Kult: The Atrocity Exhibition, episode 4: Echoes of the Past

We ran, following the few people who seemed actually concerned about the bombers, and soon found ourselves dragged into a shelter.  We talked in pitch darkness.  We'd all reached the same conclusion.  Either we were all drugged at the exhibition and suffering the same hallucinations, or we were in hell.  And the way the others were talking, they didn't seem to find that very surprising.  Jared said he deserved to be there.  Jim talked about some kind of deal he'd made.  I couldn't think of any reason why I'd deserve to be in hell.  But then, I don't know what the rules are.

By now I'd at least got some idea of what might be happening.  Marielle Dubois was trying to raise Vaquelin from the dead by sacrificing her husband.  What all the other stuff was I don't know, but she would have to open the gates to the underworld to bring him through.  And that would explain how we ended up there.

I didn't want to stay there in the dark, contemplating what sins I might have committed.  The bombers were gone, so we went back outside.  Visiting the cathedral, or basilica, or whatever we'd seen in the distance might have answers, we figured.  There was some kind of procession outside, heading in that direction, all wearing white masks.  Jim grabbed a mask that had fallen to the ground and put it on.  Jared took my hand and we danced along behind them.

The building looked like it was made of bone.  The procession stopped outside, as if all the people had been frozen in time.  I could hear Jim screaming as he took off the mask, and Jared let go of me and started trying to dance with the frozen people.  I was left standing there alone, surrounded by these people in faceless white masks, and ended up crying on the floor until Jim helped me up again.

I was sure there had to be a way out, because that place wasn't made for us.  Jared was still sure he belonged there, but I was sure we must be in Vaquelin's own personal hell.  Ezra knew a bit about Vaquelin and I was sure he'd mentioned he'd lived in Paris at some point.  And whatever the others had done, we didn't belong in someone else's hell.

Mentioning Vaquelin got a response from the frozen people.  Jim told them to give us directions to find him, and they all turned to face the basilica.

There were figures of death on either side of the door, mounted on horses and wielding scythes.  Somehow we all had the same thought about them, and made a run for the door.  For a moment I could feel bony fingers touching my back, but then we were inside.  But we were inside a small apartment, with graffiti covered walls and rats in the kitchen.  Two doors, one with the sound of feminine moaning coming from it, and the other with the sound of rattling chains.

Jared went to investigate the moaning sound.  I followed Jim to the sound of chains.  Through the door we found a mass of crumpled sketches and torn canvases, and in the middle of it was Guy Vaquelin, naked with iron chains hooked into his flesh.  And there was a man dressed as a barrister, pulling on the chains and swearing in French, telling him that he was a miserable failure and not worthy to be his son.

I don't think I've ever empathised with someone as hard as I did with Guy Vaquelin in that moment.  There was so much I wanted to say to him.  But I didn't get the chance, as Jared suddenly appeared behind us, saying that some fathers needed killing.  And when he went for Vaquelin's father, I wanted him to do it.

I tried to pull the chains out of his hands while Jared had him distracted, but he just pulled back harder, and in a moment he had the chains wrapped around my neck, strangling me.  Even as I managed to get untangled and breathe again, Vaquelin went for me as well, trying to strangle me.  I can see I'm going to be having a very long talk with Dr Lana about all of this.

It was Jim who managed to save us really, shouting at Vaquelin that he's a great artist, so much so that Marielle wanted to bring him back from the dead.  Jared told us that he'd killed his own father, and by that point I was past finding that shocking.   I asked Vaquelin if his father hadn't wanted him to be an artist, not that I needed to hear the answer.  I already know that story far too well.

What we said worked.  Vaquelin freed himself from his chains, crushed what was left of his father, and ran off.  We chased after him, with Jim in the lead, but somehow the main room of the apartment was now a long dark corridor, and there semed to be some kind of time dilation going on as we couldn't keep up with Vaquelin.  Then there was a blinding light, the two death statues looked as us, and then a door closed.

Jared is going to take me up on my offer of a therapist referral if we ever get home.  I hope Dr Lana is ready for someone with even worse parental relationship issues than me.

We weren't in 1950s France any more.  I could hear gunfire, and shouting in what I was pretty sure was Italian.  Vaquelin moved to Milan after Paris, so we figured we must be visiting stages in his life.  We were in a large piazza, with dead bodies strewn about, and the stink of smoke in the air.  In the middle was a deep pit smelling of decay, and a fountain of blood.

A crowd of people ran past us, and a grenade rolled into their midst and exploded, but instead of body parts there was a shower of red flyers about bringing down the government.  So, the 1960s.  One thing I remember from art school, a bombing in Milan that affected artists across Europe.  Police officers were appearing, and molotov cocktails were being thrown, and I saw burning hands attempting to claw their way out of that pit.  Off to one side was a set of gallows with hanged bodies dangling from them.  As we ran past, for a moment they no longer resembled gallows, but a representation of a skull and a clock, with time moving forward as a body struggled and swung.  It all seemed like the setup for a painting.  Maybe one of the paintings from the exhibition, that I saw in the few moments before everything went to hell.

The image seemed to speak to something in Jim, who pulled out a sketchpad and started drawing.  Then something weird happened which I can't make sense of, with some kind of robed figure that erased everything it touched getting closer to us.  But he stopped before it got to us because there was a beggar at his feet who offered to take him to Vaquelin.  We followed him through a maze of side streets, with that robed figure still following.  Finally we reached a bank with a damaged facade, and he kicked open the door in a cloud of dust and smoke.  I went inside.  Jim waited a moment to pay the beggar, but then the beggar cut Jim's ear off and ran away.

I loaned him a hankerchief.  I couldn't think what else to do.

There were sketches inside the bank, that looked like practice runs for some of those paintings in the exhibition.  Fool's Wisdom and the Tears of Djeraba.  I could hear a scratching, scuttling noise, and papers were falling to the ground.  While Jim set the two pictures on fire, I followed the noise.

Upstairs in some kind of mezzanine, there was a loud commotion with things being thrown.  There seemed to be some kind of pattern to it, and it suddenly occurred to me that I really shouldn't be alone.  I ran back downstairs, to find the others with the paintings well alight, but with the flames seeming to do nothing to them.  Jim started talking to one of the paintings.  It seemed to be a conversation that we were only hearing half of.  He asked if it was blood or death it wanted.  I don't think I want to know the answer.

I told everyone we needed to stick together, and we all went upstairs, picking up some liquor bottles out of a crate on the way.  The paintings still burned, but something seemed to have changed about Fool's Wisdom.  A shadow I don't remember seeing before.

I was leaning over the ledge, trying to work out where the sounds were coming from when suddenly Jared pulled me away and a man starting screaming at Jim about putting ideas in his head.  He'd been inches away from pushing me over the edge.  I grabbed hold of him to try to restrain him from attacking Jim, but somehow he twisted in my grasp and then I was dangling over the edge.  A moment later we were falling.

Of course it was Vaquelin.  He recognised me on the way down, but by then I'd managed to twist round so he would break my fall.  When his head hit the fountain I heard a snap.  He was dead.  That could have been me.  No time to think about that though, with fire engulfing the room.  We made a run for the door, and once again that time dilation thing seemed to be happening.  And that robed figure from outside was watching us again.

Kult: The Atrocity Exhibition, episode 3: The Exhibition Opens

Meri appeared again, looking upset and asking about the argument, so I decided I needed to get over myself and talk to her.  She dragged Jim and me off to see Emmett Veirs, the director.  He was talking to one of the security guys, who left pretty much immediately, which was a good thing given I almost choked on the cloud of aftershave hanging around him.  Jim looked like he recognised him, but he ignored Jim as he passed us.

The director didn't think there was a problem with the paperwork.  I took a look at it myself, and it all looked fine.  Everything in order, and signed off by Meri herself, except she seemed to know nothing about it.  I never thought I'd be saying this, but I found myself actually sympathising with Meri once the director started accusing her of drinking and suggesting that he'd made a mistake hiring her.  I couldn't let her sit there and be berated like that, so I talked some crap about the effects of stress and guided her out of there.

