Cillian continues to watch from his rooftop vantage point, making sure to keep the front door of the Hotel España.
John makes his way back to the Hotel Maury where we are staying, hoping to find the bar and a decent drink. As he makes his way back from the hotel from the church, he finds it to be a pretty pleasant day.
Boris, still manipulating the Strange Face made of gold, finds himself walking around a ruined wall in the mountain that is carved with strange faces. He sees a ziggaraut in the distance that slowly shifts in and out of focus. He realizes that it is not going in and out of focus, it is writhing with maggots. He is then walking in the sunshine. The ground is red, the sky is red, everything around him is red, there was a dark opening in the earth. He is then on stage trying to perform, but there is a heckler in the crowd that reveals all of his tricks. Boris identifies this heckler as Houdini, Boris tries to move forward to confront him but he is stopped by a sheet of glass. He is surrounded by glass that is slowly filling with water. Something knocks on the glass and turning he sees Houdini who smiles, a little to wide, who then says, "the show must go on." The crowd applauds as Boris tries to climb out, trying to get to the sun, however it has gone dark… Tentacles stretch down from the dark sun trying to engulf the earth and pushed Boris back under the water. (Strange Vision - Second Vision in Lima)
Clearly he is affected by the amulet a bit more than he originally thought.
Father Fury goes and speaks with Father Fernando Tamayo who is the head priest at the church. Father Fury wants to know if the church has any documents related to the Spaniards who came to the town in the 1500's. Any journals or writings that would be in any way shape or form to those events referenced in the crumpled paper we found in the dead woman's hand.
Father Tamayo says that this church was built in the 1700s and there is nothing like what Father Fury is looking for.
Father Fury asks about the weird maggot we saw at the museum, framing the question as if the creature was some sort of snake, and Father Tamayo suggests he may be drinking too much.
There may be records like that at the Basilica and Convent of Santo Domingo across town.
The Professor is thankful that the Father stopped by and asks for a prayer and a blessing.
After performing an abridge mass for some of the patients at the hospital, he head back to the hotel to try and find the rest of the investigators.
As he strolls back to the hotel and at one point he sees some police officers moving past. They move past, uniforms pressed and looking sharp, but Detective Cupatino is not with them.
He enters the hotel and as he passes by one of the guest rooms he steps in a puddle of water that is coming from inside the room.
He goes to the door and finds it unlocked. Pushing it open he sees that the room itself is chaotic. It looks like someone had tossed furniture and stuff around the room. He sees Boris' legs are sticking out from the bathroom and the floor is covered in water. Boris' legs are kicking.
Father finds that Boris has filled the tub with water and is forcing his own head underwater.
Father pulls Boris out of the tub. Boris vomits up water and seems very disoriented.
Boris fails his sanity roll and loses 5 points of sanity.
Father Fury goes into the bathtub to drain the water and sees a mirror in the tub. The mask was laying mirror side up right were Boris' face was. He drains the water, covers the mask with a towel, and then takes the strange face mask on the dresser.
As we get rolling Nigel and the Doc notice that there is a sign, written in Spanish, on the door by the desk.
The door leads to the bathroom.
We try and scramble to avoid being noticed by the authorities.
We all rush into the conference room Nigel pulling Mickey into the room and Mickey closes the door.
Albert tries to sneak over to the window to look to see what is outside as well as checking to see how the locking mechanism works.
He sees Detective Fortunato Cupitina, by himself, standing at the door of the museum.
The detective comes in and begins to speak with the man who was in the bathroom. Shortly thereafter the voices recede into the museum and away from where we are.
We take this opportunity to try and get out without being noticed.
We are able to get out of the museum, grab a trolly, and head back towards the Hotel Maury.
Everyone eventually congregates at the hotel where Father Fury and Boris have been talking about what happened to Boris and searching Boris' room.
We all talk about the various things that have happened around town.
We wrap the mask and the bar together, making sure that they don't touch one another, and we leave the package with Father Fury.
Jackson Elias leaves, returning the keys to the Professor before we leave town in the morning.
Overnight, Boris has a horrible night sleep. Nigel on the other hand, gets a good nights rest.
We congregate in the morning and then we head over to the Hotel Espana to meet Augustus Larkin.
There are three large trucks idling, waiting to go.
Luis de Mendoza is no where around and Larkin seems agitated by it.
The truck drivers, three of them, are all German.
