This is a play report of an Unknown Armies shotgun scenario, written by Mellonbread.
People were going missing in their 'hood. Or at least that was word on the street; now that the cabal was together to compare notes they couldn't find any solid leads to go off. That was until Karla cracked open her trawling algorithms and started crunching the numbers. There was six confirmed kidnappings in the local area, all targeting single residents without a social life - mostly retirees or immigrants. The police weren't doing anything about it, dismissing the cases as unrelated or blown out of proportion. Karla began to suspect the homicide dick in charge, Sergeant Gold, was deliberately mishandling the investigation.
Before the cabal could leave the bar to begin their own inquiries, there was a furious pounding at the door. Jenny and Barry opened it, only to be bowled over by a panicked homeless woman who was clearly drugged on something - probably ketamine. Barry nursed a broken nose from the altercation, while Jenny fussed over the now comatose trespasser and Edgar went to investigate outside.
A tall man in a filthy black raincoat approached the salesman from the moonlit street, speakly with a strange flat affect. "Is my daughter here? She came this way. She is sick. She needs help. Let me in."
Edgar retreated back inside, but not before the big guy got his foot in the door. Karla freaked out as she recognised the man - he was one of the kidnapping victims. Only now he was pale as a sheet, with bloodshot eyes bugging out of his face. She hid in the basement taproom while Edgar tried to whack the intruder with a barstool, but he only succeeded in obliterating an overhead light. Barry put out some hate with his magical knuckles, but was too distracted by his busted nose to land a good hit.
The stranger grabbed the pugilist around the neck and began to squeeze, no-selling all attempts from Barry and Edgar to try and break his dead man's grip. Eventually Jenny gave up trying to drag the overweight tramp out of harm's way and moved to assist her friends. Together, the trio freed Barry and expelled the intruder from the bar - slamming the security gate behind him. The would-be-kidnapper muttered something about calling the cops, then retreated into the night.
voltagecalmed
Jenny and Edgar managed to sober up the drugged vagrant and get her name - Martha. She told the cabal that she and another woman - Sarah - had been accosted by the stranger at a bus stop they were sleeping in. Though Martha had escaped to the safety of the bar, her friend hadn't been so fortunate. Meanwhile, Karla examined the bar's CCTV and saw the big man getting into a green Volvo down the street, driven by a teenage accomplice. She ran the plates and it came back as registered to a dead man - Monroe Bosco, a recently deceased bookstore owner.
With a few leads to go off, the gang split up to search for clues. Barry - after his nose was reset by Edgar's not-so-tender ministrations - went to his local parish's homeless shelter. There he talked to the resident priest, learning unhoused folks like Martha and Sarah had been scattered across Boston after the police broke up a large homeless camp called the Bridge of Hope. The father had heard about homeless people going missing, but chalked it up to it a particularly cold winter. They'd probably find them eventually, frozen to death in a snowbank somewhere.
Barry went looking for anyone who'd seen the green Volvo around. An ex-autoworker, Tim, knew the car from his time at the Bridge of Hope - Monroe's bookstore was nearby and would often let vagrants hide from the cold inside. Pity what happened to the guy, his heart exploding inside his chest in the middle of business hours. Real awful way to go. Barry paid the guy some Marlboro Reds for the information, which the old guy immediately traded to someone else for a flask of neutral grain spirit.
Meanwhile, Jenny reached out into the occult underworld for anyone who had information on the disappearances. She eventually made contact with a Scottish Rite cultist in Baltimore who said his buddy, Tanner Quinn, had transferred out to Boston to investigate rumours of a dangerous new cabal operating in town. The teenage burger warrior had been MIA for two weeks, failing to check in on the message boards or show up for work at Mickey D's. When Jenny convinced the Mak to send her a picture of Tanner, she immediately recognised him as the driver of the green Volvo.
For his part, Edgar met up with one of his cop buddies who'd just finished his shift. After a few drinks, the beat cop admitted that Sergeant Gold had been acting strange recently - pulling 24 hour shifts without ever stopping to sleep or eat. He'd chalked it up to the guy angling for a promotion, but Edgar managed to coerce his buddy into snooping around on his behalf. He wouldn't want to get caught up in yet another departmental controversy when it turned out Gold was bent, would he?
