Play@YSDC

The fog is thick and dense around you, cold tendrils snaking into your clothing and tickling your skin almost as though it were a live thing. The bright roundness of the moon can still be somehow glimpsed through the cloud which surrounds you though you can barely make out more than a few yards ahead of you. You can primarily see the concrete platform and the stripe of paint declaring how far you should stand back to avoid being sucked under the train's wheels, and the red brick building behind you with its white-lined windows and Victorian lamps pressed against the station's brick walls and sitting unlit. Benches line those same walls, empty of fellow passengers, crowding more thickly beneath the blue awning that stretches before the station restaurant. You can smell the smoke slowly dissipating from the train itself and see it mainly by its dark silhouette, somehow darker than the space behind it. You can hear the sounds of its engine slowly, ever so slowly cooling, as though the train were parked here to stay. Perhaps with a flashlight you could see further, as it is, you have to walk and look about.

There's nobody on the platform that you can see, but there is a coat on the platform itself. It's hard to make out in the gloom, but there appears to be some sort of dark stain....

Places to Go:

• Appledown Station Restaurant (broken open from the inside).
• Main Waiting Room (covered in chains that have been snipped).
• Upstairs Bedroom Window (cloth rope dangling down from it).
• Shed (unlocked).

Evidence Collection,There are twin scrape marks across the platforms. 1-pt Outdoorsman or Crafts spends available.

Flashlight on the coat,The coat is stained with blood.

Opening the folded coat,A mess of blood slick feathers lies around a quivering skinless mess, vaguely shaped but for a beak and ... and talons! Is that a tiny bird? It looks like something has pulled its feathers off. Stability Loss 0/1.

Forensics Knowledge,The bird wasn't skinned. Somehow its feathers and skin were firmly attached to the coat and yet loosely attached to its body, meaning that when the coat was last unwrapped they went with the fabric. This ... isn't natural. Stability Loss 0/3. MAXIMUM OF THREE CAN BE LOST ON THE PLATFORM IN THIS SCENE SO IF YOU HAVE ALREADY LOST ONE YOU CAN ONLY LOSE TWO MORE.

Kate emerges from the shed and leads the way back to the train.

They reach the platform, footsteps heavy against the concrete despite their best efforts, and no sign of that other fellow. They can head down the other side of the platform, if they wish to find their way toward the front of the train where the baggage car sits.

Artemis breathed a bit easier when they got back to the platform. "Let's find that boot and get into the train. I am really hating this place, Miss Kate."

Artemis turned and headed down the side of the platform towards the train.

Kate nods and goes to the other side of the platform, heading for the baggage car.

Jonathan takes a deep breath before saying: "All right, let's do this".

It's not an easy task to saw through the fabric and, worse, it's loud. Each hacking sound sets your teeth on edge and stands your hair on end as the sounds will doubtlessly carry far and wide in this fog. Eventually you carve a large enough hole to squeeze through one at a time....

"Once you get inside," says Kate when she sees Artemis squeezing inside, discarding the broken saw and drawing her scalpel, "find the bolt cutters and break the chain to let us in. If you run into trouble, scream and we'll follow you in."

Artemis has a quick look in the little covered walkway between train cars then pokes his head back out, "No cutters here, but something is moving on the other side of the door. It could be one of our colleagues stuck in there."

"I'll come join you," whispers Kate, squeezing through the torn fabric and into the walkway.

He dropped to the brick surface of the platform and the drop jarred his legs and hips. He stifled a grunt of pain from the old war injury. Now was not the time to give in to that,[/] he told himself. He winced as he straightened himself and made sure to keep the walking stick aloft. He heard Miss Kate and stepped slightly out of the way to give her room to land.

Kate steps down off of the train onto the platform, then turns around to help Jonathan.

The platform vibrates lightly -- as though there were an approaching train. Oddly enough, normally only the tracks would vibrate like that and then only if you were quite close to the train.

There's no sign of any lights to pierce the darkness outside of the station house.

"Right on schedule," says Kate, checking her watch. "That was the train arriving. Again. Glad we weren't aboard when it happened."

"But, Miss Kate, it didn't leave," Arty looked about puzzled and then pointed towards the station. "We need to figure out what is going on in that place, I think."

"I can't make any sense of it either," says Kate with a shrug. "Well, let's head to the station."

The vibrations in the platform grow in intensity. Enough to rattle the window panes, but not enough to make you unsteady on your feet.

Jonathan still seems a little dazed after all that's happened. Now he seems to snap out of his silence and says: "Do you really think there's a train coming? I bet this one isn't leaving - yet. I think it wants us... inside. Or something like that. Every time I've tried to leave, one way or the other, I've found myself back in. I think we should probably turn around and run, even if we end up lost and the cold kills us. But it has come down to the three of us, and I think we have got to stick together. So if you think the station is where we'll find our answers... I'll come with you".

"One of our founders once said, we either hang together or we hang separately," Arty said with a wink and a wry grin. There was a sudden bit of resolve that seemed to straighten him and push away the ache. "Let's get to the bottom of this, we missed something on our way out of the Station and surely that collection of horrors is not our ride home."

He walked towards the Station trying to find one of the ways into the place that didn't require them to climb up the makeshift rope he had helped to send down from the upper story.

"I don't know how," says Kate, "but I get the feeling it's the same train somehow. It's already there, but it's arriving again. Well, let's get to the station. Maybe we should check the restaurant first now that it's busted open. We were never able to search it earlier with that creep in there."