The Gangsters Campaign

*Not to be confused with The Mafia Campaign.*

**The Gangsters Campaign** took place on Semal in 435 A.U. and concerned low-level members of Semal's organized crime.

## Premise

Beneath the high rises and gleaming lights of the planet Semal, a seething churn of ruin and fortune animates the population. Everyone is on planet to get rich quick and get out. Most will end up dying here.

On closer inspection, those high rises aren’t up to code (or what passes for code). The gleaming lights at General Etheric are a beauty, but the ones inside your tenement are gas lamps that would make your grandfather nervous. The ‘speaks are a good time, as long as you’ve still got money and the Constabulary doesn’t decide on a shakedown. The factory might be the only place for two miles that’s air-conditioned, and that gets deducted from your wages. It’s not clear what you’re building these days – a month ago it was hubcaps, then some Baron went bankrupt and now you’re under new management and you’re making literal cogs in the machine. If you don’t like it, there’s millions of people more desperate than you.

Maybe you came with some money, or you scraped it together on-world, and now you’ve got your own establishment. Deduct the bribes you pay to the Constables, and the protection money you pay to the local crime boss, and the constant shipping delays because of ether-market trades you read about in the paper two days later, and the rent, and you’re probably making marginally more than you would in the sweatshop. At least you’re not sharing a room with three other people anymore.

Maybe you’re a professional, with a license and everything. That’s a fine thing, and after fifty years working for one of the big companies, in company-owned housing, eating company-owned meals, you might be able to retire if the subsidiary company managing your pension doesn’t implode. If you do end up working forever, at least it’ll be in an apartment with reliable heating and etheric lights. Or you could go private and hope for the best with the two cents you’ll have to rub together after paying off your debt to the company.

If you’re ever going to get out of this sweating, steaming lake of offal, or make a life in it that’s worth living while you’re young enough to enjoy it, you’re going to need to cut corners. That means skirting the edges of the system. Crime. Nothing terrible, like those syndicates you hear about on the radio. Just little things. Certainly not violence. Probably.

## Background

It has been 36 years since the end of the First Coalition War, as it is known officially among the victors (unofficially, the Aeldmen call it the Fialta War). Bareth Aefendt remains the Serene Doge of Aeldrum, serving out what will be his fourth full, consecutive, thoroughly unconstitutional term. The Serene Doge is still only 170 years old and remains wildly popular, at least according to the state media – privately, Aeldmen may shudder or rejoice at the thought of a presidential dictatorship that could last another hundred years. Under Serene Doge Bareth’s regime, Aeldrum has prospered, some say largely by yoking its industry to the predatory mercantilism of “Fialta Reconstruction.”

Certainly, the brief Gunboat Wars of 427 A.U. and 429 A.U. with Aeldrum’s former Thalranese allies showed that the Serene Doge aims to enforce the commerce clauses of the Third Treaty of Korinth indefinitely, and it reminded the cosmos that Aeldman warships with Orcish Directorate marines (“peacekeepers”) can do exactly that. The collusion of the Bank of Valdos with the Aeldmen (nominally to avoid a second cosmic war) and the moral indifference of other great powers precipitated the Confederate Scramble, a new boom period of hostile takeover, fire sale acquisition and every other form of carpetbagging that Aeldman ingenuity could devise.

In 432 A.U., the Pin Jump was at last reinstated, undercutting the renewed stranglehold of the Nippon States on Celestial trade with Imperial space. Most importantly, however, the Pin Jump was rotated slightly to avoid the Brass Cities’ commanding position on the old Pin Jump Route. The Imperial powers found Celestial space much changed: a more even balance of power prevailed, with the Brass Cities isolated from great power politics and the Nipponese held in check by the Middle Kingdom and the Kingdom of Aksai Chin. The growth in trade proved explosive, and with an Aeldman monopoly on all Imperial routes to the Pin Jump, the profits were eye-watering.

At the heart of these trade booms is the world of Semal: it is both Aeldrum’s gateway to the Fialta Confederacy and the shortcut to the Pin Jump from most worlds in Imperial Space. Still occupied by the Serene Duchy of Aeldrum, Semal sees more trade than any Aeldman world except Aeldrum itself. Internationally, its trade is rivalled only by Bishant, Korinth and the Pin Jump (to which it is one of the key access points). Semal is planet of boundless opportunity, and it is littered with broken promises and failed ventures.

Semal’s population has gone from a pre-Coalition War level of 18 million (a third of whom are believed to have been killed or displaced during the war) to a current total of 80 million, made up of Aeldrum gentry and colonials, desperate castoffs and enterprising opportunists from the Fialta Confederacy, emigres from Celestial and Naga space, Directorate Orcs trying to enjoy their cut of the mercantile profits Aeldrum has secured with orcish blood, and every other cosmic point of origin. Three quarters of adults on Semal were not born on the planet.

The devastation of the Coalition War and the mass influx of people during the post-war economic boom has left Semal with a strained, shoddy infrastructure – millions live in streets running with sewage and pay calamitous rents for the privilege. Pandemic is prevented only by breakthroughs in vaccinations and other medicines – all the same, preventable disease is rampant across swathes of the planet. Gleaming factories on the frontline of Aeldrum’s industrial machine are staffed as often by economically ruined Confederates as by Aeldmen. More than a few of those who have “made good” are Fialta, taking to the cutthroat economy of the new world as their forefathers did to the endless border wars of a century ago. Semal’s key industries include finance and trade (driven by the technological marvel of instant communication using General Etheric’s Ethernet) and supporting industries such as commercial ship production, but also a vast array of consumer goods, such as textiles, television sets, mechanical computers, automobiles (land and aerial) and medicines. High value, low weight goods are typically produced on Aeldrum and the core worlds, but to save on shipping costs many mid-value activities such as assembly are performed on Semal directly.

In the 430s, the cosmos is in the midst of a technological revolution. Instant communication, while still too expensive for consumer use, has transformed industry: consumer ethernet is touted as just a decade or two away. Medical marvels (some developed by the likes of the Nebai Corporation and others extorted at artillery point from King Sigvald) extend life, so that well-to-do humans have been routinely living to ninety and futurists speculate that the first elf to reach 500 has already been born. Tens of thousands of captured Brass Cities drones from the battlefields of Harwel and the Pin Jump have yielded knowledge that advanced mechanical design beyond prior imagining, and improvements in soul-mapping have allowed not only a transformation in computing, but the widespread development of consumer cybernetics: though still largely a luxury good, millions now enjoy the benefits of artificial limbs and organs, and augmentations that exceed rather than mimic the capabilities of flesh are beginning to see use. Etheric computers remain the province of government academies and the larger corporations, but private mechanical computers are commonplace.

With such a teeming mass of mortality and an endless churn of fortunes made and lost on Semal, crime is rampant: the latest Ethernet infrastructure pipes into corporate headquarters not far from streets where gangs settle scores using surplus hydrogen weapons. Being under defacto military occupation, Semal has local governments (townships have mayors and assemblies) and nine representatives in Parliament but no elected executive: its highest governmental authority is the Military Governor, appointed by the Serene Doge and confirmed by Parliament. Law and order are maintained by a ramshackle network of competing institutions that would have been the shame of even the defunct Aeldrum Trade Company. The local Constabulary sometimes amounts to a criminal syndicate in itself, taking bribes to patrol some streets and not others, extorting anyone who skirts the edges of the law and cannot put up a fight, keeping just enough order to avoid the intervention of other law enforcement groups. The planetary government also has a body of Sector Magistrates, with their own enforcement appendage, the Magisterial Police. Local judges are elected, but the Sector Magistrates overseeing them are appointees of Semal’s governor, and the Magisterial Police are often imported from off-world law enforcement agencies to minimize the chance of corruption. These forces are often spread thin, however, and tend to focus on smuggling, financial and industrial violations and organized crime. As a result, communities have often formed extralegal Watch Societies and similar vigilante groups, keeping their streets as safe as possible and enforcing a rough-and-ready form of dubious justice outside the overtaxed court system. Large private entities often receive dispensations to manage their internal security, and company towns typically have the best managed police forces, as much to keep workers in line as to protect them from criminal activity. The critical strategic position of Semal as Aeldrum’s gateway to the Confederacy (and as the first line of defense against another national trauma like the invasion of Harwel) means that it also hosts a significant military presence, consisting of highly fortified bases at the planet’s etheric gates and along its main rail routes and other infrastructural lifelines. The bases are largely staffed by the Parliamentary Guard, but they are commanded by the Aeldrum Dragoons, with senior officers all hand-picked loyalists to the Serene Doge’s regime. The Guard protects against external threats and cannot be deployed domestically without an act of Parliament, but the Dragoons have a standing license to ensure the security of Semal against internal threats. Thus, Semal’s highest form of law enforcement is perhaps its most arbitrary, managed by the Aeldman Department of National Intelligence and its military auxiliaries in the Aeldrum Dragoons: the Dragoons have been involved in a number of high profile takedowns of crime bosses, often over the procedural protests of their counterparts in the Magisterial Police. Perhaps the most visible sign of Aeldrum’s role on Semal is a two-page photo spread in the *Semal Register* of Dragoon officers with non-regulation insignias painted on their armor, smoking spice sticks and congratulating each other over a pile of dead gangsters.

The people of Semal have an apt adage: “On Semal, you can buy anything you like, but it’s probably illegal.” Weapons are restricted, with noncitizens forbidden from owning any firearms (short blades are permitted and common) and citizens restricted to a narrow class of licensed armaments. The tremendous volume of trade, overwhelming movement of people and seemingly inexhaustible supply of Coalition War-era materiel make serious disarmament of the population a fantasy at the bottom of a long list of law enforcement priorities: many a shopkeeper keeps an old trench gun under the front desk and drops a few extra ducats in the local constable’s pocket every month. Likewise, a proliferation of new and dazzling drugs to enhance and entertain has found an eager market on Semal, which was then swiftly restricted by the state (and by corporations worried about the proliferation of absenteeism). Enforcement is uneven, particularly as some drugs are considered beneficial to society because they improve focus and reduce the need for sleep: the historically lax drug laws of Aeldrum proper have also led to cries of hypocrisy in the management of the issue on Semal.

About forty percent of Semal’s population lives in the metropoles at the so-called North and South Gates (the North leads in Aeldrum, the South in to the Fialta Confederacy), imaginatively called Northgate and Southgate. Another forty percent of the population is clustered along the great rail and canal lines between the two poles. The remaining fifth of the population mostly lives in a variety of exurbs and farming towns, supplying food and raw materials to the hungry factories and warehouses. About a million Fialta descended from the pre-war population of Semal reject Aeldman rule and live in semiautonomous communities in the hinterlands of the planet. These groups are a source of occasional violent conflicts with the Dragoons and the constabulary of far-flung rural settlements. More often, the violence supplied by these renegade Fialta comes from denizens of the metropoles who buy the refurbished surplus weapons scavenged by the renegades.

Semal follows Aeldrum’s usual permissive policy on religion, as long as the local church does not attempt to affect government, organize labor or arm itself (militant organizations such as the Knights of Adarnum are forbidden, and enforcement is handled by the much more effective national security apparatus). Many philanthropic societies operate under the auspices of one of the great cosmic religions (with frequent check-ins from National Intelligence), and some activists seek common cause between labor organization, political autonomy for Semal, and organized religion.

