Naril

Priest and Hawthorne Investigations: A Modern Fantasy Adventure!

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations

A Modern Fantasy Adventure

An introduction

The moon was a crescent of hard silver light the night Cameron walked into the aging room of his distillery and found a spider the size of a Volkswagen. There were other shapes nearby - cocoons, smaller than a person but not by so much that he thought he'd stick around and take a closer look. Cameron swallowed hard and backed out of the room, afraid that if he rolled the door shut he might wake the thing up. At the same time, though, if he left the door open, the spider might have an easier time getting out, and out is where it could eat him. Deciding that discretion really was the better part of valor, or at least of not being digested, he walked backwards with slow steps past the threshold, out into the humid Illinois night. Overhead, a sodium lamp cast harsh orange shadows over the rust-streaked exterior of the metal-sided warehouse, lending only a little extra color by the watery headlights of Cameron's truck, which had been new sometime before the first time humans set foot on the Moon.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked down at the screen, then back up at the door to the aging room. He called up a dial pad, but...who was he supposed to call? The police? Animal control? An exterminator? He imagined the last conversation and let out the first bite of a barking, hysterical laugh, something that yipped out of his mouth and bounced off the corrugated metal wall in a sharp spray of discordant echoes. In front of him, the huge spider shifted, one giant leg coming uncurled from the apparently-sleeping mass with an almost delicate motion. Cameron took a step back, the phone slipping out of his hand, panic welling up behind his eyes while he watched another leg unfold, opposite the first. No longer caring how much noise he made, Cameron scrambled toward his truck, out of view of the door, and started digging in his jacket for his keys.

He was well into dropping them for the third time when he heard another sound coming up the driveway, this time something more familiar. Tires crunched on the gravel road, along with...something else. Cameron turned away from the slowly-unfurling spider, raising one hand against the glare of another pair of headlights, the sound of John Denver's Country Roads wafting into the night. The lights resolved into another truck, just a little newer than his own, and it came to a sliding, skidding halt a couple of meters from the door, spraying gravel all the way to Cameron's boots.

The truck's doors opened and a handful of people piled out, stepping over one another in no particularly good order. In the headlights' glare, Cameron couldn't quite see who these people were, save for the driver, who stepped out and took the few paces over to the man with long, quick strides. He could just make out her blue-green eyes, the curve of a cheekbone, the edge of a suit jacket. She looked at him, then at the warehouse, then back, and she shoved a hand through sweat-dampened hair.

"Hey, so," she said, sounding almost a little sheepish, "I've got a weird question for you." The words came with the rich enunciation of an English private-school education, which Cameron decided he wasn't going to worry about right now.

He looked past the woman, at the shapes of people behind her, then turned his head back back to the warehouse, neck muscles twanging. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a kind of squeak.

"Right," the woman said, "Look - this probably sounds ridiculous, but..." She took a deep breath and pointed at the building, "Is there a huge spider in there?"

Cameron gawped, a proper gawp, the kind that left his jaw hanging loose for a moment. It took him a long, long moment to get enough of his muscles under control to nod and point.

"Okay, thanks." The woman turned and gave a thumbs-up to the people behind her, and they came forward.

Cameron could make out more about the group now, in the hard shadows of two sets of headlights. They didn't look 'official' - no matching suits, no coordinated gait, not even the same kinds of haircuts. One held a shotgun, another had something wrapped around their arm, three objects pulsing with white light orbiting it with no obvious connection to one another. The woman watched with an expression Cameron couldn't read - a wry pull to a corner of her lips, a small roll of one shoulder. She breathed, and the air smelled like thunder.

"Who...who are you?" Cameron managed, after what felt like an eternity.

"Ah," the woman said, "...I'm Lydia. We're from Priest and Hawthorne Investigations."

Behind her, the spider had finished unfolding. It turned in place, long, delicate legs making the kind of thumping sounds on the ground usually associated with earthmoving equipment. One of the newcomers shouted, and the shotgun boomed. Cameron winced and fell against his truck, hands covering his ears. Morgan, for her part, stood steadfast and turned toward the warehouse. The spider shrieked, the sound almost louder than the shotgun. Morgan turned toward the warehouse, then looked back at Cameron. To her left, the metal wall buckled, and a meter of monstrous hairy leg punched through and started slowly rending a tear in the sheet metal.

"I wouldn't worry," Lydia said, reaching into her jacket, "We have this perfectly under control."

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Hi there!

Welcome to the OOC thread for Priest & Hawthorne Investigations, a modern-fantasy RP!

In this story, the players will take the part of people working for the titular Priest & Hawthorne Investigations, a small paranormal-detective service operating out of Chicago (though cases can take them all over). You are people from all walks of life, and have come to PHI by various means - maybe you're a police detective who couldn't overlook something that was obviously a monster attack, maybe you're a Real Actual Wizard but still need a way to make rent, maybe you're a park service ranger who's seen one too many Bigfeet. Whatever the reason, you're living in that liminal space between the mundane and the supernatural, and sometimes helping keep people safe from things that they never knew meant them harm.

The tone of this story is going to be along the lines of Hellboy, The Dreseden Files or The Dirty Streets of Heaven, probably with a dose of Hellblazer, The Sandman, and because I don't believe in grimdark, Ghostbusters. Depending on what I'm reading at the moment, I'll probably toss different ideas into the pot (Supernatural - sure, why not! Jujutsu Kaisen? I mean, who doesn't have a crush on Gojo), and I am also very pleased to hear suggestions and interesting ways to push on the world.

