Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Six

Session six was harder on the players than it was on me. We had a full house, which is a rarity in Cow Town compared to Coal City. I got to use the first custom dungeon generator I made for Esoteric Enterprises.

The characters:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Acrasia, Dream of Hunger (Spook Lvl 3)
• Dwayne Brutananadilewski, Big Guy & Rock (Bodyguard, Lvl 2)
• Elizabeth West the Necromancer (Occultist Lvl 1)
• Thurston East, Fragile Cyberneticist (Doctor Lvl 1)

Cassie got word from the loan sharking operation that some dad in the suburbs was holding out on her. She sent Hatchet Hands Fred to deal with the problem, removing the need to resolve it herself. Acrasia kick started a bootlegging operation, recruiting a bunch of drug addicts from the K-12 school for her crew.

The job: meet up with the Seekers of the Path, and figure out what they want done about the Sink, which rumor has it is about to kill everyone.

Last time they talked with the Seekers, the Occultists told them a better way to get to the hideout: the ugly painting on the second floor of Flowers Coffee. The painting was ugly, all right. A couple barns in the middle of a field. They tried taking the painting off the wall, leaving notes behind it, and exploring the area for secret doors. Then they tried climbing through the painting, into the field on the other side.

They went around behind the two barns, one red and one black. The black barn was nailed closed, with a big DO NOT ENTER painted in letters ten feet high on the door. The red barn had an occult assistant brewing a strange potion in a still. He told them to go down the stairs to the guest rooms.

The guest rooms were underground, in the real world. That's what Thurston figured out by looking at the weak signal his phone was getting. They were nice, but they were also empty. There was only one unlocked door. It took them into a room with a huge one way mirror - the other side of the mural in the Occultists' lobby. Two occult librarians greeted them. Elizabeth asked if she could access the Seekers' repository of tomes. They promised that if she did this job for them, they'd open up the books, literally and figuratively.

The Seekers of the Path explained that the Sink was the seed of an egregore or aquastor, formed from the fear of millions of slaughtered animals, whose semiliquid remains had all been poured into the same reeking pit. The Vampires were probably worshipping the thing, hoping to cash in when it turned the tables humans were the ones kept in cages for their blood. In the meantime, the only way to slow it down was to stop the flow of meat into the Sink.

The target was Plant 7, the largest United Meat Train abattoir in Cow Town. Over the last two weeks, the plant's production of useful meat products had fallen to zero, but its output of waste meat into the Sink had increased commensurately. Evidence of deliberate feeding. The Seekers of the Path would pay 2,000 dollars to shut down production at the plant.

The team left the way they'd come in, to plan their attack.

• Elizabeth went to the United Meat Train HQ and pretended to fill out a job application. She gathered information on Plant 7 while she was there. They were hiring line workers, but didn't have any technical or administrative personnel. Unlike all the other plants, number 7 had a strict NDA and an elaborate background check required. Elizabeth left without putting her name in, careful to avoid the security cameras on the way out.
• Thurston went back to the safehouse and developed two devices for the heist: an electromagnetic pulse bomb to destroy electronic systems, and an ammonia-bleach binary explosive that would produce mustard gas when detonated remotely. 
• Cassie, Acrasia and Dwayne went to surveil the plant directly. They made some disturbing discoveries.
• Aside from the trucks delivering cattle, nobody seemed to come in or out of the plant
• There was a security perimeter OUTSIDE the plant. The guards were all watching to make sure nothing escaped, along with a bunch of suits and scientists watching the plant and taking notes
• The plant wasn't sending out ANY packed meat. It was all going through the waste outflow pipe into the sink

The team formulated a plan to infiltrate and disable Plant 7. They would hijack a semi truck shipping cows from a ranch to the plant, put the mustard gas bomb inside one of the cows, deliver the cows, set the bomb off when the cow went inside, then rush in and do as much damage as possible before escaping.

The first step was hijacking the truck. They identified a route far away from the town and parked the van in the road, pretending it had broken down. It was twilight and the trucker coming down the road didn't see the van until the last second. He jerked the truck off the road, swiping the van with his trailer and knocking it into a ditch. Not a catastrophic collision. Thurston rushed up to apologize to the driver. Dwayne rushed up to club him senseless. The driver ran and Cassie dropped him with a knife to the back. Thurston stopped him from bleeding to death, and they tied him up and dumped him in a nearby field. Thurston tried and failed to get the semi truck operable, removing several important components from the van to effect the repairs.

With no prospect of getting the truck up and running, they decided to modify the plan. All they had to do was hide the bomb in one of the cows (who were still in the semi trailer) and call in the accident. Without the driver present, there would be no evidence that they had staged an attempted hijacking. Another truck would be called up to deliver the cow trailer, and the bomb would make it into the abattoir after all. Dwayne would call AAA to come repair the van and the rest of the gang could Uber home.

It worked like a charm, except for a couple problems

• The call to AAA would place them at the scene of the crime when the driver (or his body) was eventually discovered
• Going in separately from the cow with the bomb meant they wouldn't be able to track it into the abattoir

The players got back to town well before the trailer was picked up. Acrasia took the detonator for the gas bomb and climbed over the wall to scout Abattoir 7, while the rest of the team waited outside for the trailer with the bomb cow to arrive. Inside the perimeter wall, there were three entrances to the slaughterhouse. The loading dock where the cows went in, an employees only door, and the waste outflow pipe where the reeking discharge went into the sink. The employee entrance was locked, so Acrasia climbed onto the roof to look for an alternate entrance. She found the air vent of a big HVAC unit, and climbed down it into a cold storage room.

