Scion – Petro Campaign – Session 56
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 Jul 26th 2009
Today was a nice mixture of fun, exciting, and terrifying. Once we arrived in London, the day started out with a trip to the British Museum. We spent an hour or two there, enjoying the museum’s collection and soaking up the legendary ambience of the place. Echo, Tabby, Ray, and I hit the Japanese section while the others went to the areas devoted to their own pantheons. And once Echo, Tabby, and I were done in the Japanese collection, we went to the Greek section and looked around for a bit. Echo was both amazed and a bit chagrined to see so much stuff that she recognized there. I don’t think she really understood how many artifacts the British plundered from Greece during the archaeological heyday. >_<
Oh, and Adam noticed a couple of odd employees at the museum, including a relatively even-tempered satyr and gangly horse headed Filipino youkai that he called a Tikbalang. I guess it makes sense that such a concentration of legend would have supernatural guardians, right? I’m surprised there isn’t a band of heroes tasked with defending the place.
Anyway, the museum was fun. I think even Tanith enjoyed going to check out the Celtic section. Echo got bored with the Greek section pretty quickly, though. Been there, done that. ^_^. But by that time we were ready to meet up with the others and move on. The new Harry Potter movie had just opened, so we decided to catch a matinee. I had no idea so many of us liked those movies! It was actually Ray’s idea. Not at all what you’d expect, right? The movie was good, but…Adam kept talking during it. I think he was just trying to get on my nerves, and it worked. Doesn’t he understand common courtesy, or did that get lost in the shuffle in his magnificent brain? >_< *sigh*
And after the movie, I convinced Adam, Pierre, Elisa, and Ray to accompany me to one of my favorite London clubs, a really well known cyber-goth-industrial venue called Slimelight. I generally play there whenever I’m in London, and this was no exception. ^_^ Meanwhile, T-Bone went out to spread a little confusion in old London. ^_^ Anyway, the manager at Slimelight let us in for free, of course, and I spent a while mingling with the crowds and totally enjoying myself. Echo and I were hot, and I even managed to drag Ray and Adam away from their table and onto the dance floor. My adoring fans were clustered around and I just soaked up the worship. Honestly, right there in the center of my own religion, I completely forgot about Hod and everything else that was going on. And when the managers asked me to come up and do some live mixing, I couldn’t resist. The crowd went crazy! I was at the top of my game…it was sheer heaven. ^_^
Secretly, I think Hod really enjoyed himself too. He might be blind, but music is something you hear and feel. ^_^
And then Crom Cruach had to go and ruin it. I didn’t really know anything was up at first, but apparently Ray, Elisa, and Adam felt something going on outside. Next thing I knew, Adam telepathically warned me that Nuckalavee and a bunch of fachan (those macabre half-men Adam and Ray fought on the formorian freighter) were descending on the club and they were going out to fight them.
I didn’t want the clubgoers to get involved, so while my friends all moved out into the street, I stayed put, made myself into the center of attention at the club (as if I wasn’t already ^_^) and ramped up the fervor on my music to keep all the mortals focused on me instead of the danger outside. And it worked long enough for the others to finish off most of the fachan and begin to draw Nuckalavee away from the club and toward the British museum. Adam let me know what they were trying to do, so I worked my music to a strong, fulfilling conclusion and then gracefully stepped down. My fans were in too much ecstasy to be too upset at the short performance. Wish I could have stayed and played longer, though. T_T
Why the British Museum, you might ask? Well, we knew that Nuckalavee could only be hit by iron weapons (steel wouldn’t cut it…literally). So Ray and Adam figured that the Iron Age collection at the British museum would be a good place to find weapons we could use against the horrid beast.
Anyway, I signaled to Echo, Tabby, and Dahlia to stay put, and by the time I got outside, the others were already gone. And apparently Hod summoned a blizzard, because the snow was coming down so thick I could barely see more than a few feet in front of me. I screamed for Ray, hoping he’d hear me and come pick me up so I wouldn’t have to drive to the British Museum (which meant I’d probably miss all the action and end up with the car wrapped around a fire hydrant…there was a blizzard blanketing the area). He sent Chase back to pick me up.
Getting into the museum wasn’t hard. The satyr guard (his name was Damien) let us in. I guess he figured something was up. And he had a maenad named Misty with him. She was adorable. Much like my shikome actually. Which meant the others didn’t think much of her, but that’s par for the course. We arrived a bit before Nuckalavee and the few remaining fachan did (Hod’s blizzard slowed the titanspawn down a lot), and in fact Elisa and Adam blew away the other fachan before they could enter the museum. While they were doing that, Ray grabbed every iron weapon he could find and planted them in a couch in the lobby, turning it into something like a very deadly pin cushion. Since the weapons were likely to break after each strike, he wanted to have plenty available. And while that was happening, I bolstered everyone.
