Bring Down The Red Star - Session I
Today I got in on a new campaign for Unknown Armies. Our Objective is to take down a russian psychic-satellite over our city of Delight, Arkansas.
Our strange angel quartet counts: Arthur, the Narramancer Conspiracy Butf Pulp Writer; Jeff Moonchild, "John Lennon's Superman" and real life superhero/occult vigilante; Marox L'Rois, septuagenerian rock star and "master" of the peruvian death-grip technique of immortality; and Sebastian Crowe, the luckiest wretch in the state of arkansas.
This is written from the perspective of Morax
I think it was Arthur's idea - I call him Doc Valis, just about every time I met him he seemed like a Philip K Dick impersonator, his brain on the science fictional frequencies, scrambled from the maestro's pages like a contact high on blot paper - he was our conspiracy nut. The satellite up there, and some kind of sick conspiracy rising like Birnam Wood to take it in its clutches. A federation of orgone-powered Thule Society posers, black tie federal alphabet bastards from the addle-fort base nearby, crazed freaks wielding dream machines pried from the hands of honest stargazers.
You've got to understand that Arthur came up with it. From him, it sounded like someone should actually do something about it. He has the Mpungu for stories, the slick bastard.
I invited everyone around to my place to talk about it. It was me, Arthur, and Jeff, and I was happier that he was there because I always tried to include him in the goings-on of things when I could. The house was big, two and something stories in regal pose up on a dark little hill outside the Gantry suburbs, but I'd never put much furnishing in, so the main room had a couch and no wall between the kitchen where the cabinets all held most of a bar's worth of liquor.
We talked about what to do and what our leads were, and Jeff tried to use his good eye to look at the satellite—see if he could read its horoscope, but he just said it was on the wrong side of the planet that time so he wouldn't be able to see it today.
Then I got onto the one lead I had, Pete Stokoff and his gang, The Golden Order of The Black Hand, all rich and weird. I was rich because I'd made the money and then stopped. But those types were like the ones I'd seen in the big circle, stock pickers and small time moguls, like if they could only have enough money to eat it as well as spend it. I'd heard that they were involved in some kind of fix on a rocket program. Military contacts, maybe.
What we needed was to get one of Stokoff's left hand men onto our side, maybe even the boss himself if we could get a meeting. Valis and Jeff worked on it, and came up with a dinner hall called The Pyre that those creeps liked to hang out at.
I made some calls, but it was a dead end—nobody I knew had an in there. It left us with just the one lead, and Valis said we could dig it up at this place he knew.
He said there was a library where we could get all the answers, since it was geeked with craft. So there we went; this rusted out old book repository building like where they keep buses out of service. An evil-eyed manservant named Timmy asked Valis for the password before he let us in. I asked before I step foot in that place, if it would cost me. If there was some kind of price to get in.
It was Booklantis, Bibliomuria, the Akashic Library. Borges' ghost was in there somewhere, folding a thousand cranes a thousand times from little slips of paper in shelves five storeys tall and a mile deep, among the couple of other ancient rimer library techs that haunted the place.
The rules were the usual; don't take books off the site, don't damage any books or they'll rip out your soul, sign before using the copy machine. Jeff and I got our own time to look around while Valis went to the office for our paperwork. We must have been in that maze for two hours, and found nothing. No leads on Stokoff's patsies. All I got was the section of all Valis' paperbacks and his cutout with him smiling too soon after dental surgery.
That was when he came back, holding a sheet that said I had to bleed on it. I'll say it, I flipped. Signing things in blood is one of those things I swore I'd never do again, not unless I had a gun to someone's head. The bat running the place heard me yelling at him, and I told him he could keep the paperwork and I'd see him outside, and then that sweet old lady with a cane of sugarwhite bone tap-tapped and made me a door out of there.
Timmy threw Jeff out pretty quick after that, for messing up the books. Cleared about two feet from the door. We got the OK that Valis would be okay on his own, so I did some Horse to get my head straight and called up my kids while Jeff drove.
