Sablemage
Demi-God
Previously, on The Dracula Dossier… The team enter the cave at Sadikan Monastery and almost immediately find themselves in a firefight with Keritescu and half-a-dozen recently turned vampires, which they dispose of surprisingly quickly. Vincent grabs Derya Kaya, Ritter scoops a pile of documents into a bag, Cartwright exits to set up the escape and Lonely and Smyth press forward to burn the vampire’s coffins. Lonely ends the session face to face with St Armand. Now read on…
Lonely’s blood is up and he leaps over the coffin separating them to hack furiously at Saint Armand with both knives – the special ones he had made to order for killing vampires. While he’s doing this a horde of rats surges round the corner and splits in two; half start fighting over the fallen vampires, drenching them with blood, while the others charge straight at Smyth, who throws a road flare into the pack.
Fortunately for both of them, Lonely manages to incapacitate Saint Armand, which disperses the rats and renders her visible again, and while he’s busy sawing her head off and stuffing her mouth with garlic, Smyth starts stacking up the coffins and setting fire to them. Somewhere there is another vampire which tries to dominate Smyth mentally and get him to leave the site, but he shrugs that off. Lonely pauses to report in, and reaffix his gas mask; meanwhile the tactical net reports a contact in the woods, and the SAD/SOG fireteam move in to capture the target.
Telling Vincent to get Derya up to the top of the cliff, Cartwright and Ritter head underground to join Lonely and Smyth in searching the facility; they find nothing of value, but Smyth does find a biohazard waste sack and cuts off the vampire heads to take with him before burning the bodies. The remaining vampire makes a break for it and is gunned down by concentrated fire from Cartwright, Smyth and Ritter. Smyth adds its head to the bag, and will later incinerate all the heads and dump the ashes in the Bosphorus.
The noise over the tactical net sounds like their fireteam is being taken apart by yet another vampire, and they deduce the existence of a secret exit, then follow it to a ladder into the woods, where they find their support team dead. However, the gunfire from this fight has attracted attention; the Turkish gendarmes pile into their cars and start driving up to search the woods, while the guards hold their positions to protect the facility – the team hasn’t made enough noise inside to be noticed, or maybe the orders are “whatever you hear, stay outside the wall”.
The PCs manage to evade the police searching the woods, but while loading his sack of heads into the car, Smyth notices there’s a tear in it and one of the heads is missing.
They debrief Derya Kaya, learning nothing new from her, but sifting through the documents Ritter salvaged they discover that Dracula’s bioweapon is using raw materials from an old Soviet base in Norilsk, and he now plans to refine the product here in Sadikan using subordinate vampires (who are immune to disease) and distribute it using a Barcelona-based smuggler called Vallejo. It also seems that while Dracula trusts Saint Armand, he doubts the loyalty of Varkony, and doubts that of von Dolingen even more.
They now have enough clues to figure out Dracula’s plan; he intends to cull the human population back to the level he and his fellow vampires need for food, and dispose of the surplus livestock.
They ask the CIA to take care of Vallejo, reasoning that if Dracula has no bioweapons it won’t matter whether he has a distribution network for them or not, and make their way to Norilsk to deal with the source.
GM Notes
The most amusing part of all of this is that despite the supernatural carnage erupting all around him, Vincent has never been in a position to see or hear any of it, so since Cartwright specified not telling him about vampires, Renfields and whatnot, he remains blissfully ignorant of them. Clearly, he is the comic relief.
Lonely got lucky there, and thanks to Frenzy, Conviction, Bennies, aces and specially-crafted meteoric iron knives, did 10 Wounds to the vampire in a single round. And that was after armour and Soaking. I let her get drawn into fighting him instead of doing the best thing, which would have been to run for it and get out through the secret exit while leaving the rats to fight Our Heroes for her. Next time, Gadget, next time; I have plenty more NPCs where she came from.
However, this is all pushing them up Dracula’s To Do list. They must be pretty near the top now.
Meanwhile, off to Siberia.
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