Rasputin and Felix Usopov

Grigori Efimovich Rasputin

Known as the "mad monk," Grigori Rasputin was an outlandish figure in the court of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Born in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoe, his conduct there got him into so much trouble that he disappeared into the Russian wilderness.

He wandered over all Russia, made two pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and roamed both in the Balkans and in Mesopotamia until he came back to Russian in 1903, when he arrived at the religious Academy of St. Petersburg, where he was welcomed as a penitent. He became highly popular in religious and mystical circles. The Grand Duchess Militsia, a leader in Russian mystical circles, introduced him to the Tsar in 1905, when Rasputin stopped Prince Alexis' hemophilia by laying on of hands. He quickly became a fixture in the royal household and a particular confidante to the Empress.

Rasputin spoke for the Russian peasantry to the Tsar. He abhorred Russian nobility and declared that class to be of another race, not Russian. Wild-eyed and unkempt, he was strangely charismatic and his personal magnetism was legendary; at the same time his bouts of drinking, womanizing, and wild behavior created a scandal in Russian society. He was a hit in the salons and reveled in luxury and extravagance. He made a point of humiliating the high and mighty of both sexes. Too clever to sell himself to anyone, he was courted with gifts from followers and those hopeful of getting into his good graces. On many occasions he took from the rich and gave to the poor.

He was finally killed in 1916 by a cabal of aristocrats led by Felix Yusopov, who feared Rasputin's influence had grown too great. Rasputin's death became the stuff of legend: assassins fed him poisoned cakes and wine, and when the poison failed to kill Rasputin they shot him and beat him. Still Rasputin didn't die, until finally the men bound him and tossed him into the Neva River, where he drowned: 30 December under the modern calendar.

Felix Yusupov

It is interesting to note that, aside from a memoir penned by his own hand (if you can trust the objectivity of such a work), exceedingly little is to be found on the subject of Prince Felix Yusupov.

A review of Prince Yusupov's published memoirs, Lost Splendor: The fascinating first-person account of the cross-dressing prince who poisoned Rasputin with rose cream cakes laced with cyanide and spiked Madeira is now back in print. Originally published in France in 1952, during the years of Prince Youssoupoff's exile from Russia, Lost Splendor has all the excitement of a thriller.

Born to great riches, lord of vast feudal estates and many palaces, Felix Youssoupoff led the life of a grand seigneur in the days before the Russian Revolution. Married to the niece of Czar Nicholas II, he could observe at close range the rampant corruption and intrigues of the imperial court, which culminated in the rise to power of the sinister monk Rasputin. Finally, impelled by patriotism and his love for the Romanoff dynasty, which he felt was in danger of destroying itself and Russia, he killed Rasputin in 1916 with the help of the Grand Duke Dimitri and others. More than any other single event, this deed helped to bring about the cataclysmic upheaval that ended in the advent of the Soviet regime.

The author describes the luxury and glamour of his upbringing, fantastic episodes at nightclubs and with the gypsies in St. Petersburg, grand tours of Europe, dabbling in spiritualism and occultism, and an occasional conscience-stricken attempt to alleviate the lot of the poor.~Prince Youssoupoff was an aristocrat of character. When the moment for action came, when the monk's evil influence over the czar and czarina became unbearable, he and his friends decided that they must get rid of the monster. He tells how Rasputin courted him and tried to hypnotize him, and how finally they decoyed him to the basement of the prince's palace. Prince Youssoupoff...is perfectly objective, remarkably modern and as accurate as human fallibility allows. His book is therefore readable, of historical value and intimately tragic. It is as if Count Fersen had written a detailed account of the last years of Marie Antoinette. --Harold Nicholson, on the first English edition, 1955.

Excerpt from a news article about a Mexican artist who was a favorite of Yusupov during his exile:

"In Paris, Contreras met the Countess Ksenia Sheremetyeva, a descendant of the famous Russian aristocratic family. She invited him to lunch with her grandparents, the Prince and Princess Yusupov. "I had no idea who they were at the time," Contreras said, laughing. "I was served like royalty, and there was this beautiful old gentleman sitting across from me." The artist's voice took on a special intensity when he recounted the instant connection he felt with the prince, then in his 70s. "He was a very great soul," Contreras said, "a mystic, who could heal with the hands."

Indeed, the prince -- not unlike Rasputin -- had a reputation as a faith healer. He also claimed to have glimpses into the future. Contreras used to accompany the prince on visits to sick members of the Russian emigre community. Yusupov would place his hand on the patient's forehead and pray, and "the person would come back to life, back from death," Contreras said.

The young artist was invited to live at the Yusupovs' home in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, and he spent the next five years there. He described his relationship with the prince as that of an adopted son and his father. The family used to introduce him to friends as "the son who fell to us from heaven."

One forbidden topic was the prince's role in Rasputin's murder, which remained a source of shame for the family.

According to generally accepted history and Yusupov's own memoir, "Lost Splendor," the prince led the group of conspirators that assassinated Rasputin in 1916. The so-called "mad monk" had scandalized St. Petersburg with his controversial lifestyle and immense influence over the royal family. Yusupov, together with a group of nobles and army officers, decided to kill Rasputin in an attempt to save the Romanov dynasty from self-destruction.

On Dec. 29, 1916, Rasputin accepted Yusupov's invitation to dine at his Moika Palace, where the conspirators served him wine laced with cyanide. When the poison left him mysteriously unaffected, the conspirators shot him four times, clubbed him and tied him up before dumping the body in the Neva River. Three days later, the body was found in the frozen river, arms freed in an upright position, as if he had tried to claw his way out from under the ice.

The murder was never discussed at the Yusupovs' home in Paris, Contreras said, until one afternoon when the old prince "confessed everything."

It was during the artist's last year in Paris, not long before Yusupov's death at 80. One by one, the princess, her daughter and the governess left the lunch table, leaving only the prince and his "spiritual son." Yusupov wanted him to know the whole truth, never before divulged to anyone, Contreras said.

Yusupov told him about his first meeting with Rasputin, at the Peterhof Palace outside St. Petersburg. The two established a mystic link, the prince recalled. "The prince told me Rasputin looked him in the eyes, and he fell down under his gaze," Contreras said. "He felt the soles of the feet tingling, saw through the eyes of Rasputin. When the prince managed to stand, Rasputin stumbled in turn and cried out, 'Felix, together we could own the world!'"

The artist described Yusupov as the antidote to Rasputin. "The same powers that man had, he had in good," Contreras said. "He vanquished him!" But the artist was unwilling to say anything about Rasputin's murder in the interview. He said he was preserving the prince's private papers, entrusted to him by the family, to publish along with the revelation of Yusupov's testimony."

The Shadow Curtain

Finally home, the pack arrive at their caern, only to find it surrounded by the Technocracy's caution tape. Ready for a fight, they duck under to find the area swarming with Technocrats. The sept, meanwhile, is not even aware something odd is going on.

Ambrose gets home, smells ozone, puts coffee on for Hermetic ("So what do the Cultists want this time?" "Not the Cultists. You've been summoned to Doissetep"), and catches a quick shower and a change of clothes before they head out. The Hermetic is kind of disappointed in his lack of reaction.

But that changes when he arrives at Doissetep to find a group made up of Porthos, some Virtual Adepts, Mark, and two New World Order agents. To which his only response can be, "Oh my god." Mark agrees.

Both groups follow their respective MiBs to a Technocratic Construct. One of Ambrose's MiBs is a young smart-mouth, who keeps making sarcastic comments when people talk to him. After observing the young guy's rather un-MiB-like behavior, he turns to the older MiB. "Training?" The older man rolls his eyes.

At the Construct, the shifters and mages meet up with each other and a man in white. "You are in the Matrix," Tim quips.
"You only think that's funny," Ambrose tells him.
Ambrose to the young MiB: "Don't you dare say anything about spoons!"
MiB: "There is no spoon."

Displaying a map showing a whole lot of stuff the Technocracy supposedly didn't know about (grandstanding bastards), the Man in White briefs them on the disappearance of Russia from all surveillance. The Union wants the group to go in, get info, and maybe find a way out if they can manage it. Nobody else has, so far. When the Garou challenge them on it, the Man in White informs them that their caern will be held hostage. Ambrose is given override codes for Technocratic resources. He reads one number aloud, and sees the young MiB stiffen. Shame; he was sort of eying that kid for possible Tradition recruitment.

At any rate, it looks like the fae may have a way in and out. He needles the Man in White by casually calling Faris to arrange the trip, which takes about 30 seconds. Though Faris thinks they're insane for wanting to go there now.

Stepping out of the briefing room, they come face to face with Room 101. Ambrose shudders. Before they leave, Sonya grabs a bunch of tradeable goods; cheap, readily available American goods could come in handy for bribe material or quick cash on the Russian black market.

Then they're off to the Russian freehold, where they're met by a Troll. He points them to a Glass Walker caern, but when they arrive, it's empty. Everyone is dead, the caern's Gnosis stripped. Rey uses his psychometry spell, backed up by Sonya digging up a security camera: they see a guy who seems to be a Zmei--a Russian dragon--eat the caern's heart. Sonya shares a look with Olesya, murmuring, "That's not possible..."

Interestingly, plain old regular cell phones seem to work. The Garou are suspicious that the Technocracy knows more than they're telling. Ambrose doesn't bother being suspicious of something that obvious. They follow the "Zmei" trail to St. Basil's, where they detect some kind of mind control effect lingering over the altar, like a shimmering warp in reality.

Then it's onward to to Moscow University, where a Technocratic Construct is located. There, they find 30 dead MiBs in an office and two frozen Iterators. Their DEIs are stuck in a loop. Rey does his psychometry trick again: a well-equipped, well-trained MiB comes to the door, then smashes his way through everybody. The other MiBs seem to know and fear him. The Iterators are already frozen when he arrives, and the blood from the fight splashes across them. He's wearing a ring w/Nephandus symbol. One of the MiBs, more composed than most, gets a message out to Control before dying.

The group raids the Technocratic gear at the base, and Ambrose closes down DEI signal (interestingly, he notices it's an Umbral linkup). The Iterators come back online. They can't add much to what the group already saw, but they agree to cooperate. They trade contact info, grab heavy arms, and head out to find more Technocrats. Iteration X doesn't know the MiB, but obviously the NWO agents did. The NWO keeps their secrets well, one of the Iterators comments.

