London Town, Zombie Town
Game date: 08 Jan 2012
Present: Andy, Jim, Ken, Kim, Maer, and Terri
Katherine and Ezekiel take off to their respective family estates to announce the happy news of their impending parenthood. Meanwhile, others of our party settle in to their London lives. Rebecca stays in her father's Kensington townhouse. Josephine takes to her digs off Baker Street. Evie takes to her kip. And it's there that she's rudely awakened by two Ogre enforcers of one Lord Cataver. The Lord Cataver has gotten word of Evie's recent windfall and is demanding she fork over his percentage of her take. Evie refuses, as it's her jink fair and square. The Ogres smash her kip to smithereens and she ducks out in the mayhem. She runs into two of her friends, Billy the Butcher and Pop the Weasel. They tell her the entire building is in an uproar from the Ogres looking for her and before they can go any further, a beat walker bangs on the door to inform Evie she's to claim the body of her Uncle Abner at the morgue.
At the morgue, she finds that her Uncle was killed by a dagger with a note attached. The note reads: "Family and Friends might not be expensive. Continuing to keep what is ours is expensive." A coin is also found with the body: On one side are four arrows at the cardinal points of a circle, on the other is a skull with a dagger thrust through an eye socket. It is Cataver's personal calling card. They are given a blanket to wrap the body in and they take it away. Pop is carrying the legs of the body when they start to twitch! Evie's Uncle is not dead--he's been made into a zombie! Cataver is rumored to turn people he doesn't like into the walking dead and it looks as if her Uncle's met the same fate. Billy was two years a butcher's apprentice and he makes short work of the body with his cleaver. He and Pop dump the pieces into the Thames and after disposing the body, Evie goes to Josephine to tell her what has happened. Pop and Billy go off to find proper clothing as Evie's self-appointed bodyguards.
Josephine listens to Evie's account and immediately suspects Cataver has marked all of our party for harm so as to leverage jink from Evie. They hire a cab and ride off to find Billy and Pop. Luck is with them and they find the two fresh from rolling some unfortunate middle class victims for their clothes. Introductions are barely made before they are set upon by three zombies. They jump into the cab and drive away. They go to Rebecca's townhouse to warn her of the danger.
While the night unfolds for Evie and her friends, Rebecca is also having a rather trying evening. Her wastrel brother Jonathan shows up unannounced at her father's doorstep. He accuses his sister of abandoning him in Egypt to fend for himself and to get home he had to sell the rights to the dig. Well, he had the money for second class passage but the proceeds from the sale allowed him to travel first class. Rebecca is incensed! How dare he sell the rights to the dig. It wasn't even his to sell! And no she did nto abandon him in Egypt. Father was with him, surely. No, dear sister, Father didn't show. What?! And the argument between siblings descends quickly into insinuations on his part and rising above it on hers. At the end of the argument, Jonathan takes himself upstairs for his rooms. Rebecca checks on him a few moments later and finds him getting fresh with the upstairs maid. Rebecca puts an end to it, sends her brother to his room, and gently tells the maid to go down to the kitchens for a cup of tea. And when the maid is gone, Rebecca seriously considers magiking her brother's door shut.
She's prevented in carrying the thought out by Josephine and Evie's arrival. She lets her friends in and sees them in the parlor. Josephine doesn't waste time on chit chat. Knowing Rebecca is experienced in magic, Josephine shows her the coin and the note. Rebecca sees the note and is horribly repulsed by it. It's been written in some sort of vile ink. Knowing that Dionysius Beignet has the requisite connections amongst Thaumaturges who might be able to help, Josephine next goes to Ezekiel's and Katherine's estate, with Evie, Rebecca, and Billy and Pop in a rented carriage. Once there, Josephine shows Beignet the evidence and he narrows the origin of the note down to a section of the sewers where the underground river of Leeds runs below the City. Furthermore, he knows of Lord Cataver.
