Dramatis Personae
- Alexander (played by +Daniel Dover ): 6’ 4’’, 225 lbs. Tall and muscular with a gleaming smile. He has almost iridescent white hair and faintly golden skin. Exudes a calm, quiet confidence, and moves with the grace of a dancer. Literally inhumanly attractive. He’s strong, fast, durable, indefatigable, and has some matter control powers. Cares about everybody and everything.
- Eddie (played by +Ignus Pyre): 6’, 180 lbs. Outwardly disheveled looking, but his scruffy furs hide high quality gear underneath. Fairly average looking with reddish brown hair and a bit of stubble. Carries an enormous backpack but doesn’t seem too slowed by it, despite a slight limp, a pulls a trailer behind him made from the rear end of an old ford mustang. Honest, forthright and reliable, but won’t speak too much about his past. He seems to have a sixth sense for monsters and the dark fog.
- Jacob “Doc” (played by +Asta Kask): 6’, 150 lbs. Kinda lanky with leathery, weathered skin and greying hair, offset by piercing blue eyes. He’s compassionate, responsible, and very careful with his words. Dreams of building a place where metahumans can live unprosecuted. Has some healing powers. Followed by a 45 pound cat, that flies and leaves a rainbow trail behind it. Yes, really.
- Kurst “Kurt” Vetrson (played by +Antoni Ten Monrós): 6’ 4’’, 110 lbs. Wears layers and layers of clothing, but underneath them he’s anorexically thin and very pale. He always feels slightly cold to the touch, but despite the layers isn’t actually bothered by the cold. Young and usually speaks fairly coarsely. Absolutely hates wendigo. Has ice powers that he doesn’t like to use because they’re not fully under his control. Good with a bow.
- Dr. Nicodemus “Nick” Faust (played by +Hal Batty): 6’ 4’’, 180 lbs. Tall and lean. Flaming red hair, chalk white skin, and coal black eyes. Also literally inhumanly attractive, and his charms work on men and women alike. Wears a dark charcoal suit with crimson waistcoat and cravat, with a long black overcoat, even in the midst of a blizzard. Has an arrogant smile on his lips, only offset by an intensity to his eyes. Master of magic
- King the Maine Coon (NPC Ally): a huge Maine Coon cat (almost 50 lbs. and 4.5 ft long) that can fly/hover (leaving a trail of rainbow colored light), go “boneless,” shoot lazers from its eyes, ignore a structure’s ceilings and floors (but not its walls), and other more interesting abilities. He can haz cheezburger.
The Prodigal Sons
Eddie and Kurst
Sentinel Butte, North Dakota, 11° F light snow and heavy winds
January 28th, 37 AB, 12:00 pm
North of Poole’s Palace
Eddie approaches Kurst carefully after watching him stomp on wendigo heads and eat invisible sandwiches for a little while, and they begin to talk. During this talk Kurst says that he is a monster, like the wendigo, that he shares their blood. Eddie refutes this, telling him that if he was truly a monster, then he’d have killed the entire party months ago, and that he trusts him. Kurst stares back in disbelief ‘How can you trust me after I ate that girl’s arm?’ Eddie looks very confused, and tell him that he didn’t eat anything, Eddie had assumed it was some kind of PTSD. After a little more talking they begin the trek back to the castle.
Haunted Houses
Alexander, Faust, and Jacob
Sentinel Butte, North Dakota, 11° F light snow and heavy winds
January 28th, 37 AB, 3:00pm
North of Poole’s Palace
We cut back to the castle where there’s a commotion around the boy we saved from the wendigo after Jacob healed his arm. The people of Poole’s Palace are watching the good doctor in awe. Nick walks over to where Alexander is standing and asks to speak with him, but Alexander wants to take the boy to a private room first.
Once the boy is safely delivered to his very own private cell, Alexander sits down outside in a meditative position to speak with Nick, who sits down next to him. Nicodemus first admonishes Alexander for taking a potential enemy back to this safe place, he may nigh indestructible, but not everyone is. Nick then says he wants to return the boy back to the Saviors of the Heartland, which triggers a long debate about whether it’s the right thing to do. (Which Nick doesn’t really care about, but there are appearances to keep up.)
A woman comes up to Jacob and asks him how he did that, how did he heal someone’s arm? Jacob responds by telling her that wasn’t him, it was simply God acting through him.
