Notes Taken by Samantha and Alastair Beadle.
Andrey Sichul, also known as Nut (the Egyptian goddess of the night), has recently been feeling some extremely powerful magical disturbances (like magical nukes), somewhere to the north east of the country (note that Mother Bear has been feeling disturbances come and stay; Nut feels them come and go). He feels the need to investigate - whether to stop it or to accumulate power or wealth is yet to be decided. He shuts up his antiquities shop and books a ticket for Krasnoyarsk on the same Trans-Siberian express as the others booked tickets yesterday.
He then goes for a final good meal in the Taganka district (with a bottle of vodka) before heading for Yaroslavl Station.
Mother Bear bids good-bye to her family and also heads of to the station.
General Winter arranges with his staff to leave them for a while and off he sets. Adrik has packed his suitcases and he and the General take a cab to Yaroslavl Station to take their first class seats to Krasnoyarsk.
Akula bids good-bye to his boss and colleagues and leaves the university.
Napalm wakes up in a broom cupboard with another person; he is unconscious. She opens the cupboard door and they both fall over. She gets up, she vaguely recognises the other inhabitant of the cupboard as one of the veterans she was drinking with last night. As the door opens, empty bottles fall out of the cupboard.
She staggers out; she seems to be in a second floor hallway in the Veteran's Foundation. She makes for the office of her councillor - Dr Borodinsky. A few office workers avoid her as she goes. She has to wait a little while, but Dr Borodinsky sees her and she has a counselling session, her first in a while. It is as unsatisfactory as usual - Dr Borodinsky is concerned, but Napalm won't tell him the full truth about her and her powers. Afterwards she leaves, begs until she has enough roubles for a cheap bottle of vodka, drinks it, and make for the Yaroslavl Station.
Mother Bear and Akula both come out of Komsomolskaya Metro station and meet up on the station concourse and bitch about the class system (in that the trains have first and second class cars). as they board the train.
Andrey (Nut) is already on the train, reading a classic of Russian literature. As Mother Bear and Akula pass by his compartment outside the train, he senses that Ludmilla is magical in some way - quite powerfully so - probably some kind of nature magic. He watches them go past, Akula senses this and looks at the watcher - a middle aged man with a peppering of grey hair. They nod to each other and then continue on their way.
The General and Adrik arrive at the station, entering under the hooded arch covered with reliefs. Adrik gets a porter for their bags and they walk up the train to the front (where the first class carriages are) to board. As they go past Nut senses another magic person - General Winter, in his Reserve General's uniform. He too seems to be suffused with some kind of nature magic. Nut sinks lower in his seat, and take sly looks at the military man. General Winter doesn't notice. He and Adrik go to their compartment. The only difference between their first class compartment and second class is that first class only has two berths which second has four.
The train moves away from the Yaroslavl Station, running only five minutes late. Napalm arrives at the station just in time to watch it leave. She leaves the station by a side exit, ignites, and flies after it. The train continues on.
As the station disappears into the distance a couple enter the same compartment as Akula and Mother Bear - a large fat man smelling of sweat and garlic, and a small pinch-faced woman.
Nut is sharing with two business men, Igor and Cheslav. He passes the time of day with them, and they offer him a drink. He refuses at the present time but promises to drink with them later.
The train passes through various of Moscow's suburban stations, then out into the countryside. Mother Bear phones Napalm (getting a 'low signal strength' warning from her phone - they seem to be getting outside the mobile phone network). Napalm tells her she is flying above the train, and after a bit of discussion she lands on the train and Akula opens the door (at one end of the carriage) for her and she gets in. She then makes for the bar. Akula follows.
Mother Bear returns to her compartment. The couple glare at her, she glares back, then sits down and looks out of the window.
In the bar, Akula buys Napalm a drink. The price is stupidly high. He tells her to wait and goes and finds the General. Having done so he and the General make for the bar. Napalm is waiting. The General opens an account with the barman and drinks are served.
Upon investigation it seems that each carriage of the train has two toilets/sinks, one at each end, for the up to 36 people it carries, a timetable in the corridor, and there is a samovars of hot water available at the end of each carriage. Each carriage also has an attendant (the provodnitsa).
