We don’t need this level of fanservice!

After a two-month break, we're back in New York. The Prince's ghoul delivers a note to Lottie which confirms that the broken ghouls are indeed Abrogard relatives, and they are indeed Jeanine's. The letter is the Prince's handwriting, but it's perfumed. Is he siding with the Toreador for some reason?

Lottie and Frankie drop into Theo's to let him know maybe getting too hard on the Toreador is ill advised at this stage.

Lottie and Julius go to Angela and instruct her to get Andreas into whichever nursing home will take him at short notice. She's also instructed to (and then made to forget having done it) calling a particular phone number to say on behalf of Charlotte Hansard, "J Calloway" isn't to disembark any ship. Could Jeanine be headed for Staten Island, where the Anarchs are?

Frankie, meanwhile, goes to get both the knife and the plans from Benny. The note left by the contact in the planning office is weird. It's in English but is hard to read, and looks like a lot of nonsense? Frankie brings it to Lottie and Julius, who get weird vibes off it. They try to look at it in a mirror, in case of some kind of magic filter, but it still doesn't work. It's put in a locked drawer for later.

The three of them then go over to the Staten Island ferry. Frankie drops the two of them off and drives off. Lottie and Julius are met by Tommy the Fool, a fairly useless mook, in case they need someone to do the heavy lifting. Or maybe in case they want a snack on the way, you never know.

There's a hole in my city, dear Liza, dear Liza

We’re back in Thistlehold! Talking to the head witch, it turns out the rubbings we had of the stone tablets were nothing more than simple merchant receipts or something like that. So much for that, huh?

Murmei is told that his sister Rilia has gone missing, which he already knows - she is, after all, a full-fledged barbarian now and calls herself Deadorna ... who is shown the place where we caught the Flayer, and told the story of how that came to be.

We see Elsiosi a couple of times: first when she comes around looking for her betrothed (who hides in his bedroom, pretending not to be in), and second when she comes around sporting a corrupt basalt ring. This time Murmei isn't hiding and, after botching a roll, tells her stories of how brave they were in Davokar.

There's a message to meet with a Prios person in a bar. The big, city-wide warning bell, which has been silent for the past four years, goes off. There are Colossi coming through the forest - witches normally ride those? Deadorna talks to barbarians about a well, and we finish on what sounds like a great big explosion in Thistlehold. Not so much an explosion as a giant sink hole suddenly opening up and swallowing a considerable chunk of the city.

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.

We know it's corrupted

There was an icky axe-a-mole thing in the arcade. I mean, everything about this place is icky and creepy, but ... y'know. We found a guy. We went into the Enchanted Wood, where we went past a creepy picnic (which we ignored, yay us) to find a shed in the woods.

There was an animatronic werewolf attacking us, because for some reason we were the three little piggies and we got out of the shed just before it collapsed? Being in a deadland is not recommended, by the way. You easily get damaged - as Vince can confirm.

WOULD PEOPLE STOP BEING SCARED OF US?!

After getting a good night's sleep back home at the Blackstone headquarters, we followed clues. Booker went to the Crow Bar and got sloshed on psychedelic potions for "research purposes", and Gorbash went to see if Ixchal was home. She wasn't.

However, Jayson flashed some Cyber-Knight armour, making shopkeepers a bit nicer to us, and we found clues that took us north east, to the Silversmith Gang territory. Apparently they're quite nice ... as gangs go.

Further on from them were the East Side Boys, another gang, a couple of whose members were seen escorting Rita roundabout when she went AWOL. The ESB were really rather concerned about our presense, because our reputation preceeded us. Their attitude was along the lines of "PLEASE DON'T KILL US". We had no plans to. Although, their leader Maria's reliance on a "powerful mage" called Lion was a bit creepy. Lion insulted the lot of us to various degrees. For instance, claiming the Cyber-Knight wasn't a Cyber-Knight. Maybe we'll feed him that fusion bomb next session. You can't trust people who claim to be powerful mages when they're defrauding people with psionics!

On a sad note, we've lost our Glitter Boy player due to him having other commitments (we wish him well). On the other hand, he might or might not be replaced by a guy who's already familiar with this blog, because he's been quoted on here before. It might up the madness a bit more. GASP!

Football is the answer to everything, including cake

At Trevor's mansion (it has a long drive, it's a mansion), we settled down for the night. Cans of Stella, football on telly, zombies trying to break through the back door ... the usual. We also found Trevor's sister Agatha in the basement - but she seems to have lost the plot.

Eddie sacrificed his precious pimped-out baseball bat hitting at the zombie, and we all got away relatively unscathed. Well, apart from the bodyguard, but hey, he's just an NPC.

And then we had pizza, looked at old school internet message boards and made contact with a potential ally in Nottingham.

It was an eclectic sort of session.

Play it again until I kill someone!

We stayed around the radio telescope and continued the investimagations and interrogations. McAffe tried to convince Bones to break into the chalets, while Mulligan continued to bully the telescope staff. Trying to find the wifi password (they didn't have a guest network, go fig), McAffe ended up using his hacking skillz in order to grant him and Cully internet access in order to do background checks on staff.

And then hell broke loose. Literally.

A maniac came after Bones and nearly beat him to death with a baseball bat, and when patched up by McAffe, he was so preoccupied with saving the world that Cully had to sedate him and handcuff him to to a bed as he really was in no shape to save anything.

Then there was lots of shooting of telescopes, re-pointing where the telescopes thought the general direction of the Nemesis Star was so that it wouldn't be found again, and some kind of strange being helped in the destruction of said radio telescopes.

But umm, we all made it out alive, and with our sanities intact, so that's another job well done for X Cell!

This would make a great PowerPoint presentation

Once we got back to the hotel after a good day's work, we went to sleep ... and woke up in the middle of the night, because of a storm. Outside, a big, red sphere hanging in the air ... with eyes ... It caused a crapload of SAN to be lost (enough to kill off two characters) - and then we woke up. It had never happened. Still scared the willies out of us, though.

Well, aside from Mulligan, that is. He's come to terms with his own mortality that puny things like that don't cause him to lose Sanity.

We also met the car mechanic again. First, he whistled a tune across the street - and then he came at us with a tyre iron. Some grappling and handcuffing later, we finally had to tazer him to stop him from killing himself. Yes, it's against protocol and our training, but then again, neither are how to deal with the Old Gods.

Is Mansions of Madness like Cluedo for Satanists?

As we had to fill a session with something due to being a player short, we decided to try the Cthulhu boardgame Mansions of Madness - a relative of Elder Signs and Arkham Horror. Three investigators went to an old mansion, where axe murderers abound!

... We didn't succeed. The GM won. Oh well.

What's that coming out of the ground, is it a monster?

In the adventures of Mulligan and Cully, shizzle really hit the fan. Not only were the ATF storming the cult's compound, all guns blazing, because the person put in charge of them had body-swapped with a Japanese member of the mother cult, the rogue body-swapper was also trying to Do Something.

Mulligan jumped into a helicopter and tried to figure out how to smoke him out of the building by dropping something through the roof, and Cully went with an FBI team around the back. As soon as there was an earthquake and the building started to sink into the ground, she turn and ran, while Mulligan frantically called to Dieter the helicopter pilot to climb, because we had seen this sort of thing happen before.

True to form, a big tentacled monster came out of the ground, waved its tentacles around, ate the body-swapper and then decided to slink back into its cave. A broken stone/egg type thing might have had something to do with it, we're not sure.

Either way, the mission was a great success. Sort of. As long as Mulligan can rest up in a hospital for a month and Cully doesn't lose any more Sanity.