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations is a very small office, perhaps 10 or so people. The founders, Ada Hawthorne and Samuel Priest, are not often around, and the nominal person in charge is a woman called Morgan - don't worry, there will be a list of important NPCs toward the bottom of this post. PHI has been a going concern for about 150 years, but you don't have to have been with the organization for that entire time, of course. Jobs are handed out by Morgan, and how she gets them is a surprisingly normal combination of referrals, hearing about weird things going on in the area, and people calling PHI with weird problems - the firm is, after all, on Yelp.

I don't mean to scare anyone off, but I tend to have rather high standards for posts and characters. I'd like this to be quite a small group of people (maybe up to five, including myself), and it will not be first-come, first-served. I don't have specific roles in mind, but I would ask that you consider what makes a good team dynamic and a good story. I am, for example, generally not looking for silent and distant loners, violence-crazed psychopaths, vengeance-driven walking armories, or children.

Other than that, I'm not placing too many restrictions on characters - Faeries, Literal Actual Angels, or even Literal Actual Humans are completely welcome. I would caution you that I am personally fairly tired of vampires and werewolves, but if you impress me and make a good narrative case for yourself, I'm very easy. That's really the rule for most things - make a good case for whatever you want to write, and I'm not too hrad to convince. The big thing to consider here is the why of your character - I don't care if the character is No Joke Actually Freya, Lady of the Slain, but I do care that there's a really good reason why she's slumming it in a dingy monster-fighting office with a shitty landlord and traded Folkvangr for Bucktown.

We will be having a loose Session Zero once the cast is finalised in the Discord (Which is here: discord.gg/eD4wxfpH) to arrange things like what people think of one another, find the places where characters mesh in interesting ways, where they scrape in interesting ways, and try to round off the edges of the places where they come together in ways that don't work.

To that end: I do expect that the characters can work together. Like I said above, I'm not going to accept brooding, silent, inward-turned loners who communicate in monosyllables and by racking the slide on a handgun. (Unless you make it really funny.)

I do have several story arcs in mind, but they're deliberately designed to be flexible and to allow the players to push on the world; I will rarely say "no, you can't do that," since the yes-and of collaborative storytelling is my favorite part. :3 That is to say that I'm not not expecting this to be a bring-your-own-adventure sandbox, although I am more than happy (and am expecting to) tailor the world for the characters in it.

Finally, to contextualize the introduction above, the RP starts on a night where PHI has been chasing reports of a gigantic spider across the city. It has, over the course of the night, managed to get away from you a number of times, either directly running away or, in one case, causing a different problem that you had to deal with instead. You've been tracking it (if one of you has a means to do that, great, otherwise I'm totally handwaving how), and appear to have cornered it at a distillery some distance away from the city proper. What happens next is, well, up to you. <3

And now, without further ado, the character sheet:

Character sheet!

Name:

Gender/Pronouns (as applicable):

Race/Species:

Age (Real and apparent):

Appearance: Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but I tend to prefer written descriptions. If you really have something perfect, that's fine; so is commissioned artwork.

Personality: Broad strokes is fine, I don’t need to know every bawdy joke they like to tell. Please don't make this a bulleted list.

Powers, Traits, and Abilities: Let this cover supernatural powers, mundane skills, and whether or not they’re particularly good at Ski-Ball. Be brief but complete, and include at least one thing that isn't related to fighting monsters - a hobby or passtime, for example.

Background: I do not want a biography here. Write me a scene that tells me the important things someone would need to know about the character. This can be (for example), a police interview, a last will and testament, or if you can squeeze it down that far, a fortune cookie. If there are Big Secrets you don't want the other characters to know, that's fine, but I would like to know them so I can incorporate them into the story. Be direct, be oblique, but above all, be interesting.

Important NPCs!

Ada Hawthorne - One of the founders of PHI. She is a handsome woman that appears middle-aged, red hair threaded with hard, bright silver. She is not in the office often, and what she does when she's not around is also not entirely clear. Many supernatural creatures in the area seem to know who she - and her Investigators - are, and mentioning her is something that will open some doors and close others violently. Her name is the one on your paychecks.

Samuel Priest - The other founder of PHI, a man with silver hair tied in a tail and a full beard, who wears a bowler hat and the kind of vest that went out of style in the late 1800s. He is in the office more than Hawthorne, but his direct appearances are fairly rare. He will occasionally call in with jobs for the rest of the cast.

Shiloh Cooper - One of PHI's support staff, who is in charge of the company's archives. She organizes the various magical trinkets and artefacts Investigators have recovered, and files records of cases. The PHI Library is by far the largest room in the small office that PHI rents, and Shiloh is its mistress. Taking things without asking can be grounds for something far more serious than a dressing-down. She is approximately five feet tall with dark hair and bright blue eyes, and despite that gives a very strong impression that she is no-one to be trifled with.

Morgan Blackwood - Tall, lean, captivating, and dangerous in the apex-predator kind of way, Morgan is the nominal 'office head' of PHI. She's one part dispatcher, one part investigator, one part administration; in total, a very busy woman. All of you have known her for the entire time you've been at PHI; it is very likely Morgan's was the first face you saw at the office.

