We started in the mannequin house at LunaVista (one of the seven cities, and some kind of creepy Nevada weapons test site), with our heroes, Annabelle (we retconned things so she was there), FrankCairo, Mary, and the wounded King and Queen in a multi-way standoff. Plus assorted goons. The group’s “no shooting” resolution lasted about three seconds. Annabelle told Mickey to shoot Cairo, and so he did, setting off a barrage of bullets from all sides. In a pause in the gunfire, Frank Cairo, wounded but not dead, told Mickey that Annabelle was working with Disney and other Nephilim who were theme-parkizing Las Vegas, and urged him to kill her, take the King and Queen, and rule the city as his heir. Annabelle argued strenuously against such a plan.

More gunplay (and knife play) left the goons dead, and Reese and Mickey and both the Cairos seriously wounded. But Mickey used entropomancy to say that (get this) Angie had taken his bullet for him. (It occurs to me now that should have tabooed the rest of his charges away. In his defense, he did then do his best to get her to a hospital.) While the Scarecrow chased Mary and the King and Queen into the back of the house, Annabelle ordered Mickey to finish killing her father rather than tend to the wounded Angie and Reese. Mickey shot Annabelle. He had some more words with the dying Frank Cairo, who warned about the how the King and Queen could get hold of one’s mind and urged Mickey to just kill it.

Ben/the Scarecrow took the King and Queen from Mary (it was healing itself by draining the life out of her), promising her no harm would come to it/them. (Heh.) The Scarecrow asked the King and Queen what it wanted and it started stealing Ben’s memories of his childhood. The Scarecrow forced it to partially heal the dying Reese and Angie, but at the cost of much of his lingering connection to Ben’s humanity. (Nice dynamic here as it was actually Mickey who was insisting the Scarecrow do something to heal Reese and Angie – whom Mickey had caused to be shot – and thus forcing the erasure of “Ben” as a real person.)

With Reese and Angie semi-healed, the group left for BurningMan in Cairo’s Mercedes. The utopian collective aspect of Burning Man was dampened by the presence of the SuicideKings and all the witch cultists, summoned by their Dark Mother. Reese told SonnyMundo to clear the central scaffolding of cultists and the Suicide Kings set to beating the shit out of wayward L.A. youths with great enthusiasm. As they did so, the Scarecrow voluntarily surrendered the last of his memories of Ben to the hungry King and Queen, which then abdicated to him, making the Scarecrow King.

The WickedWitchOfTheWest arrived, landing on the top of the Burning Man scaffold and scuttling down to talk to our heroes. The Scarecrow returned her children to her. She told a bit of her story, saying that the great crime against her was not her rape at the hands of the League of Good Roads, for that transported her from the colorless plains of Kansas to the fairy-land of Oz, but rather her ejection from Oz back into this dreary world. Then she ate the former King and Queen, saying “there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” and commanding the assembled cultists to sacrifice themselves for their mother, which most of them did. This allowed her to ascend again, this time as The Moon, a symbol of the murderous, devouring crone.

Then the Scarecrow announced his change of plans. Rather than sacrifice himself to fire, he was going to use the Oneiros to undo the original rape of Dorothy entirely. (On his orders, the Suicide Kings had brought the Oneiros and with it Danny Greer’s kids Harmony and Danny Jr.) This caused a big showdown between him and the others—the Scarecrow was looking for a way to put right all the terrible things that had happened, both recently and in the past. But to the others this seemed like just the sort of power grab Frank Cairo and others had warned about, the kind of arrogance that always seems to accompany use of the Oneiros.

Argument ensued. It looked like things might even turn bloody, Mickey with the Kingkiller’s gun, and the Suicide Kings split on whether they wanted to burn the king or kill for him. But the eventual compromise was for the Scarecrow to burn and for Reese, Mickey, and Angie to use the Oneiros—not to erase what happened in 1893 but to ascend Momma Beulay as an avatar of the Empress—a good mother in counterpoint to the devouring mother of the Witch. (Around this time it was revealed that Angie knew Momma Beulay was the Witch of the East, and a potential avatar of the Empress as well. Angie’s deal with the loa Erzulie (“who will you redeem”) was in fact a promise to Momma Beulay to look after the boys and make sure they did the right thing.)

So the Scarecrow climbed up into the wooden man, and Mickey lit the pyre. There he burned, and his power and secret knowledge was fed back into the land. Then the others activated the Oneiros and witnessed all the overlapping stories written onto it. They saw they could almost ascend Mama Beulay as the Good Mother; she was ready and willing to go. But in the end they couldn’t do it with one of her children living and one dead. (There was a little retconning around this point: I gave the PCs the option of killing Reese and thus ascending Mrs. Beulay, but it was decided that the mother who loses her children would not be much of an improvement. Also, nobody could bring themselves to let Reese die. (Aggrieved cries could be heard from the burning scaffolding at this point.) We decided both sons would have had to be alive for Momma to ascend as truly positive symbol of motherhood.)

Our heroes rolled back to Las Vegas in Cairo’s Mercedes (the Oneiros in the trunk). From there Reese and Mickey planned to drive back to see Marlon in Key West and spend a long time sipping fruity drinks on the beach. Angie was invited to come along, as were the Greer kids, but I imagine Angie might well take her leave of the gang at this point. And the Greer kids might keep following the radio signals to find their father. With Angie’s debt to the loa Erzulie / Mama Beulay / the Good Witch of the East paid, her musical career is poised to take off now, if she still wants it. Reese and Mickey couldn’t think of anything Angie would rather do than retire with them to Key West and “raise the kids” (sort of a strange proposition since Harmony Greer is probably only 3 or 4 years younger than Angie). But I suspect Jess would be able to.

And as the Scarecrow King returned to the soil, Route 66 and all the other dried up roads in America bloomed, not with flowers but with funky weird roadside Americana and groovy retro diners. And each diner claimed to be serving the best pancakes in the USA. Through the miracle of transubstantiation, traditional miracle of sacrifice kings, the pancakes became his flesh and the syrup his blood, and lo those who ate the pancakes received his power and his secret knowledge. And so America became stronger and ineffably stranger (and probably gayer – turns out Ben was gay and had kind of fallen for Reese – can you believe it? omg lol)

It was also revealed that Marlon had arranged for the killing of WallyChurch and perhaps for the assembling of the PCs; he had to some extent engineered this whole replaying of the Wizard of Oz. Though it is an open question how much of all this he could have planned or foreseen.

Every man a king. Or queen. Whatever.

<|SessionSummaries|>