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practicalcatI've been playing a tabletop game with some buddies which can basically be boiled down to "burned spies uncover a world-wide vampiric conspiracy" and it's awesome.
Rolfe is running the game. It kicked off with all of us were summoned to Marseille. Well, technically only a couple of us were summoned to Marseille, but the rest of us were expected (kind of) as well. Us being:
We met the person who brought us all together in an apartment building, which seemed to have recently had some new cameras installed. The woman, who introduced herself as "Hopkins" (though Tzofiya knew her by a different name, they'd worked together previously), was the only one in the building, and the apartment she was in smelled strongly of garlic and had bouquets of wild roses in the windows. She seemed a little discombobulated, but told us that she needed us to retrieve a certain book of secrets from a German agent who'd holed up in a nearby church. She couldn't go because the building was under surveillance, but we were good enough that we'd have better luck. The two groups weren't exactly thrilled to be working together on something like this, but Hopkins promised it was important and that we'd be paid, so we went along with it.
Tzofiya and Dov and Gloria hung out in a park across the street from the church while John stayed back with Hopkins to do research on the church and Gideon prepped himself for infiltration by disguising himself as one of the janitorial staff. Tzofiya was taking pictures of both the church and of the park around them for cover, but when she snapped a picture of a strangely-dressed man muttering into a cat carrier, her (very nice) camera glitched out. Rebooting it and trying again resulted in the same effect. It was weird, but Gideon had managed to get into the church by that point, so she and Dov left Gloria outside to keep watch and sneaked in as well.
Inside, they eventually found the German agent in one of the rooms in the basement that was clearly some sort of safe house. He was dead as a result of having been bitten to death by rats, rather than the gun-shot that a priest (or a deep cover agent) had bandaged. That man had had his throat torn out by rats, which: what. Rats don't do that. The only book we found was an unusually thick copy of Dracula: the Undead in the hands of the German agent, but when Tzofiya took it from him, a rat leapt out from beneath the table where the agent was laid out and tried to attack her. Dov slapped it across the room before it could reach it's target though.
About that time, Gloria saw a gang of German bikers pull up outside of a church. The lead biker intimidated the surveillance trucks into leaving, which was unusual to say the least, and then started directing members of his gang to go inside the church. Gloria radioed to warn those of us inside, and stayed to witness the lead biker take issue with the weird guy with the cat carrier. Cat Carrier sprinted off, followed by Lead Biker. Gloria stayed just long enough to see a few other members of the gang follow them, and then come back with Lead Biker beat all to hell, at which point she beat feet for the extraction point.
The rest of us were sneaking along a "forgotten" tunnel, until we heard the sound of the huge steal grate we'd just passed under being...peeled back, for lack of a better word. We decided to sprint the rest of the way out, found a car, picked up Gloria, and headed back for John and Hopkins.
Hopkins had found some reason to get John to leave the apartment, and wasn't answering the buzzer when he got back, so he broke in. He found her running around in a state of apparent psychosis, saying that she needed to be on the water. He made an effort to calm her down, eventually radioing the rest of us to meet them at the boat Hopkins had down on the docks. He also used one of his still-intact cover identities to get some medication that he thought might help.
Once we were all on the water, Hopkins explained herself: she was part of an agency (Edom) within MI-6 that had dealings with vampires. The novel Dracula was actually a redacted report on the first contact Edom had with a vampire. Her codename was "Hopkins" because Anthony Hopkins had played Van Helsing in a movie, her predecessor had been codenamed in a similar fashion. She'd noticed that she'd been behaving strangely and had been intending to recruit the now-dead German agent to be her successor, but then when they met, she blanked out and shot at him. Then all of us arrived saying that she'd contacted us, and while she'd considered recruiting us, she didn't remember actually sending any messages. This was largely met with skepticism from everyone except the ex-Mossad agents, who mostly shrugged and went "yeah, demons are a thing".