I think I had some kind of hallucination on the way to Meri's office.  Bloated figures, eating something, surrounded by flames.  Another thing to check with Dr Lana.  At least it only lasted a moment.

I figured I was right about the stress when I saw Meri's office.  Clothes and a sleeping bag.  All the hallmarks of someone spending far too much time at work.  I confirmed that it was her writing on the forms I'd just been reading, but she didn't remember being involved.  She brought up the chanting in the gallery again though.  That security guy, Alano, was involved.  Turns out he's some relative of Jim.

Meri started breaking down at that point, and all I wanted to do was reassure her.  Losing a chunk of her memory isn't the same as losing Spencer but I recognised that feeling of nothing making sense.  I told her I knew a good therapist.  Dr Lana's great with this kind of thing, after all.

Meri took some valium and went to sleep.  I covered her up with the sleeping bag, and that's when her key card fell out of her pocket.  As I picked it up, there was a sound from the speakers in the room.  Static, but with an undertone of people calling out, a sudden scream, and then silence.  Jim heard it too.

I'd been starting to have suspicions about what was going on here.  Hallucinations, memory loss, Jared's episode earlier.  It all added up to something in the ventilation system.  I heard about a theatre once that tried to create ambience for a play by putting perfume in the ventilation system, and ended up putting the entire audience to sleep.  The way this whole event was being staged, the idea that someone was trying to add to the atmosphere by drugging us all seemed quite plausible.

I convinced Jim to join me in a bit of snooping.  Meri's key card got us into the loading dock, where we found a couple of massive generators running.  I managed to slip in some oil and burn myself on one of the engines, but I did spot a trail of red droplets on the floor.  Blood.  Jim followed them, and found the trail from the lift, between the engines, ending at a brick wall.  My first thought was that we'd got the trail the wrong way round and that someone had been injured by the wall and gone to the lift to get help, but the trail didn't seem to go that way.  I wondered if there was a secret door or something, but when I touched the wall to test it it seemed solid enough.  Except now I had blood on my fingers too.

I didn't know what was happening, but I didn't want to stay there either.  We ran down the corridor and back into the public area, where we found Jared.  He was looking better and said his girlfriend was on her way but he still didn't want to be alone, and I know I felt better having him around.

That's when the exhibition opening was finally announced.  We all had the skull symbol for the first group, so in we went, with Jared nodding to various movie types along the way.  Of course we had to queue first, but that was very well staged.  The tolling of a Venetian bell, good use of shadows and light, sounds of agonised wailing and crying.  I should have taken notes, but whatever the hell we'd all been drugged with was getting worse.  I felt like I was being watched by some omnipresent being, and it seemed like the statue of a decaying ballerina that I'd ended up next to had moved, and was reaching out for me and screaming.

By then I just wanted to get the whole thing over with.  We were lead through a curtain in a cloud of dry ice, into a crowded room.  The doors closed and I could just make out Marielle Dubois at the front, with a smoking cauldron on either side.  She spent some time reminiscing about the artist, in a way that would have made me pretty uncomfortable if I was her current partner, but it didn't seem to bother Anthony.

Then the curtains opened, and once again it seemed like there was some kind of trick lighting with the paintings.  I could see the appeal of this incredibly dynamic work.  There seemed to be someone singing in French, audible over the rustle of the crowd.  The paintings weren't the only thing on display.  Some kind of symbol was painting on the floor in white chalk paint, and it seemed like the colours of the paintings were running down into it.  It was hypnotic, somehow.  I felt like I shouldn't have come, but at the same time couldn't leave.  It took Jared's hand on my arm to get me to move.

There was one more artwork to display.  A triptych.  The Tears of Djeraba.  Marielle opened it up, then before I'd even had time to take that in, she'd pulled out a knife and cut Anthony's throat.  There was so much blood, and that chalk symbol seemed to be sucking it out of him somehow.  And Alano had shown up with more security guards, and suddenly he stepped up and kissed Marielle.

I had a sudden moment of clarity then.  Jim was freaking out, so Jared and me grabbed his arms and tried to run for the exit.  At first we couldn't even move him, because there were flayed rotting arms reaching out of the paintings to grab hold of him.  Alano's whole body split apart, and some huge figure emerged from it, still holding Marielle.  I could hear the cracks as she was crushed in its embrace.

We had to get out.  I didn't want to go near that thing, but I couldn't see any other way.  I lost my grip on Jim, but he was running by now.  And then we were out, and I ran into Jared a moment before Jim ran into me.  It was like the building was being pulled into some other place, full of flames and the sound of screaming.

Jim ran downstairs and I followed.  Jared remembered Meri, and by this point it didn't seem like looking for her would make things any worse.  Except when we got to her office I could hear chewing sounds from inside and there was blood running from under the door.  Jared was the only one brave enough to look, and shut the door again straight away.

I thought maybe the loading dock would give us a way out.  I lost track of the others along the way, as all the light turned yellow and something seemed to be following me, but I broke into a run and I was back with them.  Meri's key card didn't work on the loading doors.  Jim hit the fire alarm, hoping that would open things up, but it just turned on the sprinklers and after a few moments the water turned to blood.  Jared grabbed a fire axe and smashed open the chains holding the doors.  I heard the sound of springs and gears, and then blood poured in under the doors as they opened.  Outside there was nothing but a burning landscape and the sound of screaming.

That's when I knew we were going to die.  Either that, or we were already dead.

Except when I looked at Jim and Jared, I knew I couldn't give up just yet.  That blood covered wall, the supposed secret door.  I hadn't investigated it properly but maybe there was a way out.  When I looked back I saw it - holes in the wall, with some kind of darkness beyond.  I went back for Jim and Jared.  I tried to ignore those two huge engines, but I couldn't help seeing that there was some kind of grinder atop each one.  Samantha and Nasrah were being crushed in them, with their blood pouring into the engines.  But I had to keep going.

It felt better through the hold in the wall.  It was a dark and empty space but there seemed to be a light in the distance.  I wanted the three of us to hold onto each other, but Jared was already going, so I held Jim's hand and followed him.  As we got closer to the light I could hear jazz, and then suddenly we were on a street.  The sun was black and the street was flowing with blood, but other than that we appeared to be in Paris in the 1950s.

Jared sat down at a cafe, and joining him seemed like the best thing to do.  He ordered food.  I just asked for coffee.  I wasn't sure I could stomach anything else, and I was getting a very unsettling feeling.  That Rosetti painting of Proserpine holding the pomegranate sprang to mind.  I glanced at the waitress as she went back inside, and suddenly the cafe wasn't a cafe but a tomb full of rotting bodies, and the coffee cup was full of lumpy mould.  A moment later it was gone, but I put down the cup anyway.  Jim must have seen it too, as he started throwing up.  I couldn't make myself look at Jared who was still eating, with ichor dripping down his face.

Jared insisted on making conversation with the waitress.  Jim said he could see a burning building.  I couldn't, but by this point I was willing to believe him.  Somehow that was more reassuring than the waitress telling Jared we were in Montmartre, and kissing him.

That's when I heard the air raid sirens.  But the kids on the street went right on with their game of football, even as bomber planes began flying overhead.

Concrete Cow 22

It's two years since I was last at Concrete Cow.  All a bit nerve wracking.  Conventions where you sign up on the day used to be my normal, but that's all changed in the last two years.  I'm used to knowing in advance what I'm going to be playing.  I decided the best way to mitigate that was to offer games in all three slots.  If they filled, then I'd know what I was playing.  If they didn't, it was back to surprises.

Arrival was a bit hairy.  I had to get up early enough not just to get ready, but also to take a covid test and wait 15 minutes to confirm I didn't have the 'rona before I left the house.  Accordingly I ended up leaving somewhat later than planned.  Then when I drove to my usual car park I discovered it was now hosting a covid testing site.  Fortunately there was still just enough car park left for me to find a space and jog back to the Old Bath House.  Then the door I normally go in by was closed, so I had to remember where the other door is.  But finally I was inside, and able to get my sign up sheet on the table with time to spare.

