Session 14: A Strange Conspiracy Part 1

 October 12th, 2013 

The Chapman Street Irregulars met up again on Saturday for lunch at Hathi's Garden and to have their weekly catch-up (per Eric's request). Francois mentioned that some of his hobo friends had gone missing, though that was not entirely unusual for vagrants. Still worth looking into at some point. Tia brought up the bruise-like mark on her neck, and the rest of the group revealed that they had similar marks on their own necks. Chiara finished up with an account of how Hannah was turning into a recluse, and the motley decided to go check up on their youngest (so to speak) member.

They found Hannah in her room staring at her computer screen in a daze. By all accounts, she'd been in that state for two days straight without taking care of herself beyond bathroom breaks and the bare minimum of food, so Tia decided to “trip” over the power cord “accidentally,” unplugging it and breaking Hannah from her trance. After she expressed confusion about what day it was and why she was in this state, the group sent Hannah for a shower and a proper meal.

While Hannah was out of the room, the rest of the motley investigated the computer. Tia took the first look, observing the patterns in the locate images that had captivated Hannah and trying to draw them. Her efforts weren't very helpful, given her general lack of artistic skill and the patterns' complexity. Eric decided to give it a go and picked up on the patterns in the system, but as he viewed them he slowly started to succumb to their mesmerizing power and only just barely pulled himself out. Chiara took the next look, searching for occult connections, and determined that the patterns were part of a ritual. She unfortunately fell in deep as well and had to be pulled out, with Simon recording the event on his phone. The group discussed the issue, then scrubbed the computer's browsing history and had Hannah install an ad-blocker on her browser.

 October 13th, 2013 

They decided to visit the library the following day to ask if Goatskin had any idea about Francois' missing hobos or the mysterious computer hypnosis, since Chiara remembered seeing “screen zombies” there. Goatskin was surprised at the timing, since they'd recently had issues with one of their computer labs and the tech sent to fix it seemed to zombie up as well. Additionally, Goatskin's human girlfriend had been acting strangely lately, showing up late to work and glassy-eyed. The group decided to investigate the computer lab, after emergency Pledges to improve everyone's ability to work with computers and the occult.

In the affected computer lab, Tia felt a presence via Kenning but wasn't able to pinpoint it. Eric examined the computers, but he couldn't find anything on the drives themselves. Chiara examined the patterns, determining it was some sort of ritual or meditation rote for channeling, summoning, empowering...something like that. She just didn't know what the end goal was supposed to be. She did get a look at the code with Francois' help investigating, and determined where the source server was. They ran a WHOis to determine the server's owner, one Ted Sprague in Portsmouth, RI. They then performed a basic exorcism that seemed to purge the supernatural presence from the room.

NPCs Met
None

Enemies
Hypnotic Lolcats

Other Stuff
Session 13: The Winter Court's Errand (Part 2)

Session 15: A Strange Conspiracy (Part 2)