There are no safe mental spaces

Lottie and Julius take the Staten Island ferry, while being followed by the Nosferatu Primogen. Sneaky Prince. AltLottie comes out to play and she, along with Julius, agree that killing Jeanine is bad.

At Theo's, he looks as the dagger and says she's seen both Jeanine and Charlotte with it. Frankie agrees to sign a formal complaint against Jeanine. As the two Brujah leave to find their Primogen, another car T-bones them and tries to run them off the road and shoot at them. Theo gets some shots off before Frankie gets them out of the way. (This will have “interesting knock-on effects” says the GM.) After all, if the unknown assailants shoot back with the Tommy guns they're sporting? Heads probably go splat, which is bad for vampires. Failing to find Don Cerro, they end up at ... a house where we know from previous (way back near the beginning of the campaign) that Charlotte has two apartments in? And Theo has a key?!

Staten Island smells funny. Following a scent, the Malkavians find Jeanine in an inn, looking ... poorly. Tommy the Fool tries to get a room, but they take Jeanine up to the room she already has, where Julius pricks her finger. Jeanine has somehow become Thin-blooded?! How the fuck is that even possible?! This complicates things enormously. What to do? AltLottie suggests skipping town. Julius declines.

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 ...

Anybody who is anybody will soon walk through that door

It's 1922 and the Mangano crime family are keeping their part of New York, uh, safe? Going about their daily lives, three cousins run a speakeasy and a gambling den, things like that. One day they're told they're going to be Made Men (and Woman), and have the ceremony with lots of booze ... and the next thing they know they black out, and when they wake up they're in pools of blood and lack a pulse.

Huh.

It didn't go so well for little Lottie, whose mind was somewhat ... fractured in the process. At least her sire brought her a snack. Val discovered that while he might still bite the first hobo he came across, he wasn't going to eat him without first cleaning the guy's neck. Frankie decided to be cautious and not eat a cop, but instead went for a canoodling couple, because hey, dinner AND dessert! (He even offered some to his sire, who wasn't as impressed as he expected.)

This was sort of session zero, in which we get to know the characters and take them through the traumatic lovely memorable experience of being turned into vampires. Turns out the Cosa Nostra is a bit bloodier than expected ...

Starring:

• Carlotta "Lottie" Mangano, Malkavian flapper girl
• Frankie "Fatso" Mangano, Brujah speakeasy bootlegger
• Valtena (Val) "Pretty Boy" Mangano, Toreador gambling den maestro

We parasited the parasite god

After Elani's meeting with the orcs to find out what they were doing with their troops, we found ourselves having joined forces with them. We fought with cinematic flair, superhero landings, dragons, crackling electricity on swords and everything.

Umberlee (the baddie) and her friends, including a big demon, were found inside a mountain. There was a big fight, someone might have got away, but all the rest of them were killed. The demon turned out to not be a demon, but a parasite god, and when the corpse exploded ... a lot of celestial energy was freed.

The issue was what to do with said energy. Elani took half and gave half to a follower. Gunda took half for Tempus and half for a follower, but as Tempus couldn't have that half it went to her instead. Denethor, having received a dire warning about "not taking what wasn't yours" (which he mentioned to Elani, who didn't care if it referred to this or not, but failed to pass on the message to Gunda) gave it all to his followers. So I think we ended up with four exarchs and a new Godbound or something like that. Which was nice.

The dire warning was in fact to not touch the celestial shards we knocked out of the demon/parasite god. Had we done so, we would have ended up insta-killed and perma-dead. There were bodies of gods strewn about the cave, so that's something we're going to have to get back to at a later date ... seeing as how those gods did in fact include our own preferred deities ...

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/

Stop turning me into a Space Marine!

We didn't start the campaign this session either, because we were too busy continuing the character generation. This is serious stuff!

On the plus side, the GM had made a mistake with our Veteran choice, which meant that we had to do some rejigging of points and Edges/Hindrances. On the plus side, my character didn't have to have a major phobia against cold, tetanus and sitting down. Only getting one fate chip is probably going to prove inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as those phobias. So yay for that!

Finding Axcalibur with a d10 frag grenade

Seeing as how we were going to check out a warehouse, we got tooled up. The Russian especially, he went to B&Q and really went to town. Tilly went home and got tooled up mentally, by looking through books, finding an obscure reference to a Czechoslovakistani blood ritual cult from the early 1800s, headed by a guy whose name even the GM had trouble pronouncing, but "Tonsillitis" is close enough.

After meeting up at Starbucks, we also got tooled up very below board in a car park. Now we're carrying some old, sawn-off shotguns with ammo, a couple of handaxes and a bigger, diamond-edged axe Eddie took such a shine to that he named it Axcalibur.

At the warehouse, we heard voices ... saw footsteps ... and witnessed the carrying of a big box that definitely was from an Indiana Jones film, even though the GM insists the box really doesn't contain the Ark of the Covenant. Shots were fired (not by us), and suddenly we found ourselves face to face with the warehouse owner. In the words of the Teletubbies: uh-oh.