Game 1: Liminal

My Liminal scenario Bad Blood is set minutes away from the Old Bath House, so I decided this one had to be run at Concrete Cow.  I got five players signed up, and off we went.

I was mildly concerned about timings.  Bad Blood normally takes about four hours to run, and this was only a three and a half hour slot.  However, somehow things do seem to run faster offline than online, and despite occasional off topic conversations as a bunch of people who'd not had much physical company in the last two years took the opportunity to catch up, it all seemed to work.  It turns out Bad Blood is actually one of my more flexible scenarios, timing-wise.

Part of the reduced run time may just be handouts.  Normally I'd include a few Google Maps links and Streetview images to let people immerse themselves in the setting, but with the actual setting being right outside the window, I didn't bother, and just included the one handout that's plot-relevant.

With the gradual return of in-person conventions and limited time slots, timing is definitely something I need to be aware of, so it's good to know I got it right this time.

Game 2: Kult

The second slot was a four hour slot, so I decided this was the time to pitch a game of Kult.  Called to Account is pretty reliably four hours long.  My hope was that things running faster offline would counteract the additional time at the start spent choosing and reading characters, which normally happens prior to the game when I'm running Kult online.  I'm glad to say it did.

I had a great group of players for this one.  Kult really shines when people lean into their characters, particularly the disadvantages, and having players keen to spot the roll triggers and attempt to Keep It Together without being asked is always fun.  There was great interaction between the characters, and a final outcome that was a first for this scenario.

It was a bit worrying pitching Kult, as it's certainly not for everyone, and I was wondering what I would do if I didn't get the full four players I wanted.  As it turned out, not a problem.  Plenty of horror fans keen to play!

I used my new character sheets for this game, built in LibreOffice so they're fully customisable in that or Word.  The goal is to have all the information you're going to constantly need in play - attributes, conditions, stability - on one sheet, so you only have to refer to the rest for details of the advantages and disadvantages.  It also meant that once they were in document pouches with a copy of the moves sheet, the bits that need to be kept secret from other players were all hidden.  I handed out the sheets in the pouches, and asked people to pick based on the front sheets and not open them up until they'd chosen.  A practical way of transferring my normal online approach to the tabletop.

It was gradually getting darker throughout the game.  I didn't notice at the time, but I feel it added to the atmosphere as the scenario gradually ramps up the tension and horror over time.  It was quite a shock when we got to the end and someone turned the lights on!

Game 3: Matrons of Mystery

The evening slot is technically three and a half hours, but I figured numbers would be a lot lower and also people wouldn't mind a shorter game, so this was the best slot for Matrons of Mystery that can easily run under three hours offline, and is also doable with only two players if necessary.

In the end I had three players, pretty much my ideal number, and we dived into Dicing with Death.  Mavid, Enid and Margaret performed a thorough investigation of the murder of Scott Sallow, despite allergy attacks, enforced spa treatments and a very thorough education on genre emulation in game development.  They finally managed to catch the killer just in time to stop them staging the death of another suspect to frame them for their horrible crime!

This ended up being the only evening game that ran, so I'm very glad to have been able to offer some fun in this slot.

Reflections

While I've done two other in-person conventions since the pandemic, this is the first time I've run games other than Matrons of Mystery.  It's good to know I've still got the knack.

I did wonder if I'd made the right choice pitching games in all three slots.  There were a number of other games listed on the website that I would really like to have played.  But with covid preventing some people showing up, the other games that interested me didn't run.  My games all ran, and I'm very happy with how they went, so ultimately I made the right choice.

This is probably the smallest Concrete Cow I've attended.  Part of that is that numbers are down across the board thanks to covid, but also the fact it didn't go virtual over lockdown might mean it's dropped off a lot of people's radar.  I think the autumn event is going to need much stronger advertising if we're going to get the numbers back.  Concrete Cow is pretty special to me as my first (and for a while only) convention and I really want it to succeed.

All the same, with the current situation I had no complaints about a small event.  Combined with the organisers requesting that everyone have proof of vaccination and a negative test, it felt a lot safer than some of the larger events I've avoided going to.

I've missed this.  It's good to be back.

Kult: Broken Walls, episode 9: Hotel

I drive the scooter like I'm on autopilot.  Total obedience to the rules of the road.  I can't risk being pulled over carrying a bag of drugs and an SMG.  Keep Mary safe.  Get back to Raven.  Nothing else in my head, until Mary nudges me.  A Ford Lincoln has pulled up next to us at the lights.  Big flashy car.  Car that she points out is about to ram us, until I take off down a back street and spent some time losing them in the maze of alleyways better suited to a little scooter than a big car.  At least I still remember how to do that.  And we make it back to the hotel before the battery runs out.

Raven's clearly on edge when he lets us back in and I can't blame him.  I plug in the scooter, hand over the stash, and apologise for not being able to get him any clothes.  He pulls out a blister pack, pushes out a couple of pills, then throws it to me.  Diazepam.  I swallow the pills.  Maybe when they take effect I might be able to keep going a bit longer.

There's a problem though.  I've got Raven's notes but the book itself isn't in English.  I glance at it, just on the off chance it's in one of these new languages I seem to have picked up lately but no such luck.  Raven was using the internet for translation but that's no use to us now.  We're going to have to go old school and get a book.  Maybe the hotel receptionist can give us directions?  I'm not asking.  I don't think I should be having important conversations in my current state.

Mary reports back.  There's no library around here, but she's got an address for a bookshop.  Raven goes through his notes and writes down the details of the book we need.  He gives Mary some money for the book and some extra to pick up some food.  He wants wine as well.  Not happening.  Not until the benzos wear off.  I can't handle seeing him unconscious.

It's just the two of us now.  Raven rolls the biggest joint I've ever seen, lights up, and pulls out his moleskine.  It's poetry time.  And what do you know?  Fucked up on benzos and second hand skunk turns out to be the ideal state of mind to listen to his gender-swapped retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.  I could listen to this for hours.  Or is it just that I needed so badly to hear his voice that I don't have to pretend to listen?

Part way through there's a knock at the door, and Raven insists I take the SMG while we answer it.  But it's just Nathan, coughing violently.  I guess it did get a bit smoky in here after Raven shut the window.  I don't think Nathan likes the poetry though.  He starts talking about another appointment or something, but then there's a tap at the window.  Nathan goes to look while I cover him with the SMG.  At first I don't see anything.  And then I hear Beatrice's voice.

She's in a bad way, and I really don't need to be doing first aid in my current state, but she needs that dislocated arm reset.  With a bit of help from Nathan we get it back in place, and after Raven hands over his joint she manages to talk.  She's lost Harry.  She took him back to the hospital but those plastic soldiers were there waiting for them.  She couldn't stop them taking him.  All she could do was escape herself.  She slips a hand into her jacket, then pulls it out again covered in blood.  And before I can even figure out what's happening, her face turns pale, and she falls back on the bed.

Oh god.  Beatrice.  I pull up her blood soaked t-shirt and find the massive bleeding wound.  Fuck.  I am not sober enough to be trying to deal with this.  But if I don't she's going to die.  I tell Nathan to go and get a first aid kit, and try to staunch the bleeding with a handful of tissue.  So much blood.  So much pain in her eyes.  My hands are getting slippery from the blood but I can't stop.  Cocaine stops bleeding, doesn't it?  And it's a painkiller.  Raven throws me a bag.  This is probably a terrible idea and going to leave a massive scar, but either that or the pressure I'm applying is starting to work.

Nathan is back with the first aid kit.  Everything I need to treat the wound.  Just need her to hold on a bit longer.  And now she's convulsing, but I am not losing her, not today, and while Nathan holds her down and Raven shoves some crushed up pills into her mouth, I finish dressing the wound.  She's stable.  She's going to be OK.  Although we are definitely not getting the deposit for these sheets back.

