We all get off to something of a late start, with most of us filtering in during the early Unreal tournament: Tim (Clayton Burrell), Paul (Allen MaCavity), Chuck (Liam Morgan) and Bruce (Jack Rowell). Chris insists that he is in charge, but none of the rest of us believe him.
Clayton Burrell wakes to hear the sounds of chains rattling in his basement. He investigates and finds that the newly-vampiric David Patchmaier has recovered from torpor. Patchmaier is quite hungry and expresses this in the sort of screaming, frenzied tone that makes Burrell think rather eagerly about making a quick midnight run to Home Depot to get more chains. Considering that Patchmaier has only one arm, his struggles to get free are very nearly successful.
Burrell eventually thinks better of the Home Depot plan. He instead responds by getting a jerrycan from the garage, filling it with four points of his own blood, and rather gingerly handing it to Patchmaier along with a straw. Patchmaier writhes, struggles, and sucks the jerrycan down to the last drops.
Burrell waits until Patchmaier calms down some, then tries to spin a really positive version of the events leading up to his being chained in Burrell's basement. Based upon Patchmaier's eager acceptance of Burrell's only slightly preposterous story, it is quickly obvious that Patchmaier is Blood Bound to Burrell.
With the situation under control, Burrell sets down to interrogating his new Childe. He finds out that Patchmaier was investigating the mysterious string of dying people and the vicious video-game punks because Jon Galliard told him to. Patchmaier mentions that Galliard thought that the individual responsible for the dying students was a member of some kind of vampiric terrorist group (probably the Sabbat, though Patchmaier really doesn't know any details). Galliard had wanted him to make a long term project of watching the guy, with the idea that if Galliard wanted to get favors from the Prince a terrorist's head would make a nifty bargaining chip.
Patchmaier's interest in the Blood Adventure video game parlors arose in a rather similar manner. One evening he went with his boss to talk to a white guy in the park. The meeting sticks in his mind because the white guy looked like a typical fellow in his late 40s, wearing a trenchcoat, a pair of nice crew socks, brown loafers, and absolutely nothing else. For all that the guy was dressed like a fruit, he was dead right that a lot of weird things were going on at the video game parlors, though Patchmaier says that he didn't learn about the spontaneous shooting angle until later.
Burrell finally decides to call up everyone else and let them know about the news. The other characters filter in to find Burrell explaining the Facts of Life to Patchmaier. Among these "facts", Burrell lets drop:
The other characters notice that every time Burrell tells Patchmaier something unpromising he gets an unhappy look on his face that quickly vanishes behind a glow of pure joy. They deduce that Patchmaier's lizard brain is telling him that all these sacrifices are good because they make The Boss happy, and releasing appropriately large quantities of endorphins to drive the message home.
Patchmaier asks if he needs to kill people as messily as possible. Burrell suggests that messy killings are actually a bad idea, no matter how little the characters' behavior would tend to support that.
Most of the other characters are deeply upset by the fact that Patchmaier is alive. Allen MaCavity wants to torture him for information, or just for the heck of it (it isn't clear). Liam Morgan wants him gone, but doesn't want to know what happens to him. Jack Rowell argues that he should be killed, even though he is somewhat surprised to find that deliberate murder still poses moral problems for him. Burrell counters all of these arguments by saying that he wants Patchmaier to stay at his ranch, out of sight, tracking down the two escaped ghouls with a computer.
At this point Patchmaier speaks up to point out that he doesn't really know how to use a computer, or to find anybody without going out in public. Most of the people he deals with don't use computers much either, making them hard to trace electronically. He knows that the two guys who survived aren't leaders; they're just goons. Using only a computer to track them down, they'll be basically invisible.
The characters decide to leave Patchmaier locked in the shed. Burrell seems mildly upset. Patchmaier remains happy. As usual.
Liam Morgan is driving his (relatively) new motorcycle through the city when he notes that he is being followed by a white van with tinted windows. After some rather trivial evasive maneuvers don't work, he heads to an abandoned warehouse near the Carter Arms, calling ahead to have the other characters meet him there.
