Theivery, artifacts and a really big rock

[Cowardly Leon]

Hi, it's me again.

About five days ago my friends and I were doing a little light poking around in a city in Midwestern Canada. We were taking a look at some rumors that someone had been stealing items of 'mystic' importance from collections, usually the same sort of stuff and methods. Smash and grab, but they ignored anything shiny or obviously valuable for things that only collectors and occultists would see value in.
The police here have chalked it up to private sale to people not willing to buy stuff through proper channels.
Canada has been experiencing a great deal more rain than normal this year so it was pretty much wet depressing work for something during the summer. We did a lot of footwork and a lot of talking with the people involved. You know... the real investigation kind of stuff.

What we did find out was that most of these items spoke of a great and ancient evil. A powerful War-spirit that had been driven out from many countries by cabals of powerful mystics before it was exiled to the West.
The more local artifacts were supposed to be used by a group of local spellchuckers to fight and contain this War-Spirit someplace in the north and that they could (of course) also be used to free it. So the people that made these fetishes and items scattered them across the land, giving them to various Indian tribes as gifts so that they could not be gathered together for such a purpose.

Guess they didn't count on the white man coming up with the idea of putting all this old junk under one roof and calling it a museum.

A visit to some of the libraries in the area and some internet surfing gave us more to go on. For example the location of the resting place of this War-Spirit.
In the Canadian Shield there is a huge boulder that's half buried on the shore of a glacial lake. It's got this weird look to it like two twenty-foot tall stone balls had somehow been squished together. The locals have called it... get this... The Devil's Keester.
Yeah it does kinda look like a huge rocky butt. But from the legends we pieced together the War-Spirit was trapped between two bounders that were transformed into a solid whole. We figured that the thieves would be headed that way so we mentioned our suspicions to the cops and they thanked us for the theory that the robberies were by a batch of religious 'nut jobs' but it was far more likely that the items were already in someone else's collection.

I guess it's hard to take such a theory seriously when the final destination has the word 'keester' in it's name.

We got to the lake, settled in at the hotel and got our bearings... and at the suggestion of our own spellchucker, June investigated the Devil's Keester after dark. When we got there all we found were a batch of the local kids drinking beer and hanging out. Well it looked like a waste of time until I noticed that they all looked like they were stoned out of their heads, I don't mean just drink I mean STONED!
Their faces were... frozen in one position, their eyes never blinked and they had these wide toothy smiles. They never talked and although they lifted the beer cans to their mouths they never drank... the cans weren't even open.

We sat and watched for a while longer while they did their thing... then this guy in a three piece white suit comes down the beach with a suitcase. He walks up to them and they all stand up in the weird jerky way like those puppets with the strings and he opens up the suitcase and hands out the stolen goods.

It was really freaky. Every instinct I had was telling me to get my own keester out of there while Mister White-Suit began to chant while scattering dust in the air and the teens circled the boulder waving those artifacts about. I felt the air get all greasy like the inside of a bag of potato chips and a red line began to form in the boulder's 'crack'.

It was then that my friends jumped into the open and attacked the group. I... stayed in the bushes and watched. OF course the teenagers stopped what they were doing and began beating on them. Mister White-suit kept up his mumbo-jumbo while the teens fought tooth, claw and artifact against by friends and I swear that I heard a new voice in the whole thing. A second chanter was singing along with White-suit in perfect time, It wasn’t an echo but something in the immediate area. It was then that I saw the mouths appearing along the red line in the boulder… not really real solid ones but like someone drew them on the rock in red glowing lines, only they were animated. First one was there… then another and another all in a row, more and more voices joining in and the chant getting louder.

Even I could tell that things were getting bad fast. It was then that Bernie grabbed one of the teens in a bearhug and as a large whoosh of fire happened where he touched it (Bernie’s like that) there was this shriek from it that sounded like a garden claw being dragged across a sheet of steel.

This thing… ripped out of the teen’s clothing and flopped it’s burning carcass about in the sand. It was like an octopus, a starfish and a crab had done the nasty and their kid was this… boneless thing with one eye in the middle, crabclaws on each of it’s five tentacles and dozens of smaller pencil-thin tentacles were attached to those. Oh yeah… and the freakiest thing about it was it had no skin. Like those ‘flayed’ drawings of people you get in art class to get an idea of where the muscles are.

So this thing is there in the sand in what looks like it’s death-throes when Elvis grabs the shirt of the teen he’s fighting and rips it off and reveals another of these things. It’s body if you can call it that, was wrapped around the poor sucker’s own body but the tentacles were wrapped around the other limbs with those other tentacles dug deep into the skin. Maybe to the bone, I dunno, medicine and bodies is Elvis’ thing, not mine.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these teenagers all have one of these things on them, and the way that Bernie’s boy was groaning on the ground kinda let us know that these poor saps really didn’t want to be White-suit’s puppets.
I then saw an arm beginning to slide out of that rock, all red and unreal as those mouths and I swear I nearly needed new pants at that point. The thing on the ground begin lashing out at Bernie, trying to drag him down into the sand keeping him from getting anywhere near White-suit. Everyone was busy except for me so I did something really stupid… really really stupid.

