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...