Napalm asks for food and gets peanuts and more drink (it's too early for the dining car, where the bar is, to be serving food).
Nut takes a walk to the bar with his colleagues to play cards. He sees the magical people he saw before in there, along with others. The scungy woman in combat fatigues (Napalm) also shows up as magical, some kind of unpleasant thing, as far as Nut is concerned.
Mother Bear goes to the bar and meets up with the others.
Nut and his comrades sit and get tea. Then they start to play poker for fun. Nut wins the game with ease, but the stakes are low and they pass a pleasant couple of hours.
After an hour or so they pass through Sergiev Posad; blue and gold monastery domes are visible off to the north.
From six o'clock food is served. The train stops at Yaroslavl for a nominal few minutes, and Mother Bear and Nut briefly get off the train to stretch their legs. Mother Bear buys a map of Russia from a kiosk on the platform. The stop drags on longer than the timetabled few minutes instead lasting for twenty minutes. Eventually the train moves off. It then crosses the bridge over the Volga river giving excellent views back over Yaroslavl, and on.
Napalm is offered food and vodka by Mother Bear back at the compartment. Napalm is taken back to the compartment. With Mother Bear and Akula's full co-operation she is at her worst - drunken, smelly and obnoxious. The couple in the carriage leave, muttering, after she throws up on the fat man. Mother Bear then gets water for Napalm and Akula puts her in one of the bunks.
Nut and his comrades pass a few hours playing cards, eating and drinking before returning to the carriage.
Mother Bear goes and asks the carriage attendant for a bowl to wash Napalm in. She flashes some cash at her and suddenly a bowl appears.
Napalm is washed and her clothes are changed with her old combat gear being cleaned.
Everyone goes a bed. In the middle of the night Napalm has screaming nightmares. Akula and Mother Bear wake up and the carriage attendant knocks on the door to ask what is going on. Nut and several other passengers lurk around also. Mother Bear tells them that Napalm is all right but suffered in Afghanistan and gets nightmares. People nod in understanding. Napalm continues to wake up a large percentage of the train again and again with nightmares. People's sympathy for her starts to wear thin.
In the morning, everyone wakes. Napalm sleeps in. When she gets up she has dress in some of the tarty clothes she stole of Mother Bear's daughter Raisa, with combat boots. [OOC : She is, for a while, a good impersonation of Tank Girl...]
The train continues on. Mother Bear scans the map and compass and tries to pinpoint the source of the "disturbances" she has been feeling off to the north east. This seems to be a scattering of various points in Siberia.
The train rumbles on, passing through Danilov, Vyatka, Perm, over the Urals (which look like hills here), Yekaterinberg, Tyumen, Omsk, Novisibersk, Taiga, and Marlinsk. People get off and wander about on the longer stops.
The landscape turns into Siberian taiga - frozen birch forest.
Eventually Krasnoyarsk is reached, four time zones ahead of Moscow. The train is about eight hours late in arriving, so it arrives at about 4am. In Siberia. In February. It's cold. Napalm and General Winter don't care. They all get off the train. It continues on towards Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok.
There are various hotel touts hanging about. Nut approaches the rest of the group and asks if they are looking for hotels and that they could get a better deal if they all go together. Haggling is done, and a good deal is made. Nut introduces himself as Andrey; the others introduce themselves, and then they make for taxi's and then the hotel. As they come out of the station they see the wall of the Post Office opposite, decorated with a large mural of Lenin and other important communist figures.
We all get to the hotel, the Hotel Krasnoyarsk, and General Winter opens a tab at the bar. Unsurprisingly, Napalm gets very drunk and passes out. Adrik takes her to her room (shared with Mother Bear). Mother Bear puts her to bed. Akula and Nut are sharing.
In the morning, Mother Bear take more readings, and senses where the disturbances are. The closest is still thousands of kilometres away in the north-east. Nut cannot at the moment detect anything.
Adrik is sent out and hires a suitable off road vehicle (a snow-cat thing) plus provisions for General Winter, but not the others.
Breakfast is served. The breakfast room has great views over the frozen kilometre-wide expanse of the Yenisey River and the bridge to the other side. Akula sleeps in. Napalm is woken up by Mother Bear and she eats as much as possible.
