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.