I didn't have a plan for this session other than, "Do the stuff I had planned for session one and didn't get time to do." That worked just fine. "Plan" is a pretty vague term anyhow. It's more like "list of stuff to throw at the PCs when nothing more presentable is happening." I expect that as the game grows, it'll develop its own momentum and I won't have to prime the pump quite so much. 

Events started with Cicely getting a midnight call from Trey Hogan, her ex-boyfriend. Midnight calls, as a plot device, were a lot more atmospheric before call ID and answering machines. I'm just sayin'. Trey was kind of drunky/apologetic/aggressive, and I threw in a "Look, maybe you're right about that... bedroom stuff... um... I guess I could give it a try, if that's, like, a dealbreaker." I knew the player would get a kick out of that. Cicely didn't pick up, just turned the volume down and then called her friend Annette. "Look, my ex-boyfriend just called and I can't get back to sleep. Wanna get a drink?"

Annette, by the way, is the sister of Seth's late girlfriend. Not sure what to do with that... something, though. Anyhow, they talked. Annette had a little bit of little sister syndrome (established by Seth's player, very firmly) so she has nothing bad to say about him even though her parents blame him for her sister's death. It was her sister's kidnap/murder 18 months ago that prompted Annette to (1) shave her head and (2) start studying street sorcery. This stuff's illegal but widespread, and it's what Cicely also pursues. They refer to it as 'knitting'.

Meanwhile, a knock came at Seth's door, which he opened.

SETH'S PLAYER: Doesn't this place have a camera on the lobby?
ME: (Shrug.)
SETH PLAYER: Okay, I open the door.
ME: Do you have a peephole or anything?
SETH PLAYER: Sure, but I never use it.

The door smashed open and there, in front of him, was the rotted, naked corpse of his headless ex-girlfriend. Only now she had a noggin made of blue fire, trailing off into gray smoke for her hair.

Seth made his Stability check and that shit was ON. The fight was somewhat one-sided, however. He kept landing blows that had zero effect whatsoever, while when the corpse hit him, it HURT. Given that he can bounce a 9mm bullet off his chest, this was a definite surprise. (For you WT fans at home, the corpse had Body 4, so it was only doing Shock damage, but Penetration 10 against its designated target. It also had AR 10 against its target -- in this case, yep, Seth.)

He flew out the window and, since he had an apartment near the top of his building, it decided not to jump out after him. Instead, it threw his charcoal grill at him as he dive bombed it. The grill bounced off him, as did the creature, and he flew back away from it again. He heard a crash, and then a car alarm going off in the parking lot below. It threw a table at him, which he caught, and then his VCR, which he also caught (though we never addressed where he put this stuff. Hm.) Sick of this, he swooped in and grabbed it (absorbing more punishment in the process) then flew out over the parking lot and exploded. No effect. Threw it head first into the parking lot hard enough to mess up the sedan it landed on, and it popped right back up game for more. It ran back into his building and then the cops showed up. As soon as they were there, the thing vanished.

Leo and his uncle drove up to Columbus because they had an appointment to talk to its licensed municipal defender, a guy called Vast. His superpower is that he's twelve feet tall and roughly eight times stronger than a normal person his size. They got there just as his cook was quitting, uttering the classic, "I can't work under these conditions!" line. Vast followed him out and bellowed, "Then F***K YOU!"

ME: ...and when a guy with lungs the size of a large suitcase yells, the whole neighborhood hears it.
LEO: If this is a bad time we can come back.
VAST: Who the hell are you?
LEO: Mm... we had an appointment?
VAST: Huh?
LEO'S PLAYER: Why do I feel like I'm about to hear 'fee fi fo fum'?

Vast invited them in and called his secretary.

VAST: Yeah these... they did? Oh, Devon? So... okay... yeah. (Hangs up.) So you're the guy who did that thing on the frozen lake? Sorry about that thing with the cook. Hey, how's Devon doing?

He then indulged himself in a bitch session about the suckitude of (1) being a licensed municipal defender and (2) being twice as big as everyone else.

VAST: I gotta get all my clothes tailor made, custom furniture, custom car... do you know how much it costs to have a custom toilet built? Not to mention not being able to comfortably crap anywhere else...