I call them my kids, but i'm more like their Papaw or maybe Great Papaw. Some rambling old bastard telling them about tradition and what's good for them. But it's hard not to. At the start, it was just the one canny punk scoring girls and pot, but someone like that gets a crew, and then that crew starts getting ideas, and they'd just end up where I was—if they were lucky.
They call themselves The Red Lodge, and that first kid's name is Cambion now, but doesn't need the fake ID anymore. They're a little confused, still acting catholic about the book of solomon and killing puppies for satan, like it'll conjure up anything but glitter and a kick in the stomach. They're growing up, though. I can feel it.
I'm sure none of them are actually mine. And none of them have actually killed a puppy.
I had this little geek on the line, all yes-lord-morax and it-shall-be-done-lord-morax, and scheduled a little bash at my pagoda of malfeasance for the evening. Jeff dropped me off to go and kick around his "Mooncave", what I think he calls the attic he keeps all his paintings of Uncle Al. The drugs freaked him out, I think. I should have had him stay.
The first thing I did after I cooled down from the dope was do up the Nganga in my back room. It's nowhere anyone could find it by accident, all the way in what I think was a walk in closet on the second floor. I needed the strength for the working we'd get up to that night, so I drew the chalk circle and blew hard on the candles and the palo-satanas with my blood and my rum. Twisted up my fingers into the grooves below the meat. A little shake to get the spirit flowing. All that was so much easier than the usual, sacrificing a goat and whatever trash Aquino was getting up to. It's what I tried to teach the kids—easier work, and the good word of rock and roll.
They arrived a little after that in Cambion's fleet of brown and black pallet trucks, about two dozen of them like sunday night at michael jackson's in reverse. Cambion I always watched a little closely. Easy as a pet rock except for that reptile instinct, the kind of serpentine personality that put him in charge of everyone in the first place. One day, he'd get his hands around what I'd been trying to teach him. Unless he never roused, in which case it would be someone like his lieutenant Paimon. That kid I'd talked to on the phone, he had the brain for it. One of them was going somewhere, more than any of the rest that just hung around for the black mass and free rides.
Paimon organised all the craft I needed in the stage room, blew up a little altar with some dead animals, black candles, severed fingers - not his. The rest of the lodge all chewed up peyote, picnic'd outside or ganged up when I started to vamp on the machines. It was me, this girl around Paimon's age, and this little punk named Tubby—Cambion, too. Playing up to my track list for that festival in '87: Lavinia, Bishopshead, then Unfurl Father Night.
I got into it. Luceron chords shooting from the head, and it felt like the roof was going to twist off. Something about playing to a crowd peaking on mescaline. All that lightning had to go somewhere, so I tried beating it right into whatever psychic pirate frequency was hooked onto the satellite, see if I could get someone to shake loose from that comet. That's when I saw the girl. Valis' age, thirty something. Hispanic. Wearing this jackass costume like a russian wedding suit with a hood. Her shadow spilling up around the edge of my vision, because she was at The Pyre. I was only seeing her Pepper's Ghost.
So when we'd finished, and everyone was picking themselves up off the floor. The boys tell me they're coming to pick me up. Doc found whatever it is he wanted at the library, and Jeff was...dressed up. In one of his costumes.
They laid on the horn, I was coming down to the lawn before they spooked the cops up to my hill and they told me we all needed to get down to The Pyre, to find our pigeon in The Black Hand. What did they need me for? I'd gotten them a hint, if they needed anyone to "investigate" it should be Doc.
I was still considering it, but maybe I just didn't want to feel old, staying at home instead of going out past my bed-time.
we were missing Sebastian's player, so we called it early before anything important to the real investigation happened.
For mechanics relevant to this session, Morax cast 2 Gutter Magic Spells: the first time using his Peruvian Death Grip supernatural ID, for a +20% boost to his Secrecy for casting Gutter Magic, and the second to Bless the objective (with a measly 3%, because gutter magic at the small scale is indistinguishable from just getting lucky.)
He also failed a check for his Rich Weirdo ID, which lets him call in favours - rewarded with a pathetic 2% bonus on the xp roll i did at the end of the session.