"Yeah, all those insults just remind me how useless this group is. Sounds fun and all, but I ain't gonna go out with these shmucks to get shot at just so you can fill your pockets, asshole."
Ben goes and gets a tub of war bacon, then slumps down on the couch next to Vince to watch TV. He doesn't share the bacon unless Vince shares his crisps.
...He has his P90 in his lap, BTW. He doesn't really leave the thing, ever.
Edit: Ben also takes the offered suppressed pistol from Nanami, and stows it under his cost somewhere.
Vince shrugs and continues to watch TV. You sit down next to him with a slice of leg and scowl between chunks of meat.
After a few minutes, Vince grunts, and turns to you.
"I'm not sharing the reward for this. But if it's money you want, you can have it. How does five thousand each sound? If the deal goes through, obviously."
Okay, so do my back spikes count as magical samples?Don would have picked up a small pistol and holster at the gunfarmer's. Budget ~300. Also, I will buy a medical syringe and a sample of magical snake venom, something preferably acidic in nature that doesn't burn glass. I will fill the syringe partly with my blood, and then fill in the venom, then Chalice it. Chalice creation will take place next to a busy street on the way back. Two clots.
If I don't have time to do all this at the market, stick with the gun and syringe.
Right. You purchase a slightly oily handgun for £400, the smooth surface expanding and dilating imperceptibly, the grip patterned like snakeskin. It's pretty small, but hey, shooting someone in the head kills them regardless. Just don't expect to stop a rhino with it. Browning 9mm - pretty big clip. Cheapest they had.
The gunfarmer you buy from, a cowled mexican standing on the other side of the long cloth-covered table laden with outlandish living weapons, gives you their usual lecture on what a gunfarmer weapon is. The weapon is creature, firing eggs that hatch from out their targets, feeding off nearby death to create more young in a cycle as vicious as NRA lobbying. Usual jazz.
Next up, you're looking for magical acidic venom that doesn't dissolve glass. You come across a stall of dark purple fabrics, covered in elixirs and Well, something claiming to be "Madame Bothrops" but is clearly just a mass of yellow-gold snakes inhabiting a dress. "She" sells you half a pint of something labelled Obdux Fel Aurem in an unsteady hand, a fizzing golden liquid that presses against the sides of the vial in the shape of a multitude tiny salamanders, each individual forming then dissolving back into the brilliant mass to splash against the lid.
Costs you £500. You didn't give me a budget, but that's the price of a half decent Chalice occult medium, and you're never getting a gunfarmer weapon and an occult liquid for £300. This will, by the way, be the most powerful demon ever invoked in Coven, going by the materials at least.
Next to a busy street, huh? In the usual tradition of heavy collateral, testing commences just outside a packed throughfare. A few scant metres from crowds of innocent bystanders... huh, your internal monologue is getting kinda dark. Reminding yourself that the people around you aren't dead yet, you mix the blood and arcane venom in the medical syringe. Patiently resisting the impulse to inject the poison directly into your bloodstream, you pull back the syringe as your arteries are agonisingly drained of the sticky red good stuff. Finally, you create the chalice, using the insane concoction in your hands as a portal to link your mind with a hellish being beyond the ken of mortals.
After a brilliant golden flash, you no longer hold the chalice in your hands, but deep within your brain. And the demon you have called upon arrives.
The street beneath you cracks and melts, a flaming circle of paving stones shoved out the way by the upper body of an incandescent golden lizard. The air is rich with the stench of fire and blood, as the magnificent creature forces its way from the earth and looms above you. With one regal claw it gestures to the panicked crowd of mortals beneath it, uttering some indecipherable words of scorn or wrath, before collapsing into the amorphous bulging tube of a great bacterium. Burning flagella extend from the sluggish mass of fiery golden blood, seeking out the mortals that stray too close. Gilt flames leap from them, tearing across people's skin in waves of miniscule salamanders, burrowing through their veins deep into their hearts.
The terrible fire leaps from mortal to mortal as they flee desperately from the scorching arcane mass. Ten seconds of this hellish fire and it is over, and those ten seconds are enough to litter the street with charred bodies and screaming injured.
The demon vanishes as quickly as it arrived. But as you survey a scene reminiscent of a napalm attack on a thriving and unready capital, you gain a new rune:
carnage.
