In the Rain

In the Rain is a modified WoD chronicle in which Mathew Clayne is the main character.

The World
The game takes place in an alternative reality, where the cold-war only recently ended in 1998, leaving the world, still recovering from this. The war in the middle-east still happenend, though and was one of the primary factors that lead to the end of the Cold-War.

The NATO countries are much more militarized in culture, buildings are typically made with inbuild shelters and constructed to resist earth-quakes, floods and great amounts of heat, while the shelters are meant to be safeguarding against radiation. Up until just recently, in all NATO countries, it was forced that all men upon reaching adulthood, had to undergo basic military training, and after that had to serve as members of their respective countries militia's. In 1982, it became a requirement for women too, in some NATO countries.

In most NATO countries, it was even required that children of the age 6 up until the age of 15 had to participate in Pre-military boy/girl scout organizations, and in order to motivate the young people to serve in the military professionally, and take longer educations in the military to better serve in case of world war 3 errupting against China and Russia, many governments made it difficult to get an education of any sort, unless getting it through the military.

History
History did not change a whole lot, it is more the fact that neither NATO nor, the Warzarwa Pact-countries ever stood down until in the late nineties. A lot of very small short wars errupted, mostly one of the two major factions against one of the opposite faction, that did not have Neuclear weapons, resulting in the other countries stepping in, and forcing the effort to a halt.

Capital City
Originally named New York City, Capital City became the undisputed capital of the NATO countries. The city is huge and dense, with a seeding underbelly of criminals.It has it's share of urban myths and attracts all sorts of personalities. A part of the city, known as "the zone" was sealed off, after a dirty bomb went off, and has been shut down for a long time, but rumour has it, that radiation is down enough that one can travel there again.

Other places of note in the city, include the gigantic prison "Captical City correction facility", "Crazy Island" or Tinker Isle's Asylum and correction facility, which is essentially a prison island, where the critically insane and condemned criminals of different kinds, are allowed to try and live a regular life, situated just by the coast and the former naval base turned slums, known as "Rat town". Another place of interest is Clock-town, the largest industrial quarter in the world. Amongst these places that are relatively small parts in this almost country sized city, regular people go about their daily business, not entirely ignorant of what happens after nightfall, but quite indifferent towards it, in most cases.

Magnetized vaccum "Tube-trains" make it possible to travel from one part of town to the other, in minutes, and the trains have been outfitted to carry cars. The city has an exceptionally sophisticated metro&tram network, and busses are only used to travel in area's where trams and metro's are ineffecient.

Prologue
Clayne came to his senses, and opened his eyes. It took a few seconds for him to realize that the bright yellow dots he saw through the haze were infact the eyes of a beautiful and stern looking, woman in a business getup. Her looks captivated him for a few seconds, but soon the retired special operative inside him started taking over, as if returning from a long vacation.

Clayne had been tied to a chair, by professionals, he deemed, as they had used zip/strip cuffs in favor of rope. The chair was frail, and made of wood, however. First mistake... A quick look around revealed two armed guards. Big guys, obviously with gang-relation. One black with army cut hair, the other one white and completely shaven bald. Both had large collections of prison tattoo's decorating their muscular bodies that seemed chizled from granite. The white man dressed like a biker, with a leather jacket, cargo pants and military boots, while the black man, wore a tank top under a parker coat, baggy pants and well worn sneakers. Both had dogtags dangling from their necks visually, and more importantly, both were wearing kevlar vests and armed with AK-47's. Clayne had no idea who had the resources to get two people like that working together, so his first assumption was that they were both imposters, most likely undercover operatives, originally military but recruited because of their already existing relations, but if these people had access to government resources, he was so far in over his head that it wouldn't even have mattered to begin with. The woman soon tore Clayne out of his speculations. With a commanding voice, that revealed her professional attitude to be more than just a getup, she asked him to state his name, and proceeded to interrogate him in a very military-like fashion.

As Clayne considered his options, he took notice of his own state of being. Several damaged ribs, bruises and cuts. He had been hurt badly. Escape seemed unlikely. He thought back, trying to remember exactly where it had all gone wrong...

The Beginning
Mathew Clayne had recently given up his job as a cop in Salt Lake City, when he was forced into working a Traffic deskjockey position, after having offended his superiors for weeks with his brash and hot-headed way of tackling his cases. It seemed to him they didn't like results, maybe his own personal successrate made them look bad. The truth was that Clayne's methods got results, but it also generated an awful much of heat and aggression, and at one time, he almost provoked a full-scale war between the police and the largest biker gang in town. His superiors simply couldn't afford to keep him at the front lines, and when he was moved into trafic, took it as a slap in the face, and responded by quitting.

