LogDunslough Cartographic Society-Jason-8

Game log for the 2018/05/06 session of Blades in the Dark: The Dunslough Cartographic Society, as taken by Jason

Dr Oz wants to obtain a Skovlan reliquary, which he could use for research purposes, and which we could then sell on for a fat profit. We have some extra time to prepare because we're going to be working on our own turf. Most of the team trains, but Clip leans on Jeren to plant false evidence of insurance fraud in the Ankayhat dock fire. Jeren is getting nervous about the tinkering he's doing with the archives and hesitates to try to get the entire incident wiped away, but with contradictory documents in the files, our heat gets a little lower.

Dr Oz and Washout go to the museum to see what exhibits we might like to steal, with Arvus and Clip in tow. It's a little awkward. Dr Oz keeps trying to give a formal academic tour, but he keeps getting sketchy on us, Clip keeps muttering about slanderous remarks against Skovlan, and Arvus just doesn't belong. Still, the Philatory of Milos the Spiteful. Milos was a minor but notable Skovlan warlord from about three hundred years ago, famous for impaling his enemies. The philatory is made of gold, decorated with void pearls. Pool shows up a little later, and she and Clip look over the security around ol' Milos' finger.

We conclude that the best idea is simply to go in to a section of the museum that's under renovation, so we're not likely to encounter people. We sneak into the Skovlan area without encountering a single guard. Washout worries tha there might be dogs, or even ghosts. Dr Oz tries checking for ghosts and yep, the Museum is haunted. He hears the sound of children laughing, in the ghost world.

We flash back to Washout whipping up a fake philatory, which should buy us a couple days before anyone even notices that the real thing's gone missing. He then, in the present day, tinkers his way through the lock on the display cabinet. Actually, it's locks, plural, because he has to pick many locks and effectively disassemble part of the case to get the thing out clean. As he works, a ghost kid walks up behind Clip and asks what he's doing. Clip somehow keeps his cool and says he's just hanging around but he wants some piece and quiet. The ghost accuses him of trespassing, but Clip totally brazens it out by pointing out that if he was trespassing, and got caught, he'd be scared, and since he wasn't scared, it must be OK for him to be there. The ghost actually buys it. A ghost girl then shouts "boo!" at Dr Oz, who tells her that startling people is naughty, but he's willing to play with her. He tells Pool he's stepping out for a tea party. The girl invites "Edmund" to play with them, and unfortunately, Edmund turns out to be a guard. Clip, meanwhile, has to have an ironic conversation about how hard it is to find your own place.

Anna the ghost girl leads Dr Oz over to Edmund the security guard and calls his name, at which point Dr Oz invites Edmund to join their tea party. Edmund doesn't understand how Dr Oz got here, and doesn't seem to understand how Dr Oz could have "just walked through a door." Oz cheerfully compels Anna to "make Edmund take a nap". Anna vanishes, and then Edmund yells and hits the floor.

By this time Washout and Arvus have managed to get their hands on the philatory, and they're just a short time from being done putting it all back together. They send Pool to go look on the Doctor. Dr Oz has a flashback of scouting the region and noticing a quiet little cemetary (Saint Crispin's), and now he goes there with Anna to have a nice tea party. Pool comes running back to the team to let them know that Dr Oz will not be returning to the party. She hides from the guards along the way, who are all rushing to where the scream was. Dr Oz makes it out of the museum without being spotted. Clip keeps Holtz the ghost boy occupied. When it's all done, Pool leads the team out of the museum, in the approved almost-a-total-disaster way. Clip tells Holtz he'd like to come back and talk some more, and Holtz is up for that, as long as they can find a nice quiet place.

Dr Oz's tea party goes on and on until Anna suddenly gets suspicious of the overly friendly grown up, at which point she decides he's creepy and she doesn't want to see him around her museum ever again.

