Scion – Petro Campaign – Session 1-4 (The Grundy Cycle)
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 Aug 4th. 2007.
[Note: Since this first journal covers four rather involved sessions, I’m just hitting the highlights and the events that most directly impacted Erika. She’ll be sure to give more attention to the other PCs in future entries!]
I’ve just come off one of the most incredible weeks of my life. I mean, a lot of crazy stuff has happened since mom opened my eyes to the supernatural, but nothing like this.
Basically, my efforts to track down my mother, Izanami, finally paid off. I heard that there was something going on in the Red Mountain area, you know, the place they filmed that movie Quiet Mountain, and sent Keiko to check it out. Jackpot. She reported that servants of Izanami, Hel, and Hades were up to something big. I didn’t have any deejay gigs scheduled, so I got the girls together and we headed up to Red Mountain to check things out.
I’m not going to cover every detail, but I’ll hit the highlights. First off, I ran into several other children of the gods there. That’s more than I’ve ever> met before, and over the course of the week that followed, we got to know each other pretty well. I’m keeping in touch with all of them now, but they still haven’t come to see me in action at a club. Sure, I know the cyberindustrial thing isn’t for everyone, but they’d enjoy it if they gave it try.
Here’s the roster:
Adam Wednesday is a son of Odin. He has a deliciously dark outlook on life and cynicism practically drips off him, but he’s great guy. And hot too. I should definitely flirt with him more. He’s pretty much a goth even if he doesn’t admit it. Among other things, he’s good at prophecy and knows a lot about the occult – a lot more than I do, anyway. The two of us work well together. Maybe there’s some potential there.
Masika Summers is a daughter of Horus. She’s a cop, and way too strict and stern for my tastes, but I guess that’s what makes her so reliable. Unfortunately, she’s been busy since we parted ways, so it doesn’t look like she’ll be working too much with the rest of us from here on out. I had a fun discussion about situational ethics with her, and actually got her to admit that it might be okay to break the law from time to time for the right reasons, but she got pretty miffed at that.
Pierre de la Cimitere is…well, let me put it this way. Have you ever seen the James Bond movie Live and Let Die? You know the Baron Samedi guy in that film? Well Pierre’s that guy. He looks just like him and has his same enticing mixture of creep and comic with a healthy dose of crazy. He’s a son of Baron Samedi, in fact, and he travels around in an undead hearse full of zombies. Really, he’s a great guy, and I like him immensely (the zombies help). I turns out he was somehow involved in helping to draw the rest of us together.
Ray Mac Cloud (a.k.a. the Black Shogun of Harlem) is a son of Raiden and the biggest badass I know. He’s like the samurai ideal, only he’s black, not Japanese, and he’s kinda ugly. Despite his rough appearance and all his posturing, though, he’s really a sweetheart. He’s already saved my life on a couple of occasions, and he really looks out for his friends. He’s into electronics and computers too, so he and I have a lot in common. We might hang out more if he wasn’t always trying to live up to the ideal of the stoic warrior. One other thing – Ray has a posse of gangbangers who follow him around. Most of them are okay, but that Mad Dawgg is…a poor excuse for human.
T-Bone is a New Orleans jazz musician who is a son of the Kalfu a voodoo Loa. He’s a taciturn blues man. I can appreciate that. He plays the trumpet beautifully. We’ve talked a bit about music, and even though our styles are as different as they come, at least we have some common ground. I’ve already sampled some of his music to put into my own tracks. He doesn’t seem to care much for technology, though. Even when Ray and I got everyone set up with good cell phones so that I could network us, T-bone kinda disappeared. I don’t even think he has a cell phone, if you can believe that in this day and age. Oh, and Dahlia (the freakiest of my rokurokubi girls) has really latched on to T-Bone. They’ve been spending a lot of time together. Way to go T-Bone!
Elisa Corazon is daughter of Tezcatlipoca. She’s a frontline photojournalist who does most of her work in war zones. Since I’m really into photography too, I thought we might have some things in common, but she’s really bloodthirsty and kinda fanantical in her approach to problem solving. Really, she’s pretty scary, but she gets things done. Her photography is really macabre, which is appealing in its own way. I doubt she’d let me Photoshop any of her work to give it that dark, haunting effect, though.
