En annan krönika (Snowflake Valley)

[TheMightyGustav]

October 11th-15th
From Maxwell Fister


Diane Fishburn

935 Pennsylvania Ave, Apt B

Washington, DC 20535


Diane,

My apologies for lateness of this message. I find myself in a brief convalescence following an encounter even more harrowing than that at the Paradise and shall relay to you shortly. The phones here have been out for some time and I have been unable to check in.


My traveling companions and I met exceptionally bad weather traveling through the mountains and were forced off of the road in whiteout conditions. While attempting to make our way to a nearby town we were surprised to find an elderly native american man standing directly in front of us. Excellent driver that Ed is, she was still unable to avoid hitting the man and losing control striking a tree afterwards causing some amount of damage to our minivan. By the time we managed to get out to help the victim of the accident, he had pulled himself up and disappeared into the storm. We had no choice but continue on into town in search of a medical rescue team.


The town of Miner's Folly itself seems somewhat lost in time tucked away in the mountains as it is. I am certain that under other circumstances it's quite beautiful, but none of us are accustomed to this amount of snow and were anxious to get help for the man we injured and keep moving. It was not to be, though. We found the sheriff's department manned by a rather uncaring deputy who either through racism or simple laziness was unconcerned with the fate of our accident victim. He assured us that the man was simply drunk and able to take care of himself. Had it not been for later events, I would insist that you use your connections, Diane, with our mutual friend Kathleen to look into the matter. We were forced to take lodging and hope for the best. The weather report called for three to four days of blizzard.


From here things get hectic and confused. We took rooms at the Clearwater Hotel to wait out the storm. There we met a young inebriated Dr. Carmichael in the bar who had also been caught by the storm as well as two vacationers, Dr. Alan Huxtable and Samantha Augenmesser. Shortly after turning in for the night Victor and I were awakened by noises outside our window. Upon investigation it appeared that the visitor in the room next door had either thrown himself through his window to the chasm below or otherwise met foul play. Not trusting the local law enforcement, the three of us performed a preliminary search of the room. It turns out to have been rented to one Mr. Carson whom we later discovered to have some sort of business with the local mine owners, the Delaneys. Although there were many signs of a struggle, no cause was determined and no sign of the body was discovered. A briefcase was found with personal papers, but once opened some sort of security device destroyed the contents. The local sheriff arrived soon after to seal the room.

[TheMightyGustav]

In the morning Ms. Augenmesser discovered that Dr. Carmichael had also been attacked and killed in her room on the first floor. This one had not been quite so clean as Mr. Carson's and her remains had been scattered about as if torn apart by some sort of animal. In fact, portions of the room as well as the corpse showed vicious claw marks of a sort none of us had seen before. Luckily Ms. Augenmesser managed to take some pictures of the scene before Sheriff Wilhelm appeared.

The Sheriff was not too pleased to see us at the center of another event in his sleepy town and his appearance nearly caused certain hidden issues to come to light. At this time we also met a man by the name of Ian McGregor who claimed to be a visiting salesman of Mining equipment. The front desk of the hotel later confirmed this story.


We took the remainder of the day to do some research on the town and get the minivan fixed. Victor and Huxtable discovered evidence of similar attacks in the past as well as other strange events surrounding the Delaneys. Considering this is such a small town it doesn't seem too out-of-hand for one family to have multiple problems, but something about it just doesn't sit right. It seems that in 1923 a group of native americans from a local tribe ransacked and vandalized the Delaney mansion.



That evening Ms. Augenmesser had what appeared to be a psychic episode during dinner. She witnessed a man (later identified as Maximillian Delaney, the current owner of the mine) having his dinner. Mr. Delaney reportedly communicated with Ms. Augenmesser in some sort of non-verbal psychic fashion. I am not entirely clear on the subject of the communication between the two, but it seems our arrival here may not be so accidental after all. Some of my companions (most notably Huxtable) are less than convinced of its existence, but it sounds very much like the empathy-speech of the Peruvian Axtlocl Tribe. In any event, the barkeep confirmed that Delaney had, in fact been there for dinner and none of us saw him leave.



In the interests of safety, we tried to keep the party as close as possible in as few rooms as possible that night. Our caution paid off, for shortly after the lights were turned off, a thumping against the window woke us. Ed and I approached the window, weapons drawn and peering down saw a large hunched humanoid creature staring up at us. It fled into the darkness and we pursued.


