Sam: When last we left our friendly neighborhood reality deviants, they had just finished running to their mentors, contacts, and superiors for help.
John (ooc): And Avatars.
Sam: Perhaps, but your Avatar didn't actually offer to help you stop Walmart.
John (ooc): Oh yes she did. You just don't know it, yet.
Sam: In summary, Clara turned an apartment into a death trap, Homer found out that he has to choose between the hospital and Fate, Walter made arrangements with a priest to have the hospital's money laundered, Allan discovered two social groups that would become highly volatile if mixed, Draw sat around and drank beer, and Christabel found out that her mentor is too busy a witch to be mucking about in Edinburgh.
Nate (ooc): Maybe she's a Death Eater.
Ed (ooc): That or Percy is her boss.
Mary (ooc): I hope you mean Weasley, and not Shelley, though I don't know which would be more frightening.
John (ooc): Given his behavior Christmas Eve? I'll take a Weasley any day.
Fanny (ooc): It makes so much more sense, now. The Verbena are too busy to bother the Technocracy because Voldemort has come back into the picture. A hospital in Edinburgh is small potatoes compared with a wizard who wants to grind the muggles under the heel of wizards and witches.
Mary (ooc): Um, isn't that what all the Traditions want, though? We say we're giving Sleepers a choice, but the choice is an illusion. If the muggles looked at all the choices and said "Thanks, but we don't want to be possessed by demons," would the Traditions mothball their foci, stick their paradigms where the sun don't shine, and accept that answer?
Nate (ooc): I'm thinking no.
Mary (ooc): Exactly. So, the Traditions are really on the same side as Voldemort.
Ed (ooc): Maybe Christabel should find Voldemort, instead, and ask him for help stopping Walmart.
Bill (ooc): What a plum of an idea. I've always wanted to be a Death Eater. Better a hot death-eater than a cold death-eater.
Nate (ooc): Is Christabel sure her mentor isn't actually allied with the Technocracy and now warning the suits of our plans? I mean, if she's out to kill Voldemort - whose views and objectives are so clearly the same as those of the Traditions - doesn't that mean she's the enemy of the Traditions?
Bill (ooc): I think you've been listening to G.W. too much, Nate.
Nate (ooc): See what having a muggle for a world leader does to a country? I suddenly feel like siding with Voldemort.
Fanny (ooc): But Voldemort isn't exactly your warm and cuddly type. He tends to kill people rather a lot.
Bill (ooc): Yes, but it could just be the manifestation of an internal conflict between muggle-kissing Verbena and Tradition-focused Verbena. He's trying to bring the Verbena as a whole back into alignment with the other Traditions, and sometimes that means killing those who become to powerful and dangerous. One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.
John (ooc): He's trying to make the Verbena more like the Order of Hermes?
Nate (ooc): Fanny, you should see if you can track down Voldemort and make him an offer that will interest him.
Fanny (ooc): What would I have to roll to do that?
Sam (ooc): You can't. Voldemort doesn't exist in my World of Darkness. Walmart, people, Walmart. No more talk of this voldemart, I mean Voldemort.
Nate (ooc): Freudian slip! You just called him Voldemart. Voldemort is the one secretly in league with the Technocracy. He fosters this anti-muggle sentiment among the Verbena in order to keep them at each other's throats so they won't notice as his Voldemarts spread like a disease throughout the world.
Bill (ooc): Very shrewd. A worthy opponent, this Voldemort.
Sam (ooc): For the last time, there is no Voldemort in my game.
Mary (ooc): Of course not. We killed all the Nephandi in the British Isles two sessions ago.
Bill (ooc): Look at Sam. I think he's going to explode.
John: Let's get back to the game. "Our situation is dire. The Technocracy wants to bulldoze a hospital so they can build the Downtown Edinburgh Voldemart."
Sam (ooc): Walmart, dammit.
John: That's what I said. "Monsignor Argyle thinks the suits will disrupt the hospital's finances, first. If it's in trouble with its creditors (who might be but probably aren't associated with the Technocracy), it is only a matter of time before the land is forclosed upon and sold to the highest bidder."
Mary: "Which will, of course, be the big-pocketed Voldemart."
John: "Exactly. They've neatly made it impossible for us to fight the creditor directly without harming innocent people."
Nate: "Which they know we don't want to do."
Bill: "Ethical issues aside, bombing a financial institution would also make us terrorists, and thus the perfect targets for swift capture and thorough reprogramming."
