M.I.S.T Campaign: Session 47

If I never have to dip so much of a toe into the River Urnes again I’ll consider myself fortunate.  It is, perhaps, the most trying thing I’ve done since my visitation.  Not physically.  No, that bit of swimming is something I could do a thousand times without tiring.  In ordinary water, at least.  But that river wears on you; emotionally, mentally, spiritually.  It seeps through flesh and bone, without care for either, to set its hooks into your soul.  So easy is the temptation…to close your eyes, stop struggling, relax, and sink.  To be lost forever in its dark depths.

It is a fortunate thing that I took Kebauet up on her offer, assumed a Virtue of the Psedjet and of my Father.  For without the strength of will it granted I might well have been lost to those dread waters.

As it was, I was the only one to enter them who emerged from them out of his own power.

Andrew might have been able to, I suppose.  But I was close to him, not taking any chances, and short on time.  So I simply tossed him out of the river, onto the deck, before turning my attentions elsewhere. For it was the Vigil Brand I’d placed on Rufus blaring like a claxon within my mind.

We pulled him from the river twice.  The first time when Ken snagged him with her shadows and the two of us pulled him to the barque.  But as soon as I had a moment to take stock of what had happened I realized that the river had separated his being into constituent parts.  We’d dredged up his soul, but the river had not relinquished the body.  So I went right back in after him, dark as the waters were I barely even managed to find him.  But I did, tied a harness to him, and we got him pulled back to the surface.

But of course it couldn’t have been that simple, not with this river.  The body wasn’t alive or dead.  But it was animate, and hostile.  It snapped at Ken as soon as she drew near.  I was quick enough to pull it away from her but…she must have seen something, known somehow that what was happening was beyond our ability to solve right now.  Because the next thing I knew was the roar of a gunshot, the muzzle flash from her rifle, and Rufus’s blood cooling against my skin.

It’s…sobering…the first time we’ve really lost somebody.  Even if Andrew was able to bind his spirit, prevent it from departing.  I mean, Einherjar have died over the course of our adventures, sure.  But we can’t just throw a feast to get Rufus back.

And I haven’t known my Einherjar for a fraction of the time that Ken’s had Rufus as her companion.

And I’ve never had to put one of them down with my own hands.

I can’t even imagine what she must be feeling.

M.I.S.T. Campaign: Session 46

So all those snakes, cutting through Kebauet’s waters to get up to the barque in time…not actually an issue.  As it turns out Imhotep possesses some measure of talent with illusions, and wanted to “test” us before leaving.  Slightly annoying, but no harm done overall I suppose.

Anyway, while we were subject to the illusion he led us to the room where Ra was blessing the souls that Kebauet had prepared for the journey across Duat. We were paid very little attention throughout.  Not that it was exactly a surprise.  It was a formalized ritual, thousands of years old, which we had no place in.  The gods present simply performed their duties, as they had for thousands of years, and then set off to continue their journey.

Then Khonsu arrived to pursue an old grudge with Thoth.  Except now, apparently, he holds it with Andrew instead.  He made the effort of making his reason for coming appear superficially beneficial, I suppose.  But was almost openly antagonistic towards Imhotep and did little to hide his disdain for Andrew.  He claimed that we’d never be able to keep up with the Solar Barque without his assistance, more specifically his influence over the passage of time.  And offered to bet them against the five days he lost to Thoth in a similar gamble so many years ago.

Unsurprisingly, Andrew was hesitant to take him up on it.  He also asked Khonsu if the loss of those five days really continued to rankle him even after all these years.  It was a question to which…Khonsu took exception.  And his response was to hit Andrew with some manner of Moon boon, bastard.  Then he left, saying that Denise would know how to contact him if Andrew changed his mind.  Which served as a reminder that she’d suggested we could gamble with Khonsu for time before we even arrived at the gate.  I’ll wager a mountain to a molehill he was planning on having that confrontation, gave Denise a suggestion that he hoped would lead to it, and decided just to show up anyway when it didn’t happen on its own.  It’s so very comforting to know that the specter of a Titan-aided divine invasion does nothing to curb divine pettiness.  At least Andrew claimed to be fine afterwards.  But we’ll probably have to keep an eye on him just in case.

I suppose I shouldn’t exactly be surprised that Claire seemed to manage to offend Kebauet somewhat with her remarks about the situation.  It would be nice if she’d stop doing that to seemingly every other Psedjet of import we meet.  I imagine it’d probably make it a whole hell of a lot easier work with them to turn back the Dodekatheon.

