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 nice to have unlife goals

Lottie ends up near the Washington Heights library. It seems Lladislav the Tzimisce's return is welcomed. It's rather touching. While having a sniff around the place, she also discovers some Jewish gangsters who seem to be involved in this, and a Setite is following her? (Is Ellie more concerned about her than the Prince?) She then overhears Turlev and Blaise telling off Lladislav for having "undone decades of work" with his stunt in Harlem. He really can't be around when Ecaterina gets back - unless he, too, would like to become a head shorter.

Meanwhile in Harlem, Val's car screeches to a halt in front of Frankie. Julius is also in the car, badly injured. They speed north to find Lottie, but Julius sends Val off to the Bronx while he and Frankie jump out of the car and run on foot to get to a safehouse near Columbia University. He makes some decoys and sends them off in a different direction.

Lottie does a number of impressive jumps between moving cars to avoid getting followed to get to the second nearest safehouse - incidentally the same one Frankie is carrying Julius to. Finally the two player characters are in the same building again!

This got spicy real fast

Lottie and Frankie continue their discussion about what happened while they split the party. Lottie then explains to Angela why Frankie can't take her out on a date, and her reaction leads the players to surmise that a certain crush might actually be reciprocated. She also gives strict orders about which Kindred are allowed inside the house, i.e. definitely not Charlotte.

In this week's "ghouls acting kinda weird": Angela gives Frankie's neck a funny look.

The Commissioner of Plants and Buildings in Brooklyn is apparently excited about the Brooklyn Bridge building works, which are taking place during daylight hours and begun the same day that the three cousins were Embraced.

Frankie meets Val to discuss plans, how Val needs to talk to his police contacts to find out everything he can about the hits on Red Hook. This turned into a more personal conversation between the two cousins, where Val finds their new lifestyle to suit him very well, but he notes that Frankie might never get used to it - as highlighted by Val, who had brought them a couple of women to snack on, was busy sweet-talking his before biting, whereas Frankie apologised to his.

Val, it turns out, is worried about the situation between Lottie and Charlotte. That the air gets frosty when Charlotte is mentioned around Lottie is one thing, but it also seems to be happening the other way around ... However, if it comes down to it, he's on his cousins' side. He also kindly offered to stake Jeanine for Frankie. So thoughtful!

Meanwhile, because of the lack of a phone in the Manhattan residence, Julius says he's getting a new place, which will have a telephone. He's confident he can get that house tonight ... because he wasn't planning on paying for it. The family living there are mindwhammied into submission, will be great at answering the phone and taking messages and acting as snacks. Plus, he's just given Lottie a family, which she's never truly had. It's incredibly romantic - and sexy. They can totally take time out for a bit of bedroom fun, despite previously telling a certain cousin that there's absolutely no time for anything other than business right now.

Left brooding after Val's heart-to-heart, Frankie asks Benny to arrange a flower delivery for Angela. In a further doubling down on his humanity, backed up by dice, instead of driving to Theo, he thinks about happy childhood memories and somehow ends up outside Golconda Park. All sounds and all lights around him fade out, spooking him and making him return to the car, handing a passing drunk some spare change in the process.

So in a strange turn of events, Val might actually become a sort of bridge between two cousins who are clearly heading in opposite directions on the morality scale.

 

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.

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.

Can I get Willpower for that?

Last time ended on a cliffhanger - things had just turned frosty between Frankie and the boxing promoter, because someone failed his Intimidation roll. (He succeeded on the first one. It was very satisfying.) Turned out that the eight weirdos around the corners of the boxing ring were staring around the room in sequence. Once the situation was defused (because Frankie thought it best not to start a fight in a room full of mindwhammied people when he's in the presence of his big brother and a number of other humans), four of them walked away.

Lottie is a much better negotiator, and got a much better deal. She should go back to the boxing promoter and re-negotiate the percentage. Ellie said she'd find Valenti for us, seeing as how her childe apparently knew where he was. After leaving Ellie's she went to see a production of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, or at least a part of it, in order to negotiate a new deal at the theatre. This was also successful, because she's the negotiator of the two!!!

Lottie then bumped into Theo Bell and offered her services in the mood changing department (to help him become the next Brujah Primogen) and asked him to please maybe keep an eye on her cousin, seeing as how Frankie's sire has been shit. Theo did this by essentially hijacking the taxi Frankie was in to get out of Harlem. Frankie, bless him, went "this is basically my boss, I should tell him what I know if asked" and told him about both the werewolves and Ecaterina at the steelworks incident in Gowanus. This apparently spooks Theo, who says Elysium is likely to be called the next night.

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?!?

Why did I end up with a fucking monster as a sire?!

Val and Frankie waited for Marco, who turned up with a couple of cabaret girls ... and turned out to be very keen on blood. He ... he might have become a blood junkie already?

Julius was finally introduced to AltLottie ...

