Previously:
Prepping for a session < Drinking 2L of Coca-Cola Zero™ and bantering for an hour about Slam Frank and so on to pad out the session length
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
So: The party is in Rodnovprom's repurposed mining facility, with fire trucks from Sudbury arriving soon to respond to their call for a plan they didn't end up using. Rob makes the party promise that if his head is removed and his brain unspooled that they will take a picture and show it to his daughters. Bart adds that they should also show Rob's daughters Bart's picture of a goblin, as they will surely believe it if shown alongside an unnaturally-mutilated corpse.
After looting the lab they find car keys in the pocket of one of the less-mangled Norsefire corpses, pick up that xanned-out and Hypha'd-up technician, load him up in the back of the car (a grey 2016 Mazda CX-3), and zip out of there just as the fire trucks arrive. They debate ways to convince the technician to come up with a cure for the Hypha, such as by locking him inside an AirBnB and gaslighting him into believing that the Hypha has caused the apocalypse outside.
They get a call from their boss in the Knights of St. Phanourious - A Mr. Alistair Whittwhicky - and are cautioned about the high profile they're making for themselves in Pinemarten. Alistair advises them that their boys in the lab have analyzed the pattern of the sites of the head-removals and brain-unspoolings and found that they form a spiral that starts well out of town and is drawing inwards, centered on the Rodnovprom mine. The party arranges to have a sample of the Hypha mailed back to Knights HQ in England, and for a 'care package' of anti-fungals, ammunition, and amphetamines to be delivered to them in Pinemarten.
Hoping to catch Sarah Chepovetsky, the Rodnovprom CEO, they head to the Rodnovprom office in town, only to find it hastily abandoned due to them live-streaming their slaughter of the Norsefire security team to Sarah last session. Breaking in they set off the alarm, but quickly shut it down, and Codekiller lives up to his name by hacking into Sarah's computer.
Investigating her emails and documents, they find: correspondence with Volodymyr, the head of Norsefire, telling him to knock it off with agitating the locals, conversations with military higher-ups in the Ukrainian and Canadian forces as well as NATO getting hyped for the Hypha project, a back-and-forth with the Hawk & Beetle Club - some rich local weirdos - to get permission to repurpose the mine, and plans to fly back to Kiev out of Toronto in the next couple days. They consider calling in a bomb threat to delay the flight so they can hunt her down, but ultimately decide against it.
On the payroll they find the address of an employee, Adidas Jones, which is along the projected curve of the spiral of unusual killings.
Deciding that at this point they should try and check out the Borderland, Codekiller puts some lo-fi beats to study to to lull Rob to sleep on the break room couch. Rob drifts off and finds himself face-down in a muddy crater, from where he skulks off to a shack in the woods nearby, spooked by the sight of some great shadowy silhouette slowly circling on the horizon.
He finds the shack open to an apartment in some urban center, wherein someone was clearly tortured, with notes in Cyrillic written on napkins on a table. He snaps pictures of the location and the notes on his phone (which was on his person when he fell asleep - his clothes and such are also the same as in his sleeping condition), then tries the door to the kitchen only to find it opens to an underground pantry. In there he goes up through the trapdoor and finds himself in a partially-collapsed warehouse.
In the warehouse he encounters a skittish young soldier named Vasily (who Rob recognizes from a comatose body in the mine facility), who informs him that they're stuck in some sort of living hell wherein they can't permanently die, and that his fellow soldiers have snapped from the stress under the 'leadership' (repeated torture and murder) of a man named Mikhail, and are now hunting down anyone they can get their hands on - among other threats like screaming drones with the faces of men and bipedal wolves and so on.
Rob gets Vasily to shoot him in the head, which he does, and Rob jolts awake back in the Rodnovprom office. He informs the party of what he learned and transcribes the notes from the photos he took in the Borderland. Bart translates them and finds they are a transcript of the capture and interrogation of Moroz (the mentally-disturbed homeless man they themselves tormented for several sessions).
They resolve that next time they should all inject the Hypha and enter the Borderland together.
Join us next week(?) for more oodles of fun.
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