Nate (ooc): Good thing this is England. On the other side of the pond, they'd send you to a prison on an island where soldiers lounge on the beach and soak up the tropical sun during the downtime between questioning you without the presence of a lawyer and piling you and your fellow prisoners up like toy blocks made of human flesh.
John (ooc): Sounds like the sort of place that cries out for a vampire with Vicissitude as a prison warden.
Bill (ooc): Let's just not go there. I'd like to accomplish something other than a discussion of world politics, tonight.
Mary: "It would be helpful if we knew exactly what the Technocracy is planning. Even if we know they're going to slash the hospital's financial wrists, that's not a specific enough threat for us to plan against it. How could they do it?"
John: "In broad terms, there are two options - reduce income or increase expenses. How could those be accomplished."
Bill (ooc): You realize we're breaking Rule Zero in-character, don't you?
Sam (ooc): I knew their plan before we even sat down to play tonight. It gave me something to do this week when I was taking a break from mourning my lost plot and NPCs.
Bill (ooc): You're such a baby, Sam. Suck it up. It was your own fault, remember?
Nate: "Income is pretty easy, really. While the hospital generally charges patients (or their insurance companies) for the services it provides, it is heavily dependent on individual donations and grants from the Church. Expenses are a more complicated matter - staff salaries, facility maintenance, infrastructure upgrades, utilities, medical supplies, and legal expenses all take bites out of the overall budget."
Mary: "The donors seem a likely target. It wouldn't have to mean killing them, either. That might even be counter-productive. Philanthropists tend to write favorite charities into their wills, after all."
Bill: "I smell a scandal. Get enough angry patients together to speak out against the hospital. Between the bad PR and the legal fees, they'd be hitting both sides of the ledger at the same time."
Mary: "That seems like a good possibility. Short of fixing the price of energy, materials, and labor pretty much throughout the country, they probably don't have much control over the other expenses."
John: "And short of brainscrubbing every major donor and paying patient, they don't have much say in how much money the hospital generates."
Nate: "We're missing something important about what Argyle mentioned, though. The Church wouldn't be able to secretly control the expenses or donations, so how could the suits sabotage the finances in a way that has nothing to do with stopping donations or increasing costs?"
Mary: "Strike the medium of exchange."
Fanny: "Pardon?"
Mary: "The hospital doesn't keep all its assets in cash, right?"
Nate: "Of course not."
Mary: "Most of the money is in one or more bank accounts, right?"
Nate: "Yes. Of course. If the Technocracy drains those accounts, the hospital couldn't pay its bills. The donations and expenses could stay the same, but the flow of money would stop."
John: "Why not all of the above? How about a scandal in which major members of the hospital board cooked the books to steal gobs of money that they then spent on dubious goods and services - prostitutes, illegal weapons, drugs, gambling, or trips to terrorist training camps."
Nate (ooc): It strikes me that it's really good that this game isn't set in America and that I didn't decide to play an Ahl-i-Batin. Hello, Gitmo...
Bill: "Walter, do you have access to the hospital's account ledgers?"
John (ooc): Of the phrases I least expected to hear in a roleplaying game, "account ledgers" is probably near the top of the list...
Nate: "Yes, of course. I can certainly see that everything is in order."
Mary: "Be sure to check with everyone the hospital owes money to make sure the expenses are going where they are supposed to go."
Nate: "Of course."
Sam: So, you're checking the books, right?
Nate: Yes.
Sam: Anyone have an Accounting or Finances ability?
John (ooc): You're kidding, right?
Sam: How about Bureaucracy?
Nate (ooc): I don't remember seeing any such Ability in the rules.
John (ooc): Yeah, Sam. This isn't exactly Hunter, you know. We're mages. We need things like Cosmology, Enigmas, and Occult. Balancing the Checkbook is beneath our interest.
Mary: How about Investigation or Law? I have the former, and I believe Allan has the latter.
Ed: Yes, I do.
Sam: Investigation is more along the lines of CSI, and Law would let you detect the legality of certain expenses. Neither would help you identify whether the books are balanced. I'll let you roll a straight Perception check, dif 8.
John (ooc): Screw that. We have magic. Bill, if you'd be so kind.
Bill: Draw is going to use Cor 2 Time 2 to examine the books as they were, are, and will be.
Sam: You'd still need to know what you are looking for.
John: Fine. Homer will assist, adding Entropy 1 to find the points of discrepency. We'll write those sections down, along with where and when we found those problem areas. That will at least narrow down the search. If we can't figure out the issue from there, we'll hire an accountant to muggle out the details for us.
