Sin City: Reconnecting (Geist)

Howdy there, folks. Back with another write-up from my Geist: The Sin-Eaters game.

Not a whole lot of news to add. There haven't been a lot of personal changes in my life worth talking about as of late, and there's not much else worth getting into that you aren't already reading this post to avoid. 

Before I get into it, a quick word -- I've mentioned before that the Geist game should have a general content warning because it gets into some heavy topics in places, particularly towards the end of this session. So this has been your warning before you go forward.

So we pick up that afternoon after the ceremony to cleanse Sam of the 'taint' or whatever you want to call it inflicted on him by the cursed coins. The group decides to play it slow for the moment and just keep an eye on things and see if Mel turns back up, so in the meantime they spend some time on personal business.

Eddy, for example, decides to follow up on that picture he found of his geist's girlfriend. He recognizes the hotel in the background of the photo as the Northern Club -- now called the Monte Carlo, a place where he used to deal booze back in the day. It was the first joint to get a legal gambling license, but before then it was big on the illegal gambling and drinking and they were regular customers of Eddy's back in his rumrunning days.

He heads in and his geist, the Lonely Proprietor, immediately slips over behind the registration desk, looking out on the place like he's supposed to be there. It occurs to Eddy that he might have actually been acquainted with the Proprietor in life as the guy currently behind the desk asks if Eddy's here to check in. Eddy explains that the place is an old haunt of his back in the day (Ha!). He asks if anyone from the olden days is still working there, and the guy mentions Louie, who was a bellboy when Eddy was selling booze to the place. Louie happens to be around though currently helping a customer, so Eddy wanders around some (while the Proprietor looks more closely at the waitresses in the gaming area) and waits for the older gentleman to come back down. He's mostly bald with a white mustache.

Louie's happy to see Eddy, as they haven't had much reason to encounter each other since Eddy got out of the illegal booze trade. They talk about the good old days a bit, and Eddy maneuvers the conversation around to the Proprietor's old flame and Louie gets to talking about her. Her name was Delores, and everyone called her "D," and she had a relationship with a concierge named Johnny Staff. It was kind of an open secret -- she played at being single to facilitate flirting with the customers for tips, but she and Johnny were in love. Tragically, Johnny got stabbed in a mugging out behind the hotel one night, and Delores kind of vanished a month or two after that. They never found out what happened to her, though Louie mentions they looked around and they couldn't find any evidence she'd left town and no sign that she'd died or anything. She just disappears.

Louie mentions there was a private investigator or something named John Wallis sniffing around the place after Johnny Staff's stabbing, and he mentions that he might know a thing or two. Eddy makes a note of that and he and Louie talk about sitting down after work some day and getting a drink -- but none of the bathtub stuff this time.

We then shift a few blocks away to the El Cortez, where Richard is going in to have a chat with Richard "Manny" Rossi, local mid-level crime boss and personal nemesis of Kenneth. But he goes up to the desk and asks to talk to Rossi, and makes sure to drop his own name. So they send him back as Manny isn't busy, and he welcomes 'Dicky' in, all friendly smiles and offers of booze. Manny isn't a young man, but has a mustache and goatee (which stands out in the era).

After some pleasantries Richard shows him the photo of his geist, the two men, and Manny in the background, and they get down to it. Manny remembers that, it was the opening of Bacchus. He mentions that was several years 'and about thirty pounds ago,' as he pats his gut. The woman was Lillian Loch, the older guy was her father, Robert -- one of the original investors in the casino -- and the younger guy was her fiancé, Max Polk, the original manager. Manny remembers Lillian as a sweet girl, real nice. There was a plan at one point for Max and Lillian to get married and then the couple would 'inherit' the casino from Robert some day. Y'know, classic 'marriage as transaction' sort of deal. But he mentions what a shame it was, what happened to her.

Turns out one day she and Max went out to Hoover Dam for day out -- this is back when it was called Boulder Dam -- and they got into an argument. Apparently she'd gotten a tip that Max had cheated on her, which Manny says is just a thing that happens when men are surrounded by pretty waitresses and showgirls, they're only human, you know -- the sort of typical stuff sleazy guys like him use to justify being sleazy. But they get into a fight -- Manny suspects she'd wanted to have the conversation in public, just in case -- and she takes a few steps away to catch her breath and goes over the edge of the dam. Some say she had a freak accident and fell, some say she jumped, some theorize that somehow Max got close enough to pusher her. Though Manny himself wasn't there, he heard all this second-hand. 

