Seven To Go
Jul. 4th, 2005 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianTo start off with, there was still Five Spice, going "Wheels! Bus! Round and round! Round and round! Round and round!" ad nauseum. Skank had decided that it would be best if they stopped at The Pirate Inn to see if little bitty boy Jodi Blake was still hanging around. Except the place was boarded up, the goats and residents were gone, and the ground inside their carefully built goat pen was kind of muddy. Kuo-Li determined that the blood making that dirt into mud was both goat and human, so they concluded that Jodi was long gone, and so was the proprietor of the inn. And the goats. Lucius then informed them that they should stop off at the Sons of Ether chantry in Elephant and Castle so they could find out if his house was rebuilt -- after all, it was the only place they knew they could stay.
Once they got there, the guy behind the security desk placed a call to "Elise" instead of just calling for Esther, Lucius' Etherite contact. A minute or two later, they are joined by a twenty-five-year-old strawberry blonde wearing a lab coat, baggy jeans with a three-eyed smiley face as a kneepatch, purple boots and flight goggles, and carrying an oddly shaped pistol-looking thing and a handheld device of unknown purpose. She pointed both at Skank, who instinctively pulled his shotgun. And that, after some verbal kerfuffle, is how Skank met Elise Woad, his little sister. Turns out she started on the path to Awakening by reading some of the paperwork 'Geoff' had left just before he buggered off to the Thig chantry house and then the woods, but her quest for enlightenment (or at least nifty scientific ideas) brought her to Marie Greer and the Etherites. It turned out that the handheld thing was basically a G-reader -- a device that analyses and compares genetic information. Elise had been doing some cryptozoological work in the wilds of Scotland during October and so missed the SBB's first couple of appearances there, but she caught the security stuff later (Esther showed her, just to point out some of the weirdness going on since this Convivium thing) and thought that burly tattooed guy might be her six-years-vanished brother. Hence the G-reader. The pistol? As any Transmet fans may have guessed, that was a bowel disruptor. Skank wants one. There is fear.
Turns out that, while all this was going on, there were some questions about Molly. Last time she was in there, she was ten and nearly a foot shorter. Now she's almost six feet tall (very tall for her age, but she's going to be huge) and appears anywhere from a very large twelve to an underdeveloped and very tall fifteen. Some bigwigs wanted a look at her and took her off to one of the labs, convincing her that it was for the benefit of her health. So while Elise took Lucius to talk to Esther about his house (already completed), Skank and Kuo-Li went to the lab in question and tried to retrieve Molly. They weren't letting him in and, after being rather roundly threatened, the bigwigs suggested that Elise take him down to Pharmacology and get him calmed down. After some long discussion, Elise convinced him to try the electric blue pills because they'd made her see pixies, not that she told him that... Unfortunately, this was a psychoactive Mind/Spirit focus, and it linked into some of the recent Silent Hill shit. He had an extremely bad trip and the lab guy (who reminded him of Shroom, oddly) had to knock him out. After an hour or so, the others made it down to the lab where Molly was being examined and realised that something was going very wrong. They went to retrieve Skank, who had regained consciousness by then (and his first action was to send the lab guy halfway across the room with a single punch) and stormed the lab. They were allowed in at that point, and seemed to have Molly stabilised until Elise started pushing buttons. Then there were beeps and siren things and they had to usher everyone out so they could work. So Elise suggested they go to dinner at "a nice little family-run place I know". Lucius and Kuo-Li declined, wanting to try to get into the north of the city for some Sarah-hunting, checking up on Ajahn and general recon, so it was Skank and Elise having dinner and getting to know each other again.
