Chuck (Liam Morgan), who we have come to know as "Little Shaka", gives us the miss this week, though he offers his apologies. Paul (Allen MaCavity), Bruce (Jack Rowell) and Tim (Clayton Burrell) all manage to put in an appearance, as does Chris (who is in charge).
Thanks to his Humanity botch, Jack Rowell now has a minor Derangement. Up to five times, but no more than once per week, he will be afflicted by horrible stresses when he is reminded of people being burned. He can expend a Willpower point to suppress these problems.
The characters wake for the evening in Oliver Bradford's house in Galveston. The place is pretty large, though not quite the "manor house" that Oliver continually mentions. They have two ghoul prisoners, one of whom has not regained consciousness and one of whom is not in such bad shape. Oliver is desperate to Blood Bond the two ghouls (to make them easier to interrogate), and then hand the conscious one over to the Duke. He is less than enthusiastic about Clayton Burrell's intention to be the one to do the Blood Bonding.
Oliver is quite insistent that he has been promised one of the ghouls, and that he should get the one who is able to talk. Clayton Burrell points out that this is a bogus agreement, and that Oliver has already alienated the Scourge for the characters. Oliver argues that the Scourge obviously had some information about the ghouls' activities, and didn't act upon it. At the same time, the Scourge has had a history of following leads into the Sheriff's jurisdiction, a behavior that has caused him to come to blows with the Sheriff once (he lost, obviously). Since then, he has been very careful about how he has dealt with things he knows about in the Sheriff's territory.
The Sheriff, Glen Tanner, may have known about the ghouls for almost two months, but found other things to do with his time.
As a further complication, the characters have heard that the Brujah Marigold is moving in to town soon. She is a Childe of the Sheriff, and had some Masquerade- and Prince-related problems up in Detroit.
Oliver's ghoul Jeeves returns from his day of following the local news to claim that Tyrone Guffwell, an unexpected survivor of the trailer park massacre, is being held in a hospital nearby. The newsreader thinks he was a survivor of a gang-related RV fire (arson) event. The report is that he is still in critical condition, but has stabilized. The police are expected to interrogate him soon.
While Clayton Burrell tries feeding the unconscious ghoul (Reuben, also known as "Mr. Childhood Memories") a blood point in the hopes that this might bring him around, Jack Rowell sets up to use his Terrible Mind Powers upon the second ghoul, a luckless bastard named Mark. The ghoul is currently chained to a heavy cement wall in the basement.
After some substantial interrogation, Rowell learns that two ghouls were away from camp. Neither of them was David Patchmaier or Lenny (the boss). They had been taking one of the ghouls' Embraced kidnap victims to "deliver" it, though he's not sure where. He claims that the normal procedure is to show up at a bus station with the body in a piece of luggage. They leave it at one end of the place, then go to the other end and pick up the payment from a locker. This body was one they had been feeding from for a while and pretty much used up. So far, the ghouls have made three deliveries like this. The first time they were really hurting for money, so they didn't even wait to exhaust the body's ability to feed them. All told, they have abducted and Embraced a total of eight people. One of them had really funny-tasting blood - they just disposed of that one. She was a prostitute, obtained from the one ghoul who was a pimp. Some of the others weren't too successful, and simply died in the Embrace. A couple of others hadn't been used up yet, and died when the characters attacked the camp. Mark thinks that the ghoul gang had become independent, but Lenny was handling all the details of the body-trade.
The characters argue among themselves over who might be purchasing the bodies the ghouls have been selling. Allen MaCavity offers that he's heard the rumor that there are vampires who can only feed from other vampires. The other characters argue that this is just a rumor. Both Allen and Clayton Burrell are much more comforted by the idea that there might be a network of old independent ghouls out there who need to purchase a steady supply of blood.
The characters have two significant things on their plate at this point: they need to whack the survivor in the hospital, and they need to meet with David Patchmaier in the Galleria at 21:00 to talk about turning him into a vampire.
The characters show up in front of the mall Taco Bell shop in the food court of the Galleria for their appointment with the ghoul David Patchmaier. They find him sitting alone at a table, playing solitaire. Everyone sits down. The characters start off as bluntly as they can, by pointing out that there is a problem: two of the ghouls weren't home when the characters' raid hit.
Patchmaier seems pretty nonchalant about this, commenting that he can surely find them in a couple of months. He goes on to chirp out, "I can find anybody! That's why I'd be such an asset to the organization!" The characters make various dismissive gestures.
Clayton Burrell says that converting Patchmaier into a vampire will require a quiet place and a couple of days. The conversation goes downhill from there, because Patchmaier doesn't trust the characters, and the characters don't trust him. Allen MaCavity tries to get things back on track by promising to start the bureaucratic wheels rolling, and asks how Patchmaier expects to survive in the meantime. Patchmaier says that he has money, and that he's gone dry on blood - he hasn't been feeding because what Lenny and the others were doing creeped him out.
