Darkness Unvailed

We start night eighteen the same night we played through night seventeen, so everything is fresh in their minds as to what happened. Well on with the show.

Gracey and Paul both wanted to see the tapes first as they fell asleep last night, though this morning they wake at the same time, so their was no sneak previews for either of them. Paul gets out of bed and heads in for a shower, as Gracey gets dressed and heads out to start the tapes. Gracey pops the first one into a player and start to watch it as soon as Paul gets out. The tape is a dub of a poor quality recording. (Or as I put it during the game a crap-tacular security camera tape.) As they watch the tape most of it is really boring. They can not tell what part of the city it comes form though after getting most of the way through the tape they get a call from Victoria. Gracey goes to take a shower while Paul talks with Victoria on the phone. While still on the phone Paul puts in the second tape to see a drive by shortly after hanging up on Victoria. The car that was attacked explodes and on the tape you see some one get out. fall, and turn to ash. This makes Paul go back over the first tape a little closer. As Gracey returns to the room, from her shower, she asks about what she has missed. Paul tells her about the second tape leading him to take another look at the first.

Victoria wakes and feels that the files she got yesterday should prove to be a good challenge for the evening. As she pours over them they start to make sense to her. She picks out that these files are a plan for getting rid of the Carthians for with in the city, by taking out the leader and fueling the in fighting until they are no more. After working this out, she gives James a call. With in this call she goes over the plan that she found in the note and tells him they should check out Dalia’s offices. James agrees and they plan on getting the group together. Victoria calls Gracey to no avail, next tries Paul, and goes over the plan with him. They talk about the tapes as they have not gotten anything out of it. Victoria decides to meet Paul and Gracey at Paul’s.

Hugh wakes at the warehouse the Carthians have been using as a safe house. He spends time listening to the crowd and looking for his sire. Though some of the night passes in this way he gets a call from Victoria and leaves shortly there after.

Christian feeling a little cramped does talk with anyone and just takes some time to go out to a few bars. This plan doesn’t work very long as he gets a call from Paul to meet up at the office building the meet at originally.

Victoria arrives at Paul’s and is informed about what was on the tapes along with Gracey. The first tape contains a car crash with a Kindred getting out and walk into a building across the street. The second tape having the drive by recorded on it. After hearing this she give James a call to let him know that they are going down to the offices tonight. Victoria tells James that she will get a hold of Hugh and Christian and have them meet up there. Victoria tells Paul to call Christian, Gracey to call Hannah, and she will call Hugh. The calls go well. They all arrive, a short time later, at the office complex.

Victoria start to find out if anyone has a plan for entering the building. Gracey asks why not just walk in as the last time she was here it wasn’t a problem for her. Paul reminds her of the run down the hall incident, and she informs the group that is not the last time she was here, much to the surprise of the group. Victoria goes over the facts about how the building is controlled by the prince and Gracey didn’t have a problem. This fact hits Victoria as interesting. Paul thinks the best place to start looking is in the basement, as a joke. (Why he goes there I don’t know though it does prove interesting again.) Gracey start heads up to the second floor for a look at these offices, when Victoria start to convince the group that the basement is the place to start as the last offices were bear of information. Gracey start talking about how long before they meet back here, when Paul steps in and talks about how splitting up the group mite not be a good idea.

(James’ player makes a comment about what happened several thousand years ago were the group split up. A veiled D&D reference as we had all just about died last week in that game, as a result of someone not following the group. It took a bit for everyone to catch on to it, but every got a laugh out of it.)

Victoria goes on about why the basement may be better, and with Paul supporting her that is were the group starts to explore. They head down the familiar path to the basement, asking Victoria what they are looking for. She stumbles around until she finds a place the hall should continue, but does not. Gracey studies the wall to find some seems. Hugh talks about shouldering it down, but Gracey old him up. About this time the security guard find them, but they see him first. (They start to go over plans on hiding with the sneaky Tremere and obfuscate, it just gets funny for a short time then they get back to the game.) The guard shines his flashlight at the group blinding them, and asks them what they are doing down here. Paul repeatedly tells him to get the flashlight out of his eyes as the guard asks again why are they down here. At this point Gracey starts towards him making full use of the light. This makes the guard quiver just a bit, weather it is from someone walking up to him or having a damn good looking chick head his way, she does know.

(Gracey’s player still a little new to how thing work in vampire asks if the flashlight would hurt her, I tell her only if he hits her with it. James’ player makes a snide remark about the question, and has a speaker fall on his head from the entertainment center behind him. This gets laughs and remarks about that what you get for making cynical comments.)

