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[GlyphGryph]

(I can't find my My Life with Master book, so thats obviously being postponed until I do. In the mean time... there's a pretty epic long term game I've been planning, and this will be the start of it.)

It is strange, how one thing can lead to another. Looking through history, one is constantly be surprised by the seemingly mundane coincidences that can add up over time to create unlikely outcomes. Study history long enough, and a person may find himself drawn to these seeming coincidences, discovering strange patterns and a seeming purpose behind them. Once you begin to see the larger picture, how all these coincidences fit together, one can often begin to doubt they are coincidences at all.

-Tony Strawthmore, A History of History, A Story of the Unseen Hand

Your name is Pessacus, a Pequot, a respected warrior. You have grown up on stories of the exploits of your ancestors, so many of them great heroes, and you know it is your destiny to someday be such yourself. Even the spear you held had a history for you to live up to, for it was said that an untold number of moons ago, it was used to slay a great demon that threatened the very existence of the world. It was still strong, and had never been known to break in its long history. You were expected to prove worthy of it.

So when the leaders discovered a small group of Tunxit outcasts living on their land, when the news came that you were to be sent out with a small party to kill them all, you were elated at your first opportunity to prove yourself in battle. You would prove that you were as strong, as fast, as powerful as any of your ancestors.

The attack had gone well, and you had earned a few notches, but as the others were mopping up, you noticed a single Tunxit man running through the woods, attempting to escape. Giving chase, you set off after him, but soon find he has disappeared into a jumble of rocks covered with strange symbols. Searching the area you last saw him, you find a gap in the rocks, disappearing into the darkness below.

You must decide if you should wait for the others, or continue your pursuit. There might be another exit nearby, and the man could easily escape.

Spoiler: Inventory (click to show/hide)

The Spear of Tols
Waterskin

[GlyphGryph]

Realizing that there is no one else who can make this decision for you, and that the man could be disappearing as you speak, you call to the others that you are following an enemy into a small cave. If they heard you, so be it. If not, you could handle on your own. Kneeling down, you slip into the cave. Wriggling a little between the stones and dropping to the floor beneath, you give your eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness. You spear feels warm in your hand as you cast your eyes around in the dim light from the hole above. The floor is rough, uneven, but clearly made of some sort of cut blocks of stone. Ahead, the passage, with its unnatural walls obviously worked by hand, grows darker, and then bright once more, descending downwards into the cold of the underground.

You move forward, cautious, weapon at the ready for whatever surprise the escapee might have left for you. Coming to a split in the tunnel, you hesitate for a moment. To the right, the passage gives way to a gentle light, but the air is stale. The light itself is not the warm glow of a flame, but something more subtle and hard to describe. From that direction comes a low, rythmic pulsing, almost reminiscent of the ocean waves one can hear in a conch shell. To the left, the warmer glow of fire seeps into the passage, and as you strain your ears, you hear the the low murmuring of half whispered words of desperation. To the left, then, is your prize.

Clutching your spear tightly, its warm handle fills you with confidence. As you get closer to the sound of the muttering voice, you no longer creep along, but stride. Turning a final corner, you step into a fairly large chamber lit by several torches. The Tunxit tribesman kneels before a small alter, covered in strange symbols and a large cloth covered with stains both fresh and ancient. Two smaller light sources burn on the altar, and the man is slowly rocking back and forth as he continues his muttering.

"Stand!" You let forth a challenge to the kneeling man. "Stand like a warrior, turn and face me!: You continue, but he pays you no heed. You notice, now, that he is holding a knife in his left hand, wiping it back and forth across across his breechcloths, and that blood is running down his right arm to his finger. A circle of bloody glyphs surrounds him on the floor, and as you watch the blood from his finger completes another and then stops, the circle of figures now whole. Aghast at the sight, stunned by this mans madness, you watch as he buckles forward, clutching his bloody hand to his chest, and vomits forth a noxious black fluid.

You wait to see no more, stabbing your spear towards him. Your aim is true, and the point pierces his chest, and you pull him back from the circle, dragging him halfway across the chamber before pushing your foot against his back and pushing him off the point. As he falls to the floor, he moans a horrible moan of pain, of agony. He rolls towards you, looking at you, and you notice that his face is inhuman, warped in a horrible mangle of teeth, deep set eyes, and bony protrusions. As he moans at you, the skin down the sides of his neck seems to burst open, blood pouring on the floor from the new wounds, and hairy muscles erupt from the openings, as if the man is shedding his skin, breaking forth from an old body that can no longer hold him.

You raise your spear and stab downwards towards the man once, again, a third time, until his moaning ceases and his writhing stops. By the time you are finished the mans old skin is split to his naval, revealing an abomination dwelling inside him, and you turn away in disgust, releasing the contents of your stomache to mingle with the already sour odor of the room. Backing away, you turn the corner and rest against the wall for a moment to catch your breath and regain your composure, out of sight of what just happened.

Your mind races at what you've discovered.

Spoiler: Inventory (click to show/hide)

The Spear of Tols
Waterskin

[Armok]

RUN! RUN AND PRAY YOU HAVE NOT BEEN INFECTED!

Once you get out, strip all your posessions and clean yourself THROUGHTLY in nearest CLEAN source of water that can in no way have any conection to this, and use grass or somehting to stick down your throat to induce vomiting.

[xdarkcodex]

Run back in and look around to see if there's anything useful!

[GlyphGryph]

Your mind screams for you to run. To rinse yourself of this abomination, to return to the brightness of the sunlight, to throw up until you can do so no more.

But you steel yourself. You calm your nerves. Your people are not cowards, your ancestors were not cowards, and you will not give into cowardice. You are descended from a slayer of demons, and have sought just such an opportunity to prove yourself. You have uncovered something horrible here, something evil, and it must be dealt with. YOU must deal with it. You must return into the room, make sure the creature is dead, and figure out what must be done next.