We all load up and roll out, but not before the Doc takes a quick look at Larkin. He still believes that he is a bit strung out. Larkin is wearing heavy cologne and the Doc sees a glimpse of his veins and sees they are very dark, unhealthily so.
The weather as we move on to Puno changes quite considerably, the temperature drops significantly. We are also at a much higher elevation. The Doc starts suffering from Altitude Sickness.
We did not prepare for cold temperatures and the drive into the mountains is pretty miserable.
Puno sits at over 12,000 feet.
Puno is a maze of streets that sits next to Lake Titicaca. The countryside is a lot of farms, herds of alpaca, and moves into the city.
We move into the city and to a hostel that Larkin has arranged for us.
He is going go make sure the supplies for the next leg of this journey are ready to go, including transportation and warmer gear.
There are no tourists, we are all getting quite a few looks, except for John and the Father.
Jackson wants to go off and find his contact in this town.
We go to wait in a cafe were we can get a meal and a warm drink.
Jackson returns a short time later and says that things may have gotten worse in the city and his contact had to go into hiding.
Boris sticks with the doc, John and Nigel stay in the cafe, and the rest of us go with Jackson.
We go down to the water and starts negotiating with the locals to try and go out on the lake.
As we wait for Jackson to do his thing, Albert gets a sense that someone was watching him, but when he looks to see what is going on he sees a teenage girl who was staring at us. But it appears that maybe they were just looking because we stand out.
Albert catches this girl staring at us a lot, but they are just interacting with a merchant.
Jackson secures us a boat to take us across the lake. We head out we find that the scenery is beautiful, but we do see a variety of communities of huts built on reed rafts. We come to a cluster of islands a couple of miles away from Puno and several young men come out of the huts with clubs and there is a lot of yelling before Jackson and an older woman who comes out of one of the huts, are able to calm everyone down.
We disembark from the boat on to the reed floats, that don't feel like sure footing. However, we head into the old woman's hut.
Introduced as Nayra, this gnarled old woman seems happy that we are here and welcomes us into the hut and invites us to sit.
She picks up a bowl that is filled with jerky and offers it to Mickey.
Mickey bites one of the pieces which turns out to be a piece of wood which sends the old woman into fits of laughter.
Jackson goes about trying to ask the old woman questions about what is going on.
She has a story about the Death Cult, she refers to a kharisiri. She tells a story in Spanish.
In the beginning everyone lived happily a dark god, full of sickness, fell from the sky. he went into the mountains and tried to lure the people away because he was hungry. He tried to lure them with feats of strength and riches and when people went to the mountain, this god would eat them. The gods began to weep for the people, forming the lake. The hero, Ekeko, went to this dark god and told him that there was better food, deep underground, and showed him to an armadillo burrow where there were rich roots and grubs. While this dark god feasted, the hero placed a great stone over the the entrance to the cave, and then another, and another, until he buried the dark god deep in the earth. Others went to the site and consecrated it, built a temple on the site, casting spells laid in gold, to keep this god sealed away.
There are tall pale faced men who come down out of the mountains, with sharp blades, they also wear white large brimmed hats, that feed off the essence of the dark god, and murder people for dark purposes. These are the kharisiri.
This woman also warns us to not go into any caves so we can avoid the Machukuna, creatures made up of bones who try and lure people in by offering to work off their sins.
Elias believes that the death cult is using these stories to cover their activities. He thinks these kharisiri are references to the conquistadors.
We ask if she knows the size or shape of the pieces of gold involved and she said that it was just gold worked into the temple.
There are rumors and concerns in town that there are locals that have been turned by the kharisiri. This woman has come out here because she cannot trust anyone.
While we sit and talk with this woman, we start to hear a strange gurgling sound. Looking toward the entrance to the hut, it is surprisingly dark. This strange sound, sounds like a weird, choked, gurgling sound.
Albert and Mickey go to check out what's going on and Mickey hears a thump and looking that direction, there is a boat, not the one we came on, bumps up against the reed hut, drawing their attention. Mickey sees the lower half of a person slide off the reed mat, into the water.
Mickey hears a voice, in English, says, "Give us the woman." A humanoid form moves forward in the shadows. Strange mouth sounds echo out of the darkness as a humanoid creature, with a lamprey mouth, walks out of the darkness.
We ended the session there.
Session 7:
The Lady of the Lake
Memories and possibilites are even more hideious than realities.
