Play@YSDC

Mrs. Evans stifles a yawn, clearly growing bored of your questions and entreaties.

"Yes, sleep would be nice, but what with the Preacher's preaching and the Councillor's crying, it's too noisy to sleep."

A cold breeze rattles through the grove. The sky darkens.

Some of you remain resolute and steadfast, convinced that you are doing the right thing. Others, like Des, are perhaps a little less certain.

Regardless of your own feelings, for a loudly sobbing Lewis, time is up...

“Time to go dearies; time to go.”

Mrs. Evans' features fade until only the outline of her figure is visible. Through this outline you can see another space: dark, red, and flickering with flame. This doorway grows, swallowing up the entire grove. You do not cross into the realm, it grows to envelop you.

You suddenly find yourselves in a hellish, fire-damaged facsimile of Cwmllyn as it was in the 1900’s. Grove Street is narrow and cobbled;
all modern buildings have been replaced with grubby Victorian hovels while school is a corrugated iron hall.

The chapel, however, is largely unchanged. You can see no living townsfolk, but dotted around the scorched scrub around chapel, corpses hang from blackened gibbets. The sky is black with soot, interspersed with pinpricks of burning ash. The air is unbearably hot, making it difficult to breathe.

From the direction of the chapel, carried across on the howling wind, snatches of hoarse and cracked preaching can be heard over Lewis' exclaimations of terror:

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death… Confess your sins! In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins… Confess!”

Interspersed throughout this is another voice, wailing pitifully.

“Leave me alone! Please!”

You are in a literal hellscape! Please make a CON roll to see if you can bear up against the scorching, ashen atmosphere. If you fail, you become Impaired (and thus fumble of a 90+ rather than 100).

Izzy can't bear it... she expected something awful, but not this. She couldn't have anticipated this. Still, even as Mrs. Evans ignores all call of reason and logic, Izzy steels herself as best she can against the hellscape they find themselves in. It seems she didn't need to worry about grabbing Lewis, since they have all been dragged to the inferno together anyway...

CON roll: 40%

1d100

OOC:   Right, I think something went screwy there, the 4 is what I rolled just now but the other one seems to date from four days ago when I accidentally put a second roll that I didn't need for a previous post - I don't think I can delete the second one so I guess just ignore it being there?

1d%55%

Pass.

"Gordon. Bennett. Everyone awright? Well, this day has not gone the way I thought it would when I woke up. I would even go so far as to say it's gone a bit pear shaped. This happen to you before, Team Voodoo? "

Skipper looked at the corpses. "Umm, I can't imaging that was happening even in Wales anytime in the last century or two."

He reached for his backpack.

Does Skipper still have his backpack and contents thereof? If so, he'll pull out his old F3 camera.

Jordan is barely able to withstand the intense heat. "I'm okay," he says. "It is a bit warm here, though. Well, it seems obvious what we have to do: stop the preacher and the Councillor from being so bloody loud, so Mrs. Evans can go back to sleep. Let's start with the preacher. He's in the chapel. Besides, it'll probably be cooler indoors."

CON roll (70% stat) in the hellscape:
d%

"Still got my F3! Excellent."

Camera dangling around his neck, Skipper paused to pull out and light a cigar, pointlessly careful not to blow smoke in anyone's face. Then he started taking photos.

"Voodoo 5-0, I do believe this is a fireball day after all."

CON (70) 1d100

Des’ self-belief eroded in a heartbeat and she sank to her knees, staring in shock at the hellish townscape in from of her.

”Fuuuuuuuuqqqqq… …” was all she could say.

Leo blinks as his eyes water. The heat is unbearable. He looks around at the flames and charred landscape and back at the woman.

POW (80/40): 1d100

"Roger, roger. Copy that. Looks like everything here is already burned anyway." After the debacle of the last time he cast the fireball in public, Leo spent time in the magic library researching supernatural entities. Which ones were solid and which ones weren't. Which ones could be both. He felt clueless in that regard with this one. She looked solid for the moment.

He shook his head as he moved to an angle that would at least miss the church. This creature probably wouldn't even feel it, but he had to try.

He'd also spent dozens of hours in the basement on the makeshift firing range Peter rigged up firing over and over again. Once he was happy with the angle, he started the motion. The familiar TARDIS grind of Leo's magic started up. Leo released a fireball at the creature.

"Special delivery, courtesy of The Folly..."

