Mister Vampire: Requiescat in Potentia

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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile »

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The staff of the Patton Hospital are, or rather were, 100% supernatural. Since most of their deaths weren't reported, the state is entirely unaware that their hospital is completely unstaffed, and since even when being run lawfully most patients are locked in their rooms overnight and just didn't get let out for the past week, everyone who didn't find some way to break out has died of dehydration. The hallways are as white and sterile as ever, but the rooms are disaster areas. A few windows have glass shattered and stained with dried blood, the iron mesh beaten away to form a crack just small enough for someone to worm their way out. Those unlucky enough not to have access to bludgeons capable of that level of property damage, or too weak to make use of them by the time they got desperate enough to try it, are dead and rotting in their rooms. With the current crisis, no one has bothered to clean this up, and since this isn't exactly a building people visit on their Sunday strolls, they probably won't be until a new supernatural inherits the hospital and has to find a way to explain why all of the patients are gone without breaking the Masquerade. Plus, this place is now extremely haunted, packed with wraiths mulling about the Shallow Gloom equivalents of the rooms they died in, wraiths who will probably conglomerate into a poltergeist within a few weeks.

Clyde Robinson's room is empty, the lock on the door has been shattered. Examination of that look reveals it to have been crowbarred open from the outside. Looks like Chambers and Schultz were right - Robinson was either sprung or, more likely, abducted and killed to tie up loose ends.
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Post by Whipstitch »

"No cleanup crew yet? For a state facility? This fucking city."

Marco's first duty is to the Vow, so he'll retreat to Chambers' office to make a few calls about the prisoner situation. He's got 7 dice for Bureaucracy rolls dealing with Business or Government and is capable of summoning Chambers' for advice, so hopefully he can hash out a rough battle plan for delaying inspections and getting patients transferred to and from similar crooked operations so that the place isn't entirely empty in the meantime. As for the bodies the simplest solution is probably to get some trogs in and let them do what they do best.

After that Marco will try summoning Clyde and if that doesn't work he'll try to do a psychometric reading of Clyde's final days even if that's probably difficult under the circumstances.
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Post by Chamomile »

The good news is that you don't have to worry about the inspectors, because Grant Ellis has taken over sending them the checks and so long as those keep rolling in they seriously don't even bother showing up anymore. This is actually something of a Masquerade problem in and of itself - with Los Angeles and its environs in the state they're in, the shadow masters have frequently been too distracted with supernatural cold war to properly prune the excess corruption in the city, which could lead to intrepid young journalists more idealistic than is good for them catching on in greater numbers. It really would be better if inspectors would at least make a show of inspecting the building and just take the hint when people like Chambers say that the north wing is closed for renovations and is totally empty and that sobbing you hear on the other side of the door is just the pipes.

In any case: The inspectors are no problem. Those intrepid journalists might be, however, whenever they catch wind of the inspectors' sloth, so Marco is able to make a few calls. Of course, one of the problems with this city is that while, just like everywhere else, there are plenty of other operations being run by monsters, but they're all run by different sects of monsters, and those sects are all an awful lot less friendly with one another than you'd expect. Not so much that they'll actually let a Masquerade breach in the making like this just happen, but enough that they'll expect compensation for being forced to clean up the Makhzen's mess. Marco has his pick of Lavros, the Griffith Pack, or Lestrand to owe a favor to in exchange for a shipment of fresh patients from a couple of different hospitals (a couple of whom may have to be quietly reassigned from 'suicidal runaway sent in for psych evaluation while we try to find her parents' to 'criminally insane,' but whatever, most crazies won't be missed and are therefore pretty much interchangeable), or you can just hand the contacts off to Grant Ellis and foist the trouble of repaying those favors onto whoever ends up getting the hospital - Grant himself if he can't find a replacement.

Unfortunately, the free meal offered by the bodies isn't going to cut it as an exchange because the places he's talking to already have a strong and renewable supply. That said, the bodies problem is indeed an easy one to solve, and it even helps ease the growing unrest with Makhzen rule in the city just a little by offering a nice, free meal to every trog and mutant in the county. They'll have the place picked clean in a few hours and then quietly slink out in twos and threes over the course of the night.

