Scion – Petro Campaign – Session 58
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 Sep 6th 2009
Once again, we’re off on a new heroic adventure to defeat the nefarious plans of the titans. Wow. It sounds so melodramatic when I put it that way…but it’s true. This time it looks like we’re dealing with titans related to the Devas. Still, the only troubling thing is that Ray has disappeared. I don’t know where he went off to, but I am worried about him. It’s not like him to abandon us in the middle of an operation like this. I wonder if his loner tendencies are finally getting the best of him?
Anyway, before I get into all that, let me update you on a couple of things. First off, the kids are doing well. Rose and Alandra are growing up so fast, and everyone adores them. ^___^ I think they’re as attached to their Aunt Miko as they are to Elisa, Echo or me! And everyone’s fawning over Veronica. She’s adorable and already stretching out her little rokurokubi neck. Pierre’s household is having an interesting time dealing with that. ^_^
Speaking of Elisa, she and I have been working together on a bunch of artistic endeavors now that my latest album is out and I have time to devote to some other things (though I’ll be touring again soon). We’ve put together a wonderful gallery showing of our photography, which is currently on display in one of Boston’s finest art galleries. The response has been incredible. Elisa’s photography is so compelling! She has a much better eye for such things than I do. ^_^
She’s also been helping me with some self-promotional work, especially the members-only section of my website, which features tons of great pictures of yours truly and the rest of my group (even Keiko!). Maybe the most exciting thing, for me anyway, is the new book we’ve put together. It’s kind of a chronicle of my life as a musician, with loads of great photos of me, Echo, and the rest of my entourage around the house, on tour, playing clubs…you name it. There are some exclusive concert photos and lots of new studio images, all taken by my dear friend Elisa. There’s even poetry by Feng Yi scattered throughout and it comes with a multi-media CD with lots of extras. The book hasn’t been released yet, but the pre-orders are already through the roof! I’m so excited! ^_^
Okay, enough self-congratulating. ^_^ Back to our more immediate concerns.
I got a call from Adam while Elisa and I were discussing some of the aforementioned projects. He didn’t tell us much at the time, but he did set the scenario up for us fairly well. Hiney and Perry Moppins (two of Ray’s youkai followers) had shown up with news of something odd at the DuSable Museum. Two artifacts, one a barrel used in an all-black bar that had been burned down and the other a goblet used for communion at an all-black church, had been stolen, but none of the guards or curators realized this because the artifacts had been replaced with convincing illusions.
Apparently, Ray had recently spoken to the Amatsukami goddess Marishiten, who had warned him that we might be facing the spawn of the Deva titan Ravena, a titan of drought. The titan craves a sort of divine liquid essence known as amrita, and according to Adam, both of the relics stolen from the museum could be used to hold the stuff. >_< I guess it can only be held in relic containers or it loses its potency? I’ll have to ask Adam about that.
We all loaded up on the new Valkyrie jet and flew to Chicago. Keiko and Sera flew the plane, and I brought only my elite shikome this time. I left the rest of the shikome at home with Dahlia and Kimiyo to look after them while Quinn, Miko, Echo, and Pierre’s daughters take care of the babies. And by the way, the VTOL features on the jet are incredible! We were able to land right in Adam’s backyard! ^_^ The jet’s fast too. It only took us about an hour to reach Chicago from Red Mountain!
Once there, Adam took us into his secret high-tech lair beneath his house, a veritable Bat Cave of gadgets and monitoring systems. It was really cool. ^_^ He recently completed a city-wide surveillance system to warn him of any strange occurrences in “his” city (he really think of it that way; it’s so cute! ^_^), and it paid off almost immediately. No sooner had we arrived than a series of alarms went off indicating four separate attacks on various spots in the city: our tengu friend Hondo’s house, Helena’s apartments, the Natural Science Museum, and the Children’s Hospital, where my macabre sister Miki lives and works. The invaders were Deva titanspawn, mostly shapeshifting rakshasas, fiery asuras, long-tongued ghosts known as langsuir, and viscera-trailing flying heads known as laylek. It was going to be a busy night.
It was immediately apparent that these attacks were some sort of diversion to keep us distracted from our enemies’ true objective, but we really didn’t have any choice but to go deal with them. Since Helena wasn’t home and thus wasn’t in danger, we decided to leave her apartment be for the time being. Similarly, we didn’t have any friends at the Natural Science Museum (and actually guessed that might be our enemies’ true objective), so we split up to go deal with the titanspawn at the hospital and Hondo’s house.
