GURPS IOU Finale

[telerib]

So, the group followed THE Computer's directions, found the remaining pods, and put them in felt baggies in a cut-scene. Captain Cannabis and Edward built a potato gun to shoot theirs around campus; DelMonte did some rather unspeakable things with the other. Solomon promptly found more trouble to get into.

A young and feminine Hysteria major was distraught over the loss of her mother's pet cat, Moggie. (Mom and Moggie had apparently come to campus for "Parents and Pets Day" or something). A monstrous tentacle had zipped up out of a steam tunnel vent, grabbed the cat, and disappeared. The team reassembled to Find the Cat.

They accessed the steam tunnels via the hole left in the aftermath of the Battle of the Crater re-enactment. The first oddity encountered was a suit of maintenance worker clothing, all empty, stretched out in a tunnel nexus. It had apparently been investigating the meep skull which rested on the teeny-weeny, oh-so-cute miniature Evil Altar. Captain Cannabis was prevented from duplicating that mistake, and the group moved on.

The tunnel terminated at a large wooden door. It wouldn't budge, and actively resisted the Captain's efforts to manipulate the wood. DelMonte might have been able to ooze under it, but he/she/it would have had to leave the can behind. Solomon, leery of traps, took the Hysteria major to an alcove off to one side, where they'd be out of the line of fire. The young lady apparently took this as an invitation of another sort! This not really being the time or the place, the young swashbuckler did his best to keep her hands off his weapons-belt - and managed to hit a trigger of some sort with his elbow in the process. A secret door swung open, allowing them all to bypass the stubborn wooden door.

On the other side of the door was a sub-sub-basement for some building, probably WUSE, filled with cleaning supplies of various sorts, and a ladder to the building above. No fewer than seven doors lead out of here; if anyone thought it odd that there were *doors* in the steam tunnels (whose ostensible purpose is to allow steam to *flow* around campus), they didn't say anything. DelMonte picked the green door, and away the heroes went.

Apparently, "Behind the Green Door" is a movie that DelMonte Productions would be happy to remake.

The creature in the room behind the door was rather DelMonte-ish, but larger. It strangely called to the Lecherous members of the group: DelMonte and the Hysteria major both took off at a run. Solomon took off after the co-ed and managed to catch her before she got to the tentacle creature. He tried to slap her back to sensibility, which got her eyes flashing at him in a singularly disturbing Incredible Hulk-like manner. Edward and the Captain refrained from entering the room (IIRC).

Then the Captain, insulated from the creature's emissions by his Haze of Hash, called, "Fire in the hole!" and used the potato gun to lauch a can of WhupAss at the creature. It bounced off its rubbery hide, hit the ceiling, and exploded. The group took cover as best they could, hitting the dirt and/or retreating into armored cans.

The backblast raced down the tunnel to the cleaning-supply room, setting the chemicals on fire! Unable to go back that way, the only other exit from the room was behind the monster. And so was Moggie!

Luckily, it also cleared the creature's miasma, and DelMonte and the Hysteria major (she did have a name! Uh... Muffi or something) were freed from its influence. The group worked in two teams to defeat the menance. DelMonte and Solomon took up the front rank, engaging the creature in... um... well, they each did what they did best. We'll leave it at that. Meanwhile, Edward re-tooled the potato gun to run off the WhupAss supply - it was the only way to get the power level up enough to project a watermelon (which the Captain determined was the creature's weakness) at high enough speeds to do any damage. Several rounds of tinkering later, the cry, "Fire in the hole!" went up again.

The result was spectacular by any standard other than IOU's, and even then it was respectable. The normal humans (and cat) managed to make it past the creature and through the door, which was good, because the explosion pretty much emptied the room of oxygen. (The cat was, unfortunately, flattened in the duck-and-cover, but a trip to Lazarus will undoubtedly set things right. Unless Moggie was already *on* life #9). DelMonte's can was half-imbedded in the ceiling, and it took the amorph a bit of doing to pull him/her/itself out and down. Edward and the Captain had elected to take their chances with the room of burning chemicals and climbed the ladder to the surface.

Reunited on the surface eventually, they pointed Muffi and Moggie towards Lazarus. For their own wounds, it was voted that the kind nursing student from the last adventure would offer a much better bedside manner than the Lazarus staff, and the heroes staggered off.

---
Some details fuzzy; I think a can of WhupAss may also have been employed against the big wooden door; also, I know that there was a big fire that broke the monster's spell, but I'm not entirely certain I remembered it correctly. G'head and add comments if I got stuff wrong.

Comments

[edg.livejournal.com]

The big fire that broke the monster's spell was Edward burning off the Luv-Gas with Captain Cannabis's lighter. :) ("There's a reason you don't use Fireball underground!" Hey, Edward has Rapid Healing, and if anyone else got hurt or killed, he could just wait a few hours and then take them to Lazarus. Or that's what he figured, anyway.) Other than that, it all looks good to me. :)