The Thing From Planet X

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

Star of Wormwood rising over the White City.

Death of a curandero. El Espinoso. Famous witch of Arequipa. Wrinkled old man wrapped in blanket. Born in the Colca Canyon. Kept giant hummingbird as familiar - fed it with sugar water from his cupped hands.

Sought out by Arequipa natives for protection from demons and the evil eye. His recent clients - weavers, stonemasons, railway engineers - all tell the same story. Poisonous green star visible only to them. Burning in the night. Calling them to climb up the volcano Misti and give themselves to whatever waits at the top.

El Espinoso kept a healer’s shop among the close-packed white adobe houses of the Barrio de San Lazaro, above his wife Rosita’s chingana - makeshift tavern selling corn beer and cheap wine.

Dried toads. Snake skins. Owl feathers. Raw eggs. Coca leaves. Guinea pig skins. Dried stillborn llama fetus relaxing on a shelf. Bundled medicinal herbs - chamomile, cat’s claw, Andean mint. Shrines to Rose of Lima and St. Martin de Porres - mirrors, red candles, holy water, double-armed Caravaca cross.

Books under the table. Jonas Sulfurino’s Grimoire of St. Cyprian. Frances Barrett’s Celestial Intelligencer. Johan Georg Hohman’s Long-Lost Friend. The Old Man of the Pyramids’ Black Pullet, dictated to a Grande Armée officer in 1798. The Little Albert. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. Reina Valera Bible dog-eared at Revelations 9.

El Espinoso’s corpse found on the narrow bed where he treated his patients. Crusted with grey fungus. Suffocated on grubs. New variety of insect crawling from his nose and mouth - something halfway between a locust and a wasp.

A few of the grey locusts still infest the house. Rosita can’t get rid of them. Bites raise painful welts and enable you to see the poison star.

Mi-go. Fungal arthropods. Extrasolar parasites. Wasps from outer space.

Yuggoth. Hive-moon of the mi-go. Sapient. Icy plains. Crystal towers. Fungal chasms. Oceans of dark oil. Pulsing grey-matter abscesses like geodes thinking diseased thoughts. Not yet discovered by science. Will be known as Pluto by 2025.

William Henry Pickering. Astronomer. Pointy beard. Bald. Avid mountain climber - one of the first to conquer Yosemite’s Half Dome.

Born to a cadet branch of the ancient and respectable Pickering family of Massachusetts. Puritans. Witches. Illuminati. Mad sea captains. Family mansion in Salem permanently tainted by Satanic practices of Timothy Pickering, Revolution colonel and George Washington’s Secretary of State.

Brother Edward also an astronomer - pioneer in stellar photography and director of the Harvard College University. Employed team of female computers to process astronomical data at minimum wage. Now deceased.

Inherits occult library of distant retired-whaler uncle Hiram around 1881. Discovers lost chronicle by conquistador Pedro Cieza de León, describing Inca practice of qhapaq hucha - leaving drugged children on mountaintops to die as sacrifice to Yuggoth. Fixates on idea of contacting extraterrestrial life.

Gets job from his brother as Harvard astronomy professor. Leads eclipse expeditions to Chile and Grenada. Establishes observatory sites across the Americas. Mount Wilson, California. Flagstaff, Arizona.

Boyden Astronomical Station on Misti’s ash-barren vicuña-haunted slopes. Below sulphurous crater. Atop Inca shrine ruins. In shadow of 20-foot iron cross. Tea garden. Flowers. Balcony with view of Rio Chili’s stony canyon. The Rockefeller Reflector - 16’ Cassegrain telescope protruding from polished dome.

Takes first photographs of Martian canals. Persuades colleague Percival Lowell they’re engineering works that harbour vegetable life.

Discovers Saturn’s ninth moon Phoebe and a secret tenth moon Themis - both captured Kuiper belt objects, the latter of which is a mi-go colony and living Yuggoth fragment. Ropes Lowell into hunt for Planet X - the Solar System’s ninth planet, beyond Neptune’s orbit. Observes lunar insects and pale fungi fields in Eratosthenes Crater.

Compelled to retire from Harvard. Establishes private observatory in Mandeville, Jamaica. Continues to publish.

Returns to Arequipa to control Boyden Station. Converts staff to Yuggoth worship. Nervous Greek overseer John Paraskevopoulos. Almost-deaf detail-fixated human calculator Annie Jump Cannon. Chatty Belgian priest Georges Lemaître, whose Hypothesis of the Primeval Atom prototypes the Big Bang.

Discovers hibernating mi-go larvae in torso cavities of Ampato ice mummies. Revives qhapaq hucha. Lures wasp-bitten victims up to crater. Bashes out their brains. Stores corpses in station ice house - more wasps bred in their guts.

Themis in the sky. Dislodged from Saturn’s orbit. Piloted by Abaddon, bottomless pit angel - exterminating wizard and mi-go faction king. Every sacrifice beckons it closer to Earth.

El Espinoso’s protective magic too effective at helping victims resist call of Wormwood. He had to be stopped.

Butch Cassidy. Cowboy outlaw. Leader of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Fled to Bolivia after a botched train robbery with Pinkertons in hot pursuit. Rumours of his death in San Vicente following a mine payroll holdup have been greatly exaggerated.

