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 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?

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.

We'll all be Malkavian by the time this is done

In the basement of a little cottage in Staten Island, AltLottie and Julius have a frank discussion. Turns out Lottie is actually the third person Julius has sired, gasp. AltLottie tells him a few home truths about Lottie's and his relationship - he needs to shape up or ship out, basically - which has the desired effect, as he really does want the relationship on offer. AltLottie switches back to Lottie, and to save time Julius gives her a memory dump of everything that's happened, and the interrogation of Jeanine continues.

Jeanine hands over the key to her house (well, she won't be needing it ...) and reveals that, unsurprisingly, Maslowe was going to be her heir, but she didn't have a chance to formalise it yet. For a short while she had considered Frankie, but she kinda went off him because he's very stubborn when it comes to having ethics. Lottie gets her two write two back-dated letters, one that names Frankie her heir, one that signs over the ghouls to Julius. Just in case.

That knife of hers? It was used in some rituals. It also went missing, and she did not in fact carve that J into the guest bed at Val's ... She also gives background on the ghouls. Where they come from, how she tracked them down, and so on. Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned, and she might've been better off taking up a different hobby.

Lottie and Julius blood bond right in front of their torture victim (with Tommy the Fool cowering in the corner), because bare cell with a drain in the floor is just so romantic, ya know? (They were in a similar room the first time it happened. Is this going to be a thing now?) They follow this up by going full Malkavian mindshredding on her, which, true to form, makes them super horny again.

In Manhattan on the way back to Charlotte's apartment, Theo divulges his rivals for the Brujah Primogency. Out of the other three, Frankie has only met one: Delilah, from Elysium! When asked if Charlotte can be trusted, Theo says "to a point". The two of them have a sort of off-and-on thing going on. It's currently on. Frankie admits that when it comes to himself, “it’s complicated”, because saying he has the hots for his cousin's ghoul seems like a thing best kept to himself at this stage.

Don Cerro, the Brujah Primogen, is waiting for them back at Charlotte's. He agrees the Brujah had to make a show of strength, but geez, Theo (and Frankie) couldn't have been a bit more subtle about it? Turns out a Setite doing garbage disposal in Harlem and the Bronx has had a lot of business in Little Italy recently. The Giovanni wanted rid of dead bodies (!) and agreed to a one-off slave trade with the Setites, who wanted some live bodies. Not that this means anything in particular at this stage?

Charlotte spoke with the Toreador to get more information about the Giovanni ghouls and found out her Primogen and some guy called Tamoszius are planning to nominate Frankie for Scourge (!), which is of course completely ridiculous considering he's a baby in vampire terms - it hasn't even been two weeks! He clearly won't say yes, and saying no would hurt future career prospects, except what fucking career prospects does a non-political 13th Gen have anyway, even before taking into account that he narrowly avoided being declared Caitiff after being publicly disowned by his Sire? So is that really such a loss? Theo finally suggests they beat the Toreador at their own game: have the Brujah put that Tamoszius guy forward for Scourge first. Having him turn it down would hurt his social standing wayyyyy more than it would Frankie, and the Toreador couldn’t counter-nominate Frankie without it looking like sour grapes.

Damnit, I have narrative blue balls!

This is a combination of two sessions, partly because they were both short so not a lot was said, and because they both covered Elysium. The first was short because the GM had internet troubles and instead of having no game, we desperately improvised by ending up doing a group call using actual telephones. #OldSchool

So, Elysium. We were at the Met, sitting in the auditorium watching Faust: Part 1. There was a young man with Jeanine, but we didn't recognise him, nor did she introduce him to anyone, and when she did spot Frankie she didn't appear to recognise him? Don Cerro, the Brujah Primogen, talked to Jeanine who introduced the young man as Steven Maslowe. Who?

Nor did it appear the Prince knew, when he invited Lottie and Julius to speak with him. The Prince had invited the Sabbat (!) to Elysium, for a hitherto unknown reason. The Prince asked the two Malks to keep an eye on them, which they did from the Malkavian Primogen box. Lottie wasn't pleased at the Sabbat referring to her as a "morsel".

Frankie told Theo about the knife Jeanine (allegedly) gave him, as she broke into a third party's house to deliver it. Theo later invited Frankie to the Brujah Primogen box and offered to take him under his wing. Don Cerro was, perhaps understandably, a little miffed about this.

So, in front of the entire Camarilla and the Sabbat, Jeanine finally introduced Maslowe to the perplexed Prince as ... her previous Childe from Atlanta, who is hoping to make his mark on New York City. The only people happy about this were the Toreadors, who thought it was hilarious - except for Charlotte (we don't know why) and Val, because his cousin was just very publicly disowned by his Sire. The Brujah were not happy being screwed over by one of their own, but at least Frankie wasn't declared Caitiff as a result. Phew?

The Prince wanted a private word with the two newbies. Did Frankie realise how fucked he was? Sort of? Not really? (Frankie doesn't get politics.) But yeah, he's pretty fucked, as is probably everyone he cares about. (This is just about the worst thing to tell a character who is fiercely protective of his mortal family and who also isn't adjusting well to being a vampire ...)

