Nomad 6's player was unavailable for this session.
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So the team now return to their lead in Room 1517 in Hotel Doihara. Hotel Doihara is a 35-storey-building whose front windows have screens over them that show a number of pictures of happy women's faces, sometimes holding puppies up by their face. A doorman in a creamy golden suit and bow tie stands by the revolving doors, smoking a cigarette that he flicks away at their approach. He asks if they're visitors or hotel patrons checking in and whether any luggage will be coming. They say they're visitors and head on through.
The lobby is shaped like a backwards L with creamy walls and golden carpets and a large curved desk behind which stands a Hispanic woman whose name badge identifies her as Rodriguez and who speaks Japanese and English with a Japanese accent. The bump of the L is divided by an aquarium in the shape of a curvy line filled with jellyfish that Leningrad identifies as largely harmless.
They speak to Rodriguez and state they'd like to visit Room 1516. She asks for the name of the guest they'd like to visit. Tokyo quickly hacks the room registry with her neural device and comes up with the name 'Michelle Warwick' - British National and Le Reve saleswoman. Rodriguez nods and patches a call through to see if Michelle with accept guests. Tokyo hacks into the phone (which is an Internet phone anyway) and does a poor duplication of a British accented woman's voice speaking Japanese. As she only says Yes and No, though, it'd be hard to catch.
Rodriguez gets her permission to send them up and gives them all guest pass cards, warning them not to lose them as it'll be hard to leave otherwise. They head into an elevator (it only opens when a card is inserted) and head up to floor 12.
Tokyo hacks the security cameras and gets a still of Michelle Warwick from her check in time to send to the others PDA. The recording shows Michelle taken to her room by a bellhop. They go inside her room. A couple minutes later he leaves, she calls him back flirtatiously, flashes her phone against his image code on his I.D. badge to pay him a bonus, and he leaves. She has long black curls and a bright smile.
A few of the team instantly figure her for dead. Especially when Tokyo hacks the key card registry and finds that her key card was last used regularly on 06/07/2052 and then twice more on 08/07/2052 to enter and leave within an hour.
Tokyo hacks Michelle Warwick's credit card account which is unfortunately with a British bank and immediately sets up against a sysadmin. She manages to win (it was very close) and delay the sysadmin while she picked up the credit card records which showed that she purchased a flight to Japan back in March amongst other ordinary purchases in Britain. She purchased lunch from the Sheffield City Airport on 01/07/2052 and then a late dinner in Haneda Airport. She made a few purchases about the town but these purchases stopped on 06/07/2052 at around mid-afternoon with a taxi ride. Some of these purchases may have been in the post as there is a cost included for a shipping company. From that point on, there has only been British utility and rent transactions and Doihara Hotel Room hire that has been withdrawn on 07/07/2052, 14/07/2052, 21/07/2052 and likely tomorrow as well. In three more such transactions, she will have maxed her credit card.
Room 1516 is a room of creamy carpets with a double bed flanked by IKEA cabinets topped with lamps. Rich purple curtains are pulled back over the glass sliding doors that lead out onto a short balcony that overlooks the laneway below. A large screen on the wall before the bed that stands over a long, low cabinet that also contains a mini fridge. A small section of the room by the entrance is taken up with a bathroom / toilet. A makeup case is in the bathroom, a travel suitcase by the long narrow cabinet is mostly empty (clothing redistributed amongst the cabinets), and a British design laptop sits in the corner. There are a few shopping bags from Japanese retail outlets that includes a fluffy robot kitten and a robot fish. She has no handbag or I.D. anywhere in the room.
Miami uses his CSI kit suitcase, luminol and UV glasses. No bloodstains detected in likely spots - even on the balcony. He also takes a copy of the fingerprints from the make up box and finds a loose hair in her hair brush to run a DNA analysis. Of course, he'll need a copy of the original to truly make a comparison.
London calls his newfound contact in British Intelligence (remember his cover is true - he had to purchase three dots in Sworn Officer for that) as they didn't want to try and hack the police database of a super paranoid country.
"Hello this is Bellevue Psychiatric Institution," says a smooth British male voice.
"Hello, London calling," said London, making the appropriate call-and-answer.
"Ahh, how can I help you?"
"I need to speak to Records."
"One moment. Transferring."
Another voice picked up. This one female. "Records. How can I help you?"
"I need the file on Michelle Warwick."
"Very well. Please confirm your coordinates."
Tokyo told London their longitude and latitude.
"Confirmed," said the voice. "Please connect us to a secure computer."
Tokyo offered her PDA, refusing to make contact using her neural network, but when they started hacking into other sections of her computer she repelled the intrusion.
"A secure computer, please," said the voice.
London offered up his smart phone. A program started downloading onto his phone.
"Thank you, I have installed CASEY and give you the record. Please return the file when you have no use for it."
"Thank you," said London, hanging up. He spoke into his phone. "Hello CASEY, can I see the file on Michelle Warwick?"
Much of the file was rather ordinary but it did provide a fingerprint and DNA sample (the latter necessary for international travel) and that did match up with the fingerprint and DNA sample found within the hotel room.
Tokyo figured the body might be in a dumpster in the laneway below the balcony. London expresses doubt that a person would try to hide a body by dropping it fifteen floors. The two headed downstairs to bust open the padlocks on the two dumpsters that were overlooked by the staff doors.
