Today is Mother's Day, so Tim (Byron Ignaciou) decides that paying respects to his mother is more important than hanging out with his layabout friends. The layabouts include: Paul (Allen MaCavity), Bruce (Jack Rowell), Chuck (Derek Stone) and Chris (who thinks he's in charge).
Allen MaCavity ended the last session adorned with multiple aggravated wounds and locked in a room with two tarted-up winos (courtesy of Jack Rowell). Despite his incredible injuries, he elects to drink lightly from both winos, allowing him to heal a single aggravated wound over the next day.
Jack Rowell makes sure to get the two winos out of the room and released with doctored memories before sunrise. He figures there's no sense in letting MaCavity frenzy on their asses when he wakes up hungry the next evening.
While MaCavity is busily trying to heal himself, Derek Stone spends his time trying to shadow Susan Jackson. He tries calling around to find where Toreadors might be, but his sources give him bad information and he ends up spending several hours wandering around through random clubs, convinced that if there are vampires there, they're doing a really good job of hiding.
He does learn that she will be at the Battle of the Bands the next evening, along with all the other Toreador. Which he already knew.
Jack Rowell expects to scrape off about $100,000 from the two blocks of grant money he has collected so far. He determines that if he socks the money away for a whole year, he can have Resources 4. He decides to do this. He also interviews his architect on the park project, ensuring that the guy will leave the basement of the building that's getting knocked down intact and accessible to Rowell and his compatriots. As a precaution, he also makes certain the guy will prepare two sets of plans: the real plans and the plans he submits to the city.
Jack Rowell buys three self-contained battery-powered video cameras capable of taking one frame every 15-30 seconds for several days. His plan is to have them dropped off near the Boneyard docks to gather information on exactly who is using the area.
Rowell then brings up the three area strip clubs with his contacts in the city government. By the next Monday evening, they manage to come up with a fairly large quantity of information about them. Three different individuals own the three clubs. Two of them are topless clubs serving alcohol (most of their income obviously derives from drink sales). The dancers are expected to show enough interest in the clientele to get them to buy more drinks. The third is full nude and is not allowed to serve alcohol, but the owner of the club owns the liquor store across the street. They don't make as much money as either of the other two clubs, but they still do just fine. One of the owners was once a roadie for a band, and has a criminal record dating from that time (predominantly because he had a tendency to "take matters into his own hands"). The other two are pretty clean: one has a college-era drug charge, and the other one is pretty much clean.
MaCavity wakes. He has his eyes back, but he still lacks his boyish good looks. He notes that the entire room smells strongly of Aqua Velva and Brüt. He uses Obfuscate like a mad bastard and heads out to hunt. He collects ten blood points in short order, and uses five of them to heal another of his aggravated wounds.
The Battle of the Bands is scheduled to happen on Friday, January 19th. The putative start time is 19:00, but everybody important knows that nothing will really get going until about 21:00. Derek Stone makes certain to show up fashionably late, but fully fed.
Derek Stone heads upstairs to the "Toreador Zone" (a roped-off area with some privacy, to allow the Toreadors to be as obvious as they'd like without any chance that mortals will see them). He finds the Toreador hanging around up there, with Narda Cash and her entourage at the center of the crowd. Several of them are engaging in fairly obvious vampiric behavior, but nobody has gotten out of hand so far. Stone spends his time chit-chatting and working hard to avoid falling asleep from boredom.
Stone is able to determine fairly quickly that Narda's entire entourage is Blood Bound to her. Narda obviously dislikes Susan Jackson the most: whenever there is an obnoxious task to be done ("Fetch my sunglasses from the car!") she sends Jackson to do it. It is clear that Susan once had some status in the Toreador clan, but that she is now a nonentity. Over the course of five hours, she is sent out for three separate errands, none of them very earth-shaking (sunglasses, scarf, attractive doorman). Narda and her people drive around in a nice, large BMW SUV, one that you could probably sleep comfortably in all day long. Or all night. At this event, it is kept in a guarded reserve parking lot.
