Session started at 7:13 pm on 2/13/2007
Attending players: Michael, Sarah, Ben, and Eva
Presiding GM: Aaron
So we are at the target's door. The doctor has just knocked and a female voice responded asking who's there. Ajax talks to the woman through the door. He tries to convince her we're maintenance. He's being uncharacteristically unconvincing.
When the door opens, she's pointing a gun at us. Fun... Ajax talks her down a bit but admits that we are from outside. She's still scared of the bitch who was her band partner from what I can tell.
I can't believe she's happy to be here all these years. I guess the not being on drugs might be part of it, but still. Geez.
She really wants to know who hired us, but we can't tell her since we don't know.
She apparently has a son who she won't leave without. She says her son went to "The Cult Upstairs". It takes us a moment to realize that she means up in the crazy bad levels of the tower. Oh crap.
("Oh, I'm sorry, you disapproved of my tactics? I'll banter with your burning corpse."
~Michael)The doctor sends a watcher spirit up to get at least a little info. Meanwhile Ajax tries to get more info out of the target. The kid is apparently 10 years old and the folks from the cult grabbed him a few years ago. The cult is apparently up on floor 431, the highest uninhabited floor.
("I mean really what's the worst that could happen?"
~ Eva
"Reavers. Reavers are the worst that could happen."
~ Sarah)The target thinks that some of the kid's friends dared him to go up, but since he hasn't come back something must have happened. His friends are Jason, Wendy, and Mahir, so we can start by talking to them. The target's kid is named Duncan.
She's more amiable to the idea of going with us if we get Duncan back and bring him along.
She directs us down the hall to visit Jason's parents. Jason's dad is a rather tall orc. He seems nice enough, although I think Roebuck is a stupid family name. After some chatting the guy lets us in to talk to the kids. They're all around ten or eleven, two orcs and an elf. Jason says that Mahir dared him to go upstairs and the kids start squabbling trying to pass the blame. Wendy breaks out in tears almost immediately. They cough up a general idea of what happened. They did dare him to go up, but they all feel very upset about it now. Yorick makes them all cry with an ill placed comment. We thank Roebuck and flee before we can cause any more damage.
We stop back and tell the target that we're heading upstairs.
So.... almost 300 flights of stairs later...
Around 350, the background count picks up. The doctor and I are both feeling very green about the gils.
Around 420, Ajax detects a wireless network and freaks out. He demands that we all completely shut down our commlinks. We take a short breather and talk about what's upstairs. I'm so glad to see that Yorick is beginning to get in on the teasing Ajax. Even without the senses to be distressed about the background count, Ajax is beginning to get an abnormal air of panic about him. His outrage at the teasing distracts him a little.
We form up a marching order and head up stairs, trying to be relatively quiet. There's no reason to let them know we're coming.
The landing of floor 431 is covered in skulls.
(Yorick hears a base drum in heart beat tempo coming from upstairs.)
I can't hear anything so I step up on to the landing to get a better look. The others follow. The door onto floor 431 is closed. When I look down I realize that the skulls are carved with the same symbol. It's the fucking tattoo. God damn it.
After some well suppresed panic on the part of Ajax, the doctor and to a lesser degre myself, we retreat back down a few flights of stairs to talk. The doctor and Ajax are both having serious second thoughts. We have to explain to Yorick about when we've seen the symbol before. This is not the best thing I've ever wanted to do, but I really feel like we should try. Eventually we agree that we have to try to get the kid back if he's still alive.
We head back up to floor 431. Yorick is leading now because Ajax thinks he'll be better at noticing dangerous things.
("It could be a tape recording of a robot chanting while playing a drum." ~ Ben)
("The weather is the same as it always was: dim with a chance of bullets." ~Ben)
Yorick cracks the door open and I can hear the faint sound of chanting in a strange language. The wall I can see past Yorick's leg is a flaking reddish brown. Lovely.
We edge through the door and down the hallway. The chanting is getting louder and now I can hear drumming. It sounds like a heartbeat. As we round the last corner I can see that we are heading into an atrium. There's a huge window on the far away ceiling lit by the twinkling of the city lights. Lights from a world that is completely foreign to this place we have stumbled into. There are partly clothed figures dancing down below, screaming and chanting. I can smell the musk of people and the sickly smell of blood and leather. I'm pretty sure I don't want to know what they are doing.
(Yorick sneaks forward a little more and sees that there are some weeping people down in the middle of the circle grouped around a corpse. They are being forced to eat dead flesh. It's some sort of initiation ritual. There's a man with computer components strapped all over his body who seems to be their leader.)
We are crouched just around the corner of the wall waiting for Yorick to come back and tell us what's going on down there when two shots ring out. Shit.
I draw my gun and sprint out to Yorick. Two of the cultists are lying on the floor in pools of blood. There are some very unhappy people clustered in the middle of the dancing including a blond kid of about the right age. Ajax isn't far behind me. He yells, "Lume, get the kid" and opens up on the cultists.
As I turn to dive into the crowd I hear one of the doctor's stun spell sizzle and woosh past me into the mass of cultists. I think I'm a little over twenty meters away from him. Out of the corner of my eye I can see that Yorick is trailing about half a meter behind me.
A half dozen of them are slicing at me with knives as I try to get past. There are just too many of them I can't get out of the way of all the blows. One of them manages to miss my armor and opens up a gash in my side. I twist away from the worst of it and try not to think about how bad it is as I continue forward.
I can hear Ajax's gun and the doctor screaming. Things do not look good for us.
I'm too far in this to give up now. I duck under the blades and sprint. I'm only about four meters from the kid.
(The doctor burns an edge for another pass to summon a force 5 earth elemental and send it to kill the cultists.)
I push those last few meters, sling the kid over my shoulder and reverse direction. I get an eyeful as Ajax is trying to distract the cultists who are hot on my tail. They all turn towards him. Shit. Ajax is not durable, but I only have time to worry about running and dodging.
I'm 11 meters from the door. There are seven guys on Ajax. He almost manages to hold them off, but the last one gets him in the gut and he falls, bleeding profusely.
A huge dark, dusty creature slides into our reality and turns it's gaze on the cultists. Oh God I hope that's the doctor's. If it's not it won't much matter what I do. I manage to make it to the door. The spirit doesn't even look at me.
Yorick, with Ajax slung over his shoulder, follows me out the door. We all dash down the stairs a few flights. When we don't hear any cultists pounding down the stairs after us we stop panting on the landing of floor 424. We stand still long enough to let the doctor make sure Ajax isn't going to bleed to death.
She manages to stabilize him and we hike down five more flights of stairs before the doctor looks at the rest of us. She does an initial clean up and throws some bandages and stitches on us. The kid is physically okay, but completely catatonic. I continue carrying him.
I'm not really clear on what happened next. I remember walking down and down the stairs and then suddenly black tentacled creatures were crawling out of the walls. It's hazy after that until everything came sharply back into focus with the doctor trying to do some sort of ritual hand gesture while throwing her whole weight against me to keep me from going over the edge of the railing and falling down the stairway to my death.
Yorick is similarly restraining Ajax, who isn't in very good shape either. The doctor clears him up with a quick spell. Once things have settled down, she explains that she thinks the cultists poisoned their weapons with some sort of hallucinogen.
After a short break to get ourselves calm again, we hike down below the 350th floor and then rest to let the doctor patch us up further. Fixing up Yorick backfires and the doctor ends up lying flat on her back with a bloody nose. We give her a few minutes to rest and then continue downstairs.
End of Session