From him they got a little bit of backstory about Columbus, where he led a well-publicized raid on a massively crime-sodden part of town that had a no-shit supervillain running things -- a guy who shoots bolts of force and flame out of his eyes and who calls himself Eyebeamz (yes, with the Z). The raid was kind of a wash. No buildings actually fell down, but there was a whole lot of damage, fires, injured civilians, a couple cops dead, Vast badly hurt but Eyebeamz smashed down through the pavement into the sewers below. No body was recovered though, and Vast is sure he's alive.

VAST: Yeah, you want to know what municipal work is like? Check this.

He opened his shirt to reveal hideous scars. Tracy, moved, stepped in and healed them.

VAST: Dude! Now that, THAT'S a power! I mean, the world must be your oyster if you can heal like that! Sure, the AMA regulations have to be a pain, but...
LEO: I can see that you've got a lot of wounds from your work...
VAST: Not any more!
LEO: Not all scars are visible. I know.
VAST: Hell, I'm happy with ditching the visible ones! You guys are all right. You need anything, gimmea call. You're from Cinci? Say hey to Seth for me too.

Driving home, Leo and Tracy discussed Leo's future. Tracy is still conflicted about all this mutantcy business, since his close friend Reverend Wright believes its all Wiles Of Satan. Tracy recommended that, whether Leo believes that or not, he might not want to let his newfound telekinesis drive him too far off his life's path.

Meanwhile, Lucien had a talk with his older brother in San Francisco. It's his apartment that Lucien arrives at when he makes the long jump, and the player decided that he's in on Lucien's secret. He expressed amazement that Lucien was hurt and offered him some cautions. Lucien pooh-poohed it and teleported back to Cincinnati for his shift at the dealership. Upon his arrival he called Seth and got his secretary.

Seth's co-workers were amazed that he'd actually been injured.

COP: I thought you didn't have to worry about, you know, bullets and knives and getting cut shaving and stuff.
SETH: I can still get hurt sometimes. I got hit by a train once.

He was displeased but not terribly surprised to learn that the Mime had escaped.

CAPTAIN: We had him cuffed, in four point restraints and under armed guard, but when he woke up he somehow freed himself, walled off the the guy watching him...
SETH: ...and let himself out the window on an invisible rope?
CAPTAIN: No, fired an invisible arrow over to the parking garage, went over on an invisible zip line, and then crashed an invisible car out of the second floor to jump over the roadblock. The good news is, we got prints and a name. Brace yourself.
SETH: Oh?
CAPTAIN: The Mime's real name is... Robin Banks. I almost understand his life of crime, now.
SETH: His dad must've been one sick individual.
CAPTAIN: Robin's a two-time loser, served time for robbing a liquor store and for a weapons charge. Daddy's no prize either -- rap sheet like a roll of toilet paper, weapons stuff, assault, lots of theft and robbery, and apparently he's a survivalist too. But the good news is, we recovered the stuff he stole. It's funny: He went after the safety deposit boxes and not the vault.

The stuff Banks stole included some gold Kruegerrands, jewelry, uncut diamonds in a velvet bag, bearer bonds... and a big thick notebook full of weird symbols, apparently encrypted.

Seth visited University of Miami, Cincinnati, which is home to "The Cube" -- a windowless square building shunned by normal students, home of the Department of Applied Thaumaturgy, one of the few legal places to study sorcery in the US. It's got three separate security forces: Federal, local and private. The secretary there told him that Dr. Majors (the department chair) was teaching, as was Mr. Hogan, Dr. Jefferson was in Switzerland... but Dr. Eisenerbrecht should be free. If he wasn't in his office, he was probably at the Student Union.

And indeed, the erudite-to-the-point-of-incomprehensibility Eisenerbrecht was there, along with Cicely. That was a stroke of luck for Seth, as it turned out.

SETH: Do you know who I am, sir?
EISENERBRECHT: Of course, of course I do! Did you ever get a handle on that advanced calc, Tony? I remember you having a dickens of a time.
CICELY: Actually, that's Seth Murphy. The Sentinel? Our municipal defender?
EISENERBRECHT: You look just like a math grad student here.

After the pleasantries...

SETH: Do you know anything about... er, um, reanimated corpses? This one had a head made out of blue fire.
EISENERBRECHT: The appearance of a manifested spirit, when confined to three-dimensional physical parameters, can vary greatly. It all depends on a sort of psychic topography...
SETH: Uh huh. Let me take some notes, 'kay?
GM (to Cicely's character): You can translate Eisenerbrechtese, if you care to. He's saying that it could be just about anything.

