esotErik
2015-02-02, 12:37 AM
So last night a couple of friends and I decided to try a roleplaying game using Skype and Roll20. None of us had ever played a roleplaying game before and we did absolutely zero prep-work, so we chose Fate Accelerated (because it seemed easy enough) and found an old Call of Cthulhu adventure prompt promisingly titled: “I Want You to Kill the Ice Cream Man.” I was the GM and my friends immediately devolved into Grand Theft Auto-esque antics, but the night eventually ended with a dramatic tale of star-crossed love. It was a really fun time and the resulting story is entertaining enough that I thought I should share it with you. Sorry if my write-up is a little long.
The Characters
Chad Bradley: Enthusiastic member of Alpha Chi Zeta impatiently waiting to return to college, where his domineering parents can't stop him from overdosing on alcohol and harassing nerds. Has connections in the burgeoning experimental IT department on campus. Holds liquor very well, can't avoid the friendzone, and sounds an airhorn at opportune moments (friend actually blared an airhorn sound several times). Because he is a habitually inebriated driver, he receives a bonus whenever hitting someone with his car.
Margaret Black: 28 years old. Former serial killer. She faked her death to get out of her engagement with long-term boyfriend, Bobby Brown. Calculator repair person, arsonist, depressed and gay. Because she is a knife collector with knives shoved into her bra, she receives a bonus when trying to stab dudes.
The Session
Having just gotten off work at the experimental IT department on the nearby campus, Margaret and Chad were having an early dinner when a strange, disheveled man approached them. As Margaret threatened him with a knife and Chad prepared to run him down with a car, the man explained that four years ago, his child was taken by some sort of monster in the guise of an ice cream man. The disheveled man confessed to having accidentally killed an ordinary ice cream man the previous day and presented Margaret with a briefcase full of photographic evidence of the monster's years of abducting children and his strangely plane-decorated truck, hoping that she and Chad would continue his pursuit. He then ran across the street to turn himself in to two nearby police officers, who, threatened by his screaming and running, gunned him down in the street.
Angered at the death of their new friend, Chad and Margaret (who first burned the briefcase for no apparent reason), ran the cops down with their car, killing them instantly. They then drove off in search of the ice cream monster who had also wronged their "friend," beginning their search at an elementary school where they hoped to question children about mysterious ice cream man behavior. Unfortunately, having just left dinner, they arrived well after school was over, and so slept in the car over night.
The pair were awakened by two police officers who noticed that not only did their car match the description of the previous day's hit-and-run, it was also covered in blood. After Chad failed to hide in the backseat and Margaret failed to convince the officers that they had just dropped off a child, the two stole the police car and sped off in a hail of gunfire.
After finding spare police uniforms in the trunk of the car, Margaret and Chad proceeded to a second elementary school where, posing as police officers, they questioned children about suspicious ice cream men. The children were totally useless, but Principal Williams (totally by coincidence) mentioned the ice cream man who had been murdered earlier that week and informed him that the man's truck was still impounded by the police. The principal then subtly asked if they might be able to help him get a good deal on purchasing the truck, and they agreed to meet him that night at the post office (they refused his offer to meet at police headquarters). But upon leaving the school, they saw the two police officers from earlier inspecting the stolen police car. Thinking quickly, Margaret snuck up on them and slit their throats. Our cop-killing duo then stole their Badges and guns and tossed the bodies in the trunk.
They met Principal Williams that night, as planned, and drove him to the police station, now confident in their disguises. Margaret attempted to navigate directly to the impound lot, but got lost and attracted the attention of a nearby police officer. Thinking quickly, Chad deflected suspicion by claiming that they had arrested Williams (it helped that they had forced him to sit in the backseat) for attempting to bribe them into giving him an impounded vehicle. The lie worked and the police officer took Williams away, but not before casually mentioning that the vehicle had been reclaimed by its previous owner, a Mr. Hughes.
Chad and Margaret then decided to reference a phone book, where they found 30 Hughes's in town. Margaret first called "the Hughes with the most sinister sounding first name," Xavier Damien Hughes, who became frustrated with the fake police officers' refusal to believe that he did not, in fact, own an ice cream truck and hung up on them, though not before Chad called him a "****lord." They then called Hugh Hughes who, while not an ice cream truck owner, did by some happy coincidence live on a street regularly serviced by the distinctive plane-adorned ice cream truck. Chad then became angry at Hugh for "misgendering" the obviously female Margaret, who was posing as a male police officer, and also called him a "****lord."
