Project MONUMENT 046: 6-7 August 2010, Paris, Clichy-sous-Bois
INTERNAL MESSAGING - LEVEL 4 CLEARANCE REQUIRED - EYES ONLY
To: O5-3/780
From: ADMINISTRATOR
Very well, M...but I've got my Eye on you.
INTERNAL MESSAGING - LEVEL 4 CLEARANCE REQUIRED - EYES ONLY
To: O5-3/780
From: SCP-780
Late on the night of August 6, Roland and Souna, along with Chul-soo, went to their meeting with Pythias, the Winter King, Roland with a large gift-wrapped package in tow. They entered the phone booth as they had been instructed, and when they did, changeling magic sealed them inside. The phone rang; Pythias was on the other end, and asked why the subjects wanted to speak to him. Souna did the talking as the subjects had agreed, and told him about the evidence that they had found implicating Lenore, the Autumn Queen, in the recent disappearances, and that they planned to accuse her of this at court on August 9. Pythias's first response was, "Why are you telling me this?", to which Roland responded that the subjects were afraid for their lives and wanted to make sure that someone knew what they'd learned in case something happened to them. Pythias seemed to know what the subjects were telling him already (in fact, he even knew that Lenore had not called the meeting of the Court, despite the subjects trying to make it look like she had) and spent a long time speculating as to their real motives. He even asked Souna whether it was true that the other subjects had once helped a Fetch kill an ogre, which Souna could plausibly deny having heard. However, he told them that his greatest concern was the safety of his people, and that the subjects did not need to fear that he would not take their accusations seriously at Court.
Roland and Souna returned to the catacombs to tell the others what had happened. Roland seemed disappointed by the outcome and said that he felt the meeting had gone poorly because Pythias had been more interested in the subjects' motives than in their evidence, and that they should have anticipated the questions he asked them. However, the fact that Pythias seemed very supportive of the need to find and stop the person working with the Gentry gave the subjects some hope that Court would go better and that they would be taken seriously with Pythias at least somewhat on their side. Souna did not bring up what Pythias had said to her about the ogre, for which the other subjects were no doubt grateful.
August 7 was the day of the block party that the subjects had arranged as a means of limiting access to the garden where they believed a Hedge gate to be located, hoping it would cause the agents to lead them to the person or group behind the disappearances. The night before, the subjects met in the catacombs to discuss their plans. While Robert would need to stay close to the garden itself due to the mayor's presence at the event, the other subjects would stay away from the activity, track the agents, and see where they went. They even decided to risk using one of themselves as bait in order to be fully certain of being able to follow the agents (the idea being that Souna could track whoever the agents grabbed).
The discussion then turned toward how to make themselves more tempting targets to the agents. Souna somewhat reluctantly shared that creatures such as the agents took sustenance from a magical food called "goblin fruits," and that such fruits could either be picked in the Hedge or purchased on the changeling black market, at a place called the Goblin Market. Since the subjects did not want to go into the Hedge under any circumstances, they got Souna to speak to Chul-soo and learn the location of Paris's Goblin Market. Though Chul-soo tried his best to dissuade Souna from going there, telling her that the individuals who were there would try to get the other subjects to make deals in which they would have to exchange non-monetary things of personal value (such as important memories, talents or abilities, or a firstborn child). Souna assured Chul-soo that she would not allow any of the subjects to make any deals at the Market other than the one necessary to get the goblin fruits, and that they would use something out of the box of strange items that had been given to them by SCP in order to make the deal (although, strangely, the subjects could not find the "genie lamp" anywhere in the catacombs when they looked for it).
Aðalsteinn, Bo, Roland, and Souna went to the Goblin Market together, entering by way of a manhole in a parking lot that was guarded by a goblin-like creature. They climbed down a latter and entered a large subterranean space with the look and feel of a very strange open-air bazaar. Souna saw a large table of goblin fruits toward the back of the market and focused on getting there and ignoring the other stalls - but the non-changeling subjects were all distracted by other items. Bo reluctantly forced herself to walk away from a merchant selling an elixir that he promised could erase painful memories, while Aðalsteinn was distracted by a stall that sold a wide variety of apparently magical artifacts. He noted that some of the artifacts had ghosts bound to the, and attempted to communicate with the ghosts, though most did not speak any language he knew, and the one he could talk to seemed to want only to be let out to destroy things. Souna urged Aðalsteinn to walk away, and he reluctantly complied.
