Moon's Haunted/Session 1

The party, a special missions crew of the ATC’s Expeditionary Exploitation Operations Division—gathered aboard the deck of its ship, reviewing its orders from McCabe. It had aptly christened its vessel *La Petite Mort* for its size and for the party’s cover as ATC Mortuary Affairs. Preparing *La Petite Mort* for travel to Nocturne, the party’s members talked amongst themselves. Present were the commanding officer, Major Vash Kesdis, her second in command, Master Sergeant Jaures de Vranne, covert operator Corporal Belle Zuiki O'Clery, freelance contractors “Grandma” Gladys Lockheart (an occult specialist) and Gaston Rimm (children’s book author and expert in frontier research and alien cultures), and an ATC civilian psychiatrist, Eleanor Macabeau. Further, Lockheart brought her granddaughter Abbey. Rimm brought his scribe and assistant le Fou. Maj. Kesdis brought her aide-de-camp Specialist Mik Dozir. And Eleanor brought her wife/sniper Nolwen Katarin and her wife/Irish mercenary Moirin Cuilinn.

Only de Vranne had not been a longtime associate of the EEOD—Kesdis, as a commanding officer, had previously (and successfully) served with both Lockheart/Abbey and Rimm/le Fou, and was aware of the exploits of O’Clery and the renowned therapeutic care of Macabeau (who seemed singularly able to convince imperialist colonizers that they weren’t evil and assuage their consciences, a key CV builder in getting her attached to the division.) Similarly, the others in the EEOD had heard of Kesdis and her leadership abilities and boldness in “hostile negotiations,” and vaguely knew of each other’s existences in the division as well. But de Vranne, a transfer from another unit, neither knew anyone on the team, nor was known to them. The team took this chance to introduce themselves to him, and to each other. In turn, de Vranne called particular attention to his deputy role, reminding all solemnly (and to some eye-rolling) that the say of a superior officer was final, and that he would deal with any who allowed personal feelings or goals to interfere with the mission. (He also, to some confusion, urged others in the party not to cross into his line of fire.)

After these introductions, the party reviewed the comms policies. The ship was able to reliably and securely radio McCabe from its systems, but all communications were to go through Major Kesdis. After the party moved from Nocturne to Kamens, McCabe would relocate from gods-knew-where to Nocturne to maintain real-time close contact if necessary. Further, Kesdis would be able to personally contact McCabe via her own handheld radio, but this was only for emergencies, as its security could not be assured. Finally, after a few verbal barbs among colleagues, a besotted and mildly-insubordinate drinking competition, and a retelling of the stories of the dwarven Maccabees and Banshee the Blind by Rimm, the party settled in for its voyage to Nocturne.

Landing on Nocturne, Kesdis and de Vranne were accosted right away by Port Muirkirk’s harbormaster. The harbormaster intuited the true nature of the party, and warned against leaving the ship alone, as locally employed Nocturnals acting as spies would certainly discover the party’s nature as well—though rebuffing the harbormaster and holding cover, Kesdis left Specialist Dozir to watch over the ship.

The party found Port Muirkirk in a sad state. Meant only to harbor a few hundred miners at a time, the about 2 kilometer-squared encampment was overcrowded with ATC workers awaiting extraction after their sudden withdrawals from Kamens as waves from even the very first rotation of miners had still been unable to get transport home. The poverty of depleted rations and full bunks lent itself to a seedier section of the camp. De Vranne and O’Clery traveled to a nearby bar, the most wretched hive of scum and villainy they could find in Muirkirk. After deftly fooling an aggressive drunk into allowing passage, de Vranne began to chat up the bar’s patrons. Gathering little but what he knew already from McCabe’s briefing, de Vranne prepared to leave with O’Clery, until one of the patrons he had been chatting with leaned in close, showing as he did a dark matting of blackened, varicose veins along his back. A dull glint suddenly entered the patron’s eye, looking almost like an uncanny sort of abject despair, as he whispered something known only to de Vranne. Horrified by whatever it was, de Vranne hustled the patron outside into an alleyway at gunpoint. O’Clery followed to keep watch (of both the street and de Vranne) as de Vranne began his interrogation.