With that out of the way, Marco can try and summon up Clyde. With nothing but a picture and a pretty detached description to go off of, not even a corpse, it's not easy going, but Marco's lucky today. He manages to summon up Clyde's ghost, who is happy to rave about the rats. There are chips installed in the rats, you see, which allow the Others to communicate with Clyde through the chip they implanted in his body when they visited him. The Others said they were going to liberate him from the clutches of ignorant humanity who were not ready to make contact with other life, that he had been selected for his ascended consciousness. They asked him to report on the guards - when they arrived, when they left, what they talked about. They were particularly interested in "the shipment," a piece of zetathon exelyte they apparently had right in the building, keeping it here to suppress the Others' network. The guards talked about the shipment a lot. Clyde had always known what it was, had always paid very careful attention when he heard them talking about it. He was able to tell the Others all about it, it was kept in a locked box somewhere in the basement, near his wing of the hospital, he guessed, judging by how long it took them to walk there and back when someone talked about checking up on it.

Clyde's pretty observant - shame about him being delusional.
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Post by Whipstitch »

If Marco hadn't already summoned Chambers for advice he'll do so now and ask him point blank about "the shipment."

As for the favor, Marco will play nice with the Pack on this one--if we end up as enemies owing them a favor won't count for much anyway in the short term and if we were to win hard enough it probably won't matter much long term, either. Certainly he'd rather deal with them himself than give them any leverage over someone else in the area--many supernaturals would sell their mother for a hamburger, after all. If we don't end up as enemies then working with the Pack is as good or better than working with an Ifrit.
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Post by Chamomile »

Yes, in retrospect questioning Chambers about it was a pretty obvious move that probably should've been taken for granted.

"The shipment" was something sent to Chambers by an old friend of his. The fortunes of the two had diverged a bit over the decades - Chambers was a moderately important supernatural logistician in a minor kingdom and his friend was a mehtar in Phoenix. Of course, Phoenix ended up capitulating to the Marduk Society and its princeps and entire mehtar council executed, so maybe Chambers was the more fortunate one in the end, Chambers muses, before remembering a moment later that he only outlived his friend by about six months.

In any case, "the shipment" was an oversized steel briefcase, very heavy, which arrived about two years ago when things first started to really go south in Arizona. He was left with instructions not to open it up and was never told exactly what was inside it. Even after his friend died, Chambers decided the risk that it was some kind of Pandora's box (possibly literally Pandora's box, you never know) was too great and just kept the whole thing under wraps. He'd honestly kind of forgotten about it, it'd been gathering dust in the basement for so long.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Marco ask Chambers to take him to where the briefcase was kept. In the highly likely event that it's gone he'll do a reading of the theft. He's hoping to get a good look at the thieves and see if they cracked it open to verify the contents.
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Post by Chamomile »

As expected, the briefcase is missing. A Psychometric reading of the area only reveals masked man entering and making off with it, led by Clyde Robinson, who's all kinds of nervous about approaching but is bullied into doing so by someone who appears to be a ringleader of the pack. Unfortunately, they didn't check the contents on-site.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Marco will call Ellis to inform him that he's checked out the sanitarium and that both the Chambers and Becker killings now appear to have involved the theft of guarded items. He'll also ask if there's any objection to the troglodyte plan, stressing that disposing of potential fetters is a vital step in haunt prevention. Marco won't push too hard though given that it's probable that Ellis kept the scenes intact so that blood mages and clairvoyants like himself could work their mojo on them.

Once that's done Marco will retreat home to replenish his power points and set himself to using his LA Crime background to try figuring out where the rats will be recruiting from next. He's thinking of pulling a Jay Jordan himself, only with more backup and less dying messily.
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Post by Chamomile »

Ellis will go ahead and have the place cleaned up immediately. He lost pretty much all of his able and willing investigators when Becker and Lyons bit it, and so long as someone's already gone to the hassle of making the calls there's no point in putting it off. He's a little bit surprised when you mention it - "Clean up? So is our rat problem solved? Eh, you're the investigator, do what you think is best, I guess. Can't hurt to be thorough." This city's a bit of a sloppy operation, it seems.

