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.

 

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 ...

Everything IS better in Brooklyn

Lottie met back up with Julius who told her about an 8th gen/800-year-old vampire called Ekaterina the Wise, a.k.a. the vampire Val met the previous session. Her jaw is all messed up from an attack (that was meant to hurt people close to her?) that didn’t fully heal when she was turned. They decided not to tell Frankie about this, because a Frenzying Brujah in the living room sounded like a bad idea. (Frankie's murdered sister Caterina is his berserk button.)

Meanwhile, Frankie and Val (henceforth an NPC as the player dropped out) went to a restaurant in Lexington to meet up with "Cola" Schiro. Cola was successfully intimidated and spilled that he'd met Jeanine before, at a party in Staten Island, and had been giving her info for the past two months while she used him for snacking. She was particularly interested in Frankie as of three weeks ago (read: a week before the cousins were turned). Once interrogated, our cousin Vince was left to take care of him.

Weirdly, Prince Wellsley showed up in disguise to tell us he wanted Umberto Valenti disposed of, quickly and quietly. He will grant us one question truthfully answered, but we decided to save it for later.

Back with the Malkavians, they do some research, because parks are losing their auras. There's a planned road called Anaconda Street, and its planned path goes through a park. The work started the same day our cousins were Embraced. The park, it turns out, has "no voice".

They also met with Aisling Sturbridge, a Tremere friend of Julius's, to investigate the park situation by way of a ritual. There were runes, blood and a chalk circle and they felt uncomfortable. Lottie insisted on her blood being used instead of Julius's.

In Harlem, the guys investigated the scene of the drive-by looking for clues, and followed a trace to an old Family safehouse, where they discovered an old vampire with a forked tongue - a Follower of Set. He wanted an unspecified favour in return for giving up the location of Umberto Valenti. Val tried to Dominate him, but it didn't work and the guy got a bit grumpy. They then had to high-tail it back to Julius's Manhattan place to not get fried by approaching dawn.

Lottie and Julius had a long-awaited talk about blood-bonding, deciding to say yay to double-sided, nay to one-sided. We'll see what happens with that. It was getting light outside, so everyone went to bed, meaning to discuss the night's details the following evening.

Because of budgerigars

Val spoke to a sergeant cop saying influential people told the cops to keep an eye on Brooklyn. Wait, that's our turf?

There was some kind of consideration about comparing "blood flavour" between the teen ghouls and the kid Jeanine sent Frankie as a present, but in the end we decided this was a stupid idea. So Val invited his sire Charlotte around to his place instead.

She, it turned out from Auspexing Malkavians keeping watch outside, had some kind of weird spiderweb looking red bond thing going on in her aura??? Marco (Val's ghoul) was puppeteered into relaying a warning message to Val from Julius ... and brings some girls from the club for people to snack on. Some might have done this more reluctantly than others.

Charlotte decided to have an impromptu Celerity training session with Frankie, because Jeanine is kind of a pretty shitty sire, so threw cutlery in the air for Frankie to catch. She was impressed that he managed to do this, even with a bit of a flair, that she let it slip that Jeanine is busy playing with a new toy. One she's planning on presenting at the next Elysium.

And then there was gunfire downtown and we were all on high alert ... A vampire gangster's life can be complicated. Although perhaps not quite as complicated as what was going on in our 1932 AU at the time, which is what the beginning of these quotes references.

Character therapy sessions, though? Those are awesome and come highly recommended.

Do we have dinner coming to dinner?

We wanted to go on a raid against the White Hand warehouse, but realised we were way outgunned. Genius idea - go to a hotel and borrow their phone and call the cops on the warehouse (because that's totally how the mafia do things ... we've realised much later when we found their code of conduct on Wikipedia). Then we just had to sit back and wait for the cops to bring the numbers down to a better level.

While doing this Frankie also received relationship advice from his cousins. Lottie's advice might have been slightly better than Val's, who was very matter-of-fact and didn't actually address the problem:

"How do I talk to her? You're good with dames, what do I say to her?"
"Well, if you want a girlfriend, she's technically the only and/or logical option. So good for you."
"... Uh ... thanks?"

At least Lottie suggested getting Angela a present, maybe a really fancy bottle of wine that could be used for when she ghouls her. The fanciest bottle available was swiftly requisitioned from the restaurant where we had camped out, and it was WELL fancy.

And then we had really weird dreams again. What's up with those?

Don't look a gift knife in the mouth!

We continued our plan of taking over the Irish gangs' territory, partly because we want to and partly because they fucking tried to murder us. Seeing as how the week leading up to this session had been spent on writing pretty extensive backstories for our characters (well, two of them at least) Lottie, through Auspex, finally realised one of her cousins has a long-standing crush on her BFF and now ships them in character as well as out of character.

