Call of Cthulhu : Prologue

Six years.

Six years since I entered that house in Boston. Six years since I was taken to Arkham Asylum suffering from acute schizophrenia and total amnesia. Six years missing from my life.

I remember the beat cops calling me to the house – I think I’d picked up something of a reputation as a hotshot detective. Five cases cracked in quick succession. Maybe they thought that joining them in the pouring rain that night would bring me down a peg or two. Maybe there was something more to it.

The house was owned by a religious cult. They been there for a few months, and there’d been plenty of complaints about them. Petty thefts and harassment of neighbors, strange lights in the night, chanting, music and, most disturbing of all, screams. When gunshots were reported, they couldn’t be ignored any longer.

I entered the house by the side door. It was a mess. Paper peeling from the walls, splintered floorboards, books and papers strewn all over. I made my way upstairs to find the first of many horrors of that night. A dormitory where five or six of the cultists had committed suicide. Poison it looked like. Their bodies all shared the same tattoos and scars, carved into their flesh.

In one of the rooms at the front of the house, one of the cultists was still alive. He appeared to recognize me and called my name as he stood up in front of the window. Before I could say anything, one of the cops outside shot him, spraying me with his blood. More death. More horror.

Downstairs, I found another room. On the walls were pinned a series of photographs of the same man. I felt my heart beginning to race as I recognized the face in the pictures. It was my own. Why were they watching me? What was happening here?

I found a cellar door leading down into the darkness and I could hear screams coming from below. The stairs collapsed behind me as I made my way through a makeshift tunnel to what looked like a morgue. More bodies were in evidence, and from their wounds it looked as though they had been …. experimented on.

Further down, I found somebody alive … barely. He was strapped to a slab, with tubes leading away from his body towards tanks. With mounting horror, I realized that the tanks contained his internal organs, his brain, his lights, his heart still beating. What in the name of god had they done to him. Electricity flickered and danced around him, and after a while the poor wretch was finally dead. I retrieved a green crystal from what looked like some sort of control panel in front of the slab.

The final room contained another control panel amidst some alien machinery. I felt strangely compelled to place the crystal in an empty slot and then operate the controls … 

Time slowed. Unimaginably bright lights shone from the machinery. I covered my eyes with my hands, but still I saw … things that I hesitate to describe. Creatures. Rugose cones, ten feet high, with tentacles. Horrors from beyond the stars …

Oblivion.

 "We eventually found him by following the sound of his screams -- I'd never heard anything like that before, and I hope I never hear anything like it again. When I first saw him lying there, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I've never seen a human being so drained of life, yet still breathing...he just kept chanting some strange words over and over again. It took three of us just to subdue him enough to carry him outside" – Robert Armstrong

 

 

Sweepies

Well, I'm just playing with the new preview of the flock browser. It's based on the firefox kernal, but it has in built support for del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr pictures and its own blogging tool. It's a bit wobbly as yet - it won't download previous posts for editing yet, but I think that it's worth keeping an eye on. I particularly like the flickr toolbar that displays all of your flickr images as thumbnails in the blog tool so that you can just drag them into your post when you need them.

I've had a couple of days off this week with one trip to Birmingham on Wednesday, where I managed to get loads done. Thursday afternoon was spent at Ikea, and it was a little bit stressful - there were clowns posted at the entrance for some reason, and half way round I started panicing because I thought we were going in circles and were doomed to wander amongst the showrooms for an eternity. Still, at least Jan got the office chair she wanted as well as a sort of shelf thingy to go over the bed, and I had fish and chips for lunch as a treat. Yaybo! Friday was Meadowhall day, and we completely failed to get the teapot that was the whole purpose of the trip, but instead we came back with chinese food, bodyshop deoderant and a Teen Titans comic for Jamie.

I played a bit more of Thief : Deadly Shadows, and after escaping from Pavelock prison and retrieving all of my thieving gear I found that I had been framed for a murder and now had telepathic assassins tracking me down. Hmmm, wasn't expecting that.

This morning though, saw the long awaited Call of Cthulhu : Deadly Shadows drop through the door and after doing the hoovering I've played through the prologue. Bloody hell, it's scary stuff. There are none of the usual first person health displays or numbers on the screen - everything you need to know is communicated by what you see. As you get injured, you see blood splatters and you start shaking and slowing down. More importantly though, as anyone who knows anything about the Cthulhu mythos will tell you, is your fragile grasp on reality - as the horror unfolds and your sanity is drained, the screen starts to blur and distort, the controller pulses in time with your heart beat, and the sound is muffled so that you can just hear your breathing. I think this is one to play at night time for best effect. Even on a short play, this game gets my highest rating of ACEBEST. I feel another gaming journal coming on ...

Lost Rhapsody

From b3ta.com this week, comes this very silly little flash movie for fans of Lost …

Flock

This is just a test of the flock blogging tool

Harry Potter Fiction

For them's that's interested Alicia has posted the first chapter of her new Harry Potter fan fiction - A Most Interesting Contradiction. Please let her know if you like it, and I'll nag her to get on with the next bit ...

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