After a short chase through the forest, we arrived at what appeared to be an abandoned shack, possibly belonging to one of the original residents of the town. The figure was nowhere to be seen, but we did discover a small box with some rather old letters apparently a correspondence between Ian's (grand?, great-grand?) mother and prospector father. The elder Jasper Delaney, the original founder of the Delaney Mining Corporation played a suspiciously prominent part in these letters.

[TheMightyGustav]

Ms. Augenmesser again showed herself to be exceptional sensitive, talented and keenly focused as just touching one of the letters seemed to allow her to see events that the rest of us weren't aware of. We had very little time to ponder the matter, however. The beast we had been pursuing hadn't left the vicinity after all and chose that moment to attack.



I've seen many strange things over the past few years, Diane, but nothing quite so instinctively frightening as this. If you were to imagine in your most terrifying vision what a legendary werewolf were to look like you wouldn't be too far off. Standing around 7' tall on it's hind legs, the thing lept at us from the roof of the shack. Our weapons were virtually useless against it. Ed crowned the thing with a tire-iron hard enough to crush an ordinary person's skull and it just seemed to get angrier. It went after Ms. Augenmesser who immediately ran away. The beast wouldn't give up the chase until she dropped the Delaney letter she still held in her hand. It was obviously protecting some sort of territory that included those items.



Not too quick to learn the meaning of "ineffectual," we eventually managed to regroup and beat a hasty retreat back to the hotel. Both Victor and I had taken some nasty bite wounds. Mine had gone THROUGH my armored vest completely as if it were paper. The doc managed to help us somewhat, but Victor began to fall ill almost at once.



Uncertain of what to do and suspicious of MacGregor's part in all this we searched his room only to find that it hasn't been slept in for some time and his belongings appear to be a collection of mine related informational packets from the last 30 or so years.



Seeing no other possibility for help, we made our way to the Sheriff's office. I hadn't realized at the time, but the doc had been clearheaded enough to bring his video camera along and had caught the whole thing on tape. This combined with our wounds nearly seemed enough to convince the Sheriff of the reality of beast, but it was already too late. The creature attacked the station, killing both Sheriff and his deputy and nearly doing Victor and myself in as well. We only survived by the quick-wittedness of our comrades. They apparently dragged us both unconscious into the unused jail cells and locked the creature safely out where it couldn't reach any of us. It was there that I awakened this morning in the care of our doctor friend and a group of the local native american tribe. They seem to have some sort of information for us. And a request...or mission. I'm afraid there will be little time to rest and heal. Today we go into the mines.



-Maxwell

[TheMightyGustav]

October 16th -18th

To: [e-mail]
From: [e-mail]
Subject: lots to tell you

dear katarina,

man, do i miss you, hot stuff.

sorry i haven't been calling you, but i've been stuck in a podunk town in colorado with those friends i told you about, and there's been no cell service to speak of due to a huge storm. max (the weird seismology dude) is letting me write this to you on his laptop so that you don't get too worried, which is nice of him.



although i'm not sure you shouldn't worry--it's been fucking weird here. we've been attacked by ...get this... *werewolves*, the first time so badly that i thought for sure max and victor were going to die---but then these hippy native american guys took us all to their sweatlodge and i don't understand how they did it, but they healed all our injuries. i got a huge gash through the squid tattoo you like, but it seems to be healing amazingly fast.



we met these two people at the hotel we ended up at--this really cute chick named samantha (totally my type, but not nearly as bad-girl angry as you, sweets ), and this very strange and kind of creepy doctor named huxtable. when all of us were in one sweatlodge being healed, for some reason, the indian elders took huxtable into a separate lodge and got him megabaked, and i guess taught him some healing fu. he sure picked it up quickly, because he used it on me while...oh man, this is so difficult to explain. ok, lemme start from the beginning.



once we came out of the sweatlodge, the old indian guys told us that they had been fighting an evil dark force that was in the mines, and that because one of the members of their group had just died (oh god, he ran right out in front of the minivan in the middle of the fucking snowstorm and i hit him--couldn't avoid it! gah!), they needed our help to find this weapon thinger to use to help keep the evil at bay. they told us we had to do it right away, since the ritual and full moon (did i mention WEREWOLVES???) were the next night...i felt so goddamn bad for hitting that guy that i decided to go ahead and help them out.



turns out the weapon thing is in an abandoned mine, so we had to steal the snowcat from the police department (like anyone would notice, since both the sheriff and the deputy were killed by the SAME WEREWOLF that tried to EAT US, oh man), and drive there. you can bet your hot ass i took my shotgun.



max and victor are fucking klutzes. BOTH of them had trouble climbing down the elevator shaft, and max actually fell a fair distance. once we all got down there, it started to suck even more. it was SO COLD... colder than outside! and i don't know, it just started to feel wrong, all extra super dark and thick...i can't really describe it.