## Summary

### Session 1

West Fens District — split from East Fens from some accident by General Aetheric

* lots of new east fens people —> more marks, and more competition

we are all living in Upper Harp Street (nicer part of a bad part of town)
pontooners and boardwalkers gang operates in east? fens

Prektanos ['pɹɛk.tɑ.nos] — all of our boss — Shantine vet of Coalition War

* in charge of numbers games (gambling) and also all of the drugs (legal and not)
* splits power

other gangs / competition:

* Half-Orc Bob: barjacks, mostly orcs, his streets independent. competes with prektanos
* Judge Reddick: an elected judge. #2: Slim Frank, who runs racketeering (prektanos will be paying him dues)
* Madeleine Tark: runs hoteliers and service industry (wink). big financial backer of reddick

the man we all need to make happy is prektanos

Other factions:

* “Civic forces of good”: dragoons intel division; magisterial office

Intro

* A gray and dreary day. Dramatic. It’s wet.
* Near Upper Harp Street, in the premier casino Little Bishant, Prektanos turns a good profit from dice games and spinning things
* New mark for Prektanos: Aicitel (he owes Prektanos money)
* Attention on Randolph (protege & ward of Prektanos)
	+ Some new bodies have washed up: a couple days old
	+ Magistrates (?) took bodies not to the local but the higher-up place, and the area is cordoned off
	+ P wants R to make it clear P’s people were not involved
	+ Poncho, Randolph, and Aicitel, plus the Tinys are headed over that warehouse. In Aicitel’s very nice car, very quickly.
	+ Gertrude following along behind, not being noticed, making sure Randolph stays alive, followed by anyone who owes P money.
* Aicitel: got here last year; has creative ideas that will be easier with lax bldg codes
	+ How did he afford this nice-ass car?
* The water is unusually high (much more than normal high tide)
* Lenny is hungry.
	+ also, despite his lack of social graces, he’s not unintelligent
* Investigation commences
	+ Warehouse boss is not competent at his job. He’s here because Prektanos wants him here, & owes his livelihood to the don
	+ Constabulary is not super bothered, but magisterial officers don’t want to talk to Randolph
	+ Several blanche at the recollection of the bodies, and many are quite tired. One wants to gtfo asap
* Two levels of law enforcement: constabulary (police) and Magisterial office (like FBI)
* Two sinister men in body armor walk into Vec’s shop. They are not from around here. Vec figures out they are law enforcement officers (magisterial), pretending to be gangsters.
	+ Agent Johansson wants to know what happened to a torso that Milton pulls out of a cooler (lol)
	+ It’s missing its spine.
		- And yet this is not what killed the person: was done surgically (though not cleanly)
		- Harpoon / hook wounds in the front of the body that maybe killed them
		- Ritual killing, probably not a gang killing, probably not the pontooners
	+ The body is waterlogged.
	+ Icons carved into it match some Vec has seen at Harriet’s shop
	+ His professional opinion: pontooners did it, and someone else got ahold of the body
	+ Magisterial sigil is Aeldrum manticore holding a balance
* Everyone goes to Half-Orc Bob’s bar (Barjacks)
	+ Gertrude watches from the other side of the room
	+ Lenny gets six pounds of potatoes and three pints of rotgut with the chewy bits left in. Yum.
	+ Poor Randolph orders the rotgut also.
	+ Poncho gets whiskey for Molly, a new dock worker friend/informant of Randolph’s
		- She heard shooting, but also a crack/booming sound: drums. Then also, unearthly screams. Mostly at night
		- Sleep deprivation (those who heard the screams couldn’t go to sleep)
		- Some folks were unnerved enough they stopped coming into work
		- One of the five bodies was a friend of hers who had stopped coming in: Joe B (the B stands for Schmoe)
		- No screams at all the night Joe B. Schmoe III died
		- The fact that the Magistrate is involved at all (rather than leaving it to the locals, like they prefer) mean it’s a big deal
		- Part of a gang move to take over the wharfs?
			* Doesn’t make sense as pontooners or boardwalkers (both too small). Maybe some from outside the neighborhood:
				+ Upper West Trenchies (founded by Coalition war vets, kinda paramilitary, have tangled with Prektanos & others in West Fens previously)
				+ Darby Street Gang
	+ Other dock workers saw the foreman being led away in a straitjacket
	+ Some people (?) leave at the same time Molly does and go down the same alley. Maybe they’re all just headed in the same direction!
* Some sinister characters visit Harriet
	+ Impossibly thin, wiry hands
	+ They are very much not government officials.
	+ Very interested in historical artifacts that are antique Semal (pre Imperium; before Fialta means >100 years ago)
		- She offers them a Fialta sword
		- They *hold it to their skin and listen to it*
		- It doesn’t sing.
		- They want something from pre-Mage Imperium (aka >8,000 y.o.)
		- What does this singing sound like? When you are about to fall asleep, you will hear it.
	+ They give her a gold ingot with symbols Harriet does not recognize (as belonging to govts or gods)
* Then some less sinister characters arrive (the magisterial cops)
	+ Harriet’s nickname is Samantha, which she got at her sorority in correspondence school at Ohio State University (canonical; she’s got a pamphlet and everything)
	+ They want to know if Vec treats gangsters
	+ Show her a little metal disc with an icon picture of a ritual
		- Very dated -- maybe pre-mage imperium or maybe interregnum (between mage imperium and current era)
		- The ritual pictured is how to activate it. Like a prayer guide
		- The more sinister visitors’ throats puff in and out, eyes darting around... *still very creepy*
			* The fact that they’re very interested means the artifact is probably pre-mage imperium
		- Instructions: basically, what kind of blood to use, how to use it, and under what configuration of the planets
		- Harriet puts blood on it
			* Corner bois are hyperventilating
			* Musical screaming.
			* Medallion’s surface bubbles, expands, contracts, and sets her desk on fire. When the smoke clears, the medallion has disappeared.
			* Also, the gold ingot in her pocket is very hot.
	+ After agents leave, first visiting buddies are upset she didn’t tell them about having seen such items before: “I saw your thoughts. I saw you lie!” wants her to sell them the things immediately
		- They’re definitely snakes (Seth)
		- Snakes that read minds.
		- Maybe frogs? Probably snakes.
		- Can’t rule out frogs.
		- Probably due to GE pollution.
		- Very creepy, very articulate pollution snakes. Truly unfortunate.
* Econ: 10 ducats = a day’s wage for a laborer; business owners would make 2.5-10x as much, depending on how they’re doing

### Session 2

Harriet lied to the frog/snake people and they are angry she didn’t tell them about having an artifact with that interesting icon

* But they didn’t read her thoughts the first time??
* So there was extra info in her interxn with magisterial officers
* She claims she didn’t remember the thing until magisterial officers came in with another example, continues trying to talk her way into a sale

Ayham Vec visits Harriet

* Sees the reptilian guys leave her shop but basically forgets what they look like as soon as they leave his line of sight
* Ditto for the symbols burned onto her leg: forgets them as soon as he looks away
	+ There’s also extra metallic residue and strange blood movement in her leg
	+ Vec walks off with a sample of it in case it’s part of a secret government surveilance system. Harriet warns that “it may attract unwanted attention”
	+ “Let me know if your leg starts doing anything funky”

Molly having a conversation with three “individuals”

* One extra after they left the bar
* One of them is called Sergeant/Sarge
* They’re people she knows; she violated some deal by talking to Randolph
* Gertie & the thugs have a firefight
	+ one ded & falls into the fens
	+ It turns out (according to Ricky Shaw) that they’re upper west trenchies; they didn’t do the original murders, were just sent on cleanup to eliminate witnesses
	+ Ricky Shaw makes it out alive with a few bullet wounds and gets sent home
	+ Sarge is unconscious & tied up in Gertie’s friend’s car en route to Ayham Vec to get both of them patched up
	+ Gertrude makes note of the location for future use (no one came to investigate the firefight)

Back in the bar...

* Everyone piles into Aicitel’s car
* Bob gives Lenny some pastries & money and inquires after his dad
	+ He’s not dead
	+ Lenny eats the pastries
* Lenny picks the lock into the dead dock foreman’s apartment building (“it will never again accept another key”)
	+ We’re gonna Sherlock Holmes this. Wallpaper is well maintained; stairs are creaky; apartments are largely uninhabited (no nameplates, so any residents are transient); “active magisterial investigation” sign on the third floor apartment’s door
	+ There are rustling sounds inside the apartment
	+ Lenny, the community treasure, also picks this lock
	+ “Various expressions of human viscera” which are festooning the bedposts
	+ 2+ bodies, which were dismembered (lots of chalk outlines for limbs); little flags and notes around tracking evidence
	+ Whole place has been bathed in chemicals to make it slightly less gross
	+ Window left open
	+ Looks like foreman tried to go out door, then quickly turned around and tried for the window
	+ Randy decides not to tamper with the crime scene; he doesn’t want to get bloody
		- Well, ok, he tampers just a little bit. (adds a few random notes)
	+ Burn marks on the ceilings reminiscent of heavy warehouse ropes
	+ Opposite window is open and it’s also cordoned off

Ayham Vec’s shop

* Gertrude shows up bleeding slightly with a very trussed up Sarge who is bleeding a lot more
* The shot sent him into shock. Vec extracts the bullet; he’s pretty well hurt and ideally should rest up there for several days with consistent medical attention to prevent infection
* Gertrude is mostly OK; needs a few days of bedrest and she’ll be alright

Gertrude goes over to Harriet’s to use the phone

* Harriet is piling up mirrors, which are singing. There’s apparently a battery mechanism. Jeff is scared.
* Then the mirrors explode. Harriet ducks. Jeff does not duck.
	+ He gets impaled by the mirror and some acid-coated battery material, and also by a bunch of the tchotchkes in the shop
	+ Then while he’s bleeding, he lands on a medallion, which catches fire and burnes him pretty good
	+ Back to Vec’s place!
* Harriet immediately goes back to her shop, suspecting the lizardmen will come back, which they do, starting on the second floor (?)

Randolph goes up to the second apartment across the street that was also cordoned off

* Talks to a neighbor: there were strange lights coming from the apartment across the street (he thought it was a gas leak)
* Foreman had lived there for some years (not what they heard from the earlier neighbors)
* The buildings are CONDOS, neighbor tells us with pride
* The neighbor pulls up enough seats for him plus “the three of you”, but there are two of them…
	+ ...There are actually three of them, because there’s another person there, he realizes now...?????
	+ So all three of them walk out of the condo…
	+ Once Randolph mentions him, Victorio sees that he’s there… temporarily…. tries to tackle him, but instead tackles Randolph
	+ Third dude skeedaddles
		- WHO WAS HE
		- He was a person, but Victorio didn’t see what he looked like -- just projected Randolph onto him
* Victorio: “something really fucky just happened, and I don’t like it”
	+ VICTORIO IS REALLY REALLY CONFUSED (and Seth)

Spooksters show up in Harriet’s place, looking for the medallions

Notes on the creepazoids:

* They don’t seek out physical confrontation -- not aggressive
* They’re willing to negotiate (see Harriet’s experience)
* They basically erase themselves from your perception whenever you are not actively looking for them (not actually invisible)

### Session 3

(meta-knowledge for non-logan ppl)

* Harriet made some offer to the frog people and we are waiting to see if they’ll take it
	+ She wants to sell them and in exchange get out of some obligation with Church of Dalthad
	+ she’s susceptible to dalthadian temptations – some addictive elixir. Also, her blood is traceable by the church (?)
	+ They want her blood… just to see what the obligations are to the Dalthadis! Definitely not to control her or destroy her soul! … probably
		- Maybe the quantity of blood affects how much control they get, if that’s their goal?

Vec’s shop: Sarge, Gertrude, Vec, Jeff, Harriet

* Sarge asks Vec not to let him get tortured; Vec attempts to save his life
* Gertrude interrogates him first
	+ I know you work for the trenchies and that they were doing cleanup for someone else. Who was that, and what were they covering up?
	+ Who were the guys? Hooded, veiled. “when they spoke it sounded like ringing in my ears, but i knew what they meant to say.”
	+ What were they trying to cover up?
		- There’s something they wanted that the flood waters washed up -- something they couldn’t get at before, but is “going to help them a lot.” They’re dredging the fens
		- They’re also grabbing people, taking them into the swamps, and they don’t come back... or only part of them does
	+ Who are the targets:
		- Anyone helping them dredge the fens who talks (to the magistrates, or to Prektanos, or to .. someone else, maybe Randolph?)
	+ Gertrude thinks that’s all they’ll get from him… but still can’t just let him go (already called the boss). Lets Vec cut him loose to give him a chance; shoots him from Vec’s upstairs window when two of Prektanos’s guys fail. RIP.

Things prektanos wanted to know:

* Who in the warehouse worked with the trenchies & what they’ve been doing
* What is happening in the West Fens and how will it be used against Prektanos’ gang
* What the magistrate (and the other office people) know and how they know it

Harriet tries to give the frog bois a family member’s blood instead of hers

* …. “Not fresh enough! This is DEAD BLOOD”
* And they want her to do it with their small super-sharp knife because it’s going to “hold” the blood lol cool
* “Alright, it’s time to make bad decisions!”
	+ Gives them some blood via her own knife, but IT’S NOT ENOUGH
	+ So she gives them more blood!

Jeff says the guy who brought Harriet the medallions smelled of the marsh, wore big watertight boots, and hadn’t slept in a while

Randolph etc fill in Gertrude on the forgettable dudes near the murder site… she realizes one of them was there when she saved Molly / captured Sarge

Everyone goes to Vec and tries to ask him intelligent questions

Then we go to Harriet, with slightly more success (i.e. she tells Gertrude that the medallion she saw explode on contact with Jeff’s blood is probably relevant, & maybe implies a link with the lizard people)

* Vec + Harriet solo: yes, she has some medallions and is probably selling them to these guys. (they appear to be useful in some creepy blood ritual, which would be nice to know)
* Vec’s contact will be invited to town to check out the medallion

Harriet goes off with the frog men and some of the medallions (they need her to leave \*now\*, apparently to fix her blood situation)

* When Jeff opens the shop door, all Harriet hears before she’s out of range is a painful ringing

G-men show up and arrest Vec regarding Sarge’s death… yikes.

