Burning Footsteps: Reading is Fundamental (Promethean)

And here we are again, with another of these flashback posts. As I write this I've got the first session of my group's new chronicle in the works, but there's some things in my notes I need to go over before I finish it so I thought I'd see if I can bang this out.

Oh, and before I get into it, Under Alien Skies is available in PoD, for those inclined!

So we picked up with the group taking turns watching the house with the lab, as the next day they're going to try and repair the alchemical beacon to attempt to summon whatever it was that escaped. A couple of them pass the time looking through stuff in the lab.

Steve looks through the journal he found in Gino's house and finds an old black and white photograph. It depicts a bunch of young men, some with girlfriends and/or parents, standing out in front of a bus station. Some were in military uniforms, and one shows off a tattoo he'd apparently just gotten. This catches Steve's attention, because he has that tattoo. Like, not the same design. The same tattoo. The back of the photograph reads "Waco, TX 1941."

While Rudolf is on watch, he looks through the doctor's notebook he'd previously swiped and finds a bunch of scraps of paper, each one with a different message on it. In no particular order...

The Scion...

Painstakingly perfected, searching for meaning

Searching for the heat of the divine fire

His only flaw was that of his creation, the original sin of his creators

A balance will be restored before he finishes his quest

The Soldier...

Always seeking a mission

Looking for the first person to give him direction

Not the one that birthed him, but the one from whom he was birthed

His mission will be fulfilled, but one that has been forgotten

The Bog Man...

So many mysteries

Knows not his past, has a massive hole to fill

His future will lie in the gaps that were left behind

Will he be strong enough to face the void?

The Faithful...

Wolf in sheep's clothing, walking among the flock

What is the higher power of which he speaks?

How does he carry belief when he himself does not believe?

The Morningstar will face the Almighty soon enough

The Orphan...

Cast from one shadow to another

Wishes to step into the light

He seeks acceptance from the same people who damned him

He watches and yearns for more

The Missing...

Wanting to make the heart pump to feel alive

Pain makes one feel alive

May not understand what she seeks

The fire is warm but also burns

The Lost...

Blindly rushes into the future

Wants to escape the past

Rushed into the Lion's den

When the lightning bolt forks, a small spark is lost

He shows this to Father John, who's staying up with him. They read over the passages and come to the pretty obvious conclusions that 'The Bog Man' and 'The Faithful' refer to the two of them. They pocket their scraps of paper and, once the others are awake, show them the remaining five. Naturally, everyone's kind of awed at the prophetic nature of these passages, obviously written long before the group came together at the house.

They go over the rest and Ander guesses that he's 'The Scion.' Steve is obviously 'The Soldier,' and Jack isn't sure whether he's 'The Orphan' or 'The Lost' but settles on the former. Which means that Lafayette is probably 'The Lost' and Jane is most likely 'The Missing,' since she'd quietly vanished at some point before their encounter with the Baron and they hadn't seen her since.[0]

The group seems surprisingly understanding about Rudolf keeping the notebook from them, given that he doesn't have a whole lot of reason to trust them just yet. Ander looks at some sketches in the notebook and recognizes a lot of the inventions in the lab. There were also devices that weren't there, and things that judging from comments in the margins were things that just came to Doctor Gino in a dream. One that stands out is something that looks like the cryogenic capsule from the movie Forever Young, with the phrase "mountain of rust" written all over the page for some reason.

Steve shows them the photograph he found, and says that regardless of what happens, at some point he's going to need to go to Waco and start asking (and hopefully) answering some questions about his past. He'll stick with the group for now, especially while they deal with whatever broke out of the basement, and once there are no more pressing matters he might take his leave. The others who, again, have all just met each other yesterday, agree that's fair enough.

Their focus turns to how they're going to rebuild the beacon. Rudolf says that if someone can give him something of a 'starter charge,' he might be able to use his command over electricity to get the thing going. Father John tries to see if there are any lingering lightning spirits left over from the previous night, and finds that there are a couple weak ones still floating around. He gets them to agree to give Rudolf a charge, which produces a dramatic display of collecting ambient electricity and forming a burst of ball-lightning that he's able to feed off of using his Electroshock Recharge Transmutation.[1] 

Ander spends a couple of hours actually rebuilding the structure of the beacon, with Rudolf watching to try and glean insights about his own nature by seeing some of this mad science at work. Steve spends the time preparing traps in case it shows up, and Father John laments the necessity as he'd like the chance to try talking to it. Once Ander's finished rebuilding the beacon, Rudolf uses his Electrification powers to jump-start it with a blast of electricity equivalent to a natural lightning bolt (partially thanks to a really good roll).

