LogDead Drop Vienna-Jason-2

Game log for the 2020-08-16 session of Dead Drop: Vienna, as taken by Jason

On the day of the conclave, the team takes a long hard look at security to find a weakness. There's a catering pavilion that's going to be a bear to get past because everyone's coming and going, but if Maribelle can get past, she'll be home-free. She makes her way in. Betts details herself to watch her exit point, while the rest of the team wait in a car a ways up the road. She finds a spot where she's got a good view of the emergency exit from the fallout shelter.

Maribelle gets into position to receive feeds from all the radio bugs. She's behind a shrubbery, feeling safe from discovery and the Knights Who Say Ni alike, when some dude in priestly robes approaches the same shrubbery, looking for a place to light up. She sneaks off when he decides to take a leak, avoiding discovery, satchel full of tape recordings. She then runs off to the car.

Betts sees two guys pull over and act like they're having car trouble. A third guy seems to be relieving himself in the shrubs and then vanish into the cave. She photographs the guy who went into the cave. After he comes out and his comrades finish "fixing" the car, they go up the road and into the retreat.

Betts then slips in to the fallout shelter to retrieve the recording device. As the gets it down from its shelf, she inadvertently knocks over a can. She's quick enough to catch it with her heel, hacky-sack style, and puts it back on the shelf, somewhat the sweatier for wear. She meets up at the team car, and the whole group retreats to their base in Vienna.

As the team listens to the recordings, they hear a mix of many different languages. Latin and Italian dominate. The conversation in the fallout shelter, however, is in German. In the radio feeds, they hear a conversation about some new students for Father Cardolini, who will apparently be ready for their new education soon. In the fallout shelter recording, between Cardolini and someone he respectfully refers to as Professor, they discuss planning for a ritual. It involves subjects and other preparations, in a sanctuary in Trieste. Intel is documented in Google docs - see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M-ysWFffB8owcGA7QvECpl3yfK7JRZhunaMlqeg8Tfg/edit#gid=2025047803 .

As we listen to the tapes, we also find that vampires have an aversion to flowers for the dead. The Professor specifically orders that the sanctuary area get cleared of all funeral flowers.

Winston begins researching the church in Trieste. There's been a church on that site since forever. In 1850, they demolished the old one and built the current church. There's an account from a worker on the site, claiming that he found archeological evidence of something odd happening at the site.

Wilmer goes looking for financial information. The Catholic Church doesn't release its records easily. They operate many institutions in Trieste, including the religious school, which take donations. People are often "noisy" about those donations, making them visible through unofficial means even if the Church doesn't declare them. However, a lot of the donations seem to be unusually obscure. They go through shell corporations and other staples of the money laundering process.

Ditch thinks about all the Yugoslavians enrolling in the school, and investigates to see how smuggling in Trieste works. He finds some Croatian fisherman with Italian passports, drinking in a dive bar. He notices the guy sitting across from him looking over Ditch's shoulder, and feels movement behind him. He jumps to his feet, and the bottle someone was swinging hits him in the shoulder rather than the head. He looks around and calculates this is going to be a three on one fight. He hip-throws the guy behind him into one of the others, buying him time against both of them, but the third man comes at him with a knife. He avoids taking any harm and tries to go after the guy's arm, but he can't get control of it, and moments later, the other two are on him. The three beat him down, and take his wallet and jacket. Ditch now has the "vicious" trauma. He did, however, catch the name of a courier / human trafficker named Mladic. They also mention that the priest likes Mladic's girls.

Maribelle goes to Trieste to surveil the outside of the church. The log didn't get the details of what she saw.

Betts goes to surveil the back of the church. She sees someone goes in the back, unlock another door, and then go down some stairs. She gets a photo of him.

Winston suggests we should try to open up the door Betts saw, since the weird stuff would likely be downstairs and locked up. We could also attempt to rescue anyone we find there, since they're probably victims of the conspiracy. Winston checks to see if he can find someone who can take care of the people we rescue. He finds someone called Andre who claims to work for a shipping company. Andre's actually Greek. He can move some people, sure, just tell him where they're going.

We wait for night and go in. Ditch carries a heavy loadout, everyone else goes normal. Betts is in the process of picking the lock for the basement when it opens, and a surprised priest sees someone picking the lock. She pulls her pistol. He screams. She shoots, too late. He jumps and he's falling backward down the stairs. Ditch shoulders Betts out of the way and leaps down the stairs, attacking the priest with his Italian switchblade. He sprains his ankle landing on the guy, but being landed on by Ditch and stabbed quells the priest pretty well. He won't be screaming anymore.

Wilmer orders everyone to bum rush the basement, trying to outrun whoever is responding. Maribelle decides to stay upstairs and guard the exit point, but everyone else charges the bottom of the stairs and goes through a door right away. It opens into a wider chamber, which contains the entrance to a spiral staircase down. As we rush in, Ditch and Betts are approaching that staircase when someone in robes and a porcelain mask comes up. Betts charges him and pins him. He tries to grapple her in response, but she's too quick for him. Ditch tries to stab him but the priest crouches under his attack. Wilmer was reflexively reaching for his flask, and has the brilliant idea to try and gag the guy with it. The priest falls flat and busts out some judo action that sends Wilmer flopping down the stairs. Winston tries to kick the priest while he's down, but accidentally kicks Betts insted. Ditch stabs at the guy again.

