Arc 16: Rivalries

## Session 1 (12/24/2022)

* We open on Denver, on December 4th in the early morning
	+ Storm clouds above, no rain but plenty of lightning
	+ Addie leads with River, Simon in the convoy’s gift from the last summit, the hoverbus
* The group enters through a gate checkpoint, and are directed to park at the Denver Convention Center, where the meeting is being held
	+ Before the meeting, group activities:
		- Ghost goes to scale a building, trying to scout out Denver, and is seen by a Vanguard that asks what the hell he’s doing
		- Ghost sneaks away, and the Vanguard raises an alert on his radio about a suspicious person
* King, Addie, and Gregg go to the American Trade Center, where Addie wished to meet up with Hanharr
	+ Addie finds Hanharr in the makeshift guest apartments
		- He tells her his men are currently sleeping off their medical needs
			* Red Fang’s people had caught them along the way, killed 5
		- He tells her Red Fang wasn’t always as strong as he is now
			* Some time ago, he’d attacked an S-Mart with a small community around it, headed by a man who called himself the S-Mart Overlord
			* He and Red Fang fought for hours until Red Fang won
				+ He came out of that fight twice as strong, and bullets couldn’t touch him anymore
			* The battle was fought in Roswell, New Mexico
		- Hanharr says he’s afraid of what Red Fang’s becoming, and he has one friend on the inside that feels the same
		- Addie asks a favor of Hanharr: be the face of ex-gangers who turned sides, help her establish support for them and have to kill less
			* Hanharr agrees
	+ Addie heads out, Gregg talks to Hanharr
		- Gregg asks how he can be trusted, what proof we have
			* Hanharr says she was taught well to be suspicious, but the blood of his companions speaks for itself
		- Gregg tells him it’ll be hard to earn trust after all everyone’s lost to the road gangs
		- Anya follows Gregg like a good babysitter
	+ King hooks up to the computers in the trade center
		- They find a file marked Catalyst, Admin password doesn’t work
			* Talks to the spirit guarding the data, and is told DDH and AI are allowed access
			* King takes DDH (Hellstromme’s) identity for the login, and unlocks the file
			* It’s the data Hellstromme used to create androids, a soul tap trying to trap a human soul
				+ Prototype of what Mac is
			* King sets the password to the name of Victor’s wife, Maya
				+ Tells the password to Victor, H3x, and Scott
		- King then looks at cyborg infiltrator info, on how they appear more human
	+ King finds Addie, Gregg, and Anya, takes them to meet with Victor and Scott
		- They meet atop the building
		- At Addie’s request, King sends up a swarm sphere to disrupt the air around the roof to counter ComSat
			* Senses a push against the wall, but it backs off
			* King tells the group of the file they found and looked at
			* Scott mentions Hellstromme had an obsession with immortality, and this was probably a conduit for that
			* Addie asks King if they can tell who accessed the file and how long ago
				+ They find Hellstromme was not the last to connect, but he did interact with it after Judgement Day
				+ King sends a copy of the logs to Addie’s palmcorder
* The group heads to the convention center
	+ King picks up radio reports of a masked man jumping between buildings
	+ Gregg sees Ghost sitting on the hood of his car, and asks if he’s stalking us
		- Addie explains he’s there to help, and he tells her what Damocles is
	+ Atom drops in, gives Addie a hug
		- Tells her Ike has some sort of arcane protection, and there isn’t any news of outside interference in the meeting
			* Besides the parkouring weirdo in a mask
* They enter the building and the summit convenes
	+ Addie walks up with Simon, Jo, and River, and Simon gives the speech
		- It reveals that Simon was possessed by Baphomet since the start of the order, and the demon was the Boise Horror
		- He announced changes to the order
			* A name change: The Vigil
			* Greater collaboration with other factions
			* No more “Test of Worth”
			* Greater oversight to current Vigil members so they’re caught before they become a threat
		- The news is met fairly well, at least at face
	+ Addie gives her own speech on Hellstromme
		- She tells the summit Hellstromme is alive and moving in the shadows
		- Essence testifies to his survival, and what she and her group did for him
			* He’s supposedly working on a way to take out the Reckoners
		- Addie tells them they’ll have to make a decision on what to do about this, and she doesn’t trust him at all
			* Ike doesn’t want to give Hellstromme a seat at the table, wants him questioned, but just wants the Reckoners put down
			* Hotah, the Sioux delegate, says Hellstromme was always hostile toward the Nations, but taking out the Reckoners is enticing
			* Atom and Joan agree that Hellstromme shouldn’t be worked with, his plans should be taken, and he should be neutralized
	+ Choc asks the factions for help in clearing out walking dead in the south
		- Choc has the central server for the supercomputer communications, so…
		- Junkyard offers help
	+ King goes into the net during this, sets a tap over the net on Ike’s palmcorder to receive any messages sent to or from the device
* After a short while, there’s a burst of commotion, of radio chatter
	+ Several guards take positions at the doors
	+ A couple more drag in a women in ragged clothes with blackened feet
		- She looks exhausted, dehydrated, and barely able to stand on her own
		- The guard say she knows where the Convoy is

