Dracula Dossier Episode 49: Highway to Hell

“No one holds command over me. No man, no god, no Prince. Call your damnable Hunt. We shall see who I drag screaming down to Hell with me.” – Vampire: The Masquerade

Ruta Nacional 40, March 2014, Ten Minutes Ago

Ritter checks his weapons for the tenth time and says: “Why us? Why is it us doing this? Why aren’t EDOM or the CIA or Mossad fighting the vampires?”

Behind his back, a Sayaret Aluka operator mutters: “What am I? Chopped liver?”

No-one hears her over the strained laughter from the other agents.

Ruta Nacional 40, Now

As Dracula moves closer with murder in his eyes, Smyth wonders whether killing him will make the others stop fighting. Probably not, he decides, we couldn’t take the risk, so we’d have to kill them anyway, and they know that, so they’ll keep fighting if only to save their own skins.

Ritter shakes his head to clear it, extracts himself from melee with the Renfield and the werewolf, somehow not giving either of them an attack on him as he goes, and pumps his shotgun as fast as he can into the werewolf, eventually killing it. His attacked SA operator fires a short, controlled burst at the Renfield, but misses it.

Smyth and Emilia slash furiously at Count Dracula, and Emilia inflicts an unbelievable amount of damage on him – damage which would have killed any four normal men.

The isolated pair of SA operators focus all their attention on defending themselves against the melee attacks from the Renfields they’re facing, which means they withdraw without being injured.

Lonely hacks the Renfield in front of him to pieces in a frenzy, but when using his off hand against the werewolf he only manages to shake it.

Cartwright steps back from the Renfield and werewolf who have just dropped his attached SA operator, and guns them both down with magnetised iron from his shotgun. This frees up Vincent to shoot two Renfields in the back on full auto, and he drops them both.

The surviving Renfield and werewolf both miss their targets but Count Dracula – badly wounded as he is – resorts to his powers of mental domination. Emilia and Smyth see him appear to evaporate into mist before disappearing, while his voice echoes in their minds: Run. Run away from me as far and as fast as you can. Smyth manages to resist this telepathic order, but Emilia does not, and leaves the fight, followed by the faithful Messy the Wander Dog.

Ritter takes careful aim at the Renfield before him and kills him with a headshot. Lonely meanwhile stabs the surviving werewolf with Lilith’s Bite, his trademark weapon, and kills it.

Smyth switches his melee weapon for the M16 SA lent to him, and scans the area through the SLR sight, looking for Dracula. The Count is hunkered down next to one of the burning cars, only a few yards away, in the best cover he can find. Normally he would be able to sneak away, but…

“Got you,” Smyth says quietly, and shoots him cleanly in the head. Dracula finally collapses, incapacitated.

Aftermath

While Cartwright stabilises the downed Sayaret Aluka operator and bandages Ritter’s wounds, the rest of the team cut Dracula’s head off and put head and body, suitably bagged, in separate cars. Emilia and Messy slink back after a few minutes. On reflection, they decide to behead the Renfields and werewolves too, just to make sure. The police will later issue a statement bemoaning drug-related gang violence. As Ritter observes, what got Dracula killed was his arrogance; if he’d left the team alone, or run away when he could, they wouldn’t have needed – or been able – to kill him.

Having hacked the satnav to steer everything onto a road which they have just blown up and littered with burning cars and dead bodies, they decide to get the Hell out of Dodge. There’s a lake not far off, where they abandon the incriminating evidence before using thermite to incinerate Dracula’s remains and anything else they really don’t want found, and dump the ashes into the lake. Everyone is fit enough to hike out.

“What now?” Smyth asks. “I mean, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve done what I set out to do.”

“We need to get out of the country,” Ritter says, “And then we have some phone calls to make. I want to know how much of Dracula’s organisation is still active.”

“Isn’t Chile on the other side of those mountains?” says Lonely.

“I’ve always wanted to see Chile,” says Cartwright.

The camera dollies back and up as the team starts moving towards the nearest pass through the Andes, disappearing into the sunset.

GM Notes

The team got lucky in this fight. First, they killed everyone else in Dracula’s car, so he didn’t have any mobile blood bags to heal himself with. Second, Emilia inflicted four Wounds on him in one hit, taking him up to five – vampires in this campaign have Tougher Than Nails and Improved Nerves of Steel, so they have five Wounds and (being Undead as well) ignore Wound Penalties. Third, and this was planning more than luck, they set up the ambush so that Dracula was facing off against the two characters best suited to dealing with him and made sure they had the right gear to do so. Even so, without Smyth doing massive damage with his last shot, Dracula would have escaped using his invisibility. Plus, throughout the session I rolled appallingly badly, and the PCs rolled really well.

Ordering Emilia to attack herself or any of the PCs would have triggered a second saving throw against the Power, so it was safer to tell her to run for it.

For this episode I took a leaf out of Dragonbane‘s book and set up some combat actions for the Bad Guys in advance, including pre-calculating everyone’s Parry, Toughness, their probable actions and the dice rolls required for each. That was very helpful and I should do it more often.

Next up: Epilogue.