He now worked in the nightclub "Belief", as head of Security.

Clayne liked the freedom it afforded him and the power he had to be his own boss, and not being punished for doing things his way.

A regular day on the job, as he was opening the club, however, Matt started having strange hallucinations, visions of a black stork like bird with red eyes that he took a picture of with his phone and, later, seeing "himself" in the room he was in, standing right across the isle, though something was different about this clone.

Shortly after, he came to himself, realizing that it was a dream, he checked his phone to see what time it was, and if someone had called. He found that only a minute had passed since he arrived, and that somehow he had taken a picture of a gull, about 15 minutes later than the time actually showed, which of course seemed impossible. The surroundings of the gull in the picture were suspiciously similar to those of the black bird he had attempted to take a picture of in his dream. Shortly after, he found a note in one of the rooms in the club, and realized it was a suicide note, and only seconds later, the churchbells (the night club being located inside an old church) started ringing, despite not being in use anymore. The cleaning lady had hung herself from them.

Later that evening, Matt's father called him on the phone, and they spoke about the incident, and how Matt couldn't help but think that the dream was somehow related to the happening. Matt's father reminded Matt that he used to have weird episodes like that all the time when he was younger, but apparently Matt somehow forgot. In an instance, he started remembering a few of them, as his father told him about them, entering a trance-like state where he saw his memories flash by as visions. The visions seemed to occur when something grim was about to happen to someone, but it was hard to pin down why and when they occured exactly.

After speaking with his father, Matt returned home and checked his mail, finding an envelope with no poststamps or addresses on, implying that it had been dropped in his mailbox directly. Opening it revelaed that it contained the dogtags of his former comerade in arms, Milo, who had been taken prisoner along with Charles (another squad mate), during a botched a mission in the Amazonas on which Matt served as squad leader. Both Charles and Milo were freed from captivity about 6 months later, by US forces, Charles was slightly traumatized and a bit starved, but otherwise just bruised, but Milo had had both of his legs amputated from the knee and down, along with his right arm from the elbow and down. The two of them stuck together from that point and on, and the rest of the squad knew that. It was shortly after this botched mission that Clayne left the military.

On his answering machine was a message form Charles, asking Clayne to go to New York City, telling him that someone had killed Milo.

Clayne packed a few things and went to New York City. Immediately upon checking into his hotel, he started having visions again, now finding himself trapped inside this dream-world for a long time. Upon going downstairs, he encountered the receptionist in a weird scenario, and he decided to interfere with her actions. She gave him 13 cards, 12 of them blank, the last one seemed to be his own call-card, but it was somehow obscurred, and the information on it, was bogus. He once again encountered his "dream-world" clone, apparently a grittier and darker version of himself, who was somehow always visible in reflective surfaces. They had a conversation, and the clone told Mathew that it was infact him, or maybe the other way around, and that it remembered all of his "episodes", referring to his weird hallucinations/visions in which he always found himself in a darker and surreal version of the real world, and claiming that normally their roles were reversed, and the clone would only be able to oberseve Clayne through reflective surfaces, but now, somehow he was trapped. He helped Clayne return to the normal world by sending him back, and from that point on, it seemed that clayne could still see his clone while in the normal world, in reflections, as well as see how the "other world" looked at his specific location by looking at reflections.

By going down stairs, he also discovered that his actions in the "other world" had somehow had an impact on the real world, as the receptionist down-stais had suddenly had a drastic make-over and turn of personality after having interacted with her in the "other-world", or at least what he thought was her.

The next day he started searching for Charles address, or other contact information, but instead found Milo's address. Going there, he found Milo's body molested body inside. After seaching the apartment, he discovered drugs inside the apartment and found a small SD card with a text file and a video on it.

The text file revealed that someone had recorded the video, killed Milo and left evidence of it right there, without knowing exactly who he was leaving it for, but that it served some sort of purpose.

