The Gangsters Campaign/Session 18

~under the sea~
*Who is in this cavern?
**Criss, Harriet, Cilla, Icheb, Vec
*Submerged boat – looks like 50-year-old tech but way more signs of age
*Harriet has been down here
**How has she been breathing?
***With algae & medallions
***She’s been there for 5-7 days!! (she’s pretty sure. She fell asleep once.)
**Also, she has a Beautiful Mind style corkboard
*Harriet’s scars have gotten deeper since the last time Vec saw her (not new injuries, just deeper)
*Her symbols & sigils aren’t those of Hieranthotat – instead, appear protective (like those on Cilla’s armor). She is an occultist
*Harriet did successfully collect her insurance money
**Backup was called into a bank because of an extremely agitated customer – she did leave with some of her money. 
*Icheb might be able to try to strip Harriet of all her protective sigils (all over her skin..) in order to “save” her
*Harriet is obviously lying about claims that she didn’t sign up for the occult stuff (and everything else), but Vec covers for her
*She has been cataloguing, and “mostly I’ve been dreaming.” lots and lots of medallions. 
**Is making a mathematics of the medallions
**Wants help carrying them up above ground
*Harriet has been communicating in her dreams with a priest of Hieranthotat (in the sarcophagus?)
*This isn’t a watercraft at all!!!! It’s an etheric vessel that crashed into the water.
**Early Mage Imperium, been under the lake for 5,000 years
*Mnimi tore themself apart (mentally) trying to solve the unsolvable problem. Unlike humans, Mnimi didn’t have the executive function to stop obsessing over it.
**Was it something Mnimi was unable to solve?
**OR something they didn’t WANT to solve?
**OR something incomprehensible – e.g. the problem from the perception of an angel – requiring more than a physical brain
**Strong hypothesis: got a sustained glimpse of Hieranthotat’s perception of things. 
***Their mind might have been (in parallel) powerful enough to grasp how incomprehensible it all was
*There are 2000-3000 medallions at the bottom of the lake. 
**Complex operations probably require a few hundred, maybe Harriet’s require up to 1-2k?
**So, the gang agrees: Harriet will come along and help use the medallions to destroy the veils and stop Hieranthotat, then save the Curators, then “dispose of” the remainder.
*More about the ship:
**Very old, very Mage Imperium
***Pyramid with an eye at each point – Mage Princes before the Imperium
***Might date to final conflict b/t Hieranthotat & worshippers of Adalna
**Ship is only mid-sized
***Large ones can’t survive outside the ether, except when suspended by balloons
***Amphibious in the sense of ether + atmosphere
***Probably just a supply shuttle, not a long voyage kind of craft
*It turns out Harriet stole Jerry’s notes about the medallions
**Harriet points out that Jerry stole her work first
**Jerry proceeds to heckle her through his megaphone
*How to escape with the medallions & without the diving suit bodies?
**(are they veils? They appear to be veils inhabiting bodies inside suits, to protect the veils from being torn apart in the mud)
Mission: smash the veils, retrieve the medallions
*Plan: park the vessel between the medallions and the veils; maybe ram them. 
*Ok, we don’t ram them
*Criss starts rolling all the medallions (using … water pressure????)
*Veils wake up; Cilla shoots a couple of them, which slows them down (water coming in holes in the suits) but then the veils stop up the holes. So it doesn’t kill them
*The third one starts tapping on the submarine walls… and then there’s more tapping from the other side… 
*Harriet does a jazz duet with sock puppets… and the scratching and the tapping answer
*The mud bubbles… something is coming out from underneath (with slivers of medallions embedded in their flesh)
**At least seven of them, which start to surround Harriet
*Meanwhile, the veils are trying to wrap the engine in chains
*The boat starts vibrating, and the flattened bog creatures sink back under the mud, while the veils slow down…
**Icheb is distressed; the ship isn’t supposed to do that
*4/5 medallion bags get severed in transit by the bog men
**We consider just coming back with more explosives and more disposable henchmen. 
**Cilla shoots a torpedo at them, which does nothing
**Griphook throws a mine at them… very very well. It hits one of them, begins to tick, and explodes, scattering the bags of medallions (several weeks’ of work by the cult)
**we make it out with one bag of medallions
*Did we reset the campaign? No, because the Will of Hieranthotat is now manifest. The cult knows a lot more than they did before, and meanwhile they’re winning the gang war against Don Prektanos
And then for some reason Christophe really cares precisely where we all are
*Criss & Griphook go to see the boss
**At every stop, they see cops and local militia… and Trenchies, out of trenchcoats and into constabulary uniforms
**And lots of body bags. Yikes.
**Criss is about to get arrested. Griphook “doesn’t feel strongly about Criss and continues walking.” 
**Criss punches the would-be arrester hard enough that his head comes off. “Like a Pez dispenser!!!” -Criss 
***With delicious vertebrae.
**Criss is basically a walking death machine. “He has also seen my face, and needs to die.” … “Now I have two corpses to loot!”
*Jerry & Vec go to the tattoo shop to retrieve Mnimi
**Mnimi sitting in the box… tapping
***Their glamour has failed
**… Mnimi was trying to warn them. Waiting for them is Agent Johansson, who has some questions for Vec. 
*Medallions stay on the boat with Cilla, Harriet & Icheb, plus Watson, Iko, and the semi-conscious rescued deprogrammed cultist
**… where barges are blocking off the canal, and constables headed by Slim Frank make to board the SS Innocence
**Several cars pull up, full of cops, along with the Thing That Was Slim Frank
Category:Session Summaries