Jack Rowell tries to back up Allen MaCavity's comments by saying that it will take some time to get permission to turn Patchmaier into a vampire, and that vampires are pretty conservative (even worse than state employees). After all, this is a big deal, with a big payoff. He insists that the characters need to find the remaining ghouls. If Patchmaier manages to hunt them down, it will be good for the characters and thus a big help in getting him what he wants. Rowell thinks that Patchmaier bought it, but Burrell thinks that he didn't.
Patchmaier leaves first, asking the characters to wait for ten minutes. Allen MaCavity pays no attention to this request: he waits until Patchmaier gets out of sight, then Obfuscates and follows him. He picks him up near the exit and watches him get into a minivan with two other black guys. All of them are wearing jackets and could be packing heat. MaCavity also notices that Patchmaier is carrying a bag from Dillard's. Clayton Burrell and Jack Rowell wait for a while, then follow MaCavity.
MaCavity approaches closely to Patchmaier and his two friends, himself, and opens fire with his pistols. It turns out that he's armed with a pair of magnum pistols, which doesn't do much for his efforts to remain hidden. He booms out a shot at them, missing badly. The three guys look towards him with deer-in-the-headlights expressions; one of them reaches into his jacket for a gun. MaCavity opens fire again, shooting Patchmaier's arm clean off in a… moderately grotesque manner. Patchmaier screams bloody murder. MaCavity screams bloody murder right back at him. One of Patchmaier's friends panics and runs into the darkness. The other starts simply screaming at the top of his lungs. MaCavity uses Obfuscate to disguise himself and duck away.
The other characters arrive on the scene within a minute or so to find the screaming man, Patchmaier on the ground next to him, Patchmaier's arm flopping about near the car, and a few stunned bystanders. Rowell Dominates the screaming ghoul into shutting up, believing that Rowell is a paramedic, and thinking that the minivan is an ambulance. Burrell drags Patchmaier and his arm into the minivan, waits till Rowell gets inside, then starts the van up. Rowell finishes the cleanup by Dominating the screaming ghoul into shutting up and getting into the minivan. Burrell runs into a nearby car to (eventually) make the whole incident look like a hit-and-run accident before driving away into the darkness.
Jack Rowell takes over driving while Clayton Burrell moves into the back to try and deal with Patchmaier. Concluding that there is nothing else to be done, Burrell decides to Embrace him. He manages the timing properly, so the process works. On the minus side, Patchmaier instantly Frenzies and starts trying to suck Burrell dry. Burrell pulls away, deciding that if Patchmaier comes at him he'll just shoot him a lot. Patchmaier comes at him, but Burrell manages to fumble his gun. Patchmaier grapples Burrell, then latches onto him and bites. Patchmaier bites deeply, ripping away Burrell's eye and inflicting three levels of aggravated damage. In utter desperation, Burrell fires wildly and shoots Patchmaier dead. Again.
By this time, "panic" doesn't even begin to describe what Patchmaier's surviving friend is going through. Jack Rowell looks away from his driving to grab the guy by his head, look into his eyes, and tell him, "Shut up and calm down!" He gets seven successes, and ends up driving the ghoul into terrified, frozen paralysis. When Rowell turns back to driving, he finds himself bearing down on another vehicle and only barely avoids plowing into it.
About this time, the horribly mutilated shape of Clayton Burrell throws itself into the front passenger seat, stares at Rowell, and slurs out, "I got him! I need someplace quiet. Like Oliver's house."
At this point, Allen MaCavity calls up Jack Rowell on his cellphone. Rowell tells him to find some hookers, maybe three of them. At this point, Burrell moans out that he's got a house in an outlying town (the place where the Renaissance Faire is - "I have a sword-cane!"), and that MaCavity should bring the hookers there. MaCavity finds three wholesome-looking girls who look like they're "just doing this to make ends meet." He persuades them to go out into the middle of nowhere, all the while quelling the terrible cries of his conscience.
Patchmaier's friend turns out to be an old high-school buddy of his who doesn't know anything about what's going on. Out of disgust that the poor bastard didn't know more, Burrell drinks him dry, using him to heal one of his aggravated wounds, leaving only one more to go for him to regain sight in his once-missing eye.
The characters hide Patchmaier's dead friend underneath Burrell's trailer for "safe-keeping". Just about at they finish, MaCavity arrives with his three hookers, one of whom is a bit dubious that a really great party might actually be going on out in the middle of ripping well nowhere.
