It takes a while, but we eventually manage to get everyone to arrive: Tim (Clayton Burrell), Paul (Allen MaCavity), Bruce (Jack Rowell), and Chuck (Liam Morgan). We also get Dan (Oliver Bradford) back, and engage in a minor celebration. To demonstrate that he remains firmly in charge, Chris orders a series of cautionary floggings.
In the last session, the group had congratulated itself upon the success of the kidnapping plot against Majid, the fellow in charge of the Blood Adventure arcades. The congratulations ended quite soon after that, as things pretty much went off the cliff. The characters were treated to a series of succeedingly more and more horrible discoveries revealing just how inhuman Majid and his cohorts actually were.
Notably, Majid managed to get away from the characters without too much trouble, going to ground in his surprisingly fortresslike headquarters.
The characters are discussing their next move when Clayton Burrell realizes that Allen MaCavity doesn't remember anything bad that happens to him. Clayton tests this by shooting him in the kneecap. This manages only to ruin MaCavity's pants and force him to exert his Self-Control to avoid trying to tear Burrell's face off. Burrell keeps his face (though for a while he has to carry it around with him in a paper bag).
Knowing that there are werewolves in the group's near future, Clayton Burrell buys some silver flatware and ingots to melt into shrapnel for pipe bombs. He also hooks up the other characters with a source for silver ammunition. Everyone is able to purchase 50 rounds of this ammunition (in a standard caliber) to be delivered overnight by FedEx. It is only after Clayton has placed all of his orders that he remembers the Sheriff's "No firebombs, No explosives, No newspaper articles" rule and thinks to check with the Gangrel Primogen Kenneth Vaughn to verify that the Kindred powers-that-be would not object overmuch to the discrete use of a few pipe bombs. Kenneth agrees that the judicious use of pipe bombs is reasonable, then asks all the characters to stop by his place for a planning session. Burrell manufactures eight pipe bombs with silver shrapnel and brings them along to the meeting.
The characters arrive at Vaughn's apartment to find the place already crawling with vampires, including:
Kenneth rather blithely assumes that nobody else has a plan, so he describes his own (as it turns out, nobody speaks up to object). He explains that he has already hired Osamu Tadako to whip up a quick thunderstorm with his weather magic. The thunder and lightning will do a nice job of covering over gunshots and pipe bomb explosions. The two Gangrel who can change into bats (Chet Ferguson and Marty Wiscord) will serve as air patrol, circling the building to look for any escapees. Everyone else will split into two groups and hit Majid's building from two sides simultaneously. The other Gangrel (particularly the two who expect to be out of the line of fire) make appropriately enthusiastic murmurs.
Vaughn mentions that he doesn't think that snipers will be all that useful because visibility won't be all that good. He submits that anyone who is chickenshit enough is welcome to stay outside and try their hand at sniping, if they're willing to endure the ridicule of everyone else after the raid is done. At this point, Chet asks once again if he's one of the guys flying around. Vaughn tells him that he is, at which point Chet looks happy. Nobody accuses Chet of being chickenshit.
At this point, Burrell chirps up that he's got some pipe bombs with silver shrapnel. Oliver Bradford suggests that bringing along some tear gas grenades would be an even better idea. Vaughn makes noises of agreement towards both suggestions.
Vaughn points out that he's going to have the building demolished after Majid is removed. This should free up the characters' tactical options, as the demolition crews should really cover up any possible Masquerade breaches. He also mentions that he had the power to the building (actually, the whole subsection) killed early that morning. His private repair crews assure him that that whole area of the city is going to be out for the next two days.
The characters approach Majid's refuge with some measure of caution. The building is a four-story concrete block, with few exterior windows above the arcade on the ground floor. Vaughn's sources say that the interior structure includes both wooden and plasterboard partitions. There is one elevator, and two sets of stairs. Vaughn reminds the characters that while the elevator itself won't actually work, the elevator shaft could still be a viable access point for some of the defenders.
The characters' basic strategy is unsurprising: the attackers will divide into two teams, one in from the front and one from the back. The characters' team will go in through the back of the building. Except for one on the door proper, there are no windows on the back of the building, enabling them to make their approach with little risk of detection. The characters will attack first, with the second team joining them from the front after they hear noise (gunshots, for example). Inside the building, each team will take one set of stairs.