"Okay, so much more powerful beings don't want to touch it, doing this requires skills that nobody here has, and it's a dangerous mission to boot. why do you expect me to do this for you, again? We're not a gang; you just dropped fifty pounds and a pamphlet on me and left your front door open. Honestly you can have the money back, I have no clue what it's good for at this point."
Hmm. Let's go find some particularly deserving mortals to test my six-cost spell on. As well as the effects of the first spell's gas.
Vince shrugs at you.
"Do what you want. I'll give five thousand to anyone who carries this out though."
Deserving, eh? With an eleven year old's clear sense of guilt and innocence, you pick out the offices of a company recently involved in an environmental scandal. Never mind the families these people have, their own portion of the blame, or the ethics of answering wrong with wrong, think of the goddamn penguins. Why does nobody ever think of the penguins?
The penguins in the forefront of your mind, you drift through the offices in a deadly haze, a continual stream of barely visible vapour issuing from your wand. With all the stupid mortals bending over you to smell the lovely incense stick and ask where your mummy is, half a dozen are poisoned in minutes. They die quietly, their eyes glazing over during a period of at most thirty seconds.
Using the six-puissance spell on a different floor of the office is an entirely different story. A faint tremor runs through reality, some chemical flicker you feel deep within your soul or maybe metabolism. Then everyone around you starts thrashing and screaming.
You watch horrified as the men and women going about their lives just a moment ago collapse yelling, massive areas of their boding fizzing and steaming red mist. Skin melts from bone as grisly acid pours from their limbs and faces, few surviving past a minute. You watch a man crawl past you, arms eaten to the bone, face half blistered away by caustic acids, torso a mess of blood and vapour.
Think of the penguins. Think of the penguins. Think of the penguins...
"The mortal seeks the red brine that birthed her. I do not think she will ever touch the land."(Can't be me, Nanami is at least two steps away from being mortal.)
"So what are we hauling around, exactly? And what are the hazards of it? Do we just have to not touch it? How big is it? Can we just put it in a lead box and carry it in a bicycle basket, or a messenger bag?"
Give the pistol to Ben.
Take some pictures with the camera with Nanami 'made up', if makeup is required. Phone Dave and basically let him know that I'll need an artist who can draw Nanami as good as I can look for the camera, and if he isn't sure he can manage, here's some sample images to use for practice. If he's sure he can't handle it, ask him to help find someone who can, as he'll still be good for creatures and background images. Send him the posed pictures.
Whatever the answers given by Vince, time to head out to scout the route. Bring the camera. Start at the downtown building, and try to figure out what the hazardous locations are, or at least the first one. Also, try to find a good area for another practice video. If I've got time, shell-shock a mortal somewhere into filming me going through some more wand practice, with my spells. If Nanami didn't improve into her new image, use an illusion to look like it for the video. The new spells should provide enough content for an interesting video.
You're sort of beyond makeup at this point - even if illusions didn't hide it, red mud and pig entrails would suit your complexion like kohl and diamond. You take the pictures, and send them to Dave. He'll look for someone else, but doesn't have any real money, so can't get much past DeviantArt request level. And not even the best ones either.
Vince just shrugs and tells you where to go meet the guy. He also boredly mentions that he'll give five thousand pounds to anyone who completes this mission, and suggests you round up some other Coven members.
The organisation headquarters is a grand stone building apparently converted into offices, overshadowed by the glass-covered skyscrapers around it. You look around, but the immediate area seems unusually quiet magically speaking, and you have no idea where you'll be going. Might be a good idea to ask, once you have assembled half a team.
"I believe we might actually be in a gang. No one has any clue about what's going on. If you don't want the money, I'll take it. Make sure the door doesn't hit you, I heard it might be possesed by a ghost."
I'll assume I don't have any clots. I guess I'll just follow (with my broom, from above at a long distance) anyone who actually bothers to go to the adress and make sure they don't die.
You hover a hundred feet above Bella, looking for danger. Like a burnt undead guardian angel.
Name: Nanami Adachi. (Nanami)
Unnatural beauty granted by demonic contract and the adoration of mortals. Slight charisma/popularity boost.
Power from mortal media.
Can create illusions.
Conscripted into twenty-nineth legion of Amdukias.
