thessalian (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thessalian) wrote2005-04-25 02:00 pm
thessalian) wrote2005-04-25 02:00 pm
Mirror, Mirror
I have a theory: all fashion designers are devout, Bible-thumping Christians who believe that all women should be punished for Original Sin. Why the hell else would there be this huge big deal about underwire bras and high-heeled shoes? Wandering around for a day in clothes designed to blend into a private sector office setting has been a real education after all these years. The only thing NHS really has going for it is the ability to get away with wearing one’s DoomBoots in the office. Still, the job’s pretty cushy when compared to some of the stuff I was pulling in the NHS, so I really shouldn’t whinge.
Anyway, yesterday was Mage, when the entire party went on a voyage of self-discovery and existential angst. Things were relatively normal the next morning. Lucius went up and had a bit of a sparring match with Miyamoto Kaede, and Kuo-Li and the boys wound up watching that for a little while. Then Skank woke up with a bad case of what appeared to be spirit snakes -- they were just all over him for no apparent reason. Research turned up squat all at first (this was Lucius trying it with Molly's book on snake gods, and he eventually just got fed up with it), so Skank decided to just live with the umbral snakes. After all, as Skank himself said, this was far from the weirdest thing that had happened to him or indeed any of them.
This turned out to be a bad idea, as Fett, the Garou of the group invited for breakfast to discuss the vampire problem in Llandeilo, tried to eat Skank's head and called him "tainted". Eventually Skank stood down from the usual "fuck you and the wolf-form you rode in on" approach, but this was only after the whole deal where Fett took Crinos form. Skank got unaccountably pissed off around about then, and his sudden change of mood kind of squashed any questions to be asked of the new arrivals. They did get a certain sense of what this mission to kill Sabine was to the new arrivals -- a hit for personal reasons on the part of the client, apparently -- and that there was a possibility of Assamite guards. Beyond that, though, they didn't get much, because the sudden weird anger was too much for Skank to deal with and he went off to destroy a couple of walls in the car shed. The others sent the visitors away and went to investigate Skank, doing a last bit of research before they went so they could see what they were up against. Molly also had a brief conversation with the enigmatic "unidentified supernatural" Mr Bishop, coming away from that looking a little confused and freaked out.
What they got was Psuelak, finally remembering the information they got from the past-life-dox Skank had a couple of sessions ago. Apparently if you're after him specifically for a pact or something, he'll deal with you. However, if you're just farting around or you summoned him by mistake, he will watch you for awhile and then test you. If you turn out worthy, he will take you over. The first marks of him trying that is the victim breaking out in astral snakes; when they're gone, the takeover is complete. Which meant Skank was in a great deal of trouble. So out they went to try to talk to him.
Unfortunately, they turned up too late. By the time they got out to the car shed, Skank had tried to step sideways to get away from the stupid snakes and wound up getting himself taken over completely -- his mission was to kill his cabal, particularly the little girl. Lucius tried to explain to him what the snakes meant, but Skank said, "Oh, don't worry; they're gone now". When Lucius tried to tell him that this was a bad thing, Skank punched him and went after Kuo-Li next. Kuo-Li hit Skank, drove him to the floor, got Forces-hit away a little, then punched him unconscious. They decided the best thing to do would be to do what they did to Rodney -- duct tape his mouth shut, tape his hands behind his back and take his foci. Problem being, the only place Lucius could think of to find duct tape was the cellar labs, where Molly was working. She got the impression that Mr Skank was in trouble and ran out to see what was going on. Lucius was right behind her, trying to distract her attention with the book telling what had happened to her mentor while he tried to tape Skank's hands behind his back. Since he was only doing it one-handed, when Skank woke up, he could break away quite easily and went to crush Molly's windpipe. Thankfully, she managed a good bit of reflexive magic and protected the area around her throat so she couldn't be strangled. Then Kuo-Li hit a nerve in Skank's arm to make him drop Molly and then Lucius just broke his arm. At which point, Molly threw up a shield around Skank so he couldn't get out, and while they were talking about what to do, Molly had a look at him with Spirit. After a bit of a look-over, she pulled something out of him. See, it wasn't so much Skank that had been taken over; it was Geoff Woad. She separated the Geoff-spirit, who was happy enough to be a separate entity from Skank, and pulled him out. So now you had Geoff and Skank, technically the same person, but one just manifesting into a corporeal entity and one already corporeal and really fucking confused. After some conversation, Geoff got away, and they had absolutely no idea what to do next, or what he was planning.