Liam Morgan asks if anybody can provide some tac headsets to prevent friendly fire incidents. After a substantial quantity of complaining, Spider finally admits to having four such headsets in his car. Headsets are issued to two members of the characters' team and two of the front-door team. The two Gangrels assigned to air patrol are not provided with headsets, after Spider points out that they wouldn't be able to do much more than squeak into the things anyway.
Vaughn also provides each team member with a single tear gas grenade. Burrell and MaCavity each carry two pipe bombs. Thanks to Bradford's forethought, everyone is also equipped with a pair of Speedo goggles to ensure that they will not be blinded by the gas. Unfortunately, the ghoul sent to pick the things up from Wal-Mart gets a variety of colors, including pink, ensuring that there is a vicious "goggle rush" by vampires intent on not damaging their cool ensembles with sissy-looking goggles. Jack and Marty end up wearing pink goggles. Several of the characters compliment Jack on how the goggles draw attention away from his polyester suit.
Oliver Bradford and Clayton Burrell spend a lot of time making bets with each other over who will have the highest body count, and the highest red-haired body count. The other characters look at each other knowingly, all thinking the same thing: you can never, ever throw Humanity away too fast. Get rid of it as if it were on fire…
The characters have Allen MaCavity steal a van for the final approach. They drive up the alley behind the parlor, ready for the attack. Everyone looks very unsuspicious. This part at least goes without a hitch. MaCavity gets the back door open, and the group piles out and hits the door en masse.
Oliver and Jack lead the group in to find a room with four very very fast toughs. The toughs look up upon hearing the door slam and the storm noise suddenly increase. They raise their guns with lightning speed and open fire. Jack elects to tough it out like a man, while Oliver dodges like a schoolgirl. Oliver takes one bullet square on and suffers six levels of damage, felling him like a lemur under a foosa's claws. Jack gets shot twice and happily exclaims, "I'm only mauled!" Oliver moans, "Ohhh! I'm crippled…"
Burrell doesn't help the initial situation at all when he botches his initiative three ways from Sunday and trips over an invisible turtle. Fortunate for him, his Obfuscate hides him from the goons (the other characters, robbed of the chance to see him disappear in an avalanche of bullets, fail to applaud). Both MaCavity (Obfuscated) and Morgan (visible) go for cover, though both Bradford and Rowell concur that neither of them appear to be in much immediate danger.
MaCavity rushes among the goons and tries to lay about with his assault rifle, which promptly jams on him. Oliver Bradford sees MaCavity's example and decides to follow suit, drawing his blade, turning up his Celerity, and wading into the fray only to suck up a pile of bullets. Liam Morgan, not to be outdone by any mere Toreador, leaps in behind him and cuts down two of the goons. Rowell's contribution to the fracas is much more moderate: he shoots one youth with a shotgun that inflicts five levels of damage, though this doesn't appear to actually slow the fellow down at all . Burrell notes this and shoots another one from point-blank range. Strangely enough the goon can't see Obfuscators, so he doesn't dodge. Burrell dishes out seven points of damage, knocking the youth down, managing to knock the youth out of the running.
At this point, there is only one gunman left, and he is out of ammunition. He steps back to reload. Morgan the Celerity-crazed swordsmen moves in for the kill. Morgan thinks about taking off one of the youth's limbs, a thought that distracts him enough to cause him to bury his sword into a nearby video game. MaCavity is upset to see the youth still standing, and shoots him. Then Bradford shoots him. Then Rowell shoots him. Then Morgan punches him. After all this treatment, the youth finally falls over and dies.
At this point, the characters start to hear a lot of noise from the front. Morgan peeks through the door to see a couple of toughs behind the desk, reloading. Morgan wastes one. The other one, alerted that something is wrong by the fact that his friend's innards are all over the place, spins around and shoots back. The gunfire starts up again.
MaCavity takes advantage of the chaos and shoots semi-randomly through the door. Tear gas flows into the back room, indicating that the front door team didn't forget that they had tear gas grenades (in contrast to the characters, who completely ignored the stuff). Bradford actually fires the final shot, killing the guy. Most importantly, the youth had red hair.