Puissance: 2 +1 not from Amdukias
Ritual: 0
Runic Sight: 1
Banal Combat: 0
Aim: 1
Melee: 0
Agility: 1
Praticality: 3
Inventory: £225
Backpack, expensive camera + memory cards
Quality sketching paper, art pens+pencils, charcoal, etc.
Sketches of self as main character, Amdukias, the non-mortal world, etc.
[Tier Two Glass Rod Crystal Wand] - Enhanced slightly through media
Large, fist-sized mind-controlling spacerock fragments.
Painting supplies, a glass cutter, battery powdered soldering iron, eighty feet of red cloth, white rag and thread
Diving gear: masks, suits and some scuba tanks. (dumped)
Knife
Gunfarmer's Silenced MK-23 Pistol 12/12
Runes
Pestilence: all living things will someday die. This rune accelerates the processes of death with the energies of life - a draining and a consumption at once.
Puissance: 11/13
Puissant Clots: 2
Ben Breeze
Stats:
Puissant fettle - 0
Ritual potency - 0
Runic sight - 0
Banal combat - 6
Aim - 1
Melee - 1
Agility - 3
Practicality - 0
Inventory: 2xtaser, handcuffs, police baton, stab vest, torch, incapacitant spray, and a first aid kit. All in sports bag.
4 Athames, 2.5 legs War Bacon (Vince's Fridge), a worn face-concealing hooded coat, bin bags.
Concealed: knife in one boot, knife on a leg, and one on his torso.
Two generous Roast Beef and Horseradish Sandwiches
Two bin bags of assorted pills from pharmacy (Vince's fridge).
£20
Set of keys and passcard
Gunfarmer P90 (50/50) (in bag)
FN Minimi light machine gun, 200-round belt, (59/200) round belt
Puissant clots: 7
Puissance:5/5
Name: Zamenis Paean
Puissant fettle: 3
Agility: 3
Aim: 3
LICH: feeds on the bleeding hearts of his enemies.
Undead. Necromancy bonus.
Heavily Charred, not that it matters to you. But you look like you've spent the night on a live barbecue grill.
Respined and very slightly shorter.
Inventory: £1, Certificate from Belial (valid for one sample of occult substance)
Large Knife, knife.
Surgical tools: scalpel, a saw, and tweezers.
A length of shimmering, crystalline rope,
{Unknown Potion}
Dragon Tooth Phylactery on [Tier Three Steel Mop Broom]
[Human Leg Wand]
[Ulna and Hand Wand]
Lightning Longsword
Human spine caduceus
Puissant Clots: 0
Puissance: 14/14
Name: Don Joe
Back covered in bone casing, small spikes
Ritual Strength - 2
Runic Sight - 1
Puissance - 1
Aim - 2
Agility - 1
Practicality - 1
Inventory: £1000
Murdered guy's wallet
Card of Mortal-mind cleanup guy
[Chain Coin Pendant]
[Giraffe Wine Chalice]
[Venom Blood Syringe Chalice]
Simple Knife
Five bone spikes
Gunfarmer's Browning 9-mm 13/13
Runes
Market Savvy: You know what things are worth, and who will pay for or try to get them. From your time spent as a banker, a passive rune.
Acid: a rune that eats into whatever it touches.
Nebula: a rune that glows brilliantly, written in brilliant points of light. Can be written on the sky itself to send messages through the stars.
Carnage: paint this on something, and increase the likelihood of large numbers of people being killed or maimed near it. How on earth could you have picked up such a rune?
Puissance: 3/6
Puissant Clots: 1
[spoiler=it's the cycle of life]
Name: Jane Zisigin
[Heeded by Deep Ones]
Puissant fettle: 2
Runic Sight: 1
Aim: 3
Inventory: [Tier Two Deodorant Stick Wand]
£50
Bag of living scrap metal
Samples of: Human blood, Roses, Rotten Food
Runes
Megafauna: the first magical creature Jane really saw was a demonic rhinoceros trampling the broken bodies of her parents. This rune gives a passive awareness of nearby massive beasts, and will attract them when written.
Waif: boost to stealth when alone.
Clots:0
Author
Topic: COVEN: Gulled Goldsmiths and Lost Locomotives (Read 153909 times)