Scion - Petro Campaign - Session 125
Wow. Just when you think you're a badass god or something, chaos spawn pop out of nowhere and kill you. (>_<) Seriously.
That's what happened to me, anyway, after we decided to follow up on reports from General Chou's camp that strange, fluid metal creatures (things that looked a lot like the T-1000 from Terminator 2) had been assaulting the outskirts. That's why Colonel Boom laid all those mines. Anyway, we had a feeling that these things were somehow connected to Chu Jun, and as usual, our feeling was right. We tracked them to their source, but along the way they decided to ambush us, appearing from seemingly nowhere to strike while our guard was down.
Sonny soaked up their attacks and without even thinking, lashed out and annihilated two of the T-1000s. T-Bone was quick and sly enough to avoid their strikes, and Adam can't be surprised. Somehow Charles and Elisa weathered the attacks well enough, and of course Pierre was okay. But me? I died. Two of them pounced on me, and even though I was able to ignore their first strike and corpse-shed the second (you should have seen my corpse-shed head go flying through the air! SO macabre!), their follow up attacks left me bleeding on the ground with a slit throat and and impaled heart. (>_<)
So I manifested a new me and dismissed the dying me. The new one flipped the bastards off and entranced them with my resurrected beauty. I totally should have made myself into zombie Erika too. That would have been awesome. (^_^) But I was far too pissed about being killed (and yet strangely fascinated with my own dead body, though Charles assures me that's not normal ^_^).
Anyway, while I was rising from the grave, the others were destroying some T-1000s, which were, in their way, a lot easier to kill than the one from the movie. Fists and bullets seemed to work just fine. And then more appeared - this time made of a black goo that was as thick and sticky as tar. We called them tarbabies, and T-Bone seized on the opportunity to make himself out to be Brer Rabbit. Sonny handled the fiends nicely, though, getting a fist stuck in each and them using them as weapons against the T-1000s. The tarbabies didn't survive. (^_^)
So, after we fought of few of these new creatures, Charles and Adam looked at the sorts of mystical powers our foes had manifested and determined that they were some sort of coagulated chaos run-off. Adam believes they formed from the collected chaos forcibly shed from servants of the Bureaucracy who have been "rehabilitated." Ummmm…am I the only one who sees this as yet more evidence against the Bureaucracy's policy of transforming undesirables into loyal servants? If you ask me, it seems like the Celestial Bureaucracy has a hell of a lot in common with the modern China it represents, and not in a good way. Just add pollution (psychic, in this case) to the list of screwed up side effects of their practices.
Okay, I'm being preachy again.
So anyway, Adam and Charles also surmised that since the T-1000s and tarbabies demonstrated an assortment of powers similar to those possessed by Chu Jun, that Chu Jun was involved somehow, either willingly or unwillingly, in their genesis. Whatever the truth, we had to find him and figure out what the hell was going on so that we could get back to the business of mending a fractured pantheon.
And find him we did…along with more T-1000s and tarbabies and a crazy chinese chaos sorcerer eunuch. For all of its austerity, Tien has some really silly people running around, and apparently this sorcerer was once the proud owner of a certain psychotic duck that was turned into Colonel Boom, and now he was itching for revenge and was none too subtle about it. We cornered him in a vast chamber filled with a pool of icky viscous fluid from which the chaos-things were spawning, in the middle of which was an island festooned with gooey strands of webbing that enclosed a faintly glowing cocoon. It reminded me a bit of the place I fought the oculopede with Storm's group when we were trying to eliminate the centipede plague. Anyway, The cocoon was pulsing and writhing, and while the rest of us faced the sorcerer and his T-1000 and tarbaby henchmen, Pierre leaped on the cocoon to tear whatever was inside free…only to find that it was Chu Jun…sort of. He…didn't look so good. But more on that later.