Returning to the street, Sonya buys a paper in which she finds a hidden message: 30505 Kremlin. It's an address. Slipping in during a tour of the famous fortress, they find that 30505 is a broom closet, and also a hidden Eiluned sidhe's office. He tells them that three days ago, the Celestial Chorus and Verbena in a chantry north of Moscow started acting odd. All the Tremere and Tzimisce suddenly abandoned ship. Two days ago, the Shadow Curtain went up, shutting down almost all movement and communication between Russia and the outside. All the vampires who hadn't already evacuated Russia died suddenly, within three minutes. One day ago, people started dying.

He pulls a file on the Zmei, and Olesya and Sonya realize, to their horror, that the Garou missed one when they were packing those things up a few millennia ago. Is this MiB working with it? Controlling it? The sidhe says he "isn't authorized" to tell them everything about the MiB, whose file runs back to the late 1800s. The human intelligence community knows something's up, but so far has no idea about its true nature. The Nosferatu are watching. Ambrose suggests communicating with the outside world via normal phones and short wave radio. He thinks the Technocracy has gone underground, piggybacking on normal communications.

The sidhe sends them on a Trod to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, where he tells them the resistance is HQed. Ambrose, having a tourist moment, takes some pictures when they arrive. The ones taken with his paranormal film reveal a hidden door into one wing. It leads to a chamber containing a gear puzzle that has to be put together. When that's done, two Tesla coils pop out and light up to reveal a gateway. They step through into the palace's grand hall, except it's filled with an enormous, bustling lab. Etherites and fae (mostly Nockers) are scrambling all over the place, all action centering around Nicola Tesla, who's standing at the far end of the room, observing a huge screen. Ambrose has a starry-eyed fanboy moment (Jared: "Is he alright?" Mark: "I don't know, I've never seen this before.")

When they approach to ask what's going on, Tesla whistles up four round floating gizmos. "No, you," he says, pointing at one. It projects a hologram showing events it recorded several days ago:

A caern outside Moscow is under attack. The Garou are fighting well against a swarm of banes, BSDs, and Nosferatu, who are led by a beautiful man with a black sword. When two Corax who've been aiding the Garou try to flee to carry the message to other caerns, the man sprouts bat wings to chase them down (Mark says the "man" is a demon). Falling back to regroup during a lull, something swoops over the Garou's heads that startled them so badly that they actually fall out of rage and stop fighting. It's Baba Yaga, who sweeps in on her mortar and pestle, three Zmei following her.

Perhaps understandably, the record ends there. The Garou ask Tesla about getting word out, but he says there's a Mind effect worked into the Shadow Curtain that garbles any message on the way through. There's the Dreaming, but he's reluctant to play that hand just yet, since it's the only edge they've got. He has tracked a lot of activity out in Siberia, but he can't get the Garou there to talk. When Tesla informs them that Baba Yaga is after the Soul Egg, Sonya explains that a long time ago, the Wyrm managed to reach its hand into the world. The Garou drove it back out, but the talons of the hand remained, forming terrible monsters in their own right who ravaged the earth. One is the legendary Deathless Koschi of Russian myth, and he was locked away inside that egg. They don't know what Baba Yaga wants with it, but she reflects that the two interact a lot in the myths.

Ambrose tells Tesla that Dante came in with five MiBs, and has gone missing. Then they need to go to Siberia to find out what's up. Sonya decides it's time to call on family. They head down to the Shadow Lord caern where her great-grandfather resides, near the Caspian Sea, so they can take a Moon Bridge to Siberia. On the train, Rey wanders restlessly, and feels someone watching. When he casts a spell to call them out, the Nephandus MiB turns up. They chat, then the train stops, declaring there's a moose on the tracks. Not too odd for Russia, but right now everything is suspicious. The MiB insists that it wasn't him.

Meanwhile, Ambrose and Mark discuss the Shadow Curtain. Ambrose thinks it must be a thin veil surrounding the territory rather than an effect blanketing it, because such a thing would simply be too big to sustain. He suggests that it's probably passage through the curtain that garbles the message--a viral effect, because otherwise the Shadow Curtain would be be blanketing the whole world. So if they can pass a message through that doesn't depend on the interaction of minds...something like the trick where you teach a horse Morse code, or something automated... Mark suggests a HITMark. Ambrose calls the Iteration X operatives, who think they might be able to send a message straight to Control, where it'll be obsessively decoded until they inevitably work out the randomization. A pattern can only get so random, after all. Jonas, on the other hand, suggests going to sleep and thinking really hard about Faris, and someone else suggests the Umbral tunnels. Sonya isn't against the idea, but points out they'd need to be wary of the Ratkin.

When the message about the moose is yet again repeated, Sonya gets suspicious and notices Rey is missing. She sends Jonas to hunt him up. The MiB leaves as Jonas gets there, then the two of them head forward to the engine to find the engineers hypnotized. After they call the others, Mark comes forward to snap them out of it. Rey does his psychometry trick and sees a man with spooky eyes hypnotizing them.

Distrusting the situation, they get off at the next station and drive onward. Sonya notes they're being tailed. Checking it out, Ambrose detects two mages: one seems fairly average, but the other reads as an enormous bear of a man. When the group stops at an inn for the night, they note the huge guy come in, except that he looks normal-sized. He watches them briefly before he gets distracted by a pretty bar maid, and ends up getting plastered, acting barbaric, then staggering up to his room.

Well, if they want info, Sonya figures there's no better time. "He may not even remember talking to us tomorrow," she points out. She and RF go upstairs, but the guy's so out of it that poking and prodding doesn't wake him up (though he does cough up a whole roll). Finally Sonya says, "It's 11:30 at night, and I'm a woman in your room." That sits him up. Still sodden drunk, he tells them he's tracking the MiB, whom he hates personally though he won't explain why, and he isn't affiliated with any group at all. He turns down their offer of alliance, saying, "It can only end in sorrow. Women want me, men want to be me. And some of them want me too." Since he's now up, he proceeds to make huge noise. giving up, the group goes to a different inn.

The next morning, Sonya plots to lure the rogue MiB out of hiding. Part of the group will scout while the rest of them run errands. At the general store, Ambrose says to Mark, "I wonder if that spyglass of mine can spot invisible people." Mark figures he might as well try it. Ambrose quickly spots one quiet bubble near Aila, and another bubble that's imagining everyone naked. Horrified, he shuts down the spyglass and tells Mark. A quiet voice sounds over his shoulder: "You shouldn't talk so loudly."
"I'm not talking loudly," Ambrose retorts, insulted.
"I can hear your thoughts," the invisible MiB tells him.
Then over Ambrose's other shoulder, the big Russian's voice rumbles, "What are we talking about?"
"I hate you both!" Ambrose declares.
"Who?"
"You know what?" Ambrose snarls. "Right there!" He points to where the first voice was coming from, then dodges away as two invisible men go flying through the store's front window. Sonya orders them to move out as the huge Russian man (whom she recognizes as the monk Rasputin) and the MiB Nephandus square off in public, the MiB (whom she places as Felix Usopov) backing away and pumping Rasputin full of bullets from his two guns while Rasputin, pretty much ignoring the assault, keeps coming after him. "You're a fucking cockroach!" Usopov screams.
"Felix, I slept with your wife!" Rasputin yells back, sounding highly entertained. Mark and Ambrose flee from the Paradox they feel crackling around the area.

Clearing out while the two men thoroughly distract each other, they reach the caern without further incident, and tell the Garou there the story. Since the caern is near the edge of the Shadow Curtain, Ambrose asks to go to the border so that he can take readings on it.

They take a Moon Bridge to Siberia (Sonya warns Ambrose not to probe it), where they repeat the story to the Wendigo there. Already aware that the dragons are stirring, they've been fortifying the bound Zmei. They suggest consulting the Firebirds if they want to find the Soul Egg. Mark and Ambrose talk with them about the demon, suggesting banishing it by breaking its summoning bonds, and speculate that if they're lucky it might even turn on Baba Yaga. To the group's bemusement, the Wendigo ponder whether it'd be more Renown to fight Baba Yaga or the thing that killed her. Ambrose comes up with an unpleasant plan: in the worst case, they could render the Shadow Curtain visible and let Paradox deal with it. But that'd probably be catastrophic.

Tesla gave Ambrose a letter before they left, which now activates with a map into the wilderness. Following it takes them to a Gurahl who lives with a tribe full of crossbred Garou--the Siberakh, who are half Wendigo, half Silver Fang--and young Dmitry Romanov, last of the Romanovs and also a Silver Fang. Gurahl Ivan is unhappy about the letter from Tesla, which says, "Come to the Winter Palace." "Hunting in woods is great," he monologues, "but sometimes you just want to sit around at home and sleep for a few months." Still questioning the man's judgment, Ivan grumbles that he wants to talk to Tesla, so Ambrose phones him. Ivan tries to argue over the phone, mainly by repeating, "I don't want to," and "Are you sure?" Handing the phone back to Ambrose, he instructs him to "Tell him his thinking is not straight." Ambrose repeats it, incredulous. After a 'cunning' argument, which pretty much consists of Tesla affirming, "Yes, I want you to come," Ivan agrees to lead all 200-some Siberakh to St. Petersburg.

When he hangs up, one of the Siberakh knock on his door to ask, "Do you want us to keep surrounding the place and intimidating the strangers while you serve them tea?"
"Hi!" Aila chirps at him.
Ivan waves him off. "No, you may go."
"Actually," Sonya intercedes, "if you'll call your leaders in, we'll fill them in on events."

Ivan explains that it's Tesla who found Dmitry and gave him to Ivan to raise. He sends people out this way to tutor the boy in anything useful for him to know. Though he's only 18, the Siberakh already see him as a leader. Ivan seems to be very protective of the whole bunch, but especially Dmitry, whom he says has never exhibited any of the Silver Fang instability.

They take the Umbral tunnels back. With 200-plus Garou, Sonya doubts Ratkin or any other tunnel-dwellers will be an issue. Ivan suggests they find the Firebird Pendant, which will lead them to the Firebirds, and tells them it's also a weapon. It was hidden in the Dark Umbra by Silver Fangs of the Ivory Priesthood. Find one of them, and between it and Aila, they'll surely be able to get the pendant.

