Halloween Game the Second
On October 31, 2001, a group of teenagers gathered for
a party at the house of a guy named Rick, an NPC (non-player character, meaning
they were controlled by the Game Master, who runs the whole thing).
The game included several such NPCs and players: Chad, Bay, Paul E,
Paul H, Will, and Scott. The DJ of the party had been playing remixes
of the Monster Mash for about 2 hours and then finally decided to pop in
a black cd he had gotten from a creepy old guy.
As the cd began to play, the room changed, and the partygoers
found themselves on a deserted highway in the middle of a forest. A
nearby road sign read Halloweentowne. With them were a few pieces of
furniture and Chad’s precious ninja motorcycle (which he had brought into
the party with him). The partygoers were immediately disoriented and
began to bicker among themselves. At last they split up, the players
and Rick going in one direction while everyone else went somewhere else.
Soon enough, Rick and the guys met up with a crazy-looking
guy in his mid-forties named Greg driving a military-grade hummer.
After a vain search for the others, they returned to Greg’s house.
In a similar manner as the year before, Greg explains the horror of this
dimension, etc, etc. (Note: He also made fun of the guys who
came in 1999, saying they were losers whom he had to piece back together.
The players who had participated in the first game were a little ticked off
at the comment, but the game went on.)
As they loaded up on the essential heavy weapons, Greg
showed them a journal he had found in a curio shop (which, by the way, one
should never go to on an evil night like Halloween). It was written
by someone who had come to Halloweentowne from the real world back in the
early ‘20s. According to the journal, some of the monsters of the Roaring
Twenties were especially bad and the people who died were lucky. (For
more information about this type of super-horrifying monster, check out some
stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Ooo, scary stuff.)
So the guys loaded up in the hummer (except for Chad,
who drives his ninja) and headed out. Meanwhile, Greg took off on his
motorcycle on his annual spree for free money. The guys had some adventures
and fought some monsters, but I can’t remember much that happened.
Rick got killed somewhere along the way, too.
Afterward, the guys take a shortcut through the woods
back to Greg’s house to regroup. Suddenly, they come upon a part of
the road that seems to be slithering in the shifting moonlight. As
they drove over it, it turned out to be a huge pile of writhing worms.
The hummer made it over the worms alright with only a little tire damage.
Chad’s ninja, however, slipped on the worms and he fell into the mass.
The guys leapt out of the hummer to help and pulled a
much-bitten Chad from the mass. Suddenly, an enormous worm-queen approached
from the woods. The guys released an amazing amount of ammo in the
resulting firefight, putting an end to the wormy menace with a nice complement
of Molotov cocktails.
The guys then took Chad back into town to purge him of
the worms. They came upon the house of a mystic lady whom Greg recommended.
The lady got rid of Chad’s worms and gave the few potions to the guys.
As the guys prepared to leave, they did something absolutely horrible.
(You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but no. These guys are so very,
very lethal.) They decided that they couldn’t have a mystic sitting
around like this, so they braced the door and burned her house down with
her inside. (I’m still appalled, but not as appalled as the murder
of the poor princess in another game. These guys would slaughter their
own grandmothers if they were NPCs.)
Some firefighters appeared, and the guys stole their truck.
They would have gotten clean away if not for a guy with shaggy black hair
and a black trench coat who silently walked up. Destruction beat up
the stolen fire truck and took out the firefighters who didn’t run.
He also destroyed Greg’s hummer, machine gun and all. In the battle,
Scott and Paul H were both killed. At last the survivors finally escaped.
Just so Scott and Paul H had something to do while the
rest of the guys played the game, they took over control of some NPCs who
knew about the monsters. Scott now played as an NSA agent with military
connections, and Paul H became an Amazonian priestess who had traveled to
the town to take out a monster from the Amazon. They helped out the
guys till the end of the game. (An aside: These two characters were
hitting on each other a lot. It was really, really gross.)
The guys gear up for the last battle with their monster:
a giant spider who is destroying downtown. They duke it out with the
spider and eventually kill it with some rockets. And so the survivors
return to the real world, forever scarred by the terrors of Halloweentowne.