(Call of Cthulhu) Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs by 秒針, Japonism(2021年更新版) by INT の犠牲者卓, 2021/12/22
This is the final part, day 3, of the narrative replay for the Japanese Call of Cthulhu Scenario, 神々は電⼦ドラッグの夢を⾒るか, or Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs, written by 秒針 of the INT の犠牲者卓 , or Victims of Int group. If you haven’t read or listened to Day 1 or Day 2, I read or listen to it in parts or the entire thing here.
If you’re a player, or just don’t want to know everything about the scenario ahead of time, you can read or listen to the first, spoiler-lite section of my review of it here. You can find the Japonism bundle with this scenario in it on booth.pm
Onto Day 3 of Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs?
Midnight passed, and though tired, Itsumi thought there was still more they could do before HMF kicked off in the morning. With a call to Detective Gakuto he might be able to weasel into interrogating one of the arrested Serialists, and it might be worth staking out the HMF grounds. Majima and Akira agreed, and though Daiki wanted little more than to make the most of his day off and go to sleep relatively early, he would follow along.
Luckily Detective Gakuto worked nights and gladly volunteered to join Itsumi and guarantee an interrogation. The suspect seemed an ordinary man. Late 30s, musician. He looked haggard and at first didn’t answer Itsumi’s questions, just shook his head saying he’d explained everything already so many times, and no one listened. But Itsumi would listen. He told the Serialist he knew about Tristan, he knew about the heretics, he knew about HMF.
The Serialist nearly sprang out of his chair. He begged Itsumi to stop it! Tristan was the Devil’s Music! It would destroy them all!
Itsumi calmed him down, asking in particular how to stop Tristan. The serialists had been planning to play a song from their god at the HMF to counter Tristan. They didn’t know if it would work, and well knew it would be dangerous, but what else could they do? The HMF organizers wouldn’t cancel, the financing company wouldn’t pull the plug, and the police wouldn’t listen!
When asked about the heretics, about Masahi, the man snarled. The fools thought the Devil’s Music was from God. Blasphemy. Masahi was the worst among them. He’d heard the music, and knowing what it was, still pushed ahead to broadcast it with the whole world! Though, if it hadn’t been for Masahi being involved in HMF, the church might have never learned of Tristan at all. God be praised for small miracles.
Itsumi showed the suspect the member lists he’d found at the church, and also had Detective Gakuto check which members had been arrested. Between the three of them, they narrowed down two members that had slipped through police and were known to be heretics. The suspect told Itsumi to be careful. Those two thought they carried out the will of god – they wouldn’t let anyone stop them easily.
Leaving the police station, Gakuto said he wouldn’t be able to have the event canceled, or even Tristan stopped, not just based on the words of a jailed cultist. But knowing that two possibly dangerous Serialists were still on the loose, he’d be able to keep more officers on the lookout, and loop Itsumi into the command structure. If he spotted anything untoward at HMF, he could call on the officers and they’d know who he was.
Parting ways, Itsumi met back up with the others and drove down to the HMF site at the Roppongi Art Hills complex, stopping on the way to pick up his well-worn bokuto. The heavy wood felt good in his hands, though he hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. The Art Hills complex had a couple people walking through on their way home or to night work, but otherwise it was silent. A public space, there wasn’t anything impeding their wandering around, but nothing had been set up yet. With little else to do, they decided to camp out in Itsumi’s car.
They awoke early as the first trucks pulled in and started unloading equipment. With the Chala ID badges they could wander around the stages and equipment areas without any problems. Tristan’s unveiling would be held at the main stage in front of the Hotel Grand Continental, a towering structure of reflective glass.
As more and more people poured in, stages took form, and booths for souvenirs and refreshments sprang up, Kenji Charashima from Chala Inc. called Daiki, telling him that Tristan was being transported to the HMF now in a white van. Unfortunately Chala had a lot of white vans and he couldn’t say exactly which white van… But when it arrived he’d get a notification, so he’d call Daiki back right away!
They waited backstage at the main event space, keeping an eye out on the crowd and making note of the equipment. Lots of speakers, all over the place. Numerous back ups and failsafes. Lots of staff. If they had to disable the speakers they’d be noticed for sure. Being hassled by staff didn’t matter much beyond wasting precious time, but it opened them up to the heretics, if they were watching. They’d need to get at the equipment running Tristan directly, and hopefully quietly.
By the time the event kicked off, thousands of people had come. New crews, musicians, tech enthusiasts, simple passerby, professionals, amateurs, tourists, families. Police were scattered around entrances and key places, but nowhere near enough to keep an eye on everyone.
Forty-five passed. Only fifteen minutes until the special event. Until Tristan. Still no call from Kenji. They were getting ready to start pulling out wires at random when Daiki’s phone finally rang. Tristan had arrived! It was being run on a server stack in an equipment tent, just off the stage. Right under their noses.
Trying to blend in, the four walked over to the tent, seeing it full of blinking servers and flashing screens. Akira gulped and pulled out his laptop. A pair of engineers busied themselves in the tent, and when they looked over at Akira plugging into the servers they had been expressly told to keep clear of, he shrugged, making his Chala badge clearly visible, and said he had to run a few last checks just be to be extra safe. An experienced liar by now, Akira convinced them completely, and they turned back to their work. Akria quietly puffed a sigh of relief and dove into his work.
It would take time, he knew. Tristan had spilled out of its USB drive all over the servers. It seemed to even be searching for a way out. He’d need to hunt it down, and he might be able to delay it a bit. But it would take some time.