At the Winter Palace, which Tesla explains is a pocket reality of his own making, Olesya hunts up an Ivory Priest while Ambrose and Tesla analyze the Shadow Curtain data. Realizing that it was designed by the Choristers and Verbena from that chantry that went weird, they work out that they might be able to break the Choristers free of the bond on them, which was probably slipped into the Communion wine--hence the reality ripple over the altar at St. Basils, which was probably caused by conflict between that and the cathedral's paradigm. It may even be combating the compelling magic. Besides, the Chorus probably summoned the demon, and may be so upset by that that it could shake their compulsory faith in their new mistress.

They send Jonas, Tim, and Rey to steal some personal possessions from the clerics. That part is easy, but on the way out, the Zmei intercepts them. "Scatter!" shouts Jonas. Tim throws a ninja smoke-bomb, Rey darts into the cathedral and pulls the fire alarm, and Jonas dives into the ensuing crowd, popping up to yank the Zmei's pants down. Tim sneaks into the Russian tank on display in the square, uses it to shoot the Zmei, then they all bail. Jonas's Deed name may become "Pants-the-Wyrm!"

The fae slip into the Choristers' dreams, giving them ominous nightmares to shake them from the bond. Jonas raids the Zmei's wallet ("Did you mug a Zmei?") and finds his address on a Netflix card, as well as a business card with the address of a Black Spiral Dancer hive in a Moscow warehouse.

Next day, word is that Baba Yaga's army is moving so fast that it seems to almost literally be in three places at once. That has to be Dante. Priority One immediately becomes getting him out before Baba Yage is able to exert any further control over him. But where could he be? Ambrose bets he's still fighting, and asks if anyone has spotted anything out of place or exceedingly coincidental happening. Dante might've left clues somehow. Minus that, he suggests Moscow University. The MiB Nephandus might want the equipment at the Technocratic Construct to help break Dante. They call the Iterators, who wistfully suggest a self-destruct sequence which would kill the Virtual Adept. Instead, Ambrose asks them to talk to the systems and see if he's there. He's not, so he uses Technocratic gear he snatched to build a crude tracker for Technocracy gear. While delving through the stuff he nabbed, he discovers a Talisman among the stuff: a cell phone that analyzes a person, then provides a cell phone number that hacks the person's brain and gives a limited amount of control over them. Nasty thing.

Remembering the business card, Sonya guesses they might be holding Dante at the hive. They load themselves for bear (speaking of which, Ivan arms himself with a war hammer klaive and comes along), then Mark teleports them into the center of the hive. The shifters jump the BSDs while Ambrose tries to knock out Dante (who's hooked up to an IV of vampire blood). He gets ambushed by Dante's co-located duplicates. Jonas knocks out Dante by beating him with a table.

The BSDs scatter out of the building, the Garou in hot pursuit...right into a parade. People run screaming except for one old man on a bench. Running down an alley, Aila encounters the Zmei, and starts chatting with him. She learns his name is Shazar. After a bit of conversation, he observes, "You're buying time, aren't you?"

Ambrose shouts at everyone to get clear, then destroys the warehouse by weakening its support structure till it collapses. Then the group catches up to close in around the Zmei. The old guy pokes his head in, absolutely relaxed about the whole thing. But the Garou are totally outclassed by the Zmei and they all know it.

"I have a plan," Ambrose declares. The Zmei, amused, wants to know what it is. "You want to see the plan?" asks Ambrose, surprised. "By all means." So Ambrose walks right up to the Zmei, then shoves an industrial-strength stink bomb into his face. "Run now!"

They all scatter, meeting up a couple of blocks away. Sonya orders them to pile into Rey's car, and they get chased by the Zmei and something that they don't spot but which feels like a Dauntain, which nixes the idea of scrambling to a freehold. Dante is still too beaten up to focus. Aila asks the Gurahl, "Aren't you all about healing?" Ivan licks Dante to use his healing Gift (Dante's all, "Augh! What...?" Ivan: "I still respect you.") and Dante clears them out to a road near the Winter Palace with a seamlessly executed effect that not only has them making a perfect transition from one street to another, but also blurs any chance of detecting what happened by making all the cars blend together where they left.

Dante gets patched up, meets with Tesla briefly, and then leaves to inform the Traditions of what's going on. Now that he's back in form, no Shadow Curtain is enough to keep him pinned down.

Enter Tillingtast part 3: Follow the yellow brick road

When they get to Wales, they find that Tillingtast's place is subtly surrounded by the Technocracy. So Ambrose calls him and arranges to meet him in a nearby town (of course Tillingtast has a back way out of his secret lab). Tillingtast missed much of the context, so he believes that Ambrose is still on his side, having narrowly escaped from the savage killer werewolves.

But when they get to the town, they find it infested with living killer mannikins and everyone human is dead. What's more, they find they can't leave. When they try to head back toward the edge of town, it just stays away from them. While they ponder this, a mannikin comes out of the dress shop, dragging a dead Man in Black behind it.

Spotting them, it attacks, but the Garou kill it easily, and then the MiB wakes up. Apparently he's got nanites, which doesn't make Ambrose happy. He tells them that his group came to deal with the situation. Something had clued them in a while back, so last year, they genegineered the wheat crop so it'd let them track the town's inhabitants, as well as act as a dead man's switch. They can activate some enzyme and kill anyone who's eaten the crop.

He's not about to let this stand, and right now, killing him is more trouble than it's worth, so the MiB comes along while the group tracks down anybody still alive in the town. They get a bead on three people. One is a Nocker, holed up in his barn, who got hold of the Technocratic helicopter and...modified it. It can't fly anymore, but now it can turn into a giant robot. The MiB is displeased. The Nocker comes along, figuring hanging out with living death machines is better than waiting for mannikins to eat his face. His unusual arsenal gives Ambrose an idea; he grabs some shotguns from empty houses and starts to tinker with them.

The second guy is a pale mage who lives in a house with a vampire in the basement: a Tremere, judging by the weird altered Hermetic symbols Ambrose finds marked on the house in blood. The guy tries to chase them away, but the Garou sense badness in the basement and are determined, so a fight breaks out. The MiB pulls out a Thunderhead, second-B-est FG to be found. Jonas uses one of Ambrose's modded shotguns (now operating something like rocket launchers) to blow a hole in the roof, which works out well when someone else puts a hole in the floorboards, leaving the vampire exposed to sunlight. They knock out the mage, a ghouled Verbena, and take him along in some kind of extra-dimensional sack Tim has.

The third person is holed up in the general store. He's a totally normal guy who's just hiding out and has managed to survive. When the MiB voices his admiration, Ambrose recognizes the gleam in his eye and argues with him over recruitment. The man tells them that the mannikins showed up a week ago. Just before that, yellow-brick roads and scarecrows started popping up. Ambrose invites the guy along. Sonya, realizing he'll get totally messed up by the Delirium (not to mention other things, most likely) instead has RF knock him out and stuff him in Tim's bag.

Then mannikin police show up outside the store, and get blown up by Ambrose's shotgun-cum-rocket launchers. The Nocker calls his car and has it transform into a giant robot, at which point mannikins swarm out of the surrounding houses. The group runs.

So now they get to follow the yellow brick road, which yes indeed, runs through town. They get attacked by monkeys, of course, which draw back and simply watch from a distance once they realize there are Garou in the group. When they hit the poppy field, Ambrose and Jonas pass out and have to be carried out and woken up. To everyone else's combined amusement and irritation, Ambrose and the MiB keep sniping at each other: "Your fake ether..." "It wasn't fake until you published that essay!"

In thiws way, they reach the "Emerald City." Which looks like it's half city and half hospital. Nurses, doctors, and orderlies wander about, ignoring the group completely. Aila, the Nocker, and Tim start nattering about Silent Hill, which annoys Sonya and the MiB.

The group splits up, one half going upstairs, and the others down. Ambrose notes that some of the "people" wandering around are only illusions of people, or maybe after-images, visible memories. Others, the fae say, are chimera.

Upstairs, Sonya and the MiB spot a drug-runner they know works for some eastern European vampires. He looks deformed. Sonya thinks he might be a fomori. She also notes an unusual number of burly orderlies. Jared gets to a computer, where he's able to confirm that this was a mental hospital.

Downstairs, they spot a weird-looking, crazy-eyed doctor with bad dress sense and a special badge that says "Access Area O." There are huge orderlies down there, too. Following Wild-eyed Doctor through the door, Ambrose memorizes the passcode he enters. The doctor seems kind of...more real than the rest. He follows a long hallway with a door at the end marked "Patient prime," where he talks with a nurse about a 'worsening condition.' The employees here wear "Autumn Health Care" logos. When Ambrose tries to memorize the code for the "Patient Prime" door, he gets caught in a flash of light and goes missing. After the flash, the doctor talks as if he's just come out of the room, and he's carrying a blood sample he didn't have before. They keep along in the doctor's wake, accumulating more passcodes, to a large lab. In there, the doctor waits until lab techs leave, then he drinks the blood.

Upstairs, the fae feel a pulse or tremor and an orderly heads upstairs. They spot the Autumn Health Care logo, too. The orderly heads to a man in an office who seems relaxed, menacing, and in charge.

Ambrose wakes in the hallway, but he's not in the fuzzy-edged dreamworld anymore. He sneaks into another hall, avoiding orderlies, then hides from some giant freaky Silent Hill-looking dogs in an A/C vent. In there, he hears voices echoing through from a nearby room where two men are arguing over a patient. One sounds Russian, and talks like he's in authority. They sound angry that something hasn't happened. Spying through the vent, Ambrose sees a doctor saying something about "you can't rush Awakenings." The Russian ignores him, wanting a timetable stepped up because a Tremere from the "camarilla" is in town.

The group downstairs continues to observe the wild-eyed doctor, who is typing notes on a dangerous experiment with the patient that he thinks should wait due to her instability. But it's "James'" orders (apparently the annoyed guy who was talking to the Russian isn't really a doctor). The group wonders if the experiment is what caused all this. They want to find Ambrose but don't know where to look.

The upstairs crew follows the orderly and the menacing man down an elevator behind the office that exits below basement level, where they overhear the same conversation Ambrose just heard. Speaking of whom, Ambrose pops back into the dreamworld when his friends enter, and slithers out of the vents to join them.

Heading out, they meet up with the other half of the group, then catch up to the doctor who's carrying a horrible helmet covered with spikes and hermetic symbols. Ambrose waves the MiB up, and they look it over, wondering if it's Nephandic. At any rate, they confirm that it makes them both feel sick.