The Gallery was a dead end. It got so confused in the Spirit sense that it wouldn't let anyone near the Skank paintings. Instead, Skank enlisted Molly's help to summon and bind the Geoff-spirit. However, there was a botch, and instead of Geoff, they got a man in robes and a gas mask. Skank recognised this 'man'; he couldn't talk, but he had been watching Skank since before his Awakening, so they tried questioning him anyway. Eventually, they got the idea to ask the other Thig of Skank's acquaintance, starting with Lucille. She was intensely peeved, telling him that she had insisted quite some time ago that he needed to do some regression work to have a close look at what had happened to him in the past. Now they were stuck with this Skank/Geoff thing that they really needed to talk to, work on and generally defuse before something nasty happened. Basically, before Skank could get rid of the Psuelak-tainted Geoff Woad, he had to find out what the bloody hell had happened and how to talk him out of the state he was in.
A little bit of research suggested the Mirror Zone as a place to start the quest for "what the fuck happened?" -- basically it's a place that takes you to the place in your life you really need to address and forces you to do it. While Skank could have gone in alone, he decided for some reason that the others ought to come as well, so Kuo-Li and Lucius got invited. They accepted (Lucius had gone back to his practicing on the roof, but decided to show off and jump off and wound up breaking his ankle. However, he managed not only to heal himself but to groom himself well enough to make it look like he hadn't just made an unfortunately crappy landing in a bush) and Molly wound up taking them all there, going along herself to make sure she could get them out again.
But of course, the thing about voluntarily entering the Mirror Zone is that it's not going to limit itself to one person when it comes to delivering life lessons. Lucius got the treatment first -- the group found themself in the Dev, and Lucius was forced into a rather uncomfortable and enlightening conversation with Eurydice. He nearly fell into the same old traps and mistakes again, mostly by not admitting to her that he did love her and was a total moron to let her go, but got forcibly reminded that the only way any of them were going to move on was for him to rectify matters, at least in his own head. So eventually he followed Eurydice out of the pub, made his admission, and they moved on.
Kuo-Li, surprisingly, took even longer to accept his little bit of instruction. He found himself as a weak, powerless eleven-year-old being attacked by three wargs. He ran for a campfire he'd seen off to the east and blundered directly into Sarah, who was into some working or other. She sent him off somewhere safe in the shadows, then drew her shapechanging sigil into the ground, going all mountain lion. She could take one warg on her own, but stood no real chance against three -- one tore her throat out, then all three eviscerated her, all while Kuo-Li watched. They left, her body turned human on death, and Kuo-Li found himself presented with the corpse of his girlfriend and no way to help her. He couldn't even bury the body, and could only cover her when he managed to get Lucius to give up his coat for the purpose. Eventually, he got it drummed into him that he couldn't be there all the time, and might find himself in the position where he couldn't save the day -- for her, for any individual. That hit him hard, so after some serious stubbornness, he just broke down crying. And the scene shifted again.
