Mageverse Politics
Jan. 3rd, 2005 01:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianO'Neill's actually got it right with the food and all. I got it right too -- when we got to Sourcebook Central, I got a text message from Mark saying that they were running late and feeling like crap, so they were going to skip the session. I know people. So we were two Ecstatics short, which I kind of expected, and were without Posty, which was kind of a shame, all things considered, but never mind; we still had one of the longer and more involved sessions ever.
The morning involved everybody getting up early, on the basis that sign-in at the Convivium happened quite early, and various of them had things to do. One of them involved looking at the notes for Lucius' speech and realising that, while it more than adequately covered their doings over the past couple of months, it covered them too well; as in, despite it being a South Wales panel, all the stuff they really wanted to say involved the stuff they were finding out in London, which could quite easily be stricken from the speech on the grounds of irrelevance. They're going to have to work something out about that. The other task for the morning involved Skank trying to get hold of Correspondence whiz Thig Emily Swift to warn her about the upcoming possible problems. He still had his radio from when he and the old crew were blowing up various vamp nests, so he contacted Colum. Unfortunately, all Colum had to say on the matter was, "Mate, lay off the drugs", which understandably freaked Skank out. Eventually, he got Dawn's help in contacting Emily and the message got through ... and a little more besides. Apparently, there were some rumours going around about Skank and his crew -- how Skank had deserted his house, and how he was consorting with massasa, that sort of thing. Understandably, Skank was unbelievably pissed off. At which point the doorbell rang. Behind it was Ajahn, one of Lucius' compatriots, who had comandeered a stretch limo somehow and "happened to be in the neighbourhood". He also had the documentation that Marcus had left to Lucius with regards to the Nephandic activity they shared, so they have some basic info on the Sidewinder Brigade. Not that they have enough to really help them, but they do know where the autonomous eyeballs came from now -- Fomoriiiiii!
When they turned up at the Savoy, they discovered that the revolving doors had been converted into a sort of sensor thing, and a sort of package scanner had been set into a nearby wall. A sign read, "Please remove all luggage, fetishes, foci, familiars and other magical items and place through this slot", and Skank suggested putting Morrison through it as a test. However, since Kat wasn't there, I had E picking a fight with him on her behalf, since she wasn't going to let her puppy become a guinea pig. Anyway, Molly sent Loofah through and it turned out okay, so everything else went through, and then they went through the revolving doors. There were a few incidents, like when Jeremiah got banded with a maroon wristband that apparently denotes mental problems and Molly got banded with a yellow-green that is supposed to indicate vast amounts of paradox, but for the most part it went okay until Michelle went through ... then got stuck and vanished. Susanna, who was right behind (as her guest), got pulled through and also vanished. Of course, this upset people, and it only got worse when it turned out that they had probably been moved to the fifth floor, where the Order of Hermes males were hanging out ... and their rooms were sandwiched between a bunch of Janissaries. Now, Skank already knew that there were some rumours flying around about him, but he apparently didn't appreciate how far those rumours had gone. Thing was, they were being helped along quite a bit by House Quaestor. They got this information, as well as things like room numbers for their captive friends, from one of a number of time-displaced Leannes who kept wandering around the place trying to get everything done, which was apparently very disconcerting. After having a word with Michelle and Susanna (who he reduced to a gibbering wreck, incidentally), Skank went to seek out a House Quaestor mage and by the time he got a name, it was time for the Akashic Brotherhood speech. The whole thing was so bizarre that they didn't get a chance to speak to the girl from the pictures Carl's friend sent, who they saw hanging by her heels from the chandelier pretending to be a bat.
They got a little bit of info there. Japan maintains technology, mostly because it's run by Sons of Ether. China's a mess after various non-Communist factions tried to overthrow the CPC and created a civil war that turned into a vampire buffet. Vietnam's a Confucian paradise. And then there's Korea, which is doing quite well except for the Flambeau-induced crater where Seoul used to be -- apparently some Marauder decided to try to turn the entire country into an episode of M*A*S*H and the resulting battle destroyed the House Flambeau mage, the Marauder and the entire city. Kuo-Li decided to hum the M*A*S*H theme at this point and, for generally being rude and a smart-arse, his mentor Shu-Rong made one of her longer (three-hour) lectures cycle through his head, promising a similar fate for him should he transgress again.
