Jan NBR The Bayou Boss Versus The Red Chapel Gang 45SS

[Thechosenone]

:seamus

Seamus

Copycat killer

2 belles

Cybelle

2 crooked men

3 night terrors

Bete Noir

Body Guard

Distraction

42SS crew

:teeth

Somer teeth Jones

2 skeeters

Hog Whisper

2 Slop Haulers

3 piglets

War Pig

McTavish

2 Bayou Gremlins

Claim Jump

Kill Protégé

44Stone crew

Pre-Game

“Thisss should make a comfortable new home for us.” Madame Cybelle’s lolling slow tone draws on for a number of uncomfortable seconds. A ruddy rope of rot drips from the corner of her lips before being rubbed into the back of her spoiled hand. The roughness of her face tears the sagging flesh of her hand but she doesn’t feel the flap of meat nor the creep of blood.

“Maybe.” Seamus bats away at the swarming insects that flitter around his murder of madams while his crook necked miners work to make the place functional. The filth of the old foundry is apparent only to Seamus, the mess is lost on the others. Their minds are too far gone to really care about such petty details as organization and habitability. Their biggest concerns these days are keeping track of their desiccated limbs.

“What exactly am I going to do with this place? I mean, the price is right but neighborhood is a bit rough.” Seamus says as he spit cleans one of the windows to stare out into the bogs. They churn under the night sky. The moons cast their tombstone glow over the sinking mire and show it for what it is, a wet patch of green and brown death as far as the eye can see. There’s life here for his bevy to feed upon and tangles to conceal them but that’s not the problem. The life here is as lethal as his ladies and the tangles are far too curious and hungry for their own good.

The darkness quivers in the upper rafters. Seamus looks up to see another of his beauties. This one walks with an odd gait, her movements like the flipping pages of a picture book. Not complete, missing steps that material beings need to take to reach one point from another. They make her dread saunter appear jerky, stiff and quick as a fluttering eye. She holds long knives in her hand that drip a constant encarmine drizzle down on their heads. Where she walks her darkness infects everything.

Seamus tips his hat to the specter. She’s not one of his belles. She something else, a dirty stain he picked up that can’t be cleaned… she’s a tortured memory that can’t be forgotten. Bete Noir is all she’s known as. Silent, wordless, slaughter happy Bete Noir.

“I take it you like the place Bete?” Seamus calls up but she’s not there to answer. Instead he can feel the weight of fragile arms slithering around his shoulders and daggers like the twin fangs of a serpent move into view, held fast by alabaster fingers. They cross over his jugular and from the corner of his eye he can see her head beside his. Long thin lengths of black hair mingle with the pall of darkness she carries. The strands swim like hair in a watery murk around his face, caressing his cheeks and leaving a cold sting as they do. His eyes can’t find hers, the empty entropy burned sockets that they are, but he can see her lips. The color of a fresh kill, they move but no words come out.

“I’ll take it as a yes then?” Seamus smiles. Predicting Bete is an impossibility; one could sooner predict the chaotic crawl of decay in a corpse or the wriggling dance of a congregation of maggots. If he died here in her embrace it would be an end worthy of the life he lived. Far better men than he have been penetrated by her, bleed to death and swallowed by the night. At the moment he struggles to think of a better way to go.

Her blades pull out of sight along with her white flesh and red lips. The coils of hair are the last to leave. There’s a small ping of disappointment in the death obsessed hatter but he shrugs it off.

One of his belles, the intoxicating Ms. Fanny Lisbon, turns her attention from the festering wound her mouth just caused to her own arm. The patch of bleeding skin slaps her chin as her head twitches back and forth. Though the functions of olfactory analyses have long since dripped out of her nose she still sniffs the air and moans. Different senses function now. “Maaaddaammm….” She moans.

Cybelle snaps her fan open with a startlingly quick gesture and waves the air in. “ffflllessssh…” She whispers. Her fat head rocks to the side and milky white orbs meet with Seamus’ gaze. “FLESH!” She snaps the fan closed and points down one of the long dark halls.