I wrote a full character sheet for Morgan a while ago; here it is for your enjoyment

Name: Morgan Silas Blackwood

Gender: Female (And female-presenting)

Race/Species: Succubus

Age (Real and apparent): Over 90 years old; appears early thirties

Appearance:

By any measure, Morgan is a striking woman. She is tall, though not quite approaching six feet in heels, with fair skin and a tumble of blue-black hair that falls to her shoulders, tied with a piece of leather cord into a loose tail. Large, blue-green eyes set off the wicked, elegant lines of her face, with sharp cheekbones and a strong jawline that stops just short of masculinity. Her lips, full and inviting, often tilt into an expression of playful mischief, at least when she's not concentrating on something else. She is possessed of a lean, dangerous figure, unmistakably feminine, and she works for it. Morgan moves with a long lifetime's practiced grace, a kind of lazy confidence shared with apex predators.

In her professional capacity, Morgan prefers well-tailored suits in colors that flatter her with contrasting, button-down shirts and slightly heeled boots. What jewelry she wears is typically studs in her many-times-pierced ears, and she has a pendant around her neck on a leather cord. Her shoulder holster is carefully concealed by excellent tailoring and body language, but there is only so much you can do to hide a handgun. Outside of her official capacity, Morgan prefers jeans, old band t-shirts and a battered denim jacket. For reasons that Morgan has only occasionally been truthful about, she has a rich, plummy, London-private-school accent.

Personality:

Playful, flirtatious, and apparently fearless, Morgan is a force of personality. She is gregarious without being boistrous, friendly but not overbearing, loyal, warm, and only occasionally viciously witty. She's kind of person you both love hearing stories from, and telling stories to - entirely without artifice, she is a perfect audience, gasping and all but applauding at exactly the right moments. She is, in general, collected under pressure, and responds to stress with humor and smart-assery. She is neither secretive nor open about the fact that she isn't human, but is careful with the specifics, depending on who's doing the asking. If pressed, she would probably identify as bisexual, but few enough bother to even wonder.

Powers, Traits, and Abilities:

By her nature, Morgan is a manipulator, through psychic weaponry, pheromones, body language and even the timbre of her voice. However, since she believes, at her core, in the primacy of free will, there are lines she will not cross and things she will not do; active choices made consciously out of a sense of responsibility and foundational to her sense of identity. She's not above using her supernatural allure to get a guard to focus only on her if another member of the team has to sneak into a building or to get a better deal on her cell phone plan, but she will not grab someone by the psychic brainstem and dragoon them into her bidding. Though she reins in what she is consciously, it isn't something she can entirely turn off - heads turn, and other supernatural creatures know she's there, and some of them even know exactly what she is by nothing more than the way she smells.

Morgan also possesses a psychometric talent, by which she can make physical contact with an object and discern important events from its past. These do not appear in a linear, digestable narrative, but rather take the form of often-abstract, disjointed visions that express important moments in the object's past, where it received or created a psychic imprint. These images are seared indelibly into Morgan's mind, and she cannot forget them even if she wants to, rendering this a skill she uses carefully.

She is remarkably hard to kill - nobody has managed it quite yet. She doesn't have a mutant healing factor, but her body is very resilient and heals more quickly than one might expect - something that has saved lives, and left her with several interesting scars. And, of course, extended stays in a recovery bed.

In the mortal world, Morgan is an FBI-trained investigator, though she no longer has any contacts with the Bureau. She has kept up on the world of modern technolgy in large degree, but she is not anything like a hacker or digital-forensics specialist. she can drive, call a Lyft, and order delivery with the best of any other mortal.

Outside of her position with Priest & Hawthorne, Morgan is a skilled belly dancer, an enthusiastic karaoke singer, and a vintage hi-fi enthusiast. She has a large collection of vinyl records (most bought at garage sales or thrift stores), and spends a lot of time on her couch, listening to music through a pair of very old, very nice headphones. She has a cat, who enjoys Morgan's music by sleeping on her stomach. She is not particularly good at Ski-Ball.

Background:

"Do you know what you are?"

Morgan lifted her head, tried to blow away the strands of hair stuck to her face. Almost every part of her hurt and the crust of dried blood above her left eye itched and her fingers were almost numb, but she managed to pull one corner of her mouth up in a wry grin.

"Special Agent Morgan Blackwood, FBI," she said, each word made sumptuous by her accent.

Another woman stood in the room, proud and glorious and terrifying. She let out a short huff, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, and shook her head. Her long legs flashed, turning away from Morgan with the scrape of a polished heel on hard ceramic tile. She circled the chair Morgan was cuffed to, every movement a predatory stalk and dipped one long-nailed hand into her jacket. Though her vision was still blurry, Morgan couldn't help but appreciate the way every seam flattered the other woman, tracing and accenting her figure in smooth, dark cloth. The woman pulled something into the light, like a cigarette case. She opened it with a click, and the smell of spices filled the air.

"You're better than this, Sister," the woman said, now to Morgan's left, "We are so much greater than you know. You - we - were meant for such great things." She set something on the ground with a glassy clink, "And here you are, a pet monster. A nightmare on a leash. And happy to be there."

"And your way is better?" Morgan said, turning her head to keep her captor in view, "You're trying to sell me on Juliet's Path to Purpose and Happiness? I'll pass, thank you."

"You really don't understand, do you?" The woman, Juliet, sighed, "We looked for you for so long, Sister. You were the last piece of the puzzle, the checkmate play. But I suppose even we can't account for everything." She set something else down, a rustling noise, "I remember that night - the storms, the summoning, the ritual. But when we came to find you, there were nothing but bodies."

