Hunter Session 33

Previous: Hunter Session 32

One by one, in the middle of the night, all of the hunters were awakened by Arie bringing the news that the apartment building was soon to come under attack. Nobody knew which vampires were attacking or what their motive might be; they only knew that someone wanted them dead, and the fact that the furnace had just gone out proved it. Most of their time before the attack was supposed to take place was taken up with getting to the building itself, but there was time for a few larger-scale defenses to be assembled while everyone made their personal preparations.

First of all, everyone agreed that the guardian babies needed to be kept safe and away from the building at all costs. Charlotte pointed out that as far as she knew, none of the vampires (except for Charlie) had any idea where she lived, so she volunteered her house as a haven for the babies. Melba directed Bergs, Leslie, and a few of the other Merciful hunters to take the babies to the house and guard them there. Charlotte called the power company to tell them about the outage, but they said it would be at least an hour before it could be activated again. Paladin said that the building's generator could run off of gas in an emergency, but that it would take at least 60 gallons to run it for an hour. Thus, Melba gave a credit card and the keys to Arie's Humm-Vee to a few hunters and told them to buy as much gas as they could haul, and hurry. Melba then took a number of other hunters to defend the parking garage and wait for the others to return with the gas. The badly wounded Kurt used an edge to unify the hunters who'd be holding the front door, and Charlotte tested out a new ability that let her inspire others whose confidence was flagging. Otherwise, the group only had time to divide the rest of the hunters up into tentative groups that would guard various areas of the building before the vampire attack began.

It started, not surprisingly, in the front entryway. Arie, Charlotte, and Kurt were leading almost a dozen other hunters in keeping the attacking vampires from entering the building at all costs. The hunters had parked Arie's Explorer in front of the door to create a bottleneck and make it harder for the vampires to enter, but it didn't provide enough cover to protect them completely when three cars sped in from two different directions, and the vampires inside them opened fire. Charlotte managed to shoot out a tire on one and the gas tank on another, making a very satisfying explosion, but the vampires retaliated by taking aim at the Explorer's tank. Soon, the vehicle (containing many of Arie's weapons that he hadn't been able to salvage) was a burnt-out, smoking ruin, and a number of the hunters within the blast radius - including Kurt - were even more seriously hurt. The vampires began to pile out of the cars, and the hand-to-hand battle began.

Meanwhile, Randy was trying to do his part in the front entryway without being very effective when he heard a strange noise. Pausing to focus, he realized that he was hearing helicopters. Randy grabbed Pete and Pete (who also didn't seem to be doing much) and ran up the 17 flights of stairs that led to the roof. Once there, Randy was horrified to see two helicopters loaded with six vampires and blood slaves apiece approaching the roof...one of which was piloted by Haji's right-hand man, Tsao Lo. Realizing that there was no way the three of them were going to be able to hold the roof in a toe-to-toe battle against twelve monsters, Randy told Pete and Pete to run away...then locked eyes with each pilot in turn and Burdened them.

Randy was expecting his Burden to simply stop the helicopters and keep the pilots from landing. The actual effect, however, was radically different and immensely more destructive. The pilots held still, unable to move under the effects of Burden...but the helicopters kept going. One of the pilots shot out of the open side of one helicopter and fell to his death; his copilot barely managed to maintain control, and flew away rather than risk another assault. The second helicopter had it even worse (though Tsao Lo turned into mist and escaped unharmed from it). This craft's pilot shot out of the door and straight up, into the helicopter blades. Apparently he had some kind of supernaturally augmented stamina, and when he hit the blade his body provided just enough resistance to stop it from spinning for a split second before it sliced through him. This put the helicopter into a dead spin and send it crashing into the roof of the apartment building. Randy had just enough time to run through the door and back into the building and literally throw himself down the stairs as the roof exploded in an enormous fireball and the top two floors of the building began to cave in. (Summarizer's note: while our #1 enemy in this campaign was Haji, our #2 enemy was for sure physics.)

In the parking garage, Melba heard first the explosions from the ground floor, and then the chaos going on up on the roof. Realizing that nothing was happening in the parking garage, she decided to go upstairs and help. On the way, she ran into Randy coming down with a horrified look on his face, ("I'll explain later" was all he'd say when she asked what had happened on the roof), and Charlotte and Arie dragging the mortally wounded Kurt out of the fray. Their carefully constructed plan had, of course, pretty much fragmented as soon as things started exploding. When Melba suggested that they all go to the parking garage to wait for the gasoline to be delivered and defend it from below, everyone agreed. It was a good thing that they did, too, because a strike force consisting of Tsao Lo and six of his blood slaves soon broke in through the locked doors, attempting to cut off the hunters from the inside. A vicious and protracted gun battle ensued in which the hunters spent a long time chasing monsters around and behind parked cars. Arie's machine guns and explosives eventually finished all of them off, Tsao Lo included.

Arie, Charlotte, Melba, and Randy ran upstairs to help defend the entryway, just in time to witness the arrival of the guardians. Shirley, Oscar, and Cassius emerged from below the parking garage and out of the sewers to take the vampires by surprise. It couldn't have come at a better time, since the hunters were beginning to lose ground. Realizing that their helicopter aid had been cut off and that their leader was dead, the remaining vampires and blood slaves were soon on the retreat. The hunters Melba had sent to the gas station returned with gas so that Paladin could start bringing the generator and the building's protections back online. However, the hunters' problems were just beginning, since they realized that a SWAT team or ten and a large number of cops would certainly have heard the explosions and would soon be on their way...to a building full of illegal guns and explosives and a bunch of people wielding them.

So the hunters swung back into action to hide all of the most egregiously illegal weapons by loading them into Charlotte's car and Arie's Humm-Vee and taking them to the house that Paladin owned in Edina. Paladin got the furnace back on, which chased off all of the remaining attackers. Arie ran downstairs to clear out the armory the hunters had established in one of the lockdown rooms, only to be trapped inside of it and get subdued when the SWAT team busted down the door (an experience he found exhilarating rather than terrifying). Charlotte did her part to slow down the cops and buy some more time for her friends by crying her eyes out and generally making a scene in front of the first responders as the ambulances took away the most seriously injured hunters (a group which included Kurt and Steve).

After being checked out by a wide variety of medical professionals and giving their statements to the police, the hunters reconvened to discuss what had happened and what they'd do next. The biggest question, of course, was how all of this had gotten started in the first place. Arie relayed what had happened when he went hunting with Kurt. When he described the woman who'd given the information to Tsao Lo's people, Randy began to freak out. Eventually he calmed down enough to explain that the woman Arie had described was Sarah, his ex-girlfriend. Sarah had been unable to let go after Randy dumped her a few years back and had begun stalking him. Her constant and unwanted attentions were what had prompted him to leave Minneapolis for San Diego in the first place. The hunters knew that in the morning they would have their work cut out for them. Not only would they have to make sure that all the hunters and guardians were safe, they'd have to start the work of rebuilding their home base almost from scratch...and Randy would have to face down Sarah one last time to ensure that nothing like this could ever happen again.

Next: Hunter Session 34