At sundown, Hopkins abruptly went into a trance-like state, where she looked each of us in the face and identified us by name. Then she fell out of the trance and freaked out until we sedated her, and then we agreed that it was time to motor on out of there because there was definitely SOMETHING hinkey going on. We managed to slip a police net (the news was claiming that Hopkins was wanted for some connection to a terrorist ring) and escaped Monaco. We also discovered that Hopkins' laptop was bugged, so we left it somewhere to be retrieved later, once we picked up the computer expert Gloria knew.
Cue Raúl (Chris), Mexican white-hat hacker. We had some fun in Monaco while he worked, with John and Gideon winning us a bunch of money and Gloria making friends with someone who might be useful to us in the future or might just be a red herring (Rolfe laughed his ass off at how doggedly we'd pursued this guy, assuming he was part of the conspiracy. Curse our gamer-primed brains!) Tzofiya also got to Spider-Man her way up an elevator shaft and jump between balconies.
By this point, we had to keep Hopkins sedated all the time, mostly because she tore up her own forearm with her fingernails and took a chunk out of John's arm with her teeth (which had resulted in the hilarious OOC exchange of "You can't insert a catheter in a synagogue! That's just tacky!" "You mean, like, on the Sabbath or just in general?") And we were having problems with rats sneaking in and biting her, which was...really weird. Raúl noticed that there was a weird glitch in the cameras every time the rats came around...and that there was one in the hallway RIGHT NOW. So we bundled Hopkins up and motored. By this point, we had reason to believe that something (whether it was "really" a vampire or not) was tracking Hopkins, and we really couldn't keep hauling an unconscious woman around with us, so we installed her in a mental institution with a lot of money to pay for her care. John and Gloria were beginning to believe that vampires might be a thing, though Gideon was still a hard-line skeptic and Raoul was mostly just in a state of "what the hell did I just get myself into".
We engaged in some investigation at Château d'If -- Gloria had placed a bug on one of the German bikers, who we knew were somehow tied into all of this, and we'd heard that they were making plans to go there. Dov was busy (Jeff was unavailable due to work) and Gloria was under cover with the bikers, so Tzofiya and Raúl and Gideon and John posed as couples on one of the tours. Shenanigans occurred -- John saw a guy taking photographs down a well, Tzofiya and Raúl followed him pretending to have been sneaking off to make out, but when they took a selfie with him, he pulled a gun on Raúl and Tzofiya couldn't disarm him fast enough to prevent Raúl from being (non-fatally) shot. Before that, they saw the Lead Biker go down the well in question, and then John overheard through a wall near-ish the well, the sound of the biker trying to talk to someone while fighting them in a way that made the wall shake and sounded like someone being hit with a sledge hammer. Gideon, meanwhile, sneaked around the office area and discovered the identity of Cat Carrier: turns out he's a fairly important person in the French government. Oo-er.
We managed to escape due to some fast talking and Tzofiya making her intimidation check against the bikers while carrying a rapidly bleeding out Raúl, and we motored out of there too. Raúl got patched up and relaxed a bit by hacking into the computer Gideon had stolen from Cat Carrier's office, where he found a lot of sexy pictures of a headless lady. 1) Weird, 2) Weird-er, because his previous hacking of the pixelated pictures that Tzofiya had taken of Cat Carrier in their first encounter had shown a headless woman standing over him. He passed them on to a buddy to get a second opinion. Time to motor off to London, where Edom is supposedly headquartered.
Jessa had to leave the game at this point. I'm not sure what's going to happen with Gloria. Jeff is still involved, but he's super busy on weekends because Conventions, so Dov tends to be "off elsewhere".
In London, John and Gideon (under cover identities) managed to bluff their way into a future meeting at "the Ring", a place mentioned in the book. Meanwhile, we took advantage of he fact that we have a hacker and London has a Metric Ass-ton of cameras to look for That Weird Vampire Glitch. And Raúl found it: twice a day, a wave of that glitch would go out, generally just after dawn and dusk. We went to investigate that site, which turned out to be an old warehouse with a weirdly large parking lot. Watching it revealed that there was only ever one guard on duty, and the glitches seemed to happen just after the guard made their rounds.
