From: cpearce%nemesis@nemesis.acs.unt.edu (Chris Pearce)
Subject: Get This in Not LA - Scene II
X-Gated-By: The Black Marble Wombat@morticia.cnns.unt.edu
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Organization: University of North Texas
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Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 22:32:17 GMT


Here's scene 2 from Get This in Not LA... hope you enjoy it!

Scene 2- The House that Jack Built
----------------------------------

It takes Our Heroes some time to pack up the suburban, but they eventually
finish late in the afternoon. They decide to drive towards London and enter
it on foot after dark.

Zenon begins driving towards London.

"I zeenk I see a place we can park the zuburban!" announces Francois from
his seat.

Indeed, Francois had found a place. The suburban drives up to a ramshackle
abandoned cottage. A broken rail fence surrounds the yard, which is heavily
overgrown with weeds. The door hangs from broken hinges and the windows are 
all broken. The house looks sinister in the waning light, but Our Heroes 
decide that it is as good a place as any to hide the suburban.

"Let's search the place," offers Buffy, "It might have something useful that 
we can scavenge -- maybe some elegant Victorian clothes. I've read all about
them in my Barbara Cartland novels!" Buffy smiles happily.

Everyone agrees and enters the house.

The interior of the house is, if anything, in worse shape than the exterior. 
The wood underfoot creaks ominously. The main room contains broken furniture. 
One door leads to a bedroom, one door leads to the kitchen, and a last door 
leads to the cellar.

"Francois," Dakota says, "Establish a lookout position from the roof. We don't
want anyone sneaking up on us." Francois leaves.

Dakota, Buffy, and Zinon enter the bedroom. A look in the closet reveals some
old clothes, partially moth-eaten, but still serviceable. "Oooh, a corset! and
a dress!" squeals Buffy. "Help me lace the corset, Zenon!" she coos as she 
slips out of her dress. "Look at the lace. Pity it's so worn out, though," 
Buffy sighs regretfully.

Dakota, searching through the closet finds clothes that fit him. "Let's pack 
these up and put them in the suburban," he says to Zenon.

In the main room, Mikki notices a tintype picture in a sterling frame. "These
must be the people who lived here," he notes. The last few days in the
country had evidently done him good -- in fact, he hadn't gurgled or screamed
in almost an entire day.

"Let me see that," Jack speaks. Mikki hands Jack the frame, and Jack removes
the backing. A wrinkled and folded piece of yellowed paper falls to the ground.
Jack picks it up. "It's in some kind of code," he announces. "Maybe it's a
coded key. Look at these six-pointed stars drawn in the margins, though.
Why embellish the code with that particular design?" he asks. No one answers. 
Jack shrugs and puts the paper in his pocket. Mikki keeps the frame.

Hiroshi regards the cellar door. He'd recently been in a cellar -- several
in fact, and none of those experiences had been particularly pleasant. With
a loud grunt, he kicks the door, hard.

His foot drives straight through the rotten wood, and Hiroshi is left standing
on one leg while his other leg is stuck in the rotten doorway.  "Arrrrrrgh!" 
he screams in frustration. "Perhaps if you gentlemen would be so kind as to 
stop discussing your picture frame and GET ME OUT OF HERE, we could continue 
down the cellar?"

To their credit, Jack and Mikki don't laugh too horribly long and eventually
extract a scowling Hiroshi from the doorway, though the inch-long wood shards
and splinters put several large, painful scrapes down the sides of his calf.

Still scowling, Hiroshi opens the door. With flashlight in one hand and gun
in the other, Hiroshi starts down the steps. As Hiroshi steps upon the
stairs, they give a loud groan. But Hiroshi isn't afraid of anything this
side of a 5th-planting gospog, so he continues.

CRASH! As Hiroshi puts his full weight on the stairs, they collapse beneath
him.

THUD! Hiroshi lands flat on his back. His head cracks against the remnants of
the stairway. Though dazed, Hiroshi still has enough of his wits about him to
notice the cat-sized green object pouncing at his face. Using the lightning
fast reactions he developed in his years in MarSec, he aims his pistol and
shoots!