Anna…I don’t think she ever shared her last name…is almost as much of a badass as Ray, but she’s more of a loner…though she is a friend of Adam’s. She’s a daughter of Artemis. To be honest, she joined us a bit later than everyone else, so I don’t really know her that well, but she seems like the “angry” sort. At least she dresses like a goth, which is cool.
There’s one other really important person to mention. Her name is Mara, and she’s an oread (a kind of mountain nymph) connected to Red Mountain. She a beautiful, caring, and affectionate woman. To make a long story short, we rescued her from the unsettling events surrounding Red Mountain, and she helped us resolve things there. With the help of Keiko, Sera, and the rest of my girls, Adam and I even drove off some shikome (female demon servants of my mom, Izanami) who were threatening her. She really developed a huge crush on me, in part because I’m by far the hottest member of the group (I’m even hotter than Adam), in part because, as she puts it, I risked my life to save her from the shikome, and in part because I guess I’m friendlier to her than anyone else.
Whew. That’s pretty much everyone. As a group we seem to work pretty well together. We’re all pretty versatile, but Ray, Elisa, and Anna are front-line fighters, and between the two of us, T-Bone and I are comfortable in just about any social situation. Adam and Pierre are our occultists, and both of them are handy in a fight (which is good, because I’m totally useless in combat).
Once we all found each other, we started investigating what was going on at Red Mountain. I won’t bore anyone with all the details, but basically here’s what we eventually figured out.
Izanami, my mom and goddess of the Japanese Underworld, had access to a gate to the Underworld that was located deep within the still-burning coal mine shafts under Red Mountain (there used to be a mine there until the fires started and drove everyone away, leaving nothing but a ghost town). She had apparently been working with Hel, the Norse goddess of death, but then Hades discovered the portal’s existence and decided that he wanted to use it for his own ends. Three powers of death operating together in the same place is pretty potent stuff, by the way. The morbid chill in the air at Red Mountain was invigorating like you wouldn’t believe. But that’s beside the point. Hades ended up driving Hel off and made a pact with my mom.
Ever heard of Solomon Grundy? Well, he’s from a creepy little 19th century poem that goes like this:
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end of
Solomon Grundy
As with most 19th century children’s rhymes, there’s a dark side to this one. Solomon Grundy really exists, and Hades wanted to bring him out of the Underworld so that Grundy could enact vengeance on all those astronomers who decided that Pluto, Hades’ planet, isn’t a planet anymore. How typical of those Greek gods.
Anyway, there was a big astronomer’s convention going on in Boston, and Hades wanted Grundy to go kill the scientists. While I think zombie astronomers might have been interesting, I doubt there would have been enough left of them to make zombies. And they really didn’t deserve to die, even if Hades…I mean Pluto…is just a “dwarf planetoid” or whatever it is now.
So, according to a prophecy that Adam shared with us, the seven of us (me, Adam, Ray, Anna, Elisa, T-Bone, and Masika) had been drawn together by Fate to stop Grundy, and Pierre was responsible for making sure that happened. Just as there are seven days in the poem, there were seven of us.
More importantly, Grundy’s own Fate was bound up in the poem itself, and that’s why we were so important. We were the agents chosen by Fate to make sure the poem ran its course…we just had to make sure that happened before Hades’ plan played out. In this case, Fate was both our friend and our enemy. In the end, it virtually guaranteed Grundy’s demise since the poem said he would die. But by the end of Saturday, he could easily have gotten the astronomers, so we had to defeat him before that happened. Unfortunately, we couldn’t defeat him before Saturday either since that’s not the Fate that was written in the poem.
As a result, we spent most of the week just trying to weaken Grundy while he got christened, married, and sick. And Grundy is not to be trifled with. He’s a giant zombie and, as zombies go, he’s not cuddly at all. He probably could have killed me with a flick of his wrist, which is why I kept my distance and supported my comrades from the side whenever we had to fight him. He was usually accompanied by an entourage of lemures, manes, and shikome, which didn’t make things any easier, but at least I was able to take some good photos and help out with the Heavenly Flare ability granted to me by Amaterasu. It’s amazing what a bright flash of light will do to the servants of Death.