Wilmer looks around and finds himself in a vaulted space, though not a terribly big one. The stonework seems very old and ornate, and the floor is a Classical-stype mosaic. He sees two people dressed in robes and wearing porcelain masks, and three children sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding hands. The robed figures are behind them. They look at Wilmer, surprised. Wilmer looks at them, surprised. They pull knives. Wilmer thinks to run and goes just leaping up the stairs, running headlong into Ditch and the priest. He tries to sort of leap over the priest, but the priest grabs his ankle and knocks him down. Now it's a pig pile, with the priest on the bottom, then Ditch, then Wilmer, as the two other masked folk come up from below. Betts tries to shoot at the people coming up the stairs, but since it's silent, they don't realize what she's doing, and they aren't deterred. Ditch stabs the cultist again, and this time, he puts enough holes in him to determine the outcome comprehensively.

At this point, Ditch loses his patience and pulls the folding-stock AKM out from under his jacket and goes to work on the people coming up the stairs. The people from downstairs have made the fatal mistake of bringing knives to a gunfight. Ditch makes an incredible noise, firing a short-barelled rifle in what is basically a stone cave, but guns them both down before they can accomplish anything.

Ditch goes down the stairs. The three kids are still there, and have not reacted at all. He notices that all three kids are naked. There are some half-columns along the edge of the room, serving as shelves of a sort, and the kids' school uniforms are sitting on them. Ditch goes into the room, aims up the staircase, and tells Wilmer to go get them.

Wilmer and Winston both go in. Winston starts taking pictues of the room. Winston pulls out his first aid kit to try to figure out why the kids are behaving this way. As soon as he puts his stethoscope to the first kid - and by kid, we mean middle-teenage years - the kid starts to scream big loud blood-curdling screams.

Maribelle hears gunfire, and knows that anyone close by will hear it too. She shouts down that company is coming. In the meantime, she shuts and locks the exterior door.

Wilmer loses his patience and zaps the screaming kid with his stun gun. Since they're all holding hands, the one he zaps goes unconscious, but the other two get a light zap. It jolts them out of their trance-like stake, and they're now very confused. Winston hands them clothes and tells them to dress. Wilmer asks him to dress the unconscious one while he cleans up the room. Betts comes and helps get the kids out.

Maribelle can hear the team coming up behind her now, so she unlocks the door and goes to get the car started. As she walks across the piaza, a guy calls out to her. He and his buddy just came out of a cafe and want to know what's going on. They're shouting in Italian, which doesn't speak properly, but she can puzzle out that they want to know what's going on. She replies in German and tells them she's leaving a meeting for an event. They ask if she heard gunshots, and she assures them she did not. She's not persuasive. One answers in German, insists that he heard gunfire, and says they should call the authorities. She comes closer, to melee range, and then just explodes into violence on them. That takes out one of them, and the other runs for it. He's running away, not toward the cafe or any other visible destination, so there may be a little time. She pulls the car around. The team drives away, with Wilmer advising Maribelle on how to avoid pursuit. She's not a trained pursuit driver, and Wilmer's distracting her, and she ends up sideswiping a parked police car. The cop, who'd been chilling and eating a canoli, does not approve of this style of locomotion, and embarks upon pursuit.

Wilmer tries to get on the CB and find someone who can help get these cops off their tale. He remembers a guy called Luca who does illegal transportation and might just have a CB radio. He does! Wilmer, who Luca knows as Gustave, says he can help but it's going to cost. He rattles off an address and says he needs five minutes. Then we can honk five times and he'll use his truck to block the intersection. Wilmer tells Mirabelle to not fuck up for five minutes and she'll be home free. Mirabelle pushes herself to the limit but she's just not good at this, and the cops start boxing her in. Reinforcments are coming at the speed of radio. She's just barely avoiding getting cut off. Wilmer points his surveillance camera out the window and starts taking flash photos of them, hoping they'll flinch from the light or be blinded. One of the police mistakes the light for gunfire and starts shooting. Luckily, the car is bulletproof. Winston pulls out a map and tells Mirabelle how to get to Luca's intersection.

With Luca's help, Mirabelle eludes the cops, but the cops are almost close enough to get the license plate. She puts her right foot to the floor and drives absolutely unhinged, keeping them from getting close enough, but she starts having flashbacks of car chases from her war days. She's talking about people who aren't there and sobbing.

We pull over and then pass the kids off to Andre, who's going to ship them to London. We also come away with a shared commitment to developing some team prowess, so we won't suck so much in the future. The cops haul Luca out of the truck and interrogate the crap out of him. He doesn't rat, but they're all over him, and when he contacts Gustave/Wilmer to get paid, the cops get the number. Wilmer recognizes the sounds of a bug and tries the old "crank caller" gambit, but he knows someone is looking for him and knows that the gang is in Vienna.