Mage: The Continuation

This is the second part of me blathering on about the Mage: The Ascension game that I'm a part of. Last time I talked about the players and the characters that they're playing. This time I'm going to be bringing you the story so far.

First, a little background on where our game falls on the timeline of the World of Darkness. In the published World of Darkness, there are two factions of mages. There is the Technocracy, who is portrayed as being bent on holding humanity back and limiting what can be done in the world with the available technology. They're like the FDA of tech. An example is that before the telephone was "invented" there was a group of people who used a magical effect that allowed them to speak with one another across great distances. In order to make this easier, they used a focus that they could speak into and then hear out of. Over time the Technocracy refined the effect and brought humanity around to a point where they could believe in such an effect. Once people were ready to believe that it could happen, the technology was released and it became a part of The Consensus.

The other faction is known as the Traditions. Notice the plural. The traditions are not a single entity and almost never act as one except to thwart the evil machinations of the Technocracy. Individual mages of different traditions work together all the time, but the organizations as whole enteties have a hard time seeing eye-to-eye. The Traditions are supposed to be striving for "Ascension", either personal ascension or the ascension of humanity as a whole. Given this idea of ascension, the Traditions are supposedly in it for the good of humanity where the Technocracy is only there to keep humanity down. PCs are almost always members of one of the traditions.

That's the world that is published. In the world that we're playing in, the Technocracy is not evil and is not in it to keep humanity down. The Technocracy is just another faction of mages just like any of the individual traditions. The difference is that the Technocracy has a much higher membership, and a lot more power in the modern world.

So, here goes the recounting of our Mage game. Some of these events happened several months ago, so the details are a bit fuzzy:

We start the game with Bob, Jody, Maria, Allen, and me. We all know one another and share a house. The house is legally owned by Bob and Jody because they both took 5 dots in resources and are richer than probably anybody else in Japan. The property is a located on a Node, which is a place of power where ley lines intersect. Together with a really powerful Spirit mage, the 5 of us dedicated the node to us as a group and created little pocket realms where we could work magick and develop skills without Paradox.

So in the opening game we are approached by a group of Shinma. These are basically animal spirits who inhabit human bodies after the human whose body it was has died. It was largely a getting to know the setting game and not much was really accomplished at this meeting. The next day, while Jody was at work (as an emergency care doctor) we got a visit from a few men in black suits who wanted to talk to me. I don't really remember why they came looking for me, but they did. I was more than happy to show them around some of my more stable experiments. It turned out that they were from an organization called Strike Force Zero who deal with supernatural creatures... usually fatally. They wanted me to develop some tech for them. I said that I'd be happy to take the challenge and we set up a meeting a few days later in Tokyo at their HQ. As they were getting ready to leave I noticed that one of them had done a magical effect targeted at my computer system. I immediately started looking over my equipment checking for what had been done, but I had no real way to accuse the men. I don't remember the exact context, but one of them told me "You just can't trust technology."

While I was inside talking to the agents Allen comes home. He sees the strange car in the drive and decides to do some snooping. The idea of snooping was a good one, but the execution went poorly. Somehow Allen got inside the car (go him!) and snooped around but didn't really find much of any importance. He did find a rather nice, large gun. I think it was a rifle of some kind. He decided that he wanted to ensure that the gun didn't work properly, so he decided to heat up the bullet in the chamber so that it would swell and lodge itself in the gun. At this point the GM gave Allen the predictable "Are you sure you want to do that?". Allen has not been gaming for very long, so he didn't recognize this as the warning that it was.

There is not really a mechanism for what happened, so Victor had to wing it a bit. The short version is that Allan heated up the bullet and the gun enough to trigger not only the bullet in the chamber, but also the rest of the clip. It probably wasn't very realistic, but it was very theatrical. The next problem with this scenario comes from the fact that Allen was inside the car with the gun, right next to it in fact, when it exploded. Allen took a substantial amount of damage, exited the car, and hid in the bushes next to the house.

Of course, an explosion like that attracted the attention of everyone on the grounds and soon we were all looking at the agents' car with it's windows blown out and shrapnel all over the interior. The agents were sputtering, but everyone that they knew to be home had been accounted for. I looked at the agent who had said it to me before and repeated "You just can't trust technology." I got extra experience for that.

After the two agents drove off Bob, who was up on the roof looking for who could have caused the explosion, noticed a rustling in the bush where Allen was hiding. Assuming that whoever it was wasn't supposed to be there or they wouldn't be hiding he threw a knife toward the bush. Bob actually intended to miss the bush and flush out whoever it was so that they could be questioned. Bob botched on his roll and hit Allen, who had already taken substantial damage. Allen falls out of the bush unconscious. Being the kind, loving souls that we are (and knowing that none of us have the required Life sphere to heal him) we call an ambulance to come and take Allen to the hospital.