Leningrad felt a sudden chill in the air as he gazed out over the balcony and, guessing it was a ghost, he activated his Lore of Ghosts and turned around to see her passing through the glass balcony doors and searching around the room. Her body was translucent and it faded off down the calves to nonexistent feet.
"Where am I? Where did I put it? It has to be around here somewhere," she murmured.
"Hello? Michelle?" asked Leningrad.
Miami glared at him, realising that he could speak to ghosts which was a talent that his host once held but which he no longer had. He started seeking out an anchor but found it difficult as he had no supernatural ability to do so.
Michelle ignored them. "I don't know where I am. I'm missing it. How can I go back home without it? I can't return."
"You're missing a body as well," said Leningrad.
Michelle continued to ignore him.
"Michelle, what are you looking for?"
She finally looked over at him. "Oh, hello. Who are you?"
Leningrad thought a moment. "Dave. What are you looking for?"
"Myself. I need it or else I can't go home. Have you seen me?"
"Michelle, you're dead."
She continued to look around for a bit.
"Michelle?"
"Oh, hello. I'm sorry. Did I let you in?"
Miami, hearing second hand what she was looking for, guessed that she were after her passport which would have been in her handbag. It would be hard to get back into Britain without it. He headed downstairs to see if it were in the dumpster.
Leningrad used his Lore of Ghosts to grant her sentience but his abyssal Torment twisted it at the last moment and she recoiled as if slapped and cowered by the wall. She told him that she remembered going onto the balcony for some air and there was a sting, like a bee sting, and she couldn't breathe. She also asked after the bellhop, Takahiro, who she thought was cute. "I'm dead, aren't I?" she asked a little weakly.
Leningrad took this moment to leave, knowing that she would soon become hostile to the living.
Downstairs there was no luck with the dumpsters although London did find a tooth that had rolled under a dumpster. Miami sought the violence of the landing through Lore of Patterns, purposefully opening himself to the Torment to reach further into the past. As her death caused a ghost, I allowed him to reach further back than he normally would do so. He heard her making a choking sound as she fell and hit the laneway.
Tokyo hacked the security cameras and checked the approximate time and found that the doorman was by the security doors smoking when she fell. He fetched an older couple in business suits and they dressed her as a homeless bum and called the police who took her away. It looked like they took advantage of her death to keep drawing on her card.
They asked at the desk for the bellhop and met him behind the aquarium where they were asked to wait by the receptionist. There was some privacy there as it was around 3.00AM and the receptionist was just out of the line of sight. Takahiro arrived and offered to help them with their luggage when it arrived.
"Like you helped Michelle with her luggage?" asked Leningrad.
They tried to get him alone but Takahiro refused. "For all I know, she fell off the balcony because of you."
They learned from him that a woman was found dead, swollen around the neck, who looked like she had taken a tumble from the balcony. The hotel manager called her in as a Jane Doe so they could keep claiming the rent from her account - or so Takahiro assumed. He'd noticed the room remained booked out but he never saw Michelle again. She had a nosy long-term guest, Mrs. Takashi, who had told him that she hadn't been there for weeks though some rough men went in there once at night. Mrs. Takashi also said that Michelle was a fool because she let in a technician, an adrogynous looking woman, into her hotel without checking with reception. The woman wasn't Japanese but she was "some type of Asian - Korean, Vietnamese? They all look alike." The date was 06/07/2052, sometime after dark and before 11.00PM.
Searching the footage again, Tokyo got a picture of the woman heading to the hotel room and Tokyo used FaceBook's system to track her down to a page for Muoi Kai that hadn't been updated for the past 7 years. The last serious of comments were based around a motorcycle crash that left her invalided and put her Martial Arts and Stunt Driving future behind her. She wanted to be a stuntwoman in the Japanese movies.
They then headed out the front to meet the doorman who had so callously discarded Michelle's body. They were hopeful he'd stolen her handbag and so had the ghost's passport. Leningrad tried to knee him in the nuts as a greeting but London was trying to pull him into a grapple and so he kneed his leg and as he stumbled out of London's grip, Tokyo missed a tazer grab on his shoulder (her fingertips have Tazers in them). In other words, they all failed to get a single success.
He tried to pull away from them, but Leningrad stabbed him in the leg a glancing blow, Tokyo dropped him with her tazer hands, and Leningrad threw him over his shoulder and took him back into the laneway. London cuffed him to the dumpster's wheels. The doorman had pissed himself from the tazing and was quite shocked.
"We're here about the woman you bundled up as a Jane Doe," said one of them.
"Which one?" asked the man, shocked.
They soon found out that this had happened three times over the past few years. If the individuals fell, he'd assumed that they were already dead so what was the harm in quietly getting rid of them? They didn't want that kind of reputation for their hotel, after all. If they kept drawing from the credit cards, did it really matter? The team threatened to kill him if he didn't have something more for them. He told them he'd made a deal this time to cover up the body for an Asian woman for money and for footage from the last few incidents to disappear. She'd come on a motorcycle and he'd taken a picture of her license plate. Tokyo took the pictures off his phone and took the phone with her. They said they'd come back for him if he didn't inform the families of the deceased and turn himself in to the police.
Tokyo ran the license plates through a database her company had purchased access to and got an address. Hopefully it was the right one.
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By the way, in this game the upgraded nWoD variants of the lores are a little different than the originals.
Also, in all of these instances the individuals could speak Japanese and English so all of the players got to be involved in the interviews.
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