Case Files of the Knights of St. Phanourious: Pinemarten, Ontario - Session 4

Previously:

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Peace was never an option.

Our party is:
Bart "Codekiller" Regis
Manhoman "Dr. House" Kamaroff (portrayed by friend of the blog deus ex parabola)
Auggy "Shillelagh" Ashe
Rob "The Belt / The Punisher" Wagner

They begin this session in Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms, Rob surrounded by armed guards in a wrecked van, Auggy hiding with a terrified teenage arsonist, and Manhoman tending to a shot Bart in the woods nearby.

I'm writing this a few weeks after the session and through banks of brain-fog, so this will be less of a beat-by-beat summary and more of a gisticulation of the session:

• Outnumbered and outgunned, the party surrenders, and are taken prisoner by the remaining Norsefire personnel, who accuse them of being Russian spies.
• They are brought to a medical facility hidden inside the defunct mine, where comatose and severely-injured people are being held in rows of medical beds, hooked up to IVs and monitors and suchlike.
• Rob, the first to be captured, is strapped to a bed and hooked up to an IV - though he was cleverly able to hide a holdout pistol on himself that got through the pat-down.
• Not willing to be injected with whatever it was the goons were planning on injecting them with, the party tussles with them, and through a truly divine series of rolls actually turns the tables on the Norsefire guys, and have them pinned behind a medical bed.
• Attempting to negotiate, the head of the Norsefire squad tosses the party his phone, on a call to his boss, the CEO of Rodnovprom, Sarah Chepovetsky.
• The party is unwilling to make a deal, and accuse Rodnovprom of being behind the monster that's been unspooling people's brain-matter. Sarah professes ignorance, the party does not buy it, and with an improvised explosive blast the remaining goons to kingdom come.
• The party then searches through the mine-facility, looking for clues and survival horror game environmental storytelling voice logs.
• They make their way to the grow-op section of the facility, where they find and intimidate a technician - the same technician who was supplying Debbie and Marlin. He tells them that the facility is growing a fungoid hyper-dimensional organism they call "the Hypha", which is able to link the minds of those in suppressed states of consciousness into a shared dream-realm called the Borderland created from their memories. Rodnovprom aimed to use the minds of casualties of the Russian-Ukraine War to create a next-gen military training simulator for NATO.
•  They press the technician for a cure for the Hypha, or else a way to extract it from Rob, but he says he doesn't know how. They kill him, or maybe they don't, I'll have to double-check, and then they leave the facility.