===== Genesis - Session 24 Recap =====

The sun was setting over St. Petersgrad harbor when Harold dropped his teacup.

It didn't slip. He heard it shatter against the deck without looking down. The sound of it brought six weapons cocking simultaneously — the bodyguards spread across the aft deck of the VSS Dominion. Behind the party, the arcane cannon traversed slowly in its housing, its barrel sweeping a lazy arc over the harbor. The metallic scent of a recent test firing still hung in the evening air. Fog was rolling in off the water — not enough to hide anything, just enough to frame it.

Harold looked at Viktor. //"It's been a while. I think I'm going to enjoy this."//

Lusat had been waiting for this. He pulled out the pocket watch — the Rift-Flicker, taken from Lucian Drekanov, Harold's own brother — and held it where Harold could see it. Then he cast //Haste// on Thorun and told Harold, in the flat tone of certainty: //"Only through death will you find the hope you seek."// Harold did not flinch. What followed was not clean.

Thorun, hasted and furious, made for the arcane cannon. He scaled a crate, used his friend's new horse as a step stool, got his footing, and swung his hammer true, triggering its Shard Forge Resonance. The cannon housing detonated along its fault lines. Brass fittings and wrought iron blew outward in all directions. Thorun turned his hammer on the gunner and finished him with a single swing. The cannon and its operator were gone.

So was the horse. Mutated and panicked by the shard-infused explosion, it bolted across the full length of the deck and trampled directly into Viktor and Carl, knocking Carl prone. Harold laughed — the most genuinely amused anyone had seen him all night.

The explosion left Bogdan completely unharmed. A phial in his pocket had absorbed the shard magic entirely and Harold clocked it immediately. Using powerful psychic magic he singled Bogdan out and forced him overboard into the water between the ship and the docks.

Viktor summoned the //Echoes of Kaali// — five spectral figures that rushed the remaining bodyguards at his direction. The bodyguards pulled bayonets and started slashing. One echo dissolved.

Lusat unleashed a //Fireball// at Harold. Three bodyguards who had line of sight on Lusat fired their revolvers in defense of their charge, all three connecting. Viktor reacted and shielded his friend from one shot while the other two landed. The fireball engulfed Harold — and both port-side cannons caught in the blast cooked off simultaneously, a cascading detonation that sent Harold's tea table sailing off the stern into the harbor. Harold's smirk held, but it was costing him something now.

What Harold did next nobody saw coming. He reached out psychically to the mutated horse — still loose on the deck, still panicked — and issued a mental command it had no fortitude to resist. Harold directed it back into the party. Carl planted his polearm and stopped the charge cold, but the horse still connected a hoof strike before it ran out of momentum. Viktor erupted: //"Every single one of your side quests has fucked us in some way!"// Harold, bleeding and singed, laughed maniacally at the chaos he had authored.

Thorun, hasted, leaped down from the cannon platform and charged Harold directly. Two bodyguards fired as he came off the platform. Both missed. Thorun hit Harold like a freight train. For the first time the smirk twisted — the arrogance becoming anger, if not rage. Thorun kept going: a second attack, a third, then a full action surge. Harold finally responded with an arcane command that twisted Thorun's mind at the last moment, redirecting his final attacks into a bodyguard instead of Harold himself. Harold Drekanov stood bleeding and battered in the light of Carl's //Moonbeam//. The smile broke.

Harold pushed into Thorun's mind again — pricking, finding weak points — and cast //Dominate Person//. The thousand-yard stare settled over Thorun's face and everyone could see it. Harold walked slowly across the burning deck, placed his hand on Thorun's shoulder, and said quietly: //"Kill them, please."// Thorun turned toward the party with white knuckles.

Bogdan pulled himself up from the water below onto the docks. He placed //Hex// on Harold, then cast //Wall of Fire// upcast and centered it on Harold, catching Harold, Thorun, and a remaining bodyguard inside the inferno. Harold tried to //Counterspell// it and failed. The wall went up. Harold Drekanov's final inhale was choked with fire. His last breath was a guttural wail that rolled out across the bay. He went down on the aft deck of the VSS Dominion in a pile of burnt shardisite-lined coat and bent filigree, his derringer still in his hand, unfired.

The remaining bodyguards set their arms on the deck. Then a slight, imperceptible nod passed between them — and one by one they went over the railing into the water below. They were loyal to who they were loyal to. It wasn't the party. They were not pursued.

Lusat looted the body. The shard-filigree derringer had survived the fire. Harold's Department of Continental Affairs lapel pin — magical, intact — was still on what remained of his coat. Everything else had burned.

Viktor picked up Harold's skull by what was left of the hair and walked with purpose to the bridge.

Harold's second-in-command was behind the glass when he arrived. He saw the skull pressed against the window — burnt flesh, scorched hair, still recognizably Harold — and wet himself. The captain, standing beside him, looked at it differently. There was no fear on his face. What was there looked more like resignation, or maybe readiness — the expression of a man who always knew there would be a reckoning. He looked down at his Viroc insignia, pulled it off, set it on the table. He then opened the door for Viktor.

The second-in-command was escorted off the bridge by the captain's personal guards at Viktor's request. Viktor informed the captain that the destination was still Murmansk. That the purpose was still to confront Minerva Sedgewick, the captains face hardened. But, when Viktor told him the purpose of this voyage was not to restore authority over Viroc but to bring hope to the people Viroc had been trampling for decades, the captain's entire identity was reorganized in that moment. Whatever remained of his loyalty to the tyrannical institution of Viroc Industries died in that moment. With that reform it appeared as though years of hardship and tribulation melted from his features. His eyes refocused on Viktor and he replied matter-of-factly that they could be ready to embark as scheduled in three hours.

Viktor raised the question of rechristening the ship — the SS Nadine. When he explained why, there was no longer any question about where the captain's loyalties lay. He was their man. This was their moment. In twenty minutes, the flagship of Europan authority would proclaim itself anew as a beacon of hope for the world.