Hiding out in a squalid miners’ brothel in La Rinconada. Gold-mining town north of Lake Titicaca. Highest permanently inhabited place on Earth.

Mud. Tin shacks. Garbage. Tarpaulins. Dirty snow. Breathtaking mountains. Glacial lakes bubbling with pale chemical runoff. Thin air - altitude sickness shortens lives. Clay demons stationed at mine entrances - locals say God rules the surface but Satan reigns unchallenged underground.

Didn’t exist ten years ago. Founded by Yuggoth cult around another Inca sky shrine. Butch runs the mines. Workers toil as near-slaves - paid only by the single day they get per month to look for gold themselves. Mi-go queens nest in sprawling fungal caves below the cordillera - subterranean albino Inca descendants tend to their every need.

Butch has made himself a bandit king.

Highwayman squads under his command roam the Titicaca lakefront and the highlands between La Paz and Arequipa. Shake peasants down for their last coin. Deprive priests of their charitable funds and robes of office. Loot silver from mine strongboxes and city-bound mule convoys. Cart prisoners back to La Rinconada for sacrifice - Butch personally breaks their heads.

Aged montoneras who fought under Cáceres, the Warlock of the Andes, in the War of the Pacific, leading bands of desperate men. Armed with mi-go weapons. Electric guns. Ice-mist projectors. Bulletproof slime-web armour - humans don’t produce the right hormones to feed it. Miniature earthquake bombs used to derail trains and trigger landslides to block mountain passes.

Whole town’s in the cult. Butch preaches Revelations at them every Sunday from the pulpit of a cramped tin church. Penitentes parade through the streets, autoflagellating - conical red hats resemble snow formations of the same name.

“El Quemado”. Butch’s second in command. Short. Wide-brimmed hat. Has been struck by lightning seventeen times. Actively seeks it out. Nervous system scrambled. Lichtenberg figures permanently etched in skin. Incredible quick draw. Jumpy. Sees things that aren’t there. Aspiring paqo shaman - cursed by apu mountain spirits.

Harry Longabaugh. The Sundance Kid. Lives with his common-law wife Etta Place on a floating reed island in Lake Titicaca, taken in by friendly Uru Indians. Has repented of his sins. Butch wants them both dead.

Francisco Alcázar. Distinguished Mexican scientist and ethical philosopher. Staunch atheist. Believes in the death of God and the supremacy of Man.

Guillotined in Paris for murdering his wife. Head stolen from basket by Nazi doctors seconds after death. Attached to tubes. Revived. Permanently grafted into cockpit of the LZ-125 zeppelin, nicknamed Valkyrie, which operates as a portable Thule Society research base. Spiritually merged with the ship. Flies it with his mind.

Commander of G.O.O.D. - the Global Organisation for Observation and Deduction. Secular scientific research institute which promotes space travel and biological immortality. Thule cutout. At war with the Soviet biocosmists for control of mankind’s future.

Worships Abaddon as what he calls a “macrobe” - a superhuman form of life. Mi-go have already colonized the Moon. Purified its surface. Driven rebel forces (nude lunar Amazons riding giant ants) back to dark-side verdant valleys. Alcazar would like them to perform the same operation on Earth.

Create a perfectly rational society, liberated from the flesh, without the mess of locomotion or reproduction. A world of brains in jars.

Valkyrie anchored at Llullaillaco. Dormant volcano on the Argentina-Chile border.

Atacama fringes. Brutally arid plateau. Flamingos picking over salt flats. Yareta plants - blobs of chartreuse velvet. Dirt-floor tambo lodging houses. Travellers with mules. Aymara women in bowler hats knitting as they ride. Rhea. Hairy armadillos. Colourful lakes.

No glaciers on the mountain’s peak. Valkyrie visible from below as a tiny silver dot. Lookouts guarding the ascent.

Third and most important of the Inca sky shrines.

Living zeppelin traverses the Andes. Co-ordinates with Butch and Pickering. Collects sacrifice victims with especially powerful souls. Handful of abducted streetsweepers, millionaires and nuns stored in steel brig.

All G.O.O.D. leadership currently aboard.

John Scrounge. Head of Daily Operations. Dreary old bureaucrat. Only speaks in vague jargon and cliches - literally incapable of original thought. Psychic link with Abaddon. Wasp eggs in his brain.

Septimus Winter. Director of Research. Pointy beard. Pince-nez glasses. Idealises precision. Views emotions as curious medical anomalies. Has portable Objective Box in which they can’t exist.

Dr. Antonio Grimaldi. Director of Medicine. Obese Italian eunuch. Sincere Fascist - gleefully anticipates the coming world of machines. Irritating sing-song voice. Skips like a child from place to place.

Reverend Alan Stryker. “The Mad Parson.” Gloomy. Deranged by daughter’s suicide. Believes all use of power is expression of God’s will. Punctuates doom sermons by firing revolvers at the sky.

Florence “Pixie” Shortclock. Head of Security. Chatty. Boastful. Namedrops famous acquaintances, i.e. Mussolini. Subjects criminals to electric therapy. Oversees corps of Women’s Auxiliary Police.