At the local university, Doctor York of the biology department is prepared to show the board an incredible discovery he has made. He claims to have discovered a whole new species of insect just this morning!

As he places the large glass case at the table, he dramatically pulls back the covering over it revealing...

Possibilities

1 Hundreds of tiny, scuttling white spider like creatures. They are still tinged red with blood and internal organs.

Josephine Thayer was a student at the University. She was also a powerful dreamer, who wandered into the labyrinth of Eihort. She accepted Eihort’s dread bargain. A week later, she felt her whole body alive with pain. She was trying to get to the medical room, when she stumbled into Dr York’s room. She fell apart into hundreds of tiny white spiders, which York, his mind now broke, scooped up into a specimen case.

2 A strange, blob-like creature.

Dr York is an ambitious but flawed cultist. He is more concerned with making cash than worshipping anything nasty, but he finds an odd invocation to Zathokkwua necessary when he wants to learn how to transmute lead into gold.

His latest experiment was trying to summon a servant creature for himself. He ended up calling on the “Primal Slime” to grant him one of its children. He received a small disgusting blob like creature, which he was very disappointed with. He decided to make some cash by claiming it was a new species of insect and selling it to the university.

It is one of the protozoa like spawn of Ubbo-Sathla. In time, it will grow in size and sprout many tentacle-like appendages. It will then begin to absorb every living thing around it.

3     An empty box.

While Doctor York was having his breakfast this morning, he found a centipede like creature in his melon. Excited, he thought it was an unknown creature, and bundled it into a box to take to the University. When York pulls back the covering, the box is empty.

The centipede is in fact a known poisonous species, and York has somehow unleashed it on the university. It won’t be long before students start to drop dead.

© Paul Hebron

A small community housing project has recently been completed on the edge of a large wood just outside of town. The project’s aim is to create a safe, pleasant environment for parents and young children. Families move in at the start of summer. Once the school holidays arrive the children begin exploring the wood, climbing trees and going wild out of sight of their parents.

A few weeks into the holidays Annie McElroy notices that food is missing from the cupboards and fridge. At first, she thinks it is her husband, snacking during the night. She doesn’t mention it to him but drops it into casual conversation with the neighbours. It seems everyone has been victim of the mysterious food thief – and nobody has admitted to it.

Possibilities

1 Children are stealing the food. Whilst playing in the heart of the wood they encountered a place where the barrier between the Dreamlands and the Waking World is very thin. The Dreamlands point of contact is the Enchanted Wood, where the Zoogs live. These sweet-looking creatures have befriended the children, who are bring food to the creatures. The children will never tell the grown-ups about their new, special friends, The Zoogs are doing their best to entice the children into the Dreamlands proper, and it is only a matter of time before they succeed.

2 The community’s adult males have been subjected to the dream-sendings of a dead witch. She has been persuading them to bring food to her grave in the woods. The food rots rapidly into the ground and nourishes her body, strengthening it and putting flesh back upon the bones. The men have been obeying her instructions in their sleep and have no memories of their actions.

3 Early in the housing project’s construction a body was found in the woods. The body, that of a homeless man judging by the clothes, was badly mangled and parts looked as if they had burst open. To avoid bad publicity the site foreman had the body buried in one house’s foundations and bribed the workers to keep quiet.

The body belonged to a man who had fallen into a narrow hole in the woods and found himself in an underground labyrinth. There he encountered the Great Old One Eihort who offered him the usual choice: death or become host for Eihort’s brood. The man chose the latter and died when the brood erupted from his body.

The Brood have lived in the wood since then, but some have migrated into the houses, hiding in cracks and the shadows of cupboards. It is the brood that has been eating the food.

© Robin Low

Mr David Bradley – a violent murderer currently serving his final year of an eighteen-year sentence – was found late yesterday evening swinging gently from the ceiling of his cell. He had hung himself using a thick leather belt.

The penitentiary is renowned for its high suicide rate, but the recent increase is unprecedented. Mr Bradley is the fourth inmate to take his own life in the last month. The prison governor, Mr Torben Stones, is investigating the deaths but refuses to comment on the possibility of corruption amongst the prison staff.

A brief visit sufficiently demonstrates why anyone incarcerated there might wish to take their own life: the drably-painted, crumbling brickwork; the dour-faced guards; the loud and abusive inmates; and the poor recreational facilities; all help to contribute to the general atmosphere of gloom and oppression.

Possibilities

1 For thousands of years the area beneath the penitentiary has housed an immaterial lloigor consciousness. It lay inert for most of this time, only recently - with the construction of the prison - did it recover from its torpor. The lloigor, named K’huterrinlis, seeks to escape by channelling a telekinetic field up to the surface through which it can escape, unfortunately a field of that length requires considerable energy. K’huterrinlis leeches this energy from the unresisting minds of the humans above.

K’huterrinlis’ mere presence is enough to create a noticeable pall of depression and despondency over the prison. This (along with draining the prisoners’ will-power) is the reason for the increased rate of suicides. However, the prisoners are not the only ones to feel the lloigor’s insidious presence. Even senior staff (like Mr Stones) are losing their motivation and the will to continue. More deaths are inevitable.

2 Mr Torben Stones, the prison governor, is a devout servitor of Eihort. Beneath the penitentiary, Mr Stones has created a network of twisting and interconnecting tunnels - a labyrinth. It is in these that he summons his master, the Dark Bargainer. Each week a prisoner is taken into the labyrinth and is questioned by Eihort. Given the alternative, most of the frightened convicts agree to Eihort’s demands. After he has been impregnated, Eihort uses the Cloud Memory spell to make the subject suppress all knowledge of their terrible ordeal.

Occasionally the spell is not fully effective, and the unfortunate victim understands the changes they are experiencing. These individuals would rather die at their own hand than the squirming proboscides of Eihort’s grubs.

Mr Stones plans to spread Eihort’s brood by only impregnating those who are nearing the end of their sentence. The convicts then leave and several months – or even years – later, the brood emerges.

3 Torben Stones is no longer completely human. While his body is of Terran origin, the mind belongs to something greater – a Yithian. Similar minds are housed within almost all the prison staff.

The Great Race uses the prisoners as subjects for temporal mental transference. In this way, the prisoners can escape incarceration by travelling 450 million years into the past. Meanwhile, the convict’s body is inhabited by a Yithian’s consciousness enabling it to study the current period, these individuals are usually smuggled from the prison so they can interact with the world outside.

This is an equitable arrangement; the Great Race can continue their research without the difficulty of having to fool the subject’s friends and family, while the human minds were allowed comparatively more freedom. There is just one small problem; many of the prisoners’ minds are brutal and violent. They caused considerable damage when they inhabited the powerful, conical bodies. While many minds were pacified; terminal force was the only solution for extreme cases. When this became necessary it meant that the minds were returned to their original forms leaving the human body devoid of consciousness. The suicides are faked, in order to disguise the prisoners’ true cause of death.

© Hadley Connor