But not just each other -- Elise's little family-run place was extremely little, and the family it was run by was the Woad family. In short, she took him home to their parents, went in and announced, "Geoff's home!" before running off to her room. His father was a bit of a grouch but his mother seemed a sweet if overly sugary-sweet lady who fed him an overabundance of vegetables and wanted him to bring his 'little friends', girlfriend and adopted daughter home ("Ray! We're grandparents!"). All in all, it could have gone a lot worse, particularly since he managed to dance around what he actually did to keep himself in beer and skittles without actually lying and even apologised to his mother and minded his manners a bit after his comment about demons made his mother cry. Skank and Elise said they'd come back later, but they had to check on Molly who was "in hospital" and see if she would be able to come out tonight. Skank actually considered staying with his parents overnight, particularly since they'd kept a room for him in the new house just in case (it contained boxes of some of his old stuff, including evidence of his former horrible taste in clothes -- box full of checked shirts, weiner pants and one bright yellow track suit), and it turned out to be the best option they had for a place to crash. Lucius and Kuo-Li had got as far as the south end of London Bridge before hitting a barricade manned by a Verbena who advised them to come back through the barricade a) during daylight hours and b) only with someone who could put a Forces-shield around them or something. The Verbena fed them and they came back past the Woad house, where they ran into Skank and Elise. Listening to the fight noise, including a particularly loud explosion, from the north, they headed back to Elephant and Castle.
And there they found out that the doctor in charge of Molly's case was one Dr MacInnis, who if you will recall was last seen in the Void Engineer base next to Bokugo, also doing tests on Molly (isn't disguise a wonderful thing?). Lucius waited downstairs while Skank, Kuo-Li and Elise headed upstairs to get Molly the hell out of there by force if necessary. However, it wasn't. Most of the top brass lab people had been stabbed, the vat in which they'd stuck Molly was broken and Molly was gone. The blade wounds were, to Skank and Kuo-Li, reminiscent of that mad-bitch wall-walking assassin fomor that had recently been jammed into Mavis Moore's body. So Elise called down to security for a clean-up crew and the guy on reception, obviously assuming the worst, made another call, which Lucius heard -- a description of Molly being put out with the phrase, "Approach with caution; presumed extremely dangerous". Skank, Kuo-Li and Elise were ushered from the building at gunpoint, at which point Skank made some crack about how they'd make really good Fearless Space Marines. He's so lucky he didn't get shot.
When they came out of the building and into the attached shopping centre, they smelled burned flesh. Following the smell, they found bits of very charred former human and, jammed into a photo booth near to the scattered bits, a very stab-wounded Molly. She was healed fairly well by Lucius, but there was something else wrong with her, so their best bet was to wait until morning and get her to Lucille; it was something that the group could barely identify, much less cure (though Elise knew it was something project-related in the top brass department). Skank then had a check on things in the Gallery to try to find the others back at Bokugo (they were fine and well) Lucille (apparently on her last legs and still wroking her butt off in a MASH unit set up in either King's Cross or Euston) and Emily (with Leanne and a very sick Ajahn in an undisclosed location that was apparently not St Martin's In the Fields). Then he got lost in the Gallery on the way out and found himself in the "All Things Evil and Nasty" wing. He saw Shu-Rong, Kuo-Li's mentor, being used by Jodi Blake in the ritual they saw being conducted on Mavis a few weeks previous. Evidently, they'd found her in her weakened state and, since they'd lost the assassin fomor, used Shu-Rong as the new vessel. Of course, the scariest part is that not only does Shu-Rong keep her martial arts know-how, but it takes a long time for a mage-fomor to lose his/her powers, and what is lost as the Avatar rots is gained as new bane-gifts. The already hard-as-fuck assassin fomor just got a lot harder, and Kuo-Li just got very, very pissed off. As in, using Do to trash the photo booth. Then he went to check on Sarah, who was apparently in some bar with a pink girlie umbrella drink but otherwise okay.
And of course, it got worse. It turned out (though the group's attention was on other things) that the 'particularly loud explosion' they'd heard was the Woad house -- and only the Woad house -- blowing up with the elder Woads still inside it. So Skank has found his parents only to lose them again, and Jodi Blake says hello via note in the wreckage again. Thankfully, Leanne got in touch with Lucius at around that point, and she sent Emily, with whom she had evidently been working lately, to collect them and take them to their little safe house. Emily was allowed to drive the Battle Bus so she could do her Correspondence mojo properly, and she drives like she talks. This is not a good thing. In any case, they wound up in the Portobello Road area in a small house whose back garden was crawling with unnameable things that were a cross between tarantulae, Rottweilers and ferrets. Lucius demonstrated his newly earned Entropy 4 ability by simply decomposing one of them, and then was jumped by another while poking at the remains. Elise used the bowel disruptor on it, thankfully missing Lucius, and it shat itself into unconsciousness all over Lucius. Then Molly, who appeared somewhat delerious, tried to pet the "doggie" that was about to run at her, and Kuo-Li just dragged her into the house rather than getting into a big fight with the buggerdly things.