Morgan heard her stand, a few quick steps, and a voice by her ear, "Were those your first, Sister? Did you take them? Can you imagine that feeling, that thrill, whenever you-"

"No," Morgan interrupted, her voice ragged and hard. This close to Juliet, she could smell copper and salt.

"No? Then..." Juliet started, then walked in front of Morgan again. She considered, and then her expression broke into the kind of smile that starts religions.

"Ah...I see. The detective, the raid. It was their doing, yes? And then...of course." The expression became something that was not a smile, "She didn't complete the ritual - but that detective did. You have a conscience." She spat the words.

"They were madmen," Morgan said, her voice quiet, "Working with power they didn't understand. Connor-"

"Is that what you think?" the woman said, incredulous, "Is that what they told you? After all these long years - oh, Morgan."

Her voice softened to a purr, an inch from Morgan's ear, "I'll ask you again, and don't be cute with me. Do you know what you are?"

Morgan looked into Juliet's eyes, the same eyes she saw in the mirror every morning. She saw a certainty there, a depth of understanding, and it called to her across almost a century. There are questions you never really give up on, no matter how distant they might be or how foolish the quest to answer them, and a desire unlike any she'd ever known flared in her chest. She spat the words at the air, hurled them across decades.

"A mistake," Morgan said, "An unintended consequence. A predator."

Juliet pulled away, her expression almost triumphant.

"Oh, Sister, no," she said, chuckling, "That was no barely-literate secret society, luring members with promises of orgiastic rites. They were part of something so much grander than themsleves, a piece of a vast and intricate machine that even now coils across the world." Juliet started walking again, and enough of Morgan's vision had come back that she could see what the other woman was doing.

There were lines drawn on the floor, circles and points and arcs, careful paths of white salt forming sigils and runes. At the edge, a final line that finished the design, containing a figure of five equidistant points. Four of those points already had objects placed there, things that could only be ritual totems. Even in her battered state, Morgan could feel the power thrumming off them, her skin prickling. With a start, she snapped her head to Juliet, standing from placing the final object, and she realized what she was seeing - a Practitioner of the Art, walking deisul around their sacred circle.

"We are their weapons, Morgan," Juliet said, "Their harbingers. We prepare the way for...well. What comes after." She took a long, slow breath, her eyes closed in concentration, "The perfect point of the most subtle spear. What else motivates these mortals but their desires, their hungers, their lusts? The entire race comes with their own bridle and saddle, we need only take the reins." She looked over at Morgan, and crossed the lines of salt with care.

Juliet knelt, brought herself ot eye level with Morgan. Her eyes roved over her sister's face, and she brought one hand up to touch her cheek, cool fingers rough with dried blood. She leaned in with viper-strike speed, and Morgan felt the woman's lips against her own for a moment that lingered like a dying breath. Then she stood, turned, and took two long, delicate steps.

"But none of that is for you, I can see that now. Losing you will be hard, Sister," Juliet said, her back to Morgan, "But the arc of time is long. Another decade will mean little. And with-""

A small sound pierced every other sound in the room - a metallic click, then a rattle. The noise cut off Juliet's words like shears on thread, and time seemed to stop. Juliet spun, and her eyes met Morgan's for the length of an indrawn breath. Then Morgan exploded from the chair, her hair a dark comet trail, and she brought an arm dangling an open handcuff up, fingers clenched into a tight ball. Her fist connected with Juliet's temple, sending her sprawling to the floor with a sharp gasp, the designs beneath her spraying away in a chaos of tumbling grains.

Morgan spun, her shoes further scuffing the careful runes, turned to her left, eyes scanning in a frantic search. There, surrounded by its own tangle of magic, a dagger made of glittering black glass, the handle wound in rough twine. She lunged for it, her hand tingling where she brushed away another magical working, fingers wrapping around the handle in the skin of a second.

When she touched the weapon, Morgan felt a pressure against her mind. The dagger pulsed with history, with fable, with emotion and the weight of time. It dragged at her soul, her vision swam, and she nearly lost herself in that current. With an effort of will, she shoved the sensation away from her mind - there was no time to allow that connection now. She stood, started to turn back, then white light blossomed behind her eyes from a blow to the back of her head. It seemed her sister had recovered more quickly than Morgan had expected.

Morgan stumbled forward, her hands almost nerveless from the blow. She gritted her teeth, tried to swallow down sudden dizziness and nausea, and then she felt something else. Gasping, she managed to stand and turn back to Juliet, who stood with hand outstretched. Morgan could feel power flowing from her, something that should have been a crashing wave; a dark, vicious pull at everything primal and carnal inside her. But she felt all of it split and flow around her, something she was aware of but was not affected by. Morgan shook her head, and she met the other woman's eyes again.

"You really are one of us," Juliet said, her voice tinted with pleasant surprise.

Morgan straightened, stalked toward her, brought the glass dagger up in a hard, sharp punch at Juliet's side. She felt the woman's silk jacket part around the tip, the fibrous tearing of the blade through her skin, the scrape of glass on bone.

She watched her sister's eyes, found herself suddenly lost in those gemstone depths. She felt her lean into a sudden embrace, one arm around her shoulder, the other still wrapped around the dagger's handle. Morgan felt the power sluicing over her mind flicker and back away, but Juliet's eyes didn't waver. They were deep, intelligent, wicked, and when the other woman fell, Morgan found that try though she might, she couldn't pull her own gaze away. Only when Juliet's eyelids flickered closed did the world return, and Morgan realized she hadn't been breathing. She looked down at her hand, saw the blood dripping off her own fingers, and she swallowed against a hard lump in her throat.