The two traveled to Hugh Hughes's home of Eldritch Street but discovered that it was, once again, night, and there were no ice cream trucks to be found. They instead hid the car in a small wooded area, buried the murdered police officers, and slept for the night.
The next day, Chad and Margaret engaged in a stake out of Eldritch Street and, shortly after the end of school, saw the distinctive ice cream truck. Concocting what is surely the greatest plan ever employed in all of human history, Chad convinced a young boy of how awesome it would be to be a police deputy, Margaret handed him her gun, and the pair instructed him to shoot the ice cream man. The boy did as he was told, murdering the ice cream man in cold (ha) blood, sending children and parents running and screaming. Numerous people yelled to fake cops Chad and Margaret to stop the boy, so Chad instructed the boy to relinquish the gun. Unfortunately, the boy, mad with power, opened fire on the two who barely managed to get out of the way. Chad returned fire on the small child whom he had, himself, armed, but as children are fast, wily little things, the boy dodged with ease and took cover behind some nearby hedges. In desperation, Margaret shouted just two simple words, "Hey, stop!" The boy, having lived a spoiled life in which he had never actually been told "no" or instructed to stop, found himself seeing the world in an entirely new light and dropped the gun and surrendered.
After arresting the child and placing him in the backseat of their car, Chad and Margaret planned to drive off in the ice cream truck to investigate it and the ice cream man's body at their leisure, but found a trail of black slime leading from where the body should have been to a nearby manhole. Margaret took the lead as they pursued the creature, Chad staying a decent distance behind in case of surprise attacks. This proved to be their undoing, however, as the incredibly inebriated Chad got lost in the sewers and actually doubled-back to the original manhole, which he thought to be a second manhole through which the creature had escaped. Returning to the surface, he found himself surrounded by police officers. "Are you the one who gave a child a gun, ordered him to murder an ice cream man with it, then opened fire on the boy, then arrested the boy and left him in your car, then ran away into the sewers?" one asked. "No," Chad said, "that was my partner. I was chasing her. Come help me find her!"
Meanwhile Margaret, unaware of the absence of her companion, followed the slime trail out of the sewers into an apartment building where, upon pressing a slime-covered elevator button, she discovered that the liquid was incredibly acidic. She followed the trail to its terminus at apartment 303 and decided to burn down the apartment building. She succeeded only in making a tiny useless fire and so instead decided to pick the lock with one of her knives. This somehow worked and she entered what appeared to be an entirely ordinary one-bedroom apartment, except for a colossal freezer in the center of the living room. She opened the door and... immediately received a face full of acid. She ran around the apartment and, her vision clearing, saw that she was pursued by what appeared to be an ice cream man, if ice cream men had solid black eyes, a second, monstrous mouth protruding from their first, and oozed black slime.
As the creature prepared to douse Margaret with another acidic vomit attack, she managed to catch it off guard by telling it how beautiful it was. At that very moment, Chad kicked in the apartment door, shouted "It's ugly, shoot it!" and opened fire with two cops he had brought with him. While Chad landed several shots on the monster, the cops weren't actually completely sure what they were shooting at and more or less just fired around the room at random, accidentally hitting Margaret in the leg. The ice cream man made a break for the window but the now-heavily wounded Margaret called after it: "Wait! I love you!" Intrigued, the ice cream man stopped next to the window. "I know what it's like to be an outsider!" Margaret continued. "I've murdered people too!"
The monster spat on the floor. "You could never know the pain I have endured. I was born a human centuries ago. I grew up like a normal child, then my skin began sloughing off, my eyes turned dull black, my teeth fell out and my lips enlarged until my mouth becamelike a sucker! I lost my gender and my digestive system changed. I can now only feed onhuman flesh treated with my own hideous vomit!"
Unable to formulate a proper response, Margaret merely stuttered and blushed, before bringing out the big guns. "Are you from Tennessee? Cause you're the only ten I see." The creature vomited at her and jumped through the window.