Next was Amsterdam -- a club called the Karmadrome. Skank was shadowing his former self as he went in, thinking it was really cool that they had a guy who was the spit of Jimi Hendrix on the door, had a drink, then got to dancing with a particularly sexy someone called Corvus. She started talking to him about n-space and ur-language and all kinds of things that made all the wrong kinds of sense, and given that the dance floor was situated on a Node, it's no surprise that Geoff Awakened at that point. From there, they got talking to Shroom, who handed over a parchment with instructions for how to contact a creator-god called Ptah who seemed pretty cool. Still, Shroom cautioned, he had to be careful because there were some other summoning rituals on that page that he didn't want to be messing with. And then Geoff started talking to Skank, telling him that this was all a lot of bollocks and if he did try it, there would be sabotage on the part of the more sensible him. Needless to say, Geoff tried it anyway when he got back to uni, and pretty well deliberately bollocksed it up, going for the wrong evocation out of sheer spite. Geoff kept insisting to Skank that it wouldn't work anyway, explaining away the sudden hissing sound and the snakes and hitting Skank with a few home truths about his uni days into the bargain. Skank basically said, "I was an arrogant twat, and you'll change your tune this time tomorrow". Thankfully, Skank had got his life lesson pretty well learned before they got into the common room that was the source of all that devastation, bloodshed and horror (but not before he saw Ada wave at him and walk into the common room ahead of him; Geoff still refused to believe any of it). The fact was that he couldn't blame Shroom for any of it anymore -- it really was his fault, because he can be a complete arrogant arse (case in point: mouthing off to a Crinos-form Garou).
The final one was Molly. That one was fairly simple -- they wound up explaining to an adult version of her that, actually, she's better at magic than Skank -- even now, when she's eight, she's got more power. This is a hard lesson for an already-confused eight-year-old to learn. But then again, there's a source of even more confusion in that when she regressed to youthful form, she only went back as far as ten -- her aging process seems to be speeding up to catch up with what her Avatar thinks her age should be. This is worrisome because Skank now thinks he doesn't have as much time as he thought before Violet gets her mitts on him.
In any event, they came back (with Kuo-Li and Lucius rather pissed off) and tried to think about how to find the newly corporeal Geoff Woad. They were spared that by an incensed Lucille asking what the hell was going on -- Geoff was in Liverpool, helping Beep lead a strike on Flambeau home base with what remained of his army. A suicide mission if ever there was one, but at least they knew where he was. In the end, Lucille sent Emily to fetch them, giving them time to have some lunch and for Kuo-Li to visit Sarah. Turned out that there had been another death in town (Darren Murphy, he of the big bad bullying) and one near death. Turned out a girl named Sophie had taken a very bad turn and Mr Bishop had gone in to see her. When he came out again, Sophie was in better health but acting differently; sort of shy and retiring. Kuo-Li realised that this was very much how Alice had acted when he knew her, but had no idea whether that was an effect of the ghouling or if Alice was always like that, so he went home to ask. Turned out that Mr Bishop had a very special gift -- he could put a soul into the body of someone who had recently died nad keep it there permanently. In short, Mr Bishop is a demon. He might be seeking redemption, he might just be curious, but whatever the reason, he just brought Alice back to life in Sophie's recently emptied body. They confirmed this with a trip to Sophie's house before buggering off to Liverpool, and Molly confided to Skank that Mr Bishop had done it as payment to Molly for services to be rendered. They know Molly can't be affected by mind effects, and they also know that there will be Assamites and ghouls between them and Sabine, so they want to distract the others while Molly does very nasty things to Sabine before Mr Bishop rips her soul from her body and utterly destroys it. Also, Molly's very happy that her friend is back and won't hear a word against it.
So off they went to Liverpool, which was not only completely destroyed but drained of most of its raw Tass -- the lines of power in the place were mostly dead. When mages fight, it isn't pretty. They even found a few Triffid-like man-eating plants but managed, despite the strains of using magic on such dead ground, to destroy all of them. Then they found Beep, who was making as little sense as usual. It seemed that Geoff was leading the Flambeau armies to spots of high Thig concentration and waiting for the nukes before moving on. Then Molly discovered a better way of flying than hang-gliding off the roof; she used her foomstick as a broomstick and shot off in the direction where she could see some actual Prime. Skank eventually had to levitate a car chassis to carry the others at a speed in which they could catch up with her, but when they did, at least she'd caught up with Geoff and stopped him in his tracks. So Skank and Geoff had it out one final time. Apparently Geoff's remit was to lead the Flambeau nukes to destroy all of House Thig, who he saw as the source of all his misery. Skank couldn't let him do that because, after all, it was just going to add more fuel to the war that was already global, if Emily is to be believed. However, when he went to kill Geoff, Molly had already intervened because there was a chance that killing Geoff would also kill Skank, and she wouldn't let that happen. There was impasse until Skank realised that he could manipulate the Forces/Prime shield she'd put around Geoff and use it to squish him flat. As he did this, he went comatose, and Molly found the snake-tainted spirit that had been moving Geoff Woad about and fried it
Skank, meanwhile, found himself in Dawn's favourite umbral glade. Dawn herself was there, gently chastising him for the self-sacrifice and showing him the fate of the other him. Then said, "If you're going to do this sort of thing, you're going to need more power to deal with it". Then tapped him on the head -- Skank has survived his seeking and is now at Arete 4. When he woke up, Emily had arrived as evac service and was whimpering a mile a minute until Skank reached up and shut her up. Hugs all around and the group finally got to go back home.