Marco puts out some feelers in the criminal underworld. The local gangs are fairly divided along racial lines, which means when you're looking for someone whose recruits are all hispanic, you don't even have to ask about the Crips or the Aryan Brotherhood, and once you can add on qualifiers like "has been moving into San Bernardino recently" and "worships a rat and/or rats in general" it gets pretty easy to narrow things down. On Eastside there's a small handful of communities where MS13 has come recruiting - much to the ire of local Latin Kings. Kids trying to prove they're tough and for whatever reason (usually related to supernatural interference) dissatisfied with the Kings end up heading out to San Bernardino with MS13, and they don't come back. There's a rumored affiliation with rats amongst this particular set of MS13, and Marco has a friend of a friend in the Kings who's shaken out the MS13 hideout from one of the kids who'd been talking with them. This Latin King is hoping to do something about this rival set showing up and "abducting" the locals, but the Kings have been distracted by a police crackdown lately and most of them want to lie low for the time being. This contact doesn't know of any Kings besides the one who's on board for sending MS13 a message right now, so Marco'll have to supply an army of his own - shouldn't be a problem, really.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Gear question: I've got Finance 2 and backgrounds in LA Crime and Ballistics. Can I easily acquire/have in my possession a pair of sweet bullpup assault rifles like the Steyr AUG, TAR-21 or FN SCAR? I mean, they are comically illegal in the good state of California but given his stat and power layout dual wielding them like an unholy blend of Neo and the Terminator would really be his preferred method of murdering as many people as possible in as short amount of time as possible. I'd be amenable to tweaking the description of my Finances to reflect gun running as a primary income stream if you like, given that what exactly he does off-screen hasn't been too relevant until now.

Anyway, Marco doesn't intend to ask permission or be terribly subtle about this lest any remaining moles in the Makhzen get wind of this. He wants to wait until nightfall and hit the MS-13 hideout fast and hard with his Ulmi crew doing the heavy lifting while a few Calaveras converge on the location shortly thereafter to slow any reinforcements and take out MS-13 who flee the building. Gear is simple: he wants his men to come loaded with machine or heavy pistols and a methanol & motor oil based molotov cocktail each given that rat swarms may be an issue. Marco also wants a few machetes along too--if he can't take any prisoners, he can take left hands and get to summoning later. As a general rule he prefers his men stick together and don't play hero during fights--his preferred method of engagement is to have them make heavy use of available cover while Marco acts as the difference maker. He's proud of how reasonably his crew is but they're still not soldiers.
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Post by Chamomile »

The current Finance of "unmarked bills" strikes me as exactly the kind of thing you could give to an arms dealer in exchange for lots of weapons, so there isn't even any reason to retcon anything. Marco can just exchange his liquid assets for firepower while he's preparing his team for the assault. That said, Marco's strength is 3 according to the sheet, which is one dot lower than you need to fire them one-handed (without penalty, anyway) even if you have a bullpup design taking you down to medium size. Sidenote: While double-checking lengths of bullpup assault rifles I have discovered that the SCAR PDW looks goddamn amazing.

In any case, Marco calls up the Calaveras and his Ulmian squad, meeting in the prerequisite abandoned warehouse, a few beat up chairs furnished and handed out to members of both in descending order of importance - a lot of goons end up standing in the back. Most important, and directly across from Marco, are Agustin Benavidez and Catherine Stewart, street-level leaders of the Calaveras and the Ulmian team, respectively. Marco explains the plan while a few grunts are mixing up the molotovs at a workbench off to the side. By the time night has fallen, the team is ready to go.

