From Hell
From Gothic Earth Wiki
| From Hell | |
|---|---|
| Chapter: | Boston |
| Play Date: | November 23, 2009 |
| Story Date: | January 7, 1899 |
| Players in Attendance | |
| Aaron Shurtleff (Gao, Melchitt) Justin Conner (John Sheppard) Kelly Lee (Elise LeBlanc, Vinny Castille) Melissa Turffs (Katerina Petrovich, Rachael) Nathan Quam (Lawrence Tate) Raquel Quam (Alexandria Knight) Scott Hardie (GM) Stephen Gambill (Jacques LeBeau, Vivienne LeRouge) | |
| Character Appearances | |
| Charles Witherspoon, James, Jeanne Witherspoon, Mary Jane Kelly, Theresa O'Neill, Thomas Carnacki | |
| Character References | |
| David O'Neill, G.W., Jack the Ripper | |
| Order | |
| Overall Session #: | 16 |
| Previous Session: | Secrets and Lies |
| Next Session: | In Vino Veritas |
The fourth game session in Chapter IV: Boston was played on November 23, 2009.
Plot
Thomas Carnacki invited the group back into the room that he had arranged for a séance, after Elise had interrupted the first attempt. He made a point of lifting the tablecloth to show his "electric pentacle" underneath, a device with wires and glass tubes that he claimed could contain most spirits, assuring their safety. The ring of candles on the table indicated the spirit's boundaries. The group asked him whether it had been broken, and he said that a sufficiently angry and powerful spirit could break the barrier, but this was rare. He mentioned once encountering some kind of entity that took the form of a massive "pig spirit" that tried to break into this dimension through nightmares; attuning his device perfectly was the only way to stop it.
The group sat around the table, hand in hand: Carnacki, Elise, Gao, Katerina, Jacques, John, Alexandria, and Lawrence. Katerina had suggested trying to contact Charles Witherspoon's father to ask why he disapproved of Jeanne, but the group decided to contact Jack the Ripper directly. Carnacki patiently called out for the spirit of Jack the Ripper for twenty minutes, until the group felt the air grow colder and a presence enter the room. A nervous young woman, heard but not seen, was disoriented and pleaded not to be hurt. The group calmed her and asked her questions. She was Mary Jane Kelly, and she thought she was in Whitechapel in 1888. They asked her what she remembered about being attacked, and she described a man covered by a large coat and hat that concealed his identity; he muttered something about "Charles" while attacking her viciously, despite her pleas to be left alone and her insistence that she didn't have any clients named Charles. When the group asked if she knew of a Charles Witherspoon, she said that was her doctor, and acknowledged that he sometimes sold things that she brought him. She insisted that he was a kind man, only getting angry once when she brought him a monogrammed item (with the initials G.W.) that he said was essentially worthless.
Elise watched Carnacki in the flickering candlelight, noticing that his lips were not moving and he seemed to be in a trance while the spirits spoke. The group asked for the first person possessed by Jack the Ripper in Boston. It took some time, but a spirit came forward, a gravel-voiced man who seemed even more lost in the void. After some plodding from the group, he said he remembered feeling a terrible chill to his bone, like he had fallen into an icy pond in Boston Common. Something had made him feel so hateful, first at someone named Charles, then at a woman he remembered attacking. He didn't know her, but he felt so full of rage that he did unspeakable things to her, believing that she knew this "Charles." After they released the spirit, Jacques was the first to say what had become clear: Jeanne Witherspoon WAS Jack the Ripper, wearing men's clothes and attacking her husband's patients. After something had killed her in London, interrupting her while she changed out of the outfit, her spirit followed Charles to Boston and was now attacking his new patients ten years later, possessing bums to do it. The group speculated on what had mauled Jeanne in London, and Jacques suspected a werewolf, which might have been enough of a connection for Theresa O'Neill to have a vision that werewolves were somehow involved in this case despite the group finding no sign of them. The group decided to summon Jeanne's spirit to the séance, and this time the response was immediate: A withering, icy cold entered the room, with a palpable sense of menace. Invisible to them, Jeanne demanded to know why they were interfering. They said they wanted to protect lives, and asked her to stop if Charles closed his clinic and never treated a lady of the night again. She wavered and tentatively agreed, but their insistence that they would stop her from killing again pushed her into a homicidal range. She promised to kill the "witch" they knew in town, and left. They realized right away that she meant Theresa. Carnacki said that Jeanne would be able to move around town, but couldn't enter a building on her own; she would have to possess a body to walk inside, and that would buy them a few minutes to get to her.