Over lunch, Skank got into the face of a House Quaestor mage, who reeeeeeeally didn't want to talk to him. However, Skank managed to pry out more than the basics of the rumours and got a nasty shock when it turned out that he, according to everyone around him, was responsible for the enforced Mage-ghouling incident rather than being the one who blew the whole thing to hell. Worse yet, they'd apparently talked to Colum about the whole thing and a mind-scan of the warrior proved that he remembered nothing at all about the incident, so it was Skank's word against ... well, everybody else's. It gets even worse -- apparently, what happened to Brenna and Hoshikuro has gone down on the books as "a legitimate experiment", and Rodney "The Creature" Delevan's only crime in the matter was overeagerness. Skank, on the other hand, has his resonance stamped all over the cracked bottle that had originally held Brenna's spirit, and since it's gone back on the Wheel, it can't go back to Brenna's body anymore. Therefore, Skank is being charged with the murder of Brenna Blair. Skank's only answer to this was to offer to let the Quaestor mage look through his mind and see that he was telling the truth; Skank doesn't have the ability to shield his thoughts or fool a Mind mage. Unfortunately, though the Quaestor did this, he said that he got a very different story when he did so on others in similar positions, so he had no idea who to believe. The Quaestor also took the opportunity to peek into Molly's mind, but was surprised when Molly could sense it and yelled at him for it. Eventually, Skank had to back off lest he hit somebody. He went to the bar and got his hip flask topped up by a pretty Ecstatic who traded him the whiskey and some weed for a kiss.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group were visited by Violet Scheherazade herself. Jeremiah tried Spirit sense but could get nothing from her. Violet asked for a chat with Molly -- alone, of course -- and Kuo-Li left it up to Molly, who'd had enough scary people poking at her for the day so she said no. Instead, Violet extended an invitation for Skank and Molly both to meet her in the bar between Banquet and Ball, said "It's a pleasure", and turned to go. However, Kuo-Li being the irrepressable little sod that he is, said, "The pleasure's all yours", and she heard him and turned his dinner into snakes. Kuo-Li wasn't the only one whose lunch went icky -- Lucius' lunch rotted before his very eyes, indicating that his old rival Roger Botha was up to his old tricks again. Lucius had apparently resigned himself to going hungry, but Molly pushed her plate at him, got up and said, "It's a buffet lunch, Mr Lucius..." Anyway, needless to say, Skank wasn't very happy about events but wasn't going to miss the audience with the Heinous Old Mare, so at least his evening had some excitement to it. Afterwards, Lucius found Romulus and Remus running about with what they recognised as Emily's never-removed orange-green-pink striped scarf, which Lucius removed from them and showed to Skank. Skank went hunting for Emily's Avatar, botched and bounced his senses off the fuck-potent basement wards, knocking himself semi-conscious in the process. Thankfully, he has a friend in the business -- Lucille McBride, the last of his cohorts and the one who put his leg back on after the original Golem incident. She dealt with the concussion with ruthless efficiency and Skank tried again, finding that he hadn't missed by much -- Emily's Avatar was directly next to the strange wards in the basement, but Lucille told the lot of them to bugger off and let her deal with it. You don't argue with Lucille; it's not worth the effort.
Next was the Celestial Chorus talk, which was amusing. The older ones told tales of Amsterdam as a Cult of Ecstasy haven, Marauders in Greece, a completely depopulated Turkey and Rome being home to HIT-Marks at least. Also they discovered some old Norse mages who seemed to operate outside the known Traditions but were far more coherent than most Orphans. One of the younger Choristers had insisted that they communicate with the rune-mages they called Laerdom mages, and two of them actually attended the Convivium -- Vigrid and Kirsten. The others tried very hard to talk to Vigrid, Kirsten and the young Chorister, but they kind of scared the poor bugger and he ran off. Kirsten insists that the nervous little bugger just needs time -- what with Rome and the scorn of his elders, it's been rough.
Tea-time, and Jeremiah tried to talk to Frank about the Mage-ghouling thing. Unfortunately, Frank not being the most easygoing chap in the world, jumped to conclusions and herded Jeremiah out of his room, causing Jeremiah to basically give the entire damn Tradition the finger. Meanwhile, Skank tried to cheer Susanna up (note: this doesn't work when it's Skank doing it) and attempted to talk Michelle down from a terminal case of boredom. When he went down to the lobby to find magazines or something, he found Romulus, Remus and Molly playing something that can only be called Forces-dodgeball. Eventually they gave that up (Molly used the ball to cast a case of friction burn on the Creature, who she'd noticed snooping around) and settled for straight tag. Lucius just watched in amusement, while Skank, deciding that no one was going to blow him up for going into a storage room, decided to stake out the door to the basement. He thought he had proved himself wrong when he got pinned -- not ungently -- to the storage room floor and dragged via Forces effect into the shadows. That was Lucille, with unconscious Emily in tow. Skank hoisted Emily up and hauled her out towards the lifts. At around this point, Romulus and Remus decided to engage Lucius in play, both slapped him in the head and cried, "Tag! You're it!" So Lucius decided to play -- missed Romulus, missed Remus ... and wound up tripping over Molly, landing right on top of her. She had a grazed and carpet-burned knee and a bump on the head, and was knocked out for a minute or two, so Skank ordered Lucius to get her the hell into the lift and up to her room. The girls got dropped into their respective rooms, Skank patched Molly up and checked on Emily, who was less talkative than usual, probably due to headache. They still had the Cult of Ecstasy talk to go to, so they left it at that.
