Session 01

{{Sessions
 * date = September 19, 2010
 * enc = * Bubbles
 * Dr. Byron Orpheus
 * Celeste
 * cell woman
 * a ferret
 * a ghoul
 * Howard
 * the police
 * Walter
 * Whisper
 * William
 * log =

Starting Situation
In Boston, people are going missing -- at first just homeless people, but renters have been joining the ranks of the missing recently.

Washington Park is dense with weres and fae. Things are getting more aggressive with the residents starting to hunt people.

Public sentiment is turning against the homeless population.

Kate
Dr. Orpheus owns the top floor of Powell's Books, and there is enough of a threshold there to ward against supernatural nasties. He provides some protection for Powell's.

Kate meets up with Dr. Orpheus to check up on any info about her past. He tells her that someone on the Island is there who might know about her past. She takes off for the island.

Troy
Troy has an encrypted file that decrypts itself occasionally to reveal clues about what is going on. That was the lead that brought him together with Kate and Ming in the first adventure, and now it shows a new clue: a time and GPS location, the latter of which refers to the corner of Flanders and Park. This is on the way from Powell's to the Island at about 7-8 PM at night; he bumps into Kate at that time, curiously. Also on the corner is a woman with her dog on a leash, and a couple of homeless guys chatting.

Right at the time that the file indicated, the two bums unveil to be a single ghoul, who turns and eats the woman's dog. Kate and Troy jump in, to try to take down the ghoul. However, for the first couple of rounds, they don't seem to be able to shake the ghoul from going after the woman. The ghoul kills her while ignoring Kate and Troy. As far as Troy could tell, she was alive. However, the quality of his investigation was a bit dubious. At the end of the next session we learn that the woman has not survived.

Eventually, Kate and Troy land actual blows on the ghoul. Before it can eat their faces for this, it hears the police, and turns to run. They take off after it, in a general northeasterly fashion. Kate trips it up, and Troy falls behind.

Hobb/Ming
Hobb notices an intelligent-looking ferret, and begins following it. It tries to sneak away, but Hobb keeps on it. After a while, it abandons stealth and runs openly over to a circle of people.

Meanwhile, Ming is following Whisper, a spirit. Whisper is playing Dean Stockwell to Ming's Scott Bakula. (Brendan) The spirit looks like an incomplete person, something less than a full spirit. Abruptly, Hobb and the other ferret cross his path. The ferret screeches for attention, then runs into the tent. The ferret tries to sneak out by digging out the back. Hobb waits for it at the outside of the hole. When the ferret emerges, it hisses at him, then rushes back inside.

Hobb follows through the hole into the tent. There were two people sleeping in the tent. The ferret hisses at Hobb, and Hobb transforms in an attempt to talk with it. Someone catches naked-Hobb in the tent with Howard and Walter (the two people); the ferret takes advantage of this distraction and flees. Hobb tries to take a blanket to cover himself and follow the ferret. When he pulls the blanket away, he discovers that Howard and Walter are dead.

He tells people to follow that ferret, and some people do so. Hobb then calls Celeste over.

Ghoul
Troy falls way behind, so he chooses to stay behind and talk to the cops. Troy gives them a description of the homeless guise that the ghoul was using. The cops say, "Fucking homeless. Probably heading to the Steel Bridge."

Kate and the ghoul scuffle some more on the run. She finally trips him up, allowing her to get close enough to bash him with her pipe, so that she can get a tracking spell done later. Her arm is gashed in the process. She runs; after a moment's consideration, the ghoul doesn't chase her. She takes the circuitous route to her place.

Troy smoothly talks his way out of suspicion with the police. He says that he tried to give chase to the homeless man who killed the woman, but he got away, and that some other person gave chase later.

Ferret
The ferret eludes the guards out of the camp as Hobb and Ming give chase down Hoyt. They see someone running their way... The ferret gets away, but Hobb gets a whiff of her natural scent. She's got a little of the Island's scent and a little of Washington Park's, but she's definitely an outsider. She makes it to the ghoul, which Ming now recognises for what it is.

The ghoul reaches down to let the ferret scurry up his arm, and turns to take a run towards the Broadway Bridge. They get away -- the ferret takes off and runs west, and the ghoul goes into an abandoned looking building at a building near the train station (former office space). The ferret heads towards Naito.

Hobb and Ming see the police arrive at the Steel Bridge in the distance, with the standard welcoming committee coming to meet them. They continue tracking the ferret because Hobb needs to know. They think she may have jumped into the river.

Troy goes over to the Steel Bridge. Ming and Hobb give up and return to the camp.

Camp
Hobb thinks Howard & his friend William might have been were-goats. Walter hung out with a couple of goats and a man named William, who was slowly developing goat-like traits, even in his human form. Walter was probably a straight-up mortal, but he was seen often with Howard and William's alleged goats.

The police basically aren't getting in. Ming gets enough info while listening to realise that the cops are trying to track down the ghoul as a murderer, but have a totally incorrect description of him -- one that points a finger at the homeless. Ming goes off to let Bubbles know why the cops are there, but Hobb finds Bubbles first. Bubbles gives Hobb a little bit of the third degree, but he doesn't think Hobb did it largely because of how the two died. They were basically mummified (in the Egyptian sense) in the span of a couple of hours. They are embalmed with missing organs and the head filled with sawdust.

Instead of ghosts, Ming sees that the tent walls are basically splattered with spirit gore... as though their souls exploded. It's noted that William is missing. Troy and Ming exchange stories and go off to find Kate.

Hobb finds hoof prints in between the two bodies. They're goat-like, but indented enough to indicate standing on hind legs. William's scent doesn't leave the tent. Hobb wants to find Ming, but he's gone, so Hobb goes to check on the ghoul. He sneaks into the building through ventilation shafts. Someone is grumbling about something in the basement about his cell phone not working and a wizard. He decides to wait around for the creature to go to sleep.

The Sight
Kate, Troy, and Ming catch up on events, and Kate agrees to investigate. The cops are watching the area, so Troy dresses down. (It's noted that they know the corpses were mummified, despite their being clothed, because the eyes and brains are gone.)

With Kate's help, Troy and Ming are able to vaguely remember an urban legend about this sort of thing. There's usually a missing person involved in this kind of thing in the couple of cases they've heard of.

Kate uses the Sight: There is a "negative light" from the center of the room that washes across the room and partially reflects off of/penetrates the two bodies in the room. The anti-light tears its way through them and flays their souls out of them; their bodies are pocked with holes torn by the ripped-out souls. She can see their souls and the worst parts of their lives sprayed out over the wall.

After many brutal failures at Lore checks, she focuses just on the source of the explosion. There is a goat-man standing at the epicenter, with solid black eyes -- made of emptiness, not empty sockets. It's like a void created by something being pulled away somewhere. (The goat-man is what cast the anti-light). He had a wyrm's tail wrapped around him. The wrapping of the tail squeezed and popped him away.

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