Synopses September 1999 - December 1999

last updated 4/22/00

(read from the bottom up)

Date: Dec 7, 1999
Game: Kult
Title: Parallel Doppleganger Processing
GM: Kathleen
Players: Jason, Jim, Gerald
Characters: William Pennyworth, Bruce Norton, John Smith
Quotes:

"You faxed the floor-plans to yourself under the name John D. Salinger? In Washington DC? You know how many red flags you just tripped in the NSA?" - Kathleen
"We'll use one of the corpcicles to batter down the booby-trapped door." - Jason
"We've sent in a clean up crew to de-animate the re-animated bodies." - The Company

After appearing in downtown Washington DC after traveling through another dimension the party checks into a random hotel, only to discover a note from someone in the company telling them that they must stop Evergreen. A little bit of research reveals that Evergreen is a contracted supplier of parts to the companies AI Hardware division. Since Evergreen turns out to be located in the silicon valley, the party jets back to the East Coast, catching what little sleep it can on the plane.
Upon reaching the West Coast the party meets up with Bruce Norton and a Red Jones (short for Redemption Jones), a 6' ex-CIA "solutions" person employed by the company.
The raid on Evergreen, though foolish, manages to succeed. After a climactic battle with the "suit" running the assembly plant, the company is called in to clean up the mess the party has left in it's wake.
Apparently Evergreen was up to it's own nefarious ends, and was planting the souls of dead people in the AI's it was selling to companies, so that these AIs could link up on the Internet and eventually merge to do some terribly big and awful thing. Now the company is wise to it, although we don't know for sure how many of these units Evergreen has installed around the world.

Date: Nov 30, 1999
Game: Illuminati: New World Order
Players: Jason, Jim, Allen, Gerald
Notes:

Still worn out, but we now tried the modern version of Illuminati, and found the new rules a little slow to get used to, but still entertaining.

Date: Nov 23, 1999
Game: Illuminati: Classic
Players: Jason, Jim, Allen, Gerald, John
Notes:

People were still too burnt out to play any RPGs, but we cracked open Illuminati, the classic version, to spend a pleasant couple of hours stabbing each other in the back. In the end the Gnomes of Zurich (Jim) won.

Date: Nov 16, 1999
Game: Confusion and being busy, no game

Date: Nov 9, 1999
Game: Confusion and being busy, no game

Date: Nov 2, 1999
Game: Kult
Title: Parallel Doppleganger Processing
GM: Kathleen
Players: Jason, Allen, Gerald
Characters: William Pennyworth, Sam Smith, John Smith
Quotes:

"I write 'remember to get the books' on the back of my hand." - William Pennyworth
"There's probably a lot more magical glowing things at Faust's house." - John Smith
"What? Go talk to Faust with a splattering of the blood of stolen books staining our hands?" - William Pennyworth
"See... I'm not as crazy as you think I am." "Oh yes you are; you're that crazy and you're contagious." - Sam Smith, John Smith

The company gets in touch with the party and it is learned that Thomas's "tumor code" is a search program, which is scanning the net for other AI's of it's kind.
As the party's walking around Berkeley, a homeless person starts playing with Sam Smith's phantom cat. Once she becomes cogniscent of the rest of us, she sells Smith a necklace made out of a really old coin. All she's willing to tell us is "You'll need this."
The tape the party planted in the graduates' office reveals a conversation of Alastair with an unnamed person who is looking for someone, and that unnamed person can track that someone because that someone has "a kid."
After listening to the tape, the party broke into Faust's office, which was a magic trip-wire zone. The party stole those books with the most magical warding on them and then hid out in the campus library. The books tried to make the party forget about them, but the party was too crafty. There were three books total, one in Latin on Breaking the Illusion, one in Greek and a really creepy one in Arabic.
After realizing that no one was immediately going to show up to recover the books, the party broke into Faust's house, which was plastered with magical wards and sorcerous trip wires. Every door and the seal on every window had a trip wire. So the party cut a hole out of one of the planes of glass and climbed through. Inside the house the party found a door to an empty warehouse in another dimension, the "door" being actually a mirror. After a fight with a transformed house-dog, the party traveled through the door to the warehouse, only to find that Sam's phantom kitty was suddenly made flesh. It was not too happy to be visible to mere mortals, either.
After all sorts of trouble and being lost in an unworldly industrial zone, and bartering for passage back to our dimension in a bazaar (cutting a long, scary story short) the party returns to earth (Washington DC).
The reason the necklace was needed? It was the only currency that was worth enough to get our guide to escort us back. Our guide? She was the 19 year old version of the homeless person who saw Smith's cat in Berkeley.