A few more unsteady steps took her to the door, and she shoved it open. The hinges shrieked, the heavy metal banging against the wall. Her balance still shaky, she had to lean against the doorframe for support and she paused, her breatg ragged in her throat. She swallowed in a few gulps of air, then she heard a voice from ahead - familiar, with a deep Southern twang.

"Morgan?" Came the voice, "'Zat you?"

"Sam!" Morgan shouted, "Sam, I...give me a minute, I'm just down by the..." Her voice trailed off.

She came into Morgan's view with her pistol at the ready. Her shirt was open farther than Morgan had ever known it to be, the buttons torn, threads dangling. Her eyes were wide, her green pupils dilated, spots of color on her cheeks.

"Best get back in there, Miss Blackwood," Sam said, raising her weapon, "She's got plans for ya."

Morgan felt her shoulders slump. "Oh no, Sam. Not you, too," she managed. Then she stood, straightened, swallowed.

"I'm so sorry."

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An hour later, Morgan pushed her way through another heavy steel door. She felt the oppressive humidity of a Georgian summer evening slap her in the face like a wet towel and in that moment, nothing had ever felt so wonderful. She pulled in first one breath, then another, her throat hot and sore, her body protesting from every muscle and joint. Groaning, she propelled herself away from the wall, digging in her pocket for her keys. They would know what vehicle to track, but Morgan had ben suspecting a day like this would come. She didn't have many options, but she'd made sure she had more than none.

She fell into her car with a hard puff of breath, started the engine, felt the air conditioner struggle against the boiling darkness. She had warned them. There were memos and emails and texts and lunch dates and screaming, arm-waving fights. They knew there were other things like her - myths given life, ghosts, and monsters from folktales. She'd known that eventually, those forces would come for the mortal world, for the Bureau, but they hadn't cared. And now, this.

The air conditioner finally started to catch up with the outside temperature, and Morgan felt the cool, dry kiss across her skin. It was time for something new. She had always looked for answers to other people's questions because she'd already known all her own answers. In the space of an evening, all of that had changed. She wondered if they would look for her, and decided that she didn't care.

With another groan, Morgan straightened, reached up and put the car into gear. She drove into the rising sun, and she didn't look back.

In terms of lore - you've been in this world before. It's the standard urban fantasy pot, but feel free to expand on things where you feel it's important. If you want to flesh out world of ghosts and souls, that's absolutely something I'd like to read about; if you've got particular ideas about the Faen Courts, I'll probably let you get away with it. Did you inherit Baba Yaga's hut; are you descended from Haroun al-Rashid; is Gabriel the frontman of a Scandinavian metal band? So long as it don't tip the whole world on its ear, it's probably golden.

Again, the Discord is here: discord.gg/eD4wxfpH and I'm there...at least some of the time! I'll also be responding here in the OOC thread, so don't be shy!

Priest and Hawthorne Investigations: A Modern Fantasy Adventure (Again!)

This is genuinely a ton more interest than I expected, so I'm going to go ahead and start dressing up the main RP thread. :3 I also have PMs from several of you, which deeply tickles me, which I will be responding to as well. In the meantime, I've also set up a Discord, since that seems to work well: discord.gg/rzYfZQs8

Priest and Hawthorne Investigations: A Modern Fantasy Adventure (Again!)

Well, you know. We’re wizard private detectives, we probably butt heads with the wizard cops quite a lot. That may be a plot point! Hmmmmmm

Priest and Hawthorne Investigations: A Modern Fantasy Adventure (Again!)

Well, that’s quite a lot more than I expected this fast. :3 I’m excited!

Priest and Hawthorne Investigations: A Modern Fantasy Adventure (Again!)

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations

A Modern Fantasy Adventure

An introduction

The moon was a crescent of hard silver light the night Cameron walked into the aging room of his distillery and found a spider the size of a Volkswagen. There were other shapes nearby - cocoons, smaller than a person but not by so much that he thought he'd stick around and take a closer look. Cameron swallowed hard and backed out of the room, afraid that if he rolled the door shut he might wake the thing up. At the same time, though, if he left the door open, the spider might have an easier time getting out, and out is where it could eat him. Deciding that discretion really was the better part of valor, or at least of not being digested, he walked backwards with slow steps past the threshold, out into the humid Texas night. Overhead, a sodium lamp cast harsh orange shadows over the rust-streaked exterior of the metal-sided warehouse, lending only a little extra color by the watery headlights of Cameron's truck, which had been new sometime before the first time humans set foot on the Moon.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked down at the screen, then back up at the door to the aging room. He called up a dial pad, but...who was he supposed to call? The police? Animal control? An exterminator? He imagined the last conversation and let out the first bite of a barking, hysterical laugh, something that yipped out of his mouth and bounced off the corrugated metal wall in a sharp spray of discordant echoes. In front of him, the huge spider shifted, one giant leg coming uncurled from the apparently-sleeping mass with an almost delicate motion. Cameron took a step back, the phone slipping out of his hand, panic welling up behind his eyes while he watched another leg unfold, opposite the first. No longer caring how much noise he made, Cameron scrambled toward his truck, out of view of the door, and started digging in his jacket for his keys.