Lucius got a visit from Romulus after he got in. Romulus said he was planning to go back to London. Lucius said, "Fine. Go" and then got the wrath of Remus heaped on his head; both twins then packed their bags and went to Kuo-Li to ask if he could get them transport to London because their father didn't want them. Skank gave Lucius a good talking-to, reminding him that the boys are his sons, for pity's sake, and anyway, London is not a safe place because of Beep's army, roaming Malkavians and angry Technocrats. So Lucius went to talk to the boys and wound up taking refuge in, "You're not going to London; you're grounded". When he stomped back upstairs, Skank asked "How old are you, anyway?" ... at which point, Lucius had a Serena attack and answered "seven". So Romulus and Remus got to meet Serena, first in their dad's body and then in her own (Life magic is a fun thing), and they like her better than they like him. When Lucius came back to himself in spirit at least, he tried to get the house to make sure the boys didn't leave or alert him if they tried, but the house didn't recognise the Serena-voice as an authorised denizen of the house. He tried to switch back and got himself at seventeen, which the house still didn't recognise, so Kuo-Li just set a Mind-Correspondence rote on the boys to wake him if they were trying to leave and everyone went to bed. Next session: vampire hunting.
Just a brief at-work update, though the majority of the write-up went on last night. When I get home, I must actually try to do some writing on something that isn’t Mage, though I’ve been doing a lot better at that recently. Yet again, it’s the problem of too many projects and not enough me. Argh.
Anyway, yesterday was Mage, when the entire party went on a voyage of self-discovery and existential angst. Things were relatively normal the next morning. Lucius went up and had a bit of a sparring match with Miyamoto Kaede, and Kuo-Li and the boys wound up watching that for a little while. Then Skank woke up with a bad case of what appeared to be spirit snakes -- they were just all over him for no apparent reason. Research turned up squat all at first (this was Lucius trying it with Molly's book on snake gods, and he eventually just got fed up with it), so Skank decided to just live with the umbral snakes. After all, as Skank himself said, this was far from the weirdest thing that had happened to him or indeed any of them.
This turned out to be a bad idea, as Fett, the Garou of the group invited for breakfast to discuss the vampire problem in Llandeilo, tried to eat Skank's head and called him "tainted". Eventually Skank stood down from the usual "fuck you and the wolf-form you rode in on" approach, but this was only after the whole deal where Fett took Crinos form. Skank got unaccountably pissed off around about then, and his sudden change of mood kind of squashed any questions to be asked of the new arrivals. They did get a certain sense of what this mission to kill Sabine was to the new arrivals -- a hit for personal reasons on the part of the client, apparently -- and that there was a possibility of Assamite guards. Beyond that, though, they didn't get much, because the sudden weird anger was too much for Skank to deal with and he went off to destroy a couple of walls in the car shed. The others sent the visitors away and went to investigate Skank, doing a last bit of research before they went so they could see what they were up against. Molly also had a brief conversation with the enigmatic "unidentified supernatural" Mr Bishop, coming away from that looking a little confused and freaked out.
