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THE POWER OF PUNISHMENT LAY on the cobblestones of a dirty alley. This, as her eyes blinked open, was the first thing she could bring into focus; grimy stones, bits of refuse settled against the juncture of a building's wall and the ground.

Her cheek was pressed against the cobblestones as well, which meant she was lying on her stomach with her back exposed to --

She rolled over, blinking against the noontime sun that snuck through the rooftop barriers overhead to stab at her eyes. The alleyway was dank and old (which seemed familiar) and thick with the stink of molding trash. (That seemed familiar too, although somehow for a different reason.)

She sat up, resting her arms on her knees. She was wearing slacks, a jacket. Her knuckles were scraped and bruised. A taxicab drove by the mouth of the alley several dozen yards away and she realised she was in London.

She didn’t know how she knew it was London, what or where London was, or why it filled her with a certain relief, but she knew that she knew and she knew she was not wrong.

Forcing herself to her feet, she took stock of her surroundings. The dead body on the ground between her and the alley’s dead end caught her attention first.

Her reaction was not fear or revulsion but resignation, as though this were a familiar scene playing out for the hundredth time to no happy conclusion. She approached the face down body (too much like her own earlier pose for comfort) and rolled it over.

A flash. A memory. Looking over the shoulder of a London bobby, looking down on a body lying in a very similar -- the same? -- alley. Blood everywhere. the poor woman's eyes wide with terror and death and the stink of blood and offal nearly overwhelming and --

Five... no, seven bullet entry points. Centre mass. Also, his eyes were missing. It did not look as though he’d ever had them.

She remembered. He was striding straight towards her from the dead-end of the alley, half-smiling. She had had a pistol and he had been wearing sun glasses.

Looking around, she found the gun against the wall and shortly thereafter found a holster for it at the small of her back. She didn’t see the sunglasses anywhere.

She frowned. It didn’t feel right, having used a gun. There was something...

Something... off. Wrong weapon. Not the feeling that she wouldn’t have killed someone, but the feeling that it wouldn’t have been this way.

So something was wrong, but that wasn’t the real problem.

She’d been trying to remember her name since she’d first rolled over into the sun, and she couldn’t.

(edited transcript version of intro session)

-_-GM:-_-

You wake up on a psychiatrist couch.

-_-The Power of Lust-_-

Actually, for me that makes all kinds of sense.

-_-GM:-_-

Taking your own measure, you note that you are dressed in your typical...?

-_-PoL:-_-

Leather.

-_-GM:-_-

Right. Leather. You have an ornate but serviceable knife in your left hand -- both of which are coated in blood that has long-since gone tacky; in your right hand you hold a cell-phone whose screen indicates you've missed... ten calls. As soon as you register that, the phone starts to ring.

-_-PoL:-_-

Answer it, sit up if I haven’t already, and look around the room.

-_-GM:-_-

The room is typical Freudian fare: dark read leather and mahogany, heavy drapes over the windows. The female voice on the other end of the line is speaking somewhat loudly, her voice is filled with strain. You're not tracking the words however, as your attention is on the angel sitting in the traditional psychiatrists wing-backed chair across the shadowy room.

-_-PoL:-_-

Angel? That’s what it is?

-_-GM:-_-

He’s wearing the robes you associate with angel imagery. Also, the big white wings hanging over the back of the chair is a giveaway.

-_-PoL:-_-

What’s he... doing?

-_-GM:-_-

He looks quite dead: his chest has been split open and youre’ fairly sure even from here that his heart is missing. The voice on the other end of the phone is repeating a name over and over, as though trying to get your attention.

-_-PoL:-_-

Is it my name?

-_-GM:-_-

You're not sure. You don't remember your name. *Can't* remember, actually...

-_-PoL:-_-

Greaaat. What’s the name she’s calling me?

-_-GM:-_-

Macy. It doesn’t exactly sound wrong.

-_-PoL:-_-

“Who is this?”

-_-GM:-_-

“It’s me, obviously. There are people watching my place and all kinds of crazy shit on the news. What happened?”

-_-PoL:-_-

Is there a TV in here?

-_-GM:-_-

Psychiatrist’s office? There’s a radio in the corner. It just happens to be on the hourly new summary. Massive fire at a Rave in Chicago, firefight in London. Some sort of massive power grid blackout in Malaysia. [assumes caller’s voice] “They said you were dead.”

