Unexplained Phenomena Unit, session 4: the Fingers of Devi

Played 23/9/22. This mystery is inspired by Jeepers Creepers!! a MOTW scenario by RS Veverka.

Player characters:

Ghost, the Crooked Assassin (Aaron) - a quiet, stoic assassin, he's with the unit as long as they keep paying him. Wears a black leather jacket, tank top, tribal wolf tattoo on his right arm, sniper rifle in an inconspicuous case that he has slung over his shoulder.

John Moore, the Expert (Kye) - the teams man with the van, and the van has everything an organised monster hunter could ever need. He's a rough middled-aged guy with greying brown hair and a scruffy short beard, wears fairly smart clothes.

Mike "the sensorite" Jones, the Flake (Paul) - the least jaded and most caring of the team, an excitable young nerdy guy obsessed with sci-fi, fantasy, occultism and conspiracy theories. Wears a long red coat, jeans, illuminati T-shirt, John Lennon style round sunglasses, serpent pendant, rings on every finger.

Salem, the Crooked Charlatan (Harvey) - a meticulous, sly and bitter con-man, born from a life of crime, looking for ways to manipulate the supernatural to his advantage. He looks imposing, with sharp black hair and goatee, tight grey suit with black shirt and tie.

Alexander Demonaco, the Professional (Dom) - focused and humourless, a professional agent of UPU, the most devoted to the organisation of the team. He has black hair with shaved sides, handsome face with a goatee.

Some resources that the team gained from the last adventure, that went into Mikes possession for study and safekeeping (and keeping secret from UPU):

- 5 vials of Alchemium (a drinkable form of the magical hot spring water from Whistlepine town) - when drunk during a rest (10 minutes minimum), all your wounds will be magically healed.

- 1 wand - in the hands of an innately magical or psychic individual, the wand provides +1 to spellcasting rolls. In the hands of a non-magical individual, an Alchemium vial slotted into the wand's core can fuel up to three spells before the vial is expended.

Early in the morning, Mike Jones received a distressing voicemail message from a cousin he hadn’t spoken to in a while: “Hey man, it's Mark. It’s… it’s been a while, huh? Look, I need to cut to the chase. You work for the government, right? Some kind of division that investigates stuff that doesn’t make sense? I’m making this call from prison. Last night, I came home to my boyfriend acting strange - you remember David, right? I can’t remember if you’ve met him, but he… he wasn’t himself. H-he attacked me. I knocked him out in self-defence and called the police, but they took one look at my history of violence, assumed I was the aggressor and arrested me. I swear I’m taking my meds, I swear that I’ve been doing better these days. Please… you’ve gotta help.”

Having been called into a UPU supernatural sciences and archive facility by Alexander Demonaco for a debrief on the last mission, Mike took the opportunity to requisition some drugs and occult materials to help him experiment with the spellbook they had previously acquired, and he succeeded in opening his mind to other dimensions and entities outside of space and time.

His first premonition was: a room filled with icy water, slabs of meat and glowing blue spheres floating upward, at the very bottom is a glowing blue crack. Staring through from the other side is a giant blue eye - it’s pupil shaped like the symbol. A feeling of malevolence emanates from it.

Looking for Mike after he didn’t turn up to the debrief meeting, the rest of the team find him and slaps him out of his trance. Demonaco bans him from requisitioning any other materials. Cut to the debriefing scene - the team tell Demonaco about the monster and the portal from the previous adventure, but successfully omit their dealings with the peaceful inhumans without Demonaco being any the wiser. When Mike brings up both the voicemail he received and the premonition he had, Demonaco makes some calls and discovers there have been multiple disappearances in Mikes cousins city in the last 12 hours.

A few hours later, the team arrives in Harkon city. Posing as FBI agents, Demonaco and Salem go door-to-door asking about the disappearances. They find that the people who disappeared were either delivery drivers or ordinary people that were last seen going to the shops. Sightings of the people before they disappeared described them as acting strange, and drinking a lot of vinegar.

Posing as an FBI agent, John went to the police station to have a chat with Mike's cousin, Mark. Mark's version of events was that when he got home to his boyfriend David, he was drinking a lot of vinegar and acting kind of drunk. As soon as Mark made his presence known, David got up and said he needed to leave, in a way that didn’t sound like himself. Mark blocked his way and asked him what was going on. David started biting and punching, and they got into an altercation that ended with David being knocked out. When John asks the officer supervising him if this situation could have anything to do with the disappearances, he’s given the contact info of the police chief currently leading the search parties.

Posing as a journalist and cameraman respectively, Mike and Ghost interview David in the hospital, who doesn’t seem to remember anything, but he admits to being a delivery driver for a meat processing plant. The team regroups at Mark and David’s house. John and Mike do some research into the entity that Mike saw in his premonition, and find that it fits the description of an old god of discord called ‘Devi’ (pronounced ‘Deev-eye’), a serpent too large to escape its own realm, so it sends proxies to enact its will. Analysing the meat from the back of David’s delivery truck, John and Mike also discover two broken egg shells in the meat, that look like the glowing spheres from Mike's premonition.

At the same time, the rest of the team discovers a black, foot-long leech-like creature hiding in the bathroom, with a single blue eye - with a pupil shaped like a symbol. Presumably the creature that took control of David until he was knocked out. The team fight two of these creatures to the death, noting that they keep attempting to latch onto the back of people's necks in an attempt to possess them.

Mike figures out that if the brainworm creatures like acidic substances like vinegar and the cold (eggs stored in frozen meat) then they probably don’t like the opposite, so John finds an old flamethrower in his van and Mike and Demonaco run to the shops to grab some bleach (an alkaline substance) and vinegar (to lure the creatures if needed). However, at the shops, they find that the shop staff and a few customers have become possessed and are shambling off with arms full of vinegar bottles, in the direction of the meat processing plant. After being spotted and chased around a bit, confident that the processing plant is the source of these creatures, the team regroup again and come up with a plan.

Ghost finds a rooftop to keep an eye on the meat factory with his sniper. He sees the entrance guarded by police officers from the search party, all possessed and armed to the teeth. He spots delivery vans being loaded up round back with more of the egg-laden meat - if those vans get out, these creatures could spread exponentially. Meanwhile, the rest of the team ambush the group of possessed shop staff and customers that they had seen earlier, so that Mike can test his theory about the bleach being corrosive to the worm creatures - and it works. They save the victims they can, hide the bodies of those they can’t, and start moving towards the meat factory.

At this point, Ghost has sniped the control panel to the meat factory’s entry gate to prevent the egg-laden delivery trucks from leaving. When the first truck starts ramming into the gate over and over, Ghost hesitates to shoot the possessed driver, but on Demonaco’s order he does it. The rest of the crew stealthily get into position to contaminate the factory’s sprinkler system with bleach, throw a Molotov cocktail into the loading bay to activate the sprinklers, and then quickly close the shutter door to keep the possessed workers and police officers inside. The plan goes off with only a few scrapes and bullet wounds sustained, and our heroes get covered up to enter the bleach-filled building.

Stepping over the chemically burned bodies, they find the freezer room. Opening the heavy metal door, they see a room where the floor has fallen through to reveal a watery pit. In the depths of the water, the team saw exactly what Mike had seen in his premonition - the eye of Devi staring back at them. Telepathically, Devi communicates with them, but only Salem understands the promise of return and vengeance. The crack in the pit closes, and the team is alone once more.