Of course, I was curious about my mother’s role in all of this. I saw a chance to connect with her again, but unfortunately it didn’t play out. Her servants were more interested in turning me into a shikome than putting me in touch with mom. A part of me is really worried by that. It makes me wonder if my mother even wants to see me again. I mean, she’s pretty much left me on my on so far…what if she doesn’t care about me? Or what if she’s disappointed with who I’ve become? I mean, sure, I can be gloomy and gothic when I want to be, but there’s a reason people think of me as a “perky” cybergoth. Maybe she doesn’t like that. Or maybe she doesn’t like my association with Amaterasu…
Anyway, my mother’s role in the plot was to provide Grundy’s bride, which he needed in order to fulfill the Fate of the poem so that he could go introduce the astronomers to an early grave. She offered the ghost Oiwa for the task. I was impressed. Oiwa is one of the most famously malevolent ghosts in Japanese legend, though in all fairness she became that way because her husband poisoned her so that he could hook up with another woman. Oiwa has a right to be upset. She didn’t just die because of her husband’s infidelity, the poison deformed her horribly before she expired. So I felt considerable sympathy for her even though, in her role as Grundy’s bride, she tried her best to kill us.
So, how did we deal with Hades’ plan? I think “blunt trauma” is a pretty good description of our first plan. We (and by “we” I mean everyone except for T-Bone and I, who weren’t comfortable with the level of violence proposed by this plan) decided to wipe out as much of Grundy’s “escort” of manes, lemures, and shikome as possible by blowing up the church where Grundy was getting married. I got some great photos, but I think it was more Elisa’s kind of work. (She told me she was able to sell the photos she took to a tabloid publishing agency).
During the fight that ensued, we were attacked by Oiwa and her ghost handmaidens. And we were able to send them back to the Underworld…or so we thought at the time. Oiwa tried to possess me (at least, I think that’s what was happening), but after we defeated her, she melted away into what looked like inky black water. She touched me then, just once, and disappeared. I felt something cold settle in my belly, but didn’t think anything of it at the time. After all we’d just been through it didn’t seem all that important.
Over the course of the next day, we stopped shikome reinforcements from coming in from the Underworld and managed to lure Grundy into a massive tiger trap. That’s right, a tiger trap. It was Masika’s suggestion. As silly as it sounds, it worked to keep a weakened Solomon Grundy busy for a day which ended up buying us much needed time.
Of course, by the time Grundy was escaping, I had discovered that Oiwa hadn’t really disappeared. She had taken up residence inside me, where she was reconstituting herself. Since she posed no immediate threat, Adam and the others convinced me to wait to get her exorcised until after we had dealt with Grundy. It made sense, and I was pretty confident that I could get Fukuda-san the priest who mentors me in my observance of Shinto, to exorcise her. Since Oiwa was, for the time being, a part of me, I decided to use that to my advantage and managed to keep Grundy at bay for a few more hours by turning on the charm and talking to him (chastely, I’ll add) as though I were his “blushing bride”. And once he grew tired of that and became restless, Elisa drove an eighteen-wheeler on top of him.
This group has some pretty brutal plans. Then again, Grundy was a pretty brutal guy…
In the end, we managed to slow Grundy down enough to keep him away from Boston and the astronomers. And by the time Saturday rolled around and Fate dictated that he could be killed, Ray, Anna, and the others didn’t have much trouble finishing him off.
On Sunday we buried him, and that was the end of Solomon Grundy.
Red Mountain returned to normal, which isn’t good, but compared to what was going on, it isn’t bad either. I’m Still keeping up with Adam and the others. After all, Fate drew us together for a reason.
As far as I know, my mother still has possession of her portal, and I hope that Hades doesn’t try to drive her away from it like he did Hel. I’ll do what I can to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’m still distressed that I didn’t get in touch with my mom, though. I was so close! And now I’m worried that she’s angry with me. This whole Grundy episode wasn’t exactly her idea, but she did have a stake in it, and I’m afraid I may have really pissed her off by helping to foil Hades’ plans. I hope that’s not the case, but I’m still worried about it. I don’t get depressed often, but I’ve been pretty down since I got back from Red Mountain. Quinn, Keiko, Sera, Dahlia, and Kimiyo have been trying to cheer me up, but it hasn’t worked so far. I have a deejay gig tomorrow night, though, and clubs usually reenergize me.