Karla and Jenny tried to track down the missing burger warrior, hoping to get some answers out of him. After a few hours of searching the interwebs, they got a hit for facial recognition. It wasn't pretty. Tanner appeared on a video posted to various alt-right messaging groups, being beaten by a trio of masked youths. Amidst the homophobic slurs they were screaming at the poor kid were mocking references to him being a Scottish Rite cultist, so his attackers were probably in-the-know. The snuff tape ended with one of the assailants promising Tanner was about to go "meet Mr. Flat Affect".
Edgar was breaking into Monroe's bookstore. It wasn't difficult, his estates' executors had come through and cleared out the merchandise but they hadn't done a great job boarding up the windows. Nor had they taken everything from the back office - the gunslinging salesman found a cardboard box of polaroids behind a filing cabinet. Most were of smiling customers, but a handful were clandestine photos taken of a tall man in a red and black suit, directing a pair of workers unloading a truck full of medieval torture equipment and refrigerated morgue drawers. They were taking their disturbing accoutrements into a brick building down the street, some sort of old church or fraternal order hall.
Meanwhile, Barry was down the street investigating what was left of Bridge of Hope. There wasn't a lot to see, the police had been thorough trashing the place. It was strange none of the inhabitants had rebuilt the place though, these homeless camps were generally like mushrooms. Further down the street, the pugilist spotted a trio of youths trudging through the snow, smoking cigarettes they were obviously too young to have bought. The hoodlums slunk into a narrow alley and disappeared from view.
As the pair of cabalists linked up, Edgar's phone rang. His cop buddy had rifled through Gold's desk and found obvious evidence the detective had been stalking all the kidnapping victims before they want missing, as well as photographing the exterior of Jenny's bar. He'd also had a bundle of 1980s-era advertising paraphernalia from an Irish bar, the "Full Boot". According to Google, it was located in the basement of an old Order of the Hibernians temple - the same building the teenagers had ducked into. With their target identified, the Sleepers readied their weapons and jimmied the lock.
Inside the old temple were makeshift sleeping quarters, filled with the same rank stench the tall stranger reeked of. The duo found ample kidnapping paraphernalia - needles of ketamine, steel zipties, blackjacks, baseball bats etc. At the far end of the room was a pair of doors, one leading upstairs to a set of offices/apartments the other descending into the Full Boot proper. They decided to head upstairs, finding an impressive bedroom decorated with thick bearskin rugs, black satin and floral arrangements of poisonous flowers. Barry swiped a briefcase full of money and fake IDs, Edgar stole an encrypted laptop. All of it seemed to belong to that strange suited man in Monroe's photos.
The pair retreated from the Hibernian temple, intending to stash the evidence in a dead drop for their teammates in case the next step of their plan didn't go well. On the way there, they were nearly bowled over by a tweed-clad academic hustling towards the Full Boot. Edgar asked what he was late for. The scholar hemmed and hawed, mumbling something about a performance. The salesman pulled a gun.
Now with a pistol in his face, Dr. Warren Marimow admitted the Full Boot was actually a front for an occult torture dungeon. But don't worry, his interest was purely academic! He was researching human sacrifice for magickal charges you see, he wasn't some sadist.
Barry and Edgar exchanged a look. Then they beat his ass and threw him in a snowbank.
Meanwhile, Karla had hacked into municipal traffic cameras with distressing ease and was looking for the green Volvo. She spotted it outside the same parish homeless shelter Barry had visited earlier. So she and Jenny loaded up onto the back of her battered Vespa and shot off into the Boston night. They arrived to see Tanner and the tall man from earlier accosting Tim the autoworker, who was too drunk to notice the danger he was in. Karla called out, coercing the mind-controlled burger warrior with appeals to his better nature. Kidnapping people for a human sacrifice scheme? This wasn't the magickal revolution that he was supposed to be fighting for.
