Esoteric Enterprises - Session Eleven, Part One

The final session! I opened up registration for six players instead of the usual five, so that nobody had to miss the finale due to slot restrictions.

In attendance:

• Johan Cilliers, Impulsive “Antiquities Dealer” & Interdimensional Parasite Host (Mystic, Level 5)
• Cobb "Jury-rigged immortality is still immortality" Taylor (Doctor, Level 5)
• Devin Skull “The Punk Bard” previously of LudiCURSED (Mystic, Level 5)
• Eileen "Last Rat" Walter (Bodyguard, Level 4)
• Tristan Vedhart, Babyfaced "Artist" & Most Excellent Brain (Explorer, Level 4)
• Dawn Unseelie, Third Generation Red Cap (Spook, Level 1)

The Kimeras spent the week holed up in Eileen's studio apartment, while Coal City slowly rebuilt itself. It was cramped, until Cobb knocked a hole through the wall into the apartment next door. The neighbors wouldn't mind - they had all fled the city, fearing flooding and neverending magical gang warfare. He covered the interior with plastic wrap, with a fiction of preserving it immaculately so that nothing would be amiss when they returned. Then he set up his lab in there, and that went out the window.

The Kimeras spent the week stocking up on supplies for the final confrontation. Liza the Sharp Objects and her gang of teenage delinquents, the Sharp Objects, served as shoppers and couriers. They even retrieved Zeke's stash for the Kimeras, only taking a modest cut off the top for their troubles. Along with his will.

If you guys are reading this note, then my second biggest fear has come true and I died... I want you guys to know its okay. I've never really felt alive until I joined our little gang that would become Kaldron's Kimeras, and I have enjoyed every second I get to spend with you guys. With my grandma sick with alzhemiers and my parents dead you guys are the only family I have. Hopefully I went out in a cool way so you have a cool story to tell. Try not to be sad for to long, if you can please celebrate me and Kaldron's lives and the times we shared, and remember us often so we remind you of the ideals and values our group holds and that you should be careful and enjoy the time you have.

Whatever financial assets I have are to be split amongst the surviving members of Kaldron's Kimeras, along with my er... book collection and notes, and a bottle of scotch I have hidden in my desk. Plus any of my other possessions that are recovered or found in my apartment. Also please show the rest of the Kimeras this note.

I love you guys
-Zeke Witwer 'The Delayer'

 The Kimeras bought spare parts to replace their lost organs. A new leg for Tristan. New skin, taken off a mimic, to replace Johan's melty aboleth skin. Cobb flubbed the installation, rather than duplicating the mimic's ability to change its skin color at will, Johan's skin became a living mood ring, changing according to his emotional state. Totally beyond his control.

(Normally I hate huge shopping trips, but this was totally appropriate. The Kimeras had a lot of money to burn and the game world was telling them that there was no turning back once they walked out that door)

They also loaded up on guns, armor, and magic items. With the smugglers on the run and the goblin market shuttered, the artifacts trade was in disarray, but Devin used his Locate Objects spell to pinpoint the remaining collections in the city. He sent the Sharp Objects out to buy the two artifacts that caught his attention: a magic camera that froze its subjects in place with every shot, and a briefcase that made people unwilling to attack its carrier.

(The Kimeras would use the camera to great effect, but I totally forgot about the briefcase. My fault)

The surviving Red Caps let slip that they were sending someone over. Dawn Unseelie was supposed to be Zeke's fiance, under the terms of the arranged marriage. She was there to get revenge on the MIBs and the Aboleth, and to see if any of the other Kimeras were a suitable match for her.  As a third generation Red Cap, she didn't have all the powers her parents did, but she was a wizard with a blade.

She arrived just ahead of Rhonda, one of Liza's teenage delinquents. Rhonda came running in, tossed down her package, and told the Kimeras there were a bunch of tattooed gangsters in vests coming up. Half the Kimeras went across the hall and slipped into one of the empty apartments to set up an ambush, while the rest of the gang hid in Eileen's apartment to complete the pincer movement. Devin waited in the hall to bait the trap.

Eight surviving Fat Buddhas came down the hall. Their eyes were glazed over and their movements were synchronized to an unsettling degree. Like the goons who followed the hypnotist around. A gease on all of them.

Devin ducked into Eileen's apartment before the goons opened fire. They stacked up around the door and tried to unlock it with a volley of pistol fire. This is a bad idea that they would know not to do if they were in their right minds, but they were under a magical compulsion to get inside. One of them took a bullet to the femoral artery from a riccochet and went down. The remaining seven emptied their magazines and got the lock off the door through brute force.

The Kimeras attacked from three sides - the apartment across the hall, Eileen's apartment, and the apartment Cobb mouseholed into. The pincer movement caught the Buddhas in a kill box, the Kimeras fired a volley and charged in with sharp and blunt instruments. The Buddhas screamed and pleaded that they weren't doing this of their own accord - it was a gease, please knock us out or something. The Kimeras hacked away until all the final surviving Buddha broke and ran. The Aboleth's curse hit him as he violated the gease, turning his skin into clear mucous that slid off him in a sticky mess.

(In Esoteric Enterprises, surprise attacks deal damage directly to Flesh, but don't grant any special bonus to hit. Hypothetically if you sneak up on someone you have a chance to take the aim action and get a bonus to your chance to hit, maybe I'll remind people of that in the future)

The Kimeras tossed the surviving Buddha in the bathtub of the apartment to stop him from melting. The Buddhas' presence was troubling. It meant the Leviathan cult knew where they were. They grabbed their gear and piled into the used van that the Sharp Objects had bought for them and left in a hurry.

The city was patrolled by Provincial Guard troops with helmets, plate carriers and rifles. None of them stopped the van as the Kimeras drove across the little bridge to the West Side, where the surviving Red Caps were holed up in the abandoned Ursus Fitness building. They parked the car in the garage and took a maintenance door to the second floor.

The Red Caps had taken over the smoothie shop on the upper level of the gym. There were two second generation hoods (the barkeeps from the Blood For Sex, Dawn's aunt and uncle), and eight third generation thugs left. They asked if it was time for revenge and seizing control of the underworld at knifepoint. The Kimeras debated how to do this.

The Men in Black and the Aboleth were the big threats. The Kimeras worried if they chose one to fight, the other would attack them once the battle was won, when they were at their weakest. The MIBs had a sensor network that let them track anything moving in the underworld. The Kimeras knew where the sensors were, because they placed them themselves. One of the sensors was positioned in an Underworld Frontier near the Leviathan cult's sewer cluster, where Johan had escaped from the previous week.

The Kimeras decided to hit the sensor, then continue to the Aboleth's hideout and kill it. They'd meet the Red Caps at the warehouse entrance on the East Side, since the ruins of Vinculum and the Blood For Sex were sure to be watched by the police.