The PCs:
- Julianne, a computer whiz who fell on hard times and had to take a “temporary” job at All-Mart over a year ago.
- CC, an obnoxiously upbeat new-agey internet personality and crystal collector. She has recently begun to question her worldview.
- Darian, a full-time computer science student on top of his All-Mart job, also with a curiosity about the occult.
- Star, a washed-up, self-aggrandizing grifter.
Three nights after the shootout, All-Mart is still bustling with reporters, cops, and unnatural phenomena. John has brought on his unhinged and untrusting cohort Nicholas as unofficial store security. Although the shootout has mostly been kept under wraps by the police, the PCs learn that Marie was fatally shot that night, albeit killing one more cop and injuring another in her last minutes alive.
Most of the PCs have had their wounds patched up but are still sore, unable to properly recuperate while having to keep coming to work. The surviving stockboys are gone, leaving the onerous task of stocking solely to the night shift. Darian’s family frets and can’t understand why he still keeps going to work after everything that's happened to him. CC, who is still missing, is blowing up in the true crime sphere online.
Darian, Julianne, and Star are back at work as usual on the night of Tuesday, November 28. Julianne starts a new, secret exostock stockpile away from security camerasa, which she tells Darian about without revealing its location within the store. The PCs have also found an exostock item in the stockroom since the night shift took it over: a Gaiawave, a weird, “eco-friendly” microwave with lots of “mother earth”, crunchy branding.
New exostock also comes in that night: eight sets of oversized nail clippers priced in a currency that doesn’t exist as far as the PCs can ascertain. Star trims all ten of her fingernails with a pair but sees no immediate effect, although later in the night she notices they seem a bit thicker and shinier – but perhaps she's just seeing what she wants to see.
While Star is at the register checking her nails, Mr. and Mrs. Smith come in. Mrs. Smith, apparently desperate despite her husband’s nonchalance, grabs Star and demands she show her to the Gaiawave, as she's certain there's still one in the store despite failing to find it so far. By this point, Star has plugged it in a few aisles from the register and tried heating a drop of her own blood in it, but failed to see anything unnatural happen.
Mrs. Smith explains to her that the Gaiawave can resurrect dead things heated inside it for exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds, then follows up with the bombshell that she wants to use it on her stillborn child, which is in a cooler in her car.
Star agrees to let her use it in exchange for $600 (ten times the Gaiawave’s MSRP) and being allowed to take Mr. Smith home with her. Mrs. Smith writes the check on the spot but warns that "transferring control" of Mr. Smith is no trivial feat. Meanwhile, he diligently retrieves the baby’s corpse.
Star and the Smiths watch the baby rotate slowly inside the Gaiawave, and Darian happens by while the timer runs. Upon seeing a baby in a microwave, Darian panics and freezes, transfixed until the requisite seconds have passed. With the unsettling odor of cooked meat on the air, Mrs. Smith retrieves her daughter, who is in fact now alive, and now bawling.
Mrs. Smith starts to explain to Star the details of her relationship to Mr. Smith, or more accurately, the Mr. Smiths, as there are actually six of them which she's been bringing to the store interchangeably. As Mrs. Smith explains it, her “husbands” are actually people without souls, who she has learned to track via a ritual and whom she has found she could control by implanting a fragment of her soul into them (using a different ritual). At this point, with only a seventh of her soul left in her own body, she's barely still human, and her memories of the rituals she once knew are hazy at best.
She says she doesn’t want to teach Star the soul-splitting ritual out of fear it would bind them to each other through the Mr. Smith, but agrees to try and remember other useful rituals to pass along and to leave the Mr. Smith she had brought that night at the store.
Later, Julianne draws a connection between the Mr. Smiths and the stockboys, seeing as they both had a hallmark forgettability and anonymity to them. However, the stockboys became distinct the night of the Christmas party and shootout, leaving this connection an open question for the time being.
Before Mrs. Smith can leave, Nicholas, having seen the baby go in the microwave over the security cameras, stomps up and demands an explanation from the PCs present. When they dissemble and refuse to hand over the Gaiawave, he brandishes a rifle with obvious willingness to use it. Star throws the magickal machine on the ground, breaking it, and then Nicholas shoots it twice for good measure, saying it's for the best that all exostock be destroyed. He then returns to the security office, fuming, and Mrs. Smith leaves the store with her resurrected daughter. Some time later, the PCs hear another gunshot from elsewhere in the store.
