Excerpt: Title?! We don't need no steenkin' title!

Denny continued to set the scene for us. Mood music, gothy and full of harpsichords, played in the background, and the candles on the table flickered in time to the beats of our hearts.
“You enter the library. The walls are covered in books. in Built- in mahogany shelves covering everything on the west, south, and east walls. The north wall holds a fireplace that sits empty, only a light dusting of ash on the soot covered marble showing that a fire had been lit recently. The floor has expensive carpets layered underneath the furniture. Everything looks expensive.”
I glared at Martin, playing the Gangrel.
“Don’t you dare touch anything, Pots, or I’ll rip off your fingers and stuff them down your throat.”
He looked hurt.
“Now, Maddie,” broke in Rikki, sounding strange in a southern texas accent as he spoke before Martin could, “why would you go and say such a mean thing like that?”
“If that Beast gets any of this dirty, Riley, MacCoulin will know we’ve been here. And we can’t afford to piss off yet another Elder.”
Jonathon shrugged.
“It’s true,” he grunted, picking up his pencil to play with it for a bit. “It’s bad enough the Justicars’ are rumored to be coming into the city for something. I’d hate to add MacCoulin pissed that we’d been looking around after he’d said no to that ledger sheet.”
“The least of our worries, I’m afraid, Lister,” I added quickly. “Let’s just find this bauble and then get out of here.”
We turned back to Denny.
“I’ll be looking through the bookshelves,” Rikki said softly, “seeing if I can find some sort of book safe, or a safe behind books.”
“Do you take off any of the books?” Denny asked.
“Um,” Rikki thought for a long moment. “No, not yet. I want to see if there’s any traps or anything that may sound an alarm or otherwise cause trouble.”
Denny nodded.
“Okay,” he shuffled papers in front of him. “Go ahead and give a Perception plus Alertness roll.”
“Alrighty then,” Rikki mumbled, grabbing ten- sided dice until he had the correct number corresponding to the amount of bubbles on his sheet for both the stats. “What’s the difficulty?”
Denny thought for a moment.
“Just roll and tell me what you got.”
“Okay,” he replied, rolling eight dice in his hands. Then he let them go over the table, and tallied up the rolls. “I got three 9’s, two 8’s, a 6, and two 4’s. How’d I do?”
Denny made his own quick dice roll.
“You’re about to take a book off the shelf that’s just eye- level with you, when you notice a tiny line in the shelf that looks odd.”
Rikki stroked his chin where he’d tried many times to make a beard grow, and had finally given up just this past summer.
“I look closer,” he said.
“Okay,” Denny replied, “In the line of the paint, you see a faint metallic sheen, as though a tiny wire had been placed where a grain of the wood would normally hide it, but had been shoved aside from something previously, showing itself.”
“Um,” Rikki said softly. “Hey guys?”
“What?” I, as Maddie, asked.
“We may have a problem.”
When the Toreador said that we may have a problem, a wise vampire stopped to hear him out.
“What?” I asked again.
“I think the books are booby trapped. We should be very, very careful not to just take them down when we look for things.”
“Are you certain?” I asked.
“Not dead certain, but I’d really rather not find out if I’m right,” he said with a tight smile. We all nodded.
“Makes sense,” I replied, after a long moment. “Alright, be careful how you handle the books, and what and how you touch things. We do not want another edition of last weeks debacle.”
Everyone else nodded, and in Pots case, vigorously, since Pots had been the one to get stuck in a Nosferatu’s trap of touching something he shouldn’t have, only to get his hand stuck in the wall. It had taken quite a bit of fast talking and some hefty favor bribes to get him released without having him gnawing his hand off at the wrist. It had been close.