[Actual Play: Demon] Strange as Angels Series 2

[Emprint]

http://www.saberpunk.net/strangeasangels/poster.jpg

Previously

Series 1, "To Love and to Serve", was chronicled here (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=78045&highlight=) and here (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?p=2607134). Here's what happened:

Xariel, a fallen angel of deaths and endings, has returned to Earth in the body of retired police detective Max Harris. While Xariel was investigating the deaths of a number of teenage runaways, Lucifer, the onetime leader of the fallen, reappeared on live television.

Meanwhile, Xariel's former comrade-in-arms Sandalphon- the very murderer he was pursuing- attacked his friend Jill and Max's friend Mitch.

By rescuing them both, Xariel avoided asking himself a hard question: whose values and loyalties are really driving him? Xariel's? Or Max's?

Exhausted from protecting his friends, but drawing strength from the pact forged with Jill, the angel returned to Max's apartment.

Someone was waiting for him.

The Cast

Xariel- A fallen angel in the body of retired police detective Max Harris. (Player character.)

Dennis Hertz- Another detective with the Chicago police department.

Jill Thompson- Xariel's thrall, former coordinator at the Angel Sanctuary shelter.

Labazar- An angel of the wild in the body of conspiracy journalist Quint Whiteman.

[Emprint]

Demon: Strange As Angels

Out of the Past

Episode 1- "Bette Davis Eyes"

Scene 1- Max's Apartment

A classy looking dame. That's the only way to describe her. The woman sitting across from Xariel combines bits and pieces of a half dozen stars of Max's youth. Sophia Loren's hair. Lauren Baccall's eyes. Bette Davis's... mouth.

"I'm in trouble, Xariel. Bad trouble."

"So you said. But who are you?"

"Lirael." She says it like it's supposed to mean something. After a pause, "I need your help."

"First things first. How did you get in here?"

"Your kitchen window. There's a leak."

"A leak isn't the same as open."

She smiles, just vaguely. "I'm good with water."

Lirael. Water. That should tell him who--

The war. Lucifer's last crusade.

Max would only remember two cities, but Xariel knows there were five. That's not the only thing Max would have gotten wrong.

The shining city, fortress of the nephilim Seboim, is crumbling into the sand. A few minutes ago, this wasn't even desert- the Defilers have sucked the moisture from the ground and the air, and the angels of the deep earth have split it apart, fire gushing up from the mantle.

A group of humans runs, as they were told to. One command, whispered in their ears by Lucifer's armies.

"Leave. Don't look back."

Xariel watches Seboim's last defiance. He was powerful- the knowledge of angels and the soul of man wedded together- but ultimately he is no match for the experience and ruthlessness of Lucifer's soldiers.

One of the humans slows, stumbles. She looks back at the battle.

Xariel pleads with her silently. Turn around. Don't keep looking. Don't make me...

But she keeps looking, enthralled by the destruction of her home. Xariel raises his sword to take her life...

...but before he can bring it down, a harsh wind sweeps across the plain. It sucks the oceans from the woman's body, reducing her to a flimsy pillar of dust and salt.

That wind is Lirael, the Breath of Silence.

Xariel stumbles, reaching to steady himself on the coffee table--

The oceans of the spirit world, deep and still, where waves disturb only the surface.

There is a light and a kiss and eyes that go on forever.

The eyes are Lirael, the Breath of Silence.

This time Max's hand connects with the table, and he steadies himself. He sees the smoke curl upwards from Lirael's cigarette.

"I hope you don't mind?" She cocks an eyebrow.

"Not at all." He lights his own. "So, what kind of trouble are you in, and why should I help you?"

"Tommy was... hitting me. I... she... went black..." Lirael tells a stilted narrative. About ten hours ago, her host, Kristina Davros, was being beaten by her husband, Tommy Jenkins. Kristina collapsed, and Lirael entered her body.

When she woke back up, Tommy had been shot- with her gun. She shows the gun to Xariel- it's a pearl-handled little thing with a short barrel. A lady's gun. Lirael is convinced that the police will blame her for shooting Tommy. Lirael called 911, then fled the scene. He was alive, but probably isn't by now.

"Even if they thought you did, it's self defense. Nobody's going to be sorry this guy got what he had coming. So what are you really afraid of?"

She reaches into her alligator handbag again, producing a ziplock of small black capsules.

"I... she... helped Tommy with these." She frowns. "I think I took money. I've just escaped a prison. I don't want to go back."

Xariel nods- he understands the kind of trouble she's in now- or thinks he does, anyway.

"How did you find me?"

"Your name was written in the air. You've worked miracles. I followed them through some pretty bad neighborhoods, but eventually they led me here."

She sees Xariel's hesitation. "Look, I don't have much to offer you. But," she offers her hand, and Xariel takes it. "I think I can manage one more miracle. If you help me, I'll make you young again."