But while Souna was pulling Aðalsteinn away from the table of artifacts, Roland was perusing a table of potions being sold by a woman who resembled a mangy, humanoid lion. Roland seemed particularly interested in a potion that the woman said could reverse the effects of up to 50 years of aging; though it might not extend a person's lifespan, they would certainly spend the remainder of their days spry, healthy, and youthful. In exchange for the potion, Roland offered the lion-woman the wrapped persent he had intended to give to the Winter King; when she opened it, the genie lamp was inside. The lion-woman liked the idea of trading the lamp for youth, but said that because youth was so valuable, she wanted something else to sweeten the deal - Roland's insanity. Roland immediately accepted, and the lion-woman took his insanity by clipping a piece of his hair. She then handed the potion to Roland and told him to drink it slowly. Before Souna could intervene, Roland had swallowed the potion, and fell to the ground shaking.
As the lion-woman opened the genie lamp (which contained a piece of paper that said, "Congratulations on activating your personal Wish-Granting Genie (tm)! *Patent Pending. Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery."), the subjects rushed to Roland's side just as he sat up and said he was fine. They were shocked to see that Roland now had the appearance and capabilities of a man in his early 20s. When he spoke, his strange accent had vanished, and he confirmed that he felt much more clear-headed. Bo and Souna were both furious at Roland for having made the deal, but since there was nothing they could do to change it, Souna said they should just continue on. They made their way to the goblin fruit seller, where Souna traded the jar of bugs from SCP and the token that had been taken from the ogre that revealed a changeling's true form for a variety of useful goblin fruits. The subjects then left the goblin market.
The next day, the street fair in Clichy-sous-Bois began just as planned. Robert stayed close to the mayor and the garden, while the other subjects wandered around other parts of the town. Aðalsteinn filled his pockets with goblin fruits to present a tempting target for the agents, while the other subjects watched from a distance. Eventually, some agents approached him, but instead of capturing him, they simply took the goblin fruits out of his pockets and left while consuming the fruits. The subjects did not know what to do until Robert texted them to say that he had just seen a woman behaving somewhat suspiciously sneak into a greenhouse in an area of the garden where no party-related events were happening. By Robert's description, Roland recognized the woman as Mohammad's sister Fatima. Realizing that they were not getting anywhere with the agents, the subjects hurried back to the garden.
Outside the garden, the mayor got up on stage to give a speech in which he formally announced his candidacy for President of France. Afterwards, he asked Robert to continue on as his chief of staff throughout his campaign, an honor that Robert gladly accepted. In the meantime, the other subjects sneaked into the greenhouse and heard voices coming from inside a strange, small room through a vine-covered archway that looked like a warm, cozy cave. They listened in a conversation in Arabic between Fatima and an older woman who Fatima referred to as Salwa. Roland translated the conversation, which consisted of Fatima sharing her worries and concerns about feeling cut off from her community and from France in general. She also said that she was starting to dislike Mohammad's tight grip on the community, and that she felt that his claims of peace between his people and normal humans were overly optimistic. It sounded to the subjects as though she had been affected by the agents' abilities. Salwa responded sympathetically.
The subjects could not get a good look at Salwa from where they were, so Souna crept closer with a camera until she could see that Salwa was actually an ogre with blood and gore covering most of her form. But Salwa saw Souna's reflection in a mirror and leapt out of her chair, grabbing a large femur from off the wall as Souna snapped a picture. She then shoved Fatima into a large, bubbling cauldron over her fire and began to attack the subjects. Roland ran over to the cauldron and saw that Fatima seemed to have fallen through the water and into a different place, so he jumped in after her. Souna saw him go in, grabbed a garden hose from nearby, and tossed it in after him so he would have a way to get out. Aðalsteinn and Bo then began to attack Salwa with their knife and gun, respectively. Since Bo's gun was not silenced, the shots could be heard outside where the mayor was gladhanding his constitutents, and a panicked stampede broke out. Robert took advantage of the chaos to run back to Sputnik 3 and start driving toward the greenhouse to help the others.
