The Popes Ring

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The Popes Ring

A Scruffy Cowboy along a boardwalk in a old western town suddenly grabs a young lady in a billowing dress and pulls her through an invisible doorway into a corridor filled with strange aliens, additional corridors, windows looking out into strange landscapes and such. 

‘Where are we?’

‘Purgatory!’ and then he proceeds to pull her into a side alcove and inflicts his lascivious ways on her. After finishing with her, she falls back into her town’s dirt street, naked and humiliated.

We then learn that that cowboy is hundreds of years old and has obtained many magickal powers by his use of ‘The Popes Ring’. Apparently each New Pope has a Magickal Ring fashion for them by Elves, but The Elves do not reveal to The Pope how to use The Ring. They are expected to ‘know’ how to use it by virtue of their worthiness of being The Pope. Needless to say; Few Popes ever discover that The Ring has any special powers at all. 

Many years ago; A Cardinal removes The Ring from a Dead Pope and replaces it with a cheap imitation which is buried with him. The Cardinal takes The Ring believing that it is simply a colorful trinket, or worth something because it was once The Popes.

The Cardinal’s Ring is then stolen from him and changes hands many times, without anyone knowing what it’s real value is. Then The Cowboy comes to own it by a series of odd circumstances. He later comes to befriend a Mystic of sorts and The Mystic discovers The Potential of The Ring. Together they explore it’s power, but neither of them are particularly good, and fortunately, not genuinely evil, just very amoral & mischievious. The Mystic eventually finds his own way and leaves The Cowboy. He lives on & on, inadvertently murdering many victims and causing great trouble, and occasionally rescuing innocents, but never doing anything with any particular intent. He is just wandering along, allowing things happen to him.

One trick is to enter and exit from Purgatory any time he desires. Purgatory is a benign place and he uses it as his personal sanctuary. No one there has any interest in him and they all have their own problems. 

He occasionally runs across Angels, but they are curiously uninterested in him as well. They consider him to something of a pest, but not a serious problem. The Ring has some kind of inherent authority to it, And is either indifferent to who wears it, or has, and this may be what The Angels believe; The Ring choses it’s owner for some grander purpose that they shouldn’t interfere with, irregardless of how incomprehensible The actions of The wearer expresses.

The Elfin Community is aware that he has The Pope’s Ring, and are attempting to repossess it, and bury it with The Pope that it was made for, but each time they attempt to intervene, High Strangeness takes over. Other Quixotic beings seem to have an interest in either stealing The Ring for themselves or Keeping it on The Hand of The Cowboy.

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