Seamus cocks his head and listens. There is a growing noise like the sound of thunder on the distance. He grabs up his lantern and turns it down the hall as the clambering reaches a crescendo. The hall quakes and the vibrations shutter up his spin before the void of the hall breaks. Pigs, squealing, shrieking bog battered pigs charge through the hall and into an adjacent corridor.

“Pigs?” Seamus coos. “Well ladies, looks like Bacon Birdies for breakfast eh?”

His suggestion is met by dozens of agonized howls that slay the silence of this place. They demand flesh and their torpid demeanors shift into a hungered frenzy.

Seamus reaches into his tool bag and pulls out a cast iron frying pan. “Ladies, let’s go shopping. Word on the street is the butcher has fresh hogs for sale and….” Seamus’ trite commentary stumbles and stutters as the hallway plating gives in to a new horror. Large as a mastiff, a sweat covered hog chews on a piece of iron before eyeing the hatter. Its growl/screech is the stuff of hell and its eyes have all the hunger of his ladies but twice the hate. It hurdles down toward him with no fear, just a craving. Warm blood on its tusks.

“We’re gunna need a bigger skillet!”

Turn One and Two

Bete moves through the rafters and stares down on the foundry floor like a hunting raptor waiting for prey to cross her path. Hollow eyes find a sight curious enough to earn a confused tilt of the head.

Creatures skitter and rush through the halls of the foundry. Not pigs. Not animals at all. At least not anymore. Their flesh is dark and the color of the mire. Their teeth yellow as moonlight through the marsh fog and sharp like the ragged edge of a can lid. Their eyes dart and scan, their little minds process paths and trajectory as they leap, bound and scuttle through the debris with all the precision of apes between jungle branches.

But they’re not creatures. They carry crude guns born of bayou science. And they wear clothes too, the tattered wear of the frontiersmen and all of it stitched with no concern. It mocks fashion and function like a parrot mocks speech. Bete watches them herd the hogs through the foundry while they follow, both near equals as far as civility goes.

The largest hog eyes Seamus and eviscerates the foundry halls as he charges. She grabs handfuls of night in her marble hands and throws it forward. The globlets of shadow take form into Night Terrors and flock around the pig raking his eyes and spitting blinding dark all around them. The large hog is powerless to escape the maze of claws and sightless obscura.

But there is another being that causes her entropic thoughts to reel with uncertainty. With these little monsters is a man. Dressed in swamp slicked overalls and large hat, he directs the tiny creatures who seem to understand the simple words he uses. He pulls on a chain and tugs his weapon into clear sight, an albino alligator that snaps and hisses. The beast clips its jaws at a massive mosquito demanding it to buzz down further into the facility while its master leads the green creatures in.

A gurgling throaty bellow draws her night eyes. She sees a beast, larger than the other green things but clearly of their stock. He wears the coat and hat of one of the Guild’s outlander dignitaries. Maybe belonging to a treasurer or taskmaster. The dirty white garment and hat contrast his completely moss colored flesh. He chews on a cigar with a shattered mouth and cracked lips while terrorizing other meeker kin. They scurry and screech under his harsh slaps but obey; running off only briefly before returning with more of their kind to join the battle. The Boss beast and his quartet of fear soaked lessers join the advance as well.

Turn Three and Four

“Lord have mercy! I can’t see a thing with all the vermin flocking about!” Seamus swats and stabs at the clouds of insects that herald the advance of the creatures. But its more than just bugs and he can feel it. Their icky little bodies are filled with an energy that he’s never felt before. All he can think of is Soul Stone. They feel like the sucking hollow left behind after a Soul Stone is used; a perfect crumbling vacuum of potential.

He can see the source from across the foundry. The boss beast.

The Bayou guide, Mctavish, nods encouragements to the boss. “Keep it up Jones. Keep on’em. Use every bit o’ da Sinkin’.

McTavish understands the barking snarl speak of the Gremlin. It’s the newest language to Malifaux. Weeks old only and remarkable in its development but he grasps enough to communicate.

The boss, Jones, carves obscene glyphs in the air with the looping awful drool from his mouth while his hideous visage is wreathed in his cigar smoke. “Flay the flesh! Lay bare the bone! Upon this ruin let grief be sown!” With each word the flood of negative energy grows eating away at the mana of the place and confusing the actions of the undead. Jones giggles, a rolling quivering giggle that ripples through his obese body.