Inside the cauldron, Roland landed in what appeared to be a holding pen in the middle of a thick jungle. Dead spiders and other insects lay all around, along with evidence that people had been kept there for some time. Roland tried to coax Fatima to climb up the garden hose, but she resisted and he had to forcibly haul her out with him. In the greenhouse, the fight with Salwa was not going very well; Salwa was very tough and could keep going even after wounds that would have been fatal to a human, Souna's attempts at attacking her with magic were ineffectual, and both Aðalsteinn and Bo were steadily being worn down. Just as things looked most hopeless, Robert crashed through the side of the greenhouse in Sputnik 3 and ran over Salwa. He shouted for the others to get in and bring Fatima with them, which they did just as Salwa was getting up yet again. Robert ran over her a few more times for good measure, then drove away before the police got even more involved.
The subjects dropped Fatima off some distance from the garden and told her to go somewhere safe, since she seemed very dazed by her experience and they did not know what else to do. They then took the badly injured Aðalsteinn and Souna to Dr. Freund for treatment. The subjects had no idea what to do with the things they had learned or how this could possibly help them at Court on Monday, so they decided to go their separate ways for the night, rest and recover, and get together the next day to figure out what to do. When Robert returned to his apartment, he was just getting comfortable when his cell phone rang. At first, when he looked at who was calling, it said "DESTINY," but when he looked again it was his sister-in-law Genevre. She was frantic and told Robert that she had just seen her daughter Eloise, Robert's favorite niece, walk out the door to go meet some friends and vanish into thin air without a trace. However, there were a large amount of dead insects where she had been standing...
Robert immediately recognized this as a Hedge gateway that had unexpectedly opened - and that, despite the dangers, he had no choice but to attempt to rescue Eloise before she was taken to the land of the Gentry. He tried his best to calm Genevre and promised her that he would take care of it. Then he called the rest of the subjects, as well as Chul-soo, and told them what was happening. The others were quite alarmed to hear this news, and unsure of how they would deal with it, since most of them were very badly hurt and in no condition to enter the Hedge (though some of the injuries had been lessened with some of the goblin fruits that had been purchased). This was particularly driven home when Chul-soo said he could not take the chance of accompanying the subjects into the Hedge, since that would mean that everyone who knew what was really going on would be at risk, and no one would ever know the truth if none of them came back. Still, the subjects agreed with Robert that something had to be done - they were just not entirely certain how to do it.
INTERNAL MESSAGING - LEVEL 4 CLEARANCE REQUIRED - EYES ONLY
To: SCP-780
From: O5-3/780
Peach,
On second thought, I think that we should speak to each other as soon as possible. I don't know when I will get a better chance than this.
Malus Sylvestris
What a session this was! Even I was surprised with how it came out - largely because the entire goblin market/Roland regaining his youth sequence was complete improvisation. I had a feeling I was going to need to pull something unplanned out when the PCs started asking about goblin fruits, being that a goblin market is the logical place to look for such things, but we STs hadn't gotten around to talking about the nature of the goblin market at all. As I described it, I saw the opening to bring in a player goal that Noel had expressed to me at the beginning of the game about how he wanted Roland to regain his youth and (temporarily) overcome his mental instability, and have to deal with the fallout from both of those things later on in the story. We'd originally discussed it happening in a slightly different context than this, but the time was right, so we went there! Now to figure out where we take it...
My players also really stepped up their game, too. The PCs who didn't buy anything at the goblin market very believably portrayed temptation (always tough to do in an RPG), and Noel's beautifully wrapped genie lamp package had me cracking up (because no, I didn't know what was in the box when he presented it to me!).
I'm hoping we haven't lost too much momentum from our VERY lengthy break from this game (that's why you haven't seen this plot summary until just now). With a trip into the Hedge and some very important plot developments coming up, we didn't want to move forward unless all the players could be present. So we took Super Bowl Sunday and the following Sunday off because of player absences. We were intending to play last Sunday, but the foot of snow that was dumped on our city in just a few hours had other ideas. )c: And we'll also need to take next week off because of MarsCon, argh! Oh well - I'll just have to do everything I can to make this session extra awesome and keep the players excited for what comes next, whenever it may come...
What is this?
