[UA] A little help?

[thanatos]

RANDY: Ok, let's get down to business, the way I see it, someone is out to 
make a sequel, you know, cash in on all of the movie murder hoopla, so it's 
our job to observe rules of a sequel. Number one, the body count is always 
bigger, number 2, the death scenes are always much more elaborate, more blood, 
more gore, carnage candy. Your core audience just expects it. And number 
three, never...
                    - Randy, _Scream 2_

Okay, he never finishes the third rule, but I think it's some variant of, 
"Never assume the killer--either from the first film or this one--is dead."  I 
include this quote as a sort of warning against doing it.  Sequels are 
cinematic junk food.  They might taste sweet at first, and you do crave them, 
but they leave you feeling bloated and empty after the fact.  With that HUGE 
caveat on the table, let's proceed:

Start with a Hermit.  He meets the group soon after the Swap Meet, presumably 
standing next to the crater where the farmhouse once stood, and warns them 
against doing this thing.  Thanks to them and their sacrifice, a great wrong 
was corrected eventually.  To return could mean undoing the wrong, to the 
detriment of the universe.  If they insist upon this course of action, he has 
one piece of advice--go out and do something Noble, to give the universe a 
reason not to dust your sorry ass out of spite.

This is key.  The mechanism is a sort of time travel, where causality is less 
important than consequence.  The universe doesn't care whether or not you kill 
your grandfather--it'll punish you both just to hear you squeal.  The group 
are indeed going back in time, to a point slightly after they escaped.  But 
things are different.  People who were dead are now alive, and visa versa.  
What's worse, something _knows_ that the PCs are back, and they're somehow the 
key to its survival or destruction.  The Noble acts (which must be 
accomplished WITHOUT the benefit of a flip-flop) will act as a sort of anchor.
 If they die here, then that future noble act will go undone, and the universe 
will suffer, so it's less likely to kill you...in theory.

But the Hermit's got other motives.  Despite his heavy-handed protestations, 
he needs them to go back--in fact, he knows that if they don't go back, then 
the wrong will never be undone.  They weren't ready then, but they're ready 
now.  They just need a little insurance.  The Noble act works like this--if a 
person wishes to undo something, such an an imminent death, he's given a 
choice by the GM--endure the consequence, or forgo the Noble act.  If the 
latter, then the PC is nailed by an ungodly Stress Check, and loses the 
ability to call on his Noble stimulus for an unspecified amount of time.  Even 
worse, he lives with the certain knowledge that whatever Noble deed he did has 
now gone horribly wrong, with unimaginable consequences.  But hey, he saved 
his own ass, right?

What they do not realize is that they're replaying things EXACTLY as they 
really happened the first time, and not as they've been allowed to remember.  
There are three lynchpins, three events where they zigged instead of zagged, 
and to earn the right to zag, they must sacrifice their Nobility (yeah, I 
know, it's a little strange, but bear with me).  The Hermit is transferring an 
unbearable pain into five or six (depending on the number of PCs) seperate 
pains, which the Universe can handle a little better.  In the end, though, it 
will be obvious that a lynchpin involves the inevitable death of a PC, but if 
they've saved a Noble anchor, they can presumably skirt that issue, right?  
Wrong.  The Noble act was sacrificed in order to give the PC the right to die.
 If, however, the PC chooses to die and NOT sacrifice their nobility to get 
out of it, then all will be made right.

So what's going on in that house?  I'm thinking, "In the Heat of the Night," 
which features an illegal abortionist in a hick town.  In this case, though, 
the abortionist has two lackey sons that are in charge of getting rid of the 
evidence.  At first, they burn the evidence, but that soon proves to be too 
cumbersome, so they start burying them among the crops.  Then mama dies, and 
they bury her out there, too.  About 9 months after that, the first lump 
appears in the field.  They unbury it, and discover almost a fully grown child 
still in the amniotic sack.  They free her, and are astonished to find that 
she speaks in her mother's voice.  Something strange and unholy has happened.  
These are the Wanted, the hollow shells of people, and their mother and other 
demons can inhabit them.  However, the shells don't last long, and while 
there's plenty out in that field, the mama knows that they need to plan for 
the future.  So the two go out and kidnap a woman, and use her to 'breed more 
seeds' for the field.  She insists that they allow two to go to term, so that 
she can have lackeys after these two have kicked on.  Oddly enough, they 
don't.  As soon as the first child reaches 13, an odd transformation happens 
in the first lackey.  His hair becomes unmanageable, and he begins to 
knuckle-walk.  In short order, he becomes a baboon, but in form only.  He 
still has human intellect (well, his wasn't that great to begin with).  And so 
it's been since 1965.  During that time, they've kidnapped over fifty women, 
but at the time the PCs intrude, they've just buried the last one, and are 
looking for a replacement.  To stop the Wanted, they need to find the mama and 
destroy the body.  It's actually not that hard--each 'seed' is connected to 
her by an umbilical cord.

Well, back to work.


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