(Continued from part one)
Ezzy wasn't tending bar at Vinculum. The Kimeras needed to find her to get paid. The Domovoi was still sitting on the counter, helping himself to a pint of "liquid bread". He told them that Ezzy had left with some of the other earings. Headed for the Armed Arms hotel, downtown. The Kimeras realized something big was happening at the hotel. Mara the Mercenary had offered them a job bodyguarding a client there. They decided to throw themselves into the fight on the Ponda Ray side, find Ezzy and get paid.
There were gunshots coming from inside the hotel. Smoke poured out of the windows where something had set the interior on fire. Devin used his electrical sense to scan the building for creatures. He spotted the electrical signature of a lithic creature squirming up the staircase on the third floor, along with a massive gamma ray emitter.
The Kimeras entered the building through the service door, which had been bored open by the passage of a large stone creature. They ascended the stairs and ran into the Ponda Ray goons, who were staying well behind the rock monsters. The mafia greaseballs had plate carriers and kevlar over their polo shirts and bowling slacks. Ezzy came down the stairs to deal with the Kimeras. She had lost the scarf covering her eye. Behind it was a hole, which went through the eye socket and out the back of her head. She pointed out that they had visitors. A group of hooded figures was hurrying up the stairs after the Kimeras, a couple stories down. She tossed a grenade down the stairwell to thin the herd. The survivors rushed them.
The Kimeras opened fire into the mass of cultists. They quickly realized that the strange, squid hooded gangsters were using illusion magic to screen their advance and hide their positions. Eileen identified the genuine article among the mirror images. Devin leaped down the stairwell and killed him with his magic hammer. The cultists gathered their magic power together for a sleep spell, but only succeeded in dropping Devin. The Kimeras and Ezzy bludgeoned, hacked, tazed and shot the rest, until the only survivor broke and ran. The enterprising Kimeras scrounged a few credit cards off the dead squid cultists, then followed the rest of the mobsters up to the top floor.
The mafia goons were stacked up on the landing. Down the hall, a squid made of stone (the Lithic Emissary Anticline) and a horrible glowing blue man-centipede were preparing to breach a hotel room. The squid peeled off the door and was met with a hail of gunfire. Both creatures rushed into the room. The shooting stopped. A remora-faced vampire flew out into the hallway, teeth dripping with the stone squid's magma blood. The Ponda Rays and the Kimeras opened fire, killing the monstrosity in a hail of bullets and shotshells.
Lieutenant Lenny was there. He was honest with the Kimeras: he didn't expect them to survive after giving the message to the Fat Suns. But they did, and a job was a job. He peeled 1,500 dollars off his wad and handed it over. Then he advised the Kimeras to get the hell out, before the cops showed up. They took his advice.
As usual, the group had no car to escape in. They made their escape on foot. As usual, this got them in trouble. A black Ford Taurus pulled up. Agent Karla rolled the window down. The MIBs wanted to talk to the Kimeras. With Karla, Kid and the Masked Man in the car, they had space for two people. Tristan volunteered for a debrief, and Eileen came with as his bodyguard. The rest of the Kimeras headed to the Blood For Sex for a victory drink. The MIBs stopped by Nando's before heading South into the old warehouse district, to a safehouse they'd set up in a defunct smelter.
The MIBs were happy with how the Kimeras handled the paradox beasts. The crab had flung the Masked Man a full week into the future using its time powers, and he had only just gotten back. They wanted to know about the courier job for the Ponda Rays. They were very unhappy about the Kimeras releasing an infoweapon into the underground. They admonished them about the extreme danger of infectious infoware, which could easily spread to the city above and become a major information plague. Then they took their statements about the shootout in the hotel. They were likewise bothered that the lithics were operating above ground. Then they let the Kimeras go.
Eileen and Tristan met Cobb, Zeke and Devin at the Blood For Sex. They spent a couple hours drinking and having a nice time, counting up their earnings from the night. They left with smiles on their faces, ready to go home and sleep.
It was a fuckin' ambush.
The four shooters on the rooftops around them waited until they were well away from the Blood For Sex before firing, ensuring the group couldn't just duck back into the club. The initial volley tagged Eileen and sent everyone running for cover. Tristan dashed back into the club and shouted for help, calling in the marker that the gang had earned from the Red Caps several sessions ago. Eileen sprayed her looted MP5 at the rooftops to suppress the shooters, but one of them managed to tag Devin anyway.
As his head disintegrated around the 7.62 by 39mm projectile, the rock star lashed out with his magic hammer, striking a rat among the trashbags and killing it. He was restored to life, barely clinging to existence but alive nonetheless.
(The player had very deliberately stated he was taking cover in whichever alley had trash in it. The magic hammer he found in the ancient tombs had a special ability that gave the user one last attack when they were killed, and restored them to life with 1 Flesh point if they successfully killed something with that final hit.)
Zeke joined in with his FAL and pinned the remaining shooters. Something pushed past him out the door of the club. He saw, for a second, a tiny, long armed creature in a red hat, swiftly scaling the side of the building. There were gunshots, a shout cut off by a wet, meat slicing sound. Five Red Caps had stolen out of the club, responding to the Kimera's call for help. The shooters didn't stand a chance.
When the Kimeras scaled the fire escape to the top of the building, the Red Caps were waiting for them. Their hats were soaked with blood, which was gushing from the filleted corpse of a Fat Sun mercenary. The four shooters were the survivors from the hotel and the limestone caves, come for revenge on the Kimeras. They'd almost gotten it too.
The money from the mercenaries' rifles and wallets added up to a tidy sum for the Kimeras. They used their downtime after the mission on a shopping expedition, picking up armor, gas masks, and a new spellbook. They'd killed off their oldest friends in Coal City, the Fat Suns, but also made a powerful new ally in the Ponda Rays. Hopefully it was the right trade.
Some of the combats got a little overlong, with too many NPCs shooting at each other or casting spells. The players said they enjoyed it anyway.
I expected the Leviathan cultists to be a little tougher, but their massed use of the Sleep spell is only really a "Gnome With a Wand of Death" versus low level PCs. Chalk it up to the cultists underestimating the Kimeras. Not a mistake they'll make twice.
NPC magic users are too much like Pathfinder or 5E, with big spell lists that send the DM careening across the book to find all the necessary information to run them. One of the smart things the new edition of Delta Green did was abandon Call of Cthulhu's "this monster has an INT test's chance to know X random spells" and just give all the monsters a small list of curated abilities that fits their theme and can all be read in one place. But then they fucked it up by going back and giving a bunch of them spell lists anyway. This is a teaching moment for myself. A smaller list of more interesting abilities is better than a huge list that has to be referenced and offers no guidance for what the enemy should do.
The players have repeatedly stated they don't expect Coal City to last more than a couple weeks, with all the monsters, magic, shootouts and terrorist attacks. Hopefully I can come up with an appropriately apocalyptic ending. Maybe next week. Only one way to find out.
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