“You too!” Jones breaks his snarling demand of the Mosquitoes only to drink from the dingy bottle in his grip. The syrupy moonshine oozes over his torn lips and broken teeth. “Use the Sinkin’!”

The Sinking. A name for the magic that the gremlins have made their own. It’s a parasitic energy that decays all systems and breaks down possibility. It’s entropy in its purest form… stagnation.

The gigantic insect jams its proboscis into the ether itself, penetrating the flow of mana and drinking it dry.

Seamus curses as another of his spells withers at the end of his fingertips. Jones nods, his moonshine pours out a hole in his chin and down his white coat. He wipes at the saliva hooch runoff dripping down his neck. The man in the big hat amuses him enough to earn a brief throaty giggle. “Gut him!”

Pigs swarm the flock of Night Terrors now along with Mctavish and his snapping gator. Where before they were weighing down the massive hog with numbers its now they who struggle against impossible odds.

Bete, still slithering about unseen, can feel her terrors swallowed up by the mouths of pigs.

Seamus backs away from the building entirely and turns his attention to the troubles outside. The creatures are swarming the site and they’re threatening to cut off their escape route. The bayou is alive with the howl of beasts and the crack of guns. “Huh? Not how I expected the night to go. I was thinkin’ a nice warm night by the fire, wrapped in the arms of my lovelies would be nice.”

“It would be” Cybelle licks her lips and runs a bloated finger along the curve of her veiny bosom.

A stray round rips into Fanny’s shoulder and severs the weak ligaments dropping the arm to the wet earth where it crawls about like a wounded animal. “You’re still perfect to me Fanny!” Seamus assures his rotten lover before blasting the beast that took her limb. She moans a thanks.

Bete feels the death ripple through her benighted body. She’s drawn to it and her form materializes around the bleeding critter, rising up from his blood to stare down his companions. She also stares into a long dark almost as deep as her own, the barrels of the other creatures’ guns. Bullets blast the area nearly shredding her but they reap a tally of wounds among Seamus and the other belles. Bete dances across the night and back into the shadows while Seamus has no choice but to return to the building.

Turn Five and Six

Seamus opens the door hoping to find the hogs dealt with by his broken necked miners. “Olright m’ boys we’re packing up for greener pastures so bag them hogs and…”

Instead he sees the nightmare smile of the boss beast moments before the squeal. He turns just in time to catch a glimpse of the greasy streaks darting from the dark. His tools gut one as it leaps but the other one wraps its filmy jaws around his shocked face.

Bete is again drawn to more fresh death. She has cravings just as the other women do that cannot be sated. As she rises from the blood her body is hammered over and over again by the crush of hooves and gore of tusks. The big hog and its fellows spatter her and the Sinking destroys any chance of her haunting return tonight.

Cybelle splinters the face of the big hog with her iron fan, a triumphant moan with jaws that dangle a serpent’s yawn apart follows the death. Fanny however is not lucky enough to claim a victim. She’s smashed up against the wall of the foundry and pasted into it by the stampede of hogs and the poke of one of the creature’s prods.

The gremlins holler and scream. They sip from flasks and dirty bottles before shattering the empty containers mocking the celebrations of the humans they watched for years. Jones stomps across the rafters downing his own grog while Mctavish’s gator eats its fill of rot below.

The boss points down with his stabbin’ pole while the slow deep red glow of fire returns to the furnaces. “Stoke the fires! Bring me flame! Bring me clatter! Make this place rumble with thunder like it did for the menlins!”

Jones looks down on the corpses littering the site, Gremlin and Menlins alike, and licks his lips. “Skin’em! Crisp ‘em! Eat em’ raw! Have yer fill and kill kill KILL!”

Gremlins

Claim Jump 4VP

Kill Protégé’ 2VP

Red Chapel

Distract 2VP

Bodyguard 0VP

[Rannith]

Very entertaining.

It sounded like a very fun game.

I especially liked the parts from Bête Noir's POV.

THANKS!