I'll wait for a clarification on the assault rifle thing before we begin.
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Post by Whipstitch »

(Marco has Devastation and according to page 261 "A character with Devastation can use any weapon they can use at all in one hand with no penalty." Marco isn't brutally strong, he's a talented tactile telekinetic, which is part of why having a maimed left hand doesn't actually bother him in the least. I mentioned the bullpup thing mostly because I do indeed think such things look awesome. Marco's preferred weapons would be a pair of Tavor X95s. Those things are crazy small, and thus perfect for a psychic gunman.)
Last edited by Whipstitch on Wed Nov 19, 2014 12:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Chamomile »

(Apologies for the delay. It's a pretty complicated combat in a system I haven't used a ton of, so I spend a lot of time looking things up and double-checking to make sure I haven't skipped a step and I haven't had the hour or so necessary to set it aside and chug through it 'till now.)

There are two kinds of lookouts. The ones who alert their team to incoming trouble by shouting an alarm, and the ones who alert them by getting shot in the face. The lookout posted at the door to the MS13 hideout is the latter.

The thugs inside are bright enough to take cover when the shooting starts, firing back blindly out into the streets while Marco and his Ulmian crew crouch behind the cars parked at the curb and in the driveway, returning fire against thugs hiding behind couches, televisions, and around the corners of walls inside the house. A few from the upper floor begin firing out a window.

Marco shouts for cover, opening up on the exterior of the house along with every Ulmian with a machine pistol, tearing through the walls with a withering torrent of gunfire while he dashes around the side with preternatural speed. Taking heavy fire, the surviving thugs begin to retreat, two out a back window and out into the street, only to be caught in the headlights of a las Calaveras car and quickly run down, the others deeper into the house. The mutants retreat around the sides of the house, trying to get another angle on the Ulmians, a pair run directly into Marco while he tries the same trick, eyes widening and filled with lead a moment later.

Kicking the house's side door in, Marco walks straight past a terrified lookout clutching a revolver in shaking hands, paralyzed with fear, and steps out into the main hallway of the house, hitting the one thug remaining in the front room with a casual burst from one of his rifles before stepping further into the house to chase down those who'd holed up in a kitchen, shooting at him ineffectually while he fills the room with lead. One dives to the ground and survives the onslaught, firing a bullet that barely grazes Marco's shoulder. As he levels his rifle with the panicking survivor, his attention is drawn by the revving of a chainsaw. Two burly mutants ambush him from behind, he sidesteps a crowbar, ducks under a chainsaw, and blankets the both of them with a full magazine from each rifle, one backs away and snarls, the other goes down. The crowbar mutant swipes at Marco, who backs out of the way, switches out a magazine, and brings the mutant down with one burst and then the wounded thug on the ground with another.

After a full minute of sustained gunfire, it's a guarantee the police will be here inside of five minutes. So now what?

(Mechanical recap of the fight:

Round 1

-Marco activates Celerity, kills lookout and takes cover - he'll close distance to MS13 on round two after their numbers are thinned and some number of them are suppressed
-MS13 thugs find cover and fire at Marco and Ulmians behind cover, one of them barely scores the 4 hits necessary to deal damage on an Ulmian, but gets soaked to nothing by the flak vest
-Las Calaveras sits in their cars and chills out
-3 Ulmians suppress the attacking thugs, the other 3 have heavy pistols instead so they open fire on the enemy directly. Through a combination of better luck, unarmored opposition, and superior firepower, they score terminal wounds on two of them and ordinary wounds on a third
-Lookout on side entrance ducks inside the house and cowers
-4 MS13 mutants all open fire on Marco and the Ulmians. Those on the ground floor are attacked by suppressive fire but don't take any hits. The MS13 mutants score three hits, one deals petty wounds, another ordinary, and the third serious
-Marco's second pass is up, he opens fire on enemy mutants upstairs, misses one (2 hits on 12 dice to attack - not his lucky day) but insta-gibs the other