The Prince said he could potentially offer the Mangano clan a boon of protection, but they would need to ask him the question he had granted them - specifically without Julius being there. Lottie asked about the broken twin ghouls, which the Prince was unable to answer, but said he'd look into. He then granted everyone "of Frankie's blood" the boon of protection, so that's one crisis averted - and another one created. Frankie's uncle (a.k.a. Lottie's "dad") is of course being actively harmed by another vampire's ghoul, so Angela will quickly have to stash him in some care home so he's out of the way. At least his mind is so broken now that he'll never regain proper consciousness ...

(We shouldn't worry about Charlotte being mind-controlled. We'll find out soon enough.)

Val had left with Charlotte, so Lottie and Frankie rejoined Julius and went back to the couple's Manhattan home to discuss events. Frankie went to bed early while Lottie talked about blood bonding with Julius in private, offering. Julius succeeded a Willpower roll to not throw himself at her.

And that's where we left it.

Crazy people trying to deal with things

Julius is out when Lottie and Frankie return to the Manhattan house. Lottie went to shower off the Tzimice red mist ickyness she had to walk through in Harlem, while Frankie looked out through a window and saw Julius talking to a Gangrel, who wanted him to ally himself in regards to the Gangrel primogency.

Everyone in the same place, we started catching up with what everyone had been up to. Julius had been researching Egyptian mythology. The primordial creator goddess was not a part of the cousins' dream, apparently. Neither cousins nor players have any clue what this means.

 A surprise Jeanine appeared! Lottie and Frankie went to hide in another room to avoid her. She invited Julius to tomorrow night's Elysium. With Lottie's Auspex, she saw the bond between Frankie and his sire was very thin and fragile, but in fairness she hasn't been around for about a week, and the cousins have only been vampires for about a week and a half. And she didn't even enquire about her childe either. Bitch.

Victor, the Setite in the safehouse in Harlem, came by to say Ellie has Valenti and is ready to hand him over. He wasn't looking in a great shape. Not that the cousins really care.

I'll pretend I didn't just Google that

There was a lot angst, angst and more angst in this session, because of the thing we learned the previous session and how we couldn't discuss it with Julius. On the plus side, Frankie's BFF Benny got to make his first appearance!

We talked to Julius about our weird chaos dreams. Turns out Lottie is having Norse mythology dreams, Val is having Greek mythology dreams, and Frankie Egyptian mythology. We were advised to keep the dreams going as long as possible to learn as much as possible.

Lottie and Val went to place a call at a phone box, which was essentially the two of them arguing for half-hour IRL. After which, we cut to another half-hour of Julius and Frankie having a chat involving discussing if relatives of vampires are somehow protected by default - because Frankie would be very concerned about the Manganos obviously and it totally has nothing at all to do with those two ghouled relatives of Julius Charlotte showed us last session. No way, no how, no siree. #smooth Then they awkwardly had a talk about ghouls in general (because of Benny), and being in love with Angela - at which point Julius botched a roll and somehow got the impression that Lottie and Angela were lesbian lovers?!?

Microchips in a crisp bag

Coming across some weird purple stuff on the ground, shining a light on it made it sprout tentacles and suddenly we made a new friend - it called itself Terminus and the group decided to give it a moral compass. Like don't take stuff people need to survive, don't kill people (unless they're trying to kill you first), family is important, that kind of thing. Gunther added that it "shouldn't let the bastards grind it down", which may or may not be good advice? The thing grew and grew and maybe we have unleashed a monster on the world.

We got back to the barge-on-wheels and were stopped by some other mutants, who wanted to jab us with needles before explaining what they were for. Turned out to be some kind of vaccine, but as far as we saw it, it was an unprovoked attack and they were trying to inject us with goodness-knows-what, so we put the pedal to the metal and drove out of there. The vaxxers were very insistent, however, and gave chase. They exploded in a fireball, but not before taking out one of our wheels - Cecil was NOT amused.

Moral of the story: if you're regenerating, eating weird berries is fine. To everyone else, they're less fine.

This looks like a job for fusion blocks!

Sooo ... Gorbash went and had a chat with one of his dragon friends, and now we're apparently supposed to go on some kind of suicide mission because attacking a flying fortress - the Death Star, basically - is somehow a reasonable thing to do???

You are defeated, I have the moral high ground!

As it was a bank holiday we convened earlier and started by playing The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth boardgame. We did not succeed with our mission, sadly.

Then we went into the edges of Davokar, pretty much, on the hunt for the escaped gargoyle. We found it - or it found us - and it decided to attack Elindra. She got two permanent corruption for her trouble. Fortunately we had given that seed to the witch in a previous session, which she had grown to a tree that can remove permanent corruption, so she's "only" on one now.

The engagement between Murmei and Elsiosi Garlaka went ahead, and she left town with Murmei's mum. Not before trying to convince Murmei that Elindra is just a mercenary who doesn't really care about him and would turn against him as soon as someone else paid her more than he did.