The sorcerer was definitely the most pressing concern. And while Sonny, Elisa, and Charles attempted to thin out the ranks of the sorcerers minions, Adam and I focused on the sorcerer himself. Unfortunately, he was a sorcerer of god-like power in his own right, and was able to meet Adam's tactical intellect on even terms. To make matters worse, he used his telekinetic powers to toss Adam and me around like rag dolls, which was not only extremely painful, but also extraordinarily rude. I tried to entrance the sorcerer, but apparently he really was a eunuch, because he didn't fall for my charms. (>_<) Sadly, Adam and I could do little more than keep him busy, but he really unleashed his fury on me when I managed to entrance most of his minions. Before he could finish me off, though, Elisa and Charles killed him. Of course, nothing's ever that easy, and when he died his flesh withered away and four black calamities tore themselves free of his body, but you know, by that time, we pretty much had things under control…except for the thing that used to be Chu Jun…
Chu Jun emerged from his cocoon as a deformed humanoid thing with a huge head (seriously, what is it with these big-headed boys?). By this point, the whole fight was starting to feel like the climax of a Japanese RPG video game. While I kept the mooks entranced, the others focused fire on Chu Jun and the black calamities. Charles used Divine Resolve to help keep Elisa from succumbing once again to Crawling Chaos, and Elisa's shots made her a big enough threat that Chu Jun laid into her with everything he had. Fortunately I had bolstered everyone before the fight, so she was able to take the punishment, and soon enough, our efforts overwhelmed Chu Jun's defenses and he fell, a ruined corpse of what he once was. Poor Chu Jun. Twice dead now and we still don't know exactly who or what was behind the switch, though I'd wager Abigail is responsible.
Anyway, Sonny suggested that we have Chu Jun resurrected via the magic of Taiyi. He almost certainly had servants and a shrine prepared for that. We traveled to the Forbidden City…or rather, the others did. Sonny wrestled the deformed Chu Jun into submission so Charles could use Taiyi to repair him, so now he's the real chu Jun again. Thanks the gods. Meanwhile, I had to deal with a bit of a meltdown from Echo, and she unconditionally demanded ALL of my attention, which meant that she wanted me to dismiss all my duplicates except the one with her temporarily. Ummm…I'll give the expose on THAT when I can. For now, I gotta go.
That's what happened to me, anyway, after we decided to follow up on reports from General Chou's camp that strange, fluid metal creatures (things that looked a lot like the T-1000 from Terminator 2) had been assaulting the outskirts. That's why Colonel Boom laid all those mines. Anyway, we had a feeling that these things were somehow connected to Chu Jun, and as usual, our feeling was right. We tracked them to their source, but along the way they decided to ambush us, appearing from seemingly nowhere to strike while our guard was down.
Sonny soaked up their attacks and without even thinking, lashed out and annihilated two of the T-1000s. T-Bone was quick and sly enough to avoid their strikes, and Adam can't be surprised. Somehow Charles and Elisa weathered the attacks well enough, and of course Pierre was okay. But me? I died. Two of them pounced on me, and even though I was able to ignore their first strike and corpse-shed the second (you should have seen my corpse-shed head go flying through the air! SO macabre!), their follow up attacks left me bleeding on the ground with a slit throat and and impaled heart. (>_<)
So I manifested a new me and dismissed the dying me. The new one flipped the bastards off and entranced them with my resurrected beauty. I totally should have made myself into zombie Erika too. That would have been awesome. (^_^) But I was far too pissed about being killed (and yet strangely fascinated with my own dead body, though Charles assures me that's not normal ^_^).
Anyway, while I was rising from the grave, the others were destroying some T-1000s, which were, in their way, a lot easier to kill than the one from the movie. Fists and bullets seemed to work just fine. And then more appeared - this time made of a black goo that was as thick and sticky as tar. We called them tarbabies, and T-Bone seized on the opportunity to make himself out to be Brer Rabbit. Sonny handled the fiends nicely, though, getting a fist stuck in each and them using them as weapons against the T-1000s. The tarbabies didn't survive. (^_^)
So, after we fought of few of these new creatures, Charles and Adam looked at the sorts of mystical powers our foes had manifested and determined that they were some sort of coagulated chaos run-off. Adam believes they formed from the collected chaos forcibly shed from servants of the Bureaucracy who have been "rehabilitated." Ummmm…am I the only one who sees this as yet more evidence against the Bureaucracy's policy of transforming undesirables into loyal servants? If you ask me, it seems like the Celestial Bureaucracy has a hell of a lot in common with the modern China it represents, and not in a good way. Just add pollution (psychic, in this case) to the list of screwed up side effects of their practices.