Tzofiya stayed outside to keep watch while the other three took out the guard and went inside. The warehouse was largely empty, with an office where the tech hadn't been updated since the 80's and a weird trap door in the floor of the warehouse. Gideon and John went down under the floor while Raúl hit the office to see what he could find. Gideon and John found weird stuff written on the walls of the hallway from the trap door and a weird vault at the end of the hallway, surrounded by weird pipes. Gideon opened up the peephole and found a room full of dead bodies, each with a thread leading up to the ceiling tied to one finger. Gideon, still the skeptic, knocked on the door to the vault. Meanwhile, upstairs, Raúl was flipping switches to see what would happen. What happened was that Gideon glanced away when some water came out of the pipes at his feet, and when he looked back, one of the bodies was missing.
Whoops.
They retreated back to the office, where they picked up the phone and were immediately greeted with a demand whether "one of them" was awake. Gideon was able to get the number and the three retreated to Tzofiya's hiding spot, where we all witnessed a whoooole bunch of emergency services and government people show up really quickly. Gideon called again and the phone was picked up by a guy on site -- and one we recognized as being part of Edom. Hostilities were exchanged and we scarpered and disposed of the phone.
Which brings us to this most recent session!
At this point, we're all on board with "if this isn't vampires, then it's something sufficiently like vampires that we can just call it 'vampires' and be done with it". And we may have just set one loose. Good job, Gideon. Gideon and John are still planning to keep their appointment at the Ring, assuming they can figure out where that is. The team split up for the day: Raúl to try and type up the redacted bits and the hand-written notes in Unredacted Dracula so that we could threaten to release it onto the 'net, while keeping an eye on the news for anything relevant, Gideon to try and find the Ring for their meeting tomorrow, Tzofiya to go shopping for supplies (garlic, wooden stakes, wild roses, those seed bombs you can toss over fences to plant a bunch of wild flowers, UV lamps, etc), and John to wander around in public being his cover identity.
Gideon found three potential locations for the Ring, and determined with some in-person investigation that the closest one to London was probably it. He'd actually been there once for hand-to-hand combat training: an old manor house on a river, where the river had been used to form a free-flowing moat around the house. Seemed like a place that vampires would have a very hard time getting to, huh?
Raúl discovered that the news was reporting that the Warehouse Incident was some kind of terrorist bomb threat, and that "suspected terrorists" had been seen being lead from the building. Someone had told them, off the record, that it was tied to a ring Marseille. He also discovered that a fire truck from the scene had caused cameras to Vampire Glitch as it passed them, until it pulled in to a surprising dead spot in camera-covered London. He reported this, and Gideon and Tzofiya went to investigate. There weren't any fire houses in that area of town, but there was an old building that used to be an asylum of some sort. Gideon theorized that it might be where Renfield had been kept. The two of them talked their way inside, posing as photography artists, but things got...hinkey. Old buildings with brand new doors and keypads, a lot of cameras...nope nope nope, this is a trap, time to motor. As they made their escape, they were intercepted by a soldier with a gun and two "fire fighters" with axes who told them to kneel with their hands on their heads. Gideon kept playing the confused art student until one of the fire fighters came in range to zip-tie their hands, then managed to spin the guy around and shove him into the soldier. The other fire fighter hesitated just long enough ("can I actually hit civilians in this situation?") for Tzofiya to take him down and steal his axe. They booked it and scaled the wall, running in different directions. Gideon Hot Fuzzed his way through a bunch of nearby yards, laying a few false trails before doubling back to his car. Tzofiya...well, she had an axe. Some small children were very impressed by the lady with the axe chopping through their fence. Tzofiya, having left a very obvious trail, eventually abandoned her axe and also doubled-back.
John, meanwhile, was approached by a Very British Man, who suggested he visit a certain tomb in a certain cemetery at sundown, then opened and closed his umbrella a couple times and left. It was so obvious that he wasn't sure what to do with it at first, but after he heard about Gideon and Tzofiya's escape from the asylum and Raúl reported that images from that were being circulated tied to the "terrorist bomb threat" at the warehouse and that the cover ID Gideon had been using when they bluffed their way into the Ring meeting might be blown, it was instead decided that we should just leave the number for a burner phone at the site with a note reading "call me, Umbrella Man".
