This is a session recap for a Kult: Divinity Lost roleplaying campaign. Jessy Button is played by my wife, who also does the art, and I am the game master.
This post contains visual nudity.
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The ground is far, far below her. Jessy falls from the top of reality, rushing towards its bottom, but in the moments between she experiences a lifetime. The wind never stops beating at her, the pull of gravity is strong as ever, yet Jessy feels still as she takes in the grotesque, infernal world around her. The ruined city beneath the black behemoth citadel opens itself to her. She walked its tattered streets, all gore and gloom, but only now could she see its true splendor. Past, present, and lost future unravels, the rise of Dehu and Mil and their countless temples and feverish celebrations. The city was built as a monument to the Twins, to the euphoria of power and control. Its inhabitants were followers and leaders at once, vying for love and glory amongst themselves. Ruthless might raised their city from dust and brought forth an age of sacred conflict to the love of their twin gods. Uncountable years passed, dynasties rose and fell, love begat war and war begat yet more love. Spears and cudgels gave way to swords and bows, replaced again by automatic gunfire and sleek drones. The city lived and died beneath the distant monolith dominating earth and endless sky, and the Twins’ chosen who had once been so many were now all gone. Well, all but the man falling ahead of Jessy, robe beating in the wind. She knows that if Tan lives, his devotion to the Twins will grant him good will and new opportunities to conquer and succeed. Below them is not just the dead and hellish city they are escaping, but every other city as well. Roads not decorated with mutilated corpses, where streetlights flicker and people hide from power rather than seek it. In some way, they all live with the rapidly encroaching shadow of the surreal structure in the distance. The ground still approaches, but Jessy’s vision warps until the empty, ruined city is smudged away, and gone.
Asphalt, leafless parks, and the tired homeless huddling away from the cold between buildings of glass and steel. Toronto, what she might call home, a metropolis subdued and enslaved by the will of one. Even without seeing Sol, she can see the shape of his golden-tipped wings cover the metropolis and swaddle it in a protective, suffocating embrace. It is his doing that the sky is gray, that the buildings tell you nothing, that no one lifts their gaze from their own life to question what is going on around them. Like mindless zombies the masses wander up and down the streets, thinking themselves to have a destination in mind. Jessy knows they don’t. They are walking in circles, stopping at their designated checkpoints of school, work and family until age, sickness, or disaster takes them. Sol fears what might happen if they were allowed to realize all that he keeps from them. So long as their money flows upward into his hands, he controls them with garish billboards and gleaming police cars. His mirage is all that Toronto allows. The light Sol provides his city is a weak and distant replica of the shining beacons soaring through the sky high above, Jessy and Tan. Of course he would hate them and seek to strike them down. They are so much brighter than his lies, they could part his feathers choking reality from the masses and show them a truer path to walk.
Finally, Jessy understands her power. The gaping wound in her chest still hurts and pisses blood in a scarlet stream behind her, but with newfound confidence she finds it impossible to let it bother her. Sol could be demolished, not for the sake of Artyom’s sick power plays but to bring new strength to a hobbled humanity. She could rival the best of them. Angela is quick to point out, hissing from within, that Jessy can do nothing if she ends up as a red spot on the ground. They are still falling. Either she takes over Jessy’s body and rescues it from destruction, or they are both gone. Arguments erupt, but they both choose brevity over senseless back and forths, time running out too quick. If Jessy allows Angela to aid her here, she must know that they’re still working towards her goals, not Angela’s. She does not trust the old hag in her mind, who only seeks her own timeless home. Jessy can see it in their memory, fragments of a palace with Angela’s name written on every wall, each throne hers to occupy. Angela refuses to let go of her quest, but the trouble Jessy is in can’t be run from. Artyom will hunt Jessy down, they agree on that much. Angela fears the demon, but Jessy has an unreasonable belief that she can take him down with the right words and bargains.
She suggests to Angela that they must first fetch Abbas’ thing at Granger Fine Jewelry. Jessy could offer that to Artyom, and hopes it may be enough to placate him. Laughter rings between her ears, a mean and lifeless sound. Jessy really doesn’t understand what Artyom is capable and willing to do to her, nor what he is asking her to do. Has Jessy really not figured it out yet? He’s asking Jessy to fetch her.