The characters beat him to the warehouse by mere moments, just long enough to cause all the random transients using the place as a latrine to clear out.
Morgan drives into the warehouse and hides. The other characters see the van pull up to a street near the building and sit, apparently watching the place. Nothing happens for 20 minutes. At that point, both Allen MaCavity and Clayton Burrell become bored. They Obfuscate and head out to intercept the van. Their strategies couldn't be more different: MaCavity tries so hard to stay hidden that the occupants couldn't him even if he wasn't invisible, while Burrell simply walks up to it. Neither of them has any problems. They find that the engine is running and the parking lights are on. MaCavity and Burrell have a brief discussion about what to do that ends when Burrell decides to shimmy under the vehicle and cut the brake and fuel lines. He manages this without any particular problems.
The van continues to run for about a minute, then stalls to a halt. A few minutes after that, a second van pulls up beside the first. The occupants of the first van rush over into the second van. Burrell throws caution to the winds and dives underneath it to cut it's brake and fuel lines as well. Unfortunately, the second driver is in a bit of a hurry and pulls away from the curb before Burrell is able to scramble out from under the vehicle. Burrell ends up with a couple of tire tracks across his midsection.
The second van doesn't manage to get very far either, and both Burrell (who quickly regains the ability to walk) and MaCavity are able to see that the occupants of the second van (presumably including the original occupants of the first van) include two tough-looking guys and a half-dozen kids ranging from 14 to 18 years of age. The kids are all wearing headset radios and sporting guns. One of the toughs appears to be angry, and tells the kids that the second van, "is coming out of your pay - that'll be $10 from each of you." The kids bitch a lot, but they fork over the money anyway.
Burrell and MaCavity follow as this incredible collection heads down the street and gets onto a city bus. Burrell thinks about cutting the bus's fuel lines, but elects to board it instead. MaCavity follows suit. The bus trip was uneventful, except for the various complaints of the armed teenagers, who seem upset that they lost $10, that they aren't getting to shoot anybody right now, and that the vans both stopped working.
A half-hour later, the gang gets off the bus and walks into a building marked Fritz Electronics. The place looks like a run-down little one-man shop for electronics stuff, complete with the ancient Motorola TV sets behind the big glass window in front. The place looks very closed, with heavy metal grillwork pulled down over the front of the store.
As soon as the gang walks in, Burrell dials the business number on the building door. He gets an answering machine. He keeps on calling until he gets a tired-sounding guy who tells him to call back tomorrow when the store is open. Burrell insists that he wants to talk to one of the armed children. The guy sounds even more tired, says there's nobody in the store, and hangs up. Burrell calls several more times, then gives up and stops calling.
Burrell and MaCavity reconnoiter the area. They find a small parking lot in back of the building. They also find a phone book (conveniently enough, at an area payphone). Fritz Electronics is in the phone book, under the TV Repair and Appliance Repair sections. They boast 25 years of local service.
While Burrell and MaCavity gambol around the city Liam Morgan searches the abandoned vans. The first contains a random collection of fast-food wrappers and soda cans, plus a repairman's belt. The second contains a lot of spare ammo in clip form for smaller handguns, the sort that 14-year-olds could use. Both vans also have very impressive tinted glass, possibly good enough to keep a vampire burning even when the sun is up. Morgan elects to not test this out.
He thinks about moving the vans to a chop shop and trying to get some cash for them. After deciding that moving a couple of disabled vehicles around would be just too much trouble, he settles for pushing them into an abandoned lot to let the local scavengers pick them apart.
Allen MaCavity spends most of the rest of the night watching the back of the repair shop. Around 04:00, an elderly man with more than a passing resemblance to Gepetto carries a big bucket of trash out and dumps it next to the dumpster. MaCavity uses the opportunity to attack the old man with the idea of grabbing him and feeding from him. He grabs the fellow without any problems, then drinks from him until he passes out.
MaCavity searches the fellow, finding a wallet and a huge keyring. He takes both of them. He then heads through the little back door and finds himself in an open garage or motor pool. The place contains a single vehicle, and a large supply of random debris. The door into the building proper is unlocked.
