The Blind Trojan Horse
| The Blind Trojan Horse | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven Adeptus | Shedim | ||||||||
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Delphi Ez-Azael Mojo Joe Ice | Saul | ||||||||
Summary
Runners are hired to discreetly spy on a child. It goes badly and it's discovered that the boy is an amnesiac shedim possessing its victim.
Background
See The Pride Of Kevin Crimes, The Slippery Bastard and Average Ohio Road Trip.
The Meet
A call for runners is made to look into a middle-class woman's son. She's a single mother, Veronica Amundi. Her only son, Saul Amundi, has acted strange, skipped school and more or less ruined his cherished opportunity to become a corporate SINner with a good job and good wage. She is afraid of her corporate status being risked if she hires official channels and wants to keep her son's situation quiet.
The Plan
Legwork begins by coercing Saul, going by the name of Cain online, to actually cooperate. Magical uniqueness and eccentricities seem to get him interested and he's almost compulsively curious about various astral horror stories and urban legends. His search for more knowledge can be deemed almost reckless. Veronica notes that he's been mildly allergic to sunlight for his entire life and that he used to have a violent childhood, lashing out at everything until he turned four and she finally managed to teach him manners. Saul appears interested in a Matrix forum/imageboard that discusses various supernatural conspiracy theories, one of them being the tinfoil hat theory of the Delayed Armageddon; it's often spouted by conservative Christian hard-liners: Dunkelzahn delayed Armageddon as ordained by God and as a result committed a great blasphemy which is to blame for the evils plagueing the world now. Angels have begun walking among mortals and preparing the planet for the proper Armageddon so that it can't be stopped a second time.
Saul even finds a few potential people that may have become 'vessels for angels' as he puts it: Don Aycker and Jeice Brown. Aycker was already seen by Mojo Joe before during his run in an Ares Facility (see Among Us) and Jeice Brown was certainly destroyed as a shedim host in Ohio. Later, Aycker was also found as a shedim host in Seattle and destroyed. Saul is determined to keep looking, having found forbidden lore in a book that the forum sometimes offers people bold enough to read it. It has notoriety in that most who read it go missing within twelve months with the exception of Saul who's stayed active on the imageboard for three years. The runners outsource Ice and Delphi for additional aid and the Matrix support tracks the forum's archives to be on the MCT grid.
Further research shows that Saul's room is always 10 Celsius colder, but he appears mundane and not to be the source of anything. Delphi manages to glimpse a careful peek at the boy's astral powder fortress he's crafted for himself and when he sleeps, she notices a shedim possessing the 15-year old's body. She intends on scouring the boy's room while he is allowed out at night for his "activities" again, something Mojo Joe and a spirit will trail him on while Ez-Azael watches over MJ's body and Delphi checks the room. She finds drawings Saul made when he was 6 years old, indicating that he had nightly premonitions about a figure in darkness telling him to wake up.
The Run
Going after Saul becomes the next point. They track him to a warehouse with a ward in Redmond with a sewer grate into the OU. Delphi finds a copy of the eldritch book that Saul had made, sitting around in the warehouse. When Saul returns, hands bloodied, he claims that he went exploring rumors of crucified corpses in the OU but his forum associate, Sargon, had gotten caught by feral ghouls and he ran to save himself. Ez-Azael's changeling nature flares and he attacks the callously disregarding boy, causing his face to twist unnaturally and Deathly Aura to activate instinctively. Mojo Joe recognizes a shedim's contortions at once and chases after the escaping, panicking child. After a brief scuffle he's cornered and he's confused as to why the runners are so hostile. Little by little, he feels out his twisted face, looks down at his elongated arms with extra knuckles and begins shrieking in despair, realizing he's not even human.
The runners restrain him and check the book as well as the pictures for more astral impressions, both divined and psychometrized. A golden dagger with a spiral blade was offered as a baptism present by Vyers Michikawa, a former executive in DocWagon whom Veronica also worked under 15 years ago. He died four years later on Saul's fourth birthday, timed with his change in personality. Vyers was a blade collector, lover of antiques and a magician, possibly a summoner of shedim as a dark hobby. The gold dagger appears crucial for the shedim's nature, but spirit searches and divination both show no clues of its whereabouts, possibly even hinting that the dagger as an entity no longer exists. Delphi leans on Oracle's support and the mentor points towards the tome, which imprints a Horrifying name into her very soul.
Manarangda.
Knowing the name changes her ability to perceive puzzle pieces as well, however. She looks at Saul, the shedim and the dagger again and the book. The notebook is a copy of the original tome, Saul is possessed by the shedim and the dagger's gone; but Saul is no longer possessed by a shedim that has its home anchor in the dagger. The anchor has become Saul's body and the dagger's a disposable third wheel. Saul's distraught and borderline catatonic after realizing his true nature and suggests the team tells Veronica he died in the hands of ghouls so she'll remember him as her actual child.
Aftermath
Veronica doesn't take the news well and commands the runners get the hell out of her house. Saul keeps his commlink in case his 'mother' thinks of calling him one day and decides to hide in many hideouts he prepared in the Barrens for eventualities like these. He's in deep anguish and has for the first time found knowledge that he wished he wouldn't have found, but still prefers knowing it and being in pain than living in blissful ignorance. The runners give him their numbers too on burner commlinks which he can call if he ever ends up needing help. Whether Saul truly is an innocent victim without the same vitriol as most shedim remains to be seen, but the true Saul is likely long dead and all that is left is the impostor with the knowledge that all he knows is a lie.
Rewards (1.5x Runtime Multiplier)
- 17 Karma (17 RVP)
- 16 CDP (7 RVP)
Game Quotes
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Ez-Azael: "I really shouldn't have flipped my shit like I did... Especially since the kid seems to be left in the dark about all this. Never met a Shedim, let alone a mostly non-hostile one, but this definitely has me sour to Shedim summoners. Hopefully things get better, and at least Saul has some problem-solvers he can call on."
Mojo Joe: "Yup... shoulda figured life gave me too much a freebie with that vacation. Now I am right back into it. But I still am not giving up... maybe this kid will prove something. I at least am now stable enough to realize there was nothing I could have done better. I'm just... I need some time and a good drink."