Tearing down windows and doors and I could not find eyes like yours

This whole session was basically all dream. Except this time they were in the same one (sans Val) - the Egyptian primordial sea of darkness thing. Lottie turned on Auspex and discovered her and Frankie were floating in what will basically become aura/everything.

A pyramid and an Egyptian god emerged from the water, Tatenen with the sun crown. Turns out if you use True Sight on a god you can get a seizure, a splitting headache and get glowing, golden eyes.

Tatenen wanted to know the cousins' names. Lottie negotiated some sort of immunity for three people each of their choosing in return for giving the names. She only really wanted the immunity for Julius, and offered her other two spots for Frankie. He chose to decline them, and after giving it a lot of thought chose the other three people that are now connected to their new unlives: cousin Val (who we guess was left out of the dream not because he was lucky, but because he's now an NPC), and ghouls Benny and Angela. Tatenen told them to stay and learn.

They observed fighting snakes-with-frogs-heads, the sun rising (doing them no harm, which was nice), and then blood with black aura streaks gushed forward, so they ran to avoid it. There was a creepy and quickly developing foetus that came out of a piece of flesh, and another god stabbed himself in the right hand. It was all very strange and neither characters nor players had a single clue WTF was going on.

Frankie woke up with bite marks in his hands, and since he botched the understanding roll, Julius must have some kind of a rat problem. Lottie woke up with golden eyes - huh. Val, it turned out, had also had wet dreams, but in the other sense of the word. They told him and Julius about the weird dream and about what happened the night before.

Lottie worried that she was the one choosing Julius as a sire because she had asked for him to be protected at the very beginning of time. He tried laying those fears to rest, and complimented her on her new eye colour, which she now hopes will be permanent ...

The horde was in storage at the time

We have another player joining us for Rifts, taking over the role of the (now former) Juicer NPC Maria "Speedy" Gonzales. This session was mostly to get a feel for how the party have been running the character.

So, in order to impress our new player we all rolled exceedingly poorly, but somehow still managed to take down the group of vampires we managed to antagonise last week.

On the plus side, we're now definitely in Mexico, but the tequila hasn't yet started flowing.

We found vampires using mech suits, though, so that was kind of ... a thing.

This is going to be a long trip

We've started a new game: Symbaroum (read more about it here)! This first session was mostly putting our characters together, and after much ado, the line-up is as follows:

• Elindra: A changeling (an elf raised as a human) rogue/assassin
• Murmei: A human wizard's apprentice and son of a noble
• Valgai: A human warrior and veteran of many a battle

The basic plot is that the population is moving across a big mountain range. We're one of the few remaining groups and it's now our turn to do the trip. An order of wizards have decided to give one of their apprentices the job of chronicling the journey for posterity. It's a very important and prestigious job, and Murmei (hapless idiot that he is) totally bought that explanation. In truth, they were just happy to be rid of him for a while.

Thing is, other people might also want to be rid of him for purposes far greater than "he's a bit of an idiot", hence why Valgai has been hired as his bodyguard, and Elindra as ... well, also kind of a bodyguard. Murmei is just happy to be there, because writing down everything that happens on the trip (provided the ink doesn't freeze - this is a great concern) is super important.

There is a caravan getting ready to cross the mountain range at first light tomorrow, and the group asked the caravan's leader (a merchant called Argostos) to join, along with some NPCs. Argostos was happy to let the party join him. After all, considering one of the NPCs, a wizard called Bartholomew, has a Sunstone on him, and having magical artefact that can bring light and heat as the first snowflakes of the season starts to fall might be a very good idea. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it ...

Who doesn't want to roll a bucket of d6?

Investimagations continued. Baradhi and Jayson went to a pub so that Baradhi could appear to be asleep, when he in actual fact was in astral form looking at Rita the Major Babe's shop with Jayson standing sitting guard. There were three large smoke pillars - solid on the astral plane - that took up most of the room.

Meanwhile, the other three were back at base, with Booker still in charge. Because the other two didn't check back in, Gorbash was dispatched to make sure they weren't in trouble.

They weren't. They just hadn't checked in. The three kept looking around a bit more, and talked to a shopkeeper.

And then they didn't check in on a very good line, so Drake was dispatched. Booker stayed back at the base ... having a coffee ... very slowly ...

And then a lot of Rakshasa came for the rest of the party, from every direction ...

So. Anyone for Rakshasa mince?

Welcome to Louisiana Fried Rat, can I take your money?

Exciting times ahead! Hatch and Murphy are still blissfully clueless their new accomplice is long dead, because he's still doing things like moving around and talking. Ohhh the hilarity that will ensue when they finally succeed on those Notice checks!

In other news, the team decided to find out where the singing dame's fanboy/stalker lived by tracking down his place of work (a bank), pretending they wanted to interview him for a newspaper article. He hadn't come in to work, as it happened, but by promising to do a favourable article on the bank manager - and later do him a favour pro-bono (it's difficult even typing those words!) - by discreetly investigating why the guy wasn't at work, the trio finally found their way to his apartment.

Sadly, it seemed to mostly be a dead end. And there wasn't even any money in it. Hey GM, we've all got rent to pay, you know!