He heads back to Patient Prime's room, where Ambrose catches the door code this time. Patient Prim is an 8 year old girl. The doctor straps the repulsive helmet to her head and pumps in quintessence (they do indeed spot a Nephandic symbol on the helmet when the doctor moves his hand). Something seems to go wrong with his readings, because he suddenly calls in the other doctors, and then pulsing colors and waves of energy erupt from the little girl.

The surroundings start to fade in, edges sharpening. The Dauntain comes in, quite pleased with the result. Then there's a rainbow explosion, which throws Ambrose into the wall.

When it clears, there's a twisted black tree that rises as far as their eyes can follow. Nothing to do but climb up--at which point, Ambrose and the MiB both demonstrate that they have anti-gravity devices. The little girl is lying unconscious at the top. Jared gets the helmet off her, and they note that the tree wasn't made by her. She's fine, but her chrysalis energy was corrupted by the helmet. Noting that the tree looks like a prison that got busted open, they work out that the point was to do exactly that.

Closer inspection shows that the helmet was created by a Thig Hermetic. Rey does psychometry on the tree: he sees it transplanted from the Milderwood. He sees the tree split open and a person all in white with a mask, beautiful but frightening, emerge. She leaves with the Dauntain--a Fomorian of the White Court. The mage was tossed away by the explosion, the crazy-eyed doctor--a vampire--simply fades out of sight via some power of his.

They need to get the girl out of here. Emily wipes out the MiB (the sudden violence toward a guy who'd been helping them alarms Ambrose), Ambrose removes the quintessence batteries from the helmet and has them smash it. He plans to rig a car to explode and send it at the building, but they run into more mannikins outside. He lobs a smoke grenade and frag grenade at them. Garou smash! Ambrose hardens the smoke to trap mannikins; the Nocker summons the copter-bot. Rey hides the girl. Ambrose uses electro-magnetic fields to wrap fire around the robot, after which the trashing reaches its climax.

Letting the robot guard their rear, they get the hell out of the town. At the edge, they see an overturned Bentley and a copter taking off. Sonya throws Aila at the copter. She grabs the side, tears the door off, snags the klaive and Dr. Tillingtast (who's wrapped up and drugged), falls backward in a flip to land on her feet.

When the copter comes around to confront them, Ambrose shoots the copter with one of the rigged shotguns, taking it out.

His phone rings. "Dr. Quintrell..." "You blew up my house!" he shouts, and hangs up.

Dr. Tillingtast, still uncionscious, teleports away. He must've been on a dead man's switch. The group, with more important things to do, heads toward the freehold. The canister the Klaive is in is locked up to crazy levels and wrapped in anti-magic. Sonya considers simply tearing it open, but gets distracted by HITMarks on motorcycles chasing them. Rey, driving, takes off. Sonya shoots out a bike tire, the bike flips, the HITMark lands, throws the bike at them and keeps chasing. Aila starts tearing out seats from the car and throwing them. Ambrose dives under the dashboard to soup up the car, then his phone rings. "Dr. Quintrell," the MiB asks, "why do you keep answering your phone?" A horrible screeching dissonant noise erupts from the speaker, disorienting everyone in the car. Tim grabs the phone and calls back with a Gift that gives the answerer a bladder control problem. Jared turns the pavement to mud.

Then a guy on a motorcycle and a man on a goat joust with the HITMarks, which lets Rey outdistance them and reach the freehold.

Jonas opens the Klaive case. Jared looks sick. Ambrose's phone rings again. Ambrose almost doesn't answer, but this time it's Mark, asking if things are okay, and if he ran into Technocrats. "I trust you, but people are talking about you plagiarizing your last two papers." Que one enormous rant from Ambrose about the Technocracy being jerks.

The group takes care of the Verbena, arranging for him to be shipped off to a Verbena chantry, and the shopkeeper, who will pleasantly not remember his trauma, and then they spend the night at the freehold. The next day, they head back with the Kin Jared saved.

It's three days from Halloween, and the fae go on the warpath. There's a Fomorian loose!

The Garou, anticipating a nice calm rest for a couple of days before the next crazy adventure, return to their caern in Chicago. It's surrounded by Weaver-smelling police tape.

Aila: "Oh my god, they took our caern!"

Enter Tillingtast part 2: Back to England

Not even 24 hours later, Dr. Quintrell is made to eat his words when he's accosted by a British urchin child with another invitation from Dr. Tillingtast. The kid is persistent, and though Ambrose inexpertly tries to politely extricate himself from the invitation, he feels sorry enough for the boy to invite him to dinner. The child begs off, muttering something that sounds like "the steak isn't rare enough."

But Tillingtast looks to be playing a role in events, so information-gathering is called for. In their research, the changelings and Ambrose quickly turn up the fact that Quinn and Tillingtast are connected. Quinn holds a seat in the House of Lords, for which Dr. Tilliingtast is a scientific advisor. He is also mega-rich, and work is classified by the British government. Or, well, technically some secret society/conspiracy group thereof.

Sonya ships out some of her collected info on Giovanni activities to Interpol and other Garou positioned to make use of it. She holding some back because the wraith has given her enough dirt that, timed properly, it could stagger the clan when the Garou need a major distraction for something significant. In return, her contacts tell her the Giovanni are putting out feelers for anything they can learn about werewolves. The intelligence community, which combats them as organized crime with a weird occult edge, reports that some Giovanni tried to enact some crazy ritual in Italy. Sonya recognizes the rite as one used to control an ancestor spirit, but there's no sign whether it worked or not.

Contacts in MI5 tell her that Quinn's group is more of a conspiracy thing, a group called the "Harbingers of Avalon." Technically speaking, they're a circle of businessmen who want the Empire back. They're obsessed with King Arthur, think the world's destiny is the British Empire and that it'll save the world or something. Between the lines, Sonya recognizes a possibility of Technocracy ties. Dr. Tillingtast builds technology for them. She also collects the interesting tidbit that Sir Quinn has a prosthetic mechanical hand, but no one talks about it because the last person who mentioned it vanished along with their whole family and all their pets.

Jared is called in by the fae to dig up Sir Quinn's genealogy. His family started Irish, but after they were anglicized, they set about eradicating all Irish ties. Quinn's family helped the potato famine along just to kill off the Celtic branch of the family, and those were the mundanes!

They all gather for a meeting at Dreamsoft, where they meet the Fiona knight Emily, who's a cousin of Jonas. Dreamsoft's connections say that Dr. Tillingtast is building something huge. Ambrose requests a description of Tillingtast's equipment from Faris, and rest of the group decides that the easiest course is to have Ambrose visit Tillingtast, much to his dismay. Jared and Ray will go along, since Tillingtast apparently believes that the fae--especially sidhe--are god-like aliens from whom the British were descended and are here to save the world.

Tillingtast's manor is just outside a pretty old-fashioned English town. He's practically a caricature of a broad English gentleman. For example:
Jared and Tillingtast: "Is it Jared with one D or two Ds?" "One." "BULLY!"
Ray and Tillingtast: "Toffee, excellent." "Care for some, sir?" "No, I have to cut back on the sweets. I'm getting HUUUUGE."

Dr. Tillingtast sits them all down for a two-hour excerpt of one volume of his Greatness of the British documentary series. "Since making this, we've discovered that the English are even MORE spectacular than previously thought." He shows them some pictures of the globe, with bits belonging to the British Empire blocked out in red. Past, present (claiming a number of spots that aren't in fact British), and the future--which is all red, including the oceans. He also displays a picture of the "Enemies of the British Empire" which is everything except Britain. Obviously interested in showing them more, he hesitates over whether he can trust Ambrose's companions...so the fae reveal their seemings. He hits the floor and kowtows backward out of the room.

In the town, the others explore. A little old man/lady rambles about how the town is nicer, Dr. T owns everything, the vampires get a couple of tourists each month, and a lot of jobs are supported by working on his secret project. Which is quite a lot of startling information from an apparently mundane old lady...man. Vampires?

S/he also complains about the emopunk kids who hang out at the arcade every night. Jonas and Aila take that cue and stop by. They meet an Etherite girl named Miriam who talks about crystal tech. She says people have to go help out at the manor sometimes.

Back at the manor, once he recovers from the shock of having his lords and masters drop in, Tillingtast lays out his Grand Plan:
Step 1: Be English.
Step 2: Build a time machine to go back and change the course of the British Empire. He shows schematics for this machine, powered by "beast people things." "Now, I am not saying that we have killed people, because we do not. But, almost." He's using Kinfolk blood as a conductor for the power, with the help of some vampires (Giovanni). His target: "And hopefully...kill Ghandi!" Along with several other people they've tagged as needing to go (George Washington, for example). He also mentions that if all that fails, the backup plan is simply to rebuild the Empire through political maneuvering.

He explains that they stole a Garou artifact called the First Klaive. It's a desirable object for its age, because the machine will allow them to travel through time for the extent of the item's lifetime. He mentions that other vampires have been poking around, apparently unhappy with the attention his project has been drawing.

On the way out, Dr. Tillingtast agrees to give them a tour of his work tomorrow, then arranges a ride back to town. The vampire urchin shows up again as Tillingtast's chauffeur. On the drive back, he lets slip that he's a 345 year old spy for London's Prince.

The rest of the group patrol the town, find a vampire running the local grocery, and get answers to some questions from him. Turns out, he was sent by London's Prince, too (but he won't name the Prince). He tells them that three Giovanni are staying at Tillingtast's manor, and is able to give them some information about Tillingtast's security measures. Since he's so cooperative and seems to be helping out, the Garou don't kill him.

Aila talks to Miriam again. She says Dr. Tillingtast needs to steal a crystal from the Dr. Who convention they drove past on the way out of London, and also she knows where the Kinfolk are.

The next day on the tour, they discover that Tillingtast has Gremlins, not Nockers, helping him. Ambrose gets a photo of the First Klaive, which is hooked into a machine, and investigates the time machine. It's constructed to spin so fast that it vibrates through time...or else explodes. When he spots robots acting as security guards, equipped with Havoc Guns, he tries to warn his companions: "In the world of BFGs, these are the B-fest, Effing Gs." After that, assured of his guests' trustworthiness, Tillingtast reveals the next step of his plan: he needs to get the crystal from the Dr. Who convention, and he expects Ambrose to steal it for him.

The Garou look up the old lady/man again. It turns out to be the Nuwisha, Tim Runningaway. He tells them Tillingtast has 112 Kinfolk locked up to power that machine, the machine is being constructed in an Umbral pocket, and that yes, he can get in and out (Nuwisha, as Sonya grumblingly observes, get into everything). He tells them about a research assistant named Melanie, who vanished the same time as the Gremlins showed up. She had previously worked for him all over the world, but only stayed at his house for about a day before she disappeared.

