Stories from The Between RPG
By Alex White
- 6 minutes read - 1156 wordsThe Between 2nd March 2025
Players
- Jen M - Valentine Demaris, The Undeniable; whose memory dates back to Roman times and dresses as male or female to suit their needs
- Diana - Paloma Carrión, The Mother; a scientist who is trying to create anew her dead lover, Winston.
(We only concluded one day session on this adventure)
Day
It is late breakfast, and the weekly arrival of specialist pies from Figg’s bakery—the best in North London—is delivered as usual.
Valentine takes one of the pies, bisects it sharply, and then picks her way through it, with a bit of a glazed look on her face. Paloma sees that Valentine is a little distracted and takes a pie for herself, starting to scoop out the crust on the top.
Partway through eating, Valentine finds a terrible bit of gristle or something - but when she spits it out into a handkerchief finds that it is the tip of a human pinky finger. She retreats to the WC, and when she returns has a big decanter of sherry, which she takes liberally.
Paloma investigates with all her scientific curiosity (not shared by Valentine) and determines that although this set of pies has human meat in all of them, it is the first time that this has occurred. Previous sets of pies which they have eaten are OK. She stores the finger tip in a little vial of gin as a preservative, and attempts to reconstruct what seems to be bits of a hand from pie contents.
Meanwhile Valentine investigates the box and discovers a hand written note which says ‘to my beloved Demaris, love Mr Figg’
“Dating must be weird for you” Paloma says.
Valentine replies “you have no idea…”
The get in touch with DI Pettigrew who goes to arrest Mr Figg. This is clearly a police case and they can sort it out.
Vanessa is out of town, so they decide to pursue investigation of the Whatley Camera.
One of the earlier clues was an orrery in the photograph which represented the seven celestial realms, and Valentine sends a note to her contact Brisbane to find out more information about them.
In preparation for visiting the Camera Obscura Society, Valentine decides to dress as his masculine personality, and he finds a dress for Paloma and helps her get her hair… well, interesting even if it isn’t very orderly. Smartly dressed, Paloma finds her posture changes a little automatically!
At the smart Kensington house where the society meet, the door is opened by the lady of the house, Portia Abernathy. She is wearing some kind of sheer black kaftan which shockingly leaves little to the imagination. Her hair is plaited and woven up around her head a little like a crown, and she has a small, tight mouth. Portia recognises Valentine immediately, and wants to talk in detail with him, and sends Paloma off with the houseboy to talk to her husband, Cyrus.
Portia speaks to Valentine, and is attempting to seduce him a little; flattering him, drawing his hand over to rest on her breast to feel how much her heart is beating, and so forth. Valentine is unmoved by her efforts, and walks around the room, speaking to her while she watches his firm derrière, and then approaching her, untwining some of her braids and then gently but firmly holding them to control her head.
Valentine removes her belt and suggests that he bind her, but she refuses, and counters with an offer that he returns in two days time at the new moon, so that they can together photograph his girlfriend and learn new truths. As a token of her intentions, she pulls a copy of Dante’s Inferno off the shelf and bids he read it before returning.
Meanwhile the houseboy has lead Paloma to see Cyrus Abernathy. He is seated in what looks like a laboratory of optics, and is wearing outlandish garb - a form-fitting white body suite, tight in all the right places, and with silver cords tied around his biceps, his thighs, and his neck. He is curious that Paloma is a doctor, and he describes his dissatisfaction about being rejected by the Royal Society so many times. He explains to her how he thinks photographs are like pocket dimensions, parallel worlds to ours. Paloma sees a monocle, magnifying glass, and telescope each with exactly the same form of cracks on them. Cyrus lets her look at one of his special photographs through them and rather than the chromatic fringing that she expected to see from the fractures there is strange fringing in silver, black, gold, and white.
Paloma asks whether he could create the cracks in her compact mirror, and emboldened by her flattery agrees to. He places three quartz rods in a triangle around the compact, and mutters in a strange language while carefully cracking the compact.
Paloma is watching him carefully, intently, and she suddenly remembers that terrible argument she had had with her Winston. She had been out at an underground circle who met in secret to dissect and discuss. It was a stimulating academic environment and the sun was rising when she returned home, to find Winston tired, cheated and enraged. He shouted, said that she loved her craft more than him, and walked out. That choice of his to leave her had been so lonely.
She is in the same kind of zone watching Cyrus, and spots exactly how and what he does, and memorises the weird pointless chant he is making.
And then it is done. Her compact can be used to see the strange fringing in the photographs. She doesn’t spot it anywhere else that she views through the mirror.
Cyrus suggests that she returns in a couple of days time, at the new moon. The houseboy then comes and brings Paloma back to Valentine, and shows them both out.
They discuss their findings as they leave. The moon phases, the cracking of the glasses, the strange distortion. Interesting that Portia didn’t want to be photographed herself.
When they return home, there is a message from Brisbane who says there are only six celestial realms! He knows nothing of a seventh.
Reading the copy of dantes inferno, it is different - it has an extra chapter that mentions a fragrant void, and is a of mixture Italian words from different centuries that seem out of place in a 16th century edition.
As Paloma reads out the chant sounds, Valentine realises that it is in the dead Babylonian language, and that the chant is of some strange mathematics.
Meanwhile DI Pettigrew returns. They have Mr Figgs, and he is banged up in the Bedlam asylum. They haven’t caught the rest of the family, and all Mr Figgs will say is some weird kind of nursery rhyme. They are welcome to go and visit if they think they can get more out of Figgs.