Hello all and welcome to the September edition of the Voice report for Houston!  As always, I am Sasha, your constantly distracted college student of a Voice.  Before we get into the minutae of last month's meeting, I want to remind our readers that the annual Monster Mash meeting is coming up.  If you don't know what that means, it's our annual Halloween party!  There's going to be food (for those of you that eat), costumes, a cheesy movie where we say what Hollywood got wrong, right, or other, and all the candy (and diabetic blood for our vampires) that we can handle.  It's a potluck, so bring food/drink if you feel like it.  We'll also have someone get carryout pizza if you feel more like chipping in a couple of bucks than buying something.  It's important to keep the spirits up, even in these darker times.  I hope to see ya'll there!  Now, on to the minutae.

September's meeting opened with us rolling up to Vintage Park to take care of an abomination.  That thing was huge, like the size of a thanksgiving day balloon!  I gave a few people some boons before they went off to fight it and watched the fireworks after civilians got shooed out of the area.  The problem was...there were more believers in the area that weren't with the Accord and ended up ogling, fighting alongside our close combatants, or trying to stay out of the way.  After a bit of rushed negotiations once the abomination was taken care of, we brought them back to the Citadel for vetting and confirmation.  Thankfully everyone agreed, though some were reluctant to do so.

With that we had 17(!) people show up to meeting, including myself and the regulars, a couple from Austin, and I think a few from another town close to here.  I didn't get to talk to them much.  We had a couple of new vampires show up, a ghost-girl that wasn't Ash, some new Bastet (the werekitties), a mortal (you'd like him New Guy, he's a scientist that was really confused with all the input that was happening), and a changeling that was fresh from the hedge.  Yeah, I had to take point on talking with him.  Whatever his blade is had sealed away most of his personality and was using this giant as a doll.  Yeah, the True Fae are real monsters.

Anyways, once everyone was in the Citadel and settled, One of the new vampires was helping out some of our old hands on a servant/"angel" body and then someone sliced their hand accidentally and things got a little crazy.  Luckily the new vampire lady calmed down enough to step out ofthe room after a while.  After that, there was something to do in the spiritual world and a battle where I didn't hear the details.  I tried to get into the DPS database when asked, but was locked out, and whomever else tried was locked out.  Damn sysadmins, I guess I'll have to try when no sane person would be awake.  Unless they have shifts, then I'm fucked.  Most of my time at meeting was spent dealing with The Blade Ineffable and trying to get him out of the mindset that his Keeper put into him so he could become more human again.

The meeting ended pretty peacefully, all things considered.  Hopefully those that attended will come back to help out with the bigger things we haven't had the manpower for this month, along with the party.  Hope to see you there this month.

Sasha

New Guy's October Update

I saved Halloween.

Maybe I should put that in context.

I know I've been pretty incommunicado-- I've mostly been running around playing troubleshooter. Sometimes proverbially, sometimes literally. This is the life I live now.

Anyway, I happened to be passing through Missouri on secret mission stuff, at which point I hear that there's a fledgling cell getting its shit together in Jefferson City. Like, they'd been stuck in the shadow world for awhile, or some crazy bullshit? I have no clue.

It's a small cell (for now). There was a werewolf, a lady who turned into a flock of crows (or was it a flock of crows who turned into a lady?), a zombie-ghost, and a woman who said she was normal but after I saw her zing around some brain-powers and show up with a cowboy ghost sidekick, I'm pretty sure she's a zombie-ghost too. Maybe she doesn't know it yet? I don't know how this works. Also I'm not including their names for security reasons (and also because I may be a little drunk and can't recall them properly).

But yeah. By the time I showed up, shit was already going bad. As apparently, the Church of Ultimate Truth set up a nine-block Halloween party literally next door to the Citadel. Hoo-boy. And I thought Houston was bad.

And just to make things worse, as soon as people streamed into the Halloween block-party, they got transported to one of those pocket-dimension things set up to look just like the couple of blocks. We blunder around for a bit, and take a quick trip over into the spirit-world, at which point we see the LITERAL SPIRIT OF HALLOWEEN flailing and vomiting and being taunted by lesser asshole spirits and otherwise having a shitty day. Seriously, it was this twenty foot tall skinny dude with a giant pumpkin head. What the fuck.

So naturally, I take one look at the horrible giant spirit monster, and I realize “Oh hey, I bet some Truthy assholes are trying to summon him through some kind of corrupted ritual in the physical realm.”

I don't know what's worse, the fact that -I- knew this, or the fact that the other Accordists hanging around didn't. Seriously, that's your job, weird things! I'm just supposed to be the guy with the press pass and a drinking problem.

So yeah. At this point the werewolf went chasing off after one of the lesser spirits like he was chasing a squirrel, ghost-zombie dude went invisible, and we kind of left ghost-zombie-girl-in-denial in the spirit world for a bit. So it was just down to me and the bird-lady to run around and start destroying the weird Halloween totem-poles that were the physical components of the summoning ritual. Oh, and the crowd had been mind-controlled into doing the thriller dance, plus there were some asshole Servants running around-- some kind of weirdo wizard and a werewolf made of silver.

Eventually, we manage to regroup at a CUT church at the epicenter of the weirdness-- I pull the fire alarm to get any mundane folks out, and I manage to talk/sneak my way to the basement … at which point everything just goes to shit.

Werewolf guy went off beserker-ing at the wizard (but didn't catch him) and zombie-ghost-in-denial lady chased off after him trying to play damage control. Meanwhile, in the basement, there's a full-out Evil Ceremony going down, complete with robes and chanting and a line of hypnotized bystanders getting sacrificed. Oh, and there's some kind of corrupted artifact that looked like one of those orange buckets of kids candy. And the Pumpkin King is getting sucked through a giant portal in the basement. That kind of day.

Bird-lady and zombie-ghost-dude managed to keep the heat off of me long enough to empty my .357 into the artifact-bucket and destroy it. That's when things really got crazy, at which point it pretty much descended into a shitshow of a brawl, in which I got:

Stabbed. Multiple times.

Bitten by a werewolf who gave me a weird foot disease (but not lycanthropy, thank god).

Cursed (but not badly?)

And I picked up a minor mutation, to boot. Woo. Silver lining is I'm working on getting that shit fixed, but it still sucks.

And again, this is the part where I realize I've been in the Accord for too damn long. Because the Jeff City Accordists were flapping around wondering 'wait, should we kill this guy?' I had to note: “These assholes are ritually cutting throats and chanting and wearing robes in a church basement. They are the literal definition of cultists. Fucking SHOOT THEM.” The one time indiscriminate slaughter is the legit solution, and I wind up working with the only Things in the Accord who have sudden pangs of conscience.

I will at least note bird-lady was the MVP of the night, doing all kinds of bird stuff (like, say, going all Alfred Hitchcock on mobs of cultists), and otherwise keeping her head in the game. Jeff City, you should give her shiny things or cash money or something else for being good at her job.

So yeah. I nearly died, which sucked. But by then The Spirit of Halloween came all the way through the portal to the material world. But, since I had the foresight to destroy all the physical components, including the artifact-bucket, The Spirit of Halloween gave us a little assist (also: candy), and bought us the time we needed to escape. I pumped a few silver bullets into the Servant-werewolf on my way out, for good measure, so there's some more RQ lowering for you.

And now, I'm just going to hole up in an undisclosed location with an undisclosed amount of hard liquor until I can take these stitches out. Silver lining: chicks dig scars, right?

But still. Seriously. I SAVED A HOLIDAY. How crazy is that?

Now I'm really fucking paranoid I'm gonna have to go to the North Pole come December.