Unknown Armies Play Report: You're Not Alexander! Part 1

The story was a strange one. Because the Thessalian hero Ajax had murdered the prophetess Cassandra at the end of the Trojan war, oracles had ordered the nobles of the Hundred Families of Locri in Thessaly to send two virgins yearly to the Dardanelles and leave them to make their own way through to Troy. By tradition, the natives would come out to catch and kill them, armed with axes and stones, and only if the virgins escaped would they enter Athena’s temple by a secret passage and live there in safety, dressed in a slave’s robe and shorn of their hair until a replacement managed to relieve them. The rite was to last for a thousand years, but at some point in Alexander’s life, it is known to have been interrupted. As ruler of the Thessalians, it was perhaps Alexander who first dispensed his subjects from their duties.

(The text says Ajax "murdered" Cassandra. Anyone familiar with the lore knows the details are more graphic. Ajax the Lesser raped Cassandra on the Altar of Athena after she claimed sanctuary in the temple, turning the Goddess against the victorious Achaeans.)

 

Enough of that. The time is the fourth century BC. The place is the ruined city of Troy, four miles inland from the West Coast of Anatolia - modern day Turkey. For centuries, a small temple of Athena squatted in the ruins of the Trojan citadel, receiving occasional pilgrims come to pay homage to the heroes of Homeric lore. Then the Great King Alexander crossed the Dardanelles and liberated Troy from the Persians, opening the city to tourists from across Magna Graecia. He dedicated his armor and weapons to the Goddess at the shrine and promised to build Athena the largest temple in the world.

 

Our story begins with three people living in the Trojan Tourist Trap, a decade after its "liberation" by Alexander the Great:

• Jocasta, virgin sacrifice offered by the Locrians in a thousand year ritual to cleanse the sins of Ajax the Lesser at the end of the Trojan War. Survived the bloodrites and was allowed to live as a slave at the Temple of Athena. Champion boxer, serves as the town's police force.
• India, snake handler and devoted worshiper of Dionysus. Sells tourists a "kykeon" made from opium, wine and snake venom. Gains supernatural powers from handling snakes. Deals drugs to Jocasta in exchange for protection from ruffians.
• Pseudanor, India's son by a wealthy tourist who disappeared long before his birth. Incapable of casting snake based magick, but blessed with innate snake abilities. A teenage hellion who loves pranks and mischief.
  

Pseudanor was up late and creeping around town, as usual. His infrared vision let him see at night, and the dark held no terrors for him. What it did hold, which he saw when he left the house he lived in with his mother, was a group of men waiting in ambush. The five figures were watching the house, and conferred with one another when they saw Pseudanor leave. The snake boy pretended to leave, then hid on the terrace above the house to observe the strange men. The strange men must have spotted him, because one raised a burning object to his lips and emitted a cloud of smoke, obscuring the group from Pseudanor's heat vision. He reocgnized the smell from his mother's drug collection - the strange man was burning hempseeds in a clay pipe.

Pseudanor climbed onto the roof of the house to get a better look, concerned that the men were approaching through the smoke cloud. He was right, a hand reached up from the cloud and tipped the heated residue from a clay pipe onto the thatched roof. Pseudanor brushed the hot embers off the roof to prevent a fire, shouting at the arsonist to identify himself.

India woke up in the middle of the night. Her son was running around in the dark, again, starting fights with strangers, again. She rolled out of bed and went outside to get him under control. And ran into the strange man who stank of cannabis, blocking the door. The man scooped up his clay pipe off the floor, and India slammed the door shut in his face, forcing him out of the house. Then Pseudanor jumped off the roof and bit him. The man flung up his arm, and Pseudanor's teeth sank into a layer of warm wax covering the man's body. The strange armor prevented envenomation, but it left a nasty bruise and prompted thet man to yell for help.

Up the hill, in the Temple of Athena, the slave Jocasta was sweeping the porch outside the inner sanctum. She heard shouts of alarm from India's house and ran to assist, sliding down the ruined wall in back of the temple and running across the roof of India's house to get to ground level. Pseudanor was grappling with a Persian man clad in a wax bodysuit, and four ruffians with clubs were advancing on her. Jocasta demanded to know who they were. The four men conferred with each other in Macedonian Greek, confirmed that Jocasta was the woman they were looking for, and attacked her.

By me

Jocasta punched a man in the throat and instantly disabled him, boxing handguard cutting the meat and crushing the airway. The other three swung their bludgeons and knocked her unconscious with a lucky blow to the head, but another went down to a nasty venom spell cast by India. He panicked as he felt the poison coursing through his body, rendering him insensate and leaving the two bravos to confront India and Pseudanor. Pseudanor was busy fighting the wax clad fire mage. He bit him again and got a good poison bite in, pumping venom into the guy's arm. The guy used random magick to superheat the blood coming out of the wound, giving Pseudanor a nasty mouth burn. The mage got out from under the snake boy and fled.

 

India ran inside to grab a significant charge. She had one already, and a second one would unlock a library of devastating snake based magick. To do this, she had to let a snake bite her. India's house was two rooms and a patio, and in the back room she kept snakes in a stone lined pit. She reached in and grabbed a viper, letting it latch into her arm and envenomate her. 