What they got was Psuelak, finally remembering the information they got from the past-life-dox Skank had a couple of sessions ago. Apparently if you're after him specifically for a pact or something, he'll deal with you. However, if you're just farting around or you summoned him by mistake, he will watch you for awhile and then test you. If you turn out worthy, he will take you over. The first marks of him trying that is the victim breaking out in astral snakes; when they're gone, the takeover is complete. Which meant Skank was in a great deal of trouble. So out they went to try to talk to him.
Unfortunately, they turned up too late. By the time they got out to the car shed, Skank had tried to step sideways to get away from the stupid snakes and wound up getting himself taken over completely -- his mission was to kill his cabal, particularly the little girl. Lucius tried to explain to him what the snakes meant, but Skank said, "Oh, don't worry; they're gone now". When Lucius tried to tell him that this was a bad thing, Skank punched him and went after Kuo-Li next. Kuo-Li hit Skank, drove him to the floor, got Forces-hit away a little, then punched him unconscious. They decided the best thing to do would be to do what they did to Rodney -- duct tape his mouth shut, tape his hands behind his back and take his foci. Problem being, the only place Lucius could think of to find duct tape was the cellar labs, where Molly was working. She got the impression that Mr Skank was in trouble and ran out to see what was going on. Lucius was right behind her, trying to distract her attention with the book telling what had happened to her mentor while he tried to tape Skank's hands behind his back. Since he was only doing it one-handed, when Skank woke up, he could break away quite easily and went to crush Molly's windpipe. Thankfully, she managed a good bit of reflexive magic and protected the area around her throat so she couldn't be strangled. Then Kuo-Li hit a nerve in Skank's arm to make him drop Molly and then Lucius just broke his arm. At which point, Molly threw up a shield around Skank so he couldn't get out, and while they were talking about what to do, Molly had a look at him with Spirit. After a bit of a look-over, she pulled something out of him. See, it wasn't so much Skank that had been taken over; it was Geoff Woad. She separated the Geoff-spirit, who was happy enough to be a separate entity from Skank, and pulled him out. So now you had Geoff and Skank, technically the same person, but one just manifesting into a corporeal entity and one already corporeal and really fucking confused. After some conversation, Geoff got away, and they had absolutely no idea what to do next, or what he was planning.
The Gallery was a dead end. It got so confused in the Spirit sense that it wouldn't let anyone near the Skank paintings. Instead, Skank enlisted Molly's help to summon and bind the Geoff-spirit. However, there was a botch, and instead of Geoff, they got a man in robes and a gas mask. Skank recognised this 'man'; he couldn't talk, but he had been watching Skank since before his Awakening, so they tried questioning him anyway. Eventually, they got the idea to ask the other Thig of Skank's acquaintance, starting with Lucille. She was intensely peeved, telling him that she had insisted quite some time ago that he needed to do some regression work to have a close look at what had happened to him in the past. Now they were stuck with this Skank/Geoff thing that they really needed to talk to, work on and generally defuse before something nasty happened. Basically, before Skank could get rid of the Psuelak-tainted Geoff Woad, he had to find out what the bloody hell had happened and how to talk him out of the state he was in.
A little bit of research suggested the Mirror Zone as a place to start the quest for "what the fuck happened?" -- basically it's a place that takes you to the place in your life you really need to address and forces you to do it. While Skank could have gone in alone, he decided for some reason that the others ought to come as well, so Kuo-Li and Lucius got invited. They accepted (Lucius had gone back to his practicing on the roof, but decided to show off and jump off and wound up breaking his ankle. However, he managed not only to heal himself but to groom himself well enough to make it look like he hadn't just made an unfortunately crappy landing in a bush) and Molly wound up taking them all there, going along herself to make sure she could get them out again.
But of course, the thing about voluntarily entering the Mirror Zone is that it's not going to limit itself to one person when it comes to delivering life lessons. Lucius got the treatment first -- the group found themself in the Dev, and Lucius was forced into a rather uncomfortable and enlightening conversation with Eurydice. He nearly fell into the same old traps and mistakes again, mostly by not admitting to her that he did love her and was a total moron to let her go, but got forcibly reminded that the only way any of them were going to move on was for him to rectify matters, at least in his own head. So eventually he followed Eurydice out of the pub, made his admission, and they moved on.