Once the characters remember that they have tear gas, the rest of the building goes easy. There are a total of 24 youths, no adults, and no Majid. During the course of the fighting, the characters note that the youths never show fear in combat, though they do react when they get hit and tend to cry for Mommy when the tear gas hits them.
With the building pacified, Bradford sets the question: "what's the best way to figure out who kills more kids?" The universe, in the persona of the GM, comments: "You know that you're both going to have to make Humanity rolls here…" Bradford responds: "I know. I just want to know who won the bet!" It develops that both Bradford and Burrell had spent a substantial part of the assault gleefully gunning down kids who could have simply been subdued and handcuffed. It is finally determined that Burrell's body count is higher. Bradford is so upset by this that he botches his Humanity roll and becomes Deranged. Noting this, Rowell pats him on the shoulder and reassuringly comments, "Don't worry, kid. It ain't so bad. And anyway, welcome to the club!" Bradford is also comforted by the fact that Burrell also failed his Humanity roll (considering that both of them had to make the rolls at difficulty 9, this isn't too surprising). Jack Rowell is also impelled to make a Humanity roll because no matter how much he might protest to the contrary, casual killing still bothers him. In a dramatic turnaround, he actually manages to make his roll and hold on to his (precarious) Humanity 4 rating. Neither Morgan nor MaCavity have the slightest trouble keeping their own marbles intact.
The characters are able to loot the building. They find plenty of firearms, mostly TEC-22's and small-caliber pistols. They also recover a single sniping rifle that some industrious kid had attempted to use (he managed to keep a substantial number of characters at bay until Burrell simply walked up and shot him under cover of Obfuscate).
The top floor of the building proves to be where Majid had his bachelor pad. His sense of style was clearly impeccable, inasmuch as he had the whole ensemble, from the heart-shaped bed to the mirrors on the ceiling. His kitchen was also finished with a keen fashion sense, starting with the garbage compactor full of human bones, moving on through the blonde hair in the trash can, and ending in the… unmentionable… contents of his refrigerator.
It takes the characters seconds to determine that every Science Ninja Murder Squad game is gone.
With the search done, the characters turn to interrogating their six prisoners. This task is made relatively trivial thanks to the fact that Jack Rowell has no qualms about simply shaking their minds for information. Eventually it comes out that Majid left with a van full of stuff sometime during the day. Majid had elaborate defensive plans but gave them up when the power went out (though not before, suggesting that the loss of power was what told him an attack would be coming soon). One of the youths actually knows Majid's cell phone number. Rowell and Morgan make a point of writing it down.
The characters are somewhat upset to learn that Kenneth Vaughn had known that Majid was gone before the raid even got under way, and didn't see fit to mention it to everyone else. As a consolation, he does mention that he sent someone to follow Majid, but adds that he hasn't heard back from them yet. Though Vaughn tries to act like he didn't know that Majid was in the van, the characters don't buy it for a second. They rather widely assume that his erstwhile retainer has been converted into spare ribs. Rowell and Morgan guess that Vaughn was much more interested in getting Majid to move away than in actually catching him. Rowell goes one step further and speculates (to himself) that Vaughn may have been on the take, and bore some hidden loyalty to Majid.
Clayton Burrell and Oliver Bradford gather up the bodies of the fallen and take them off to feed to Majid's demon car to see if it will get healthier. Vaughn is slightly horrified to hear what they're planning to do ("Dude! We're gonna feed the car, what it'll do we don't know…"). When they reach the parking garage where they stored it, they find that it is back in mint condition. They note that a scuffed briefcase is lying next to it. They conclude that it is able to feed itself. They are not particularly cheered by this discovery, for all that it promises to make vehicle maintenance much easier.
Oliver Bradford decides that his unique position in vampiric society makes him a perfect candidate for stoolie. He acts upon this epiphany by calling Sheriff Glen Tanner and spilling his guts. In particular, he tells the Sheriff about the recent raid upon Majid's headquarters, and the fact that Vaughn had known that Majid was already gone prior to the attack. He also describes Majid's demon car and its newly-found ability to feed itself.
