Los Encantados

An adventure for Lima PCs, working for Morris’ Bar.

Percy Fawcett. Explorer.

Born into aristocratic family of Yorkshire shipping magnates. Theosophical uncle. Mapmaker for the British Secret Service. Friend to Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard, who gives him an Atlantean basalt statue as a birthday present.

First sent to Bolivia by Royal Geographic Society in 1906. Encounters giant spiders and 60’ anacondas. Stumbles across Manuscript 512 - account of a lost city in the Brazilian hinterland, produced by emerald-seeking bandeirantes in 1753.

Stages 1925 expedition to Mato Grosso jungle in pursuit of Lost City of Z. Disappears.

Dean Ivan Lamb. Flying mercenary.

Works for Elmer J. Faucett, co-founder of a small Peruvian airline. Makes weekly air trips to Iquitos - remote rubber-planting settlement in heart of jungle. Inaccessible by foot. Only other ways to get there - travel downriver from Yurimaguas or up from Manaus and the Atlantic.

Flies load of cinema equipment from Lima to Casa de Fierro - planter’s abandoned iron palace that everyone insists, despite a total lack of evidence, was built by Gustave Eiffel. Ceiling girders home to vampire-bat colony. Filmmaker Antonio Wong Rengifo transforming it into Iquitos’ finest picture palace.

Loads plane up with canisters of film at jungle airstrip - Wong’s homemade movies, for distribution across Peru. Realises he’s missing some paperwork. Goes back to Casa de Fierro. Discovers Wong in conversation with Fawcett. Immediately recognises the Englishman - followed the story back in 1925.

Hides. Is not seen. Waits for meeting to finish. Shadows Fawcett to waterfront. Watches him depart upstream on steamship Beatriz - captained by Guillermo Cervantes, disgraced army captain who led an abortive rebellion against the federal government in 1921. Technically wanted for treason. Familiar presence on the Iquitos docks.

Goes back to plane. Flies home. Has some idea of reporting sighting to Fawcett’s family and asking for small reward.

Police waiting for him at the airport.

Now in the lock-up for the distribution of blue movies. Men making tender love to pink river dolphins. Women embraced by anacondas. Fishlike things copulating by firelight - could be actors in rubber suits. Orgies in flooded forest. Stone ruins as backdrop - plazas, bridges, overgrown temple walls.

Cops demanding information. Needs you to get it for him. Sincerely did not know what he was helping to sell.

Julio César Arana. Once an Iquitos rubber magnate. Tortured and enslaved Indians. Atrocities exposed by British consul Roger Casement. Business closed down. Never prosecuted. Became senator for Amazonian province of Loreto.

Now lives quietly in Lima seaside district of Magdalena del Mar. Clifftop hacienda overlooks desolate beach. Children Julia and Luis tend his Rio Putumayo estates, on the disputed border with Colombia - form patriotic juntas to agitate for war.

Handles Lima end of Wong’s dirty-pictures business. Basement porno theatre. Shrunken heads positioned as voyeurs. Silent grey-faced Barbadian butler Henry King. Hosts stag nights for businessmen and politicians - untouchable by law.

Armando Normand. Plantation manager under Arana. Horrific serial killer. Cuts people up with machetes and feeds them to dogs. Suffers from nameless tropical fever that yellows his skin and makes his hands unsteady. Fluent, convincing liar. Escaped Iquitos prison with Rodríguez Brothers (two more of Arana’s murderers) in 1915. Still technically on the run. Wears comical false moustache.

Operates in Lima as Arana’s enforcer. Shrinks heads of unlucky detectives. Still wants revenge on Casement, who was executed in 1916 for high treason against the British Crown.

Lope de Aguirre. Conquistador. Traitor. Fought in Peru’s early civil wars. Followed a judge who sentenced him to public flogging for three years across the country before stabbing him to death.

Joined Pedro de Ursúa’s 1560 expedition down the Amazon in search of El Dorado. Overthrew and killed him somewhere in the jungle. Proclaimed self expedition leader and Prince of Peru. Found the Orinoco via the Casiquiare canal. Laid siege to Isla Margarita, off the Venezuelan coast. Shot. Dismembered. Head exhibited in public square.

Aloha Wanderwell. “First Girl To Drive Around The World.”

Husband mysteriously shot on yacht in Long Beach, California. Returns to Peru to hunt for treasure of Inca general Rumiñawi in Ecuador’s Llanganates Mountains. Discovers golden library etched with Martian hieroglyphs in the Cave of the Oilbirds on the Andes’ eastern slopes.