Nevertheless, she did offer aid when I asked if she had any advice for us before we left.  More specifically, she allowed us to immerse ourselves in her waters if we so chose.  Doing so would re-align our souls slightly, she explained, replacing one of the virtues held dear by our pantheon with one of those held most sacred to the Psedjet.  Which, in turn, would make it easier to navigate Duat.  And on a more personal level the Psedjet virtues are also much closer to those of the Yazata than those of the Æsir are.  So, in addition to navigating Duat, the other main reason I took her up on the offer was the hope that doing so will help me better understand my father’s people.

Ken was the only other one who took the plunge, so to speak.  Well, Andrew did as well, but he was already in possession of Psedjet virtues anyway.  It felt…a little strange going through the waters, refreshing in a way, perhaps?  It’s a difficult thing to describe.  And I’m afraid that I don’t really have the words to do so.  Regardless, there weren’t exactly any pronounced and noticeable differences upon emerging.  But I don’t doubt that some will show themselves in time.

Then as we left Kebauet offered one last bit of aid, to me specifically.  A silvery vial she referred to as her “hour of moonlight.”  She expressed confidence that I’d know when to use it.  Hopefully she’s correct, as I’m not really sure what it does.  But I’m certainly grateful for all she’s done to help us nevertheless.

Then we got back to our Barque to continue the journey downriver and Claire…I have no idea what she was thinking.  She decided to use her sun boons to light us up like, well, a Solar Barque.  Because becoming a target was just what we needed.  Sure enough something hit us pretty much before anyone had a chance to react.  The jolt was enough to knock me overboard, not that I consider going into the water personally to be much more than an inconvenience.  But Andrew went over too, which I found significantly more disconcerting.  And I’m pretty sure I heard a third splash.  Just a bloody mess…

M.I.S.T. Campaign: Session 45

Andrew’s spell to track Imhotep led us to Duat’s first gate.  The Solar Barque stopped, briefly, there as well.  Which is fortunate since if we drift too far from it we risk being singled out as targets ourselves, instead of the focus being almost exclusively on the gods.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve certainly never shied from a fight.  But I’m smart enough to know there are forces down that are beyond our capability to handle, not the least of which is Apep.  So sticking to the vicinity of Ra and his entourage definitely sounds like the smart move.

We met Kebauet there; whom I found to be a slightly distant but altogether low-key and pleasant goddess.  I also couldn’t help but, briefly, wonder if she was on my Mother’s list.  I could see it being the kind of match she’d go for; establish ties to another underworld, pairing me with someone who has experience administrating an Underworld could prove useful since I stand to inherit one, and she’s even somewhat of an elementally-aligned Death Goddess.

But that wasn’t something I spent too much time dwelling on in Duat.  Imhotep was nearby.  And, surprisingly, wasn’t too difficult to convince to come along with us.  He didn’t’ really care that the Psedjet were on the ropes, which wasn’t really too much of a surprise.  I’d kind of seen that coming from what Kebauet had said.  And I suppose I can certainly sympathize with a sense of antipathy towards one’s native pantheon.  But he was rather quickly swayed when Andrew and I(mainly Andrew) pointed out that the Egyptian people themselves were suffering quite a bit because of the war.

Of course, since that went well it naturally meant that something else had to go wrong; which, in this instance, seemed to take the form of Titanspawn snakes following us to Imhotep.  They’re courtesy of Nyx, apparently.  The urge to just stand and fight them is, of course, there.  But this is what you’d consider a retrieval/escort mission, I suppose, not a combat one.  We need to get Imhotep back to Midgard, which means the less dangers we expose him to the better.

So we’re hoping to avoid them entirely by going up, through Kebauet’s waters.  It’s a risky proposition, for more reasons than one.  Imhotep says the time and distance of the journey will vary based on the belief of the soul, which means we’ll have to hope we don’t run into time dilation that’ll cause us to arrive after the Solar Barque has left.  Not to mention that we’re hardly traveling through regular water.  Imhotep says that we’ll emerge from it changed.

So…here’s hoping for the best.

M.I.S.T. Campaign: Session 44

Remember when I said I suspected there was another reason we were traveling with the group of Psedjet Scions that we hadn’t quite been told?

Remember when I said that sometimes I hated being right?

As soon as Cindy parted the waters of the lake, and revealed a barque with the canopic jars on it, it was obvious that we were traveling to Duat to find Imhotep instead of simply going through his tomb.  Claire insisted on steering the thing, completely disregarding my point that it should probably be done by a Psedjet, or at the very least by someone with a connection to Death.  And I won’t lie, that she was so dismissive of my concerns made it rather satisfying when some sort of light cluster arose from the barque itself and refused to let her take the helm.  She was not at all happy to be relegated to the rails.

