Book Four: New Orleans - The Big Uneasy

[Mant72]

Dr. Francis Morgan:

Frank clutches the trapezohedron crystal through his jacket, eyes Agent Skinner, and steps through the portal.

[SocraticLawyer]

Skinner follows them into the wall/portal.

[Grognardsw]

The investigators step through the mural-painted gate into a chiaroscuro space of confusing colors and mists and time twists. A howling wind carrying whispers of voices they do and don't recognized. The men glimpse each other as children and old men. There is a feeling of suction drawing them toward inevitability... (San. check, yes=1d3, no=1d6)

They emerge...

The men suddenly find themselves in a ring of standing stones amidst a swamp bayou. It is dusk. The stones remind Marius and Frank of the ring of stones outside of Konstantin Chertovski's 'shunned house' mansion in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, New York.



There is a light drizzle.



There is a clear path leading from the stones deeper into the swamp. Marius the hunter spots bare footprints in the moist rich soil.

[DadsAngry]

Marius:

Sanity check (71%) [1d100] = 81
San Loss [1d6] = 4

Spotting the track he points them out to his colleagues. "This way. We have him now. You hear me Carcosa! I'm coming for you!"

[SocraticLawyer]

Ignatius Skinner, BOI agent
Sanity check (32) [1d100] = 94
Sanity loss [1d6] = 6
Skinner feels another part of his mind slip away as he emerges in the bayou. What he has seen in the past few minutes he would never have dreamed possible. The wall, the hands, the creature, the confluence of himself and the other investigators at all points in time.... what does it mean? It sort of makes sense, somehow. Like in a dream.

Skinner tries to clear his mind and focus on the task at hand. Keeping his gun in hand and ready, he follows Marius into the swamp.

[Grognardsw]

The investigators, especially Agent Skinner, struggle not to be overwhelmed by their experience through the gate. Is this what Raymond Randolph went through in his passage through the device in the cave at Mt. Latmos?

Skinner feels his mind fracturing. This is the place. It breathes, it eats, and, at night, beneath a crawling ground fog with the luster of vaporized pearl, it dreams; dreams while tiny predators stage a nightmare ballet in sharp black grass. It is a living thing. It has a soul. It has a face. As night falls he can almost see it.

Then hawk-eyed Marius spots a darting shape some 50' away!



Can that be Carcosa? It doesn't look like quite human (San check Marius only. Yes=0, No=1d2) It darts away out of sight like a frightened deer before anyone can see it.

Skinner can almost imagine what it might look like if the swamp were boiled down to its essence, and distilled into corporeal form; if all the muck, all the forgotten muskrat bones, and all the luscious decay would rise up and wade on two legs through the shallows; if the swamp had a spirit and that spirit walked like a man.

He stares into those places where the evening has pooled beneath the distant trees, and glimpses an ambiguous shifting of the darkness: something large, large and slow, its movements solemn and inevitable, heavy with clotted, sodden weed that forms its flesh. Its skeleton of tortured root creaks with each funeral pace, protesting at the damp and sullen weight. Within their sockets its eyes float like blood-poppies in puddles of ink.

Skinner shakes the images from his mind.

This place, he can inhale it through flared nostrils, drink in its musk, green and pungent. There is the delicate scent of mosses and lichens. He can stand in the gathering darkness and know that were he to raise his arm, reach out to his full length, his fingernails would brush with something wet, something supple and resilient. Something moving. He shouldn't have come here.

"Are you alright sir?" asks Agent Callahan, breaking Skinners' almost hypnotic submergence into this place.

[Mant72]

Dr. Francis Morgan:

Sanity Check (65); Current Sanity (41): [1d100] = 67

Sanity Loss: [1d6] = 6

The mentally frayed doctor feels his febrile grip on reality slip even further, and he is unable to suppress an unsolicited laugh that crawls its way from his throat to erupt from his mouth.

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

His chortles echo through the moss-draped hell. He grips both pistol and trapezohedron crystal with equal tenacity and knows that to proceed will only lead to new avenues of madness.

Damn, 6 points of sanity loss all at once! Frank will try to follow the others into the bog if he is able.

[Mant72]

Dr. Francis Morgan:

His shoes sink into spongy peat moss as Dr. Francis Morgan attempts to gather his bearings. “These standing stones... The Shunned House...Doppelgängers...David...Edith...”

Something frets and squirms beneath the professor’s arm like an infant. He opens his jacket and peers down at the strange, pulsating stone. He smiles warmly and mutters, “You’re safe. Everything is all right.” He caresses the side of the trapezohedron.

“Slow down, we’re coming,” he calls out to the others as he follows through the murk and muck.

[SocraticLawyer]

Ignatius Skinner, BOI agent
I'm fine, he says, lying to Agent Callahan. Which way did he go?

Skinner leads the group further into the swamp, gun drawn towards the man-like shape if he knows about it, otherwise straight ahead.

[DadsAngry]

Marius:

Sanity Check (60%) [1d100] = 29

Unfazed Marius moves up 50' to the location of the creature's last known location. "Give me a light! I need some light if we are going to track Carcosa!"
Marius examines the ground looking for tracks.