Adma, Elisa, and Pierre, our heaviest hitters, went to deal with the rakshasa assaulting Hondo’s place. Adam warned us that rakshasa can create powerful illusions, so I gave Elisa my lock of svartalfar hair, which renders the wearer immune to illusions unless they are created by a much more powerful being. Hondo’s apartment was a slaughterhouse. Most of his youkai followers, many of them innocent non-combatants, had been massacred by the rakshasa. Hondo himself was facing his final moments when Adam and the others arrived and ambushed the rakshasa, swiftly defeating them and saving our lecherous friend’s life.
Meanwhile, T-Bone, me, and my shikome flew to the Children’s Hospital and while Keiko kept the jet hovering above the building, we dropped in and entered from the roof. The ghosts and flying heads were tearing through the hospital, killing anything in sight, but fortunately Miki and her zombies were there fighting them off. T-Bone invoked some sort of illusory cacophony to distract our enemies, which made them much easier to fight, while I invoked a Buddhist exorcism ritual to drive off the langsuir ghosts. My shikome coordinated with T-Bone to tear apart the laylek. The sheer horror of the laylek’s appearance was not easy to deal with, but we managed to persevere. >_< And after the initial wave had been dealt with, I went to find Miki. She was doing fine…using some sort of horrific contraption of specter-flesh to mow down the remaining titanspawn.
Once I’d made sure Miki was okay, I turned to deal with the other issue at hand…namely the fact that nothing was dying. Even the laylek that my shikome were feasting on weren’t actually dead, even if they were incapacitated by their wounds. It was actually quite compelling. But more to the point, some of the hospital’s child patients who had fallen prey to the assault and who should have been dead weren’t. They were just writhing in agony from their wounds. But that was a good thing…it let me heal them. Thanks to that, none of the children actually died. ^_^. I asked Miki if the anti-death effect was her doing, but she was as puzzled by it as the rest of us.
We quickly regrouped with Adam, Elisa, Pierre, and Hondo to head off to the Natural Science Museum, and en route we compared notes. Adam thinks that a Deva scion must be responsible for the anti-death effect on the hospital. They can apparently have that power, and it’s unlikely that a titanspawn would be using such a thing. Then I remembered that there’s a big-name Indian bollywood pop-star named Ravi in town on tour. I don’t know much about him (we move in very different circles artistically), but I do know that he’s more than mortal, and probably a Deva scion. It’s possible he’s responsible for the anti-death effect. If so, he might know more about what’s going on. We need to look him up, and I should be able to take care of that with my connections.
But first, of course, we had to go to the Natural Science Museum, where several rakshasa and asuras had thrown a truck through the front entrance. We were hoping that the museum was their real target, but it turns out it was just another diversion. When we arrived, a single rakshasa was fighting off a squad of police, and we got there just in time to see it summon a sheet of flame to fill the museum’s main lobby, engulfing the police in the inferno. Elisa, our own little pyromaniac, sank into a shadow and emerged on the other side of the fire, behind the rakshasa, and shot it through the head, killing it instantly.
There were bound to be more titanspawn inside, but I suggested that it might be a good idea to see what they were after here instead of just barging in to kill them. The others agreed, and while Adam, Elisa, and Pierre saw to the police, I used my divine mastery over my appearance to shape-shift into the now-dead rakshasa. I prowled into the museum to find his friends with T-Bone invisibly backing me up.
It didn’t take me long to find the other titanspawn: three rakshasa and two asuras. They asked what was going on at the entrance, so I told them the police had been dealt with but the scions (referring to us, of course) hadn’t arrived. They accepted that and set about deactivating the museum’s sprinkler system, no doubt to increase the chaos their fire powers would cause. It was apparent that they weren’t in the museum to steal another artifact…which meant this was just another diversion. >_<
I waited for a few minutes before saying going to “check on the entrance again,” and once I’d returned, I told them that the scions had someone watching the entrance, but it didn’t look like they were going to attack. I suggested that the scions must be onto us and that we should probably abandon the assault, as it didn’t look like it was going to serve its purpose. They agreed and all took flight, smashing through one of the museum skylights and returning to their master or whoever’s masterminding this whole thing.
And that’s where we stand. The attacks have been dealt with, but we’re no closer to figuring out who’s behind all of this or what they were after. Moreover, it looks like whoever’s behind all of this is pretty clever, which means our own wits (read: Adam’s tactical genius) might be sorely tested. Still, I think the next step is getting in touch with Ravi. Keiko’s working on that for me as we speak, so once I finish typing this, I’ll see if she’s made any progress.
Until later…