The video showed that someone had been stalking Milo for a while and that Charles had been looking after Milo for quite some time, almost acting as his professional helper. It even showed someone breaking into the apartment (probably because Milo and/or Charles were involved with drug trade) to attack them, Milo taking a beating while charles managed to kill both the assailants, and evidently hide the bodies. From this point on, it showed Charles almost doing everything for Milo, as he seemed to have broken his only funtional arm, which was now in a caste and aparently their relationship even turned sexual at some point, which was quite confusing for Matt, as he was farily certain neither of them had been homosexual prior to their capitivity at what point Clayne pretty much lost contact with the two of them. Shortly after that Charles apparently stopped showing up, and the stalker snuck inside the apartment, drugging Milo, and at this point and onwards, began extreme torture of Milo for no purpose at all, it seemed, except to humiliate him and make him suffer up until the point where he died.

Surgery was invovled in the torture, implying that the torturer was a skilled surgeon. Milo had been severely beaten and humiliated, he had been exposed to brain-washing treatment, had several bones removed from his body, the sinews in his only remaining arm cut, he had both of his kneecaps shattered (making it impossible for him to even walk with fake-legs), been deafened on his right ear by burning the ear as well as had his left eye removed. In the video, Matt heard the camera man state that he intended to reduce Milo's existence to nothing, by taking away all of his senses, and finally paralyzing him entirely leaving nothing but his mind in the darkness, but these were not the worst things that happened to Milo.

Clayne was left wondering why someone would do this to another person, and determined to figure out who did it, and make them pay.

The hunt begins
Who were the last people to see Charles and Milo alive and together? Except for the mysterious psycho-stalker who sadly fitted into the gritty world of Capital City urban myths all too well. Clayne's focus fell on the gang-banger types who had assaulted Charles and Milo in Milo's apartment. He suspected that it had to do with the drugs he found. Only problem was, Charles had sort of killed them, and disposed of their bodies, but Clayne suspected that they weren't working alone. To him, they looked like the typical steroid gorilla's employed by most mid-level dealers, to keep their own pushers in line, as well as to protect said pushers.

A quick look at the vials that contained the drugs, gave Clayne something to look for. Drugs are usually bought by some high-up dope-dealer who sells small watered down portions to his contacts, who then package it in small tubes or vials, or even bags to resell it, probably after watering down some more, or adding poison to it.

Cross checking reciets and the names of the grocery shops found on the shopping bags lead him to believe that Charles, who did most of the shopping for Milo, generally arrived from the eastern route, also leading him to believe that it was probably also where he had picked up the drugs. Some street reseach lead him to the corner it was sold on, and further observation helped him identify the boss of the small crew, which seemed to have been heavily reduced since Charles killed about half of them.

Clayne proceeded to track the guy, ironically called "Clean Joe" to a small strip-joint of exceptionally back-alley proportions. Basically, it was a warehouse which had been outfitted with lamps, a bar and some stripper-poles.

He followed the man into the bathroom, where he beat him up, and under the threat of poking his eye out with a shard of broken glass, he asked him about Charles. The guy refused to talk, and Clayne responded to this by making good on his threat. As the man lay there, screaming and fighting to get free, terrified of the fact that his life had just changed like that in an instance, Clayne took direct measure to ensure the cooperation of his mutilated source. He planted the shard under the other eye...

This got the man talking, Joe spilled his guts, and claimed Charles was in the Mafia, and was the one who supplied the dealer who sold to Joe. He didn't know anything about his whereabouts though, but gave up his "superior" or however the hell that worked. It didn't matter to Clayne, and frankly, he didn't think letting Joe go back to his little café where he could resume watching his pushers make him money on that corner. So he as thanks for his cooperation, Clayne decided to relieve him of that duty, permanently, by stabbing out his other eye as well, and leaving him there, on the bathroom floor, screaming so hard that you could actually probably maybe just hear him over the terrible elecotronic noise mixed with stuttering voices that barely spoke comprehensibly in a language that was hardly possible to catogorize as english.

Fleeing out the window, and onto the streets, Clayne returned to his base of operations. That shuddy motel room. He quickly came to the conclusion that it would serve him no more. He spent some time and money finding a cheap one-room apartment near the general areas of interest to him, and he moved most of his assets and resources from Salt Lake City to Capital City (NYC), including all his vehicles and all of his equipment.

Feeling suitably equipped for the task, he dressed in his stalker outfit, and set up a sniper/surveilance nest on the roof across the street from his new "sources" address. Having listened in on the man's phone conversations using a laser-microphone, and spied on him for a while, Clayne decided it was time to interrogate the man named Lionel R. He entered the rather secure apartment by rapelling down to the kitchen window which was left slightly open, and sneaking in that way. Armed with a knife, a sap, a handgun and his twisted mind, he made his way further into the apartment...