Episode 6: Strange Things Afoot at the Circle Q

## Cast

Season: 1

GM: DeyDey

Hunters: Penny, Chip, Rowan, Claire

Setting: Carson Creek, CO

Synopsis: The hunters encountered a stranded alien, ISS, who had accidentally caused a housecat to grow to gigantic size and terrorize the town. They offered to help the alien get home, and in exchange it restored the cat to normal.

The hunters traveled to the microscopic town of Carson Creek, Colorado. It's in the boring half of Colorado, for those of you following along on your maps. But for once, something interesting was happening: local rumors have it that a furry Sasquatch thing has been responsible for a series of local pet disappearances, and this week it escalated to murdering the local history teacher.

They went first to the teacher's house, which was the scene of the attack. Rowan led the way, finding the back door smashed in, with tufts of black fur caught on the frame. Penny used the Beyond the Realm of Science Scanner (BROSS) to determine that the monster had been transformed via technology beyond human knowledge. Chip did some poking around and discovered that the teacher collected preserved meats. Everybody but Penny stole some jerky. Claire invoked dark magic to relive the moment of the teacher's death: a huge dark thing the size of a bear took him by surprise, apparently provoked because he saw it in the bushes and threw a rock at it.

Chip had a hunch that if technology was involved, the high school science lab might have more information. The group followed them there, and discovered a kid sized furry creature in the lab tinkering with an electronic device. On seeing them, it ran away immediately, and nobody could catch it. Claire managed to make telepathic contact with it first, and learned that the creature was lost, scared, and alone, and it only wanted to go back home.

At this point, the group split up, with Claire and Rowan tracking down the little creature, and Chip and Penny heading for the house of another teacher they guessed might be the next victim.

Claire and Rowan did find the creature, in that they fell into a snare it had set, and it rushed out to threaten them with a tuning fork. But Claire boosted her telepathy to let herself and Rowan speak to the creature, and Rowan reassured it they were friendly. It revealed that it was an alien, stranded in this town for decades, its ship buried beneath the local arcade. It also admitted that it had created the bigger monster by using a "bigification" ray on a local animal. Rowan named the alien ISS, and Claire lent it her hoodie for an E.T. style disguise. Together they went to unbigify the monster and find the ship.

At the home of the second teacher, Penny created a distraction by posing as an extremely obnoxious insurance agent while Chip snuck inside. Their first discovery was the teacher's elderly mother, who mistook them for a student. They pretended to be looking for the bathroom, and then put together the pieces for their second discovery: the bigified monster was the teacher's cat! And it was only a matter of time before the cat came back.

In fact, it was a matter of not much time at all, because the cat attacked Rowan and Claire on their way to rendezvous. They were both reluctant to hurt an innocent creature, but it didn't return the favor; they both got mauled. Chip and Penny came to the rescue, with Chip distracting the cat using the stolen jerky and the offer of pets, while Penny shot it with a tranquilizer rifle. Due to some questionable aim, they tranquilized both Chip and the cat, but that still gave them and ISS plenty of time to turn the bigification ray into a smallification ray and return the cat to normal. ISS took some of the extra fur, and Penny took the rest as evidence.

The feline peril was no more, and the party retreated to bandage their wounds and sleep off the tranquilizers. Some future group of hunters would have to return and help ISS get back to its ship.