But that, of course, isn’t the reason I hated being right (again).  While it’s by no means easy, there are more ways to get to an underworld than most people would probably expect.  By far the most dangerous is to go through the funerary practices of the ancient cultures that revered a pantheon at the peak of their worship.  It’ll definitely get you to the appropriate underworld realm easily enough.  But if you take that route and absolutely everything isn’t done absolutely perfectly you don’t get to come back.  So guess what the six Psedjet heroes have to do to get us all to Duat?

It fell to me to read the spells of Going Forth by Day, as I’m easily the most closely associated with Death of anyone in the band.  It seemed to be the most grave, solemn, thing that I’ve ever done.  I mean…I’ve put my own life on the line time and time again.  But never before have the lives of other been so inextricably and immediately dependent upon me being absolutely flawless.  But I will be a Death God, heir to an Underworld.  It’s my heritage, something I’m finally at peace with after a quarter century.  I wouldn’t allow myself to be anything but perfect.  So that’s what I was, under Andrew’s watchful gaze.  The gods of the canopic jars emerged to prepare the six souls.  They even bowed to me.  Gods, bowed to me….that still stands out as incredible even amongst everything else that was going on.

And then we were in Duat, an endless river covered in endless darkness.  Except for the Solar Barque itself, since we’d arrived at night.  And that’s a craft you can’t help but see; the figures of Horus, Set, and Ra apparent upon it at a glance.  Truly a majestic sight.  But one that has to be pushed from the mind for now.  I’ll be speaking to Horus eventually, it seems.  For now my task is to find Imhotep, and to ensure that the multi-part souls of six Psedjet heroes are able to return to Midgard.   So with Andrew’s hand on the tiller we set off across the waters of Duat…

M.I.S.T. Campaign: Session 43

The newer Scions probably would’ve been in a lot of trouble had they been there on our own.  But our foes, scorpions that moved through Earth as though it was water, weren’t at all a match for high-level demigods.  It was almost a bloodless victory on our part.  Just a scratch on one of the newer Scions because Cindy didn’t get her safely to high ground quickly enough.  But the creatures died easily enough.

Claire and Ken one-shotted one of the things a-piece.  I smoked the other three, literally.  Caught them all with a bolt of lightning.  It was…exhilarating, addictive, wielding the raw fury of the sky like that.  Almost as much as wielding the power of death had been down in the depths of Helheim.  In one instant I lit the canyon with an almost blinding flare of light, reduced our attackers to fried husks, and fused a decent-sized chunk of desert into glass (kept a chunk of that as a souvenir).

I’ve truly come to enjoy the thickening of the ichor in our veins.  And not just because we become more powerful, closer to being gods in our own right.  But because we grow ever closer to the primal forces that we wield, become capable of wielding them in new ways.  It’s intoxicating.

But I digress.  It looks like we would’ve had a group of vultures set on us almost as soon as the scorpions were finished off.  But Andrew did, well, something to ensure that nobody else would find us on the way to Imhotep’s tomb.  A relatively unassuming trick at first glance, but infinitely more important than it would first appear.  Just the sort of thing you come to expect from him. And it worked wonderfully in getting us to the tomb without any further incident.

M.I.S.T.Campaign: Session 42

Egypt certainly has their border security well in hand.  We’d barely arrived in Cairo when someone approached us, mentioned Andrew, and requested that we follow them.  Not just for me and Lexi; but Ken, Claire, and Cindy as well. 

We were lead to Andrew and a woman named Kahi, who is to be our contact while we’re in Egypt.  She’s a blunt, no-nonsense individual.  Which, frankly, I like.  I’ll take someone who’ll lay it all out there over someone who’ll dance around the subject any day.  She had a few mannerisms that seemed distinctly feline, too.  I’m guessing daughter of Sekhmet, though there are certainly other possibilities as well.

And I don’t think our Tuatha members’ trip to their High Court went well.  Because neither of them spoke of it, and Claire was in a particularly foul mood.  Which, unfortunately, she opted to take out on Kahi.  Which I really wish she hadn’t done.  While I think Kahi’s professional enough that it probably won’t come back to bite us…I sincerely doubt that it’ll help any.

Anyway, we’re off to Imhotep’s tomb.  The Psedjet are hoping that their greatest builder can help construct a defense to keep the Psedjet at bay.  Ordinarily they’d need Isis, Serket, Neith, and Nepthys to make contact with the guardians of the canopic jars to free him.  But since they’re needed to hold back the Psedjet the hope seems to be that the four demigoddesses in our band can take their place in the rituals.

