Entry 17: Who Is Stone?

      The evening after the disaster in the City of Angels we were visited by a woman named Jackie with a crew cut and wearing a duster, armed with a Gatling pistol asking if we were the troupe that had blown The Rock up. She seemed to be very stressed out and seemed to honestly want to help us, so we admitted that we were. It's good to see that Colleen recovered enough from the traumatic events she went through to crack a joke warning Casanova against trying to sleep with her.

      She then told us that the apocalypse that just happened in Lost Angels was was just Grimme using a very small amount of the "Happy Dance"'s power. She then told us that Stone planned to unleash all of it's power and that we needed to get to the Devil's tower to stop him.  She also told us what Jasper Stone is. He is a Harrowed, a corpse that has been animated by a Manitou, and he was the first Harrowed and is so terrifying that his Manitou is completely cowed by Stone. He was shot in the back by his own troop during the battle of Gettysburg moments before the reckoning.  Stone is also the harbinger of death.

    When we asked what a harbinger, we learned that there is a spirit world known as the hunting grounds, which is vaguely shaped like a tree; at the top is the happy hunting ground where people go to dream, but the bottom of the tree is where the dead-lands are located, ruled by 4 powerful entities known as The Reckoners or War, Pestilence, Famine and Death. These entities were sealed away, but the shamans keeping them sealed away were betrayed by a young shaman named Raven who wanted revenge against those who wronged him, which was the cause of the Reckoning.  Luckily the entities are unable to enter the world, and have to work through monsters and their Harbingers (the 4 horses of the apocalypse).

Horseman - Harbinger/Horse
Pestilence - Professor Darius Hellstrome
War           - Raven
Death        - Jasper Stone
Famine      - Reverend Ezekiel Grimme

    Jackie then told us that she is from the organization that controls both the Texas Rangers and the Agency, which if it were coming from anyone else I would dismiss as nonsense, but with what she knows it almost seems plausible. She then told us that we would need to hide the Happy Dance at the Devil's Tower and into the dead-lands where it would be harmless (since it worked by taking power from the dead-lands, which wouldn't matter or work if it was in the dead-lands)

         Understandably she wanted to come with us, and it couldn't hurt to have another experienced gunslinger if we were going after Stone again, and now that we know the what 'game' we are playing and the stakes, I am sure we can succeed in stopping Stone, because otherwise ...

       Jackie told us that we would need to ditch our wagons and take the train, which we were not to keen on doing, since we were rather attached to our wagons, and would be unlikely to get them back if we left them unguarded in the desert. Unfortunately when we got to the train station the train was already speeding off, so we quickly arranged for our wagons to be loaded and sent on the next train and found an Irish pilot, named Wilson, who was willing to fly us where we needed to be quick, for a price.