Washout works on his Oracular Prognosticator, and almost completes the work. He talks up how haunted the Museum is, and prints up a broadsheet full of salacious details about the Captain of the Kingmaker to help keep the blame on the Inkrakes. He also trains Resolve. Pool indulges her vice and trains Prowess. Dr Oz works on silencing his voices, and he almost figures it out. He also asks the ghosts in the Museum to stir up more trouble, which effectively takes heat off of us. He pays coin to take a third activity, investigating the Philatory of Milos the Spiteful. It turns out that this new item and the research he does on it helps stop the voices for good. He's going to need to find a demonologist if he really wants to keep digging into this stuff, and comes up with a lead on a tier 3 demonologist. Once he's done with his research, we sell the Philatory, although Dr Oz keeps Milos' finger bone, and puts it in a bottle of gin. To answer the question nobody asked, yes, he does drink the gin. Clip reduces his stress, trains Resolve, meets more Skovlans, and takes a rep from the team to reduce our heat, by telling stories at a bar about how massively haunted the museum is. Arvus trains playbook and Resolve. Washout then takes a rep from the group and completes the Oracular Prognosticator, which looks like a weird armillary sphere thing. It can be used once per score by anyone with tinker. The drug trade picks up and brings in 6-coin! But now we're almost out of Lush, so Washout spends a coin to start a new 6-clock project to decipher the recipe.

Dr Oz's brother Gonzalo appears in his room, just sitting on his bed. They exchange insults for a while, until Washout pokes his head in to rebut the Doctor's claims. They gradually change the subject until they're giggling about how desperate Gonzalo must be, to come visit the eelery. Oz pours him a Milos gin. When he finishes his drink, Gonzalo gets up to take a tour of the eelery, and laughs when Washout tells him that the rest of the facility is off limits. Gonzalo doesn't take that well. He demands to know Washout's name, and when Washout declines, Gonzalo insists... with eyes rolled back in his head and then turned black, and his voice inhumanly low in pitch. There's a scuffle as Washout tries to inject him with standstill poison. He's suddenly paralyzed when he tries, and has a sudden and very lucid vision of someone he loves dead at his feet.

Arvus goes looking for Clip as he hears the sounds of a scuffle. His dog starts barking frantically at Dr Oz's room.

Dr Oz tries to attune and immediately realizes this isn't Gonzalo in the room. In case he had any doubts, Gonzalo's head does a 180, and the voices he's heard before fill the room.

Arvus sticks his head into the room just as "Gonzalo" brushes past Washout. He exchanges compliments with Arvus, who says he's "Jaime"'s brother. Arvus has to keep telling his dog not to attack. Gonzalo is advancing toward Clip in the hallway until Dr Oz calls out, "Master, I have been wanting to learn from you." That gets the thing's attention. Clip tries to lunge and inject it with slumber essence while Dr Oz has it distracted, and while he makes contact, it does nothing. Meanwhile, in the ghost field, Dr Oz is seeing his brother's face overlaid with a horrible demonic face, and suddenly the demon face vomits forth blood, the room becomes very cold, and he realizes that all he has to do for the demon to instruct him is to kill his brother. When the demon realizes that Dr Oz would absolutely kills his own brother for knowledge, it takes that for acceptance. He hands Clip back the syringe, says, "Good, good!", and walks out. Clip tries to throw a vial of electroplasm at its back, but the vial just goes right through it, as though Gonzalo was never there. Also, it's bad for the wall. Once the demon phases through it, the wall's covered in a lovely mix of black goo and electroplasm.

The team falls to rancor. After argument too rapid to log, Washout throws the giner into the fire. Clip urges him to use electroplasm. Anyway, after more arguing and some discussion of possibly murdering Dr Oz to make this problem go away, we decide to go visit Daphne Templeton.

It takes her a minute or more to come to the door, and she things a bit before letting us in. As we walk in, our feet crunch on a barrier of salt. Washout makes sure that we don't break the line. Dr Oz asks her for help with his demon problem and explains about our recent encounter and the unintelligible voices in his head. She takes a book from her library, brings it back to the table, opens it, and asks us to describe what we saw. We do so, including the news that it calls itself the Master of the Void. We find that demons hunger after a single thing, and they want that thing from everyone, always. Perhaps if we can figure out what it wants, we can understand what it's trying to do with us. Washout reminds us of the story of Esketra, and Clip suggests that it must be a demon of fratricide or familicide. He asks her to teach him, and Clip interjects that while we would all love for her to help him, she should exercise discretion about what she teaches him. Meanwhile, Washout decides that he wants to sleep with Daphne. Somehow she actually finds him interesting. Dr Oz is going to be sticking around to assist her, Washout is sticking around to "help out," and the rest of us are looking for some neural bleach.

Clip goes to Fitz's house to try to warn her. He catches her between appointments, and has a little time for him. She thinks his warning is cute but she has no interest in demons or any concern.