Enlisting the help of his fellow officers, Chad pushed the giant freezer through the bullet damaged window in an attempt to crush the monster, but missed it by mere inches. They rushed down the stairs and commandeered a car while Margaret shuffled out of the building after them and collapsed in the street. Chad found another slime trail which he followed to a four-way intersection where it inexplicably split into each direction. Chad continued driving straight and radioed other officers to follow the other two trails. Before long the trail diverged into a wooded area and Chad and the officers were forced to continue on foot. They eventually found themselves back at the intersection: the ice cream man had doubled back to create multiple slime trails and confuse his pursuers. Chad received a call over police radio as he walked back to his car, informing him that one of the other paths had also doubled back to the intersection. Oh, and the ice cream truck had disappeared from that crime scene.
As Margaret laid uselessly in the road, a familiar ice cream truck pulled up. The ice cream man monster gently lifted her into the back, made her comfortable, and then began driving away. Curious, Margaret asked why he was doing all of this.
"After years of hunting down humans for food, I discovered that my vomit contained chemicals that can weaken the will of a victim, allowing me to call them to me. Children, of course, are the least resistant to my call, so I decided to prey on them. I also learned that, with my skinless body, I can wear stolen skins. This," he said, tugging on his flesh, "was a young man named Ray. The ice cream man is the ideal disguise. I can select my child victims without creating any suspicion. The freezer in this truck keeps my stolen skin from rotting too quickly. And I can use the ice cream to introduce my mind-dominating chemicals into my victim's body."
"So what are you going to do with me?" Margaret asked. "Are you going to wear my skin?"
"No," it said. "I just thought, like you said, maybe we have something in common. And, well, no one has ever said they loved me before..."
"We could work together!" Margaret suggested. "We could go around murdering people together!"
"I... I think I'd like that," the monster said with its equivalent of a smile.
Margaret reminded her new-found love that she was badly wounded, so he decided to stop at a convenience store and get her some bandaids. But as he exited the building, Chad finally pulled up.
"I'm gonna hit him with my car!" Chad shouted as he attempted to hit the monster with his car. The monster was violently pinned against the wall of the convenience store, its fake flesh ripped apart and its innards severely crushed. It shouted in pain and let out a stream of its acidic vomit towards the windshield. Chad leapt out of the the car, narrowly avoiding the acid, but his two police companions were completely disintegrated.
Having climbed up into the driver's seat of the ice cream truck, Margaret was faced with the toughest choice of her life. Was she loyal to her sort-of friend Chad? Had she merely been charming the monster to distract it and protect herself? Or had the charade become something more? Was the ice cream man her future?
Making her decision, Margaret drove the truck full speed at Chad. He dodged out of the way at the last second, but Margaret tore through the car, disabling it and freeing the ice cream man from the wall. The monster spat another stream of vomit at Chad who dodged again, rolling into position beside the truck. Taking aim, he shot his traitorous former partner-in-crime in the chest, seemingly killing her.
But Margaret was only mostly dead. Taking aim with her own handgun, Margaret attempted to put Chad down once and for all. But it was not to be as her shakey, injured hands missed by a mile and Chad leapt into the truck and kicked her out of it, all in one motion. He then backed up, hoping to run over the monster, but missed. This was the final stand off. Chad put the peddle to the metal as he accelerated towards the monster. Enraged at the seeming death of his beloved, the monster stood his ground and let out a final jet of vomit, but in his injured state missed Chad and the truck completely. Chad slammed into the monster and crushed his body beneath the tires as he sped off into the night.
There, in the convenience store parking lot, Margaret lay in a pool of her own blood and spilled bra-knives, while mere yards away her one and only love lay flattened in a pool of his own black slime. He reached his one still functioning arm feebly towards Margaret. She, finally getting to employ her calculator skills, graphed out a heart and then tossed the calculator towards the ice cream man. But, in her severely injured state, her throw went wide and broke the store window. She watched the ice cream man's arm fall to the ground as everything faded to black.
Chad burned the ice cream truck in a distant field before walking to a roadside restaurant for a meal. As he sat at a booth, he overheard breaking news on the radio.
