Episode Five: Foundations & Eaves

Session One (1.8.11)

Mage School: Reaching Up the Watchtower

• Issa has cast a spell that allows him to be aware of everything that happens within the Regina's walls. When a mysterious, shadowy figure appears over Malachite's bed, Issa sees it and shakes Malachite awake via scrying magic. The shadow immediately vanishes, leaving behind the six-shooter that Auctorita summoned into the hotel right before she began attacking us. Rasayana determines that the weapon has an intimate connection with the hotel.
• Autumn uses post-cognition to look into the gun's past. It was purchased in the 1800s by a young boy and his father. The father was later killed, and the son took vengeance by killing the murderer with the six-shooter.
• Serafina awakens the spirit of the gun to ask it about its previous owner. The son's name was Cole, and he grew up to be a notorious gunslinger. He killed dozens of people, though he claimed he'd killed more. He was eventually lynched at the Hotel Regina. The gun seems sad about Cole's death and said that Cole was angry after he died. According to the six-shooter, the shadow and Cole are not the same being. The shadowy figure is “what remembers Cole” when the gun is back inside the hotel.
• Via post-cognition, Autumn watches the fight with Auctorita again. She summoned the six-shooter from the Flavel House Museum, then deliberately let it drop. The shadowy figure came afterward, picked up the gun, and disappeared.
• We layer Autumn with various mage sights so he can get a better idea of what the shadow figure is. It is deeply tainted by Death energy, and though it is not a ghost, it looks like a ghost returning to its anchor when it disappears.
• Malachite hacks into the police database to see if the museum reported the gun missing. They did, and the file contains pictures of the display it was in. There is a frayed noose and a picture of Cole at a card table. Rasayana realizes that the picture was taken at the Regina's gambling hall.
• Serafina, Autumn, and Issa go to the museum to ask the Riverboat Captain about Cole and the shadow figure. He tells them that Cole was lynched by a group of sailors possibly for cheating at cards and possibly for being caught in bed with another man.
• The Riverboat Captain interrupts himself when he catches sight of the Columbia Maiden outside the museum's window. He says that she's the spirit of the river, but they see her very rarely. He is a little in love with her.
• Serafina goes outside to try and talk to the Maiden, but the spirit is in the middle of the river where Serafina can't reach her. Serafina runs into a different spirit, one that manifests as a child and constantly asks for money.

Session Two (1.15.11)

Mage School: Oblations

• Stoughton contacts Serafina about her interest in joining the Guardians. All that night, she has what can only be described as “serpent dreams.”
• Autumn also has a strange dream, involving a lighthouse with a red searchlight, a blood red tide, the shadowy shape of an oceanliner, and four people who appear and then disappear into the crimson tide—a European woman, a spoiled fratboy, an all-American girl, and a skinny, strung-out young woman.
• At breakfast the next morning, there was a lot of quasi-hostile discussion of Serafina's decision to change her order.
• Autumn attempts to draw the faces of the people in his dream so that Malachite can run a facial recognition search. The very first drawing he produces is Charline Toulouse. After that, Autumn simply begins describing the people, on the off chance that we recognize them. Another one turns out to be Carlie Banks. The remaining two we don't recognize, so Serafina uses the descriptions to shapeshift into them. We take “their” pictures, which Issa uses to scry on them and steal their wallets. Once we have their IDs, Issa returns their property, after relieving the frat boy of his cash and putting it in the strung-out girl's purse.
• The other two potential victims are Robert Henderson and Valentina Cooper. Valentina has a sister named Sophia.
• We split up to engage in various investigations, both magical and mundane, into the mysterious gun and Autumn's dream.
• Later that night, we decide to arrange for Autumn and Rasayana to get a read on each potential victim's fate/death and any connections between them.
• Malachite and Autumn go to the Wet Dog Cafe to see Carlie; her death is coming in days or weeks. They then visit Charline, and her fate looks the same. She tells them she is leaving for New York soon and asks Malachite to house-sit.
• Valentina works at a strip club called Annie's Upper Town Tavern. In order to lure Robert there , Issa creates drink tickets to the club, and Serafina doctors them with pheromones and plants them in Robert's hotel room. At the club, Autumn sees the same fate on Valentina and Robert as on the others. Valentina's is the most intense, possibly the most immediate.
• Rasayana sees one connection between them, obviously supernatural. Issa copies that sympathy onto himself and follows it via scrying to its source. It's a damned vampire, and he is at that moment with Carlie at the Desdemona Club.

Session Three (3.19.11)