Kuo-Li, surprisingly, took even longer to accept his little bit of instruction. He found himself as a weak, powerless eleven-year-old being attacked by three wargs. He ran for a campfire he'd seen off to the east and blundered directly into Sarah, who was into some working or other. She sent him off somewhere safe in the shadows, then drew her shapechanging sigil into the ground, going all mountain lion. She could take one warg on her own, but stood no real chance against three -- one tore her throat out, then all three eviscerated her, all while Kuo-Li watched. They left, her body turned human on death, and Kuo-Li found himself presented with the corpse of his girlfriend and no way to help her. He couldn't even bury the body, and could only cover her when he managed to get Lucius to give up his coat for the purpose. Eventually, he got it drummed into him that he couldn't be there all the time, and might find himself in the position where he couldn't save the day -- for her, for any individual. That hit him hard, so after some serious stubbornness, he just broke down crying. And the scene shifted again.
Next was Amsterdam -- a club called the Karmadrome. Skank was shadowing his former self as he went in, thinking it was really cool that they had a guy who was the spit of Jimi Hendrix on the door, had a drink, then got to dancing with a particularly sexy someone called Corvus. She started talking to him about n-space and ur-language and all kinds of things that made all the wrong kinds of sense, and given that the dance floor was situated on a Node, it's no surprise that Geoff Awakened at that point. From there, they got talking to Shroom, who handed over a parchment with instructions for how to contact a creator-god called Ptah who seemed pretty cool. Still, Shroom cautioned, he had to be careful because there were some other summoning rituals on that page that he didn't want to be messing with. And then Geoff started talking to Skank, telling him that this was all a lot of bollocks and if he did try it, there would be sabotage on the part of the more sensible him. Needless to say, Geoff tried it anyway when he got back to uni, and pretty well deliberately bollocksed it up, going for the wrong evocation out of sheer spite. Geoff kept insisting to Skank that it wouldn't work anyway, explaining away the sudden hissing sound and the snakes and hitting Skank with a few home truths about his uni days into the bargain. Skank basically said, "I was an arrogant twat, and you'll change your tune this time tomorrow". Thankfully, Skank had got his life lesson pretty well learned before they got into the common room that was the source of all that devastation, bloodshed and horror (but not before he saw Ada wave at him and walk into the common room ahead of him; Geoff still refused to believe any of it). The fact was that he couldn't blame Shroom for any of it anymore -- it really was his fault, because he can be a complete arrogant arse (case in point: mouthing off to a Crinos-form Garou).
The final one was Molly. That one was fairly simple -- they wound up explaining to an adult version of her that, actually, she's better at magic than Skank -- even now, when she's eight, she's got more power. This is a hard lesson for an already-confused eight-year-old to learn. But then again, there's a source of even more confusion in that when she regressed to youthful form, she only went back as far as ten -- her aging process seems to be speeding up to catch up with what her Avatar thinks her age should be. This is worrisome because Skank now thinks he doesn't have as much time as he thought before Violet gets her mitts on him.
In any event, they came back (with Kuo-Li and Lucius rather pissed off) and tried to think about how to find the newly corporeal Geoff Woad. They were spared that by an incensed Lucille asking what the hell was going on -- Geoff was in Liverpool, helping Beep lead a strike on Flambeau home base with what remained of his army. A suicide mission if ever there was one, but at least they knew where he was. In the end, Lucille sent Emily to fetch them, giving them time to have some lunch and for Kuo-Li to visit Sarah. Turned out that there had been another death in town (Darren Murphy, he of the big bad bullying) and one near death. Turned out a girl named Sophie had taken a very bad turn and Mr Bishop had gone in to see her. When he came out again, Sophie was in better health but acting differently; sort of shy and retiring. Kuo-Li realised that this was very much how Alice had acted when he knew her, but had no idea whether that was an effect of the ghouling or if Alice was always like that, so he went home to ask. Turned out that Mr Bishop had a very special gift -- he could put a soul into the body of someone who had recently died nad keep it there permanently. In short, Mr Bishop is a demon. He might be seeking redemption, he might just be curious, but whatever the reason, he just brought Alice back to life in Sophie's recently emptied body. They confirmed this with a trip to Sophie's house before buggering off to Liverpool, and Molly confided to Skank that Mr Bishop had done it as payment to Molly for services to be rendered. They know Molly can't be affected by mind effects, and they also know that there will be Assamites and ghouls between them and Sabine, so they want to distract the others while Molly does very nasty things to Sabine before Mr Bishop rips her soul from her body and utterly destroys it. Also, Molly's very happy that her friend is back and won't hear a word against it.