Nathan still has to go out.  I'm left with Raven and a sleeping Beatrice.  Covered in Beatrice's blood.  So tired.  Raven wants to know if I'd like to see some real magic.  Absolutely fucking not.  I've seen far too much weird shit in the last few days.  He knows some kind of incantation that will supposedly help Beatrice heal faster.  But he doesn't know where that power is coming from.  Best not to mess with dark forces after all the shit we've been through.

Raven can obviously see how tired I am, as he suggests I get some sleep.  When the hell did I last sleep?  At the hospital, when I had to stab myself to wake up.  Fuck.  OK.  I'll sleep.  But he's to wake me up if I seem bad.  And if I randomly start bleeding, that counts as bad.

I'm sitting on a bench face to face with a Roman soldier.  He asks me my name, and I tell him.  He says he knew before I said it.  How?  Probably the same way that I know his name is Huldra.  There's some link between us, spanning fifteen hundred years.  I dream of him, and he dreams of me.  He tells me how he killed Tertius, his Centurion.  Something came from the blood.  He wants to know what happened with the pagan wise woman and the Centurion and the red leather book.  I don't know enough Roman history to know about the people.  But I know about that book.

We have to destroy it, he tells me, and all the people who've used it.  How do we do that?  It's a magic book, and must be destroyed with magic.  Surely as a barbarian I have magical abilities?  I don't think so.  But I'm pretty sure I know people who do.  Then he leans forward and hands me his spear, and the next thing I know I'm waking up back in the hotel, still with the spear in my hand.

Raven has gone to sleep, but Beatrice has woken up again and is staring at me.  I remind her of the hospital and how this isn't the first time something's followed me back from my dreams.  She asks me if I know how to use it, in perfect Latin.  More to the point, I ask her how she knows how to speak Latin.

She tells me about a dark moment in the hospital while I was being treated for my leg wound.  Do I believe in past lives?  I didn't last week, but I'm rapidly reconsidering.  She remembered being a Roman soldier.  Ave Huldra, she says to me.  Ave Manius, I reply.  What the fuck is going on?  How do we know each other's Roman past life names?  Is this some kind of messed up fate thing?

We spend some time just talking, trying to get used to this whole thing.  Beatrice is a bit upset by memories of things Manius did.  I understand.  Huldra did some things that I'm finding pretty upsetting too.  We moved on to discussing Raven's poetry, taking advantage of him being asleep.  Beatrice is worried about whether it's healthy for him to be writing a poem that's basically retelling the story of him being dragged to hell and tortured.  I have no idea.  It's not like I'm a model of good coping strategies after all.

Mary gets back and Raven wakes up at the sound of the door.  She's unfazed by the state of Beatrice - or me for that matter, still covered in her blood.  Mary's got a massive burn on her hand and needs the first aid kit breaking out again.  Once that's dealt with, she hands over the book, casually mentioning that she had to deal with Mildred to get it.

I look at Raven straight away.  I can see the look in his eyes at the mention of that name, and hear the sudden silence that's more than simply not speaking.  But he's holding it together.  And we've got everything we need now to read the book.  I'm briefly distracted by Mary, who's found a letter than Nathan left for her.  I'd forgotten all about it in the panic of dealing with Beatrice.

She reads it, and then hands it around.  It's from Vilde the Viking, who I've never met, but know of by reputation.  Word on the street is, she burned a bunch of people alive.  She's terrifying.  But compared to Mildred...well, no.  Not demon scary.  Just regular human scary.  And the letter says she's rescued Mary's brother from something or other, so it sounds like she's not all bad, and maybe Mary should go and meet her like the letter says.

Shit.  Mary's brother.  I was supposed to be going with her to find him, and forgot all about it.  But there's nothing I can do about that now.  I just have to read this book.

Kult: Broken Walls, episode 8: Home

Harry Bates introduces himself.  What am I supposed to do?  I've no idea how to treat a bullet wound, and I've got the feeling any kind of interference will just add to the number of those.  Beatrice moves in front of Raven, which Harry doesn't like.  He tells her to sit down, pointing his gun at Raven.  She's refusing, so I beg her to do what he says.  We only just got Raven back.  I can't lose him again.

Lily and Harry seem to be getting along well.  Seems they both blame Nathan for dragging them to hell.  I think I'm starting to see the implications of that.

Why isn't Nathan dead already?

Now the threats are back.  Make up leave, tie us up or shoot us.  He favours the last, and aims at Beatrice.  I can't let him do that.  She meets my gaze, and says a few words in Latin.  She'll be the distraction while I take him out.  How do I even understand Latin?  I barely remember a few words from school, but I understood that like it was English.  More to the point, how does Beatrice know how to speak Latin?  But there's no time to think about that.  I've got to stop Harry.

Except my foot catches on something, something that I'm not sure is even there, and I fall flat on my face.  At least I've drawn Harry's attention.  He throws me zip ties and tells me to tie my legs and hands.  But the next thing I know, Beatrice is on him.  The gun falls from his hand as she gives him a beating I didn't know she was capable of.

What are we going to do with him now?  He did say he wanted to get his friends back from hell, and there is that portal in the basement.  Beatrice picks him up and carries him most of the way there before some vestige of normality catches up with her and she declares that she's taking him to a hospital instead.  Nathan isn't happy, and starts threatening her.

"Don't you fucking dare!"

That's the first time he's heard me swear.  Seems like it got through.  Finally we come to an agreement.  Beatrice is still going to take him, but first she's going to break his leg so he can't go chasing after us if he escapes the hospital.  She wants to talk to me later about the fact she knows exactly how to do that, and drives her spear into his leg.

Hell changed her.  It changed all of us.  Most of all Lily, who finally disappears, leaving Mary behind.  How do I explain?  She wasn't like this when I knew her.  The Lily I knew was sweet and kind and full of enthusiasm.  Now it seems like there's nothing left but spite.

Just the four of us left now.  We need a plan.  I need to get Raven's book, and I'd like to pick up a few other things for him as well.  Clothes and so on.  He asks for his stash.  Well that was a given.  If nothing else, Nathan is still with us despite the hole in his chest, and could probably use something for the pain.

Raven's not doing well though.  He says he'll slow us down, and he's right.  I was counting on being able to leave him with Beatrice but now it's going to have to be me taking care of him.  He suggests that he could just stay here.  Quiet abandoned warehouse where nobody's likely to show up.  Except that's not exactly true.  There's a portal to hell in the basement, plus some homeless friend of Mary's called Simon who spends time here.  And Simon's brother Zeke, who isn't exactly his brother any more but is definitely bad news.

That's enough to send Raven into a panic attack.  What do I do?  Raven always knew what to do when I needed him.  My first thought is that he needs the oxygen mask, but he pushes it away, so I do the only thing I can think of and hold him until he calms down again.  I'm taking him to a hotel.  I know the kinds of places where people don't ask difficult questions.  I've spent a lot of time taking photos in them.

Nathan's got some business of his own to deal with, but Mary wants to visit her brother.  I don't really want to go into a flat with a portal to hell on my own, and Mary could use company when visiting her brother.  Guess we're sticking together for now.

I can't face the thought of taking Raven on public transport in his current condition, so we call for an accessible taxi.  These hospital wheelchairs are the worst, I suppose to discourage you from stealing them, which is exactly what I've done.  Mary takes the front seat and I find myself wedged between Raven and Nathan.  Good thing I'm small.  Raven asks for his pen, and pulls out his moleskine notebook, which he's also somehow managed to hang onto through all this.  He says he feels a poem coming on.

So that's what people mean by tears of joy.

The hotel is as shitty as I remember, and wants a deposit for the sheets, but as predicted they don't ask any questions about us.  We book into the optimistically described family room and get Raven settled in.  The TV stays off.  Technology is not our friend right now.  I leave Raven attempting to think of a rhyme for 'excruciating', and take a bus back home.

