The Battle That Wasn’t
The gloves are off. The Seventh Tower Consortium is well and truly pissed with the Nameless, who are still standing strong and literally at the same level of prestige and strength as they were at the start of this war, DESPITE taking an ostensible big loss at the beginning.
Meanwhile, they have been humiliated and rebuffed at every turn. Deckherd Hall was visibly attacked and scarred. V-Sea-W does not have a replacement. The Nameless’s contacts continue to give them a cold shoulder. They are nowhere CLOSE to their organizational goals.
So, next time, they’re going all in. Old Meachum’s Hagfish Farm is the target.
Session Recap
Squads of ex-Marines with all kinds of heavy weaponry and artillery were deployed by Seventh Tower to destroy Old Meachum’s hagfish farm. Their plan was to flank around through the Deathlands, come up through a service entry in the Lightning Wall, and then blow the place to hell. They got 2/3 of the way there, but then . . . well, the Nameless happened.
Oh wow! Must’ve been quite a battle!
So, funny you should say that . . . There wasn’t a battle, exactly. Oh, there was an invasion planned, to be sure!
Gotcha. Was it ghosts? Soup? Hagfish? Drugs?
Just ghosts to start with! Anticipating the possibility of a Deathlands flanking maneuver, the Nameless rigged the service entrance to be a ghost door (an entry from the real world into the ghost field)! When the invaders tried to pass through, they found themselves exposed to something lurking in the space between the ghost field and the world!
Shit, that’s a good offensive maneuver! What was that “something”?
Remember Old Wickhamm? Or Young Hamwick? Whichever you prefer, same thing.
. . . I remember the Nameless going to a whole lot of trouble to KILL Old Wickhamm/Young Hamwick. How did they survive?
As the Nameless discovered, Old Wickhamm is more like a ghost-virus than a traditional ghost. An instance of her has been lurking in the ghost field this whole time. When the ex-Marines popped, she took them all over and brought them through the ghost door!
Shit, that’s one way to deal with an invasion. So . . . mission accomplished?
Not quite. For sundry different reasons, Orianna and Cruncho were worried about/intrigued by what Old Wickhamm might get up to with several dozens of new hosts and a liminal dimension to play with. They ventured in while Sizzle and the Clockmaker stood by outside-
Wait, the Clockmaker was there? Not Arkin?
Yeah, that’s a whole thing. Anywayyyyyy . . .
So, Orianna and Cruncho make their way into the ghost field to discover that the Wickhamm instances had set up shop in a pre-Calamity version of the mining town that had preceeded Duskvol itself. The Wickhamms had split into groups and begun multiple rituals to create their own ghost keys, and thereby to force their way into the real Duskvol.
That sounds like it could be a bad time, sure. So, the Nameless charged in to stop them?
Ish. Orianna couldn’t resist the chance to do a bit of ghost field archaeology to try and get a sense of what kind of presences were around before the Calamity. She got extremely un/lucky and opened herself to a POWERFUL new presence. Does the name “Vazara” mean anything to you? Anyway, Orianna was briefly incapacitated by Vazara’s new influence, leaving Cruncho alone in the ghost field.
Oh dang! What did Cruncho do?
Well, at the behest of some of the ghosts in his skeleton (don’t ask, we don’t have time), Cruncho left Orianna to her own devices. Instead, Cruncho did the same thing Cruncho does generally: went towards the nearest group of enemies and went sicko mode.
Sure, sure. Stupid question.
Eh, be nice to yourself. You’re just a rhetorical device so that Ted has an easier time writing this.
Ah, right. SO! What next?
Well, big ol’ brawl, basically! Orianna came to, newly empowered by Vazara, and joined in the demolition derby against the Wickhamms (all of whom had taken the time to develop new characters, their obsession with bits remaining strong across all instances). Orianna worked to destroy them, Cruncho worked to destroy MOST of them but sample one of them. Hell, the Clockmaker came through the door (with the Spider in tow, no less) to observe the chaos and to take his OWN Wickhamm sample! And that’s how the battle ended: 3/4 of the Wickhamms destroyed, 1/4 captured by two obsessed maniacs with PLANS.
Okay . . . What about Sizzle?
Strap in motherfucker.
So, while all the other stuff was happening in the ghost field, Sizzle stayed outside to keep an eye out for a potential second wave. What she found instead, riding through the Deathlands, was her father, the Man in the Hat (seemingly to watch the invasion from the sidelines).
Father and daughter got to speaking, and the Man in the Hat laid out the entirety of what he’d been working for, and why he’d left her and her mother: he had done everything to create a money-making organization that would expand at the speed of communication, shaping the world around it to create unceasing profit for itself.
That sounds awful like a modern-day corporation!
And that’s exactly what it is! The Man in the Hat (Joseph Woodward, if you’re familiar or nasty) was insistent that he was doing it for Sizzle and her family. Whether or not that’s true, Sizzle wasn’t buying it, and broke off talks. Realizing there was little point trying to exact revenge on a man no longer human enough to appreciate it, Sizzle was ready to let him ride off into the sunset. But instead, Woodward charged, and father and daughter decided to do their level best to kill each other.
Is that how the place burned down?
Partially! They DID to a lot of shooting and stabbing and falling off of things, but the fire really only started because the Clockmaker came out of the ghost field, saw the father-daughter dance of death, and decided to set off some pre-planted explosives.
. . . Why?
Because YOLO, I guess.
So at the end of it all, the biggest threat to Old Meachum’s hagfish farm turned out to be the Nameless itself.
Yup! Really makes you think.
Wait, how did Old Meachum die?
Headshot by the Man in the Hat, taking a bullet that was meant for Sizzle.
Dang.
Dang indeed.
Untethered
Orianna stands in the dusty attic of a tenement she knows is important to her, but no longer feels like home. A pitiful altar adorned with a fragmented and steely sculpture, various aging tomes, notes and ritual markings stands against the far wall, next to an open journal marked with the names of various supernatural threats to the city. It feels foolish to have put so much hope and faith into all of this for so long. To have been so alone in her hopes.
If there is power in a union, it was not enough to protect the people that lurk in the shadows of Orianna’s mind, now shapeless, faceless. Not on the scale that Orianna knew. But a union of gods– of the forces that should dwell in earth and sky and water, the forces that nourish and destroy, and have felt the sting of failure as acutely as Orianna has… that sort of power cannot be ignored. The kind of power that can shake not only the pillars of the city’s elite, but against the darkness that oppresses all of mankind.
She looks to the shattered welding mask that lies next to the table, a memento of her last encounter with Wickham. Elia. Its function means little to her now. Quellin will know how to craft a finer one– one that will withstand the surge of power she needs to finally destroy her foes. The witches will know how to create something with the storm of spirits and skies that churns in her head and her heart. With that, she can begin to pursue the secrets of the ancient world in earnest– and protect the faithful against the machinations of the Cinder King’s so-called empire.