MaCavity uses Obfuscate to make himself look like the old man then heads into the building. An instant after the door latches close, two handgun-bearing youths pop up. One of them asks, "did you see anything?" The other listens to his headset, then raises his gun again. MaCavity senses that he is in danger. He tries to duck back out of the door, but discovers that his old-man disguise appears to have given him a bad hip. The two youths blaze away at him with the reckless lack of concern characteristic of both fanatic death commandos and experienced Quake players. MaCavity gets hit a lot of times. He elects to tough it out like a real man and does surprisingly well. It is flatly obvious that the youths have nothing against shooting him a lot.
MaCavity dodges through the door and tries to Obfuscate away to safety. He starts out by hiding in the motor pool. Several youths emerge from the building, all of them sounding like excited Quake players. They proceed cautiously, as if somebody could kill them with a single bullet (perhaps they're ActionQuake players). MaCavity chooses his moment carefully, sneaks towards the door of the motor pool, and gets spotted by one youth for his trouble. MaCavity runs for it amid a hail of poorly-aimed bullets (perhaps they're not ActionQuake players after all).
MaCavity gets outside, dumps blood into Strength and Stamina for all he is worth, hefts the old man into a fireman's carry, and runs for the horizon. He quickly determines that his Obfuscate does not work for him while he carries the old man. On the other hand, the old man's body does block a series of the youths' bullets for him. Unharmed, he drops the old man and runs for his unlife.
He makes it to the end of the alley with one youth right on his heels. The youth is breathing quite hard - apparently the Fritz Electronics gunsels are none too athletic. The youth gets a clear line of sight, shouts "I'm gonna get a kill!" and opens fire. MaCavity dodges. Like an elephant on drugs. MaCavity gets hurt. Badly hurt. But, fortunately, not so badly hurt that he can't run out of the youth's fire path. The youth doesn't help himself by behaving like he thinks that he can get more ammo simply by firing off-screen. MaCavity eventually manages to lose all of his pursuers, though he manages to suck up a surprising number of bullets in the process.
Clayton Burrell heads off to hunt for the next four hours. He has no luck, and gets only a single point of blood. He tries hunting for another hour, then goes to sleep. He is much more successful then, getting two points of blood.
Jack Rowell goes to City Hall and Dominates his way inside. He looks through city records for anything he can find on Fritz Electronics. He finds out that it is a small, privately-held business that has been in operation for some forty-five years. The founder's son took over about ten years ago. They look to be thoroughly licensed, and their floor plan is on file. They have licenses for some hazardous materials, but nothing that would seem out of place for an electronics repair company. The company bought the entire building about thirty years ago, and Ebenezer Fritz (the son) actually lives upstairs. There are a couple of minor complaints against the business, but nothing that would raise any eyebrows. The property is not mortgaged, but the company does own another property some miles away (described as "storage") that is mortgaged. The company has owned this second site for about five years. As before, it's floor plan is also on file, though it is fairly simple: the whole place is just one big room. It does appear to have appropriate plumbing, a sprinkler system, and emergency lighting.
Convinced that he has gotten everything he can on Fritz Electronics, Rowell turns to the Blood Adventure arcade chain. They have been in town for 10 years and have five outlets (a new one opens up about every two years). The chain is owned by a fellow named Mustafa Majid. He has lots of licenses, and all of them look in order. He isn't without his faults, though: he has had periodic trouble with the fire marshal for a couple of his locations, a tendency to expect garbage collection (but then to not pay for it), and four sexual harassment complaints from female employees. Majid is also an immigrant, and has INS paperwork (including fingerprints), but not in City Hall.
Jack Rowell, Allen MaCavity and Liam Morgan spend the day sleeping in their biohazard refrigerators at Colfield Plaza.
