Not Quite Lovecraft

You had to act fast. As frenzied as the cultists were in their ritual once they noticed you everything would break loose. You took a deep breath and drew on your spell to spread fear, targeting the head priest leading the ritual first and doing your best to spread it out among the cultists. Oddly enough they didn't react the way you expected, beyond the head priest turning towards you. Perhaps the unnatural nature of the ritual itself and the frenzy they had worked themselves into already had them filled with fear, and the amount you introduced with your spell did not make an obvious difference.

You weren't giving up on this. You drew your gun and shot the head priest. Even with him facing you and clearly starting to order his cultists to turn on you, he wasn't fast enough to dodge the bullet. He fell back in shock from the bullet puncturing his lung and leaving him to collapse to a slow painful death. More of the cultists turned to face you, and you had to press back to gain space as you shot more into the group. Unfortunately they had reached mob mentality, and looked more than willing to tear you apart with their bare hands even as the ones you shot fell back and were partly trampled by their fellows.

You pulled on your ability to cast darkness through the warehouse as a last minute push forward. You took a breath. What now? Summon Nemo and Phileas to fight with you? Summon a horror? Perhaps you could create confusion and have them fight each other.

[ ]Focus on freeing the victims
[ ]Summon your familiars to fight with you
[ ]Cast a confusion spell over the cultists
[ ]Summon a horror
[ ]Write-in

I do not want to stop writing, but I am currently too sick to be able to focus and get anything down. Hopefully I'll be back in a couple weeks!

You can't stop thinking about the poor humans being consumed by the monstrosity in the center. Again you wish that your mind would reject the reality of what you're seeing so you could take in less of the horror. But you can't. You shove your way through the violent mob of cultists, doing your best to push them back. You accumulate a few bruises before you reach the worm like creature in the center and reach out to try and pull the closest sacrifice out. She screams in pain at being yanked, even as she clutches tightly to you with desperation. She hadn't thought anyone would come, but you had made it here.

You pulled and pulled. You weren't strong enough, you've never been that physically strong. You resort to pulling out your claws to clumsily start slicing at the monstrosity's flesh to try and cut her out. The cultists behind you shove you forward, and you find yourself being pulled into the monstrosity's maw alongside the other sacrifices. A surge of adrenaline shoots through you as you start fighting harder. You refuse to become part of this! You've come so far, how can you be stopped here?

The monstrosity's flesh clings to you. You can feel it trying to merge with you and make you a part of it. You grab your gun and blindly try to reload it, only to fumble it and lose it inside the gullet. The woman you were trying to rescue is clinging to you as if there's still a chance you'll both get out of this. You take a deep breath and start slamming your fists into the monstrosity's flesh. You aren't going to stop until either it or you are dead.

It's reckless, you know it is, but you draw from your own blood and messily smear it across the entrance of the maw. You chant out a spell, repeating the words "render" and "sunder" over and over again. You can feel the room grow heavier and heavier, pressing down on your mind-

The monster is dead. The woman beside you is badly injured, her legs cut off from where they had been consumed. The cultists are screaming around you. You are exhausted. You slump over and play dead. They won't kill you if they think they already succeeded. The cultists slowly scatter, and you have the chance to pass out from your injuries.

You wake up to find the woman you had been trying to save at risk of dying from bleeding out. You're not much better, but you at least are fully intact. That's more than can be said for her.

Sanity Lost: 20 pts
Pick a neurosis:
[ ]Compulsive Washing: you need to be clean. You will rot if you are not
[ ]Hoplomania: Firearms are life. You need them. You cannot live without them. You will collect them whenever possible and migrate to their presence
[ ]Agromania: You only live in open spaces. Closed spaces feel suffocating. The open sky makes you feel free
[ ]Cheer: You cannot stop smiling, no matter what you are feeling


[ ]Contact Nemo to fetch you
[ ]Try to call for Emily
[ ]Call on Isis
[ ]Crawl to a phone to call a hospital
[ ]Write-in

You reach out to Isis. You don't even know what you're saying. The chant for the barrier? An offering? A desperate plea? All you know is you're reaching for the goddess with the desperation of the dying.

And she responds.

It isn't much. There's a soft pour of warmth through your body, and a renewal of energy, just enough to get moving. You know that you will owe the goddess for this. You pull yourself forward and over to the woman. She looks at you as she breaths in little gasps. You grab onto her hand, it's colder than it should be, but there's still a faint pulse in her. "We're not dying here," you promise. You feel some of Isis' warmth trickle through you to the woman. You know it'll be enough to hold her here. The woman won't die.

You get up and stagger out towards the docks. It's jarring to walk out and see workers still going about their lives as if nothing happened. None of them know what is in the warehouse behind you. You stumble forward and grab onto a man's sleeve. He jerked away and looked at you in fear and revulsion.

"Please, we need help. We need an ambulance," you begged.

"We?" the man half questioned.

"Yes. She-there's a woman, she's...worse."

>>>>

It's a relief to be in the hospital and bandaged up. It's a touch uncomfortable, you can tell the doctors are confused at times by what they see in your charts. The scales they can't see likely confuse them. But you are being restored back to the state you are in your portrait. It would likely go faster if you could focus on painting that directly instead of simply sitting in bed resting.

Jackson comes to your bedside. "What went wrong?"

"They were in the middle of sacrificing two people. I couldn't let them do it," you explained.

Jackson gave a smile. "Ah. You're too much of a hero." He patted your shoulder. "The smart move would have been to wait for a better chance."

"But then the woman I grabbed wouldn't be here. How is she?"

"She's alive. For more than that?" Jackson shrugged. "It'll take time to know for sure. Survivors of cults are usually in rough shape."

"Well, there's that at least." You let out a slow breath. "Can you tell them I'll pay for her medical needs?"

"I can. You really won't stop when facing these things, will you?" Jackson shook his head. "I thought I was doing good, but I always avoided direct confrontations. Just gathered the evidence to reveal it."

"Still pretty good. This last case has landed us both in the hospital, huh?" you tried to laugh.

"The police are going nuts on it," Jackson informed you. "They're cracking down pretty hard on everyone. A couple people on the force even got arrested."

You took a deep breath and relaxed. "Good. That's good." You still had to make an offering to Isis for keeping you and the woman alive long enough to get to the hospital. After that, well. There were still things to chase.

[ ]Go to England
[ ]Go to Egypt
[ ]Go to Africa
[ ]Go to China
[ ]Work on your portrait
[ ]Study the books you retrieved
[ ]Write-in