The Moloch: a setting sourcebook for KULT
Chapter 2: Strange People, Stranger Events
Peter and Kurt were asked to meet Hauptkommissar Lehmann (the police officer) at the precinct. Both get there punctually the next morning. The office is a large, shared room with some mobile brown separators to provide some privacy. They fail.
Lehmann is not there, but his colleague Oberkommissar Wellheim, whom Kurt saw the evening before, is. He tells them Lehmann's late but two guys from a task force would like a word with them. They're on their way.
While waiting, the two observe a young vagabond at another desk staring intensely at them. Once he has their attention he slowly shakes his head, then unnoticed by anyone else takes a sheet from the desk, crumples it and tosses it into the waste paper bin under the desk, then leaves.
The PCs ignore this (the players reasoned that their characters would not react to this as they have no reason to be suspicious). Then another policeman stops by asking them whether they were waiting for Lehmann. When they confirm that he says that unfortunately Lehmann was transferred to another precinct on short notice just this morning.
Wellheim returns with two very bulky, nordic types. They begin interrogating the PCs, asking for their personal info and their testimonies but without noting or recording anything. Then they say that a Mr. Nettesheim is going to meet them here soon.
Nettesheim comes and he looks like an identical twin of the man Kurt saw being run down in the street the evening before. His ratty sneer is highly unsettling. The officers ask the PCs to accompany them into more intimate questioning rooms. Kurt spots the homeless person again when they walk past the staircase; he's still shaking his head urgently. Kurt says he needs to take a leak, and while one of the officers waits for him the other and Nettesheim accompany Peter into a questioning room.
Kurt looks for a way out but there is none. But when he returns to the hall he finds that the officer is studying the photos of wanted persons on the other wall and Kurt decides to sneak past him down the stairs and out of the building. Here he sees the vagabond on the other side of the street and follows him into a narrow passage leading away from the main street.
Meanwhile Nettesheim tells Peter that this was a highly unusual procedure for them but it would have to do. Next thing he knows the bulky officer holds him in place effortlessly while Nettesheim takes a syringe out of his suitcase, finds a vein on Peter's arm and empties the green liquid inside the syringe into his arm. Peter begins to become sluggish. Then, the other officer comes in and says that Kurt has disappeared. Both officers go out to find him. Peter tries to reach the window but is hindered by Nettesheim who puts him back on a chair. Seconds later he falls into a deep sleep.
Kurt meets the vagabond whose voice now for the first time shows he's actually a girl. She urges him along but they go back when she finds out Peter isn't coming. They watch the officers standing on the step, looking around, while an ambulance arrives and two fat persons in white get out, grasp a stretcher and walk into an alley next to the precinct (where they will find an emergency staircase which can be accessed from the room Peter is in). Kurt and the vagabond whose name is Jessica decide they'll wait inside the ambulance until Peter is put inside, then drive off. They actually do this and get away with it.
Jessica leads Kurt, who is driving the ambulance, into an alleyway and onward through ever narrower streets until they can't go any further. She gets out, disappears for a minute and comes back with two other homeless people. These two take Peter between them and the group wanders on. They pass backyards, junkyards, ruins and dirt-strewn alleys with rats and mildew and walk on for more than an hour, never passing a normal street in the process. Eventually Jessica opens a hatch in an abandoned factory leading into the sewers and they climb down. The journey ends in a subterranean chamber where numerous homeless are huddled, cooking a skinned cat over coals and generally hanging around. Kurt and Peter now look and smell as if they belong here already.
They are greeted by a jovial person calling himself Herr Schmitt. He tells them they have run out of options because the Management was after them. They can only stay down here with the others, many of whom are refugees as they are. If they need to go back up (to rescue family, collects their savings etc.) they must do so quickly, then return, but it isn't safe so he wouldn't recommend it. Later they will meet the Professor and he will enlighten them on a point or two.
Kurt and Peter are shown a way out and they find that they have travelled a distance they couldn't have travelled on foot, and definitely not in just over an hour. Kurt knows his plastic is worthless but Peter takes some money from his account, then calls his wife and tells her to get out with their children. He being a state attorney they have discussed such a possible emergency in the face of terrorist threat and she complies. Then Kurt and Peter discard their mobile phones.
Kurt wants to see his father and they first recover Kurt's car from the vicinity of the precinct and then go to his father's company. There Kurt finds everyone highly agitated - Kurt's father hasn't been seen since Friday last week and there is an official person in the office who is investigating the books - the company has been declared bankrupt. Kurt uses a shower for the truck drivers to become a little cleaner and decides he should be leaving. On his way out he sees the official person - ratface again!
Kurt and Peter go to the villa of Kurt's father. There's a black Mercedes limousine parked near it which oversees the entrance. They drive on and enter the house through the back. Watching the limousine they see the passenger side open and out comes Ratface again, stretching his legs. Kurt's father is not here, the house looks thoroughly vandalized and searched, a car is missing. Kurt and Peter leave.
They were shown a certain symbol which they should look out for, pointing them towards a way back into the underground. They find this symbol near an empty house, pointing them towards a boarded-up window. They can push the boards away effortlessly, climb in and find a dissembled toilet with no installations left inside, the door filled in with bricks and a hole yawning where the toilet itself was. They climb down into the cellar where a walled-up narrow walkway leads to a hole in the back wall, this again leading down into the sewers. Here they meet a bag lady who takes them along for part of the journey. The guides change; the PCs see several new signs they don't know yet and one other interesting feature: a cord dangling from the ceiling of a sewer with rat and bird heads attached, feathers and what looks like a reptile skin. They ask their guide about this and he says it's the entry to the territory of the others. 'Other humans living down here?' they ask. 'Not humans. Just others. I never met them. We respect their territory.'