Libra, Sessions 8 & 9 - The Wizard Freaks Skip Town

Last time, the party realized they had infinite money and learned how to become immortal. 

I'm going to tell you the truth - I barely remember session 8 and it was mostly a gunfight. The players decided they had gotten all the value they could out of the Vampire's Head, they wanted to stabilize the city and end the Head-Kanopy conflict, and they thought it would make them look good with OSIRIS to do something about it. It turns out no amount of vampires mean much when the PCs have a pocket sun and all the weapons American gun laws and infinite money allow. 

In between sessions, Valrel decided to pick up Satan as her new patron, take him out for dinner, and harass him with questions (in exchange for only a minor timeshare in her soul), Moon Dan figured out how to turn on the alien antenna in his jaw (listening to 🗏︎🗏︎ ☞︎💣︎📪︎ ⍓︎□︎◆︎❒︎ ❒︎□︎♍︎🙵 ❍︎◆︎⬧︎♓︎♍︎ ⬧︎⧫︎♋︎⧫︎♓︎□︎■︎ and making the extremely dubious decision to start broadcasting), and the Finance Optimizer put his head down to focus on obtaining the Black Metal of ibn Yazid. 

Of course, this is troublesome. Alchemical authors falsely attribute their work to Classical writers, never city their sources, and cloak their text in ciphers, poetry, prophecy, and gibberish. It would take months... without help. 

1. The Stygian Library would certainly have any relevant texts.
2. Someone with comprehensive knowledge of celestial law and the Astral Plane would know more about the Metal - though all of those are OSIRIS researchers. 
3. And, you could always work with ibn Yazid himself. It's possible that his body is the "Law-Struck Corpse" rumored to be for sale at this year's Black Auction in Washington D.C.

So, especially because they leveled the Vampire Head's tunnels and blew up a Walmart in the process, the PCs decided it would be a great time to not be in Philadelphia.  

Unfortunately, the Black Auction is invite-only - fortunately, flashing around plenty of money and the theater ticket the immortal Abraham Lincoln bought before his unfortunate first death got them through the door. 

They hang around with the rich, famous, and magic in the opulent (and mildly-haunted) Hay-Adams hotel, intervene in a duel between an exceedingly upset hedge fund manager and the Comte de Saint Germain, lose a duel with the Comte de Saint Germain, crack the hedge fund manager over the head with a cane and then kind of stand around not knowing what to do, frantically try to avoid En-men-lu-ana, the ancient Sumerian king Moon Dan shot at back in the 90s, and walk out of the ruins one exceedingly cuboid law-struck corpse and one bottle of comet wine richer.

Hey, wait a sec - the ruins?

The final lot of this year's Black Auction was Tango, the extremely psychic elephant - when "the Officer", dressed in misshapen medals with molten text from the exceedingly nonspecific "Eurasia", lost the bid, she pulled a whistle from her pocket and drove the elephant mad. Tango promptly disassembled the Hay-Adams dining room into floating geometry, then fled into the sky as the PCs stopped the Officer from escaping with her. 

Tango hasn't been seen since - the PCs lost track of her over the Atlantic Ocean. It was generally agreed that this was a perfectly average Black Auction... except for the theater ticket, which is sure to power some kind of presidential-assassination-via-sympathetic-magic, as the PCs realized right after putting it up for sale and right before getting outbid for it by En-men-lu-ana.

Oops. 

Analysis

I'm starting to run out of things to say, honestly. 

The Black Auction was overstuffed - I had six NPCs, all with help from Phlox's wonderful GLOG server, and one packed session is Not enough time to introduce all of these people and what their problems are. They will never show up again - maybe if I run another campaign of Libra in Washington D.C. these'll be the local factions or something. 

There are Four (4) (IV) sessions left of Libra, and I think it'll all line up perfectly. One session for kidnapping some OSIRIS scientist, one session for the Stygian Library, and then a climactic session where they reach the final step of the magnum opus while I the rapidly-expanding teamup of people who want them dead hammer on the doors. (Currently, that's the Zontamanancer, his son (as the idol of Apollo), the last City Bug infectees, the leaderless vampires, and a scout UFO from the alien empire.) OK, that's 3 things and 4 sessions, but I'm sure one of them will go long, or they'll decide to try their luck against Kanopy (now reinforced by the PMC "131 Halley's Comet"), or they'll forget what they're doing entirely, or we'll have to skip one. See? Perfect.