Run 01 - In Which The Party Is Gathered, And In Which Lemons Are Used By Skuld As a Slashing Weapon The game opens in late summer in False Harbor, NJ, a sleepy college town. Trisha goes around handing out colorless gems which are Revive Gems, and business cards to Liz's tutoring service. Most of the rest of the party is baffled, calls the number on the business card, and all set up times for tutoring. At night, Liz expects the Dark Hour, which doesn't come. Instead, she spends the night staring out at the giant funnel of Shadow over the ocean at the beach. In the morning, Kyle shows up, and she sees the funnel, but her parents don't. Uh oh. Liz leaves to get some damn coffee and runs into Trisha at the coffeeshop playing piano. They talk. Meanwhile, Dee shows up at the beach, and she and Kyle start exploring around the funnel. The two college kids come up running, armed, which freaks out the high schoolers. Jason calls again, because he's convinced this is an ARG, and Liz figures out the response to actually get him to join the party. Which he does, armed with a bag of lemons. The party, now assembled, goes off to explore a cave that's available at low tide. They find a staircase leading down underwater to a door. Kyle and Liz go down to explore, and then a fight happens with half the party underwater. Whoo. Jason, having no other weapons, seems to do remarkably well with the lemons anyway. After the fight, the water drains enough that we can go exploring down the tunnel. There's a spiral staircase that looks like it belongs to the museum. We take the staircase, and surprise, there's a fight. We win, although the lemons are starting to look kinda sad. --- Run 02 - In Which The Party Learns The Value of Looking Up, Detours Momentarily Into Awkward Turtle Land, and That Dead Mammoths Are Still Dangerous, Especially When Shadows Possess Them We're still in the tunnel in the cave. We continue down the tunnel, after the staircase. There's some discussion about the differences in Persona users and the nature of Shadows between Trisha and Liz, who seem to disagree on certain points. Everyone else thinks these two are possibly crazy, especially Jason, who's still looking for projectors. Trisha seems disturbed by the fact that members of the party have two Personae, except Liz, who only has one. Liz explains that she used to have two, but one "went away". Trisha is deeply disturbed by this ("How did you just wake up one morning with part of your brain missing?! Did you suffer some sort of mental trauma?") Kyle realizes, even with Empathy 1, that we're in Awkward Turtle Land and opens the door to the next room. We look up, and it's a fight. Yay! No more Awkward Turtles! After the fight, we continue on, until we reach a room that branches out in 3 directions, with a mammoth skeleton in the center. The skeleton mammoth in the center comes to "life", if "life" constitutes being controlled by Shadows trying to kill us. The sign by the mammoth helpfully tells us "For the love of god, don't use magic". Physical fight it is. It goes badly for a bit, with the knockdowns and charging, but eventually, we manage to Rage it, which means it's weak to Physical attacks, and can't knock us down anymore, and it goes down quickly after. Yay us. However, we're all tired at this point, and so we go back home to get some sleep. Well, most of us do, except for Liz, who lives in a dorm that got invaded by a frat party, and after some drunken college shennanigans, a cranky Persona user, and a frightened freshman , and ends up sleeping in her car. --- Run 03 - In Which Members of Our Party Keep Making Obscenely High Knowledge Rolls That They Do Not Want, And Certain Party Members Have Nervous Breakdowns The next afternoon, the party meets up at the beach. There's a new kid there! His name is Matt. For some reason, he thinks the party is the Maylasian Liberation Front or something to that effect. However, he can see the swirling funnel of shadow, which means he's a Persona user, which means he's coming with us anyway. We start exploring the rest of the museum, finding a staircase up to a balcony (probably with a plot frob that we studiously avoid), and two hallways branching to the east and west. We go down the east hallway and find that at the end of the hallway is a door marked 0, and the other doors alternating the sides go from I to VIII. Astute, genre savvy members of the party note that these match the Tarot. This is great because if any member of the party touches a door not aligned to their Arcana or are not Trisha, it hurts like a bitch. The first hallway we go down is aligned to I - Magician, which Kyle can open. It's a hallway. It changes texture halfway through. At the end of the hall is a Shadow Gate, so that's it for that way. There are 3 doors. Two of them lead to empty rooms. The third door leads to an empty room with a glowing circle on the floor. Spooky. We leave. The next door we can open is VII - Chariot, which Matt can open. Huzzah. We end up in a shed. What. The shed opens into a yard. There's no sound (no insects, birds, etc). The plants apparntly look like they're from the New England area. There is a street. Trisha starts walking down the street, and then appears walking up the street in the opposite direction she went, and claims she walked in a straight line. Jason immediately starts trying the Lost Woods path, which fails. Meanwhile, the party goes into the house. Liz recognizes the house and flips out. Kyle starts trying to treat for shock. Matt is exploring the house, seeing that it's empty but looks like someone had been in the middle of breakfast. Jason is playing with his phone, trying to get to the Internet. Unfortunately, all he can get are Google pre-cached pages. He then rolls well enough on his Knowledge roll to hear crazy mumbling through the static when he listens to his phone. He THEN fails the next Knowledge check and asks Kyle if she wants to listen. She also fails that common sense check, and listens. She rolls high enough to hear actual words, hears the voice asking for Liz, and starts yelling at the phone. Liz hears her name, demands the phone, and listens. And then SHE rolls STUPIDLY high on her Knowledge roll. It's Nyarlahotep on the line. He says "hello". Liz proceeds to freak out. The party hauls out of there, Liz calms down enough to tell part of what happened last time, where she was part of a group of kids who tried to fight Nyarly before and kinda ripped reality apart in the process. It was bad. We continue down the next hallway, completely ignoring the part where the GM is clearly leading us to the plot frob on the balcony. Jason tries the X - Fortune door, and then Shadows show up trying to gank us. --- Run 04 - In Which There Are Zombies And Ridiculous Dancing The fight starts with 4 shadows who are each weak against a specific element and resist all other magic. FUN TIMES. Dee, Jason, and Kyle are Level 2! We go into the Fortune door. It's a stone corridor, this one looking like it's been chipped out of stone. Until it changes texture again, to bare concrete and drywall, with swinging doors at the end. We're in a concourse of a shopping mall, but it's night and empty. And then Jason realizes this place has 4 GameStops. And then we hear the groaning. wtf, zombies? We head back to the cutlery store and bust in. There are shadowy human things looting knives. The party decides it's time to deploy Sexy Dance, and proceed to feed Jason and Trisha cards for this. Trisha then plays the item crafting game, with knives from the cutlery store, and leather procured by Dee from the "lingere" store across the way. The party decides to not ask questions, and Trisha makes a one-edged sword. We send the charmed shadows after the "zombies". Scouting around some more, at the insistance of Dee, who has the highest movement rate, we find a large number of shadow zombies just kinda milling about in more copy-pasted mall. We decide discrecion is the better part of valor and hightail it out of there. Also, we're all tired, so we call it a night. The next morning, instead of sleeping in like reasonable people, Liz kicks the party awake and drags them to Victory Apparel, claiming that they carry armor. Skeptical Kylie is skeptical! Jason is concerned about the availability of zombie-proof gear, as that was last season. Dee just wants to know if they have little hats. --- Run 05 We finish up at Victory Apparel, and then head to the beach. Kylie tries to Door XI, which opens, with no ninjas.