* on the way out they stop into Harriet’s shop “to ask her to look after his shop” -- where they find one of the fish guys dismembered and burned out from the inside (?!). Jeff is still there and totally uninjured, except he is now blind, deaf, and mute. Poor Jeff.

### 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

### Session 5

Harriet awakes having washed up in East Fens (but still close to the West Fens), holding the knife that she used to carve figures into her body

* Symbols are easier to focus in on than what was in the gold bars, but the geometry is similar
* The symbols are protective sigils, related to her customers and probably how she escaped. Perhaps because she has crossed into a new state of being
* May give her the ability to escape detection.
	+ Insects do not care about the sigils.
* Probably related to the Usurper.
* Not a lot of government oversight of East Fens and plans to link it up to the city’s canal networks are “nascent”
	+ Streets are 12 feet underwater, but people do live in the buildings (for illegal reasons or just not wanting to move)
* East Fens has population in the low 1000s, compared to West Fens 90,000
* Harriet climbs into one of the houses and realizes she is covered in her own blood and other people’s organs
	+ Very cunning trap with tripwire and a shotgun totally prevents her entry thru the window
	+ Harriet finds some armed people in an upper floor of the town house, but they realize she’s covered in blood so they must hate Harriet and are afraid of her (she thinks)
		- It turns out they are not cannibalistic and do not want to eat the organs she’s wearing
		- They felt sorry for her because she’s covered in blood, but now not so much
		- She offers to find lost things for them and that just makes her sound like the dredgers…
		- They let her use their shower and are going to take her back to the boardwalk (East Fens place where the smugglers hang out)
		- … and they lock her in the bathroom

Prektanos convo ctd

* Vec will hook him up with an occult expert

Several people have gathered in the casino lobby

* Andddd then they shoot it up
* Shooting high; not trying to kill customers
	+ Prektanos says after the fact that they were trying to bankrupt him without attracting attention of the magistrates (who won’t care about the staff getting killed)
* Deliberately shot most of the staff first, most of whom died. Vec saves one cashier, who says there were at least 4 of them
* Smiles says: 7 gunmen
* Body of one of the guys: trenchie tattoos; reasonably high up (major sergeant?); had hydrogen ammo (also indicates high-up in org); military surplus body armor

Folks who found harriet show up at her shop

* Vec intercepts them; they know where she is and successfully get a grand out of him for “information”. They want another 1k to bring her to them.
* Instead, Lenny tears out the woman’s tongue (by accident!)
* So the dude talks:
	+ Harriet’s in the Pallon buildings, middle tower, 3rd floor -- used to be mid-range apartments
	+ And they don’t actually have guards

Harriet and the bathroom

* Tries and fails to cut her way out with a dagger
* Doesn’t recognize herself in the bathroom mirrors
* Puts a little blood on one of her carvings… which deepens
	+ The carvings that are the worst on her body are those underneath the viscera
* The knife came from the insanity box, and it was pulling the knife out of the box that started the whole situation
	+ Several parts of it are melted, she thinks from a ritual
	+ Looking at it, “the memory of song,” which she can’t reproduce
	+ Inscriptions on the knife could be “unraveled” into the symbols on her body
	+ The singing was transmission of instructions to Harriet for how to mark herself
	+ Knife collapsed in on itself, because the song drew power from the knife
	+ There was a robed, veiled figure that, when it spoke, just sounds like static

Gertrude, Vec, Lenny, Randolph

* On the dude’s boat
* … dark water, moving shapes, 2 mud dragons, and one humanoid
	+ Mud dragons have vestigial limbs
	+ One gets a limb caught in the engine, gets torn apart, dies, and kills our engine! Cool. it spews a lot of ink and viscera along the way
* They show up at the building and don’t recognize Harriet until she identifies herself
	+ The key is to look for details, not the entire person
	+ Q: if Vec tranquilizes Harriet, does she still regain wound points? ‘ a forced rest is still a rest ‘ —DM
	+ She doesn’t really want to put the knife down… but she does
* Decide to stick around for the night
	+ Congratulations, it only took us until session 5 to unite as a party! Everyone’s in one place.

### Session 6

The whole squad is in one place!

* Townhouse in East Fens, with a newly liberated Harriet
* Lenny has some sewer-water-infused potatoes (#umami)
* Vec is hanging onto Harriet’s occult knife for now, wrapped in a cloth
* It turns out there’s a fish/frog man with us. Harriet thinks it’s a servant of the static man (the one who attacked her)
	+ The static guys sound like static at least some times, probably to everyone for whom their messages are not intended. We don’t know if they can turn it on & off. But everyone can hear this person
	+ Even when looking directly at this person, he is super non-descript
		- “You do see us – you always see us. You just don’t notice us.”
	+ What do the symbols on Harriet mean? “They mean she opened the box.”
		- The box has a lot more to teach Harriet. It’s very urgent that she return to the wharf.
	+ “In efforts to help the victims of the Usurper, sometimes we let people hear the songs of old things. Sometimes it protects them”
	+ Who was in the water chasing us? They belonged to the Usurper.
	+ Harriet can see this person better than the rest of us, but is no better at reading the face
	+ Could never recognize this face, unless it were actively talking to us. Gertie ponders how it might have been on the planet all along, throughout any of their childhoods...
		- Couldn’t disguise themselves as anyone else, because they still wouldn’t be recognizable
	+ Vec looks at it in the mirror: it’s human-ish; pallid; bluish; hair growing in weird patches all over its face. Eyes blink sideways; mouth perpetually slightly open; musculature all underdeveloped, or just alien.
		- Now that it’s been seen, it looks a little sad and ashamed
		- Why do you hide your appearance from us? Makes it easier to participate

Backstory on these nondescript guys

* Where are you from? We are from many places; we remember many things: schools and academies, battles, travels in the ether. We remember all these places, though we were not there. We remember long before – we are an amalgam of experiences; curators, preservers, inheritors.
* Inheritors of what? Our ancestors were expelled [from .. somewhere]. They left and became different, more like you. It was good for a time, and then it was not. We are what comes after. We are trying to learn more about what our forefathers became. We are heirs to -- you might call it the Mage Imperium.
	+ Note: *No one* claims inheritance from the Mage Imperium, not even Aeldrum
* Is the Usurper one of you? No. The Usurper seeks to take the place of the deity of the Mage Imperium.
* Singing artifacts? Those are from before the Imperium. Not part of the inheritance, but they are a tool that will allow us to claim it
* What is the inheritance? The Voice; the intercession of the imperial deity, Adalna
	+ Guided Mage Imperium to its apex. Classes: Seers (psychics, who heard her – mouthpieces) and Mage Princes (scholar-governors who dealt with temporal matters on behalf of the Seers, who used this lore to build the greater technological marvels in history)
	+ Modern era’s industry exceeds Mage Imperium, but a lot of distinctive tech still is Mage Imperium
	+ Imperium collapses when Adalna stops talking to the Seers; Mage Princes fell into infighting
	+ If she bargained for time, is it possible that she will return (maybe by waiting for another section of time that is hers, or maybe by bringing the universe to the state she needs it to be in)
	+ Unlike other gods, Adalna shares knowledge. Any contact with her might enable creation of a second Mage Imperium
* Motive? Creature does believe its own story
* Why Semal? Semal is the place where we will find the tools to claim our inheritance. It was once far more important than it is now: once there were more than two gates here; it was an outpost, a means of control for the empire preceding the Mage Imperium. Also the place where Adalna made one of her first covenants with her followers. The ether has changed; Semal is no longer where it used to be -- but the objects here are the same. The empire before the Mage Imperium had powers making them as gods – but was suppressed by the Great Pantheon, which is what allowed the followers of Adalna to come to the fore. We’re back to find the same tools which the predecessors of her Imperium used, to usher in her era
	+ The Usurper wants to take these tools for their own purpose. The Usurper is the shadow, the fragment of one of the god-kings of the empire that came before; that’s why they call him the Usurper
* History before the Mage Imperium is very shaky (perhaps in part because everything that isn’t Mage Imperium gets mistaken for it -- there’s no radio carbon dating) -- it’s far from public knowledge what preceded it.
* The items you’re seeking? Blood sacrifice items -- take the power of the user and draw on them to activate “certain magicks” . Like puzzles which are solved by the addition of blood
	+ Can these things be used as weapons?
		- *[static… from Matt’s mic, or the Usurper, who can tell?!?!]*
* Ok, now the Usurper is coming! Cool.
	+ Harriet barely hears it (knows the sound is there, but doesn’t perceive it)
		- Turns out she’s invisible to it!
	+ Figures in white cowls on a barge approaching… plus a tall figure, 6 feet while sitting (on a throne). Static sounds are it calling out to its dozen servants
	+ Can Harriet & frog person sneak onto the barge? No, because the servants will still see them -- don’t share the Usurper’s weaknesses.
	+ What are its powers? Few for now; they will grow
		- Gertrude shoots the Usurper real good and it turns into a lot of hexagons (like carbon molecules). splits in half, and each part is fighting for dominance to re-absorb the other…
* So those tools the fish guys needed… One of few things left in Jeff’s mind was where Harriet stashed the items
	+ The remaining ones are those that she left at the wharf, and some she hid without telling Jeff. they need all 5 to do whatever they intend to do
* The barge wasn’t coming for us, until our hostage runs downstairs yelling for their attention, at which point… they are coming for us
* Fish friend offers us medallions: it will give you the experience of drowning, but without dying. Upside? It also does this when you’re in the water.
	+ Harriet takes the offer immediately and dives in *(“leading by example”)*.
* Usurper’s guys come in with a machine gun; Victorio grabs the now-dead hostage as a human shield, but still gets dead.
	+ Vec risks life and limb to loot those nice electric gloves from his still-warm body
* Randolph takes the hint, grabs a medallion, and jumps. Gertrude takes out the machine gun and is ready to just keep fighting; Lenny drags her away & tosses out the window. Everyone else jumps. Some of us swim very well (Lenny does a swan dive)... and some don’t. Gertrude & Vec are pretty badly wounded. Somehow no one else dies down there. The crocs don’t like the smell of us – corrupted with the medallions.
	+ Everyone gets 400xp!

### Session 7

* Harriet finds some medallions at the wharf
* The medallions we used to cross under the water are now corroded / expended
	+ Blood followed the labyrinth on the surface of the medallions, not always taking the optimal path… appears to have been directed by “some kind of force” within the device
	+ When frog man gave us the medallions, he “configured” them first.
	+ Human blood and the small amount of soul in it isn’t strong enough to have done the soul magic we’ve seen them do. Probably “significantly ancient and highly cursed.”
	+ Extra knowledge is needed to configure the medallions to do useful things
	+ Do gods have souls? They aren’t organic, and aren’t driving organization in a body… it’s less that they have souls and more that they are souls.
		- The gods fight over souls because they need to consume the energy derived from them to do useful things. Maybe imbued soul power in these objects, which was then expended
* East fens people – were potentially slightly associated with the boardwalk gang
	+ Boardwalk Gang: would be giving permission to (or being intimidated by) anyone dredging areas in East Fens. They used to run things in East Fens … but now have gone to ground, relatively speaking. Still could make trouble for anyone doing this dredging
	+ Pontooners: different gang in the area
* Randolph releases the de-tongued East Fens person (I think)
* Vec’s occult buddy (now played by Seth – Jerry Swanwallow)
	+ Medallions predate Imperium
	+ Thanacids (sp?) god-kings actively emulated the gods; used the souls of blood sacrificial victims to power their magicks; maybe could carry objects infused with souls of their sacrifices. The Great Pantheon gods did not love this, nor did their followers (mortals usurping their power), so they were smacked down pretty hard. Maybe the Usurper is one of them
		- Apparently these guys were powerful enough to re-route aetheric lanes with their blood magic – including to isolate some parts of their civilization for long enough to degrade / store their artifacts, rather than the more expected route of Pantheon gods re-absorbing their power
	+ The buddy can test one of these artifacts to see how much soul energy is in there, if we give him one. Then, how efficient is the use of this energy?
		- If very sophisticated (e.g. angel level), a single soul’s worth of energy could’ve powered them to keep us alive underwater
* 2-3 frog guys visit Harriet
	+ One of them is the one who gave her the medallion, and got her out of her shop to safety previously. His skin is falling off.
	+ “We were not meant to last long.” here to achieve something in particular? “We make our own purpose.”
	+ The molting one (her buddy) sticks around; two others go off to get her stash, once she’s shared the location of those remaining medallions
	+ Harriet misses her “dose” of … something, and buddy gives her a medallion to swallow to replace it.
* Disruption to Prektanos’s drug enterprise – recurring issue
	+ Strung-out person comes up to a dealer with apparently stolen money, tries to make a big purchase, then someone else beats up and robs (but not kills) the dealer
	+ Short-term harm to the business, but without damaging “the prize”, i.e. the business opportunity

