ENTRY 13: THE BLOOD BATH
------------------------

We join our stalwart friends still on the cruise ship Mauritania. They
are, as usual, arguing......

Sitting at breakfast on the morning of Day 11 of the cruise, the group
started discussing whether or not to tell (a) Dr. Smythe or (b) The
ever-popular Miskatonic Trio about the strange door in the basement,
and their increasingly paranoid conspiracy theories about crew
members. After much argument, they decide to do both things.

After informing Smythe, everyone went to the Miskatonic Trio's
quarters, to try and start a discussion on the door and hopefully plan
another foray into the bowels of the ship. Things got quite heated,
and Thorpe punched Jim in the face. Jim punched back. Most of the rest
of the group was momentarily stunned, and then started ineffectually
yelling at the two combatants to stop. This did nothing. Katya decided
to take firm action, and tried to get into the middle of the
fight. Don, seeing Katya's great example, decided that if one person
trying peacefully to get in the middle of things was good, another
person drawing a saber threateningly was better, and proceeded to add
a deadly weapon to the fist-fight. Jim ran out of the room; Katya
followed him. Elizabeth, not picking up on the fact that her ranting
was entirely without effect, started yelling at both Don and Thorpe
for being assholes. They ignored her.

Katya returned, informing the others that Jim wanted to be alone for a
little while. {Jim, in the meanwhile, had headed to the infirmary, and
then to the Assistant Purser, requesting a room change to steerage.}
The group decided to split up until tempers returned to normal. Don
headed to the Engineering Room, as did Katya (with some of Elizabeth's
money). Elizabeth headed back to her room; on the way back, Smythe
made a surprising revelation: his name is actually Wesson.

In the engineering room, Don and Katya managed to bribe their way into
a tour of the bowels of the ship to look for a book allegedly stolen
from them by the former purser. They got a good tour of a (mostly
Arabic) section of the ship. They saw mostly tool rooms, and in one of
the rooms they saw a faint spider-web outline in a door shape. The tour
ended.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth had heard some strange noises coming from Jim and
Adrian's room. After investigation (read some fast talk to get Jim to
let her into the room), she discovered that Jim was planning on
leaving, and tried to convince him to stay with the group, eventually
succeeding. At around that point, Katya returned. The three of them
agree that a trip to the room is desirable, and decide that the party
should be thus: Jim, Katya, Elizabeth, Blocke, Fuda, and Smythe. (Note
the conspicuous absence of Thorpe and Don.) After some in-fighting
between the Miskatonic Trio, Blocke and Fuda lock Thorpe in the room
and agree to the new plan. They reach the room, which is full of tools
labelled in Arabic. After looking for the door, the party saw a faint
outline with strange characters surrounding it. After some study, they
realized that the characters were one line of text, written from top to
bottom, split through the middle. They went about starting to decipher
it. After quite a little while, Fuda recognized the character set as
that of the Balukastan language, which hadn't been used in around 400
years. (He informed the group that Balukastan was part of current day
Pakistan, on the eastern edge of the Islamic world.) He then mentioned
that he had no idea what the characters meant, the language having
been dead for several centuries.

Katya decided to do something useful,and check for a lock on the
strange door. There was none. She noted that there was writing on the
top and bottom of the door as well as on the sides.

There was a close call with people in the hall. Someone from outside
the room closed the door.

When they could breathe again, some of the group started trying to
transcribe the characters around the door. Katya made another
interesting discovery: the same writing occurred along the floor and
the ceiling, and the walls, forming a three dimensional box of
writing, missing one end. That end, coincidentally, was the wall
containing the mysterious door.

Upon closer examination, the writing on the wall was discerned to be
two words; the first word gradually turning into the second, over and
over, in incredibly small and fine print. The text around the door was
also repeated text, but different. Blocke noticed that above the door
the party entered through, a sign was traced finely into the wall. It
was a 5 pointed star with an eye in the middle, and a flame inside the
eye. He recognized as an 'elder sign', which offered protection. He
claimed that it was a barrier for magic creatures (which would prevent
them from using the door). When asked what he meant by 'magic
creatures', he nonchalantly answered 'Well, you know, demons and the
like.' This did not do much to comfort the already freaked out party.

Jim, having heard a noise, investigated further. Listening closer, he
thought he could hear 4 to 5 crew members talking. The group started to
be wery, wery quiet. After borrowing a mirror from Elizabeth, Jim was
able to see a bad thing: in EACH direction, 3 or 4 large-ish men
hugging the wall, coming towards the group, armed with pistols. Oops.

Looking around the room quickly, the group noticed vents in the
ceiling. Blocke investigated, managing to get the grate off. He saw
that there were nails exposed in rings approximately every 1 to 2 feet
inside, and that in one direction, the vents seemed to lead to the
room behind the door; in the other direction, they led about 10 feet
and then straight up. And then, something totally unprecedented
happened: the group started arguing about what to do next.