MaCavity rises first, because even though Liam is a saint among vampires, he is also a deep sleeper. His night starts rather poorly, as he wakes to find his Auspex clanging like a broken fire alarm. He pushes the door of the refrigerator open to a dead Haitian guy in the center of the room (probably Willy), and a lot of little punks sitting around on the furniture. They are all carrying guns. Some of them are watching TV Some of them are smoking Willy's cigarettes. A couple are looking at a video monitor. Apparently, none of them wanted to look into the biohazard-marked refrigerators. MaCavity closes the refrigerator, glad that they're not too observant.
Jack Rowell rises next, opens the refrigerator door, and comes eye to eye with an armed youth. Jack is more afraid of the kid than he is of Jack, so Jack uses Presence to panic the kid. This plan succeeds beyond Jack's greatest hopes. The kid screams and wets himself.
Unfortunately, this also has the effect of warning the other youths that the game is afoot. MaCavity hears the noise and leaps to action. He uses up two dice bursting out of his refrigerator, then sprays the room with automatic gunfire, downing one of the kids. For his trouble he is rewarded with a hail of rather scattered bullets. The clarion cry goes up: "They're in the boxes! Shoot the boxes!"
Liam Morgan continues to snooze.
Rowell continues to try and scare people, full aware that this is the best he can do in a fight.
Liam Morgan finally wipes the cobwebs from his eyes and emerges from his refrigerator, a scream on his lips and a fancy claymore in his hands ("Doesn't sleeping with a claymore sort of chafe?"). He cleaves one of the youths in twain in the sort of way that was thought to have gone out of style towards the end of the middle ages. The youth looks somewhat the worse for the wear. He then deftly dodges his way away from a hail of bullets. Two more youths confront him. He responds by disarming one (literally) and cutting the other in half (nine, count 'em nine! levels of damage), all the while avoiding serious damage.
Rowell continues to try and scare people. One youth finally notices his efforts and shoots him. Rowell finds himself in a world of pain (4 levels of damage) and crawls behind a sofa to heal himself.
MaCavity manages to avoid serious damage, though he doesn't manage to outshine Morgan's sudden ability to make limbs and internal organs spray across the room in graceful arcs.
Within moments, there is only one youth left. He cleverly tries to run away, yelling, "They're killing us!" into his headset over and over. Rowell tries to use his Presence to get the youth to pay attention to him, but finds that it doesn't work that way. He grouses that he's being totally rooked, but nobody pays any attention to him. MaCavity comes to the rescue by shooting the youth a lot, enough that he falls over, possibly dead.
The final tally among the attackers is: two panicked, two wounded but conscious, two wounded but unconscious and three dead (including one that Willy apparently managed to get before they got him). On the characters' side, both Rowell and MaCavity are wounded, and Rowell's ghoul Willy is very, very dead. MaCavity drinks from the dead punks, taking five blood points. One of the panicked punks notices and cries out, "Oh god! He's feeding on them!" Rowell tries to solve the problem by hog-tying and blindfolding the two panicked youths using an array of convenient zip-ties, duct tape and bandages.
Rowell has Morgan break the lock on the front door while MaCavity breaks into an unused office on the same floor at the cost of his lockpick set. Rowell Dominates the two wounded punks into parroting a story about how they were involved in a break-in that fell apart into an argument and a gunfight when it turned out that there weren't any drugs in the place. Neither punk has much willpower, allowing them to buy into the story surprisingly quickly. Morgan collects all the headsets to make the story look more convincing.
With the crime scene prepared, Morgan and Rowell hide in the office across the hall with the two hog-tied punks, while MaCavity Obfuscates and waits in the characters' office for the police.
The police show up within minutes. They get into a brief gunfight in the lobby with two more of the punks, then head up in force. From what the characters can tell, the two in the lobby didn't last long.
The cops spend two hours picking through the ruins of the characters' offices, then another two hours beyond that to actually completely clear out of the building. For much of that time, the only officials present are two detectives and a police photographer. The older detective is really quite happy with the situation, so much so that he is almost gloating. He explains to the younger detective that this is an ideal setup: all the perpetrators are present, they were obviously up to no good, and they're all dead except for the two who spilled their guts. Closing out the case will take nothing more than a bit of paperwork. The younger detective seems hell-bent upon pointing out the flaws in his senior's optimistic case, much to the older detective's irritation. The younger detective persists in asking a lot of hard questions ("Who is the dead Jamaican guy?", "Why were the punks so well armed?" and so on). The older detective finally manages to get his way and persuade the youngster to give it up. As they leave, the old fellow complains, "You really seem to want to make things difficult."