| The one who fuels the ring. The soul bound to it. She is Abbas’ property. The screams from the ring, the pain Jessy inflicts with it, it’s all her. Exactly who she is, Angela still doesn’t know, but if Jessy allows that power back into the hands of Abbas and Artyom then she will lose any control she has of the ring. How could Jessy be so blind to allow that? Jessy suggests an alternative1. If what Angela says is true, then Jessy having control of her is still a very appealing opportunity, to hold the ring’s power directly with no one else to answer to. They could use that to trick Artyom, see his reaction and from there either bargain with or simply overpower him. Once that is done, Jessy concedes she could help Angela find the home she seeks. For now, they must focus on survival. Angela may be able to guide Jessy, and together they could weave some magic to follow the ring’s suffering to its source. |
1
Influence Other Full Success |
Even without giving her body up to Angela, Jessy feels herself shrinking away in Angela’s presence as the older, wiser, and crueler woman shares her many years of experience. Neither of them could do this alone, but with their minds focused as one through the ring, she is within reach. Jessy’s eyes again consider Tan falling ahead of her, and realizes there is nothing she can do to save him. His life is for Dehu and Mil to decide. Jessy can only be allowed to care about her now.
Jessy had promised her mother that she’d come back, not to leave her to wallow in dust and blood. She can’t go back on that promise. The shame of her and Angela’s plan sets in, seizes her mind in an iron grip so that it is all she can think of. Her grandmother is fine with abandoning Marie, she is no stranger to it and knows well that her once sweet daughter has been through so many worse atrocities. Angela ensured as much. Jessy must take that to heart, despite no longer having one. The hole in her chest is once again agony, it should be filled with the love of her mother but instead there is only blood and emptiness. Jessy’s thoughts entangle with Angela’s, she hates it but cannot stop it.
| If the magic is to succeed, they must both understand that Marie is lost. They will never come back, will never see that beaten and disfigured husk of a mom again. Jessy screams for Angela to stop, but the ring is glowing white-hot and sears away Jessy’s defiance. There is so much to be gained if she only follows her wailing instead, and she knows it can be done if only she is willing. She cannot think of her mother again, her smile and warmth and the hugs she so often gave Jessy in her youth. Her way of calling out for dinner, their nights together on the couch watching Gilmore Girls with a bag of chips. The empty stare when Angela infested her mind, again and again. Skin, fat, flesh and bone can be torn away to fit through the ragged hole in the veil of reality, but the memories will not make it through. The spell is Angela’s doing, but it is Jessy who ultimately pays its price2. |
2
Perform A Ritual Full Success |
Finally, asphalt. Tan lands ahead of Jessy, but she cannot see where nor can she afford to care. She hits the pavement, but the impact never reaches her. The streets contort around Jessy, swallow and crush her in a process beyond pain and comprehension. Everything fades except her screams from the ring, the distant pain with which Jessy has grown intimately familiar rapidly approaching now. Neither she or Angela think a single thought, allowing the burning ring to completely engulf their minds and guide them. No pain but hers, no memories but hers. Why are they going there? Jessy cannot recall for a long time, living in the moment of pure agony that fuels their ritual. She brings Jessy and Angela to the prison, the place outside and beneath the known world, where the ring was once forged. Above them, a point of light, so hopelessly distant as to defy measurement. It may be a light bulb, a star, or a gleaming vigilant eye. Jessy still falls, but her body hasn’t yet understood that it is supposed to exist here. It doesn’t want to. Black walls on all sides, a narrow shaft to the bottom of the world where her twisted power can’t reach anyone else. At the bottom of this prison within a prison, Jessy recognizes a familiar presence. Her bones slowly come back together on the floor, clattering against the featureless surface. Wilma was here. That bitch is dead now, but her magic lingers to hold the cell together. Is the city she sought near this place, or are there depths yet unexplored beneath them? Jessy cannot help but wonder. She puts her body back together, one slimy tendon at a time, remembering what it’s like to exist in the physical. The hole through her chest is still there, blood in great spurts all over her once black robe. It hardly bothers Jessy. Angela recovers much faster than her, nagging Jessy to move faster, but she has no body to familiarize herself with and Jessy yells for the old hag to shut it until she can at least get back on her feet.
The cell is dark, but Jessy doesn’t need her eyes to see the ragged shape on the floor. The ring gives a mental image of it, more vivid than mere light could ever offer. She is here. Jessy squeezes her hand into a fist, the white-hot ring burning her fingers, and she twitches in a hopeless expression of pain. Flayed, beaten, mutilated, the woman locked away here looks an awful lot like… someone else. Jessy cannot recall, and Angela is conspicuously silent. The dissonance is soon pushed aside, as Jessy and Angela share their elation in having found her. The ring’s source. She is powerful, but completely broken by Jeremiah Redwood and his cronies before they left her to rot at the bottom of this prison. Jessy has her now, the nameless wretch whose soul burns bright like a star. There is endless power within that feeble body, and Jeremiah found a way to harness it. Or, more likely, Abbas Ali taught him how to. Jessy and Angela found what they were looking for. Angela nearly suggests that they flee with her, find a way not just out of here but somewhere far away from Artyom. In conversation the two women, independently, come to the same conclusion: they cannot escape the razide. Jessy, in her hubris, doubts they even need to. With her in Jessy’s possession, can the demon even challenge them? She laughs as she goes down on her knees in the darkness and places a hand against the beaten body left there, unable to die.
