Keepers and
Hunters: Eric Fattig, Karen Twelves, Adrienne Mueller, Sean Nittner
System: Monster of the Week
Supplement: Tome of Mysteries
Campaign Overview
Overview of the entire campaign here: Agents of Cisra
Adventure Log
New Mexico. Pasatiemo. Here to investigate a string of unexplained aneurisms.
3 Days Earlier – In the Office
McCloud welcomes us back, debriefs Jessica, while Malik and Stazia are at their desks. Jessica agrees it was our fault and we’ll be more decisive next time. McCloud says Prof Noble has activated his Congressman. She’ll clean it up.
Current Mission? Several Aneuryisms. CISRA painting it as a gas leak. Suburb of Albuquerque. Meanwhile Mordecai has some swelling in his frontal lobe which should go down and then everything will be okay.
Stazia, on the flight out, has a vision of a truckstup, with people slumped over with nosebleeds. There’s a newspaper with today’s date. Albuquerque Times. (By the time we land; we know there’s a second incident.) Then she sees a small little town, a rest-stop on a highway, motel, diner, etc. She has a vision of a woman slumped over a counter with a nosebleed and then we see fire starting to spread, all the buildings are on fire. There’s something small, quadrupedal moving towards (the viewer). (Devil Dog?)
We go to the scene of the second incident. No one dead. Some people in comas. But! We can draw a line between the two sites, and we can see that Pasatiempo is the third point on the line.
Car doors click as we step out into the hat dry, New Mexico air. Hotel+diner attached. General store. Mechanic’s shop. The general store is the gas station. Sign in the window of the diner and few cars.
The victims who have woken up have no memory of anything weird happening before they blacked out. Stazia checks out the diner, Malik checks out the Hotel. The diner has a sign saying it’s being fumigated and it’s completely cleared out. Malik walks into the lobby of the motel, which is well air-conditioned but a pretty sparse kind of place. He asks for two rooms from a woman behind the desk. (There’s also a slight balding man behind the desk, reading a magazine.) She says the hotel is pretty quiet and there are only a few other guests. Says backparkers come through Spring and Fall. One room with a rollaway, is what we splurge for. Malik says we’re collecting research data. She says she hasn’t seen anything weird happening. She has they had a big summer storm a few weeks back. She says they still do the continental breakfast, but the diner is unfortunately closed. Her name is Jimena. And she didn’t lie.
Meanwhile, Jessica investigates the general store. Tall, bear of a woman behind the counter. No crime. Quiet town. Soemtime some drunk folks. She heard it wasn’t a gas thing at all. She friends with folks at the county. Some kind of brain thing. But young people! In their prime! But it sure is cheap to live here. And it’s nice a remote. But sometimes other people come around looking for the cheap land… but noone has bought in recently. One company, Anhydrous Unlimited, set up a chemical factory. Said they’d bring jobs and hire local, but they didn’t follow-through on their promises. They brought in all their own people. Not much industry here since mines shut down. Some of the deepest mines in the world. Maybe silver. Theresa. Or Big T. They’ve got sandwiches AND chips.
Meanwhile Stazia tries to identify what actually was on fire. Sees Bugout Exterminators. Sees a hole in the backwall, big enough for a fist. Something could have dug this out. (How to protect the victims? Assuming they’ll soon all be on fire. She has a terrible hunch that it’s already too late.) She decides to investigate the hole. It’s around the back. She’s worried about Hanson. Remembers his death-touch. Wonders if it works on stuff as well as people. She’s worried he’s back. One the exterminators walks over to her. (There’s a team of them). Danson asks if he can help? Stazia says she’s an entomologist. Saw a dragonfly go into a hole. Wondered where the hole leads. They’re sprayin’ now, hope to be done soon. She shouldn’t be here. Doesn’t say what they’re trying to kill.
We compare notes. Stazia remembers the logo on the chemicals of the fumigators. Whatever was in those canisters, wasn’t toxic, it was flammable.