Around that time, Bob gets a ping from his Twin Soul feat that tells him Jody's is in danger. He hops on a motorcycle, Maria hops on behind him, and I jump in a car attempting to follow them. To keep Allen from feeling left out of the game, Victor had his spirit separate from his body and float through the air above the ambulance.

As Allen is floating around, he sees Jody being attacked by a specter. Wanting to help out, Allen throws a fireball at the specter. The specter sees the fireball coming, puts Jody between himself and the fireball, and pulls Jody through the shroud long enough for her to see Allen throwing the fireball and to take the effect in place of the specter.

**NOTE**
Having come back to this retelling many times I have finally decided that it's getting way too verbose for its own good, especially for a recap. So, I've decided to up the pace a good deal and start again from the beginning.
**NOTE**

It turned out that Jody had been abducted by a small group of Kitsune (Werefoxes). We beat up the Kitsune until they limped off and then we headed home. A few days later one of the Kitsune showed up at the house saying that he'd been disowned by his tribe and he wanted to make reparations. I'm not entirely sure why, but Jody convinced everyone that he shoud be given a room. For my part, I was facinated by the boy. As a genetecist I was enthralled by his ability to change back and forth from human to fox to something in between. Not to mention that during the fight we had seen that the Kitsune in their hybrid forms had multiple tails. For some reason I really creeped the kid out, but I can't imagine why.

A few days later we all headed to Tokyo for a few different reasons. I had a meeting with higher-up members of Strike Force Zero, Jody wanted to visit the brother of the Specter that attacked her, and everybody wanted to visit the bookseller's district to try to improve our library backgrounds. At one point we got split into two groups. Jody, Allen and I went to the restaurant to meet with Strike Force Zero, and Bob and Maria ended up investigating an alleyway that seemed to be oozing a lot of oddly corrupted chi. Jody was able to describe the alley to our hosts and they dispatched a team to close up the rift.

Eventually we met up with James, who Maria knew from a magical ritual several months before. We were getting drinks when we all felt some strange spiritual shift in the universe that seemed to be centered on the alley. When we went back it was just a normal alley, like any other.

The next day we went to the house of the specter's brother. There was an epic battle facing Jody, Bob, and Maria against the specter. The battle lasted about ten rounds, but since it was all happening in the spirit realm, it only took about 30 seconds or so while the living brother was making us all tea. I didn't participate in the battle because my character never noticed that anything was going on. We managed to dispatch the specter and send him on to the Shadowlands, then we bid the brother farewell and went to buy some books for our libraries.

Shortly after ariving back at our house we received a request from a group of Hermetic Mages. Okay, actually Allen got orders from the tradition, and he begged and pleaded for the rest of us to help him. They were going to be assaulting a stronghold in Japan where some Tremere vampires had set up shop. We all agreed to help for various personal reasons. Being a bioengineer and a scientist, I made a few fun toys for us to test out on our assault. I created a bacteria that ate sugar and produced ultra-violet light. I also modified maggots that were about finger-sized and would eat vampire flesh. The UV bacteria I put into a big sprayer that was worn on my back, like they use to spray pesticides. The maggots I put into glass christmas tree ornaments for use as grenades.

At some point, unbeknownst to the rest of us, Allen became host to the spirit of Caine. Yes, Caine. We all knew that there was something else inside him, but none of us knew what it actually was. Around that time, Maria was impregnated by Lilith.

So, we assaulted the castle along with a bunch of Hermetic Mages and a few other vampires. At the bottom of the complex we found a vampire floating in some kind of field that was being maintained by a group of Tremere mages. It turned out that the floating vampire was Tremere himself, who had been taken over by the spirit of Saulot (If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's Vampire: The Masquerade storyline stuff). Saulot said something that I can't recall and then he burst into flames. Every vampire on the planet with either Tremere or Salubri blood fell over and rotted on the spot.

As for my experimental weapons, the "goo" worked better than I had actually anticipated. It caused massive amounts of aggravated damage especially when applied to the skin of a vampire or ingested. The maggots weren't such a success. They worked as designed, but they were far too slow and only truly useful as torture implements.

We returned from the raid and had some down time where nothing much happened. Jody noticed that the Kitsune that had been staying with us was having trouble sleeping. Maria, Jody, and Bob all decided to ride along in one of his dreams to see what was bothering the boy. Once again, James and I got left out. They saw in the Kitsune's dream the visage of Gaia, caught and pierced by the Weaver's web. Bob decided to cut through the webbing and the motion jostled Gaia's form and caused her great pain. She cried out that she finally had a purpose for the Kitsune. Her purpose for them was to end her and thus, end her suffering. My character wasn't there for that, but as a player my mouth just dropped. Victor had never actually said who the bound woman was, but I had figured it out. Bob and Jody hadn't figured it out yet. I thought it was a pretty twisted plot point, but it is an end of the world campaign.