The Gaiawave, courtesy of Kristina, Darian's player
Somewhere else entirely, CC awakens, cold, hungry, thirsty, and in extreme pain. She's laying in the snow near an unfamiliar hedge maze and marble pavilion, her wound still untreated. Vince is nearby, and when he sees she's awake, he begins complaining loudly. CC’s limbs shake uncontrollably for a time as she comes to, and Vince tells her she’s been comatose for days, and that they're trapped in their current location for reasons beyond him.
CC wanders into the hedge maze. Vince makes no effort to stop or follow her. Despite the area’s extremely low temperature, neither of them seems to be suffering from hypothermia. CC passes ice sculptures of people familiar to her, specifically people she’s wronged throughout her life in pursuit of her goals. The guilt welling up inside overwhelms her. She topples and smashes the sculptures in a fit of pique until her physical pain outweighs the emotional. Watching the sculptures fracture only makes her feel worse.
She delves further into the hedge maze until she finds a clearing in the center. In it, Hamzah kneels and stares into a pool of fresh, clear water. CC approaches him and he expresses great remorse at bringing her into the fold of the occult underground and thus allowing her to be injured and trapped with him in what he believes to most likely be hell.
With difficulty, CC gets Hamzah to explain what he thinks is going on, though she fails to console him despite blaming all her woes on John. Hamzah admits that there's a possibility that this isn’t, in fact, hell, but part of the rumor-shadowed House of Renunciation. He feels it's unlikely, though, seeing as three of them had entered it together (while normally the House admits one person per room at a time), but based on the feeling he got from looking into the pool, he thinks it's possible.
CC feels it too: a clear sense that to drink that water is to give up her goals and ambitions, and lose a core part of herself. She convinces Hamzah to bring Vince to the pool and try and think of a way out. Hamzah believes that if this is indeed a Room of Renunciation, drinking the water would let them escape, but he's afraid of what would be left of him without his obsession with anticapitalist martyrdom.
If only out of their hunger and desperation, Vince and Hamzah oblige CC in a meditation that culminates in the three of them drinking from the pool. However, both Vince and Hamzah hesitate at the last second, prompting CC to do the same. Vince reflects that the people who got to know him generally hated him, and he ends up dunking his head under and drinking first thinking it might not be such a bada thing, despite CC’s attempts to get him to wait until Hamzah is ready to do it together. Vince immediately disappears, seemingly affirming the Room of Renunciation theory.
Hamzah explains to CC that he believes Vince and his cohorts are part of a hit squad for The New Inquisition, a magick-hoarding criminal organization led by millionaire Alex Abel. He also tells her he has actually performed two major spells: one to prevent TNI’s goons from ever catching up to or harming him (which must apparently no longer be in effect, to Hamzah’s surprise and dismay). The other was to tank the All-Mart corporation before Abel could buy it out for the exostock that appears in its stores.
Hamzah admits that merely eating valuable objects was insufficient to power these spells; for that, a plutophage needs something priceless. The solution he's found lies in the symbolic weight of the corrupt rich people who manipulate the capitalist machine. In the early 2000s, he ate a stew containing the remains of J.P. Morgan, granting him the mojo for his first major spell. In 2020, he ate the recently-deceased body of John McAfee to harness that same power.
Hamzah tells CC this to explain he's repulsed by his own behavior and the harm he’s caused in his obsessive quest against Abel for the past several decades, but he's still reluctant to give up his crusade and his whole identity to escape the Room. Failing to sway him, CC drinks, and returns to the All-Mart, at the base of the stairs to a crawlspace, where she, Vince, and Hamzah apparently crossed into the Room. She no longer bears her obsession with natural materials, and that may just be the tip of the iceberg.
She stumbles into the break room and sees Nicholas there, clearly up to no good. He says he's going to call John to tell him that CC is back back once he realizes who she is, but after she ineffectually tries to physically prevent him from doing so, he reluctantly calls her an ambulance instead.
Although the PCs are reunited on the material sphere, it’s clear things are ramping up and time is running out. Have they forged enough allegiances and gained enough knowledge to see their goal through to the end?
We’ll find out in the next session of Escape from All-Mart!
Sadly, this won’t be for a few weeks due to the bane of all UA cabals, scheduling.
Objective progress: 60%->68% (the main progress here was CC
learning about the existence of TNI and its role in their objective.)
Click here to read the previous session's writeup
Click here to read the next sesion's writeup
Apocrypha from All-Mart (includes a news article handout I gave the players)
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