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*

Elder vampire uses a telephone for the first time

Waking up, and after having breakfast in bed, Lottie makes a round of phone calls. Val didn't have any strange dreams, but he'll go Auspex Frankie to see if he's now glowing gold too. Frankie recounts the Greek creation myth to Julius over the phone (the Elder vampire's first ever phone call! We're so proud of him!), and it seems both Tartarus and Eros were missing. Seb reports more innocent shop keepers have been arrested.

Frankie also makes a phone call - Benny reports the cane is still on schedule and Angela was pleased about the flower delivery. Val shows up, confirms Frankie has a bright golden aura, and drops him off in Red Hook before heading off to speak to his cop contacts. In Coffey Park, Theo gives Frankie a history lesson. Frankie points out that the Sabbat attack is being led by Ekaterina, which makes Theo realise things are perhaps slightly higher priority than he previously thought - insert facepalm here.

Lottie and Julius go to a secret lab in Queens and meet up with Aisling the Tremere. She recoils having seen Jeanine's thin blood, especially as she finds out where it's from. She does a few experiments on it, and says it's similar to the thaumaturgic Path of Blood, but somehow inverted? It's like Entropy of the Blood, "Chaos undoing Creation", an Unravelling of the Generation. They also discover that it isn't a directed spell, or whatever, meaning it might have been directed at someone else and then spreading up the generation line. It spreads from Childe to Sire? Frankie is absolutely fine, but the Prince got a hold of Jeanine's other Childe - Maslowe. Coincidence?

Perhaps they do actually need to tell Aisling everything that's been going on, so Julius tells her everything. She may or may not thank him for this later.

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.

 

Are we SURE we're the good guys?

We had a look at the records over at the Queen's Legate to see which (read: whose) houses went down the hole, in case that has some significance. The archivist there seems to have the hots for Valgai.

When going to speak with a Father Servola, people threw lanterns at us, and we ended up in a fight with some cultists? They weren't being very nice to us, at any rate.

Then some kind of "special" (in a Chosen One kind of sense) 6-year-old child proclaims Murmei is evil. This is a surprise to everyone, because being a bit of an idiot? Sure. Evil? Umm ...? Valgai's Witch Sight confirms this - the belt makes it look like Murmei's some kind of corrupt, evil thing. Perhaps it's a good idea to un-bind himself from that belt at the nearest opportunity?

Maybe you should consider a Path?

In Staten Island, Adelaide says she Sees spiders all over Jeanine, digging into her and eating her regret. (WHY IS DOES IT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE SPIDERS?!) Lottie "convinces" Jeanine to put some of her blood into a thermos flask. Looking at the thin blood in the flask, Adelaide freaks out, saying it's "cold, so cold". She doesn't mean temperature-wise.

After Jeanine puts the lid on the flask, it's put into some oven gloves for an extra layer of protection. Lottie and Julius strategise what to do with Jeanine, and they decide to leave her there for now, and make their way back to Brooklyn. She asks him about his first Childe, who appears to be missing, presumed dead, after angering some werewolves.

Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Frankie and Benny are thinking ahead. If you're in a Prohibition setting, your character is a bootlegger, his ghoul is a bartender in a speakeasy, you and your cousins are planning to open a blood donation clinic, and the house rules say you can mix alcohol with blood to make it fine to drink, it would be rude not to combine these factors, right? If one was to find out which types of blood goes best with which types of alcohol, there's a whole new market to tap into right there.

In the end, the two cousins finally meet up again, at "Angela's", where Frankie was considering heading anyway, after a brief phone conversation. Frankie starts telling his cousin and her Sire his side of what's happened while they were away, and the two Malkavians are not exactly thrilled about his and Theo's raids on the Giovanni affiliated speaks in Little Italy ... If only they knew it was (sort of) Frankie's idea ...

I love your lack of self-confidence

The gang (sans Elindra) go to see Nightpitch. They leave a message then get to meet him in person, to discuss the recent events. Valgai then speaks to Yagaba, the chief witch. Always good to speak to people.

Elindra also speaks to someone, but my notes literally only say "someone", so whatcha gonna do?

We decide the Templars need murdering, because of course they do. It's like a thing, right? Can we burn down the Winged Ladle Inn and plant a heretical book there? And some fake bronze tablets? Because that would work out pretty well, or so we think.

Valgai also gets to torture a cultist, so everyone got to have some fun. Especially as it was suggested Elindra pretends to be a hooker, but her hooker talk was along the lines of calling people "dearie" so she sounded more like a grandma than the 17-year-old she actually is. It was weird.