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 the Ladder - it's a song to him; one rip-roaring, finger-snapping,
hip-shaking 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 he look at himself in a mirror if he
doesn't, let alone 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
he the sort to dismiss it out of hand, either.
He's 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 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 offers the potential for running gun fights with demons not
particularly well known for 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 demographic...