A sobbing, now nearly-comatose patron, revealed to be one Paul Wilson, had no memory of what he whispered. de Vranne intuited that some sort of control had taken place while Wilson’s eyes contained the mysterious glint. Wilson added a bit to the atmospherics of the situation, mentioning that he had seen some of the returning miners mad and frenzied enough that they actually attempted to scale walls — to some success and at the cost of their fingernails. He further noted that the only “normal” survivors of the most recent wave of evacuees, the last mining rotation before the party was summoned, were across town, holed up together for safety in one barrack as a sort of “union.” Wilson noted they were scared not only of being killed by some unnamed horror, but also of being taken by the ATC. Apparently, many of the last voyage’s wounded or seemingly most insane were wrapped up by unknown ATC forces almost immediately upon return to Muirkirk before they could talk to anyone and were extracted back to Aeldrum. As de Vranne left Wilson with money and supplies, Wilson entreated him to find his brother on Kamens if he could, Pete Wilson, whose fate was unknown.

The party sent Rimm, Lockheart, and Macabeau to make contact with the union, hoping their collectively less-intimidating auras would open more doors. Winning entrance to the barrack with promises to the guard to protect the union from the paranormal, Lockheart led the trio inside. With dozens of eyes upon them, they sought audience with the union’s leader Renata, and her second, Pike. Pike told his story in a back room: The first week of labor on Kamens tired everybody, seemingly to tangibly weigh them down physically and emotionally. Pike’s reduced production but keen eyesight got him placed on 12-hour shifts standing watch at the lip of the crater where mining was taking place, which extended still a few hundred meters above ground level. As the next 2 weeks passed, Pike saw strange, unimaginable things. Figures darted across the landscape. The “crater diamonds” that some claimed to see when landing or ascending from Kamens seemed not to be embedded at all, but hovering above the ground of the craters. And indeed, sometimes in the shadow of these craters, long figures hid, meters in size and occasionally draping appendages over the craters’ edges. Never knowing if he was hallucinating, and certainly missing events both to falling asleep and to the system’s strange night cycle, Pike ended his account with his harrowing boarding of fleeing vessels after about three weeks, seemingly to escape some ongoing attack he could not remember.

Asking Renata what she could corroborate of these events, the party noticed the same glint in her eye as de Vranne had described in Paul Wilson as she shooed them away. However, the unionist escorting them out spoke briefly with them outside, indicating that Renata and Pike had left out a key part of the story. Apparently, after the first wave of miners reported seeing things, each subsequent rotation was accompanied by one Dr. Gant, who maintained a station near the mining site and who oversaw treatment of work injuries and mental stress. However, individuals who went for consultations with Dr. Gant invariably never returned, with excuses made about being “taken off the job.” The unionist further indicated that after the final attack, many evacuees were triaged at the far corner of Muirkirk by one Dr. Larsen. After the trio reported these leads, the party searched the starting intelligence McCabe had given them to find the personnel files of Dr. Gant. However, Kesdis found that only she had the clearance to see Gant’s file, and she reported little except that Gant was indeed a real person whose whereabouts were unknown but who should have been with the final rotation.

Recognizing Renata may be possessed, the party split up: Macabeau and O’Clery to surveil Renata, de Vranne to poll the drunk tanks of Muirkirk, and the rest of the party to interview Dr. Larsen. The party found Larsen seemingly entirely alone in his practice apart from a moaning in the back. When the party used its cover to press Larsen to allow them the chance to interview survivors, Larsen led the party to a nearly-comatose miner named Edgar. Rimm communicated with Edgar via blinks, eventually convincing Edgar to draw what he had seen in le Fou’s notebook. With sudden fury and hand bleeding from effort, Edgar drew a horrible, multi-legged creature before rearing in bed and giving what looked to be an awful shriek. Interestingly, no sound came out at all, though Edgar’s vocal cords bulged. Rimm alone appeared to hear something, and turned to the corner of the room to see it but found only an open window looking out onto Kamens, shining brightly. Further, Rimm, familiar with illustration from his childrens’ books, recognized a note of celestial illumination as though from holy texts in Edgar’s work.

