Scion – Petro Campaign – Session 17
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 Jan 27th 2008.
Well, we’ll soon head out to the ruins of Kaymakli, where we’ll be going underground to look for the Eye of Madness. But before that, it looks like we’ll be meeting with the other group of scions we’ve been hearing about. You know, the scions of Dionysus and Loki who call themselves the Chaos Theory.
Hmmm. Does our band need a name? It might be nice, but we’re so dysfunctional that we’re just barely a band anyway, and I doubt we could ever agree on a name. Oh well.
Anyway, let me start at the beginning. The flight to Turkey was fairly uneventful, for me at least. Mostly, I just listened to music, chatted with Echo, and tried to relax. I’m really excited about our upcoming journey to the Underworld, so relaxing wasn’t exactly easy, but I managed.
Later (much later, actually), Ray informed us that he had had a pretty interesting encounter with Hades during the flight. Yep. Death god Hades. He apparently said something about how he was going to help us even though we’d caused him problems in the past (you know, the whole Grundy thing). I think he was really impressed with Ray’s nobility and the reverence Ray has been showing to Solomon Grundy. I mean, as far as Ray is concerned, Grundy was a servant of the gods just like we are, and so he deserves respect too even though he was our foe. That’s a pretty nice outlook on things. I like it.
Anyway, it sure impressed Hades. He gave Ray a ring that lets him see vampires whenever he wants. He can see shikome and maenads too. Actually, he could see the bite I received from Miko—the one that made me a carrier of the shikome essence—and the places where my shikome have bitten Echo. Sigh. Echo’s such a freak. ^_^ A loveable freak, but still a freak.
Needless to say, this ring could be very useful to us since we’re going straight into vampire territory…
As soon as we landed and left the airplane, we were jumped in the terminal by several weird vampire things. Adam called them vrykolakas. They were fierce, bestial things, not at all the elegant vampire that Bram Stoker wrote about or the ones in New Orleans. They attacked with no concern for the innocent bystanders, and we stood and faced them. Ray, Anna, and Adam tore into them while Echo hid behind me and T-Bone looked for a good opening. Pierre taunted them to draw their attention away from me (he’s such a sweetie! ♥) Since they were vampires, I used Amaterasu’s power to invoke the power of the sun, and began blazing with light. That got their attention. The light burned them; they started smoking and steaming, and the damage that it did made it easier for the others to kill them as quickly as possible. Elisa was really impressive! She fired bolts of sunlight from her rifle and each shot reduced a vrykolakas to piles of ash!
I discovered a new ability during the fight too. ^_^ One of the vrykolakas slipped by the others and attacked me. It hit hard. It wouldn’t have killed me, but it would have hurt like hell. But I didn’t actually take any damage from it. Instead, the strike knocked me back into the wall. I was fine—I even landed on my feet, basically. I looked up and saw my own body in front of me where the vrykolakas was. It fell, horribly wounded, and then decayed rapidly until it was nothing but bones that disintegrated into dust. How cool is that? Not only can I sometimes avoid damage entirely, but it looks morbidly grotesque when it happens. ^_^
Once we’d finished the vampires off, I kept glowing until they burned to ash (Adam thought they might come back to life unless we destroyed them completely). No airport security people showed up, which was odd. It makes me wonder if there was a supernatural effect over the place. Another, more disturbing option is that the security forces have somehow been subverted by our enemies. If so, who knows who else they have control over. *worry*
We didn’t waste any time leaving…but as we hurried down to the baggage claim, we ran into some more enemies. These were strange, shadowy creatures that looked something like big, spider-bodied things with vaguely humanoid torsos and long, tentacle arms. They were after us too. We quickly discovered that we couldn’t hit them normally, but they were still vulnerable to my sunlight. Elisa’s sun bolts did a number on them too, and Ray discovered that if he lit his weapons on fire, he could damage them as well.
Even so, they were really dangerous opponents. One of them kept attacking Elisa, and I could tell that every time it hit her, she grew weaker and more fatigued…not physically, but psychologically. Since she was obviously flagging, I used my divine charisma to encourage her as I shouted, “Elisa! What’s wrong with you? You’re better than this!” I thought she’d go for that sort of hard-edged pep talk, and it worked. She regained her will to fight and helped us finish the shadow beasts off in short order.
