TASC hires original Chantry members for paranormal investigation. [The original members are: Jeremy and Rachel Gollub, Brad Solberg, Slade, Martin Lockhart, Victoria "VI" Milhone, Imogen "Genni" Hotchkiss.]
[We are all approached separately (except for Rachel and Jeremy, who get a joint offer of $5 million each) for a five-year, $5 million dollar contract working for TASC. We are told very little, and end up gathering in TASC headquarters (in Marin County), with a few random other people. Some of us recognize each other (Rachel and Jeremy recognize Brad, and vice/versa). A man walks to the center of the room, and slowly transforms into a huge, nasty-looking wolf-like monster. (No offense intended to werewolf types - these were just first impressions). Several people scream and pass out, one barfs and starts gibbering, and the rest have reactions from "Oh my!" to "Wow, cool!". Needless to say, the former (including the barfer) are taken away, and the latter are invited to accept the contract.
TASC explains to Brad, Rachel, Jeremy, Slade, Martin, Genni, and VI (the survivors of the werewolf shift) that there are three types of aliens who have invaded the earth. Alphas are what we would call Vampires, Betas are what we would call Werewolves, and Gammas are unknown. The new employees are charged with investigating all of these and reporting information back to TASC regularly, with full writeups of what they've discovered.
Over the next few weeks, as they start on their first mission, the new TASC employees each start having strange experiences. They begin seeing the world in a new way. Rachel discovers that she has developed a perfect memory, along with surprising mental control over her body (she only needs a little sleep, and can cause psychosomatic symptoms or cure them at will). She also begins seeing odd shadows superimposed on people - wolflike shadows on the man who transformed in front of her (and others on the street), and strange cords extending from some people into the distance, and between people. The more she looks, the more she sees things that she never would have believed in before.
[Jeremy finds his biology education much on his mind, as every living thing he looks at seems to reveal some secret, or a clue to its current state of health. He notices that women are pregnant before they know themselves, and precisely which street people are suffering from hepatitis. Some of the odd people Rachel points out almost glow with vitality, but the oddest of all are the walking corpses who only come out at night. -J]
[[Fill in your characters here.]] --Rachel ]
Investigate Nora as child, strange killing @ Golden Gate Bridge.
31 October: Nora's Ascension
Slade ambushed while visiting Mr Davis(Syndicate). Brad, Dave, Noelle and Catherine rescue. Rest of Chantry followed/attacked by MIBs. Hang out in Berkeley and meet Star, Athena, Dave, Catherine.
[We got the invitation to Berkeley because Jeremy had already met Star. She was by then making for him a "chainsaw suitable for felling trees in a mystical forest, by moonlight." The problem with the whimsical approach to finding mages is that sometimes you get what you ask for. -J] [Someone explain where Noelle came from? And where she went?] [Noelle was a mutual friend of Rachel's and Catherine's. I assume she's somewhere doing Weird Science. - CB ]
Ambushed by MIBs @ SFO. Members returning from telling relatives that they are "dead". A vampire arrives at same time, with an extensive retinue.
Meet Tremere while convincing them that Rachel wasn't Helen of Troy.
Visit Sebastian's Club?
Italy??? VI's inheritance. TombOfAres, aka "Scooby Doo In Tyrolia". Meet Giovanni and Pedano "family." Piss off Avis from Order of Hermes. Martin & Slade time travel to meet previous guardian and get the eternal flame.
Big arete quest? Everyone heads out Nora's door heading for the Sun. Space ships from weird space station shoot at us. Something hits the web strand we're on and everyone is knocked off in different directions.
Nephandi investigation at bequest of NWO
[This was the one that had the guys killing things and leaving candles around burnt-out pentagrams. The candle had some weird fourth-dimensional attributes. -al]
Martin & Slade go to the sun
Slade kidnapped by Sabbat impersonating Mircalla. They play with his brain in an attempt to get information. Offending vampires tracked down while trying to escape on an airplane. Vampires eliminated with help from MIBs.