 

The two bandits weighed their options. They had two men down, but their target was unconscious and within easy reach. Then a shout came from the direction of the inn. Three partygoers ran toward the scene of the action, in various states of undress.

• Kancharmon the performance martial artist and prostitute, caught in the middle of his Briseis act, wearing a bedsheet and carrying a long dagger.
• Agathon of Sparta, a limber rogue carrying a straight xiphos and wearing a hastily grabbed tunic
  
• Antenor of Athens, a hulking brute equipped with a curved kopis, wearing nothing at all

The would-be kidnappers grabbed their downed comrades and fled the scene as India emerged from the house, pregnant with venom and venom magick. Pseudanor chased after the two men, intent on capturing one to interrogate. He ran down the hill and caught them in a glade at the bottom. They refused to abandon their comrades, swearing in Macedonian and striking him with clubs until he retreated.

India fixed up Jocasta's bruised head. Kancharmon and his two Johns verified that there were no more bandits waiting in ambush. Pseudanor had seen Kancharmon naked before, but never missed a chance to do it again. He found the hero-for-hire incredibly sexy, especially as a woman. Kancharmon immediately summoned India to deal with her son's broken fang. Robbed of an opportunity to mack on his crush, Pseudanor sulked as his mom fussed over him, pointedly ignoring the twin snake erections tenting his chiton. Lame.

 

Kancharmon opined that the attackers were probably soldiers, based on their tactics, discipline, and the language they used. Antenor suggested that it was a covert operation, the soldiers disguising themselves as bandits. Agathon thought the soldiers had actually turned to banditry. He had just heard the news that the Great King Alexander lay dying in Babylon. The soldiers might be getting a head start on the ensuing breakdown of social order.

India verified that neither Jocasta nor Pseudanor were in mortal danger. Kancharmon took the two customers back to the Fawn's Heart, to re-assume their roles as Patroclus and Achilles. Pseudanor thought about the guy he bit. The man was clearly Persian, but he didn't know why he wore a wax outfit. The one Persian he knew was Garshasp, owner of the Fawn's Heart. Pseudanor went to the inn to figure out what was going on.

The Fawn's Heart was a two story building, set against one of the old terraced walls of Troy. The first floor held the fire pit that served as the kitchen. The second floor had rooms for rent, and a roof garden where men drunkenly tossed their drinking vessels onto an oil and wine soaked pile of broken pottery. Inside, an Egyptian woman flanked by a pair of slave bodyguards sampled the local wine. The prostitute Hedistē sat at the bar, clandestinely jacking off the tourist next to her in exchange for a drink. Pseudanor had no patience for any of these jokers. He went straight for the bearded, shirtless Mede tending the cookfire. Garshasp explained that his people used wax to prevent corpses from poisoning their surroundings. A rotting body was a physical and spiritual pollutant, an impermeable layer of wax stopped it from poisoning the earth it was laid into. A Persian who wore a wax suit was just getting a head start on his own funeral. Probably a Magi, the tribe that made up the religious elite of the old Achaemenid Empire. But such a man would never kill with fire - to do so would pollute the flame eternal with a corpse. He would only burn buildings as a diversion.

 

Many of Garshasp's people served in the armies of the Great King Alexander. It had become a point of contention between him and the normally sycophantic Macedonian Nobility he surrounded himself with. Alexander recruited Persians to fill elite guard positions, normally a prestigious position reserved for elite Greeks who distinguished themselves in battle. The mysterious Magi who tried to burn India's house was probably working for the Macedonians.

Roused from unconsciousness and healed by India, Jocasta went back to the temple. The precinct was surrounded by a stone wall, inside which the other priestesses lived in small houses surrounding the temple itself. The temple was built in the antestyle, with a columned porch open on one side. Jocasta went inside to sweep up the inner sanctum. Technically she was supposed to stay out of sight of the Goddess, but nobody else ever bothered to clean up inside, and all the priestesses knew if they kept Jocasta out it would never get done.

The inner sanctum of the temple was shabby by the standards of the civilized world, but the image of the Goddess was impressive for its great antiquity. A big piece of stone, salvaged from the ruins of Troy. One side was flat, with a carven relief depicting the Goddess Athena. Before the image was a sacrificial altar, where animals were slaughtered, butchered, and the remains burned. Over the door leading into the room were the weapons and armor of Alexander the Great, who offered them in exchange for the panoply of Achilles that he took from the temple. Behind the altar, beneath a layer of accumulated soot, Jocasta knew there was a loose floor tile that led down into a secret passage - the one she used to enter the temple many years ago.

Jocasta spent a couple hours scrubbing and scraping away at old blood on the floor, then went to sleep in her usual spot on the porch.

The next day, India and Pseudanor woke up to the sound of horns. They peeked out of their house and saw a handful of chariots parked outside the Fawn's Heart. A group of hypaspists, elite Macedonian spearmen bearing weapons and armor, escorted an important looking man in a cape and disc-shaped hat up through the ruined city to the temple. 

Pseudanor recognized one of the men as a soldier from last night. He ran as fast as he could to the Temple, to warn Jocasta before they arrived.