The Power Cut

During a storm a few nights ago there was a power cut affecting a wide area around a nearby town; when the lights came back on, Robert Wilkinson (a friend of the investigators) was found dead in his home. His body was strangely withered and aged.

Possibilities

1 Wilkinson is actually the malignant agent of a local cult. In the cellar of his home he keeps a young Colour Out of Space that he uses to kill captured victims and unwary investigators. The Colour is trapped within an electromagnetic field that Wilkinson can switch on and off at will; however, with the house’s generator undergoing repairs the energy for this field is tapped directly from the local power lines. With the power cut, the Colour was released, and it quickly fed upon its captor. Now it has once again been drawn into its magnetic prison, and only the strange drain on the nearest power plant indicates its existence to the outside world.

2 Wilkinson was older than he appeared. A lot older. He had discovered an ancient scroll bearing a ritual that would allow him to regularly rejuvenate himself, effectively bestowing eternal life. However, a few nights ago he made a fatal error when choosing to perform the ceremony, and the sudden power cut – a possibility he had entirely overlooked – interrupted his reading of the all-important magic words. With the spell suddenly broken he reverted to his real age, and the scroll – a contract with the Outer Gods – crumbled into dust, its final conditions met. Only Wilkinson’s secret diary bears any clue as to the terrible pact he made, a pact he paid for with his soul.

3 The investigators have made some dangerous enemies, individuals who will stop at nothing to destroy them. This group travelled under cover of darkness to the home of Wilkinson, where they tortured and interrogated the player’s friend with the Shrivelling spell, before finally ending the interview – and the poor man’s life. Now this group is ready to strike, strengthened by the information they have acquired. They know as much about the players and the progress of their investigation as did their late friend.

© Callum Pearce

Three Point Landing

A small aircraft lands at an airfield. The landing would be unremarkable except that the pilot and all three passengers are dead.

There is no sign of damage to the aircraft - nor is there any indication of what happened: there is no sign of a struggle nor any injury to anyone on board. However, all the bodies are old to the point of decrepitude; one of the corpses is almost skeletal. It seems that the pilot managed to land with his last breath. Documents carried by the passengers establish their identities and their ages: the pilot is 28 and his passengers 35, 41 and 52. The aircraft was in the air for approximately three hours, yet autopsies suggest that everyone on board the aircraft died of old-age or of age-related illnesses.

Possibilities

1 The people on board the aircraft have been attacked by an incorporeal creature (similar to a Colour Out of Space) that drains the life force from its victims. Those on board the aircraft failed to realise what was happening until it was too late. Now the creature lurks somewhere in the vicinity of the airfield.

2 The aircraft encountered a discontinuity in space-time. Anything passing through the discontinuity has its ageing process accelerated by a factor of about 200,000 (although this cannot be measured accurately). Inspecting the aircraft reveals that it has also aged, much like its occupants.

The discontinuity is stationary, but it is increasing in area and when it intersects with the ground things will really start happening...

3 The pilot and his passengers have died as the result of a peculiar disease that rapidly ages its victims. The pilot and passengers were part of an archaeological expedition and have recently returned from a remote part of the world. During the excavation of an ancient tomb, disease spores were released from a stone sarcophagus, infecting the entire expedition.

The disease has an incubation period during which the infected person is not contagious, but thereafter it progresses rapidly. It is likely that all those remaining back at the expedition are also dead.

© Tony Hickie

From the (Spaces Between) Stars

Two-thirty a.m. is a time when town is quiet, save only for the quick footfalls of a stray wanderer, swiftly heading for home. The investigators have just rounded off a successful evening of cards and are bidding their host a good morning.

Suddenly, the peace is broken by an ear-piercing roar as a crepuscular shape hurtles through the sky leaving a phosphorescent haze trailing behind it. The object’s path of descent sends it hurtling into the clouded depths of the town’s lake. Residents stagger from their houses and before long a crowd has gathered at the lake’s edge. Onlookers can discern a nebulous, viridian glow spreading beneath the surface of the water; it pulses regularly like the rhythmic pounding of a giant heartbeat.

