Search the Community

OOC thread for rolls and resolutions for thread. Weird times in Small Town, Arizona, U.S.A. Nick, Equinox and Pitch investigate!

GM June 12th, 2014, 4.45 PM, Half-Moon Summit Park, west Springsvale, Arizona "Found it like this. Last week." said Jane Aqui as she climbed out of the truck, the middle-aged park ranger tilting her broad brown hat a little farther from her eyes, the better to squint at the ungainly, smelly heap in front of her. She'd kept a polite few feet from the new arrivals since first meeting them, the odd crew seeming to get a little more awe even than the usual outside the world's super-capital. Even the evidently taciturn Jane had dug a little deeper than the usual "Can you really do magic?" that seemed to come up every time they were recognized. Which admittedly had been twice. Springsvale wasn't much. At the best of times, and especially when perched a few hundred feet above the valley the town stood in, it was compact and industrious, a collection of pale houses, a brightly-painted school and dark warehouses, offices and factories hugging miles of the scrub-rich eastern bank by a small, fast-running, very blue river, the town's dusty road running south to the I-15 highway only a few miles distant. A few bits of suburbia spilled away from the river, looking very much like fingers on some skeletal hand. Somewhere behind them, far out of sight past the hills, lurked the rugged Grand Canyon's eastern end. Far below, another truck pulled into town, one of dozens they'd seen since getting to Springsvale forty-seven minutes ago. Small ponds and rivlets spilled away from the main Springwater, but beside those distractions it ran as direct as compass point. They weren't there for the sights, though. At least, not the natural, or man-made ones. They had been called here to deal with the giant snake lying in a dead, mouldering heap in front of them, surrounded by sickly-glowing runes. A small camp of white tents had sprung up in another clearing about 50 yards away, from Phoenix University judging by the emblem a few of the laughing, chatting twenty-somethings and dignified-looking elders sported, and the comically grand white-red flag. The heat and wind hadn't been kind to the corpse, it was bleached enough to disguise whatever color it had been before, and was now a feeble yellow-brown. It was lying on its back, belly cut open and resting a gaping, sunken head on its coils. It was already sagging from decay. They had been able to smell it long before they saw it. Ranger Aqui cleared her throat "Gathered you folks knew about this...kind of thing. Heard it from those kids who do that show about the town. It's not normally that strange. 'Least not giant-snake-strange." She turned her squint to the ghoulishly-painted necromancer, the robed witch, and the biker-looking woman with the stick "So..." her squint turned quizzically to the deceased serpentine object of their distress "...what's this mean?"