Session 13: Brunch and Bloodshed
To pass the time until noon, when they were to meet Helen at the granary, the party (except for Aegis) found a nice brunch place in Troy and got to know one another better. Kallos told them about being raised in the Goliath community in the mountains, discovering the Greek pantheon and specifically Hephaestus, and becoming his cleric by, among other things, forging a shield and writing a dissertation on the connection between Goliaths and the giants of Greek legend—“It’s still in the town library!” she proudly exclaimed. Meredythe told the group that she used to be a dancer. (Kallos: “Oh, I thought you were an assassin!”)
“My wife taught me,” Meredythe explained. “It was rather difficult. The matrons always said, ‘how unbecoming of a young man of your age,’ but it gave me a lot of freedom. I danced at cotillions, festivals, in fields… I hope one day I can see the sun and the rolling fields again. I’m out of practice, though…” “Any time you want to practice, I’ll play for you,” Amara offered. Meredythe smiled. “Thank you. What is dance without the greatest music?”Callidora then took a deep breath and told the party about her past:
“When I was a child, my parents were merchants, traveling merchants. We had a pretty good life. One day, there was a festival in the town where we were staying. It was a spring festival, and I wanted to make some flower crowns. My parents and I went out into the field and made flower crowns. Then, when it was getting dark, I turned around and saw my mother get shot in the back by bandits. I played dead, hoping and praying that my father was still alive… he was not. I went back to town all alone, covered in blood. And they saw me as a curse. They had been having a lot of bad luck recently, and they thought it was because of me. They called me Melantha, because I was like a dark, cursed flower to them. And one day, they decided to lift the curse by killing me. As you can see, that didn’t work. I kind of wanted it to, I wanted to be with my parents… but Artemis saved me, and I’ve been her huntress ever since.”Amara promptly asked Callidora if she wanted a hug. Callidora said yes, and the party shared a brief group hug. At noon, they went to the granary, where they found Helen in a shadowy alcove, her face once again veiled. Helen initially tried to lie to them that she ran off to Troy simply because she was bored with her husband and wanted to elope, but the party sensed that she was testing them and pressed further. Helen said that she needed to know they were trustworthy and demanded a secret from each of them, one of equivalent significance to the one she was going to tell them. Kallos, Meredythe, and Callidora all told her their secrets privately. Kallos revealed that she was exiled from her tribe by refusing to participate in a ritual killing and eating of her beloved mentor, while Callidora repeated the story about the town thinking she was cursed and trying to sacrifice her. When Amara’s turn came, she decided to tell everyone, not just Helen, saying:
“I don’t like secrets. I hate secrets, and I hate that I have them, but… I was a huntress of Artemis and I left because I fell in love, that’s the main gist of it. I lived with it; I hid it for years. It took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t wrong for wanting something I wasn’t supposed to have. But that’s not my secret. It’s the story of everyone who leaves. But… I didn’t leave to pursue love. I left to escape it. I didn’t fall in love with anyone else. I fell in love with Artemis. And I just… couldn’t stay.”Convinced by their willingness to offer up their personal information, Helen told them the reason she had come to Troy:
“When we were young, my sister Clytemnestra, my cousin Penelope, and I made a blood oath to protect each other and, failing that, exact vengeance on any man who would hurt us. We mingled our blood and spun our minds together, so that we would always know if one of the others was in danger, and so we could stay in touch with only a thought.” She tapped her finger to her temple and smiled. “We grew up, got married, had children. Then Clytemnestra’s husband, Agamemnon, turned violent. Abusive. She was about ready to cut his head off with an ax, but we convinced her there was another way. I would go to Troy, pretending to elope with the prince. All the kings of Greece who had sworn to defend my husband’s honor should I be kidnapped—well, they’d all have to go to war. And Troy is heavily fortified, with walls built by the gods themselves. It has enough grain to last years under siege. Agamemnon will die in battle, just one more slain soldier in the futile war against Troy.”When Kallos asked about all the other soldiers who would die in the war to come, Helen said that dying in battle was the most glorious fate possible and that she was sending their souls to Elysium—an attitude typical of her Spartan culture. The party tried to convince her that it would be easier to just kill Agamemnon outright and make it look like an accident, to which Helen replied, “Are you volunteering?” The party, after a few seconds of deliberation, agreed to assassinate Agamemnon. Helen then channeled the spirit of her sister Clytemnestra, who thanked the party for rescuing her daughter Iphigenia and told them to, “Fuck him up.” Helen also brought a message from Penelope, her cousin: if the party met a man named Odysseus, they should tell him, “Telemachus is waiting for you at home,” and that he would not stand in their way. Jason arrived and told the party that a Greek ship had landed a little further down the coast. The party went back to the Argo and recruited Caeneus to go among the Greeks and figure out if Agamemnon was there. Caeneus came back and confirmed that Agamemnon was on the ship, as well as the fact that they had sent a messenger to Troy to negotiate terms of parley and discuss the possibility of Helen’s return. Callidora noticed an old beggar man watching them from the shadow of the docks. She pointed him out to the rest of the party, and when he tried to escape, he tripped and fell into the water and was promptly captured by the party. They interrogated him. At first, he pretended to be a conscripted swineherd named Eumaeus, but the party saw through the lie and threatened him with violence. Eventually he told them he was Odysseus of Ithaka. Amara delivered Penelope’s message. Odysseus asked if a woman had told them to say that, and when they confirmed it, thanked them for the information. The party asked Odysseus whom the Greeks had sent as a messenger to Troy. He told them it was a young man named Sinon. They then asked him the best way to get to Agamemnon. He suggested that Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, could kill Agamemnon in a sudden rage and no one would question it, as the two hate each other. He told them Achilles’ boyfriend Patroclus would be the best one to talk to in order to make that happen. Kallos immediately got excited about the possibility of performing Ceremony to marry the couple. Odysseus asked if he could leave, and the party let them go. He was halfway down the shore when the party realized he had, during their interrogation, stolen all their coins and replaced them with worthless metal disks. Kallos chased him down and coerced him into returning the money. Thoroughly humiliated but rather impressed, Odysseus did not push his luck any further and returned to his ship, leaving the party members to keep plotting their assassination of Agamemnon, leader of men.
Relations
Protagonists
Amara, Callidora, Kallos, Meredythe Maegwund
Adversaries
Agamemnon, Odysseus of Ithaka
Plot type
Session
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