The Old Barnaker House. Every kid has heard about it. Everybody has a different awful story about it. All of them agree it is a very bad place.
But here you are on Halloween Night, all because of that jerk Roger. He dared you and your friends to spend the night there. You couldn’t let him bully you.You will show him who is chicken! Everybody knows that there are no such things as ghosts. Everybody knows that, right?
So get your slingshot and your pocket knife. Grab some candy and ready your Rubik’s Cube. You and your friends are going to go face-to-face with the horrors of the Barnaker House.
Harry shines his flashlight into the dining room, but it's still too dark to make out anything. But then something occurs to him about the plants. "These plants should be dead by now," he says. "Without water, they wouldn't survive long. Which means someone must be watering them. Maybe someone's secretly living here."
Hard Notice Stuff roll (40% / 2 = 20% skill) in the Dining Room: d%
Science Class roll (80% skill) in the Entrance Hall: d%
Sanity roll (current level 40) about the plants: d%
Louis looks at the plants,
“Someone must be living here to look after all these plants.”
He follows Shirley and Darren into the parlour to the fireplace.
“Looks like the flue is blocked, if we clear it we could try lighting a fire. Give it a prod up the chimney, Daz.”
Roger walks up to Kyle, standing with his face close to his, looking him in the eye. 'Try Hard Robard, are you asking me if I break into abandoned houses and water the plants?' He shakes his head in a comically disappointed way, maintaining eye contact uncomfortably long. Then he turns away and wanders into the dining room, lighting the candle on the table with his Zippo.
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Looking into the fireplace and poking about in the ashes and charred wood, Darren tries to open the cast-iron damper, but it's tightly closed against the flue and doesn't budge. He inserts the crowbar and tries to pry it open.
Can you roll STR with a bonus 1d10 for the tens since the crowbar is going to help a lot
The way the wood is charred and the ashes have settled suggests this fire was only made in the last few days.
It is the knapsack that catches Shirley's attention and she reaches up to pull it off the mantle to take a look inside.
"Why would someone even want to live in a place like this?" she asks after Harry and Louis share their suspicions.
Spending one night in this house wasn't a big deal, even if she wasn't too keen on Roger just locking the front door; she'll make a note of checking the back one, just in case; but if someone was already in the house that might get her in trouble.
Nature (80%): d%
"Well, if it wasn't you, someone was definitely here recently. This wood was burned only a few days ago."
The knapsack is battered and looks to have been repaired many times. It's pretty full, like it contained the meagre worldly possessions of someone homeless or itinerant. There's a sewing kit, a few cans of food, a pouch of tobacco and rolling papers, a fairly large pocket knife, two matchboxes (one containing matches but the other with pieces of chalk), a flask of liquid, and a roll of bills.
Unscrewing the flask and giving it a sniff, Shirley gets a harsh whiff of alcoholic spirits, whiskey maybe. And unrolling the bills it's made up of $5 and $1 notes, maybe $100 or more in total.
With nothing of interest in the dining room, Harry crosses the hall to see what the others have found. "I was right," he says unnecessarily. Of course he was right.
Leaning heavily on the crowbar, eventually the damper starts to make a grinding noise and then pops open with a screech. A noxious cloud of sulphurous black dust whooshes out the chimney to flood the room. There's a nasty musty tang that follows as something thumps out of the flue and bounces into the fireplace and then onto the floor directly in front of Darren.
Ian screams, 'Giant rat, giant rat!' The creature is crouched on the soggy carpet, it has a sharp pointed face and matted grey and white coat. It remains in its rigid posture, not moving. Ian eventually stops screaming. It's not a rat. It's the desiccated corpse of a dead raccoon.
Roll Sanity - 0/1d2 loss for the shock and surprise. Keep a note of any sanity loss on your sheet in the Finished Characters thread.
With the bonus die that's a pass - the 81 becomes a 51
"Of course I was right," says Harry, examining the finds. "Whoever's living here sure isn't poor." Then he sees the dead raccoon and gulps. "Not a rat, a raccoon. Don't worry, it's dead. It won't bite. I'm kind of curious what killed it. Maybe I could dissect it." He examines the dried corpse.
Sanity roll (current level 40) for the dead raccoon: d%
Sanity loss: 1d6/3
After the initial shock, Darren covers his mouth with his sleeve, keeping it together to show Ian andcthe others he's not afraid. He uses the crowbar to poke the body of the raccoon.
“What the- holy crap!”
Louis jumps, drops the can of food in shock and it rolls away under the sofa.
“Jeez, man you really scared me.” He says crossly.
“Kyle, it’s just a dead raccoon, probably fell down the chimney and starved.” He prods the corpse with his foot. “Poor blighter.”
"Relax, Kyle," says Harry. "It's just a dead animal. While many ancient cultures believed that such things were omens, today we know better thanks to modern science."
The racoon is stiff and very dead. There's nothing obviously remarkable about it. Raccoons do fall down chimneys and die now again, this isn't the first you've heard of.
From the dining room comes the sounds of smashing and crashing followed by laughter, 'Hah, yeah, take that you lousy furniture.'
There's something under the sofa. The end of it is poking out, a sort of round loop of metal attached to a shaft that disappears beneath the mouldering upholstery.
The sash window has been nailed shut and there are boards hammered across the interior and exterior of the frame, leaving only a few gaps to see what is left of the grimy and broken glass. The rain outside has picked up and batters against the boards, dripping through the cracks and gaps, running over the sill and down the wall. There's little light from the outside but...was that something moving across the window? Some kind of shadow?
