Divine Blood - Wasps Among Butterflies - Third Session - Aria's Milkshake

Warning: This post has not yet been edited and was written late at night. Grammar goofs and typos probably abound.

This session involves three characters:

• Arianrhod Monica Trengrove (aka Aria), the succubus and Perfect Lady of War who makes use of Surprise Death Cuddles.
• Sophia Ecks, Voyeuristic Visionary and the Human Heimdall suffering from a bit of Establishment Blues.
• Sarah Gow, a Napoleonic Werepanther from an Urbanized Tribe who tends to feel that if she's Annoyed, then Your Feelings are Irrelevant.

Aria's Milkshake Brought Ninjas to the Street

Wasps Among Butterflies Campaign Index

The story starts off a couple of days after the night club run. Aria is trying to do some community outreach without offending anybody by performing minor parlor tricks for children. Sophia is hanging out in the office and Sarah is hanging from lightposts and trees in imitation of anime characters for some reason. The course of the day is interrupted when Sophia gets a call from one Detective Igarashi Toji of the computer crimes division, whom she refers to as "Zenigata". He demands for her to come and see him and after some discussion and needling, Sophia agrees to come...and even offers to stop by and pick up some donuts on the way. Sarah and Aria decide to go along, with Aria driving her car of course.

They stop by a Mister Donut in order to pick up the donuts and fail to notice the fact that they are being watched. While Aria goes on into the building first to get some donuts a chocolate milkshake with a shot of frangelico Sarah and Sophia stop as an arrow narrowly misses the two of them and strikes into the button of the semi-automatic sliding door, which starts opening and closing and opening and closing due to the arrow being lodged there. Both of them take cover, Sarah finding a bush that she is thankfully small enough to take cover behind. 

Meanwhile, Aria hasn't yet noticed and is placing her order when a second arrow shoots through the glass just missing her and the cashier, sticking in the wall and vibrating with the remains of its momentum. She hardens her body to give her some sort of armor since she's not wearing the body armor and pointedly tells the cashier in a calm voice "Chocolate milkshake with a shot of frangelico" before turning around and starting to walk out through the shattered plate glass window and looking for the attacker.

Sophia calls 911 and gets a singularly unhelpful receptionist who seems more interested in details like getting the proper name and spelling of the police officer they wanted to talk to than anything else. Sarah tries to track back the arrow and narrows the shooter down to one of three buildings. Unfortunately, she also gets a shot taken at her by the hidden archer and only just barely gets out of the way though she now has the feeling that her position has likely been pegged. Aria further uses her biokinetic prowess to flood her system with adrenaline and due to the increased tactical awareness she manages to identify where the shooter is, finding him on the third floor of a building shooting through an open window and some binds which flared at just the right moment for her to see the attacker. She decides to go invisible and step out toward the edge of the road.

Having gotten fed up with and suspicious of her conversation, Sophia decides to trace the call she's on and discovers that she's been routed to a cell phone rather than the police. She and the receptionist begin to get snarky with each other. Sarah dives for better cover, provoking a shot taken at her due to the sniper previously having her pegged. The shot fortunately misses and she gets into better cover near a sort of parked car where someone who hasn't noticed the arrows and shattered glass yet has set their hazards on in the very narrow street so they can talk on the phone. Aria tries to move invisibly across the busy street, but doesn't quite manage to get it. Instead one of the cars slams into her so that her invisible form smashes the windshield and the driver's panicked smashing of the breaks sends her flying off again while a series of other car crashes sets off and essentially locks down all transportation on the street. Fortunately, the low speeds prevent serious damage being done to the succubus.

Sophia traces the call with what she has deemed the "Tsundere Police Department" into the Mister Donut and with some searching identifies her talk-buddy as a woman in a back corner of the restaurant, out of the line of fire and calmly talking on the phone while the rest of the people in the restaurant are frantically hiding behind tables and taking pictures with their cells. She tries to time the moving door so that she can get in the Mister Donut without going through the obvious window or making noise, but doesn't quite make it.

The archer takes another shot, his arrow passing through the car Sarah took cover behind and just barely missing her, causing her to breathe a bit in relief as she looks at the arrow now embedded in the pavement. Aria stands up and manages to get herself into the building's first floor as she starts looking for ways up.  Sarah joins her soon after, getting past the now stalled cars easily.

Sophia notes the woman she's talking to stand up and start to head for the restrooms and manages to dart inside past the moving door. However, something she did revealed her intentions and the woman turns around with a taser, firing it but failing to hit the Visionary. Sophia tries to tackle the fake dispatcher in the Mister Donut, but the woman dodges aside and then turns to grab a glass from the scared cashier and smashes chocolate milkshake with a shot of frangelico on top of the Visionary's head. Sophia then moves to lick her face clean of the milkshake, unconsciously enlongating her tongue temporarily to do so. Something that she's capable of doing due to her Visionary nature.