Date: Oct 25, 1999
Game: Champions
Title: Joey's in the Basement
GM: Jason
Players: Neal, Allen, Gerald
Characters: Blackcat, Dr. Grey, The Hippo
Quotes:

"I never hit a little old lady before, they're tough." - The Hippo
"I like the Catholic Priest Attack Squad idea myself." - Neal
"Digging up his casket and throwing it on the front doorstep seems a little cruel. Hell, I could put my hand in his skull and do a little puppet show for her... `Hello, my name is Joey. I'm your dead son.'" - Blackcat

Informed of a missing persons report that had escalated into a missing pair of police officers, the Green-peace sponsored super-hero team ventured forth into the most deserted of Silicon Valley's warehouse districts. In short order the most suspicious of abandoned houses in the desolate district was given the once over by Dr. Grey's brain and found to be of dubious character; most telling was the writhing, screaming essence of one of the missing police officers. The Blackcat was soon to find out that the ground floor of the house was haunted by the indomitable spirit of Mildred Winslet, who was unwilling to accept the truth of her son Joseph's demise. The heroes quickly found out that force was not the solution to curing Mildred's condition, and after releasing the spirit of Mrs. Winslet from this mortal plane, the trio of heroes unearthed a trio of unwholesome spirits in the basement. Spirits which had just finished feasting on the essence of the dying police officer. In the midst of a tough and soul-numbing battle the heroic trio's fresh recruit, the Hippo, discovered the foul spirits' one weakness, being separated from their beloved portal, and exploited it to it's fullest.

Date: Oct 18, 1999
Game: Kult
Title: Parallel Doppleganger Processing
GM: Kathleen
Players: Gerald, Jim, Neal, Jason
Characters: John Smith, Bruce Norton, Serge Nicolav, William Pennyworth
Quotes:

"What are you taking to California?" "Guns! Lots and lots of guns!" "You're not getting on the plane with them." "Ok, they'll go on the cargo plane." - Kathleen, Neal
"He's raving about mind control rays and waving the shotgun around." "Oh, great, he's a nutz as Smith." "No, Smith is smart enough to wear his tin foil hat." - Kathleen, Allen, Neal
"I shout `Look! A Bookworm!' and then bug the grad student's phone when he looks the other way." - Neal
"Gerber's Skull Caulk, guaranteed not to infect!" - Jason

After defeating the kitten thing, Sam Smith is taken to the hospital, and Norton and Smith are told to follow up the investigation on the West Coast. They are assigned an Ex-Spetznaz protector by the name of Nicolav to protect them, and an (ex?) thief by the name of Pennyworth to help them catch Simon. On the way to the Baltimore Airport Smith, Norton and Nicolav are attacked by a babbling psychotic with a shotgun, but are able to subdue him. They fly through a dubious temporal shift to arrive in California and join up with Pennyworth in the investigation of a Professor Faust who Simon appeared to have called shortly after appearing on the West Coast. Faust seems to be guilty of something, but nothing can be proven. An investigation of the Banks' security tapes leads to no further clues.

Date: Oct 11, 1999
Game: No game, all busy

Date: Oct 4, 1999
Game: Kult
Title: Parallel Doppleganger Processing
GM: Kathleen
Players: Allen, Gerald, Jim
Characters: Sam Smith, John Smith, Bruce Norton
Quotes:

"How do you fight a possessed computer?" "Not give it your credit card number?" - Gerald, Jason

When the company learns that one of it's head system programmers has somehow stolen $1.5 million dollars from various accounts, in cash, in person, and simultaneously from six banks on the opposite coast; they decide to call in the experts. Smith, Smith and Norton are put on the trail of Simon, former Company system's programmer. At Simon's house the team discovers Gregory, a self aware, self maintaining, un-unpluggable AI living in a computer in the study. Gregory, it seems, had also been talking to the Company's AI, a machine named Thomas, which had developed a large tumorous lump of code somewhere in it's central core. The team also discovered six mirrors in Simon's house, five of which were shattered. A bestial kitten-thing was seen lurking in the reflection of the 6th, and then later in a reflection in a window. The beast-kitten-thing leap out of the window when it was shattered and attacked the trio.

