Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Scenario:

You are a highly trained Ninja who secretly protects humanity from horrific extradimensional beings. You managed to deal with the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, kill the cultists who were invoking the Dark Mother herself, and then send the foul eldritch horror back to whatever place she comes from. In the process you 1) decapitated two Russian immigrants whose chanting nearly killed you, 2) reanimated them and then set the house on fire, creating zombie flambé, 3) took out two Hollywood directors, a gifted animator made of bugs, and a scary femme fatale (and by the way, their cabin got burnt to a crisp, too.} You desperately need to find a girl you think is trapped inside a motion picture reel, meaning you need to shakedown the studio head for a safety deposit key to retrieve the film.

Now, what are you going to do about that police detective that keeps calling you? He just knows about the two burning zombies and that one of the people you called a cultist has disappeared (granted, on a different coast than he was supposed to be on). How do you explain it in a fashion that lets you (and your accessories-after-the-fact) off scot-free?

Any suggestions, because Sunday's game is going to get rather ugly, I think, with the consequences on this one, and we still have an innocent to save.

(Errata: I made two oopses in this post. One, we didn't take out the gifted animator--the cultists took out one of their own. Two, he wasn't made of bugs--he was flesh and blood (a lot of blood), but had bugs around him all the time. At some point the 'made of bugs' possibility came to mind and it stuck with me despite evidence to the contrary. My game master pointed out the error, and I stand corrected. We still need to come up with a solution to our problem of vigilante justice, though. Thanks.)

PS We think we have the solution. You take all of the questionable assets your paranormal investigations company has--blood diamonds, gun-running, drugs, plutonium, everything but the llama milking farm--courtesy of the insane yet weirdly competent secretary, and transfer it to said dead cultist (who happens to be Russian) and then tell the police that he has links to the Russian Mafia and they probably killed him and the others because their little cult was threatening to expose the Mob's activities. Whew! It's not fool-proof, but it's enough to hopefully keep Margaret's character from dying in the gas chamber (I think California still has a gas chamber) and my character (who is almost five months' preganant) from delivering her baby in jail due to accessory after the fact without trying to explain Mythos beings to civilians.

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