I never levelled, so I will put a point in Puissance and Aim. Recover my strength, try an feel out the nature of the giraffes. DO NOT SUMMON THEM.
"Well. Vince, what's going on out there?"
Vince sighs and consults a bundle of thermometers stuck in a skull.
"As far as I can tell, someone's woken up the dread necromancer Benkazal the Fucking Awful. I'm not going to ask, seeing as you got the power source, but you might have seen him. About five-foot four, black robes and cowl, torrents of death-magic illing anything he looks at... easy to miss."
"Anyway, a few decades back he got bored of killing and torturing with his undead legions by his side, and decided to sleep for a few centuries, see what the world looked like then. But something woke him up, apparently. He must be pretty pissed off about it."
"The sky-creature that flew over us... well, I have no idea. Word is London's Alchemist's were messing around in the sky recently, but I don't know what that has to do with Benkazal. They'll try to kill each other, and the necromancer will probably win. The sky-being looked explosive but fragile."
The giraffes, eh? Feeling out the nature of a summon is like running imaginary fingers around the inside of your brain. They slip into some disturbingly deep holes.
You percieve a veil beside you, with a ghost of a rift in it. Not beside you in the ordinary sense, but somehow beside you perpendicular to reality. Looking at it more closely, it's made of some kind mesh, full of holes smaller than atoms, almost nothing moving through. You get the sense that with enough puissance and skill, you might stretch the veil until the rift was as wide as you chose.
Looking through the veil, you see a dry and dusty plain, swirling in lurid Munch-esque colours, mesas and dry riverbeds stretching out endlessly. Through some queer twist of physics, the space is simultaneously packed to bursting with giraffes and almost totally deserted. The giraffes chatter ceaselessly, their mouths mouthing frantically, and the tiniest whispers drift towards you through the rent in the veil, laced with cruelty and venom. Many of the demons wear hats of different sorts. You can't tell where the hats come from.
Oh, and before I forget, you gain a rune:
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.
"Could anyone remind me why did we need this glowy thing?"
List of things to do:
1) Make that Caduceus with a human spine and intestines. If I could just safely use mine, do it. For some reason, Vince's house has a lot of body parts.
2) If I can, find out what are the spells from my hand wand. Don't test them on myself.
3) If I have the time, try to identify the mysterious potion and rope. Don't use them on myself. Ask Vince about them before experimenting.
4)If for some reason I still have spare time, research on various ways to reanimate the dead.
((I think my Puissance cap should be at 14))
Vince tells you.
"Once this storm blows over, the power source will be a valuable Coven asset. It will make our witches stronger, and come in handy with thaumaturgical devices. At the very least, it's a free recharge of puissance whenever you come back here. If you have a house, you want electricity and gas. Same principle."
The caduceus, eh? Removing your own intestines is quick and easy, but the spine less so. You manage to separate it from the ribs and pelvis in ten minutes or so, but the brain is a trickier area. With a lot of sawing and snipping in front of several mirrors, you finally separate the jagged rod of bone from the back of your skull. Sitting about cleaning it of flesh is a relaxing excercise, and you can feel your puissance and anatomical knowledge flowing into the artifact as you prepare it. Finally, you wrap the two charred strands of entrail around the rod of bone, and pour your two clots into it. The backbone straightens and lengthens, transforming into a staff as tall as you, while the ropes of blackened viscera rise and sway. Two bulging dark organs at the top of each strand develop dark beady eyes and flickering black tongues.
You get up, ready to show off your new creation. Then the top half of your body flops sideways until your head is touching the ground, as your lumbars and core muscles fail abjectly. It's not painful, just embarassing. Hard to walk around like this without knocking over small items of furniture.
One of the snakes pipes up.
"You didn't think thisssssssss through, did you?"
The hand wand: one punches something at long distance, up to a hundred metres away, though Vince's magical wards stop you doing that right now. The other has to be used on a body, so I can't tell you what it does yet. Coven members can be a little defensive, so any player-on-player testing needs the consent of at least one party.
Vince examines the potion, and concludes that it's a REALLY strong alchemical sedative. Sleeping beauty level shit. Stuff could roofie a whale. You get the drift.
The chain you determine for yourself is really strong, made of interlinked crystals, pretty flexible and has an incredibly high melting point and heat capacity. So it can absorb a lot of energy without it burning your hand off. Like the tilling NASA uses for reentry, you can hold it when it's white-hot.
Research, huh? Given you're trapped in a house with someone who is definitely NOT a necromancer, there's not much you can do.
2
You dig up an instructional manual on auto repair from the endless stacks of magazines in the bathroom, covered in what may be occult diagrams. After reading it cover to cover, you conclude that it was just a load of doodles. Oh well, at least you learned something about fixing vehicles.
"Yeah, 'we did good'. You didn't see it, we were in an unloseable situation and still managed to win by the skin of our teeth... I need to find a new outfit..."
Ben continues to grumble and laze about the house, obsessively cleaning his guns and counting his ammo every few hours.
The P90's full. So is the assault rifle Zamenis has.
"What... What."
Eep. A rune or two would be handy about now. First priority is to find something to make into a level 2 wand,
So that I can feasibly defend myself. I don't have anything in mind and Jane honestly doesn't know anything yet so I'll just follow my tunic sight until I find something that looks both potent and wand-shaped.
I wouldn't kill a player before they had starting equipment unless they were really asking for it, don't worry.