This entry was originally posted at http://gamerchick.dreamwidth.org/584607.html. You can comment on either journal. Number of comments on Dreamwidth:
To: O5-3/780
From: ADMINISTRATOR
Very well, M...but I've got my Eye on you.
INTERNAL MESSAGING - LEVEL 4 CLEARANCE REQUIRED - EYES ONLY
To: O5-3/780
From: SCP-780
Late on the night of August 6, Roland and Souna, along with Chul-soo, went to their meeting with Pythias, the Winter King, Roland with a large gift-wrapped package in tow. They entered the phone booth as they had been instructed, and when they did, changeling magic sealed them inside. The phone rang; Pythias was on the other end, and asked why the subjects wanted to speak to him. Souna did the talking as the subjects had agreed, and told him about the evidence that they had found implicating Lenore, the Autumn Queen, in the recent disappearances, and that they planned to accuse her of this at court on August 9. Pythias's first response was, "Why are you telling me this?", to which Roland responded that the subjects were afraid for their lives and wanted to make sure that someone knew what they'd learned in case something happened to them. Pythias seemed to know what the subjects were telling him already (in fact, he even knew that Lenore had not called the meeting of the Court, despite the subjects trying to make it look like she had) and spent a long time speculating as to their real motives. He even asked Souna whether it was true that the other subjects had once helped a Fetch kill an ogre, which Souna could plausibly deny having heard. However, he told them that his greatest concern was the safety of his people, and that the subjects did not need to fear that he would not take their accusations seriously at Court.
Roland and Souna returned to the catacombs to tell the others what had happened. Roland seemed disappointed by the outcome and said that he felt the meeting had gone poorly because Pythias had been more interested in the subjects' motives than in their evidence, and that they should have anticipated the questions he asked them. However, the fact that Pythias seemed very supportive of the need to find and stop the person working with the Gentry gave the subjects some hope that Court would go better and that they would be taken seriously with Pythias at least somewhat on their side. Souna did not bring up what Pythias had said to her about the ogre, for which the other subjects were no doubt grateful.
August 7 was the day of the block party that the subjects had arranged as a means of limiting access to the garden where they believed a Hedge gate to be located, hoping it would cause the agents to lead them to the person or group behind the disappearances. The night before, the subjects met in the catacombs to discuss their plans. While Robert would need to stay close to the garden itself due to the mayor's presence at the event, the other subjects would stay away from the activity, track the agents, and see where they went. They even decided to risk using one of themselves as bait in order to be fully certain of being able to follow the agents (the idea being that Souna could track whoever the agents grabbed).
The discussion then turned toward how to make themselves more tempting targets to the agents. Souna somewhat reluctantly shared that creatures such as the agents took sustenance from a magical food called "goblin fruits," and that such fruits could either be picked in the Hedge or purchased on the changeling black market, at a place called the Goblin Market. Since the subjects did not want to go into the Hedge under any circumstances, they got Souna to speak to Chul-soo and learn the location of Paris's Goblin Market. Though Chul-soo tried his best to dissuade Souna from going there, telling her that the individuals who were there would try to get the other subjects to make deals in which they would have to exchange non-monetary things of personal value (such as important memories, talents or abilities, or a firstborn child). Souna assured Chul-soo that she would not allow any of the subjects to make any deals at the Market other than the one necessary to get the goblin fruits, and that they would use something out of the box of strange items that had been given to them by SCP in order to make the deal (although, strangely, the subjects could not find the "genie lamp" anywhere in the catacombs when they looked for it).
Aðalsteinn, Bo, Roland, and Souna went to the Goblin Market together, entering by way of a manhole in a parking lot that was guarded by a goblin-like creature. They climbed down a latter and entered a large subterranean space with the look and feel of a very strange open-air bazaar. Souna saw a large table of goblin fruits toward the back of the market and focused on getting there and ignoring the other stalls - but the non-changeling subjects were all distracted by other items. Bo reluctantly forced herself to walk away from a merchant selling an elixir that he promised could erase painful memories, while Aðalsteinn was distracted by a stall that sold a wide variety of apparently magical artifacts. He noted that some of the artifacts had ghosts bound to the, and attempted to communicate with the ghosts, though most did not speak any language he knew, and the one he could talk to seemed to want only to be let out to destroy things. Souna urged Aðalsteinn to walk away, and he reluctantly complied.