Home isn't feeling as welcoming as it used to.  Looking up at that old Victorian building, all I can think about is the hell portal on the top floor.  Mary's looking at it too, and she tells me about the black shadows infesting the place.  Between that and the car that's pulled up at the end of the street, we have to move fast.  Mary drags me down an alleyway to the back of the building.  There's a fire escape here with a locked grating, but this is my home.  I know how to get in.

One problem.  The fire escape leads to my neighbour's flat.  I barely know the guy, and now I'm about to break in.  Fortunately he works nights, so at least he's unlikely to be home.  These Victorian sash windows fasten on the inside, but they open wide.  Mary doesn't hesitate, smashing a hole with her elbow, and we're in.

We've got company outside.  I go to open the front door and see one of the guys in tac gear that I saw at the hospital.  Facing away from us, so we could sneak past.  Except he's holding some kind of sub machine gun, and do we really want to take that chance?  Maybe we could distract him by throwing something down the stairs?  As we're considering that, the phone rings.  Dammit, we don't need noise right now.  Mary pulls the cord out of the wall, but the phone keeps ringing.  She answers it, and turns pale.

I don't know what the hell that was, but right now I've got other concerns.  I heard footsteps move towards the door and then stop.  No chance of a distraction.  We're going to have to go for an all-out assault and try to take him down quickly and quietly.  I've fought these guys before.  Mary grabs a baseball bat that's leaning by the door, and I pick up a kitchen knife.  We make a plan via silent gestures, and then I open the door.

There's nobody there.  I look all around, and up at the ceiling, just in case, but nothing.  Time to go for it then.  There's a window opening at the end of the corridor, but this isn't my first time picking Raven's lock and I'm in in a moment.

The place is immaculate.  Everything neat and tidy, even with a smell of pine freshness.  This was supposed to be an easy job.  Just grab a few things and go.  And now nothing's where I left it, and I can feel that downward spiral that I only dragged myself out of a few hours ago starting to take hold again.  The book's not under the mattress.  The stash isn't in the bathroom ceiling.  What now?

The tac gear guy must have heard us searching.  There's a sound of splintering wood and a smell of ammonia and I barely have time to throw myself to the floor as a spray of bullets tear through the flat.  We're done for.  Except somehow Mary's got my back, and unleashes some kind of whirlwind attack, and when I manage to get up and look round the guy is slumping to the ground and his head...his head has fallen off.

It's not a guy.  It's not human.  It's some kind of creature made of plastic.  That's what I fought at the hospital.  As I'm trying to deal with that, Mary hands me its sub machine gun.  Do I know how to use it?  Hah.  It can't be that different to a 9mm, can it?

Somehow the shock of the gunfire and hitting the floor has given me a moment of clarity.  Of course it makes no sense for Raven's apartment to be immaculate.  This place smells of patchouli, not pine.  This is an illusion, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of what's underneath.  The book and the stash are both on the bed where we left them.  I just can't see them now.

Mary is good at this kind of thing.  She saw the shadows from outside the building.  As she's stripping the body armour from that creature, I ask if she can see the things on the bed.  I don't know what she does, but she can see them now.  And she reaches out for them, but she can't pick them up.

It feels like I'm being crushed.  So close, but so far away, and the only way I know to reach them is on the other side.  Why did I ask Mary when this whole fucking mess is my fault?  I should have stuck that kitchen knife into my leg and let the pain do the job, never mind if I end up bleeding out on the floor.

My name was Huldra.  I was stolen from my homeland and taken to this rainy island.  They trained me to fight and taught me their language.  They have a different name for me, and beat me if I use my old name, but in my head, I still call myself Huldra.  The Centurion has captured a holy woman.  She has promised him something.

I'm curled up on the floor.  I don't care if I bleed.  I reach for the knife, but my hand goes right through it.  I can see the book, and the stash.  I pick them both up.  Mary is talking to me, and I'm trying to answer, but she doesn't seem to understand a word I'm saying.  Everything around me is confusing.  I'm not sure where I am.  But Mary know where she's going, and leads me out, back down the fire escape.  My scooter's parked back here, and it'll carry two.  Mary's the only thing keeping me going right now.  I'm no use to Raven like this.  I just need to get Mary to safety, and then I can let go and let the spiral take me.

First Time Playing: Dungeon Bitches

Dungeon Bitches is a game I wanted to support, hence backing the kickstarter, but wasn't one I expected to actually play.  Fortunately I was wrong, and a small group of us assembled to give it a go.

The premise of the game is that you play women who've found themselves for whatever reason with no play in society and end up dungeon crawling because the dungeon, while full of horrors, is still safer than town.  There are inevitable comparisons to be made with Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but while TSL tends more to swashbuckling romance, Dungeon Bitches is more on the survival horror end of things.  And that suits me just fine.  Even after a short campaign of TSL, I still find romance rather awkward.  Horrible things in dungeons, not so much.

We'd all decided on our playbooks (called deals in this game) in advance.  The one I found myself drawn to was the Beast, who's reason for having no place in society is that's she's literally a monster.  Ignoring the obvious werewolf option, I decided to make her a lamia.  Horrid Form and Intoxicating Bite made sense as moves for a snake person.  I had to pick a mannerism that hinted at her true form, so I decided that Emerald always wore long skirts and had a tendency to forget to walk and inadvertantly glide.

The other two players picked up the Wounded Daughter and the Disgraced Princess.  The playbooks list two relationships to define with the other characters, so with only three players, we were a pretty tight-knit group and started with plentiful bonds, the meta-currency you can use to help each other out.  (The fact you can spend bonds to improve a roll after they make the roll is a strong positive for me, someone who hates being forced to gamble with meta-currencies.)

As is tradition, we started out in a tavern.  With the premise of the game being that the town is not a safe place for us to be, there was immediate trouble.  Emerald was concerned about one of the waitresses who might have got a glimpse of her true form, but ultimately it was the Disgraced Princess who ended up getting us into a fight when all Emerald really wanted was to eat her plate of boiled eggs in peace.

The adventure saw us leave town, have a brief period of respite in a hut in the countryside (after cleaning up the remains of a jar of noses that got knocked over), before venturing into the dungeon proper.  There we dealt with spiders, slimes, paladins, and the worst thing of all: temporarily getting separated.

The actual dungeon crawl didn't grab me quite as much as the rest of the adventure.  I suspect it was because it felt a bit OSR-ish, and while I'm not entirely uninterested in OSR dungeon crawls, it doesn't exactly fit in with the PBTA mindset I'd gone in with.  It may just be that in this one-off game which included character creation and a town sequence just didn't have time to properly explore the dungeon aspect, so perhaps a future game will make things clearer.

Mechanically things felt pretty solid.  There are four stats and ten standard moves which covered everything we found ourselves wanting to do.  The playbook moves felt interestingly thematic and got plenty of use.

And despite everything the book says about this not being a nice game, and about it being raw and emotional, it wasn't particularly uncomfortable.  While the characters had traumatic pasts and traumatic presents, we were playing a close-knit group who loved and supported each other.  That meant there was room for light-hearted moments (Emerald's obsession with boiled eggs, the ongoing issues with spilt nose juice) and tender moments (protect Debbie the NPC at all costs!)

We all had enough fun that we're thinking of playing again with these characters.  I'm also looking forward to the various supplements from the kickstarter stretch goals, which offer some different settings to play in.  It's not going to be a regular favourite, but I'm glad I took a chance on this one.

There's just one big negative.  The book itself  Unlike every other book I own, this book is in landscape format.  Which for the PDF actually works really well when I'm reading off the screen, but for the physical book, I hate it.  It's weird to hold, and looks terrible on the shelf.  (There's also no form-fillable PDF character sheet, although that's a minor gripe compared to a landscape oriented book!)

It's also not a particularly enjoyable read.  The author's writing style grates on me at times.  The art is a mixed bag, with some evocative pieces but some that I just find unpleasant - and not the ones that are intended to be unpleasant, either.  The visual layout is stunning but frequently hard to read.  Between that and the landscape layout, this one is not joining my bedtime reading pile.

