Divine Blood - Wasps Among Butterflies - First Session - A "Simple" Rescue

This session involved three characters:

• Arianrhod Monica Trengrove (aka Aria), Psyche Raised Succubus whose demon-form is referred to as Form of Scorpubus and who was Orphaned by a Van Helsing (slang term for hate crimes targeting the supernatural)
• Sophia Ecks, Voyeuristic Visionary, an Unethical Hacktivist and Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant
• Sarah Gow, a Napoleonic Werepanther from an Urbanized Tribe who tends to feel that if she's Annoyed, then Your Feelings are Irrelevant.

Highlander cultists

Wasps Among Butterflies Campaign Index

Starting in media res, the team is setting out for a raid on a bunch of bousouzuku New Agers (believe in the supernatural, but what they believe doesn't match reality) turned Van Helsings who have noticed that a local dryad hasn't aged since they were kids and have come to the conclusion that she's a "Highlander". So they've kidnapped her and dragged her to a shrine, shoving the shrine maiden into a closet while they decide how they can get the supposed Highlander's immortality for themselves.

Sophia places a call for pizza while reconning the situation and giving Sarah and Aria the basic positions of the thugs.

Sarah and Aria sneak up to the site with some help as Sophia hacks one of the bosozuku bikes to start revving up. This draws four of the seven to the parking lot to see what's up. Aria slips past them and leaves these four to Sarah. Sarah quietly incapacitates one of the four thugs without being seen while Aria takes on her battle-form (actually an illusion backed by telekinesis and instinctively geared toward invoking uncanny valley, creating armor, making it hard to accurately aim and causing people to react poorly) on her way up.

Before the remaining three see her Aria has stabbed her illusion/telekinetic stinger into one opponent using biokinesis to fill him with a lethal poison that attacks both body and life-force causing the "full Indiana Jones face melting" while causing the other thug to fall firmly to the ground. The other thug facing Aria takes up the dryad and uses her as a shield.

Sophia attempts to support Sarah by fooling more with the bousouzuku computers, but causes one of the bikes to rev up and smash into others, causing an explosion that knocks Sarah off her feet and concusses the three thugs as well as setting the trees at the base of the shrine's stairs to catch fire. Giving Sophia a glare, Sarah stands up and makes use of the thugs' concussions to bind them up within their own clothes hopefully long enough for her to get a rope. The hacker meanwhile feverishly starts copying the camera feed to her personal files, especially of Aria's lethal stinger-poisoning...because Voyeuristic and Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant. 

Aria tries to knock out the thug she knocked over before and glares at the man taking the dryad hostage. The scorpion-tailed succubus sends the man into a shuddering gibbering mess as he retreats to a corner doomed to nightmares the rest of his life but Aria misses the thug who is trying to stand up. The man stands up and tries to take a swing but merely slams his hand into her telekinetic demon form and ends up off-balance in front of the succubus.

Sarah runs up to the van and knocks on the window trying to turn Sophia's attention to the fire spreading into the parking lot trees. After a moment, Sophia looks up from drooling over her death-video and then panics, revving the van (Aria's van, by the way) up and backing recklessly out of the parking lot, nearly running over Sarah; who manages to artfully flip up over the van and land on her feet as a cat should; clipping a car on the way out of the lot and slamming across the street back into the wall on the other side of the road.

Aria looks back to see the fire rising behind her and uses her stinger on the off-balance thug and altering his biology to produce loads of fire-retardant gasses and knocking him back into the fire, where he explodes into a burst of freon and other extinguishing chemicals, reducing the spread of the fire to a lower level. The dryad is now chanting "please be the good guys" as she stares at the succubus.

Sarah, getting irritated, sees one of the three thugs stand up and find a still operating bike before peeling out of the area. Since she hadn't taken outright werecat form and he hasn't directly witnessed anything supernatural, she lets him go and drags the other two off into the bushes before they can escape and knocks them out...since "they haven't really done anything that bad yet" except, you know, kidnap one girl and invade the work-place of another with intentions of killing both of them because they thought they could become immortal that way. 

Sophia meanwhile hacks the shrines' landscaping sprinklers to go off to finish off the fire...and soak the now thoroughly annoyed werepanther.

Aria meanwhile drops her demon-form and frees the shrine's caretaker revealing an older teenager with blue facial marks like upside down brooms pointed up toward her eyes. Recognizing the marks of someone who practices white magic, Aria takes the gibbering thug into custody as well as encouraging the dryad to move along, she offers for the shrine maiden to come along to a debrief and checking over to see if she's fine. With a slight flush, the shrine maiden agrees to come along they get to the van and Aria demands to know what Sophia has done to her van as an annoyed werecat comes up.

Fortunately for Sophia the pizza with her two friends' favorite ingredients shows up and they leave the area.

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The playgrid for this session is almost empty, sadly.

A "Simple" Rescue roll20 Play Grid

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Some notes: The villains had average stats, +1 to use of their melee attacks (when they made such) and +2 to driving. They were easy to take out and I wasn't giving them even a full Stress track. The players made a lot of really good rolls. Aria's player and I both expected the extinguisher man trick to result in a life-force consequence but she rolled really well and got out of the scene with only Stress filled.

The shrine maiden is an actual goddess, Kiki Himiji, 18 years old, the Goddess of Brooms. (she is literally 18 years old, she's never reincarnated even once yet. she's named after the "Kiki's Delivery Service" movie in universe). To determine if she was subject to Aria's Striking Looks advantage, I rolled randomly. She ended up being sexually attracted to a non-gender related characteristic (many Gods are asexual or attracted to things unconnected to gender) that Aria had displayed. I decided Kiki was attracted to hero-like manners and behaviors and so has a mild crush developing now.

In terms of canon-timeline, we've decided that reports about this event hit Zhuge Shen's desk approximately five seconds after reading the report from Mao Semezou regarding the fact that she's encountered Demons and Gods and can confirm that they are physical beings rather than spiritual entities.

Wasps Among Butterflies Campaign Index