The investigators arrive in a village which, as they approach, seems deserted. As they enter, they are blocked by cars stationery in the street, and surrounded by frozen people and birds hanging in the air. The whole village seems to be under some power that has stopped time across the whole town.
Possibilities
1 This is an illusion. When the investigators enter the local pub, they note that the image on the screen of a TV (or perhaps a thrown dart hanging in the air halfway to a dartboard) is indeed moving, but incredibly slowly. The investigators have accidentally triggered a spell that slows their perception of time a thousand-fold. This spell is powerful but has its price – entropy has been massively increased; the accelerated investigators are ageing a year or two every hour that passes. They must break the spell or wither and die.
2 The Great Race of Yith have frozen time over the village using their stasis cube technology, in order that they or their cultists may study it for them, taking a few human specimens for later dissection. The device generating the stasis field has been secretly built by the cultists in a hidden laboratory and must be shut down to return life to the town.
3 An antiques dealer in the town has discovered an alien artefact which allowed him to communicate with a long-dead sorcerer of the serpent people. The sorcerer tricked him into opening a time warp to the modern age so that he could escape the decline of his people. However, the ritual went slightly wrong and time was frozen around the warp. The sorcerer was able to pass through and reclaim his artefact (the antiques dealer is frozen in the middle of his ritual with his hands clasped as if to hold the absent artefact) and the sorcerer has made the dead town his lair.
© James David Beard
Possibilities
1 This is an illusion. When the investigators enter the local pub, they note that the image on the screen of a TV (or perhaps a thrown dart hanging in the air halfway to a dartboard) is indeed moving, but incredibly slowly. The investigators have accidentally triggered a spell that slows their perception of time a thousand-fold. This spell is powerful but has its price – entropy has been massively increased; the accelerated investigators are ageing a year or two every hour that passes. They must break the spell or wither and die.
2 The Great Race of Yith have frozen time over the village using their stasis cube technology, in order that they or their cultists may study it for them, taking a few human specimens for later dissection. The device generating the stasis field has been secretly built by the cultists in a hidden laboratory and must be shut down to return life to the town.
3 An antiques dealer in the town has discovered an alien artefact which allowed him to communicate with a long-dead sorcerer of the serpent people. The sorcerer tricked him into opening a time warp to the modern age so that he could escape the decline of his people. However, the ritual went slightly wrong and time was frozen around the warp. The sorcerer was able to pass through and reclaim his artefact (the antiques dealer is frozen in the middle of his ritual with his hands clasped as if to hold the absent artefact) and the sorcerer has made the dead town his lair.
© James David Beard