Sheriff Tanner hangs up, calls back, asks where the two of them are, then shows up at the parking garage. Neither Bradford nor Burrell are particularly happy about this, and they get even less happy when Tanner tells Bradford to get the briefcase. The car doesn't eat him, though he does notice some bits of semi-dissolved bone poking out from the underside.
Burrell offers to blow the car up with pipe bombs, "Even though we're not supposed to have pipe bombs." Sheriff Tanner seems unusually happy to hear about this particular application of pipe bomb technology, but he isn't too keen on discussing the plan in front of the car. He has both characters take the car out to a scrap yard. On the way, Burrell tries to talk to the car by talking to its radio. In response, the radio shifts station on it's own, but doesn't speak back intelligibly.
At the scrap yard, it is clear that Tanner has already called ahead: one of his retainers is there to open the gates. The car jumps forward when the guy steps in front of the car, as if it were hungry. Tanner orders Burrell drive the car into a car crusher. Burrell is distressed to find that the car refuses to go inside on it's own. In the end the characters are forced to grapple the car with a big magnet and drop it into the crusher. This takes quite a bit of effort, as the car does it's best to fight for it's life. When the jaws of the crusher finally close upon it, it makes a wet glooshing sound totally unlike a metal object. Foul liquids ooze from around the edges of the crusher. The characters rather pointedly avoid touching the liquids.
Jack Rowell and Kenneth Vaughn arrange to neutralize the remaining prisoners through liberal use of Dominate. They mess with their minds enough to muddy up the events of the last week or so. They enhance the effect by denying them food and water for a couple of days, and then dose them on crystal meth (provided by one of MaCavity's little friends) to complete the effect. The characters then disperse them and drop them off on the streets near a half-dozen homeless shelters, church soup kitchens, and mental hospitals. This is humane enough (surprise!) that nobody has to make any Humanity rolls.
The characters enjoy two months of downtime, and four experience points as a side benefit (note that the characters did not gain any additional experience at the end of the session as a result).
Oliver Bradford spends an amazing amount of time sighting in his newly-acquired snipergun. The other characters make snide comments about how focused his life is. He responds by setting up a conversation with Sheriff Tanner about becoming some sort of deputy. The other characters get reeeeal quiet.
It also develops that Oliver Bradford owns a five-acre homestead out in the middle of nowhere with a nice house in the center. He has the whole place walled off, with a radio-controlled gate. His house features a 25-seat home theater, a ballroom, and all the other comforts you would home. He's also got a group of miniature horses for emergency feeding needs (the other Toreadors scoffed at his initial plan to keep goats).
He starts spending more time working on film production to get some Toreador artistic credentials going. As a side project, he decides that he wants to throw a huge Toreador party. He takes detailed notes on how other Toreador parties go, most of which sound like "Ghoul-baiting: Three vampires sneered at this game… the human didn't last long in this game…" He finds that one popular long-term game is to support some human artist and try to get them to fall in love with one of the Toreadors. Once the artist is established and (hopefully) infatuated, the Toreadors crush them and destroy their career, then step back to see if they survive. Another similar game involves getting permission to create a Childe, then forcing them to guess who their parent is after dumping them headlong into the more abusive aspects of Toreador social life. This game works even better if their victim's life had been going really well before the change. Bradford notes that this is a deeply cruel game, and that the Childer created from it normally end up as either Caitiff or dead.
Allen MaCavity spends a lot of time working on converting the local drug boss into a ghoul. He finds a couple of streetwalkers the guy is known to patronize and brings them back to a hotel room for Rowell to Dominate. He has Rowell instruct them to introduce some of his blood into the local gang boss' food or drink. MaCavity gives the first girl three vials of blood. Rowell totally brainwashes her (7 successes). She explains that it might take upwards of a month to arrange this. MaCavity settles back to wait.
While he waits, he spends his leisure time fixing up a new lair on the ground floor of an apartment building. He makes a point of ensuring that it is really well concealed, and quite defensible.