The Cult of Ecstasy representatives spent most of their time surfing in Australia, but did manage to pay enough attention to develop something of a speech. For instance, things didn't go as badly in the cities because no one was worried about freezing to death. However, groups of young people got fed up with things and formed their own little tribes, living either in abandoned cities or in the bush. Some went insane in the Children of the Corn sense, while others Awakened en masse and became tribes of Orphans. Some of these Orphans were taken in by Aboriginal proto-Dreamspeakers who refer to themselves only as the People. Two of them came too, a man named Uwan and his sister Pengana. Unfortunately, when the speech devolved into Steve raving about the surfing, Lucius got up to leave. Uwan decided that this was rude and turned him into a dingo. Lucius decided to be stupid and Molly decided to collar him with the only thing available -- Loofah. Unfortunately, dingo-ate-my-Lucius twisted and turned so much that he wound up choking himself into unconsciousness. Eventually, the speech ended and Molly let Lucius go and Uwan turned him back. So then they all got into their fancy duds and went to this Banquet and Ball. The few notable things there involved Molly pulling a Forces effect to make Jeremiah's suit appear maroon to match his wrist-tag, Skank checking up on Emily (still headachy and slow, but seemed okay) and general faffing.
The Banquet tables were laid out a little like Hogwarts -- one table to a Tradition. At the Euthanatos table, Lucius found himself sitting between Leanne and Lesley, and across from Ajahn, who winked at him and indicated Roger, who was sitting in the one spot on any banquet table where it's nearly impossible to comfortably reach anything. Meanwhile, Lucius got swarmed with female compliments over his kimono and Lesley, who'd apparently cast a very minor glamour on the man, whispered "You owe me". Lucius owes Leanne, Ajahn and now Lesley some serious favours. Meanwhile, there was little going on at the Verbena table, Kuo-Li was having some polite conversation at the Akashic table ... and the shit went down at the Order of Hermes table big-time. See, Molly was sat between a representative of House Shaea and a representative of House Flambeau, and across from an ex Miscellanea. Skank was a couple of people along from Molly, and eventually sauntered over to make sure everything was okay. Apparently, Molly was being propaganda'ed to death, so Skank encouraged her to ask questions. So she asked the Flambeau, "Is it true that you're an entire house of pyromaniacs?" (Skank at this point said, with the evil grin, "She knows some big words, see?") She asked the Shaea about whether there was such a thing as reverse misogyny; the Shaea said something about how she would be good in the house, and the Flambeau said, "If I don't set fire to her, I think I'm gonna like her". Then the Ex Miscellanea asked for a demonstration of Molly's abilities. She managed to make the candle flames from the table candelabras reach in neat little pillars right to the ceiling, which encouraged the Flambeau, and then Molly said, "I can do Spirit, too!" When permitted by Skank, she did the Handmaidens of Bast rite and called some very beautiful Siamese cats, who mostly stared at the Ex Miscellanea. The Ex Miscellanea, a little perturbed, decided to make the problem go away; she *poof*ed all the cats. I mean all the cats, including Loofah and every other feline familiar in the building. This pissed Molly off incredibly, so she set a jinx goblin on the Ex Miscellanea; she's going to have the worst luck until she brings the familiars back. Unfortunately, this also touches on her magical ability, so even if she wanted to back down, she's not sure she could actually do the spell properly. Around this point, Jeremiah decided to start a rumour that Lucius and Kuo-Li were an item, but botched his Manipulation+Expression roll so badly that the rumour turned into "Jeremiah and Kuo-Li are an item".
Then came the Ball. The girl from Carl's pictures tried to play flute with the CoE band and they booted her off, at which point Jeremiah tried to chat her up, when the girl backed away slowly and then ran like hell. Skank and Molly went off for their meeting with Violet, who was actually using a projection and made an abortive attempt to make Skank believe that Molly would be better off with a more skilled mentor. She also referred to Molly as "just an average eight-year-old", which begged the question "What do you want her so badly for?" Unfortunately, that was never answered, nor was "What the fuck are you up to in the basement?" At which point, her projection vanished, and the pretty little Ecstatic offered Skank a bottle of rocket fuel to take back to the party. Later, Lucius decided to try to have words with Eurydice, who was wallflowering and watching Romulus and Remus get taught a few Forces basics by Molly of all people. (They were juggling Ecstatics; one of them clung to the disco ball in the ceiling and wound up caught and crowd-surfed.) Lucius tried to take responsibility for the boys, calling them "his", and then Eurydice verbally bitch-slapped him, telling him that she'd tried to contact him when she knew she was pregnant but he wasn't willing for her to know his location, so... Anyway, she stalked off, monumentally pissed off, and Lucius started drinking some of Skank's rocket fuel. Roger had been taunting Lucius all night, so Lucius decided to confront Roger at this stage, and Roger crossed a couple of lines, so Lucius punched him; got him right in the nose and floored him. This led to a couple of Janissaries grabbing him, hustling him up to the fifth floor and dumping him into an empty "holding tank" room overnight. Skank went up to ask what had happened, didn't tell Lucius off (after all, we all hate Roger Botha) and checked up on Susanna and Michelle (who was pommel-striking a wall in boredom; he offered her some of the rocket fuel). Then he spoke to one of the Janissaries, who gave him next to no info except for the fact that Michelle and Susanna would stand trial and be kept in isolation until these fourth day trials as a precaution. Around then, he had a conversation with Merrick Archbold bani Tytalus, who suggested he had information to give ... for a price. They weren't going into it right then, so Skank went back down, took Molly up to bed, checked on Emily (asleep) and then went to bed himself.