-_-PoL:-_-

“Who?”

-_-GM:-_-

“Everyone. Where are you?”

-_-PoL:-_-

... “where are you?”

-_-GM:-_-

“My place, like I said; being watched. (long pause. player waits) New York.”

-_-PoL:-_-

“Right.” Where am I?

-_-GM:-_-

You glance out through the drapes. You’re on the second floor of a brownstone on a residential-looking street filled with dozens of other brownstones -- it almost has to be New York, although you could never explain how you know that.

-_-PoL:-_-

“I’m... close to you. I’ll call you back when I’m closer.” Hang up. Wash off the blood from the knife and my hand, wipe it down and stick it in my coat or belt or something until I can dump it. I’m leaving. Oh, but before I wash up, I cut the angel’s throat, just in case.

-_-Other Player:-_-

What?

-_-PoL:-_-

It looks like I tried to kill him, but I don’t know what kills angels -- I don’t even understand how he IS one -- so I definitely want to make SURE, because right now there isn’t any little voice in my head that’s telling me “It couldn’t have been me!”, so I’m going to assume it was and make sure I do it right.

-_-GM:-_-

... Umm... Right. Next player.

A MAN SPRAWLS across a threadbare and badly sprung armchair. A light bulb socket hangs directly overhead, dangling from the ceiling on a cord and holding only the shattered remains of a blackened bulb.

There is dust on the scarred wooden floor, the single windowsill, the radiator next too it, and on the misused armchair itself – all of which seems entirely undisturbed. The room is otherwise empty. Something in the chair is digging into the man’s back.

He is lithe and wiry, the man; lean, with short blonde hair so pale it was almost white. He wears a fine pair of slacks that quite are quite obviously part of an expensive suit, a dark, form-fitting sleeveless shirt somewhere between silk and mesh, and no jacket. A shoulder holster hangs along his left side, empty. He, unlike the room, is not covered in dust.

He raises his other hand (instinct or habit, one might say) to take a drink and discovers he still holds the neck of a whiskey bottle between his fingers. He seems less surprised by the natural inclination of his hand to cling to a bottle even in unconsciousness than he is when he notices that the bottle ends in jagged shards about halfway down.

There is something dark and tacky on the jagged edges of the bottle, and he is not injured (barring the damage the chair is doing). The room does not smell of spilt whiskey, nor does he see broken glass or blood (or footprints… how did I get here?) on the floor as he sits up and looks around.

He stands, wiping the bottle down to erase fingerprints and dropping it on the chair behind him as he looks over the room. Neither his jacket nor the presumably missing pistol are anywhere to be seen so the holster hanging at his side remains both conspicuous and useless. He slips it off, winds the straps around the holster itself and shoves it into a pants pocket where it bulges and ruins the line of his slacks, but does not draw as much attention.

His gaze moves to the bare window and the world beyond. Tenements. Projects. He is certainly not dressed to blend in but, searching his mind, he finds no particular concern about such things. His natural instincts tell him he is more than competent enough to handle the dangers of such places, though he has no idea how or why.

Of course, in searching his mind he finds precious little else in the way of information or memory, which does bother him. He is a well-dressed newborn delivered into an abandoned tenement in an unknown city. The room holds no further information for him beyond that.

Turning to the door he walks into the rest of the world, searching for himself.

_(This last intro log was easily the most difficult, since we didn’t do much more with ‘Pat’ than set the stage for upcoming events... by this point our time was running out.)_

A wooded copse looks down over an open expanse of grass. Faeries flit from shadow to shadow in the gloaming beneath the trees, occasionally circling the head of the creature that stands at the border of darkness and light. The creature is not human, but seems to give the impression of a humanoid form, if that form were composed of the firm but pliable substance of a mushroom, it’s skin the durable ‘leather’ of a puffball. It’s toes dig into the earth beneath it and flat black ‘eyes’ take in the world beyond the trees.

The strange shadows of a city loom all about this small patch of tamed wilderness – the place were she stands is a temporary refuge at best.

Why the creature thinks it needs a refuge is unclear even to it, but somehow it knows.

As it ponders the how and why of that it senses a type of smoke, somehow both near at hand and very far away. It knows this smoke is called ‘incense’ and that knowledge brings with it something like fear.

The smell grows stronger.

Campaign Log