You’re standing at the edge of the Pencatte Catacombs park, the part where the nicely-curated and protected catacombs are fenced off from the real catacombs, the deep tunnels hiding deeper magic that run under most of Pencatte.

Your group of friends has a tradition of Halloween dares, and this year, all your past dares have come back to bite you.

You’re going to go into the catacombs. Your friends are cheering you on, jeering you on, but they’re not coming with you.

It’s just you, these bolt cutters, and the darkness.

You slip through the gate, flip your friends off, and walk into the dark.

The sounds of your friends fade fast, too fast. The tunnel slants slightly downwards; you’re in a rough section, where the walls are braced but there’s no brickwork or other decoration.

The rational part of you says this is why the park part ends here – the park catacombs are not just cleaned and sanitized, all the bones gone, they’re pretty. Lots of carvings and fancy metal work and mosaics.

This part is just a tunnel.

The rest of your mind has other opinions.

This tunnel, everyone says, this is where the ghosts come out, and the gate isn’t just to keep explorers like you out, it’s to keep the ghosts in.

You feel a breeze from down and to your left. You can’t hear anything at all. Your flashlight plays over the tunnel, and in front of you it splits: stairs downward to the left. A slow angle continuing slower downward to your right.

You’ve gone in.

You could turn around now.

Of course, your friends would know it was barely filling the dare. Also, this would be a very short story.

But you could turn around now.

Or you could keep going. Left, where the breeze is, or right, where you’re not that far underground?

SO.  While you stand at this intersection looking between left and right, you pat the bolt cutter hanging from your left hip.

You didn’t come into this COMPLETELY unprepared.

You have your little every-day carry pack, of course, but in addition to that, you brought with you you brought with you 1 of the following:

* a deep knowledge of dead languages & languages of the dead

* a charmed necklace which keeps you comfortable in all temperatures

* a radio tracker

* a Bowie Knife

Left

The leftward route goes quickly from slanting packed dirt to stone stairs. There’s no light but your flashlight, but the breeze gets stronger and stronger.

You take the stairs carefully. There’s nobody here to see you be brave – also nobody to rescue you if you fall and break something.

Still, near the bottom of the stairs, you slip on a puddle and flail out, grabbing for anything.

your flashlight clatters to the ground.

you managed to grab on to something.

Do you:

Go back up the stairs.

Attempt to find & repair your flashlight

Follow the glow along the floor.

Lightning Round

You stand at the bottom of the stairs in the near-darkness, contemplating your next move.

You’re glad it’s you and not some of your other friends. They might be more eager – but one of the secrets you’ve been keeping from them means that you’re better equipped to deal with this than they might be.

Your secret: You are (a(n))

enchanter, although a novice

elemental (earth)-rooted

unregistered shapeshifter

animal-focused witch

unregistered shapeshifter

Being an unregistered shapeshifter definitely has had its ups & downs for you.

For one, you have to keep it secret -the fines for not self-reporting are pretty extreme.

For another, you have to keep it under control, not just for moral reasons, but you don’t want to end up shot on sight with silver.

But you HAVE that control, & as long as you keep it, that means you have an edge nobody else does.

You hope you don’t need that edge today, but it’s nice to know that it’s there.

Follow the glow along the floor.

As you stare at them, the lines of light seem to brighten.  You can’t make out much beyond maybe a foot and a half (.5 meters) up the wall or along the floor from the glow, leaving a lot of the passage in the dark.  But the lines are so smooth, so perfect.  You pick the left-hand one and follow it as your eyes slowly adjust to its paltry illumination.

The floor is carved here, although you can’t make out the letters.  You’d need the flashlight for that, and the glow is pulling you forward

Your nose catches a scent from ahead: deep, loamy, and cold.

As you stare at them, the lines of light seem to brighten. You can’t make out much beyond half a meter up the wall or along the floor, leaving a lot of the passage in the dark. But the glow – it’s smooth, perfect. You pick the left-hand one and follow it as your eyes slowly adjust to the wan light. The floor is carved here, although you can’t make it out well.

Right

The floor sounds squishy under your feet after the first few feet. You look down, but the flashlight reveals nothing more than dirt. Dirt, and more dirt, and more…

You’re almost ready to turn around, the dirt getting squishy and muckier, when your feet hit brick.

You’re standing under an archway, and even as you move your flashlight beam, there is some sort of light ahead that doesn’t move.

Backing up, you see that the archway has an inscription on it.

Study the Floor Carvings

You play your light over the carvings.

They’re so deep in some places they seem like you should have tripped on them, barely scratches in others.

The floor seems like a solid slab of stone from stairs to that deep-smelling hole you almost fell in. There’s 3 deep patterns: one made of meticulous diamonds, one of numbers, and one of words, or at least letters. You think they’re Greek. Around that all are the shallow etchings.

