The Masks of Nyarlathotep: Australia pt 4

Extracts from the Personal Diary of James Elliott

Day 2 in the City - continued

There is no way of telling day from night, or of measuring the passage of time. We really don't have a clue how long we have been here. It is not even clear that concept of a specific date is valid here. From now on, I shall simply count the number of our sleep/awaking cycles.

Kakatak gave us some smaller (more-portable) lightning guns. They still take two hands to fire, but they only weigh a few kilos. The Great Race do not use or approve of Mythos sorcery so we need to careful about using it around Kakatak.

Using the Flail and Sceptre for its magic boostly effect, I cast Healing on Marshall. Unfortunately the artefacts only provided a small amount of power so most of it still can from me. Still we want Marshall to be one of our frontmen, so we need him to start off as healthy as possible.

Our plan is that Marshall, Freddy and Muldoon are the spearhead, who will carry a frontal assault. The rest of us Fatima, John, Kakatak and I will head for the exit, with the intention of securing it for our departure.

I felt rather faint. As though I had fallen asleep on my feet and been sleep-walking. I had had a nightmare. All I really remember about it was falling over in a corridor with a couple of inches for liquid shit on the floor and getting literally covered in the stuff. Very vivid! Very nasty!

We have changed our minds and are not executing the frontal assault yet. I am not quite sure what happened, but we seem to have had some premonition that the plan we had had was doomed to fail. We need others to help us.

It is becoming clear the Marshall and Muldoon are suffering for the delusion that John is dead. They cannot see him. They think I am suffering from the 'delusion' that he is still alive.

We need a silver needle to give to Eliza when we get to her so that she can use Open the Way. John has one, but they cannot see it any more than they can see John. They decided that they would go back to where they think his body is to search for his needle. They also want to show me the body to prove John is dead.

We returned to the location of the fire-fight with the cultists. Of course, there is no body there, nor any pool of blood. The floor has dust with scuff marks consistent with my recollection, but no area where a pool of blood could plausibly have been cleaned up. As far as John and I are concerned, that is clear proof that it is Marshall and Muldoon who are hallucinating rather than I.

Having failed to find John's needle, we tried to find Eliza's. We went to the bunk-room to search for her needle. We found what is left of her clothes, but a thorough search failed to find the needle.

While we were there we noticed something decidedly odd about the bodies of the dead cultists. In spite of all having been dead for the same period of time (to within a few minutes), they were at enormously varied stages of decay. They vary from freshly killed to apparently several weeks old.

Next we went off to look for Dave, to try to rope him in. I am not sure how much use he would be in a fight. However he has survived for some time down here, so clearly is not without resourcefulness so may well be as good as most of us. We found the place where we met him before, but he was not there. We decided to call it a day, and bed down there.

Day 3 in the City

Dave turned up in the night. We asked him about the lay-out of Huston's HQ and got the basic layout. He also told us about what he called the ‘dog-snufflers’, which he thought were a potential allies.

Using Dave's description, Freddy cast a scrying spell to view Dr Huston's private chambers. This showed a hexagonal room, where Dr Huston and Eliza were eating a meal of tinned food.

Following Dave's directions, we found the ‘dog-snufflers’, who are in fact ghouls. They were initially reluctant to help us. However we promised all of the dead cultists once they have been killed, with the bodies of the ones we had already killed as a pre-payment. This got them on board.

Dave thinks there are mimis near the blue plaza. We went in search and found one. He took us to the others, by drawing a line on the wall and then folding the wall up like a bit of cardboard; an impressive bit of dreamtime magic. Inside there are about fifteen mimis, mostly male. We think we have a reasonable force of now, and are in with a chance.

I am concerned that we don't really know what the new allies’ motivations are. They would clearly like to be rid of Dr Huston and his cultists, but it is hard to be sure that when that is achieved they won't turn on us.