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.