BLAM! BLAM! CRASH! Tink-tink-tinkle.... The object explodes as Hiroshi's shot
hits it dead on. Glass shards and a cool liquid rain down upon Hiroshi's
prone form. The liquid covers Hiroshi's face, runs into his eyes and mouth.
It's sour. It's vinegary. He'd killed a bottle of wine.

The flashlight, still functional, illuminates a large wine rack at Hiroshi's
feet. Hiroshi staggers to his feet, grabs the flashlight and stares around.

"Are you okay?" asks Jack from the cellar door.

"Of course I'm not okay!" berates Hiroshi. "But I've found something!"

The cellar is dark, musty, cool, and damp. A wine rack stands on one wall,
stacked crates stand along another. In the center of the cellar is a large 
barrel.

"Get Dakota, Buffy, and Zenon. There's stuff down here!" yells Hiroshi.

Meanwhile, Francois sits bored on the roof. No one is within miles. His
attention wanders, and Francois begins just taking in the landscape. Then he
notices the roof. It's white, or at least parts of it are. Francois stands
and looks carefully at the roof. He turns left, he turns right. It looks
like the white patches are arranged in triangles that point away from
the spot at which he is sitting. He counts. One... two.... three four...
five points. He grabs for his walkie talkie.

"Uh, guys... zere is zis five pointed star painted on ze roof!"

"Wonderful, just wonderful!" his radio crackles. Buffy's on the other end. 
"We had to go and find the house of Satan himself! Well, this is just 
great, just fucking great!"

"Francois, stay on the roof. But radio if you see ANYTHING strange," orders
Dakota.

Buffy, Mikki, and Jack climb into the cellar. The crates are filled with jars
of lye, carbolic acid, and saltpeter. Hiroshi and Jack grab the wine and 
crates and lift them up to Dakota and Zenon, who take them out to the 
suburban and strap them on the luggage rack.

Buffy looks in the barrel, which is full of a clear liquid. She sniffs it and 
finds that it is just musty water. A gleam from the bottom of the barrel
catches her eye. She reaches for it. "Icky!" she murmurs. She grabs it.
It's cold and metallic. Pulling it out, she finds it is an elaborate silver
hair comb. Not a spot of tarnish mars its shine. She eagerly puts it in her 
hair, which has become somewhat frazzled in the last few days. ("Maintenance
under conditions such as these is always a losing battle," she was wont to 
remark... often... loudly.) "How do you like my new comb, Jack?" she asks.

Jack just mm-hmms.

Mikki, meanwhile, paces around the cellar. Pace, pace, pace, pace, pace, pace,
pace, squish. Mikki stifles a scream and looks down. It's just a muddy
patch. Mikki removes his foot from it, yet continues to watch it carefully.
Then he notices that the muddy patch is perfectly rectangular. "Guys?" he
asks, in a quavering voice.

Hiroshi, having finished handing up crates, steps over. "Hmmm. Let's see here."
Hiroshi kneels and inserts his arm into the muddy patch. It goes in, down to
the elbow, and then stops suddenly. "There's something buried under here," 
Hiroshi remarks, "Go get the shovels from the suburban!" he yells to Dakota.

Dakota returns with the shovels and hands them down. Hiroshi, Jack, and Mikki
grab shovels and begin to dig. About half an hour goes by and they uncover
a large rectangular box, about two feet wide by five feet long by one foot
high.

"I want my gun," remarks Buffy. Dakota retrieves it for her, and she sets it
up to point at the box. "Okay, Jack, you can open it now!"

With a loud creak, Jack pries the nailed-down top from the box. A sick sweet
odor of rot immediately fills the cellar, but Jack keeps prying. The box gives
several large cracks and pops and then the lid flies off!

Imagine, if you will, a large box full of human stew. For that is almost
exactly the view to which Our Heroes are treated. The box contains
a dead body.

