The Grey Sisters
An adventure for Lima PCs, working for Morris’ Bar.
Julio C. Tello. Quechua anthropologist. Director of the Museum of Peruvian Archaeology, a cluttered and disorganised collection of pre-Columbian artifacts in a few back rooms of the Magdalena Palace. Excavated the Paracas necropolis. Mild-mannered. Collects trepanned and ritually deformed skulls.
Pedro Zulen. Assistant professor of literature at the University of San Marcos. Anarchist. Librarian. Has tuberculosis - haunted by poor health. Painfully shy. Won’t look you in the eye. Students love him. Corresponds with Bertrand Russell. Teaches popular course on psychology and logic.
Invites Tello out for a drink at Morris’ Bar. Wants to show him a cool old book he’s found in the San Marcos library archives.
A theological manuscript by Francisco de la Cruz, former university rector, burnt at the stake for alumbrado heresy during the grand auto-da-fé of 1578. Inspired by the Pistis Sophia and the Borborite Scriptures. Advances the hypothesis that the Inca emperor Pachacuti was heir to the bloodline of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ.
Found a few days later in his office, stabbed to death. Manuscript missing.
Night janitor saw a woman exit the library building. Face concealed by a silk mantle. One eye peeping through. Wrapped from head to toe in fabric. Voluminous skirts. Satin shoes. Holding a bloody dagger. Vanished into the shadows before he could get close.
Zulen’s notes full of references to historical Peruvian lunatic asylums. Pre-Columbian madness treatments - boring holes in skulls to let the demons out.
Jorge Guillermo Leguía. Head of the Faculty of Letters. Oversees Philosophy and Language. Zulen’s boss. President Augusto Leguía’s nephew. Appointed to replace the exiled Christian socialist Victor Belaúnde. Keen to prove his loyalty. Father German (El Tigre) established the El Frontón prison for regime enemies - sent to die in Panama after publicly criticising his brother’s unconstitutional re-election bid.
Archive curator. Grants access only to scholars whose work promotes Peruvian cultural integrity. Has written at length on metaphysical aesthetics. Incessantly quotes Henri Bergson’s theory of the elan vital and his Matter and Memory, which posits that the brain can have absolute knowledge of the spiritual world. Developing a system to scientifically measure Beauty, enabling the creation of a maximally beautiful object.
Pays Tello a special visit to dissuade him from further investigation. Leans on the police - official position is that Zulen’s murder was a theft gone wrong.
Can be followed. Connections to Peruvian criollo aristocracy not hard to track. Regularly visits the Casa de Aliaga - always leaves in a good mood.
Manco Capac. First Inca monarch. Makes contact with the Zeta Reticulans using lost Lemurian technology sometime around 1200. Opens diplomatic relations. Negotiates for a wife - Mama Ocllo, full-blooded grey alien, with whom he founds a powerful dynasty of extraterrestrial hybrids. Masters antigravity. Builds soldiers from living liquid gold.
Pachacuti. First Inca emperor. Convert to old Zeta Reticulan heresy. Self-proclaimed avatar of sun god Inti, whose cult is a front for worship of the living singularity Azathoth. Wise and noble ruler. End goal is the destruction of all life on Earth.
Inca monarchs mummified upon their deaths. Kept in storage bins below the Qorikancha - the Temple of the Sun. Paraded in Cuzco plaza on special occasions. ‘‘It was customary,” wrote the chronicler Pedro Pizarro, “for the dead to visit one another. And they held great dances and debaucheries. And sometimes the dead went to the house of the living. And sometimes the living came to the house of the dead.’’
Spanish magistrate Polo de Ondegardo appointed governor of Cuzco in 1558. Makes telepathic contact with Pachacuti’s mummy.
Carts the mummies back to Lima. Stores them in the morgue of the Hospital Real de San Andrés. Founds Gnostic Illuminati cult devoted to their worship. Recruits acolytes from the Peruvian elite.
Hermilio Valdizán. Psychiatrist. Author of such books as Defend Yourself From Madness!, Sexual Perversions In Primitive Peruvians, Anatomists Of The Colony and Mental Alienation In The Indian Race. Active in the Mental Hygiene Movement. Director of the Victor Larco Herrera National Asylum for the Insane.
Honorio Delgado. Valdizán’s loyal sidekick. Presides over the asylum’s daily operations. Bullies the nurses. Pallid and sickly. Obsessed with cleanliness. Won’t touch an object handled by a stranger until it’s been scrubbed with bleach. Opposed to masturbation - sees its malign influence everywhere he looks.
Both men are Azathoth devotees.
San Andres Hospital long associated with mad anatomists of San Marcos Medical School. Mummies transferred along with lunatics to Cercado Asylum in 1859, then to Herrera in 1918. Cult has been feeding souls of madwomen for centuries to Pachacuti and his royal brethren - transforming them into “grey sisters”, soulless Azathoth servants who instantly shrivel and die if their faces are seen.
Cesar Moro. Surrealist poet. Rigid stare. Author of The Sulphur Spectacles and The Turtle On Horseback. Just got back from Paris. Spends a lot of time at the asylum, teaching art classes to the mentally ill. Writes down the stuff they scrawl on walls. Describes his chosen profession as “repairer of pink machines”.
Tipped Zulen off to the location of the de la Cruz book. Hoping to recruit him. Now trying to cover his tracks. Will be in trouble if the cult leaders find out.
Isabel de Jesus. Holy woman. Lives in a Daughters of Charity convent on the former site of San Andres Hospital. Rarely seen. Views the world only from an enclosed balcony.
Venerated by the Lima poor. Capable of bilocation - manifests at weddings and the bedsides of dying men. Has attained such a high level of divine knowledge that nothing she does can be sinful. Encourages her devotees to mortify their flesh - rolling naked in needles, bathing in freezing water, rubbing hot peppers into their mucous membranes. Sleeps two hours a night. Wears a spiked silver crown.
Travels at night through the Lima catacombs. Leads the other nuns in grotesque orgies with the elderly friars of the Convent of Santo Domingo, who impose obscene penances that she blissfully accepts. Archbishop Emilio Lisson presides over Black Masses with her body as the altar in the Palacio de Torre Tagle, baroque mansion and main headquarters for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Entertains aristocrats. Eugenia de Aliaga, charming society hostess, descended from conquistadors, whose family have lived in the Casa de Aliaga for sixteen generations and still keep its antique torture chamber in good working order. José de la Riva-Agüero y Osma, Marquis of Aulestia, polymath and transvestite who’s trying and failing to start a radical Catholic youth movement in the style of Charles Maurras. Ántero Aspíllaga, elderly sugar millionaire with impeccable manners who hasn’t given up on his dream of being President one day.
Pachacuti’s daughter. Heir to the Inca throne.
Catacombs beneath the asylum full of undead stillbirths, fathered by royal mummies on anonymous lunatics and nuns. Twenty-foot piebald maggot is daughter of La Perrichola, eighteenth-century actress and viceroy’s mistress - Pachacuti visited her as the Lord of Miracles, patron saint of Peru, and convinced her she was blessed.
Once a year the world’s greatest matadors gather at the Acho Bullring to compete for the Golden Scapular of the Lord of Miracles.
The Little Lizard. The Caliph of Cordoba. The Fat Pope. The Salamanca Kid. Playing to the crowd in their golden suits. Preparing to take on the most dangerous fighting bulls in the world.
Isabel has publicly announced she will marry this year’s winner.
Christ told her in a dream that she’s blessed with eternal purity - will remain a virgin no matter how often she has sex. She requires a mortal father for the Negative Messiah. The Black Son of the Black Sun.