Aria notes that there has been a bit more time since the archer's last shot than there has been and gets worried that he's evacuated. She runs up the stairs and gets into the empty room with a bow and quiver of arrows but before she go further she hears a click from behind the door and just barely manages to stop herself from letting go of the door itself. With a little bit of very stressful psychic tinkering she manages a telekinetic tether to keep the door pressed against the mine she can barely see through the cracks.

Sarah runs up to join Aria and finds herself passing the smell of heavy adrenaline that is currently marking the invisible succubus's position to her nose and finds the same empty room with the bow and arrow. Behind her Aria is moving on towards the roof, but Sarah sees Sophia down in the Mister Donut having a little trouble and decides to help out. She takes the bow and arrow and launches a shot. As the arrow leaves the bow, she sees a wire release and separate from just a couple of moments before a massive current of electricity ripples through her from the floor. The arrow whips past Sophia into the false receptionist's shoulder however.

Aria gets up to the roof and finds the archer trying to leave by a fire escape but darts over invisibly to pull the vaunted Mufasa-technique and destroy the man's fingers as she says "long live the king." The archer tries vainly to hold on to the rungs of the fire escape but his destroyed fingers fail him and he falls screaming to his death three stories below. 

Meanwhile, Sophia's opponent pulls the arrow out of her own shoulder declaring calmly in her receptionist tone that this wouldn't have been a problem if she had just cooperated on the phone like she should have. Then she tries to stab Sophia though the entire exchange is an exercise in comically inept defense and attack.

Feeling a bit more than singed, the werejaguar decides to head down to the street by the stairs and see about helping Sarah directly. Her recent electrocution leaves her dizzy however and she bumps the tethered door on the way out. She gets down to the ground before the door swings open again and the claymore devastates that floor, bringing Aria down from the roof to two floors below on a slide of drywall and debris. 

Sarah gets across the street in time to receive a second chocolate milkshake with a shot of frangelico to the face and the fake receptionist flees out the back and into the city. Sophia doesn't get out of the door in time to see where she went and Sarah's still just smelling her own fried synapses. Then Sophia gets another call from "Zenigata" who complains about her not being at his office in a timely manner. Aria arrives asking about her shake and Sophia notes that she's wearing it prompting Aria to complain that she can't drink that, it has hair in it and why did Sophia get hair in it?

They hear approaching sirens and Sarah wonders if they should stay or should they go. (GM comments if they stay there will be trouble) and they decide to stay though Aria does a bit of origami and sends out a message to Psyche to get the legal machine running by using a bit of butterfly paper.

They ended up in Zenigata's office playing for time for Psyche to work some legal magic while Zenigata...errr...Detective Igarashi demanded to know just what Sophia was involved in, citing that he'd been seeing weird computer patterns that he was familiar with in a number of recent cases. Sophia rises to the bait and declares that he couldn't be seeing any patterns because good hackers don't leave patterns. Sarah asks what makes her think she's a good hacker and gets a glare in return. The detective connects them to both the shrine rescue and the nightclub assault though he seems to be more fishing than anything and then the call comes for him to release them.

As they're heading out of the police station, Kiki Himiji pops out in front of the group to start gushing out at Aria and also start speaking in some worryingly open manners about "having never been in a human police station before" and talking about being rescued at the shrine as Detective Igarashi pointedly glared at them all. The group asks Kiki if she needs a ride or anything and she notes that she has family coming and besides she's eighteen and can make all of her own decisions and stuff.

They ask her if her family has been in White Magic for long to which she replies "duh" thinking it's obvious that she's a Goddess and proceeds to note that her parents have been magi for a thousand years...or was it two thousand maybe. At this point a car pulls up and a man calls out hurriedly for her to come with him and she says "that's my half-brother, I have to go, bye." Before walking off to leave the scene.

Back at the Psyche headquarters, a talk with Mr Ryujin and review of the coded ledger finds a list of several Yakuza related businesses such as the night club, some front businesses, a modeling company and what are likely to be several drug labs and the scene cuts off with them wondering how they were tracked down.

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Aria's Milkshake roll20 play grid

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This session made things a lot more difficult for the players. One of them received a moderate consequence and everyone was pushed and at least one villain got away to return later. I still might be a bit too cautious with the heavy environmental hazards like the claymore dropping Aria two floors. Even though the building structure absorbed the majority of the shock.

Wasps Among Butterflies Campaign Index