We did eventually get a call, and Umbrella Man was a little put-out that we hadn't shown. He warned us that we didn't know what we were messing with, and we dropped enough information to convince him that maybe we did know a few things. He said that he wanted to meet in person so he could give us something, but just after we arranged a location, Gideon heard a hiss like the line might be tapped.
The next morning, just after dawn, Gideon and John were waiting in the British equivalent to a Dennys' with the most garlicky breakfast on the menu. Umbrella Man pulled up, hesitated, locked his briefcase in the trunk of his car, and went inside. Tzofiya, watching from cover, saw a rat crawl out of the undercarriage of his car and onto the bumper, staring intently at the lock. She sneaked up on the rat, which was so unnaturally focused it didn't notice her at all, and batted the rat across the street with a stick. Raúl, watching through security cameras, noticed the Vampire Glitch in a haze that seemed to be settling over Tzofiya, and waved her over to the van where he was hiding out.
Inside, Umbrella Man obligingly took a bite of Garlicky Breakfast and revealed that he was a retired MI-6 desk guy who owed someone a favor and had no real idea of what he was doing. But he had been told to deliver something to us by someone we'd identified as being part of the conspiracy. He was already on edge, and freaked out when he saw Tzofiya through the window batting something off of his car. The assurance that she was "with us" only did so much, especially when John and Gideon told him that he'd been followed and that they'd like to move this to another location. He freaked and just wanted to get the delivery over with, and marched out to his car to retrieve the briefcase. Gideon and John went with him, which was both good and bad. Bad, because it meant that they were right there when some horrible vampiric monster sprung out of the trunk and eviscerated Umbrella Man before draining all of his blood, good because it meant that Gideon could grab the briefcase out of the trunk and John could, with strength borne of terror, shove the vampire back into the trunk and slam it closed. As the trunk dented outward from the inside, they jumped into the van and the vampire broke free as they peeled out of the parking lot. The vampire started to chase us, but was stymied by the sunlight and had to escape to the shadows.
We went to ground in a synagogue where we discovered that the documents were a mix of newspaper articles, original documents of the Unredacted Dracula, and some letters possibly to Dracula and others. Virgil was quoted in several letters, and we realized that Edom was a Biblical reference. "This is some Hellfire Club bullshit", John complained over a list of the names of the "sons of Edom" linked to various English lords. He also translated the Latin in the crest on some of the letters to "Passable Cup", which some study tied to something Jesus had said allowing us to conclude that Edom views vampires as their route to immortality.
And that's where we closed out the session. So far, we are a little shaken and a little bruised, but still sane and healthy. We'll see how long that lasts.
It's been a blast so far, and I've very much enjoyed playing Tzofiya, who's ended up having a darker, more deadpan sense of humor than I expected. I'm fairly certain that she's made a target of herself for the vampires at this point, which also promises to be fun. Especially since she's the primary badass, what with Jeff not being able to make it all the time.
Here are some fun In Character quotes and exchanges:
Tzofiya: (deadpan) I usually notice headless women wandering around in parks.
Raúl: Okay, if that was a movie, I'd watch it. It sounds like something by Quentin Tarantino.
Tzofiya: (deadpan) I'm not barefoot.
Dov: (to Gloria) Speaking as your bodyguard, please don't turn every head in the place.
Tzofiya: (over the radio) I found the dead guy!
Raúl: ...I still have no idea what's going on.
Gideon: Do you know where the term 'graveyard shift' comes from? Back in the day, before we had modern technology, it was difficult to be sure that someone was dead--
Tzofiya: (interrupting, to deadpan a joke) It's fairly easy to make sure someone is dead. Cut off their head, for example.
John: 'Be sure' and 'ensure' are different. We're not talking about double-tapping grandma, here.
(later, in the same conversation)
Gideon: The book describes several ways to kill a vampire. A stake through the heart, chopping off the head...
Tzofiya: (grins to show she's joking this time) 'Double-tapping grandma'.