## Session 2 (1/14/2023)

* We open up on the party interviewing Lexi, the Convoy scout
	+ 2 days before the summit, the head of Convoy security, Mel, was working with the remains of a gang against Convoy interests
		- He was put in the jail rig while the Convoy leader Dickson and the lead scout Berry decided what to do
		- They were attacked by unknown forces that broke Mel out
			* They had military grade gear
		- Dickson went after them with a group
		- Berry sent out scouts to get help from the summit
		- Along the way, they were attacked by something
			* They heard a film reel clicking, it was big and didn’t like to be seen, good at ambushes
			* She saw a recording of Ten, another scout, projected on a wall, of him being torn to pieces by thin wire
			* This happened in Rafer Valley
				+ Area is prone to rock slides
					- I hope we die in a rock slide
* Drive out of Denver
	+ Addie’s still a bit tipsy
	+ Group drives on the interstate toward Montana
	+ Road Encounter: six well-maintained hot rods ride up behind us
		- All windows covered with metal, cameras in a bundle on the front
		- Turns start
			* Ian breaks one down the middle by slowing Gravedigger on top of it, the axel gets bent
			* Ghost takes a grenade, car gets damaged, then damages the offender in returning fire through the back of his own
			* Gregg attempts to stab one of the metal windows
				+ As she strains to lean out of the car, her hand on the wheel and foot on the pedal pop off, remaining in place
					- Not even a single concern
					- No one notices this
			* King slows down to knock back a couple cars
			* Addie slows, swiping a clean cut through the driver’s side of one of the cars
				+ Inside, a humanoid body bleeds white blood and the car careens toward the side of the road
				+ Addie moves to attack Gregg’s combatant, gets off balance and beefs it, spinning out
					- Her bike takes a wound, she’s fine though
	+ Combat over
		- River runs over to Addie, puts the pieces together, and verbally tears her to shreds
			* Physical wounds have nothing on psychological ones
		- King goes over to one of the damaged vehicles
			* It starts shooting from its mounted gun
			* King tries to convince the car spirit inside to drive off and screw with the line of fire
				+ Instead, the spirit is royally pissed off at King and runs them down
				+ King takes 2 wounds as the vehicle drives into King’s APC and stops moving
				+ Ian riddles the car with bullets juuuust to be safe
				+ King gets up, has the Swarm eat the car door
			* Inside is a humanoid figure, hispanic skin tone, wires go from connections in the head to the car
				+ King attempts to disconnect the cables, and a beeping occurs
				+ Gregg smartly steps back
				+ An anti personnel mine goes off, and the explosion sends King flying
					- Takes enough damage to shut down and go into repair mode
					- River helps repair them
		- Addie investigates the other car she’d damaged
			* Ian dismantles the explosive
			* Addie gets a canteen of the mysterious sticky viscous white ‘blood’ the humanoids bled
			* Addie notices they look like Reinhardt’s soldiers they’d seen before
				+ All innards removed, just wiring and tubing
				+ She takes pictures of them
* After a long while more of travel, the group makes it to an old rest stop
	+ Motel occupied by several vehicles, we meet the Convoy scouts there, along with their lead scout Berry

