Thread: In NomineMainz
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Old 08-04-2011, 01:59 PM   #5
Phoenix42
 
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Mainz, Germany
Default Re: In NomineMainz

Adventures
Incidentally, Heaven and Hell both have an agenda now that the war is over and things are slightly more settled. Gabriel, Dominic and Laurence, but also Saminga, Baal and Beleth are all wondering who exactly cooked this whole Nazi thing up. They know it wasn't them, so they assume the Other Side must have done it. Demons partook in the Nazi's crimes, of course (who wouldn't? joyride!!), but even the occasional angel was apparently involved (cf. below).

One of the main tasks set to celestial characters in 1945 is to find out who exactly perpetrated the crimes of the Third Reich. Heaven is reluctant to believe that humans could manage this all alone, and the Princes of Hell (especially Saminga, who is furious at the idea that somebody could have outdone him) want to know who of their colleagues hit the jackpot.
The answer is, of course, what everybody had feared - mankind cooked Nazism up all on its own; a strange string of events, a lost world war, a tradition of racial imperialism, a group of nationalists, anti-semitism, was all it took to create the most fearful destructive machine the world had seen to date, and make Hell look like a bad back-up copy.

The way the characters find this out varies widely, but in general it is certainly worth being the adventure climax. In our group, the Cherub of Gabriel had been attuned to a boy with a birth defect; the Cherub had saved the boy and his family during one of the last air raids on Mainz, sacrificing his body to get them to safety, but went into Trauma. Upon awaking, he found that his charge had been killed, and set out to find out why.

The boy, like many other impaired children, had been taken away to a clinic where he was euthanised. The trail, naturally, was littered with people (nurses, doctors, etc.) who had betrayed him, and had handed him over knowing what would happen. Finally, they came across the Hadamar Clinic in Hessia, one of the places used by the Nazis for that purpose; nurses and doctors administered poison injections to the disabled and the elderly on a routine basis. The angels then came across the doctor who had been the highest-ranking doctor not to have been arrested by the allies, a certain Dr Victor Gorgass. When faced with angelic retribution, he broke down and said that he was at fault, and begged for mercy, saying he could not explain his actions - he felt as though he had been possessed by some indescribable evil. The angels investigated, and found that he had been indeed possessed by a Shedite for some time. They spared Gorgass, and followed the Shedite's trail to a nurse it was currently inhabiting. The Shedite was half-mad, ranting and raving, but still powerful enough to put up a fight. In the course of the fight, it revealed to the players that it had possessed the doctor in 1944 to use him to sow death. But once in the mind of this man, it had been confronted with an evil so pure and deadly that it could not with all its willpower further corrupt it - a human who killed simply to watch people die, and took a passing pleasure from the idea. Sometimes he enjoyed the look on their faces as they slipped away. Gorgass soon realised that something was inside him, and investigated. The Shedite found itself trapped by a superior will, and told the doctor everything he wanted to know. On occasion, Gorgass would yield to the Shedite's pleas and kill a subject the way it wanted him to, granting the entity a moment of respite before further questioning, but in general, the Shedite collected Discord after Discord, going increasingly insane in the process. After a few months, the doctor had gained knowledge of the War and of the true arts of the Occult to a point where few mortals could hope to tread. He released the Shedite into one of his nurses, and began studying. He knew that the day would come when angels would come for him, so he prepared some artefacts and spells to help him. Using a talisman of Lying, he bull****ed the angels into believing his sobstory, but after they had left he realised that he would have to barter with the powers of hell. He summoned Beleth, and offered her a deal: the Hadamar Clinic as a Tether in exchange for his protection and loyalty. Beleth graciously accepted - she knows talent when she sees it. The angels arrived in time for him to bind them with an ancient occult Song and make his escape. All they could do then was flee the formation of the Tether, as Beleth returned for her end of the deal.

One more character I would like to mention, whom the angels ran into, is Oriwin, a very old and very powerful (ex) Cherub of Purity who, after Uriel's summoning, had petitioned to be word-bound to a people with heathenish but well-meaning traditions, so that he could purify their beliefs: the Sinti. Indeed, he was largely effective, with the Sinti adopting a variant of Catholicism and becoming deeply devout people. However, Oriwin was always puzzled at why they were still constantly at odds with the people around them, despite the fact that their religion was effectively the same. When, many centuries later, the Nazis began talking about segregating, and Racial Purity, he thought that it might be a good idea - so much strife had been heaped on the Sinti over time that maybe it would be best if they had a good clean start of their own, maybe their own country, away from all the hatred... The same could be effected for other persecuted peoples, the Jews and the Roma, he was sure. So he helped the process along, giving his knowledge in aid of the drafting of the Nuremberg laws. When he realised what he had done, it was too late. He had to look on as his charges were exterminated in the thousands. Only a lone demon of Kobal learned about it and is still laughing now. Oriwin in 1945 is currently wandering around Germany (maybe Mainz, maybe Nuremberg, who knows?), reduced to tears, too ashamed to go to Heaven, waiting for demons to find him that he may go to his Final Death.

Okay, enough for today - there are a few tidbits one could add, but that will be later... again, I'm not sure this is useful to anybody, if it is, I'd be glad to get feedback (including on bits I could have done better).
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