Round 2

-Marco suppresses the mutants on the upper floor and runs around the side of the house so he can head through a side entrance and hit the thugs without cover without yielding cover himself. Thanks to Celerity, he can do this at a careful walk without sacrificing accuracy.
-Two thugs attempt to return fire despite being suppressed. One of them misses and is missed, the other misses and gets shredded by an Ulmian machine pistol with a terminal wound. Of the four others, two attempt to flee out the back windows, and the other two flee deeper into the house (including the wounded one, who isn't enjoying his -2 wound penalty).
-One car's worth of Las Calaveras fires up their engines and chases down the two runners, one is hit for a terminal wound, the other suffers only an ordinary wound
-One seriously wounded Ulmian decides he's just going to stay behind cover, the rest open fire on remaining thug and mutants. One hit on a mutant dealing ordinary wounds.
-Mutants return fire. They retreat around the sides of the house to get a shot at the Ulmians without being suppressed, and get a total of four hits (even though one of them was firing with penalties from both wounds and moving faster than a careful walk!), scoring ordinary wounds on an already ordinarily wounded Ulmian, serious wounds on another already ordinarily wounded one, and ordinary wounds on an unwounded one
-Marco's second pass, and the movement of the mutants through the same area as him, gives him an easy shot from the distance of his choice at two of them. One gets hit for a terminal wound, the other is hit for 6 net damage which is...Also a terminal wound? The chart doesn't actually say. Weird.

Round 3

-Marco mops up the one remaining thug in the entrance room of the house from behind, moves deeper inside to confront the two thugs who retreated within, hits one with a terminal wound
-Remaining thug in the house scores petty wounds on Marco (really rather lucky, considering the wound penalties he's operating under), thug on streets hits driver of the Calaveras car chasing him for petty wounds
-Calaveras score serious wounds followed by ordinary wounds on thug in the streets, incapacitating him
-Now that the MS13 mutant has the angle on them, those Ulmians not crippled by wound penalties are going to close distance and charge him, hoping to finish him off before he can retaliate. It works, the mutant is incapacitated by a hail of ordinary and serious wounds
-Lookout makes a break for it, other Las Calaveras car (technically on their turn, since movement is declared in advance, so this notation is a little bit sloppy) hits him with an incapacitating wound
-Two new mutants, armed with a crowbar and a chainsaw, emerge and engage Marco in the house. They miss.
-Marco attacks mutants twice - one miss, one hit for serious wounds

Round 4

-Marco lands serious wounds again, incapacitating the chainsaw mutant, and lands serious wounds on the crowbar mutant
-The remaining thug fires at Marco and hits again, but Marco absorbs the damage from this one completely
-Las Calaveras chills out
-Ulmians move into the house, set up shots against remaining mutant/thug, decide not to take them for now so they won't get hit by movement penalties
-Wounded, frenzied mutant makes laughably impotent attempt to get past Marco's melee threshold of 6
-A pair of ordinary wounds incapacitates the last mutant on Marco's second initiative pass

Round 5

-Marco mops up remaining thug with an insta-kill)
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Post by Whipstitch »

(Sounds legit. Against more serious opposition I'd probably have Marco be quicker to use Shifting Sands vs incoming hits, but he's got 5 Willpower so a Petty Wound just means he makes a pithy Jesse Ventura quote if anyone asks about it rather than of suffer a wound penalty, so who even cares?)

The priority list for Marco's men should go something like this:

1. Escape. Duh. If something is going to take more than 3 minutes it probably shouldn't be done. At least one person should take Marco's car and drive away immediately. The Calaveras should probably also leave ASAP since they're likely not as good at this sort of thing.

2. Capture. If there's any obviously alive but incapacitated mutants handy I'd like one captured.

3. Cleanup. Throwing stray mutant corpses into the entryway of the house and tossing a few Molotov cocktails onto the pile would be nice. If there's any corpses/incapacitated mutants that are far away from the house it'd be cool if people drove up to them and threw them in the trunk on their way out.

Marco himself will push his luck a bit farther than the rest of his men and will look around the building until the first siren arrives or until he finds something juicy. He's good at sneaking out of places and while he can't outrun a radio he can sure as hell District 13 a mortal police officer even if he limits his use of Nimble Feet to double speed in order to preserve the Masquerade. If there's anything obviously valuable like over sized metal briefcases or ornate looking candles he'll swipe those. He's also willing to settle for laptops.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Fri Nov 21, 2014 12:59 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Chamomile »

One of the Ulmian crew drives a car over to the mutant who came around the side and throws him into the trunk, while four others drag the mutants from in and near the house into the entrance to light them up. They're pushing the three minute time limit by the time they've dragged in the mutants from downstairs, and there's still one up top. Rather than drag the last one all the way down, they set the four on fire, then use the chainsaw to rip the face off of the one upstairs, destroying his most obvious mutation. It's up to Lestrand and his vice-grip on the police department to make sure the coroner torches the rest of him without examining it properly.

