As they enter the corridor they feel the scent of dressing rooms. They carefully examine the slightly lit up corridors and rooms and find - dressing rooms. Sandra finds a short corridor and in the other end another door. Behind it she hears the sound of machines reminding her of a story about a mangle by Stephen King. In the dark corridor they're very grateful for Maurice's flashlight. They start to think about finding the fuse box and sabotage that for knocking out the lights to be able to more permanently sabotage the printing machines. Sabotageing the printing machines could be hard though because either it's dark and easy to approach them or there's power and easy to sabotage them by dropping stuff into them but hard to apporach them. Instead they decide to destroy the fuse box and switch boards more permanently to stop the printing machines long enough for new news to pop up. The fuse box and switch boards probably aren't sorrounded by people wich makes everything easier. Probably they find these in the basement.
They continue to senak around in the end of the building and find a stairwell with stairs upwards as well as downwards. For a moment they ponder about splitting up but then they remember all scary movies where people split up and get killed of one by one. Erik do for a short insit on this being real life and not a scary movie and that that doesn't apply here. Then he realises what has been going on the last hours and falls silent. They decide to stick together and examine what they expect to be the cellar.
The stairs extend down to a cellar with a big storage area full, a maze of stacked storage cases. There's an electric switch that when switched brings some light and makes the room barely navigatable. As they they look around somebody suddenly calls them and ask who they are and what they're doing. Maurice walks forward and lifts his sweeper and says that he's just there for the cleaning. The voice tells him that that isn't necessary down here and Maurice makes excuses about being new at the job and asks where he is. The other three sneaks back slowly sliently while Maurice approach the other man. The other man looks at him and irritated expalins that he's in the storage area and switchboards and calls him names for having walked down in the cellar when searching for the rooms to clean. An argument sails up as the experienced and older maurice is treated like an unemployed kid by the not even middle aged mechanic. Maurice doesn't take that and hits him with the sweeper and tries to push him to the ground.
Maurice's player gathers 3 Discipline dice and do a minor use of his Exhaustion talent (very quick). Since Maurice has 4 in Exhaustion that grants him 4 successes and a gauranteed win versus the game master's mechanics' 1 Pain die. Dice are rolled and Pain is dominating and a marker is put into The bowl of Despair.
As he hits the mechanic the war memories return and he sees the man as what he is: One of the germans who are behind most of the wrong and evil things in the world. ''German bastard!'' he shouts as he hits him again and again. As Erik comes running he hear Maurice scream ''Now you're going to die!''. Erik shouts for Maurice and finds him tring towards him with the sweeper held like a gun with bayonette. Erik backs a little and asks if Maurice is okey. ''Oh, well, I guess so he says'' and sits down. ''What happened?'' Erik asks. Maurice explains that it was a german - in uniform - and that he pullled forth something to hit Maurice. As they gather at some distance from Maurice they see the knocked out mechanic wich Maurice seems to refer to as ''the german''. Nobody really wants to be left behind watching the mechanic so Maurice ties up the german and puts some of his own jams eraser into his mouth to stop him from screaming and of they go - searching for the switch board.
As they look around realising how big the area is Erik again starts to spew out his flies and the others flee searching in other places.
Erik's player gathers his 3 Discipline dice and adds 2 Madness dice for minor use of his madness talent. The game master rolls 1 Pain dice. Erik wins and Madness is in dominating. The game master picks one marker from Bowl of Despair to remove the madness 6 and thereby tipping it over to Discipline being in dominance. The marker goes to Bowl of Hope where the palyers can use it. Erik's player also get to either remove a check mark on Exhaustion or Fight/Flight. He chooses to remove one at Fight/Flight.
Erik's flies finds the switch board for him while the others shrugs everytime they hear the buzzing. Following Erik's shouting where to go they find the switch board and soon Erik's there as well - giggling. As both power cords as well as fuse box are quite unshielded they decide to start a big fire that will break the cords and fuse box enough to stop the printing machines for a while. They gather paper, note books, parts from a case and a kerosene lamp. Maurice learned how to burn things down during the wars and starts quite a good fire as the others leave and carry away the mechanic. Since Maurice also is very quick he can stay a little longer by the fire and still leave safely.
Maurice wants to start a fire that stops the news about them from being printed, the game master rolls 10 Pain dice. Maurice's player gathers 3 Discipline dice, 1 Exhaustion die from straining himself (+1 Exhaustion, in total 5), 6 Madness die. He also gets minimum 5 successes from minor use of Exhaustion talent. He also uses a marker from Bowl of Hope to decrease his Exhaustion after the roll. Maurice's player wins and Discipline is dominating. Since Discipline is dominating Maurice's player decides to remove a Flight check mark.