The guard asks her, if he can do anything for her. Gracey starts to buff about having a meeting some were in the building. The guard announces that they all need to leave unless they have business in the building. Hugh turns his back to the guard to see if he can find a way to open the door, and finds the mechanism, but not how to open it. Christian through this catches the gaze of the guard and tells him they need the door opened can you help us; we need to get something from behind it. The guard happily walks over and opens the door for them and tells them to have a good night and walks away. Hugh tells Gracey to go first and she retorts that he is the man and he should go first. They fight back and forth over this for a short time before Christian tells them that he will go first. Christian walks in does not look around turns and comes back out screaming. Victoria just tells him that was funny and they all enter the room. They find them selves in a planning room.

Right here we stop for the night as it was late and I need time to prepare for this room as they were not suppose to find it until later in the game. We pack it in and head on out for the week. We come back the next week with a bit of bull-shitting before we get back to the game.

As they pass through the Door way the see a set of double doors the opened in on the planning room. The room contains a large central desk with an assortment of half open filing cabinets. One wall contains a map of the city subway system with a faint route marked on it. Gracey starts to check through the filing cabinets, finding two video cassettes. Victoria takes a look around the room for any passages that are hidden. As the group continues to look closer at the top of the desk Victoria realizes that the map on it is for the sewer system. The strange thing about the map is a few different marks in different parts to the city. Along with the sewer map is the title and blue prints for Elmwood Estates. James and Victoria talk over some of the information that they already had gathered to see if anything jumps out at them. After finding out about Elmwood Estates, James takes a look through the files. James finds information pertaining to The Orphanage and how Derrick Coverstone has set himself up a stronghold around it. While James is running through the files Victoria takes a closer look at the map on the wall. She can follow a route on the map finding that it goes through many abandon subway tunnels and head over to New Jersey.

James, Gracey, and Victoria keep looking over the desk and files for anything else. Victoria stumbles across a business card for Lt. McNaily and starts to show it around. When she shows it to Paul, he starts to tell them about what his PI had found on him. That this Lt. has been slipping recently, not getting most of his cases to close, also that he was in charge of the investigation on the assault on the welder and the warehouse fire. The odd part of his recent behavior is that he and a couple of his officers have been hanging out at places owned by Donald Riddell. Victoria sees that in one of the files are plans for using the two warehouses as a launching point to try and take over the docks area. Also with in that file is a copy of the “To His Holiness”. After sharing this information with the rest of the group, they decide that Vern needs to die.

With one more, quick check, of the room Gracey heads to the second floor offices with the rest of the group following her up, as they now have a healthy respect of being separated. They take a back stairwell up to the second floor. Once there they find eight doors running down each side of a main hall for a total of sixteen. Gracey just walks down and checks randomly the third door on the left side of the hall. The unlocked door leads to a small reception area with two offices behind it. The place looks to have been empty for about a month and is only furnished with some cheep desks and chairs. Next Gracey checks the forth door on the right to find it locked. James after see that Gracey is down the hall takes the first door on the left, finding it locked. They start to go over what is going on as James see that Gracey is about to pick the door she is at and stops her, so they can do this with some sort of plan. James has them check each door to see if it is open or locked, before trying to open them. They find with all this searching, an adult daycare facility, office, and file room, a small meeting room with extra tables and folding chairs at the back, a large conference room with copies of most of the files on kindred within the city that are very detailed, save for the LS. In another of the offices they find some antique furniture, but little else. The next on the go to again has antique furniture and is nicely decorated. With in the one of the desks are some of the LS files that were missing. They check Pete Ares file getting information about how he had controlled the Queens area in recent times, also go over Carmen Oster’s files. The last office on the left turns out to be more of a reading room for someone. Victoria opens the broom closet and checks it over finding it a solid room. Last room on the right they check had been converted into on large room with four desks in it. With in the desks they find more LS files, one of them being Dalia’s. The file gives them more information about Dalia’s habits and hang outs. Dalia had started to invest in the hotels around the airports and also the Yellow Cab Company. Dalia’s file had some old subway plans and information on how to redevelop them.

Gracey talks about calling around to hotels to see if she can find Dalia that way. Paul talks her out of it as it would serve to drive her farther into hiding. This does prompt them to go back down to the planning room and check the two maps against each other. Victoria rips the map down and takes it with her. About this time the night has mostly slipped away and they all head home.

End of this night’s work as I take a minute to gather the next part of this mess and start on the next night with them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2005 at 19:29 and is filed under Story Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.