As a parting gift Elindra and Valgai were given bottles of expensive wine, as a thank you for looking after Murmei. Valgai re-gifted one of the bottles to Elsiosi's brother, who was visibly uncomfortable by it. HMMMM. The party decided to try the wine on a rat, but all that happened was that the rat got drunk. Did that mean the wine wasn't poisoned, or was it maybe a human-only poison somehow? Because even Murmei finally had to admit something fishy was going on with his future wife.

Welcome to Saerloon, home of ... stuff

The B team went to the city of Saerloon to investigate. Alwin managed to do a "Diagonally" instead of "Diagon Alley" on the way travelling through some sort of fire-to-fire transportation system and had a bit further to walk to catch up.

In the city, fighting ensued, because of course it did. We won, because we have plot armour. Or happened to be lucky. One of those.

(I may have forgotten to post stuff here for a bit.)

We're not here to assassinate the guy from The Fast Show

In the third and final part of this Victoriana session the party have dinner with Lord Ralph, make countless references to The Fast Show, find out that Ted's wife is actually Mrs Doyle, and try to find out if Ralph, Ted or Mrs Ted know anything about why they might have crashed an airship in a field nearby.

They find out that there's another manor not too far away, belonging to the Waldegrave family (who may or may not be shady), and that there's a vicar who might know something that could help them.

Ohh, THAT apocalypse

The symbiote previously known as Barry was apparently actually called Bally according to the player's notes. We're not sure if that's an improvemen or not.

Anyway. Plot progressed. Turns out some bad nights were caused by visions of some cultists bringing Nxla back. Yeah! Them other cultists don't know how to act. And so on. There was a guy there who blended in with the ceiling, had a very pointy nose and a forked tongue and looked like it has something to do with Coalition State.

We went on a quest to speak to Psyscape, by way of meeting the Grey Seers again. We didn't cause a cell to burst into flame this time, so I think they don't mind seeing us again.

The Dog-boy is a go(o)d-boy

This isn't very long, but it's the last bit of Rifts for the time being. We made it out of Coalition State - somehow. Not with intact SAMAS, though, but you win some and you lose some. At least we got John back and looked cool getting the hell out of Dodge. Or, well, dodging. Stuff like that.

Can the NPC fly a SAMAS?

Last week we left our group near Lone Star in Coalition State. This week, we did what we went there to do, and then got the hell out of there. Well, okay, we're still working on that part.

First of all we met Magali, one of the rat people. We think she's on our side, or at least we hope she is because we've just gone and told her everything about us. Gorbash got to be admired by rat kids and healed some very ill people, so at least they like us.

Then we went to get John, which included infiltrating a very big compound in order to break him out of jail. By pretending to be NTSEC. It went surprisingly well, even though Booker's fake ID card was commented on as being very old and should be renewed. Someone had him autograph a sign in sheet, which would be sent for handwriting verification, so we were on a strict timer.

John was obtained, and seeing as how the NTSEC officer whose ID card Booker was using had accepted his "usual" choice of transport without double-checking exactly what that meant ... we were shown to the roof, where six shiny SAMAS were waiting for us. None of us had a driving skill last week, so we sure as hell don't have a flying skill! Lucky for us the Dog-Boy could at least slave all the other SAMAS to Booker's, and show Booker how he's supposed to fly. We're still not in the clear, but at least we managed to take off without crashing to the ground.

Axe, not ass - makes more sense now

After putting Deadlands: Hell on Earth on pause for a bit, we've instead arrived back at the Blackstone Juggernauts. Booker informed the crew that our friend and boss John has in fact been replaced by someone and we should look into that. Gorbash went to talk to Ixchal and give her that white rose petal - she was suitably impressed - and Jayson went for a booty call at Maria's.

Apparently there's a big bounty on all of our heads - except for Donna's, which Booker found incredibly suspicious.

Then a Rakshasa called Sister Anna wanted to meet us at a diner that did very nice burgers and milkshakes. She wanted some stuff back. And then there was an ominous ringing sound coming from Booker's coat ...

Call me salty, but ...

Our Deadlands session was two hours shorter than usual, and we didn't do a whole lot, so there wasn't much written down.

However, we also have a boardgaming session saved up for times like these.

Falling for the plot device

Jack tried to flirt with the tanker truck driver he decided last session he was going to marry. She wasn't impressed.

Vince had a chat with the other Syker in town and Maggie discovered they had come to some sort of hipster vegetarian hideout where they grew their own food and served bran muffins and stuff.

We then helped to build a fence around the town and waited to be attacked. And so we were. Epic Syker blew head off bad guy - there was a mini mushroom cloud and nuclear fallout and everything! \o/

Do Doomsayers glow in the dark?

We're on the road again ... or, well, three of us are: Jack the Road Warrior, Vincent the Syker and Maggie the Law Dog.

I think we ended up somewhere in Wyoming, where we spotted some guys on the side of the road. They were looking for something, so we decided to help out. Turned out to be related to burned out corpses. Doomsayers are in the area, and them folks are bad news in general.

Eventually, modifications were made to the cannon mounted on top of Jack's truck and Maggie might glow in the dark, but it's all good ... even though the truck is now a rolling bomb waiting to go off at any second ...

We're a bleak bunch of bastards

Having some delicious cake and a long, very good game of Cards Against Humanity with a special guest star. :)