Scion – Petro Campaign – Session 38
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 Nov 16th 2008
I AM OFFICIALLY A MOTHER! My baby girl, Rosa-Petra Lacey (we’re mostly calling her Rose), was born on Pierre’s estate on March 30th, 2008 and she is beautiful! ♥ ^_^ ♥ She has the cutest rosy cheeks and absolutely adorable rose-pink eyes. I can’t believe how wonderful she is! ^___^ We thought a long time about her name. Echo didn’t want a “normal” name for our daughter, and we eventually settled on Rosa-Petra because of her eye-color and because she’s an oread (thus the Petra, which is derived from the Greek for earth or stone).
Echo’s labor wasn’t too bad, though of course I was anxious the whole time. She had a water birth, which was the standard in ancient Greece. She’s actually recovered very quickly and is back to her usual bright, talkative self. I’m so glad. A quiet Echo was…unnerving. Cila helped with the birth, and thanks to her and the health purview (which let me lactate even though I wasn’t actually pregnant), I was the first to nurse our baby. I hope I was able to build a strong mother daughter connection right away by doing that.
We’ve been trying to spend time together with Rose since she was born. It’s hard to spend time apart, actually. But with all that’s going on with Pierre and Elisa, my friends need me, so I’ve had to leave Echo and Rose alone more than I would have liked since she was born. That’s okay, though. Any one of my friends would do the same for me. ^_^ And I feel that they’re both pretty safe at Pierre’s estate. After all, Elisa and Pierre are the ones who are really in danger.
Guess what else! Jacob (you know, from Storm’s group) showed up! Apparently he sensed that Elisa and her baby were in danger and flew in to see what he could do to help. I gotta tell you, I was really happy to see him show up at Pierre’s place, especially since everyone else was out tracking down leads at the time and Echo was about to go into labor. In fact, Jacob arrived just in time to help deliver Rose. He has some experience with that, which really doesn’t surprise me, given that he seems very family-oriented.
Speaking of Jacob, once things had calmed down a bit (actually once we were all en route to checking out another possible lead) I managed to get him involved in a discussion about our friendship and our conflicting sub-cultures. He seemed kinda surprised there was an issue and didn’t understand why his rather typical middle-American lifestyle would even create a counter-culture movement, which is really one of the problems endemic in that culture. It was a really interesting discussion. It still amazes me that he and I get along as well as we do (which is really what brought the topic up in the first place) given our vastly different outlooks on things.
But we did both agree that despite our differences, we also have some pretty significant similarities, not the least of which is that we’re both pretty compassionate. We’re both concerned about individuals, even if they seem insignificant to people like us. Actually, of all the people I know (including the other scions I work with), Jacob’s probably the most humane and compassionate. Don’t get me wrong, my other friends and companions are compassionate in a sort of general, societal sense. They are true heroes who look out for mortals, doing everything they can to protect them from the titans and other threats to their safety. ^_^ But sometimes it seems like their concern for others, particularly mortals, doesn’t go beyond a sort of idealistic sense of guardianship.
I guess we’re all becoming more arrogant and aloof in our own ways. I know my vanity and desires interfere with my compassion and humanity at times. I guess it’s a natural side effect of becoming gods. But Jacob seems more down-to-earth. He seems more concerned about individuals not just as people to be protected or defeated or used, but as real people to be valued for all their virtues and flaws.
Anyway, getting back on track, by the time those of us at the estate had settled down with Rose safely delivered, the others returned. They were all happy to see and hold Rosa. Jacob and Ray both Vigil Branded her, which makes me feel so much better. I know I can always rely on them to keep me and my daughter and wife safe. Elisa and I chatted for quite awhile about babies and how excited we both were, and Rosa apparently senses that Ray’s a lot sweeter than his intimidating appearance and distant demeanor might imply; she seemed quite comfortable when he held her. ^_^
After everyone had been introduced to the latest member of my family, I passed Rose off to Echo and the others caught me up on what they’d discovered. I have to confess that I was still pretty distracted by my newborn, so I didn’t really catch all the details. Basically, though, they followed the trail back to a small house that once belonged to members a voodoo cult that opposed Pierre’s. The house was basically an elaborate trap rigged with complicated explosives. In other words, whoever’s setting this up knew we’d probably track things back to the house and were prepared for us.