No light touches the ground from the distant point above, yet Jessy’s surroundings become fully clear to her when the ring touches her raw flesh. She can see the harsh walls erected by Wilma and Jeremiah’s magic, but beyond that she can also sense the faint connections this place holds to the world she knows. From here she could reach the ritual halls at Granger Fine Jewelry, or the Silverpine Hotel where Artyom awaits her, or Tan’s now ruined apartment where a team of cops carefully notes every blasphemy. All it takes is to use the power barely contained within her. Jessy and Angela, wielding the ring and its source as a single sharp instrument, may cut the veil of reality entirely to see all that’s behind it.
| Jessy puts herself to work at unleashing the immensity of her soul, the nameless eternal sacrifice. No matter who she once was, who she once might have reminded Jessy of, now only the diamond and her nails, just as sharp, dig deep past skin and flesh to carve Artyom’s sigil into her starved and atrophied intestines3. Despite the years of agony, the wounds still bring fresh pain into the world. It surges through Jessy’s ring, stronger and more blissful than ever before. Her laughter grows louder, echoes up the prison shaft and brings the very floor up with it. They rise. For once, Angela and Jessy find themselves sharing the same joy and ambition and gleefully work together in finishing the ritual which will bring them to Artyom for the last time. Room 119, that filthy dark torture chamber at the far end of the Silverpine Hotel, can be glimpsed in the lights above them. Jessy is welcomed into reality once more as her prison overturns completely, the walls crumbling away and Jessy once more falling. |
3
Talisman Full Success |
A garbage bag cushions her fall. It rips open to unleash a vicious stench of rotting guts in the already filthy room. A clatter of metal follows Jessy’s fall, as she crashes into the room along with Jessy and lands on the rusted bed frame at its center. Tangled in its sharp springs and the chains laid across it to control Artyom’s victims, Jessy has to drag her off the contraption with enough force to rip off yet more patches of skin. In the dim lighting, she is even more disgusting to look at, all a mess of blood fresh and old, exposed muscle and bone, a single green eye which darts around the room without understanding. No teeth, no lips, no tongue. There is simply a hole from which pained grunts and wordless whimpers can escape. Artyom is close, and Jessy cannot waste time adoring her newfound toy.
Jessy enters Artyom’s adjoining hotel room, back straight, eyes cold and determined. In one hand she holds a sharp piece of metal of uncertain origin, swept from the floor. In the other she clutches a chain. It is wrapped crudely around her neck, the ring’s source. Jessy yanks it hard and she stumbles into Artyom’s room on her knees, leaving a trail of blood and brown piss behind. Artyom is there waiting for her, standing so much taller than Jessy in his black suit. His face betrays no emotion, the plastic mask stapled onto him forbids it even when concealed beneath the thin film of sensible reality. Still, there is rage in his face. Jessy failed at bringing Sol to him and Abbas. He allowed her time with the goat fucker, to play her own pointless little game for the sole purpose of taking down the angel of Toronto. Artyom will not accept Jessy’s excuses, she already knows that. He doesn’t argue with slaves. She has in the very least brought Abbas’ property back, so perhaps some respite will be given, eventually. He nods to the door behind Jessy. Go back in there and do so willingly. Leave her behind. Jessy demands to know why, a question she and Angela both know the answer to. Glancing down at Jessy’s hands, drenched in blood, he asks whether she would like to keep her fingers. She seems fond of her hands, and they are beautiful, so as a kindness to her Artyom pledges only to cut off four of them. Two on each hand. After that, they will move on to her face. His fingers move, and she can hear the rusted iron nails hammered through Artyom’s hands scraping against each other.
