Coffin Dance
| Coffin Dance | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven Agamemnon Black Lodge | Order of the Temple | ||||||||
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Charon Barracuda |
Character1 Character2 | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Ajax :( | Silver-Lined Coffin | ||||||||
Summary
Agamemnon's buddy dies. Gotta get his body back!
Background
Agamemnon has a loup-garou friend, Ajax. He really likes the guy, and he hasn't shown up in a while. It's a bad, rancid vibe.
The Meet
Agamemnon invites both Barracuda and Charon to meet about such a thing and while the meet goes well, the suspicion that the Order of the Temple has something to do with it rubs Charon the wrong way. The meeting happens at 8PM, but at 3AM Charon's due for a meeting with Mr. Herenight at her old burned-down penthouse. They might have to put a pause on work if they can't resolve this fast enough; those meetings can't be skipped, but Charon's happy to help since the furry bastard was a good guy.
The Plan
The plan is to investigate and find the damn body-
The Run
At first, the duo go to the last known coordinates, finding little tufts of fur and C-Squared spilled everywhere. Signs of violence on the astral tell Charon that something definitely happened here, and fortunately there's a homeless person in a dumpster that they squeeze for more information in return for some compensation. He does give the two a few leads, directing them to the Tacoma Docks. After some searching via useful contacts, they find a potential ship that is about to head to Italy. Vatican's forces moving something?
Charon and Barracuda decide to infiltrate the Vory-controlled docks since Charon has a bad track record with the mafia. Charon uses her newly learned trick of Facial Sculpt she learned from the twins, thanks for that to make herself into a very high-strung Chinese inspector from the City of Tacoma, looking into possible secondary inspection. Barracuda will be her very disgruntled bodyguard and together they make through the gates -- being an incredibly convincing social adept lets Charon sell the lie easily, combined with cheap clothes and a high visibility vest. The best camouflage of all.
When they reach the ship in question, Charon, introducing herself as Li Khan insists on making a second inspection since she 'doesn't trust her deadbeat colleagues' and refers to the increased HMHVV epidemic as the city tightening their security and hygiene measures. They let her into the cargo hold to check on the cargo while Barracuda stays behind to chat with the guards. After some time, the true Vatican members arrive and sternly tell Li Khan to leave, since they're about to disembark and they already have all the paperwork. Charon realizes she's outstayed her welcome and pushing the matter further wouldn't seem plausible, so she agrees and walks down the gangplank, asking Barracuda via DNI if he's found anything. Fortunately, he responds positively, letting Charon leave the Vatican people behind and start making her way towards the warehouse he's in.
He's talking to two guards that are getting tired of his chatter and tell him to leave. When Barracuda pushes the matter, they get anxious and suspicious, one even showing their machine gun to him. At this point, the inhumanely stealthy vampire attacks the mundane guard from behind as Barracuda works in tandem with her ambush to hit the Awakened one. Combined, they catch the two guards by surprise, but are unable to knock them out in one decisive attack. Reluctantly, Charon instructs Barracuda to take the Guts she provided him earlier and activates Terrorscape, paralyzing both mercenaries with sheer terror due to yellow twerking Amogus filling their minds.
With that, they grab a silver-lined coffin that contains Ajax's body. Charon activates her Supernatural Prowess, lifts the entire coffin with ease and legs it out of the entire compound with mind-boggling speed of a one-percenter Awakened individual. Barracuda is quick to follow suit, getting in the truck and driving the hell away. Barracuda checks the coffin for bugs, copies the manifesto attached and the two of them arrange a dead drop with Agamemnon since they can't be sure if they were followed.
Aftermath
When Charon gets to her meeting with Herenight, the man himself has only bad news to offer. The ritual involving her resurrection has near-irreversible taint to her aura, resulting in her current situation of having an Astral Beacon. It's making her aura unstable, most likely, and she's next to tainted goods for the Lodge due to her unsubtle nature. While she's improved her act recently, they're willing to offer her a possible way out, something they found after doing a thorough review of the research that a team of runners recovered from the late Garry Foreman and his genetic forays into HMHVV 1a, also known as the Bruckner-Langner strain. The blood ritual may make her viable as a recipient of an experimental genetic therapy that may agitate the Strain 1 in her to mutate into 1a -- unfortunately, it is most likely to have a 99% fatality rate, accelerating its mutation and burning through Charon's essence all the way down to zero. The 1% chance is successful mutation, something that could clear her aura.
Upon hearing that she is not a failure yet, even Charon has to excuse herself and head to the restroom to not let anyone see her emotions forcing their way to the surface. The jaded, hundred-year old vampire cries for the first time in years, muffling the sound of it into a drying towel. When she regains her composure, she comes out of the restroom to find Herenight's banshee pet grinning smugly at her, earning a Supernaturally Prowessed knee to the groin that deftly subdues the smug banshee. Charon accepts to the procedure once her loose ends are done with. There's only Benny left on her list, and once he's dead Charon will become the most likely test subject for the Lodge's research.
Because if anyone can survive such a lethal experiment, it's the woman with nearly as much raw magical power as the Black Council itself.