But after that, Robert was looking to get out of the casino thing, and all that. My notes on the latter parts of the conversation get shaky in places, admittedly, but Manny at one point comments on how easy it is to run a casino if you haven't somehow literally run it into the ground (or he makes some similar jab at Mel, I can't recall). But he and Richard finish up their little chat by having a drink to Lillian.

As Richard leaves the club, a car comes squealing out of the traffic right at him. He dodges out of the way but it clips his leg (which he partially patches back together with Plasm) as the driver hits the side of the building. He has to stop and calm down his geist, but the Synergy boost he got from completing a Remembrance scene just moments ago gives him an edge in that regard. But then he goes to check on the driver, who's slumped over the wheel, unconscious, with a cut on his head. Richard subtly uses Marionette to help him rip the door off the car and pull the man to safety... just to hear the ringing sound of a single gold coin falling out of the man's pocket.

We go through a quick montage of the cops and an ambulance showing up, taking the man away, taking Richard's statement, etc. And as all that wraps up and Richard starts to head back to Crossroads Inn, Eddy shows up as his scene was happening simultaneously and he was only a couple of blocks away. Eddy comes rushing over and Richard shows him the gold coin on the way back to the hotel and he explains what just happened. Eddy gives him a hit of ghostly hooch out of his flask, sharing some Plasm with him to help fix up that leg some more.

Meanwhile, Kenneth has been back at the Crossroads Inn, trying to recreate some Shoshone clothing from scratch (specifically, some beaded leggings), something he can pass off as an authentic artifact to sell that tobacconist on the idea of making part of his shop into a mini-museum. He uses some Plasm to try and tap into his geist's skills, and has some trouble at first, frustrating him and starting to cause problems until the geist just sort of takes control of his hands and uses him to finish the job (tearing up his hands a bit in the process).[0]

Eddy and Richard get back just as he's finishing up, finding him in kind of a stupor from the Skinwalker having ridden him hard and put him away wet. His hands are abused and a little bloody. They apply bandages and booze to Kenneth and Richard fills him in on what happened and why he's come back with another of those cursed coins.

Kenneth expresses a strong desire to execute Mel should they encounter him again. Richard isn't entirely thrilled at the idea, but he agrees that Mel is clearly too dangerous to let run around and they can't expect mundane law enforcement to be able to do much about him in any case. Eddy agrees.

But now they're worried about whether Mel deliberately set up that car crash, or if the guy was just collateral damage. They don't know if this was an attack on Richard, or if it was just stupid luck that he was there. Kenneth floats the idea that it might have been some sort of attack on Manny's casino. They decide to spend a couple of days recovering and recharging, and see if Mel makes his presence known (they're a little worried about going to look for him, just for him to pass them going the other way so they'll have just missed him).

So we jump ahead a couple of days, with the group recovering some Plasm from the hotel's cenote and Richard having healed the rest of his damage from the car crash. And Richard gets a call from the hospital -- the driver of the car wants to talk to him.

So Richard heads out that way where he meets Jack Dunn, who wants to thank him in person. He explains that he's had a rough year, and surviving that car crash was probably the best thing that's happened to him in a good while. Richard asks how he got the coin, and Jack explains that his late wife had a gambling problem, one that got so bad that she killed herself. He's been trying to trace her movements in those final days since then, on and off, and earlier that day he'd gotten some info from a bartender steering him towards the El Cortez's slot machines. He'd tipped the bartender heavily, and the bartender gave him some 'change' in the form of the coin, and he headed out there and the car has some freak accident mechanical fault that caused him to lose control.

He says that in the time since his wife killed herself a little over a year ago, the one good thing that's happened to him has been someone pulling him out of that wrecked car. Richard, already very concerned about all this, twitches when he hears that Jack's wife Kathryn has been dead about as long as Richard's been a sin-eater... and then Jack shows him a photo and that seals it. It's her, the woman that Richard tried to save and couldn't. He excuses himself to keep from completely breaking down in front of the guy. He steps back in a couple of minutes later, and they talk a little more and Richard leaves Jack his card in case there's anything he can do to help him, anything that needs fixed or anything like that.

And we left off on that emotional note. Thanks for joining me. Mahalo.

[0]-- For those of you following along at home with the mechanics, his first roll on the extended action to make the leggings was a failure, so he takes a condition to keep going and then gets a ridiculous roll that lets him finish the task on the second roll.