After the fight, she described how being attacked by the creatures made her feel. Apparently, as her will weakened, she could feel the beasts start to take control of her. That’s really frightening. If these things can take control of us, then they really are dangerous. We’ll have to be very careful in the future. Scary. >_< The only good news is that, according to Adam, they probably can’t go anywhere that sunlight has shone directly in the recent past.
Did I say good news? We’re going into a place that’s been sealed away underground for ages! I have a bad feeling we’ll see more of these things.
Vampires killed, check. Shadow beasts killed, check. With that, we left the airport, rented a couple of vehicles, and found a hotel where we could crash. We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping for supplies (and I took a short break to recharge some of my power from the sun). We’re not sure how long we’ll be down there, but it could be awhile. Fortunately, none of us have to eat very often, so we don’t have to bring much in the way of food or water. Echo warned us that air might be a serious issue, since it’s likely to be thin and stale down there. We got some oxygen masks to help with that, though hopefully we’re all hardy enough to get by without too much trouble. Pierre, Echo, and I shouldn’t have any trouble because of our connection to earth, so that’s something, at least. All in all, it looks like we’ll be able to travel light.
I will have my laptop packed away in my pack, though. I mean, if we’re going to be down there for long time, I’ll need to keep up with my journals, right? I have a couple of extra lithium batteries for it too, and they’re charged up, so as long as I just use it to type a few entries for later posting, I should be fine. And if something happens to it…well, at least I backed everything up at home before leaving for the trip, and I have a couple of flash drives with me to back things up while I’m here. ^_^
Shopping done, most of us tried to get some rest. Echo and I dragged T-Bone off to a high-class Turkish bath that was recommended by the hotel. I’ve always heard that Turkish baths are supposed to be incredible, what with the massages and all. And the rumors were absolutely true! I felt soooo relaxed and refreshed when I left that place…it was absolutely euphoric. ^__^
Late in the night (or really early in the morning, depending on how you want to look at it), Ray got in touch with us all and asked us to meet up with him. He’d been out prowling around like Spiderman and looking for wrongs to right and criminals to punish. He’s so gallant, even if he is a bit narrow-minded. ^_^ During his patrol, he ran across Chaos Theory. They were burying the bodies of a bunch of maenads that had belonged to one of their members, a woman named Calliope. She’s a scion of Dionysus, and was really upset that her minions had been killed. I was relieved to hear that she doesn’t treat them like cannon fodder. Like me and my shikome, she seems to cherish her maenads and treats them like the people they are.
Aside from Calliope, there were three others and a snake-like thing that must be a creature they created to help them find their way through the ruins. Zag is another child of Dionysus. He’s…colorfully effete. That’s not exactly how Ray described him, but that’s the impression I got. Benton is a child of Loki. Ray described him as a smallish, scruffy-looking man who seems to have a dangerous affinity for fire (Duh, son of Loki!)
The last was Laura, a scion of Loki. She’s a tall, leggy blonde. T-Bone perked up when Ray mentioned her. He’d better not be thinking of cheating on Dahlia. I mean, sure, Echo sleeps with other people from time to time, and I hooked up with Persephone once (not that I really had any choice in the matter), but the two of us have an understanding. Echo’s a nymph, after all, so she works under a slightly different set of principles than most people do. But Dahlia’s in love with T-Bone, and she sees their relationship as exclusive. I thought T-Bone did too… I’ll be pretty miffed at him if he breaks Dahlia’s heart.
Listen to me! I’m totally overreacting. I mean, what guy wouldn’t perk up at the mention of an attractive, sexy blonde? I’m sure I’m worrying for nothing.
Anyway, the Chaos Theory want to strike an alliance with us, at least for the time being, so we’re going to go meet with them and talk about it. We have very similar aims and we share many of the same enemies, so they think that combining forces will help both of us. Well, I’d rather not fight them if we can help it. I mean, presumably we’re on more-or-less the same side. I hope so, anyway. Still, I’m a bit worried about what will happen when we find the Eye. I doubt they’ve gone to all this trouble just to let us walk away with it.
Oh well. Maybe we can convince them to leave us be once we’ve found the Eye. In any event, working with them should give us a better idea of what they’re up to and how to deal with them if it comes to that.