So, 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.
A wand could be literally any vaguely wand-shaped object anywhere in the city that isn't already arcane. You really don't want to pick that for yourself?
I can give you an idea of the magical things nearby, if you like: a celestial insect stretched across the face of a tower-block, a troll lurking in a subway, rat-headed people in suits scurrying about their business, a gregarious dwarf, badger warlords conducting a military campaign, a puddle within which lurks a meeting place for eldritch beings, and of course somewhere around is a magical demon rhinoceros.
Well, the most important issues seem to be to get further away from that disaster and to do something about my fingers. Shame about the river spirit, but so it goes.
Find a business with a first-aid kit for employees. Most any business will do, but restaurants tend to have unusually well-stocked ones due to the relatively frequent occurance of cuts. Do first aid by bandaging up my hand and the cut stumps of the fingers. I don't want an ambulance, so use an illusion to limit the apparent severity of the injury. After that, do some trolling in public places, like a pub or bar or restaurant or such to find someone who is most definately into me, in order to try and get a place to stay for a few days. Do try to make a cultist, but just a place to stay would be fine, as then I can shower, clean my clothing, and maybe get some money. Phone Dave and Vince to let them know that I'm okay, and ask Vince if he knows any good resources in the area. I should be able to figure out where I am pretty quickly just by looking at a street sign.
Also, be sure to examine myself in a mirror to try and tell if the rune is having a passive effect on me, (as well as estimating my beauty), and to see if maybe I'll get another rune for that.
You stumble away from the bank and down mostly deserted streets towards a cluster of shops and restaurants. A crew of mages perch on scaffolding over a housing estate, massive plants consuming the brick and mortar in bizarre vegetable predation. Several watch you dourly out of sight, sensing the grimness moving in the west. Apart from that, the occult entities here must be weaker, as they all seem to have gone to ground.
Prac: 1+3
You bandage your wounds in the kitchen of a nightclub, then leave through the back, sensing a potent being lurking on the dancefloor. You're still beautiful, but a high speed trip through a canal puts a noticeable dent in that unless you actively project an illusion. A cafe several blocks away politely ignores your drying clothes and brackish smell, while you project a frazzled Helena Bonham Carter exterior, masses of luxuriant red hair over dark sockets and well-formed cheekbones, batting your eyelids at anyone who walks in.
You find your victim soon enough, a New Zealand tourist who seems endlessly fascinated with you, buying you several restorative drinks after you let him sit at your table. He's fortyish, weathered and sun-browned, and terribly interested in what there is to do and see in your bit of London. The two of you sit talking for almost an hour, and it's decided that you'll go back to his place.
Then there's a scream from the back of the restaurant, accompanied by a good deal of hissing. Registering it, you look round in surprise, only for a black iron crossbow bolt to fracture the glass shopfront in between you. Outside the restaurant slithers a terrible sight. A serpentine body the length of a car trails behind the massive torso of a woman in full chain armour, her muscular arms reloading a giant crossbow.
The man sitting across from you recoils in a mixture of fury and fear. His features blurring and misting, you now percieve beneath the outlines of the middle-aged white tourist a green-grey corpse, dry flesh pulled tight against strong cheekbones and grey hair swept back over the skull by a feathered comb. The chin and cheeks are tattoed in minute swirling patterns, lines of dark ink running from empty eye sockets. A finely carved musket is slung across his back, and a wide, markless jade club hangs around his wrist.
The undead warrior in front of you leaps to his feet, cursing.
"Tell me what you know about the dark lord in the west, or I'll leave you to the hunters!"
Double-ambushed. Your day just keeps getting better.
Vince watches the battle on a flickering green monitor, as number slowly rise and fall.
"The skything is losing. It's almost down. Benkazal will probably go after whoever woke him. I just pray he doesn't go after us."
He taps a femur against the edge of the screen and listens to it speculatively.
"Leave it a little longer to go out. Give it an hour or two, he'll have moved away. If he hasn't..."
Vince doesn'lt finish, but it's clear that if the necromancer finds a reason to stick around, everyone's dead or worse.Name: Nanami Adachi. (Nanami)
Unnatural beauty granted by demonic contract and the adoration of mortals. Slight charisma/popularity boost.
A few fingers short (bandaged, probably infected and giving you Weil's Disease as well)
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: £25
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
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: 6
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.
Inventory: £25, Certificate from Belial (valid for one sample of occult substance)
Large Knife, knife.
Surgical tools: scalpel, a saw, and tweezers.
Dead Guy's pockets: a set of car keys, a length of shimmering, crystalline rope,
{Unknown Potion}
Dragon Tooth Phylactery on End
[Human Leg Wand]
[Ulna and Hand Wand]
Gunfarmer's Armour-piercing Amphibious Assault Rifle (30/30 Rounds)
Lightning Longsword
Puissant Clots: 2
Puissance: 14/14
Name: Don Joe
Ritual Strength - 2
Runic Sight - 1
Puissance - 1
Aim - 2
Agility - 1
Practicality - 1
Inventory: £130
Murdered guy's wallet
Keys to Maserati
Card of Mortal-mind cleanup guy
[Chain Coin Pendant] - Used
[Giraffe Wine Chalice]
Simple Knife
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.
Puissance: 3/5
Puissant Clots: 2
Author
Topic: COVEN: Gulled Goldsmiths and Lost Locomotives (Read 153714 times)