Running Lot 214

In This Chapter

The case scene by scene. Scenes Two through Six can run in any order the players choose; the Case Clock (Chapter Three) decides what they have time for. Scene Seven happens whenever they move the relic. Scene Eight happens only if the Petition Clock reaches 4.

Each scene lists what is there, the checks that find it, what happens if the characters miss it, and where it leads. Difficulties use the Investigation Difficulty table in Chapter Ten of the Universe Guide. Each key conclusion has at least three routes:

Scene One: The Case File

The characters read Handouts A through E on the drive north on I-79. The Lyncean character received the referral from Analyst Jenna Tran on Friday; the Latchkey character received the courtesy copy from Fiona Kessler this morning with a single line: Church items. Go look before someone else does.

Let the players read. Answer questions about procedure, but not about meaning. The packet is built so that nothing in it is impossible on its own, and only the whole of it is strange.

Checks available on the drive:

A successful check here can trigger Impossible Evidence (Universe Guide, Chapter Four). Good answers: the mundane explanation does not explain why a cat missing for five years and a watch missing for nine were returned to the same street in the same week, or the glasses appear between two frames that the metadata says are one second apart.

Scene Two: Ridgeview Court

A cul-de-sac of seven split-level houses built in 1974, maples going orange, a basketball hoop over every other garage. Number 22, the Hales', has a detached garage with a side door and a single window facing number 24.

The neighbors are cooperative, sincere, and wrong. Play Merciful Dissonance by the rules in Chapter Twelve of the Universe Guide: each of them has a folder (Chapter Three of this book), and each defends it gently if pushed.

Emma Linder, number 18. Thirty-four, works from home for an insurance company, holding a large orange cat named Pickle. Pickle has been gone since April 2021. He came back well fed, groomed, and wearing a collar she has never seen, with a tag reading BISCUIT and a phone number from Harborcreek. She called the number. A family there lost their cat on 19 September and are devastated. Emma has not told them.

Adaeze Okonkwo, number 25. Seventy-one, a retired Lakeshore General nurse, dignified and warm. Her husband Chidi lost his steel watch at a Steelworkers picnic in 2017 and died in 2020. The watch was on her porch rail on 24 September, running and set to the right time. She has decided it was a kindness, and she will not be talked out of it.

If a character mentions Lakeshore General, Adaeze adds, unprompted: the night staff on four have always said room 411 is cold. She worked there twenty-two years. She never believed it, and she never took a patient into 411 if she could help it.

Ray Kowalczyk, number 24. Fifty-eight, retired from GE Transportation, owns the doorbell camera and resents it. He is sure the Hale girl is sneaking out, and he is sure the camera is faulty. He will give the characters the full clips from 25 September to 5 October if asked, and he will complain the whole time.

Checks:

About the footage. The reliquary is not an entity, and what it moves is physical, so every return records perfectly (Universe Guide, Chapter Twelve, Recordings and Merciful Dissonance). Ray has watched the key appear three times and filed it as a glitch each time. Showing him will not change his mind.

If they miss it: the listing (Handout D) and the storage records still point to number 22.

Leads out: Number 22. The hospital, if Adaeze mentioned room 411.

Scene Three: Lakeshore Self Storage

A drive-up facility on upper Peach Street: orange doors, a keypad gate, an office that smells of burnt coffee. Tony Ruggiero, manager since 2016, is friendly, bored, and relieved someone official is taking his email seriously.

Unit 214 is empty and swept. Outside its door, on the concrete, there is nothing, for the first time in ten years; Tony points at the spot.

What Tony has: the rental agreement (Frank Mazur, 22 June 2011, autopay), the lien notice, the auction record (Curtis Hale, $340), and a photo the auctioneer took of the open unit on sale day. The photo shows brass candlesticks, garment bags, two banker's boxes labeled ST. ANTHONY / PAPERS, and a shape under a wool altar cloth on a folding chair at the back.

Checks:

If Fiona reads the Registry entry: she goes quiet, then says the Archive has been looking for LK-NA-04471 for fifteen years and she would like it in an iron case before sundown. She asks the characters to call her the moment they have eyes on it.

Leads out: Number 22. The phrase never petitioning it for a person.

Scene Four: The Hale House

A tan split-level with a detached garage. Inside, the house is clean in the way houses are clean when someone is working hard to keep things normal. Every clock in the house reads the correct time now, because Joan resets them each morning. In the kitchen, a wall clock with a cracked face is in the trash.

Joan Hale

Sixty-eight, Curtis's mother, moved in after Laura died. Sharp, practical, a retired school secretary. She is home all day and answers the door with the chain on.

Joan believes the wiring is bad: every clock in the house stops at 3:07 each night, and she has an electrician coming Thursday. She will say this firmly. She believes it (rule one). If pressed about the glasses on the mailbox or the ring on Maddie's pillow, she becomes short, then says, "Laura lost those glasses at the lake the summer before she died," and changes the subject.