After a month has gone by, MaCavity gets back in contact with his streetwalker. She claims that the mission is done - one vial went into a bowl of chili, another went into a Bloody Mary ("I make them really well"), and the third became part of a prison burrito. MaCavity decides to get into contact with the dealer. He quickly finds that the dealer has no real desire to meet with MaCavity. MaCavity's various efforts to press the dealer's lieutenants on the matter ("Does he ever talk about me? Does he seem like he's missing something in his life?" Lieutenant backs away slowly…).
With persistence, he finally manages to meet with the dealer and finds that the fellow really is his ghoul. The dealer hadn't made any effort to contact MaCavity before because he had no idea who he was supposed to be loyal to. He had been rather curious about the fact that he was now able to punch through walls and perform surprisingly well in bed.
MaCavity swiftly gets the fellow to agree to funnel some money to him, apartment-and-ammo money. The dealer clears about $20k per month net of expenses and "low entertainments" for the troops. MaCavity is moderate in his demands, giving himself Resources 2. He also leads the dealer's men to think that he's some sort of business associate.
Liam Morgan watches MaCavity's haven-building project, and decides to do the same sort of thing. He gets an apartment and hides a gun safe in it, in a false closet. This is nothing more than a decoy. He then arranges a real hidey-hole in the space between the floors, with an access under the bed. He is quite fortunate that the apartment has ugly brown shag carpeting that does a really good job of hiding the trapdoor.
Jack Rowell spends his time being very, very busy. His first step is to create two ghouls. The first is a social activist from Carter Arms named Laquonda Jeets. She is a heavily-built black woman with a strong voice and an array of opinions about the way Carter Arms should be run. The second is Isaac Purcell, the maintenance man for the Colfield Plaza (the Carter Arms maintenance guy Joseph Kresh is already Clayton Burrell's ghoul).
His ghouls in hand, he files the necessary paperwork to found the Carter Arms Community Development Corp (CACDC). Ms. Jeets is the President of the CACDC, and most of the other offices are filled with either her associates or Rowell's hireling lawyers. With the corporation in place, Rowell applies for as many development grants as he can think of (community watch, repair broken windows in Carter Arms, methadone clinic, HIV testing clinic, rape counseling center, job counseling center, etc.) from as many funding agencies he can remember. He spends two months' worth of disposable income ensuring that Ms. Jeets has an office in the Colfield Plaza with lights, heat, air conditioning, and furniture.
As a side project, he has Mr. Purcell set up a haven for him in the basement of the Colfield Plaza. Rowell picks a storage room filled with random junk and located against the main plumbing access wall for the building. He has Purcell clear a corner and put in an old wooden crate with some blankets and padding inside. Purcell knocks a hole in the wall of the room giving Rowell access to the crawl space around the plumbing fixtures. Rowell finds that this haven suits his personality fairly well, except for the fact that it is rife with rats, a problem he solves by having Purcell scatter rat poison around.
Clayton Burrell tries to find the remaining two ghouls from Jon Gilliard's crew. He learns from Patchmaier that one of them went to live with his mother, while the other one went to Atlanta leaving behind a very, very cold trail.
Burrell tries to visit the ghoul living with his mother. He finds that the ghoul is gone, but his mother claims that one day after her son returned he was visited by a man who looked (from the description she gives) a lot like Jon Gilliard. The man and her son chatted for a while, then her son vanished again.
The potential reappearance of Jon Gilliard is obviously rather troubling to the rest of the characters. It starts to look like Gilliard may still be out there, having faked his death. The obvious consequence to the characters is that if he reappears, they may be forced to hand the Carter Arms back to him.
Burrell tries to put his discovery out of his mind by fixing up the characters' office in the Colfield Plaza. His improvements include an alarm system leading down to the basement, hooked to the main door and to the refrigerator room door and a series of compartments drywalled off in office. Access to one chamber is through a "false cubicle wall". Access to another is a false back in a storage cabinet. Access to the third is behind a file cabinet. Burrell caches weapons inside each of them, drawing from the supply of TEC-22's captured in the raid on Majid's headquarters. He also equips each chamber with a pair of headphones linked to the new burglar alarm. The headsets are set loud enough to be able to wake even a sleeping vampire (probably).
