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I have been living on an airship! (part 1)

Below is the first part of a game log/ RPGFIC from a steampunk Mutants and Masterminds game I play in. there are a few previous logs here from earlier games. Our characters had a long break, in game time since our last adventure (2 years) so I filled in some backstory on my own. The telling though was getting too long, so I am breaking it up into two parts. What I have here is my backstory, and the first part of the game. I will have the remainder done in a day or two.


Excerpted from The Journal Of Rosie Ramses

I have been living on an airship! (part 1)

A couple of years ago, my dearest friends and compadres in adventure and esoteric practices and I, returned from a trip to a very bleak future. None of us has really been the same since that time: The Lady Penelope Westmoreland, or simply “The Lady” as I usually call her, as she was and is one of the few women I have met in England who deserve a title... 

The Lady returned to the horrible future to rescue her niece, and brother, who is the maddest of scientists. He went to work at ‘Westmoreland Heavy Armaments,’ The Lady, and Reilly, the spy’s company that is mostly working on those Mechanical Dinosaurs that shoot galvanic energy from cannons. I’m really glad I never met any Dinos back in the Amazon, that were so armed. They were dangerous enough, even to me, Queen of the Lizard People. My reign was meant to be short, but I tamed the T-Rex by taking out his bad tooth (part of which is my dagger) and treating his pain with my herbs.

The Lady as well as ‘The Shelley Monster,”aka Oswald Amadeus have basically  thrown themselves into the work of the company, developing the future galvanic tech, and science in the person of her brother, the well named Seth. He is one to be careful with, but the Lady has given him a long leash to do his researches. The spy, Reilly has taken the route of the opiate as his ‘cure’ for having lived through the horrors of the future, a future we may or may not have exacerbated with our tinkering with time. I keep trying to get him to take a trip with me to the Dream Time, so that he may see how relative a term “the future’ really is, and just how mutable. He must come to it on his own, though I fear for the safety of those around him, given that he still seems to be doing a great deal of work for The Crown, despite his nihilistic opiated approach to everything these days.

We have seen our old Irish Vampire Friend, Quaid; hanging around the Kerberos Club, in recent weeks, he seems to have finally rid himself of his arch-nemesis Griselda, the Vamp who turned him, and has since spent a lot of her time trying to destroy him. I don’t understand Vampires. So much drama, when you could live forever, possibly. They are the vain creatures, that they seem to be, indeed.

Myself, I have been writing a great deal, but not of any current adventures, as without my boon companions, my time has been spent mostly researching the psycho-tropic botany of the British Isles. I was, however, during these researches, trapped for three months in a castle in Ireland, but that is a long convoluted story, and, I see no gain to repeating until I can make some peace with the odd little men who had me trapped there. One day they just let me go. I’m not sure what really happened.

But I digress, I have completed my study of the Psychotropic Botany of The British Isles, and have started doing a comparative study of Temperate, Jungle and Desert Psychotropes. I have yet to find my way into the ‘British Dream Time,’ in the same way I have with The Mayan, and Outback Dream Times. London itself, may become a category. It is quite amazing how many herbs and gooey mouldy psychedelics can grow in the Metropolitan places we call cities. The Big cities are mostly Botanically undocumented. This is most of my work these days. Though sometimes I still use “the chair,” my techo-magick conduit to the dream time, to other dimensions, I use it mostly for relaxation.

There are some other recent events of note, but I will come back to them when it is thematically appropriate. To bring my dusty journal a bit more up to date, currently we are drifting in an airship, north from Bombay toward Delhi. I am excited to be traversing on an airship, it has been a dream of mine since I first saw one in the Amazon, years ago. We flew all the way from England, over parts of Europe, stopping every thousand miles or so to re-fuel and briefly look silly trying to walk on the land. sea-legs? try air-legs. I feel all woobly when I try to walk in the gravity of the earth. 

The others seem more adaptable. I think this is due to my connection to the worlds behind the veil, the DreamTimes, to use the most useful word in english, that infers what it should about the place I mean. Dream time where both dreams and time are real, and not real, where everything is one and millions. I am looking forward to traversing even more in the Hindu Dream time... but I get ahead of myself, I’m in such a hurry to document the rather large transformation of thought and mind I have most recently undergone.

Oh, facts, I keep missing the facts, we are the group of us weary adventurers on a mission of pure capitalism, really. Of course these things always end up turning into giant battles of mystics and technologists somehow, it’s already happening. When you bring war with you, war also follows behind you, and is waiting for you, where you  go. We are going to Delhi to meet with Commander in Chief General William Rose Mansfield, who either will buy The Lady’s Death Machine that looks lie a mechanical Ostrich/velociraptor carrying two large cannons on it’s flightless wings. The thing is pure destruction, and causes there to be a void in my vision of the dream time around the space it occupies.

Competing for government contracts with the villainess in charge of Babbage Computational, Ada Lovelace, is a calculated risk, if that’s not putting it too lightly. Our trip had been very peaceful until just before we made it to Bombay.  That night I had a rousingly intellectual conversation with Lord Vernon Eaglesbury on the core similarities in Cosmologies of the Outback, and India, as filtered through the philosophies of George Berkeley. Lord Eaglesbury was a scholar of some note and had known my father by reputation, though he was cagey about having met him, he had nothing but good things to say about my father’s limited publication career, that was cut short by the curse of Amon-Ra. I decided to turn in early, whilst the Lady sat up late, staring out the window, as if she could see something the rest of us couldn’t. This is likely true. 