The most obvious valuable thing to be taken from the battlefield is the mutants' guns. While the regular thugs have pea-shooters worth peanuts, the mutants have real proper weapons (the ones who have guns at all, anyway) worth at least half a thousand a pop, probably more, and they're all pistols that can fit in your pocket. The flatscreen television and PS4 sitting in the front room were also pretty valuable, and the PS4 not even too hard to make off with, except for the extremely large number of bullet holes now in them. All the suppressive fire has done a serious number on the entrance room.

But the basement has something pound-for-pound more valuable than basically anything: Cocaine. An entire garbage bag's worth which has, unfortunately, been left mostly scattered throughout the room in various piles of bags, with most of the bags no longer in the garbage bag, probably each pile to be assigned to a different dealer. Looks like MS13 were selling on the Kings' turf while they were recruiting, either that or they pulled this off some irritated Kings they knocked off or something. Who cares, it's over $200,000 and half of it is already in a Santa sack.

The sirens are approaching by the time Marco's gotten his hands on all of it. A police officer spots him on his way out, and running away from the scene of a dozen murders with a large sack full of something unsurprisingly leads to the officer attempting to give chase. Equally unsurprisingly, that chase lasts all the time it takes for the police officer to round the first corner and realize that his quarry has vanished.
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Post by Whipstitch »

(Nice. I mentioned laptops primarily for the information they may contain but I'm not about to turn down a shit ton of cocaine. I mean, ffs, Marco's got Master Passion: Greed. He'd probably roll around in that coke like a pig in shit if he could do so without spilling. And for the record, his object of obsession right now is probably the mysterious case--it's valuable, missing, AND forbidden. That he doesn't even know what it is only makes him want it more.)

Anyway, Marco will whip out his cell phone and arrange for the driver of his car to pick him up a relatively safe distance from the ruckus. He'll tip off Lestrand's goons that they're about to have an uptick of mutant corpses on their hands but will assure them that measures were taken to make this a closed casket situation and that there's no doubt as to causes of death. Otherwise his next move is to interrogate the poor bastard that got tossed in the trunk if they happen to still be alive. Marco has like 10 dice for that sort of thing so he's pretty confident that he can at least find out who the mutants were working for.
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Post by Chamomile »

Marco and his team reassemble in friendly territory with a little over half an hour or so left on the trunked mutant's clock. Threats to the guy's life are surprisingly helpful considering he's already critically injured and very much unlikely to survive regardless of what Marco does with him, the mook apparently hasn't figured out that he's been shot several times in lots of places that contain rather large quantities of blood. He holds out for a while, but ultimately breaks down and starts handing out a few names and locations. The first one is the claim that he's working for Lestrand who is operating out of a certain address, which Marco happens to know is in fact a subway station. Not exactly Lestrand's usual digs. The mutant goes through a couple more lies, but by now Marco has caught onto his tells and is 90% certain that the name and location he eventually gives out are accurate: James Manfield, a Griffith Pack nezumi vanguard, who according to the mutant is operating out of the Alexandria Hotel. It's a suspicious claim, but the mutant sticks to it even after Marco points out that the Alexandria is deep in Lestrand's territory. Previously, when pointing towards some implausible element of the story, the mutant had always changed tracks, caught in a lie. Now he's sticking to his guns.