I have a note that legit says "Frankie awkwardly having The Talk with Lottie" which I think refers to how she's a big girl now, and ... well, she's a vampire now, so not like she can get pregnant.

We met up with Charlotte at a house that contained ghouls gone wrong. She introduced us to two teenage ghouls who are alleged descendants of Julius, but that Jeanine has been keeping them as bait to see if Julius would break the Masquerade - because she’s pissed off with him spurning her a century ago. We don't know if this is genuine or not, but that's the explanation we were given. Lottie was very freaked out.

So, how can we plot to get Jeanine out of the picture without triggering Julius, or killing anyone - and making sure Frankie isn't on the line considering Jeanine is his sire.

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 ...

Deadliest Catch: Human Slaves Edition

In the final session of Rifts, for what might be a very long time because we've complicated things for the GM now, our best laid plans involved using a warlock to create a distraction. He unleashed a water elemental that would turn the town of Moreno into a lake. A lot of people, including the vampires' human slaves that we wanted to save. Gorbash managed to save a handful, and took them to safety, but not without a body count because he had to do it very quickly, in a kind of trawler manner.

But we got the people we were sent there to save, so that's good? Mission accomplished? There were a number of vampires in storage somewhere else and they appear to not be there any more, but that's not going to be a problem, right? No, let's head back home to Blackstone Juggernauts HQ and get ready for our next adventure, I'm sure it'll be fine.

We're going to Chicken Pizza!

So, ahem, I think I may have been slightly distracted here, because my notes literally say "we do a robbery?" (someone died, and we feel bad about it ... I think) and then mentions something about a pig truck and aligning with a good goddess whose name I can't remember. The interesting thing to note here is that Hecate was willing to let go of Booker, provided he do her a favour (it was finding someone and/or killing them?) and in turn he got to swear fealty to this new goddess that we had just helped.

Maria was happy to receive swords from Gorbash. He treats his professional girlfriend quite well, it seems! The second session I didn't make memory notes for, so ... someone who is not me might have a functioning memory in order to recall what we were actually doing.

Who wants to give a recap?

Well, since this session and calling ourselves out on being ungrateful players, we've provided the GM with pages upon pages of backstory, which he can screw us over with later. We're very proud.

That did not come into play in this session, though. Something else did, but I can't remember exactly what because I forgot to note down helpful reminders that I could use when trying to remember it months later.

Although I do remember why we only had a handful of quotes from the 30th (which I've included here) because while Lottie was busy having it off with Julius, Val and Frankie were followed when heading back to Val's place. It was a rival gang, and they ended up getting shot at. Frankie got shot quite severely, actually, and we were worried there for a bit. Fucking Brenda Toner.

Questions find answers

We went into an Aztec pyramid, where killed vampires and were very nearly killed in the process. At least Booker and Jayson were, had they not been pals with a dragon that turned their SDC armour into MDC armour. It was a tough fight, but we killed the vampires, removed some pillars and escaped with the target we were there to rescue. Yay us!

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?

The horde was in storage at the time

We have another player joining us for Rifts, taking over the role of the (now former) Juicer NPC Maria "Speedy" Gonzales. This session was mostly to get a feel for how the party have been running the character.

So, in order to impress our new player we all rolled exceedingly poorly, but somehow still managed to take down the group of vampires we managed to antagonise last week.

On the plus side, we're now definitely in Mexico, but the tequila hasn't yet started flowing.

We found vampires using mech suits, though, so that was kind of ... a thing.

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.

So you come from a land Down Under

We're going on an adventure down under! No, not Australia - Menzoberranzan! We're trying to get down to the entrance to Faerûn's world engine and hopefully Bahamut will let us in. But first, we'll have to traverse a number of traps put in place by Lolth. But she's our friend ally now, so that should count for something, right?

We came to a trapped tower on an island in a lake and encountered two angels, because of course there had to be sodding ANGELS. Well, now there are no angels. Yay us!

Not that we're not still battling to get to where we're going, though. There's a yellow brick road and a sign saying to keep off the grass and everything.

Bahamut is in a bad shape.

Exorcising the brain fart from hell

Lockdown adventures in post-apocalyptic USA somewhere *motions vaguely to the west* continues. We're heading toward Mexico, as it happens, where the tequila flows freely - we presume. There are no vampires in Mexico, honest guv'na.

Except the ones we keep on finding.

(The sessions 22^nd and 29^th were cancelled. People still get ill in lockdown, even if it's thankfully not Covid-19 ill.)

Arriba!

An audience with the Prince of New York

The cousins Mangano were summoned to the Prince of New York to be introduced to vampire society. They were very well-behaved. Janine was slightly disappointed Frankie didn't take the bait and ingratiate himself with his elders.

We - Lottie in particular - keep seeing weird stuff going on when we cross the Manhattan (?) bridge. Something's clearly going on there, but what?

Side note: we saved a(n Italian) kid from being beaten by an Irish gang and decided to meddle a bit in a competitor's territory ...