During his time lurking in the abandoned office across the hall, Morgan spends his time listening in on one of the cheap headset radios. A couple of hours after the police arrive, someone starts running through a series of call signs. He starts out with "Splatter 1" and gets to "Splatter 8" before he gives up. Morgan peers out the window at this point and sees yet another white van with tinted windows parked on the curb.
Shortly after the radio contact, Morgan gets a very helpful call from Malcolm Carter, who tells him that there are lots of cops all around the place. Liam explains that there was a small altercation, and asks if he can do something to stop (or apprehend) the people in the Fritz Electronics van currently outside the building. Malcolm expresses some concern that he might get hurt, then thinks of something and agrees to help. Liam watches as four cops walk over to the van, roust the two guys inside, cuff them, and drive them away. Liam is not too happy to see this and calls Malcolm back to complain. Malcolm explains that there are Tremere who control some police precincts, and he can get the prisoners transferred so the characters can talk to them. He warns that this might take a while, and asks if the two guys are likely to make bail. Morgan notes that he doesn't know, and that he hadn't particularly anticipated that they would be arrested.
Malcolm contacts his Tremere friend (whom he explains is a bit of a jerk) and reports back that he can get the characters in to talk to the prisoners at 03:00. Jack Rowell passes the time by interrogating his prisoners, taking two points of blood from each of them in the process.
Given the he has rather little else to do with his time waiting for the cops to disperse, Jack Rowell turns to interrogating the two punks he captured. They claim to be Chet (age 14) and Rerun (age 16). It is quickly obvious that they are seriously hooked on Science Ninja Murder Squad and a wide variety of other first-person shooters. Rowell has a lot of trouble getting them to stop bragging about their various high scores.
He finally manages to get them to admit that they work for Majid, whom they know as the owner of the arcades. He gives them $400 a week and all the video games they can play. In exchange, they shoot people and guard stuff, both of which are okay with them. His curiosity aroused, Rowell asks them whom they shoot. They explain that they normally just beat up folks, especially concerned parents and community leaders interested in getting one or another of them to return home. Rowell notices at this point that neither youth has bathed in a shockingly long time.
They say that Majid currently has only two or three dozen kids working for him, as a lot of the kids he'd recruited went off to work for Majid's brother a couple of months ago. Majid's brother is (at least to the punks) a really big-time guy in the electronics industry out in Atlanta, where he runs Sand Electronics. The brother pays $1000 a week, and gives out neat SWAT-style uniforms, good radios and neat guns as well. Rowell doesn't have to guess too hard to figure out where both these punks have their career aspirations set.
The punk describes Majid as a cool guy and a ladies' man, with a vicious temper to boot: piss him off and you're a dead man. He is "old", dresses as if he just barely missed disco, and drives a red Porsche.
Once he gets a chance, Rowell looks into Sand Electronics. The company is 30 years old, got beat up rather badly in the 80's and then again in the early 90's, but is doing extremely well now. They make video games, with an emphasis upon software, though they also manufacture video game consoles. The company name is actually fairly recent, dating to a change in officers and their current dramatic change in fortunes.
Liam Morgan, Jack Rowell and Malcolm Carter go to the police station, where they meet Callista, the Tremere with the connections. She looks like a taller version of Thelma from Scooby Doo, except that she wears pants. She is quick to instruct the characters that if anybody asks, they are lawyers or family members, and otherwise should keep their mouths shut. She quickly nominates Rowell as the "lead lawyer", and cautions everyone about avoiding violent activity. She then leads them to the interrogation rooms up on the third floor.