They found out what happened to Ajahn, too -- apparently, he possesses no Correspondence ability, or at least not enough to allow for co-location. However, his main gift has always been to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to fix things. Unfortunately, in London, the 'right place' is everywhere and the 'right time' is always right now. So the war hitting London started pulling Ajahn in several different directions all at once, which was killing him slowly and painfully. The only way to save him was to stop the war. Things got even more complicated when it turned out that Molly's delerium came with uncontrollable magical outbursts -- Jodi Blake left another souvenier for Skank to brood over (his box of old, geeky clothes, spattered with his parents' blood) and it suddenly caught fire for no reason. Lucius put her to sleep and yet it kept on happening -- she summoned dancing, singing, really annoying pixies in her sleep. They had to wake her anyway because the box of Geoff-wear meant that Jodi Blake knew where they were, so it was safest just to move to Lucius' house as fast as possible -- thankfully they had two very powerful Correspondence mages with them and, while Leanne moved Ajahn and fetched Lucius' car, Emily hooked the Bus to the Mercedes and drove off to Chelsea with Correspondence fuelling. Unfortunately, she neglected to ask Lucius' permission before doing the grappling and Lucius cut the tow-rope mid-trip. He crashed into the Natural History Museum and was lucky to survive. He eventually had to walk home. When they got there, Molly had another outburst that sent anyone who left the room they were in at the time to various points in Silent Llandeilo (including poor Elise, who at least was in the Circus and so had no monsters to deal with). Skank was the only one of them with enough Spirit to get home, snap Molly out of it and get her to bring the others home. Then he suggested that he try to lock her powers down, at whcih point she panicked, told him that enough people had done enough shit to her lately, and started unconsciously destroying Lucius' ornaments. (Esther could rebuild the house and even restock it, but she couldn't do anything about the wards.) They just had to sit tight until morning.
King's Cross had been demolished, and not recently, so they went to Euston and found Lucille's makeshift hospital. They also found a half-dead Lucille dragging herself around the hospital dealing with the worst cases. They still had to bring up Molly's condition, and it was diagnosed as some kind of Life/Prime virus; it brought on fever, delerium, uncontrolled magics, then finally physical and Avatar degradation and eventually death. Apparently Molly was some kind of guinea pig. Lucille prepared an antidote, the making and application of which finally floored her. Kuo-Li, Lucius and Elise all worked together to bring her to something resembling health and insisted she rest, but Lucille sort of ignored them and the discussion was rendered slightly moot by the arrival of a badly-burned Emily and the supposedly dead Caritas imposter. It turned out that Lucille had Emily working with Leanne on a mission to track the Technocracy plant that had started the whole damn mess so that they could torture the truth out of her in front of the entire Order if necessary to prove Skank and his compatriots right. Leanne isn't a combat bunny, but she has Time and Correspondence, so she can scry people out if needs be, and Emily has enough "creative demolitions" to be an effective retrieval squad. However, she did not return unscathed, obviously, but she did her job and had a lot of help when it came to healing up. So all they had to do was secure the fake Caritas and wait until the meeting that Lucille had called via Mind magic. They passed the time by helping the war casualties.
When they got to the National Theatre, where the meeting was to be held, they were very careful about securing the venue. Kuo-Li put a Correspondence ward around the false Caritas, aided by Molly who did a Prime ward -- now she couldn't do magic and could not be Corresponded away from the problem. Skank, Lucius and Molly also put a Prime-Spirit ward around the venue in case of Sidewinder Brigade attack. They also saw that Beep had somehow managed to rally the entire House -- every Thig around the globe -- behind him and his cause, so he obviously felt like a bit of a jackarse when he found out how the war had started. House Flambeau felt like an even bigger bunch of jackarses, it turned out -- they'd decimated House Shaea; it now no longer exists. Worse yet, they flushed out not one traitor but two -- Merrick (true or false) got away but Beep's right-hand woman also turned out to be a plant, and she stabbed Beep before killing herself. They saved Beep's life and caught the spirit of the departing Technocrat, who wasn't responding very well to torture and eventually got let go because of a botched Spirit-Prime roll. Eventually, they brought up the Technocrat plant in the Sons of Ether chantry and the virus with which they had infected Molly. This was as some kind of warning, I suppose. At the end of the day, Lucille's efforts with Beep floored her again and Skank pointed out that, while they were fighting amongst themselves like idiots, Emily and Lucille had been trying to fix the problem or at least minimise the casualty lists. The Life mages among them went off to Lucille's makeshift hospital and the others just left, evidently to spread the word. And when they were alone, a sparrow came through the window -- the impact killed it, and made the note attached to it hard to read, but they managed: "2 DOWN. 7 TO GO." They had stopped the Hermetics from self-destructing, but they remembered who Kim had said was next on the list. Skank went off to the Gallery and looked under V.