About a half-hour later, Steve sees something coming, a vaguely-blurry and transparent figure that upon close inspection seems to be a woman wrapped in a pancho. Jack also sees it out a window as it glares at them. It stands just outside the ring of traps (mostly trenches to slow it down, and a Predator-style spiked log to swing down from a tree). It half-crouches and leaps into the air, the pancho spreading out into a pair of wings that allow it to fly up and land on the roof with a quiet 'thud.' Those of the group experienced enough to recognize one realize they're dealing with a Pandoran.

The battle was brief, and once the group destroyed the creature, Steve, Ander, and Father John explain to Rudolf and Jack what it was they just fought, enlightening them as to another detail of Promethean existence. The group waits for the beacon's charge to burn out, which takes a couple more hours and coincidentally fades about the time the sun goes down. Steve looks through Gino's journal some more and in the later entries he finds more and more comments about visions, dreams, and apparently visitations from a being who left behind "burning footprints" when he walked. The journal also references a map being left for him in his house that would be guarded by something, which is sounding pretty familiar. It's also sounding more and more like Gino might be a demiurge.[2]

Once the group is sure the beacon is worn down they start heading back to Gino's house. Thy try to flag down the bus, but by stupid luck they get the same bus driver who'd encountered them the night before, whom Rudolf had decided to mess with because he could. When the guy sees them through the front window of the bus, something in him snaps[3] and he speeds up the bus and aims it right at them. Everyone but Rudolf, who decides he's had enough of this, dives for cover. But Rudolf stands his ground, and in a moment of pure spite unleashes a blast of lightning powerful enough to 'kill' the bus, knocking out the electrical system on the bus and wrecking it.

In the process, though, he managed to hit a couple of Minor Milestones[4]: "Have a meaningful encounter with someone infected by his Disquiet," (I'd certainly consider 'attempted murder' as meaningful, especially since it was Rudolf's higher Azoth rating that set the whole thing off) and "Perform an act of pure anger."

We kinda pause at this point for some OOC applause for the first Milestone award of the chronicle.

But afterwards, in-character, Rudolf realizes what he's done and apologizes to the rest of the group as now they have to walk to Gino's house, especially if they don't want to risk something like that happening again. It takes them a few hours to get there but it seems to be just as they left it. The group goes in and Jack talks to the wreckage spirit, trying to befriend it. They break a picture frame to get its attention, and they explain to it that they're the doctor's guests that it's been waiting for.

The spirit accepts this at face value (helped by the fact that it's true) as they dig through the stuff in the living room looking for the map. They eventually realize it's underneath the rug the spirit's been guarding. The pull the rug aside and find a map scorched into the floorboards as if with a welding torch (or the Firebrand Transmutation). The map is vague, though. It describes geographical details but has no names, and none of those details specifically stand out. But it reminds Rudolf of something he found in the notebook.

He flips through and finds the edge of a page that's been torn out. Judging from pencil marks on what's left of the page, it looks like the page had been used to copy down the map before being torn out. On the remaining part of the page is the number "126," which Jack interprets with the Translator's Eye Transmutation as meaning "one hundred and twenty-six," as opposed to "twelve and six," or "one and twenty-six," or something to that effect. But it's obvious now that they need to figure out where the map leads and what the number means.

Before going any further, though, they decide to get together and perform the ritual to bind themselves into an alchemical pact, mystically linking each other together. And when Prometheans do this, a symbol appears on them, even if the group doesn't have a specific one in mind. They do the ritual without an intended symbol, and they find themselves branded with a symbol that appears to be a human footprint wreathed in flame.

And we left off there, with them trying to figure out how to tackle the puzzle of the map.

[0]-- As I've alluded before, by this point I was aware that Amanda wasn't coming back. And having already killed off one abandoned PC, I thought it'd be tacky to do again and there was no story benefit to doing so. This was also my way of presenting the notion in-character that she was gone and not coming back, so they would know not to wait for her to turn back up.

[1]-- Just taking a moment to reflect on the fact that this power, which let a Promethean recover Pyros with electricity instead of just healing damage with it, became such a widely-used staple across a lot of peoples' games that the second edition of the game just made it an innate power.

[2]-- 'Demiurge' is the common term for a human who's created a Promethean, especially back in 1e.

[3]-- Basically, the roll to resist Disquiet went as badly as it possibly could have and the driver jumped the rest of the way to the "torches and pitchforks" stage.

[4]-- Milestones are steps on the path to becoming human, lessons or experiences a Promethean has to learn/have to progress along the Pilgrimage. They're generally customized to individual characters and usually kept a mystery until discovered. In the first edition, achieving them earned special experience that could be used to buy certain powers.