A Night at the Museum

By Chipdawes at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Leoboudv., Public Domain, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4578262

 

 

    Perhaps it was unwise to start a blog and then leave it alone for the next six months. Nevertheless, here I go again.

    This weekend I ran a scenario from the 2024 Shotgun Scenario Contest titled "Mellification," written by Andrascha and Hendrik. It's pretty good! I had a lot of fun running it, and the players acquitted themselves well. This is going to be an AAR for that game.

    Most of my players I had introduced to the system just a month previously (in another shotgun scenario, the relevant AAR perhaps to come) and none could be considered regulars. I will take the opportunity to briefly thank prolific scenario author mellonbread for the pregens I used, in case I never get around to writing it.

    Let's begin! Content warnings for body horror, gun violence, and dead animals. Spoilers to follow, naturally.

 

 

    The responding Agents were:

• Albert White, Firefighter
  
• Charity Chandler, FBI Special Agent
• Daniel Walsh, Criminal Locksmith
• Patrick Brewer, Freelance Journalist
  

 

    The scenario takes place over a single day and night at the Penn Museum, an archaeological institute in Philadelphia. The Agents arrive in midmorning, having been informed by their Delta Green contact that Freddie Grant, a night watchman, had been hospitalized yesterday on account of half his bones suddenly disappearing

    They made introductions with the museum director, a woman named Constance Ainsworth, using Agent Chandler's credentials to establish an official investigation. They immediately inquire whether the incident was recorded on camera, and Dr. Ainsworth shows them to a bank of monitors manned by Jamal Coleman, the first person to come across Mr. Grant after his misfortune. 

    The footage shows Mr. Grant making his rounds before pausing suddenly, and standing still for nearly a minute before collapsing. Agent Chandler and Mr. Walsh notice a barely distinguishable blur shifting in the darkness.

    They depart to make a closer inspection of the exhibition wing where this happened, a recently-installed display of ancient Chinese funerary culture. In the low light, they examine stone burial urns, bronze spade coins, a millennium-old mummy from the deserts of central Asia, a splint-mail burial suit made of polished jade, an arrangement of foot-tall terracotta figurines, a mustachioed copper mask, and a heavily oxidized copper sphere.

    In doing so, they notice several things:

• The sphere glistens with a sheen of fluid under its key light.
• The mummy's skin looks unusually supple, more leather than parchment.
• No matter where in the exhibition hall they stray, those figurines always seem to face them.
  

    The Agents want to inspect the sphere without its plexiglass display case, so Mr. Walsh quickly rakes the lock open (hardly a high-security application) and removes it. The fluid is faintly yellow, and gives off an intensely sweet scent. Honey, they conclude. They also notice that beneath the patina, the sphere has an inscription in oracle bone script.

    Having been told by Dr. Ainsworth that several pieces in the exhibition are borrowed from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Mr. Brewer searches through the museum's online archives. He doesn't find any relevant listings, but while trawling through the Wayback Machine, finds a mention of a Dr. Jensen Wu heading the "Unclassifiable Artifacts Department." Mr. Brewer recognizes the name of the Delta Green friendly, but his staff phone number has been disconnected.

     The Agents resolve to find an expert in oracle bone script, and immediately encounter one in the form of the surly Dr. Zhou Jing. He's unhappy to have the cops around, but picks up after translating the inscription. The sphere contains the heart of an ancient sorcerer preserved in honey, material evidence for the mellified man—an apocryphal miracle cure made from honeyed human flesh. 

    Being closing time by now, the Agents speak to Dr. Ainsworth to let her know they'll be staying overnight. Mr. Coleman is warned to not approach the exhibition hall (no betting on lightning failing to strike twice). Agent Chandler guards the corridor to keep people away, Mr. Brewer goes to question the facilities staff, Mr. Walsh heads back to the exhibition to inspect the mask, and Mr. White pinches a fire axe from a storage room.

    The journalist Mr. Brewer meets the janitorial shift lead, Jodie Williamson. When asked about strange goings-on, she takes him to the museum's basement to show him a storage room next to the steam boiler where dead, sticky rats have been turning up at an inexplicable rate. A new batch is scattered across the floor. Mr. Brewer prods one with the tip of a disposable pen. No bones, no organs, just a skin-sack of rancid honey that oozes from the dead animal's mouth.

    Agent Chandler intercepts Dr. Jing when he wants to enter the exhibition hall to take some photos of the sphere containing the mellified heart. No can do—a crime scene, you see. He stalks away.

    Mr. Walsh cracks the lock on the mask's case with similar ease. The mask is green with oxidation, and bare of ornamentation. The eyeholes are empty. Hedging his bets, Mr. Walsh places the ancient artifact over his face. He is not possessed by a ghost. He turns around. On the opposite side of the room, the copper sphere glows with a faint inner light, pale and diffuse. He hears something—pa-pum. A long minute passes. Pa-pum. Like a felt mallet over a drumskin. Like a heartbeat. He calls for Agent Chandler.

    She's halfway back when she finds a body collapsed to the floor. Dr. Jing, with his camera in his hands. He tried to sneak in through the utility access corridors, and nearly made it. By the sensation when taking his pulse, nothing flows in his veins anymore but cold, viscous honey.

    The Agents rally to the exhibition hall, as Mr. Walsh sees something shift in the darkness from the corner of his eye. A humanoid form of pale and diffuse mist, robed and faceless, glides from the shadows. Mr. Walsh draws his .38 revolver, fires. The exhibition hall descends into panic, as only whoever wears the mask can see this spectral presence. A stray gunshot shatter a funerary urn. Focusing themselves, the Agents turn their weapons on the sphere in its plexiglass case. Bullets riddle a relic twenty times older than the agency they serve, and the misty form dissolves but for its heart, which sinks into the floor. Below. The boiler room.

    They burst into the basement just in time to meet eyes with the shambling monstrosity that's burst from its cocoon in the boiler room: 400 pounds of gristle, bone, and semi-crystallized honey charges. Agent Chandler makes for cover deeper in the room while the other three occupy it in an arched threshold with gunfire and axe-strikes from point-blank range. The honeyed flesh soaks their pocket-pistol gunfire, barring one or two lucky shots. 

    An accidental discharge by Agent Chandler penetrates a steam pipe, creating a gout of hot vapor that Mr. White tries to shove the monster into. He's overcome by the flesh's supernatural strength, however, and is pinned against a wall. The flesh begins to tear off ragged strips of skin, pasting them on with congealed blood and honey to repair the damage done to it. Mr. White manages to push free with the haft of his fire axe while the monstrosity is distracted by gunfire. It changes focus to Mr. Brewer, but in a single miraculous overhand swing, Mr. White splits its skull like a log down to the vertebrae of its misassembled spinal column.

    The hulking body is hurled into the coal-fired belly of the museum's boiler furnace, where it burns with the smell of rancid honey-mustard barbecue. Agent Chandler wipes any suspicious sections of footage from the museum's camera system, and they frame the dead Dr. Jing as a convenient suspect for the accident that befell Freddie Grant. The little inconsistencies, the lingering matter of how any of this happened at all?

    Well.

    Nothing a little red tape can't fix.