The Verbena wing was gone. Almost entirely gone. The only two pictures left were a fuzzy one of Sarah and one of Michelle, who did not look at all well. Kuo-Li went off with antidote and found that a fruit basket had arrived for the group from London, containing things it was hard to get in the arse end of Wales, and the only two who'd eaten from it were Michelle and Romulus, though he wouldn't admit it and had to be caught out through his twin-bond to Remus and Kuo-Li's observational skills. There had also been an attack by the Wyrm-tainted Shu-Rong that left Remus and Susanna sorely wounded. In short, things were going badly, badly wrong all at once. But at least the Hermetic War was sorted, and all they had left to do in London, really, was to find Sarah. They contacted Chloe because Kuo-Li had sensed Sarah in the West End somewhere (immediately before accidentally passing her description to every Toreador in the West End, possibly), and Chloe turned out to be the one who'd fed Sarah the pink girlie drink the night before. She gave the others the list of possible places of employment she'd given Sarah and the others went on a hunt for her.
They started at the Intrepid Fox, which was full of mages and vampires. (In fact, they hadn't seen a single Sleeper since their arrival with the exception of the Woads.) After Elsie was done helping Kuo-Li make a total tit of himself to the burly vamp barman, Skank took over and got the info that Sarah had taken two steps into the bar, looked around, screamed and left again. Evidently, she has Prime-sight, or just enough Life to be able to see all the holes where life should be but isn't. Either way, she would not be working there. Next was a pizza parlour of sorts, where she'd evidently accidentally insulted the proprietor and either called up cockroaches or noticed that he had cockroaches so he threw her out. Either way, none of them are eating there. They wound up at the fetish shop where they had done some pre-Convivium shopping, which was two doors down from the 'adult bookstore' also on their list. The fetish shop, when Kuo-Li looked, was full of vamps, but downstairs was Sarah's mind in the body of a pony. In a fetish shop. Two doors from a porno bookstore. Draw your own conclusions. The gang sure did. Molly stomped in and shouted, "PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE THE REASON THAT PEOPLE LIKE ME AREN'T ALLOWED TO HAVE PONIES!" Then there was foom. Lucius and Elise did the clean-up on surviving vamps -- Elise decided to see how her bowel disruptor worked on vamps, and the results were so disgusting that Skank had to put the thing out of its misery before following Molly upstairs -- just in time to see her do her Phoenix number on the entire upper level.
Meanwhile, Elise followed Kuo-Li downstairs; he hadn't been able to get near Sarah because she kept snapping at him and backing away. Elise stepped in and turned the chains on her hooves into strawberry pudding (her speciality) and she asked Kuo-Li mind-to-mind for some damn clothes before she changed back. Molly gave Sarah her shirt, borrowing Kuo-Li's in the meantime (Molly's T-shirt would make an effective dress for Sarah, given the height differential) and they eventually took her back to Lucius'. It ended with Molly slightly jealous of Elise and still a little shagged from the Technocrat virus which is apparently what took out the entire Verbena population, Elise afraid to leave the front room after what happened to her last time she did (Skank eventually put her to bed) and general "We did something right but still ... every Verbena except Michelle and maybe Sarah dead ... fuck". Of course, no one's surprised they were next. With the Wicca thing, they're the most Sleeper accessible Tradition out there -- and therefore the most sleeper agent accessible. Still, it's a blow. An entire Hermetic House and an entire Tradition blown away. The Technocracy have taken the gloves off. That wasn't a war they just stopped -- it was just the first battle.
I want it to be the next session now. Now or soon. There's so much on the go! And there's even a chance that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mapp might be able to make the next session as Elise -- he was intense amounts of fun. Skank's little sister as an Etherite as played by mapp was hysterical. Plus, hey -- bowel disruptor.