Kurst and Eddie return bearing gifts, all the weapons, armor and goods they’d managed to take from the Saviors, and there is a lot, thanks to Kurst’s 3 on Scrounging. Nick asks them about slave collars, high-tech gadgets used by the Saviors to control their metahuman slaves, but sadly all of them had been destroyed in the fight.
They talk for a while, with Jacob asking why he looks so pale, was this the first time he’s seen violence like this? Kurst tells him sadly not, so Jacob asks whether it was the wendigo, and he replies with a dry laugh, ‘Wendigo don’t scare me, no more than looking in the mirror.’While they’re talking the lights flicker, then die. So Eddie, Kurst and Mitchell head down to the generator to see if they can figure out what’s gone wrong.
Where Alexander is sat in the darkness he gets a sudden scent of lilacs and lily of the valley, and out of the corner of his eye he sees the tail end of a glowing, ethereal dress pass around the corner. He begins to follow the scent of flowers, until eventually he sees a woman disappear through a wall in front of him. He makes a roll and correctly guesses that she’s here for someone, that person being Nick, and quickly making his way through to the common room, he arrives just in time to see this woman reemerge from one of the walls.
Nick’s face goes pale, then absolutely rigid upon seeing her. At first she approaches with love in her eyes, but upon seeing his expression, she changes, becoming the image of a warrior goddess. ‘You dare to believe I’m not her?’ and Nick responds ‘Yes, I dare. He seeks to trick me, but does he forget? Tricks have been my stock in trade since I learnt to speak.’ With that she floats forward and drops a toy soldier at his feet, a toy he’d made when he was five years old, and given to her with the promise that he’d never let his father hurt her. At this point I let Nicodemus make an Occult! Roll, and Christopher confirms that this isn’t an illusion or a trick, but is in fact his mother. He chokes up and asks what happens, she explains that she just couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t take his father’s abuse, so she took her own life. With her death, the pact she’d made with his father was broken, and he’d be coming for him. Nick says he was getting closer, each day was one closer to her freedom, but she just tells him he wasn’t fast enough.
She vanishes and is replaced by a tall figure with dark eyes, I know this man is Jonathan la Croix, my father. In my infinite wisdom I decide that Nicodemus should make a Fright Check, and roll a 15, leaving me stunned for 6 seconds, and costing me 6 FP. Alexander steps forward to reason with la Croix, but with a twitch of his finger he sends him hurtling back against the wall, and pins him there. la Croix and Nick start talking. The conversation starts with Nicodemus calling la Croix a monster, to which la Croix replies with ‘No worse than you, after all, you failed to save her.’ la Croix then tells him that he has until the Winter solstice, when he’ll be coming for Nick, to finally put him down. Nick gives his word that come the Winter solstice he will see his father dead. la Croix says that better men have tried, and before he leaves he lets us know that we have company. As the conversation neared it’s conclusion, Alexander turned the wall behind him into cotton, and sinks into it, but before he can use it to his advantage la Croix finishes talking and disappears. Jacob asks who that was, and Nick replies by saying ‘That was a monster, that was my father.’
Oblivious to everything that’s been going Eddie is downstairs working on the generator. It seems the room was originally designed to hold three generators, but it currently holds only two. Eddie asks Mitchell about this, and it seems there’s a third one in a local high school, but it’s swarming with wendigo, something like a nest for them. Kurst comments that it ‘seems like a job for an exterminator.’ (Cue gravelly voice and guitar solo.)
As we’re about to head out to see what this ‘company’ my father was talking about was, Christopher asks all make Perception rolls, and we smell the thick, cloying smell of fresh blood. It seems la Croix doesn’t have enough original thoughts of his own and has to copy mine. We end there.
After Action Report (Hal)
Again, another great session, although perhaps more so from my perspective than everyone else’s, since I got to spend a lot of time roleplaying Faust today, since learning of my mother’s death and my father’s plans made up the majority of the session. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out, Nick’s going to be pretty messed up for a while after the death of his mother, but we have almost a whole year before the Winter solstice comes around and la Croix will be a threat. The timing somehow feels off, but we’ll have to see how it goes, I’ve been wrong about this kind of stuff plenty of times before.
“All Along The Watchtowers (Instrumental)” by The Forest Rangers ft Gabe Witcher (as the session “opening song”)
“Home” by Edward Sharp and The Magnetic Zeroes
“The Ghost Scene (Hamlet)” by Patrick Doyle
“No Son of Mine” by Genesis