Derek Stone learns that Narda and her people will be at the Houston Opera tomorrow, attending the pre-opening show of Figaro 2000, an "updated" opera sponsored by another of the local Toreador. He assumes that they want to have an opportunity to be snotty. He decides to get in touch with his one-armed gun nut ghoul Johnny Kaczynski and asks him to find a tracking device.
While Narda Cash and her entourage are at the opera on Saturday night, MaCavity and Stone try to plant a tracer on Narda's car. Their attempt is an embarrassingly terrible failure: the tracer thing fell off the car, cracking its case, then rolled into a puddle. Stone and MaCavity manage to use duct tape to reconstruct their device, and then to tape is securely onto the underbody of the vehicle.
His tracer "securely" in place, Stone hunts down Scourge Harper and starts asking him questions about Susan Jackson and any enemies that Narda Cash might have. Harper knows that several Toreador don't like her, basically because she's not a Clan member but still attends all the Clan events. She doesn't get along with Jane Fine at all. Narda, in spite of her behavior, has some beliefs that women should be self-sufficient and should be able to kick ass and take names when necessary. She doesn't think that Jane is an embarrassment to this ideal. Narda also absolutely loathes the Brujah Liz Durden, who was a reporter of some note in the 70's and 80's. Durden has since made it her business to look into folks' backgrounds, including Narda. The last time she spent any attention on Narda, she managed to get another Toreador out of a serious bind.
Stone comments, "There seem to be a lot more people that Narda hates than who hate Narda." Scourge Harper dryly notes that Narda has shown a real resourcefulness at removing people who hate her from the scene, or at least from their own free will. Anyone else who bears her ill will has learned to stay very quiet. Harper thinks that Liz could probably do the most damage to Narda if she wanted: she is smart, resourceful, and people have tried and failed to kill her in the past.
Scourge Harper then offers Stone transcripts of phone conversations that Narda and her people have had. They follow a practice of changing their cellphones out about every two weeks, which means that Harper doesn't have complete coverage, but his people are fairly diligent nonetheless. He's found that most of the transcripts are not very interesting, but he doesn't have time to read them all. He offers to have a guy bring it out to Stone later. Stone accepts. Harper's man delivers the transcripts within hours, burned to CD. Stone quickly discovers that one of Narda's entourage has a real fixation for using the internet through a cellphone. On the plus side, Stone is able to use this information to determine Narda's schedule for the next several days.
The characters decide to take another trip out to the Boneyards. They start with a visit to Juniper's, basically because it's got a better name than Uncle Nasty's Sex Shack (a shabby-looking pornography store nearby that doesn't seem to do nearly as well as the well-lit Adult Video place next door). Allen MaCavity goes into the back to feed, under the cover of looking for a private lap dance. He spends $400 and gets 4 blood points for it. Jack Rowell and Derek Stone look around in the meantime, determining that the place looks a lot like a strip club.
Each of the three strip clubs are on the same street, spaced some distance from each other. The other successful businesses in the area consist of three gas stations/ice houses and a Texas Waffle-Chicken Kettle franchise (open 24-7). There is a large motel with weekly rates nearby, and another one with hourly rates some distance away. Both look rundown. A cop goes by about once every ten minutes, often enough to make the characters realize that it is only one cop. There are security types and bouncers working the parking lots and doors at the strip clubs. Even on a Sunday night, there are a lot of people there. Everything in the area that isn't a strip club is in pretty bad shape.
Jack Rowell finds a tough-looking guy and uses Dominate to have him pick a fight with a weedy-looking fellow. They fight readily enough, but it is obvious that neither of them is particularly skilled. It doesn't take long for a couple of bouncers to arrive and break it up. Both brawlers are shown the door. Rowell notices that everything in the bar pretty much came to a halt when the fight broke out, and then went back to normal after the principals were ejected. Which would be what you'd normally expect in a bar like this.