Once they got there, the guy behind the security desk placed a call to "Elise" instead of just calling for Esther, Lucius' Etherite contact. A minute or two later, they are joined by a twenty-five-year-old strawberry blonde wearing a lab coat, baggy jeans with a three-eyed smiley face as a kneepatch, purple boots and flight goggles, and carrying an oddly shaped pistol-looking thing and a handheld device of unknown purpose. She pointed both at Skank, who instinctively pulled his shotgun. And that, after some verbal kerfuffle, is how Skank met Elise Woad, his little sister. Turns out she started on the path to Awakening by reading some of the paperwork 'Geoff' had left just before he buggered off to the Thig chantry house and then the woods, but her quest for enlightenment (or at least nifty scientific ideas) brought her to Marie Greer and the Etherites. It turned out that the handheld thing was basically a G-reader -- a device that analyses and compares genetic information. Elise had been doing some cryptozoological work in the wilds of Scotland during October and so missed the SBB's first couple of appearances there, but she caught the security stuff later (Esther showed her, just to point out some of the weirdness going on since this Convivium thing) and thought that burly tattooed guy might be her six-years-vanished brother. Hence the G-reader. The pistol? As any Transmet fans may have guessed, that was a bowel disruptor. Skank wants one. There is fear.
Turns out that, while all this was going on, there were some questions about Molly. Last time she was in there, she was ten and nearly a foot shorter. Now she's almost six feet tall (very tall for her age, but she's going to be huge) and appears anywhere from a very large twelve to an underdeveloped and very tall fifteen. Some bigwigs wanted a look at her and took her off to one of the labs, convincing her that it was for the benefit of her health. So while Elise took Lucius to talk to Esther about his house (already completed), Skank and Kuo-Li went to the lab in question and tried to retrieve Molly. They weren't letting him in and, after being rather roundly threatened, the bigwigs suggested that Elise take him down to Pharmacology and get him calmed down. After some long discussion, Elise convinced him to try the electric blue pills because they'd made her see pixies, not that she told him that... Unfortunately, this was a psychoactive Mind/Spirit focus, and it linked into some of the recent Silent Hill shit. He had an extremely bad trip and the lab guy (who reminded him of Shroom, oddly) had to knock him out. After an hour or so, the others made it down to the lab where Molly was being examined and realised that something was going very wrong. They went to retrieve Skank, who had regained consciousness by then (and his first action was to send the lab guy halfway across the room with a single punch) and stormed the lab. They were allowed in at that point, and seemed to have Molly stabilised until Elise started pushing buttons. Then there were beeps and siren things and they had to usher everyone out so they could work. So Elise suggested they go to dinner at "a nice little family-run place I know". Lucius and Kuo-Li declined, wanting to try to get into the north of the city for some Sarah-hunting, checking up on Ajahn and general recon, so it was Skank and Elise having dinner and getting to know each other again.
But not just each other -- Elise's little family-run place was extremely little, and the family it was run by was the Woad family. In short, she took him home to their parents, went in and announced, "Geoff's home!" before running off to her room. His father was a bit of a grouch but his mother seemed a sweet if overly sugary-sweet lady who fed him an overabundance of vegetables and wanted him to bring his 'little friends', girlfriend and adopted daughter home ("Ray! We're grandparents!"). All in all, it could have gone a lot worse, particularly since he managed to dance around what he actually did to keep himself in beer and skittles without actually lying and even apologised to his mother and minded his manners a bit after his comment about demons made his mother cry. Skank and Elise said they'd come back later, but they had to check on Molly who was "in hospital" and see if she would be able to come out tonight. Skank actually considered staying with his parents overnight, particularly since they'd kept a room for him in the new house just in case (it contained boxes of some of his old stuff, including evidence of his former horrible taste in clothes -- box full of checked shirts, weiner pants and one bright yellow track suit), and it turned out to be the best option they had for a place to crash. Lucius and Kuo-Li had got as far as the south end of London Bridge before hitting a barricade manned by a Verbena who advised them to come back through the barricade a) during daylight hours and b) only with someone who could put a Forces-shield around them or something. The Verbena fed them and they came back past the Woad house, where they ran into Skank and Elise. Listening to the fight noise, including a particularly loud explosion, from the north, they headed back to Elephant and Castle.
