The Gangsters Campaign/Session 13

* Recap of last time: “various shootings, mutilations, and other wholesome activities”
* Siege-like setup (we control their entries & exits) but can’t blast our way into the building, and they have a janky RPG (but it’s still an RPG)
* Prektanos’s guys have just pulled up; we also have the joe-mobile, Mr. E Diving Person (hi Logan), and a bunch of folks in the townhouse w/ machine gun nest
* We left off with… occult unpleasantness.
	+ Veiled figures on many-limbed appendages
	+ Fading aetheric energy; a general and profound sense of dread (like infrared madness … which is apparently a real thing?!??!)
* Mr. E sets fire to Slim Frank as he comes around a corner.
	+ Frank shoots a hole in his fuel tank; Mr. E detaches the tank and throws it at him, but he misses. Sad days. Some nearby cultists, being blinded, get tossed around like ragdolls as it explodes. Shrapnel all over the body is “the new fall look.”
	+ A small, tesselating stream of gearlike teeth snake their way across the cobblestones
	+ Cilla shoots him. “He’s not dead yet … … … now he is.”
	+ “Logan, you may be pleased to know that the fire does 5 damage to Slim Frank’s corpse.”
* Mnimi, in between their mental collapse, is v happy b/c they think the Usurper is Adalna’s angel. Mnimi tells Jerry that the collective of cultists is approximating the intelligence of the Usurper, distributed across several brains
* Half-Orc Bob’s first floor is made of stone…. “But Smiles is a very enterprising driver. Give him the word and he’ll try to drive into the second floor, which is made of wood.”
* Randolph launches a molotov cocktail into the bar, through the armored car’s sunroof. After that, someone drops a bomb in through the sunroof. “You’re fine. Your machine gunner is not. Most of him gets blasted out the window.” Smiles is sad about the leather damage.
* Mr. E Diver: probably the enemy of our enemy; probably a Pontooner or another West Fens gang member, defecting. Joe says, “sup”
* Flames below are curving away from the interior of the building (pressure difference?!)
* Upper levels of the building have “an eerie calm”, with the wrong time of day kind of light on it… much darker than it should be, especially given that it’s on fire.
* Third story of the building: slumped back in a very big chair, looking alive but not very active. Next to it, a briefcase of cash moneyyy. Figure has its head in its hands, stands up with great difficulty, and SETS SOME MONEY ON FIRE, NOOO
	+ Griphook shoots it, and it does not rise again.
	+ Cilla also shoots, but only hits the money. She and Watson are both sad.
* Logan: “is there anything else … flaming that I could throw at something that’s not flaming?”
	+ No.
* Joe shoots something that gives a heart attack to the crawling cultist. And the teeth that were crawling towards it are no longer interested!
* Prektanos dressed up for this fight – ready to smoke a cigar over the corpse of his enemies
	+ He very much wants to be seen
	+ Logan’s person: “my name is Icheb and I’m sick of all this occult bullshit.” “I’m here to burn things that are occult.” [Prektanos hires him on the spot]
	+ Randolph says hi, and “don’t worry. It’s not my blood.” (Prektanos: whose blood is it? Randolph: the blood of the fallen.)
* Vec plays some strange music, piped through Swanwallow’s megaphone.
	+ It’s nullifying not the sounds being made, but the distortions of reality – now we (Randolph) can hear what’s really happening, which is a summoning ritual, which was bending the fabric of reality
		- He goes a little crazy. But just temporarily!
* Griphook & Cilla climb up a fire escape
* Icheb & Joe really expertly dodge a monster with a bear trap in its mouth ???
* Cultists have self-mutilated and their blood has formed a tesselated trio of triangles
	+ Icheb shoots one of them and the brain blood is purple. This is not as it should be.
* Then Icheb shoots again, poorly, and it goes into the floorboards… then comes back. Thousands of milling hexagonal teeth emerge from the floorboards. Ichev blows highly-pressured oxygen at himself. It turns the teeth into rusted, creepy legos.
	+ Note that the teeth are not really teeth, but medallions, chiseled into shapes to be able to interact with each other
* Vec and Swanwallow hear something like a slab dragging itself up the stairs of the townhouse….
	+ “Vec was the most reasonable one in the anarchist chapterhouse… that’s why we kicked him out.”
	+ “Breathe deep, and you will never be without me”, says the veiled thing to Vec and Swanwallow before it dissipates
	+ “This cosmic anarchy is really good. The laws of physics and the laws of reality are constraints on the will of people, and they must be undone.” (The Usurper is making offers to Vec. “Do I hear any of this?” “No, Seth, you’re still turning it up to 11.”)
* Griphook & Cilla find Half-Orc Bob, who is dying (nice shots, Griphook). He has lots of money and guns, and wants us to save his wife & daughter, who he locked in a safe. Watson says there’s a life form in the safe, and one in the walls. It’s pretty creepy.
	+ H-O B offers not to take the deal that the thing in the walls is offering him, in exchange for a quick death and rescuing his wife & daughter. But it turns out they are already a merged mind…. Cilla opens the safe, they discover this, and Griphook closes that thing right back up again.
	+ Griphook grabs cash and GTFOs, stopping just long enough to give Prektanos his cut. He doesn’t even wait to answer the Don’s questions, only answering over his shoulder that Half Orc Bob is dead. Griphook finds himself a nice restaurant and gets very drunk.
	+ Cilla stays behind, only to hear a dozen people tramping up the stairs to Half Orc Bob’s annex. She sees them descend on Bob’s cadaver and rend it, each eating a piece. Somehow gaining Bob’s knowledge, these entranced cultists, most of them his former Barjacks, throw open the safe to let out the wife and daughter. Cilla blasts away three of the entranced, but when she sees a whirlwind of teeth heaving up the stairs, she thinks better of fighting this occult nightmare solo. The last thing she sees before retreating down the fire escape is the people in the annex walking one by one into the teeth, as Watson helpfully counts down the number of lifeforms in the room.
* Icheb stays behind as everyone else leaves, so that he can dynamite Half-Orc Bob’s place. He tries and fails, but the building begins to collapse anyway, revealing a rising column of the gear-medallions.
	+ “You remember (after a failed will save) an old and terrible lesson: there will be five forms of Hieranthotat’s coming. The first form is the promise of Hieranthotat. These are the veiled creatures. The veils are the promises. Second, the remembrance, the means to remember properly – this the cultists acquired from Bob. third, the will of hieranthatot, which knows what the god needs.”
	+ The will is human flesh stretched over medallions, becoming at least the illusion of a body. It takes over the form of Slim Frank
	+ Icheb, wary of the incoming wail of constabulary sirens, flees the square, dumping his car near the sewer canals, where his submersible is waiting.
* Randolph emerges from madness on the stoop of Lenny’s place. Lenny answers the door, and Randolph pours out a litany of apologies for how he treated Lenny. Lenny thanks Randolph for the important lessons he’s taught him, then tells the journalist that he’s nothing but bad news, and never to bother Lenny or his dad again.
	+ Friendless and alone, Randolph returns to his newsstand, where he finds the place ransacked by Harriet, who left a helpful note saying she was leaving to find new and exciting things. Randy is then joined by Slim Frank, who offers him a new association. The two burn down the newsstand for the insurance money, and Frank tells Randy what a shame it is that Don Prektanos would try to silence an independent journalist by destroying his property.