Attempt to break into Harriet’s shop

* Lenny is distracting a cop who knows his dad – gets a nice lesson about not letting bad men take advantage of his strength for their bad deeds
* Gertrude tries to knock Harriet out and steal the big stash of medallions, which fails because Gertrude is not actually strong. Harriet tries to leave while holding a knife to her hand over the box, threatening to release all their power at once if Gertie makes a false move. She does it anyway, and tries to shoot Harriet in the foot, but instead blows her whole leg off. Gertie grabs the box and runs; a cop comes after her, and she tries to get him to stop and help Harriet, but he just chases Gertrude. G calls to Lenny in an unusually clear tone given the distance: "You need to go help Harriet in the shop, now." Lenny does, and scoops up Harriet and her not-at-all-cleanly-detached leg, bringing her across the street to Vec, who (along with Harriet’s unusual fortitude) saves her from the brink of death.
* Failing to shake him, Gertrude ends up killing the magisterial officer who was chasing her; his body falls in the canal and floats away. She considers leaving the medallions at Joe’s place, but wants to make sure they get where they were going – to Aeldman NatSec, in exchange for her cousin, whom she had abandoned years earlier at the scene of the crime when the cops busted one of their heists. He took the fall for that and several other crimes she and their gang had committed.
* Despite many warning signs, and despite the frog men very effectively pursuing her—and trying to sway her not to turn over the medallions, saying their whole civilization is at stake, which only fails because of her deep, long-seated resentment of outsiders telling her what to do, and because the laundry list of her assorted sins is so very long—Gertie goes all the way in: into a prison yard and a meeting with her cousin, who was on death row. After she tells him he’ll probably be released for the service she’s done for the Aeldmen, the cousin leaves, and Gertie’s left to her end: four snipers in four towers around the yard, who kill her instantly.
* When all you have is a gun, everything looks like a target. RIP Gertrude, who only knew how to do one thing.

### Session 8

Vec’s shop

* Harriet is healing, but still not well, & in medically-induced coma
* Vec’s occultist buddy Swanwallow is hanging out
* Fish-frog person (suddenly named! Mnimi) applies some medallions to heal her more quickly. They burn a lot (and some even melt into her scars), but they also heal her some. So Harriet is awake! She just still only has one leg.
* Harriet reveals that Gertrude shot her and stole the box of medallions; Mnimi says she went to the prison, where Harriet says she was going to trade for her cousin

Joe’s place

* Randolph visits. Joe has a very spirited and wrong theory about Gertrude being a closet Fialta rebel. Randolph unfortunately realizes that this is untrue
* Randolph points out that the Fialta rebels probably don’t have much use for occult artifacts, but maybe the Aeldmen do…
* Joe’s next theory is that Gertrude went to visit someone from a raid that several members of their family made years ago, who must have been imprisoned since. If they had this leverage over her for that long, she likely was being used by someone high up in Aeldman national security for years (high up because no one else could have gotten a known killer of Aeldman officials released). But if she went in person, she is probably no longer of use to them, and hence probably no longer a threat. And it probably wasn’t a vast Fialta conspiracy
	+ Randolph decides to believe this theory

Back at Vec’s

* Harriet wants to reattach her amputated leg. She requests the occult knives back from Vec to do the next round of blood magic.
* Are medallions like a contract? Swanwallow says someone paid dearly for the power in them: but now it’s contained, so the user is likely not the one paying
* Swanwallow says knives are probably from the Pantheon Wars – very ancient, not from any god he knows. No signs of forging – it’s as if they were brought into existence fully made
	+ Mnimi says they are ancient and would be very powerful in the blood magic, but is not sure they will do what Harriet wants them to
	+ Vec gives one back and keeps one
* Harriet reattaches her leg (with help from Mnimi) using two medallions as conduits, but not perfectly; she’s basically using her life force to power a dead limb

To Randolph’s!

* The hexagon monster we saw was not the Usurper, but his servants. Main concern is the cult and whether they will manage to summon him back
	+ They run on blood magic; they should not be. Anything forcing the servants to obey the laws of reality is a helpful tool against them.
* How many medallions are there? Mnimi & co have ~70% of the total stash; Harriet had around 500 medallions in the case originally, so the other 150 are missing. (Fish folks probably have others from other sources)

Head down to the wharfs

* Someone sprayed-painted a lot of local gang signs on buildings along the way, then defaced them. They also hung up an effigy of Don Prektanos
* Lenny goes to cut down the effigy and two guys show up and shoot him. Lenny kills one of them and the other one runs off
* A cop sees this and approaches (surprisingly calmly), attempting to fine Lenny for the crime. Lenny wants to do it in court instead (“I’d like to be able to file this as a business expense”), but Randolph gets out and pays the fine. Cop notes it down as an unfortunate electrical accident with a streetlamp
* When we get there: there’s an evil energy here. The creature was destroyed on impact with the box (as was the box), and it tried to reshape itself… the cobblestones are hexagonal.
	+ The box isn’t what drove Harriet insane: instead, it was an antithesis to the creature, and the shock of those two encountering and obliterating each other is what drove Harriet mad
* Vec drawing the mirror reverse of the creature’s death cry wakes it back up (but powerless)... sounds to him like a dirge, but hopeful. Vec is charmed by it (isn’t defying the gods just like sticking it to the ultimate man?)
	+ The sacrifice was going down to add itself to the numbers below the water… to wrap itself around them, and give structure for their king to return
	+ Vec now knows roughly where they’re doing their ritual. Will he tell the gang?
* The place where they’re making the altar is linked to the dredging… dredging is where they’re getting the medallions; altar is where they’re taking them. There’s something beneath the altar, which is what they’re interested in

Back to Prektanos’s

* Randolph going in for a convo with the big boss.

Harriet’s shop

* Mnimi and Harriet (feeling froggier by the day) decide to drop into Harriet’s shop to pick up a new leg for her, and a few other sundries.
* Vec rouses the newsboys into a little riot to distract the cops; three of the four guards are diverted. Mnimi makes it in and snags a serviceable leg for Harriet, as well as a crown that used to belong (long ago) to a local seer
* The fourth guard spots Harriet as she is sneaking in and detains her inside.
* Mnimi tries to distract the guard with some bonus anger at the newsies’ particularly rousing chorus of which side are you on?, but he decides Harriet is another agitator and drags her outside with him. Vec saves the day yet again, swooping in with his NSB letter and declaring that Harriet is an asset, and he needs them not to detain her. Impatient, the guards decide they don’t have time for this vagrant and send Harriet off with Vec.

### Session 9

Vec + Swanwallow

* People are getting murdered in the waters!
* There are fish-people who want to resurrect Adalna, using these medallions
* Some other people (thannasids) want to resurrect this other guy – the Usurper
* Mage Imperium: not very egalitarian. Promise was not prosperity, but safety. Spread out into the cosmos to take over a dangerous & hostile universe, and protect it; success came through intelligence and scholarship. Incan-style authoritarian system. Upper class (Mage Princes) outweighed by a factor of 1,000-100,000, and themselves significantly outnumbering the Seers.
	+ People were generally cheap labor for the government.
	+ Everyday people still get a better deal under the brutal Fialta system (e.g. freedom of movement)
* Her thing is sharing knowledge with chosen people (Seers) – beginning from medieval style technology, maybe some basic travel between planets. Radical imbalance of information (faster-than-light travel) – most of the threat was eventual defectors from the Mage Imperium itself. So conditions for a second Mage Imperium are not there; it’d take a “cosmic cataclysm” for something like the Mage Imperium to emerge again.
* Privately, tells Jerry he’s interested in figuring out how to redirect power from the medallions …. “for the goal of self-government,” Jerry presumes

Randolph + Lenny + Don Prektanos, in Prektanos’s new secret hideout in a tenement basement

* Shows him a letter about potential alliance between Prektanos and half-orc Bob, anti-Trenchies. Need to find an orc who knows about it
* Don Prektanos is scared. He’s having all of his food tasted
	+ Lenny has a very dainty bite of chicken
* Gertrude going rogue: someone fairly high up in the Aeldrum government was apparently using her. Suspect that she’s dead now, or at least in jail. Had plenty of dirt on Prektanos and he hasn’t been hauled off, so probably the betrayal was about something else.
* Don Prektanos pulls Randolph aside and implies that we lean on Lenny’s father, a close friend of Half-Orc Bob for the information we need

Harriet @ Vec’s

* Weird connection: Info is transmitted into medallion from the flesh to the reattached leg, but no loop back
	+ When it’s detached, leg’s internal structure collapses in on itself. “You likely want to dispose of this forthwith, as it is an incredibly awful occult item.” -DM “...Wait. I could have a use for this.” -Harriet
	+ Slightly strange things happen when it’s incinerated. Vec is slightly stressed.
* The new leg is an aetheric device… semi-autonomous; can just strap on with basic medical knowledge. Jerry calibrates it super well to Harriet; she’s most of the way back to full functionality of her old leg
* Harriet reaches into the incinerator to retrieve her medallion (it’s on fire.. Maybe there are more down there???) until Mnimi tells her that one’s spent

Jerry meets Randy

* Harriet suggests Randy write up his interrogation questions in advance, or at least outline them
* Jerry suggests that’s a very government, bureaucratic move. Also, this typewriter will learn the sequence of your soul, to prepare you for assimilation.
* Harriet thinks it’s just slightly possessed, and so writing something up would probably make it more forceful. Half-orb Bob should write up his confession on it.
* Randy is pretty sure Jerry’s at least slightly right, and Harriet is full of it.
* Lenny is sent off for food. He’s bringing some back, which is good, because Vec only stocks oatmeal (food of the proletariat)
* Lenny’s father is pretty close with Half-Orc Bob. Randy proposes pretending to poison Lenny to get info from his father. Does Vec have horse tranquilizers?
* Generally, Half-orc Bob’s gang is like a protectorate of Prektanos’s – exempt from Prektanos’s taxes etc., but has to get his signoff to start a gang war
* The letter they took off the cop was not in the same hand as the cop’s; appears to be a woman’s handwriting, which Vec could recognize if he saw it again
* Lenny talks to his dad about lots of food and neighborhood goss and also about linking him up with Randy
* Jerry interpreting the medallions / mazes: maybe could make arbitrarily complex arrangements using multiple medallions

Off to Lenny’s dad’s place!

* Kind of a squalid tenement… with a shack on top!
* 2-3 story tenement but it’s all the same apartment!
* Appears to be a clean, safe neighborhood, if poor
* Lenny’s dad is very big. He’s also super proud of Lenny and his budding journalism career.
* Has a big Aeldrum flag hanging in his place… modified ATC, crossed with a rifle and a lance. It appears that he was a drop-trooper – there to ransack, instill terror, and break the morale of the Fialta.
* Does Randolph know him? Ought to, but hasn’t run across him.
* He’s not proud of being a shock trooper, but is proud that that’s how he got into that place. Unlike most, he probably served enough time (because a tough gig) to earn citizenship during the war. The fact that he owns a home is pretty good – he’s proud of that. “Pull yourself up by the murderous bootstraps, kind of thing” – Quay
* Lenny is a budding food columnist, they say. He got shot [at] “because they were doing photos” for the top of the column
* Randy says they’re investigating deaths among the Trenchies – and he’s nervous, but only because it sounds dangerous for Lenny
* Randy shows him the letter – he says he doesn’t talk shop with Bob, but doesn’t think it would be a good thing for him to do.
	+ This neighborhood is safe because of some kind of protection. Back in the day, that was probably Lenny’s father; it’s likely that he brokered the arrangement between Half-orc Bob and Prektanos, and would be unhappy to see it violated
	+ Asks for confirmation “for the story” – he can’t provide it. Anyone else who could?
* Bob has friends who work with the wharf gangs. He was planning something big

Lenny and his dad (Rich Craw) continue to be really dang heartwarming

Harriet and Jerry bond about occult things

* Jerry claims he wants help with the medallion mazes; Harriet decides on an agent-based model
* The typewriter has really good equation handling, so Harriet starts doing the work on there. And then she keeps going, for hours and hours, breaking her fingernails, fingertips bleeding, until the typewriter drains her of mental & physical energy and she collapses (3 days of work in 12 hours… this sounds strangely familiar)
* Turns out she’s actually devised a pretty good model of blood flow through the mazes

Pontooners visit: Vec & Mnimi visit the siblings (ex-barjacks)

* They are either doing or have approved of any theoretical dredging in the area
* Vec goes inside to wait for the lieutenants
* Mnimi hides under a wooden walkway, and directly over them passes the veiled entity, thousands of hexagonal teeth grinding against each other. The veil is a sensory apparatus, seeping through cracks in the wood, almost finding Mnimi… but not quite.
* Lieutenants (Allan & Rebecca) show up and they’ve aged prematurely – totally exhausted, smoking and blinking in unison
* Vec asks about the Trenchies working with Half-orc Bob…
* Allan is stuttering… likely because he cannot or will not give his full attention to Vec. he doesn’t necessarily \*want\* to be … it’s like he’s fighting something, a problem consuming his attention.
* Offers to introduce Vec to “the boss” – Mnimi realizes it’s the veiled buddy; Vec doesn’t know yet
* Their attention wanders again and Vec takes the opportunity to ask again
* Someone took the tapestry of a will and wove it into space… so that this thing, no matter what you did to it, would remain bound tightly to reality. If you wanted to shield yourself from a god, this is what it would look like.
* This is an intelligence recorded and maintained through a collection of artifacts very much like the medallions.
	+ Is it the souls? The souls are the medium. The medium is not the product. The souls are not the point.
* What are you doing here, and what are your intentions?
	+ I am the promise of the heir to come. I am the promise and the seal that Hieranthotat will walk again.
* It starts absorbing Vec, who backs up… it hisses, don’t you want to know how to outlast the gods? And, guys, he kinda does.
* Mnimi terrifies Allan & Rebecca for long enough to distract the veiled thing, who releases Vec (and slips him the mirror), and he runs.
	+ ...but it senses Mnimi, and slips down through the floor to her, trying to envelop her. The terror she feels and the terror it senses ricochet off each other, driving her completely insane: the unity is broken.

