Obsidian Dawn

An adventure for New Orleans PCs, working for Belasco’s Rare Books.

Bad time to be a priest in Mexico City.

Bible burning in the Zocalo. CROM union strongmen in red pointed penitente hoods defend the pyre from angry peasants. A manifesto gets nailed to the cathedral door. The Apostolic Church of the Fifth Sun declares its aim to liberate Mexico from Old World superstition and promote the world’s first truly scientific faith.

“The Cosmic Race is coming,” it announces. “Citizens, repent!”

IAQS (Spanish acronym) has defenders at the highest levels of government. President Plutarco Calles from his office in the Chapultepec Palace has commanded the police to turn a blind eye to its provocations. Pitched battles rage in the streets between quintosolistas and Knights of Columbus.

It’s currently illegal in Mexico for a priest to criticise the government or walk down the street in their official robes. Calles and his revolutionary comrades want to crack down on the Church and re-educate the public. Over in Jalisco they’re executing rebels and hanging priests from the ceiling by their thumbs - the Inquisition in reverse.

Mexico City’s infested by the Feminine Brigades of Joan of Arc - the women’s auxiliary branch of the Cristero rebel front. They infiltrate government offices, raise money from the old noble hacienda families, hand out propaganda leaflets depicting Calles as the Grand Turk.

Now their best agents are being picked off one by one. Some nights ago the corpse of Carmen Reyes, gunrunner and nun, was found on the floor of the cathedral, naked and with its heart plucked out. A deliberate desecration. Shards of obsidian were found inside her chest.

The Churubusco Monastery, in the bohemian district of Coyoacan. Once an Aztec temple. Now a school for artists, run by Dr. Atl. Muralist and volcanologist, emaciated, with a wide-brimmed hat and a long white scraggly beard. Took his pseudonym from a Nahuatl word that can mean semen, brains or water.

Atl was the first to witness the Obsidian Butterfly. On an expedition to the top of Popocatépetl. Now a true believer in what he calls “biblical socialism”, although whose Bible is not exactly clear.

Runs propaganda for IAQS. Painting skulls, sewing costumes for the tough CROM steelworkers and carefully recruited crooks and deadbeats who make up their rank and file. Printing copies of the manifesto, pamphlets about Cristero atrocities and Irradiador, the modernist art magazine. Putting up murals on every clear patch of wall.

You can see these murals everywhere. Visions of old Tenochtitlan. Assembly lines. Scientists equipped with cosmic engines, conquering the universe. Karl Marx pointing the way to Paradise. Red-fleshed peasants dancing in the cornfields with skeleton women in jade skirts.

Presiding over it all - the Obsidian Butterfly. Queen of Paradise, her wings tipped with knives. Atl can explain to you that she comes from beyond Aldebaran, far behind the stars. She and her daughters are here to induct us into the Galactic Federation. An enlightened empire, founded on the principles of pure reason, where mankind will be as gods.

But first we have to prove our worth.

Atl gets his funding by special courier from the Soviet Embassy. Built by the mad architect Gomez de Parada on the site of an old hacienda not far from the Bosque de Chapultepec, said to be haunted by the Countess de Miravalle’s ghost.

Here the Soviet Ambassador, Alexandra Kollontai, sidelined from the Party for siding with the Workers’ Opposition one too many times, presides over a world-class spy network and lays her plans for Communist world domination - of course, on her own theoretical lines.

Jose Vasconcelos, former Mexican Secretary of Public Education, founder of the muralist movement under Obregon, true believer in Atlantis and author of the book The Cosmic Race, is hopelessly in love with her. Believes that they can breed a mestizo master race and found a universal city in the jungles of Brazil.

Together they sponsored an expedition to Carcosa, a lost city in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental, in Tarahumara country. Working from a sketch map sold for half a bottle of tequila by Ambrose Bierce.

What they found there was a beacon. A way to summon the tzitzimimeh, the skeleton star women of Tamoanchan, who despise unreason beyond all things. The Aztecs repelled them with pointless sacrifice, the Spanish with prayer when they appeared to Juan Diego as the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1531.

All this is documented in the Embassy’s well-stocked occult library. Proletkult, the Red occult research agency, has a solid budget for this stuff.

The Xochimilco wetlands. All that remains of the ancient Aztec lakes. Bargemen ply the channels, ornamenting their boats with bright flowers, but none of them will take you anywhere near the Isle of Dolls.

They say it’s haunted. And it is.

Dolls nailed to trees. Blank staring eyes. Thousands of them. They say a mad don drowned a young girl in the canal, and hammered the dolls up to repel her ghost. But some of the boatmen whisper, over jars of pulque, that the girl was a skull-faced demon, and only the don’s madness kept her from coming back.

On the island, in the tangled vegetation of the floating garden, an old adobe hut. Walls painted bright blue.

The hut is guarded. By the cipactli, an axolotl the size of a small car with mouths full of needle-sharp teeth at every fingertip and joint. Lurking in the canals, deadly silent until it attacks. Plus its thousand smaller children, wriggling towards you in a pink-gilled tide. They’re pretty cute, until they bite.

Inside the hut sleeps a woman. Magdalena Calderon, in a red silk robe, surrounded by flowers and more dolls’ heads on a heavy iron-framed bed. A blue jade mask on her face, not Olmec but vastly older.

She is the beacon. Her dreams in smoky coils trace patterns on the walls, emanating out through the universe. Calling to the stars. She is an enthusiastic Communist and volunteered for this.

It’s not enough to just take off the mask. She will wake up. Demand it back. And the Obsidian Butterfly will appear, demanding to know why you hate Beauty and Truth. (Also this will happen if you stand around talking for too long, and disturb her sleep.)

Darkness falls over Mexico City. Blackout and eclipse. Not predicted on any astrological charts. Whatever’s blocking out the Sun, it’s not the Moon.

The quintosolistas run riot, starting fires, as the star women descend, their glass knives ready to flense the irrational and reveal the inner light of Truth. At their touch men become totally logical, and start building machines out of each other’s skin. Cristeros and random normal people hole up in churches with guns to fight for as long as they can.

You have to kill Magdalena.

And cut out her heart. Kindle a fire in her empty chest cavity, in the way of the old Aztecs, when they wanted to restart the calendar every fifty-two years and delay the coming of the Sixth World of Consciousness. Take the fire to the Zocalo, to the site of the Templo Mayor, and burn the IAQS manifesto at the cathedral altar, while praying to God.

Or something equally irrational. A pointless, foolish waste of energy, demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the universe really works. Only then will the tzitzimimeh judge you unworthy, and leave.