Xariel pushes her hand away. "Keep your miracles. You just have to give me your trust."

She looks at him, puzzled.

"Tell me your name."

Lirael hesitates, then relents. The syllables pour forth, strangely accented storms at sea and waves upon the beach and kisses in the deep and the sound of a foot crunching on dry sand.

"You'll need someplace to stay." Xariel casually dismisses the possibility of her remaining in his apartment. "Hold on..."

Xariel closes his eyes and whispers a name. "Labazar."

"Xariel?" comes the Devourer's confused voice.

"Yes."

"Huh. So that's what that's like. You're on my TV. You look a little like Regis Philb... uhm, you can't see me, can you?"

"No, why?"

"Ah, no reason. So, uh, what can I do for you?"

"I need a safehouse. For a friend of ours."

"Somebody from the war?"

"Yes."

"Lemme think... yeah, I got just the place. Got a pen handy?" Labazar gives Xariel the address of a cheap hotel. "The manager is a buddy of Quint's. Shouldn't have any problem with the hush-hush."

"Good." Xariel breaks their connection, and turns back to Lirael. "Now, where can I find Tommy?"

[Emprint]

Scene 2- The Hospital

Tommy Jenkins's room is a floor up from where they treated Jill earlier tonight. It's dark, the lights on machinery vageuly silhouetting a human figure against the translucent curtain.

Xariel pulls a chart from the wall and flips through it. Multiple gunshot wounds, six bullets extracted. Critical but stable. Looks like she didn't kill him as bad as she thought.

The angel steps forward, opens the curtain and considers taking back that thought. Massive and obvious damage has been done to the right side of Jenkins's trunk and skull, both of which are being held together less by bone and tissue than by plastic and bandages. Xariel senses that Tommy's been on the edge of death for a while.

Tommy's intact eye blinks open.

"Hello, Tommy. Can you talk?" Xariel's words are gentle, but his tone is ominous.

Tommy chokes some air out, but no words form.

"Alright, we'll do this the hard way." Xariel reaches into Tommy and pulls his soul out. It stays anchored, but it's a little more talkative than his body.

"You should be dead right now, Tommy."

"Yeah, I know." Tommy's voice is harsh, like a guy who isn't used to anybody having one up on him.

"Your wife do that?" Xariel gestures to the dealer's body.

"Kristy? You've got to be kidding me." Tommy snorts.

"Did you see who did?"

"...no." Tommy pauses. "I want to be let go. Fuckers won't let me go." Tommy's head moves slightly, painfully to indicate the hospital.

"You shouldn't speak like that of your betters, Tommy. You hit your wife."

"Not too hard. She just got me mad sometimes." He sees Xariel isn't buying it. "Look, man, I love Kristy. And I wouldn't hit her too hard right now. I wouldn't hurt my kid."

"Kid? She's pregnant?"

"Yeah, she--" Tommy chokes, as grimy shadow tendrils reach up and drag his spirit back in. Xariel tries to pull him back, but can't. There's some kind of binding on him.

That's what's keeping him alive, the angel realizes. The work is sophisticated- the kind of binding Slayers used to do in the war, to protect souls from loyalist Reapers. There's a lot of power backing it, too... and something else. Xariel looks closer, deeper, and he sees it. A name written in the binding. "I AM WHO AM." Yahweh. The name of God.

Can I even write His name? Xariel wonders, idly tracing the letters in the air. He can't- even as the faintly glowing, many-dimensional figures of angelic script take form, some of them tarnish or collapse. He gives up and lets them go.

Xariel remembers Torimel's apartment. She'd written the name of God in human languages both ancient and modern. But she couldn't write it for real. If she had, she might have survived.

Who's still out here who can write His name? I shouldn't have assumed that just because I haven't seen His servants means they aren't here.

"Harris?"

Xariel turns; behind him is Detective Hertz.

"Lemme guess. Stopped by to see Mitch, stayed for the freak show?"

"Something like that. This your case?"

"Yeah, and it's a doozy."

"What's his angle?"

"Black Heroin. Tommy-boy's the local representative for the Santucci Family."

Xariel nods. The Santuccis blew into town in the late seventies, gangsters from back east taking advantage of a tense and expensive conflict between home-grown Chicago gangs. Their edge was a fancy new drug called Crack. Max remembers investigating the Santuccis in connection with the Katie Ballard murder case.

Hertz rambles on a while longer. Xariel picks up that the slugs removed from Tommy and the scene so far are from the same type of gun his wife owned, but that the injuries seem to indicate that he was shot in close quarters with a much more destructive weapon.

Barely, Xariel manages to persuade Hertz he can help out some. Hertz gives him the address of Tommy's apartment.

[Emprint]

Scene 3- The Jenkins Penthouse

Xariel searches the apartment. After a quick search, he thinks the scene has been cleaned up. There's some pills the police didn't discover, and a number of pictures of Jenkins with a woman. A woman who doesn't look like Lirael.