Hurrying to her house under twilight, they burst inside, and found her coming in from the back yard with plants from her garden. As she explained that she was fine, Jacques lunged toward her with a knife, and the group realized Jeanne was in control of him. He managed to stab Theresa in the shoulder despite Gao getting in his path and Elise shooting him with a grazing bullet. Theresa began chanting a spell, but stopped when Vivienne urged everyone in the scene to calm down and stop fighting. Katerina began bandaging Theresa's wound, but Jeanne stabbed her in the back. When Alexandria called out that Charles still loved her, Jeanne turned to her with a murderous rage, and this hesitation gave John an opening to strike. He kicked so hard that Jacques flew out the open back door and landed in the snowy yard with cracked ribs and a stiff back. A mist rose from his body and disappeared, and when he came to, he was very apologetic for letting that happen. Theresa understood, playfully calling him "Jacques the Ripper," and gave him a root to chew on that eased his pain and let him walk again.
By now, it was clear that the group had to confront Charles Witherspoon and put an end to his wife's ability to possess people and commit murders. They talked about killing him, or taking him out to Boston Common to let him see what was happening, or getting him to close his clinic so that she would stop. Hurrying to his mansion in Beacon Hill, they found the nervous butler panicking at the door and pointing down the hallway. A locked pair of double doors rattled on their frame, while some kind of eerie glow shone underneath them. John kicked open the doors, revealing a swirling maelstrom in the parlor on the other side: Jeanne's spirit had manifested in the center of the room, with various bric-à-brac encircling her in the air. Charles cowered behind an armchair, trying not to be hit. The room looked like a shrine to Jeanne, with her portrait and funereal urn dominating one side of the room over a fireplace, while shelves and bureaus held various items that had belonged to her in life. As the group crossed into the room, Jeanne's hand elongated into sword blades, and the swirling objects transformed into knives that began stabbing them randomly and frequently. Each time they were struck, the knife would turn back into a teacup or a statue or an ashtray, whatever it had been, still impaled in its victim.
John rushed across the room and grabbed the funereal urn, then ran out of the room with it. Lawrence and Elise urged Jeanne to calm down, to no avail. Frustrated, Gao marched right up to the spirit and pointed at her with a stern expression; she raised one sword to strike the child, but hesitated and then flew away to hit someone else. While Vinny snapped photographs, Jacques cast a healing spell on himself, trying to gain the strength to fight back. Jeanne charged at the rest of the group and stabbed Elise through the chest with one of the sword blades, puncturing a lung and knocking her out. Alexandria yelled at Charles to tell his wife that he wasn't cheating on her with any prostitutes, but the man was too terrified and didn't take any action. Katerina summoned Rachael, who tried to use her soul-draining power on Jeanne, but wasn't able to touch the spirit to activate it. Jacques tried casting a spell on the ghost that could drive it insane, but it had no effect, and Gao was unable to hit the spirit by throwing things at it. Lawrence called out for the doctor to stop this by telling his wife he'd never treat a prostitute again, and this time Charles managed to speak up. But when he told Jeanne that he loved her and wasn't sleeping with his patients, she screeched that she didn't care! She hated that he treated prostitutes only because it sullied their reputation in town and lowered their social standing, a revelation that bothered several people in the group, most of all Alexandria.
The swirling knives were taking their toll on the group, giving them all bleeding injuries that were beginning to threaten their lives. While Alexandria and Vinny tried to protect the unconscious Elise, and Jacques began hitting knives out of the air with his cane, Gao tried lifting her portrait off of the fireplace mantle and threatening her with it. Safely down the hall, John had pulled out a blessed candle that Aidan Kane had given him while they explored a different mansion in Baltimore[3], and lighted it on top of the urn and began praying. His knowledge of the occult told him that Jeanne's remains inside the urn were her link to this world, so with most of the group running up behind him, he ran outside with the urn and tossed the ashes across the snowy grass. In the room, Jeanne saw Gao holding the painting and became enraged, flying at the child to strike a deadly blow, but faded away as she lunged forward.
The doctor sobbed and begged forgiveness for having any part in this. He responded to Jacques's demand for a reward by telling him to take a jar of change from his bedroom, but Katerina had already done that, so he asked him to get a few dollars from the butler, James. In talking to him about Jeanne, the group confirmed that she could have been Jack the Ripper: Although he has aliases during all of Jack's killings, Jeanne was out along on those days, and Jack had used a surgical scalpel that could have been taken from his practice. The group healed themselves as best they could at the scene, while pocketing a few expensive-looking items from Charles's house, and limped back to Theresa's house. After they explained everything, she gratefully thanked them on behalf of the city of Boston, and praised their service to La Lumière. When they said they had no idea what to do next, she told them she belonged to another, very different organization, and wanted to introduce this group to them; they were strong "believers" in the occult, unlike her "close-minded brother." She believed that she could help Elise unlock mystic power within her with proper training, which appealed to Elise, so the group agreed to rest with her for a few days and hide out from the Six-Fingered Hand. She asked them to meet her at the station the next afternoon, where they would take a train to Salem.
Historical References
Mary Jane Kelly was a real victim of Jack the Ripper in November 1888. A few weeks earlier, the police received a letter claiming to be written by the killer, which he self-addressed "from hell" at the top.
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