Paranoia isn't a bug, it's a feature

 Before heading off to bed, Julius was fed some bottles of blood to make him wake up again, and that's just as well, as half his face seems to be missing. (Thanks, Ecaterina!) That's going to take a while to heal back up.

Lottie lures a group of fratboys back to the house as Julius is in no position to go on a hunt in his current state. The couple's particular way of feeding is somewhat unsettling to watch for anyone who isn't them.

They then have a catch-up. There's going to be an outright war with the Sabbat, and an Elysium will have to be called ASAP. The gold auras are gone. As new safehouses are needed, and a safehouse for LJ isn't safe if anyone but them know about it, Lottie hands Frankie the key to Jeanine's place, saying Jeanine left it with them (they swear they didn't kill her, but don't tell him they tortured her), that it's intended for him, and unlike the places he might want to go in Brooklyn, it's warded.

They have an outing to said apartment, near Morningside Park. Looking around the place (using one of the fratboys as a canary) they come across a kitchen drawer of "oppressive nothingness" and Jeanine's will, listing Frankie as her heir ...

Julius quickly averts his gaze from the creepy drawer, but Lottie goes full on Auspex on it - and starts having a seizure. She leaks blood and gold from her face, and Julius goes after her.

In the Dreamscape, as that's where Lottie ended up, she's seeing both Nordic mythology's icy plains with a giant trapped inside the ice, and a snake wriggling around his feet trying to eat through the ice. The Egyptian mythology's pyramid is also there, and she can see shadows of herself and the others from previous visits. The pyramid is bigger and more ornately decorated.

Neith, the goddess who wasn't there last time we encountered the Egyptian mythological dreamscape, talks to Lottie, offering her all the knowledge and answers she wants/needs, but it will hurt. She's fine with pain, as long as it doesn't hurt Julius. The gods propose a bargain of "perfect preservation" of LJ's relationship, but that sounds too much like a trap so Lottie doesn't take them up on it. She's told to climb the pyramid ...

It's nice to have unlife goals

Lottie ends up near the Washington Heights library. It seems Lladislav the Tzimisce's return is welcomed. It's rather touching. While having a sniff around the place, she also discovers some Jewish gangsters who seem to be involved in this, and a Setite is following her? (Is Ellie more concerned about her than the Prince?) She then overhears Turlev and Blaise telling off Lladislav for having "undone decades of work" with his stunt in Harlem. He really can't be around when Ecaterina gets back - unless he, too, would like to become a head shorter.

Meanwhile in Harlem, Val's car screeches to a halt in front of Frankie. Julius is also in the car, badly injured. They speed north to find Lottie, but Julius sends Val off to the Bronx while he and Frankie jump out of the car and run on foot to get to a safehouse near Columbia University. He makes some decoys and sends them off in a different direction.

Lottie does a number of impressive jumps between moving cars to avoid getting followed to get to the second nearest safehouse - incidentally the same one Frankie is carrying Julius to. Finally the two player characters are in the same building again!

Vampire: The Fangening

The fight up in Harlem continues. Frankie and Val eventually manage to incapacitate the Shovelheads and stuff their staked bodies in a car, along with the ghoul that can be useful for interrogative purposes later.

Lottie, meanwhile, sneaks off after the Sabbat guy leaving the scene. While being obfuscated she clings onto the outside of the guy's car to see where that might lead. He seems to be heading north west.

Edgar decides to go up to a door, and after seeing Theo heading in the same direction across the rooftops Frankie follows at a distance. Which turns out to be just as well, as Ecaterina shows up and makes Edgar a head shorter. Julius shows up to face her.

 The two cousins still on the scene, being utterly unable to help and not wanting to be a potentially fatal distraction for Julius, decide to see if they can find Lottie, but she has already hopped to a different car, and they have no idea where she is.

 

It's been a good adventure

The party decides to go to Ravenia, by way of Castor. In Castor there's a church with a partially collapsed floor. This eventually leads to us taking down the city's mayor slash undead monstrosity, and stopping a ritual to bring a lindworm through a magical portal. Deadorna kindly offered to put him out of his misery as an alternative to being sent back into some kind of hell dimension, but the lindworm took offense ... and was sent back, for possibly someone else to deal with in another couple of hundred years time.

In the woods we later came across Mother Elsana and the Night Lady. Elindra removed a cursed gem from a corpse, and as the Ordo Magica would only paw it off to someone else anyway, she buries it in an undisclosed location.