### Session 10

* Ayham Vec and Mnimi start the boat ride back to shore
	+ Vec sets the boat on a course (badly) in order to diagnose Mnimi
		- Mnimi has gone insane
		- The boat hits a lamp post and both Ayham Vec and Mnimi are knocked out of the boat
	+ Ayham Vec gets back in the boat and then “sees” Mnimi swim out to what Vec believes to be the repository for the medallions
* Ayham Vec fills in Randolph about what happened
	+ Confirms that Pontooners, Barjacks and Trenchies are planning on working together. Also relays that Mnimi fell overboard
	+ Randolph does not believe that Ayham Vec is telling the whole truth and heavily suspects that Ayham Vec is trying to collect the medallions for himself and his friend
* Harriet and Jerry experiment with the medallions
* Ayham Vec and Randolph go to report back to Don Prektanos
	+ His bunker is much more bunkerish with blast doors and more creature comforts
	+ There are also some new people in the room with Don Prektanos
		- They include a character called Mr. (“Stabby McStabberson) Griphook (Quay) who always looks ill and is the only other person sitting beyond Don Prektanos.
			* A “Scary Mother Fucker” and an “evil looking guy”
			* Control the other new people in Don Prektanos’ office
			* Brought back to help Don Prektanos with this situation
			* Out of jail for less than 24 hours and already looking for a reason to go back
	+ Don Prektanos greets Randolph with a kiss on each cheek. He is learning who his real friends are – and Randolph is one of them.
	+ Ayham Vec tells his story about what happened on the Pontooner base and Don Prektanos believes him
	+ Also lets Don know that the occult happenings is probably related to what these three groups are up to
	+ Vec argues that we should pursue a diplomatic approach and let Half-Orc Bob know that we know about his upcoming treachery.
	+ Randolph convinces Don Prektanos to attack Half-Orc Bob and his gang to send a message that he is not to be messed with or betrayed
		- Randolph is given a Shantine Boarding Harpoon - the weapon Don Prektanos wants Randolph to use to kill Half-Orc Bob
* Regrouping at Randolph’s
	+ Ayham Vec fills in Harriet and Jerry on what happened in the island
* Randolph and Griphook go to meet with Lenny’s father to get Lenny back
	+ Lenny’s father was very proud of what he’s accomplished so far in his life. These have been the most wholesome 2 days of their relationship.
	+ Lenny’s dad has taken his shotgun out and keeping it readily available
	+ Lenny and Randolph go into the kitchen to talk about journalism and review Lenny’s writing
	+ This leaves Griphook and Lenny’s father in the living room for a V V V V AWKWARD conversation about the accuracy of Lenny’s dad’s sources
	+ Veiled threats ensue, then become unveiled. Griphook is politely but firmly carried out the door.

### Session 11

Randolph and Lenny talk

* Food columns: Lenny might inflate ratings, but that’s probably ok
* Is Lenny coming back with the gang? “We can ask my dad when I need to be home for dinner”

Ok, let’s check in with Lenny’s dad…

* Griphook was rude
* Requests that Randolph make sure Lenny is only going to the classy restaurants, the kinds that won’t get shot up
* You NEED to be home by 10 for baking hour.

Randolph & co return to the print shop

* There’s a local constable (Cilla) here waiting for them to return. Her armor is made out of various welded-together holy symbols from different obscure religions, and she’s got an automaton head in a briefcase.
	+ She seems to be historically concerned with the occult, and a bit of a loose cannon
	+ On retainer with Prektanos

To Harriet’s for the diving suits and some casual looting!

* Everyone loots the store
	+ Harriet gives Cilla a pen that has been used to write several confessions, some of them true!
	+ Randolph tries on some sock puppets that get into a VERY deep conversation with each other
	+ Vec finds a nullspace-corrupted record player
* Harriet sets her shop on fire (evil fire) for the insurance money
	+ To her great horror, the community water brigade shows up with water (good water) – her shop may not actually entirely burn down
* This happened on Cilla’s watch.. Who to frame for it??? –> Cilla throws a holy symbol into the flames and pays a newsie to run away in a black cloak

Half-orc Bob’s place

* Lenny orders all of Bob’s favorite things on the menu
* Bob asks lots of questions about what Randolph has been up to
	+ Lenny says he’s hanging out with Vec and working on tattoos of lizards
* Lenny tells Dad he’s going to go back to Half-Orc Bob’s the next night, but Dad says this might be a conflict of interest….
	+ OK, Lenny, imagine I’m making cookies for you, and you’re my #1 guy—you know you’re my #1 guy, Lenny. I ask what kind of topping you want on your cookies, and you say sprinkles. Now imagine someone else is coming over and wants to buy some cookies, and for the sake of metaphor, Lenny, imagine my cookies are good enough to sell. Now imagine that they really want lemon cookies. Well, we know that lemon and sprinkles don’t mix. That there is a conflict of interest.

“I want the record to show that Jerry was reasonable.” –Seth

“I want the record to show that Randolph has not been reasonable for several sessions.” –Daniel

So what’s the plan? Half-orc Bob said to come at 7; we’ll go at 5 and just assume that’ll help.

* “I reserve the right to bounce, because you guys are some double-crossing, motherfucking RUDE friends.” –Lenny
* Half-orc Bob, Trenchies, Pontooners, and the culty friends are likely all going to be at this meeting
* We steadfastly refuse to make any plan besides “try to get some information, but then just show up early”

### Session 12

* Plan:
	+ Griphook is staking out the place
	+ Jerry will give a speech
	+ Medical van comes, stakeout leaves, tank comes… three tanks come?? We are not subtle.
	+ Come in with guns blazing. That’s about as much plan as we had
* Two cops assigned to Half-Orc Bob’s place: a local guy, and Slim Frank (Judge Reddick’s #2). Why is Slim Frank there? And so few other cops? It seems like he knows what’s coming.
* Surrounding area: relatively safe because it’s H-O B’s turf. A few cafes, fruit stands, etc. No other taverns
	+ Griphook sets up at a cafe. Gather information? “No, fuck people.”
* Jerry sets up outside, expounding by microphone upon his beliefs that the only true government is no government at all, while Griphook sends more people his way. “Self-government is the KEYYYYYY to our very being!!!”
	+ Jerry is giving the most successful speech of his life, or perhaps of any of Seth’s characters’ lives
	+ Griphook sees a tall, lanky man with a gray coat. He brings out several barbacks with 2x4s and lead pipes. He is very intimidating.
	+ Slim Frank is ready to somewhat violently break up the crowd (to make way for H-O B’s “party”); Cilla can’t talk him out of it so just arrests Jerry (taking a commission on this task, which when she has to return it to Slim Frank later she will definitely be noting as a business expense)
	+ They walk past Randolph’s shop, who successfully takes the hint and goes into reporter-mode to distract a few lingering fans for long enough that they can slip away and get Jerry out of cuffs
* Some folks have soggy clothes, like pontooners…
* A couple barbacks are carrying large cases; one sets up shop on a balcony
	+ More start loading into cars, a little column of which “pushes away”
		- …. Which they just use to block off access to the tavern, except one unguarded side door. Griphook sees this and just keeps the knowledge to himself, potentially prolonging the showdown by several hours
* The appointed hour (when Lenny was supposed to join in, only Lenny is home with Dad) comes and goes and nothing happens
* Tank approach: we don’t manage to ram anything, but Smiles sure does shoot some things with the machine guns as they ride past these cars
	+ How many guys were standing around before the shooting started? “More than 5, fewer than 30.” Helpful
* Griphook finds a bloated, severely mangled body in one of the boxes; another is just ammunition. Sends one very scared barback home; carries ammo up to the other, who is a bit more suspicious, so he shoots. Takes position on the second floor of a townhouse with that newly available machine gun
	+ A few H-O B guys go to investigate; Cilla & Griphook trade shots with them
* Joe offers Vec some sedatives (no thanks, he has those) and amphetamines to get the thugs ready for battle (sure, Vec will take whatever else Joe’s got)
* Things happen, people shoot at each other, Slim Frank shoots Griphook, Griphook takes out a dude coming up the townhouse stairs, Slim Frank tells Cilla she’d better kill him or she’s a dead woman (PLUS her career will be ruined). …
* Logan as not-Joe lights some cars on fire…
* Joe attempts three times to tear gas the tavern, but never quite gets a canister inside
* Joe ends up on the wrong end of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher… “it’s half damage, so it’s ok, you probably won’t be killed, just maimed”
* The body in the box in the townhouse turns out to be the now insane Mnimi, who has turned to follow the Usurper
* Prektanos shows up with reinforcements
* On every corner, a veiled figure crawls up on pseudopods (y’all this means temporary legs, I googled it)
	+ “A symphony of occult horror” coming from the house: multiple people run out bleeding from their eyes
		- Then …. nothing else comes out
	+ All aetheric energy in the vicinity flickers off
	+ Slim Frank shoots someone in the face who was trying to hang onto his cloak and just keeps walking (is he the final boss???? Probably not, but guys???)

### 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.

### Session 14

* We massacred Half-Orc Bob & squad, but didn’t stop the ritual;
* The beast appears to be wearing the face and maybe memories of Slim Frank. The way has been laid for Hieranthotat to return to the world.

Icheb has a narco-submersible

Slim Frank:

* Probably clearing hundreds of thousands of ducats in the protection racket alone
* Also likely does hits for Reddick and Reddick’s friends
* Not useful in East Fens, because there’s no law there. Pontooners probably paid him to do business in West Fens

Cilla, Icheb, Jerry, Vec, & Prektanos

* Five stages of emergence of Hieranthotat:
	+ We learn them from Icheb, whose brain, upon reflection, is “gibbering with information”
	+ 1: the promise: he will return, and the veiled people know he will return
	+ 2: the remembrance: to learn what he wants. The cult achieved this partly using Mnimi. (may not be complete, but it has happened)
	+ 3: the will: to do what it wants (this is its current form)
	+ 4: the way: the way for his return
	+ 5: the ascension of Hieranthotat, making him a true god (not corporeal form, but a deity who can draw power from his worshippers)
		- There were people who tried doing this: large numbers of Mage Princes tried doing this, but it costs a lot in terms of human lives – maybe thousands
	+ To bring him back, they probably are looking for: Lots of power (medallions); a holy place (somewhere Hieranthotat lived); lots of artifacts
* Icheb gets some mines concealed as rescue buoys

Vec and Jerry examine Mnimi

* Signs of the bends + water pressure damage – probably was 100-200 feet underwater
* All bodily functions work, but not a single one is coordinated
* Also struggling to talk: parts of their brain that handle speech are warring with each other
* Most people’s souls vary only mildly from moment to moment
	+ Note, soul is a regulatory mechanism
	+ Mnimi has a ton of variance. Not a wave function with lots of variance, but multiple waves vying with each other
		- Different parts of their intelligence get close to realizing something, and the other parts gang up on it to drown it
		- The mind is choking itself – the muck is a defense against realizing … something. “Were I to step in, the brain would see me the same way” and basically zap it
	+ Other curator’s brain has multiple waves as well, but not as much variance
* How about some soothing music? Or, silence?
	+ “Autocracy of the brain” is pretty good at resisting effects of the aetheric deadener, but Curators are not so much
	+ The muck gets cleared away for Mnimi, who realizes whatever deep evil they were holding themselves back from realizing, and begins to scream continuously
	+ Then they play silence, which lets the Curators fully experience their thoughts and emotions, which neither of them are very happy about…
* Vec shows them a mirror, and they almost reassert control, but not quite. They keep screaming until their energy gives out, at which point they go semi-catatonic

In this state, the glamor where people can’t see them flickers in and out

Criss, the elf has “aligned interests” with us against the cultists of Hieranthotat

* The head of security at Madeline Tark’s hotel & brothels
	+ Generally bankrolls Judge Reddick’s campaigns
	+ Controls the only vice activity that Prektanos doesn’t have his hands in
	+ Not as well off as Prektanos or with the same power base, but is in super deep with political powers here
* Icheb mentions that Slim Frank is now an abomination
	+ Icheb is obviously raving mad, but he’s also not wrong
* Criss basically here to look after Tark’s business interests; Tark has probably concluded that this occult stuff is bad for business
	+ Maybe there’s a rift between Tark & Reddick??? If so, Criss was probably selected for his discretion (and to follow the boss’s orders to the letter, and not to get any clever ideas)
	+ Mentality of a bouncer

Big boat trip!