Burrell chains Patchmaier down in his workshop. He turns on all the machines in the room to disguise the noise of Patchmaier screaming, should that be needed. He also puts a hammer and stake nearby, for the same reasons.
The characters kill the prostitutes and drink their blood, aided in large part by the fact that Rowell is able to Dominate them into compliance. Of the thirty available blood points, fifteen go to Burrell, ten gets fed to Patchmaier through a funnel, and five goes to Rowell.
Patchmaier's wounds heal, which had been something of a question given that he's 14th generation. His arm remains missing, though the stump has sealed over. Unfortunately, he doesn't regain consciousness.
Interestingly enough, neither Burrell nor MaCavity suffers Humanity loss from their behavior, while Jack Rowell finds that he is no longer bothered by "wanton destruction." He continues to throw Humanity away as if it were on fire.
Patchmaier's bag proves to contain a deck of cards, a TEC-9, a mirror, a WD-40 spraycan, a lighter, and a daily planner. The daily planner lists a lot of contact information, and notes on a series of investigations Patchmaier has either finished, or had been working on.
One of Patchmaier's investigations has been going on for a year and a half. He is tracking a bunch of people who just suddenly "wind up dead", apparently (typically) of a weak heart. One victim has died every two weeks for the last ten months. The symptoms are fairly distinctive: victims become progressively more and more sickly until they finally die. The most recent victim is a week into the cycle.
Rowell asks: "What could be doing this?"
Burrell thinks he knows the answer: "Werewolves!"
Rowell scowls at Burrell.
Patchmaier has also been watching a group of 13-18 year-olds. Most of them have been involved in criminal activity, some of them in shooting sprees. They are all tied back to a chain of video game parlors that the kids liked to hang out in. The suspects have very different backgrounds; their only obvious link is the fact that they've all picked up a gun and used it in anger.
By the time the characters have figured all of this information out, two days have gone by. Against their hopes, Patchmaier hasn't obliged them by waking up in the meantime. Even worse, there are still news reports about Tyrone Guffwell, the "arson survivor" out at the State Hospital, who is expected to regain consciousness any day, and who is described in the media as being under police guard.
The characters dump the three hookers and the dead friend underneath Burrell's compost heap, after chopping the bodies into pieces with an axe. Burrell rejects Rowell's suggestion to use a chainsaw instead, on the grounds that "it's too messy."
The characters decide to deal with Tyrone Guffwell, who is in danger of being able to talk to the police any day now. The plan is to send Allen MaCavity into the hospital very quietly, armed with a syringe containing a compound prepared by Clayton Burrell. Burrell's idea is to use his Toxicology skill to come up with a suitably undetectable poison. Unfortunately, he isn't able to think of anything, so he gives MaCavity a syringe of antifreeze instead and suggests that MaCavity should take a look at the guy's chart to see what kind of drugs he's been prescribed. With any luck, one of them will be suitably fatal in a large enough overdose.
MaCavity disguises himself as a male nurse and successfully infiltrates the hospital. It's a state hospital, so there is only a camera in the lobby, though oddly enough there is a color TV in the room. He gets to the police guard at Guffwell's door, who definitely doesn't stare at his breasts, gets into the hospital room, checks the guy's chart, gets back past the guard, and walks out to tell the other characters (who are waiting in the getaway vehicle outside) what the drugs are. Guffwell is on a variety of painkillers, and actually has a morphine drip going. It looks like he could hit a button to release more morphine into his system, though it is limited to dispensing only up to a maximum dosage per hour.
MaCavity, faced with several unhelpful suggestions on what to do (altering medical equipment, syringes of Drano, etc), spends the next four hours obtaining enough morphine to kill a person from his various criminal contacts.
Later that night, MaCavity returns to the room armed with enough morphine to kill. As he is preparing the needle, the patient wakes and asks him, "What are you doing?" MaCavity is filled with an immense desire to help the fellow and make him happy. Strangely, he is not reassured by this sudden desire. He spends Willpower to resist the feeling, then covers the patient's face with a pillow. The patient makes a move to the call button. MaCavity does his best to restrain the fellow and inject him with the drugs. He is creeped out by the fact that the guy is terribly strong despite the fact that he is covered with burns and… slippery skin.
This little scene is interrupted when the cop enters the room. The burned ghoul stands up and starts pulling tubes out of his arms. The cop, apparently not bothered at all by the fact that the patient is moving around, orders MaCavity to get onto the floor. MaCavity does his best to barge out past the cop. The cop catches him with his off arm and whips him with his pistol butt. The blow is obviously seriously backed by Potence. MaCavity staggers, then quickdraws his gun and fires at the cop, who simply sidesteps. MaCavity takes advantage of the lull and runs for the door. The cop follows with unnatural speed, all the while threatening to shoot him. Eventually, the cop decides that MaCavity isn't going to stop and just starts shooting.