It is discussed whether to get a guide, but they decide against doing this. Napalm says she can drive the vehicle, and is insulted when no-one takes her offer seriously - she can actually drive tanks and the like. Eventually they agree to let her drive - "there's not much she can crash into" says Akula. They decide to take a second vehicle just in case and Adrik goes and hires a snowmobile.
Then Mirov arrives at the breakfast table (well, a form the others know Mirov uses). He is greeted by the party and introduced to Nut by his civilian name (Moriz Ioakimovitch Rugatov). Nut cannot sense any magic about the new arrival.
Mirov sits down and eats. He says he was in Novosibirsk and saw the others, then followed them here. He sits and chats to Nut, who claims to be exploring the country when his business is low. He goes on to claim he wants to see Siberia in winter - "when it is at it's wildest."
Suddenly Nut feels a building magical disturbance - he tenses. It builds faster and faster and then spikes. He excuses himself from the breakfast table. Akula, noticing something amiss, follows him. Mother Bear then senses another of her disturbances. She too leaves the breakfast table.
Nut makes for the roof of the hotel with Akula following him discreetly.
Nut reaches the roof, then opens his briefcase, takes out the ancient Egyptian sceptre and ankh, and transforms into his alter ego of the beautiful middle eastern woman, with midnight-blue skin dotted with stars, scantily clad in gold who is Nut. She floats an inch or so off the roof. . Akula sees the new identity and puzzles over where the old man has gone. Nut looks out from the roof, lines up the source of the magical disturbance and pin points it.
Mother Bear runs to her room, gets the map she bought earlier, and pin points the area, or at lest the direction, on the map.
On the roof, Nut heads back for the door up where Akula is lurking. Akula keeps out of sight. Nut cloaks herself in thick darkness and when the darkness clears away, has transformed back into the Andrey. Akula goes back to the others and tells them about Nut. They conclude that he is a transvestite, but there is clearly a little more to it than that, as Andrey and Nut have, among other things, different heights and builds.
Nut goes and asks Adrik about hiring a vehicle. Adrik tells him he should talk to the General. When Nut does so, General Winter and Mirov ask Nut to come along with them. Mother Bear and Akula are suspicious of him. There is a brief discussion about provisions. The General has got himself sorted out but not the others. Mother Bear and General argue over who should have sorted out the provisions.
Napalm checks out the vehicle Adrik has hired it is a Snow cat, tracked, with a passenger cabin, tent extension, and a trailer full of the Generals provisions. The supermarket where Adrik obtained them is visited and more provisions are bought (it is not well stocked even by Moscow standards). Akula gets Adrik to point him in the direction of the hire shop to ask about the hire of a snow mobile. Akula does this and gets the snow mobile, spending lots of the remaining dollars.
Those of the group who worry about the cold also go off and buy proper Siberian-quality warm clothes and other gear.
The snow mobile is attached to the snow cat and they leave the city, off over the bridge over the Yenisey River. Napalm drives well, out of the city and along the highway to the east. There is a fair amount of traffic.
The railway runs nearby, and they notice a train passing on it loaded with tanks and other military items. Napalm and General Winter decide it is the 8th Guards Division, and they are heading east too. There are thirty T86 tank, thirty Mil Mi-28 combined attack and troop-carrying helicopters, thirty hovercraft-type GEVs - half troop carriers and half like hovertanks. There are also three 'spider-tanks' - what looks like normal tank bodies and turrets, but armed with blasters and on six think insect-like legs (General Winter recognises them as prototypes of the T96 walker-tank but doesn't tell anyone else). There are also carriages full of troops and armoured ammunition cars. Napalm and General Winter think it seems to be rapid response team.
They continue on. They eat lunch. After a few hours they leave the highway and go onto a side route through the taiga forests. The level of traffic decreases drastically. The going becomes more difficult. They camp over night. It's cold.
The next day they carry on. After they have travelled for some time, flashes start to light up part of the horizon ahead - it looks like distant bombing. Napalm stops the vehicle, saying she needs to 'go for a walk in the woods'. She goes off, ignites, and flies off to investigate. Nut notices the fiery dot in the sky which is Napalm, and reading Mother Bear's surface thoughts finds her wondering how to explain it should she need to.