* Watson gets swapped into a deep-sea lamp where a lightbulb once was… and gets his own propulsion. He’s a little Watson-sub.
* Entire houses have been ripped from their moorings (?!) – actually apparently dynamited
	+ Were high-value occult stashhouses
	+ Icheb goes into one of these
		- Whatever sub-basement where “the occult things” were stored is just entirely gone
		- He falls through a broken girder and finds several cadavers, held together with rope and twine
		- Later they are dredged up and interrogated – their souls have been stuck in them, and so they are still kind of alive
* Battle with pontooners who were dredging up the corpses – a couple get away, we take a couple captive, and some die
	+ Something something underwater
		- Logan/Icheb: Someone else might be better equipped to do this than me
		- Christophe: You’re in a DIVING SUIT!

### Session 15

As we sail away from the carnage, we consider our two Pontooner captives:

* More experienced guy is a transplant: highly ranked, but no tattoos, just the clothes & fancy gun. He didn’t come up thru Pontooners
* The other one is out
* Griphook starts questioning the conscious one
	+ With alcohol, charm & wiles!
* Dude has a medallion in his throat – a “gift”
	+ His major arteries seem to be threaded through it, and he can probably manipulate it to draw some blood with certain arrangements of voice
* “Give me the beginner’s guide to your cult”
	+ Wants his hands free… no thanks
		- Has some occult power; unclear whether his own or ability to activate effects in other people
		- Probably more manipulative than magical – Griphook reads him as a charlatan
	+ “Hieranthotat is a promise” .. basically, follow him now and when he’s a god he’ll reward you
	+ Griphook still knows wtf is going on and realizes this guy is middle management. Doesn’t understand the rituals, etc.
		- “We are collecting the pieces of Hieranthotat”
	+ Griphook continues to be fucking brilliant and convinces the guy he’s also a secret agent of the cult and wants to help
		- The cadavers were being used to contemplate – oracles / communicators with Hieranthotat; help by communing with the spirits of the dead (mass ritual suicides of the cultists thousands of years ago before Adalnarites overtook them), who can share all kinds of info about where the medallions are
	+ Criss interrogates the guy about medallions
		- What’s your name?
		- You don’t need to know that right now.
		- OK, I’m going to call you Criss. You look like a Criss.
* Unconscious guy has cancerous growths on his neck and a medallion in his head
	+ They use these to communicate more quickly (doesn’t require human language)
	+ Icheb doesn’t remember what Hieranthotat asked him to do, just that it was so terrible he cut it out of his head
	+ Icheb thinks that the pain is a necessary part of psychologically recovering from the culty influence, so he tells Vec to wake the guy up
	+ Vec will do the physical surgery and Icheb is the spiritual guide (how reassuring)
		- Don’t worry, your soul is safe on the *SS Innocence*
* Go directly to the altar or talk to some corpses first?
	+ Griphook suggested it to Guy (who thinks he’s a cultist), or maybe Guy suggested it.. Anyway, supposedly the corpses can guide us to another cache.
	+ Jerry and Vec vote altar, everyone else leans corpses.. To the corpses we go!

### Session 17

Random background

* Ethernet: there are two of them, so Imperium & Aeldrum ones are separate
	+ Communication still has to go through hubs, which are controlled by states
	+ Access is much more expensive than IRL
	+ Local internet is up and running on highly developed planets
	+ Generally a tool of states, large corporations, powerful institutions like universities, and very wealthy individuals
	+ Private servers are possible, though v expensive
	+ Rudimentary internet piracy is possible (concealed transmission routes)
	+ Internet navigation is culturally specific

Oracular cadavers

* How to talk to the Oracular Cadavers?
	+ Medallions are like hard drives – housing the cadavers’ souls, and then using the souls to investigate certain things.
	+ So: extract medallions from cadavers; reverse engineer how medallion has deviated from the basic form required to implant into a cadaver (would take several weeks)
	+ OR take soul from the cadaver and put it in a living body, which after the inevitable madness might allow quicker extraction of the information
		- When implanted into a person’s brain, medallions also change the way your brain works (e.g. Guy used one to make a cultist kill himself)
	+ So: can Guy use the cadavers to kill us all?
		- Yes, if Guy cuts someone’s throat, shoves a medallion inside, then sends that person down to the deeps to feed the cadavers, who can then emerge from the water and do some murderin’
		- They become most dangerous as the power degrades, because they become unable to distinguish between friend and foe
* What do we want to know?
	+ What defenses does the altar have (who’s down there, what are they doing)
	+ Where are the cultists located/distributed
	+ How’s the effort going to facilitate Hieranthotat’s return
		- + any vulnerabilities / what are their concerns
	+ Griphook’s story: I’ve been in deep cover for a long time; need to figure out how the progression is going and what are the threats that need to be dealt with
		- Aka SWOT analysis of the cult of Hieranthotat, plz
* Guy goes and talks to the corpses
	+ The altar is not where Hieranthotat will arrive. The altar is the key which will open the vault, inside which are the tools of Hieranthotat’s remaking
	+ Cadavers have been hearing about the vault… listening to echoes reverberating from 5,000 years ago of souls trapped in that vault, which have been waiting for the chance to remake their lost king
	+ Where is the vault, and once we’ve prepared the altar, how can we turn the key?
		- Vault is directly below the outflow of the East Fens dam
	+ How to protect the cult?
		- Cult needs to be able to safely operate, so shutting down the dam would remove the workers around who are witnesses / watching
		- Dam is the reason the cult was able to thrive in the first place, but now the time has come to step beyond the cradle
	+ Guy goes to escape; Cilla shoots him
		- Icheb has his trusty vial of coolant to assist extraction
		- Except he wants the Pontooner with a medallion removed to punch Guy, but Vec has just knocked him out again, so to enable him punch him later, Icheb removes Guy’s head and takes it with us, on ice alongside the medallion

At the altar

* we send down Watson in an oil lamp-turned-sub for recon
* Indentation around the level of 30-40 feet below basement of East Fens
	+ Active dredging over last several days (water is turbid)
	+ Marshbed “scarred” by dredging
	+ Granite slab that sounds like a coffin if the thing being buried were five times larger than any man; must weigh 3-4 tons. Not going to come out of the water in one go
* Slag heap is actually an enormous cache of medallions in very big nets (each net containing 500-1000 medallions)
* Sonar towers / antennae below the water -- will go off if anyone gets too close
	+ Appears to be stolen from General Etheric
* Dredging appears to be forming a canal line, to enable dragging the slab/coffin up to shallower waters
* 5-6 diving suits anchored at the altar
* Opposite bank across from coffin is a raised hill, 15 feet around level of coffin
	+ Spectroscopy readings of the hill suggest abnormally high metal content: it’s a buried hull of a ship
	+ Highly corroded metal & sandbar formation suggest it’s been there a long time
	+ but, appears to be fashioned of very modern materials (metallurgical processes recent to the last 50 years) … hm…
* All of this is ~200 feet below the water
* Shoot one of the frozen medallions out of a torpedo. The old, damaged tissue doesn’t set it off at all, just sloughs off
	+ Watson takes pix for Jerry. Two problems:
		- Exposure to blood at certain concentrations is quite important.
		- Dead blood doesn’t work as well – needs to contain the soul, so it needs to be fresh
* Sarcophagus: When they were dying, Thanaccids derived means to keep themselves comatose rather than dead (cryogenic freezing for the soul). Used devices to slow the passage of time almost indefinitely: seal inside their own extradimensional space
	+ Coffin probably contains souls that might help Hieranthotat return.
	+ Time actually moves very slightly faster around the sarcophagus
	+ From perspective of the gods, time is linear but probabilistic. (Time is a flat circle) (it’s all one big probability curve, only collapsed down to reality when needed)
		- Maybe the coffin has been constructed to keep that multilateral view on reality (Schrödinger’s cultist)
* Could we drag away the sonar sensors?
	+ Cover 360 degrees around plus above (but not below)
	+ Make the water all turbid enough to block the sensors?

Jerry & Icheb’s journey

* Inside those 6 diving suits, people all wearing The Veils
	+ One of them pins Jerry Swanwallow under it, against the muck
	+ Basically a medallion controlling brain as wetware running a guard routine
	+ Another one tries to pull off his helmet, yikes
		- Cilla shoots that one with the harpoon gun and Criss pulls real strong to get it off of Jerry
	+ Icheb tries to stop water inrush with coolant
		- Ice gets everywhere
* In the meantime, a subtle but unmistakable shadow falls over the light that is cast from the surface above. A ship – a pretty big-ass ship – is heading towards the sarcophagus
* Iko releases some mines, which all miss the big-ass ship, and they float to the surface unattached, bobbing menacingly
* Iko tries to shoot a torpedo at this big boat and gets a nat 1. “Congratulations, you get the sub stuck.”

Griphook’s antics

* Griphook tosses one of the (proximity-based) mines towards the engine, successfully starting the process of sinking it onto our ship
* Iko & Icheb work on freeing the sub (DM chants “nat 1, nat 1” to no avail)
* “This has been a disastrously unsuccessful outing, but Griphook’s the only one who got hurt.”
* “Wait, your dex mod’s +6?” “Yep, so is my charisma mod.” “Griphook is just wasting his time with you guys.”
* “Where am I bleeding, Christophe?” “just… generally”
* When there are fresh bodies, the diving suits with Veils just tear apart the current bodies from the inside and then replace them with fresh new cadavers

Inside the hull

* Someone intentionally buried it to make an air pocket / tunnel
* We get to a galley area paneled in ancient, petrified wood
	+ And there, poring over some papers … is Harriet!

