Divine Blood - Wasps Among Butterflies - Mother's Last Day

This session includes three characters:

• Arianrhod Monica Trengove (aka Aria), the succubus and Perfect Yandere of War who believes Psyche is Doing the Right Thing and is Lost Outside the Hierarchy
• Sophia Ecks, Ainur of the Interface and Virtual Apex Predator who lives on The Bleeding Edge
• Sarah Gow, a Napoleonic Werepanther from an Urbanized Tribe who's a Practiced Shapeshifter

The optimism is on page 1D

Wasps Among Butterflies Campaign Index

With the matter of the train wreck and it's consequences handled and turned over toward the agencies best equipped to deal with it, the wasps head on to their task. Traveling northward they stay with some relatives of Sarah's who had moved toward preferring snow leopard forms rather than panther ones. They filtered quietly into the surroundings and settled in to track down the M5:9 laboratory and start surveillance on it. Then, keeping a low local profile, they started researching the area and seeing if they could find any weaknesses in the facility.

They did manage to find that Adelaide Kuroiki had a tendency to use the same basic designs with most of her hidden facilities, including a basic square central area, booby traps, and facilities on site to run various experiments. Having found the facility in the nearby hills, they proceeded to map out and study the guard routes and behaviors until the time came for them to be called in to the assault.

The call went out and they moved on their plan, having a minor setback when Sarah had a minor run in with a tree while trying to avoid being spotted, but still, they managed to get in and disable the front door laboratories before moving deeper into the facility and without triggering an alarm. Aria helped in this by rendering herself and the other two members of the team invisible.

Reaching out through the Visionary network, Sophia was able to find the echoes of five of Adelaide's bodies present on the facility and all of them were undergoing some level of mental distraction due to the world-wide, and even cosmology wide, effort made to end the threat she posed. The team split up, the better to track down the various bodies, with Aria going in one direction and Sophia going with Sarah in the other.

Aria took it upon herself to keep the guards busy while Sarah and Sophia took out the first two of Adelaide's bodies. Leaving one alive, Sophia opted to use her as an access point into Adelaide's mind and take the fight to her directly, scouring her mind with the release of several visualizations of eldritch monstrosities with which to counter the abhorrent thing of stitched together and screaming souls that was Adelaide "Mother" Kuroiki.

While the Ainur continued her mental assault, Sarah protected her body from the security forces that were approaching and Aria was free to end the physical life of the other bodies in the facility. That left them only dealing with the security forces and trying to convince them that their employer was well and truly dealt with. There was some difficulty at first and Aria was forced to try her hand at creating an illusory sheet of titanium granted some telekinetic semblance of reality to create a cover for the automatic weapons-fire while Sarah harassed the attackers from varying angles.

Eventually, Sophia was able to get a snapshot of the full operation and the dozens upon dozens of simultaneous operations each striking out against one of Adelaide's many bodies. Convinced that Adelaide and all her bodies had been finally dealt with and unwilling to continue to face the lethal combination of werepanther and battle-trained succubus, the security forces surrendered to the Wasps.

This last session of the campaign we decided to wrap up quickly rather than draw it out admittedly as we'd gotten a lot of play out of the combat mechanics of the game, which was our main goal, and story-wise the last portion of this was waiting for the go-command from the world-wide effort. However, we did come to some conclusions. Among these we decided that there had to be a ramping difficulty for tactile illusions to create stronger material.

As it currently stands while you technically need both Tangible Illusions and Illusory Attacks to make attacks which deal physical damage, all you really need to do is make a tangible illusion of a physical object, such as a sword, and then use that to attack with. This will remain perfectly valid. Adding Illusory Attacks on top of Tangible Illusions would allow for the creation of short-lived illusions rather than something that has to be maintained and result in a more efficient and less tiring way of making Illusory Attacks. Meanwhile, using Tangible Illusions to create a shield, of say Titanium, might be more draining than simply using raw Life-Force but come with other advantages such as obscuring line of sight allowing your were-panther comrade to come at the enemy from an unexpected angle.

For the matter of Mother/Adelaide, I did not come up with full stats for her in this case as the entire point of attacking when they were was that she was being attacked all over the place at each of her bodies and had to split her attention all over the place while also dealing with the psychic attacks of several people. Thus she was much less dangerous than she had been when their other characters encountered her in the first playtest campaign.