3 -- The Subway and the Warrens

[Session one: Sunday, May 26th, 2013]

Previously, the coterie has a strange dream.

I track down a local expert who specializes in the sort of fancy magic doodad we're looking for, and since I don't know jack about mysterious artifacts that I see in my dreams, we decide to seek out her help.  She lives down in the rat warrens under the subway, and so the fastest way there is by the 38th street A-Line subway entrance.

On our way down, we pass a homeless man.  I give him two bucks.  I know it's not going to wash the blood off my hands, but it's two bucks more than he had before so fuck off.

We hop over the gate marked "danger, no entry" and proceed down the tunnel only a short way before hearing some broad cry for help.

That debutante Nick takes off down the maintenance corridor like a big, dumb rocket.  I draw my pistol and chase after her.  We all arrive moments later to witness a small gang of thugs overcome with their lust and wrath for some unfortunate girl that fell into their trap.

Even before I can let off a shot, Nick's knife is in one of their ribs.  Street justice.  That guy trades her knife for his.  Guess which one of them bleeds more.

The others arrive shortly after, and serve up their own.  X rips into the closest one with his teeth and claws (I did mention he has retractable claws like some nightmare, right?)

We trade our lances.  It ends, predictably enough, with five corpses, and five barely-injured vampires.  These assholes didn't stand a chance.  With the train coming, I leap down the spider-hole in the middle of the tracks with just a half-second to spare.

The train arrives.  The doors open, revealing our mess.  The doors close again, and the automated subway carries on to the next station.

Bones McGee - Jimmy Vellum, that is - hops down the hole last.

"Hey Emil.  Drop something?" he says, tossing me my c96.

We continue down the tunnels underneath the subway, all the way into the sewer.  On my right, after about five hundred metres, I notice a Circle sign.  A rat skull's got briers growing out of its poor little mouth and engulf the edge of what appears to be a door.

"She's here," I say - "and the sign says 'open'".

We walk in, and the crone appears.  A hobbled creature of skin and teeth, she promises information in exchange for a toll.  We must retrieve her daughter.

I scour her hovel for clues towards our real goal (the sundial) while Cargen Nikola aska the witch for more information on her daughter.  I swallow my bile as I realize this creature has bought a six-year-old.

At first, we head back the way we came, but the thought of emerging into a crime scene makes me reconsider.  We agree to meet soon, and separate out into the night.

2 -- The Dream

[Session one: Sunday, May 26th, 2013]

I've been here in Gloryhill ever since 1995, when I decided to take my chances in this shithole.

The corruption of the city really starts to rub off on you.  Just last week, I broke a man's arm.  He was one of those pseudo-intellectual mouthbreathers who sticks his pinky out when he drinks.

I only regret I didn't tear it off completely.

I met these associates of mine here, and we decided to work together.  This dream we've all been having... it's something macabre, that's for sure.

I'm standing besides the banks of the river that runs through Gloryhill like it's main artery - flowing past the city dump on the south, it carries the stench all the way north through the slums and out past the water treatment plant.

Gotta be a weird city that tries to purify the water going out, not coming in.  All the rich folks playing King of the Hill up top a ways truck in bottled water, I guess.

Whatever - so the five of us are standing beside the river, looking down at this pretty young thing - or what's left of her.  She's in pieces on the riverbank, the water carrying away her creamy filling.  For once, though, we don't care about that precious Vitae we're wasting on the minnows.

Instead, we're holding her dissected body parts like some grotesque trophies.  I've got her spleen, or gall-bladder, or something, I don't know - in my hands.

I look down at the girl, and see she's wearing an amulet.  I drew it here.
The inscription on it says et lux in tenebris lucet cum spiritu tuo.  Or, in English, and with your spirit, light shines in the darkness. Freaky, huh?  The coterie and I decide to track this thing down.

1 -- Emil Stone, P.I.

My name is Emil Charles Stone - and let's start at the beginning, shall we?  I was born May 20th, 1893 in Berlin, Ontario.  About the only thing I remember from my youth was in 1916, when they changed the name of my city to Kitchener.

Anyway, I couldn't even vote at the time, since I was overseas for a month of Sundays they called The Great War.  Didn't see anything too great about it at the time, mind. Just a lot of men laying down the knife and fork for nothing.  My job, and a fitting one at that, was to pick up the dead in my lorry and give them an earth bath somewhere the lead weren't falling like raindrops.

After the war, I decided to go live on the Spanish Riviera.  Beautiful country, that.  I can still remember the last time I saw the sun setting over the hills beyond the casa where I lived.  There was even a dame there - there's always a dame, isn't there?  She was keen on me, but when the Nationalists started making noise, she signed up and got a bullet for her trouble.

By that time I had already beat it over Italy way.  This Mussolini guy was in power - I got word that he was just as bad as Franco was in Spain, and I keep my head down to hope it'll all blow over.

Fast forward to 1936.  I'm approached by some Rusty Guts calling himself Mycroft.  He says he's part of something called D section of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and he needs my help for God and Country.  I was already on a fake German passport in Italy, and he found me, so I figured why not.

I take the next train to Jolly Olde Deutcheland, and spend my war sitting in cafes drinking stale coffee with German SS officers.  Occasionally I was called upon to kill some of these guys, but most times I just had to tell the boss man what they were up to.

Once, when I was following a group of especially sinister blackshirts, I saw a group of local resistance fighters leap out of the bushes with foot-long, razor-sharp claws and eyes like some sort of fever dream - all skin and claws and teeth.  They almost killed me, too, but something stopped them.  Maybe it was my panicked screaming in French that I was their ally.

I fled that bloodbath, and never told anyone until today.  Not because I was worried people would think I was crazy, but I was stone sober:  I remember thinking that if we had a few more Frenchies like that, we wouldn't need the army.

Like I said, I spent my war all going down by the ground.  I would find out where important people were trying to hugger down, pass the word along, and a few days later read in the newspaper how they caught the monkey with the long tail.

So I'm eating in France in 1955, and a real saucebox of a bird walks up, puts herself down right in front of me, and tells me a long-winded story about some nazi still dead set on hunting down herself and her family.  At first I wanted to tell her to scram, that's not what I do around here, but something about her eyes made me stop.  They were bright blue.  On top of that, I thought it was real funny how she didn't look Jewish, Greek, Gypsy, or anything else the nazis cared about.

Besides, I ask her, what sort of crab cake keeps up the business of Jew-hunting after big A.H. himself bit the bullet?  She gives me some fimble-famble about another bunch who he already wiped out in 1954.  Funny how that one didn't make the papers.

By this point I'm so taken with the ridiculous story that I gotta find out how it ends.  I take the case.

I found out quick.  He wasn't even trying to hide, just walking around in broad daylight like no cares in the world.  This guy winds up dead real fast, and the same girl as before finds me again, and floors me with what she says next: that I should join her happy little family.  She tells me it's either this or go out of print myself.

I still remember dying that night in July.

I still remember my blood draining out into this weird chalice thing, and one of her "brothers" walking over and giving me a transfusion of his own.

Needless to say, I quit the Secret Intelligence Service when I could no longer answer the phone during the day.  Besides, it turned out there was quite a market for gumshoes like me at night anyway.

I've been all over since then, from France in the 50s and 60s, to New York during the long night of short knives called the 1970s, and then Gloryhill in 1995.  Been here in the city on the hill since then.  And sometimes, if the wind is just right, you don't smell the trash they let pile up in the streets.