Mage School: None

• Issa sees the vampire feeding on Carlie, then licking the wounds, which close up. Carlie seems dazed and woozy, but otherwise unharmed.
• The cabal heads to the Desdemona Club to intercept the bloodsucker and his potential victim.
• We decide not to storm the place en masse, instead opting to send Rasayana in to check out the vampire, talk to him, and attempt to plant something on him so that Issa can track him later on.
• The vampire (whose name we learn is Dalton) grabs Rasayana's arm when he goes to drop the charm. Dalton doesn't realize that Rasayana has planted something on him; he seems to think Rasayana was trying to steal his wallet. He immediately recognizes Rasayana as a mage.
• Dalton is apparently at the club to meet with a mage and mistakenly assumes Rasayana is that mage. When Dalton asks Rasayana if he's there to pick up the “payment” in accordance with the “deal,” Rasayana goes along with it. Rasayana's act is so convincing that not only does he fool Dalton, but he also nearly gives Serafina a heart attack thinking he's actually working with the vampire.
• Rasayana pumps Dalton for information and learns that the mages the vampires actually have their mysterious deal with are Wai Chi and his Seer pylon. Dalton also talks in vague terms about something that happened in the 1970s, threatening that similar events could occur if the “deal” is not kept. Rasayana walks away from his encounter with Dalton with a black folder containing $5000 and several pages that appear to be from a grimoire.
• Malachite heads into the club to back up Rasayana if he needs it. Autumn enters a few minutes after that in order to get a look at the vampire.
• Autumn ends up talking to Dalton, not just observing him. Dalton pegs Autumn as a mage, too.
• Malachite encounters a second vampire who, like Dalton, has no trouble recognizing Malachite as a mage and thinks he's there to pick up the “payment”. She is sitting with the frat boy from Autumn's dream. She sends the boy off to get them drinks, then invites Malachite over. She flirts with him, and he flirts back, going along with her assumption of who he is. She invites him to look her up sometime, and he promises her he will.
• After leaving the Desdemona Club, the cabal returns to the Regina for a research montage.
• Issa scries on the two vampires and sees them heading into the cruise ship from Autumn's dream. To his surprise, their cabin is warded, and he can no longer see them once they cross the threshold. Issa also decides to scry on Wai Chi and sees him in a hotel in Portland.
• Malachite does a few internet searches and learns that a number of people have gone missing along the cruise ship's route over the last few years. They tended to disappear from one stop and turn up dead at a later stop, after having been missing for weeks or months. Most of them also gave reasons why they were leaving town, so no one thought to look for them until far too late.
• Autumn and Serafina both contact their orders to try and get more information about vampires. Autumn's contact refers him to another mage, a vampire expert, who agrees to tell us what he knows in exchange for four units of vampire blood if we end up fighting them, or some other favor if we don't.
• Issa texts Stoughton to let him know about the Seers' dealings with Dalton and his ilk. He gets a call back from Veles, who tells us that if nothing else, we have to get the rest of the grimoire away from the vampires.

Session Four (3.25.11)

Mage School: None

• Before the cabal can continue their investigation into the vampire problem, Sophie and her occasional guardians Casey & Esmer come by the Regina. They are looking for Sophie's sister Valentina, who never came home from work. Valentina would sometimes crash on the Regina's porch when she went on a bender.
• We offer to look into Valentina's disappearance pro bono, as we already know what her fate will be if we don't change it.
• While Autumn stays behind to keep working on the grimoire pages, the rest of the cabal goes to Sophie's apartment to investigate and to get Issa something he can use to scry for Valentina. But when Issa tries to see Valentina, he hits a wall, which makes us immediately think of the warded room on the vampires' ship.
• Malachite uses some magic and his laptop to hack into the security cameras on the cruise ship. He can track Valetina's progress up to 4:30 am; after that, she disappears into lower levels of the ship, the vampires' lair.
• After dropping off Sophie & her guardians, the cabal heads to the cruise ship. Rasayana snows the hostess into letting us on board.
• Malachite takes over the elevator in order to get us down into the restricted areas of the ship. In the cargo hold, we find some kind of magical tripwire which will alert the vampires if anything living crosses it. Malachite suppresses the spell so we can cross.
• Serafina senses some malevolent spirits in the hold with us. She commands them to leave us alone, and to tell no one they've seen us.
• We find an obviously new and ridiculously secure door set into one of the bulkheads. Autumn uses post-cognition to see the vampire Eldis go through the door with Valentina in tow. This is the place we've been looking for.
• At Serafina's suggestion, Malachite suppresses the fire system outside the door, but any such systems beyond the door are isolated from the rest of the ship.
• Issa scries to the other side of the door. He sees a security guard there, looking at us on a bank of computer monitors. He has a phone in hand.
• Issa knocks the phone out of the guard's hand through the door using Space; Autumn unbolts the door with Matter, then closes it behind us.
• Rasayana reads the guard's aura to see how far his loyalty to the vampires goes; his loyalty appears in the form of blood vessels through his aura, indicating that he's drunk some vampire blood.
• Past the guard & his security monitors are a pair of wooden double-doors. Issa can't scry beyond them.
• Issa knocks the guard unconscious as Autumn opens the double-doors.
• The vampire Eldis leaps through the doors, attacking Autumn & Serafina.
• Issa makes the wall invisible, hoping to let in some sunlight, but the spell is unraveled by the disbelief of the human guards on the other side. We do catch a quick glimpse of Valentina before the wall turns opaque again.
• Serafina manages to douse Eldis with gas, and Malachite takes the opportunity to throw a firebolt at him, reaching up the Watchtower to do so.
• Serafina attempts to behead the vampire as Rasayana casts Evil Eye on him.
• Seeing as how he's on fire, Eldis goes into frenzy.
• The metal door behind us rolls open as the other two vampires arrive on the scene. The female vampire Anisette attacks Malachite at vampire speed, wielding dual knives. Luckily for him, she misses.
• Malachite increases the intensity of the fire engulfing Eldis. He goes up like a Roman candle, burning to ash in a matter of seconds. (Malachite totally burninated that vampire. Yay, Forces!)
• The metal door behind us closes again as the third vampire retreats. Realizing she's been abandoned, Anisette drops her weapons and surrenders. She offers us anything we want in exchange for her continued existence. We agree, but Issa takes a lock of her hair as insurance.
• We grab anything of value and Valentina and get the hell out of there. We take the girl back to the Regina and put her to bed, then contact Sophie to let her know her sister's safe.