Eat the Book Lady, even if she looks gristly!

The party loot the corpses of the people foolish enough to try and murder them last week before deciding they should probably start heading back.

Murmei, meanwhile, discovers that the owner of the Silent House (my notes for this session are really thorough, the previous sessions are scant at best, so don't look at me) lives in Ravenia. That's the same kind of area where his family's lands are.

He then decides to look and see if he can find any information about his beloved's family. Turns out one of them live in Thistlehold, and the place where we went in a previous session and saw monogrammed chairs had one that matches this person: RG. Do we really need further evidence that the Garlaka family are shady as fuck, though?

Seeing as how no one's come to pick him up, he's eventually thrown out of the Queen's Legate when they have to close for the night. Elsiosi intercepts him on the way home, and wonders what he's doing out alone late at night on dangerous streets. He pointed out he's a skilled adventurer, whereas she is a lady and should definitely not be out alone at night, so he escorts her back to her inn. Instead of coming upstairs for a drink, he bid her a good evening and stomped off back home to sleep.

In the night, the rest of the party return. In the morning, it turns out that the copper tablet contains the Prophecy of Sarkomal. Something about a woman on a throne. No one can make heads nor tails of this.

We go to look at Anadea the Templar's house, now that I believe she's no longer alive. There's a malnourished young mare cat in the box. Deadorna feeds it and decides to make it a pet while the others search the rest of the room.

There's a mysterious note and a map of what appears to be some kind of underground system. There's a sedative potion and some kind of reddish truffle-looking thing, but it's far too rare and advanced for Alchemy Novice Elindra to be able to identify.

Your only choice is to be happy

This session was mainly taking place in weird ass dream space. Lottie woke up in a sea of Julius's blood, and then Julius's arms lift her out of it. She calls for him, he actually manages to enter her dream and join her. They see the pyramid rising from the blood. Julius looks up, his eyes get burned away as he looks at three ancient beings hovering in the air, and "there's always been three".

They need to find Frankie and try to reach him - but get no reply. Drinking from the sea of blood, Julius's eyes are restored ... but they're now looking exactly like Lottie's. There's mysticism afoot - something is unravelling and Creation is trying to catch up with itself. It's related to Jeanine's blood situation and Frankie is important ... somehow. They also get a sense that it's important to watch Creation to its completion.

Frankie, meanwhile, gets interrogated by the primordial goddess Gaia, who gets a bit frosty when finding out that he's a vampire, but looking into his soul makes her a bit friendlier. He's a man, despite also being a moving corpse, that's why he matters, apparently. When saying he shouldn't allow the Beast to become all that he is, he asks if there's a way to get rid of it. Well, no, but she has a few pointers for what he might want to consider to get as close to that as he can.

He does hear Julius calling for him, but dismisses it as a weird dream thing and doesn't respond, as he's busy witnessing the Greek primordial myth and was told to watch it closely. It appears that Tartarus and possibly Eros were missing from this?

The trio all wake up with bright golden auras - and Julius now has golden eyes, just like Lottie.

It appears we are the Chosen Ones.

And remember, kids, the GM wants you to fumble!

We battled people in a corridor. It wasn't great for them. It wasn't great for us either, in fairness, Valgai got badly injured, but he lived and most of the people on the other side didn't.

Next session, the party left Murmei (and Knightlight) at the Queen's Legate to look at books to find out more information about house ownership, and so on, while they went to search through some houses. They get into a massive fight, because of course they did, and Deadorna for a long while was the only one really damaging them. Lucky for us, the party survived. The people (Templars?) attacking them didn't. Don't mess with motivated adventurers, FFS. Will NPCs never learn?

This got spicy real fast

Lottie and Frankie continue their discussion about what happened while they split the party. Lottie then explains to Angela why Frankie can't take her out on a date, and her reaction leads the players to surmise that a certain crush might actually be reciprocated. She also gives strict orders about which Kindred are allowed inside the house, i.e. definitely not Charlotte.

In this week's "ghouls acting kinda weird": Angela gives Frankie's neck a funny look.

The Commissioner of Plants and Buildings in Brooklyn is apparently excited about the Brooklyn Bridge building works, which are taking place during daylight hours and begun the same day that the three cousins were Embraced.

Frankie meets Val to discuss plans, how Val needs to talk to his police contacts to find out everything he can about the hits on Red Hook. This turned into a more personal conversation between the two cousins, where Val finds their new lifestyle to suit him very well, but he notes that Frankie might never get used to it - as highlighted by Val, who had brought them a couple of women to snack on, was busy sweet-talking his before biting, whereas Frankie apologised to his.

Val, it turns out, is worried about the situation between Lottie and Charlotte. That the air gets frosty when Charlotte is mentioned around Lottie is one thing, but it also seems to be happening the other way around ... However, if it comes down to it, he's on his cousins' side. He also kindly offered to stake Jeanine for Frankie. So thoughtful!

Meanwhile, because of the lack of a phone in the Manhattan residence, Julius says he's getting a new place, which will have a telephone. He's confident he can get that house tonight ... because he wasn't planning on paying for it. The family living there are mindwhammied into submission, will be great at answering the phone and taking messages and acting as snacks. Plus, he's just given Lottie a family, which she's never truly had. It's incredibly romantic - and sexy. They can totally take time out for a bit of bedroom fun, despite previously telling a certain cousin that there's absolutely no time for anything other than business right now.

Left brooding after Val's heart-to-heart, Frankie asks Benny to arrange a flower delivery for Angela. In a further doubling down on his humanity, backed up by dice, instead of driving to Theo, he thinks about happy childhood memories and somehow ends up outside Golconda Park. All sounds and all lights around him fade out, spooking him and making him return to the car, handing a passing drunk some spare change in the process.

So in a strange turn of events, Val might actually become a sort of bridge between two cousins who are clearly heading in opposite directions on the morality scale.