You step around the corner and back into the chamber. The creature has stopped bleeding, the red blood pooling around it on the smoothed floor, shining in the torchlight. The torches themselves are merely jammed into cracks in the wall, secured with cloth. You could easily retrieve one. Casting your eyes across the rest of the room, you notice that upon the alter stands a small carved bone idol of some monstrous bear-like figure, with too many arms, mouth, and teeth. Beside the idol are an assortment of strange knotted ropes. On the wall over the alter, you see the faded stains of old blood, stains of dozens of different glyphs. The floor itself is stained in a similiar way, a large circle of old blood before the alter, and darker areas under where the mans newest bloody marks had been made. Obviously many of these blood glyphs have been marked on the floor here over the years, and much blood had been spilled - perhaps the same dark rituals that lead to the abomination that lied before you on the floor, causing you to think back to your childhood, to the stories of monsters lurking in the forest just beyond the sight of human beings, to several years ago a hunter from your tribe was found mutilated in the woods.

The dark stains of blood are not limited to the circle, however. A trail of blood leads away from the circle, back down the tunnel the way you came.

The only other thing in the room is a small stand, obviously meant to hold the ceremonial blade that not now lies on the floor by the dead man. The blade itself is waved, made of a hard brown stone sharpened to a a fine edge. It appeared to be made of the same substance as your spear tip, which the elders said could only be found in distant lands. You had once heard it referred to as Chimoo Metal, though you were unaware of what the words meant. You did know the knife was probably rare and extremely valuable.

This left only the man, and you forced yourself to inspect him for a few moments. He was badly damaged by whatever dark magic he used in his ritual. One of his arms were cut from the shoulder to the elbow, not split, the clean line indicating he had done it himself with the knife. Around his neck was an elaborately decorated necklace, and the band around his head was marked with a strange symbol.

Content that you'd seen everything this room had to offer, and that your stomache and nerves remained calm, you pondered what you should do next.

[Armok]

destroy the place, to make sure the rituals are undone.

[dragonshardz]

>>Take the knife, the torch, the necklace, and the headband.

Is this going to be something similar to Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem?

[GlyphGryph]

Yup, sort of my own little sequel... canonically, occurs in the same world, or at least that was what I originally planned. It's pretty much become its own thing at this point

[Vanigo]

Don't touch anything. This looks like a job for a shaman; you're as likely to call down some horrible curse as you are to do some good here.

[GlyphGryph]

Your first response is not to touch anything - its clearly unclean, some sign of abomination. such things are better left to those older, and more experienced than yourself, like the shaman. But as quickly as it comes, the thought is chased away. You are here, they are not, and this situation needs to be dealt with.

No, you will undo this dark power yourself.

You bend down, picking up the knife and examining closely. Far to valuable to leave here, in a place like this. The edge is surprisingly sharp. You wipe the blood off on the cloth of the dead thing, and then use it to cut off a strip of cloth and the leather rope from his waist. Wrapping the cloth around the blade, you tie it to your own breechcloths so it safely hangs lose, and then pull a torch from its place on the wall.

You consider taking the necklace and head band as well, but then discard the idea. You want no truck with these obvious symbols of this terrible cult. Instead, you tip the torch forward, lighting first the altar, and then the body, and step back out of the room as the thick black smoke curls around the whiteness of the grotesque figurine. As the smoke grows stronger, you back down the hallway to the split, moving first to head back outside, but then you stop.

If there's more of this stuff down here, you will take care of it. Holding the torch before you, your spear at the ready in the other hand, you head down the hallway, descending deeper as you do so, leaving the smoke behind you. The rythmic pulsing returns, almost reminding you of a heartbeat, and it grows stronger as you head down the hallway. The light grows a bit brighter as well, a sickly colour that casts strange shadows on the wall as it reflects off of the uneven walls and mingles with the light or your torch. Finally you come upon a set of stone steps, that descend into an enormous room. Great tapestries line the walls and ceilings, starting to either side of the entranceway and working their way around the entirety of the room, their pictures telling an epic story. The light that reveals their presence comes from the far ends of the room, from a pulsing fleshy mass, a dome of of brown mass and black ichor, the black seeming to ooze with every pulse as if the mass is some bleeding, otherworldy creature. It is also the source of the heartbeat that fills your ears. The thing is large, three are four times your height and wide enough to touch both walls, obscuring any of the room that may lay beyond. The brown leathery surface appears cracked, and through those cracks not pulsing with black blood pours the light. The light it casts forth seems to fade from red to brown to dark and sickly green and back again in time to the pulsing, but the worst is what it illuminates.

The floor of the room is awash in living, scaled flesh, their dozens of shallow breaths seeming to operate in unison and in time to the pulsing, scales and feathers curled upon and over each other, and in the center a massive creature, like a colossal lizard wearing a headdress, its long, thick, feather-tipped tail curling around it as it sleeps.

[dragonshardz]

Pargon Pargon Narokath Pargon Pargon Santak Pargon Pargon Mantorok

[xdarkcodex]

360 head shoot COD style! ( throw your spear at it, aim for the head )

[Evergod41]

Or, throw torch at it...

[xdarkcodex]

throw everything at it and try to get away.

[GlyphGryph]

The following image may or may not help you, but it should give you an idea of the layout of the rooms. If anyone want to ask any questions or clarifications before the next major update, thats fine too. Remember, this is ultimately a Call of Cthulhu based game - details and noticing them can often spell the difference between life and death (or insanity).


Green represents sleeping feathered lizard creatures. the pulsing thing is brown with black. You are the little guy with the torch and spear.