Ultimately, it's a weird game and one that's certainly not for everyone, but despite my issues with the book, the system is well designed for its target audience and does everything it set out to do.  I would absolutely play this again, if only with a pretty small select group.  I would definitely recommend the PDF over the hardback though.  Unless your shelves are just too well arranged for your liking and you feel the need to throw a spanner into the works, of course.

Kult: Broken Walls, episode 7: Hospital

Raven needs a hospital.  He needs a lot more than that, but right now that's all I can do for him.  Nathan looks like he's been through a fire, Mary's covered in blood, and some other guy that Nathan refers to as Harry looks catatonic.  Beatrice clearly has no more intention of leaving Raven right now than I do.  So we all go.

The looks the A&E staff give us.  I feel like we should be getting loyalty points or something.  The others get whisked away, but there's no way I'm leaving Raven.  The staff want us to leave but neither me or Beatrice have any intention of being separated from him.  You don't go through hell for someone and then just walk away.  Especially when I can't shake the feeling that this is all my fault.  I don't know if it's Beatrice's stubbornness or the complete mess I must look right now, but they let us stay with him.

Then Beatrice notices the burn on her arm.  It's bad.  Really bad.  Hellfire bad, I guess.  I tell her to get it treated.  I'll stay with Raven.  And I do, up until they point where they want to put him in an MRI machine or something and I'm forced to wait on the seats outside.  I sit hunched up, hugging my legs against my body.  And that's when exhaustion catches up with me.

I'm back in hell.  Back in the cathedral with the blood soaked altar, and this time there's a person sitting on it.  Raven.  Raven, but not quite how I know him, looking better with more muscle and short hair.  And he speaks.  He tells me being tortured has uncovered some memories.  I want to ask him questions, but he insists that I should answer questions in return and I am done with this Hannibal Lector bullshit.  So he tells me the one thing that I'm most afraid of.  He holds up an arm and shows me something writhing beneath the skin, and tells me that I was too late.

Then he starts to twitch, the same way I saw Arachne do when he was wearing Damian's skin, and a moment later his mouth splits open and an arm emerges.  I can't watch this.  I have to get away.  I run, but I hear the creature mocking me with Raven's voice, telling me how worthless I am and how useless it is to run.

I have to wake up, and all I can think of is the nightmare when I was about to kill Lily and the knife in my own throat woke me up and Raven was there to hold my hands and tell me I was OK.  I only have to think it and the obsidian knife is in my hand.  I need to be careful.  I need to cause pain, not seriously injure myself.

And I wake up in the hospital with my leg spouting blood.  I guess obsidian is sharper than I thought.  Everything after that is a bit of a blur, but at least if you're going to cut an artery, a hospital is the place to do it.  The next thing I really remember is being in A&E with my leg bandaged, and an absolutely furious Beatrice.

Of course she's angry with me, and my protestations that it was an accident and I did it in my sleep don't seem to be getting through.  So I ask if Raven's awake yet.  And that does get through.  She tells me he's in a medically induced coma, and breaks down into sobs.  I want to do the same, but I've never seen her cry like this before and one of us is going to have to be strong.  She wants me to tell her that it didn't happen, that I fucked up the dosage with the LSD and we just had a bad acid trip.  I wish I could, but I know she knows it's not true.

She's afraid.  Afraid she made a mistake coming with me and was nothing but a liability when I know damn well I would never have got him out of there without her, and I tell her so.  Afraid of the feeling of wanting to stab me.  Afraid that we were too late.  And after my dream, so am I.  I tell her about it, and explain why I had to stab myself to wake up, and how sometimes things follow me from my dreams back into the waking world.  In this case, an obsidian knife in my leg.  Normally Raven's there to help me.  He knows what to do when he hears me screaming.

But it occurs to me.  The thing in the dream told me I was too late.  But was I really?  Or was it just using my dreams to torment me?  There's been a lot of that kind of thing recently.  Why should I believe what I was told by a nightmare creature that wants me to be scared?

Beatrice stares at me.  Then she puts out a hand.  Confused, I shake hands with her, and she introduces herself to me.  Beatrice Andrews.  So I do the same.  Isabella May, ex cultist.  And I tell her what's really going on with the old cult members who've been causing me trouble.  Not harrassment or fraud or anything she was imagining.  Demons wearing the skins of people I once knew in order to torment me.  Would she have believed me if I'd told her the truth when she asked me the first time?

She laughs.  Not what I'd call healthy laughter, but it's better than the sobs.  More her.  She's brought me a coffee.  I promise to try to stay awake while she checks on Raven.

As I'm downing the coffee, which is terrible compared to what Beatrice sells, I hear a voice outside.  Someone is talking to Beatrice, telling her she has to go, and initially she's arguing, but then there's a sudden change in tone and she's agreeing to whatever she's being told.  I'm already scrambling to get out of bed when the door opens and a woman walks in.

She's familiar, but it takes me a moment to place her, because last time I saw her we were at Paradise Gardens and were running in terror from one of the flayed corpses.  Janet, Mary's friend.  Except now she's fashionably dressed and talking like a normal person.  Or at least, a lucid person.  There's nothing normal about what she's saying about healing my leg.

The pain is excruciating, and it's all I can do to keep my cries of pain suppressed to the point where I don't inadvertantly summon a bunch of nurses.  But afterwards I can feel even under the bandages that the wound is gone.  At least I don't have to convince her that we can't leave without Raven.  She seems to have got that message loud and clear from Beatrice and I've already spent more time away from him than I intended.

She does something that stops people noticing us as we move through the hospital.  We come to a locked door, and by some miracle my lockpicks are still in my pocket where I shoved them after breaking into Raven's flat.  I'm on edge, and my first fumbling attempts fail.  Janet is getting increasingly urgent, and there are some heavy footsteps heading our way.  I focus everything I have on the task, and the lock clicks open just in time for us to dive through the door before two people in masks and tac gear looking like they just wandered out of some video game pass by.  No time to think what on earth they're doing here.

Raven.  He's there, hooked up to some kind of breathing apparatus, and while he's not intubated I can see he's going to need oxygen if I'm going to take him away from here.  And I am going to take him.  Wheelchair.  Oxygen.  A set of scrubs for me, so I look like a nurse instead of a blood soaked patient.

I used to be good at this kind of thing.  Evading pursuers, moving unnoticed.  Since my trip to hell, something seems to have changed.  The skill is still there, but it's harder to focus on.  And so when the lift doors open, the two masked people are standing right outside.

My first thought is to play it cool, and tell them to step aside as they're blocking the way.  Instead one of them throws a punch at me.  I duck it, take the extendible baton that Janet's offering me, and slam it into his crotch.  Not much of a reaction.  That and the smell of hot plastic tells me these are no normal opponents.  I go for the head instead, hoping to knock him out as I drive the baton into his chin.  He goes down, but the baton is knocked from my hand as I find myself facing the second.  The urge rises, to leap, to grab his head and push.  And as his head slams against the wall I land catlike on the ground, and Janet slowly claps.

Hell really has changed me.  Time was, I didn't think I had it in me to really hurt someone.  Now I know that's not true any more.

The path is clear.  I get Raven out of the hospital, and Janet tells me to head back to the warehouse to meet the others.  It's not long before she disappears from sight.  Not much of a surprise at this point.

Mary lets us into the warehouse.  Nathan and Beatrice are already there, and Beatrice is busy sharping the end of a broom handle into a spear.  She pulls up a box for me to sit on, and parks Raven between the two of us.  His hand feels cold and clammy when I take hold of it, but it helps to be able to feel he's there.