The group heads out to the convention, which is a front for an Etherite expo. When he spots a Doc Eon Action Jacket up for raffle, Ambrose can't resist throwing in for it. Nobody there knows Melanie, whom he was hoping might be an Etherite, but he forgets all about that stuff when the guy with the crystal sets up his presentation. The crystal is from Shard Realm Time, and is surrounded by a small force shield. Studying it, Ambrose realizes that the crystal is constantly bombarded by energies from a pinhole gateway into the Pulse, which sets it vibrating. He notes that the presenter is wearing a Doc Eon time watch...which is really odd...

But the Garou poke him back to current matters. They need to get that gizmo. It turns out to be easy enough. After Ambrose tells him the best way to distract all the Etherites, Tim the Nuwisha makes illusionary HITMarks to draw out the Etherite crowd while the others grab the device. Tim snags the Action Jacket, and they split.

There's no way they're giving the real thing to Tillingtast. This device is way too dangerous. Instead, Ambrose creates a fake machine and with the fae's assistance designs a fake crystal, then they take the duplicate to Dr. Tillingtast and plan to return the real one to its rightful owner.

When he gets the doohickey, Tillingtast shows them the inside of the time machine. Ambrose is distracted by a voice that keeps returning to whisper dire predictions over his shoulder. When he sees the reflection of a Paradox spirit in the glass, he nearly freaks out, making excuses to run to the bathroom so he doesn't hyperventilate in public. There, he senses the remnants of a chaotic surge of energy. When he tells the fae, they think it might've been a fae going into Chrysalis. Melanie?

While Tillingtast wanders off to take care of something, Ambrose brainstorms a way to shut the machine down. What they need is to keep the power from building up in the control spire so that the machine never activates. He explains that if it does activate without anyplace for the energy to go, it'll probably explode in epic manner, possibly taking a chunk out of the Umbra and maybe even the Dreaming along with earth. He rigs up a power sink, disguising it cleverly among the structure of the machine.

Dr. Tillingtast invites Ambrose to be one of the people on the time travel expedition. He says Sir Quinn will inspect the machine on Halloween. Then he gives Ambrose a teleportation device for emergency escapes.

Back in town, the Garou find a dead body. Looks like someone was being turned into a cyborg, except that all the robotic bits are completely meaningless and non-functional. RF volunteers to do the autopsy for the town officials (they're short a doctor at the moment), so he can get a closer look. Then weird time ripples start affecting the town. During one, someone in the group spots a woman in a lab coat wandering around.

Collecting at the hotel, Ambrose realizes that some kind of energy flux is interfering with the containment field on the crystal. It could be Melanie, if that chaotic energy is still clinging to her. Guessing that she's the woman in the lab coat, Ambrose traces her resonance and they track her down to the town park--except no one's there. Betting she's out of time-phase, Ambrose leaves a note on the fountain saying they want to help and asking her to reply. A moment later, he spots new writing on it: "I don't believe in fairies."

He spots her reflection in the fountain: a young woman in a lab coat, cables, cybernetics, and circuitry winding through her flesh in meaningless patterns. She reaches out for him from the water, and he throws himself backward, then takes a more cautious second look. Sure enough, she's got the Iteration X symbol on her coat. She's an Iterator gone Marauder.

Well, what do you do about that? Ambrose has a crisis of morality, announcing dramatically, "I can think of one thing, but I'll never be able to live with myself it if works." The others demand an explanation before he does something stupid, but he fails at communicating his thoughts coherently, so instead he simply walks over and writes, "You had a visual malfunction. You know the Computer is right."

It works. She pops back into reality, standing in the fountain. Thanking him, she invites him to Autochtonia. He could come with her, she says, since the Computer is calling her back. He stammers his way out of that one, of course, and feels awful.

With that sorted, they go to bed. Ambrose, not sleeping well to begin with, has a dream about a Sidhe who adores the Union. The guy seemingly walks into Ambrose's dreams to congratulate him on the job well done, and tries to convince him that cold reason is good. Ambrose at first thinks he's a figment, then gets upset about being fed the Union's party line from a faerie. During their discussion, the fae tells him that Sir Quinn wants the machine to explode so that he can combine the wreckage into a perfect mythic Britain.

Next morning, Ambrose receives a cookie bouquet with a 'thank you' note and mirrorshades that let him see Time. He's very upset. The others, giving up on getting any complete sentences out of him before lunch, take the crystal gizmo to a London freehold (ruled by one Berwin Lindell of Oxforshire) to keep it safe.

At Tillingtast's, gremlins are loading Glamour into boxes attached to the machine. While he's off ordering the gremlins about, the group develops a plan. Jared will disconnect the Kinfolk. Ambrose will disconnect the Klaive. Ambrose quickly rigs a sonic structural integrity disrupto which they can use to shatter the glass through which the Kinfolk blood is flowing. The Garou and Tim will head in via the Umbra and hold off the robots and whatever else turns up to stop them. This'll be during the day, so they won't have to worry about the Giovanni.

It all goes according to plan. Jared impales the gremlins (Tillingtast: "You accidentally killed our Nockers, m'lord!"), then turns on Tillingtast, who turns out to have an impenetrable forcefield. Seeing Ambrose already over by the Klaive, he calls to him to protect the Klaive and run away with it. "Sure thing!" Ambrose replies.

Meanwhile, the blood vats crack and blood floods everywhere--enough to wake three sleeping vampires into frenzy. The three Giovannis come ripping in through the ceiling after it, but they're less interested in combat than food. Sonya snags one of the Havoc Guns and fires, jolted when the thing blows away two of them at once. Everyone kind of freezes for a second, because it's a really big bang. Tillingtast tells her to put the gun down before she does something disastrous with it. For once, she thinks he might be right.

The third Giovanni, driven out of torpor by pure shock, gets splatted by Jonas. Ambrose gets Aila to throw him across the wreck of the room toward the door, but in the hall he gets caught by the Sidhe from his dream (a Dauntain, the other fae informed him), who tries to take the Klaive away. He refuses to let go. They fight over it, till Jared and Ray get out there to jump the Dauntain. Jared slices him open with his Dusk Sword. "What the hell...was that?!" the Dauntain demands. "Oh god, it hurts!" A spider nervosa appears to protect him.

Then everything goes to hell when a Drone shows up, which turns out to be a werewolf stuck in Crinos with an illusion around him. At that point, Dr. Tillingtast extracts himself from the wreckage in the lab, zaps the Klaive with some weird ray, then teleports himself away. Ambrose rips the emergency teleporter off his arm, not wanting to get zapped away after him. Tim snatches it up and destroys the Drone by teleporting it into the time machine, which is full of Glamour all set to react to a massive infusion of Banality.

But the Klaive is disappearing. Its essential Pattern seems to have been teleported away, and the rest of it is fading out to follow. Ambrose is able to freeze the pattern into place, but that leaves them with a very strange phenomenon of two instances of the First Klaive, both of which are the "true" one. And Tillingtast has the other.

The Garou insist they need to go after it. The child vampire (presumably also awakened by the flood of hemoglobin), tells them that Tillingtast has a secret lab in Wales. Tillingtast then calls Ambrose and gives him the location and passcodes. So it's off to Wales for Round Two.

Enter Tillingtast

Sonya gets a vision. She doesn't recognize it, but it's the Gernsback Continuum, where she watches mages experiment with a Native American spear that has an evil spirit trapped inside it. The vision shifts to Victoria Station, and then to Darkside Moonbase. She tells the pack, and realizing this is mage stuff, they get Ambrose to explain the dream.

Elsewhere, Ambrose, stopping at a coffee shop to pick up lunch, finds a napkin with a note: "Head to Jellystone."

Meanwhile, the Gurahl Caleb is working at Yellowstone as a park ranger. He's been having trouble with a new Pentex subsidiary called Native Heritage Inc., which supposedly is a charitable organization for preservation of native and culturally important places and artifacts. Needless to say, their idea of preservation is somewhat unorthodox.

Currently, however, he's tracing the theft of a spear from the museum there, which was removed along with a Uktena banetender's staff. They were taken by a Raven Mocker, a corrupt crow spirit, who then lost it to some laser-wielding mages during its escape into the park. Caleb meets a Nuwisha who calls himself Tim Runningaway, and two federal agents who are investigating the case (the Project Twilight partners the group met before, in Pennsylvania). They're heading down to Arizona, where the spear was originally found.

Hearing of the theft and betting it's connected, the pack takes Ambrose out to Yellowstone with them to investigate this dream of Sonya's, and they encounter Caleb there. While they fill each other in, Ambrose pokes around with his gadgets and ends up following around a fomori who's wandering around the museum. He catches the fomori's attention, in fact, and stumblingly tries not to incriminate himself when the guy asks him what he's doing. Jonas drags him back out to the others as they prepare to leave.

Ambrose suggests they check out the Etherite science stations at Yellowstone before they go, and indeed the assistants there give them the names of the Etherites involved and explain what happened. They found the Raven Mocker trying to make off with the spear, shot it down, and then took the spear to the Gernsback to test it once they realized it was odd. They also are able to put clues together to figure out that a Lasombra stole the staff separately.

In Arizona, they learn that the cave complex--old copper mines, dug into an older cave complex--where the spear was found has been bought by the Venetian Equity Mining Corp. Sonya is suspicious, and rightfully so: digging through records turns up that one Antonio Giovanni is in charge of the company, along with stories that the mines are haunted. Sonya makes note of the court records, which point toward some judicial corruption (she stores that information for later use in legally getting the mines back into the proper hands).

RF finds them a Uktena caern not too far away. The Uktena there say that the spear contained an ancient mage spirit-talker named Desire on the Wind. He was an ancient Navajo badass, extremely evil, and knew where even worse objects were: a talisman called the "Wolf's Paw," which granted the fighting abilities of a werewolf, a book called the "Book of Rashalka" which was a legendary BSD artifact that was said to drive you mad if you read it, but also impart great abilities such as the power to wield plagues. It sounds almost like someone managed to set the Black Spiral to paper. The Uktena say that the spirit of the Banetender is said to still be locked in the spearhead with the mage.