In Ravenia Valgai meets a friend, Teig, in a pub. (Teig as a character will be joining us going forward, replacing Valgai.) Murmei does a lot of research and is stopped from going to investigate a hubbub outside Ordo Magica in the middle of the night. His sister doesn't seem to think it's a smart move to get involved when people are out to potentially murder you? The hubbub turned out to be a whole family getting killed by a giant spider. Kind of like the one Elindra has as a familiar - except she was a few hours north of Ravenia at that point. Someone's setting her up?

Should have bought that Celerity

Evil Prince Basketcase seems to have brought the proverbial popcorn with him, as he's wondering how Lottie would rate her cousins' physical abilities. Dafuq? Is this just a game to him? The two Malks tell the Prince about Jeanine's intel about the Sabbat wanting to attack Brooklyn, and apparently he already has people watching the place.

Val and Frankie stick together, while Theo and Edgar head up top of some buildings. Shooting ensues after a noisy group of ghouls with a vampire walk the streets making a lot of noise. The two cousins go through the back of a shop to see who the group of six nervous vampires on the other side of the building are. They are spotted and end up fighting three Tzimisce shovelheads inside the shop. One of which manages to put his fingers through Val's face, upon which Frankie finally rolls to resist Frenzy ... and succeeds.

The Prince suggests Lottie shadows the Sabbat guy alone, which doesn't go down well with her or Julius, but they still go along with it.

 

It's all gone a bit strange 'round here

 Three new characters, two strapping young lads and an old lady, are mysteriously invited to a building in the city. It's about a job. Our job interview is basically an escape room scenario. We have to find certain things - at least three of them - and evade something called "cleaners" (killer robots, sort of) in order to find the way out.

One of the ways to do this is to have skills that mean you can tell them to go away, or for one to take care of the other two. After finding three, the group has a choice - do we continue to look for more of the thingamabobs or leave? We decide to continue, which was the correct answer. Had we decided to go back to the lobby, job done, we would have failed the job interview!

Turns out the organisation that invited us deal with multiverses, and it just so happens there's a case to go on straight away. In Wisconsin. A university student seems to have certain skills and knowledge that he really shouldn't have (they appear to come from one of the multiverse locations). Why is that? Is he actually from that place, and not from Guildford after all? Let the investigation commence!

Starring:

• Beverley "Bev" Squares
• Colin Scarlet
• Franklin "Frank" McClure
  

 

Chipmunk stripper ghouls in bow ties

Lottie and Julius need to melt their piece of brass somewhere, so Aisling takes them to a place she knows in Manhattan. As they drive across the Williamsburg Bridge, the Malks Auspex the water, and there's a shape lurking below the water. As it breaks the surface, it's a pyramidal mound. We've seen those before - in dreams ... Both Malks pass out, and are woken up by Aisling, who didn't even realise what had happened until she pulled up at the place.

At the ironworks, the metal is melted down into an amulet and they do the ritual. They get a teeny bit distracted by the smell of each other's delicious blood, because they have to part with some of it to submerge the amulet in. They also have to kiss the blood-soaked amulet, and not licking their lips is a bit like not licking your lips when having a sugar-covered doughnut. They succeed with the ritual, and successfully give themselves selective amnesia.

They go to speak to the Nosferatu in order to get a message to meet with the Prince. The Prince's twin ghouls show up and drive them to a post office location on the outskirts of Harlem. It's the Hell Gate Station. Not at all worrying ...

Meanwhile at Coffey Park, a car comes screeching to a halt. Edgar, another Brujah, shows up to say that the Sabbat are moving in on Harlem right now. Instead of going "oh, is this one of those times we should think before we act?" Frankie, Val and Theo pile into a car and follow Edgar up to Harlem.

Turns out the source was Ellie Harewood, the Setite the cousins had met previously. Some Tzimisce went right up to her, in front of some Kine customers that had to be adjusted, and fleshcrafted talons saying they were taking over. Or words to that effect. Either way, was Red Hook only a distraction and their actual target is Harlem? Which is fine by Frankie, because Harlem isn't Brooklyn. That shovelhead we "encountered" in one of the first sessions did say something about how the Manganos were supposed to be lured south, away from Harlem.

 

I feel like we've just met a vegan elf

Ah, I was wrong. This is actually where we tried to get the big ox god’s head up the big hole in the ground. The god is dying and the head needs to get back to where it was taken from. We finally put it on a cart and dragged out of the city.

