The Gangsters Campaign/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