Ambrose hacks into the Giovanni records, but gets himself possessed by a ghostly guardian. It takes off with his body, but before the Garou can catch up to him, he manages to force it out of him, then sucks it into a containment jar. Aila makes him release it, and once the ghost discovers he's in safe hands, he's willing to turn over all kinds of information on the Giovanni: the three Giovanni in town, where they're staying, what they want (the book and staff and spear; they think the spear holds a powerful ghost and that the staff can control it). One house is cordoned off. It looks like someone broke in, killed five people--one of whom was incinerated--in a huge struggle. The pack wonders if it was the Inquisition again. It also looks like the Giovanni sent ghouls into the mine.

Ambrose makes a note to self: learn to ward against umbral entities.

Heading into the mines (Ambrose makes a spirit-viewing flashlight), they find Navajo glyphs on the walls across the Gauntlet. The story is that the Uktena banetender hunted the mage and called on Coyote's help to stop him. Coyote gave the spear to the Uktena to guard.

They find a perimeter alert gizmo. Ambrose recognizes the construction as being distinctive to an Etherite by the name of Dr. Gavin Tillingtast. The man is British beyond British, vanished about 30 years ago, studied in similar fields to Ambrose. He was known as a Victorian throwback even among the Etherites. He believed spirits were evil, just about worshipped the fae, made alarming compacts with what he considered "pure" British spirits, and was into crazy revisionist British history.

Making their way onward, the group gets attacked by shadow tendrils. One grabs Ambrose, whisking him off to a dark room where a Lasombra who was apparently hired on wants to know what they're doing there. The Lasombra's just interested in money and entertainment. He has three ugly Nosferatu or something with him. He calls Ambrose a warlock (which Ambrose vocally disapproves of), a Hermetic and a Tremere, refuses any gift or trade when Ambrose tries to talk his way free, and finally deciding not to get involved, lets the Etherite go and vanishes into the murk.

The others arrive just afterward, and united again, they all head down to a ritual room where they're attacked by bane-possessed bats. Aila beats up a spectre (noting that there are many in the area), then steps sideways into the Shadowlands, where she spots a Giovanni, three spectres, and two guys in Pentex lab coats hauling up something from a chasm.

Ambrose rigs up a half-built prototype of a gizmo that thins the barrier between worlds enough to basically just dump them all into the Shadowlands, and they all fight. Sonya knocks the Pentex guys into the chasm while the others tear the spectres apart. A Sluagh turns up to snag a book out of the chasm with his prehensile tongue. Ambrose disrupts the Sluagh's pattern (Rubs the Bones) with a sonic attack, Sonya spin-kicks him into the chasm, and Aila catches the book, which tries to possess her. She calls it a "pervert." RF claws apart the Giovanni, but after it gives him puppy-dog eyes, Ambrose refuses to finish the job on the vampire because he feels too bad about killing someone who's helpless. The Giovanni takes advantage and mind-whammies him so Ambrose will defend him, and then an armband he's wearing starts beeping. Ambrose, who isn't thinking straight, bends down to have a look and gets teleported away along with the vampire.

They get whisked to Dr. Tillingtast's manor in England, where Tillingtast offers him tea and a thirty-minute movie about the glory of the British. Ambrose gets kidnapped by Tillingtast's hunchback (actually the Nuwisha), who stamps him on the forehead with something and tosses him into the English countryside.

A helicopter shows up as he climbs to his feet. "Oh, COME ON!" Ambrose shouts, then waves his hands in futility and turns to walk away. The MiB--seemingly the same one as usual--is incredulous: "Are you walking away?", and shoots him in the knee with a novocaine dart. Ambrose can't get very far when he can't feel his leg.

They argue about who's bad for reality (MiB: "Reality is a 98-year-0ld man on life support." Ambrose; "Well, he wouldn't be so stodgy if you lot hadn't stiffened up his joints!"). The Technocrat is mad about all the dimension-hopping Ambrose has been doing. Ambrose defends that it wasn't his idea! He was kidnapped by a hunchback! This understandably produces a weird look from the MiB, who asks, "Do you expect me to believe that?" Ambrose, ignoring him, announces he'll take a plane back. The MiB thinks he's being naive.
MiB: "When's the last time you had a reasonable conversation with someone who wasn't a Technocrat, Dr. Quintrell?"
Ambrose: "You have no room to talk!"
MiB: "Deep down, you know we're right."
Ambrose: "I think a passenger plane is a perfectly reasonable method of crossing the Atlantic!"

Then there's another metaphor about stealing reality's liver, which eventually they give up on. "We're stretching that metaphor an awful lot," the MiB concedes. After which he offers him a ride back in the black helicopter, which Ambrose passionately refuses.

Ambrose then calls Mark, intending only to let him know where Ambrose has gotten to, but Mark just teleports him back. Ambrose grumbles about the MiB being right, and his fit of pique isn't helped when a letter arrives saying, "Told you so."

The Garou drop the book off with the Uktena, but not before it produces some weird dreams in its attempts to tantalize someone into picking it up and reading it. Then they head back to Chicago. Upon arrival, a letter comes from Dr. Tillingtast, inviting Ambrose back to show him proper hospitality and apologizing for "those random hunchbacks we've been having. This is the third one in two weeks. Have to put up strips or spray or something..."

"I'll never go back to England!" Ambrose swears.

Through the gates of the silver key

A free-for-all of key-grabbing ensues. Two Setites come burrowing through the sand, but before they can engage, an enormous spaceship crests the rise. Ambrose calls it a Vader, says it's a Technocracy ship, and suggests they all run for their lives. They flee out of the Umbra to the west, coming out in the desert, and follows a road they encounter toward Cairo. Something's off, but at first the Garou just put it down to the strangeness of the western desert. They do note they have trouble getting their technological gear to work when Sonya tries to check her cell phone's GPS.

Eventually, a sign informs them that they are in fact somehow in the year 1468, on a road protected by the Order of Reason. After dodging Order members and mage-related chaos three times, they find some Striders to talk to in Cairo, and Mark and Ambrose realize that they've been avoiding the First Cabal.

The Striders suggest they go to Karnak, where they talk to more Striders and some Bubasti, with whom they trade information. The Bubasti show them prophecies from a book, which Ambrose sneaks a photo of while they're not paying attention to him. While studying the photo, images of the depicted prophecies erupt from the picture, showing the Dark Man trapped in a crystal deep in the Umbra, from which he escapes.

They work out that they're probably being held in place by the effects of the key, so they want to find Aila's past life, which they locate as being out in the desert. Heading that way, some of the group fall into quicksand, which drops them into a stone hallway covered in twisted heiroglyphs.

While they try to find their way out, the others above get into a fight with Ajaba. RF owns their mamas. Into the fray comes a flying BSD with a child riding it. Jonas blows away the BSD, while Aila messes up the Setite child riding it, and RF finishes the thing right after it completes a stylish jump-off-and-land maneuver.

The people underground follow the hallway to a large hall where they find the Nephandus Batini
sitting on a throne, waiting for him. He opens some kind of unpleasant chasm in front of them, and they decide not to stick around to see what comes out. They head off running the other direction, meet up with the rest of the group, and flee to the safety of the caern they were heading for.

There, they manage to find Aila's past life, who is the priest in the vision she had. A Mokole who's staying at the caern heads out and tears apart the things the Nephandus had called up to chase them (Ambrose spends some time being flabberghasted at the militant dinosaur, then asks if there are any more alarming shapeshifters he ought to know about), then agrees to help them deal with the key. They install the key within the priest (it's really just a manifested bit of spirit energy), thus rendering the key permanently inaccessible through a temporal loop and breaking them out of the time period they'd been held in. Back in the modern day, they make their way back to Cairo, stopping in an oasis town for the night.

There, all the inn's guests get turned into zombies, whom the Garou have little trouble shredding. A couple of vampires turn up, and they get deaded quite quickly too. The Nephandus comes in, and Aila and Sonya jump him. He narrowly escapes death, leaving them irritable and unsatisfied.

A werespider turns up in the hallway with Ambrose, who shouts, "You said there weren't any more I should know about!" At a loss for what to do, he sprays the thing with bug spray. It--he--is completely offended by this, takes the can away and sprays him with it in retaliation. Ambrose: "Hey, that stuff's toxic!" Aila tries to make Ambrose apologize, but he won't, and the Ananasi sprays him again--at which point he becomes quite adamant about refusing.

The Garou are suspicious of the werespider's presence, and the werespider himself, but choose to accept his explanation that he was in the area and came over to see what was happening. With all that out of their hair (for the moment), they finally make it back to Cairo and then catch a flight back to the US.

The Silver Key

Following their harrowing visit to the Midnight Circus (relevant post forthcoming), the pack hie themselves back to the caern to crash and lick their wounds. It sure did suck, but they rescued a young werewolf, and that makes it worth it.

Aila has a dream: she sees a pipeline slinking along the course of the Nile, built by Pentex. A priest in a temple watches her during a burial procession. She sees a heartstone placed into the sarcophagus, and then a vampire and a man with serpent eyes break in to steal it.

She wakes out of the dream and talks to a Theurge about it, who thinks it's a warning vision sent by a spirit. He recognizes the Great Western Desert, which is where that tomb must've been, but says no sane Garou passes through there. Perhaps, he thinks, the tomb was a mage's. They're crazy enough to bury themselves in the Umbra. That a heartstone was buried with the body seems to indicate an expectation of resurrection... Aila tells her pack about the dream, and they agree. "I wonder who the priest was who saw you," muses Sonya. "I suppose we'll never know," Aila responds. "Oh, I don't know about that," Sonya replies.

In the morning, Sonya leaves to take care of paperwork and do some research on this "Apophis pipeline," which is the name Aila saw for it in the dream. Sure enough, it's a pipeline in the early stages of construction, still tied up in red tape and politics. Following her curiosity, she looks into this so-called "Technocracy" of the mages that the pack now remembers--mainly by dint of reading between the lines, now that she has an idea what to look for--and sure enough, if you listen to what people aren't saying, there are certain hints. Notably, things in the vicinity of Egypt sound a bit too normal.

Aila goes to talk to Faris, hoping the Eshu can tell them something about these visions. RF hunts up and recruits Mark for their little venture, and Mark leaves a phone message for Ambrose, mentioning he should keep a bag packed, just in case. RF then visits Dr. Clark, the mummy women they met before, and she offers to open her personal library to their research.

Ray the Pooka, meanwhile, gets handed the keys to a Nocker car: the Carmeleon X1, a car that can change into six different shapes, go submersible, and has a mysterious red button. The Nocker notes that it cannot fly. Ray will be the "special driver" for Dreamsoft, as well as their resident pilot.