Persephone & Pentex Investigated:
After cataloguing Pentex properties in the Bay Area, [most were inspected by the same man, now dead of cancer] and discovering that many of them are opaque to etheric senses. Genni and Noelle (Note: neither has the skills to carry this off) dress up, write resumes, and wander in to one of the buildings claiming to be here for a job interview. While babbling at the guard in the lobby, they notice that in the Umbra, this is the only real room in the building, and the rest is... weird. Noelle makes a break for it and manages to open the inner door and get a look at a sort of LSD landscape before the guard throws both of them out. The guard moves somewhat peculiarly, too, as if his joints are not entirely human.
Later, Genni gets a job with Panacea, a-wholly-owned-subsidiary of Magadon, itself a-wholly-owned-subsidiary of Pentex, under an identity provided by Dante, as Jennifer Hayden. She works for Persephone, doing chemistry simulations, but Panacea seems to be working with weird four-dimensional Bane-attracting chemicals. [This is the first hint we get of Genni's previous life background, as Persephone keeps referring to her as 'Ada'.]
Genni's first Arete Quest, to rescue her co-worker (Patricia) Elaine McGuire.
Persephone Slain [Hey, she asked for it. You just don't go around offering people infinite power at the cost of their souls. -J]
August 14: Rhianna and Slade's cubs(one male and one female) are born at the new moon. Slade is "invited" to "share" in the birthing experience. Much celebration follows.
Chryse is introduced via the NullZone adventure.
Chryse, having nowhere else to go, follows Slade & Genni back to San Francisco.
8 September: Mysterious help messages start appearing on Chantry computers and in Slade's dreams. ItX cyborgs ambush V.I. at the Chantry, Slade inside of his dream, and Brad & Jeremy while driving in San Francisco. Everyone manages to defeat the cyborgs, or at least escape from them. (Possibly proving them to be inferior models.)
While looking for the cause of the "Help!" messages people meet Ambrose Channing and some of his friends at the Spy's Demise. Ambrose is a Void Engineer who disagrees with ItX's agenda. He offers diguise 'programs' that will allow entry to an ItX construct in the Digital Web, within which a nasty experiment is going on -- ItX is kidnapping mages and feeding their minds to a machine.
Brad, Genni, Chryse, Slade, and Trip sneak into the construct. We watch a disturbing 'loyalty test' and eventually find the room with the machine. Failing to come up with any sort of team plan, Brad feeds himself to the machine in an attempt to overload it.
This turns out to be perhaps a bad idea, as the machine proceeds to try to 'integrate' Brad. Everyone attempts to feed him Quint so that this doesn't happen. Genni breaks the power dampeners so the machine gets a power surge, and Trip does VirtualAdept stuff. The combination overloads the machine an appears to deRez the entire sector. Brad gets clear. Trip saves a backup copy of the stored avatars to his computer.
[Do we still have the backup? Or did it vanish when Trip died? - Not if it was only on his local system - everything was wiped. -J]
16 September: Slade decides that he wants to talk to the Electricity Incarna and cut a deal. He goes to the Glass Walkers (who seem to get along with electricity reasonably well) and asks them how to contact the Incarna.
The Glass Walkers send us to Hetch Hetchy dam, smirking all the while. We pretend to be a film crew for an obscure art film, leaving Jeremy & Rachel outside as sentries. Combining various people's power, we manage to contact and film an electricity spirit who was probably the Incarna. It's quite fatalistic, and claims that having its permission isn't good for anything these days. It also claims that "someone else" might object to our use of electricity elementals.
Either Rachel or Jeremy notices a girl skulking around outside in a suspicious fashion. [She was either a werewolf or an eco-terrorist or both. Rachel?]
[Kinfolk, associated with a pack evidently dedicated to destroying the dam. After some initial confusion and a flying tackly by VI (also lurking outside), we dusted her off and gave her our card. I don't think anyone from her pack ever called us. -J]
At this point Martin decides to remind the Incarna of the old days by feeding it Quint. This succeeds in a fairly outstanding way.
