The Gangsters Campaign/Session 19

* Harriet introspects, gains a compulsive fascination with keys and locks, and determines:
	1. This Will of Hieranthotat is a real sonofabitch.
	2. The dastardly plan of the cult of Hieranthotat (the Will has the impulses of Hieranthotat – the will to conquer, dominate, and reanimate himself—but not his knowledge, just whatever the cult knows)
* Icheb looks around and determines:
	+ The people with The Thing That Was Slim Frank are the folks who always hung around him. Presumably they have already seen him acting weird and not questioned it, because they just do what the boss says
* Cilla shoots it with one of her two very special bullets, and she gets super lucky!
	+ She shoots a hole right through it – there’s daylight
	+ The medallions are a distributed intelligence and will take some time to reassemble their
* Harriet, with her new compulsion for keys and her ongoing need to collect medallions, immediately jumps ship to go a-looting
	+ One of the guards realizes she’s unarmed & unarmored, and tells friends just to arrest her
	+ They shoot at her legs (this sounds familiar), which are shredded
	+ She urges them to look, deeply, inside the bag of medallions she’s holding, which are still trying to actuate. One does realize the horror of it and try to stop his buddies, which is working for a while.
* The Thing That Was Slim Frank
	+ ...pulls itself together enough to say: “200,000 ducats. Yours if you kill her”
* Harriet spends her last action embedding some part of her will (or her soul? → THEY’RE THE SAME THING) into some of the medallions.
	+ Does that mean Hieranthotat inherits a debt to Dalthad??
		- It depends on how much complexity can be embedded into the medallions. If not much, then the resurrection of Hieranthotat will not really be Hieranthotat. If more, then there will be interesting things to be adjudicated.
* Then she gets shot in the head. Many times.
* Eulogy: Harriet was insane. It was entertaining. RIP.

Criss visits Madeline Tark to see what she knows. She’s added new security, and she is wearing fluffy slippers.

* Slim Frank has been mobilizing, and is in league with the Trenchies
* She doesn’t know where Reddick is in all this. She hasn’t been able to get ahold of him – for 13 years, she’s called his office at their calling hour and he picked up every time. Now he’s not picking up at all.
	+ It must be that he missed our call, because Carl would never miss our call
* He attempts to fill her in. The cultists are worshipping a god named Hot Chicken Soup. One of Prektanos’s goons has a submarine and we went out there to get some medallions and fought some rotting corpses
	+ If he’s got a sub, he’s either a fed (unlikely) or some dreg from the Pontooners
* She asks: Has Prekatnos lost it? Or has he given carte blanche to some maniac hitmen who happen to be killing the right people?
	+ It’s that one – he’s desperate.. And he’s also dangerous. These guys have guns, a sub, and there’s a bunch of them.
* She has a secret job for him.

Vec & Jerry at the shop

* Johansson has questions for Vec, & is disappointed he didn’t take the deal.
	+ Vec uses SECRET ANARCHIST SIGN LANGUAGE to indicate that there is no deal.
	+ Jerry already felt OK about it because The Man said Vec didn’t take his deal.
* Agent Milton is also there, and blocks the door
	+ Milton points Jerry towards a chair. Jerry sits in a different chair, to indicate that this is HIS choice and he doesn’t listen to The Man.
* Vec invites Johansson into a back room to talk privately
* Jerry offers Milton some crackers. Milton has his own tin of state-issued crackers.
	+ Milton isn’t here for the good of the people, but Magisterial officers don’t like local corruption. If he caught Judge Reddick being corrupt, that’s a career-making case. (Would Prektanos like it? He’d ideally want to be able to pick who got elected next, but he would let Jerry explain himself)
	+ Jerry tells Milton the name of the officers who arrested him in front of Half Orc Bob’s just before it was leveled
	+ Jerry: when a constabular officer tells me to leave, I leave. I’m not completely stupid.
	+ [Milton looks disappointed that Jerry isn’t more stupid.]
* (reminder: Magisterial officers are law enforcement answering to some point of gov’t of Semal, & generally less corrupt than local constabulary officers. They’re kind of at odds with the Dragoons. Magisterial officers would like to arrest the cultists and try them; Dragoons would go house to house to catch the cultists and kill anyone who tried to stop them.)
* Johansson notices Mnimi
	+ Vec says: related but opposed to what’s going on with the Trenchies? Something similar, but more violent and dangerous, on the other side. The puddle box in the front room seems to be something that got attacked by them.
	+ J: who are “they”, the infiltrators?
	+ V: some sort of sketchy occult stuff!
	+ The patient was “dropped on our front door.” (Who dropped them off?)
	+ Maybe I’m just an obsessive, overcaffeinated cop, but… we’ve got ourselves a problem here. I’m pretty sure you have something more to tell me about Prektanos, because of how reticent you were to name him.
	+ Gang wars come and go, and they’re bad, but occult shit is bad. Like, really bad.
	+ If you actually cared about stopping occult things, you’d tell me what you knew.
	+ V: they seem to be able to take the form of other people
	+ J: your contention is that Slim Frank has been replaced by a sinister cult that you will not name or describe to me
	+ Vec tells him about where the sarcophagus is, & what they saw
	+ How did you know where to look? “We followed Jerry’s free expression of directional mobility”

Griphook goes to Prektanos’s place

* It has been locked down & ransacked – cops are swarming his hideout.
* Griphook walks in like he owns the place, convincing the cops he’s supposed to be there.
	+ Pretends he’s a special investigator here to assist and will be very offended by anyone who doesn’t remember who he is.
	+ Talks to the dumbest officer who ever passed the constabular test, who he tells to catch him up as they walk, and they just .. do
* When they came in, the place was already torn apart – all the guns were gone, as was he – must’ve had some advance notice
* Prektanos left a sign that he’s out – not in West Fens right now, but hiding elsewhere in the city, probably one of the nicer parts of town
* Griphook headbutts the guy (lol)
	+ He also injures himself
	+ “You get to go first.” “...let’s just do it again!” “You do not hit him in the head. You headbutt him in the chest.” “This is the last time I try to murder someone in a fun way.”
	+ Does then kick the guy in the face, for a concussion
	+ And then obviously goes looting.
		- Some money, some claymore mines, & a single-shot pocket trench gun

Johansson & Vec again

* I don’t care how you know it, but if you don’t want the moral stain from a lot of collateral damage from national security coming in and killing bystanders
* Vec tells him about Slim Frank being apparently dead, then reanimated
* Milton is a head and a half taller than Johansson… who, it turns out, is a rather small man
* Criss drops by, maybe audibly mentions Prektanos, gets told by Vec to go away & they’ll catch up later
	+ … and Milton, likely the only law enforcement in the city who could take him in a brawl, catches up with him
	+ (Criss senses motive)
	+ DM: “If I wanted to arrest all of you at once …. I don’t know what I’d say. But it might be that.”
* The officers suggest that they all go to Madeline Tark’s.
	+ Notably, these magisterial officers are low on support: they’re not calling constables to make the arrest.

Jerry pulls out the megaphone to check for occult stuff. He hears an anti sound … coming from Ayham Vec’s pocket!!!!! (which could mean anything really…)