Rolfe is running the game. It kicked off with all of us were summoned to Marseille. Well, technically only a couple of us were summoned to Marseille, but the rest of us were expected (kind of) as well. Us being:
- Gloria (Jessa), an MI-6 civilian contractor, who brought:
- Gideon (Gavin), a master of disguise with some sort of former tie to MI-6.
- John (Andrew), an ex-CIA desk jockey who was burned as a result of having fallen in with:
- Dov (Jeff) and Tzofiya (me), ex-Mossad agents who hadn't been able to be called back from a mission that had suddenly become politically awkward and were burned to make up for that. Fortunately for them, they survived a mission that should have killed them and are now on the run.
We met the person who brought us all together in an apartment building, which seemed to have recently had some new cameras installed. The woman, who introduced herself as "Hopkins" (though Tzofiya knew her by a different name, they'd worked together previously), was the only one in the building, and the apartment she was in smelled strongly of garlic and had bouquets of wild roses in the windows. She seemed a little discombobulated, but told us that she needed us to retrieve a certain book of secrets from a German agent who'd holed up in a nearby church. She couldn't go because the building was under surveillance, but we were good enough that we'd have better luck. The two groups weren't exactly thrilled to be working together on something like this, but Hopkins promised it was important and that we'd be paid, so we went along with it.
Tzofiya and Dov and Gloria hung out in a park across the street from the church while John stayed back with Hopkins to do research on the church and Gideon prepped himself for infiltration by disguising himself as one of the janitorial staff. Tzofiya was taking pictures of both the church and of the park around them for cover, but when she snapped a picture of a strangely-dressed man muttering into a cat carrier, her (very nice) camera glitched out. Rebooting it and trying again resulted in the same effect. It was weird, but Gideon had managed to get into the church by that point, so she and Dov left Gloria outside to keep watch and sneaked in as well.
Inside, they eventually found the German agent in one of the rooms in the basement that was clearly some sort of safe house. He was dead as a result of having been bitten to death by rats, rather than the gun-shot that a priest (or a deep cover agent) had bandaged. That man had had his throat torn out by rats, which: what. Rats don't do that. The only book we found was an unusually thick copy of Dracula: the Undead in the hands of the German agent, but when Tzofiya took it from him, a rat leapt out from beneath the table where the agent was laid out and tried to attack her. Dov slapped it across the room before it could reach it's target though.
About that time, Gloria saw a gang of German bikers pull up outside of a church. The lead biker intimidated the surveillance trucks into leaving, which was unusual to say the least, and then started directing members of his gang to go inside the church. Gloria radioed to warn those of us inside, and stayed to witness the lead biker take issue with the weird guy with the cat carrier. Cat Carrier sprinted off, followed by Lead Biker. Gloria stayed just long enough to see a few other members of the gang follow them, and then come back with Lead Biker beat all to hell, at which point she beat feet for the extraction point.
The rest of us were sneaking along a "forgotten" tunnel, until we heard the sound of the huge steal grate we'd just passed under being...peeled back, for lack of a better word. We decided to sprint the rest of the way out, found a car, picked up Gloria, and headed back for John and Hopkins.
Hopkins had found some reason to get John to leave the apartment, and wasn't answering the buzzer when he got back, so he broke in. He found her running around in a state of apparent psychosis, saying that she needed to be on the water. He made an effort to calm her down, eventually radioing the rest of us to meet them at the boat Hopkins had down on the docks. He also used one of his still-intact cover identities to get some medication that he thought might help.
Once we were all on the water, Hopkins explained herself: she was part of an agency (Edom) within MI-6 that had dealings with vampires. The novel Dracula was actually a redacted report on the first contact Edom had with a vampire. Her codename was "Hopkins" because Anthony Hopkins had played Van Helsing in a movie, her predecessor had been codenamed in a similar fashion. She'd noticed that she'd been behaving strangely and had been intending to recruit the now-dead German agent to be her successor, but then when they met, she blanked out and shot at him. Then all of us arrived saying that she'd contacted us, and while she'd considered recruiting us, she didn't remember actually sending any messages. This was largely met with skepticism from everyone except the ex-Mossad agents, who mostly shrugged and went "yeah, demons are a thing".