MaCavity makes it into a room and Obfuscates. He can hear the cop searching room-to-room. Eventually, someone wearing a hospital robe, sneakers, and not much else, enters the room. He walks in in a way that suggests he is looking for Obfuscators. MaCavity deduces that this fellow is probably the "burn patient" based upon the torn-away remnants of latex "burn" makeup on his head.
Outside, the other characters see a hospital security guard locking down the big sliding-glass doors to the Emergency Room. It quickly becomes obvious that the hospital is staffed by several guys who obviously know what's going on. The situation gets even more interesting when a "Mechanic" with a gym bag enters through the locked door. The guard lets him in, once again taking specific actions to keep out Obfuscators.
MaCavity makes it into an elevator, gets down from the 8th floor to the 2nd floor, then sneaks into a room and out of a window, taking a moment along the way to feed from a patient. He walks back towards the characters' vehicle.
Just about as Allen MaCavity makes his dive out of the hospital window, a pretty blonde woman approaches the characters' car. She taps on the drivers' side window. Jack Rowell decides that this is an unbelievably threatening action, and responds by putting the car in reverse and pulling away. The woman pulls a gun with inhuman speed and opens fire, justifying Rowell's suspicions. It is a touch unfortunate that she manages to hit him twice, inflicting seven levels of damage and incapacitating him. He slumps down in his seat. Clayton Burrell reaches over to grab the wheel, all the while trying to expose himself as little as possible to gunfire. He drives furiously in reverse, plowing through several random obstacles before crashing into a parked car. He barely misses a bag lady, obliterating her shopping cart in the process. The blonde woman continues to run after the car with the sort of speed that suggests she's either a vampire or a cheetah on crack.
MaCavity, who emerged from the hospital on the same side as the characters' car, is just in time to see all hell break loose. He Obfuscates and walks away.
Burrell does his best to recover from his little automobile accident, shifting into forward. He continues to prove unwilling to expose himself to gunfire. Sadly, the car is too damaged to be mobile. The woman screams, "Get out of the car and lay down on the ground." Burrell kicks open the passenger-side door, slides his gun out towards her, and obeys her, albeit with a lot of questions. She claims to be a cop in a way that leaves Burrell with no doubt that she is not a cop. Rowell remains lying in the driver's seat, dripping blood.
Neither Burrell nor Rowell have any notion of who this woman is, but she is definitely quite angry. She gets even more angry when it turns out that MaCavity thought better of walking away from the scene. He sneaks up behind her and tries to put a gun directly to her head. He succeeds with incredible elegance. He orders her, "Drop your gun!"
She responds by going into Frenzy.
Awful things follow.
MaCavity shoots her at pointblank range. He shoots her in the head, and is rewarded with a shockingly small quantity of damage. She elbows him, which hurts a lot. He shoots her some more, and she does the bullet-time thing to dodge the attack. She hits back with devastating effect (4 levels of damage). Rowell tries shooting her with a shotgun, but the gun jams. MaCavity and the blonde continue to trade blows while Rowell gets into the car and starts to drive away. Just as he manages to get the car into gear, the woman falls. Rowell stops and helps MaCavity to drag her towards the car trunk. During this time, she starts to move, so MaCavity shoots her some more. A second later, she actually GETS UP, even after MaCavity shoots her again.
This sequence gets repeated a couple of times, during which time she manages to slug MaCavity again for crushing damage. Just as the characters finally get her to stay down, someone opens fire from above, hits the trunk (open), making it wobble up and down. The gunman corrects his aim, and tags Rowell with his second volley. At this point, the characters decide that hostages really aren't that important, at least compared to survival. MaCavity jumps for the driver's seat of the car while Rowell leaps into the trunk. They drive for the sunset. Gunshots spatter all across the car, and a nearby onlooker loses a head. The characters count at least six gunshots.
Burrell steals a car, drives into a bad part of town and abandons it (running), hunts (even though he's covered in blood), and takes a cab to his haven in the middle of nowhere where he goes to sleep.
Rowell calls up his contact Salvator Escovado and arranges to get rid of "one car, full of bullet holes." Salvador isn't too happy to hear that it's been in a firefight, but is slightly cheered to hear that no cops were involved.
Rowell locates one drunk derelict and sucks him dry. He disposes of the body by stabbing him and stashing the body near a gutter to make the lack of blood not look so bad. Rowell uses the blood to heal himself up (from five wound levels), and then actually manages to make a Conscience roll at Difficulty 7… Woo hoo!
Each character gains four experience points. Gaming over the next two weeks will be a bit questionable, because Bruce will be in Santa Clara and Tim will be moving. If anything will be happening, Chris will be the one to arrange it.