Eventually, it was decided that Smythe, being the smallest, should
investigate 'the other room'. He saw a section of floor, that seemed
empty. After dropping his lighter through the grate, he got a better
picture of things: a room roughly shaped like a rectangle, except that
the far wall (in an aerial view) was slanted at around a 60 degree
angle. Along the short wall was a table, in the corner of the door
wall with the longer wall was a pile of something indistinguishable,
and in the corner of the slanted wall with the longer wall, there
seemed to be steps leading to a raised platform. There didn't appear
to be any other door leading from the room. Smythe decided to head
back.

Then things started happening. Fuda exclaimed that he had figured the
writing out, and it was some kind of summoning. There was a very,
very, loud crash. {On a side note, this loud crash was Don and Thorpe
trying to save the groups' ass by loosing a large collection of empty
oil barrels on the opponents.} Jim, figuring that a chaotic time was a
good one to start trouble, stuck his head out of the door and started
shooting. After taking one out, he suffered two shots to the
head. Things did not look good for Jim.

The rest of the group was stunned.

Recognizing that they needed to do something, quickly, the group
started listening to what was going on in the hall. They heard shouts,
swearing, more swearing, and finally: 'Someone threw barrels down on
them!' 'We'll come around, then. Hold their attention!'

Katya started shooting at the opponents, faring better than
Jim. {Editor's comment: largely due to the fact that the group
suddenly remembered what rpp's were for} Thorpe got shot, but the
majority of the group didn't know that yet. On the non-barrel side,
Elizabeth heard someone shouting 'Get back here!', and decided to get
Jim's body out of the doorway.

Fuda started blubbering about 'really doing it', and reached for
something inside Blocke's coat. Elizabeth tried to stop him,
unsuccessfully. A corroded-looking knife-like thing fell out.

Things started to heat up in the hall; the right side retreated a
little, while the left side managed to extract most of themselves from
the barrels and were advancing again. Katya managed to buy the group
some time by taunting the men in Arabic.

The group came to understand from Fuda's babbling (and Blocke's
stuttering explanations) that he wished to summon something. {Gunshots
were still going on; Katya picked another one off, and Thorpe and Don
scurried into a room.} From lack of sufficient protest, it was decided
to let Fuda try to summon something. Blocke tapped the door lightly;
there was a faint shimmer. Fuda plunged the knife into Jim's
still-dying body. Elizabeth started freaking out, ranting and raving
about desecrating corpses. The air started to smell like wet
leather. Fuda began chanting. The smell started to get stronger, and
stronger.

Then the thing appeared. And the group wished that it hadn't.

It looked like some kind of alien with the skin of a cow/ elephant/
thing over it. It was around 10 feet tall, with.... things... coming
out of the holes in Jim's skin. Fuda continued chanting.

The group lost san.

It then started to move; old parts slithered back under the skin, new
parts slithered out. Fuda stopped chanting. Katya frantically tried to
hold off the people in the hall; some shrapnel started flying,
injuring some of the party. Fuda instructed the thing: 'Go kill the
people in the hall.'

Everyone else started ranting at Fuda for not being more specific
about important things, like what exactly 'hall' meant in this
context. The thing moved over to Fuda, stopped at merely inches from
his face, and then backed away, halting at the door. Katya, thinking
quickly, fired her sawed-off shotgun at the Elder Sign, obliterating
it. The thing left through the door, dragging Jim's body underneath
it. The group started to hear screams from outside. Blocke, who was
the person standing closest to the door, got sprayed with blood. He
hung the elder sign that he was wearing around his neck up above the
door, and threw up.

Someone noticed that Fuda was catatonic. Elizabeth confirmed
this. Blood started to seep in from underneath the now closed door.

{Back in Don and Thorpe's room, they got knocked across the room as
something banged against the door. They passed out.}

Eventually, the screaming stopped. After a long, long time, Blocke
opened the door to the hall. The thing was gone. The group, deciding
that nothing could possibly be worse than what they just witnessed,
opened the other door. There was a flash of light, and the group saw a
bubble over the door break. Blocke looked worried, but went in
anyway.

The group now was able to expand on Smythe's description of the
room. In one corner was a pile of carpets. In another corner, there
was an altar. The table was covered with books, papers, and other
magical artifacts.

{The group killed the orc, disarmed the trap, opened the chest, took
the treasure..... oh wait.}

Elizabeth took a notebook, papers, letter, and a photo. Katya examined
a figurine that was sitting over by the altar. It was around a foot
tall, with 8 inches of that being head. It had sunken eyes, sagging
skin, no teeth, and hands with curling fingers. It was jet black, and
disturbing.

The group found some books: The Xanthu Tablets, The Key To Wisdom, and
Cthulhu and the Necronomicon.

Elizabeth ventured out into the hall, heard an awful scream from
around a few bends, discovered Don and Thorpe, and then ran back to
the group's hiding place.