Magic (70/35): 1d100

Lewis' CON roll

[85] = 85
CON 70 1d100: [ 85 ] = 85

Bent double, Lewis hacks and coughs - spitting out gobbets of phlegm.

Perhaps it is the stifling air, the heat haze over the cracked ground, or maybe it is the soot that swirls through blackened buildings, but it is difficult at first to make out the lanky figure that stumbles it's way towards you.

Short's roll to avoid fireball

[39] = 39
DEX 50 1d100: [ 39 ] = 39

Damage to short using Leo's DEX

[60] = 60
DEX 40 1d100: [ 60 ] = 60

Fail, so 1 damage dealt. Short is Hurt.

Leo launches his fireball at the 'creature', who yelps in terror; tripping over a loose cobblestone as the spell hits him.

"Argh! Help!" he wails, frantically slapping out the flames on his already tattered suit. "What's going on? Why is everyone trying to kill me?"

Your hearts sink as you realise that the person you have just attacked is the very person you have been ordered to retrieve - a singed and bloodied Councillor Short.

"We're sorry, Mr. Short," says Jordan, going over to him and looking over his injuries. "My friend didn't know who you were. Let me help you, I'm a doctor."

Eli surveys the hellscape he is in. Watching the events unfold before him , Leo casting fireball towards the damned creature, the now transformed Councillor Short,(Now as lookinh as twisted and corrupted on the outside as he is on the inside Eli thinks to himself).He hears talk of getting to the church and talking to the preacher who seemingly unwittingly kick started it all.
Blinking his eyes against the heat Eli shouts, " I concur, we NEED to get shelter from this heat! To the church and bring the councillor! Kill two.birds with one stone as it were."

Skipper had been photographing gibbetted corpses, cigar clenched between his teeth but carefully kept out of the way of the camera. He was hoping his black and white film would cope in the low light. But with the arrival of Short, he turned and got a couple of close-up of the burnt councillor on the ground.

"Good news, Short, we're the rescue team. So what do you know about this place? What's most dangerous? And don't give us any grief or you get another fireball, this time right up the Khyber."

Gods dammit, not another one... Izzy has zero chance to warn Leo not to throw a Fireball, before he does so, and ends up hitting (however inadvertently) their target of rescue.

"Damn it Leo, can you get a handle on that thing? Not every problem needs to be blasted with fire!"

She steps across to Councilor Short, though not exactly a fan of the man given what she's heard of him, she can't see him or anyone (with a few exceptions usually covered in news media) as being deserving of this place.

"Look, sorry about my trigger happy colleague... we're here to help you, okay? We're going to try and get you out of this place. I mean, it'll be into the dock for the whole corruption thing, but hey, got to be better there than here, right?"

Whatever the others seem to be seeing, Izzy has no clue, but all she sees is the singed and scared middle-aged man in a tattered suit and marked with blood. She glares briefly at Leo, and then Skipper, before they continue on. She wonders, not for the first time, how she - the dysfunctional, excitable, guilt-ridden, geeky lesbian, second-youngest of them all, whose flat looked like a bomb site before Alice moved in and who enjoys black comedy a little bit too much - keeps somehow being the mother of the group.

"No more fireballs. Got it?"

OOC:   Not sure if I missed something somewhere? Looking back through the Keeper posts I can't see anything about Short looking like a 'creature' or anything other than human, not sure if that's something Leo's just misread somewhere and made up in his head or if it's a thing that I've missed in a previous post?

Skipper returned glare-fire at Izzy, cigar gritted aggressively between his teeth. "Hey, don't look at me, I didn't napalm the muppet."

"Meantime, you and Johnny Storm might like to put your sorting hats on and figure a way out for us."

Short's mouth opens and closes like a fish as he processes what's going on.

"Y-you're real? Actual people? Oh my God you're real! Thank Christ!"

Suddenly the ground shakes and a flash of lightning stabs the dark sky.

"DO NOT BLASPHEME!" thunders a loud voice, echoing around the ruined town.

The chapel doors fly open, causing Short to yelp.

"H-he's coming! G-get me out of here! You've got to get me out of here!"

He flings himself at Jordan, grabbing at the medical man's shirt.

"Help me!"

Meanwhile, Lewis straightens up, wiping his mouth as best he can whilst handcuffed.

"Yeah, but how?" he asks. "We can't exactly get on the bypass can we?"

"I'll protect you, sir," says Jordan, "but I think we can reason with the preacher. We're going to have to, in order to get him to be quiet. You both have to be quiet. That's the only way we can get you out of here."