One-Shot: Shadow's Folly

## Player Characters

* Dayana the Stranger is a black human-appearing woman with her hair tied up and little golden rings on her ears. she wears a flannel t-shirt (with some suspicious rips on it...) and brown pants, and her hands are blackened to the color of soot from her wrists downwards. she has red eyes, but at first glance they can appear brown. also she is a werewolf :)
* For Here Boy :D the Good Boy, *"You two have a name for me, for I could not have gotten one from my parents. I am scruffy, dirty, covered in mud crusted hair. My face shows that I am immensely happy despite the sorry shape I seem to be in. I am not wearing any clothing. I have four legs. I am a dog that should have come first huh?"*
* For Jenny the Traveler, please imagine a 5'8 fairly neutral presenting female human whose aesthetic is a cross between nerd, wild west, and steampunk. I'm talking big ol steampunk goggles perched in the forehead, faint smoke rings around the eyes from where the goggles protected them from blasts, a rifle strapped to the leg wild-west style except it's a rifle so it shouldn't be effective but it kinda is? Hair done up neat but messy, a coat that's some sort of hybrid between a lab coat and a leather jacket.

## Recap

Dayana, Jenny, and Here Boy :D run around the town, trying to get away from the shadowy monsters following them. The first two succeed, but Here Boy :D falls behind, getting stopped by three of the monsters. He rushes forward to bite one with a suddenly supernatural bite, hoping to throw them off his tail (pun intended). With shadow magic enhancing his attack, he gets The Lonely to back off, giving him time to rejoin his human(oid)s. Just before he breaks free, though, his friend Jenny tries to distract the monsters with a burst of light from her spare camera's flash. She misses and it explodes over her, covering her in glowing powder. Still, they manage to work together to escape into a nearby cave, hiding as The Lonely and The Angry pass.

When they leave the cave, they nearly run into The Hungry, but Here Boy :D manages to avoid it. After more sneaking, they finally reach the huge cave where the planar disturbance - the source of the darkness - seems to be located. As they enter the cave, Here Boy :D feels very lonely as his humans disappear. Dayana gets very hungry, a carnal bloodlust appearing which she had mostly learned to tamp down as a werewolf. And Jenny - boy, is she angry. They fully enter the even more intense darkness and walk into memories representing these emotions.

Here Boy :D is back as a pup, being pushed around on the streets by uncaring humans. Dayana returns to just after she became a werewolf, when she was overtaken by hunger and bit her grandmother - who then disowned her for being a monster. Jenny relives the big college science fair when her invention blew up and everyone laughed at her, infuriating her. Then Here Boy :D is back with the three monsters, with his humans having gone ahead. He recognizes the loneliness in the lead monster and feels Dog Compassion, going up and licking the monster, giving it company and allowing it to pet him. The monster shrinks into a teenage human muttering about his family leaving, always away. Dayana sees The Hungry and shares some of her rations with it, causing it to transform back into a regular woman with strong cravings. Lastly, Jenny meets the two-headed Angry monster and tells it about how anger can be useful if you learn to control it rather than letting it control you. The Angry becomes a pair of twin kids with temper issues.

Finally, the three adventurers walk together into the cave. They are not overcome with loneliness, with hunger, with anger. They are themselves, good and bad, complete. They see and don't see a monster with many spiky arms and a permanently crying face standing over a sphere of perfect darkness. The Forgotten tells them they will forget it - they have before. We see that last time they were exiting the cave, trying to remember who they were and what they were doing, Dayana gave a message to a bird and told it to find her later. Jenny's pager glitched out and erased its recent messages. But in the present, they try their best to remember, to hold a conversation with the monster that wants them to die so they'll just be left alone as they always are. Jenny's Tutela 3000 is going crazy near the orb of darkness and she's pretty sure it's a rift to the Shadowfell.

While Dayana and Jenny try to talk the Forgotten down (its birthday is always forgotten, it's never invited to parties, it's never remembered), to make it feel remembered and cared for, Here Boy :D takes the chance to grab Jenny's light rifle and throw it into the orb of darkness. Dayana and Jenny grab the Forgotten to make sure the dog can succeed and when he does, the darkness clears. The Forgotten is left as a crying elderly man. The Lonely rushes in and hugs him, saying he missed his grandpa and thought he had lost him. The Hungry follows, saying she was baking his cake when the Rift opened. And the Angry asks for cake too... but politely.

*As a wise totally-a-human once said, "It's really hard to deal with, but it's easier when you have people who knows what's going on and can support you through it."*

*As a very smart scientist said, "Talking to people helps too... Sometimes it can even fix the problem."*

*And as a very, very good boy once said...*

*"Bark!"*

## Continuity

This is the second and final one-shot in the *Shadowed* mini-series, coming after One-Shot: Shadow's Sworn. The mini-series took place shortly after The World Tremors in WoDaD Session 13.

## Trivia

* Probably my favorite (two-part) one-shot.