Curtis Hale

Forty-four, back from his flea-market run at 1:10 p.m. Tired, polite, protective, and broke in a way he is managing. The storage lot was a gamble. The candlesticks will cover it. The gold box is the only thing in the lot worth real money, and a man from Cleveland has offered him $4,300.

Curtis has partial dissonance. He knows things are turning up. He tells himself Maddie is moving them because she is not coping, and he is afraid for her. He pulled the photo from the listing on 20 September because Maddie begged him not to sell the box, crying, and he has never seen her cry like that, even at the funeral.

What Curtis will tell them, if asked about Laura (Inquiry or Charm, Average ; Easy if they have already been honest with him about Maddie):

"She drove herself in. Headache, she said, a bad one, she didn't want to wake anybody. They called me at ten after three. The phone records say she called Maddie at 2:51. Maddie was asleep. There was a message, and Maddie couldn't play it, and then she lost the phone at the fair that August. We never heard it. I think about that every day."

The Garage

A workbench under the side window. The candlesticks and vestments are boxed for sale. The two banker's boxes of parish papers are under the bench. On the bench, on a folded moving blanket, stands the reliquary: gilt brass, nine inches tall, a sunburst frame around an oval window, behind the glass a sliver of pale bone on faded red silk and a paper label in brown ink, Ex ossibus S. Antonii Pat. A burned-down tealight sits in a jar lid beside it. The adhesive outline of a small note is visible on its base.

The garage is a few degrees colder than the afternoon. Characters with Awakened Blood feel the room slope gently toward the bench.

Identification. Run the relic identification procedure from Chapter Nine of the Universe Guide:

• Phase 1, passive examination: no check. The object is definitely supernatural. The cold, the slope, and the clean holy quality are obvious.
• Do Not Touch That: a Latchkey character may make a Relic Lore or Containment check (Average ). On success, the GM reveals: It responds to spoken requests. Do not ask it for anything, and do not let anyone ask it for anything, within thirty meters.
• Phase 2, active examination: Intellect + Relic Lore, Hard (Class II), 30 minutes. On success: Class II, holy, a finding relic; trigger is a spoken petition; one handling rule (gloves; it is inert inside iron). With a Boon: the Registry match and a second rule (an open petition stays with the relic until answered). On failure: Class and effect only.

The parish papers. Forty years of sacristy journals, bulletins, and inventories. Handout G is in the 2009 journal (Research, Average , one hour; no roll if they are looking for 2009 or for Irene Mazur). Curtis has not read any of it; he was going to sell the boxes as "ephemera."

Getting the Relic

Curtis owns the lot. The diocese owns the relic. The Archive wants it. Let the characters choose how to resolve that; each route works, and each has a cost.

Merciful Dissonance applies to Curtis as a witness: he will not accept "a relic is summoning your wife's ghost." He will accept "the box is making Maddie worse, and it is dangerous, and we know how to handle it."

Leads out: Maddie, at 3:25 p.m. Drury, who is watching from 7:15 p.m.

Scene Five: The Broker

Anselm Drury enters the case in one of three ways, whichever comes first:

• The characters read Curtis's marketplace messages (Curtis shows them, or Technology on his phone, Easy ) and call the Cleveland number.
• The characters are seen at the Hale house before 7:15 p.m. Drury learns of it from Curtis, who texts him that "some people from the government" came about the box. Drury invites them to coffee at a café on State Street at 5:30 p.m.
• The characters are at the house after 7:15 p.m. and notice a silver Malibu with Ohio plates parked at the mouth of the cul-de-sac (Perception, Average ).

Drury is fifty-six, silver-haired, expensively rumpled, courteous to the point of comedy, and entirely professional. He is Candleless: excommunicated in 2003 from a religious order he will not name, a broker since. He does not threaten. He makes offers.

What he wants: the reliquary, for a client who wants it to find something. He will not say what, because he does not know. He is authorized to pay up to $6,100.

What he knows: that the relic finds lost things and that a petition, once made, stays with the relic. He learned it from a Candleless archive; he says so if asked.

What he does not know: that Maddie has an open petition on it for her dead mother. If the characters tell him (Charm or Negotiation, Average , with the truth), he sets down his cup and says, "I don't carry open petitions. I did once." He withdraws, calls off Wes Pruitt in front of them, and leaves Erie that night.

Other ways to move him:

On a Breakthrough on any check with Drury, he adds, unasked: his client's request came through a Philadelphia intermediary who asked specifically whether the relic could find "an object the Latchkey Archive lost in 2019." See Chapter Seven, Continuing.

Scene Six: Maddie

Maddie Hale comes home at 3:25 p.m. Twelve, small for her age, a Penn State hoodie two sizes too big that was her mother's. Smart, guarded, and exhausted; she has been awake at 3:07 a.m. for nineteen nights.