But you don’t interrupt the Lady in her meditations, so I fell to the easiest sleep I had all trip, dreaming of surfing ‘The Big Wave’ near Tasmania, with George Berkeley on the back of my Samoan made board. I awoke to a howling, like an animal in a trap, that coincided with one of the biggest lightning strikes I’ve ever witnessed, and a thunder clap right on its tail that shook the big metal balloon in the shape of a whale that we were all surfing on through the sky. The lady bolted out the door. I was not dressed and have now lived among Londoners long enough to know I should get dressed before running out into the hallway and tossing boomerangs around.

The howl had come from across the hall in Lord Eaglesbury’s quarters


Maybe not unsurprisingly, given who we are, and the kind of adventure we end up involved with as a group... A Tiger Man, most likely a lycanthrope, came tearing up the length of the airship, heading towards the bridge at the front. He was as fast as a Tiger, which is much faster than a human. 

But, Oswald Amadeus is ‘more than human,’ he’s a Promethean; and he managed to somehow briefly entangle The Lycanthrope, with one of the drapes that he rather melodramatically tore down like he was making a pass at a Bull in the Arana. 

Riley (he spells it different all the time, I’ve noticed, and his accent bounces around so much that the spelling would have to change. I imagine I’m the only one who notices it, I am not sure even, if he is aware that he has a pattern of accents that overlap, and make him sound generically “British”. If I can remember to ask him about that I shall update this section accordingly), Reilly, failed to stop El Hombre Tigre, in his opium haze, he’s lucky he was able to even get his gun out. He missed by an Outback Mile. The Tiger Man, with some pretty great strength burst out the glass bottom of the salon , onto a gargantuan two headed mythical vulture called a Gandaberunda ( I later found out). Somehow the Tiger and The Bird had timed his escape like clockwork. 

The Tiger man was astride the gargantuan thing, as big as the front section of the ship that it was turning to attack, claws and beak out, as the Tiger held on to the wing, likely digging his clawed feet into the bird’s back. Riley leapt out the window after them,  after shooting the bird, and this time: knocking him off balance... The image of those claws drawing blood unclouded my vision, and I knew what to do next: I positioned myself carefully on Oswald’s back as we climbed out on to the outside of the Airship and took careful aim. I finally had a clear shot, and got a great lucky strike taking out one head’s left eye, though I lost a good boomerang. I made them flee they headed north. 

I missed exactly how Reilly got back into the ship, as something in my wounding of the great bird, flung me briefly into the Dream Time. I saw a Brahmin, and a Tiger nuzzling together in a rice field at sunset, then I came back to the world, I was already in the Professor’s room, and about to tend to his wounds while we waited for the Ship’s  Medic to get out of bed and do the real work. 

He had a vicious clawing across his face, and his chest, but no defensive wounds; I think perhaps though that the attack was not vicious, as the beast while cunning, did not seem to be in his own right mind, which from the circumstantial evidence we had pointed to the Professor’s boon companion, his bearer, Balaraj Brijesh being perhaps an unwitting agent of any number of people who might want any of or our cargo to disappear from the world. I think we all immediately thought that somehow even here in India, using Indian agents. Ada Lovelace was once again our Nemesis, at least she is pulling the strings. No one needed to say this aloud.

We did a cursory search to see what evidence we could uncover. I found a small canteen, that was not filled with water or alcohol, but a silvery shiny , and obviously alchemically engineered liquid, there was still a fair amount in the canteen. I could scent many rare herbs, and some chemicals, but the bouquet was one that was new to my nose. I am perhaps stupidly fearless when it comes to Psychedelics, or alchemy. I knew most of the components, possibly transformative, but there was a faint odour of the Other world. I tasted a drop on my finger. I was right about the ayahuasca, where would they get that in India? There was a moment of ecstasy, just as decided, and drank the remainder of the potion. 

Lucky for me I have such extensive experience with the Dream Time. I was already (and am always) properly warded against any physical discomforts (copious vomiting) this kind of thing causes, often altering the trip in a negative way, when Unguided. I am my own guide, I fell into my Learned upon The Giant Stone that was the world trance, and guided myself through the shapes, colours, geometry, until everything became solid and colourful, so colourful. The dreamtime of India is as colourful as any other, more so, as their gods are multitudinous, and cross, melding species at will creating cross species dreams that were beyond any kind of joy I had beheld in any of my travels. 


I understood that Kali is as real as any God, and that she is manifest in an Earthly avatar, here in India, but that the Avatar is not quite sublimated, the Goddess of Destruction (beautiful wonderful destruction) may, if we can find this being in time, have a kill switch like a that steam Locomotive we took to the Moors. As I coaxed myself out of my trance and my reverie I also clearly briefly saw a Cow-Human hybrid, a Were-Cow? I was transformed in ways I have yet to grasp by this particular trip to this particular dreamtime. I know I am changing who I am (yet again), in my core, I seem to absorb these other cultures, every place I go. 

Kali is manifest on Earth, but the host is not completely sublimated. Is this a bad thing? There is more a feeling, a knowledge that I don’t or can’t yet share with my colleagues, as I cannot, despite my gift for languages, decipher what the feeling is or what form it will take when it becomes manifest, which is something I have a clear certainty about. The last thing I saw was a face like mine,though, not mine, and masked like a highwayman of the last century in England.

 End of part 1 

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