The Umbra around Hetch Hetchy dam is both well protected and full of machinery. It seems likely that the beautiful valley that was Hetch Hetchy was a powerful node which is now being siphoned by the Technocracy and redistributed via the power lines.
12 October: A trip is made to Sebastian's club [for reasons forgotten -- anyone?] and people talk to some vampires. On the way back we're followed by vampire hunters, who then turn out to be Genni-cultists. We try both to give them advice and to keep them from getting killed. Jeremy mind-reads one and discovers some information about Genni that he still hasn't shared. The cultists and the Gollubs agree that letting Genni know her future is a bad idea. Genni sulks.
(Genni did perform a miracle for them, though; creating a golden coin out of thin air with a strange symbol (something like the Dead Kennedys logo?) on one side. -- CB)
19 October: [I don't remember what led up to this, or how long everything took, so the date might be more like 22 October.] We discover the Santa Cruz mages are dead. While talking to their ghosts we run into a pack of werewolves, who we temporarily ally with. Everyone except for Trip and Martin ends up going to Mexico City with the werewolves to deal with Sam Haight. We run into Harold there, who had just won tickets to Mexico City for a vacation. The problem is solved by 27 October.
Jeremy is wounded (and blood-bound [and his chainsaw is carried off to the deep Umbra with a bunch of werewolves! -J]) so he and Rachel go home, as does Brad, who has enough Paradox to kill an elephant. Slade and Chryse decide they want to stick around and check out the Euthanatoi/Bone Gnawer ritual that takes place on the Day of the Dead. Genni stays as well. Various things happen, and Martin flies out to Mexico City to join the trio. There's a ritual in a museum and various other things, but the final goal (of finding a city spirit and hopefully cleaning up the city) proves to be impossible. The four of them plan to try again next October, and are home by 2 November.
Sometime towards the end of the first full week of November (9 November or so) Chryse finds Trip dead in his bedroom. The resultant investigation takes some unspecified amount of time, but not more than 3-4 days. As it turns out, his brain has been removed and some cultists were involved. [Someone who remembers more details than I do ought to add to this.]
[The cultists were worshipping a thing under a mountain in North California that they all thought was a benevolent alien, but was really an ugly wyrm-creature of some kind. Martin, following the paradigm of North California UFOlogists, defeated the monster by putting tinfoil on his head. -al]
A few days prior to Thanksgiving (19/20 November, but maybe earlier) Martin vanishes and history gets re-written so hardly anyone notices; Slade is temporarily replaced by a poor imitation, similar to what replaced Trip once his brain was eaten. (The Glass Walkers smirked when told about this, remembering the coin business during Slade's Coat Quest.) There's a lot of confusion, but within the next week Slade returns and steps are taken so that everyone is convinced Martin might have existed. Eventually Slade goes after him, while Vi & Brad create a paper trail. Before the end of November Martin is discovered in a hospital in Pasadena and is brought back to the Chantry. Mircalla is identified as the culprit, but no consensus is reached on what to do about her.
Sometime directly after this Jeremy, with Brad's help, gets rid of his blood bond.
Someone (Jeremy & Rachel? [Yes. -J]) confirms that Mircalla was probably responsible for Trip's death.
(Date? Al?)
Shariko is reading the Tarot and minding her own business when first Osric, then Athena, and finally Slade invade her office. Slade brings Genni to have a reading done, and Genni asks for a reading on who she was in a past life. This apparently sets off very visible tremors in the Umbra, and they hustle Shariko out claiming that she's in mortal danger from PG&E. They take her back to the Chantry, feed her bodyguard cookies, and lecture at her on the nature of magic.
Shariko ends up staying at the Chantry because it's not safe to go home, and studying Hermetic magic with Athena.
Early December: Harold wins cruise tickets.
9 December: Harold, Shariko, Chryse and Genni leave for their cruise to Bermuda.
15 December: Harold, Shariko, Chryse & Genni get home from Orlando and debrief everyone but Jeremy & Rachel, who are off at Rachel's dojo. Various private conversations occur.
Chryse talks to a nice Euthanatos in Detroit, and finds out all sorts of things about the CEJ and the House of Helekar.
