It was a dark and stormy night…
We, disguised as cultists hiding in Edward Gavigan’s bedroom, simply open fire on the cultists below. Dylan (whose name, it turns out, is actually spelled Dillon) hits Gavigan with a shot from his (Dillon’s) elephant gun for 14 points of damage, which of course he just gets up from because he’s full of monster power. Dammit.
Teddy opens fire with a Tommy gun, doesn’t do NEARLY as much damage as he hopes, AND jams the gun. Fortunately, Calliope turns her mechanical repair to fixing it, and reloads it while she’s at it. And…dun dun DUNNNN…!!!! Evelyn spies Beloved Alice!
…Beloved Alice usually has an icon of Charlize Theron from the period piece film Head in the Clouds. Now her icon is the Witch Queen from The Huntsman, and not like the NICE-looking witch queen, no, the one with black goo drooling from her mouth and the horrid vicious look in her eyes.
And then the dragons attack. (They’re not dragons. They’re worse than dragons. Shantaks, that’s what they’re called.) One smashes into the house; Dillon shoves a grenade down its throat, WHICH DOES NOT KILL IT AND OH NO DYLAN HAS BEEN BLOWN UP!
Calliope and Teddy are merely blown aside; Evelyn, in the next room, is not blown aside. The other shantak lands on the roof. Teddy opens fire with the Tommy gun again, achieving some, but not enough, damage. But then Evelyn ROCKS IT and shoots the roof shantak in the head for a critical success and enough damage to make it collapse into the house, perhaps dead? We hope? (It is dead! It stinks horribly, but it’s dead!)
Dillon manages to reload his gun while otherwise dying. Evelyn rushes to Dillon’s side and does first aid on him, but not a crit success, leaving him with permanent damage – a sucking chest wound, if you will. But he rallies, because he’s not dead yet!
Alice disappears from sight as Gavigan pulls a hideous monster out of the small black sun he’s opened up in the garden. Most of us succeed in our stability rolls; poor Calliope, who is very low on stability…does not. :) But Calliope sees reinforcements (for our side!) on the way! Maybe we won’t all die!
Teddy opens fire with the Tommy gun again, trying to kill Gavigan. Instead, some idiot cultist leaps in front of Gavigan. Teddy sees Beloved Alice, cries, “ALICE!” as Gavigan, laughing at him, says, “Ah, my dear, it is your other suitor!” Teddy, enraged, leaps from the window, not as gracefully as I hoped but without injury, and calls for Alice again. She looks faintly confused and conflicted.
During a short break in gaming, we get several points back in stability because we’re pursuing our drives (Teddy’s is vengeance). As the GM checks in with Evelyn about how she feels about her stability, she says she’s okay, she’s still got killing Alice in the back pocket.
Me: …did you say killing Alice?
Evelyn: Oh don’t worry about anything, darling, it’s all going to be fiiiiiiiine.
Gavigan leaps on the remaining shantak, nearly kills Calliope, and flies away on the shantak! We move out of combat because Gavigan’s leaving, but Dillon tries to shoot at him anyway! His gun jams, dammit! Evelyn, in an unusual act of thoughtfulness, goes to tell the potential sacrifice victims downstairs that they can run away now, then cries, “ALICE! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? THIS IS A TERRIBLE WAY TO BREAK YOUR ENGAGEMENT!”
Teddy rushes to Alice, crying, “Alice, my beloved!”
Alice: EMBRACE ME, MY LOVE!
Alice then, surprising no one but Teddy, stabs (at) Teddy. He avoids, nearly takes a shock hit, and her mesmerization breaks, causing her to collapse dramatically into Teddy’s arm.
Calliope, in an attempt to stop Gavigan, works magic for the first time, her veins blackening and her arms stretching out, out, out across the marshes as he flies away, spending her health and stability like nobody’s business…and drains ten years of life from Edward Gavigan, gaining her health back and adding two overall points to her health!
GM: Does anybody have piloting?
Me: ALICE DOES!
GM, horrified: you’re going to rely on Alice for this?
Teddy: Alice, my beloved! I know you have just been through a terrible ordeal, but Edward Gavigan is getting away and you are the only one of us who can fly a plane! Please, in order to defeat him, we need your help!
Evelyn & Calliope: know what we’ll stay here on the nice solid ground and just kill some cultists, how’s that sound
Alice: ::flies the plane::
Dillon opens fire with another Tommy gun on Gavigan as we catch up to him, doing some damage! Teddy doesn’t roll as well and mostly misses! The dragon thing drops back; Alice does a bit of fancy flying to keep it in range and us from being smashed out of the sky! Teddy completely misses with something he tries to throw, causing me to think I should have, in fact, thrown my whole self onto Gavigan, which was my first impulse. OTOH the idea of falling into the swamp and dying just seemed so embarrassing… :D Dillon throws his red phospherous and…totally misses, probably blows up an otter in the marshes.
GM: I’m very sorry about this, Calliope & Evelyn, I know all the action is taking place elsewhere…
Them: no we feel very good about our decisions right now
Teddy spends some preparedness and tries to find some dynamite, successfully, but, having no explosives at all, throws it into the plane’s seats! Dillon fails to get it out! Teddy manages to, and at the last possible moment, hits Gavigan and blows him and the dragon thing to what we hope are eternal smithereens!
GM: Congratulations! You survived! Everybody back to base now!
Back at the Gavigan’s manor house, the kid whom Evelyn beat up is very disappointed to not have had the opportunity to return the favor. Evelyn winks flirtily at him and promises they’ll always have Paris. Or a dark warehouse on the London docks. Whatever.
Calliope, having tasted the power of dark magic, is thirsty for more. Alice is permanently down (another) stability points, and Teddy must come to terms with the idea that Beloved Alice totally tried to kill him. Dillon, now permanently down at least one point in healthy, faces an uncertain future…and as we all board a train for Egypt, in our wake comes Evelyn’s father, determined to see what kind of trouble his daughter is in now…
(we are not ACTUALLY taking the Orient Express, which is a pity because there’s a whole entire Cthulhu adventure based on it, and I think it would be a riot to pause this game to do that one, obviously with the same characters and all, as part of our train trip to Egypt, but our GM is much more sensible than I am and thinks we will not do that. Which, I mean, i GUESS that’s fair, since he’s the one who would have to do all the work to set it up… :D)
And thus ends our Albion Adventure. I’m going to have to decide whether I’m playing Alice or Teddy going forward, but I have to admit a terrible dark part of me thinks it’s too bad Alice survived, because I had a great trajectory planned for Teddy if she didn’t.
What a riotous game this has been. :D
I’m so relieved! When I saw “ends” in the title I thought the campaign was wrapping up. Whew. Been having so much vicarious fun with Teddy’s (and Alice’s) adventures.
Ahaha no no we’ve got at least two, possibly three more countries to go before we finish! At the rate we’re going we’ve got another year of Cthulhu ahead of us! :D