Always Carry a Blarpie

an episode starring Stella, Willy, and Skirmish.

Tweet: Grab a marker and take some notes, FBK has gone #MonsterOfTheWeek. Join Skirmish, Stella and Will as they go a dinner party for all time… and places?

Setting: Hell Casino, Antarctica, Redwood National Forest

NPCs:

* Ruby Hemorage
* Opie Whitespore
* Bruce Dalton
* Gary Trinkle
* Danny Daedalus

Plot Summary:

A monster hunter, an insane socialite, and a possessed security guard walk into Hell's Casino...

and a child directs them to a dinner party they all mysteriously received invitations to. In the present-day somewhere in the United States, the FBK characters Skirmish Killington (Sean "Skirmish" MacReedy), Stella Argentine (Stella DiArgento) and Wevellian von Urden (Will Urden / Bill) take on a modern spin. The three of them pull up - dressed to the nines - at Hell's Casino, an opulent party house and gambling establishment in the middle of the forest. Skirmish is riding in his company van from M.E.S.S, a monster hunting agency. Stella and Will are taking a Uber Pool together, as they know each other.

The three find invitations to a dinner party hidden in their pockets / dresses, though they don't recall how the invitations got there. Opie, a young child, greets them and directs them to a room in the casino filled with fine food and some drinks. While they wait for the other guests to arrive, Skirmish gets to know Stella and Will - the former seeking alcoholic drinks and the latter stuffing himself with fancy dishes he normally wouldn't be able to afford.

Ruby and Bruce then enter, and the rest of the food/drinks arrive. The group sits around the table, and the party begins! After some chatter and more refreshments, the lights suddenly go out. When they come back on, Ruby and Bruce are nowhere to be found!

Once the trio starts investigating the room, they find four doors: one blue and frosty, one golden and stained with soot, one green with vine patterns, and one heading to the servants quarters. They open the blue door and Will trips, bringing the others with him as he falls into a long slide. The slide opens to frigid winds and an ice-covered slope, which the three party-goers continue to tumble down.

Once their painful descent is done and the three find themselves at the bottom of the snow-covered hill, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and get their bearings. They go to a nearby hotel, the Old Gold Lodge, where they find out that they are in Antarctica - thousands of miles away from where they found the casino. Skirmish blames Stella's strange behaviour and her true account of their strange predicament on her injuries from falling down the hill, and she plays along to avoid frightening the bartender. The hotel calls EMT for them and gives them a suite to check in to. As they are hopelessly underdressed for the Antarctic weather, Skirmish and Will look for winter gear in the Lost & Found, while Stella buys the fanciest and most expensive gear from the store.

They reconvene in the suite, where Skirmish phones his agency and tells them what happened. M.E.S.S, confused, agrees to extract them and send reinforcements. Will and Stella overhear the conversation and ask him about it, but he plays it off. Will falls asleep, then wakes up as a different person - the monster-killing spirit Bill that lives inside him. Stella learns that Bill and Skirmish know each other, as Bill used to work for M.E.S.S, and that Will and Bill have separate consciousnesses. When she tells him that she's a dragon, he reacts differently than most people do - he nonchalantly agrees with her. As the three discuss their theories as to what happened (with the aid of a Sharpie), they hear a commotion outside. They see police cars and ambulances arrive and a mysterious figure wearing a plague doctor mask and carrying sticks of dynamite fleeing the scene. Stella shouts and catches the figure's attention. When they turn around, she looks them straight in the eye and mind controls them to do her bidding and meet them in front of the hotel.

The figure reveals herself to be none other than Ruby Hemorage, one of the casino guests. The dynamite was, in fact, fake. She still flees from them on her snowshoes, and the others follow with skis. Skirmish tackles her and they interrogate her. She confirms Stella's theory that they are in a very elaborate game. Skirmish tackles her again and falls onto a frozen pond, disappearing into a flash of green. Stella and Bill follow, and the three find themselves in a clearing within a thick redwood forest, somewhere in California. Stella dumps her gear worth thousands of dollars on the ground, as she refuses to carry it, while the others take theirs with them as they all head down a path leading deeper into the woods.

Eventually, they come across a house marked "haunted." As they investigate the house, they find large bipedal hoof prints and grooves on the trees. They also hear a honk that Skirmish immediately recognizes as his work van. Bill and Stella crack some jokes about stealing it, but the three go toward the noise and find the van in a parking lot in front of a Minotaur-themed souvenir store. In the trunk, they find Gary, one of Skirmish's coworkers, and learn that there have been reports of a minotaur in the area. When they tell Danny about the house, he is confused, as there "are no houses in these woods." They take the van back to where they saw the house and investigate it. In the cellar, they find some Ancient Greek text, which none of them can really translate. It rings a bell for Bill - it says something about his old friend Danny Daedalus and the Icarus story.

Bill, Skirmish, and Gary determine that there must be a Minotaur around here and think of a way to attract and defeat it. Stella reasons that since it is a Taurus, and she is a Gemini, she would make the best bait. So, they set up an ambush and Stella makes as much noise as she can to attract the Minotaur, shooting her gun that she keeps in her dress (sometimes she leaves the safety off). It comes charging at her, and she narrowly avoids getting gored as it trips over a rock and she ducks behind a tree. Skirmish and Bill drive the van into the Minotaur and shoot it, causing it some serious damage but losing control of the van in the meantime. Skirmish notices that it has a keyhole in its back, and Stella finishes the beast off with an enchanted bullet to the keyhole.

As it turns out, the minotaur was a simulacrum invented by Danny Daedalus, who was disguised as (or possessing) Skirmish's colleague Gary. He tells them that they have finished the game, and the award is $500,000! They are teleported back to Hell's Casino, where Opie asks them if they liked the party and invites them to come again. Skirmish invites Stella to join M.E.S.S, and Bill/Will to come back to his organization.

Memorable Quotes:

* HONK
* "I put it in my dress" - Stella
* "Magical nonsense" - DM