The Gangsters Campaign/Session 4

* Weird situation @ Harriet’s: Vec & g-men heading in
	+ Fishy boi was “flash-fried from the inside out”
		- No lips; eyes have a secondary eyelid
		- Died in the last 10 minutes
		- Vec doesn’t remember any of Harriet’s customers looking this inhuman, but there’s enough of a gap in his memory about them that it’s totally possible (there was definitely something weird going on)
	+ Jeff is catatonic (and/or blind, deaf, mute, & hysterical), and without any apparent physical injury--cute
	+ Maybe the cops care more about this than a random gun murder? One can hope…
	+ There are no other fish guys around (conspicuously absent)
* Everyone else en route to Molly's: Randolph, Victorio, Lenny, Gertrude, Smiles
	+ Want to know what she was doing for the trenchies, and for her not to do any more for them
	+ Tenement apartment building: has a foundation, fully-enclosed walls, and glass windows!!
	+ No one appears to have followed us
	+ Victorio & Smiles running interception outside in case she tries to run for it, and also Lenny
	+ Lenny removes the door from its hinges
	+ Molly lives in apartment 4; older sister (Mary) won’t let us in
		- Mary says Molly’s Trenchie handler has been killed
		- So Tiny throws Tiny Jr in through the window, of course
		- Mary fires at Tiny Jr with a sawed off shotgun
	+ Creepy figure claims it was actually looking out for us, which Gertrude thinks might actually be the truth
		- “Don’t look in the mirrors”
	+ Chat w molly:
		- What were you doing for the trenchies? I just looked the other way for them and covered for the workers the next day. For a nice bit of cash
		- Were the workers the ones washing up on shore? Some of them were, but I couldn’t tell you that.
		- [question?] There were strange static sounds
		- Who? Jacobson, Aylder, Warrick
		- I just made excuses for things not getting done. Foreman didn’t seem to care about the productivity numbers
		- Anything else? Workers who saw what was going on didn’t always come in the next day, and those were the ones who washed up. Those were the ones who spent the most time, and when they left, they never said a word to me. One of them I tried to stop, but he just ignored me and walked on out
		- When? Last one three nights ago, one a week ago, one 4-5 days before that
		- What they were shipping: stank of muck, rot, and mold. I know what I heard, and I know that those boxes were singing (not a song that I could remember -- like a song you heard at a funeral as a kid)
		- Static: the guys would say something and the static would answer. They understood each other, but I couldn’t
		- The time a week ago: one man left and never came back, but we never found his body. He stayed late, and we never saw him again. That was Victor Dordock. A refugee from east fens, staying at a hostel with family
* What’s Joe up to? Yep, still selling drugs, & keeping his ears open.
	+ Weird big mass mutual-killing (5-ish bodies)
	+ “I arrived at a field of dead bodies and was duly freaked out”
	+ The two who died last made symbolic mutilations … on themselves
		- The mutilations are old (scabbed over & healed… apparently happened before today)
		- And those guys worked at the warehouse
	+ The earlier ones were just stabbed to death
* Harriet and her lizard buddy
	+ H: I heard noises behind us; is that what we were running from? Yes. That was the usurpers.
	+ *"Wait here"* for the boat.
	+ Buddy hands her an ancient (pre-Mage Imperium) weapon that appears to be a mini null bomb.
	+ Procession of 4-5 people… susurrus → static
	+ Harriet tries and fails to be stealthy
	+ The people look human, except for the crazed looks in their eyes and their non-euclidean tattoos
	+ They close in on her; she activates the mini null bomb and decides not to run (Christophe sighs)
* Victor Dordock’s hostel: he hasn’t been here for a week, and doesn’t have a wife & family
	+ He’d seen things; wanted to get out of whatever he was in. something about a contract; thought he had a chance to get rich, “a ticket to get out of this place”. Either got a score and skipped town, or pawned it off on someone, or the other guys hunted him down before he could leave
		- The night he came back, none of the other warehouse guys did... The rest all came back the next day, with blood on their clothes
	+ One of the three guys who died was talking about Dordock in his sleep the night before they died
	+ Warrick and Jacobson were both here until they washed up dead
	+ And one of the mutilated dead guys was Aylder
	+ Involved with anyone outside the docks? Friends, drinking buddies. But once they started working the late shift (about two weeks before deaths), they started getting strange… would come in here, sit down briefly; never saw any of them sleeping
	+ Carved underneath the bench are tallies of the number of days Dordock worked on “the project”... with extra numbers corresponding to all the days a body washed up
* Vec gets interviewed by the cops; they want to know what he knows about Harriet’s customers and transactions. Gets a little letter of recommendation as trusted source of national intelligence (+ note on the back: “figure out what’s going on”); hides it somewhere at his place
* Semal is strategically important b/c it’s the border with the Fialta, and so there’s a strong national security presence here
* Dordock had asked Vec where to pawn weird occult artifacts, and he sent him to Harriet’s
* Harriet wakes up 4 hours later, having drifted into a flooded pier in East Fens. her arm is covered in leeches because she’s bleeding profusely. And she’s mutilated with the same symbols that were on the dead guys….
	+ … Protective sigils. And she did this to herself!
* Brief debrief with Prektanos (?): how did Sarge get away