### 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

### 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…)

### Session 20

* Upon “hearing” the anti-noise from Vec’s pocket, Jerry bluffs and says it was from his megaphone
	+ Vec slights of hand the mirror out of his pocket, but Officer Milton notices
	+ Vec tries smashes the mirror by dropping it on the floor as an “accident”, again Milton notices
		- This drives Madeline Tark’s men and Officer Johansson (and Mnimi) crazy as the information it was trying to collect is suddenly released as terrible occult sounds.
		- Officer Johansson has been driven permanently insane and immediately starts freaking out
		- Johansson shoots Vec and Criss tackles Jerry to the ground
		- Milton threatens Vec, demanding the truth or else Milton will kill Vec (and everyone else). Vec says something pretty close to the truth and Milton believes Vec implicitly
		- Milton detains Vec and Jerry back at the station and sends Criss to set up a meeting with Madeleine Tark
* Cilla’s hot take – time to get my reward because the cultists are done, we’ve destroyed the medallions!
	+ Does some detective work to try find out where Prektanos is, stumbles upon some cops while going to Prektanos’ old hangout
		- Is clever enough to realize that, once she discovers it is crawling with cops, she probably should not actually go inside
	+ She heads to Vec’s and gets into Criss’ car to go “shopping”
		- It turns out Criss DIDN’T ACTUALLY HAVE ANY SHOPPING TO DO
		- So Cilla gives a quick lesson in hand-to-hand combat to the prostitutes, after asking a few detailed questions.
	+ Griphook comes by
		- Prektanos is in a rough position – oh no! Police crawling over HQ
		- Trenchies are currently winning this gang war
	+ P is running out of resources and wants us to help win the gang war and destroy the cultists
		- We don’t know how much Judge Reddick knows (or is he being ), but..
		- Constabular officers are actively holding down territory for the Trenchies, against Prektanos.
			* And they’re taking significant losses, so it’s strange that Reddick is keeping them involved
			* Can Reddick be turned away from the occult in some way?
		- Can we bug Reddick?
			* The good stuff requires signoff by Magisterial officers
			* What Reddick and Slim Frank have are locally-sourced surveillance tech (second-rate, black market)
				+ Stored near constabular barracks
			* Cilla has already raided this warehouse in the past, via Watson-on-a-hook
		- Griphook needs to talk to Tark; asks Criss, “do we need to have a heart to heart first to rebuild trust [that was broken when Griphook abandoned Criss to constabular arrest]”
			* Declines to share Prektanos’s location, “because I’ve already told you the truth already”
				+ Cilla believes them (Prektanos probably doesn’t want another meeting); cool. Criss thinks ..
		- Attempt to steal the bugs:
			* Watson picks up a working bug-and-sound-recorder package. About the size of a quarter, can be attached anywhere. Records 48 hours before needing to transmit or be picked up
	+ Chatting with Madeline Tark
		- She is still in the fluffy slippers
		- We sit on very low benches so she can look us in the eye
		- Judge Reddick has very strong thighs, helpful
		- She doesn’t want to think he’s the bad guy… so maybe he’s in danger or being blackmailed. She tells us where to find him when meeting with Dandruff (the ex-newspaperman)
		- Griphook checks for valuables, of course… there are lots; mostly bulky, but also an orb with a miniature etheric storm inside it. Cilla thinks it’s a radioactive flashbang
* Vec & Jerry at the jail
	+ Johansson has had an allergic reaction of the psyche to Vec’s vibrating mirror situation
	+ Vec says to Milton: there are a bunch of cultists working with the Trenchies and digging around for some object
	+ They (agents) took Mnimi with them
	+ Questioning
		- What were they digging for? “We couldn’t figure that out”
		- Who is we? Me and Jerry
		- Where? In the water, in some diving suits Jerry looted from the wreckage of Harriet’s burnt-up store
		- And who was with you? Me and Jerry.
		- What do cultists look like? Mnimi showed us, and Jerry has some experience with occult things in his past…
		- So what was the object? Looked like a giant coffin / sarcophagus. And there was an old, crashed ship, but we didn’t
	+ Either Milton is lying about giving Vec amnesty, or maybe he’s a psychopath who’s more obsessed with the truth than with following the law
	+ Milton demands admissible evidence of what the cultists are doing, in exchange for not pressing charges against him, Jerry, or “anyone else you’d like to add to the list of immunity”
* Griphook pawns off the orb at “The Self-Help Shop”, including a bunch of DIY home services and also lots of weapons
	+ He owes debts to Don Prektanos, on paper (since Prektanos invested in his shop)
	+ Griphook gets a long-range weapon
	+ Cilla gets lots of pewter-coated lead holy symbols of old Semal gods
	+ And Vec picks up some old Semal religious pamphlets
* And now, to visit Dandruff…
	+ Writing reams about how terrible Don Prektanos is, on the occult typewriter
	+ Quite upset, & also in a positive of influence here
	+ One bored constabular officer
	+ Griphook chokes out the constabular officer
	+ Randolph reveals that they’re baddies
	+ Cilla runs around the building, bursts in the front door, and says WOT’S ALL THIS THEN
	+ Griphook goes to “arrest” Randolph, who resists
	+ Griphook pistol-whips him TO DEATH
* Randolph… was going to help the cult! He wrote it all up, helpfully.
* Madeline Tark + Criss
	+ She fills him in: Who are we fighting, what needs to die, and what leverage do we have over them

### Session 21

The Anti Cult:

* Icheb, Iko, Isaac – interested in liberation of more pontooners
* Possible places to find them:
	1. Pontooners and Trenchies in truce brokered by Hieranthotat group in warehouse district
	2. Frontal assault on boardwalk (probably not a good idea)
	3. At the Dam (water hides aerial detection)
	4. Underwater ghoul caches/corpse wells – Back to the one with Guy
		+ barge comes by, divers, periphone guy (pontooner), text cult guy (frail, of course), and two bored guards – Quay and Matt
		+ Icheb decides to try and torpedo the barge while yelling “Salvation is at Hand” or somesuch nonsense – graze, hits corpse well
		+ Occult handler – fails at his life-zombies start coming for the ‘tooners
		+ Isaac beats the head of a dead guy
		+ Quay and Matt open fire on the *SS Innocence*
		+ Kristin throws a brick at the *Innocence* (ra ra pontooners!). It bounces back off the top of the barge.
		+ Icheb attempts to fire at corpse as good will gesture – shoots us instead
		+ Matt (Timey Death) dies and lobs a grenade at the end – shrapnel at *Innocence* hits isaac (screw your liberation – which probably is muffled by the grenade)
		+ Icheb tries his pitch again
		+ Quay jams the gun and is scared
		+ Barge is able to start moving away from corpse well
		+ Slimy Bill is a stand-up leader; he’s just a little slippery, which is an excellent quality in a smuggler
		+ Kristen (Blimey Jill) tries to negotiate then “helps” with engine...shutting down the barge for the moment
		+ Occultist killed by Icheb
		+ Quay grenades the innocence very well – Isaac gets hit badly, breaks foot, icheb gets hit with a wet paper towel
		+ Blimey Jill goes to talk to boss Slimy – permission to shoot zombies requested and provided – shoots the shit out of the dock
		+ Grimey Phil (Quay) asks for guidance – ship us away from crazytown boat please – doesn’t go so well
		+ Icheb machine guns the zombies again – one a little, bursts another
		+ Isaac plays head games – chucks head to barge,more proselytizing attempts
		+ Slimy Bill inspires? “Surviving another day makes you a better Pontooner.”
		+ Icheb tries to light up the zombies again – zombies go flop ignominiously and Jill hears a “thank you” from the depths
		+ Conversations are happening over floating boats and zombie corpses – parley party – Bill agrees but needs 1:doctor, 2:not all crew go under procedure at once, 3: recompense for Timey, 4:$$$$$$, 5:sub goes to the Handkerchief crew upon death of Icheb –deal!
			- Set a rendevous time in a couple days; Slimy & squad will bring a few friends of similar mind

Back to the main squad who just killed Randolph

* Steal the typewriter & lots of notes
* Plant a camera outside the front of Randolph’s place
* Deciding between a crackhouse and Lenny’s dad’s place, they pick the latter!
	+ Shots were fired from the front stoop, not shooting to kill (instead, he probably fired into the air)
	+ Vec asks Lenny to let them in, and Lenny says sure, just come around the back. Vec, Cilla, Joe climb up a rope ladder to Lenny’s window; Griphook begins climbing, then spots a neighborhood watch guy / Frenchie who has watched them go in.
		- Griphook swings down from the window, grabs a plank from a flowerpot (???) and vaults over the backyard minefield and the barbed-wire fence beyond it. He lands on his feet, then jumps up to the balcony from which they were being spied upon, and from which the spies are now retreating
		- Griphook follows, with intent to murder
		- Silently shoots at two guys, but misses one, doesn’t grievously injure the other.
		- Those two guys are not so silent. One shoots a Tommy gun; the other charges him. “You can reverse-grapple him.” “I’d rather shoot him in the face.”
		- It turns out there are a bunch of them; Griphook successfully shoots that one guy in the face, but two downstairs are fleeing to a car, as is a fourth down the hall. (‘You do wreak hell on the wallpaper though.”)
		- The car has a sunroof. Griphook successfully lobs a mine in, which then detonates. The car explodes, with two guys inside.
		- The fourth guy is running away and radios that the two orcs have come for them. Griphook runs him down. “What do you want to do?” “I want to shoot him in the head!”
		- Griphook recovers the radio and says some scary stuff. The guy on the other end isn’t impressed. They curse at each other for a while.
* Lenny’s dad (Rich Craw) has some wounds and seems surprisingly ok about letting us stay here for a couple hours (apparently because Lenny likes us).
	+ Lenny’s dad has also set up a pirate TV antenna and they have been watching the Great Occult British Bakeoff. Their cookies have gotten much better.
	+ Vec, Joe, Cilla & maybe Lenny attack Randolph’s notes
		- Lenny sits down at the typewriter
		- Cilla finds (1) that Randolph was deputized (to get him out of trouble); (2) randolph had detailed notes on everyone he’d met with, including slim frank’s associates, (3) an org chart with who worked for Randolph/Reddick + commentary, (4) some money, (5) his scheduled meeting with Reddick, (6) Reddick’s scheduled speech, (7) a meeting b/t Judge Reddick and a representative of the East Fens Electrical Co. (subsidiary of General Etheric)
		- Vec finds that Randolph was trying to link the cult of Hieranthotat to the old pre-Fialta Semal natives, who worshipped various swamp spirits. “The way you will know the king is by the moneys with which he pays the faithful.” + discussion of his burial place – taken off in a chariot (ship) into the swamp, saving Semal from a hostile foreign power.
			* Randolph thought he was related to them, based on his lineage studies
			* Randolph also appeared to think the cult would institute Semal’s independence, and that they weren’t so bad, plus that Hieranthotat was probably the “king” the Semalites referred to
	+ “Speaking of, I think this is a good time for a cliffhanger!”
	+ Cilla asks Lenny to talk through Randolph’s notes with them, and then he’ll ask his dad for permission to help save the city
* Icheb will go pay a call on Criss
* Back with Griphook: city officials (?) get out of the same car as a cultist of Hieranthotat !!

### Session 22

* Our boy Hieranthotat isn’t resurrected – his will is here; his power is not.
	+ The last step is reanimating him out from the folds of space where he is hidden
	+ Do it in a summoning place – maybe resurrect his priest first as an intermediary
	+ Also somewhere buried in the mud, currently being uncovered, is a sepulcher of Hieranthotat
	+ Slim Frank (and agents) are made entirely of medallions: walking, talking collections of power
	+ The Will is a facsimile of Hieranthotat’s personality and desires
		- Probably has some sense / instinct of what is needed to bring about the full resurrection.
		- But, something is currently missing: maybe the ritual, the location, or the medallions
* Where is the cult’s home base?
	+ Cross-reference Randolph’s diary with when he met with the cult – new info
	1. when he goes to Reddick’s courthouse
	2. when he visits Prektanos’s casino (which has been taken over by the Trenchies) – lieutenants. The casino is semi-operational
	+ “Will know more when I finally go to the boardwalk” (in East Fens)
* Rich Craw – saw the little Clive boy sacrificed to one of the Trenchies
	+ ...and he believes in the occult stuff
	+ But has to stay to protect the neighborhood from the Trenchies who are now after him because Griphook turned the siege (they’d just been trying to contain him) into a battle
	+ Gives Lenny the option for dad to call in a favor or go do battle with cultists
	+ Lenny asks for the ride off-planet but not until a week from now
	+ Turns out Rich’s owed favor is from the Governor, fun
	+ The party leaves presuming Rich is about to go down fighting
* Meanwhile, the rest of the squad tries to GTFO
	+ … a short detour to snag Griphook, before which Joe gets us t-boned by a cop car
	+ Griphook tries to kill a couple cops, doesn’t manage it immediately
	+ Cops surround the vehicle (Joe, Vec, Cilla, Lenny) on all sides
	+ Lenny jumps out, punches thru one car’s windshield and tries to pull a copper out thru it, but fails and gets stuck
	+ Cilla shoots at the cops in the car, some cops shoot at Cilla, some other cops shoot at Vec and Lenny. Vec gets a little stupider and less charming. Lenny gets a charley horse.
	+ Rich Craw machine guns down some of the cops and they back off enough to let the party escape
	+ Grippy gets briefly threatened by a partially-undead cultist who comes up from the carpet in the back of the car…
		- …. And then pulls a dumb & daring manuveur to throw the cultist out through the unlocked back door, and doesn’t even have to crash the car to do it. Griphook is very lucky.
* Everyone reunites at Madeline Tark’s to plot next moves. Icheb wonders whether blowing up the dam would fix things.
	+ Criss vetoes talking to Judge Reddick or going to the courthouse because the party leaves a trail of destruction behind it
		- Criss is not happy and is v v v v intimidating
		- Criss also very rudely (but accurately) calls the party “not subtle”
		- They concede & decide to go to hire some Pontooner muscle
* Hiring trip: pick up Slimy Bill’s Pontooners
	+ He notes privately that several of them are secret cultists
	+ Rather than publicly massacre them, someone has the brilliant idea to run a math test as an entrance exam to this mission
		- One cultist points out that this seems less designed to detect talent than to perpetuate class hierarchies
		- Icheb (or was it Criss) notes that that sounds like something a loser would say
	+ Party identifies and confirms six suspected cultists (they do still have neck medallions, but their surgeries were less recent and more carefully executed)
	+ Griphook is, of course, super convincing and they (5 cultists and a rando) all think they were just victims of the system. They leave calculating the cumulative probability that they all would’ve randomly failed. (“within acceptable parameters”)

### Session 23

Last time:

* Hired Slimy Bill
* Found some investigative leads to the cult (Reddick agenda; casino; boardwalk – which is basically a pirate fortress)
* Big objective of the cult is to resurrect/reanimate Hieranthotat himself, whose remains lie in the lees of the East Fens Dam
	+ Priest is the one whose sarcophagus we’ve seen under the water

Pontooners don’t have a contract w/ cult of Hieranthotat. Instead, it’s a buying relationships: they protect and assist the cult’s dredging activities

* Pontooners \*have\* to work for the cult if they want to be a Pontooner. Special bonuses for getting the medallion; several senior members have been driven mad, won over, or replaced by cult members
	+ Cult members also have a monopoly of access to East Fens
	+ They’re also controlling the dam, meaning they know when to expect high tides and low tides.
	+ So cult has also infiltrated, or is connected to, General Etheric
* Where do medallions go?
	+ They used to go to the warehouses (Molly & co had unloading agreement)
	+ Now they go to the boardwalks, or wherever else needed, under Trenchies’ guard

Everyone debates what to do next, and Criss doesn’t want anyone getting near Judge Reddick, so Vec knocks out Criss with a dart gun. Vec & Cilla are ready to go crash the Reddick meeting with superintendant of GE, but Icheb stops the boat and says, we’re going to need Criss, so I’m not starting again until this disagreement is resolved.