Dr. Clark and RF catch up to Aila at the arcade, where she headed since she got done with her task early. Aila is having problems with her quarters--they all keep turning into ancient Egyptian coins ("I have magic pockets!"). Luckily, the machine seems to take them, so she ends up playing a game that seems to be another vision. She watches the vampire and the snake-eyed man sacrifice their guide over the heartstone, which apparently does nothing, and then get attacked by bedouins. One of the bedouins grabs the stone and runs away with it. Aila's game involves playing the bedouin (who's a werewolf) as he escapes from the teleporting, lightning-throwing serpent-eyed man. Eventually, the werewolf reaches an Umbra-storm, into which he throws the stone, then turns at bay to confront the man and the vampire.

Once they catch up to each other, the pack and Mark go to Dr. Clark's house to do more research. Aila has another vision while reading, of the stone being picked up in the Umbra by a man whose face is wrapped in scarves. She thinks there's something familiar about him. The man puts the stone in a box, locks it, and takes it to a bar on the outskirts of Cairo, sometime in the 1920s. On hearing this, Sonya snags a couple of maps and compares locations, narrowing it down to two bars--one called the Scorpion's Pit and another once named Maat's Hand, now known as Tommy's. They discuss the "familiarity" of the shrouded man. On thinking about it, Aila says he moves like Faris does--as if he's absolutely sure of where he's going. Perhaps he's an Eshu?

Ambrose, meanwhile, smells ozone. "Use the door!" he calls out, and hears someone knock somewhat sheepishly shortly after. It's the lightning-bolting Hermetic again. Taking a cup of coffee, the Hermetic declaims, "It has been forseen..." "Egypt, right?" interrupts Ambrose. "It has-- What?" "Something about a pipeline?" continues the Etherite. "Um, no," says the Hermetic, whom Ambrose then motions to encouragingly. The Hermetic raises his arms grandly, then stops when he sees the packed bag. "What's that? Well, what the heck am I here for, if you're already planning to leave?" Ambrose tries to soothe the messenger's ruffled feathers by assuring him that he believes in the importance of the visions. The messenger snarkily asks, "Well how do you know? I suppose it's some of your Science? Some--" "Answering machine," answers Ambrose, who punches the button to replay Mark's message. The Hermetic smashes the machine with his staff, which Ambrose protests, then mutters, "I will rebuild it. Better--" "Faster, yes. I get it." "Seriously. I'm going to give it legs," Ambrose snipes. After a few more moments of encouraging the guy to give him the rest of the message, he finally learns that the heartstone houses an Avatar, which the mage had put there so it wouldn't reincarnate without him. Werewolves are destined to find it, but they'll need the help of mages... "Well, sure, to deal with an Avatar," comments Ambrose. "Yeah, sure, that's it," says the mage, who then disappears in a thunderclap. Ambrose is taken aback for a second before realizing that was only an illusion. The guy made for the door. Ambrose catches up to him to ask what he meant by that last crack, and the guy reluctantly scribbles it on a paper, seals it, and hands it to him. "You'll just yell at me if I tell you. Open it when I leave." Ambrose does so, and finds out that there's a snake-eyed Ahl-i-Batin Nephandus who's after this Avatar.

He calls Mark to fill him in, and Mark spreads the word to the Garou. They end up flying out to Egypt the next day. Aila has yet another vision on the way, while watching the Mummy, about Pentex buying out the bar in question (which makes it Tommy's). In Cairo, they discover that Faris booked them an entire floor of a hotel. The showoff. There, when Mark turns on the TV, Aila gets yet another vision, of the Nephandus and three vampires raiding the bar, only to find the box's hiding place empty. When she mutters something, the Nephandus turns to look at her.

She thinks that was very recent, so it's off to the bar to check it out while Aila and some of the others stay at the hotel in case the Nephandus is watching her (the mages explain about Correspondence and scrying). Aila settles down to watch TV, only to find herself having another vision about the shrouded man...except it's not a vision, it's the movie, Lawrence of Arabia. It was T. E. Lawrence?

The bar is somewhat trashed. Ray, the Pooka pilot, goes with them, and discovers that the place used to be a freehold but has since passed on. But he can follow the balefire to another freehold, where the residents tell them that the previous owners of the bar temporarily moved to a nearby museum. They get the address and head over to talk to them. Meanwhile, Ambrose, Sonya, and Faris scope out the Dreaming side of Tommy's. They find nothing, but on their way out, Ambrose finds himself hijacked, yet again, by a MiB...who wants to know what's with the pattern of showing up at the site of Nephandic trouble. Ambrose protests his innocence, sniping, "If you find out why this keeps happening, I would love to know," to which the MiB cheerfully agrees to have the Statisticians look into it all for him. Alarmed, Ambrose insists that's not what he meant, prompting the MiB to respond, "Dr. Quintrell, I doubt you ever expected to hear this from a Man in Black, but no backsies!"

The three of them return to the hotel, where Aila tells them about the new visions. Quintrell gleefully sits down to watch the movie, glancing at Aila sharply when she tells them about T. E. Lawrence. Aila's next vision involves seeing the barkeeper pass the box to a vampire who's out during the daytime...which Dr. Clark believes might be a Child of Osiris, a group of vampires so rare that even she believed them to be myth. The Daughters of Isis would know, she thinks.

At about this point, the Garou at the hotel realize they're being spied upon. Two ravens that aren't mere ravens (they're kind of icky and tainted) are sitting outside the window, and they take off when they realize they've been sighted. After Aila points them out, Ambrose gets a bead on them, and the group takes off in pursuit. Olesya drives while Ambrose hangs out the window trying to track the birds. "I can only see one of them; the other might be behind us!" he warns, right as the second raven takes war-form and makes a divebomb for the windshield.

One of the Garou uses Summon Earth Spirit to throw a rock wall up in front of it, then they spill out of the car. While they gang up on the first Corax, Ambrose nails the other, still in raven form, with a disorienting flash grenade. Aila and Jonas, now in Crinos (figuring, what the hell? Everybody on the street's already losing their minds) wrestle the first Corax to the ground. "We need something gold!" calls out the Galliard.

Frantically hunting around for something appropriate, Ambrose narrowly dodges three Razor Feathers the previously disoriented Corax zips at him. "Perfect!" he declares, as they embed themselves in the car near him. He pulls them out, turning them to gold, then turns around right into the path of the squawking, flapping assault-bird heading his way. Olesya grabs a feather, shifts into Crinos, and jumps on the thing in one smooth move, stabbing it in the head with the golden shaft.

The other Corax shifts to raven form, trying to escape, but Aila catches it easily in her enormous paws. Curious about these weird things, Ambrose moves in to look at the dead Corax while Olesya backs up...only to turn and grab the Volvo, pummeling the bird-thing into the pavement with it. Then she tears out the glove box, shoving their captive fowl into it.

The group heads on toward the museum in a stolen car, figuring to catch up with the others. Ambrose thinks he notices something strange about their surroundings, as if they're illusionary...but after a botch on a closer inspection, he decides not. Till a line of MiBs show up barricading the street. Olesya floors the gas, crashing through them.

Some of the MiBs chase them in decidedly inhuman ways. Not HITMarks, but Ambrose guesses Progenitor-created simulacrums. Drawing his gun, he picks a couple off the buildings to discourage pursuit. The Garou in the car warn their compatriots at the museum that there could be a trap.

In the museum, everything's eerily quiet, in fact. The night staff seem to be rather absent...but nothing threatening is going on. Olesya runs the car right up the steps of the museum, past two upset security guards. Waving his hand in their faces, Ambrose intones, "These aren't the droids you're looking for." Though he has no Mind magic, this confuses them enough that the group waltzes right past before they can even react.

Now together, the characters all notice that...nothing's really happening. Ambrose and Mark think they can feel a spatial twitch of some sort, though. Ambrose wonders aloud if they just accidentally wrecked a Technocratic trap for a certain Nephandus...and then the Garou start smelling something foul. Ambrose begins spinning an effort to manipulate the building's stone walls, if necessary, and the Garou clue in that they're surrounded by currently invisible zombies. The Etherite calls for everyone to gather around him, and then he drops the ceiling on the oozing bodies.

Well, they turn out to be simple corpses, not zombies, but the effort was a brave one, nonetheless. Just as they realize they're not in Cairo anymore (they've been relocated to the Western Desert...the damn Nephandus teleported them all!), the villain in question spins up out of a pile of sand with a suave greeting.

"Pretty stupid to bring us here," says Aila. "We don't have what you're after. You should've waited." "Ah," says the Nephandus, reaching toward her, "but you do." And he pulls a key seemingly out of her body...

Dear Diary

Went to the circus - it was evil. Saved some poor Windego girl who was brainwashed into thinking she was a Croatan. Fought Black Spirals and saw a ninja. Well, didn't really see a ninja, but the crazy ringmaster's pocket watch showed him kill an asian vampire. Go, Ninja! Apparently asian "vampires" aren't like normal ones. Can travel the umbra. Bad news. Mirror-mirror version of goofy scientist guy is a jerk. Crazy mages are called marauders and are creepy. Or maybe it was just the one guy. Don't care. Don't want to see any more of them.

Aila

The Midnight Circus

After all the doings in St. Clair, Ray and his carnival land themselves in Chicago, just in time to be bought out by Anastagio's Olde Time Lunar Carnival and Midnight Circus. Devyn Cavendish, the ringmaster and proprietor, hopes that Ray will stay on, offering him an excellent retainer for continuing as stunt driver for the new management.

When it opens in Chicago, the pack heads into the Circus because they hear rumors about a girl who turns into a werewolf...and it sounds alarmingly realistic. Ambrose heads in because he has heard stories about how the place fends off the Technocracy, and because of sheer curiosity. He's expecting changelings. The Garou are expecting nothing in particular. They're all severely disappointed.

At first, it all seems rather staid. Oh, sure, circuses have their little eccentricities, but...was that a vampire? Was that a mage? Is that a whole Renaissance Faire full of fae? Maybe this isn't quite so normal after all...

The werewolves start following the stench of Wyrm taint...which leads them to mysterious ninja assassins. Apparently, some mysterious woman--who's a vampire, except unlike any vampire the Garou have ever known--hired a man to take out the circus's medium.

