Session 3: Descent

This is a session recap for my current Kult: Divinity Lost roleplaying campaign. Jessy Button is played by my wife, who also does the art, and I am the game master.

This post contains violence and dead bodies.

On Tuesday, Jessy goes for a coffee date with Andi to discuss her ring and collaboration ideas. Andi admits that she’s been doing her own research about these Granger Fine Jewelry rings, because seeing one in real life made her a little too excited. Jessy allows her a closer examination, and she decides that it was likely made in the late 1970s, before all the legal trouble started for the company. Andi shows Jessy old pictures that one of her friends managed to dig up – similar rings to the one Jessy has, on the fingers of Henry Ford II and Saddam Hussein. She doesn’t know what became of them. She again questions, in her friendly tone, why Jessy would have the ring. She may be rich, but she’s not Henry Ford.

Discussing the possibility of Andi writing a blog about Jessy’s ring, they decide that more research is needed. One of Andi’s friends, Simon, knows a lady who used to work in sales for Granger. Meeting with her could be a great next step. Past this, the conversation turns to the lighter subject of doing a collaboration video about the latest line of jewelry that Andi got her hands on.

The day after, Jessy texts Carl Hunt again, asking what the hotel has said about the outrageous behaviour of their security staff. He did show them the footage that Jessy shared with him, but the hotel assured that those men were not employed security. Obviously worried, the hotel staff will handle contact with the authorities. The men dragging Elise away also remain unidentified. Carl promises to keep Jessy up to date. She expresses her worry for Elise, the girl may well be dead now.

Jessy’s sleep is ruined by nightmares, all week they continue. Always going downwards, Elise’s screaming face as she’s cut into tiny pieces by a razor sharp knife, and the homeless men breaking into Jessy’s apartment to take her away. Each dream inevitably ends with the collapse of reality, everything plunging down into an emptiness and Jessy following. The fall wakes her most days. She can’t remember what happens next in the dreams when she doesn’t.

By the end of the week, Jessy has had quite enough of it. She doesn’t like having to triple check whether her door is locked, nor sleeping with pepper spray next to her, but the dreams have her paranoid. She decides to go down below Toronto again and check out the spot where she saw those homeless men spying on her. She hopes that going there might put her mind at ease. Jessy walks down the same streets, the same corridors of the PATH, all the while unnerved by the begging men and women always present downtown. They all seem to be staring at her.

Jessy is ushered through a filthy, vandalized maintenance corridor and down a set of stairs to an unlit storage room, the TTC logo printed on water damaged boxes stacked on pallets. A few of the boxes have been pushed up to block a door on the other side of the room. Jessy keeps the flashlight from her phone up, trying to take in her surroundings. When questioned on where they’re going, her guide tries to tell her something about the way forward. The vocabulary isn’t quite there, though.

Ignoring the crude graffiti of six-legged men and hastily scrawled racial slurs, Jessy walks down the corridor, phone in hand as the sound of clattering machinery echoes in the distance. From behind a closed door, she hears what sounds like a poorly tuned radio. Jessy turns on her phone camera then and starts recording, realizing that whatever is happening she wants proof of it. The path forward leads past a set of stairs heading deeper down into the dark. She’d rather not go there if it can be avoided.

The words ‘THEY KNOW’ is scribbled in black marker on top of this paper, tearing off part of it so the writing ends up on the wall. As she walks out into the clattering, noisy corridor, she can only just pick up the sounds of someone or something coming up the stairs ahead. She wastes no time, immediately running back to try and get open the broken door. Jessy runs a long, long while, until she’s certain she must have passed the door. The corridor seems to go on forever and she’s out of breath by the time she finally reaches it. She can see her two pursuers, and hear their guttural screams, though she is well ahead of them. They hobble after her, and Jessy has no interest in letting them catch up.

She loses grip of time. Minutes, hours, days, she could not say how long she spends in there. Finally, a sound breaks through the silence – the clattering of a subway train. She runs towards it, and finds a door which she rips open in a panic to rush headlong into Wellesley Station. How did she get there? Shaken beyond belief, Jessy finds her way home before calling up her friends. She needs, more than anything, to get absolutely plastered. She drinks all night, invites Amanda over, and the two fall asleep together in her bed with empty bottles and cans around them. Having company over still does nothing to stop her dreams, locked in an empty endless space with the wailing of that corpse beast beckoning her.