I think we were all confused when Damien the satyr asked if we’d come to deal with the disturbance on the third floor of the museum…so T-Bone slipped up there like an invisible shadow (wait, that wouldn’t really be a shadow, would it?) to check it out. It turns out there was a sphinx rampaging around up there. I guess the legendary effects of our visit earlier awakened her from her dormant state or something. Anyway, she was causing trouble. And we couldn’t just kill her like most titanspawn because, according to Adam, doing so would bring unavoidable tragedy down on us. Of course, if we could trap her with an ancient Egyptian ritual, she’d be forced to ask a riddle and in return grant us knowledge, which we could use to learn of Fish Eye’s fatal weakness…but none of us knew anything about the ritual we needed to trap her in the first place. >_<
Sigh. If I’d been on my game, I would have thought of luring Nuckalavee to the sphinx and then getting T-Bone to use his powers of illusion to trick Nuckalavee into killing her. That would have been a nice, clean solution to the problem of the sphinx. But I didn’t think of that until after Nuckalavee was dead. I guess I was so focused on him that the sphinx problem took a back seat. Which is only fair, because when Nuckalavee came crashing through the glass windows of the museum, everything was blood and gore and iron and chaos.
Hod fled, using his ability to hide in shadows and phase through walls to stay away from Nuckalavee. The rest of my companions wove an intricate dance of blades, trying desperately to avoid Nuckalavee’s brutal lance. At one point I thought we’d lost T-Bone when he attacked Nuckalavee by surprise and was immediately countered.
I thought I saw Nuckalavee’s spear tear through T-Bone’s body, but apparently T-Bone’ complete shock and disbelief of the attack worked to his advantage because despite the shower of blood that spattered the wall behind him, he was unharmed. He decided not to try sneaking up on Nuckalavee after that, though. >_<
In the middle of the fight, several of the time-hounds warped in to join the fray. We did not need them hunting down Hod while we were engaged with Nuckalavee, so I hummed a gentle song and put them to sleep. Ray, Pierre, and Elisa finished them off later.
Adam actually struck the killing blow on Nuckalavee, though of course the beast isn’t dead. We didn’t have anyone there giving birth while we fought (Quinn stayed at the hotel with Ophelia and Sera, and she’s still two months from her due date anyway), so we couldn’t fulfill the conditions of his geasa. So we might have to do that all over again, and if the intelligence we have is right, he still has ten or so fachan in reserve. Still the immediate crisis was averted, and we should have a day or two at least without having to worry about Nuckalavee.
All that was left was the sphinx. So we went up to see if we couldn’t talk to her. Which worked remarkably well. She seemed a bit high…which I think is because Misty the maenad had bitten her. Misty couldn’t turn the sphinx into a maenad, of course, but the insanity of her bite made the sphinx oddly mellow. Weird, huh?
Her mellow mental state made it easier for T-Bone and I to talk her into leaving the museum and sharing some of her knowledge with us. The former wasn’t hard. She wanted to leave the museum anyway, but couldn’t because it was warded against her departure by the centaur Chiron. Ray wanted her to agree to stay somewhere of his choosing when he removed her from the museum, but she wasn’t foolish enough to trade one prison for another. However, I got her to agree to stay in the “new home” Ray had in mind for one year, after which she was free to leave. I thought by that time we’d be able to figure out the ritual necessary to trap her as a statue. I’m not totally sure where Ray intends to take her…but I think he mentioned Antartica. I feel kinda bad for the sphinx. But Ray already started suggesting that she mend her errant ways, so maybe a bit of tribulation will help convince her to abandon the titans and join the gods. ^_^ Or maybe it will fill her with a lust for vengeance that can only end in her death. >_<
We got her to agree and T-Bone convinced her that her oath to us was bound by the chains of fate (even though it really wasn’t). And in exchange for freeing her from the museum, she would share with us one piece of information: Fish Eye’s fatal weakness.
So, if Fish Eye is confronted with the reconciliation of a mother and her daughter, he has to try and stop it. If he can’t, he’s vulnerable to death. This means that one of the following has to happen: Claire and Alice (from Donegal town) have to make up, Quinn and her grandmother have to forgive one another, or I’m going to have to reconcile with my mother. While Fish Eye is there.
I’m actually pretty worried about this one, because both Alice and my mother have proven incredibly stubborn in the past. More to the point, though, Fish Eye doesn’t really even have to attack anyone to stop them from reconciling. I know better than most that a carefully chosen word or two can influence someone far more than a brandished blade. And hell, killing Alice or Claire might be the worst thing he could do. I mean, people often reconcile when all is lost and death is coming to claim them. On the other hand, being confronted by the unveiled reality of the supernatural might be just what we need to prove to Alice that her mother is right after all. Sure, it goes against the idea that faith loses its power when its object is proven, but we might not have any choice unless my mom’s willing to cooperate. And it’s not like Claire hasn’t witnessed blatant evidence of the supernatural already anyway.
I do hope I can reconcile with my mother, though. And I hope that Rose and I never become estranged from one another like Claire and Alice, or me and my mother…