The two suspects are Marty Keys and Wesley Burke. They are held in separate interrogation rooms, with one overweight, nondescript police officer sitting outside the rooms on guard, obviously waiting for the characters to finish the f*** up. Marty is in his late 20's, and quickly proves totally resistant to Rowell's Dominate. He acts really obnoxious about it, too. Rowell and Morgan do their best to interrogate him without the benefit of supernatural powers, and learn only that he's worked for Majid for three years, and has never played Science Ninja Murder Squad. He explains that his team of junior sociopaths noticed Morgan prowling around the arcade, then followed him back to the Colfield Plaza. They just figured that something bad and bloody should happen to him.
Wesley is more tractable: he proves susceptible to Dominate. He has worked five years with Majid. He knows that Majid uses kids because they're cheap, good shots, and think they're indestructible. Majid needs a good squad because he's a mover and shaker in the business world, and sometimes you just need people killed when you're a mover and shaker. He knows that Majid's brother runs Sand Electronics and buys a lot of kid gunmen. Wesley doesn't really want to meet him. He says that the whole youthful killer thing has been going on gun kids have been around for about two years, and it's been picking up a lot recently.
At this point, things turn interesting. Wesley's jaw cracks down about four inches and he projectile vomits poisonous worms at Rowell, who dodges (like anybody would choose something different). In one of those timeless moments that stay with you forever, Morgan notices that the vomit trajectory is practically flat, like a gunshot.
Morgan scrambles for the door as Wesley turns to vomit at him. Much to his dismay, he finds that the door is locked from the outside. Malcolm Carter arrives at the door only seconds later at beats at it ineffectually. Morgan elects to apply his Potence to the job and makes substantially more impact upon it. Carter does his best to help by screaming at the top of his lungs "Let me out! Let me out!". Morgan finally kicks the door open to find that the cop outside has just barely managed to get a key out.
Behind them, Jack Rowell is putting his heart and soul into scaring Wesley. Unfortunately, his early efforts are none too successful. Wesley, on the other hand, rushes Rowell and knocks him to the ground. Rowell squinches up his features as Wesley vomits worms and whatnot onto his face. Rowell makes an incredible soak and emerges unharmed. At this point, Liam Morgan comes to the rescue and pulls Wesley away from Rowell. Rowell finally manages to pull something intimidating out of his pudgy soul and stays Wesley in his tracks long enough for Carter to hit him with a chair and for Morgan to run him into a wall with a sickening crack. Wesley drools worms and goes unconscious.
At this point, Malcolm screams and points at the window of the other interrogation room. Something big and blotchy and tarlike is pressed against it. Strain marks show in the glass. It is clear that very bad things are happening, so the characters do what characters do best: they kill the tar-thing. It takes a while, as the creature has phenomenal endurance, isn't affected by Presence, and doesn't worry too much about people with sticks. By the time it succumbs, the entire area is covered with horrible-looking chemical burns.
In a totally unrelated development, Clayton Burrell takes Patchmaier out to an isolated community to teach him out to hunt. He tries to teach him to beat the snot out of people. Clayton gives him a handgun to compensate for the fact that he's only got one arm. The characters presume that he's going to be very low-profile: there's a one-armed guy with a gun who threatens people and then just gives them a hickey…
It turns out that Patchmaier isn't much for beating people up, but he is able to spin a pretty good story. Within a week, he's developed the best story in the world: "Excuse me, but I've got something heavy in my car. Could you help me carry it into my apartment?" He then takes a nip from the Good Samaritan when he's not looking. Burrell is totally upset that this works so well for him, but eventually decides to not object. Patchmaier explains that he got the idea from an article he read about a serial killer. This explanation goes some distance towards mollifying Patchmaier…
Each character gains four experience points. Clayton Burrell spends experience points on Serpentis, buying the ability to spear people with his tongue. Jack Rowell decides that five points is a cheap price to pay for Fortitude 2, and hands it over gladly. Liam Morgan makes a similar decision with respect to Celerity 2. He then spends some quality time helping Jack Rowell dig expired worms out of his flesh. During this process, Rowell says a lot of harsh things about Wesley Burke and the slime-pit he crawled out of.