At sundown, Hopkins abruptly went into a trance-like state, where she looked each of us in the face and identified us by name. Then she fell out of the trance and freaked out until we sedated her, and then we agreed that it was time to motor on out of there because there was definitely SOMETHING hinkey going on. We managed to slip a police net (the news was claiming that Hopkins was wanted for some connection to a terrorist ring) and escaped Monaco. We also discovered that Hopkins' laptop was bugged, so we left it somewhere to be retrieved later, once we picked up the computer expert Gloria knew.
Cue Raúl (Chris), Mexican white-hat hacker. We had some fun in Monaco while he worked, with John and Gideon winning us a bunch of money and Gloria making friends with someone who might be useful to us in the future or might just be a red herring (Rolfe laughed his ass off at how doggedly we'd pursued this guy, assuming he was part of the conspiracy. Curse our gamer-primed brains!) Tzofiya also got to Spider-Man her way up an elevator shaft and jump between balconies.
By this point, we had to keep Hopkins sedated all the time, mostly because she tore up her own forearm with her fingernails and took a chunk out of John's arm with her teeth (which had resulted in the hilarious OOC exchange of "You can't insert a catheter in a synagogue! That's just tacky!" "You mean, like, on the Sabbath or just in general?") And we were having problems with rats sneaking in and biting her, which was...really weird. Raúl noticed that there was a weird glitch in the cameras every time the rats came around...and that there was one in the hallway RIGHT NOW. So we bundled Hopkins up and motored. By this point, we had reason to believe that something (whether it was "really" a vampire or not) was tracking Hopkins, and we really couldn't keep hauling an unconscious woman around with us, so we installed her in a mental institution with a lot of money to pay for her care. John and Gloria were beginning to believe that vampires might be a thing, though Gideon was still a hard-line skeptic and Raoul was mostly just in a state of "what the hell did I just get myself into".
We engaged in some investigation at Château d'If -- Gloria had placed a bug on one of the German bikers, who we knew were somehow tied into all of this, and we'd heard that they were making plans to go there. Dov was busy (Jeff was unavailable due to work) and Gloria was under cover with the bikers, so Tzofiya and Raúl and Gideon and John posed as couples on one of the tours. Shenanigans occurred -- John saw a guy taking photographs down a well, Tzofiya and Raúl followed him pretending to have been sneaking off to make out, but when they took a selfie with him, he pulled a gun on Raúl and Tzofiya couldn't disarm him fast enough to prevent Raúl from being (non-fatally) shot. Before that, they saw the Lead Biker go down the well in question, and then John overheard through a wall near-ish the well, the sound of the biker trying to talk to someone while fighting them in a way that made the wall shake and sounded like someone being hit with a sledge hammer. Gideon, meanwhile, sneaked around the office area and discovered the identity of Cat Carrier: turns out he's a fairly important person in the French government. Oo-er.
We managed to escape due to some fast talking and Tzofiya making her intimidation check against the bikers while carrying a rapidly bleeding out Raúl, and we motored out of there too. Raúl got patched up and relaxed a bit by hacking into the computer Gideon had stolen from Cat Carrier's office, where he found a lot of sexy pictures of a headless lady. 1) Weird, 2) Weird-er, because his previous hacking of the pixelated pictures that Tzofiya had taken of Cat Carrier in their first encounter had shown a headless woman standing over him. He passed them on to a buddy to get a second opinion. Time to motor off to London, where Edom is supposedly headquartered.
Jessa had to leave the game at this point. I'm not sure what's going to happen with Gloria. Jeff is still involved, but he's super busy on weekends because Conventions, so Dov tends to be "off elsewhere".
In London, John and Gideon (under cover identities) managed to bluff their way into a future meeting at "the Ring", a place mentioned in the book. Meanwhile, we took advantage of he fact that we have a hacker and London has a Metric Ass-ton of cameras to look for That Weird Vampire Glitch. And Raúl found it: twice a day, a wave of that glitch would go out, generally just after dawn and dusk. We went to investigate that site, which turned out to be an old warehouse with a weirdly large parking lot. Watching it revealed that there was only ever one guard on duty, and the glitches seemed to happen just after the guard made their rounds.