We get rides from barbarians with ginormous creatures. Two hours later we get to a clearing with a big ox corpse in the presence of elves, and save the god.

The next morning, Elsiosi barges into Murmei’s bedroom. He tells her off. Valgai throws her out (for barging in like that), then invites her back in when she's suitably apologised. She comes bearing a letter from Mother, summoning Murmei to Ravenia. Elsiosi also wants to give Murmei tea to cure the abomination problem that he doesn’t actually have - he's just wearing a belt.

Valgai announces he's planning on retiring and heading back across the mountains. The rest of us convince him to maybe come with us first to Ravenia so Murmei and Deadorna can tell Mother to shove it.

What Would Lottie Do?

Theo's Vampire 101 class continues, teaching Frankie about the Sabbat. After being asked why they'd have to wait until Elysium before nominating that Toreador guy to Scourge (isn't the point to get in there first, so why wait?) he's told the "wheels are already in motion" for it.

Lottie and Julius decide Aisling should be in charge of the Fetish they're making - no, not the one they seem to have about blood bonding and then having sex in torture rooms with drains in the floor. This Fetish is to do with hiding memories. They decide to leave a cryptic message in the package Frankie is supposed to pick up from Seb tomorrow, so they'll get a prompt to go back to Aisling to restore their memories. They also discuss what/how much to hide away.

When it comes to the guys in Red Hook, Val shows up to report on how his chat with the police contact went. Turns out the cops further down know the charges are bogus, but they're scared to bring it up with their superiors? Smells like mind control. Theories abound. They should, however, not go charging in there, because that sounds exactly like what they'd be expected to do - and exactly the kind of stuff Lottie said not to do. She would be so proud of her cousin!

In Queens, they start looking at brass to use for the Fetish. It has to be brass, and made in the shape of an amulet. The piece they have appear to have been a part of the steel mill explosion in Red Hook, belonging to a Japanese guy. Hopefully they can shift the bad mojo from it before making it a magic item?

Blame it on the fiancée

We were essentially mostly fighting in these sessions. First of all we went to a tannery, and after some long stairs there was bad magic surrounding good magic and an abomination clinging to the ceiling. There was a hole in the floor.

We later had to go interrupt a ritual in the big hole in the ground, among the subterranean crystals ... and fought some more stuff. Cultists and abominations, oh myyy!

We're pretty good at fighting. No one's died yet. Touch wood. We also had to lug an ox head out of there and reunite it with its body? Or we returned it to there. Something like that. It was months ago now. 😆

When a Malkavian says someone's crazy ...

Lottie and Julius discuss theories with Aisling. Lottie removes Aisling's anxiety, because right now, there's a fuckload to be anxious about and she needs a clear head. Is the Prince trying to do something without the Primogen council knowing? Might it involve tunnelling under Central Park? No wonder the werewolves might be a bit miffed. Can we talk to the werewolves?

They also do need to speak to the Prince, but going in there with all their memories isn't a good plan. They need to somehow temporarily remove or edit a number of memories just in case. Fortunately, they have a Tremere at hand who knows just what to do.

Frankie's history lesson from Theo continues, and they also discuss hunting grounds and territory and so on. He also finds out about Hunters and Mages, and that there also seem to be Faeries and Ghosts. All this because he asked if there were other things beside vampires and werewolves he should know about. It's also suggested that if he comes face to face with Ekaterina, he should do nothing except to leg it.

Just prepare the loot list for next week

We go on adventures with a mare cat! There's a village in the forest. Will they sell us a chicken? Elindra ends up giving them one of her daggers in return. One of the villagers has a symbol for the Punisher god? But he's forbidden - on pain of death! - to worship? The village is a bit whack. Giant trees, giant bears outside the village ... and a sleeping lindworm?! We tactically retreat.

A Mother Marsh says someone needs to owe her a favour if she's to guide the part across the marsh, unless we want her grumpy. Elindra does this, thinking she can do some convince-a-roo with the help of Xanatha later. We manage to safely cross the swamp.

The 6-year-old boy we met earlier shows up, and wants Murmei to eat some sort of nut to show he's not evil. Murmei eventually eats the nut, because he's not evil, FFS.

We were attacked by things we should've run away from.

There's an axe. There's a grove. There's an old elf? We eventually go to a cultist building and kill cultists. My notes vary greatly in their, ahem, detail. *cough*