Friday, November 25, 2022

Whooooo is in my kitchen?

• In doing our speed run to check the doors we haven't, we check the vaulted doors in one of the bedrooms. It opens onto a European, English feeling kitchen, and we see an owl man drinking tea who looks up and says "My word, what are you doing in my kitchen?"

• The interior of the house looks to be in a state of disrepair, damaged from the Blitz

• The house is in the greater London area

• The pookah tells us that he's only recently found this place in the last month, and comments on things going strange in the last month

• He confirms through gestures that snakes and moving statues are a thing, and then asks about whether we're experiencing cold weather

• He evidently found the place behind a hidden door in a high rise building that led to this place, a disused freehold

• The balefires are not lit

• He seems to speak in questions whenever possible as a way to get around the pookah compulsion to lie

• His name is Ethan

• We tell him about the prophecy and the keys, and in regard to the keys asks if we think it could be in his haunted basement

• Agnes goes down immediately, and then Blaze follows, and then Moira to try and get them, and so we all go down that way

• On the way down we have to go outside and around, which isn't modern London and isn't the Dreaming, but instead looks like London during the Blitz

• He saw "terrifying creatures in gas masks" down there and chose to nope out of it

• After prepping ourselves with some cantrips, we rush into the basement and see a number of zombie-looking creatures in gasmasks and what looks like a couple telephone pole that is casting a writhing, humanoid shadow

• Ethan makes a remark asking if they're "telephone zombies"

• They're air raid siren posts, not telephone poles, which we find out when the sirens start going off, the sound of which tries to fill us with terror (succeeding on Aoife and Ethan)

• We make quick work of the gasmask zombie chimera and take out one of the two air raid sirens on the first round, but there is a huge crashing sound and I catch sight of what amounts to a colossal rubble golem who is surrounded in an aura of churning debris

• I get caught up in the debris and rooted in place, and two other figures appear that look like they were caught in a fire

• Blaze vaults off my back onto the colossus and starts wailing on it while the burning figures focus on me

• We take them all down, me by pissing on one of them to cast Eldritch Prime

• We find the key in the coal room

• Ethan asks about keeping it, since he's supposed to be one of our company in the end

• Ethan asks us if we'd like to help him with a project he's been working on

• It involves church knights

• He leads us back up and out to the actual exit of the flat, which exists out into a stairwell in a very modern apartment and retail tower

• We head across the street to a bank

• I make all but the pookah small, but not small enough to ride them in animal form, so Ethan uses Veiled Eyes on us all and opens a way into the building

• We go up the stairs to an upper floor and to a set of offices that is decorated with a blend of high tech modernity and antiques

• Agnes slips in through a crack under the door and unlocks the door

• There are a lot of old texts that are clearly being worked on researching and annotating

• There are a couple smashed up statues in glass enclosures

• There's a terrarium of snakes

• There is a very upset wild board in a cage

• Ethan says they've had an uptick of animal attacks

• Agnes says the boar is like the black lion she saw when doing a vision on the Malacoda

• Me make off with the laptops, a bunch of papers, and let the snakes out and make it look like we were trying to free the boar and spray paint some animal rights graffiti and high tail it out of there when we heard a guard come to check on why the cameras were out that Blaze disabled

• Blaze slams herself at full speed into the wall to cast Portal Passage to get us back out of the building

• As we exit the building we see a blacked out SUV come squealing up to the front of the building

• Ethan leads us through a circuitous route through back alleys and side streets away to avoid as many cameras as possible

• After making it back to Ethan's safely, we offer to have him come back to ours to look over what we've found

• Photocopies of texts and notes on them

• We gather that the original texts are probably back in the Vatican