## Session 3 (1/28/2023)

* Open up on an overhead view of a small but lively camp set up inside a blockade of wrecked cars and barbed wire
	+ It’s snowing, starting to pick up
* We meet with Berry and the other scouts
	+ Berry has a bruised pink shade of skin; we don’t talk about that
	+ Addie asks if they’ve been attacked
		- Berry says quite a few times, by: unfriendly Native American folks on the road, giant figures in the fog
		- Upon further prodding, seems they came across the same camera-ed cars we did
		- Upon Ghost and King looking over one of their battered vehicles, they determined it was attacked by guns that fired something like ball bearings fueled by ghost rock
		- Seems the group that attacked them with firepower also had large numbers
	+ Berry tells them scouts have been reporting weird things in the mist, rock slides that upon inspection seem to have not happened
		- There’s been trouble with radio communications because of the snow
	+ Addie asks Berry to help them cover the area in search of Dickson and Mel
		- King connects their car radio to Berry’s handheld, helping them hold a connection through the storm
* The group drives out close to Crestfall, Montana
	+ We come upon a rusted out school bus blocking the road, and a couple cars behind
		- King makes easy work of moving the bus with their vehicle, and Addie and Ghost push the cars out of the way
			* Inside one car, Addie sees hands attached to the wheel, cut clean near the wrists, no body
				+ Old brain matter apparently splattered on the car
			* King finds blood on the exposed bottom of the school bus, leading into a trail to the woods
	+ A screaming wail carries over the wind, and it appears to be from a couple dark structures ahead
		- The storm’s gotten worse; can barely see a yard ahead of us
		- Ghost stealths away, and when Addie asks King to follow, they can’t find them
			* Instead, they wander back near the bus
		- Addie and River look at the blood trail leading into the woods
		- Ghost heads toward the structures, and suddenly notices animal-like prints in the snow next to him
			* They disappear if he looks behind, the trail gone, but they move in pace beside him
			* Ghost radios the group, warning them, and slowly makes his way back near Addie and River
		- King radios Addie he’s going to investigate the bus, and Addie moves to make her way back to them
			* Before she can meet up with them, King gets up into the bus and finds a projector on one of the seats
			* The projector projects a silent film onto the bus ceiling
				+ There’s a lady in army fatigues running down the aisle of a bus, a little different than the one King’s in
				+ She trips and falls near the bus’s front, and something seems to grab her
				+ There’s an odd angle as the landscape turns sideways, and the woman is being hanged by an invisible wire
				+ King watches as she dies, the life draining out of her
			* King finds the projector is connected to nothing, looks like an old-school movie projector, and takes it
			* King fails to notice the thick corded wire on the floor and walls, and wire claws slash at their back
			* King crashes out the window in front of the group, and Addie bolts over to them, covering their body with her own
				+ She can’t get a read on the shapes in the mist

## Session 4 (2/4/2023)

* We open up with Gregg finding the group and Addie telling everyone to keep close as they go to investigate the screams
	+ She’d gotten into her power armor
* Addie leads the group to the run-down shack, and Ghost kicks the door in
	+ We’re treated to several video projections running on the ceiling, showing the horrifying deaths of various people
		- King and Gregg are entranced
		- No signs of the source of these images
	+ King tracks the heat signature of a person in a corner, and Ghost trains his gun on the person
	+ The person is a heavyset trucker looking man with a 5’clock shadow, he has some sorta cybernetic implants
		- He’s shivering, his clothes are in tatters, covered in lacerations
		- King hands him a coat and makes a fire in a nearby barrel
	+ The man says his name is Mel