Manuscript by Aguirre’s daughter Elvira acquired in 1600s by Scottish buccaneer “Redlegs” Greaves. Winds up in collection of adventure author Alpheus Verrill. Wanderwell buys it. Follows its directions to lost city Yu-Atlanchi, sunk in flooded jungle between the Marañón and Ucayali rivers. Relic of Atlantean refugee civilisation.

Huge stone face overlooks plaza. Vines sprout from its mouth. Something like ayahuasca - the liana of the dead. Wanderwell brews it up and sips it under guidance of Jivaro shaman Don Roberto, who imprisons dart demons in his sinuses and can spit them out as invisible disease projectiles on command.

Meets the yacuruna.

River sirens. Machine elves. Catfish-tail mermaids. Miniature policemen. Crystal labyrinths. Squawking blue larvae. Gnomes with mismatched feet. Pink-clad women riding caimans. Snakes as big as steamboats. Outer space spirits who speak computer language - beep boop beep beep boop.

All living in upside-down cities on the other side of the river’s reflection. Eager to teach sorcery. Visible to anyone who cares to look.

Gillmen. Creatures from the Black Lagoon. Not hallucinations. Breed in oxbow lakes and Yu-Atlanchi’s stagnant tunnels. Ride giant electric eels. Worship Carcosa, terminus of ultimate degeneracy, toward which they believe all life is de-evolving from an initial divine state. Wanderwell has married Figueroa, their king - wants to share his holy message of liberation with the world.

Fawcett, protected as holy fool, wanders dazed across Brazil for years. Lives with Xingu in the jungle and as opera house phantom in Manaus. Machine elves dancing at edge of his vision finally lead him to Iquitos.

Rubber boom long over. Few fat latex “biscuits” still stacked in waterfront warehouses - made by drizzling sap onto rotating spit above burning toxic nuts.

Rotting riverside manors.

Broken chandeliers. Shattered skylights. Weed-choked fountains. Mouldy grand pianos. Wrought-iron balconies entangled by vines. Waterstained volumes of Gibbon and Macauley. Morose plantation owners in Panama hats and white linen suits.

Floating shantytowns. Labyrinth of plank walkways and stilt huts. Teetering above the river. Indians in long slender canoes. Boatramps made from logs jammed into mud. Tame parrots, monkeys, capybaras, sloths. Piranha eating food scraps - everyone assures you they only attack when blood is in the water.

Lebanese traders selling machetes, hammocks, canned goods, kerosene, rum. Expensive phonographs. Tattered jaguar furs. Bars. Brothels. Dirty restaurants. Tacacho - mashed plantains with chorizo. Tamales stuffed with turtle and howler-monkey meat.

White-robed Santo Daime preachers. Syncretic religion - part Catholic, part Spiritualist, part vegetalismo. Recruiting orgy participants from among traders, boatmen, ribereños, heirs to lost rubber fortunes. Only the most beautiful subjects get transported by boat upstream to Yu-Atlanchi. Nobody returns.

Fawcett’s sacred task, granted to him by Figueroa, is to oversee the steady growth of the sex-cult. Must keep himself chaste to perform his duty - resists the sirens’ call through judicious use of bullet ants.

Valentin. Dapper linen-suited playboy with dark liquid eyes. Fedora. Gold-tipped cane. Small goatee and moustache. Funny. Elegant. Plays the mandolin. Exquisite dancer - moves like rubber’s in his bones. Appears at parties, brothels, church revival meetings. Nobody knows who is or where he came from. Jokingly claims to be a Hollywood film star, a Cuban sugar millionaire, a Spanish grandee.

Pink dolphin transformed into a human. Can change back and forth at will.

Seduces women. Leads them into the river. Sex is so good they’re never seen again.

Cândido Rondon. Brazilian army engineer. Helped overthrow Pedro II. Famous for building telegraph lines across the jungle. Travelled with Theodore Roosevelt down the River of Doubt in 1914. Roving commission to survey Brazil’s western borders.

Orthodox Positivist. Totally serious about it. Believes in reason’s inevitable triumph. Follower of Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity. Altruism. Order. Progress. Priests required to be married. Holy trinity of Humanity, Destiny and Earth.

Paid by Henry Ford to scout out new locations for utopian industrial rubber colony on model of Fordlandia. Believes it could become seed of Universopolis - ideal world capital of Jose Vasconcelos, running on Atlantean technology, inhabited by hybrid master race. Has studied jungle ruins from lost civilisation of Pebas Mega-Wetland era.

Staying in Iquitos. Investigating cult. Wants Yu-Atlanchi’s secrets for himself.