18-19 December: VI, Chryse, Genni, Shariko, and anyone else who wants to come along go up to Nevada City for VictorianChristmas. They stay overnight in a bed & breakfast, then pick up a tree the next morning and go home. Nothing at all unusual happens, except that Genni wears Victorian clothing and gets stared at even more than usual.
21 December: Overnight, Slade is apparently involved in a BART crash in the tunnel under the Bay. Despite news reports of there being no survivors, he turns up the next day, probably uncommunicative. Shortly, however, it starts to become evident that whatever he did managed to significantly piss off some *extremely* scary vampires and their minions.
As promised, Chryse refuses to leave the Chantry between 21 December and 6 January except in cases of true emergency. She makes Christmas candy and tries to think up presents for people, with varying degrees of success.
While investigating weird cults we stumble across a message drop for a renegade vampire called Ruth, who is a member of the Salubri. More details to follow.
After Rachel was attacked by cross-dressing Hong Kong ninja in late December, the Chantry went to Hong Kong to teach them a lesson. We wander around a bit talking to people, Jeremy breaks out of a police station with significant messiness, and an altercation with the ladies' room leads to a lot of paradox all around.
After that everyone flies to Greece, continuing the globe-hopping. Slade wants to go to some island for mysterious Slade-reasons, while Rachel wants to check out Troy. Poking around the ruins, Genni and VI coax information from some Black Furies about an island called Ecube with a pool that grants visions. Brad finds out about the same island from a German tourist whose father was trying to scrounge occult artifacts for Hitler. Genni spends part of the night meditating in the ruins, and finally talks to an entity who is either copy her Avatar or the goddess Athena or both.
The next stop is Knossos, on Crete, where Genni, VI, Shariko, and Rachel go off to find the Sisters of Argassi, who can arrage an invitation to Ecube. After a number of tests, they are granted access and one look in the pool each.
The guys walk the Labyrinth of Knossos, summon the spirit of Daedalus and have a long conversation. Seems Daedalus is the patron saint of Iteration X, so Brad tries to talk him into not being so generous with his favor to them, since they are a bunch of bastards.
Later, the guys are visited in their hotel rooms, but I missed that part.
Slade tries to assault the island of Aeolus, unbeknownst to most of the rest of the group,to steal a bag of winds.
Chryse & Genni go to England to do research, hopefully leaving January 15 and returning in a few weeks.
Harold wanders down to L.A. a few times to chat with a Chorister.
Around the first of the year, Athena asks Shariko to investigate Himiitsu, whom she suspects is up to No Good and may be manipulating the party.
The Seraphim and Devils adventure.
Shariko's parents are killed in San Francisco. Shariko goes to Japan for the funeral.
In late February/early March Harold buys a house and moves in.
Genni does one of her irregular sweeps of known Pentex properties in the Bay Area. She is pulled over and detained by cops shortly after leaving one of them. Some police harassment follows, making her go to the station, and forcing her to pay to get her car out of hock when they finally let her go.
Genni leaves a note on Brad's whiteboard: Chantry needs a lawyer.
Harold is called, first on his home phone and then switched to his cellphone, by an overly mysterious person warning him (everyone?) about some vampire.
One of the Pentex properties (that are gates to the Umbra) is a warehouse belonging to Young & Smith, where Genni was pulled over by the cops.
Shariko has a friendly talk with Nora (who appears in Shariko's room), and "holes in the web" are mentioned.
[Chryse has removed all Young & Smith products from the Chantry. This was mostly canned goods but included some hygeine products. There's probably a big note on the 'fridge explaining that all Y&S products will be forcibly removed, so people should find some other source for canned asparagus, or just give in and buy fresh food.]
After Chryse isolates every Young & Smith product in the Chantry, Genni does some research on them. They contain a number of chemical preservatives, which when combined, produce some of those same four-dimensional chemicals that Genni encountered earlier. Genni estimates that roughly 100 people a year develop cancers, insanities, etc. from these products.
