Degeneration Roll Results: 6, 9, 9, 10, 10 = 4 successes (I will never roll like this in a fight.)
XP Expenditure Investigation. All this creeping around and cop show osmosis is paying off.
Essay Questions
- What do you make of all this?
Riley’s occult knowledge is limited to stuff she learned in X-Files and a little bit of myth and folklore stuff she picked up through art studies and patron requests. She is struggling against using a supernatural excuse for the events that have transpired, and is angling toward coming up with an explanation that is possible within her worldview, if implausible.
She can’t explain it yet, though, and she knows that. She’s a little shaken, but isn’t panicked. With this enigma dropped in front of her, Riley is spending most of her mental energy in figuring it out. Left to her own devices, she’s going to filling some paper and canvases with the monster’s visage, searching her memory and her instincts for something she may have missed that will help explain things. She wants to figure out what it is, where it came from and if there’s more stuff out there like it.
She’s glad the thing is dead. Even if it used be human, Riley saw the crime scene photos of the dead old woman and saw the wounds on Sensei and Mulder. It can’t hurt anybody else, and that’s good enough, even if no one else ever appreciates what they did.
- Get out of jail free.
The group did nothing wrong, and in fact two of them almost died for the trouble of bringing down a killing machine, but Riley knows no one else realizes that. They have no substantial evidence — her photos and even Newbie’s video won’t hold up, because no one will want to believe it. She should know — Riley’s skeptic enough that if she hadn’t fought the thing directly, she’d still be buying her own “big guy in a gorilla suit” theory.
She’s a cop’s kid, and knows a few things about how cops work. She knows they’ve got a ton of paperwork to fill out, and if every “i” isn’t dotted and every “t” crossed, she knows they’ll have their paper-pushing superiors that never see a crime scene careening up their asses at 80 miles an hour. This sort of scene is a cop’s nightmare, because even if they arrest whoever is conveniently standing around, there’s still going to be a giant hole of unanswered questions.
So, first and foremost, Riley is sympathetic, not defensive. She empathizes that this is a horrible mess to sort out, and if she had an explanation that would bring everything together to make sense, she’d give it. It’s the truth… she wants a reasonable explanation as much as they do.
Her statement is going to be honest, with omitted details. She’s not going to tell them she saw a 7-foot monster in the alleyway trying to eviscerate Mulder, and it just conveniently melted in the rain after it died. She’s going to explain that in the dark, the rain and concern for Mulder’s safety when he cried out, when she rushed around the corner, she could have sworn she saw whatever bowled her over on its way out of the latest victim’s house. Obviously, she was at some point mistaken, or the weather, darkness and creepiness of the attacks have been taking a toll on her perception. She doesn’t know how the woman at the scene could have done the attacks. She had no idea it was even a woman that she was attacking; she just saw Mulder being attacked and she acted.
Riley shows more concern for Sensei and Mulder’s well-being than she does for proving her innocence of this or that. She knows she acted within the bounds of self-defense, and whatever that woman was, she’d been a threat. She does try to surreptitiously milk for some more information about who the woman was. At no point, though, does she mention her dad; she figures she’ll get out of this on her own or she won’t.
- Fight Analysis
We sort of kicked the crap out of the thing, didn’t we? It would have been better to have been able to incapacitate the monster without killing it, since having a live body instead of a dead one generally makes questioning by the cops go easier. We don’t have the contacts or the reach to deal with covering up murders and sooner or later we’ll end up in prison. (Or we can work on getting those kinds of contacts and reach; but it’ll take a while and I don’t know that we’re at the “let’s be professional monster-hunting vigilantes!” stage yet.)
I don’t know about a tactical leader. The closest thing to somebody we’d all listen to is Sensei. It might emerge naturally as we work together on these kinds of bizarre hijinks together.
We could definitely use some fear-managing tactics. Locking up and taking off in the face of Terrible Things That Should Not Be is not a very useful response and will lead to teammates being eaten.
I don’t have a lot of analysis because our fight with the monster was over so fast, it’s hard to say what we did well or not. I think being pretty quick on the uptake definitely helped us. And being armed didn’t hurt. But, like I said, we might need to lighten up on the lethal force.
- Monster Theories
Riley is totally staying away from supernatural explanations, and is leaning toward milder conspiracy theories. While it makes her sound a little like Mulder, it’s at least better than calling it a weregorilla. She is considering genetic experimentation, a la Isle of Dr. Moreau, as a possible explanation. It would take care of the hybridization of human and animal features that the monster exhibited, and perhaps it got loose — leading to the cover-up of its real identity.
She really hates sounding like Mulder. But she admits she’s got nothing more plausible.
