Thursday, August 23, 2007

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!"

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

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.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

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.

Monday, August 20, 2007

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.