Dramatis Personae:

• S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running, and then pressured by EUROPOL to act as a courier to provide gear and funds to informants and similar shady characters
• N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back. Saving his shoes from the sewer wandering. (Player not at session.)
• 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

24-25 April 2011

Before leaving the basement of what seemed to be the ruins of Carfax, the agents (minus Yannis, who had new shoes) decided to check out the sewer tunnel. They easily got a few hundred metres along, before finding another way up. This got them into another basement, which seemed to be used as a storeroom for bulk, shelf-stable medical goods: bandages and gauze and hypodermic needles and similar.

Sneaking around, they found two rooms labelled as ‘Animal Storage 1’ and ‘Animal Storage 2’. The former had about 50 cages of rats and mice, the latter had a similar number of bats. The remaining rooms here were either empty (but clean) or firmly locked. Consulting the evacuation plan, and then also looking on Google Maps, they found that they were in the basement of an NHS Haematology and Malaria Research Institute, under the eastern wing, on the plan noted as the Malaria Wing.

Checking briefly upstairs, they had heard some movement, but it was late afternoon/early evening on a Sunday, so it seemed minimal. On sneaking up the stairs the group saw cameras in the main corridor, and then identified a couple of labs as well as a morgue and an operating theatre. Deciding that there was definitely something weird about a malaria institute having a morgue and bats, they decided to let discretion be the better part of valour and come back another time. Just as they were leaving, they saw a guard with a handgun (in an NHS facility in London!) walking along the corridor that they did not go into. Retreating back into the sewer, with a bat (after editing one of the requisition forms in Animal Storage 2), they decided to find out more about the place before actually committing to investigating the site more.

They escaped back the way they came and then moved through the sewers for a kilometre or so. This took some pretty low corridors, needing crouched movement for a pretty good length of time, watched by skittering rats the whole way. None of them were particularly big or aggressive, keeping their distance from the big humans clomping and splashing along. They emerged out near the Abbey Mills Pumping Station.

The next day, being a Monday, the agents got into position early to watch how people arrived at the Institute. Other things noted here: the hedge inside the 5 foot brick wall was made up of rowan and hawthorn. The place is otherwise not obvious to find, despite having a normal sign and such. Most people were fairly ordinary, but a pretty nice car arriving a little later than most, with a driver stood out. Yannis, waiting back at the safehouse, was able to access a vehicle registration database and pull a name: Dr John L Drawes. This name was on the Institute’s website as the director. They were also able to convert the name into a home address at a very nice apartment complex with some additional work.

They also found that to gain entry to the Institute a patient would need a referral from a specialist. Medical people could possibly get inside, assuming that they have a reason and possibly a person waiting to meet them. Despite being an NHS facility, it is a research facility. They did some searching and found that there are some papers published by people on the (slightly outdated) website, although nothing recent at all from Drawes.

Follow-ups

The memos in the offices had two useful bits of information from the late 1970s:

1. A memo to discuss things with an anthropologist, Zarina. Further searching found a Lady Zarina Talbot (née Petran). She has not been an active academic for a while, with the most recent easily accessible papers being in the early 1980s, but she is actively involved in charity and philanthropic initiatives aimed at stopping human trafficking in the Balkans, including her native Romania. The money for this comes from her husband, who left her a widow about a decade ago. Her academic work was aimed at folklore and religious beliefs in the Middle East, focusing on statuary and goddesses.
2. A short note that someone (possibly multiple people?) was remanded to “HMS Proserpine”, which the agents know from the annotations is not a ship that seems to be on the active list of Royal Navy vessels or shore bases. The last vessel was scrapped in 1919, and it was a shore base at Lyness, Scapa Flow during WW2. Nothing is on open record since then.

The sarcophagi in the crypt are all related with the name de Playz. This is the name of a noble family in the area that ended in the late 1700s. It is not clear whether they are the source of Plaistow or Plaistow is named after the family. Lots of Williams, Henrys and Roberts in the family tree over the centuries.

GM Notes and Thoughts

This felt like not too much happened, with a fair bit of exposition and routine information gathering, but the players got a solid lead and spent some time at the end of the session planning how to best use it. Their current thinking is that even if Drawes is not going to take work home, the apartment is likely less-guarded than the Institute, so they are considering getting in there. They are hoping that there will still be something useful to pick up; his keycard would give them director-level access to various laboratories and similar restricted rooms at the Institute. They are also thinking pretty widely in terms of plans (posing as deliverymen, seducing a neighbour, replacing the driver, getting a keycard for the Institute off a guard working there), which is nice to see.

Accessing the Institute without going near Drawes is also an option they mentioned. We will see what they go for, although it is probably not going to be kidnapping Drawes, which was floated briefly - his going missing would definitely be quickly noticed by someone, where a couple of visitors or a guard behaving oddly might not be.

They have a fair number of things pencilled in to follow-up on as well, which is the nature of investigation games in general, and a sandbox one in particular. The main stuff is:

• The Institute and Dr Drawes, since there is something going on there.
• The brooch of Isabel’s, which they suspect to be the one mentioned as belonging to Lucy Westenra, which they think will be at her apartment in Cambridge. (They know she has been living there after finishing university because of her Facebook profile which is not very locked down, but obviously not an actual location.)
• Axel Logistics, the shipping company that ended up with ownership of Carter, Paterson and Co. CP&Co were contracted to provide transport by Dracula. This is a thing that stood out early as interesting, but they have just not gotten to yet.

The players were pretty sensible about pulling back once they realised that there was something weird about the Institute: the presence of a morgue, and bats, in what should be a research institute set off enough alarm bells, even without the armed guard. Drawes is worrying the agents a fair amount. They tried to shuffle it to be ‘Dracula’. Instead one of them noticed that ‘Drawes’ is ‘Seward’ in reverse, causing some minor paranoia….

Notable NPCs

• Dr John L Drawes - Director of an NHS Haematology and Malaria Research Institute in the Plaistow area.
• Zarina Petran, Lady Talbot - Anthropologist (and now philanthropist) mentioned in a 1970s memo as someone to ask about something to do with Edom’s mole hunt.