Note: Marius's sanity started at 74% before he went into the basement. He has lost 14 sanity points within this last hour. His breaking point (20%) is 15. Almost gained indefinite insanity.

[Grognardsw]

Marius rushes forward, calling for a flashlight. Agent Callahan hands his over. The foot prints are not of man! They are of a splayed, three-toed creature with talons!

Marius saw the distinct human male foot prints of the assumed Carcosa near the standing stones and leading away. That strange pale human-like-but-not-human prints are not Carcosa. Or are they?

Going back to the path, the hunter finds the human prints continuing down the path.

Frank barks out a strange laugh. Marius is concerned about his friend.

Frank feels the pulsing of the trapezohedron continue and he hears a voice in his head. By God, is that Raymond Randolph's voice? He speaks...
For Frank's eyes only:

“Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earths masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.

Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. It knows where the Old Ones broke through of old and where they shall break through again...

The wind gibbers with Their voices and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Their hand is at your throats, yet you see them not; and their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once. They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.”

Frank's inner mind explodes with imagery.

(San. check. Yes=0, No=1d3)

For all:

I house-ruled a change in the Insanity Rules in that it's 20% of one's San in one encounter, not one hour. See OOC at viewtopic.php?p=486765#p486765

[Mant72]

Dr. Francis Morgan:

Frank stares wide-eyed into the facets of the crystal, throws his head back, and howls, “Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth!”

Sanity Check (65); Current Sanity (35): [1d100] = 99

Sanity Loss: [1d3] = 3

Looks like a padded cell awaits Frank in his imminent future.

[SocraticLawyer]

Ignatius Skinner, BOI agent
Skinner looks at Dr. Morgan, hoping not to have to shoot him. But after what that psycho Reginald Wilkins did to Agent Mulder, he's not taking any chances.

Come again, Dr. Morgan? Skinner keeps his pistol ready, but not yet pointed at Frank.

[Mant72]

Dr. Francis Morgan:

Dr. Morgan shakes his head, attempting to clear away Randolph’s voice and the unsettling imagery. He senses the severity in Agent Skinner’s tone and composes himself to explain, “Hoping to draw out our quarry, my good man!“

[Grognardsw]

Agent Skinner considers Frank’s answer as stares after Marius who is following the trail by flashlight. The BOI agent is trying to calm his nerves from the startling turns of the investigation. It is as if the outlandish allegations and nightmarish implications that he has only read about in the case files have smashed the shores of reality.

Unlike Skinner, Frank has been in the deep end of the case since the beginning. His answer must be plausible?

With a sigh Skinner turns and his eyes widen in shock.

"There he is!" Agent Skinner screams inside his head.



The BOI agent shuts his eyes hard and struggles to overcome his paranoia. When he opens them Carcosa is not there.

Dr. Frank Morgan feels feverish. There is a sudden sharp pain in his head - his vision twists into something else, a spectrum unseen...

Frank has an instinctive feeling that he is seeing the swamp through the "eyes" of the trapezohedron!
(San. check, yes=0, no=1d3)

The men continue along the path, tense, weapons drawn. There is a distant beat of what could be a drum.

[SocraticLawyer]

Ignatius Skinner, BOI agent
Skinner continues into the bayou, towards the spot where he (thought he) saw Carcosa. He keeps his pistol ready.

[Mant72]

Dr. Francis Morgan:

Frank clutches his head in pain as he sees the swamp through the strange spectrum. He gnashes his teeth and manages to stave off any further mental toll.

Sanity Check (65); Current Sanity (35): [1d100] = 13

“We’re...I’m coming!” He calls out to the others as he secures the crystal and his pistol. He follows.

[DadsAngry]

Marius:

Marius focusing all his attention on tracking Carcosa. He pays no attention to Morgan's ranting. As he moves along the reloads his double-barrel shotgun so both barrels are full. "This way fellas. We've got him now for sure."

[Grognardsw]

Agent Skinner veers off the path some to investigate the area where he saw, or imagined, Carcosa. He sees no signs or tracks, but Skinner is no hunter. Marius is focused on following the trail, not commenting on the nervous vocalizations of his unstable companions.



Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create.

The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night.



Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by the men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to demoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the center of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested a noxious carven statuette.

Frank is perspiring heavily from the steady heat given off by the trapezohedron under his jacket. It whispers to him. His vision fluctuates between normalcy and kaleidoscopic colors. He glimpses things unseen by his fellow investigators.

It may have been only paranoid imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced Agent Skinner to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. Do his ears play tricks, his fractured mind rabid imaginings?

[SocraticLawyer]

Ignatius Skinner, BOI agent
Skinner checks his gun, making sure it is fully loaded. One way or another, he is ending this abomination of a ritual.

Is Skinner close enough to fire a shot at the idol? If so, he does.
Shoot idol (75) [1d100] = 39
If not, he fires a warning shot into the air.

Get back, all of you! On the ground, now! Anyone who moves gets three in the chest!