* Cilla, definitely entirely without inspiration from an unconscious Criss, suggests that perhaps Criss could go to the meeting instead of Vec & Cilla. The plan eventually evolves into a “friend” of Criss’s who works for GE delivering a potted plant with Watson to the GE Superintendent’s office
* They do this. Cilla gleans that EITHER Criss OR the GE assistant is fucking their boss… Criss promises the scoop if Cilla doesn’t kill anyone in her stakeout.
* Cilla stakes out in a dentist’s office next door to keep an eye on Watson.
* Some NPC rolls a nat 20. Worrying.

Warehouse expedition (Criss, Iko)

* Medallions generally go to the boardwalk, but go to warehouse if they’re to be used for activities in the West Fens. could occasionally be re-routed
* They delivered a letter to the head

Stakeout

* Reddick’s car is dented; he gets out with Slim Frank
* Frank is limping; limbs moving independently
* Would need: medallions, ritual location, hour, and a distraction
* Slim Frank could talk right into the minds of Reddick & the superintendent
* Reddick was being pressured, but was still being deceptive.. Superintendent was talked into something, but Reddick paid her off
* Inspection in GE in a couple of days; stationing permanent branch of local constabulary; gaining access to landing areas near the dam. Part land deal, part private security, part inexplicable access to the place
* Asked her to make sure

### Session 24

What’s the plan, Stan?

* We can’t blow up the dam enough to permanently damage it with the explosives we could get right now
	+ So, what else can we do?
* In 48h, there’ll be a ritual in the shadow of the dam;
	+ Slim Frank will probably be there
	+ We don’t know what the ceremony is
	+ GE superintendent said we could change the tides
	+ Curators offered a counter-ritual to actually undo Hieranthotat rather than just postpone his return / bury him
	+ Spring Jerry from jail? Team up with Milton?
	+ Get medallions for curators
	+ Pick up Griphook
	+ Stake out the dam? Boardwalk? General recon

At the boardwalk, looking for Grippy:

* No destruction there, so he definitely left immediately
* A pontoon boat with some medallions was stolen. Smells like our guy.
* Where did he go?? Maybe lying low in the marshy areas; maybe paid off revolutionaries in the swamps to let him thru, using the medallions
* Has not updated Prektanos on his activities (as far as P knows, Grippy is still recruiting)

Criss visits Jerry

* Ambient soul power affecting the medallions – particularly sensitive to those calibrated like they are, either ppl or medallions
* Could be used to navigate to where he’s resting and where he’ll come back
* Most medallions probably coming from where the waterline went down, not just up. Probably a bunch more below the dam that they’re harvesting
* Ritual will focus on using the medallions to siphon out Hieranthotat’s power. Substitute for a sarcophagus. Act like a vacuum seal – don’t break the seal fully. Get Hieranthotat to infiltrate the ??.
* Medallions are like little mouths feeding off the souls of the victims – so then sacrifice people, and medallions can be shaped for the power of hieranthotat to take form. And then he’s something that looks like a god, and basically just needs more worshippers
* Look at sarcophagus and give alternative energy source. Siphon him off into something that isn’t the medallions – trick it, maybe using Jerry’s artifacts, with regular old etheric energy; get his soul muddled up in there, and it won’t be intelligent anymore (although it’ll still have some firepower). Even out the peaks & valleys of the soul and turn them into just raw energy. All souls are basically the same.
	+ Counter-ritual might create a bomb, or might power other occult things.
	+ Effect on The Will? Maybe it’ll go insane
* Jerry has been temporarily released with Officer Milton accompanying him

At the dam

* There’s Grippy, digging away
* Dam is a concrete wall on top of metal pylons
* Structure is fairly deep; top of the dam 40-50 feet above (good view from up there probably)
	+ Not going to contain all the water when it rains; some will go into the marshes
* Walking thru marsh is ankle-deep water
* Dam has 3 major entry points, with guard towers
* Some cover nearby, but given 2 guards keeping an eye out, no way to approach unseen
* Slim frank buddy setting up some high-tech rafts – landing points, rolling ladders to climb from rafts up the dam
* Opposite side of bank, slim frank guys unloading “surveillance equipment” that’s probably occult stuff
* A barge has been beached w/ magisterial officers; they have pontooner boats to “hunt pontooners”
* Also, trenchies, who are fortifying the area
* “Radio tower” is actually a machine gun turret
* The cult might try to just seize control of the dam
* No sign of the GE superintendent; there are signs of several workers who appear to grumbling and not really working (morale problem). Supposed to be helping law enforcement, don’t really want to.
* Big hole that Grippy was digging: a Slimy Bill smuggling route?
* Control house is at the top of the dam – metal shutters kept down at all time; internal entry/exit point.
* Top of the dam is curved; at various points there are debris-rolling stations to launch floating debris to impair movement of passing vessels. Semal is a garrison planet & the dam is easily militarized
* Water bends in unusual ways, as if there were unusual space around a particular area -- on the bank closest to the beached barge
	+ Too far from upper part of dam to be reachable from the top

Grippy says, welcome to the dam!

* Developing a foxhole system for staying safe prior to the showdown (“congratulations to me; you’re welcome to you”)
* Says he’s not going to blow up the dam. (“but that’s a great idea!” … doesn’t appear to be “this is the baseline lie that Griphook usually lives.”)

Back in the West Fens

* Lots of Pontooners at the boardwalk have been arrested, rounded up by the local constabulary in the last couple of hours
* Catch up with Milton, Criss, and Jerry
* +3 plainclothes constables who come with rifles, etc. who are willing to take a potshot at Slim Frank

Back at the dam: the denouement

* Pontooner ‘arrestees’ are congregating on police boats, but are actually in handcuffs: they are the sacrifices. The Pontooners are mostly disarmed; the muscle now is a mix of constabular officers & trenchies.
* Then a whole brigade (all PCs but Iko, Jerry and Vec) go down to check out the foxholes Grippy has been digging. Criss trips, grabs a tunnel support, and pulls down enough of it to reveal a mine underneath. Griphook says they’re to cover our escape if we’re being pursued. Milton is skeptical. Griphook draws to shoot Milton, but Criss is faster. Criss shoots at Griphook and misses. The shot ricochets: everyone dodges the bullet, but it sets off an explosive, collapsing the tunnel and miring those who are slow in rising waters…
* Iko steers the sub directly into the dam. Vec asking Jerry to kill the engines, but he succeeds only in disabling the controls. Vec debates what to do, at the last moment, pulling out his cultish mirror and giving over control of his hands. He kills the engines, then pulls down Jerry, who had been opening the sub’s hatch to escape. Water rushes in, threatening to drown them, while Vec enchants a medallion to let him breathe underwater…
* The sub collides with the dam, crushing Iko, Jerry, and Vec to death. Iko had kept enough speed, and the engines explode on impact, causing the dam to buckle, then collapse.
* Hieranthotat gets re-buried, not dead, but banished for perhaps another few thousand years.
* As the sub is racing towards the dam and the squad is exiting the foxholes, Griphook shoots Milton in the face. He’s wounded, but not killed. Cilla tries to talk Griphook out of it; he ignores her and shoots again, then pushes a trigger to explode .. something. Most of the PCs are out of the foxholes, but the constable recruits and Icheb are still in the tunnels, apparently about to be exploded. However, they all have bigger problems now: with rapidly rising waters and a tidal wave approaching from the dam, they all attempt to swim for their lives. Joe, Icheb, Criss, Griphook, and Cilla all drown. Cilla, thinking of her recruits, refuses to help Griphook escape the wave. Criss’s last thought is, "These fuckers." Lenny is incredibly athletic and makes it out unscathed. In all, over a hundred lives are lost at the dam.

### Epilogue

It takes years until the investigation into this incident is resolved. No one ever guesses the true cause of the dam collapse.

Lenny makes it out of the scene of destruction, amid weeks-long power outages, social unrest, and much renewed gang violence. The Governor had written him a nice letter about how proud his dad was of him, and included his tickets out of Semal, some starter cash, and job references.

Watson becomes assistant chief of security for GE, mounted upon a series of rotating poles as he pleases, keeping an eye on people and telling them to watch themselves. He enjoys his retirement.

Vec had transmitted a message with lots of evidence of criminal activity to the Aeldrum Dragoons, meaning that Aeldrum National Security gets involved, causing serious damage to the local population and lots of violence against civilians. Dragoons aren’t sure if the cult of Hieranthotat was really a cult or if it was a front for the Fialta resistance, and mount a cold-war style reign of terror.

After collapse of the Pontooners’ leadership and most of the gang drowning when the dam was destroyed, Isaac and Ingo take control of the gang.

NSB gets really vicious in putting down the Pontooners, for years treating the area like an enemy combat zone, frequently boarding boats, shooting Pontooners, and tossing them overboard.

The Trenchies were also connected to the cultists, so the NSB takes an interest in them, too. (“It’s as if organized crime became a national security issue for the first time.”) The party’s actions are likely indirectly responsible for the violent, but very effective, cleanup of South Gate.

Prektanos returns with lots of evidence of criminal activity by Judge Reddick – and is prepared to use this to blackmail Reddick. But Madeline Tark, who got the drop on the situation, is prepared with plenty of blackmail on Judge Reddick herself. He retires ignominiously under her threats. They still call each other every week.

Prektanos commits suicide in his casino: two shots to the back of the head.

The newsies are as safe as they can be, living in the capital of an authoritarian government.

The Curators (minus Mnimi, who will never recover) escape off-world, with as many medallions as they can find, in a naive and unrelenting quest to restore their dead god.

## Notes

1. ↑ More critical circles have called Reconstruction the Mervodan Doctrine, after Bareth’s late economic czar, the human Francis Mervodan, who was largely considered responsible for Aeldrum’s policy of economic warfare against the Fialta. Some conservatives have argued that collaboration with the Valdosians during the Gunboat War missed the point of Mervodan’s strategy – these same individuals continued to vote for extensions of the Serene Doge’s term after a visit from his intelligence chief, Count Solaire of Lidenia and Pensace. (Mervodan once had another public role, as the champion of human political and property rights on Aeldrum and its core worlds, for which he is both affectionately and derisively remembered as “Uncle Frank.”)
2. ↑ The Shantine Empire and the quasi-rogue Knights of Adarnum took the Gunboat Wars as an opportunity to agitate for the protection (read: armament) of the Kirvan and Idolmarite faithful in the Fialta Free States. The Alusians were preoccupied with their own conquests.
3. ↑ A more somber discovery was the collapse of the Margravate of Tarim (long rumored by the merchants taking the Nippon-Brumaire route) and the scattering of its people among the great Celestial Powers.
4. ↑ A few Brass Cities exiles (cyborgs and the odd sentient automaton) still eke out a living in Imperial Space – most returned to the Brass Cities when the Pin Jump was reopened, but as cybernetics become commonplace, it is also easier for an old cyborg or even a clever automaton to blend in with the right set.