And there they found out that the doctor in charge of Molly's case was one Dr MacInnis, who if you will recall was last seen in the Void Engineer base next to Bokugo, also doing tests on Molly (isn't disguise a wonderful thing?). Lucius waited downstairs while Skank, Kuo-Li and Elise headed upstairs to get Molly the hell out of there by force if necessary. However, it wasn't. Most of the top brass lab people had been stabbed, the vat in which they'd stuck Molly was broken and Molly was gone. The blade wounds were, to Skank and Kuo-Li, reminiscent of that mad-bitch wall-walking assassin fomor that had recently been jammed into Mavis Moore's body. So Elise called down to security for a clean-up crew and the guy on reception, obviously assuming the worst, made another call, which Lucius heard -- a description of Molly being put out with the phrase, "Approach with caution; presumed extremely dangerous". Skank, Kuo-Li and Elise were ushered from the building at gunpoint, at which point Skank made some crack about how they'd make really good Fearless Space Marines. He's so lucky he didn't get shot.
When they came out of the building and into the attached shopping centre, they smelled burned flesh. Following the smell, they found bits of very charred former human and, jammed into a photo booth near to the scattered bits, a very stab-wounded Molly. She was healed fairly well by Lucius, but there was something else wrong with her, so their best bet was to wait until morning and get her to Lucille; it was something that the group could barely identify, much less cure (though Elise knew it was something project-related in the top brass department). Skank then had a check on things in the Gallery to try to find the others back at Bokugo (they were fine and well) Lucille (apparently on her last legs and still wroking her butt off in a MASH unit set up in either King's Cross or Euston) and Emily (with Leanne and a very sick Ajahn in an undisclosed location that was apparently not St Martin's In the Fields). Then he got lost in the Gallery on the way out and found himself in the "All Things Evil and Nasty" wing. He saw Shu-Rong, Kuo-Li's mentor, being used by Jodi Blake in the ritual they saw being conducted on Mavis a few weeks previous. Evidently, they'd found her in her weakened state and, since they'd lost the assassin fomor, used Shu-Rong as the new vessel. Of course, the scariest part is that not only does Shu-Rong keep her martial arts know-how, but it takes a long time for a mage-fomor to lose his/her powers, and what is lost as the Avatar rots is gained as new bane-gifts. The already hard-as-fuck assassin fomor just got a lot harder, and Kuo-Li just got very, very pissed off. As in, using Do to trash the photo booth. Then he went to check on Sarah, who was apparently in some bar with a pink girlie umbrella drink but otherwise okay.
And of course, it got worse. It turned out (though the group's attention was on other things) that the 'particularly loud explosion' they'd heard was the Woad house -- and only the Woad house -- blowing up with the elder Woads still inside it. So Skank has found his parents only to lose them again, and Jodi Blake says hello via note in the wreckage again. Thankfully, Leanne got in touch with Lucius at around that point, and she sent Emily, with whom she had evidently been working lately, to collect them and take them to their little safe house. Emily was allowed to drive the Battle Bus so she could do her Correspondence mojo properly, and she drives like she talks. This is not a good thing. In any case, they wound up in the Portobello Road area in a small house whose back garden was crawling with unnameable things that were a cross between tarantulae, Rottweilers and ferrets. Lucius demonstrated his newly earned Entropy 4 ability by simply decomposing one of them, and then was jumped by another while poking at the remains. Elise used the bowel disruptor on it, thankfully missing Lucius, and it shat itself into unconsciousness all over Lucius. Then Molly, who appeared somewhat delerious, tried to pet the "doggie" that was about to run at her, and Kuo-Li just dragged her into the house rather than getting into a big fight with the buggerdly things.
