Kara the Velveteen’s zenith move project to turn everyone into/reveal that everyone already was part human and part monster like her was about to complete, and her former crew in the New Versailles Historical Society YouTube Channel (NVHSYT) set out to stop her from transforming/revealing the truth about everyone in the city without their consent. Kara has been going about this by forming a band called Fur Coat Factory that’s going to release a song that will reveal the monster part of people when they listen to it, along with Birdie, an unreal shapeshifter who was also looking to become human before Kara convinced her to pursue this synthesis instead.
After some preliminary investigation, the crew found that Kara was working out of a recording studio in Summerset Avenue and decided to break in and stop Kara on the night before their new song goes live. After Cici the Reaper and Byron the Prisoner phased through the wall and opened a side door for Ra’in the Expert, Cici improvised an UnReal compass to point them towards the place where the song was being made, but it brought them to Birdie instead– or rather, Robin, since Birdie was a temporary name given to them by Ra’in and they made it their own in the time since they last met. Ra’in tried to convince Robin that they were fans who wanted to know how the music process was going, and almost succeeded, but Birdie caught on, realizing that Kara told them that the NVHSYT wanted to stop her, and made Ra’in mirror the people around her as Robin does, but then Cici transformed into a critic barraging them with harsh criticism and knocked them out.
After that, they all went into the basement to try and find the computers where the song was stored, but Kara was down there too, along with a jumble of sea glass chimes, old pipes, and rusted ship parts all being used as instruments. With a few close calls, they made it to the recording studio, where they saw an old friend, Pascal the Media, her face made up of the waveform in an oscilloscope. She told them that in order to make sure that Kara doesn’t just try again, they would have to invert the ritual instead of just disrupting it, making it keep things as they appear to be instead of changing or revealing them, and that this would keep Byron from astral projecting as a Prisoner unless they found a way to stop this. They then proceeded to do that, with Ra’in hacking into the computer where the audio was stored and Byron modifying the audio to subvert the magical effects. However, Byron recording additional lyrics let Kara find where they were, and she asked them to please let her do this, and when they refused, she turned into her half-seal form and attacked, while Cici held her off. Meanwhile, Ra’in has been keeping everyone from taking fallout, but their own fallout from the encounter with Robin made them roll for fallout against their own stress whenever someone in their vicinity did, so they had taken several fallouts, and were 1 scar away from having 7 scars and needing to Abandon life as a drifter, but refused to leave anyway. After Byron finished sabotaging the song, he opened a door to his book-world of Little Elysium to escape the effects of the inverted song, leaving Ra’in to dash to the button and publish it, broadcasting it directly to the minds of everyone in the City. Kara stopped fighting them then because there was no longer any point, and instead started crying about how she and Robin could no longer transform*. Ra’in tried to comfort her but didn’t really know how, didn’t have the experience she did of being 2 things at once and discovering they liked being that. Byron returned from Little Elysium, and everyone described what they were doing after the job.
*I’m not sure that this was a good twist tbh, I wanted to complicate the narrative of “she’s doing a bad thing and they have to stop her” by making it so that stopping her would have its own negative consequences, but I feel like it might have come across as cheap? idk. In any case, I didn’t communicate it very clearly at the time.
