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ENTRY # : |
62 |
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TITLE : |
THE FORGOTTEN HOUSE |
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ARC : |
GHOSTS OF THE PAST II |
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ENTERED BY : |
StarSeed / Templar |
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DATE RANGE : |
May 16th, 2001 |
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HEROES : |
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VILLAINS : |
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PEOPLE : |
Marcel, the Caretaker,
Moon, Dr Devon,
Wraith
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OTHERS : |
The Emile F. Chopin Home for the Criminally Insane,
The Jade Skull,
The KnightRider I,
The Shadow Warriors,
The Soulgem
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ENTRY : |
"Have the gates of death been opened unto thee?
or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?"
- Job 38:17
Bell, Book, and Candle.
Part one: Temptation.
The house lived up to all it was rumored to be. An old asylum, gee nothing evil
could be residing in there, none whatsoever. I wonder some days if our groups
doesn’t hate 'Fate please screw us over' written all over our foreheads. This
house looked like a turn of the century mansion with a full estate. There looked
as though there was some tracks going in, or at least Ariadne thought so. My
game is so rusty that I could tell if they were coming or going.
With the teams seemingly lack of stealth we barged in. It started to play out
like a bad horror movie. First Hydro was gone, sunk through the floor. Then came
Ariadne amd hazard man. Then it was my turn. Whatever cruel spirit that
inhabited this house of despair had me on their hit-list.
The wise warrior hits the heart first and kills the soul before they strike the
body. It was the funeral for my precious Nekomi that I saw. With one wish I
could bring her back to this world. Restore her to life and we could live in
peace. That is a false. Nekomi is at home with my son and my mother. I left them
three years ago... and I guess dimensions ago as well. The temptation is horrible.
I could nto bring myself to fall for it. It was to easy and to painful to do. I
would have betrayed the one who still calls himself Battosai. If you tug at one
string in the tapestry of a person’s life...
The second temptation was Amaterasu, the starseed who I killed so many years
ago. That is something I shouldn’t have done. It isn’t something I am proud of
but there is nothing I can do about it. I can’t change time. I may be, as I was
told, an inferior being whose concept of reality is primitive to the point of
simplicity but I have 35 years of life to work over. Mistakes are mistakes and
can’t be undone. It is what makes us what we are. Nothing more, nothing less.
And frankly I like who I am despite of what I had to do to get here.
They had to resort to dragging me away in chains to capture me...
- - -
Log entry by Andrew Mathers [Templar], 09.06.01
After promising myself not to do anymore of these godforsaken journal entries, Hazardman had to
go and get himself lost in la-la-land long enough to miss out on most of what transpired.
StarSeed provided an entry, but barring interesting insights into his character it doesn't really
tell what happened to us. Thus, I've been roped into flushing out a few details.
The first of these is the fact that we had to drag Ariadne and Mr. Stewart into this place
because of bureacratic nonsense. I favoured sending them home from Manhattan on a commercial
flight, and even volunteered to foot the bill. Agent DeSalvo wouldn't hear of it, of course,
because he was technically responsible for Stewart while we were out-of-state. Not that he could
explain what Victor could have got up to that his ability to freely travel around California
couldn't have let him do any time. Stuff and nonsense, dragging them into harm's way merely
because of a technicality.
Once we arrived at the old asylum - which retained the psychic impressions of decades of misery,
creating quite the oppressive atmosphere (or, as Dan described it, "spooky") - I tried to brief
the crew on what we might expect within (which was almost totally wrong, as it turned out). We
entered the grounds, and I quickly was able to determine that all was not quite right. The
mystical traces of Wraith led into the asylum, but I couldn't get a good sense of where he (or
the Skull he bore) could be found within. Once we entered ourselves, I knew why. The asylum
wasn't entirely in our plane. I'm not sure what pocket dimension it crossed into - one
close to limbo, and yet not far from the land of the dead - but wherever it was, my connection to
the Source was tenuous and hard to maintain, much like it was in the other pocket dimension
we had visited. This was a very bad sign.
Things started going to hell in a handbasket tremendously quickly. First Cipher vanished from the
group, followed closely by Ariadne, Hydro and Victor. Attempting to follow one of them, StarSeed
was absorbed by the shadows in going through a doorway. All my attempts to mystically determine
what was going on revealed next to nothing. Until it tried to get me as well. The
temptation itself was puerile at best - a transparent attempt to manipulate my guilt over the
deaths of the Adjudicator and Thunder to get me to agree to a course of
action to "bring them back". As if I would accept the unsupported blandishments of something that
might only have born the semblance of these individuals. Rejecting the lure, I found myself back
with my remaining comrades, and was able to give warning at last, too late for most of my comrades.
[Cross-reference:
Bible -> Luke -> 4:1-8]
I know not what temptation Hazardman, Cipher, Ariadne, Hydro or Victor succumbed to, but there is
nothing to be gained in admonishments. We all bear some ghosts with us.
Having failed to tempt us to join them voluntarily, they resorted to the chains StarSeed wrote
of. Mystical chains were shot at us unexpectedly by lurking ghosts. Once entangled, the victim
was himself rendered insubstantial and dragged off to another portion of the plane to be disposed
of in a yawning, semi-living composed of gibbering mouths and all too many damned souls. The
Soulgem. That was the fate decided upon for Sub-Zero, StarSeed and myself, at any rate. Luckily,
I was able to break free of the chains by force of will, and dispose of the faceless dead minions
using the bell, book and candle to exorcise them into oblivion.
[Cross-reference:
Bible -> Matthew -> 12:43]
DeSalvo, meanwhile, had received an impromptu tour of the facility by a caretaker spirit that
called itself Marcel, and eventually found his way along the silver threads to where we were
trying to figure out what - if anything - should be done about the sould trapped within the gem..
Attempts to dispel or attack it merely resulted in it fraying somewhat, sending all-too human
bodies (or parts thereof) flying.
While we were so engaged, the puppetmaster behind this place finally revealed itself. The entire
horizon filled with the visage of a cloaked, faceless creature who taunted us for opposing his will.
It boasted of having powers that stretched across the aeons, and of being the creator of light and
shadow. Delusions of godhood it may have possessed, one could not deny that this thing was
tremendously powerful in this place.
Then it accepted our implied "challenge", and the world changed around us.
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WRAPUP : |
We had entered the asylum seeking Wraith and the Jade Skull. We had encountered
a very powerful, yet undeniably insane creature instead. With most of the group having succumbed
to temptation, things didn't look good for the few Knights that remained.
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