Unfortunately, the mutant doesn't have a clue why James is working out of Pack territory to hit a target in the opposite direction, why he's decided to pick a fight with the Makhzen in the first place, if the rest of the Pack is in on it or if James is working alone, what's in that mysterious case, or who the mysterious stranger James is working with is. The mutant does know that there is in fact a mysterious stranger, and that James is seriously dissatisfied with this stranger's rather overt methods. Apparently he was the one behind the bus-bomb tactic, and James didn't particularly take a liking to it. The stranger's response (the mutant happened to be guarding the room at the time of the conversation, which was loud enough to be heard on the other side of the door) was that the mortals sacrificed in the bombing were worth a trifle compared to the candle and assorted other trinkets recovered in the aftermath, to say nothing of knocking a big huge hole in the Grant's ability to investigate the death of Chambers. The stranger said he planned on hitting Dan Slade the next day, but James said he'd call the deal off if they didn't take some time to rebuild the cult and let some steam blow off. The stranger was more than a little irked by this, but ultimately let James have his way.

This guy is about ten minutes from expiring from his wounds, and Marco's pretty sure he's got everything he knows.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Marco will have the poor slob cleanly executed, preferably in a way that the doesn't quite see coming. Afterwards he'll warn Slade and offer his protection.

Assuming nothing substantial results from either those actions he'll call Grant Ellis so they can meet up again.
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Post by Chamomile »

Marco makes a casual gesture towards one of his Ulmian henchmen, who fires a bullet through the mutant's head from behind. Hopefully he didn't even know what hit him before he was gone.

Slade is happy to take whatever protection you're willing to offer. He is basically the last of Ellis' officers and has been worried about some kind of attack since Becker's manor lit up, but regrettably he has relatively little ability to do anything about it except try to avoid any secluded areas where he could be killed without a fuss and keep his power topped off with regular rituals so he'll have plenty of mojo to burn if he ever gets ambushed.

Ellis is, as before, entirely willing to receive Marco at his room in the motel to discuss the crisis.
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Post by Whipstitch »

"I squeezed a mutant and a name and address came out--James Mansfield, at the Alexandria. That's in Lestrand's turf, but my bet would be that there's no partnership, since the mutant had tried lying to me about working with Lestrand before I got the other details out of him. Dunno if it's a true false flag operation or if that's just the first lie he came up with. There's also an unnamed third party involved, and they're the ones who pushed James to be so aggressive. This unknown wanted Slade targeted next, but James is more conservative, so there may be a rift there now."
Last edited by Whipstitch on Sun Nov 23, 2014 8:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile »

"Probably not Lestrand and the Pack working together," Grant says, running a hand over his bald scalp and rapping his fingers against a desk, "those two are always pretty chilly with one another. Hell, with this new Silmoore brat making trouble for Lestrand, I half expect the Pack to get in on ripping him a new one. Maybe the point is to make it look like Lestrand is lashing out, provoke some retaliation? Would explain why they didn't just gather up all their vanguards and roll right over us after lighting up Becker and Lyons. We're at half-strength, we couldn't put up much of a fight..." Grant sighs, shakes his head, refocuses. "Alright, we need to find out who this third party is, and how big the rift between these two is. If they're starting to have a real falling out, maybe we can use this guy as a scapegoat. Take him out, show the Pack we're not to be fucked with and at the same time we give them an excuse to bury the hatchet. Otherwise...I dunno, I guess we kill James too, or instead, or whatever, and figure out how to handle the Pack when we get there."
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"We should probably tip off Lestrand that someone's raising a stink from his territory, since I don't think we're in a position right now to get a piece of the pie if someone takes him down. Besides, if I have to kick the Alexandria's door down I don't want Lestrand throwing a fit."
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"If Lestrand notices we're there, we've done something wrong, but it can't hurt to let him know. Maybe he takes care of it himself, leaves us without a sucker to interrogate as to why they're making the push, but hey, problem solved for free. I'd still call that a win."
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"The big risk is the possibility that I'm wrong and that Lestrand really is in on it. But even if that's the case I don't see much point in playing dumb. People know we've been hit by now and if Lestrand and most of the Pack are both committed to taking you out then you've already lost anyway. But in any other situation getting more info out in the open may put James in hot water when people see they're getting played."
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Post by Chamomile »

"Yeah, I don't see Lestrand being in on it. If Lestrand and the Pack are working together, what the Hell are they waiting for? After a sucker punch like we just got, we wouldn't put up much of a fight. Two weeks later, no follow-up. This has to be a smallscale operation."
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