Cicely introduced herself as a friend of Annette's and soon she and Seth were getting along like a house on fire. Cicely did, indeed, break down Eisenerbrecht's abstruse lingo into something resembling English. He couldn't make head or tails of the notebook, until he pulled out a sort of lorgnette and said, "You know it has a guardian spirit, right?" He let Seth and Cicely look through the spectacles and see something dragonish and indistinct crouching on the book. Unfortunately, Seth's player then remembered that he only had a COPY of the book, so we had to put that scene behind the Impenetrable Wall of OOC Knowledge. Damn.

Eisenerbrecht opined that the guy Seth REALLY needed to talk to was an ethnologist named Dr. August Park, but unfortunately that wasn't allowed. Park (as the characters but not players knew) was in a maximum security facility in Terra Haute, optimized to hold sorcerers, in theory. Though he persistently maintained his innocence, he had been convicted of summoning three entities that had done tremendous damage to Austin, Texas -- entities that had required the Army's two top teams of Talents to finally put down. Because Eisenerbrecht is a licensed thaumaturgical investigator, he's forbidden contact with convicted thaumaturgical criminals. But Seth, with his invulnerable Mutant Hero reputation, could get access, and bring Cicely along as a translator. When he called his secretary to set it up, he was told a "Mr. Bolt" had called for him but didn't leave a number. Seth said that if Bolt called back, she should give Bolt his private cell number.

Bolt did, indeed, call back and set up a dinner appointment with Seth at a local restaurant. Tracy had a date with Anjelica, and Leo went to the Uni to visit some friends from his old private high school. (These were prep school kids who were expected to go to Harvard and Yale but, you know, didn't. So of course I did my best Thurston Howell voice. "I sahy old chahp, why don't we head over into Kentuchy and visit a tittay bar? It sounds so very jolly! But can you drive? A grille fell on my cahr lahst night."

Seth went home to change, which had little plot impact, but was fun when his player asked, "Is there evidence that what happened to me was real?"

GM: Other than the police tape, the broken windows, the damaged sport ute and the dent in the ground where you threw the thing through a car -- no, not really. Oh, and your neighbors. They're concerned. One of them gives you a ham.
SETH: Thanks. I'm okay, really.
NEIGHBOR: What WAS that thing?
SETH: Ex-girlfriend.
NEIGHBOR: I can see why you broke up.

Seth met Bolt for coffee and a 15-foot tall alligator made of fire attacked Cicely on the quad right (coincidentally) near Leo. Being an enchantress, Cicely had Cool and Stability out the wazoo, but Leo was not so fortunate and failed his check. He wound up having to burn all his Willpower to summon his Alter and keep acting rationally. His Alter went and grabbed the creature by the tail, while Cicely used enchanted agility to dodge its attempts to put her on fire. There was also an armed security guard who started ineffectually shooting at it. (Ineffectually only because he missed. Being fully materialized, the spirit was vulnerable to bullets, sticks, stones and the other ugliness of material life.)

INTERLUDE: CHARACTER GENERATION

The way character generation wound up working was that the players described what they wanted and I minmaxed it up for them. I think this was a pretty good idea since (1) none of them were particularly enthused about learning a new way to point-stack and (2) it meant all the characters were built along the same kind of design paradigm, if you get my drift. My big concern was that the enchantress would be underpowered. Her best summoning spell is a general call, which means that she gets a spirit relevant to whatever area she's in -- a spirit of metal or labor if she did the spell in a foundry, a spirit of law (or crime) if she did it in a police station. She said she'd done it in the woods and in a grimy back alley, so I ruled that she'd gotten a spirit of predation and a spirit of depression. The depression spirit would aid her once (because she'd only been able to get that much help from it) but the wild spirit was signed up until the end of the month. It lent her 1+HD+WD on any physical attacks or dodges, through use of Aces. Like I said, a pretty potent spirit.

SESSION TWO CONTINUED

The Alter got a hold of it and started trying to drag it to the nearby river, while Cicely tried to open a fire hydrant. Unfortunately, she stopped dodging while trying that, and it set her on fire. That was some damage, but more vitally it caused her another Stability check. Because her Stability pool was so high, she was able to do a multiple action, but it wasn't enough to protect her from the creature's follow up attack.

