Session 03

← Session 02 | Session 04 →

A demon and a child are introduced, and the party sticks their nose where it doesn't belong for the first time.

## Characters

* The Party
* Pax Furyk
* Kitty Vance
* Naberius MacLaughagan
* Freya Sane
* Stone Dominguez

## Summary

The party has a few days off, so they make a group chat and Kuno buys a gun and renews his gun license.

##### **Saturday, September 26th, 542:**

Saturday morning, Kuno emails Nyx to asks the group chat to go out for pizza. Nyx sends a screenshot of the email a few hours before the appointed time, so everyone ends up at Back At 'Za. Kuno pays and his attempts at conversation fizzle. Sam asks Colby about his church. Colby doesn't know much about the Bible, so Sam gives an awkward but well-meaning Bible 101.Asa debates whether a taco is a sandwich with Nyx while Kuno moderates.

On the walk home, Asa asks the party to join him in investigating the Nite Lyfe Bar and Grille, the business card for which he received at a different bar. The rest party aside from Kuno is reluctant, given the disastrous results of getting Ollie's ID chip, but agree to go.

#### **Saturday Night Plans: Get Murdered in a Back Alley**

During the walk, Asa slips on a trail of blood leading into an alley down the street and seems to be left by someone running. Sam and Colby hang back and follow behind while Nyx, Asa, and Kuno follow it into an alley full of three or four torn-apart corpses along with the body of a kid with a bullet hole in his head and a broken leg. Nyx takes a guns from the pile of viscera in case of emergency. The torn-apart corpses have red bandannas tied around their arms, which Kuno recognizes as the mark of COAST. The kid's body is full of wounds and it looks like a truly excessive amount of force was used to kill him. However, the wounds haven't done as much damage as they should have, and the kid blinks while Kuno is looking him over. He gets oddly blurry for a second and ending up standing, then limps to a dumpster and pulls out a backpack.

Nyx tries to get in his way, but he treats her like an obstacle to avoid and walks around her. He grabs a fire axe from the pile of viscera and moves to leave. Kuno offers him help, but he brushes it off. When Nyx says he can't just leave, he spins to face her with the fire axe, and asks if the party is stopping him. Apparently, this mess is a regular occurrence for him and it was some kind of job for someone called Eldridge.

Nyx pushes the point, which he responds to by shoving her against a wall, giving her an opening to read the kid's thoughts. She senses he really doesn't want to be dealing with this right now and it's not a big problem but it would be too much effort to explain along with a deep sense of hopeless loss that he's harbored for a *while*. The party eventually lets him leave without a fight, and the business card Kuno tries to hand over gets torn in half.

Kuno advocates against trailing the kid, but he is very easy to follow, since he is leaving a bloody trail where he walks, which leads to a back door to the Nite Lyfe Bar and Grille. The bar is decorated like a cabaret and is dressed well for the section of the city it's in, with a sign outside offering live shows on Friday and Saturday nights. Since it's a Saturday and the party has had no time to poke around, Kuno suggests coming back on Friday after doing some looking around.

#### **Who the Hell Was That?**

Over the week, Nyx looks into the gun she picked up, Kuno goes looking for the name Eldridge but doesn't find anything, Colby buys a pocket knife, and Asa leaves a message with Cat to ask if she knows anything about the Nite Lyfe. Nyx visits Kitty Vance, a fellow magic user she knows, to see if Kitty knows anything about the kid from the alley. She doesn't, but suggests demons might be involved somehow.

##### **Thursday, October 1st, 542:**

On Thursday afternoon, the party meets at Nyx's apartment to discuss what they've learned and make a plan. At the mention of demonic involvement, Sam puts his head down on the table and sighs as a massive, grinning crow makes a dramatic entrance.

The crow mentions the party stink of upyr, then proceeds to rag on a defensive Samuel Fischer. The party tries to get information out of the crow with little success, but Nyx realizes the child must have been a upyr. The crow leaves and the party lays plans for the next evening. Asa explains that he received a business card with very shady invitation to come have a meal at the Nite Lyfe, and the party decide to enter in three, separate groups then proceed from there.

##### **Friday, October 2nd, 542:**

Just as the party is approaching the building, Asa gets a text from Cat that reads "survey says maybe don't" to which Asa just replies "oops". Inside, the bar is a fairly well-to-do establishment, with tables and booths scattered around a raised, cabaret-style stage. The party gets seated at separate tables: Nyx and Kuno at one, Sam and Colby at another, and Asa by himself. The waitress who welcomes them is the person who invited Asa to the bar. Sam asks about the show, and the waitress says it's meant to be a surprise, though she lets slip that her girlfriend is performing tonight.