We need to stop them right now. As we run over, we see a flame light up out of the corner of our eye. Aaaand, we hear the car doors click. And we’re in Pasatiempo NM.
Malik doesn’t remember. Stazia and Jessica do. We need to stop the exterminators. We grab our FDA IDs and run over. He knows we’re not with the FDA. Malik tries to cut the crap. He says “Move up the timeline,” and starts to try and spray Malik with a flamethrower. Malik grapples him. Kickin’. Some. Ass. Malik gets hold of the spigot and has him in an armlock, pointing the flamethrower away from us. But Malik gets horribly burned. Stazia jinxes his flamethrower. She gives Jessica a bonus on the time-loopy role. “It’s really important at least remembers what we were doing the last time otherwise we’ll keep doing this until we all die.”
Something small and scaly is running away as the gout of flame comes out and time resets. It’s a small time creature and they, the flamethrower guys, are antagonizing it.
Click. New Mexico. Pasatiemo. We’re here to investigate a string of unexplained aneuryisms.
This time we break through through the front door of the diner. Uses L33T tools get us in. We here voices and see figures moving around. We tell them to freeze. We see their labels are now orange instead of yellow. Jessica clips one of them on the should to show them we mean business. Malik gets “The Boss” on the phone. “Your exterminators have run into a bit of a snag here.”
“Who is this?”
“I go by Malik. How about you?”
“You can call me Dr. Chiu. How do you have one of my men’s walktalkies?”
“Because your guy didn’t want to get shot.”
“Hm.”
“Why do you want to kill the creature in this building?”
“You know a lot. What color are my men’s nametags? The ones that change with every timeloop?”
Stazia, “We’ll just keep fuckin’ up the timeline til we get what we want.”
Malik, wonders what this man’s role is, whether this is connected to previous mysteries. The name Dr. Chiu rings a bell. There’s a portrait of Dr. Chiu in the halls of CISRA. An early director. Long since past… but he had a son. “Dr. Chiu, son of former CISRA director Dr. Chiu?”
“That’s right,” he lies.
This is the original Dr. Chiu.
Stazia gets a whiff of smoke. She wonders how to protect the creature. She realizes the hold leads into the women’s restroom. If this building burns down, the creature will burn with the thing and time will reset again. In order to protect everyone else, she needs to protect the creature. She grabs a fire extinguisher and runs to the bathroom. Hears the sound of claws on tile from underneath the sink. She looks underneath and sees a lizard, but kind of made out of petrified wood. But definitely alive and is looking at her. A little perturbed, but not aggressive. “Hey there, lil guy? We’re both tiny-winy things. Let’s get out of here?” She hold her hand out. It shows no signs of sentience, but does sniff her hand a little. (Act under pressure to entice it without scaring it.) She puts her arm out, it crawls right and settles on her should; tuck him under her shirt and runs back out. The claws are sharp. She walks calmy and swiftly out the front.
In the mean time Dr. Chiu evilly banters with Malik. “It looks like we’re out of time, Dr. Chiu.”
“It looks like YOU’RE out of time. I’m sorry but I couldn’t let this asset fall into the wrong hands.”
We toss the mic back and back out. We try to escape. Jessica directs us all to safely.
We call in the fire department and they manage to stop the hotel from completely burning down. No casualties.
The creature seems happy enough; it eats stone and metal, including Stazia’s ear-stud. It is a subsentient animal that wants to survive; it’s one defense mechanism is to rewind time when it’s about to die. Seems like they were following it from time to time.
Malik, “How do we feel about turning this thing in?” ‘But we can’t trust that it will be safe if we let it go.”
We agree to keep hold of the creature and only turn it over to CISRA once we’ve seen what has happened to the other ‘assets’ CISRA has received.
We name the critter Rocky, and find it a terrarium and lots of rocks and metal. It likes pocket change and the terrarium.
(Also. Dr. Chiu is the founder of Anhydrous Chemical. He is in his mid-80s, but he sounded much younger than that.)
