point the Skinwalker, still hungry for blood, smells a couple of living white people in the hotel and takes off in the direction that Stephanie went.[1]
Eddy uses his connection to the hotel to try and find Stephanie and warp the hallway labyrinth created by the Boneyard to funnel her back towards them before the geist finds her. He's more than a little shocked to find that she's already using some power of her own to twist space around and slow it down, teleporting between closed doors and such. But Eddy manages to steer her back to them, and tells her to come with them if she wants to live. She agrees and they flee.
So the Skinwalker is on the loose in the hotel, and Mel's in the basement... Eddy decides to call upon the strength of the Boneyard to just bring the whole building down on both. He causes an earthquake, collapsing the building on itself, completely falling apart (helped by the fact that much of it was being remodeled). He shifts his perceptions to the basement where he sees Mel in some sort of ritual space trying to fend off the falling rubble with his magic, only to eventually decide 'screw it' and turn himself into a living shadow to escape. The collapsing building does take out the Skinwalker, though -- it'll reattach to Kenneth and recover its strength in time, but at least they've been able to disable it.
Of course, who only knows what sort of consequences there might be for bringing down an entire freaking building, but that's something we'll explore in the future.
And we leave off on the krewe dragging Stephanie back to Kenneth's office to try and get some answers.
[0]-- Admittedly I'm not technically sure if that should work that way, but I couldn't think of a good reason for it not to work and decided to Rule of Cool it.
[1]-- In case it wasn't obvious in my previous write-up, the Skinwalker used to be some indigenous shaman and not particularly fond of colonizers.
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