She knows the box works. She does not know what it is beyond "Saint Anthony's box," and she does not care. She knows Frank's note said not to ask it for people. She asked anyway, because she wanted her mother back more than she wanted to follow a stranger's rule, and because every other thing she asked for came back and none of them hurt anyone. (She does not know about the Harborcreek family's cat.)

Maddie is a witness Merciful Dissonance does not reach. She has made the impossible happen nineteen times and written each one down; her own list is evidence she cannot refile.

Getting her to talk:

On success she shows them her notebook: Handout H. She shows them the phone.

The phone. A 2022 phone in a purple case, screen cracked corner to corner, completely dead. It appeared on her pillow at 3:07 this morning. She has held it all day. She has not charged it, because if it turns on she will have to decide whether to listen.

Recovering the voicemail. Technology, Average , one hour: charge it, mirror the cracked screen to a laptop, and find the voicemail cached on the device from July 2024. On failure, a phone repair shop on West 26th Street can do it by 11 a.m. tomorrow, which is too late. A second attempt after a Fiona call is allowed.

The voicemail. Duration 0:34. Received 17 July 2024, 2:51 a.m. From: Mom.

The choice is Maddie's. Do not force it and do not roll for it. The characters can offer to sit with her, to have Curtis there, to wait. If Maddie listens, the petition is answered (Chapter Three). Characters with Awakened Blood feel the garage stop sloping. Every clock in the house keeps time tonight. At Lakeshore General, the night nurse on four notices room 411 is warm.

If Maddie will not listen tonight, the characters can still seal the relic. The voicemail stays on the phone for another day.

Curtis, if he hears it, goes out to the back step and stays there a long time. Joan, if she hears it, says, "She never let anybody read that notebook," and goes to find it.

Scene Seven: Containment and Transport

Whenever the characters move the reliquary, run the Class II handling and transport rules (Universe Guide, Chapter Nine) and the relic's own rules (Chapter Six of this book).

Sealing it. Place it in an iron-lined case (small) and close the case: no check, 15 minutes with proper gloves. Tag and Bag and Bag and Tag apply. A closed iron case stops the relic's reach and stops the Petition Clock (Chapter Three). Consecrated sealing tape requires Theology 1+ to apply; it is not needed to stop the clock, but it means Wes Pruitt, Drury, or anyone else cannot open the case without visibly breaking the seal.

Handling barehanded. Anyone who touches the reliquary without relic-grade gloves makes a Composure check, Average . On failure, the character's own most-missed lost object turns up near them within a day. It is harmless and it means the relic has noticed them.

Breach. If the reliquary is dropped, or the case is opened outside a vault, or the relic is carried unsealed in a vehicle, make a Containment check, Average . On failure, run a Class II breach (Universe Guide, Chapter Nine): everyone within 25m makes a Composure check, Average , or gains 1 Strain, as every lost thing within 25m from the last ten years arrives at once: keys, gloves, a child's shoe, a dog leash, a hundred coins, a letter never delivered. Re-seal the relic to end it. The things stay.

Wes Pruitt, 1:40 a.m. If the reliquary is still in the garage, Wes pries the side door with a crowbar, stuffs the reliquary barehanded into a gym bag, and drives to Drury's hotel on the Bayfront. If the characters are watching the garage, Wes is easy to spot (Perception, Easy ) and runs if challenged. He fights only if cornered, and surrenders at his first Wound. He knows nothing but a phone number and $600.

Scene Eight: 3:07 a.m.

Run this scene only if the Petition Clock reaches 4: the petition is open and the reliquary is unsealed.

At 3:07 a.m., wherever the reliquary is, the temperature drops hard. The lights stay on. Then someone comes up the stairs, or across the parking lot, or down the hotel corridor: a woman of about forty in a gray sweatshirt and hospital socks, her hair wet as if from rain. She looks like Laura Hale. She knows Maddie's name. She does not know anyone else's.

This is Laura as a Grief Shade (Universe Guide, Chapter Eleven, and Chapter Six of this book). She is not violent. She is looking for her daughter to tell her something, and she cannot remember what, and the not-remembering is unbearable to her, and she pushes that grief into everyone in the room.

What the characters can do:

If the relic is with Drury. Drury wakes in his hotel room with her standing at the foot of the bed. He is a professional: he gets the reliquary into his own iron case within a minute, and she withdraws. At 8 a.m. he calls whatever number the characters left him, or the Lyncean Office's public line, and offers to sell the relic back at cost. His voice is not steady.

On camera. Laura's Concealment is 2, so recordings of her are clear (Universe Guide, Chapter Twelve). If she comes to the Hale garage, Ray Kowalczyk's doorbell camera records a woman in hospital socks crossing the Hales' driveway at 3:07 a.m. Ray sends it to the police as a prowler. See Chapter Seven.