The Gangsters Campaign/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.