He was well into dropping them for the third time when he heard another sound coming up the driveway, this time something more familiar. Tires crunched on the gravel road, along with...something else. Cameron turned away from the slowly-unfurling spider, raising one hand against the glare of another pair of headlights, the sound of John Denver's Country Roads wafting into the night. The lights resolved into another truck, just a little newer than his own, and it came to a sliding, skidding halt a couple of meters from the door, spraying gravel all the way to Cameron's boots.

The truck's doors opened and a handful of people piled out, stepping over one another in no particularly good order. In the headlights' glare, Cameron couldn't quite see who these people were, save for the driver, who stepped out and took the few paces over to the man with long, quick strides. He could just make out her blue-green eyes, the curve of a cheekbone, the edge of a suit jacket. She looked at him, then at the warehouse, then back, and she shoved a hand through sweat-dampened hair.

"Hey, so," she said, sounding almost a little sheepish, "I've got a weird question for you." The words came with the rich enunciation of an English private-school education, which Cameron decided he wasn't going to worry about right now.

He looked past the woman, at the shapes of people behind her, then turned his head back back to the warehouse, neck muscles twanging. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a kind of squeak.

"Right," the woman said, "Look - this probably sounds ridiculous, but..." She took a deep breath and pointed at the building, "Is there a huge spider in there?"

Cameron gawped, a proper gawp, the kind that left his jaw hanging loose for a moment. It took him a long, long moment to get enough of his muscles under control to nod and point.

"Okay, thanks." The woman turned and gave a thumbs-up to the people behind her, and they came forward.

Cameron could make out more about the group now, in the hard shadows of two sets of headlights. They didn't look 'official' - no matching suits, no coordinated gait, not even the same kinds of haircuts. One held a shotgun, another had something wrapped around their arm, three objects pulsing with white light orbiting it with no obvious connection to one another. The woman watched with an expression Cameron couldn't read - a wry pull to a corner of her lips, a small roll of one shoulder. She breathed, and the air smelled like thunder.

"Who...who are you?" Cameron managed, after what felt like an eternity.

"Ah," the woman said, "...I'm Lydia. We're from Priest and Hawthorne Investigations."

Behind her, the spider had finished unfolding. It turned in place, long, delicate legs making the kind of thumping sounds on the ground usually associated with earthmoving equipment. One of the newcomers shouted, and the shotgun boomed. Cameron winced and fell against his truck, hands covering his ears. Morgan, for her part, stood steadfast and turned toward the warehouse. The spider shrieked, the sound almost louder than the shotgun. Morgan turned toward the warehouse, then looked back at Cameron. To her left, the metal wall buckled, and a meter of monstrous hairy leg punched through and started slowly rending a tear in the sheet metal.

"I wouldn't worry," Lydia said, reaching into her jacket, "We have this perfectly under control."

-------------------------------------------

Hi there!

Welcome to an interest check for Priest & Hawthorne Investigations, a modern-fantasy RP that I think I want to give another run at. I will be looking for a Co-GM on this, at least for the first couple of months, so, you know. No pressure.

In this story, the players will take the part of people working for the titular Priest & Hawthorne Investigations; a small paranormal-detective service operating out of a large American city. You are people from all walks of life, and have come to PHI by various means - maybe you're a police detective who couldn't overlook something that was obviously a monster attack, maybe you're a Real Actual Wizard but still need a way to make rent, maybe you're a park service ranger who's seen one too many Bigfeet. Whatever the reason, you're living in that liminal space between the mundane and the supernatural, and sometimes helping keep people safe from things that they never knew meant them harm.

The tone of this story is going to be along the lines of Hellboy or The Dresden Files, probably with a dose of Supernatural, The Sandman, The Unsleeping City, and The Dirty Streets of Heaven; and because I don't believe in grimdark, Ghostbusters.

I don't mean to scare anyone off, but I tend to have rather high standards for posts and characters. I'd like this to be quite a small group of people (maybe up to five, - I don't plan to have a character at the moment), and it will not be first-come, first-served. I don't have specific roles in mind, but I would ask that you consider what makes a good team dynamic and a good story. I am, for example, generally not looking for silent and distant loners, violence-crazed psychopaths, vengeance-driven walking armories, or children.

The story will be set in 'the present,' or maybe a 'near-future' if that winds up making sense. The office you'll be working out of will be small, but not scraping-for-the-rent, and has been around for a while - that means that there probably are some kind of interesting things sitting in a back room, but that there isn't an Indiana Jones-style bottomless warehouse of deus ex machina. If you convince me it'll make fun storytelling, there's a very high chance I'll let you do it. For example: The Queen of the Winter Sidhe owes you a favor? I want to know everything about that.

I do have several story arcs in mind, but they're deliberately designed to be flexible and to allow the players to push on the world; I will rarely say "no, you can't do that," since the yes-and of collaborative storytelling is my favorite part. That is to say that this is not intended to be a bring-your-own-adventure sandbox, although I am more than happy (and am expecting to) tailor the world for the characters in it, and to work with players to establish plot hooks.

So, that's the pitch. The IC thread will very likely be the continuation of the introductory scene above, or maybe I'll write something new.

Who's interested?

