There are no safe mental spaces

Lottie and Julius take the Staten Island ferry, while being followed by the Nosferatu Primogen. Sneaky Prince. AltLottie comes out to play and she, along with Julius, agree that killing Jeanine is bad.

At Theo's, he looks as the dagger and says she's seen both Jeanine and Charlotte with it. Frankie agrees to sign a formal complaint against Jeanine. As the two Brujah leave to find their Primogen, another car T-bones them and tries to run them off the road and shoot at them. Theo gets some shots off before Frankie gets them out of the way. (This will have “interesting knock-on effects” says the GM.) After all, if the unknown assailants shoot back with the Tommy guns they're sporting? Heads probably go splat, which is bad for vampires. Failing to find Don Cerro, they end up at ... a house where we know from previous (way back near the beginning of the campaign) that Charlotte has two apartments in? And Theo has a key?!

Staten Island smells funny. Following a scent, the Malkavians find Jeanine in an inn, looking ... poorly. Tommy the Fool tries to get a room, but they take Jeanine up to the room she already has, where Julius pricks her finger. Jeanine has somehow become Thin-blooded?! How the fuck is that even possible?! This complicates things enormously. What to do? AltLottie suggests skipping town. Julius declines.

Rolling a double 20 is very 2020

So, there's a massive hole in the ground in Thistlehold. There are things coming out of that hole, and we fight them. They keep coming back with more friends. And then there's a wizard abomination thing, and that's not good - especially when neither Hairy Dog nor Yahana are with us. They were kept out of the city because a giant spider and a (sort of) tame kotka are a bit ... eye-catching.

In the middle of the fight, a nice double 20 (it was 2020 at the time, after all) ensured Murmei's bowstring snapped. Things continued along those lines. Deadorna very nearly died in the fight. Fortunately, it turned out that a counterspell was useful, because that wizard had a big Corruption cloud, and let's not?

Finally some Templars showed up to help, but there's still a bunch of Corruption boiling up from that hole in the ground, so things aren't exactly looking fabulous, shall we say?

We don’t need this level of fanservice!

After a two-month break, we're back in New York. The Prince's ghoul delivers a note to Lottie which confirms that the broken ghouls are indeed Abrogard relatives, and they are indeed Jeanine's. The letter is the Prince's handwriting, but it's perfumed. Is he siding with the Toreador for some reason?

Lottie and Frankie drop into Theo's to let him know maybe getting too hard on the Toreador is ill advised at this stage.

Lottie and Julius go to Angela and instruct her to get Andreas into whichever nursing home will take him at short notice. She's also instructed to (and then made to forget having done it) calling a particular phone number to say on behalf of Charlotte Hansard, "J Calloway" isn't to disembark any ship. Could Jeanine be headed for Staten Island, where the Anarchs are?

Frankie, meanwhile, goes to get both the knife and the plans from Benny. The note left by the contact in the planning office is weird. It's in English but is hard to read, and looks like a lot of nonsense? Frankie brings it to Lottie and Julius, who get weird vibes off it. They try to look at it in a mirror, in case of some kind of magic filter, but it still doesn't work. It's put in a locked drawer for later.

The three of them then go over to the Staten Island ferry. Frankie drops the two of them off and drives off. Lottie and Julius are met by Tommy the Fool, a fairly useless mook, in case they need someone to do the heavy lifting. Or maybe in case they want a snack on the way, you never know.

There's a hole in my city, dear Liza, dear Liza

We’re back in Thistlehold! Talking to the head witch, it turns out the rubbings we had of the stone tablets were nothing more than simple merchant receipts or something like that. So much for that, huh?

Murmei is told that his sister Rilia has gone missing, which he already knows - she is, after all, a full-fledged barbarian now and calls herself Deadorna ... who is shown the place where we caught the Flayer, and told the story of how that came to be.

We see Elsiosi a couple of times: first when she comes around looking for her betrothed (who hides in his bedroom, pretending not to be in), and second when she comes around sporting a corrupt basalt ring. This time Murmei isn't hiding and, after botching a roll, tells her stories of how brave they were in Davokar.

There's a message to meet with a Prios person in a bar. The big, city-wide warning bell, which has been silent for the past four years, goes off. There are Colossi coming through the forest - witches normally ride those? Deadorna talks to barbarians about a well, and we finish on what sounds like a great big explosion in Thistlehold. Not so much an explosion as a giant sink hole suddenly opening up and swallowing a considerable chunk of the city.