The Ad Hoc club goes away. It has been the subject of too much police attention, especially after Liam Morgan's little "disturbance." There had been a couple of guys who regularly did DJ stuff, one guy who ran a bar, and a couple of bouncer types (one of whom is dead now, the characters don't really know why). They're still around, but they're not operating in the same area.
The Carter Arms now has real security. The guards are angry looking black men from the Nation of Islam with cameras and a first-floor office. They have at least three guys on duty all the time, including one guy on the door. The guards are really arrogant, but if you don't live in the building you don't get in. The residents of the complex seem to actually be fairly happy about their new security personnel, given the suddenly lower-density of junkies and whatnot hanging around the complex.
MaCavity is out hunting when he realizes that someone is following him, and is working really hard to not be seen. MaCavity Obfuscates, loses the fellow, then makes a series of unsuccessful attempts to read the fellow's aura. MaCavity then plays turnabout and follows his onetime pursuer. The fellow is an old man dressed in a trenchcoat. He wanders around for a while, and then flashes a woman on the street. She screams and he runs off into the distance. MaCavity finally determines that the old man is a vampire, and that he is happyhappyhappy! The vampire stops running after a couple of blocks, buys a newspaper, and sits down. His trenchcoat is open, but he's got the newspaper over his privates.
MaCavity isn't fond of crazy people, and gives him the miss.
MaCavity sees him a couple more times over the next couple of weeks, and eventually confronts him. The conversation goes really well. The old man says, "Hey! You're crazy!" MaCavity responds: "No I'm not!" Old Man: "Yes you are! I'll rat you out!" MaCavity: "Go away. I have guns, and I'm almost eager to use them." The old man runs off, moons MaCavity for a bit, then walks away.
Liam Morgan gets permission from Sticks to hang out in clubs in his territory, with the understanding that he's not hunting. Sticks seems to be even a little bit sorry to hear that the only club in Morgan's territory has closed down.
Morgan looks for women with low self-esteem attached to really abusive boyfriends or husbands. He's interested in finding a guy he can beat to blisters so he won't feel bad about ghouling the wife or girlfriend later on. It takes him a month, but he finds a good guy to victimize. He beats the snot out of him and keys his car. He's a little bit upset to find out that the woman is really upset by Morgan's behaviour, and acts like she is really devoted to her beau. Morgan works on listening to her, eventually convincing that he's the best guy on earth. He manages to ghoul her slowly, over the course of a couple of months.
Sticks spends time spying on Liam, all the while thinking, "What the hell is he doing?"
Oliver Bradford calls up Majid and learns that he's still got the same cellphone number. He asks if Majid wants his car back. He says that he knows where his car is, and wants to know if Majid would pay him for the information. Majid agrees. Bradford asks for $100,000. Majid says, "I could buy a new car for that." Bradford: "Not that car." Majid: "You don't know where I buy cars." Bradford: "I don't want to get near it. I saw it eat someone." Majid: "Then it's okay, it is fed. It is probably alone and afraid." Bradford: "It didn't seem afraid." Bradford tells Majid that he'll call back the next day, from where the car is.
When Bradford calls back from the junkyard, he manages to get Majid to agree to $25,000 in advance, and $50,000 more on delivery of the location of the car. Majid says that he'll put the money in a PO Box. Bradford sends someone else to check the PO box. They never come back. Bradford's ghoul Hecubus thinks that this is a bad thing.
Bradford decides to send a second patsy, this time arming him with a taser. He recruits a redneck from a bar about 15 miles out of town. Burrell follows the redneck to see what happens to him. The guy opens the box, gets out a package, and almost immediately gets intercepted by a couple of guys in a car who flash badges and act like they're arresting him.
Burrell gets into the redneck's car and tries following the two agents and their captive. Along the way, he calls a lot of other guys and tries to put a posse together. During the process, he loses the car. Soon enough a van pulls up next to him. A duct-taped guy is thrown out onto the hood of his car. Burrell stops and gets rear-ended by someone who didn't expect him to stop. The van pulls over, stops, and backs up. Burrell gets out of the car and runs for the hills, pumping his attributes as he goes. The agents yell out, "We just want to talk to you!".