So, we were trying to get some info on a place that had a gambling den in the basement. It required catching one of the people used as a look-out and persuading him to talk. He was not an easily persuaded kind of a person, despite our best efforts. At this point the GM hadn't actually read the backstories we'd so painstakingly put together (with miles upon miles of rope with which to hang us later), but it was rather fitting that the guy decided to suggest he'd been busy fucking Frankie's sister and that's why he didn't fancy answering. It hit right in the backstory berserk button. The guy was slightly more talkative after a broken jaw, but he was never getting out of there alive. Cousins fed, Frankie drained the last two points of blood, punched the corpse for good measure and lost a Humanity point in the process.

Someone who didn't lose a point in Humanity this session was Val, who, after we'd raided the gambling den decided we should blow it up to avoid witnesses. Because that's totally how the mafia roll ...

We should totally do this film

The aftermath of the shootout meant that Frankie was pretty beat up still, but on the plus side Marco (Val's ghoul) has a cousin that owns a pet shop so he provided us both with enough small animals to make sure we could heal up.

We started raiding assets from a list provided by Jeanine. Enemy assets, you might say. Our protection racket rates are much more agreeable than the ones the Irish were asking for, for instance, and we ended up talking to a Ukrainian guy that was in charge of a distillery that provided pretty good (strong) vodka. Well, they can provide pretty good (strong) vodka for us now. Also, for all his talk of his wife or girlfriend or whatever, the Ukrainian also has someone on the side. Jeanine told us so, because he was the guy in the couple she and Frankie had snacked on in a previous session. This is not at all suspicious.

At the end of it all, some creative door-smashing and dramatic entrances later, and it was time to go to bed again, there was a pearl-handled knife stuck into Frankie's bed frame at Val's, courtesy of Jeanine. Whom he had earlier asked to please enough with the games already, they're growing tiresome. Is this ... like ... some kind of truce? Or is his sire basically just shit-stirring for teh lulz?

Girl's gotta have bubbles

Okay, I have no notes about this session, and I don't remember exactly what we did, but whatever it was it was GLORIOUS.

Other than we found a way to get in touch with Julius, because he didn't give us a number to call him on, because he's been around centuries before telephones and he's old-fashioned that way.

Was this the session where Val's car got wrecked, perhaps?

Gunfight at the OK 5th Precinct

Sometimes we have to remember that we aren't just vampires, but also gangsters, and do some gangstering.

Well, first of all Janine is showing herself to be very untrustworthy by sending Frankie a messenger with a fancy bottle of wine. He declined to try it, and he also didn't use the messenger boy as a snack. In fact, he was kind enough to give the kid a bottle of cheap booze as a tip.

Lottie is trying to find a HQ for us, sort of a blood bank perhaps, and maybe it could masquerade (har-har) as a clinic for sailors ... We'll see how that develops.

Anyhoo. Now that we're made men and woman we were going to a meetup of different mob bosses, as some stuff had been going down. Even more stuff started happening. Gunshots. Someone had gunned down a mob boss outside the 5th Precinct, and there was more gunfire about.

The mob bosses at the meet had to be evacuated, and shit would probably rain down on all of us. The speakeasy had the emergency shutdown orders executed, and we strongly suspect one of our NPC cousins to have taken a photo of Lottie's dad from the speakeasy - possibly with a view to kill him and set him up as a fall guy.

What's worse is that our sires seem to know about what's going on here, and we don't like it.

Oh, and there was some frost on the water as we crossed That Bridge again, but hey it's only May, so it's perfectly normal, yeah?

Running with Molotovs

For the epic final showdown, we found ourselves dungeon-crawling for the better part of the session. We went to the place where we thought Trevor's sister was being held (she was kidnapped last session), but there was no on there. In the park was just a building for a junior football club or something like that. However, in the cellar, there was a hidden door ... and underneath it: dungeons!

The dungeons were mainly empty, save for a chav that was scared off by someone pointing a gun at him, and a creature that could make itself invisible. We found a stone table (no Aslan), and eventually emerged in a wide ditch, where Agatha and the (useless) bodyguard were tied to a big rock. There was some kind of Lovecraftian-looking creature there, previously known as Smith, and zombies.

We might have eaten through Willpower points and Conviction like they were candy, but by golly we saved the world Derby! :D

Aberrations of evolution, as chosen by God

Things turned interesting for the group this session. While the men in the group hid to avoid detection, Tilly tried shielding the girl/victim we found and ended up being hidden in plain sight. Something's obviously going on there.

Eddie went berserk with his axe, Zolistagol got to speak Russian ("Vladivostok!") and Trevor ... had his skin badly burned. To soothe it, Tilly grabbed some holy water from her bag (like you do), and lo and behold, the witch had apparently obtained magical powers, and the skin started healing!

After much ado, we ended up torching the warehouse to destroy evidence (might have accidentally burned someone alive, but hey ho), borrowed a fake brick of Nazi gold from the Russian mob, and the girl wasn't perhaps so much as a victim but a ghoul in training, or something like that. She wanted feeding to complete the process, and unfortunately, we were on the menu. No gratitude at all, that one.

We tied her hands and locked her in one of the bathrooms at Trevor's. And then we were visited by Tony the Ghoul, who told us what was actually going on. By that point, we couldn't really say sorry, we'd rather stay in with a pizza, beer and watch the Rams game on Sky Sports.