Okay, I'm being preachy again.
So anyway, Adam and Charles also surmised that since the T-1000s and tarbabies demonstrated an assortment of powers similar to those possessed by Chu Jun, that Chu Jun was involved somehow, either willingly or unwillingly, in their genesis. Whatever the truth, we had to find him and figure out what the hell was going on so that we could get back to the business of mending a fractured pantheon.
And find him we did…along with more T-1000s and tarbabies and a crazy chinese chaos sorcerer eunuch. For all of its austerity, Tien has some really silly people running around, and apparently this sorcerer was once the proud owner of a certain psychotic duck that was turned into Colonel Boom, and now he was itching for revenge and was none too subtle about it. We cornered him in a vast chamber filled with a pool of icky viscous fluid from which the chaos-things were spawning, in the middle of which was an island festooned with gooey strands of webbing that enclosed a faintly glowing cocoon. It reminded me a bit of the place I fought the oculopede with Storm's group when we were trying to eliminate the centipede plague. Anyway, The cocoon was pulsing and writhing, and while the rest of us faced the sorcerer and his T-1000 and tarbaby henchmen, Pierre leaped on the cocoon to tear whatever was inside free…only to find that it was Chu Jun…sort of. He…didn't look so good. But more on that later.
The sorcerer was definitely the most pressing concern. And while Sonny, Elisa, and Charles attempted to thin out the ranks of the sorcerers minions, Adam and I focused on the sorcerer himself. Unfortunately, he was a sorcerer of god-like power in his own right, and was able to meet Adam's tactical intellect on even terms. To make matters worse, he used his telekinetic powers to toss Adam and me around like rag dolls, which was not only extremely painful, but also extraordinarily rude. I tried to entrance the sorcerer, but apparently he really was a eunuch, because he didn't fall for my charms. (>_<) Sadly, Adam and I could do little more than keep him busy, but he really unleashed his fury on me when I managed to entrance most of his minions. Before he could finish me off, though, Elisa and Charles killed him. Of course, nothing's ever that easy, and when he died his flesh withered away and four black calamities tore themselves free of his body, but you know, by that time, we pretty much had things under control…except for the thing that used to be Chu Jun…
Chu Jun emerged from his cocoon as a deformed humanoid thing with a huge head (seriously, what is it with these big-headed boys?). By this point, the whole fight was starting to feel like the climax of a Japanese RPG video game. While I kept the mooks entranced, the others focused fire on Chu Jun and the black calamities. Charles used Divine Resolve to help keep Elisa from succumbing once again to Crawling Chaos, and Elisa's shots made her a big enough threat that Chu Jun laid into her with everything he had. Fortunately I had bolstered everyone before the fight, so she was able to take the punishment, and soon enough, our efforts overwhelmed Chu Jun's defenses and he fell, a ruined corpse of what he once was. Poor Chu Jun. Twice dead now and we still don't know exactly who or what was behind the switch, though I'd wager Abigail is responsible.
Anyway, Sonny suggested that we have Chu Jun resurrected via the magic of Taiyi. He almost certainly had servants and a shrine prepared for that. We traveled to the Forbidden City…or rather, the others did. Sonny wrestled the deformed Chu Jun into submission so Charles could use Taiyi to repair him, so now he's the real chu Jun again. Thanks the gods. Meanwhile, I had to deal with a bit of a meltdown from Echo, and she unconditionally demanded ALL of my attention, which meant that she wanted me to dismiss all my duplicates except the one with her temporarily. Ummm…I'll give the expose on THAT when I can. For now, I gotta go.