The next night falls and Salome is no more. There’s no sign of Sebastian either, and–considering we threw a can of gasoline in his face–it’s reasonable to assume he’s off the board. The Prince is furious, but, since he’s a spineless idiot, rather than disciplining us he begrudgingly looks the other way. He puts us back on the hunt for The Englishman and also promotes Norton to Malkavian Primogen once again (which leads to an interesting scene where Norton sweeps into Elysium like the drunk uncle everyone feels slightly awkward around, issuing proclamations and threatening anyone who dares call his beloved city “Frisco.”)

In the course of all this, I get a summon from someone identified as The Baron, who turns out to be Don Esteban de la Vega, Baron of the Anarch territory of the Sunset District. He’s heard of my bravery with the werewolves and hopes I can help him with a little job, specifically, tracking down a shipment of Semtex of his that went missing. I don’t got much better to do, so I say sure, and get on it.

Meanwhile, the other players are working on different things relating to tracking down The Englishman, the details of which I can’t remember, but they didn’t have much impact on the larger plot, for reasons which will soon become apparent. The one important thing is that, during all this, Paul and his Tesseract engineers are secretly working on their solar-carrying optic-fiber technology.

So, I’m tracking down this fucking Semtex, which quickly turns into the Obnoxious Chain Quest from Hell. I start looking for leads from random barflies and drug dealers, and before long the name “Helgi” gets tossed around. I eventually wind up meeting an Anarch vampire in some shitty bar in Bayshore, a greasy guy of mixed-Latino heritage who goes by the name of Slayer. Slayer says that yeah, he’s heard of this Helgi guy, he’s some fucking giant Viking who supposedly stole Esteban’s shipment himself, and currently he’s hanging out in the Oakland docks.

Slayer promises to introduce me to Helgi, but it won’t be easy. See, Helgi’s got a high reputation in the Anarch community and he won’t go talking to any yahoo that shows up, so I gotta prove myself first. I point out the relatively minor point of punching a werewolf in the face, but Slayer says that’s not enough. Fortunately, he has a better idea. Supposedly, Helgi has some enemy that’s shown up in the Bay recently, a powerful old Sabbat vampire, like old old. He doesn’t know much about him, but he knows his name:

Marcus Sertorius.

Slayer says he’s been spotted hanging around Marin, up in a place called Cascade Canyon. Word is the reason we know he’s there is because all the werewolves are avoiding that place, and this Sertorius guy has been known to scare werewolves away. “Whatever,” I think, “I just killed one myself, how bad could this guy be?” Slayer says that if I was to kill Marcus Sertorius and prove it, that would put me in good with Helgi, and he would then meet with me to discuss Esteban’s Semtex.

I impatiently agree and leave the bar, off on the next leg of my chain quest, blissfully unaware of what was to come.