10/16 People Go Missing Every Day
A FEW DAYS LATER
Mikhaila and her pink Hummer have gone missing. Inexplicably, someone has broken into Edgar and Zee’s apartments and left the keys to their vehicles (Edgar’s bondoed pick-um-up and Zelda’s sensible sedan), which are both now parked outside.
EDGAR
Edgar goes looking for Nedry in Thomson Woods and gets lost on trails that aren’t quite the same as they had been a couple weeks ago. He triangulates off the cliff face (Fairview is surrounded on three sides by metal rich mountains) to get himself unlost. On the Fire Road, someone is messing with his truck. They make a run for it, but Edgar tackles Roberto (a news cameraman he had talked to on the day of the cabin autopsy out at the old Errol Place on Route 3).
Roberto is telling him that he was leaving a message from Nedry on his dash, telling him to meet in the quarry at midnight. Says that Nedry has been keeping him fed while he is in hiding from the town, and reveals that Hugo had been executed the night he returned from a mysterious trip that Roberto was almost the one to go on.
Little red dot appears on Nedry and he takes a bad shot that could get worse. He runs to his truck, starts it up, gives Roberto a chance and even a yell of encouragement, but Roberto is too panicked. As gunfire puffs up forest earth all around Roberto, who is clearly too freaked out to run for the truck, Edgar’s truck makes a rooster tail of dirt and rubble. He knows a shortcut across the river toward the old Varney farm and he needs to get to a hospital.
ZELDA
Has been watching the old church by Harmon Steel works because she saw a familiar slim black motorcycle parked outside. She heads in and finds the church empty except for a radio playing "Put on a Happy Face" for the billionth time. Zelda swears she will get brave enough to turn off a radio someday, but not today.
Some pictures on the wall reveal that the photos that were being taken by all the high schoolers not so long ago are somehow responsible for the town being what it is today. She hears a door close somewhere deeper within the church, but doesn’t want to investigate it any further. Her niece Heather took some of those pictures and she is worried about her. So she heads across town to check on her, her twin sister Alda, and brother in law Hanz.
She notices that there are few cars in town, and she hasn’t noticed a gas station yet either.
When she gets to their cozy townhouse in West End Park, Hanz, now much older and frail, greets her with tears in his eyes. He thinks she is his wife Alda, who he hasn’t seen in probably 15 years or so. His daughter Heather has also gone missing, but this was just a couple days ago. She has also been living without Alda for around 15 years… but it’s hard to estimate because people aren’t supposed to talk about the Past (Rule 5). Heather had been the Editor of the Fairview Phone Book, working at the Telecommunications Building next door to the Sheriff’s Office in Apophis Center (Where the meteor had struck just a couple weeks ago, as far as they have experienced.) Zee only finds generic groceries in his cabinets and no alcohol at all. He doesn’t want to talk in the townhouse because “THEY’RE LISTENING.” So they walk to the Red Saddle Saloon, which is just about the only place in town to find alcohol.
Hanz is very upset about the reminder of Alda, and plans to drink himself silly. Zee wants to check out Heather’s office and desk.
EDGAR
The hospital parking lot is nearly empty. Edgar wanders in, looking for help, but finds not a soul as he wanders around, shouting and banging on things. He opens up his wound and finds a warm sheet in a dryer to stanch the flow better. When he finally finds Dr. Martinez, she is in the same room as he and the others awoke in recently.
The person she is tending to is the one Mikhaila has called “Rasputin” and he says he’s glad to be back. Dr. Martinez treats him very deferentially, but does have a tiny bit of Hippocratic Oath in her, so leaves off to help Edgar. Edgar thinks he recognizes the guy on the bed with a natural 1 though, so he thinks its the “Will it Blend” dude from Youtube. Dr. Martinez lets her guard down a little bit with Edgar once they are far enough away from “Rasputin” and breaks Rule 5 long enough to tell him “she was more of a TikTok girl herself.”
ZELDA
Meandering her way unstopped through the Apophis Center Telecommunications business offices, she finds Heather’s desk. No one stops her, or even makes eye contact with her, but they do whisper to each other and back away from the area she’s in. Zee can’t log on to Heather’s very out of date computer, but takes a heartbreaking memento picture (of Zee and Heather at the Fairview High School job fair, session 1 of this campaign).
Zee is quick enough to avoid the Bully Deputy and rush onto the street, but unfortunately runs right into good ol’ Sheriff (nee Principal) Lewicki. He’s about to say something obnoxious and threatening, but when he sees the picture of Heather in Zee’s hands, he relents and seems to sympathize. “Was a shame she had to go out like that.”