Now this dead body is probably female, as evidenced by the long stringy
patches of shoulder length grey hair. But other than the hair, no clue
remains to give Our Heroes any information as to gender. Putrefied flesh
oozes off of the corpse, revealing patches of dead white bone underneath.
The corpse swims in the putrescent ooze, which seems to give off a malevolent,
almost living, sheen. Holy wafers fill the corpse's mouth, which is locked
in a horrific scream. The hands are folded together in front, pierced by a
wicked foot-long metal spike, and the feet are pierced similarly. At the
foot of the box, an ornate metal coffer swims in the gooey ooze.

"I'm out of here, everyone," mentions Hiroshi. Mikki just stands and yabbers.

Hiroshi strides to the doorway, grabs the ledge, pulls himself up, and freezes.
Long white canine teeth dripping with saliva are bared at him. "Dakota,
Zenon," he whispers, "turn around -- slowly!"

Dakota and Zenon turn to stare at a ghostly wolf standing 5 feet at the 
shoulder. Everything is silent for a moment that seems to last for an eternity.

Then Dakota spins, breaking off a long splinter of wood from the door behind 
him.  He cocks his arm back and hurls the splinter out the door. "Fetch!" he 
cries.

The ghost wolf is not impressed.

Zenon draws his katana, and in one mighty swing, slices at the ghost wolf. The
katana passes through the wolf as if it were just so much smoke.

Hiroshi simply drops back into the cellar.

Buffy whirls the gun around to point towards the wolf.

With a loud eerie howl, the ghost wolf bays and disappears...

..only to appear next to Francois. "Sacre Bleu!" yells Francois. "What is
zis?! A wolf? Well I will show zis wolf a trick or two!" he smirks, as he
unlimbers his laser rifle. The barrel hums loudly and the smell of ozone
fills the air and the deadly beam pierces the wolf's skull.

But the wolf simply stands there, staring at Francois with glowing yellow 
eyes.

Then it disappears...

..only to reappear in the cellar.

Buffy screams! "Take your comb back. I don't want it!" she cries as she hurls
the comb back into the barrel.

But the wolf is not be dining on Buffy this evening. It turns and lowers
its malevolent eyes at Mikki.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Gurgle." Mikki both screams and 
gurgles, destroying the party's hopes that he'd given up the habit.

The wolf crouches and leaps. It passes through Mikki's terrified form. He
screams, "It's attacking me! It's attacking me!" He starts a panicked 
flight towards the cellar door.

Hiroshi takes advantage of the distraction to get out of the cellar.
Buffy whirls her machine gun around, but Jack yells "Don't shoot, Buffy!
Mikki's in the line of fire!"

The ghost wolf whirls and snarls viciously.

Jack climbs out of the cellar.

Dakota snaps, "Buffy, Francois, Jack -- go get in the van. Zenon, help me get
Mikki out of the cellar!"

Buffy, Francois, and Jack beat a hasty exit as Dakota and Zenon lift Mikki
out of the cellar. They turn and prepare to leave, only to see the ghost
wolf snarling at them. It blocks the entrance.

It leaps at Mikki. Its drooling maw snaps through Mikki's throat and he
collapses.

"Zenon, drag Mikki out to the van!" Dakota interposes himself between the
wolf and Mikki's prone form. Zenon and Mikki exit. Dakota backs out of the
cottage behind them. The ghost wolf does not leap again.

Zenon tosses Mikki into the van, and then takes the driver's seat. As
Dakota gets in, Zenon floors the suburban, and quickly puts distance
between himself and the cottage.

"Well, at least we got out of that in one pie--" Zenon stops in mid-
comment. For, as he glances one last time at the receding cottage in his
rearview mirror, he glimpses the silhouette of a small shambling human-like
figure fading into the underbrush.

He says nothing more and continues driving towards London.
-- 
Chris Pearce -- cpearce@nemesis.acs.unt.edu
Newsgroups: alt.games.torg