It sounds like it’s either something that’ll work or fail spectacularly, hopefully the former.

And we’re taking six Psedjet Scions along with us, in case their perspective is needed at any point.  But there are also four females amongst them, so there’s a reason beyond our simple gender split that we’re being sent.  Either more powerful Scions are needed to have a chance to make the substitution…or there are going to be dangers beyond what they could handle on their own.  Which would indicate that we’ll have to watch them carefully during any fight that breaks out.

Speaking of, once we started approaching the tomb Ken noticed a handful of large beasts prowling the mountains.  That threw up a red flag immediately.  There aren’t really large creatures native to the desert, at least not mortal ones.  They tend to have too much trouble securing adequate amounts of water.  Which meant these creatures were almost certainly legendary ones, with a measure of divine endurance to help them go without water.

A suspicion that was proven correct shortly afterwards when a claw thrust up through the sands and all but snapped a packhorse in half.  Sometimes I hate being right.

M.I.S.T Campaign: Session 41

So...we returned to Midgard in Norway.  And found that the time that had passed for us whilst climbing Yggsdragsil and within Helheim didn’t quite line up with the time that had passed there.  There was a difference of oh…about three years.

Yeah, that…blindsided me.  Perhaps even more so than the conversation with my parents did.

Thankfully, in this particular instance I suppose, I don’t really have any mortals I’m real close to that would have worried too much about me.  I guess the studio that publishes my documentaries would a little, and a few old friends.  But someone had been around to spread the word that I was busy and out of touch for a while.  I guess I could release the footage I worked on before my journey to Helheim for an “explanation” of what I was up to, maybe.

But, of course, getting back in touch with mortals isn’t the big problem.  Things have gone downhill since we left.  Greece and the EU are at odds after Goras’s armies annexed Turkey.  And it’s clear enough to see that Goras is all too happy to be the second coming of Alexander the Great.  I knew that the way he was marching against Donny and Harmonia was a poorly-disguised land grab.

We’re not the only one who’s seen the pattern, either.  Egypt’s closed its borders, something I’m sure the Psedjet have a hand in.  They have no desire to be subjugated by Greek armies again.  And no one in the band seems all too keen on letting Goras run roughshod over Europe and Asia either.  So…we split up to recruit help.

Claire and Ken went to the High Court of the Tuatha de Danaan to try to get them involved.  Cindy made a personal stop at Avalon first, no doubt to speak with Bryn (she spent a while at the feast talking to the Valkyrie that was down there), and then she’s going to speak with the Amazons, I believe.  Andrew went to Egypt, he should be able to figure out what’s going on there and ensure we have a relatively warm welcome when we arrive in Cairo.

Lexi and I…we went to Iran to see if the Yazata will involve themselves.  Well, involve themselves now, I guess.  Alexander did conquer Persia in ages past, after all.  When we arrived, however, they had some of their ladies show Lexi around while I went to speak with their ambassador.  They don’t consider it a woman’s place to discuss war,  apparently.  Thank the gods Cindy wasn’t with me, it probably wouldn’t have been all that great if Claire was either.  But it was especially good that Cindy wasn’t there, as Utgard-Loki’s taint still hasn’t been cleansed…and the ambassador was Altair.

I can’t say that I was surprised, I guess…though I’d been hoping that they’d send someone else.  I can’t help but wonder if they sent him as a test.  Through my father they knew that I was the one coming, after all.

Thankfully, the meeting went cordially.  I certainly had no desire to antagonize him, or any of the Yazata.  And my reconciliation with my father seems to have improved Altair’s opinion of me.  As he put it, the instructions were to greet me with the honors due a “wayward son finding his path again.”  So I also think it’s known to the rest of the pantheon that Vayu still hopes that I’ll convert to the Yazata upon apotheosis.

But, most importantly, the negotiations went spectacularly well.  The incident in international waters that prompted Egypt to close their borders also left the Yazata firmly of the opinion that Goras and that faction of the Dodekatheon are a threat that needs to be addressed.  And when I mentioned that I thought the Yazata should throw their lot in with the Psedjet and stop the Dodekatheon advance in Egypt, before they ever get the chance to advance on Persia…well, I think I might actually have made Altair’s day.

Long story short, I’ll be their Ambassador in Egypt.  Hopefully setting up an alliance to check the Dodekatheon.  Which I have high hopes for.  Like I said, the Psedjet seem to be well aware of the looming threat the Greeks pose.  And you know what they say, any port in a storm…