Date: Sep 27, 1999
Game: Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green
Title: Black Helicopters or Some Other Huge Blood Sucking Insect?
GM: Neal
Players: Kathleen, Gerald, Jason, Allen, Jim
Characters: Gemini Ng (FBI), Don Weiner (Secret Service), Maxwell Trask (CDC), Sam Jones (US Marshal), Hank O'Neill (FBI), T.J. Smith (EPA)
Quotes:

"What happened here?" "Murders. Some deputies have been killed. Could be viral." - NPC, Jason
"Did he have bloody hands?" "Well, I took down notes about his appearance, so if he had bloody hands it'll be in my notes." "Yeah, that would be in your notes, also any scalps he was carrying." - Gerald, Jason, Neal
"Flamethrowers are not allowed in the autopsy room." "Ok - I'll go out to my car and fill up some bottles of gasoline and stand outside the morgue." - NPC, Gerald

After a bloody and nearly fruitless gun battle with the sniper in the cave of the Elders, the party drives the sniper off and closes in on the cave. Inside they find the devoured remains of the Elders, a little blood left by wounds the sniper incurred, and a mysterious metallic sphere. A jurisdictional dispute over the custody of the sphere leads to political tension between the local police and the party members; the irony of which is lost on the police when their headquarters is raided in the next night and all those on duty are killed and scalped. The sphere is lost. The party manages to find out that the sniper is a MIA CIA Black OPs named Mr. Santiago. He's been living as a hermit out in the badlands for the last 20 years. A 150+ man-hunt combs the reservation for him, and in the end his animated corpse is finally brought low. But the maximal horror was to be encountered in the autopsy, when the silvery worm-like parasite broke loose from the corpse and almost got past all the party's most paranoid precautions against such an event. In the end, though, firepower, fire extinguishers and flame take the creature out, and it it dropped into the crematorium furnace. After the trial by fire, our mysterious news clipping sender, a hip, 20 something neo-Illuminati, asks the party if they want to join a covert anti-alien MIB-type organization.

Date: Sep 20, 1999
Game: Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green
Title: Black Helicopters or Some Other Huge Blood Sucking Insect?
GM: Neal
Players: Gerald, Jason, Allen, Geoff, Jim
Characters: Gemini Ng (FBI), Don Weiner (Secret Service), Maxwell Trask (CDC), Sam Jones (US Marshal), Hank O'Neill (FBI), T.J. Smith (EPA)
Quotes:

"Spontaneous Human Exsanguination, it happens. Followed by Spontaneous Human Burial." - Neal
"Any vampire children?" "Well, yeah, 24 of 'em. Old Vampire 'pump em out' Braverman, that's why he always insisted we call him Count." - Geoff, NPC

As day breaks the party splits up investigating the reservation and the area around highway 70. The most promising lead comes from aerial surveillance, when the top of a buried car is spotted a mile away from the highway. Inside the car, which was partially exposed by coyotes, the disembowelled body of Detective Braverman of the Huston police is discovered. Further investigation reveals that he and his wife have been missing for quite some time, and have been sought as suspects in the disembowelling and exsanguinating murders of several prostitutes in the Huston area. Oh, and their two children were partially eaten by Braverman. After exhausting all clues with respect to Detective Braverman and the buried car, Hank O'Neill of the FBI gets a mysterious package of newspaper clipping dropped on his hotel doorstep the following morning. They detail a strange meteor-storm in Tacomsa, West Virginia. Following up the clippings on a hunch, the party discovers that a rash of disembowelling/exsanguinating murders have left a trail from West Virginia to Tennessee to Texas To Arizona; sometimes different people are to blame, but the serial-murder madness seems to infect the last person in contact with the killer's body. In the end we decide to consult the reservation's spiritual elders with respect to the case and the appearance of so many coyotes at the scene of the crimes. Unfortunately the Elders do not return from their spiritual retreat, and when the party investigates a sniper hiding in the Elder's cave opens fire on them.

Date: Sept 13th, 1999
Game: Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green
Title: Black Helicopters or Some Other Huge Blood Sucking Insect?
GM: Neal
Players: Kathleen, Gerald, Jason, Allen, Geoff, Jim
Characters: Gemini Ng (FBI), Don Weiner (Secret Service), Maxwell Trask (CDC), Sam Jones (US Marshal), Hank O'Neill (FBI), T.J. Smith (EPA)
Quotes:

(during an autopsy) "Why, that food's hardly digested. Seems a shame to waste it." - Geoff
"Are you trying to persuade him?" "I've got a really big gun." - Neal, Geoff

Another pan-departmental emergency has brought the newly founded team of investigators together under the orders of Patrick Hobson. A series of disappearances on the San Carlos reservation in Arizona has prompted the local authorities to call in the help of the FBI. Our team is on the scene in hours, which is in stark contrast to the epochal speed in which the local authorities have been gathering reports of missing people over the last week. Just under a dozen missing people, including a complete family and a couple dozen of their sheep have vanished into thin air over the last 15 days. A questioning of the locals and a (perhaps) too thorough investigation of the sheep ranch reveals little. The popular guess is that the Pied Piper is luring people away in the middle of the night; until a ghastly collection of graves is found near the ranch, packed with the exsanguinated corpses of the ranch family and their sheep. The bodies are whisked off to the local labs and the investigators seek the shelter of massively populated metropolitan areas as night approaches.

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