There is some discussion whether this is a Pentex plot or merely the side effect of a Pentex plot. Genni thinks that 100 people a year seems a small number for a direct plot by Pentex.
The next morning, Shariko independently goes off to find a lawyer for the Chantry. She has a bad experience seeing her dead parents (wounds and all) in the back seat of her car.
Harold has had bad dreams in the night, and a sneaking suspicion that his house was broken into while he slept. He calls Genni and Chryse, who show up to check it out. Genni thinks about magical traps and alarms, while Chryse goes into a trance on Harold's bed and tries to feel back to the previous night. She sees someone laughing at her and follows them out of the house, but loses the trail next door.
Shariko shows up, very shaken. She wants to see Athena in Santa Cruz, but doesn't relish driving on her own. Genni phones our Pedano contact to get an introduction to the Garou in Santa Cruz, and the group heads out.
In Santa Cruz, Shariko sees Athena, while the others meet Clara Skye, a professor of environmental science at UCSC. She is not Garou, but kin. We also meet Phyllis, one of her grad students, who is Garou.
Prof. Skye thinks that Genni's estimated numbers for the Young & Smith contaminations are a few orders of magnitude too low, and that the result is a sort of hypnotic susceptability, and/or psychotic episodes, making them manipulable by and useful to Pentex. The technical term is "turning humans into Fomori".
A Garou police officer arrives. Officer Bill and the whole UCPD have been ordered to look for the PCs and the car they drove in on, apparently on the instructions of an ugly old woman who walked into the main police station. A plan is developed to use Garou ringers for the PCs and stake out the police station.
Sure enough, the old lady arrives, does something to the ringers causing them to go beserk and hurt some cops, while she sneaks out laughing insanely. Chryse identifies the laugh from Harold's dream, causing Genni to make up her mind and shoot the lady/vampire from the top of an adjacent building. Genni has her usual luck, and the vampire collapses into a pile of bones.
The PCs bail town. Some bones are collected and carbon-dated - they are about 250 years old. There is some discussion over whether Genni's single shot could kill a vampire like that, but Genni is confident.
About mid-March, Genni and Chryse spot an employee leaving a Young & Smith building who is very strange in a really bad way. Following him home (which is also very weird, being in the umbra) they decide to break into his house when he leaves town by plane. They discover that he's already returned via mystical means, and is trying to eat the soul of his house sitter, Christy. Jeremy and Genni break in and rescue her, holding off the Nephandi long enough to escape. Chryse found a skull of a previous victim in the yard, along with another mysterious guy called Joseph. All flee to the Chantry.
The next day there is much discussion about killing the Nephandi, but he turns up already dead in his house. Or his host body does. Naturally, the police are looking for Christy.
A week or so later, Chryse tries to find/contact/talk to the ghosts of Shariko's parents. She is attacked by a nasty oblivion spirit and rescued only when Genni blasts it with Prime. After coming out of her coma, Chryse believes that Shariko's parents' ghosts have been kidnapped.
Harold rents the hotel room where Shariko's parents died, and Genni wards the mirrors and draws protective cricles around people. Shariko attempts to look back by looking at a tarot card through a small mirror. This fails, but she gets some dreams while in her meditative trance, of her father arguing with someone in Japanese. Her father is being threatened to do something wrong. Next Chryse lies in the police chalk outline, as redrawn by Shariko, and sees Shariko's mother being torn apart by a wolf; but the blood is already cold. Was she a vampire at the time? Christy spots a faint bad smell in the room. This is later deduced to be a Nosferatu vampire. Chryse: "I'm starting to get the idea that death is okay, but this dying thing is less than good..."
Via a note left on the door, Genni calls Joe Pedano, who tells them that the cops working for the Wyrm are trying to sit on the case of Christy and the Nephandi, while those working for he Technocracy are actively trying to pursue it. This is the complete opposite to the usual reaction to cases involving us.
It is decided to ask Jeremy to talk to Himiitsu, and get him to pass on the word that Christy is with us. Also, further things need to be followed up on the Nephandi, and Shariko's parents. Talk to Sebastian?