In Nomine Revisited: The Three Faces of Elvis Celestial

Three Faces of Elvis Celestial – Google Docs

The Three Faces of Elvis

Celestial

Or, Priscilla, Queen of the Deserted

The King has a problem.  Which means that Laurence has a problem, which means that your players — well. Guess.

Here’s how it goes.  The King’s hearing the call of Jacob’s Ladder — it’s coming as a song to him; one rip-roaring, finger-snapping, hip shakin’ mother of a song — and he wants to go climb Up it, and see who’s there.  Well, that’s what the Ladder’s for, after all.  Blessed souls go on Up, and the angels watch, proud and happy that they’re doing their jobs right.

There’s a difficulty, though.  The King did some wrong, in his life.  There’re some people that need to have amends made to them, and he just doesn’t feel right about letting that slide, or getting somebody else to clean up his mess.  God knows he did enough of that when living; in fact, if he hadn’t been blatantly interfered with, his sloth and indifference might have been enough to damn him.  So he’s got to go do some repair work.  How can the King see himself in a mirror if he doesn’t, let alone look Jesus in the eye when he meets Him Up There?

The Commander of the Host is not a sucker for this sort of thing, but neither is Laurence the sort to simply dismiss it out of hand.  Laurence is also a Malakite, so he’s going to be favorably disposed towards any plan of action that involves tracking down old evils and stomping their metaphorical heads into metaphorical goop.  On the other hand, the King is on Hell’s Saint Watch list — right at the top, with the name circled in purple and underlined.  Nybbas still fumes over the idiotic Servitor of Gluttony that denied him this particular prize, and will be happy to rectify the error.  Clearly, Laurence is going to need to give the blessed soul a bodyguard of some sort.

Remember how I suggested that you guess?  Well, this would be the place that you’d want to do that.

Fortunately for the PCs, the King doesn’t have to go atone for every sin and thoughtless cruelty that he committed: just the heavy ones, and a lot of them can be handled through proxy physical labor, quiet financial recompense (via more labor), discreet apologies, perhaps a quiet visitation or two (the tabloids are going to have a field day with “Elvis Does Nursing Home Concert Tour!” in about six months, but by then, the King should be Up the Ladder and out of the PCs’ hair).  Unfortunately, there will be some problems that may be trickier — and almost certainly one or two that just can’t be fixed, merely acknowledged.  Alternatively, for those not wanting to recreate “Highway to Heaven,” the King may simply decide to rescue some of the Media’s next generation of grist for the mill, which would also be interesting, as well as offer the potential for running gun fights with demons not particularly well known for possessing practical combat abilities.  Players often enjoy that.

Either way, eventually the PCs will have to deal with the big problem: the King’s ex-wife.  And his daughter.  And his daughter’s ex-husbands — including, oh my, yes, that one.  And her kids.  And so on.  The King will be adamant that something be done to straighten out all those people, given that he thinks that he can trace about half of all of their problematic behavior to his direct actions — and a further quarter to his bad example.  Convincing him otherwise should be interesting, assuming of course that the players disagree; at the very least, he’ll want to get his ex-wife to forgive him.  During all this, the players can easily be kept busy distracting or evading various celebrity entourages, crazed fans, the media — and the Media.

And, needless to say, Nybbas doesn’t assign incompetent demons to that particular arena in the War.

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