So off they went to Liverpool, which was not only completely destroyed but drained of most of its raw Tass -- the lines of power in the place were mostly dead. When mages fight, it isn't pretty. They even found a few Triffid-like man-eating plants but managed, despite the strains of using magic on such dead ground, to destroy all of them. Then they found Beep, who was making as little sense as usual. It seemed that Geoff was leading the Flambeau armies to spots of high Thig concentration and waiting for the nukes before moving on. Then Molly discovered a better way of flying than hang-gliding off the roof; she used her foomstick as a broomstick and shot off in the direction where she could see some actual Prime. Skank eventually had to levitate a car chassis to carry the others at a speed in which they could catch up with her, but when they did, at least she'd caught up with Geoff and stopped him in his tracks. So Skank and Geoff had it out one final time. Apparently Geoff's remit was to lead the Flambeau nukes to destroy all of House Thig, who he saw as the source of all his misery. Skank couldn't let him do that because, after all, it was just going to add more fuel to the war that was already global, if Emily is to be believed. However, when he went to kill Geoff, Molly had already intervened because there was a chance that killing Geoff would also kill Skank, and she wouldn't let that happen. There was impasse until Skank realised that he could manipulate the Forces/Prime shield she'd put around Geoff and use it to squish him flat. As he did this, he went comatose, and Molly found the snake-tainted spirit that had been moving Geoff Woad about and fried it
Skank, meanwhile, found himself in Dawn's favourite umbral glade. Dawn herself was there, gently chastising him for the self-sacrifice and showing him the fate of the other him. Then said, "If you're going to do this sort of thing, you're going to need more power to deal with it". Then tapped him on the head -- Skank has survived his seeking and is now at Arete 4. When he woke up, Emily had arrived as evac service and was whimpering a mile a minute until Skank reached up and shut her up. Hugs all around and the group finally got to go back home.
Lucius got a visit from Romulus after he got in. Romulus said he was planning to go back to London. Lucius said, "Fine. Go" and then got the wrath of Remus heaped on his head; both twins then packed their bags and went to Kuo-Li to ask if he could get them transport to London because their father didn't want them. Skank gave Lucius a good talking-to, reminding him that the boys are his sons, for pity's sake, and anyway, London is not a safe place because of Beep's army, roaming Malkavians and angry Technocrats. So Lucius went to talk to the boys and wound up taking refuge in, "You're not going to London; you're grounded". When he stomped back upstairs, Skank asked "How old are you, anyway?" ... at which point, Lucius had a Serena attack and answered "seven". So Romulus and Remus got to meet Serena, first in their dad's body and then in her own (Life magic is a fun thing), and they like her better than they like him. When Lucius came back to himself in spirit at least, he tried to get the house to make sure the boys didn't leave or alert him if they tried, but the house didn't recognise the Serena-voice as an authorised denizen of the house. He tried to switch back and got himself at seventeen, which the house still didn't recognise, so Kuo-Li just set a Mind-Correspondence rote on the boys to wake him if they were trying to leave and everyone went to bed. Next session: vampire hunting.
Just a brief at-work update, though the majority of the write-up went on last night. When I get home, I must actually try to do some writing on something that isn’t Mage, though I’ve been doing a lot better at that recently. Yet again, it’s the problem of too many projects and not enough me. Argh.