Next morning, the door to Lucius' holding cell was unlocked and Skank went to check up on a rather hung-over Lucius. Skank found his bones for him but Lucius botched his Life roll and went into physical Serena mode. Skank took Lucius to Lucille's surgery, got the poor bugger fixed up and then went to check on the girls. Emily had gone down to breakfast ... and when he got down there, he saw Emily in a plain grey suit, eating breakfast with the Creature. When he went over to talk to her, she was avoiding coffee (very bizarre) and not talking much (an indication of the End Times). So Skank hauled arse up to Lucille's surgery and told her what was going on, at which point Lucille barrelled downstairs, saw the changed Emily and put her to sleep, then had Skank drag the changed Thig up to the surgery. A little bit of Mind magic by Kuo-Li showed that someone had been dicking around in Emily's mind, but the roll wasn't good enough to indicate what had been done. Lucius botched the same effect and became Serena in Spirit instead of body, but tried to hide it from everybody. The main thing they wanted done at that point was to get the Creature the fuck out of the way, so Lucille whipped up a little something that he needed to drink and would put him out. Kuo-Li, who's just gone up in Correspondence to be able to move objects, said that he would take care of this.
So to the Dreamspeaker panel, who indicated that, aside from Sabbat in Colombia and Buenos Aires turning into a CoE party town, the main difficulty in South America was the return of the rainforests by a particularly tenacious Verbena Marauder. This wouldn't be so bad if the rain forest now wasn't a zooterrorist attack waiting to happen.
So during lunch, Kuo-Li Corresponded Lucille's mixture into the Creature's drink, at which point he finished his lunch, got up, walked halfway across the room and fell over, steaming with fever. They took him up to Lucille's surgery and had him quarantined. He broke out in multi-coloured spots and was being plagued by Guilt Epiphlings, which Skank and Molly tied to him and emphasised until he was screaming with them. Apparently, Molly was concerned when people called what she was doing evil, not understanding that there is good-evil among these people, and had to be talked out of a self-loathing fit. All the same, it worked out alright and they went off to the Euthanatos talk.
India didn't change much; the cities that survived off tourist trade suffered, but the rest of the country went on as it always had. The group found some mage groups that Lesley thought of as proto-Euthanatos and which she thought merited study, but Roger thought that they were too primitive to bother with. Lesley told him right the fuck off and got applause, which ended the talk on a not-very-auspicious note.
Meanwhile, Skank had his appointment with Merrick Archbold bani Tytalus, who indicated that he knew what had happened to Emily and that he could fix it ... and the price would be a half-hour chat alone with Molly. Skank didn't like the sound of this one little bit but went to run it past the others. Unfortunately, during the course of the conversation, they made the typical mistake of forgetting that Molly was there -- she goes quiet when people are talking about her, so she hears what they really have to say. Suffice it to say that she got fed up with them bickering and went to talk to Archbold. Skank followed and paced around outside the little parlour room until, ten minutes in, there was *FWOOMPH!*. Skank kicked the door in to see a very singed Archbold and a very peeved Molly who wouldn't say exactly why she had to foom him but referred to him as Mr Touchy-man. (Apparently, Jeremiah nearly drained the life out of him when he heard that little gem.) Anyway, after Molly threatened to call certamen on his paedophilic arse, and with four very pissed-off mages glaring at him, he was well and truly cowed into submission and was forced to fulfil his end of the bargain. He got Emily back to her former self just in time to make the Order of Hermes panel. Unfortunately, one of the things they found out when Emily was able to give them info was that, along with the Creature and Violet, the third who turned Emily into the Stepford Thig was none other than Skank's old friend Colum. Who was listed as not even having turned up to the Convivium in the first place. He's listed among a number of other missing Mages, most of them Correspondence experts from the flakier Traditions (Cult of Ecstasy, Hollow Ones). They're in such a load of trouble.
