You and Jasmine pull up to Eastgate Plaza. It's a large stone brown building, easily a few thousand feet wide and two stories tall. The signs with the names of the stores were taken down a long time ago, the outlines of the names have faded away over 40 years. As you drive up, the doors of whatever department store that was here are boarded up. There are at least eight ways in and out throughout the mall, boarded up just like this exit.
"If you would do the honors. I left my crowbar at home" Jasmine says as she looks at you expectantly.
"On it" You say. With your enhanced strength, you pull the sheets of rotted wood off of the doors easily, revealing broken glass door. While the largest would be large enough for Jasmine to crawl through, there's no way you'd get through. "Hold on..." You say. With a single kick, you kick down the doors. They crash to the ground in a heap of twisted metal and broken glass.
"If you don't mind going first." Jasmine says. She reaches into her pocket and takes out a small, metal cylindrical flashlight. Pressing the button on the back, the flashlight emits a bright blue beam of light.
"Just don't shoot at every shadow you see, and we'll be fine, Calamity Jane." You say. Gingerly, you step through the door. Jasmine shrugs and follows you. As she does, she places the sheet of wood back where it was.
It's impossible to tell for sure what store it was before the plaza was abandoned. Everything is covered in a layer of dust, to the point that you leave footprints occasionally. A central glass countertop/display in front of you may have held jewelry or perfume though that's just a guess. To the left and right, the floor turns to carpet where cloths racks may have been, but you don't see any dressing rooms. In front of you, a pair of escalators, one heading up and one heading down, are frozen, leaving them with the functionality of stairs.
"So, store by store or should we work our way up start at the bottom and work our way up?" Jasmine asks.
"Why the basement?" You ask.
"Well, I'm thinking that if you're hiding something, you'd wanna hide it in the basement" Jasmine says. "I say, we get there first. If things get crazy,
Seeing no reason to argue, you both start the long, long process of painstakingly looking through the mall. You and Jasmine stick together. You give the store a coursery look as you sweep the mall, but Jasmine goes over every inch you go through with a fine toothed comb, more than once, asking you to stop as she checks out something or another that looked off. In one of the stores, that you think may have sold appliances, there's construction equipment. Planks of wood that were brought in, power tools, paint and spackle, which has long since dried up, newspapers that were put on the floor.
"Looks like someone tried to do some remodeling here..." You say.
"Yeah, but it looks like they didn't get very far..." Jasmine says as she shines her light on the wall. "Looks like this entire wall, and some of the floors are newer. Relatively speaking." After it was pointed out to you, you start to notice it as well. THe tiles near where the equipment is slightly newer, or rather, less dust covered than the tiles from where you walked in. Jasmine shines her lights at the paper and slowly walks over.
"What are you doing, Jazz?" You ask. Jasmine bends down and sweeps some dust from the papers and inspects it.
"Checking the date" Jasmine says as she tosses the paper aside and picking up another one. "Aaaand it looks like it was around... 1992 when these guys were here. Or they really like collecting old papers"
"So, they weren't here recently" You say a little relief surging through you.
You both keep going, eventually getting through the plaza itself, and you get a sense of the basic layout of the mall. In the very center of the mall is a rotunda, with an open space that stretched from the basement to the ceiling. Up above, is a massive skylight from which hangs a metal chandelier. Evidently, no one wanted to haul it out of here. The chain supporting it is long enough that the top of the chandelier is below the top floor's floor, and wide enough to take up nearly the entire width of the rotunda. From the rotunda, there are six hallways going each way, lined with shops and occasionally branching off for something like the food court, restrooms, other stores, and offices. The hallways ended at an entrance to one of the department stores. All around the routunda, there's a set of scaffolding. Jasmine thinks that they may have been for painters, painting over the murals that were on the walls separating the basement from the first floor, and the first floor from the second. The tile floor from one of the department stores, leading to the central plaza has been torn up, leaving just the concrete.
You both continue to search Each. and Every. Store. Making sure there's nothing more dangerous than a swarm of rats hiding in the darkness. Eventually, Jasmine turns to you. "So, you said you were working on a new spell this week, right?" Jasmine says.
"Yeah" "I mean, if I'm gonna be have magic, I might as well use it, right?" You say. You think about the spell you've been training on this week. You don't want to bust it out in a real fight yet, but you think you have a good handle on it.
"So, don't keep me in suspense. What was it?" Jasmine asks.
[] "Chain Lightning Bolt. If it hits someone, then I can make the bolt pass through them and hit someone else."
[] "Mage hand" "Hey, didn't DnD steal name?" "You know I'm not into that kind of stuff, Jazz"
[] "Impression. Lets someone change their voice. If they think that I'm a man when I'm in armor, they might not think it's me when I'm outside of it"
[] "Heal. I'm technically skipping a spell tier, but I don't think that healing small cuts would make a difference. " "Well, yeah, you're gonna take some knocks out there.
[] "Reflect. It takes damage and reflects it back to whoever attacked me. I can only keep it up for a second though, so I need to get the timing right"
[] Write in (Must be approved by QM)
As you both continue your long treck through the building, you finally get to the third floor. Besides more equipment abandoned mid renovation, and a few dead rats, you haven't found anything of note. You and Jasmine had been relatively quiet the first two floors. If there was someone, or something here, you don't want to let them know. But now, you've gone through most of the mall. You're starting to relax with the job almost done. As you walk across the third floor, Jasmine turns to you again.
"You know... you feel like you're in a horror movie?" Jasmine asks as she walks forward, walking in a small jewelry store.
"What do you mean?" You ask before thinking about it. Dark place, isolated, lots of creative ways to get killed in here. And since you have enough powers to actually be the killer, you'd be killed first to establish the threat. "I see your point." You conceive. "Though we'd need a lot more people to have a decent kill count." You note.
"We don't need more people" Jasmine says. Now, she's looking behind the counter. "We'd be the opening kills. You know, how the killer always kills one or two randoms before moving on to the main cast?"
You chuckle. "Yeah. Hey, if we're getting meta, maybe we'd be in Scream 9 or whatever they're up to now."
"Well, if Ghostface did show their face around here..." She mimes drawing her pistol and points at a random direction "Bang" She says.
You chuckle as you keep searching. "Hey, maybe Ghostface is wearing a vest. Or maybe you're staring down Jason or something"
"That's why you're here, isn't it?" Jasmine playfully jabs you in the shoulder before turning her attention to a kiosk in front of an abandoned storefront.
"That's right, Jason doesn't have shit on me!" You throw a few punches to emphasize the point. As you relax and get ready to continue searching...
"Hey, Sunny" You hear Jasmine say. You turn around and see Jasmine at a kiosk about 30 feet away, shining her flashlight on a gold necklace. It's plain, lacking any adornments. It It's even lost it's shine, though given it may have been here for years.
"I'm guessing the clean up crew left it behind the first time they abandoned this place" Jasmine muses as she looks at the necklace. "Oh well, mine now"
[] "Huh, it's so small, I guess no one noticed it after all this time. Though there aren't that many people around here."
[] "...you think there's more jewelry in there there?"
[] "Who the hell would leave those behind?"
[] "Hey, you think you could let me have it? I mean, when was the last time you wore jewelry?" (Charisma -10)
[] "Put it back! If this really Is a horror movie, then that thing might be cursed or something"