The meat locker was home to two slaughterhouse workers, frantically shuttling cuts of beef through the room. By crawling on the ceiling, Acrasia escaped their notice as she explored. She mapped out the slaughterhouse workflow, the location of the main office, the security office (which was filled with horrible flesh hulks) and the most important machines. Outside, the surveillance team noted the arrival of the trailer containing the Trojan cow. Unfortunately, they had no way to communicate this to Acrasia, who hadn't brought a phone.

Acrasia made it all the way to the killing floor itself before being caught in the act by a meat boss. The beefy foreman advanced on her with a chainsaw, right as one of the workers sunk a hook into a fresh kill that stank of ammonia and bleach. Acrasia mashed the detonator and ran, not waiting to see if her gas mask would keep her comfortable through the cloud of mustine.

(I tracked the movement of the bomb-cow through the slaughterhouse. Its arrival on the killing floor at the same time as Acrasia was a fortuitous coincidence)

The cloud of blistering gas triggered a stampede of cattle out the loading dock. Acrasia climbed over them and out of the abattoir, and back over the wall to summon the rest of the group. Thurston pulled the van around the front of the abattoir, where a pair of guards and a UMT executive were watching the stampede with interest. The players pretended to be a maintenance crew, but the suit was adamant that nobody was allowed in except delivery trucks. Thurston pretended to be a meat cultist, drawn to the abattoir, in order to pique her scientific curiosity. The exec smiled and allowed them to enter the compound.

They parked the van in the delivery area. The outward flow of cattle made entry through the loading dock an unlikely proposition. The employees only door was locked, and defeated multiple attempts to batter it down. Acrasia climbed back onto the roof, and dropped a rope for the rest of the team. That same rope dropped into the HVAC unit allowed them entry to the cold storage room.

This immediately started a fight with the pair of slaughterhouse workers in the cold storage area, who were no longer fucking around after the gas bomb went off. A hail of bullets and sharp objects killed them before they could flee into the adjoining office. Dwanye charged ahead and breached the room, followed by the rest of the team. Except for Thurston, who stayed behind to sabotage the HVAC unit.

(I hate group initiative. I say "has everyone gone?" get no response, begin to describe the NPCs' actions, then a player shouts "WAIT! I haven't gone yet!" and then the cycle starts over)

The office was occupied by a meat boss and a flesh hulk. The pair unleashed hell on the players, pummeling and slashing them to ribbons and dealing Dwayne a mortal wound. With nothing left to lose, Dwayne heroically absorbed blow after blow, shielding his friends from further damage. Which helped them until three more flesh hulks shambled into the room. They knocked him unconscious and pulped him with a hail of blows.

(Dwayne using his bodyguard power to take blows for the rest of the team after he rolled "Dead Man Walking" on the horrible wounds table was an outstanding move. He saved the rest of the team from a similar fate)

In the cold storage room, Thurston wrecked the meat transport system by jamming it and then setting it to maximum speed, stripping the teeth off the gears. A pair of meat cultists burst out of an adjoining maintenance room, but Thurston convinced them he wasn't a threat, and the fight was elsewhere. Which was good, because Cassie and Elizabeth came running back into the meat locker, while Acrasia held the hallway against the meat boss and meat monsters. Thurston tossed Acrasia the EMP and fled up the rope into the HVAC unit, followed by Elizabeth and Cassie.

Alone, pursued by monsters and with a mission to accomplish, Acrasia took the EMP and went looking for things to break. She climbed onto the ceiling and went back to the bone crushing machine, the most important looking machine she'd found yet. The EMP fried its electronics and shut it down completely. With the bone crusher disabled, another fleshy hum was audible from the room to the South. Acrasia snuck in to see what the fuss was: a giant sausage grinder, large enough to swallow up a whole animal, tended by a single worker. Intending to disable it, Acrasia dropped down from the ceiling and swung at the unsuspecting employee on the catwalk.

Swung and lost her balance.

Acrasia fell off the platform, catching herself on the ledge before she went into the teeth of the grinder.

The slaughterhouse worker stomped on her fingers and she fell in.

(Acrasia and Dwayne were the MVPs this session, sacrificing themselves to protect the team and accomplish the mission. I later worried that Acrasia should have been able to just crawl under the catwalk with her spider climb powers, but the player felt the death was thematically fitting. Acrasia was a fairy born from a dream of gnashing teeth, and she died in a dream of gnashing teeth)

Outside, the three survivors ditched the van and used the grappling hook to climb over the wall. They walked to the nearest bus stop for egress. The bus arrived and disgorged six knife wielding drug addicts, who wanted to know where Acrasia was. She'd called them up and told them about a big score she needed help with. Thurston made something up to get rid of them. He didn't know what actually happened to her.

(I lost my internet connection and had to rush through the rest of the session on my phone)

The Occultists weren't thrilled with the results. The flow of meat out of the plant had stopped, but the team couldn't even describe what it was they'd done, other than release mustard gas and break one of the transport racks. Without knowing how long the plant would be out of commission, the Seekers only authorized half payment. But they offered the team free use of their dungeon entrance in the future, and access to their occult library.

The Chthonicists' mission to rescue the Light Market from the vampires was a success, but Carl the Rock (Dwayne's brother) was killed in an ambush, along with a couple other people from the Exploration project.

The players are now under investigation by both United Meat Train and their janissaries in the Cow Town Police.

Exciting developments for next session!