Man Made Gods-Modern Fantasy/Supernatural RP (Updated Links to Lore pages)

Ooookay, there's a lot of information here, but I'm just wanting to make sure I'm understanding this right:

Our characters are new hires for Apex, an organization that hires and trains people to fight monsters. To facilitate our ability to blast/punch/poke-with-a-stick, we will be teaming up with a kind of empowered spirit (the Daemon), who is also actively employed (not enslaved?) by Apex.

The following things are true about the Daemon:

1.) It is an independent being in its own right
2.) It is aligned with (though not necessarily friendly with) the human player character
3.) It grants power to the human player character in the form of various powers and abilities
4.) That power is granted to the human character when the Daemon is resident within an object (a gun, a handkerchief, the lost shaker of salt) and that object is on the human character's person. This lets the player character shoot fireballs, have super-tough skin, or any number of other effects, however:
5.) The Daemon can manifest itself as a physical presence and act independently from the human character.

Which leads me to some questions - my apologies, I'm sure I didn't see these addressed in the document, but it's possible that the mushrooms are still working.

1.) When the Daemon manifests, does it take its power back from the Handler, or is there now an empowered human and a manifested Daemon?

2.) Is the player-Daemon interaction meant to be "voice in your head, except when the shit hits the fan," or more "buddy cop where the buddy has to hide sometimes because he's a werewolf," or "I dunno man, decide which one you like best?"

I'll probably have more questions soon - but I am intrigued by this and I'm pondering a character(s)....

Falling Skies: Reboot (Mecha, Space Opera)

I'll have something up by tomorrow afternoon! Sorry for the intense delay.

Falling Skies: Reboot (Mecha, Space Opera)

@vietmyke Heya Myke! I am interested; I'm rewriting the character backstory a bit, by necessity. You'll hear from me in the next day or two. :3

Falling Skies: Reboot (Mecha, Space Opera)

Myke, I love you.

That's already my ship. Or, at least, very close to it. <3

I wrote this last time

(Art by Lownine)

INS Artemis

‘In allis verbis, tenere manu mea’

Class Olympus
Function: Strike Carrier
Manufacturer: Athoek Drive Yards
Length: 318m
Displacement: 203,800 long tons
Crew Complement: Crew complement of 800, air wing of 400, Marine compliment of 400, artificial intelligence construct compliment of 1 (backup core installed).

Assigned Groups:
MAS complement: 12th MAS Squadron
Air complement: 114th Aerospace Squadron (‘Stormriders’), 519th Aerospace Squadron (‘Pluggers’)
Marine complement: 8th Battalion, 2nd Marines (‘Delta Victor’)

Description:

The Olympus-class is first in the line of next-generation warships, designed to complement and augment existing battle strategies while opening up new avenues of attack and defense. Unlike older vessels, which are designed to project overwhelming firepower from relatively stationary positions, the Olympus class is designed to dictate the field of engagement on its own terms. The ship has a very large central fusion reactor compared to its displacement, which powers a short-recharge Jump drive and provides plasma flow for outsized conventional thrusters. It is additionally armed with forward-facing hypervelocity rail guns and a full compliment of conventional anti-ship and anti-air weaponry. Captains tasked with commanding an Olympus will know that where compromises have been made, they have tended to affect the ship’s armor plating. These ships will not endure the punishment of larger battleships and dreadnoughts, and tactics should include the understanding that these ships are designed to avoid fire, rather than simply absorb incoming. That is not to say they are not still well-armored, but they are meant to be hard to hit and hard to kill.

These tasks are made considerably easier by the ship’s largest persistent upgrade from traditional Naval vessels, their quantum-core artificial intelligence construct. Many of the ship’s functions, especially data aggregation and command execution, are handled in a way similar to the synthetic personality matrices that will remain in use for the foreseeable future. Unlike the SPM installations, the Olympus intelligence is capable not only of managing data aggregation and shipboard communication, but it is an additional member of the crew (nominally of a Master Sergeant rank), and is capable of synthesizing and contextualizing information and relaying experience-driven suggestions to command staff. In combat, the AI can coordinate firing solutions at marginally faster-than-human timescales for incoming fire, analyze and coordinate target tracking, and many other functions.

Power:

Artemis, like all ships of her class, is powered by a Kandon Dynamics fusion plant buried deep in the heart of the craft. Waste heat is piped via superconductive pathways to exterior hull radiators, or captured to use for shipboard functions. The core is similar to those used in vessels nearly twice Artemis’ tonnage, modified to be stable at comparatively low average power production and with additional stability measures for extremely rapid power ramp-up.

Propulsion: Olympus-class vessels are designed to move around their local volume with considerably more speed than ships of their size typically do. High-temperature plasma diverted from the reactor is capable of moving the ship at 3.5g for an indefinite period of time. The thrusters are additionally equipped with layers of ablative armor that will allow up to 6g of acceleration for no more than 12 hours, after which the ship will be limited to 0.25g acceleration until the armor panels, or possibly the entire thrusters, are replaced. In addition, the ship is equipped with unusually powerful reaction-control systems, and is capable of changing the ship’s direction comparatively quickly - all the better to bring the fixed-arc forward weapons to bear.

Finally, the ship’s Jump drive is capable of moving it up to 35 light years in a single jump, after which the ship will require at least 38 hours of cool-off and recharge time. The drive is, however, optimized for smaller jumps in the light-hour range, requiring as little as 5 minutes of recharge time for the shortest jumps. This is an entirely novel capability, and one that allows an Olympus a tremendous degree of mobility in the field of combat. These short-range Jumps are, however, very hard on the ship’s power system, and even minor damage will render these “combat jumps” inadvisable. In addition, with every Jump the ship must dissipate more and more heat, and it is entirely possible for an incautious captain to overtax the ship’s heat reservoirs and render themselves entirely unable to jump for a considerable period of time - or of destroying the Jump drive entirely.