The following morning, the meteor (the most accepted explanation) has become the focus of all conversations. One man speculates that perhaps H.G.Wells’ Martians were not purely the work of fiction. Another speaks of a terrible discovery made by the town fishermen. The lake’s aquatic denizens are dead. The corpses drift across the surface of the water yet bear no mark of injury. If tested, the lake now registers radioactivity.

Possibilities

1 Many of the townsfolk have made frenzied calls to the authorities, eliciting an unexpected response; that evening a full military task force mobilises on the edge of town. The lake and surrounding area is cordoned off, the guards equipped with firearms. The military begin a systematic evacuation of the town; complaints are ignored. The inhabitants are warned not to speak to anyone about their memory of the preceding night. All photographs pertaining to the object (even those of the glowing lake or dead fish) are confiscated. A full news blackout of the event has been imposed upon news stations. The military has threatened to revoke their licences if any details of the event are transmitted.

Depending upon who they approach, the investigators receive contradictory information. The object could be described as any of the following: a simple meteorite, an advertisement balloon, a parachutist or a foreign explosive device (or any other equally implausible explanation).

Just what are the military hiding? How does it involve the “meteorite”?

2 The lake now houses an invader, a being that feeds upon life itself, a Colour Out of Space.

The Colour, like so many of its race, has crossed the cosmos in search of a world capable of sustaining its near-insatiable appetite. After countless years of wandering it finally discovered the Earth. In order to avoid the sun’s impeding rays, the creature made its descent under the cover of darkness. It now resides on the lake’s bed, hidden from the sun’s rays by a murky, liquid shroud.

The creature hunts by night. Since the lake has now been drained of food it will leave the water’s protection and seek sustenance beyond. While quite content to feed on the abundant undergrowth, it will attack any humans who approach it or try to harm it. The Colour spends the daylight hours drilling into the lake’s bed forming a narrow tunnel, when this is complete it will create the embryonic spheres in which to house its young.

3 At some point in humanity’s recent history the Earth became home to a small group of the parasitic Shan (aka The Insects from Shaggai). The Shan race had already colonised many worlds, both throughout and beyond our solar system. Their next target was to be the Earth. They were instead trapped upon it, unable to teleport away due to a mysterious element in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The “meteor” is a Shan scout-vessel. The Shan have deduced that their teleportation-temples will not function and have sent a spacecraft (powered by the pilot’s psychokinetic capability).

The pilot has two objectives: firstly, it must reclaim one of the indestructible teleportation-temples that lies abandoned and forgotten at the base of the lake; secondly, it must assess the Earth’s potential for invasion. The first night will be spent loading the pyramid aboard its vessel, subsequent nights will find the creature leaving the lake and assessing humanity’s strength.

If the creature believes that the Earth would be a suitable target for invasion it will activate a beacon. That night, the sky will be filled with the falling "meteors", that blaze one-by-one into the lake’s irradiated waters.

© Hadley Connor

Wasteland

Possibilities

1 The small community is the victim of a strange, cancerous meteorite similar to the one in Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space.

2 The knoll on which the community stands was once behind German lines, and its houses used by the German Army as a makeshift headquarters. The entire area was used as a dump for chemical and gas weapons and a large amount of phosphorous. As they were beaten back the chemicals were buried in preparation for a counterattack which never came.

Over the years the containers have corroded, contaminating the knoll with phosphors and a deadly mixture of poisons, causing the yellow glow. Once in the food chain it killed vegetation, animals and eventually humans.

3 The story is very inaccurate. There is no ‘deathly brimstone light’ and no evidence of a plague on the land. The war years left the land in great neglect, the population suffered under the German Occupation and both have left what was once rich fertile land a virtual wilderness.

© Garrie Hall