Burrell Obfuscates and crosses the median, making his way through the oncoming traffic. His escape is cut short when he gets clipped by a truck while attempting to cross the traffic. The two agents in the van try to drive along his path and get hit by another car for their trouble. The van lurches back onto the median. Burrell watches as one agent gets out of the van. He staggers a bit, then takes something off his head. Huge, ribbed ears pop out, convincing Burrell that the "agent" is actually a fomor.
The ear-fomor tosses some sort of mask (or skin) to the side, echolocates about a bit, and then runs right for Burrell. Burrell tries shooting his membranous ears off. This doesn't work out too well: he misses both shots, then the guy tries to drag him to the ground. Burrell fails to shoot him at pointblank. The fomor shoots him with his unnaturally long proboscis. Burrell is horrified when the fomor starts to draw blood from him. The fomor suddenly starts acting like he's on steroids. Burrell continues trying to pointblank the fomor with wild abandon, to little effect.
At this point, Bradford drives up to see a bunch of wrecked cars on the highway. He also notices Burrell fighting the proboscis fomor on the side of the road. About this time, the fomor sucks Burrell dry. Burrell goes down. Hecubus screams, "What do we do?" Bradford: "Keep the car running!" They pull the car off into the ditch, then Bradford pops up and starts shooting bursts of automatic gunfire towards the fomor. The fomor runs straight into Bradford's gunfire, a confidence that is vindicated when Bradford accidentally shoots out the tire in his own car. Bradford eventually manages to incapacitate and hog-tie the mosquito fomor.
At this point, Hecubus starts screaming about the second fomor still crawling out of the van. Bradford ignores him, and runs to check on Burrell. Burrell looks in bad shape, so Bradford gives him a point of blood. Burrell looks better after that.
Bradford heads over to the other fomor, expecting to hog-tie him. He is more than a little surprised when the fomor stands up, saying, "I love this part!" Bradford shoots the fomor, shooting half his face off. This cuts down on the snappy banter, but doesn't seem to do much to slow the fomor down. Three more bullets at pointblank range do a lot more. The fomor falls to the ground. Bradford figures out that the second fomor seems to be dripping acid from his various wounds.
Bradford is doing his best to get out of the area (cops are accumulating near the accident scene) when the two "cops" show up. They make some demands, all the while looking like they'd like to kill Bradford a lot. After a short exchange, one of the cops goes into the back seat of their card, there are some horrible cracking sounds, and the (dead) redneck gets dumped out of the back.
Bradford drives off with the mosquito fomor is dead in his trunk. On investigation, Bradford figures out that the fellow is basically a big bug underneath what might or might not have been skin. Bradford turns the body over to the Sheriff to figure out what it might have been. Sheriff Tanner doesn't want to touch it, and gives Bradford a body bag to zip it up. The Sheriff takes the body off to let the Tremere play with it.
At this point, Bradford makes another pitch to the Sheriff to let him be a Deputy. The Sheriff seems marginally receptive, but notes that there are a lot of loose ends to this whole incident that need to be tied up. The two of them work on replacing the acid fomor's body with another more acceptable body. They try to make up some sort of "kidnapping" scenario to explain the missing (dead) redneck, trusting in the power of Dominate and Presence to tie the story together.
Bradford gets back to asking to be a deputy, and suggests that he's going to simply take orders for a month or so, and keep the personal initiative to a minimum. Sheriff Tanner seems willing to accept this offer. He suggests that Bradford should watch Burrell's friends, because he thinks the Caitiff are an unstable element in the city, and that they're planning on doing something bad. He urges Bradford to think of this not so much as spying and betrayal as keeping public order. He reassures Bradford that if he sees something suspicious but doesn't have any evidence, then there are a lot of ways to arrange for some evidence to be manufactured.
As a final favor to Bradford, Sheriff Tanner drops that Majid and company had been hanging out in the TV repair warehouse for a while after they departed the Blood Adventure arcade. Strangely, there is once again an old man who looks like the old man MaCavity (sort of) killed working at the TV repair shop again.
The characters are all confused and hurt, but still alive. Majid appears to have made good his escape, though he lost his car in the process.
Each character got four experience points earlier in the session.