Maurice starts up a good fire that destroys the switch board enough to stop the news from being printed. As the others try to hurry him he cooly feeds the fire and then swiftly comes walking telling them that they can leave now. When they pass by one of the dressing rooms they put down the mechanic. Maurice remove the gag to stop him from suffocating. ''What are you doing?!?'' the mechanic shouts. Maurice stuffs it back and hurries after the others. As they turns around the corner they hear someone raise one of the doors and shout if something happened and gets shouted back by the foreman, to return to the work. They hang around nearby to see that something actually happens and after a while they hear the bells from the fire carriages and before that the big sign on the front of the building has switched off and people start runninga round. They leave convinced that the fire is spreading. They return to the pub and order some beer, wine and food. After selling his clock to The Curator Maurice has a lot of money called Wax King coins.
They discuss what they're gonna do next. The Curator told them to ''take control'' to get out of the nightmare. Erik thinks that they need to blend in first. As they discuss they get to think of the man that followed Erik into this world and then directly disappeared by stepping to the side. The man was one of Erik's regular speed customers that were there when the police arrived and followed Erik. Yurev also saw him and knows him as a drop out from one of Yurev's courses in mathematics. He seems to know what this is all about. If he weren't he wouldn't have been able to make that split second decision and leave. Another person that comes up is The Curator since he seems to know a lot and don't seems totally against telling them things and he's neither pin heads or clockwork policemen. Yurev also brings up the strange animal that tipped them about stopping the printing machines but Sandra defintely aren't in the stage of trusting unknown animals in the gutters - not yet anyway. Normally (before they started to stay awake) they would have gone to bed a while ago and simply slept and let their unconciousnesses work the matter but as soon as sleep is mentioned they all get a creepy feeling and agree on that being a bad plan.
When Erik gets forth his smartphone to check the time (02:27) he sees that it is showing a notice about an unanswered call and a voice message, just like if it had or has contact with a cell phone network. That's strange, that it hasn't had before in Mad City. Warily Erik calls to check his message. He actually comes forward to the server that tells him that he has an unread message and he chooses to listen to it. It's his father that's wondering where he is. Apparently something happened at the hotel. There were some pusher that the police tried to catch while the pusher tried to get away by acting like he were the portier. There were some tumble and the pusher got away. His father were questioned shortly and his father also wonders where Erik is and if everything is alright. Erik tries to send his father an SMS to tell him that everything is OK and that he will get back in touch. The SMS leaves and appears to arrive. As there's some connection Erik hurries to send a SMS to his girlfriend as well. When he looks at the phone he notice that he has 10G coverage.
They all stare at the phone and erik tries to put through a call. He chooses Taxi Linköping but comes to Taxi Mad City. He tells them that he called the wrong number and hangs up. Now he starts to wonder who got his SMS:s. Now he has 666G coverage, that's less funny. Now erik comes to think of that he actually has a number to an unregistered number the rock star uses anomyously and sends him a SMS, something along the lines of ''Hi, WTF is going on, some help would fit nicely.''. Soon there's an answer from the rock star ''where are you? I need more, I have a show tomorrow night''. Erik stares at the phone.
Erik answers with another SMS ''In Mad City. How do I get away from here?''. Soon there's an answer again ''Wait slightly longer between trips? Take the train?''. They all stare at the message. What train?!? Erik turns to a local and asks if there's a railway station in town. The local looks at him as if he were from another dimension ''Yes..?'' Erik asks for directions to the station. Sandra produces a fountain pen and note book and the local puts down walk direction in list form. As Erik turns to his phone again to start the Google Maps app he notice that he has 42G connection. The maps don't load though.
Maurice looks for the owner to settle the tab and maybe get some change on his big bond paper on 10 000 Wax King coins. They go to the owner's office to not have to flash the bond paper's large sum. The owner substracts the amount for their drinks and food and writes a new bond paper on the rest of the sum. At Maurice's request the owner istead writes two bonds at 4 000 Wax King coins and hands over those together with a bag of slightly more than 1 000 Wax King coins. As Maurice prepares to receive a bag of like five kilos, maybe ten kilos of coins he gets something that weights about half a kilo. Suprised he returns to the others. For the moment they have no real plan besides waiting for the morning when the clothes shop opens, get some local clothes and take the train back to Linköping.
No comments:
Post a Comment