## Session 5 (2/11/2023)

* Addie looks at Mel’s injuries: looks like claw marks, dozens of small wounds all bleeding out, superficial but large in quantity
	+ The blood pools around him, and he gets paler
	+ Addie tries to heal him, but it doesn’t work
		- She panics, trying harder, and they seem to close just slightly
	+ Addie asks how he got the wounds, and he tells her it was something with teeth, that every time he woke up, there were marks on him
		- He stops speaking out of the blue, and King comes over to try and help
* Meanwhile, Ian stands guard by the window, and spots movement in the blizzard, and something on four legs crouched near a tree
	+ Ian yells a warning to the group before launching a volley with Sickle
	+ The creature outside moves in a blur, and dodges
	+ River and Gregg rush through the door and King closes it, trapping it
	+ There’s a droning sound, Ian says it sounds like a cicada
		- Everyone starts to feel a bit agitated
	+ Suddenly, the shack shakes, and a sound like a semi slamming into wood comes from the back wall, creating a crack
		- King drags discarded tires against the back wall, setting up a barrier of rubber
		- Addie braces against the wall with her shield
	+ Mel suddenly goes mad with fear
		- King goes over and casts healing with a barely perceptible mist in the air, sending nanites into his system
		- Mel’s chest explodes, filling the corner with gore, and his head rolls on the ground
			* The viscera gradually fades to a clear, viscous liquid on the ground
		- The head suddenly starts screaming that he’s still there, that this happened again
			* When asked to clarify, he mentions something got in his head, is keeping him alive, though he’s been killed multiple times
			* He’s been trying to warn people to leave but they don’t listen
		- King forces the manitou keeping the head alive into the Hunting Grounds
			* King ends up seeing spirits weakened to tiny molts of light chained up around the area
		- King drags the manitou and Mel’s spirit from the normal Hunting Grounds into the Net, and leaves the manitou there to be torn apart by gun spirits while Mel’s departs
* A large paw shoots through the window and tries to grab Ian by the throat, narrowly missing him
	+ It had dipped down from the roof, and Ian and Ghost lay fire into the ceiling
	+ The beast falls off the roof, wounded, crashing into the ground
	+ It’s a massive cat-like creature with two mouths, one made of metal beneath the normal maw
	+ Multiple colors of blood drip from it, and the bottom mouth screeches
	+ Gregg and River’s ears ring from the gunshots, and along with Anya, the sound gets to their heads and the supernatural agitation spills over
		- Gregg, irritated at the deafening shots, throws her knife at Ghost’s side, stabbing him in the armpit
			* Ghost stumbles against the wall, holding himself upright
		- River lashes out at Gregg, and the two square off, dodging blows from the other
		- Anya goes for Ian’s gun, and Ian dazes him by slamming an elbow against his jaw
	+ While they scuffle, Ian catches that the beast has gone invisible again, leaving prints in the snow
	+ Sickle points to where King still sits, dealing with the manitou in the Net, and demands to go after it, sensing its presence
	+ King comes back to reality, and, seeing the effect the sound has on the group, counters it with a screeching feedback loop that stuns Anya and Ian and snaps River and Gregg out of their fight
	+ Addie breaks through the barrier trap King placed on the door and runs out into the storm to try and find the creature
		- It lunges out of nowhere, slamming down on her
		- She’s able to wrestle it off, and it turns invisible again
	+ Meanwhile, in the shack
		- The projections have started to fast forward, and merge into one on the wall
		- A lanky, humanoid creature with a projector spinning with film appears on the opposite wall, the lens replaced with a large eye
		- Anya shakes off the stun and heals Ghost’s wound
	+ Outside
		- Gregg uses her spirit sight to see the creature move behind Addie
			* Gregg throws her knife, burying it in the creature’s spine, and it falls, ceasing to move
	+ Ian shakes off the stun from King’s screech, and both he and River unload bullets into the projector creature, ripping it apart
	+ Back in the snow, Addie goes to inspect the creature Gregg killed
		- It looks like a lion on steroids, pumped with synthetic muscle
		- The second, metal jaw is leaking yellow and green fluid
		- Gregg loos at the metal mouth, seeing it looks like a thresher inside
			* There’s an ominous click
		- Gregg sees a vision of an explosion happening, killing her and Addie
		- She immediately reacts by burrowing in the ground, unbeknownst to Addie, and she’s quickly gone
			* She burrows beneath Addie, causing her to fall underground
			* Addie, believing this was some other attack, stabbed her blade down into the ground, wounding Gregg
		- The body of the lion explodes soon after, causing the front walls of the shack to buckle
			* King casts a barrier to hold it up
	+ Addie reached down and pulled Gregg out of the rubble, panicking as she realized what happened, and tries to heal her
		- Failing again, and again, and again, and again, and again…
		- River helps pull Gregg out of the hole, and Ian looks through Sickle, into the Hunting Grounds, seeing two spirits in Gregg
		- King heals Gregg’s wounds, the nanites filling the frayed skin and muscle
		- Ian shares his findings with the group, and River pieces it together, telling Addie Gregg’s dead, she’s harrowed, she’s been dead
		- Addie vehemently denies it, spitting that she couldn’t be, and keeps telling Gregg she’s sorry
* A man, a bit over 6 feet and in heavy, torn winter clothes walks out into the road, calling out that he believes one of us might be looking for him
	+ He says his name is Ross Dickson, that he survived the ordeal here by faith
		- He doesn’t look like the description we were given, lacking hair and sporting unnaturally gray skin
	+ Addie casts Confession to discourage him from lying, and finds he’s telling the truth
		- He’d chased Mel here when the creatures blocked off the area, seeming to use the blizzard to keep them boxed in
		- Mel and him joined forces for a time, and he found Mel had gotten swayed by some people from a group known as the Net Watch
		- He was forced to watch as his scouting team was killed, Mel too, eventually, and he kept losing parts of himself
		- Addie says he can elaborate later, and forces him to promise not to stab her group in the back, which he agrees to
* Addie waits for the group to head over to the vehicles before she starts picking up the wrecked cars in the area and throwing them into structures, and trees
	+ She tears apart a few with her armored hands, and finally heads off with the group
* On the way back, we pick up the Convoy Scouts with Berry and head to Denver