"A string of terrible murders in Suburbsville has seemingly finally come to a close. A woman and some sort of mutated creature, believed to be responsible for the murders of no less than 6 police officers and the kidnapping of dozens of children, were found dead in the parking lot of a local convenience store. They are suspected of having impersonated an ice cream truck driver and a police officer, respectively, and..."
The waitress finally came to Chad's table. "What'll it be, hun?"
"Ice cream, please."
The Characters
Chad Bradley: Enthusiastic member of Alpha Chi Zeta impatiently waiting to return to college, where his domineering parents can't stop him from overdosing on alcohol and harassing nerds. Has connections in the burgeoning experimental IT department on campus. Holds liquor very well, can't avoid the friendzone, and sounds an airhorn at opportune moments (friend actually blared an airhorn sound several times). Because he is a habitually inebriated driver, he receives a bonus whenever hitting someone with his car.
Margaret Black: 28 years old. Former serial killer. She faked her death to get out of her engagement with long-term boyfriend, Bobby Brown. Calculator repair person, arsonist, depressed and gay. Because she is a knife collector with knives shoved into her bra, she receives a bonus when trying to stab dudes.
The Session
Having just gotten off work at the experimental IT department on the nearby campus, Margaret and Chad were having an early dinner when a strange, disheveled man approached them. As Margaret threatened him with a knife and Chad prepared to run him down with a car, the man explained that four years ago, his child was taken by some sort of monster in the guise of an ice cream man. The disheveled man confessed to having accidentally killed an ordinary ice cream man the previous day and presented Margaret with a briefcase full of photographic evidence of the monster's years of abducting children and his strangely plane-decorated truck, hoping that she and Chad would continue his pursuit. He then ran across the street to turn himself in to two nearby police officers, who, threatened by his screaming and running, gunned him down in the street.
Angered at the death of their new friend, Chad and Margaret (who first burned the briefcase for no apparent reason), ran the cops down with their car, killing them instantly. They then drove off in search of the ice cream monster who had also wronged their "friend," beginning their search at an elementary school where they hoped to question children about mysterious ice cream man behavior. Unfortunately, having just left dinner, they arrived well after school was over, and so slept in the car over night.
The pair were awakened by two police officers who noticed that not only did their car match the description of the previous day's hit-and-run, it was also covered in blood. After Chad failed to hide in the backseat and Margaret failed to convince the officers that they had just dropped off a child, the two stole the police car and sped off in a hail of gunfire.
After finding spare police uniforms in the trunk of the car, Margaret and Chad proceeded to a second elementary school where, posing as police officers, they questioned children about suspicious ice cream men. The children were totally useless, but Principal Williams (totally by coincidence) mentioned the ice cream man who had been murdered earlier that week and informed him that the man's truck was still impounded by the police. The principal then subtly asked if they might be able to help him get a good deal on purchasing the truck, and they agreed to meet him that night at the post office (they refused his offer to meet at police headquarters). But upon leaving the school, they saw the two police officers from earlier inspecting the stolen police car. Thinking quickly, Margaret snuck up on them and slit their throats. Our cop-killing duo then stole their Badges and guns and tossed the bodies in the trunk.
They met Principal Williams that night, as planned, and drove him to the police station, now confident in their disguises. Margaret attempted to navigate directly to the impound lot, but got lost and attracted the attention of a nearby police officer. Thinking quickly, Chad deflected suspicion by claiming that they had arrested Williams (it helped that they had forced him to sit in the backseat) for attempting to bribe them into giving him an impounded vehicle. The lie worked and the police officer took Williams away, but not before casually mentioning that the vehicle had been reclaimed by its previous owner, a Mr. Hughes.
Chad and Margaret then decided to reference a phone book, where they found 30 Hughes's in town. Margaret first called "the Hughes with the most sinister sounding first name," Xavier Damien Hughes, who became frustrated with the fake police officers' refusal to believe that he did not, in fact, own an ice cream truck and hung up on them, though not before Chad called him a "****lord." They then called Hugh Hughes who, while not an ice cream truck owner, did by some happy coincidence live on a street regularly serviced by the distinctive plane-adorned ice cream truck. Chad then became angry at Hugh for "misgendering" the obviously female Margaret, who was posing as a male police officer, and also called him a "****lord."
