Thursday, November 10, 2022(continued)

Paddy O'Shenanigans

• We leave the Millenium Gate museum around lunch time and disperse to our varies jobs
• News continues to talk about the murder/suicide in Conyers
  • Police are keeping the details quiet for now, but rumors are that it has some things in common with the one in Marietta from a few weeks back
• We're set to meet up with Paul tonight
  • The rest of the motley says they'll come too
  • We decide we're going to meet at my trailer
• When I go home I find the fridge stocked with enough beer to fulfill the large amount he owes me
  • There's also an envelope full of cash with a note in Paddy's handwriting that says "this should be pretty close to getting us square"
  • So I guess he robbed the bank?
  • I text him to check in, and he says he's got things sorted with Paul
• I ask if anyone would mind swinging by the freehold to see if anything is up there
  • Agnes goes by and there are police cars there and she tells some story about seeing if this is connected to a string of cases the Bureau is working on
  • The cops show her pictures from the security camera footage of a woman dressed as SpiderGwen (probably the stripper Cinnamon) and a guy in surgical mask, sunglasses, Braves hat, and a Falcons windbreaker
    • The guy looks like he's heavy, but in the way that he's stuffed the windbreaker out to make him look fat, and the photo is a little blurry and is almost certainly Paddy
  • The freehold evidently wasn't manifesting (because the mortals there)
• Folks start showing up at the trailer
  • I show them some of my horde
  • We talk about Paddy and the robbery
• Paul finally shows
  • He takes his sunglasses off once he's introduced to the gang, revealing his eyes are filled with arcane symbols
  • He has heard people talk about the pale man, that he's haunting them
  • We tell Paul about various things (the pale man, the statues, the Nephandi)
    • He's really not interested in anything we tell him, but says he can maybe put us in touch with a Verbena she knows
• Folks disperse afterwards
  • Piper forges chimerical armor for Agnes (attached to her ballistic vest)

Friday, November 11, 2022

• In the news:
  • A house in Decatur discovered their basement was filled with hundreds of snakes
  • Big storm rolling in and people are advised to stay in tonight
• Agnes goes into work and finds that an email has been sent in from a proxy of the Malaconda
  • "Mark Williams gave me a new idea. And then I dreamed of lions and hunters. What am I, if not such a lion, ready to slaughter the men that think they are the masters of the world? And I have a couple of hunters that I’ve been stalking. Tonight is the test."
    • Mark Williams was the person from the Marietta crime
  • She goes to the scene of the murder/suicide in Conyers with her partner
    • The supposed perp evidently was denied a promotion, and so the police had assumed that as the thing that made him snap
    • They were impaled (police assumed self-impaled) on the antlers of a mounted buck's head on the wall and didn't notice the tongue was cut out because of the damage to the face, but with the message, this fits a variation on the Malaconda's MO (suspending the body on hooks, cutting out the tongue)
  • The victim, Thompson (supposed perp) was a bank manager at a bank there in Conyers
    • Agnes surmises from the house that he was living beyond what his means should have given him, so he may have been skimming funds or doing something else corrupt, which would make him fit the profile for a victim of the Malaconda
    • Agnes does her bit and looks back through time
      • He did get the promotion
      • The wine that everyone drank was probably drugged as it made everyone fall asleep
      • Then things get weird: a black lion comes in, no wait, that's a guy in some face concealing thing, no definitely a black lion
      • She watches that figure stage the crime scene to look like a murder/suicide
      • He installed some rigging system to strangle the guy and lift him up to be impaled on the antlers
• We agree over text to meet at the freehold that evening
  • Aoife drives by earlier in the day and sees that there is a cop car in parking lot
• By the time we all show up after dark the police car is gone
  • The temperature had started to drop pretty severely as the sun goes down
    • Shortly after we get there and are talking about food, the storm breaks and a steady, cold rain falls and starts freezing over
    • Once the freehold starts fully segueing over to the Dreaming, the cold and the storm is just as strong there
  • Agnes tells us about the recent Malaconda murder and the black lion she saw when she looked back through time
  • I find Asad's number on his website (in reality it's still Erik's old number from forever ago) and send him a text saying I need to talk to him.  And then another that "it's about sorcery"
    • He calls back and Agnes takes the phone
    • He gives her some ideas of vaguely what the vision of the black lion means
    • He also says that from his own soothsaying, something is happening at 1:00 tomorrow
      • He doesn't know what
  • Agnes does a tea leaf reading to see if she can see what will be happening with one of us at 1:00 tomorrow
    • She sees Moira and I together, looking perplexed

Saturday, November 12, 2022

• When we wake up we're still iced in, though it looks like it might start to thaw after the sun is up
  • We have to decide if we want to be stuck in here all day or go out into the cold while everything is still iced over
  • We decide to head out, and force open the iced over door
• We disperse about our business for the day
  • I drive Agnes' car with her and Moira to her studio
• Agnes, Moira, and I wait until 1:00, watching the clock

  • As it strikes 1:00, the second hand stops

  • The few people in the studio seem frozen in time

  • With a bit of mystical effort, Moira is able to push the door open, and it stops dead in place when she lets go

    • Everything outside is stopped too

  • Agnes is able to see that Dmitri the ghost is frozen too

  • Agnes thinks that we aren't effected by the time stop because our nature as Changelings

    • Mages with Time might similarly not be effected, as well as any other entities with time related magics or powers

  • Using my Remembrance, this lines up with experiences I've had in past lives where time has been stopped, but this seems broader than anything I've experienced

    • It's most likely some big Chronos unleashing (or a Time 5 working); definitely a deliberate act by someone
    • It should, in theory, not last too long
• Aoife and Blaze experience similar moments of time being frozen around them at their jobs at 1:00
• Time starts moving again
  • Relative to us, time was frozen for 13 minutes, though for the rest of the world it was only 1 second
• The local Changeling phone tree starts going off with folks trying to figure out what happened
  • Baron Berin's freehold is incommunicado
• A while later the news reports a shocking and brutal attack at a gun shop in Smyrna where several patrons were suddenly exploded and frozen
  • This was Berin's freehold, and it comes out once the Changelings can look into it that all the Changelings in that freehold were all killed
  • The balefire there is still intact