Dramatis Personae:

• S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running. Currently working at a cleaning contractor (player unable to attend)
• N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back. Currently working at a cleaning contractor (player unable to attend)
• An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. Former Marine, pulled into the CIA as a wetworker.
• Al, playing Petros - ‘Ambiguously Balkan’, openly works for the dog/horse racing rings that the various Balkan mafias are involved with. The Dogfather.

Recap

03 May 2011

After settling Cassandra into a secondary safehouse, and leaving Padraig and Yannis to keep building their cover, Coop and Petros headed north a short ways to Cambridge. They wanted to scope out Isabel Hartley’s apartment and get an idea of anything serious that might have been involved there. They started by meeting some of her acquaintances and colleagues: notably her MSc supervisor, the curator at the Museum of Computing History. They did this by pretending to be private investigators hired by the family.

Her supervisor (a Dr Harriet Grey) said that she was a fair student (she got her MSc with an upper second), and her final research project had some potential that had been followed up on. Dr Grey works in the cryptography field. The most interesting thing that they got was that her parents died in an accident about 4-5 years ago, causing her to start her MSc a couple of weeks late.

Her boss (an Edmund Chapman) had seen her with the brooch a few times. Normally a hard worker, she was a bit more hazy than usual just before she took her holiday up to Whitby. A co-worker, Margery, mentioned that the party that the agents had seen pictures of was a birthday party for a journalist named Michael Anton.

They then decided to head over to Isabel’s apartment. This was a small two-story townhouse in the sleepy northern outskirts of Cambridge. Coop and Petros parked their rented van outside and checked the place out. No obvious sign of anyone being there, aside from an upstairs light that was on, they decided to speak to one of the neighbours, using a cover as ‘men with a ven’ here to remove some household items on behalf of Isabel’s brother, Kenneth. The neighbour had not seen anyone coming in or out recently.

The pair of agents moved through the ground-floor, to check that there were no surprises. Not finding anything, they went upstairs, where they could smell something musty. This turned out to only be some damp in the upstairs bathroom. The room with the light turned out to be much more interesting: there was a chalked circle on the floor, with some blobs of wax around it. The bed and carpet had been moved away. Since the agents had a UV light, they also saw some splatters in the centre of the circle. There was not enough to be a full-on human sacrifice or anything, but more like a cut hand, or possibly a small animal.

Happy that they were alone, they looked around to see what they could find that was interesting. They found the brooch (but took the whole jewellery box to deflect suspicion) as well as a few family photos. Some of these were in black and white and seemed pretty old, including one lady wearing the brooch. There was also an old-looking copy of Dracula, with a handwritten note on the title page: “Dear Emma, you might like this. Love M.”

They planned to clean up the circle before leaving, but noticed a police car outside, with an officer knocking on the door, so they made themselves scarce by ducking out of the back door, and back to London.

GM Notes and Thoughts

I was extremely tempted to have a vampire here, but I am also enjoying raising the tension more slowly. I think that if I was doing it again, I would do it, but it seemed a shame to have the first overtly supernatural thing to happen with only half the players there. Otherwise, they have now gotten some solid evidence that there is something weird going on with Isabel, if not explicitly with her disappearance.

Otherwise, they have now got the brooch in their possession, for whatever purposes they wish. They also have some potential direction to search in the form of Michael Anton, if they think that he is more suspicious than Dr Grey or Edmund Chapman, or might know more.

The house is really just something that seemed sensible to me, although maybe she would not be living alone? I decided that room-mates or a boyfriend might be an extra, unnecessary complication. The police showing up was because they had been inside for so long, so I rolled for whether the neighbour got suspicious after a time, and they did.

Not too much to report otherwise. My goal for the next couple of sessions is to give a bunch of information and hopefully entice the PCs into doing something dramatic soon.

Notable NPCs

• Isabel Hartley - Recently deceased woman, based in Cambridge but with links to Whitby.
• Dr Harriet Grey - Computing Science lecturer at Cambridge University, Isabel’s MSc supervisor. Focuses on cryptography and computer security things.
• Edmund Chapman - Isabel’s boss at the Museum of Computing History, Cambridge.
• Michael Anton - Journalist, was host of the birthday party with Isabel where she wore the brooch.