Marina Asylum Mods (marinamod) wrote in marina_ooc, @ 2010-10-01 14:56:00 |
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Entry tags: | mod:event |
[ Event: Darkness, Rain, Monsters : Round 3 ]
Marina's streets are pitch-black tonight. A cold rain falls. Better get out the flashlights, because that's the only way you're going to be seeing anything until dawn. It's like a power outage, only the communicators still work.
If you venture outdoors, be careful where you step: random street corners seem to have been mysteriously replaced with deep, gaping chasms. But at least everything else seems normal, right?
No, wait -- there are also monsters waiting for you in the darkness.
NOTE: Everything in this post only applies to your character if they have "darkness" in their hearts. This is not necessarily a literal darkness, but characters who are bad people, e.g. evil or psychopathic, do automatically qualify. Any character who has ever experienced something violent that haunted them -- whether or not it is their fault, whether or not the situation was later corrected, whether or not they remember it -- also qualifies. However, a deeply good character who is also from a school drama and thus has little experience with violence or trauma might see nothing at all.
There is a little wiggle room, though, if you really want your character to see monsters, and a character with more darkness in his or her heart can (optionally) experience more drastic effects.
If you're still not sure whether this describes your character, other players have asked more specifically about their own characters in the comments on the previous post, and you can do the same here.
height: 5'8"
weight: 160lbs
difficulty: easy-medium alone, but they always travel in packs
found: all sectors, outside
A stooped reptilian creature -- two-legged, smallish arms, a long thick tail for balance, and large, powerful hind legs that sport a single mean-looking curved claw. (In other words, this monster looks rather like a velociraptor.) Where its skin isn't torn to expose muscle and bone, it's covered in crumpled molting feathers that are, if you've been in the Asylum for quite a while, a familiar shade of deep purple.
Lizards are fast, vicious, and -- oh yes -- hungry. This monster is unusually interested in actively hunting you down and will begin to do so the second it catches a whiff of your scent. It will use all of its available weaponry to maim you: its teeth, in short biting strikes; the smaller claws on its "hands", which are mildly venomous (think the way cat scratches itch); and of course the nasty claw on its toe, which can cause serious injury if you aren't careful. Lizards like to jump to close the distance between them and you, and they can jump as far as eight feet, so far away might not be far enough.
An individual Lizard isn't too difficult to take down. Pepper it with gunfire, shoot it full of arrows, or stab it repeatedly with a sword... they're all reasonably effective. (Needless to say, energy blasts also work just fine.) Unfortunately, Lizards never travel alone: there's always a full pack there, six to ten creatures, and that's when things get hairy. The equivalent of a high-powered shotgun works wonders!
Lizards are also very cooperative and very social. In fact, if you're fighting one pack too close to another pack's territory, the last Lizard you kill may sound an alarm that brings that pack running. If you're looking for a night of solid battle, Lizards will come the closest to swarming you indefinitely.
height: 5'5"
weight: 140lbs (curvy but muscular)
difficulty: medium alone, hard in packs
found: in and around the hospital
At a glance, this monster might almost fool you into thinking it is, in fact, an ordinary nurse; it wears the white uniform, if rather more stained and scandalously-short than would usually be permitted, right down to the cap on its head. But an even remotely closer look would reveal that said "head" is grossly disfigured to the point where any features a Nurse might have are completely unrecognizable. And when it moves, in little starts and jerks, there is a sickeningly fleshy popping noise, as if its bones keep dislocating.
Nurses carry weapons instead of fighting with their bare hands, and a Nurse's difficulty changes slightly depending on what it's wielding: an IV stand, which it will drag behind it with telltale scraping noises; a syringe, filled with a dubious liquid that will leave you weak for the next IC day; or a scalpel, which can actually be the most deadly of the three. The IV stand obviously has the longest reach, and the Nurse will attempt to bash you with it, but Nurses brandish scalpels with lightning speed and their rusted blades are still somehow lethally sharp. (You might want to get a tetanus shot tomorrow at the real hospital!)
A single Nurse can be faced in combat with any melee weapon -- blunt or edged -- but more than one is best handled at range, where you'll have a distinct advantage. If there's a real pack, three to eight Nurses all gathered together, then keep an eye out for the one Nurse in their midst bearing a syringe; it will try to get behind you, or swoop in if its brethren are grappling with you. If a Nurse manages to inject you, it'll hit like hard liquor, making fighting off the rest of the pack or escaping much more difficult.
As implied above, Nurses are pack-hunters -- but not exclusively, and they aren't particularly social; they're much more likely to attack you because you got too close to them than they are to do it because you're beating down another Nurse right in front of them. This monster is also extremely sensitive to light, so you'll be safe in the dark as long as you don't accidentally brush up against its cold, dead skin.
height: 7'6"
weight: 280lbs
difficulty: impossible
found: all sectors, outsideNOTE: There is only one of this particular monster, and it cannot be NPCed by players. If you would like to encounter it, reply to this post. There will be a maximum of three encounters with this monster per event, with preference given to players who present us with plot-related reasons for why they should meet The Watcher.The Watcher is roughly humanoid, with thick, powerful limbs. If for some reason you get close enough to notice, it has the usual number of fingers and toes -- but they are all the same length, blunted, and perfectly symmetrical. Its skin is exceptionally cold and has an odd texture, almost like brushed metal. Its face is perfectly circular and perfectly featureless -- until you do something to attract its attention and it opens its one large blue eye, which will swivel around slowly to fix on your face.
Or maybe lock on would be a better way to put it.
From this point on, The Watcher will step towards you -- slowly, stiffly, implacably -- while that eye, which can see perfectly well in the dark, follows your every movement with an almost mechanical precision, darting around to keep you in its sights. Bullets will ricochet off. Swords will fail to cut into The Watcher's cold flesh. Blunt objects will bounce. Magic will be completely ineffective. So you had better start running.
But if you stay where you are and think about it, you might realize that, even though this monster is incapable of making facial expressions, it seems to be... judging you. And this judgment is important. If the eye turns red, The Watcher will come after you unrelentingly and you will die -- permanently. (With player permission, obviously.) If, however, the eye remains blue, the Watcher may kill you carelessly, but you'll wake up tomorrow without so much as a scratch.
Unless you count the nifty new scar on your belly: a single rough line, an inch in length and about the width of a blunt, symmetrical fingertip.
1. No one can see monsters on video or in photographs, not even the person who was right there, recording it!
2. The monsters are edible, but not very tasty.
3. If you've got a great monster idea for future posts, please feel free to share it in a comment here!
4. People who travel together will experience similar distortions of reality, unless one of them has no darkness in his or her heart at all; in that case, that character will not see, feel, or in any other way sense the monsters that are attacking their companions.
5. And speaking of senses, there's no magic or any other kind of energy involved in the monsters for characters with such abilities to pick up on. As far as characters who can see the monsters can tell, they're just real, living creatures and give off no particularly strange energy; as far as characters who can't see the monsters can tell, there's nothing there at all.
The Lens of Truth is a mod-approved exception to this rule.
6. If you trip into one of the holes, you will fall for a while. Eventually, you will black out, and wake up the next morning in the middle of a perfectly ordinary street.
7. Both monster blood and monster bodies will disappear. Monster bodies do so when you're not looking at them -- maybe they've been eaten by other monsters? -- and the blood will be gone in the morning.