But while Souna was pulling Aðalsteinn away from the table of artifacts, Roland was perusing a table of potions being sold by a woman who resembled a mangy, humanoid lion. Roland seemed particularly interested in a potion that the woman said could reverse the effects of up to 50 years of aging; though it might not extend a person's lifespan, they would certainly spend the remainder of their days spry, healthy, and youthful. In exchange for the potion, Roland offered the lion-woman the wrapped persent he had intended to give to the Winter King; when she opened it, the genie lamp was inside. The lion-woman liked the idea of trading the lamp for youth, but said that because youth was so valuable, she wanted something else to sweeten the deal - Roland's insanity. Roland immediately accepted, and the lion-woman took his insanity by clipping a piece of his hair. She then handed the potion to Roland and told him to drink it slowly. Before Souna could intervene, Roland had swallowed the potion, and fell to the ground shaking.
As the lion-woman opened the genie lamp (which contained a piece of paper that said, "Congratulations on activating your personal Wish-Granting Genie (tm)! *Patent Pending. Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery."), the subjects rushed to Roland's side just as he sat up and said he was fine. They were shocked to see that Roland now had the appearance and capabilities of a man in his early 20s. When he spoke, his strange accent had vanished, and he confirmed that he felt much more clear-headed. Bo and Souna were both furious at Roland for having made the deal, but since there was nothing they could do to change it, Souna said they should just continue on. They made their way to the goblin fruit seller, where Souna traded the jar of bugs from SCP and the token that had been taken from the ogre that revealed a changeling's true form for a variety of useful goblin fruits. The subjects then left the goblin market.
The next day, the street fair in Clichy-sous-Bois began just as planned. Robert stayed close to the mayor and the garden, while the other subjects wandered around other parts of the town. Aðalsteinn filled his pockets with goblin fruits to present a tempting target for the agents, while the other subjects watched from a distance. Eventually, some agents approached him, but instead of capturing him, they simply took the goblin fruits out of his pockets and left while consuming the fruits. The subjects did not know what to do until Robert texted them to say that he had just seen a woman behaving somewhat suspiciously sneak into a greenhouse in an area of the garden where no party-related events were happening. By Robert's description, Roland recognized the woman as Mohammad's sister Fatima. Realizing that they were not getting anywhere with the agents, the subjects hurried back to the garden.
Outside the garden, the mayor got up on stage to give a speech in which he formally announced his candidacy for President of France. Afterwards, he asked Robert to continue on as his chief of staff throughout his campaign, an honor that Robert gladly accepted. In the meantime, the other subjects sneaked into the greenhouse and heard voices coming from inside a strange, small room through a vine-covered archway that looked like a warm, cozy cave. They listened in a conversation in Arabic between Fatima and an older woman who Fatima referred to as Salwa. Roland translated the conversation, which consisted of Fatima sharing her worries and concerns about feeling cut off from her community and from France in general. She also said that she was starting to dislike Mohammad's tight grip on the community, and that she felt that his claims of peace between his people and normal humans were overly optimistic. It sounded to the subjects as though she had been affected by the agents' abilities. Salwa responded sympathetically.
The subjects could not get a good look at Salwa from where they were, so Souna crept closer with a camera until she could see that Salwa was actually an ogre with blood and gore covering most of her form. But Salwa saw Souna's reflection in a mirror and leapt out of her chair, grabbing a large femur from off the wall as Souna snapped a picture. She then shoved Fatima into a large, bubbling cauldron over her fire and began to attack the subjects. Roland ran over to the cauldron and saw that Fatima seemed to have fallen through the water and into a different place, so he jumped in after her. Souna saw him go in, grabbed a garden hose from nearby, and tossed it in after him so he would have a way to get out. Aðalsteinn and Bo then began to attack Salwa with their knife and gun, respectively. Since Bo's gun was not silenced, the shots could be heard outside where the mayor was gladhanding his constitutents, and a panicked stampede broke out. Robert took advantage of the chaos to run back to Sputnik 3 and start driving toward the greenhouse to help the others.