The creature, by the way, was a fire archon, and was in fact one she knew how to invoke. It had Create (Fire) with the Burns quality and normal damage, and then Control (Fire) with ghastly craploads of damage. So once it sets you on fire it can REALLY whale on you, which it proceeded to do. I got two results on my attack roll -- a 3x10 which would have killed her deader'n shit, and a 3x1 which I chose to use. That just ruined her leg and filled her torso with a mix of Shock and Killing damage. I suppose I can justify it with the argument that her head wasn't on fire so the Control (Fire) ability wouldn't work on it, but... nah. I was just reluctant to kill a character on its very first session.

Leo ran over and helped Cicely stop, drop and roll, the security guard called it in, and the Alter dragged it towards the river.

We cut to Bolt, comfortably drinking coffee in his full superhero getup, while Seth talked to him. Then the phone rang.

SETH: Hello... a fifteen foot what? Okay, I'm there. (hangs up) Hey man, there's a giant flaming alligator attacking campus. Wanna come? I can carry you while I fly.
BOLT: Actually, I teleport.
SETH: (blinks) Can you carry me?

The Archon was much less successful at putting the Alter on fire, thanks to its Heavy Armor, but it got some good damage in just as it made the river. The river didn't hurt the Archon, but did put the flames out on the Alter, spoiling the salamander's greatest attack. Seth and Bolt arrived just in time to take part in a three-way frenzy of killing blows, and then they went to see to Cicely.

Dr. Eden Majors and Dr. Eisenerbrecht came running, all tricked out with their occult gear, just a tad too late to help. But they did haul Cicely into The Cube, where Eisienerbrecht summoned a rolly-polly health spirit inside a tank with a fog machine. After finally bribing it sufficiently, he accessed its medical skills and was able to stabilize Cicely. This was another spirit she knew how to summon, as it happened.

CICELY'S PLAYER: This jolly doctor uncle spirit SUCKS!
GM: Give him a break, he's only 100 points.

They then hauled her over to the biology building, where Eden had said she'd be setting up. The bio students had voluntarily evacuated when they saw the Big Enchantress On Campus showing up. She had gone down where the medical cadavers were and summoned a grisly looking spirit, which she abused until it knit Cicely's wounds some more. THEN they hauled her to the hospital, where Tracy was waiting. He tried to do HIS healing wuju, but flubbed the required Meditation roll and was too shook to do it. He felt REALLY bad -- chalk one up for the "mutant powers are just Satan screwing with you" argument.

The next day, they visited Dr. August Park, who was kept isolated in a padded cell, shaved every day (because they know that hair can be used as a spell component), not permitted clothing for fear he'd use it to form some sort of occult pattern, not allowed pure water, not allowed writing implements or paper, and only permitted to speak with his attorney through an intermediary who rephrased everything either one said using synonyms, so that there was no opportunity for him to pass coded messages. They weren't allowed to speak with him directly, only via two way video.

So this bald, naked prisoner was approached somewhat diffidently by Seth, but the doctor seemed fairly accepting and approachable. "Anything to break the monotony is welcome." He stressed throughout that he was an innocent ethnographer with no practical experience with performing invocations or conjurations. He did immediately suss out Seth's description as a Greek archon of revenge, practically invulnerable to its target and able to harm it through nearly any defense... but vulnerable to everyone else, and only able to exist for an hour at midnight.

"That last aspect could change," he warned, "If your enemy has access to a... now what did my colleague call it? I believe it was a 'materialization' spell. I, of course, have never done such things."

CICELY'S PLAYER: Is he lying?
GM: Roll Sense Motive. (Park had a HUGE Bluff pool, but Cicely got lucky and beat him.) He's lying to you. Roll Bluff to conceal your suspicions. (Another awesome roll left Cicely poker faced despite her strong feeling that Park was, in fact, a practicing sorcerer.)

All in all he was courteous and informative. Eisenerbrecht had asked Seth to convey his (Eisenerbrecht's) good wishes, and Dr. Park returned them. He also asked in return that Seth put in a good word for him with the authorities.

As they emerged from the prison, Cicely was a bit shaken. On one hand, she was pretty sure that there was a lot more to August Park than was visible on the surface. On the other hand, the thought that the same magic she was practicing might be legal grounds for throwing her in a cell, naked and largely incommunicado, was certainly chilling.