The pit seems to have broken the top (or bottom) of the pattern.

Some of the deepest diamond-shapes glow.

DO YOU

• Try to make sense of the numbers

• Try to puzzle out the letters

• Try to circle the pit

• Examine the skeleton (*shudder*)

Try to make sense of the numbers

You pace around the portions of the curved-sided diamond which haven’t been broken off (into that deep pit, ulp). Most of the pattern is in normal numerals, but a few of them seem to wiggle, or glow, or tug at your eyes.

The numbers shift the more you look. Not shift – rotate. As you keep watching, you see a decimal place move past you.

2.7182818284590452353602874713526624977572470936999595749669676277240766303535475945713821785251664274…

The number moves past you one squirming, twisting digit at a time.

e.

You remember that from math class.

Why?

Looking at the edge of the pit, you can see the numbers tumble down into the hole, just to rise back up again.

Now this is getting really weird.

Try to decipher the letters

The letters working their way around the ♾ sign are probably Greek. You recognize a few of them from math, a few from Frat Row, and a couple you guess at, but unless this is talking about the change in… what? The sum of Phi Mu Mu, you have no idea what it’s saying.

You wish you’d studied more ancient languages in school.

The letters aren’t moving, at least, but they are mauled, twisted, near the break for the pit. Like, maybe, someone didn’t like what it said.

Write down the letters & Numbers

You’re not sure where to start, but the letters aren’t moving, so you begin there, at the left curve of the ♾.

You still have no idea what you’re writing, but as you mark it down, it seems to whisper to you. You want to – NEED to – read it out loud.

You try to sound it out & end up cursing. You just don’t know enough Greek. Any Greek. You’re still trying when you hear the sound of stone grating over stone.

It’s not coming from one direction. It’s everywhere.

Go back the way you came

The floor shakes a little bit and you stumble forwards. Yeah, it’s a good time to get out of here.

Back the way you came, you think. Up the stairs, away from that pit.

And the really interesting Greek letters, which you ought to finish taking down…

You climb the stairs, coming to the landing you noticed on the way down.

Didn’t they keep going up, before?

There’s nothing but a stone wall in front of you now & two narrow stairways leading down to the left and the right.

The grinding noises sound louder here.

WHAT NOW?

Examine/beat on the wall where the stairs were

Go left down the stairs

Go right down the stairs

Back to the letters. They make more sense.

Examine/beat on the wall where the stairs were

You look over the wall where there used to be stairs out of here. It looks like the rest of the walls – smooth stone with nearly-invisible seamlines between large blocks of stone.

You push on every block. You beat on the blocks. You might swear at the blocks a little bit. You definitely hit everything on that wall at least twice.

Once, hitting near the top left, you hear something grinding somewhere else. To your left, you think, and down.

You hit it again and again but nothing else happens. The wall is not moving – and your hands are raw and bloody.

You light a candle. You have three emergency candles in your EDC, because doesn’t everyone? (You know most of your friends do, because you packed their EDC).

You’re hoping that the smoke will show you an opening, or that the candlelight will show something that the flashlight didn’t.

The smoke, however, heads southeast down the stairs.

You notice, before you start to follow one path or another, that the candlelight does seem to make the writing down below flicker and glow. It’s quite beautiful.

The Writing

You’re in a pile of bones, a dark, deep, crunchy pile of bones. Your candle sits nearby, improbably still lit.

There’s a very small doorway to one side of the pit; to the other side there’s a tunnel that looks like an animal dug it.

The numbers are still falling into the pit.

Attempt to find & repair your flashlight

It takes some patting around on your hands & knees to find the pieces of your flashlight. You crouch next to a glow-line to illuminate it and swear a bit.  

It takes some doing and some duct tape from your EDC pack, but you get the thing going again. 

Then you shine it over the room and gulp

When you grabbed the wall to stop yourself – that was a skeleton that caught you. 

Maybe 6 meters ahead – there’s a deep pit. 

Even the floor carvings look ominous, like some sort of ritual circle. 

• Run away
• Examine the Floor Carvings. 
• Try to edge around the left of the pit
• Try to edge around the right of the pit

You Go: Right

The floor sounds squishy under your feet after the first few feet. You look down, but the flashlight reveals nothing more than dirt. Dirt, and more dirt, and more…

You’re almost ready to turn around, the dirt getting squishy and muckier, when your feet hit brick.

You’re standing under an archway, and even as you move your flashlight beam, there is some sort of l ight ahead that doesn’t move. 

Backing up, you can see that the archway has an inscription carved into the top of it.  There are two figures, deeply shadowed, holding up the sides of the archway.