In Nomine: The Mile Higher Club (IC)

[ladyarcana55]

Sunae is in a much better mood explaining

"Fire is a very volatile force. When I said a lot of Her Soldiers were extreme and tended to mirror Her nature, why did you think I wasn't including myself? Everything that happened that night, meh...that candle has burned out and I've moved on. As long as I can have my hour of meditations and prayers, and my two hours of practice, it'll be better. If you have issues with me, then just tell me, but I warn you, leave faith out of it. Who cares how I express my faith as long as I have it. It's really none of your business, but if you really want to throw gas on a burning ember, then so be it. You were warned."

She takes a breath

"I'll teach your team what you need to know, but you have to understand. Like it or not, compared to you I am an expert in this. Unless you have had some extra curricular activities we don't know about yet. And I expect you to listen to me. You don't have to accept it but you should at least think about it"

[tHEhERETIC]

The shortest possible summary of MHC I can manage. This includes spoilers i.e. information that was not available at the time.

Corat, Wheel of the Wind, was hauled up by a Dominican Triad for leading pilgrims to Yasukuni, a Shinto war shrine. He got snotty with the triad and Michael interfered, so he was convicted. What was left of Corat after his sentence was rehabilitated by a team of War's special forces, The Corps. After training he was quietly hired by Nisroc, word of Spies, to recruit a group of humans who Hell would not recognize as servitors of Heaven.
Michael sent his servitors to Yves' library to check the balances of the potential recruits' Fates and Destinies. Yves noticed an awful lot of Warbirds in his library, unusual for them, and confronted Michael. Being a seraph, he told Yves what he was up to. Yves, not being a seraph, concocted a cover story for when other angels inevitably noticed something going on. That cover story was the Mile Higher Club.

Corat was to recruit a random or seemingly random group of angels who should not be able to function as a team, due to differences in personalities and service. He was to set them to a task, any task, where his recruits might be inserted, to discover whether an angel would recognize them as soldier material and whether they could get along with the recruits.

Corat heard from a Mercurian friend that there was to be an angel summoning ritual at a Goth festival near L.A., and that it would include Ryuki Watari--one of Corat's recruits, but also someone known to be pursuing the possibility that angels could be summoned. They arrived to see Gavin Russo, a sorcerer and acquaintance of Ryuki's, invoke the Baron Samedi with the help of the demon Pepito. He brings the party along to witness the chaos, including some thugs blocking the door which activates Corat's Discord and Ryuki banishing Pepito on the fly.

Pepito had been a thorn in Corat's side for a couple of years, having taken the place of a dead teenager with a doting mother. Corat couldn't kill the demon without sending the kid's mother into a spiral of grief, and his kindness meant he was flirting with his own Ofanite death spiral--inaction in the face of evil.

But it does beg the question--someone throws a ritual to summon angels, and a bunch of them show up. Corat volunteers that he and Ryuki know each other, and sets up a meeting at a hotel suite to ask what he knows about what happened. Payment for that information: get to meet a seraph in person. Ryuki takes it, but wards the hotel suite. The ward is experimental to see if it will hold an angel, but it's also a gambit to tell the other angels that Corat has a problem (Discord) that needs attention. The meeting is tense--a working ward and a set of live katanas, and Ryuki at least as afraid of them as they are of him. He tells them what he knows of Gavin.

All Soul's Night, there's an infernally-provoked shootout at a cemetery in Watts. A large number of casualties, but one stands out. Gavin Russo walks through the gunfight like he's immortal, in front of dozens of witnesses. He takes three bullets before walking back to his apartment.
A Disturbance that large in hostile territory is a mission for The Corps, the same unit Corat trained with after Yasukuni. They stop at the Creation tether to gather information before cleaning up the demon mess. (The Creation tether is a soul food restaurant, the Watts towers tether having been broken in 2000.) They feign that Corat's in trouble and frog walk him out, expecting him to identify Gavin and Pepito who they've learned are involved in the massacre. Instead they discover Corat's Discord and get orders that he is not to have contact with Pepito at any cost. Corat declines help for the Discord, for now, knowing that investigating its cause would reveal his true mission (Pepito is a classmate of recruit Danae, the psychic schoolgirl who knows him for what he is).
They track down Gavin, who is no longer possessed and is moaning pitifully at his bullet wounds. The Baron possesses him momentarily, startling the team's Ofanite who takes off his head. They find an altar that reveals who his possessor was.
The team meets to figure out how best to remove Pepito. Pepito throws a party at his current girlfriend's house in the orange groves of Riverside, hoping to murder them all humorously to please Kobal. Pepito is unpopular though, and instead of a bunch of goths showing up his brother and their beer-keg reality show friends show up. Pepito drugs them, and the party has to save their lives. They get an unexpected assist from Pepito's supervisor Vato, who's so unimpressed with his minion shacking up with an ethereal that he throws him to the angels. The angels arrange an exorcism, so Pepito's vessel will remain and maintain the illusion of a teenager gone wrong, not a demon. This is meant to soften the blow for Pepito's mother, and goes mostly as planned. After Pepito is exorcised his remnant is pathetic and sweet, creating division within the party about whether it should be allowed to live.

[tHEhERETIC]

(Geez, I need to be briefer!)