Mother Bear then tunes into the military wavebands to try and find out what is going on. She hears lots of activity, but unfortunately it is all encrypted. They all listen in anyway.
After a while the activity increases, them more signs of bombing is seen, far away. They then tune into the emergency frequencies. There is some activity there:
Mother Bear starts the engine and drives off in the direction of the activity. Her experience in the tractor factory gives her a good grounding in how to drive the snow-cat.
Napalm flies off. After some twenty minutes she starts to see aircraft ahead and above, and signs of explosions on the ground. She flies into the next valley.
In the centre of the valley is a circular forest, about a kilometre in diameter, of huge trees, hundreds of metres tall, the likes of which she has never seen. It looks like the forest has been bombed and attacked with incendiaries. Root-like tendrils, some hundreds of metres long, are spreading out from the edges of the forest.
There are some hovercraft on the ground, circling the forest, troops on foot, and helicopters in the air. There are burning areas of ground where it appears aircraft have crashed or hovercraft smashed. There are large parachute-covered pallets around, where it looks like the vehicles have been parachuted in. This is not the 8th Guards, notices Napalm - they are the 32nd Siberian Regiment, no-where near as elite as the 8th Guards.
A couple of helicopters notice Napalm, pursue her, and open fire, but she dodges nimbly. She is both faster and more agile than the helicopters.
The troops continue to burn the area. Some helicopters fly over and spray napalm (the substance, not the character) over the area. Napalm sees a root lash out from the circle of forest, smash a hovercraft and then plant itself.
She starts to assist the burning of the area, and as she flies lower to attack she sees more of the roots emerging (as well as thinner, shorter ones) and also some dead creatures - strange insect-like/mammal-like/reptile-like creatures.
The rest of the group continue on until, coming over a ridge into yet another valley they meet some troops with two tanks on the track way over the pass onwards. There are two pallets here, too, and it looks like these tanks, too, have been parachuted in.
The General talks to the soldiers but they say that they have their orders and the group cannot continue on this route. So they turn the snow-cat around, go back a way, and then park the vehicle and continue on foot. They all split up, trying to not show their identities to Nut with more 'I must go for a walk in the woods in this direction now,' excuses. Nut makes a similar excuse and goes in the opposite direction before transforming.
General Winter slides off on his ice slide, taking Mirov along for the ride. Mother Bear lopes off in Bear form at high speed, following the ice slide.
Nut changes into "nubile" form once out of sight of the others and runs. Her feet leaving no tracks as she hovers slightly off the ground. She quickly comes across General Winter's ice slide and follows it to the scene (brief attempts to slide along it result in her falling on her "cute little butt" - she follows in a more conventional manner after that, running alongside).
Akula slinks along in water form, also following the ice slide.
At the forest, Napalm feeds the flames caused by her namesake. More napalm is dropped, but she enjoys the experience as she is immune to such things. The flames approach firestorm ferocity, and she uses her powers to push them to higher and higher intensity, producing a real firestorm. She enjoys this, too - her chances to let rip with her powers like this are few and far between in Moscow! However, she cannot see beyond the flames.
The others, after a long run through the frozen birch woods, reach the top of a ridgeline and can see the forest, the troops, and the firestorm below them.
General Winter reassures Mother Bear that he can control the firestorm if necessary.
Nut arrives and Akula identifies the woman as Andrey from the hotel. Nut can tell that Mother Bear and General Winter at least are the same magical people she met on the train from Moscow. Everyone except Mother Bear is somewhat tired.
They can see a brilliant spot of white flame inside the firestorm, and identify it as Napalm.
For safety's sake (of the soldiers below, mostly) General Winter contains the fire with ring of cold around it. This produces an area of fog and steam as the intense cold meets the intense heat. By this time the troops have withdrawn outside the area of hot and cold.
The roar of Napalm's firestorm fills the valley.
Suddenly troops appear out of the woods all around the group and point guns at them, the sounds of their approach masked by the noise of the firestorm. "Stand still, scum," barks the captain in charge at the group.
Akula dissolves into a puddle.