Musical Interlude: Meekakitty f/ heyhihello

A little something for the kids:

And All Hell Breaks Loose

We picked up our latest session with an interesting observation. After our little spat with the sword-wielding demon we looked around the station. Most of the physical damage to the space was gone - only the smallest evidence of it showed. (Sadly for Ghost Wolf and Craig's Musashi-channeling samurai, that didn't apply to bodily wounds!) But the interesting thing several of us spotted - some of the paintings, especially where the demon had issued for, had been repaired. Not professionally or especially well, but repaired nevertheless. Which suggested that somebody was trying to fix this place up, with an eye towards letting more of those demons through.

On our way out of the station, we ran into a man who stopped a few of us and said his boss wanted to talk to us in the back of the local pub. We agreed to gather ourselves together (Ghost Wolf and Musashi being healed) and followed this fellow in the pub like the start of a B gangster movie. Inside, we were surprised to find the local Councilman who had been at the press conference a few days before, working with a local businesswoman to announce a plan to fix up the station. This Councilman made it clear that he knew that the station was bad news, and knew that it was both a weak spot to another dimension (specifically, a dimension where angels and demons did perpetual battle) and that it didn't quite belong in our universe.

The "plan" to "revitalize" the neighborhood by fixing up the station was, for him, a front. This being Chicago, he knew all sorts of ways to prevent the work from actually happening, and that was just what he intended to do. We also discovered that it was his associate who had been leaving the hammers and crowbars strewn about - he knew that people would, without knowing what they were doing, pick them up and damage the station with them, and that's what he wanted. He had figured out that, the more damaged the physical structure of the station, the less likely the battle on the "other side" was to break through.

We asked whether it might make more sense to destroy the place outright, and he indicated that he was afraid that doing so might just throw the gates open wide and let the whole battle through into our world - as he put it, "we wouldn't have long to be sorry how wrong we were". So that was out. He also didn't know why, of all the things that had been damaged or defaced the status of Lilith had been left alone. The best thing he could think of as a plan was to keep the place messed up, without quite destroying it. A decent plan, but somebody was apparently trying to really fix the damned place.

Taking that in, we set about for the rest of the day making preparations to spend another night in the station, messing it up but good without bringing it down around our ears. For good measure, we planned to smash the Lilith statue. Sadly, we didn't quite get that far...

We returned to the station in the late evening, a little before closing time, and set ourselves up outside the fence that overlooked the "park" part of things, ready to drop a heavy stone bench on top of Lilith's stone head from the (relative) safely of outside the station. Unfortunately, we heard something massive erupt on the lower levels, and had to abort that plan to rush in to see what all the screaming was about.

Racing down to the lower platform level, we found Master Vassago - the weirdo wannabe we met in our initial encounter with the station - in the ticket booth with some sort of arcane lantern. He had obviously activated the magical powers of the lantern, which were rapidly "healing" the station, causing the walls to dissolve into the massive angels & demons battle scene we had seen before. This time, it wasn't one demon with a sword, it was a dozen or more, and a few very large and truly terrifying angels as well.

Early attempts by Soon and Tony to take out the lantern proved fruitless - Vassago was apparently hiding behind some kind of force dome (although it failed to stop the demon who came through an ate him after he enjoyed his 2 seconds of glory. Oh, well - you can't have everything). Ghost Wolf solved that problem by coming up through the floor under the dome, grabbing the demon who was busy devouring Vassago by the eye sockets, and using its head to smash the lantern, shutting it off. Yes, kids, this is the gory, R-rated portion of our show.

Meanwhile, Tony, Soon, and Ice Man were taking on three demons. Tony managed to wound one with its own sword before getting hacked to unconsciousness, and Ice Man got off a couple of good ice blasts before suffering the same fate. Soon kept blasting away, aided by one of the Carcerian's Bug Swarms, which blanketed all three demons at once. This was a fight by attrition - not our favorite kind.

Craig's Musashi, however, had other ideas. His sword conveniently affects insubstantial things - including the "real" painting-bedecked walls that were just barely visible as ghostly reminders in front of the spreading battlefield. Musashi ran laps around the room, slashing those paintings and causing the demons (and angels) nearest them to get sucked back into their own dimension. Go, sword-man!

Between Musashi's sword and the timely destruction of the Lantern by Ghost Wolf, the barrier between the battlefield dimension and our real world collapsed, drawing all of the nasties back with it (plus the remains of Master Vassago, now largely demon-chow). Both the party and the station were saved. Next time, a quick denouement to figure out how we're going to shut this little celestial horror show down for good, or at least keep it in check without us having to camp out there every night.