Some drama among the party and Corat's immediate boss, and Corat 'confesses' to Yasukuni as a smokescreen to keep the party's attention from his real mission. A costly misdirection, but it works. Nisroc upstairs is doing his own tap-dance. We find out that Ryuki has/had been geased at one point, though we get no details. We also learn that Marty flies the plane that holds the Wind tether, and that Marty has been seeing a witch doctor to try to father a child. Faith's servitor points him in the right direction, with a little miracle. Marty, as it turns out, is the reason that plane is a tether, having landed it safely against all good advice in a firestorm.

The party gains a new member, Sunae, a soldier of Fire. Mitchim gets word from his pawn shop that a Habbalite is pawning a Nazi dagger, intentionally drawing the attention of Shenmachel, whose previous role was a priest in that era. This will have to wait though, until they can sort the Baron issue out. They go to the Marches via Gabriel's volcano and negotiate with the Loa to rein in their own. On the way back, they meet the Dylan brothers, tandem dreaming in technicolor.

Upon returning to San Francisco, they also learn that the kami have ended their contract with Nybbas, and Eli has been spotted.

The Nazi dagger has numbers on it which prove to be coordinates. The Habbalite, M'ranoch Atel, was the demon who'd killed Shenmachel's vessel back in the 40's and apparently wants a rematch. He starts murdering curanderas and other witchy folk to make sure he's got the party's attention, leaving them little choice but to be at the time and place marked on the knife. It's clearly a trap, and as it unfolds it appears designed for maximum loss of life and Disturbance, Disturbance he intends to pin on the party...or use to draw The Corps, the Malakim squad, and their infernal counterparts to one location. The party intercepts his goons before they can arrive at the location, an abandoned airfield, spirit away most of his potential hostages, and beat his accomplices in battle. In the process of taking M'ranoch himself, however, there's an implied promise of survival which is broken by Shenmachel's sword, causing a serious division in the party despite their victory.

A dispute that is witnessed by Kyle, Corat's best friend on The Corps who was sent to take a report on 'the mission', Yves' cover version of it. Did such a diverse team function as a team? Laurence has gotten wind of this version of the story and has agreed to remove the Discord if the answer is 'yes'. While it's not a perfect yes, it's good enough for The Sword. Corat's role is to receive a head injury while assisting Interpol (Shenmachel's role) and is taken to a hospital on the edge of the Mojave, near Michael's Death Valley tether. There, Corat advises his team, he will likely have a large number of mortal visitors--the recruits. He asks the party to hang around and offer them moral support, get to know them a little bit and ease their worries.

Ryuki arrives early and shows by his actions that he can sense Khalid's presence inside the hospital. He's worried and does not trust this situation at all, testing Corat's vessel for his presence and setting up wards and gimmicks rather promiscuously. While the other recruits get hotel rooms, he insists on sleeping in the hospital room. He's approached by the thief Kevin, who says "You're mother's a nun," which makes him quite angry...because it's true. Ryuki secretly meets with Kevin, telling the party he's gone to get himself some dinner. Kevin tells him that he's stolen a copy of Corat's address book and that all their names are in it, along with some notes about each of their abilities and character flaws. The recruits let Ryuki run interference and plan to meet at the Morris' (pop star and her father) tour bus at a specified time. They meet, but they don't realize the bus driver has carried a Shedite into their midst.

The angels notice the meeting and approach the bus. Corat awakens, his Discord removed, and joins them all for a talk.

The Shedite named Vetis realizes he has some very valuable information deep in enemy territory, and attempts to flee the scene by jumping between people. Danae's psychic senses tell him that Ryuki is an exorcist, so he possesses him to avoid getting thrown out. The angels are prepared to take him bodily to someone who can fix the situation so Vetis leaps again, trying to conceal his whereabouts. Ryuki and the angels trap the demon. While this is going on the group is slowly gaining an audience of angels, curious. They are joined by Archangels, Michael and Janus, who has dragged Eli along for the ride, Dominic and Laurence, Marc and Gabriel, and Khalid. The true purpose of Corat's mission is revealed, and the recruits consider their options. All agree to work for Heaven, though few are sure in what capacity.
(It is revealed that when Eli went on walkabout in 1957, he went around blessing random pregnant women. One of those women was Ryuki's grandmother, and he inherited his Symphonic sense from his mother. His mother, unable to cope with it for lack of celestial guidance, is cloistered in a Buddhist convent. This is why he's obsessed and angry with angels.)
Laurence, wanting to be certain all the recruits are suitable, sics a squad of his seraphim on them, to engage in combat. They were ready for this, and with the other recruits' help Ryuki creates a nasty Disturbance to try to fend off the angels. It is only partially successful.
The Archangels begin to rehash old arguments in front of the recruits, to the party's embarrassment. Zahirah and Sunae get into a terrible argument about faith, made worse by class and cultural tensions between Sunae's grandfather and the recruits.
Laurence urges his fellow Archangels to leave, and one by one they do. Ryuki leaves some spent magic items on the ground, deliberately, hoping that one of the angels will find them interesting enough to pick them up and take them home. This is how he intended to choose his first Superior. To his disappointment, Zahirah and Mitch return the items to him.