Pinky hits the mark; the Lady (Ant­o­nia) vanishes.

Played

22^nd Septem­ber 2011.

Dramatis Personae

• Lady Ant­o­nia deVore – a Heav­ily-armed Aris­to­crat.
• Cap­tain Ben­son Cur­ruth­ers – a Mil­it­ary Police­man.
• Miss April Sharpe – a Self-taught Invent­or.
• Pinky – a Low Youth.
• Prince Sal­man of Swat – a Dash­ing Cav­alry­man.
• Agent Andrews – a Stal­wart Agent of the Min­istry.
• Jemadar Khan of the Bengal Lan­cers.
• 4 Very Large Anim­ated Statues.
• A Large Tiger Demon.

Plot

Faced with a giant mov­ing statue, Pinky very sens­ibly bolted out of the com­plex, run­ning straight back to the oth­ers. The team decided that mov­ing statues were too much to deal with, espe­cially with their cas­u­al­ties, and decided to retreat to the canyon over­look­ing the val­ley. Pro­gress home was slow, giv­en that they were car­ry­ing Prentiss’s corpse and Miss Sharpe’s arm, as well as Miss Sharpe her­self, who had taken a com­bin­a­tion of pain-killing drugs from Lady Antonia’s med­ic­al case and a con­coc­tion of her own. Pinky loc­ated the body of the miss­ing Lan­cer hanging from a tree and they decided to remove him to a bet­ter loc­a­tion for buri­al as well.

Set­ting watches for the night, they settled down to rest, wak­ing late in the morn­ing to bury Pren­tiss and the Lan­cer. Pinky had been prac­tising with one of Lady Antonia’s rifles and had showed an alarm­ing aptitude for fire­arms, while Miss Sharpe had devised a rig to enable her to oper­ate her Orgon­at­or one-handed. They decided that it might be safer to return to the temple dur­ing day­light and, indeed, they found their return trip much easi­er. In short order, they were once more observing the clear­ing from the treeline.

All seemed quiet and there was no sign of move­ment. Pinky once again ven­tured for­ward, enter­ing the out­er court­yard and cau­tiously skirt­ing the inner wall. He noted that there were four gates to the inner court, each guarded by a 25’ statue – he thought it was a reas­on­able assump­tion that all could and would move to attract intruders. He saw no signs of any live ban­dits, although there was plenty of evid­ence that they had used the facil­ity as a base. He could also see a small group of pris­on­ers chained to the wall, although he was unable to determ­ine their condition.

The team care­fully planned their next move, intend­ing to lure one of the statues out of the inner court­yard and dis­able it with heavy gun­fire while Pinky crept in over the wall, using a grap­pling hook fired from Lady Antonia’s cross­bow to reach the cent­ral tower. The plan went superbly, as the chosen statue crawled out through the gate in front of it and climbed to its feet, only to be hit by a fusil­lade of fire from the out­er gate. It las­ted long enough to injure some of the adven­tur­ers before a series of attacks con­cen­trated on its left knee brought it crash­ing to the ground. The remain­ing statues watched the event but made know move to inter­vene. Hit by a tum­bling piece of masonry, Lady Ant­o­nia van­ished though a gap in the out­er wall.

In the mean­time, Pinky’s grapple landed on tar­get with the first attempt, and he swung across to the spire of the tower. Now he was above the centre of the struc­ture, he could see that the court­yard con­tained a camp­site, but that it was deser­ted except for the trio of pris­on­ers – two in Indi­an dress, one in European. Only one was still alive, a brawny, mous­ta­chioed Indi­an who was watch­ing him with interest. Pinky moved to one of the sky­lights of the tower and climbed in, intend­ing to explore fur­ther, before he real­ised that the tower had no interi­or floors. Instead, he found him­self sit­ting sixty feet above what appeared to be a large bed, occu­pied by a huge tiger-like fig­ure. As he tried to retain his bal­ance, it opened its eyes and looked straight at him, open­ing its mouth to emit a hor­ri­fy­ing roar. Shocked, Pinky nearly fell out of the win­dow as he scrambled back­wards on to the roof.

The huge fig­ure pre­pared to leap at him, but the pris­on­er dis­trac­ted it by launch­ing into a vari­ation of the Mus­sel­man call to pray­er. Pinky took the oppor­tun­ity to get to safety, but was bemused to notice that the being seemed reluct­ant to emerge into the sunlight.

Notes

And so the mys­ter­i­ous Sal­man, dash­ing Prince of Swat, makes his first appear­ance! He’s described as resem­bling a Bol­ly­wood hero, com­plete with finely-styled moustache.

Fol­low­ing the cas­u­al­ties of the pre­vi­ous ses­sion and a month’s gap in play­ing, this ses­sion moved fairly fast, allow­ing for a lengthy plan­ning ses­sion amongst the play­ers. My favour­ite solu­tion to get­ting past the statue was to lure it over a bar­rel of gun­powder; they didn’t have one, but one of the play­ers had an Adven­ture Card that could have allowed them to scrounge it!