As Edgar lapsed into a heart attack, Larsen attempted to shoo the party out, but along the way they noticed a storage freezer. Being Mortuary Affairs after all, and responsibly attempting to take custody of any bodies, the party forced Larsen to open it. Inside was the body of a miner, whose chest had been clearly punctured inward by some wounding object about six inches in diameter. Fleeing to another room, Larsen had time to call for security forces before Lockheart’s granddaughter Abbey “hugged” him to sleep and promptly zipped him into a body bag for transportation back to the ship, which would leave passerby none the wiser thanks to the party’s cover. The party slipped out the back window just in time to escape security, but not before reading a strange communique sent to Larsen on his workstation:

You know what to do. Report to me when it’s done.

– M

Meanwhile, Dozir, the aide-de-camp, held watch inside the ship. Hearing a noise from the storage compartment, he stepped to the doorway to find that some of the body bags the ship had brought along to appear to be Mortuary Affairs had fallen off their racks. Stepping into the room to replace them, Dozir saw the door close behind him. As he turned back around, he noted that one of the body bags now appeared to be full, with a human shape. Suddenly, the full bag sat entirely upright, and the head of the humanoid silhouette fully turned to look at him. Finally radioing the party for help, Dozir watched in horror as inch by inch, a sharp black spider’s leg punctured through the top of the body bag. Reaching a meter long, the freed leg began slowly to unzip the body bag from inside as the mass within turned less human and more an apparent writhing ball of limbs. Firing a few missed shots, Dozir stumbled backwards and passed out from fear before he could witness the event’s end. Before he passed out, however, he seemed to hear footsteps within the ship, which left as quickly as they came. Racing back to the ship, de Vranne found Dozir unconscious. Believing his story, but unsure of what to make of it, he used his etherics scanner to examine the inside of the body bag, still on the floor and clearly unzipped. All ambient etheric energy had been wiped from the inside of the bag.

On the other side of town, Macabeau and O’Clery noticed Renata attempt to leave the barrack by herself. Trailing her, O’Clery caught a glimpse of Renata disappearing over the edge of a roof, apparently demonstrating the climbing abilities Wilson had told of. Luckily, O’Clery’s own platforming abilities allowed her to swiftly scale the building with her whip and give chase, apprehending Renata with her whip and body-bagging her before the pair could be noticed.

Now reunited at the ship with two hostages, Larsen and Renata, the party prepared to interrogate. De Vranne, O’Clery, and Dozir threatened Renata, who by this time had become fully bestial, her eyes keeping their uncanny glint and her torn sleeves now clearly showing matted, varicose veins. Renata responded with naught but a shriek, which, just as with Edgar, appeared to not actually make noise. However, O’Clery noted that both de Vranne and Dozir seemed to react to some other faraway sound she could not hear. De Vranne scanned Renata and found that overall she had far less etheric energy within her than a normally-souled human would. Further, it was almost totally gone from her extremities, and instead concentrated at the center of her veined mass, as though whatever was left in her body had been drawn there. In the other room, the rest of the party questioned Larsen. Instead of faltering, Larsen declared that he had “gamma-level clearance” and refused to talk to plebeians such as the party.

Kesdis revealed that she alone did in fact have gamma clearance, and told Larsen that he could speak with the rest of the party as well. Larsen relented, revealing that the ATC had asked him to stay behind as a researcher on Muirkirk in the aftermath of the evacuations of Kamens, operating on/dissecting any miners that ATC security forces didn’t triage as needing immediate extraction. Larsen was aware of the seeming transformative, possessive phenomena taking some of the miners, but had not had a chance to study anyone truly in its throes enough to understand it. De Vranne offered Larsen the chance to vivisect the possessed Renata, but lacking his surgical tools while on the ship, Larsen could only operate if Macabeau would lend him hers. We left the party with Macabeau’s decision point. Will she offer her doctor’s tools to allow an experimental surgeon to vivisect someone who could have been an innocent before her possession?