Derek Stone spends some time scanning the crowd, looking for potential troublemakers. He sees one fellow harassing one of the dancers. He doesn't see much else before Rowell's patsies start some trouble.
Having determined that the strip clubs operate like strip clubs, the characters head out to the Boneyards. They send MaCavity ("super ninja boy") out to place the cameras overlooking the stairways coming up from the water.
During the drive, MaCavity spends a willpower point to try and remember how he got his face burned off, for Jack Rowell's benefit. He is able to remember some black guy in an islander outfit spitting acid on his face, and two more black guys holding his arms and yelling, "Drink! Drink the blood!" He remembers that there are some people sleeping with goats nearby, and that they are important because they are a danger to his friends. He gives Rowell a good description of the black guy. MaCavity notices that all his memories are overlaid with a weird level of eroticism that somehow links to people having sex with goats, each other, and possibly using drugs.
MaCavity covers the stairways on Dock1 and Dock2 with two cameras, and towards some warehouses near Dock1 with the third camera.
After MaCavity returns and claims success, the characters drive in to take a look around. Derek Stone gets dropped off to look for the cameras. He is able to find one of the cameras watching the stairs, but thinks that it is still well-hidden (obviously, he knows to look for cameras). Of course, if someone is Obfuscating and watching him, then they know where the camera is.
Satisfied that the cameras are well-placed, the characters look for warehouses that look like they've been opened recently. Ignaciou, Stone and MaCavity spot two candidates. The first is a fenced-in compound in passable shape that boasts a nice new lock on the fence. The fence is topped off with dangerous-looking razor wire. The second place looks like someone has made deliberate efforts to make it look abandoned, except that all the doors are securely fastened (unlike most other places, where there is at least one door that's open). Rowell spots nothing.
The characters decide to break into the well-maintained compound. MaCavity leads off, trying to break into the office door. He picks the lock easily enough, but fails to open the door. The characters investigate all the doors, and quickly determine that none of them can be opened from the outside. MaCavity thinks there are crossbars on the doors, which suggests that either someone is inside, or that the occupants don't need doors to get in. The characters decide that they have been stymied. At this point, a couple of characters recall that they saw something up on the second floor the last time they wandered through the Boneyards.
The characters head back to Juniper's, where Rowell uses Dominate to get a truck ("Give me your keys." "Ok" "forget me" "Ok"). Stone notes that he can probably boost MaCavity up onto an open ventilator shaft from the top of the truck. MaCavity points out that he's not that athletic. It turns out that Stone isn't very athletic either. Rowell is even less athletic, and isn't shy about admitting it. Several attempts to get up into the ventilator ensue, during which MaCavity falls four times, twice on top of Stone. In desperation, the game master tells the players to stack up some crates. Stone refuses to try crates, and gets himself up into the ventilator after falling on MaCavity only once.
While the other characters are hurting themselves, Jack Rowell has a conversation with a local vagrant named Ed. Rowell plays some innocent games with Ed's mind ("Alcohol makes you live longer") before sending him off as a diversion. He gives him a strip club receipt ("This is a $20 bill") and tells Ed to go to the other side of the warehouse and start making a lot of noise. Ed obliges, and soon the other characters hear him hammering on one of the doors, yelling obscenities at the top of his lungs.
Having finally managed to make it up into the ventilator opening, MaCavity finds himself on a catwalk leading out over the warehouse floor. He descends and heads to the office area, passing a pallet of shrink-wrapped stuffed animals on the way. He finds that everything movable or valuable in the office area has already been removed, and that the entire interior is coated with dust.
Derek Stone and Jack Rowell clamber up onto the catwalk to find that the warehouse interior is very dark. Catwalks cross the warehouse floor the area, leading to the missing ventilator housings on the walls. They notice that all the doors in the building are welded shut, including the large cargo doors.