At which point we drew the game to a close, as you can imagine. How do we fit this amount of stuff into six hours?
Thank God it's a Bank Holiday tomorrow. Too keyed up to sleep, and the write-up wanted doing. Wheeeeeee.
The morning involved everybody getting up early, on the basis that sign-in at the Convivium happened quite early, and various of them had things to do. One of them involved looking at the notes for Lucius' speech and realising that, while it more than adequately covered their doings over the past couple of months, it covered them too well; as in, despite it being a South Wales panel, all the stuff they really wanted to say involved the stuff they were finding out in London, which could quite easily be stricken from the speech on the grounds of irrelevance. They're going to have to work something out about that. The other task for the morning involved Skank trying to get hold of Correspondence whiz Thig Emily Swift to warn her about the upcoming possible problems. He still had his radio from when he and the old crew were blowing up various vamp nests, so he contacted Colum. Unfortunately, all Colum had to say on the matter was, "Mate, lay off the drugs", which understandably freaked Skank out. Eventually, he got Dawn's help in contacting Emily and the message got through ... and a little more besides. Apparently, there were some rumours going around about Skank and his crew -- how Skank had deserted his house, and how he was consorting with massasa, that sort of thing. Understandably, Skank was unbelievably pissed off. At which point the doorbell rang. Behind it was Ajahn, one of Lucius' compatriots, who had comandeered a stretch limo somehow and "happened to be in the neighbourhood". He also had the documentation that Marcus had left to Lucius with regards to the Nephandic activity they shared, so they have some basic info on the Sidewinder Brigade. Not that they have enough to really help them, but they do know where the autonomous eyeballs came from now -- Fomoriiiiii!
When they turned up at the Savoy, they discovered that the revolving doors had been converted into a sort of sensor thing, and a sort of package scanner had been set into a nearby wall. A sign read, "Please remove all luggage, fetishes, foci, familiars and other magical items and place through this slot", and Skank suggested putting Morrison through it as a test. However, since Kat wasn't there, I had E picking a fight with him on her behalf, since she wasn't going to let her puppy become a guinea pig. Anyway, Molly sent Loofah through and it turned out okay, so everything else went through, and then they went through the revolving doors. There were a few incidents, like when Jeremiah got banded with a maroon wristband that apparently denotes mental problems and Molly got banded with a yellow-green that is supposed to indicate vast amounts of paradox, but for the most part it went okay until Michelle went through ... then got stuck and vanished. Susanna, who was right behind (as her guest), got pulled through and also vanished. Of course, this upset people, and it only got worse when it turned out that they had probably been moved to the fifth floor, where the Order of Hermes males were hanging out ... and their rooms were sandwiched between a bunch of Janissaries. Now, Skank already knew that there were some rumours flying around about him, but he apparently didn't appreciate how far those rumours had gone. Thing was, they were being helped along quite a bit by House Quaestor. They got this information, as well as things like room numbers for their captive friends, from one of a number of time-displaced Leannes who kept wandering around the place trying to get everything done, which was apparently very disconcerting. After having a word with Michelle and Susanna (who he reduced to a gibbering wreck, incidentally), Skank went to seek out a House Quaestor mage and by the time he got a name, it was time for the Akashic Brotherhood speech. The whole thing was so bizarre that they didn't get a chance to speak to the girl from the pictures Carl's friend sent, who they saw hanging by her heels from the chandelier pretending to be a bat.
They got a little bit of info there. Japan maintains technology, mostly because it's run by Sons of Ether. China's a mess after various non-Communist factions tried to overthrow the CPC and created a civil war that turned into a vampire buffet. Vietnam's a Confucian paradise. And then there's Korea, which is doing quite well except for the Flambeau-induced crater where Seoul used to be -- apparently some Marauder decided to try to turn the entire country into an episode of M*A*S*H and the resulting battle destroyed the House Flambeau mage, the Marauder and the entire city. Kuo-Li decided to hum the M*A*S*H theme at this point and, for generally being rude and a smart-arse, his mentor Shu-Rong made one of her longer (three-hour) lectures cycle through his head, promising a similar fate for him should he transgress again.