We need to figure out what we're going to do, and finally I've got something new to share.  Mildred talked about me reminding me of her daughter.  She might not have been Mary's mother, but she did have a daughter.  So who was she?  Mary suggests I use my phone.  Of course, that's my first step in finding someone.  Complicating things is the fact that Mildred Lawson died and was buried some time in the mid 90s.  But there was more to the cult than just Mildred.  There was Saklas himself, and the other three lieutenants, and then everyone below them.  I search all the names I have.  Mildred Lawson.  Piper Philips.  Gene Patterson.  Landon Sampson.  I remember that last one best.  Nasty little shit.  Pushed me down a staircase once.  Not even a real shove.  I was just in the space he wanted to walk through and so he kept on walking.

Missing, presumed dead, all of them.  And Mildred did have a daughter, but I don't find a name.  As I'm staring at the phone, thinking about my next move, the screen changes.  Some kind of symbol appears.  A triangle.  And then a word.  Cease.

The phone falls out of my hands and cracks as it hits the floor.  Something is wrong with me.  My lungs aren't working.  I can't make myself breathe.  Terror grips me, but I can't even scream.  I feel Beatrice's fist against my back, trying to stop me choking, but there's nothing there.  I'm going to suffocate, I realise as I fall to my knees, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.  Mary's telling me to fight it, telling me I'm stronger than that, but I'm losing this fight.

My perception shifts, and I'm somewhere else, and now I can breathe again, but when I do my lungs fill with thick black smoke.  And then I'm back in the warehouse, coughing hard enough to break a rib but at least I'm breathing.  And for a moment I see black tendrils reaching out from my phone before they disappear.

Then I hear a familiar voice, and when I look round at Raven his eyes are open and he's pulling the oxygen mask off his face to offer it to me.

As I break down in tears, Beatrice puts her arms around me and puts the mask on my face.  As the oxygen starts to take effect, Raven talks.  He knows what happened with the phone.  Technology is just one more method they can use to get to us.  It happened to Nathan before.  Except he just forgot everything he'd just read instead of being commanded to stop breathing.  Raven heard a lot while he was being tortured by Mildred, and he remembers everything.  He tells us we're all fucked.  Yeah.  I figured that.

Four of them, and they've all named themselves after demons.  Lilith, Ajulutsikael, Behemoth, Abaddon.  And they've been bickering about an accident, and the final three, while everyone else is bound or sword.  Lilith - Mildred - was responsible for the accident.  And there's the matter of the interloper.  The return is coming, and they need everyone bound or sworn.

What does it all mean?  The final three must mean us, but how does that fit in with knowing that Mary doesn't seem to have been part of the cult?  Is Lily the interloper?  Is the accident something to do with Mary, or Mildred's daughter?

Beatrice, understandably, wants an explanation.  How do we even explain this?  She's gone from knowing absolutely nothing about this to...well, all this, in the space of a day.  Mary has a go.  I'm not sure how much it helped.

So what are we going to do?  What do we have?  Mary pulls out the contract and pen she got from Mildred and puts them on the ground.  Nathan, rather to my surprise, pulls out a severed hand made of plastic and throws that down.

What I need is my whiteboard.  Then it occurs I'm in an abandoned warehouse.  The whole damn floor is my whiteboard.  I look for a piece of charcoal or something I can write with, but Raven hands me his quill pen.  How he's managed to hang onto that all through this, I really don't know.

As I write words, draw shapes and connect them with lines, I can feel the shape of things starting to fit together.  I've fought Mildred twice now.  Twice she's dissolved into smoke, and come back again later.  I am hurting her, and she's escaping.  All this time, I've been feeling helpless, but I'm not.  I've hurt her enough to make her run away.  If we can stop them escaping, we can fight them.

I need to know more information, and I know one place I can get it.  Raven's book, with all its annotations and cross-references.  Where did he even find it?  And what was he trying to do?

The bastard.  He was trying to help me.  All that time he spent sitting with me as I screamed in my sleep.  He figured out there was more to it than regular nightmares.  He got dragged into hell by a flayed corpse because he wanted me to be able to sleep.

And I can't even take the time to think about that, because we need to know about the books.  He tells me he got the name from a web forum.  Dreor Fyrngemynd, a pre-Christian book of magic, bound in leather.  Nathan remembers that Saklas had a book bound in red leather.  We really need Raven's notes.

What else can we do?  Mary mentions Maiden, Mother and Crone, which means we have to explain to Raven that there's a bit more to the place than a gothic candle emporium.  But Janet told her to stay away from them.  So she brings up the possibility of summoning Lily again.

She promised she wouldn't do it again.  But maybe it won't be so bad this time.  If we're prepared.  Raven knows a way to help.  A symbol of protection that Mary can stand in.  And we need to have our questions ready.  We'll get three.  I know that somehow.  Mary won't be able to speak while Lily takes over her voice, so Nathan and me both need to be ready to ask.

What was the accident?  How do we stop them from escaping?  And neither of us can think of a third question, but Mary has been texting her brother repeatedly with no answer.  So I guess that's our third question.  Where is Gabriel Lawson?

I said Nathan had to be ready to speak as well as me in case I freaked out again, but as Mary draws the symbol, I realise I'm not going to.  If anything, Nathan is the one who looks stressed out.  Mary calls on Lily, and there she is, bloody and branded, and staring at Nathan with a look of pure hatred.

That's when I understand.  For two decades I've been consumed by my search for her.  Now I have my answers.  She's dead, murdered by the cult, her skin used to torment me and her ghost living on haunting Mary.  I know why Mary has memories of a cult she was never part of.  And I know who Mildred's daughter was.  Finally, I can let go.  I'll always remember her as my friend, but she's not the most important person in my life any more.  Because behind me are the man I went to hell to rescue, and the woman who walked beside me the whole way.

What was the accident?  Lily's own death, a sacrifice to be used in a ritual, but something went wrong.  Not her death, but what happened afterwards.  Guilt and shame.  She tells us how in her current form she's seen everything, and it's more terrible than we will ever know.

How do we stop them escaping?  They are bound, to one stronger than us.  Our strength must equal or exceed theirs.  So we need to find more strength.  Perhaps we could find a patron.

I prepare to ask the final question, but before I can speak, Nathan jumps in with a different question.  How to heal himself without being bound?  Lily looks at him with a smile that's scarier than the look she was giving him before.  Heal his lungs?  Or the bullet wound?

And then the sound of a rifle shot splits the air, and I can hear Harry's voice shouting as blood blossoms on Nathan's shirt.

Kult: The Atrocity Exhibition, episode 2: Going Out

Funeral's over.  Time to start getting back to normal.  Whatever that means.

It's the most I've seen of Dad in a long time.  Good thing I'm still in contact with Dr Lana, with all the guilt that stirred up.  It's complicated.  I feel bad about not seeing my parents, but spending all this time with Dad reminded why I avoided them for so long.  I hoped he'd be a bit better about the gallery now I'm doing well with it, but it's obvious he's still disappointed in me.  Then there was the usual grilling over my love life, which would be bad enough even if I could give him a reason why I've given up on dating, but I can hardly share the real reason.

I had really good intentions about keeping in touch with Ezra, but that didn't go so well.  At least I did manage to text him.  Turns out he lost his father around the same time.  Nothing related, just a horrible coincidence.

I didn't have time to open the gallery with Dad needing me on hand for funeral stuff, but it's back open now.  Another coincidence.  I was expecting Ezra to visit pretty soon, but I wasn't expecting Jared at the same time, and certainly wasn't expecting Meri Janson.  She wasn't her normal self, and Dr Lana says I have to be honest in these journals, so I have to admit to some schadenfreude after the way she was behaving last time we met.  She seemed genuinely upset though, going on about Marielle Dubois taking over her gallery and hearing strange noises in the night.  Chanting in French or Latin or something.  I suggested she look at the camera footage but apparently they've even taken over the security.  Sure, I find her annoying, but she's a professional when it comes to the actual business.  It's not right treating her that way.

