Scion – Petro Campaign – Session 55
This account was originally found on Livejournal, I am not the original author—I am just a fan of the journal and have found reading it on livejournal clunky to navigate and rife with errors/instability (such as having to refresh multiple times due to the page in questions becoming unavailable often requiring multiple refreshes. The original post can be found here, published by DJ-Yomi, and was published on Jun 30th 2009
Believe it or not, we’re back in Iceland. It looks like flying to New Zealand was all for naught since we essentially turned around and came right back. In fact, the end result of the trip to New Zealand was that the cabin of my plane got trashed! T_T All for a good cause, I suppose, but I’m still upset. >_< Still, now I have an excuse to guilt-trip Adam into redesigning the plane to add a VTOL feature, which is something we’ve been talking about for awhile…not that the damage to the plane’s interior was really his fault.
Okay, let me back up. It was stormy when we got to New Zealand, and while we stretched our legs at the airport and waited for them to refuel the jet, Sera, Echo, Quinn, and Tabby let Ophelia walk around among other people, trying to let her acclimate to mortals again without immediately trying to eat them or turn them into shikome. Apparently, Ophelia wasn’t really a problem, though. The main issues they ran into were keeping her from attacking people’s bad hair like a crazed salon worker and stopping her from embarrassing herself with spontaneous performance art. I have such an artsy bunch of followers. ^_^ ♥ I think Ophelia and Steph will get along well.
Meanwhile, Adam, T-Bone, Pierre, Elisa, Tanith, Hod and I discussed what to do now that we were in New Zealand (Ray was still in Ireland). We’d bought some time, now we had to make the best of it. Ironically, we decided to go back to Iceland. Crazy, huh?
It boiled down to this. We knew how to defeat Crom Cruach’s servants, but they’d still be tough to fight. And running from Tisiphone was only going to make things look worse once she actually found us. The longer we evaded her, the more pissed she was likely to become. So we decided to go back to Iceland, trusting that Tisiphone was still in Reykjavik trying to track down Hod’s starting point. We hoped to find some tainted ground there, use Hod as bait to draw out Crom Cruach’s servants, and attract Tisiphone so that she’d arrive at about the same time and help us defeat the titanspawn. This would, hopefully, establish us as being on the same side as she was and generally make her more agreeable to helping us stall for more time. Of course, we were asking for a lot of convenient timing on this one…but in the end we decided to just let go and let Fate handle it. It usually puts us in the thick of things, so why not now? ^_^
So after fueling, we boarded the plane again and headed back to Iceland. And that’s when the plane got trashed. T_T
About halfway through the trip, a bunch of the time-hounds warped into the cabin and attacked us. There was barely room in the plane for all of us and the titanspawn, so the whole fight was a chaotic frenzy of flesh, blood, weapons, and maggots (damn Crom Cruach). I immediately evacuated Hod, Merlin, Tanith, Quinn, Tabby, and Ophelia into the cockpit compartment and closed and locked the door to keep us safe from the vile gas and maggots released when the dogs died. We hid there while the others fought the dogs, so I didn’t see much of the fight, but I do know that during the beginning, Adam was on the phone with Ray and seemed to be conducting some sort of experiment to determine exactly what sort of stimuli would trigger Ray’s sense that one of us was in danger. Ah, Adam. Ever the scholar. ^_^ When Adam was finally in danger, Ray zapped into the plane to help slay the rest of the dogs.
T-Bone used his powers of illusion to make himself look like Hod and thereby distracted the dogs from trying to get into the cockpit, and between Ray, Adam, Pierre, and Elisa, the dogs didn’t last long. Still, it was a close call.
I emerged into the cabin after letting T-Bone into the cockpit (and out of the poisonous vapors) and was appalled to see how much had been damaged. The seats were trashed, some of them crushed, others cut cleanly in two (by Ray’s katanas, no doubt). Several of the lights were smashed and one was dangling from its mount on sparking cords, and the hull was scratched and scarred and splattered with titanspawn gore and maggots. And speaking of maggots, the floor of the plane was crawling with them, which was all that was left of the hounds.
I think I screamed in dismay. Then I angrily snapped my fingers and killed every last maggot (having power over life and death is sweet ^_^). I complained to Ray and the others for making such a mess, but I guess I shouldn’t have. It’s not like they could help it. And once I’d finished, I ordered Sera to descend to a safer altitude and we opened the plane’s door to vent the poison gas and to shovel the dead maggots out as well as we could.
Oh, I should also note that at about the time we were doing that, we were flying over the Middle East, and we saw the blanketing darkness that’s enveloped the place since Ra’s disappearance evaporate. The sun now shines on the deserts again. I’m not sure what happened, but I’d be willing to bet that the Pesedjet managed to rescue Ra. I called Carina and Sam again, but they were still out of touch. I wonder if Storm’s group is involved in whatever’s going on in the Overworld?