Weapons

The ship is equipped with full coverage arcs for anti-aircraft and anti-incoming weaponry, ranging from propellant-based mass drivers to small plasma casters to vaporize or physically disrupt incoming ammunition, missiles, or ships on suicide trajectories. These weapons can be selectively controlled by the onboard intelligence, though the AI is not capable of coordinating the entire defense grid unless she devotes her entire consciousness to the task. Large communication arrays can be used for fleet coordination, or used for electronic warfare, jamming, or even direct remote override of any system that (foolishly) accepts connection.

The ship’s primary armaments, two longitudinally mounted (one above the other) hypervelocity rail guns, are in a fixed, non-overlapping profile, and can fire out either the front or rear of the vessel. They are primarily designed to deliver massive, inert slugs of metal at relativistic speeds, but they can be modified (via easily-manufactured sabot) to fire anything that will fit down the bore. Acceleration and desired muzzle speed are nearly infinitely variable, and the payloads can range from battalions of Marines to megaton-class fusion bombs. Artemis is currently equipped with 12 fusion payloads, and deployment requires the joint authorization of the Captain and the ship’s AI construct. In addition, the ship is equipped with four large plasma casters on deployable turrets in a spinal-mount orientation. These weapons are intended for direct capital ship combat, orbital bombardment, or other tasks that require a large amount of firepower.

Defenses

While captains are instructed to consider the ship’s mobility its primary defense system, Artemis is equipped with a high-performance shield system, designed to absorb or deflect most energy weapons. By varying the field, it is additionally possible for electrically conductive incoming fire to be physically deflected, though the degree of course change can be very small. In effect, a heavy-caliber mass driver could be steered to hit a less-critical area of the ship under absolutely ideal situations. Most small-arms fire can be much more easily manipulated, however the field geometry changes required represent an considerable investment of time by either onboard subroutines that could be doing something else, or direct intervention by the majority of conscious bandwidth available to the ship’s AI construct.

The ship’s armor plating is largely conventional, and lighter than a ship of this size would typically mount. The armor has been applied in clever geometries to minimize energy transferred to the plating (weapons tend to ‘skip’ off it, rather than deform or remove it), but concentrated effort, bad luck, or well-aimed heavy weapons will inflict considerable damage. While the ship is designed to be highly survivable, and critical areas (fusion reactors, warhead storage) remain heavily armored, the ship is not designed to be an immovable bulwark.

Flight Deck

The ship’s flight deck is mounted forward, with the hangar bay beginning halfway down the forward “neck” of the ship. Fighter and MAS recovery is handled through a large opening on the “bottom” of the ship, and the “top” is heavily armored and reinforced to withstand crash and combat landings. The ship provides armament, repair, and refit capability for 5 MAS units at once, and can mount 40 aerospace fighters of varying types. There are an additional 3 boarding craft, 2 railgun-launched “breaching pods” for Marines, and a number of personnel shuttles and utility craft.

The hangar is a busy place, and if many ships are undergoing refit or are out of stowage, space can be very tight. Most tools and repair stations fit into panels and storage compartments that rectract or flip out of the hull, and any tools left on the flight deck during combat launches are likely to be swept out with the initial burst to vacuum. Pop-deploy air shelters, oxygen masks, and other accoutrements of an area likely to be rapidly depressurized are in prominent and visible locations throughout the deck.

Artificial Intelligence

Artemis is inhabited by a quantum-core artificial intelligence that has named herself “Ava.” She is professional, polite, but anything but subservient. She is accorded the rank of Marine Master Sergeant, and while she is the primary authority for few things on the ship, she is a respected member of the crew. While she is very aware that she is not human, Ava does have emotions, though they tend to be somewhat more muted than a human’s. She is wholly conscious and self-aware, and has a tremendous ability to process and analyze information, but she is not necessarily more intelligent than a very bright human being. By inclination rather than programmed-in directive, Ava is affectionate and cares quite a lot for the crew, and could not be accused of considering them only as assets to be spent or saved.

Due to the extensive artificial intrusion already present in Captain Sarett’s brain, Ava has an unusual relationship with the Captain. She is capable of displaying information directly into Ava’s field of view, and of relaying information or conversation into her mind without needing a terminal or voice output. This connection goes two ways, is consensual, and either party may terminate or request reconnection at any point. She typically keeps the Captain aware of overall ship function and various administrative data (ETA, fuel reserves, etc) through ambient information (similar to a nonintrusive HUD), but is capable of other tasks. Ava tends to work closely with the ship’s executive officer, but augments, rather than replaces, that officer’s function.

Should the ship’s human compliment be killed or disabled, Ava is capable of returning the ship to friendly space on her own, with a complex series of conditions that must be met in order for her to assume that level of management over the ship. She does not, however, have the capability to replace the entire crew during a combat situation (her total available mental capacity is insufficient to manage all ship systems), and as she has no physical body, there are many maintenance and repair tasks that she cannot perform.

Falling Skies: Reboot (Mecha, Space Opera)

Hmmmm...I never did get to do much with the captain and ship I wrote last time. How do you feel about that character (or flavor of character) coming back, or would you prefer we're all robot pilots? :3