I left my nice safe hiding place, and heading towards the source of the danger snuck up behind Mister White-suit and jammed my prototype Cattleprod against the back of his neck.

His chant turned into a scream and he took a jolt twice the voltage of a tazergun before turning around to look me eye-to-eye. The man’s eyes were so bloodshot I swear I couldn’t see any hint of the white, black or color in a human eye in there. Nothing but red veins. And I freaked… I cranked the ‘Prod up to the full 5x setting and hit him in the stomach with it, my finger just down on the trigger as he hit me in the face again and again.

Finally I managed to shove him back against the Boulder itself and the voices went silent and the mouths and the arm seemed to get sucked back inside just as White-suit fell down. It was like White-sit was the flaw in it all… without him the chanting stopped, War-spirit was still trapped, and those things on the teens backs detached themselves from them and lurch into the water. Bernie and June took out most of them (Got some samples for a change) but Elvis got me and the others to get the teenagers and Mister White-suit into the truck and back to town.

The official report says that we came across this nut-job by accident. He was torturing them in his Winnebago for kicks and who knows what-else. (how else are you gonna explain the weird holes in their bodies to skeptics?) And White-suit was carted off to the nearest nuthouse dressed in a nice long-sleeved jacket. I mean, he was really stark raving psycho, raving about how he’s never gonna have another chance like that for 30 years.

If anyone has a few friends in the “Greenfell home for the mentally unbalanced” any chance they can keep an eye on mister White-suit for us? We don’t know what sort of tricks he might have up his sleeve. Bernie and June did get a chance to loot… I mean look through the crap in his trailer it tells us that he was into some serious hoodoo.

Once we have a chance to look at the notes we managed to scavenge we might have a better idea what he was up to, other than no-good.


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[Private Dic McVay]

Well done up there! I got a question though. How did you get a sample of the little muscle crab things? My resident parapsychologist would kill for a tangible sample. The way he tells it, we get the proof of the supernatural, we can alert the world as a whole to the idea.

If thats really the case, be on your guard. Im sure there isnt a govornment group or cult that wouldnt kill you and all your friends for that sample.

[Kolya]

Well done up there! I got a question though. How did you get a sample of the little muscle crab things? My resident parapsychologist would kill for a tangible sample. The way he tells it, we get the proof of the supernatural, we can alert the world as a whole to the idea.

If thats really the case, be on your guard. Im sure there isnt a govornment group or cult that wouldnt kill you and all your friends for that sample.

Including your resident parapsychologist.

Be on guard indeed...

[Cowardly Leon]

How did you get a sample of the little muscle crab things?

To be honest, I'm not entirely certain. That was more June and Bernie's doing. They just had enough of one dead one left over to actually put in a body bag and bring with us back to our trailer.
Cripes it stank... like burnt fish rotting under a hot sun, then again it was dead and Bernie's got that fire thing going on.

Elvis isn't a fish-scientist but he managed to get a styrophoam box packed with ice to keep it cool while he took some samples before we found a regular sized freezer to freeze it solid for the trip home.

The thing is uglier dead than it was alive but despite this "proof" don't get your hopes up. We can send cellular samples to some folks (As of this writing we are sending some photos and samples to the Lazlo mailing address) and any information that our friends at the local aquarium can get from it but so far they think it's an undiscovered breed of... well.. they call it a Cephalopod. Pretty much that 's the fancy way of calling it a squid.

They're not sure until the DNA tests come in but they say it has similar features to the "Vampyroteuthis infernalis". Specifically the pencil thin 'tentacles' are dexterous nerve clusters similar to 'filimants' that the Vampyroteuthis infernalis uses to hunt prey in the black sunless parts of the colder oceans.

It seems that there are still things down there that man doesn't know of yet so this thing might just be labled as one of them.

So much for proof.

We told them about how those 'filimants' seemed to penetrate the body of it's prey (Didn't mention the fact it was a human body they were inside) and they got all excited... then they told us that they found something just as exciting...

Whatever this thing is it was female... and it had an egg pouch with exactly 13 eggs in it... all fertilised.

They don't know how long it will be before they hatch but they're calling in some favors from Vancouver Aquarium to help them out.

Oh... they told us that out of respect of us being the initial 'discoverers' we get to choose the name if it's a new species.


I'm voting for "Gepettoid tyrannus"

[mrloucifer]

It seems that there are still things down there that man doesn't know of yet so this thing might just be labled as one of them.

So much for proof.

Bloody Cripes... so much for proof indeed. Well, cheers none the less blokes.