Inside the cauldron, Roland landed in what appeared to be a holding pen in the middle of a thick jungle. Dead spiders and other insects lay all around, along with evidence that people had been kept there for some time. Roland tried to coax Fatima to climb up the garden hose, but she resisted and he had to forcibly haul her out with him. In the greenhouse, the fight with Salwa was not going very well; Salwa was very tough and could keep going even after wounds that would have been fatal to a human, Souna's attempts at attacking her with magic were ineffectual, and both Aðalsteinn and Bo were steadily being worn down. Just as things looked most hopeless, Robert crashed through the side of the greenhouse in Sputnik 3 and ran over Salwa. He shouted for the others to get in and bring Fatima with them, which they did just as Salwa was getting up yet again. Robert ran over her a few more times for good measure, then drove away before the police got even more involved.
The subjects dropped Fatima off some distance from the garden and told her to go somewhere safe, since she seemed very dazed by her experience and they did not know what else to do. They then took the badly injured Aðalsteinn and Souna to Dr. Freund for treatment. The subjects had no idea what to do with the things they had learned or how this could possibly help them at Court on Monday, so they decided to go their separate ways for the night, rest and recover, and get together the next day to figure out what to do. When Robert returned to his apartment, he was just getting comfortable when his cell phone rang. At first, when he looked at who was calling, it said "DESTINY," but when he looked again it was his sister-in-law Genevre. She was frantic and told Robert that she had just seen her daughter Eloise, Robert's favorite niece, walk out the door to go meet some friends and vanish into thin air without a trace. However, there were a large amount of dead insects where she had been standing...
Robert immediately recognized this as a Hedge gateway that had unexpectedly opened - and that, despite the dangers, he had no choice but to attempt to rescue Eloise before she was taken to the land of the Gentry. He tried his best to calm Genevre and promised her that he would take care of it. Then he called the rest of the subjects, as well as Chul-soo, and told them what was happening. The others were quite alarmed to hear this news, and unsure of how they would deal with it, since most of them were very badly hurt and in no condition to enter the Hedge (though some of the injuries had been lessened with some of the goblin fruits that had been purchased). This was particularly driven home when Chul-soo said he could not take the chance of accompanying the subjects into the Hedge, since that would mean that everyone who knew what was really going on would be at risk, and no one would ever know the truth if none of them came back. Still, the subjects agreed with Robert that something had to be done - they were just not entirely certain how to do it.
INTERNAL MESSAGING - LEVEL 4 CLEARANCE REQUIRED - EYES ONLY
To: SCP-780
From: O5-3/780
Peach,
On second thought, I think that we should speak to each other as soon as possible. I don't know when I will get a better chance than this.
Malus Sylvestris
What a session this was! Even I was surprised with how it came out - largely because the entire goblin market/Roland regaining his youth sequence was complete improvisation. I had a feeling I was going to need to pull something unplanned out when the PCs started asking about goblin fruits, being that a goblin market is the logical place to look for such things, but we STs hadn't gotten around to talking about the nature of the goblin market at all. As I described it, I saw the opening to bring in a player goal that Noel had expressed to me at the beginning of the game about how he wanted Roland to regain his youth and (temporarily) overcome his mental instability, and have to deal with the fallout from both of those things later on in the story. We'd originally discussed it happening in a slightly different context than this, but the time was right, so we went there! Now to figure out where we take it...
My players also really stepped up their game, too. The PCs who didn't buy anything at the goblin market very believably portrayed temptation (always tough to do in an RPG), and Noel's beautifully wrapped genie lamp package had me cracking up (because no, I didn't know what was in the box when he presented it to me!).
I'm hoping we haven't lost too much momentum from our VERY lengthy break from this game (that's why you haven't seen this plot summary until just now). With a trip into the Hedge and some very important plot developments coming up, we didn't want to move forward unless all the players could be present. So we took Super Bowl Sunday and the following Sunday off because of player absences. We were intending to play last Sunday, but the foot of snow that was dumped on our city in just a few hours had other ideas. )c: And we'll also need to take next week off because of MarsCon, argh! Oh well - I'll just have to do everything I can to make this session extra awesome and keep the players excited for what comes next, whenever it may come...
What is this?
This entry was originally posted at http://gamerchick.dreamwidth.org/584607.html. You can comment on either journal. Number of comments on Dreamwidth: