All the normal folks show up: Nick (Vincent Cray), Bruce (Cyrus Billings), and Tim (now playing Ed Simms, refugee from the past).
At the end of the last session, the characters had just returned from Yucca Gulch, CA, where Shepherd had tried to make amends for one of his misdeeds while under Screamin' Joe's tutelage. On the way back, they learned that the minions of the Prince of Las Vegas are bad folks to trifle with. The major consequences of these encounters were Shepherd's decision to give up gambling and head out into the darkness, Vincent's discovery that vampires are still able to sprout gray hairs, and Cyrus' tragic loss of yet another surplus police cruiser.
The characters (with the obvious exception of Shepherd) spend about a month repairing the damage done by their field trip.
Cyrus drives a metaphorical stake into the remains of his bank account and gets himself a replacement surplus police cruiser, outfitted with his standard array of "supplies." By the time he is finished, he has yet again discovered that his bank account has a bottom, and that he can reach it if he tries hard enough. Eager to find something else to expend, he also invests five experience points in Animalism 2.
Vincent, faced with time off and distinct lack of experience points, locks himself into the Tremere library and studies his rituals some more. His progress is less than staggering: he realizes that if he wants to make his aura look different, he needs to control it.
Cyrus is just finishing paying for his car when he gets a call on his cellphone. His caller ID says it's Miguel Sanchez, but the caller claims to be Ed Simms, a friend of his who had disappeared some time ago. It develops that Ed has only recently emerged from torpor, and in fact just crawled out from underneath a foundation about an hour ago. This proved to be fairly disadvantageous to the three Hispanic males who were occupying the house above the foundation, as indicated by the sudden tranference of the unfortunate Mr. Sanchez' cellphone to Ed's possession.
Ed gives Cyrus some directions, and asks him to pick him up. These directions are made fairly easy to follow by the fact that the last landmark Cyrus needs to look for is a burning building: Cyrus locates the area just by following the fire engines. He manages to locate Ed after only a short search, and drives him back to his garage concealed inside a body bag (when he sees the bag, Ed drily notes, "Aha. Still the same old Cyrus, I see…").
Cyrus carts Ed off to his garage where he gets him cleaned up. He then introduces him to Vincent at Mad Dog's.
Ed Simms is a Toreador, but not the type that fawns over artwork. He is a typical white male with the slippery charm of a used-car salesman or a door-to-door pornography peddler. He was originally Embraced because his Sire was amazed at his skill at getting other folks to give him money for no visible reason.
He got himself into Torpor by gaining the emnity of the Toreador Carlos, a sculptor of cheesy Madonnas-with-bowls. Ed managed this feat by purchasing one of Carlos' statues and arranging it amid a flock of plastic flamingoes on his lawn. Carlos, made wealthy from the sale of hundreds of Madonna statues to the home-garden industry, responded by hiring a carload of ghouls with automatic weapons to run Ed off a deserted stretch of road. After they all met, and the ghouls explained their employer's dislike of Ed's taste in lawn decorations, Ed pulled his riddled body out of the fiery wreckage of his car, crept underneath the foundation of a nearby house, and faded away.
Ed's return to circulation started in confused frenzy. When he finally came to, he found himself covered in blood and surrounded by the bodies of three Hispanic males. He searched about for useful items in the house, discovering to his dismay that the previous occupants (who had apparently lived almost entirely upon beer) had a veritable arsenal on hand. Even more ominous, they also had a large stack of worn $20 and $50 bills. All told, Ed helped himself to:
After meeting at Mad Dog's, Cyrus brings Vincent and Ed over to his garage to chat and plan. To prove he is a good host, Cyrus uses his Animalism to summon up some refreshments (rats) from the back yard. Ed, seeing the carafe of blood, drinks heartily. Vincent, knowing full well where Cyrus's carafe of blood came from, refuses to drink at all.
The characters talk about finding the Sabbat mole in San Antonio. Cyrus relates to them what he has seen of the Brujah Angel's dealings in the Lackland Dump, specifically that he is meeting with a suspicious character there, one who is able to Obfuscate quite well. The two of them appear to be exchanging drugs for money and information, and (more ominously) for an odd green bottle of liquid that Angel drank from. Cyrus suggests that even if Angel is not the local Sabbat mole, his Obfuscating contact may be. The other characters agree that a good first step would be to either capture or trail Angel's contact.
Cyrus has learned that he can train animals to respond when in the presence of Obfuscating Kindred, so he spends an inordinate amount of his and Vincent's time capturing rats from the Lackland Dump (to ensure he gets "locals" who know their way around the area) and training them to sqeak when they sense an Obfusctor. By the end of his project, he has managed to winnow out six particularly smart rats from a class of a dozen. The remaining rats he suspects are too stupid to ever learn what he wants them to do.
Ed helps out in this project by purchasing a cage to house the rats while Cyrus trains them. Vincent offers him $50, but Ed breezily insists that he has his own and heads out in Cyrus' new car. He returns after several hours of intensive shopping with over $200 worth of Habitrail tubes and chambers and other accessories. Cyrus, stunned by the flood of cheerfully colored plastic gimrackery spilling over the floor of his garage, points out that rats are able to chew through lead pipes. Ed responds, slightly crestfallen, "Well, I got this metal cage too…" and produces a $10 metal cage.
Once he has his rats trained, Cyrus tries ghouling a couple of them. He discovers that while they become quite vicious, they are still able to sense Obfuscated things, and that most of their more anti-social tendencies can be curbed through specific orders against certain actions (like eating the car and leaving the garage). Armed with this knowledge, Cyrus ghouls all six of them.
While Cyrus and Vincent strive to produce suitably educated rats, Ed demonstrates that he has picked up a few new tricks: he uses his Astral Projection powers to sweep across the dump and learn the lay of the land. Unfortunately, he manages to discover little of interest.
The characters spend eight days hidden in the Lackland Dump waiting for something to happen. Cyrus scatters his rats around a couple of known meeting places while Ed and Vincent wait for them to see something. The waiting pays off (briefly) when Ed spots Angel's car approaching from the back entrance. Ed immediately zips himself into a body bag and goes into an astral trance to search for Angel's contact. Cyrus starts chirping out orders to his rat picket line.
Then disaster strikes. Cyrus' cellphone buzzes. The caller is Sattler, one of the Prince's Childer, who has apparently only moments ago learned that Cyrus has been seen around Ed Simms, a Kindred who disappeared several years ago. Sattler insists that he and the Prince must speak to Ed, and further insists that Cyrus should bring him around no more than an hour from now. Cyrus rather lamely points out that he doesn't offhand know exactly where Ed is, and tries to persuade Sattler that tomorrow would be just as good a time for this little meeting. Sattler refuses to budge, though he is willing to push the meeting off for an additional hour. Cyrus hangs up his phone with an upset look upon his face.
Cyrus quickly discovers that Ed cannot be roused from his astral trance through simple measures like shouting at him and poking him with sticks. He sends his rats out to try and get Ed's attention, to no avail. After an hour of fruitless prodding, Cyrus calls up Sattler again to say that he's located Ed, but that Ed is in some kind of trance. He notes his abject willingness to bring Ed's carcass by so the Prince can inspect it, but that at this rate Ed won't be much of a conversationalist (really, more of a conversation piece). Sattler insists, so Cyrus bundles Ed into the back of his car despite Vincent's insistence that if Ed's body is moved, Ed may never be able to get back into it again.
Along the way to the Dominion, Cyrus, Vincent (who abandons the car midway through the trip, out of an aversion to speaking with the Prince) and Ed (who manages to snap out of his trance just before Vincent departs) debate the rather fortuitous timing of Sattler's phone call, and his icy insistence that any meeting with the Prince must happen immediately. They come to the obvious conclusion: the Sabbat mole has the goods on Sattler, and is using him as a pawn. Sattler must be eliminated…
The characters are shown into Prince David's mansion, where Prince David and Sattler interview Ed. Prince David is not at all rude, but Sattler is extremely so. Both of them ask a lot of questions that seem fairly obviously targeted at fininding out if Ed has been turned into a Sabbat infiltrator. Though they don't appear to be particularly satisfied with their findings by the end of the interview, they are satisfied enough to send Ed on his way. Afterwards, Sattler spends some quality time being sarcastic towards Cyrus, noting how he is certain that Cyrus was going to bring Ed by to speak to the Prince on his own any day now, and that it must have just slipped his mind momentarily. Cyrus agrees, doing his best to keep the icy glare out of his eyes.
Having accomplished perhaps less than they might have hoped, the characters gain only three experience points for the session.