Scenes under the The Story detail the misadventures of the LoST group as their six investigators uncovered the mysteries and horrors of The Pennywell Hangmen scenario. Each player has edited The Story and as a result you'll find difficult points of views (and writing styles) as the different scenes progress.
Anyone intending to play this scenario as an Investigator should NOT read any part of The Story other than the Teaser Introduction. Keepers intending to run {:PWH:The Pennywell Hangmen} are encouraged to read over this section, as it provides an additional level of detail not present in the Keeper Resources.
Detailed below are the scenario hooks as to why the investigators are attending the Morgens Institute Christmas Party.
T;uesday 18th December 1923;
It's a chilly night as guests start arriving at Hotel Algonquin (58 - 61 West 44th Street) for the Morgens Institute Christmas Party. Some 40 people fill the pleasant 2nd floor suite, for a respectable night as guests of Ambrose Morgen, a well known New York philanthropist.
Topics of conversation include Major John Hylans recent heart attack, a Christmas Day dance marathon, the King Tut exhibition coming to the Natural History Museum and even rumours of a new speak easy in Harlem. The guests take their seats at the request of the head waiter and Ambrose Morgen is about to make a speach when the evening is suddenly thrown into chaos ...
Suddenly the main door is thrown open by a terrified young woman. She has shoulder-length hair and a nice trim figure that is clung to by an expensive looking negligee, now looking rather tattered by the wet and muddy looking stains on it. She would have look quite stunning had her face not been contorted in a mask of terror. "It's up there! It's up there!" she cries out as she stumbles towards the closest table where Jeff quickly catches her as she looses the last of her strength and falls. Estelle, knowing from experience the kind of embarrassment the young woman must feel over being so lightly dressed in a room full of men, quickly takes of her fur stole and tries to covers up the shaking woman. The mud on the woman smears of the white fur as she hugs it close for warmth and comfort. "Where in a hotel does a woman get soaked in muddy water?" Sylvester thinks to himself as the gossip-hungry crowd gathers around the scene. Jeff steadies the woman on his shoulder and leads her out of the main room, out into the corridor and into small room where he helps her down. "There are wet footprints leading up the stairs." Barrington points out and he, Jeff and Sylvester all follows the footprints up to the third floor, leaving Estelle to calm down the poor woman in the negligee.
The footprints leads up to room 11. Jeff is the first to enter the room, gun raised. He has a moment to register that the room has been turned upside down and that the lights had gone out before he hears a sound to his left, drawing his attention. As he turns he catches a glimps of a man, only dressed in his underwear, dropping out of the window with a look of sheer terror on his face. After a second the screams stopped short with a loud thud. Jeff and Barrington runs up to the window and looks out to see the man sprawled across the dented roof of a car, and a young man stands next to it and stares in disbelief. For the breifest of moments Jeff hears a strange sound he cant place but amongst wind and rush of noise from the street it is lost.
KeithFarnsworth had stepped out of the car for a smoke mere seconds before a man fell from the sky onto his car, right above the driver's seat. Blood splattered from the mangled body Keith looks up where it had come from and sees a man leaning out of a broken window on the third floor, then down again at the body. "It can't be! No no no! Anyone but him." Keith thinks to himself as the contorted face of the 'John' he had been hired to chauffeur for the evening, stared back at him with dead eyes. "And where the hell is his 'date'? Theo is gonna kill me if I lose one of his hookers."
Back in room 11, Sylvester surveys the devastation. The room had been messed up badly; paintings on the wall had fallen down, the bed had been shifted out of place, a closet had been knocked over and so on. Shards of glass from the broken window is scattered all over the floor. But what interests Sylvester the most is the smell; a thick stink of old stagnant water. He recognizes it from the mud that covered the woman in the negligee, and he now finds the same mud on the floor of room 11 and on the outside of the broken window, a window that has been broken from the outside! "It's upstairs!" The woman's words rang through Sylvester's mind.
"Who the hell tore this place apart? I don't think the man who just went out the window did and it sure as hell wasn't the girl! I think there was another man here, Someone big." Jeff says as he picks his way through the rubble that once was the decoration of room 11. "Hey, look at this. Its a business card I think - 'Theodore Depp, Carouser.' What the hell?" After a short search they find an overnight bag. Amongst the mans possessions Barrington finds some ID. "Robert Williamson, works for a Radio Station over the Hudson, K.N.Y.C". Finally before Jeff clears the group from the scene they also find the girls purse - she is Siobhan Gilbert, lives in a tenament in Harlem - and suspicously has two cards for The Sugar Cane, which both Jeff and Barrington know is one of the newer Speak Easys to have come on the scene of late.
The three men walks down to the room where Estelle has managed to calm the Siobhan enough to stop her crying. She is still in shock though, and doesn't respond to any questions. She just sits in a chair staring at the wall, mumbling softly to herself, her eyes still wide with fear. Estelle joins Jeff and Barrington to let them know how Siobhan is doing and Sylvester starts walking down the corridor towards the exit to check up on the man who fell from the window. Suddenly Siobhan bolts up from her chair and runs down the corridor, turns right and runs up the stairs. Jeff and Barrington immediately run after her, afraid that she might hurt herself, the memory of the man jumping from the window fresh in their mind. When they reach room 11 they see Siobhan standing on the opposite side of the bed, facing the bathroom, not moving a muscle. Her bare feet are bleeding from walking on the crushed glass on the floor, the blood seeping into the carpet. Jeff slowly walks to position himself between the woman and the open window. Barrington is slowly walking towards Siobhan when suddenly she takes a deep breath and then screams a long terror filled scream that cut through bone and marrow of the two men. Like a banshee the woman screams and screams, staring into the soft yellow light coming from the bathroom before she suddenly collapses. Barrington leaps forward and catches her and carries her to the mud-stained bed. Room 11 is quiet once more.
The police arrive shortly thereafter and after a short interrogation everybody is allowed to go home. When Sylvester arrives home he feels extremely tired after all the excitement of the evening. Despite his body crying out for sleep he decides to go to his microscope. The mud that covered room 11 and Siobhan was now all over his shoes and clothes. Despite all that had happened that evening, it was the mud that stood out as the most strange to Sylvester and he just had to have a closer look. Sylvester managed to keep his weariness at bay for a couple of hours before giving up and going to bed. In that time he discovered that the mud was filled with fungi of a kind he had never seen before. It seemed to be heat intolerant and toxic. Fungi are not the area of Sylvester's expertise, but still, there was something about it that didn't sit quite right in his mind. Unable to put his finger on what, Sylvester went to bed and slept a restless night filled with dreams of water.
Editing in progress
Draft Copy