In the end, Sonya talks to a spirit she saw the vampire conversing with to discover that she's some kind of Asian vampire called a kuei-jin, and for some reason she really, really wanted that medium--an 'akuma,' according to Cavendish's overheard words--dead. Which is all well and good, and something they can safely ignore (all the better if the creeps pick themselves off!) but that young 'werewolf' they came to investigate is indeed the real thing, and she's in desperate need of rescue and doesn't even know it.

While the Garou do their hero thing, Ambrose innocently attempts to uncover the secrets of the Circus. He keeps bumping into the Ringmaster, who seems like a charming enough fellow, if a little smarmy, and then has a couple of weird chats with the magician-in-residence, who's a vampire who can apparently work fae magic. Following the ringmaster's advice, Ambrose goes to meet the eccentric Dr. Owl, an inventor who runs the Museum of Oddities. They share their curiosity for strange critters, and the good Doctor spills his guts about the circus, letting on (among other things) that the Ringmaster is a Nephandus and the place is contracted with infernal powers. It (the conversation) seems to be going fairly well, in fact, till Dr. Owl shows Ambrose his latest project--an attempt to summon a demon into a sacrificial body!

Dr. Quintrell cements the fact that this place is bad news when he catches Cavendish having a conversation with a little girl in Dragon's Tongue. Then, roped into a second "consultation" with Dr. Owl, Ambrose tries to talk his way out of it as pleasantly as possible (Ambrose has exactly zero subtlety, but lucky for him Dr. Owl's equally oblivious), trying to retreat only to nearly run into Devyn on his way in!

Fortunately, Dr. Owl has enough rationality to realize this isn't necessarily the best situation, so he lets Ambrose out the back way, into the mirror maze. Figuring sight will only disorient him here, he closes his eyes and navigates by touch. This works till he feels his hand go into something soft and yielding...which turns out to be a reflection of him, come to life!

The reflection decides that it wants to replace him and take his life over. It nearly kills him before the werewolves come to the rescue in the nick of time. Finally, Cavendish realizes that the little game is up, and--being a betting man--he decides on a little wager: if they can find the way out of the circus by morning, then they're free to go. But that's easier said than done. The whole place is a tangle of realities and paths looping back upon themselves. They nearly manage to establish a path out by contacting Mark and establishing a link with him, but that falls through when Ambrose's doppelganger resurfaces and tries to kill him again.

Finally, when Dr. Owl comes out to chat one more time, Ambrose spots something: reality wobbles and fades in the old man's wake. A terrible suspicion creeps up on him...but feeling desperate, he decides to take the chance. He cons Dr. Owl into walking outside the borders of the Circus, motioning to the Garou to follow in his Marauderly wake.

Sure enough, it works. They escape the circus, much to Cavendish's ire (he calls Ambrose on his cell phone to accuse him of cheating). But that's just bitter dregs, right? They're home free...but they book it for safety, just in case.

And they gain a new friend! Ray the Chameleon Pooka has a sense for what's likely to get him killed or worse, and he books it along with them when they leave.

Rock-Paper-Scissors

Rose rearranged my desk again. I'm sure that once I find everything that it will make perfect sense to have it arranged that way. In the meantime, I can't find anything. Of course, it might be the Dreaming's way of telling me to stop working. Or Rose's...

She left her son's chemistry homework for me to proof. The boy is HOPELESS. And he makes the curse go haywire. At least his sisters know how to clean up the DDR pad before they leave. If I trip over another of his notebook's, I'm packing his ass up and sending him to Sylvan. I'll even pay for it myself to get him out of my hair.

I need a hair cut.

The trip to Appalachia was interesting. The Nanehi entertained RF and I with stories while we worked to cure the Bane Wind sickness. It was nice to be on the receiving end of thanks from the Nunehi rather than their ire. I get it, but you'd think they be more pissed off at the 'european' werewolves.

Speaking of which, I got to see a few Get of Fenris in their biggest form when that strange pack opened the story caern. Yeah, I can see how they would make awesome steeds.

Deirde decided that I have to plan one ceremony and she gets to plan the other. After losing rock-paper-scissors, I'm stuck with planning the Bonding. Note to self: Never play rock-paper-scissors against a seer. You will always lose. So I went to visit D's mother, the fay one. Thank the Dreaming, she remembered that D was her daughter and is happy to help with the arrangements. Hopefully, this means that she'll remember she's helping us when she can't remember anything else.

Guy has agreed to be my best man in both ceremonies. He's also been of more help to D than me. Typical. I've got a couple acquaintances in House Dougal working on a dress for D, a new set of armor for me, and jewelry. Yes. I know that giving her jewelry for the exchange is cliche, but I'm old fashioned and have no problem layering her in gold and jewels.

D wants a destination wedding. She's looking at Hawaii. Apparently, her mother, the other one, knows somebody and can get us a sweet deal on a group getaway. When D decides that we're doing this, I'm making her go to Hawaii to buy her dress. I'm NOT going to deal with the headache caused by a dress lost in luggage.

We haven't told her old man yet about the big news and her mom's been very good about keeping it under wraps. I'm taking him out fishing next week and I'll ask him if I can marry his daughter then.

Eleven months and counting.

I think I'm starting to grow wings again. I've got that weird itch in my back. It was seriously annoying the last time I had them. I can't actually fly and the damn things just got in the way. That's the most annoying part of the dream that makes me. Whatever goth culture thinks is cool at that moment drives certain elements of my appearance. I have a permanent set of fangs (thank you, Anne Rice) and my eyes glow now. As if I didn't look unsettling enough as it is. I'm so close to Winter that half of the youngin's mistake me for it when they run into me in the Dreaming. They better thank their lucky stars it's me and not a real Winter. They'd regret those filthy mouths real fast.

Of course, pissed off me isn't much better.

The local liege lord sent me to middle of nowhere Pennsylvania to patch up a bunch of morons who wanted to rush a Pentex facility. I get there and find out that 1) they're IOH, and 2) that strange pack was there to help. So we got to the facility and found it ransacked by members of the Inquisition.

*sigh*

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

They turned out to be all right, and managed to be something of a help when the shit hit the fan. Poor Knocker, he got a smack from the nun's ruler. Like the kid could help that he curses like a sailor.

Third and fourth session

The mages are summoned to a tribunal at Horizon re: the Verbena Nephandus. They ask the Garou along as witnesses. Unsurprisingly, she's sentenced to Gilgul and death. The Garou dislike this artificial shaping of the Umbra that the mages walk them through, and spend most of their time on Horizon in the Dreamspeakers' section.

Two Kinfolk who've infiltrated Project Twilight (a secret government organization that investigates the paranormal) turn up with information about something weird happening in the town of St. Claire, PA. St. Claire is a dirty little mining town in southeastern Pennsylvania where Siren Cosmetics has a factory. Kids have been going missing there without being reported. The Garou snag disguises and head down, pretending to be a family new to the area. Sonya and RF are parents, Olesya's aunt, other two are kids.

Dr. Quintrell gets a Hermetic in his living room again, which produces the following conversation:
Ambrose: "Are you trying to blow yourself up?"
The Hermetic: "Well, you believe I can do it, don't you? There's no problem here." A: "This isn't my sanctum."
H: "Oh shit! Why wouldn't you be working in your sanctum?"
A: "My sanctum got burned down by the Technocracy, thanks for bringing up painful memories."

After Ambrose makes him some tea, the Hermetic passes on the message that some Cultists have had prescient dreams about him and Mark working as teachers in a school in St. Claire. Not much to say to that, really, other than "Grumblemutter *$%*&@% prophecy..." He hands over fake IDs and leaves Ambrose to get Mark. They head in.

The principal of the school is a Black Spiral Dancer. Some kids are burgeoning fomori, thanks to using copious free samples of Siren products. They're the ones who seem to be going missing, which means it's probably related to Siren.

Aila and Jonas, posing as the family's kids, find out about mages when they sit down in their classes. Mark's teaching history and Ambrose teaches science. At lunch, the Garou meet a foul-mouthed little kid at school who turns out to be a Nocker and points them toward the freehold bar in town. The bartender has "some lads" in place as security and is planning to raid Siren that night, but the werewolves kind of take over and turn it into something more useful--an info-gathering trip. The mages come along after everyone tells each other their stories.

They get in and get their info easily enough, but some priests and nuns and a guy whose sword catches fire trash their way in and scrag the guy in charge of the plant. The Garou keep out of their way. Mark recognizes the old insignia of the Inquisition, and some research informs him that it's now known as the Order of St. Michael.

The next day, Ambrose gets a visit from the Technocracy during school via two HITMarks posing as students who give him a cell phone and tell them they're going to nuke the East Coast on Saturday if he and his friends can't fix what's going to happen by then (IX statisticians say it'll be an ELE--Extinction Level Event--and the Union will do whatever it takes to stop it).

The Garou learn about an old shaft and some sleeping monstrosity beneath the town that legend says was guarded by two fae. They also hear a story about a lost caern and some Wendigo who killed off a bunch of people in town after their Theurge got burned.

As the writer of this blog has lost her notes, the quick rundown of the fallout is that a small traveling carnival comes into town for the Homecoming parade, and they meet Ray the Chameleon Pooka, who is a stunt driver and candy addict. The Homecoming parade is when everything goes down: the Black Spiral Dancers have learned of the awful thing living under the town, and plan to sacrifice the fomori children at the Homecoming parade on the football field, which just happens to be where that cursed Wendigo caern is. They hope to use all that negative energy to open a gateway and call the thing up.

The Garou do a patchy job of rescuing the children, crash the Homecoming parade just as the Technocracy is getting antsy (they keep stepping up the time table for that nuclear holocaust they mentioned), and in the end everything nearly goes to hell when that portal does indeed open on the football field because while they protect the children, the Garou can't really help killing everything evil in sight so it gets its blood sacrifice anyway. The Inquisitors, who've been lurking around the whole time and alternately getting in the way and solving problems before the Garou need to, show up for a bit and then run for the hills.

Ambrose, working up in the press box of the bleachers, saves the day with some quick thinking and jet boots when he works out that they need to disrupt the portal to close it. A lot of countermagic and two Primium-plated HITMarks pitched into the hole seals that bugger up good and tight, but not before something gets out: two True Fae, who have just enough time to blitz the incoming nuclear warheads into nonexistence before their exposure to the banality of modern day makes them go 'pop.'

Between the explosion of glamour and the Technocracy wiping everybody's minds (including, once again, the Garou, leaving Mark and Ambrose once more looking like hallucinatory idiots), nobody really remembers anything odd happening at all.