They found out what happened to Ajahn, too -- apparently, he possesses no Correspondence ability, or at least not enough to allow for co-location. However, his main gift has always been to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to fix things. Unfortunately, in London, the 'right place' is everywhere and the 'right time' is always right now. So the war hitting London started pulling Ajahn in several different directions all at once, which was killing him slowly and painfully. The only way to save him was to stop the war. Things got even more complicated when it turned out that Molly's delerium came with uncontrollable magical outbursts -- Jodi Blake left another souvenier for Skank to brood over (his box of old, geeky clothes, spattered with his parents' blood) and it suddenly caught fire for no reason. Lucius put her to sleep and yet it kept on happening -- she summoned dancing, singing, really annoying pixies in her sleep. They had to wake her anyway because the box of Geoff-wear meant that Jodi Blake knew where they were, so it was safest just to move to Lucius' house as fast as possible -- thankfully they had two very powerful Correspondence mages with them and, while Leanne moved Ajahn and fetched Lucius' car, Emily hooked the Bus to the Mercedes and drove off to Chelsea with Correspondence fuelling. Unfortunately, she neglected to ask Lucius' permission before doing the grappling and Lucius cut the tow-rope mid-trip. He crashed into the Natural History Museum and was lucky to survive. He eventually had to walk home. When they got there, Molly had another outburst that sent anyone who left the room they were in at the time to various points in Silent Llandeilo (including poor Elise, who at least was in the Circus and so had no monsters to deal with). Skank was the only one of them with enough Spirit to get home, snap Molly out of it and get her to bring the others home. Then he suggested that he try to lock her powers down, at whcih point she panicked, told him that enough people had done enough shit to her lately, and started unconsciously destroying Lucius' ornaments. (Esther could rebuild the house and even restock it, but she couldn't do anything about the wards.) They just had to sit tight until morning.
King's Cross had been demolished, and not recently, so they went to Euston and found Lucille's makeshift hospital. They also found a half-dead Lucille dragging herself around the hospital dealing with the worst cases. They still had to bring up Molly's condition, and it was diagnosed as some kind of Life/Prime virus; it brought on fever, delerium, uncontrolled magics, then finally physical and Avatar degradation and eventually death. Apparently Molly was some kind of guinea pig. Lucille prepared an antidote, the making and application of which finally floored her. Kuo-Li, Lucius and Elise all worked together to bring her to something resembling health and insisted she rest, but Lucille sort of ignored them and the discussion was rendered slightly moot by the arrival of a badly-burned Emily and the supposedly dead Caritas imposter. It turned out that Lucille had Emily working with Leanne on a mission to track the Technocracy plant that had started the whole damn mess so that they could torture the truth out of her in front of the entire Order if necessary to prove Skank and his compatriots right. Leanne isn't a combat bunny, but she has Time and Correspondence, so she can scry people out if needs be, and Emily has enough "creative demolitions" to be an effective retrieval squad. However, she did not return unscathed, obviously, but she did her job and had a lot of help when it came to healing up. So all they had to do was secure the fake Caritas and wait until the meeting that Lucille had called via Mind magic. They passed the time by helping the war casualties.
When they got to the National Theatre, where the meeting was to be held, they were very careful about securing the venue. Kuo-Li put a Correspondence ward around the false Caritas, aided by Molly who did a Prime ward -- now she couldn't do magic and could not be Corresponded away from the problem. Skank, Lucius and Molly also put a Prime-Spirit ward around the venue in case of Sidewinder Brigade attack. They also saw that Beep had somehow managed to rally the entire House -- every Thig around the globe -- behind him and his cause, so he obviously felt like a bit of a jackarse when he found out how the war had started. House Flambeau felt like an even bigger bunch of jackarses, it turned out -- they'd decimated House Shaea; it now no longer exists. Worse yet, they flushed out not one traitor but two -- Merrick (true or false) got away but Beep's right-hand woman also turned out to be a plant, and she stabbed Beep before killing herself. They saved Beep's life and caught the spirit of the departing Technocrat, who wasn't responding very well to torture and eventually got let go because of a botched Spirit-Prime roll. Eventually, they brought up the Technocrat plant in the Sons of Ether chantry and the virus with which they had infected Molly. This was as some kind of warning, I suppose. At the end of the day, Lucille's efforts with Beep floored her again and Skank pointed out that, while they were fighting amongst themselves like idiots, Emily and Lucille had been trying to fix the problem or at least minimise the casualty lists. The Life mages among them went off to Lucille's makeshift hospital and the others just left, evidently to spread the word. And when they were alone, a sparrow came through the window -- the impact killed it, and made the note attached to it hard to read, but they managed: "2 DOWN. 7 TO GO." They had stopped the Hermetics from self-destructing, but they remembered who Kim had said was next on the list. Skank went off to the Gallery and looked under V.
