Pinky brings down the house; Kalarappa goes to pieces.

Played

6^th Octo­ber 2011.

Dramatis Personae

• Lady Ant­o­nia deVore – a Heav­ily-armed Aris­to­crat.
• Cap­tain Ben­son Cur­ruth­ers – a Mil­it­ary Police­man.
• Miss April Sharpe – a Self-taught Invent­or.
• Pinky – a Low Youth.
• Prince Sal­man of Swat – a Dash­ing Cav­alry­man.
• Agent Andrews – a Stal­wart Agent of the Min­istry.
• Jemadar Khan of the Bengal Lan­cers.
• 3 Very Large Anim­ated Statues.
• A Large Tiger Demon.

Plot

Real­ising they had the advant­age, the team imme­di­ately unleashed everything they had at the creature with­in the cent­ral struc­ture of the temple. As the creature dis­in­teg­rated under the impact of dir­ect hits from Miss Sharpe (braced against a wall and fir­ing one-handed) and Cur­ruth­ers, Andrews took the oppor­tun­ity to release the cap­tive from the simple, but effect­ive, man­acles that held him. He imme­di­ately thanked his res­cuer, intro­du­cing him­self as Sal­man, while rap­idly work­ing the kinks out of his limbs with a series of pain­ful-look­ing stretches, before hunt­ing around for a weapon.

His hunt was inter­rup­ted, how­ever, by a col­lect­ive gasp from the rest of the team and, turn­ing around, he was greeted by the sight of the humanoid tiger reform­ing itself (a par­tic­u­larly grue­some pro­cess, work­ing from the inside out). The team reacted by pour­ing more lead and burn­ing acid at it, but it had no last­ing effect; the only con­sol­a­tion was that it seemed unwill­ing to leave the tower and attack them, although it was con­tinu­ally roar­ing and curs­ing in an unknown language.

The team decided to make use of this fact by explor­ing the temple, look­ing for explos­ives or oth­er, more mys­tic­al, weapons. While Cur­ruth­ers turned up Salman’s sword (taken from him by the ban­dits), they were oth­er­wise unsuc­cess­ful. Sev­er­al of the agents remembered that, in legend, rak­shasa (pre­sum­ably this was one, since the oth­er creatures appeared to be ordin­ary tigers) could be harmed only by holy weapons or true her­oes. Obser­va­tion also showed that when it moment­ar­ily passed into sun­light, the illu­min­ated part of its body would moment­ar­ily turn to shad­ow – prompt­ing the real­isa­tion that it was trapped by the sun. Once Lady Ant­o­nia had escaped the tun­nel, they dis­cussed blow­ing the tower up from under­neath – but they had no explos­ives (and no card to get them). Sal­man, mean­while, real­ised he was very hungry and invest­ig­ated the con­tents of the ban­dits’ stew­pot, before real­ising it was sev­er­al days old…

The team now dis­cussed leav­ing to find the holy man or anoth­er ally, a dis­cus­sion made more urgent now that it seemed the creature might be free to attack them at sun­set… Then April noticed that the statue at the top of the struc­ture had a single green eye (with a gap­ing sock­et where the oth­er may have been) and noted that it might be significant.

Pinky imme­di­ately went back up the wall, rope and tower to try and prise it loose. This promp­ted a reac­tion from the remain­ing giant statues, which began to watch him curi­ously, while one reached up towards him. Pinky now suc­ceeded in remov­ing the gem and the build­ing promptly col­lapsed under him. Dis­play­ing remark­able agil­ity, the boy rode the rubble to the ground, as it bur­ied all three of the statues.

He stood up, rais­ing the gem above his head in tri­umph, before real­ising that the oth­ers were all star­ing past him…

Turn­ing, he was con­fron­ted by the sight of the rak­shasa emer­ging from the rubble … com­pletely unaf­fected by the after­noon sunlight!

April imme­di­ately (and quite sens­ibly) bolted behind the nearest wall, while the oth­ers began a staggered retreat, fir­ing their weapons then fall­ing back. None of the attacks had any more effect than they did before, before it sprang for­ward, claws wide, and nearly killed Cur­ruth­ers and Sal­man. Sal­man attemp­ted to cut it with his blade, but even his antique heir­loom had no effect.

In her spot behind the wall, April sud­denly real­ised that the green gem, com­ing as it did from an idol, might be seen as “holy”. Act­ing on this inform­a­tion, Pinky quickly grabbed Pren­tiss’ blun­der­buss and rammed the jew­el into the bar­rel, before fir­ing it at the creature… Moments later, the demon, scream­ing in an unholy tone, exploded in a shower of gore!

The group paused for a rest before pick­ing up the pieces and check­ing out the rest of the site. They found little of Min­istry interest, so they headed back to Myso­re City. Miss Montague and her fath­er were both happy that the mat­ter had been resolved and, fol­low­ing a few days of rest and recu­per­a­tion, the team returned to Cal­cutta and thence to London.

Return­ing to the Min­istry, they began to notice a few odd things: the recep­tion staff were all new and there was no sign of Mr Rooke… It turned out that Com­mand­er Wey­land, lead­er of the oth­er agent team, was in charge, but they couldn’t fig­ure out why…

Notes

And so it ends – on a cliff-hanger naturally!

A sub­plot regard­ing loc­at­ing and expos­ing sup­port­ers of the ban­dits amongst the palace courtiers was aban­doned due to time and com­plex­ity. The gem and idol form­ing a demon-bind­ing struc­ture came togeth­er based on play­er dis­cus­sion. I was really sat­is­fied with the whole idea (the loss of the ori­gin­al gem would have allowed the creature to awaken, the second to release it), but I did get com­plaints that it wasn’t flagged ahead of time. I’m still not sure if this is really an issue with a pulp/action plot like this.

The cam­paign will now be tak­ing a break for a few months, while I try some­thing different.