The announcers’ voices rang out, giving a five minute countdown. Itsumi, Daiki, and Majima waited outside the tent. If Akira couldn’t finish it in time, could they just smash the servers?
Akira said maybe, but it was risky. Everyone would not only notice, but Tristan seemed more like a virus now than a simple audio file. If they didn’t spectacularly destroy every bit of equipment, it might still manage to play.
Majima still had the Serialists’ tune in his head. He’d had it all night. When he dazed his fingers started playing it on his thighs. Among the various audio equipment and instruments backstage was a keyboard. If Akira couldn’t finish in time, Majima offered, he could play the Serliasits song. They thought it might counter Tristan. The others thought this madness, if not impossible. The Serialists had planned a full orchestra. But it was better than nothing. Majima grabbed the keyboard and hooked up to the speakers, and practiced. Just in case.
The count down hit zero. Nothing happened. Akira gave a weak smile, still pounding on his keyboard. The two staff in the tent panicked, and Akira mumbled he was trying to get it working. But he needed time.
Daiki spotted movement in the crowd beyond the annoyed murmuring. Two men walking with purpose towards the edge of the stage, eyes on the equipment tent. Daiki met Itsumi’s eyes, pointed out the men, then dove into the crowd.
He pointed at the two men and shouted, “Look! Exile!”
Something about the surety in his voice, or the white shirt and tie, convinced everyone around him. Soon the crowd surged, hunting for the boy band, sweeping up the two bewildered heretics.
Itsumi called in to the police, telling them there were two dangerous men in the crowd, but he’d lost sight of them.
Majima wiped sweat from his eyes. His programs worked away at chasing Tristan into a corner. Only a little longer.
One of the men broke through the deluge of screaming fans, pushing past Daiki and up to the edge of the stage. Daiki stopped resisting. He’d done his part. Let the rest handle it now.
Majima got up from his piano, stood in between the man and the tent. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He wasn’t a fighter.
The man drew a knife.
Then Itsumi’s bokuto smashed down on the back of the man’s head, dropping him to the ground in a heap.
The other man had worked his way to the edge of the crowd, but stopped at seeing his companion face down in his pooling blood. Police arrived on either side, tackling and cuffing him.
They all turned to the tent at a triumphant woot to see Akira jumping and fist pumping the air. He got it! He’d killed the little bastard! He’d erased Tristan! And with Partita crippled and withering away, there wouldn’t be another. The four relaxed, relieved, tired. They’d done it.
The HMF staff stared in horror, though. There was no music! Thousands of people waited for a ‘secret event,’ and now they had nothing. The crowd milled, annoyed at discovering they didn’t get to see Exile, and now realising they might not see anything at all.
Majima gulped and carried his keyboard onto the stage, sat down, stretched his fingers, and started playing. The others had a brief moment of panic thinking Majima was about to play the Serialists’ song, but it was an unwarranted fear.
In the following months Majima gained some renown. His performance was… perfectly adequate. Confusing, really, for the audience, who didn’t quite see what was so secret about it. But the story eventually came out that Majima had stepped up to cover the blank spot, and people ate that up. Frequent TV gigs gave way to regular spots on a few shows, and a strong core audience for his music was secured. He always had a little ditty in his ear though, and working ever so slight themes from it into his pieces, his audience grew and grew, among musicians and laymen both, as well as obscure corners of the internet, and a particular church near Jiyuugaoka Station.
Itsumi filed report after report, and then follow-up reports, and interviews for those reports, then reports for the interviews, and so on. With Akira so thoroughly eradicating Tristan and Partita no evidence was left of the music’s powers, and so Itsumi left that out of his reports, focusing on the Serialist heretics, writing that they’d planned a terrorist act at the HMF, one the orthodox Serialists had tried and failed to prevent. The suicides had been due to constant harasment from the heritics as well. It didn’t entirely satisfy the higher-ups, but with Detective Gakuto’s assurances they eventually dropped it. Soon enough, Itsumi worked alongside Gakuto, this time as a detective partner.
Akira couldn’t let it go. He’d seen the complexity of Partita and Tristan, he’d seen the programs doing more than any human could have told them to do. It distracted him at work, so he quit. Very carefully, oh so very carefully, he started a new project. The others had forgotten something, and Akira had turned out to be a pretty good liar. He’d pocketed the USB drive in Masahi’s apartment after Majima had listened to it. Akira didn’t listen to it, of course not, but analysed it, searched around on the darker corners of the internet, and even got a gig at Pensure. Someone must have known this would happen. It must have been intentional. He’d find out who had made Tristan. All the while, the song sat on the USB drive, waiting. Music is made to be listened to.
Daiki had had enough excitement. His holiday had certainly been unique, nothing he would ever have experienced at work. But his work also didn’t try to kill him. Well, at least not immediately. He greeted the slow grinding down of his mental and physical health with gusto. No one at the office would drive him to driving pens through his eyes. At least not yet. Majima might become a world-famous pianist, Itsumi might become a detective, and Akira might become a self-designated international spy, but Daiki was an office worker. A salaryman. So he slipped on his suit, tightened his tie, and got on the train. He had a salary to earn.
Thank you for reading this narrative replay for Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs?
If you’d like to see how it turns out for your group, you can purchase the scenario from booth.pm, but the scenario is currently only available in Japanese.
Before you go, though, maybe take a look at some more scenario replays?
Seeds of Terror: The Mummy of Pemberley Grange, Endless Light, One Less Grave.
Chasioum: Amidst the Ancient Trees
Japonism: Do Gods Dream of Digital Drugs?