Both Stone and Rowell suddenly spot a shadowy figure on the catwalk across from the characters' entry point. Derek Stone advances on the figure, while Rowell remains at the entry point, guarding it. Derek advances about halfway to the figure, then it vanishes. He backs up. At this point, Rowell thinks he spots the shadowy figure down near one of the pallet stacks and fires on it. He blows a cardboard promo figure to flinders.
MaCavity sees a figure float by through the office area. He shoots it. It vanishes. The shadowy figure on the catwalk reappears. Stone shoots it. It vanishes and is gone. MaCavity sees a bit of dust right where he shot the second shadowy figure. It reforms into a shadowy figure and continues on it's way. He tries to tackle the figure and it disintegrates under his grasp.
Rowell mistakes Stone for a shadowy figure with a gun. He fires, but at the last moment realizes his mistake ("Don't shoot me!") and skews his aim. Stone expresses his happiness that Rowell is a really bad shot by refraining from firing back. He does turn on his Celerity and zap over to the far end of the catwalk.
At this point MaCavity decides that turning on some lights would be a good idea. He finds a breaker box, but his Auspex danger sense goes off every time his hand gets near the switch. He uses a flashlight to examine the breaker box, but sees nothing obviously wrong from the outside. He does see that the breaker box is welded shut, preventing him from looking inside. He decides to leave it well enough alone.
His fears of shadowy ghosts pretty much conquered, Jack Rowell clambers down the ladder to warehouse floor to look at the merchandise. Most of it looks 15-20 years old. There is a lot of plastic stuff and Tupperware. In the process, he is startled by yet another ghostly presence and shoots the gizzards out of a Winnie the Pooh doll.
Derek Stone joins Rowell on the warehouse floor. He heads over to the electrical box. Just like MaCavity before him, he doesn't see anything special about it. He does spot some documents in the office area dated 1983 and 1984, plus an old Gatti's menu.
The characters start to hear faint voices on their headset comsets, saying things like, "Hey, where are you? Turn on the lights so I can see you..." The characters all strongly believe that none of them are saying these things.
Derek Stone decides that he is going to turn on the breaker box with a rope, from a range. The other characters, in spite of much evidence that no good can come of this, do not stop him. He pulls the switch from the safety of the catwalk. The instant the lights come up= a figure made of solid electricity leaps from the breaker box and rampages into the warehouse floor, shouting, "Where are my friends! I must hug them!" The characters notice that when he hugs a box, it bursts into flames. They are also quite glad that they don't need to breathe, as the choking fumes from burning children's toys quickly fill the warehouse. MaCavity and Stone open fire on the creature, only to make it realize that it has friends up on the catwalk. It moves towards a ladder up, at which point Jack realizes that the catwalk is all made of metal. He leaps from the catwalk to one of the pallets. Derek Stone and Allen MaCavity leap out of the building, landing safely, leaving Rowell alone on the warehouse floor.
Rowell makes his way down from on top of the pallet and heads towards the rope, hoping to shut down the power quickly. He isn't nearly quick enough: the creature catches him and hugs him. The other characters hear Jack's blow-by-blow commentary over the comlink, "I'm going for the rope... AAAAAAAAAAAAUGHH!" The creature deals out a whomping lot of damage, then vanishes, leaving Jack on fire. Jack tries to put himself out with "Stop, Drop and Roll!", complicating his life by dropping into a puddle of melted plastic. He considers it a great accomplishment to put himself out without going into Rotshreck.
After all the excitement dies down, the characters note that the lights are now on. And that nobody can raise Jack on the radio anymore.
Derek Stone returns to the scene, discovering that lightning-boy's brief climb has actually rendered the hot to the touch. MaCavity follows him in. They eventually find Jack. They can't help but notice that his polyester suit shows a large melted patch showing the creature's outline.
The radio voices are gone now.