Lord Cataver is none other than Baron Pinchester. He owns a club in the city over the subterranean river and has quite an odd reputation. The man reeks of corpse rot and is notorious for showing up at the opera in concealing robes and an odd beaked mask strongly reminiscent of a Medieval Plague doctor costume. The coin left on Evie's uncle is from the Cambridge Graveyard Club, a society of licensed necromancers charged with keeping England safe from necromancy. Apparently Baron Pinchester has turned his back on his duty to Queen and Country and has instead become a dread figure in the London Underworld, killing people and turning them into zombies in the persona of Lord Cataver. One thing is certain, the materials and equipment for his grisly acivities is expensive and a young woman like Evie with a treasure reputed to be worth---well, thousands at minimum--is too great a prize for him to pass up. So long as he is alive, she and her friends (and her treasure) will be in danger. To say nothing of the rest of London, as he conducts horrible experiments and makes zombies of his victims.
Clearly the man has to got to go.
Everyone suits up for the jaunt to the sewers, including Rebecca. We gain entrance to the sewers and go the rest of the way on foot. The Sewers are nasty and nauseatingly putrid. Beignet casts a light spell to light our way and Evie scampers ahead of the light to use her excellent night vision. She hears the approach of four zombies. She runs back to tell us they're coming. Rebecca readies a freeze spell and discharges it. Three zombies are frozen in their tracks and Billy kills the remaining one. Beignet instructs him to lop the heads off the other three. Job done, we push on.
We walk on the narrow walkway above the filth until we have to cross a junction. It's not a smooth transverse for several of us and the way beyond is blocked by thick spiderwebs. Josephine clears the webs with her sword, only to find the webs inhabited by spiders the size of bulldogs, hideously bloated from living off the effluvia of the sewers. Rebecca suffers from arachnophobia and runs screaming away. Evie catches her and leads her back as Josephine, Billy, and Pop kill the spiders. One of the spiders is split open and human body parts fall out. We must be getting close to Cataver's lair. He's reputed to cut people up and make them zombies.
We continue through the remains of the spiderweb and find another junction, this time covered with a grisly gate made of human bones and pulsing pink flesh lining the tunnel. Skulls chatter amongst the bones. Rebecca casts an Open Gates spell and the bones sway to one side to let us pass. Once we're through, Beignet shoots it with two ethereal bolts. The entire mass sags and falls into the water of the sewer.
Not far beyond that, we find a octagonal chamber a curving staircase up from the stinking wet and there, in a tall chair before four stone autopsy slabs, is Lord Cataver himself. He's a wizened prune of a man, a litch actually, and he has an ornate glass vial injecting a glowing purple fluid into him. We discover what that fluid is for when we launch our attack--it's a personal defense shield and we spend precious moments trying to disable it. Magic and physical attacks bounce right off it but Cataver has to spend some of his own strength to maintain the field. Blows are dealt and taken, wounds and damage suffered on both sides. In the end, after knives and spells and cleaver blows are traded, the vial is broken, the field falters, and Cataver is quickly dispatched by Billy's blade.
Evie has been gravely injured and she is saved only by some ingenious spell casting on Rebecca's part: Rebecca casts a "Defense Self" and "Gates" on Evie's wounds, closing the injuries and resuscitating the street thief. Had Rebecca been unsuccessful, Evie might very well have perished. Pop has not come through unscathed--Cataver's magic has sucked enough mana out of him that he's practically soulless. Rebecca transfers enough mana into him that he regains his soul and is himself again.
It's all over but for the chopping up of Cataver's body, which Billy does with speed and skill. There is a skiff with poles nearby and we ride it out of the sewers and make our way back to Ezekiel and Katherine's estate. Billy and Pop are flush with coin and jink--Beignet had paid them ten pounds each and Josephine had given each a crown for their help in tonight's adventure. With thirty pounds between them, Billy and Pop announce they are off to buy commissions to the East India Company, thence to make their fortunes in foreign lands. Josephine gives them her mailing address so they can keep in touch. She finds she rather likes them.
Beignet presents Evie with a bill for comportment lessons and expenses to the tune of 67.50 pounds. She pays it. When asked where she's keeping her Garibaldi haul, she archly informs she's got it banked somewhere safe. Furthermore, with Cataver gone, she and her friends and family should be safe from any designs Cataver had on her treasure. The long evening's adventure ends with everyone seeking a bath to wash the stink of the sewers off them.
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