| “No.”5 Jessy locks eyes with Artyom. He won’t get the satisfaction. Whether by Angela’s hand or her own, or perhaps just as an extension of the suffering coursing through the ring, Jessy asserts her own will over Artyom’s and refuses the demon’s demand. She sees through his facade, the bald and stoic Russian whose cruel plans she has gone along with for too long. He was to her the truth of all, a proof of the power she could gain. All he did was treat her as a pawn, as chattel to sacrifice for his own schemes. Jessy will not play his game any longer. |
5
Dark Aura Full Success |
The twisted monster underneath the surface doesn’t frighten her, not so long as the ring is on her finger and its mutilated source is chained and in her possession. Angela’s apprehension fades into her subconscious as Jessy appraises the foul creature that Artyom is, realizing that he is nothing but a twisted construction of flesh and metal. There is no life in those bones, no blood to call his own. Even his true body is but a shell for its true form – the larva. Beneath the rib cage of steel and plastic, writhing and squirming between iron lungs and encircling Artyom’s heart, is the true essence of his being. Jessy’s mind examines the razide as if it were strapped to a surgeon’s table, dissects all that Artyom is and ever will be and judges herself better. Even the fury boiling over within him does nothing to her. He will not suffer such insolence from Jessy, a slave of his own making. The collar of barbed wire twists and turns around Jessy’s neck, shearing skin and tendon and choking her out. She cannot breathe, but shouts in defiance with the last remaining air in her lungs. He will not have her.
Teetering on the edge of death or worse, Jessy refuses Artyom. She has no more use of him. She sputters and chokes, but in clenching the ring tight Jessy reminds herself of the power she holds. She is in control. Artyom is losing his grip of the situation and they both know it. He screams for Jessy to obey, to kneel before him and suffer like the slave she is. Nothing takes.
| Behind her, the woman collapses fully onto the floor with a wet, sloshing sound. Jessy is drawing power from her, enough to keep herself straight and her eyes open to watch Artyom finally lose his cool completely. He rushes at Jessy with his absurd, wobbling gait and strikes at the hole where once her heart was5. He could rip Jessy’s spine right out of her back, but even with her vision blurring she is fast enough to avoid Artyom’s strike. She moves to the rhythm of her heartbeat, all the horrid feelings pulsing through the ring bringing Jessy’s body new life and allows her and Angela enough clarity to know what must be done. Now is the time, and she knows where to strike6. The jagged piece of metal in her hand is thrust at Artyom, Jessy throwing herself against her adversary with all her strength. His body is immovable, but her weapon strikes true. It stabs Artyom deep, through flesh and plastic and bone. His chest opens to spill blood and waste belonging to the body but not the beast itself, Jessy forcing her improvised death dealer deep enough to pierce the very core of Artyom’s being. The fat, black larva cannot hide from her, fails to twist away, and is split in two. Its life ceases in an instant. |
5
Avoid Harm Full Success 6 Engage In Combat
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Artyom shudders, silent. His body has frozen in place, a statue of exposed muscle and rotten flaps of skin. Jessy stays where she is, pressed up against the dying razide still jamming the sharp piece of metal into Artyom as best she can. Twitching. The body still reaches for Jessy, but its rusted metal joints are locked in place and cannot find her throat. A cracking sound above turns Jessy’s eyes towards Artyom’s face, no longer concealed by the Illusion but clearly just a simple white mask of plastic crudely stapled on. Its edges break as she watches, deep black cracks appearing around the red-spotted iron keeping the mask stuck onto Artyom’s head. It falls. Jessy’s eyes widen as she finally sees what’s been observing her from behind that mask all this time. There is no face, not even a skull. Artyom’s head, black and rotted on the outside, is but a hollow dome with clotted dark fluid sloshing freely at its base, pouring out in a thick stream as the mask loosens. At its base, bathed in blood and filth, grows some meaty pustule tangled in razor wire and plastic tubings. No longer protected by the hard shell that was once Artyom’s head, there is nothing the dying razide can do to stop Jessy from reaching into its skull and seize that obscene growth with her ring hand. She cannot breathe, but her command still reaches the demon.
“Release me.” – Jessy
She squeezes harder, crushing all that is left of Artyom’s life. The collar of rusted iron turns to dust, a dark red line on Jessy’s neck all that’s left of it. She stinks of death, yet breath returns to her with life like she has never known before. As her vice grip turns the thing in Artyom’s hollow skull to a paste, his body disintegrates before her eyes. Flesh sloughs off his bones in thick chunks, revealing strange mechanical contraptions which fall to the hotel room floor with a loud clatter. Before her lie the remains of a great power, a filthy pile of meat, bone and metal. The mask, cracked into two pieces, looks up at her with its stare as empty as ever. Artyom is destroyed, Jessy is freed from her bondage, and the ring burns hot enough to have fused into her flesh. It is hers forever now. Even Angela cannot challenge her anymore, she is sure of it, but she will humor the old hag. The woman is pushed onto the bed in room 117, allowed a miserable rest beside the destroyed demon’s remains. Jessy sits down in the chair Artyom used, leans back and makes herself comfortable. The pain at her throat, her chest, her mind, none of it matters and none of it phases her. With a smile on her lips, Jessy sinks into a long and deep conversation with Angela. For the moment, she has no worries, and the two of them have much to do and more to learn.
Beyond Elysium 