The characters look around now that they can see the place. They find a nice new cargo container with a new lock, and a line of tire tracks near the container that go to the middle of the warehouse (lots of roll marks). There is a grating visible underneath the pallet rack and a box concealing a forklift. It is obvious that somebody has used the forklift to move and replace the items in the boxes over the grating.
The characters move the boxes away from the grating and find a 3' by 3' opening with ladder rungs inset on one side. The shaft goes down 10-15' to a darkened room. MaCavity is first down, and the first to find the light switch. The lights reveal a smallish dressing room containing ten lockers and a couple of unremarkable benches. A single massive metal door with a slide visor is the only other exit. The door is secured with several bolts and a bar. It looks very much like the room was an original part of the warehouse construction. Each locker contains a pair of ugly yellow hip waders and a hard hat with a light. Two lockers contain identical necklaces made of teeth (maybe human) and dried chunks of meat threaded on sinew. MaCavity puts one necklace on, Rowell puts the other in his pocket. One hard hat contains a liner with a name on it. Another hard hat has "MINE" drawn on it in indelible marker. None of the others are marked at all.
Unable to resist the lure of the unknown, the characters head through the metal door to find a sewer tunnel on the other side. A string of electrical lights runs down on direction, casting a cheery glow. The characters suit up and follow the lights, noticing that they appear to be much more recent than the tunnel proper.
After about a half mile the characters find a large vaulted chamber. A sturdy-looking catwalk with no guardrails provides the only path across. The entire chamber is dark. The characters put "Auspex-boy" MaCavity in front. In response, he vanishes and heads off on his own. Rowell and Stone wait for a while, then crawl across. Halfway across, something falls from the roof and lands on Stone's head. Rowell reacts quickly and tries to shoot the thing off Stone's head. Stone decides he doesn't trust Rowell's rather questionable marksmanship, and dodges. He fires up Celerity, and tries to tear the thing away. He botches, and it tightens it's grip on his throat.
MaCavity, hearing, "Don't worry, I'll shoot it off your head!" followed by a gunshot, heads back to help the others.
Rowell looks up and sees another creature gliding down towards him, plus a few more scuttling around the roof. He shoots the gliding one, injuring it, then rather hopefully holds the shotgun out in hopes that it grabs the shotgun and not him. Stone pulls his creature off, just as another creature grapples Rowell.
Rowell squeals out, "Derek! Help meeee!"
While Stone and Rowell struggle for their lives, MaCavity spends a quiet moment examining their attackers. He can see that the creatures look like human heads with exaggerated mouths, big cave-dweller eyes and a bundle of tentacles sticking out their necks. MaCavity takes careful aim and shoots the one on Rowell's head with a pistol, killing it instantly and hurting Rowell in the process. Rowell dashes across the catwalk, stepping on Derek Stone along the way. Stone shoots his creature many times, hitting nothing worthwhile. It squeals in pain and writhes. He shoots it some more and kills it, only then finding out his shotgun went over the chasm edge sometime during the fight.
Two more creatures come fluttering down from the darkness. The characters shoot at them, then run away. Jack heals himself as he runs.
The characters find themselves at a second vaulted chamber, this one more obviously a natural cave than the previous one. They can see a catwalk across, except that it is retraced on the other side. A switch on the far side of the chasm appears to control the catwalk. Stone preps some shotgun shells with no shot and heavy wadding, then MaCavity uses Rowell's shotgun to push the switch and extend the catwalk. Stone comments, "Shotguns would have made the puzzles in Myst so much easier."
The characters continue down the lit tunnel until it ends in what seems to be a natural cavern about the size of a football field. The place is scattered with stalactites and stalagmites, all apparently glistening new. A large (30x30') pond sits to one side. Unnatural yellow flames shoot up from a natural fissure in the center of the chamber. The flames seem to lick towards the characters as they walk into the chamber. Even though they are more than 100' way, the characters still think this is fairly spooky. None of the characters' cellphones or radio headsets work either. Unlit torches hang in sconces on various surfaces. Derek Stone notes that the roof of the cavern is high enough that it seems rather doubtful that the characters are still in Houston anymore.
