Episode One: The Puppet Masters

In which the Fivefold Vigil arrive in Astoria, seeking the whereabouts of the detective Forrest Clement.

Session One (6/11/10)

Mage School: Basic spellcasting, Mage Sight, Tools, Spell Tolerance, Spell Control

• The Fivefold Vigil arrives in Astoria in late November, 2009.
• We meet Ophelia Rosetti at the Columbia Inn. She fills us in on her unfortunately fruitless efforts to locate the current owner of the Hotel Regina. One of her PIs, Forest Clement, has gone missing. His car was found abandoned at the city library, and his notes on the investigation are missing. The police have been contacted.
• Autumn realizes that he'd foreseen our conversation with Ophelia in a dream, though in the dream he had different cabalmates. He and these others checked out Forest's car and spoke to another guest of the Columbia, a woman Autumn remembered as an aging actress or porn star. They were threatened by a waitress at a cafe, someone who was probably being controlled by a Profane Urim. They also discovered that the Regina is heavily warded, and mages can't get in.
• After Ophelia leaves, we decide to investigate Forest's room. On the way, we run into Olivia St. Jordon, the porn star from Autumn's dream. We question her briefly, and she tells us the name of the restaurant from Autumn's dream, the Wet Dog Cafe.
• In Forest's room, we discover various books and information requests from the Astoria Library. We also find a receipt from the Wet Dog Cafe with the name Carlie and a phone number scribbled on the back. Rasayana uses magic to trace the connection between Forest and Carlie. They knew and liked each other.
• Eos believes that Forest is dead, because she attempts to connect with him using sympathetic magic and fails.
• Autumn spots a ghost outside Forest's window, a girl whose throat has been slit.
• Serafina finds a secret passage in Forest's bathroom. We find that there are hidden cameras in this passage, one connected to each room of the inn. Malachite discovers that none of the cameras are on, except for the one connected to Olivia's room.

Session Two (6/18/10)

Mage School: Spell Factors

• The cabal decides to split up: Autumn and Malachite go to the Wet Dog Cafe while Rasayana, Serafina, and Eos investigate the Astoria Library.
• The library group finds that Forest's car has already been impounded by the police. They attempt to sneak into the library's security office to get a look at the footage from the night Forest disappeared. They almost get caught by an older librarian, but Rasayana awes her with his celebrity status, with a little magical boost from Eos.
• Eos and Serafina get the security footage by convincing the spirit of the computer to help them find the video file. The footage shows Forest arriving at the library, then going back to his car at closing time. His car won't start, and he apparently could get no signal on his mobile phone. He then walked out of camera range and never came back.
• Autumn and Malachite have an uneventful lunch at the Wet Dog Cafe. No one approaches them the way Autumn saw it in his dream. Autumn uses Grim Sight to scan the crowd, but sees no Awakened among the patrons. Malachite watches to see if anyone reacts to Autumn's use of magic, but no one does.
• Autumn examines the auras of Carlie (the waitress that Forest was involved with) and Elizabeth (Carlie's friend and fellow waitress). He sees that Elizabeth is destined for a long life and a peaceful death, but Carlie is fated to die sooner in some violent but accidental way. He also sees that death hangs heavy around both of them, which leads us to speculate that they might actually have been present when someone, possibly Forest, died.
• The cabal regroups back at the hotel and exchanges intel. Spells are cast and rituals are prepared as we ready ourselves to do some breaking and entering, both mystical and mundane.
• Malachite hacks into the police database and downloads a copy of the missing persons report on Forest. He runs into a surprisingly strong security system, too strong for a small town police department like Astoria's.
• Eos uses Forest's picture from the police report to scry for him again. She still cannot connect and suspects that he is warded, which seems to be evidence that he's still alive.
• Autumn and Serafina go down to the Regina to see if the Gauntlet is lower there. They plan to travel through Twilight to get to the police impound yard and investigate Forest's car. While there, they discover that the Regina is warded against both Prime and Spirit. No Awakened beings can get in and no spirit energy can get through.
• While Autumn and Serafina are gone, Olivia St. Jordan pays a visit to those of us still at the hotel. She seems herself at first, but is then possessed by something that warns us, "We don't like your kind around here." This echoes what happened at the Wet Dog Cafe in Autumn's dream. We suspect that someone used a Profane Urim on Olivia to deliver this message.
• Malachite, Rasayana, and Eos go back to the Wet Dog Cafe to question Elizabeth. Malachite acts as back up while Eos and Rasayana do the interrogating. Rasayana hypnotizes Elizabeth, and Eos casts a spell on her so she won't remember talking to us.
• Elizabeth tells us that she never completely trusted Forest. She thinks he might have been involved in something bad. Forest had told Carly about his efforts to find information on the Regina and how someone seemed to be blocking him at every turn. Forest was also afraid that someone was following him. Elizabeth tells us that the last time they saw Forest, he'd insisted on having lunch at the house she and Carlie share. But after only ten minutes, Forest ran out on Carlie, saying that something had come up.
• Elizabeth mentions that Forest was always carrying around a manila folder wrapped in a rubber band. She thinks he may have left it at their place. We suspect it contains Forest's notes. Eos snatches the address from Elizabeth's head before we let her get back to work.

