Keepers: Adrienne Mueller
Hunters: Eric Fattig, Karen Twelves, Sean Nittner
System: Monster of the Week
Supplement: Tome of Mysteries
Campaign Overview
Overview of the entire campaign here: Agents of Cisra
Adventure Log
Dr. Stillman gets a call from former grad student Irene Stolz, studying zoology.
- Her supervisor Dr. Cornwall is missing (has been for weeks), assistant Mike bleached all the spores in the lab and is also missing.
- There was an animal attack in the woods outside Rockville, which is outside DC.
At the lab
- Everything smells like bleach.
- Stasia & Malik take aliases Ripley & Hicks, grad students under Stillman.
- Irene said that Mike had been very supportive, but she found all spores bleached this morning. She assumes it was Mike because he had a key to the lab, though the lab wouldn’t be all that hard to break into.
- Mike had been dating someone recently.
- Dr. Cornwall was overseeing study on mold, fuligo septica.
- Mike had been studying cells becoming slime.
- Irene had been researching how slime becomes spores.
- Had a grant to study transplanting cells so others could create spores in a similar way?
- There is a security camera at the entrance to the building.
- Stasia takes Mike’s computer.
Dr. Cornwall’s office
- Everything is a bit dusty, which makes Malik sneeze. Stillman also starts feeling hayfever symptions. Stasia bugs out of the office.
- Everyone gets an alert on their phones, Jessica says there’s a suspicious death nearby. A jogger found a body in the woods, uncertain cause of death. Victim is Jerry Willdin.
At the woods
- Two police officers are interviewing the jogger.
- It’s drizzling, the woods feel creepy.
- EMT Kelly is kinda hot?
- Body (Vincent) was cold when they found him. Bruises are around the sides of his face, arms and torso, 4 inches in length.
- Kelly said his breath tasted a bit sweet (from mouth-to-mouth).
- Vincent had been camping about 20-30 min hike in.
- Yellow slime on the bottom of his shoes. Slime is very tensile and thick.
- Stillman takes a sample of the fungus, appears to move in the petri dish.
- Stasia takes every precaution to safely look into Vincent’s mouth, and a ribbon of slime wraps around her arm.
- Vincent’s whole body is actually covered with a membrane.
- Malik grabs the tendril with forceps, rips it from the membrane, and stuffs it in an evidence jar. He tries to spray it with bleach but it whips around his arm.
- Stasia uses her Big Whammy to step on the bottle of bleach, spraying it everywhere and killing the slime.
Hacker info
- Malik gets word back from a hacker friend re: Dr. Cornwall.
- Purchases for camping equipment, lab equipment for the field.
- Dr. Cornwall had ordered a new species of fungus: physarum polysephilum. It arrived from out of the country.
Mike’s computer
- Mike had been working on something, couldn’t spend enough time with girlfriend.
- Research is to infect fungal cells.
- There’s a document titled Cornwall, with human DNA sequences, looks like he was trying to see if the virus could apply to a human genome as well as a fungal genome.
- Stasia posits that Dr. Cornwall tried to merge with the fungus.
At Mike’s place
- Arrive just in time to see Mike bolting into the woods. We catch up, say we’re here to help.
- Mike says that Cornwall cross-bred the two molds and they infected him.
- Mike’s been working on a virus that could separate the mold DNA from the human, is hoping to get close enough to reject him. Malik convinces him to give us the virus and promises we’ll get Cornwall out alive.
- Malik believes that we can kill “the source” of the fungus to destroy it all.
- We call Jessica; she can’t requisition anything for us to destroy the forest.
- Stasia takes Mike’s car to the hospital; Kelly is in the ICU struggling to breathe, but the virus works!
- Stasia grabs the keys to Kelly’s Vespa, loots what supplies she can on her way out, and goes back to the woods.
In the woods
- Stillman, Malik, and Mike approach Cornwall’s camp.
- The fungus is so thick everywhere that they have to spray down the ground in front of them with bleach just to walk there safely.
- Mike trips, the fungus all around them tries to envelop him. Malik sprays him down, but feels a tightness in his chest.
Cornwall’s camp
- Cornwall is laying atop a giant mass of fungus, seems almost entranced, and says it may already be too late.
- Stasia drives in on the Vespa, has stuffed a roll of gauze in the gas tank. She lights it and jumps off right before it hits the giant spore and explodes.
- Malik can sense from the mass inside him what it’s feeling—anguish, despair, that it was right not to trust humans.
- Malik communes with Cornwall to convince him to let the spore go, that there’s hope that in the future he could find a safe home for the fungus. He convinces the fungus a little bit too! The pulsing fungus core is exposed.
- Stillman kicks some ass with a shotgun. The tendrils of the fungus wrap around him and cause damage but he holds his ground.
- The fungus is dead! Dr. Cornwall is on fire a little. Also a forest fire is spreading.
- Malik and Mike try to save Dr. Cornwall but have to flee.
The forest fire seems to be distracting enough to keep the town from looking too much into the killer mold. We did still bring back our first initial sample.