#### **Showtime!**

After the party has been seated, a spotlight trains on the stage to reveal a woman in a tailcoat. She introduces herself as Freya Sane, tonight's M.C., and announces they will be starting with a Harvest. The lights black out and guests in the restaurant are forced from their seats and up towards the stage. The spotlight on Freya returns, glinting off her cat-bright eyes and sharp, metal teeth.

People are shepherded from the crowd onto the stage, and bled dry in a number of inventive ways, with glasses of their blood offered to other patrons of the restaurant. When the crowd has shrunk somewhat, and the party has taken in the situation, they try to escape the press of the crowd. Nyx manages to dart to the kitchen and Sam makes it to the cover of the bar, but notices that none of the rest of the party made it out. Sam finds his knife in his hand for the first time, and when Nyx fires her gun into the ceiling, he stabs one of the upyr by the bar. All hell breaks loose.

The crowd rushes to escape the building, wrecking tables and glasses in the process. Asa casts fire at the upyr on stage, setting the room ablaze. Freya jumps at Asa from the stage and Kuno throws a Molotov cocktail, further engulfing the room in flame. Nyx shoots Freya in the jaw, angering her girlfriend Stone, the waitress from earlier.

In the chaos, Colby escapes to the kitchen. Sam tackles Freya so Asa can get out, leaving Sam and Kuno facing down an angry Freya. Nyx bolts to the kitchen with a feral Stone chasing her. Sam stabs Freya through the eye with a broken wineglass, dropping her, which gives Sam and Kuno the opportunity to book it to the kitchen. Stone tackles Sam to the ground, leaving him with some nasty wounds, but Asa distracts her with some fire magic and puts a bullet in her head, taking her out of commission. Colby heals Sam and gets a vision of Sam being killed by Anthony Wilson and the party leaves out the kitchen's back door.

#### **Murder Basement 1/???**

Instead of leading out, the back door opens into a hallway with three doors and a staircase descending further beneath the restaurant. The first of the doors leads to a walk-in freezer; the second two contain empty, concrete rooms with drains in the floor. Down the staircase, the party finds another hallway with more locked doors. While they are unable to access any of the rooms on this floor, the crew is acutely aware of the occasional noises produced by movement within them. At the far end of the hall is another staircase, but further exploration is interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps ascending the next flight of stairs.

With nowhere to go, the party confronts the interloper, a upyr whom they only catch a glance of before they vanish into thin air. Sam extends his senses in search of signs of life, and observes the presence of two individuals on the floor below and some faint auras on the current level. The party weighs the risks of exploring the building further before being interrupted by the kid from the alley who is upset. He mentions his assignment to distract the party while Eldridge escapes. News of the restaurant's destruction improves the kid's mood greatly and he is content to let Eldridge leave with his "chemistry set."

He leads the party out the side door they saw him use to access the restaurant previously. Kuno offers him a place to stay, but he declines and explains he prefers to sleep in the streets. He's willing to answer questions, but not at the site of the restaurant, since the police are likely en route. The party, having acquired a upyr, head to Nyx's apartment.

#### **Pax's Edgy Backstory Dump**

The upyr kid says that he's mostly a hitman/bodyguard, so doesn't know much, but that Eldridge had been doing something between science and magic with blood. Eventually, the kid plans to hunt down Eldridge and roast marshmallows on his smoldering corpse, but for now, he's happy to be out of the Nite Lyfe. The restaurant was Freya and Stone's, and it takes more than that to kill a upyr, so they'll be back. According to the kid, who gives his name as Pax Furyk, Eldridge isn't likely to care about the party, but if he did, Pax would be the one sent after them. Pax was turned by Eldridge, 50-some years ago, as part of some grand project of Eldridge's, after he kidnapped some kids to turn them and Pax was the only one to make it through. Asa, Kuno, and Sam do introductions, and Asa asks if Pax is planning on continuing his murder spree, to which he replies that he has to eat somehow, even though he's not a fan of it.

According to Pax, COAST has been after him already so they'll likely be his main targets, but it'll really be anyone who's nearby when he get too hungry. He explains that the blood isn't the important part of feeding, the life is, so it has to be fresh. Eldridge had apparently been working on a solution to that. Nyx introduces herself and asks what happened to the other children.

Pax replies that he has nowhere else to go and thus is willing to establish a basic level of trust: the other one didn't make it out, and he doesn't like to think about that. When asks why he's required to work for Eldridge, he says that Eldridge's experimentation gave him some "extra perks," one of which is the that Eldridge can give orders and then Pax loses control and gets puppeted. He apologizes in advance if he accidentally kills the party. Pax informs the party that he also eats people food, and is going get a meal and sleep in a dumpster, and leaves.

Sam, who was the worst off after the fight, gets a shower and some bandages, and Kuno makes sure he gets home safely.

## Quotes

**Kuno:** "It looks like you could use some help?" | **Pax:** "Well no shit."

**Pax:** "I've been hit by a train, this is fine."

← Session 02 | Session 04 →