we got all the way down there and picked up this really excellent disc-shaped blade thing, the weapon...and it was pretty big and kind of hard to handle, more sharp than i have ever seen a knife EVER be..cut a fucking huge gash in the nice parka i just bought before i figured that out...anyway, i ended up with that because the rest of the group are not big enough to carry something like that. or maybe i'm just too dumb to know better. we also found the bodies of two people--one of them had the blade. they were so old, like, a hundred years old. max took a locket from the other one..i guess it had something to do with the reason why the first werewolf attacked us...man.



so we hightail it out of there, and as i'm climbing up (i went last, because they figured i'd have the best chance against any werewolves or whatever with the blade), someone (or more than one someone) starts shooting at me from the mineshaft..but we got out of there without getting hit. so, we head back to the hotel we'd been staying at, and find out that the yippy annoying rodent dog of another hotel guest has been squished to death, and it sure looks like its owner gave up a budding career as a crappy fantasy novelist to become another werewolf. great.

[TheMightyGustav]

we head back out to the place we met the first werewolf (don't ask me!! i just don't fucking know why! i just didn't want everyone else to get killed!!) and sure enough, as we're poking around and looking for stuff, the guy who was the werewolf who attacked us the first time showed up--and when max showed him the pendant () he turned into a werewolf and took the pendant and ran away!! it seems as though he is the husband of some woman that the owner of the mining company hooked up with, and he's angry and jealous--but this all happened like, 100 years ago...so confusing. but before i could try and figure all that out, ANOTHER werewolf comes at us, and it looks to be the crappy author guy, reginald.



last time we tried to fight the werewolf, bullets didn't work, and i even hit the fucker square in the face with my tire iron and NOTHING HAPPENED. so you can bet we were shitting bricks when we saw another one! and to make things even better, all my friends took off running except for samantha (not that i can really blame them, but sheesh, nice of them to stick around). there wasn't much i could do but try out the super sharp cymbal blade weapon...and holy crap did it work--i took off both its arms and we managed to escape. the blade is a very weird thing. it makes me feel kind of funny when i use it, and not the kind of funny from climbing rope in gym class...but like, focused and serious and like i could pretty much take anything out if i paid enough attention to what i was doing. i don't really want to put it down. and well, it sure kicked the werewolf's ass, too...



by this time, it had gotten pretty damn late, and we needed to get back to where the indian guys told us to meet them to battle this evil force... we get there, and i turn off the cat (i'd much rather turn on the kat, but that's a different email.. ) and we wait..and the owner of the mining company, delaney, the guy who stole that first werewolf's chick, back 100 years ago ( whatever), arrives with like 6 big guys with guns...and then the indian guys show up and there's this huge cosmic power battle going on...i know it sounds nuts, but delaney and the indian guys, the shamen, or whatever, were battling each other with their minds...and the hit men were shooting at US. luckily, victor and max are a lot more on the ball with guns than they are with climbing, and helped take out delaney's crew, while i bashed on delaney with the blade...i hit him pretty hard a couple of times, and i think it helped distract him from focusing on the shamen guys, but he sure got pissed and told his remaining thugs to shoot at me..but they had sucky aim. at some point, samantha went and stood with the shamen and seemed to be helping with the cosmic battle...she is a very odd chick, but super nice. then, delaney turned into this fucking screwed up half bear half wolf thing, and took a massive swipe at me--goddamn it hurt...i thought for sure i was going to die from it, and then huxtable comes up and sort of trips and bumps into me, like a running touch-football tackle, and i am like, a billion times better again...so regardless of how creepy he is, or the fact that max and victor keep running away and falling down and hurting themselves, they sure are ok in my book...



finally, after what seemed like forever, delaney sort of...melted. it was almost anticlimactic...he just...disappeared...the shamen guys were really happy! apparently we saved their universe or something. i have no idea. i thought i was going to have to give back the blade, which i really didn't want to do...it just feels kind of right in my hands...

hmm, like you. except i don't know when i will get back to sf and see you again...we're still on our way to dubuque. man, am i glad we got the insurance on the minivan...it's sure seen better days.



i hope you're not getting into too much trouble...like i should talk. i just kind of worry about you getting bored while i'm gone...

-ed
--
a tattooed you.
black and blue tattoo, san francisco.
female owned and operated.

[TheMightyGustav]

Tänk vad konstigt!
En grupp svenska poliser var med om nästan exakt samma sak, men i en liten by i nordvästra Norrland!!
Vad är det som är på gång egentligen?