Session Three (6/25/10)

Mage School: The Nimbus

• Eos, Rasayana, and Malachite go to Carlie's house. Eos notices a graveyard nearby called the Babylon Gardens.
• Using Fate magic to help him stumble upon a means of getting inside the house to investigate, Rasayana finds a local student paper, and in the classifieds, a room-for-rent ad for Carlie's address. He uses the ad as a cover to get in the door. He meets Carlie and her other roommate Rhys, and learns that Carly has a second job at Red Dog Beer and Wine. He also finds Forest's folder of notes under the couch cushions.
• On our way back to the hotel, we get pulled over by a cop who's possessed. He delivers another warning like the one we got from Olivia.
• We go through Forest's notes and learn about the history of the Regina.
• Autumn creates a Ghost Gate in the closet of his hotel room. He and Serafina use the gate to travel through Twilight to the impound yard and Forest's car.
• While in Twilight, they encounter a spirit owl, an omen bird, who tells them that we "will bring blood" and should "beware the blackness behind the stars." The owl also tells Autumn specifically that he would enter a "gate of blackness and a hall of bones" and "an ashen time will settle upon you."
• Serafina asks the owl if he's seen anything unusual. He tells her of a man in black who is followed by "screaming darkness." The MiB has visited Twilight often of late and is probably a mage, though he seems unable to see the owl spirit.
• The former dandelion is like, "Oh, Jesus, I was born to die!"
• Autumn and Serafina examine Forest's car and learn that its electrical system was fried with Death magic. They also learn that the car was an anchor for Forest's ghost, but not anymore, because his ghost was destroyed.

Session Four (7/3/10)

Mage School: Pattern Restoration and Scouring

• As the cabal makes plans to break into the Astoria Police Department, Autumn spots the same ghost he saw outside Forest's hotel room. He goes to recruit her as a lookout. He learns that her name is Tina MacPherson,and she is looking for her father, William. He finds her anchor, the alley where she was murdered. He transfers her anchor to his phone so that she can accompany us.
• On the way to the police department, Malachite spots the Sixth Street Ley Line. We investigate and follow it to the George Flavel Museum, which turns out to be a Locus, a sort of watering hole for spirits. The energy welling up from the museum is flavored with nostalgia and commerce, and the spirits who partake of it begin to take on the same flavor.
• Serafina looks for spirits around the museum and sees the owl she and Autumn encountered before and the Asphalt Gentleman, the spirit of Duane Street.
• Serafina questions The Asphalt Gentleman about the Regina and the MiB. He tells us that the Regina is a "rowdy place" with a reputation for attracting the wrong element. He says that the MiB is a local, an upstanding citizen of Astoria, but "very terrifying." The MiB is probably from an old family, one that helped lay the railroad. The Gentleman also says he recently saw the MiB following someone who was not a local and not a tourist. We suspect it was Forest.
• At the police department, we break into the office of Dean Newcomb, the detective in charge of Forest's case. We find several eyewitness statements documenting Forest's movements before he disappeared. He was first seen heading north on 10th Street away from the library. Then he went in to Red's Beer and Wine looking for Carlie. She was not there, so he spoke briefly to the owner, Will Red Feather, and bought some wine to "calm his nerves." Red Feather watched Forest walk away along Astoria Street, then come running back a few minutes later, clearly agitated. Forest turned back onto 10th Street, running toward the waterfront and the boardwalk.
• Malachite hacks into Newcomb's computer to look up information on Olivia and the ghost Tina. Olivia has a record for solicitation and prostitution in both Astoria and LA. Tina's case file is not in the computer, but rather stored in a police archive in New Town.
• While in the system, Malachite downloads records of all Newcomb's phone calls and sets up a relay to record all future calls. He finds nothing magical about the department's cutting edge security system, but he does discover that the software was licensed to the police department by Heng Security.
• We retrace Forest's steps. When we near the boardwalk, Autumn and Serafina see a body hidden in Twilight. It's Forest. There is a gaping hole in his chest where everything has essentially been rotted away.
• Autumn uses Death magic to let us see the last thing Forest saw. It's a well-dressed Asian man holding a laptop case with a broken strap, probably because he had just snatched it away from Forest. A number of slavering specters are hovering behind him, and he is clearly using magic to kill Forest.
• Upon searching Forest's body, Serafina finds that his watch has a hidden flash drive. Malachite uses magic to download its contents directly to his phone.
• An argument ensues about how to dispose of the body. Autumn is adamant that Forest receive a proper burial, and Malachite takes his side. Serafina wants to hide the body again or destroy it, to keep the MiB from learning that we discovered it and to hide the obviously magical death from mundane authorities. Finally, Autumn alters the body to make it look like a natural death. We know from Detective Newcomb's records that the river will be dredged soon, so we put the body in the water to be found by the police.
• Before returning Tina to her original anchor, Autumn casts a spell to let her remember that she was murdered. He learns that she was killed in late April around 7 o'clock at night, but she did not see who killed her.