The two traveled to Hugh Hughes's home of Eldritch Street but discovered that it was, once again, night, and there were no ice cream trucks to be found. They instead hid the car in a small wooded area, buried the murdered police officers, and slept for the night.
The next day, Chad and Margaret engaged in a stake out of Eldritch Street and, shortly after the end of school, saw the distinctive ice cream truck. Concocting what is surely the greatest plan ever employed in all of human history, Chad convinced a young boy of how awesome it would be to be a police deputy, Margaret handed him her gun, and the pair instructed him to shoot the ice cream man. The boy did as he was told, murdering the ice cream man in cold (ha) blood, sending children and parents running and screaming. Numerous people yelled to fake cops Chad and Margaret to stop the boy, so Chad instructed the boy to relinquish the gun. Unfortunately, the boy, mad with power, opened fire on the two who barely managed to get out of the way. Chad returned fire on the small child whom he had, himself, armed, but as children are fast, wily little things, the boy dodged with ease and took cover behind some nearby hedges. In desperation, Margaret shouted just two simple words, "Hey, stop!" The boy, having lived a spoiled life in which he had never actually been told "no" or instructed to stop, found himself seeing the world in an entirely new light and dropped the gun and surrendered.
After arresting the child and placing him in the backseat of their car, Chad and Margaret planned to drive off in the ice cream truck to investigate it and the ice cream man's body at their leisure, but found a trail of black slime leading from where the body should have been to a nearby manhole. Margaret took the lead as they pursued the creature, Chad staying a decent distance behind in case of surprise attacks. This proved to be their undoing, however, as the incredibly inebriated Chad got lost in the sewers and actually doubled-back to the original manhole, which he thought to be a second manhole through which the creature had escaped. Returning to the surface, he found himself surrounded by police officers. "Are you the one who gave a child a gun, ordered him to murder an ice cream man with it, then opened fire on the boy, then arrested the boy and left him in your car, then ran away into the sewers?" one asked. "No," Chad said, "that was my partner. I was chasing her. Come help me find her!"
Meanwhile Margaret, unaware of the absence of her companion, followed the slime trail out of the sewers into an apartment building where, upon pressing a slime-covered elevator button, she discovered that the liquid was incredibly acidic. She followed the trail to its terminus at apartment 303 and decided to burn down the apartment building. She succeeded only in making a tiny useless fire and so instead decided to pick the lock with one of her knives. This somehow worked and she entered what appeared to be an entirely ordinary one-bedroom apartment, except for a colossal freezer in the center of the living room. She opened the door and... immediately received a face full of acid. She ran around the apartment and, her vision clearing, saw that she was pursued by what appeared to be an ice cream man, if ice cream men had solid black eyes, a second, monstrous mouth protruding from their first, and oozed black slime.
As the creature prepared to douse Margaret with another acidic vomit attack, she managed to catch it off guard by telling it how beautiful it was. At that very moment, Chad kicked in the apartment door, shouted "It's ugly, shoot it!" and opened fire with two cops he had brought with him. While Chad landed several shots on the monster, the cops weren't actually completely sure what they were shooting at and more or less just fired around the room at random, accidentally hitting Margaret in the leg. The ice cream man made a break for the window but the now-heavily wounded Margaret called after it: "Wait! I love you!" Intrigued, the ice cream man stopped next to the window. "I know what it's like to be an outsider!" Margaret continued. "I've murdered people too!"
The monster spat on the floor. "You could never know the pain I have endured. I was born a human centuries ago. I grew up like a normal child, then my skin began sloughing off, my eyes turned dull black, my teeth fell out and my lips enlarged until my mouth becamelike a sucker! I lost my gender and my digestive system changed. I can now only feed onhuman flesh treated with my own hideous vomit!"
Unable to formulate a proper response, Margaret merely stuttered and blushed, before bringing out the big guns. "Are you from Tennessee? Cause you're the only ten I see." The creature vomited at her and jumped through the window.