Once we got back to Iceland, we wasted no time in finding tainted ground—a vast city dump in this case (yuck >_<). We set Hod and Merlin there with the rest of us arrayed around him in defense. Ray flew into the air and used the sky itself to amplify his voice as he called Tisiphone’s name, and within minutes she found him. Using word of Hod’s whereabouts as bait, he brought her to us.
Before we could explain anything to Tisiphone, though, the ground started to quake and a massive maggot-like worm the size of a large house burst from the trash heaps and attacked. It was definitely the Earthshaker. It was joined by four slightly smaller worms, and Adam warned us that several of the surrounding trees were corrupted demon-trees like those we fought when we defeated Fish Eye. I joined hands with everyone and wrapped our wrists with a length of red ribbon to bolster us against injury, and then prepared to do what little I could to protect Hod, Quinn, and Elisa.
The fight was intense, and started off with one of the most impressive spectacles I’ve seen in awhile: Ray meditated briefly, and then with several thunderous bolts of lightning, he split into eight copies of himself! Each of the eight Rays kicked just as much ass as the single Ray, and trust me, we needed it.
Quinn and Elisa began to kiss as soon as the Earthshaker emerged, and at least one of the Rays stood nearby to protect them from the titanspawn while they were helplessly locked in their embrace. Despite the situation, it was really romantic. ♥ ^_^ ♥ I snapped some incredible picture of the two locked together with the Earthshaker rising dramatically behind them. It was like an over-the-top movie poster or something.
For over a quarter of a minute, while Quinn and Elisa were kissing, we fought hard against the titanspawn. The eight Rays were a flurry of blades and blood, but it took all of them to defeat the great Nemean maggots, and we couldn’t even hurt the Earthshaker until the kiss was done. Tisiphone could,w however, and she was able to inflict deep wounds on the beast while the rest of us fought the lesser spawn. I know that Pierre tore into one of the worms with his fists, pummeling it to death, and T-Bone ran interference for us as usual. The trees began lashing into us and went specifically for Hod, Quinn, and Elisa. Ray was able to defend Quinn and Elisa, but Hod was hit by a terrible blow…but since he was unaware of the coming attack, fate rendered him immune to it. He was hit again later and suffered the full force of the blow, but fortunately the bolstered fortitude I’d given him absorbed the damage, leaving Hod himself unscathed.
Things only got worse when more of the time-warping hounds appeared. One of them attacked me and I was forced to shed my corpse to avoid serious injury (too bad I can’t bolster my own ability to soak up hits >_<). To take some of the heat off, I began singing one of my songs as I picked myself up off the ground, steadily singing louder as I rose. My Cradlesong was able to lull the hounds into sleep…but the trees, unfortunately, couldn’t hear, so they were immune to it.
Even so, we were able to finish off most of the remaining titanspawn by the time the kiss was completed. Fearing for its life, the Earthshaker spent every ounce of its fury trying to kill Quinn and Elisa, but Ray’s valiant defense kept it at bay. And when the kiss was done, Elisa grabbed her Aztec weapon, screamed a blood-curdling battle cry, and struck the injured worm with such a terrible blow that she felled it in one hit! O_O My gods, we have to get her to kiss Quinn before she fights more often. ^_^
So that’s one of the big three down. Nuckalavee and Fish Lips are still out there, but so far so good, right? ^_^ We did get some skin from the Earthshaker that we can turn into a vest or something that grants mastery over worms and maggots and lets earth-based powers work in Crom Cruach’s domains without attracting his attention. *sigh* I’ll probably end up taking it. May as well embrace the maggot-ridden part of my mother’s rotting heritage. It certainly does seem to follow me around enough. I mean, hey, maggots are a part of the order of death and decay, right? As long as they aren’t titan-tainted…
After the fight, we had some explaining to do. Tisiphone was confused, but that wouldn’t last long before she became furious unless we explained what was going on. I was on it, with T-Bone there to back me up. We explained to the Fury that we were trying to protect Hod from servants of Crom Cruach who were out for his blood. More importantly, we explained that sending him to the competition was an invitation to start Ragnarok, and that as a reasonable member of the Dodekatheon, she’d actually be doing us all a favor if she helped us keep Hod away.
Tisiphone couldn’t argue with my charm and and T-Bone’s smooth-talking. It took a little convincing, but she came around to our point of view. She really wasn’t as bad as all the stories would lead you to believe, though that probably has a lot to do with that fact that we weren’t doing anything she really had a problem with in the first place. In the end, she agreed to help us out, and even promised to stall for time by reporting that she’d lost track of Hod somewhere in Hawaii. ^_^ So fun.
We thanked Tisiphone and she left us to decide where to go next. We decided to head to London, mostly to visit the British Museum. It’ll be a nice interlude, and from what Adam says, there’s enough legendary relics in there for us to soak up a bit of the ambience and recharge our spiritual batteries, so to speak. Hopefully it’ll be entertaining for Hod and Tanith too. And honestly, I’ve never been, so I’m looking forward to checking the place out with Echo. ^_^ I just hope we aren’t attacked there. I’d hate to be responsible for the destruction of priceless historical artifacts. >_<
More later!