Bully Cop bursts out the door of the Telecom building and nearly has Zee in cuffs but a burst of adrenaline helps her avoid that fate. She flees. Sheriff Lewicki tells the Deputy now is not the time.
Zee goes to retrieve Hanz from the Red Saddle and finds him in a drunken argument about “missing wives” with Mikhaila’s husband Huxley, who has moved on in her very long absence from his life and now has another wife of many years. Zee is not able to stop the argument from turning into a fistfight, which Hanz loses badly after Huxley does a ju-jitsu type maneuver and leaves him on the floor with a cracked rib or two.
Zee gets Hanz home and in bed. She takes the job fair picture out of its frame and sees the date written on the back. She has a very strong hunch that it is the password to Heather’s work computer, and she plans to use it later.
MIDNIGHT AT THE WHITE ROCK QUARRY
Edgar and Zelda pull up in Edgar’s beat up truck, kill the lights and walk down into the quarry. See movement by a steam shovel. More than 1 shadow. There are many many dark shadowy areas where Zee could hide, but that also means there are many places things could be hiding in the dark too. They are not able to notice very much else in the poor midnight lighting, and are lucky they can keep their step on some of the steep and rubble strewn handrail-lacking walkways.
The quarry’s beach head area transitions to watery basin that connects out to the Big Gorge River. A hungry preternatural yowling is coming from somewhere out on the water. Zee steels her nerves and heads toward the shadow at the Steam shovel. Turns out it’s not Nedry, but a pack of pointy eared, black eyed, saw toothed humanoids feasting on the corpse of Jeff Niederman (opthamologist, some kind of shady B612 affiliation in his past).
Zelda tries singing "Put on a Happy Face" to the beasts, but they just attack her harder.
She and Edgar are very badly wounded, but a whole lot of cloned commandos (like those who had been tracking Jimmy Two Shoes at the Abandoned Mall in Lewiston) emerge from the shadows, laser sighted silenced submachine guns a-popping.
They hypodermic Edgar and Zee. Zee blacks out immediately, but Edgar overhears some of the commandos griping about them "barely out a week and already trying to join the Resistance" and referring to "Mountain Central" which seems to be a military codename of some type.
GM ONLY NOTES
What had happened was… (stuff I determined behind the scenes in the moment.)
Zee’s Player is a notorious character hopper, so she built into her side story a couple NPCs that she might want to change to later. Her niece Heather and twin sister Alda. Both have been declared missing as she has started to get itchy to change things up. After tonight’s session, Zee’s player said she was ready to come in as a new character and wanted to come onstage as Heather next session. Zelda will be basically chunked into cryosleep as a Very Cold NPC/Macguffin till she’s needed again.
STUFF WHAT HEATHER KNOWS:
She woke up in the town about 15 years ago when it was almost done being rebuilt from her and the others’ photos. (Some places weren’t well photographed and so no second floor of Munson Lab, and the old hospital wing was built in error due to using old blueprints.)
Her mom Alda was also there then, but went missing about a year later. Hanz has not taken it well at all. Heather has worked hard to keep herself with access to information and used it to help form and maintain a little Resistance against whoever or whatever is running this weird-ass town and setting these strange new rules.
The Resistance spent time trying to escape the town and couldn’t. But then Roberto and Hugo (who had sided with Resistance over B612 Society in the end) had found a way through an underground section of caves along the western end of the river. Hugo just returned from 6-7 months of travel outside, but was caught and executed before he could tell anyone what’s out there beyond the big wall at the mouth of the valley.
STUFF WHAT THE PCs (STILL) DON’T KNOW
- It’s been 10,000 years or so, not just the 20-30 they suspect/assume.
- Hugo was followed back by some of the I AM LEGEND/ Wayward Pines style devolved humanity, who were then mostly put down by the commandos… a couple were captured and taken under the mountain, and a few got away.
- The cloned commandos from under the mountain found out about Nedry’s midnight quarry meeting when they tortured Roberto after Edgar abandoned him in the woods.
- When Mikhaila tried to call “Rasputin” she spoke to a very human-sounding AI. The AI used that call to adjust the algorithm and woke him sooner than he had expected. He plans to walk among the town as if he were a new arrival and figure out what’s going wrong in the town, because he doesn’t like all the ungrateful fearfulness and Resistance going around…
- As we get our feet under us in the Second Big Arc of the Fairview Campaign, the hook has been set for three main options:
- take a trip Outside of Fairview (visit the ruins of Lewiston Mall maybe?)
- find a way Under the Mountain.
- Continue trying to make sense of the Town itself, its Secrets and the Resistance
- Whichever direction they go, the other two directions will be getting worse till they come back around!