Over lunch, Skank got into the face of a House Quaestor mage, who reeeeeeeally didn't want to talk to him. However, Skank managed to pry out more than the basics of the rumours and got a nasty shock when it turned out that he, according to everyone around him, was responsible for the enforced Mage-ghouling incident rather than being the one who blew the whole thing to hell. Worse yet, they'd apparently talked to Colum about the whole thing and a mind-scan of the warrior proved that he remembered nothing at all about the incident, so it was Skank's word against ... well, everybody else's. It gets even worse -- apparently, what happened to Brenna and Hoshikuro has gone down on the books as "a legitimate experiment", and Rodney "The Creature" Delevan's only crime in the matter was overeagerness. Skank, on the other hand, has his resonance stamped all over the cracked bottle that had originally held Brenna's spirit, and since it's gone back on the Wheel, it can't go back to Brenna's body anymore. Therefore, Skank is being charged with the murder of Brenna Blair. Skank's only answer to this was to offer to let the Quaestor mage look through his mind and see that he was telling the truth; Skank doesn't have the ability to shield his thoughts or fool a Mind mage. Unfortunately, though the Quaestor did this, he said that he got a very different story when he did so on others in similar positions, so he had no idea who to believe. The Quaestor also took the opportunity to peek into Molly's mind, but was surprised when Molly could sense it and yelled at him for it. Eventually, Skank had to back off lest he hit somebody. He went to the bar and got his hip flask topped up by a pretty Ecstatic who traded him the whiskey and some weed for a kiss.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group were visited by Violet Scheherazade herself. Jeremiah tried Spirit sense but could get nothing from her. Violet asked for a chat with Molly -- alone, of course -- and Kuo-Li left it up to Molly, who'd had enough scary people poking at her for the day so she said no. Instead, Violet extended an invitation for Skank and Molly both to meet her in the bar between Banquet and Ball, said "It's a pleasure", and turned to go. However, Kuo-Li being the irrepressable little sod that he is, said, "The pleasure's all yours", and she heard him and turned his dinner into snakes. Kuo-Li wasn't the only one whose lunch went icky -- Lucius' lunch rotted before his very eyes, indicating that his old rival Roger Botha was up to his old tricks again. Lucius had apparently resigned himself to going hungry, but Molly pushed her plate at him, got up and said, "It's a buffet lunch, Mr Lucius..." Anyway, needless to say, Skank wasn't very happy about events but wasn't going to miss the audience with the Heinous Old Mare, so at least his evening had some excitement to it. Afterwards, Lucius found Romulus and Remus running about with what they recognised as Emily's never-removed orange-green-pink striped scarf, which Lucius removed from them and showed to Skank. Skank went hunting for Emily's Avatar, botched and bounced his senses off the fuck-potent basement wards, knocking himself semi-conscious in the process. Thankfully, he has a friend in the business -- Lucille McBride, the last of his cohorts and the one who put his leg back on after the original Golem incident. She dealt with the concussion with ruthless efficiency and Skank tried again, finding that he hadn't missed by much -- Emily's Avatar was directly next to the strange wards in the basement, but Lucille told the lot of them to bugger off and let her deal with it. You don't argue with Lucille; it's not worth the effort.
Next was the Celestial Chorus talk, which was amusing. The older ones told tales of Amsterdam as a Cult of Ecstasy haven, Marauders in Greece, a completely depopulated Turkey and Rome being home to HIT-Marks at least. Also they discovered some old Norse mages who seemed to operate outside the known Traditions but were far more coherent than most Orphans. One of the younger Choristers had insisted that they communicate with the rune-mages they called Laerdom mages, and two of them actually attended the Convivium -- Vigrid and Kirsten. The others tried very hard to talk to Vigrid, Kirsten and the young Chorister, but they kind of scared the poor bugger and he ran off. Kirsten insists that the nervous little bugger just needs time -- what with Rome and the scorn of his elders, it's been rough.
Tea-time, and Jeremiah tried to talk to Frank about the Mage-ghouling thing. Unfortunately, Frank not being the most easygoing chap in the world, jumped to conclusions and herded Jeremiah out of his room, causing Jeremiah to basically give the entire damn Tradition the finger. Meanwhile, Skank tried to cheer Susanna up (note: this doesn't work when it's Skank doing it) and attempted to talk Michelle down from a terminal case of boredom. When he went down to the lobby to find magazines or something, he found Romulus, Remus and Molly playing something that can only be called Forces-dodgeball. Eventually they gave that up (Molly used the ball to cast a case of friction burn on the Creature, who she'd noticed snooping around) and settled for straight tag. Lucius just watched in amusement, while Skank, deciding that no one was going to blow him up for going into a storage room, decided to stake out the door to the basement. He thought he had proved himself wrong when he got pinned -- not ungently -- to the storage room floor and dragged via Forces effect into the shadows. That was Lucille, with unconscious Emily in tow. Skank hoisted Emily up and hauled her out towards the lifts. At around this point, Romulus and Remus decided to engage Lucius in play, both slapped him in the head and cried, "Tag! You're it!" So Lucius decided to play -- missed Romulus, missed Remus ... and wound up tripping over Molly, landing right on top of her. She had a grazed and carpet-burned knee and a bump on the head, and was knocked out for a minute or two, so Skank ordered Lucius to get her the hell into the lift and up to her room. The girls got dropped into their respective rooms, Skank patched Molly up and checked on Emily, who was less talkative than usual, probably due to headache. They still had the Cult of Ecstasy talk to go to, so they left it at that.