Enlisting the help of his fellow officers, Chad pushed the giant freezer through the bullet damaged window in an attempt to crush the monster, but missed it by mere inches. They rushed down the stairs and commandeered a car while Margaret shuffled out of the building after them and collapsed in the street. Chad found another slime trail which he followed to a four-way intersection where it inexplicably split into each direction. Chad continued driving straight and radioed other officers to follow the other two trails. Before long the trail diverged into a wooded area and Chad and the officers were forced to continue on foot. They eventually found themselves back at the intersection: the ice cream man had doubled back to create multiple slime trails and confuse his pursuers. Chad received a call over police radio as he walked back to his car, informing him that one of the other paths had also doubled back to the intersection. Oh, and the ice cream truck had disappeared from that crime scene.
As Margaret laid uselessly in the road, a familiar ice cream truck pulled up. The ice cream man monster gently lifted her into the back, made her comfortable, and then began driving away. Curious, Margaret asked why he was doing all of this.
"After years of hunting down humans for food, I discovered that my vomit contained chemicals that can weaken the will of a victim, allowing me to call them to me. Children, of course, are the least resistant to my call, so I decided to prey on them. I also learned that, with my skinless body, I can wear stolen skins. This," he said, tugging on his flesh, "was a young man named Ray. The ice cream man is the ideal disguise. I can select my child victims without creating any suspicion. The freezer in this truck keeps my stolen skin from rotting too quickly. And I can use the ice cream to introduce my mind-dominating chemicals into my victim's body."
"So what are you going to do with me?" Margaret asked. "Are you going to wear my skin?"
"No," it said. "I just thought, like you said, maybe we have something in common. And, well, no one has ever said they loved me before..."
"We could work together!" Margaret suggested. "We could go around murdering people together!"
"I... I think I'd like that," the monster said with its equivalent of a smile.
Margaret reminded her new-found love that she was badly wounded, so he decided to stop at a convenience store and get her some bandaids. But as he exited the building, Chad finally pulled up.
"I'm gonna hit him with my car!" Chad shouted as he attempted to hit the monster with his car. The monster was violently pinned against the wall of the convenience store, its fake flesh ripped apart and its innards severely crushed. It shouted in pain and let out a stream of its acidic vomit towards the windshield. Chad leapt out of the the car, narrowly avoiding the acid, but his two police companions were completely disintegrated.
Having climbed up into the driver's seat of the ice cream truck, Margaret was faced with the toughest choice of her life. Was she loyal to her sort-of friend Chad? Had she merely been charming the monster to distract it and protect herself? Or had the charade become something more? Was the ice cream man her future?
Making her decision, Margaret drove the truck full speed at Chad. He dodged out of the way at the last second, but Margaret tore through the car, disabling it and freeing the ice cream man from the wall. The monster spat another stream of vomit at Chad who dodged again, rolling into position beside the truck. Taking aim, he shot his traitorous former partner-in-crime in the chest, seemingly killing her.
But Margaret was only mostly dead. Taking aim with her own handgun, Margaret attempted to put Chad down once and for all. But it was not to be as her shakey, injured hands missed by a mile and Chad leapt into the truck and kicked her out of it, all in one motion. He then backed up, hoping to run over the monster, but missed. This was the final stand off. Chad put the peddle to the metal as he accelerated towards the monster. Enraged at the seeming death of his beloved, the monster stood his ground and let out a final jet of vomit, but in his injured state missed Chad and the truck completely. Chad slammed into the monster and crushed his body beneath the tires as he sped off into the night.
There, in the convenience store parking lot, Margaret lay in a pool of her own blood and spilled bra-knives, while mere yards away her one and only love lay flattened in a pool of his own black slime. He reached his one still functioning arm feebly towards Margaret. She, finally getting to employ her calculator skills, graphed out a heart and then tossed the calculator towards the ice cream man. But, in her severely injured state, her throw went wide and broke the store window. She watched the ice cream man's arm fall to the ground as everything faded to black.
Chad burned the ice cream truck in a distant field before walking to a roadside restaurant for a meal. As he sat at a booth, he overheard breaking news on the radio.
"A string of terrible murders in Suburbsville has seemingly finally come to a close. A woman and some sort of mutated creature, believed to be responsible for the murders of no less than 6 police officers and the kidnapping of dozens of children, were found dead in the parking lot of a local convenience store. They are suspected of having impersonated an ice cream truck driver and a police officer, respectively, and..."
The waitress finally came to Chad's table. "What'll it be, hun?"
"Ice cream, please."