Greetings, programs!
So I've got another Promethean write-up for you today -- technically, I had it for you a couple of days ago and then forgot to post it, whoops. Sorry, I'm usually better about that but we had an Exalted game coming up and getting this posted slipped my mind.
Anyhow, not much of interest to add to this post, so let's get into it!
So where we left off, the throng had just tried poisoning some possibly-mutant junkyard dogs, only to watch as one of the dogs ate all the poison itself and died to protect the others.
So Father John and Steve make their way around to the junkyard entrance to try and squeeze in and get at that crane, so they can do something about the 'Mountain of Rust' before the authorities can respond to the commotion. Rudolf stays back at the tree to keep watch, with the dogs staring right at him. As Father John and Steve approach the house at the entrance, they see someone stalking through the junkyard. They get closer to find an older man, walking as if in a daze, carrying a bloodstained axe.
They try talking to him, only to get no response. Father John checks for spirits following him, assuming a spirit is interfering with him (which to be fair is a pretty logical assumption), but the Twilight landscape is pretty clean. Father John tries poking him in the forehead to get his attention, and that snaps him out of it. The guy freaks out and demands to know what they're doing in his junkyard. After a moment he consciously realizes he's carrying the axe and threatens them with it.
From a distance, Rudolf can see that all hell is breaking loose, and he uses Arc to fling a lightning bolt at the TV antenna on the roof of the house and sets the building on fire. That definitely gets his attention, and he runs back to the house, yelling for Dennis to call the fire department. Rudolf chucks a lightning bolt at him but misses, so instead he blasts the phone pole to knock out the phone lines.
Father John and Steve run for the crane to see what they can accomplish in the time they've got. Rudolf leaps down from the tree, but by the time he reaches the ground the dogs seem to have vanished. He goes over the fence and catches up with the others just as Steve goes to man the crane. He and Father John try to hold off the dogs, but in the end Steve has to leap down from the cab to help deal with them himself.
After that Steve quickly gets back into the crane and doesn't bother with any sort of precision -- he just uses the crane like a wrecking ball to knock the cars over. This reveals a pit beneath the Mountain of Rust, and underneath an empty car shell they find a mad science sarcophagus-looking thing that, as much as anything else, resembles the cryogenic chamber from the film Forever Young.
As near as they can tell, it's functional but has been left in some sort of power-saving mode. Though despite the apparent functionality, there are lights and indicators on it that seem to suggest something's wrong. Rudolf opens it up and inside finds a key to a bus station locker -- locker number 126. Rudolf sets aside the key and insists on getting inside the machine and turning it on because he's certain that something important will happen. He closes and locks the door form the inside, and Steve starts pushing buttons more or less at random.[0]
Lights flash, and the thing heats up on the inside. It flashes warning messages like "Flux containment failure" and such. In a panic, knowing what 'Flux' means to a Promethean[1], Steve tries to turn it off and back on again. But it won't restart -- it just spits out a bunch of steam and dies.
With sirens approaching, Rudolf gets out and starts arranging the area so he can try to spend the night in the thing by disguising it among the rubble, just in case it would need a longer exposure to do whatever it's supposed to do. Father John agrees to watch it for the night for good measure, staying out of sight as fire crews and police come and go. Meanwhile, Steve runs around checking bus stations.
Upon the next sunrise, Rudolf realizes he feels no different. But in the moment, it really hits him that he'd gone to all this trouble in the hopes of transcending what he was... and realizing that that mattered to him at all winds up being a Milestone for him.[2]
Father John and Rudolf are at least able to figure out that the machine was having an affect on the area -- not just with the mutant dogs, but the notion that the junkyard owner might've been displaying Promethean instincts (with the axe murders and such). At least, it's not a coincidence. They drag the capsule into a spot in the junkyard where they can get it into the VW Bus. They're barely able to cram it in, and even then they stuff the vampires inside to get better use of the space. They go and get cleaned up and Rudolf gets some ammo for the shotgun. Father John returns to the church where he'd confessed the day before, because he feels the need to explain to the priest that he's pretty sure the axe murders are going to stop now.
Then they go looking for Steve, and find him at a Greyhound station, where he's discovered that the older parts of the building match up the 1941 photograph he's got. But they use the key they found to open up locker 126, where they find a notebook inside. It's very much like the notebooks they found at Dr. Gino's place. The notebook seems to mostly contain sketches of the capsule. They skim the notebook and a newspaper clipping falls out.
The clipping looks to be about 20 years old, and it's about a psychic in Oklahoma. Written on the paper, in now-familiar handwriting, is the phrase "conduit of destiny." On the back is a pencil sketch. The sketch is of a black cloak in addition to the throng's brand symbol and the phrase "nie geborener schatten," which according to Babelfish[3] translates roughly as "never born shadow."
This winds up becoming a huge debate, spurred mostly by Rudolf, about why they've been dragged into this, mostly because Rudolf doesn't really understand what a Promethean is. He just thinks he's some kind of weird zombie. Steve tries to explain it to him, even pulling out his copy of Frankenstein to try and prove his point, but Rudolf isn't getting it.
The session wrapped up at about that point, leaving off with Rudolf insisting on working on the capsule when the group has time, and Father and Steve decide to look more into this cult they think was connected to the axe murders, the 'Neverborn Shadow' cult.
[0]-- Obviously, this whole sequence might have gone a little differently if Ander, who's actually kinda an expert on this sort of stuff, had been present.
[1]-- It's basically sort of a force of chaotic corruption that powers Pandorans and Centimani draw it into themselves to become monsters.
[2]-- For this character, acknowledging that he might want to be human is kind of a big deal.
[3]-- Woof, now that dates the original session a bit.
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