The Verbena wing was gone. Almost entirely gone. The only two pictures left were a fuzzy one of Sarah and one of Michelle, who did not look at all well. Kuo-Li went off with antidote and found that a fruit basket had arrived for the group from London, containing things it was hard to get in the arse end of Wales, and the only two who'd eaten from it were Michelle and Romulus, though he wouldn't admit it and had to be caught out through his twin-bond to Remus and Kuo-Li's observational skills. There had also been an attack by the Wyrm-tainted Shu-Rong that left Remus and Susanna sorely wounded. In short, things were going badly, badly wrong all at once. But at least the Hermetic War was sorted, and all they had left to do in London, really, was to find Sarah. They contacted Chloe because Kuo-Li had sensed Sarah in the West End somewhere (immediately before accidentally passing her description to every Toreador in the West End, possibly), and Chloe turned out to be the one who'd fed Sarah the pink girlie drink the night before. She gave the others the list of possible places of employment she'd given Sarah and the others went on a hunt for her.
They started at the Intrepid Fox, which was full of mages and vampires. (In fact, they hadn't seen a single Sleeper since their arrival with the exception of the Woads.) After Elsie was done helping Kuo-Li make a total tit of himself to the burly vamp barman, Skank took over and got the info that Sarah had taken two steps into the bar, looked around, screamed and left again. Evidently, she has Prime-sight, or just enough Life to be able to see all the holes where life should be but isn't. Either way, she would not be working there. Next was a pizza parlour of sorts, where she'd evidently accidentally insulted the proprietor and either called up cockroaches or noticed that he had cockroaches so he threw her out. Either way, none of them are eating there. They wound up at the fetish shop where they had done some pre-Convivium shopping, which was two doors down from the 'adult bookstore' also on their list. The fetish shop, when Kuo-Li looked, was full of vamps, but downstairs was Sarah's mind in the body of a pony. In a fetish shop. Two doors from a porno bookstore. Draw your own conclusions. The gang sure did. Molly stomped in and shouted, "PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE THE REASON THAT PEOPLE LIKE ME AREN'T ALLOWED TO HAVE PONIES!" Then there was foom. Lucius and Elise did the clean-up on surviving vamps -- Elise decided to see how her bowel disruptor worked on vamps, and the results were so disgusting that Skank had to put the thing out of its misery before following Molly upstairs -- just in time to see her do her Phoenix number on the entire upper level.
Meanwhile, Elise followed Kuo-Li downstairs; he hadn't been able to get near Sarah because she kept snapping at him and backing away. Elise stepped in and turned the chains on her hooves into strawberry pudding (her speciality) and she asked Kuo-Li mind-to-mind for some damn clothes before she changed back. Molly gave Sarah her shirt, borrowing Kuo-Li's in the meantime (Molly's T-shirt would make an effective dress for Sarah, given the height differential) and they eventually took her back to Lucius'. It ended with Molly slightly jealous of Elise and still a little shagged from the Technocrat virus which is apparently what took out the entire Verbena population, Elise afraid to leave the front room after what happened to her last time she did (Skank eventually put her to bed) and general "We did something right but still ... every Verbena except Michelle and maybe Sarah dead ... fuck". Of course, no one's surprised they were next. With the Wicca thing, they're the most Sleeper accessible Tradition out there -- and therefore the most sleeper agent accessible. Still, it's a blow. An entire Hermetic House and an entire Tradition blown away. The Technocracy have taken the gloves off. That wasn't a war they just stopped -- it was just the first battle.
I want it to be the next session now. Now or soon. There's so much on the go! And there's even a chance that
mapp might be able to make the next session as Elise -- he was intense amounts of fun. Skank's little sister as an Etherite as played by mapp was hysterical. Plus, hey -- bowel disruptor.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-07-05 04:30 pm (UTC)is one of the funniest lines ever.
Second, when the bloody blue stereophonic fuck are they going to realize any plan that starts with "and they took molly..." Is gonna end badly for them, and general
no subject
Date: 2005-07-05 09:05 pm (UTC)is one of the funniest lines ever.
Funniest line of dialogue, sure, but "Elise decided to see how her bowel disruptor worked on vamps" is IMO the single funniest line of description in the piece.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-05 09:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-05 10:05 pm (UTC)and GAH see what I get for typing while half asleep, that should read IN general.