The Cult of Ecstasy representatives spent most of their time surfing in Australia, but did manage to pay enough attention to develop something of a speech. For instance, things didn't go as badly in the cities because no one was worried about freezing to death. However, groups of young people got fed up with things and formed their own little tribes, living either in abandoned cities or in the bush. Some went insane in the Children of the Corn sense, while others Awakened en masse and became tribes of Orphans. Some of these Orphans were taken in by Aboriginal proto-Dreamspeakers who refer to themselves only as the People. Two of them came too, a man named Uwan and his sister Pengana. Unfortunately, when the speech devolved into Steve raving about the surfing, Lucius got up to leave. Uwan decided that this was rude and turned him into a dingo. Lucius decided to be stupid and Molly decided to collar him with the only thing available -- Loofah. Unfortunately, dingo-ate-my-Lucius twisted and turned so much that he wound up choking himself into unconsciousness. Eventually, the speech ended and Molly let Lucius go and Uwan turned him back. So then they all got into their fancy duds and went to this Banquet and Ball. The few notable things there involved Molly pulling a Forces effect to make Jeremiah's suit appear maroon to match his wrist-tag, Skank checking up on Emily (still headachy and slow, but seemed okay) and general faffing.
The Banquet tables were laid out a little like Hogwarts -- one table to a Tradition. At the Euthanatos table, Lucius found himself sitting between Leanne and Lesley, and across from Ajahn, who winked at him and indicated Roger, who was sitting in the one spot on any banquet table where it's nearly impossible to comfortably reach anything. Meanwhile, Lucius got swarmed with female compliments over his kimono and Lesley, who'd apparently cast a very minor glamour on the man, whispered "You owe me". Lucius owes Leanne, Ajahn and now Lesley some serious favours. Meanwhile, there was little going on at the Verbena table, Kuo-Li was having some polite conversation at the Akashic table ... and the shit went down at the Order of Hermes table big-time. See, Molly was sat between a representative of House Shaea and a representative of House Flambeau, and across from an ex Miscellanea. Skank was a couple of people along from Molly, and eventually sauntered over to make sure everything was okay. Apparently, Molly was being propaganda'ed to death, so Skank encouraged her to ask questions. So she asked the Flambeau, "Is it true that you're an entire house of pyromaniacs?" (Skank at this point said, with the evil grin, "She knows some big words, see?") She asked the Shaea about whether there was such a thing as reverse misogyny; the Shaea said something about how she would be good in the house, and the Flambeau said, "If I don't set fire to her, I think I'm gonna like her". Then the Ex Miscellanea asked for a demonstration of Molly's abilities. She managed to make the candle flames from the table candelabras reach in neat little pillars right to the ceiling, which encouraged the Flambeau, and then Molly said, "I can do Spirit, too!" When permitted by Skank, she did the Handmaidens of Bast rite and called some very beautiful Siamese cats, who mostly stared at the Ex Miscellanea. The Ex Miscellanea, a little perturbed, decided to make the problem go away; she *poof*ed all the cats. I mean all the cats, including Loofah and every other feline familiar in the building. This pissed Molly off incredibly, so she set a jinx goblin on the Ex Miscellanea; she's going to have the worst luck until she brings the familiars back. Unfortunately, this also touches on her magical ability, so even if she wanted to back down, she's not sure she could actually do the spell properly. Around this point, Jeremiah decided to start a rumour that Lucius and Kuo-Li were an item, but botched his Manipulation+Expression roll so badly that the rumour turned into "Jeremiah and Kuo-Li are an item".
Then came the Ball. The girl from Carl's pictures tried to play flute with the CoE band and they booted her off, at which point Jeremiah tried to chat her up, when the girl backed away slowly and then ran like hell. Skank and Molly went off for their meeting with Violet, who was actually using a projection and made an abortive attempt to make Skank believe that Molly would be better off with a more skilled mentor. She also referred to Molly as "just an average eight-year-old", which begged the question "What do you want her so badly for?" Unfortunately, that was never answered, nor was "What the fuck are you up to in the basement?" At which point, her projection vanished, and the pretty little Ecstatic offered Skank a bottle of rocket fuel to take back to the party. Later, Lucius decided to try to have words with Eurydice, who was wallflowering and watching Romulus and Remus get taught a few Forces basics by Molly of all people. (They were juggling Ecstatics; one of them clung to the disco ball in the ceiling and wound up caught and crowd-surfed.) Lucius tried to take responsibility for the boys, calling them "his", and then Eurydice verbally bitch-slapped him, telling him that she'd tried to contact him when she knew she was pregnant but he wasn't willing for her to know his location, so... Anyway, she stalked off, monumentally pissed off, and Lucius started drinking some of Skank's rocket fuel. Roger had been taunting Lucius all night, so Lucius decided to confront Roger at this stage, and Roger crossed a couple of lines, so Lucius punched him; got him right in the nose and floored him. This led to a couple of Janissaries grabbing him, hustling him up to the fifth floor and dumping him into an empty "holding tank" room overnight. Skank went up to ask what had happened, didn't tell Lucius off (after all, we all hate Roger Botha) and checked up on Susanna and Michelle (who was pommel-striking a wall in boredom; he offered her some of the rocket fuel). Then he spoke to one of the Janissaries, who gave him next to no info except for the fact that Michelle and Susanna would stand trial and be kept in isolation until these fourth day trials as a precaution. Around then, he had a conversation with Merrick Archbold bani Tytalus, who suggested he had information to give ... for a price. They weren't going into it right then, so Skank went back down, took Molly up to bed, checked on Emily (asleep) and then went to bed himself.