The Kitsune child left to go back to his family. We learned that the Shinma have been given the keys of Heaven and are free to return there as they choose. I was aproached by the Zaibatsu with a job offer giving new perspective on projects that their researchers are working on. We also see a wraith hanging around Allen talking to the shadow inside him that we don't know is Caine.

A few weeks later we got a letter saying "Thank you. Your services are no longer required." There was no indication of who had sent it, but there was a return address on an island off of the western Japanese coast. Bob decides to hop over into the umbra to scout this island out. The chi (quintessence) coming from the island is horribly corrupted and vile. It is like a blight on the umbra itself. I put in a call to my superiors at the Zaibatsu and they told me that I should have nothing to do with that island, horrible things lived there and nothing good would come from a visit. So, of course we went right on over.

There was a ferry to the island with only one crew member. The boatman. The channel that we passed through was filled with bodies and people screaming, trying to swim. Jody tried to pay for passage for one of the people in the water. The boatman, who never spoke, indicated that the people in the water had already paid and were in the water on their own will. Eventually we got to the island and saw the inhabitants were a depressed, forlorn people. There was no joy in that place. Bob was given a vision of a great dragon breaking free of its confinement and devouring the entire world. He was told that it was something that had happened in the past and was about to happen again. There was also a creepy midwife who wanted to look at Maria's baby.

It turned out that the inhabitants were from a race that were known as Fomorians. The basic premise was that the world that was created included all sorts of things, but it did not include Chimera. It didn't account for those things that were created by sentient (in our case human) imagination. So when the wheel turned and the world was destroyed and remade again, the dreams from that age were not destroyed. They became the Fomorians. Tragic really.

After looking around for a bit and deciding that we hated the place, we tried some woogy-woogy to try to cut the node on the island off from the rest of the world. I was trying to be kind of subtle about it and not draw too much attention too early. Bob decided that what we needed to do was suck all of the quintessence out of the node all at once and destroy it. It really didn't work, but it did really piss off the inhabitants. Basically, what we ended up doing was move the entire node about two feet to the left. Let me tell you, that will shake up an area something fierce. Sensing that we were no longer welcome, we fled rather shamelessly.

We had a couple more weeks of downtime, and Maria was getting ready to give birth. It turned out that contact with the Fomorians had warped Maria's mind and she had become a Marauder. Once Bob figured that out, he wanted to kill her immediately. There was a rather epic battle around Maria as she gave birth to an incarnation of Lilith. Maria died when Bob tried to fireball the kid. The child then flung all of us into the Deep Dreaming.

In the deep dreaming we argue, then split up. James and I went one way, Bob and Jody went basically the opposite. We found out that the armies of Arcadia were on the move back to the mortal realm to destroy all of the Changelings for corrupting themselves. (This was almost all out of character knowledge. The events were thrown in not because the characters would understand them, but because the players would.) We found our way to where the child of Lilith was, which happened to be the mountain where the Wyrm was being held captive. All of us got there at the same time. An epic battle ensued where Bob and Jody were trying to free the Wyrm and also kill the child. I was trying to keep the Wyrm contained by distracting Bob until the Weaver's agents could get there to repair the damage. James was mostly trying to get us all to stop fighting.

In the end, the Wyrm was not released, bob and Jody made it back to the mortal world as soon as they saw that there was a portal there, James ran away never to be seen again because Bob would kill him on sight, and I died when Jody turned all of the oxygen in my body to chlorine. In the wake of this, Bob also fears that Jody is turning into a marauder. In actuality, what Victor did was he gave Jody a shadow with the basic rules from Wraith, and Maria is playing that shadow along with her new character.

So, James, Maria, and myself all made new characters. James is a Dreamspeaker, Maria is a Verbena marine biologist with a TV show, and I'm a member of the Zaibatsu in a division similar to the Void Engineers of the western Technocracy. Maria and I are also married, which is very strange for a tradition mage and a technocrat. We debate a lot.

There was a new alliance between the Council of Nine of the Traditions and the Technocracy. The idea was that they'd go back to bickering as soon as they were sure there was going to be something to bicker about later. Orders came from the Akashic Brotherhood that Bob was to give Maria and I all the support and cooporation that he could. James just sort of showed up saying that he'd been sent by a dream and Jody told him that he could stay.

So, we all went in to Tokyo to get to know each other and whatnot. Maria had to check in with the office to start on some of the studio portions of her show including voice-over work. I also needed to check in with the office, but that will happen in the next game, I'm guessing. While we were at the studio getting the tour we found out that it had merged with an American company and a lot of the westerners had spiritual parasites. Further research indicated that the American company was owned by Pentex.

That's pretty much where we left off. And now I'm finally caught up. Wow. That was a lot.