%% date:: [[2024-06-02]] %% # [[005_20240602 The Cardinal's Request]] ![[005_20240602.svg]] ## Session Summary > [!tldr] [[005_20240602 The Cardinal's Request]] > Cardinal Leon Nerus from The Ascendancy asked us to investigate mysterious deaths at Aberdeen Cemetery in The Steam. We discovered that a company called Nakata Excavations has been moving bodies from the Cemetery to The Shriveline, but three Nakata workers have turned up dead by seemingly different causes. ^summary %% ## Video [Video]() %% --- ## Recap ![[ttrpgs/The Great Dark/004_20240526 Singing for the Conqueror Worm#^summary]] --- ## Log Introductions - Tarrin is about 23 - Prey/John - Has been playing with Andrew for 8 months in various games - [[Asheron Voss]]: middle age, late 40s. His wife passed away a few years ago due to a mysterious illness. He turned to the occult and to Candela Obscura to find out why she died and also to help people the way she would have wanted. - [[Birdie Campbell]] decided that Candela Obscura was not for her and went back to her day job. We now need a fourth, and Asheron has been around a bit longer. - Asheron is kind of like the mentor figure for the group because we need help in not burning stuff down. Safety tools - Things that will never happen in Andrew's games (lines) - Child harm (violence - definitely never something that will happen front and centre) - Animal harm - Sexual violence - Child sexual assault (Prey) - Incest (Lisa) - Veils - Death will happen but always offscreen - Explicit sex (Nicole) - Likely to be in the game - Horrific or fearsome monsters, eldritch monsters - Body horror? - "Pause for a minute" - Andrew takes this as a 🛑. It means we need to stop the game and pay attention to something. Lightkeeper [[Lightkeeper Jezebel Moore]] It's about a week later. Next adventure: > [!NOTE] Murder of Crows > _[[The Steam]] district is a hotbed of construction. One of its last open plots is a graveyard, now deconsecrated by the Ascendency. Workers have been tasked with digging up and moving the remaining bodies to [[The Shriveline]], but…strange birds gather there at night, and the workers keep winding up dead. Can Candela Obscura figure out what’s going on, and allow [[Newfaire]]’s march of progress to continue?_ We have an [[The Ascendancy|Ascendency]] contact, [[Cardinal Leon Nerus]]. He wants us to go to a graveyard in [[The Steam]], which is the transportation district. Lots of residential building has been put on hold to work on transportation elsewhere in the city. [[Aberdeen Cemetery]] is a patch of land that had been officially deconsecrated by The Ascendancy. It's the last bit of land that hasn't been turned into something for transportation. The bodies are going to be dug up and then relocated to Shriveline. It's basically like a Vatican City-- the leaders of the Ascendancy are there. Then the deaths started happening! Workers of [[Nakata Excavations]] decided to stop their work until the deaths stop. Investigations say that it's similar to what happened at [[The Twilight Theatre]]-- there's no one single source of [[Bleed]]. We're not allowed to set the cemetry on fire. We're being brought in because we were the ones that brought back the discovery of a "[[The Lens Effect|Lens]]": something that is not a single source of bleed but instead something that magnifies bleed. Nakata Excavation is a firm that has been experimenting in mechanized digging machines. [[Tatsuo Nakata]] in [[The Steel]] is the owner. Eric's family lives in [[The Eaves]]. The land underneath has never seen the sun because there are people living below on different levels. Eric's family does know the cardinal, though. Asheron Voss: Tall, thin, ghost-like the way he moves. Purple lined robes that seem like they have arcane runes. The robe is frayed around the edges, simple black clothes. Pendant and a golden gem signifying the wedding ring he gave to his wife. Long, jet-black hair, shoulder-length, with silver streaks lined through it. Very loose. he doesn't take care of himself as much as he probably should. He has a gaunt, angular face with high cheekbones and deep-set, piercing grey eyes that seem to glow with an inner light. His skin is pale, almost translucent, giving him a ghostly appearance. Dark circles under his eyes suggest many sleepless nights spent in study and ritual. He has long, jet-black hair streaked with silver, worn loose and unkempt, cascading down to his shoulders. Asheron wears a tailored, dark