Number of fucks given in this post: 2
Jeez.. funny month. The stuff I thought’d go badly went smoothly and the stuff I thought was easy didn’t go so well! Overall a win, at least!
The first thing I worried about was me and Pelican going over to Edinburgh to stamp on the toes of their Scourge so we could follow up on the Sabbat Shovelhead lead. Victor had worked out that the guy had previously worked in a hotel over there. My theory is that the Sabbat have been picking up people all over the country instead of concentrating in any one city where we can spot them! I’m shit at politics and talking to people, but I’ve got enough manners and respect to know that I need to go through “official channels” and go over there myself in-person. Anything else could be construed as an insult, and I wouldn’t blame them. I figured that I could at least go over there and do what I could to shield Pelican from the shit so that he could do the actual investigation. But it turned out that Doyle was right and we actually did have a good relationship!
So the Edinburgh Scourge is a Toreador called Dalton Manning. We got permission and approval in advance to come over and do the investigation. Surprisingly, Dalton let me take the lead. He showed me around the places we wanted to look at and were able to identify a number of hotels and other places with a large number of staff, especially immigrants. .. you know, places with the kind of people that don’t get noticed when they vanish. Anyway, looks like my theory is panning out. People are going missing in different domains in the same kind of places. Problem is… they are still going missing so the Sabbat are most likely gearing up for another attack.
The next major effort on my list was setting up all-round surveillance on the dodgy pawn shop that I’d traced those missing guys to. I dragged in the new ex-cop Gangrel since he had the skills and needed some cash. So I put Pelican, Xander and myself on night-shift, My ghouls (and anyone else the others could provide) on day-shift along with setting up cameras to cover day-time for when we couldn’t have someone physically there. Tried hacking the phones and everything.
The pawn shop is imaginatively titled “Clyde Side Pawn”, and the tag line is “a place to sell your own mother down the river…“. It’s a standard, shabby, all night pawn shop.
Xander uses some of his old buddies to get the details on the old man behind the counter. His name is David ‘Old man’ McGurk. He has a small and modest criminal record but no offenses since the 80s. He’s down as being 94 and he’s owned and operated the shop since the ’50s. The photo on his file matches the guy we’ve seen, except younger.
The shop is as busy but mostly the customers are junkies, muggers and prostitutes hawking stolen goods. The freaky things is that McGurk is the only one who works there. He is there literally 24/7… all day and all night. We can’t see into the store to see exactly what he’s doing, but no one is there for very long.
Once customer stands out though; a young, Chinese student turns up during the day, crying. She walks in with her college bag and something wrapped up in a bundle. She leaves shortly later without the bundle. She seems to fit the profile of the other missing people. We’ll need to look into this more.
All that work investigating the pawn shop paid off in other ways, too. Jon, my hacker, updated his search algorithms or whatever he calls it, and up popped a list of another 30 strangely missing people. Some of them are kindred who aren’t accepted in the city any more and haven’t been seen – which isn’t necessarily suspicious in and of itself but the rest could be linked to the pawn shop. Either way, I’ll need to look through them and see what it is Jon’s found.
I managed to get down to Stranraer to talk to the Deputy Harbour Master. Once Sully delivers the cameras he promised, we can get them set up on the harbour or maybe even on some of the boats. In return, the guy took me out for a “drink” haha!
Oh yeah, and while I was in Edinburgh I got talking to the Harpy, Farr. One minor boon and Farr got me a pile of useful info I can use to work out what’s going on with the Royal Navy off the coast of Stranraer. Basically, Scotland got totally shafted by England when it went Independent and since Scotland couldn’t afford to run it’s own military, it’s paying rent to use England’s! Of course, it was only supposed to have been temporary… London has it’s claws into the whole thing now.
The Faslane Navy base on the Clyde is still going. The biggest army base is Glencorse Barracks, near Pennicuik. Farr reckons that a Ventrue called Col. Haverstock should know someone there. Haverstock is a hunter that “needs a few deals on the black market to organise his hunts” so I dread to think what he’s hunting. Grouse? Sure!
The other thing that had a big potential to go tits-up was us going down to Manchester mob-handed with Doyle. We went down to support the new prince there and make sure that the Anarchs were going to play nice. Looks like our timing was pretty good since the Anarchs had been recently reinforced by a pile of their compatriots from Ulster. The new Prince, Eloise Kane, has got a good rep for both kicking-ass and being a canny political operator but nobody mentioned that Toreador would kill to look like that! Some people are calling her naive and too forgiving to the Anarchs. She’s claimed Liverpool for the Camarilla but hasn’t done anything to enforce it. Seems likely that she doesn’t want open warfare – especially with Angus threatening to bash heads (or swipe them off with his claws) – but she also seems idealistic enough to want to reunite Liverpool and Manchester. Either way, us turning up to support her settled down the Camarilla side so now it’s just the Anarchs causing trouble. With Prince Carter dead, the Viscount has stopped interfering in the domain… not that I consider that worth the cost!
I heard one off thing while down there, though. Rumour says that Barker has the docks of Liverpool and ran home after a series of disasters when he tried claiming the docks “for Manchester”. I’m looking forward to hearing more about that at the next court!
But where was the disaster of the month, I hear you ask? Yeah, well, so I’d done some research and figured that instead of buying a vault or safe or somewhere to put errant kindred (or frenzying Brujah) I could build it myself. You know, buy the concrete and the reinforcement and a huge fuck-off solid door. I mean, I can take apart pretty much any engine you can throw at me (literally throw if you feel like it) and put it back together. Of course, I think I’ve worked it out but these things don’t exactly come with Ikea build instructions. I didn’t fuck it up completely but it’s alot harder than it looks. Basically, I gave up on it for this month when I smashed my thumb with a hammer and just about frenzied. If I had, I’d probably have ruined half the materials and the place would’ve looked like a late Christmas with a few tonnes of cement powder sprinkled over the area, all decorated with steel bars bent into pretzel shapes.