Tzofiya stayed outside to keep watch while the other three took out the guard and went inside. The warehouse was largely empty, with an office where the tech hadn't been updated since the 80's and a weird trap door in the floor of the warehouse. Gideon and John went down under the floor while Raúl hit the office to see what he could find. Gideon and John found weird stuff written on the walls of the hallway from the trap door and a weird vault at the end of the hallway, surrounded by weird pipes. Gideon opened up the peephole and found a room full of dead bodies, each with a thread leading up to the ceiling tied to one finger. Gideon, still the skeptic, knocked on the door to the vault. Meanwhile, upstairs, Raúl was flipping switches to see what would happen. What happened was that Gideon glanced away when some water came out of the pipes at his feet, and when he looked back, one of the bodies was missing.
Whoops.
They retreated back to the office, where they picked up the phone and were immediately greeted with a demand whether "one of them" was awake. Gideon was able to get the number and the three retreated to Tzofiya's hiding spot, where we all witnessed a whoooole bunch of emergency services and government people show up really quickly. Gideon called again and the phone was picked up by a guy on site -- and one we recognized as being part of Edom. Hostilities were exchanged and we scarpered and disposed of the phone.
Which brings us to this most recent session!
At this point, we're all on board with "if this isn't vampires, then it's something sufficiently like vampires that we can just call it 'vampires' and be done with it". And we may have just set one loose. Good job, Gideon. Gideon and John are still planning to keep their appointment at the Ring, assuming they can figure out where that is. The team split up for the day: Raúl to try and type up the redacted bits and the hand-written notes in Unredacted Dracula so that we could threaten to release it onto the 'net, while keeping an eye on the news for anything relevant, Gideon to try and find the Ring for their meeting tomorrow, Tzofiya to go shopping for supplies (garlic, wooden stakes, wild roses, those seed bombs you can toss over fences to plant a bunch of wild flowers, UV lamps, etc), and John to wander around in public being his cover identity.
Gideon found three potential locations for the Ring, and determined with some in-person investigation that the closest one to London was probably it. He'd actually been there once for hand-to-hand combat training: an old manor house on a river, where the river had been used to form a free-flowing moat around the house. Seemed like a place that vampires would have a very hard time getting to, huh?
Raúl discovered that the news was reporting that the Warehouse Incident was some kind of terrorist bomb threat, and that "suspected terrorists" had been seen being lead from the building. Someone had told them, off the record, that it was tied to a ring Marseille. He also discovered that a fire truck from the scene had caused cameras to Vampire Glitch as it passed them, until it pulled in to a surprising dead spot in camera-covered London. He reported this, and Gideon and Tzofiya went to investigate. There weren't any fire houses in that area of town, but there was an old building that used to be an asylum of some sort. Gideon theorized that it might be where Renfield had been kept. The two of them talked their way inside, posing as photography artists, but things got...hinkey. Old buildings with brand new doors and keypads, a lot of cameras...nope nope nope, this is a trap, time to motor. As they made their escape, they were intercepted by a soldier with a gun and two "fire fighters" with axes who told them to kneel with their hands on their heads. Gideon kept playing the confused art student until one of the fire fighters came in range to zip-tie their hands, then managed to spin the guy around and shove him into the soldier. The other fire fighter hesitated just long enough ("can I actually hit civilians in this situation?") for Tzofiya to take him down and steal his axe. They booked it and scaled the wall, running in different directions. Gideon Hot Fuzzed his way through a bunch of nearby yards, laying a few false trails before doubling back to his car. Tzofiya...well, she had an axe. Some small children were very impressed by the lady with the axe chopping through their fence. Tzofiya, having left a very obvious trail, eventually abandoned her axe and also doubled-back.
John, meanwhile, was approached by a Very British Man, who suggested he visit a certain tomb in a certain cemetery at sundown, then opened and closed his umbrella a couple times and left. It was so obvious that he wasn't sure what to do with it at first, but after he heard about Gideon and Tzofiya's escape from the asylum and Raúl reported that images from that were being circulated tied to the "terrorist bomb threat" at the warehouse and that the cover ID Gideon had been using when they bluffed their way into the Ring meeting might be blown, it was instead decided that we should just leave the number for a burner phone at the site with a note reading "call me, Umbrella Man".
