Hey there, folks. Sorry this is a little late. The past week just got away from me. Circumstances came up that means that we didn't get to play this week anyways (but hey, we got 17 uninterrupted sessions in before the first disruption, I ain't sneezing at that), and in my mind it's not late unless the next session has happened, so I'm still good.
Honestly, I can't think of anything I particularly want to add to this other than I finally got another chapter of my furry cyberpunk story finished. I'm behind on that on the blog (but you can currently find it here), but honestly I think anyone who could or would be reading it here is already reading it over on FA anyways.
Anyhow, let's get on with the show.
So we pick up after the meeting with Carmen last session with Kenneth heading back to his office to make some phone calls, because he has an idea. He gets back to the office to find someone has slid an unmarked envelope under the door. He opens it and on a piece of plain white paper finds written in neat handwriting: "Manny could have hexed you. He could have made you so unlucky a contrived coincidence could have uncovered a deadly allergy nobody knew you had. He chose not to. For a reason."
Now, this isn't anything new to Kenneth but does suggest he's on the right track that it wasn't just a fit of pique that led Manny to killing him personally. The note isn't signed, but it's not too hard to imagine Talya sliding the note under the door on her way out of town.
But with that filed away, Kenneth's got a plan to legally confiscate and examine a couple of his slot machines, and in a way that's visible and dramatic enough to bother Manny into possibly moving something valuable that could be intercepted or tracked. He's not thrilled at having to do something visible and dramatic this early on and draw attention to himself, but maybe it's the right time.
So he starts making phone calls to his superiors in the Bureau and after about an hour of working at it manages to finagle a warrant he can pick up tomorrow to seize up to three slot machines for examination, on suspicion of their use in money laundering.
So we skip ahead to the next day, which greets our intrepid krewe with an article in the paper about Max Polk's death. The article doesn't go into details, but it suggests the police suspect foul play as opposed to a suicide.[0] While there's not a lot of dwelling on it in the moment, there is sort of a 'everyone looking around at each other nervously' moment.
Before anything comes of it, Carmen shows up at noon on the dot to check in with the krewe and finds out that they've got a solid plan for the machines without having to pull any sort of ridiculous heist. So she calls her people to get the ball rolling on the truck, with plans to meet at the casino in an hour.
As she leaves a cop comes in and asks for Richard at the front desk. The guy working the desk, not sure what to do or say, reflexively glances over to the corner of the lobby where the group is. Eddy quickly steps up to introduce himself as the owner of the hotel and no he will not be talking about his tenants with the police without a warrant. The cop, wisely choosing to pick his battles, leaves his name and number and asks Eddy to have Richard get in touch to answer a few questions.
He leaves and Kenneth suggests to Eddy that he doesn't need to be covering for Richard's screw-up, and Eddy says that Richard's a member of the krewe and he'll do what he can to help him. But he does then tell Richard he will be expected to contact them and clear this up himself.
Then they get to talking about the plan, and Eddy hopes that Rossi's not going to get any warning from someone in the cops that they're coming for the machines. But Kenneth's not worried because the local police department isn't involved in this and the FBI is probably a little tighter in that regard. He does acknowledge, though, that you don't always know who to trust.
So the hour passes and the krewe meets with the Carmen's people and their truck in the alley behind the casino. Richard and Eddy put on some coveralls to look like their with the workers who'll be taking the machines out. Kenneth psychs himself up and knocks on the back door. A waiter answers, and Kenneth flashes the badge and tells the waiter that he's going to want to get someone in a suit. The waiter flees, and Kenneth jams his foot in the door before it closes and just leads the group in.
They make a beeline for the main floor and just as they're about to reach it, the manager on duty, James Hodges, stops them. Kenneth shows him the warrant and his credentials, and gives him a number to call to check the authenticity. James put a couple of security guys to keep an eye on them but lets the group continue on with what they're doing. Richard, hidden among them, helps identify one of the rigged machines so they can take that and a couple of regular ones in a 'random' sampling.
