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.

Can we put this moat on our expenses?

We continue our journey toward Mexico, the land where there are absolutely no vampires whatsoever. Except we found a bunch on the way, like a whole storage warehouse full of coffins. There were talks of constructing a moat and filling it with water, and ... yeah.

There were fewer coffins by the end of it. And then the vampires found us.

The person who comes last can be Wil Wheaton

For the past few years we've hosted a New Year's boardgaming extravaganza at our place. This New Year's Eve was no exception.

We warmed up by playing Dixit, then Cards Against Humanity, and Betrayal at House on the Hill - which saw in midnight - and the next day, we rounded off by a few games of King of Tokyo.

That's right, we sure know how to party! #wearehorriblepeople

What happens off page stays off page

As we only had a couple of weeks before breaking off for the holidays, we decided to have a one-off. Seeing as how we'd be joined by a friend we don't see very often, and who'd like to play some more of Jurisfiction, that's what we decided to do.

In the seasonal Meanwhile in Narnia, there were reports about petrified Narnians being sold off as souvenir statues to unsuspecting visitors, and a group of agents assembled to go into Stephen King's The Shining, as that was so far the only lead Jurisfiction had.

A child was interrogated. One of the agents kept wanting to drink another agent's blood. A pirate's parrot turned out to have a rather foul mouth, and a 200-year-old politician didn't know who to trust.

Starring:

• Alice, 7-year-old (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
• Carmilla, vampire (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla)
• Long John Silver, pirate (Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island)
• Louis Gridley Wu, politician (Larry Niven, Ringworld)
• Polly, parrot (sits on Silver's shoulder)

Here's part one ...

Method acting on the Jeremy Kyle show

After rescuing the family, who were so kind to let us stay over, from their burning house (only one casualty), we were informed by Sutcliffe that he'd seen the car we were looking for - and had been asking about around town the day before - and we all shook our fists and blamed evil petroleum company Hexaco for the arson.

Because little do we know it was actually Sutcliffe's Manitou that was responsible ...

We decided to go to the oil derrick that the singer's brother allegedly (read: according to Hexaco) sabotaged, and found a bloke willing to take us through the swamp on his bateau. Three hours later, we found the deserted derrick and investigated.

And then the bateau guy was sliced in half by some kind of invisible spirit creature that we tried fighting. We survived, but only because it decided to dissolve into thin air after Sutcliffe managed to hurt it with magics. We then had to fix the bateau so we could get out of there, as the spirit thing might have seen us as Hexaco people returning to keep mutilating the precious eco system of the swamp - which is probably what caused the destruction of the derrick in the first place.

But now it's dark, and we're three hours away from being out of the swamp ... and there are alligators nearby ...

Soaking carpets in the Nottingham Chainsaw Massacre

We're back in the weird and wonderful ways of Changeling: The Dreaming again, and we left off with an Epic Cliffhanger of DOOOOOOM, in which our friend Count Valdemar was held at knifepoint in his own home. Well, it didn't exactly pan out. He got his throat cut after all, and even though Flora tried to save him, she couldn't stop the bleeding.

On the plus side, the rest of the party brought down all the bad guys, so yay for us! Jack then found some papers, while Alysiana sneaked off to administer one of the super-mega-deluxe healing potions to the princess, with Finn and Flora a couple of minutes behind. Potion administered, the princess ... well, we've yet to find out, actually.

Needless to say, Set is awesome - even chainsaws can't bring him down! Now all we have to do is to not get caught in the middle of a number of Fae nobles who want to rule Nottingham. Or get arrested for the bloodbath that is currently Count Valdemar's residence. Maybe there's an old lady somewhere we can pin it on?

A little bit of sick, a little bit of Slick

The swamp turned out not to be such a big deal after all. Us players were the biggest challenge. To begin, we had a big discussion as to the name of the guy from CSI: New York - not Kevin Bacon but in fact Gary Sinise, whether or not The Stand was a film or a TV series and when it was from ... and then it turned into a discussion who Gary Busey is, what he's been in, and in particular, who was in Leathal Weapon, and so on. Hence why we decided in the end that next time we're trying to think of an actor, we'll say it's Kevin Bacon and leave it at that, or we're stuck for at least half an hour before someone has the idea to use the IMDb app on their phone ...

At the same time, it was decided  that any film we also couldn't think of would be Care Bears, meaning that later on, when the question accompanying a banjo tune, was "aww, what's the film called?!" the answer was Care Bears rather than Deliverance ... and we imagined a hybrid of the two ... we completely lost it and roared with laughter for five minutes.

(You had to be there.)

In-game, we found the town of Blacktree, mainly because the GM thought better of leaving us in the swamp, what with the inbred Care Bears and the ghost of Slick roaming around below the surface, and said we reached the place in a very quick time. Huzzah! We obtained a sample of the eponymous black tree through the cunning use of squirrel, and then discovered the master healing potion maker was in fact a witch. (You should have seen the look on Set's face when the GM told him the witch was an old woman ... Priceless!)

While Jack's negotations with her didn't seem to help all that much in getting her to co-operate, Hugo's 20 gold dross quickly won her over. Flora got to see the potion being made, took notes, and is considering spending a working holiday there. After the potion was finished, we got the bottle and started heading back to Nottingham as quick as we could. As Jack saw a merchant with his missing father's sword in the crowd, he decided to chase after him, with Finn in tow, while Alysiana, Set, Flora and the bottle - and some NPCs - started in the direction of home. Quickly.