We did eventually get a call, and Umbrella Man was a little put-out that we hadn't shown. He warned us that we didn't know what we were messing with, and we dropped enough information to convince him that maybe we did know a few things. He said that he wanted to meet in person so he could give us something, but just after we arranged a location, Gideon heard a hiss like the line might be tapped.
The next morning, just after dawn, Gideon and John were waiting in the British equivalent to a Dennys' with the most garlicky breakfast on the menu. Umbrella Man pulled up, hesitated, locked his briefcase in the trunk of his car, and went inside. Tzofiya, watching from cover, saw a rat crawl out of the undercarriage of his car and onto the bumper, staring intently at the lock. She sneaked up on the rat, which was so unnaturally focused it didn't notice her at all, and batted the rat across the street with a stick. Raúl, watching through security cameras, noticed the Vampire Glitch in a haze that seemed to be settling over Tzofiya, and waved her over to the van where he was hiding out.
Inside, Umbrella Man obligingly took a bite of Garlicky Breakfast and revealed that he was a retired MI-6 desk guy who owed someone a favor and had no real idea of what he was doing. But he had been told to deliver something to us by someone we'd identified as being part of the conspiracy. He was already on edge, and freaked out when he saw Tzofiya through the window batting something off of his car. The assurance that she was "with us" only did so much, especially when John and Gideon told him that he'd been followed and that they'd like to move this to another location. He freaked and just wanted to get the delivery over with, and marched out to his car to retrieve the briefcase. Gideon and John went with him, which was both good and bad. Bad, because it meant that they were right there when some horrible vampiric monster sprung out of the trunk and eviscerated Umbrella Man before draining all of his blood, good because it meant that Gideon could grab the briefcase out of the trunk and John could, with strength borne of terror, shove the vampire back into the trunk and slam it closed. As the trunk dented outward from the inside, they jumped into the van and the vampire broke free as they peeled out of the parking lot. The vampire started to chase us, but was stymied by the sunlight and had to escape to the shadows.
We went to ground in a synagogue where we discovered that the documents were a mix of newspaper articles, original documents of the Unredacted Dracula, and some letters possibly to Dracula and others. Virgil was quoted in several letters, and we realized that Edom was a Biblical reference. "This is some Hellfire Club bullshit", John complained over a list of the names of the "sons of Edom" linked to various English lords. He also translated the Latin in the crest on some of the letters to "Passable Cup", which some study tied to something Jesus had said allowing us to conclude that Edom views vampires as their route to immortality.
And that's where we closed out the session. So far, we are a little shaken and a little bruised, but still sane and healthy. We'll see how long that lasts.
It's been a blast so far, and I've very much enjoyed playing Tzofiya, who's ended up having a darker, more deadpan sense of humor than I expected. I'm fairly certain that she's made a target of herself for the vampires at this point, which also promises to be fun. Especially since she's the primary badass, what with Jeff not being able to make it all the time.
Here are some fun In Character quotes and exchanges:
Tzofiya: (deadpan) I usually notice headless women wandering around in parks.
Raúl: Okay, if that was a movie, I'd watch it. It sounds like something by Quentin Tarantino.
Tzofiya: (deadpan) I'm not barefoot.
Dov: (to Gloria) Speaking as your bodyguard, please don't turn every head in the place.
Tzofiya: (over the radio) I found the dead guy!
Raúl: ...I still have no idea what's going on.
Gideon: Do you know where the term 'graveyard shift' comes from? Back in the day, before we had modern technology, it was difficult to be sure that someone was dead--
Tzofiya: (interrupting, to deadpan a joke) It's fairly easy to make sure someone is dead. Cut off their head, for example.
John: 'Be sure' and 'ensure' are different. We're not talking about double-tapping grandma, here.
(later, in the same conversation)
Gideon: The book describes several ways to kill a vampire. A stake through the heart, chopping off the head...
Tzofiya: (grins to show she's joking this time) 'Double-tapping grandma'.