The characters find a human face (minus the skull) nailed to the wall on each side of the cavern. The face doesn't talk to MaCavity when he talks to it, but it's eyes do follow him. Rowell tries Dominating the face, and is surprised when he gets it to refocus. He is even more surprised when he gets the face to speak. It develops that the face is Ralph Wiggins, who thinks that it's 1979 and who used to be a sewer worker. It identifies one of the tentacle heads as another sewer worker. He explains that Master put him there. He is able to tell the characters that the Master wears robes and is female, but knows nothing more. From his point of view, he has been nailed to the cavern wall "forever". Rather more ominously, he says that the Master can see through his eyes, but only when she shows up to ask. Rowell tries to get Ralph to forget the characters, but he botches enough to ensure that Ralph will always remember.
The characters explore the idea of giving Ralph to Malcolm, but abandon the idea on the grounds that the jumpy Tremere would probably simply freak out and confine himself to his room.
The characters sneak along the edge of the room. The fire tracks them all through their path. The other side of the chamber features a cleared area with an altar and a couple of crater-like vats containing blood. Enough stone benches for 30-40 people face an altar and a polished wall. A massive statue, twice as tall as a man, of an obviously male figure featuring horns, six arms, wings out the back, and exaggerated genitalia, dominates the altar. The characters conclude that the statue doesn't look benevolent. MaCavity collects a blood sample from one of the vats. He notes that it is warm, much warmer than human.
At this point Stone notices that nobody's watches are working. Nobody knows what time it is, which could be a big problem once they get outside.
The characters sneak back out. Stone uses his Dominate to make Ralph forget that the characters were ever there, while Rowell deals with the other face. The tentacle-head bridge remains exciting. MaCavity goes across invisible. Everyone else runs like crazy, firing off shotguns and whatnot, avoiding the heads that go whizzing by.
The characters reach the sewer corridors to find that the corridor lights are now out. They decide that this is an unpromising development. MaCavity goes ahead, then reappears a couple of minutes later from a side corridor and tells the characters to follow him. He walks 20 feet, and turns into a corpse and attacks Rowell. Rowell shoots the corpse with his shotgun. Stone shoots it too, again and again and again until it doesn't move anymore.
At this point, MaCavity notices that Derek and Jack aren't there any more. He goes back and locates them, but he doesn't appear to them.
The characters find that the door to the City Monster Squad is closed. Rowell verifies that it is also locked. Someone on the other side asks, "Who's out there?" When the characters respond, they are told to toss a wallet with some ID through the slot in the door. The guy in the room also refuses to show his head in the window. Derek Stone tries to create some trust by sticking his face up to the hole ("I can't shoot you with my face in the hole!"). This persuades the fellow in the room to show himself. He looks rather misshapen, with an off-center spinal ridge. Stone concludes that he is Nosferatu, and proceeds to attempt to Dominate him into opening the door. The guy uses Willpower to evade the Dominate.
The characters start to become concerned. They notice that all their cellphones are still not working, and in fact simply show the word "DIE!" across their displays.
Stone finally guesses that the Nosferatu is Gary. While Gary is impressed that Stone recognized him, he still refuses to open the door. However, he does call Norman (the Ventrue thug) on a cellphone to ask for advice.
The characters finally persuade Gary to call Scourge Harper and talk to him. Gary is initially unwilling (apparently, the Scourge has had harsh words with him in the past), but eventually relents. The Scourge is able to persuade Gary that the characters are legitimate, and that they should be allowed out of the sewers.
Gary explains that it is almost dawn, and agrees to provide the characters with a place to sleep if they tell him what they found down in the sewers. The characters regale him with tales of the Otherworldly Temple while he leads them down to his own sewer niche.
The session ends with the characters sheltering in the Texas City sewers with the Nosferatu Gary. Each character gains four experience points.