The others didn’t have too much trouble dealing with the trap, and managed to rescue a couple of scraps of paper bearing instructions, one of which listed information on each of us. T-Bone used one of the notes and his cheval powers to possess the person who left the note, and got a brief look at the man we think may be the ringleader of this whole operation, a man Pierre thinks may be an old rival of his known as the Tally Man (because he supposedly tallies souls). If this guy is who Pierre thinks he is, then it’s likely he’s a scion of Gran Bois, which would explain a lot of what’s going on.
T-Bone couldn’t spy on the Tally Man (if that’s who he is) for long, though, because he apparently noticed that one of his henchmen was possessed and immediately shot him in the head, which ejected T-Bone from his body. Still, we had a lead to follow. Track down the now-dead henchman, and we might find other clues.
Before leaving the house, they tripped the explosives and blew it up (no sense leaving them to claim the lives of any hapless innocents). Elisa was pretty excited about the explosion it caused. ^_^ Then they returned to the estate.
The next step was to track the henchman. That’s where Jacob’s presence came in useful. He knows a bit of magic that Adam doesn’t, and was able to follow the threads of fate to the henchman’s current location. It was in Barbados. I wished Echo and Rose goodbye (gods, I hated to leave them so soon…) and boarded our plane to fly to the island. I reminded Echo and the others at the estate to keep an eye out for Suchette when she awakened and to make sure she was comfortable and that she called me as soon as she could.
The flight was eventful, to say the least. A flight of tzitzimime swooped in as shooting stars to attack us and destroy the plane. Even as good as she is, there was no way Juanita would be able to avoid their attacks for long, so without hesitation, Ray and Jacob threw open the exit and climbed onto the wings of the plane. Braving the freezing winds that tore at their bodies, they created a set of Unseen Shields to protect us from the tzitzimime. The star demons were relentless in their attacks, but Ray and Jacob were equally steadfast in their defense, and so after a tense flight, we finally landed at an airfield in Barbados. Fortunately, the tztzimime broke off their attack as we approached the landing site…otherwise things could have gotten interesting on the ground.
Once there, T-Bone rented us a bunch of beautiful red Maseratis (for free, apparently, so I left a couple hundred dollars in the tip jar; no sense putting out the poor guys working at the rental office), and we drove an hour or so to a remote beach. There, strung up on a wooden rack used to dry fish in front of a cave, was the corpse of the henchman. Before we could really investigate much, though, the tzitzimime returned. Seven of them landed around us, and as they attacked, several amphibious fish-ape things with tails that ended in clutching, clawed hands crawled from the ocean and attacked us as well. Elisa later told us that those were called ahuizotl.
The tzitzimime mostly focused on Elisa and Pierre, except for one or two who were distracted by Anna. Fortunately, Elisa was able to avoid their attacks, if only narrowly. Pierre wasn’t quite as fortunate, and took a few hits. I spent most of the fight bolstering Pierre and Elisa while the others focused on the tzitzimime and Jacob killed as many ahuizotl as he could. Once I’d done that, I tried to help Jacob kill some of the ahuizotl, but I didn’t have much success, even after asking the kami of my gun for help. I totally complained to him after the fight. >_<
Anyway, it took some doing, but we managed to defeat the titanspawn. We took the ahuizotls’ hands, which can act as relics that can point the way to places or items, and one tooth from each tzitzimime. If swallowed, a tzitzimime tooth will keep you from taking any damage in the fall, but you’ll cause a meteor-like explosion on impact, which could be useful in some circumstances.
With the titanspawn vanquished, we turned back to investigate the corpse. The first thing we did was attempt to track whoever had brought it here, but that proved futile. The corpse had been brought there by the Tally Man, but he’d never left…probably some cheval thing that let him bodily possess the corpse and somehow leave like that so that we couldn’t track him from the site. Adam’s investigations rendered no further clues, so I summoned the corpse’s ghost.
Whoever’s behind this obviously has some power over death, because the ghost’s ears had been pierced, rendering it deaf, it’s eyes had been put out, its tongue severed, its mouth and eye-sockets sewn shut, and its hands cut off. It had no idea what was happening to it, and it certainly couldn’t tell us anything. I think we were all appalled by the brutality of the measures our enemy had taken to cover his tracks. I was especially upset by it…my affinity for ghosts made it quite painful. So I decided to release the ghost from its afterlife. Placing my hand on its forehead, I uttered a short Buddhist funerary prayer and laid the spirit to rest.
We seemed to be left without any other options until Ray removed the corpse’s shoes and summoned their kami. He spoke briefly with the kami, who was able to share information about where it had walked lately. Armed with that information, we were able to continue following the meager trail our opponent had left…