The tall man turned away from the drunken vagrant and advanced on the Vespa, producing a bludgeon from his filthy raincoat. Before he could attack the two women, the teenager kicked over a nearby trash can and scooped up a mouldy Big Mac. The kidnapper turned towards the noise and was promptly tackled by the Mak, who began smashing the rotten hamburger into his face. The girls piled on, helping the burger warrior beat the big guy to death. It was only after his brain was splattered over the pavement did they notice he wasn't bleeding. Nor was he or the Mak breathing. Realising the pair were zombies, the cabalists made a quick get away. For his part, the undead teenager started looking for another chunk of mouldy fast food, intent on continuing his sacred work even in death.
Back at the Full Boot, Barry and Edgar snuck down the basement staircase into a makeshift morgue. They moved quietly enough that the undead janitor mopping blood off the floor didn't notice. The duo tackled her from behind, Barry breaking her neck with his magic hands - muttering a grateful prayer that she was already dead. They stacked up on the door to the Full Boot, peeking inside to see a bar full of occult voyeurs - including the trio of teenagers that had bashed Tanner.
The main event was Sarah, the kidnapped homeless woman. She was strapped to a bizarre contraption, an automated quartering machine that could individually rip each of her limbs off via large handcranks. Next to her on the stage was an attractive woman in an executioner's hood and a skimpy robe that left nothing to the imagination. Conducting the macabre affair was Mr. Flat Affect, the red-and-black clad necromancer who pointed out to a member of the audience, offering him the first turn of the crank.
Sick of sadistic wizards fucking with their hood, the Sleepers kicked the door in and combat was joined. Edgar opened the fight by blasting Flat Affect off the stage with his shotgun, crippling the death cultist's shoulder and sending him sprawling. Eager for some equal opportunity fisticuffs, Barry clocked the necromancer's lovely assistant square in the jaw. To his surprise, she immediately Obi-Wan-Kenobi'd into a pile of empty clothing upon hitting the ground. He must've underestimated his strength.
Flat Affect, injured but not out of the fight, ripped a leather sack from his neck. Human teeth went scattering over the brick floor, mixing with the blood pumping out of his shoulder. He scooped one up and crushed it, spinning to fling a death curse into Edgar. But the salesman was faster on the draw, decapitating the sorcerer with .00 buck and sending the Avada Kedavra careening into the wall. At this point most of the voyeurs were fleeing the shootout, but not the youths. The Mean Guys grabbed for hidden knives and charged the Sleepers, while the zombified bartender fumbled with his shotgun. Ignoring the knife-wielding teens, Barry barged straight past them, lept the bar and superman punched the innkeep straight in the nose with the power of the Pontifex Maximus. The magickally-charged haymaker broke the demon's morale - it dropped the shotgun and made a run for it.
FAITH: The Unholy Trinity
Dodging a thrown dagger, Edgar racked his shotgun and levelled it at the punks. He told them they were wasting their time - he had their asses on film doing awful things on behalf of the now dead necromancer. If they ran now, they might make it to the border before the police found them. The hoodlums believed the bluff, fleeing the bar while hurriedly making plans to flee to Mexico. On the way out, they passed a duo of zombified bouncers that lurched inside, alerted by the fleeing patrons.
Barry laid into them with more holy punches, turning one but eating a machete to the chest for his troubles. Before his teammate was hacked to pieces, Edgar blew the zombie's arm off with a well-aimed shotgun blast. Dismembered and demoralised, the last two undead fled the melee, joining the motley crowd of walking corpses, teenager gangsters and occult voyeurs outside. With the combat over, the Sleepers picked up their shell casings and cut a very grateful Sarah free. It was time to get out of here.
Just then, Karla and Jenny arrived on the Vespa. The snuff dealer quickly began filming the faces and license plates of the fleeing patrons, eager for a fresh batch of blackmail material. Jenny spotted a figure who wasn't fleeing, instead lying in a bloody heap on the ground. She hauled the injured Dr. Marimow out of the roadside snowbank, asking him if he was alright.
He threw up on her shoes.
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