Portland, Maine
August, 1928.
Steven Gilbert is a wealthy businessman, a leading exponent of the bourgeoisie of the roaring twenties. He sees his heritage project going up in smoke, when Timothy, his only six-year-old son, disappears.
A group of investigators will try to find his missing son. The group may include:
1) Police detectives
2) Private detective hired by Gilbert
3) Relatives or friends strongly motivated to find the missing kid
But Timothy´s disappearance is not the only gloomy burden weighing on the Gilbert family. Alyssa, Timothy's mother, committed suicide one year ago, and the reason for such an extreme action is still obscure.
The tunnel ends in a larger space, a large square room with a 40-foot side. The room is dark and has smooth walls, made of a strange kind of metal, being it dark gray and very cold to the touch. The wall ahead of the investigators has two heavy metal doors. The left door is open. The doors have a large handle and a big hole in the lock, looking like doors from an ancient era.
The ceiling is very high, the flashlight beam projected forward does not show how much. The group senses that it must be high, from the echo of their small steps as they enter the place. The smell becomes strong nauseating and unbearable, forcing them to cover their nostrils. The smell comes from above.
As soon as the flashlight is pointed, towards a roof that seems endless, Kathryn suddenly screams and the object falls at her feet, as a result of an abrupt movement of her fragile nerves.
Kathryn,The vision lasts a split second, but enough to arouse horror. A mass of absurd and chaotic biological matter, made of limbs, slime.... closed eyes and mouths. Seemingly immobile and dormant. The same horror they saw rise from the pit of the Andersons' house. Now it is smeared on the ceiling of this place.
"Nononono..." whispers Kathryn, picking up the flashlight with her trembling hand. "That thing we saw in the Andersons' house...it's up there. We need to move very quietly through here and get through that door...or go back and check that side tunnel first." Of course, her own scream could have easily alerted it.
Michael,when Kathryn mention about the thing in the house of the Anderson,
terror takes over his mind, and he seems to already see that absurd being falling to the floor and creeping towards his body.
Shrieking like a frightened child, Michael runs away in sheer terror. His only thought is to hide from the thing he can't bear to think about. In his panic, he runs into the side tunnel as the closest place to get away from it. No matter what's waiting there, it can't be worse than the thing he's running from.
Going back in a desperate run, the group then takes the new tunnel. They soon realize that this tunnel makes a curve, and continues parallel to the one the´ve just left. After a few meters, the beginning of another tunnel appears on the left wall, while the main one continues straight.
"Let's take the side tunnel," suggests Kathryn. "That'll lead us back toward whatever's on the other side of those doors without having to risk going under that thing."
"I hope you'll take us with you," says Kathryn. "If you're scared, how do you think the rest of us feel? The worst thing they can do to you is kill you." She shivers.
The new tunnel is short, arrives in front of a heavy sliding metal door, open a few inches, just enough for a glimmer of light to come out, through which investigators can spy inside. The room is lit by a strong white light coming from the ceiling.
Inside the room, four creatures are gathered around a circular structure, the size of a large round table. They are the same monsters the group has fought in the tunnel, after Ivy had killed Vera died. Under this strong light, their forms appear in all their horror. They vaguely suggests the anthropoid, with large frontal roundish bulbs, thick scales with a fine skin and white flesh. Their skin is the colour of the forest floor in fall, fading green mixed with so many browns. There is a tightness to his skin except for a crinkle at the arms and legs. Their long paws are webbed, and the fingers clawed. Their clammy body syncretizes the vertebrate’s passage from marine to terrestrial life. The mouth is enormous and resembles that of a fish. One of them has jaws wide open up to the ears, showing a scary rows of sharp teeth. The bulging and lidless eyes, along with the upper part of the head, are more similar to amphibian traits, while the spiny ridges down the back point out the contribution of reptilian features. They reek of raw sewage and rotten fish. Their predominant color is a greyish-green, though they have white bellies. Their body is shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs is scaly. At the sides of their necks are palpitating gills and their prodigious bulging eyes never close.