Bill: Dif 5, with modifiers. There. 10 successes enough?
John: 10 successes on my side, too.
Sam: Okay. You look into the distant past and find nothing unusual. Looking into the recent past, the present and the future, however, you notice something rather odd. It looks like the donations and other money just keep coming in, but there are a lot of expenses that aren't coming out. All the automatic payments aren't coming out. According to the ledgers, you've sent payments to everything, but the bank accounts just aren't reflecting it."
Bill: Draw relays this information to the rest of the cabal.
Nate: "Until now, I never thought I'd see the day when an unexpectedly massive account balance would be fill me with dread."
Mary: "It is a rather clever tactic, but why hasn't the hospital received collection calls or at least late payment notices?"
Bill: "More importantly, why haven't any of the hospital's services been interrupted?
John: "I have a theory. Walter, pick one of those late payments and draft a check that will get them caught up. We're going to have a letter overnighted."
Nate: Walter will do that. He's also going to call the electic company to get the status of the hospital's account.
Sam: Their automated line appears to be rejecting your PIN. The representative you speak to explains that they are currently experiencing technical difficulties with their database. The problem cropped up just as she was pulling up your account, so she suggests you call back later."
Nate: Waiting an hour or two and then doing so.
Sam: The automated line still seems to be having problems. The representative tells you that this is a very recent issue, but such difficulties usually have a short duration. She suggest you call back later.
Nate: I tell this one to call me back as soon as their system is up, again.
Sam: She agrees to do just that. Fifteen minutes later, she calls. Just as she enters your information, she seems quite embarrassed to have to inform you that the issue appears to have come up again.
Nate: I patiently ask her to call me again when it clears up.
Sam: She agrees to do so. Three hours pass.
Nate: I call back and ask if they're still experiencing technical difficulties.
Sam: The representative tells you that the outage only lasted a few minutes.
Nate: "Why didn't Kelly call me back?"
Sam (as representative): "I'm sorry, sir, but I show no record that you spoke to a representative today. I'd be happy to help you, though. Could I get... Could you hold for just a minute for me?"
Nate: "Yeah."
Sam (as representative): "Thank you." An elevator music version of Pink Floyd's "Money" plays while you wait. A minute or two later, Greg comes back. "I'm sorry, sir, but I appear to be getting an error message when I try to pull up your account. I'm going to have to submit a trouble ticket to our IT to remedy it. Could I get a phone number where we can reach you once this has been resolved?"
Nate: Walter gives him the number and then gives up. "They've given us technical difficulties."
John: "Maybe the expressed check will slip through the spell's parameters."
Bill (ooc): I never thought I'd see the day when a major plot point revolved around the heroes trying to pay the bills.
Sam (ooc): Haven't you ever seen Blues Brothers?
Bill (ooc): Yes, but their problem was they needed to raise the money. We have the money, but the wheels of the economy have forgotten we exist. I get the feeling that once the Effect ends, all the records on all those bureaucrats' computers will show that we've received numerous notices of overdue payments, and then everyone will abruptly decide to stop doing business with us.
John: Payroll is still working, though, right?
Sam: At the moment, yes, but you know they will stop beginning with this coming paycheck.
Nate (ooc): We are going to have a lot of pissed off employees, soon.
Mary (ooc): Not to mention what is likely to transpire at tax time.
John (ooc): And that check will never get through the mail in one piece, will it?
Bill (ooc): Are we getting warm?
Sam: You're almost reading my mind. The courier apologizes when it loses the envelope with your check and offers to compensate you twice the cost of the overnighting expense.
Nate (ooc): Yay. More money we can't spend.
Sam: Yep.
Bill: "My friends, I'm afraid we might be in what could be called the bureaucratic dead zone."
Mary: "At least we can be pretty sure the Syndicate is involved, now."
Bill (ooc): I can't believe you turned bureaucracy into a villain of note in a Mage game. I must say I'm impressed.
Sam (ooc): Thank you.
John: "I'll confess that I'm temporarily at a loss for a solution to this problem. Finance has never been the strong point of assassins."
Bill: "At least we likely won't have to wait long before the Technocracy makes its next move."
Sam: And that's where we'll stop for the night.
ST (Sam) - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Clara (Mary) - Mary Shelley
Christabel (Fanny) - Fanny Brawne
Draw (Bill) - William Blake
Homer (John) - John Keats
Walter (Nate) - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Allan (Ed) - Edgar Allan Poe