Scene 5- Lobby of 1101

Talking to the building concierge, Xariel finds out that a nearby patrolman, Ethan Connors, was first on the scene after the shots rang out.

Scene 6- Streets outside 1101

Xariel finds Patrolman Connors walking his beat. After some pleasantries, he gets to the point. Under the angel's stare, Connors admits that he cleaned up the scene before his fellows arrived. He says he was scared into it by a woman with strange eyes. Eyes that seemed to go on forever.

He's actually relieved when Xariel tells him that the woman was real.

[Emprint]

Scene 7- Motel

It's raining again, running off the roof of the motel where Lirael is staying.

Lirael is getting out of the shower, her hair dripping onto the robe as it slides up her shoulders. She brushes a lock from her forehead, then startles as she realizes Xariel is standing in the room. Somehow, he's completely dry.

"That's not your face," he says, too casually. "Or hers."

"No. I told you, I wanted to hide."

"If you want to keep on hiding, Lirael," and the name echoes, "you're going to tell me the truth."

"But I--"

"Quiet." Xariel steps closer. He's taller than her. "This is more complicated than someone shooting your 'husband.' And you know that."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Something's keeping him alive, Lirael. Something that can say God's name."

Lirael's face tries to register relief and terror at once.

"You know what it is?"

"I've... I've been back longer than I told you. There's something out there that's been whispering to me, saying my name."

"One of us?"

"No. One of them. A loyalist."

Damn. I was afraid of that.

"Who is it, Lirael?"

She squeezes his arm.

"It's him. It's--" and she mouths the name, so that it can't hear her:

"--Usiel."

To be continued...

[Emprint]

Comments...

- Took me a long time to get this writeup done.

- If it seems sparse in the middle, it is- although Xariel's investigation of the apartment took a while in-game, not much of significance happened.

- As noted above, this is the second series. We're basically running the game in arcs of three to four episodes each, much the way the British series Cracker was put together.

- Usiel is a White Wolf character, though I'm using him somewhat non-canonically. His previous appearance (in flashback) is described on our wiki here (http://wiki.saberpunk.net/pm2/pmwiki.php?n=StrangeAsAngels.Usiel):

Once the Throne of the Sundered, later the Reaper of Souls. Leader of the Seventh House before the fall. Despite having voiced doubts about God's plan, Usiel refused to join the rebellion, and continued to lead the loyalist Reapers during the war.

Xariel fought Usiel for the soul of the first human to die in battle, as remembered at the beginning of Little Earthquakes (episode 1.3).

Xariel's fight with Usiel was directly borrowed from the Slayer section of Houses of the Fallen. While the description there doesn't mention Usiel (or Xariel, obviously), it seemed to me that it worked better with characters we knew.

And where I think we're going with Usiel is fairly far off from Greg's books....

- I'd actually thought of using another signature character in this adventure, but didn't. There's still a rather roundabout reference, though. Anybody want to take a guess? (In spoiler text, please, so Gecko doesn't read it accidentally.)

- It didn't rain at all for most of the first series. Now it's raining all the time. Hm.

- At this point, the game is still taking place in 2003- on October 30th, to be specific.

[Craig Oxbrow]

Darn those Reapers...

So does this mean the Loyalists are coming home?

[Emprint]

Darn those Reapers...

So does this mean the Loyalists are coming home?

Coming? ;)

[Gecko Phantom]

Yay, finally, a write-up.

The biggest thing that stands out to me, going back over this session, is how much I walked away from one of the central canons of the noir-detective story: I didn't blindly trust Lirael from the beginning. On the other hand, I'm helping her, which is a big step - two sessions ago, I was ready to walk away from Chicago entirely.

Gods willing, Emprint and I will run session 2.2 next week.

[Emprint]

The biggest thing that stands out to me, going back over this session, is how much I walked away from one of the central canons of the noir-detective story: I didn't blindly trust Lirael from the beginning.

I don't know that trusting her outright would have been plausible, and it's certainly not a requirement. Look at Chinatown- Gittes doesn't Mrs. Mulwray at first.

[Gecko Phantom]

Necro-ing so I feel pressure to make sure we play this week.

I don't know that trusting her outright would have been plausible, and it's certainly not a requirement. Look at Chinatown- Gittes doesn't Mrs. Mulwray at first.Well, its a continuum, but I think the PI's instincts at the start of a given story are trust. In "The Little Sister," Marlowe knows he's being lied to, but he still trusts the title character - he's just a dick to her in the process. In "Farewell My Lovely" we see a similar phenomena, tho' he's not trusting a girl at first.

And, well, in "Chinatown" Jake does trust Mulwray at first.

The FIRST Mulwary, at least.

It takes some kind of betrayal to put the shields up, and its just an icon of the genre that the betrayal must be relearned. Like how Mega Man starts every game without his old weapons ;)