Near the Northwest wall are placed some large rectangular structures that extend up to the ceiling. The devices have cumbersome and rudimentary mechanisms that look like the first machines of the Renaissance period. In some parts of the machine, the metal is chemically degraded, as if an advanced process of rusting took place, turning the metal into a slimy greenish and brown organic substance made of kelp seaweed and fragments of other organic material of the seabed, the same substance that assembled to generate the monsters in Norris house.
This substance looks the primary source of biological manipulation used by these foul creatures. Apparently, they are able to shape this material for different purposes.
The machines are all interconnected by large metal tubes and the lateral surface has a cavity hosting a few levers and buttons. One machine is connected to something that looks like a large cistern, whose upper end is soiled with the kolby substance, which is stirred inside the cistern and produces a bubbling noise.
Some glass cylinders are placed near the large cistern and above the machines. They contain unknown liquids of different colors, with varying gradual shades of red and brown. All cylinders have tubes that converge inside the big cistern.
The seaweed slurry articulates within the metal gears, like a slimy shapeless reptile settling into its lair. It pulsates rhythmically within the machines wheels, following the tuned and coordinated activity of the metal structures. The kelpy mass interposes between the gears like a lubricating oil to establish a symbiosis, a functional interaction between the machine and the biological.
The result is the most shocking and incredible interaction between metal and living matter ever seen. It is a miserable embarrassment for human limited intelligence, which still treats the two matters as strictly separate.
At some critical points of the structure, pieces of metal and vegetable fibers are so fused, that make it difficult to understand where the one starts and the other ends. The most astonish thing is the way the two interfaces interact coordinately, as if they were a single organism, rather than the result of an assembly process.
The liquid seems to have knowledge of the spaces he needs to occupy for its function, as it refuses obeying the insignificant and limited hydraulic law of communicating vessels, but avoids the fluid overflowing.
Rather, the slurry remains adherent to the gears and its movements are followed by metallic noises inside the whole structure, while the chemical solutions in the glass containers keep bubbling. Tubes come out of the cistern and reach the circular table.
The eyes of the creatures are staring, and their gazes are impassive and implacable, seeming to testify capacity for human intelligence and cognition. They watch a small mass of kelpy substance spreading over the metal surface and moving chaotically. One of the creatures controls the machinery through a few large levers, and this operation seem to allow the density of the substance to change. The creature observe the substance like human scientists would patiently observe the result of a scientific experiment.
The entire surface of the ceiling is bright and dazzling, to the point of disturbing and damaging the eyes when looked at for a long time. The floor and walls are made of smooth, dark gray metal. The room has three other closed sliding doors, one in the wall in front of the observers and the other on their left.
Kathryn only barely manages to keep her senses. She gestures to Michael back the way they came and around the corner to the left, to the rest of the tunnel they haven't yet explored. She'd rather not face these things if there's another choice. If they can find Timothy in that direction, they can just avoid these monsters entirely.
Going back, after having made just a few steps, they feel the cloud of nauseated smell. Soon, a disturbing noise accompanies the smell. Something that crawls along the walls of the other tunnel, coming from the southwest and going northeast. They feel that it is close to go past the entrance of their tunnel.
The source of the smell passes along the tunnel and continues in the same direction, ignoring the new tunnel where the investigators are. At that moment, one of the horrible amphibian humanoids inside the room heads for the door the group is spying throught. He has an unidentifiable object in his hand, which gives off a blue light that hides its shape.
"Hide," whispers Kathryn, pressing herself against the wall beside the door, extinguishing her light, and concealing herself in the shadows. She hopes desperately that the creature won't see her or her friends.
OOC,Stealth roll (60% skill) to hide from the Deep One:
[dice]0[/dice]
Michael is about as easy to hide as one of those German airships, but he'll give it his best effort. It has to beat running into one of those hideous things again, anyway.
Spoiler:
stealth = 20%[dice]0[/dice]
Once again his clumsiness gets him in trouble. He gets ready to blast away at those things once they head his way.