grey three-piece suit. The suit is well-worn but impeccably maintained, indicating both his attention to detail and his lengthy experience. He wears a long, dark overcoat with a high collar. His shoes are polished black leather Oxfords. Around his neck is the pendant with his wife's golden gemstone from her wedding ring hanging from it. He wears several silver rings adorned on his bony long hands. He also dons a black fedora slightly tilted forward to hide his eyes better. We get to the cemetery and it takes us a while because it's not really in a central location. It's in the middle of an industrial environment. The cemetery itself is at odds with its surroundings. It's like a 17th century bucolic sort of English romance book. At one side of the graveyard, there's a disruption. Some open, empty graves. A number of them have been dug up and emptied. There's evidence of vehicles (like a truck with a Nakata logo on it) and tools that have been abandoned. There's a row of crows watching us... Nakata excavations is pretty big. They do a lot of jobs. There are a lot of buildings put up, especially in The Steel. Newfaire is booming after the war. There's a cost of doing business in Newfaire - you probably have to grease a few hands along the way, especially within a successful company. They've probably done some bribing. They're not *unusually* corrupt for a company. In fact, Nakata actually cares about their employees-- which *is* unusual. No secret scandal that Eric knows. Asheron uses his Bleed detector. There's still some bleed, but they're not super high either. This is an old cemetery, and that's backed up by the tombstones. They're old and worn. We can still read some names, but no one that we would recognise because they're hundreds of years old. The excavations started at the south, and about two rows of the graves (more than one day's work) have already been excavated. We go have a look at those. The pattern we see is not one of abrupt interruption. It's not like they found something and it disrupted what they did. Work stopped intentionally. Calliope and Tarrin go to Nakata Excavations. The Steel is the industrial part, south from this place. - We talk to a worker, a woman named [[Ginnifer Gin O’Malley]]. Down to earth, workmen attire. She worked at Aberdeen. - She said they stopped because of the people dying. She's very plainspoken. "Weird shit" happened apparently. [[Nadia Vztlakova]] died the first night. THe next day she didn't show up to work. They found her in an alley. Next day was [[Treev Dallow]], who got attacked in his own apartment. [[Moklin Quell]] didn't come back the third day. They've had a lot of happen in excavations (noxious gases, etc) but this was different. The stuff just happened everywhere else. Curse of the Aberdeen cemetery. - She's a little older and has been doing this a while. She said they get protests sometimes especially in [[Groundswell]]. When they dig up stuff, someone always protests. But sometimes you do dig and hit [[Oldfaire]] ruins. Not here though. It's just dirt. The Ascendancy even agreed with them. - The only creepy thing was the birds. They gathered and watched despite the noise. Sometimes they started to throw rocks but that was after Nadia was gone. Treev was cut in half. - How did the big boss take it when they wanted to stop working? Everyone said they would stop because any one of them could have been on that job. They went up to Mr. Nakata and told him, and he agreed. She's probably downplaying how they got him to agree. - We talk to [[Tatsuo Nakata|Mr. Nakata]]. he's a man in his 50s. He looks like he did harder labour in his younger days. Now he's not as physically active. He mostly sits behind a desk now. He gives us copies of the police reports. Nadia looks like she was just frightened to death. She was almost home in The Steel with her family. Treev was in a fifth-storey tenement building. He was a recent immigrant in [[Groundswell]]. Neighbours heard a bloodcurdling scream and they found his body later. Moklin Quell lived in [[Red Lamp]] and he was found in his bed on the ground with water in his lungs. - Asheron and Eric are going to Shriveline, near the Vatican Island part of the city. %% # Text Elements # Drawing ```json {"type":"excalidraw","version":2,"source":"https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin/releases/tag/2.0.25","elements":[],"appState":{"theme":"dark","gridSize":null,"viewBackgroundColor":"#ffffff"}} ``` %%