At one point the manager comes out with the frustrated look of someone who's been stonewalled and can't divert this and whispers something to the security guys as they watch the krewe claim the three machines. As they load up the last one, James requests an official receipt for the machines and asks when the casino will get them back. Kenneth is like "Well, I'm not an expert but this could take a while, we've gotta take them apart and all that," and the manager just makes it clear that in 48 hours he's going to start making phone calls. Kenneth says that's reasonable before he follows the last machine out to the truck.
Carmen asks if they had a place in mind to work on the machines, and Kenneth said he was just planning on going for the hotel unless someone's got a warehouse in mind. Fortunately, the Enders do have a warehouse they can use. They give him an address and they split up (either Richard or Eddy riding with the Enders, I didn't write down which, but it was one of them) and take convoluted routes to the warehouse. At one point, on the way, the Enders' truck stops in an alley and peels off a bunch of tape covering up logos for a moving company on the truck, just in case they're being followed, and eventually everyone reconvenes at the warehouse.
Carmen suggests that she's confident that Kenneth covered his tracks well enough, and Kenneth says that for all they know Rossi's remote-viewing them right now. She says that they've had their own run-ins with Rossi, and they're pretty sure he can't do that. Kenneth asks Eddy if he can use the Boneyard to make it 'against the Law' to scry on a place, but Eddy's actually not sure if they can make him subject to that in that manner.
So they get inside and open up the slot machines and find the rigged one has runes and what look like circuitry diagrams all over the inside of the casing. Some of the runes look to be in the same style of the one that Mel used in his workings (and in fact they can see where one of Mel's symbols has been scratched out and painted over). But then, Mel and Rossi would have likely been working together when they first installed these machines, so it makes sense that he would have had a hand in whatever larger design was intended for them.
Richard suggests getting pictures of the internal components for both the rigged and the regular machines for comparison's sake, and he also says he's going to go through everything and write up how it all works in a way that Kenneth can explain to his superiors or a judge, something light on jargon. Fortunately, whatever is going on with the symbols, Richard can assure everyone that the slot machine doesn't need them to function and they're not a component in the rigged mechanisms. In other words, they don't have to try and explain magic to the judicial system. If need be, they can explain the symbols away as some sort of gambler's superstition.
Kenneth just needs to know if Richard can provide documentation establishing that these are machines used explicitly for cheating, and Richard can do that. Kenneth then suggests that if Richard is willing to testify that the symbols weren't there when he built the machines (which they weren't), then that means that Rossi or his people had to put them in later and thus had to be aware that the machines were rigged, which helps establish intent.
It takes them several more hours for Richard to do the full tear-down that he needs to document everything and let everyone take a look at the components. The Enders are copying down the occult symbols for study. At one point Kenneth calls the Bureau and tries to get them to send someone down to independently verify everything they're doing and recording, and is told they'll get someone out there in a couple of days. Eddy is twitching because there was still money in the machines and he's pretty sure they won't let any of it 'accidentally' fall into his pockets. Kenneth reminds him that if this works and they can take Rossi out of the game, then Kenneth will be in a good place to take over and he'll be much better off in the long run. And the FBI is going to be much less concerned about someone as small-time as Eddy (my words, not his) when the alternative is someone like Rossi. Besides, even if the government knew about the supernatural[1], Rossi would certainly scare them a lot more than Eddy would on that front as well. Eddy accepts that for now.
And that's about where we leave off.
[0]-- As a reminder, nobody knows in-character what went on in that room after Richard left Lady Luck alone with Max. They just know there was a gunshot.
[1]-- I mean, they do, but TFV hasn't fully come into its own just yet and even then their experiences with sin-eaters have given them the false impression that they're strictly a wartime/battlefield phenomenon. They won't figure out the truth (or at least enough of it to be a problem) until the 70's or so.
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