Next morning, the door to Lucius' holding cell was unlocked and Skank went to check up on a rather hung-over Lucius. Skank found his bones for him but Lucius botched his Life roll and went into physical Serena mode. Skank took Lucius to Lucille's surgery, got the poor bugger fixed up and then went to check on the girls. Emily had gone down to breakfast ... and when he got down there, he saw Emily in a plain grey suit, eating breakfast with the Creature. When he went over to talk to her, she was avoiding coffee (very bizarre) and not talking much (an indication of the End Times). So Skank hauled arse up to Lucille's surgery and told her what was going on, at which point Lucille barrelled downstairs, saw the changed Emily and put her to sleep, then had Skank drag the changed Thig up to the surgery. A little bit of Mind magic by Kuo-Li showed that someone had been dicking around in Emily's mind, but the roll wasn't good enough to indicate what had been done. Lucius botched the same effect and became Serena in Spirit instead of body, but tried to hide it from everybody. The main thing they wanted done at that point was to get the Creature the fuck out of the way, so Lucille whipped up a little something that he needed to drink and would put him out. Kuo-Li, who's just gone up in Correspondence to be able to move objects, said that he would take care of this.
So to the Dreamspeaker panel, who indicated that, aside from Sabbat in Colombia and Buenos Aires turning into a CoE party town, the main difficulty in South America was the return of the rainforests by a particularly tenacious Verbena Marauder. This wouldn't be so bad if the rain forest now wasn't a zooterrorist attack waiting to happen.
So during lunch, Kuo-Li Corresponded Lucille's mixture into the Creature's drink, at which point he finished his lunch, got up, walked halfway across the room and fell over, steaming with fever. They took him up to Lucille's surgery and had him quarantined. He broke out in multi-coloured spots and was being plagued by Guilt Epiphlings, which Skank and Molly tied to him and emphasised until he was screaming with them. Apparently, Molly was concerned when people called what she was doing evil, not understanding that there is good-evil among these people, and had to be talked out of a self-loathing fit. All the same, it worked out alright and they went off to the Euthanatos talk.
India didn't change much; the cities that survived off tourist trade suffered, but the rest of the country went on as it always had. The group found some mage groups that Lesley thought of as proto-Euthanatos and which she thought merited study, but Roger thought that they were too primitive to bother with. Lesley told him right the fuck off and got applause, which ended the talk on a not-very-auspicious note.
Meanwhile, Skank had his appointment with Merrick Archbold bani Tytalus, who indicated that he knew what had happened to Emily and that he could fix it ... and the price would be a half-hour chat alone with Molly. Skank didn't like the sound of this one little bit but went to run it past the others. Unfortunately, during the course of the conversation, they made the typical mistake of forgetting that Molly was there -- she goes quiet when people are talking about her, so she hears what they really have to say. Suffice it to say that she got fed up with them bickering and went to talk to Archbold. Skank followed and paced around outside the little parlour room until, ten minutes in, there was *FWOOMPH!*. Skank kicked the door in to see a very singed Archbold and a very peeved Molly who wouldn't say exactly why she had to foom him but referred to him as Mr Touchy-man. (Apparently, Jeremiah nearly drained the life out of him when he heard that little gem.) Anyway, after Molly threatened to call certamen on his paedophilic arse, and with four very pissed-off mages glaring at him, he was well and truly cowed into submission and was forced to fulfil his end of the bargain. He got Emily back to her former self just in time to make the Order of Hermes panel. Unfortunately, one of the things they found out when Emily was able to give them info was that, along with the Creature and Violet, the third who turned Emily into the Stepford Thig was none other than Skank's old friend Colum. Who was listed as not even having turned up to the Convivium in the first place. He's listed among a number of other missing Mages, most of them Correspondence experts from the flakier Traditions (Cult of Ecstasy, Hollow Ones). They're in such a load of trouble.
At which point we drew the game to a close, as you can imagine. How do we fit this amount of stuff into six hours?
Thank God it's a Bank Holiday tomorrow. Too keyed up to sleep, and the write-up wanted doing. Wheeeeeee.