She came through on the tickets for the Atrocity Exhibition, I'll give her that.  I got a taxi this time.  I'm still a bit shaky about public transport and I wanted to show up on time and relaxed.  I met Ezra and Jared there, along with Jim Bowman, an art student I've exhibited before.  The whole thing was pretty well staged, I have to give them that.  Suitably gloomy music.  Catering staff all in white suits with these weird Venetian masks.  Fancy tickets with watermarks.  And I can't fault a buffet and open bar.

We had some time before the actual opening, so we went for a look around the other galleries.  Bit of a theme going on.  We started off in the Rosenfeld.  Funerary art from the middle ages.  Pretty depressing stuff.  Just what I didn't need.  There was one painting the others seemed to kind of fix on.  Woman with lamb type of deal, obvious religious metaphor.  Being kind of sensitive on the subject of mothers right now I moved on.

The next painting along was a young man with some kind of halo and a bird on his shoulder.  Some kind of trick image, by the looks of things, as while I looked at it it somehow changed, and the man's face had partially skeletonised.  Just for a moment it put me in mind of Spencer.  The others didn't seem to notice anything odd about it though.

I clearly wasn't my normal self, which was a waste of an excellent networking opportunity, but Jared of all people gave me a pep talk.  He was quite right.  Hanging around these gloomy paintings was bad for me.  We moved on to the Hewett gallery where there was a Día de los Muertos exhibition.  Much better all round.  Just what I needed, an optimistic view of death.  I was in much better spirits when we got to the Van Assen gallery, and managed to find a kind of humour in Alfred Kubin's The Best Doctor.

I'd been having a pleasant chat with Jim and Ezra about the satirical elements of Kubin's work when Jared freaked out.  I don't know why.  Jim ran after him, and Ezra and me caught up with him outside the bathroom where Jared had locked himself in.  I'd been thinking up to then that he was the well balanced one, while me and Ezra were moping about, but I guess not.  He'd mentioned losing an uncle earlier on, but he didn't seem quite so affected by it.  Maybe I was wrong.

Anyway, he'd helped me out earlier in the evening, so it seemed only polite to make sure he got a bit of privacy.  He'd picked up a bit of a crowd, but I heard one of them say that this must all be part of the show, so I turned on the charm and ran with it.  I soon had them all convinced nothing out of the ordinary had happened and steered them away from the bathroom.

That's when I heard Spencer's voice.

Even after all this time, my heart leaps at that sound.  There's a part of me that's sure some day he's just going to walk back into my life like nothing ever happened, and that's why I went chasing through the crowd after him.  The first time I'd moved away from the others all evening and I could feel every eye on my as I passed and hear whispers about my clothes and my appearance.  I tried to ignore them, but let's add paranoia or whatever that is to the list next time I talk to Dr Lana.

I caught up with him in the basement.  I could see him with his arm around a young woman, looking just the way I remember him, talking about how he was planning on opening a new gallery and featuring up and coming young artists.  Our plan.  I called his name but he didn't hear me.  I walked up to him and tapped his shoulder, but when he turned around to look at me, it wasn't him.

Ezra caught up with me then, and I had to explain that I thought I'd recognised someone but made a mistake.  At that point one of the projectors lit up, so we sat down and watched the movie they were showing.  Some creepy stop motion animation.  It actually made me feel better though.  Ezra too.  Just something else to focus on.  I'm going to have to get some plasma screens for the gallery.  So much interesting video work is showing up, and I can't let my place get left behind.

We headed back to join the others.  Ezra wasn't sure what was up with Jared either, having assumed the same as me that it was just Jared being Jared at first.  It sounded like it was getting sorted out though, and his girlfriend was coming to join him in the morning.  Until then I figured we should probably keep an eye on him at least.

That's when things got interesting.  Brahim Nasra showed up.  Which by itself is pretty normal, given that he's a fellow art dealer, if a much bigger name than me, but he was there to stage some kind of dramatic scene where he accused Marielle Dubois of stealing art from the Tunisian government.  No idea if that's true or not.  She insisted she had all the proper paperwork, but he certainly acted like he believed it.  Security dragged him away of course, but I recorded the whole thing on my phone, and sent it to Ezra when it ended.  Well I tried.  The signal was terrible.

As was, apparently, the smell of the security guards.

Kult: The Atrocity Exhibition, episode 1: Yasmin's Busy Day

The Atrocity Exhibition is a quickplay scenario for Kult: Divinity Lost, available from the Kult Resources page. We did a narrative character creation for this game, establishing stats and traits as we went along.  You know you're playing Kult when you've only done Session 0 and you've already lost two stability...

Can't find my old journals.  Time to start a new one, I guess.

There's an exhibition at BAMPFA with some student work, reinterpretations of noir film or something, so I thought I'd check it out and make sure I'm keeping up in case this turns out to be the new big thing.  I was going to take the BART but then I got accosted by an aggressive crowd who started out just wanting a buck but then escalated to trying to get my purse and phone off me.  I tried to talk them out of it but they weren't interested until I threw a handful of bills at them.  Just enough of a distraction for me to make a run for it.

No way I could get on the BART after that.  I was standing on the sidewalk, trying to get my breath back and thinking about getting an Uber when a car pulled up next to me.  I was all ready to run again when I got a look at the driver and realised it was Ezra.  He offered me a lift, and it turned out he was going to the same place as me.  We had a nice chat about work in the car.  It's too long since we last talked.

We picked up another passenger along the way.  Jared, some old friend of Ezra's and an aspiring actor.  Easy on the eye, less so on the ears.  I was glad of an extra person in the parking garage though.  That place gave me the creeps.  He says he's done some modelling as well.  He certainly knows how to pose, and I got some good photos of the entrance until he started attracting fans.  After the earlier incident I was just glad it was him getting the attention and not someone yelling at me to go back where I came from.  I wasn't feeling up to my usual "What, England?" response.

Stepping inside is where things got weird.  I felt a fine mist blow out of the air conditioners when we went inside, and when I looked down at myself I could see blood - fake blood, it must have been - all over me.  Nobody else seemed to notice though, except maybe Ezra.  Then I looked around at the other guests.  I saw corpses.  Flayed, organs hanging out of them.  And that wasn't the worst part.  One of them had Spencer's face.

I lost the old journals, so I guess I need to write this again.  Spencer Reid was my best friend, my lover and my business partner.  We were going to run the gallery together.  Then he went away to meet with some potential investors and I never saw him again.

That's not true.  I see him a lot.  Mostly when I'm stressed, or scared.  Dates are the worst.  Were the worst.  I've given up trying.  Therapy with Doctor Lana helped me figure out the pattern, but it hasn't made it stop.  Lana can't tell me what I really want to know though.  Is he alive, and messing with me?  Am I being haunted by the ghost of my dead lover?  Or am I crazy and hallucinating this shit?

After what I saw at BAMPFA, sure sounds like the last one, doesn't it?

I must have drunk the complimentary prosecco a bit too fast.  Jared got me another drink - some kind of artisinal craft gin - and Ezra introduced us to Meri Janson, the person in charge.  I knew the name but we'd not met before.  I'd remember.  I'm used to art types being touchy-feely but she was taking it uncomfortably far.  Jared was into it though.

The exhibition was fine, I guess.  A few names worth watching, but nothing to get overly excited about.  Jared wanted to hit some bar afterwards and I thought that sounded good, so long as he was keeping Meri's hands occupied.

I forget the name of the place, but it was nice.  Vintage jazz and vintage cocktails at thoroughly modern prices.  The kind of place where you can kick back and relax, and I was having a great time catching up with Ezra and watching Jared's antics when I got a call from Dad.  Texted to ask what's up, he replied saying to call him.

No point putting it off.  Might as well get the argument over with while I was still drunk, I thought.  But for once Dad didn't give me an earful about being at a bar.  He needs me home.  Mum's dead.

I went back inside and told Ezra I'd had some bad news and had to leave.  He offered to call me a car.  That's when the tears started, and he ended up driving me home instead.  I was a mess when we got there.  I couldn't even tell him what was wrong.  But we swapped numbers so at least we might keep in touch this time.  I'm going to need a friend.