Mork Borg – Part 2: Meat and Statues

Read up on what the Mork Borg game this is, how it works, and who is trying to survive in the dank and dark:

Part 1: Murder and Worms – Three from death-row scour the rooms and horrors of a buried den, origin of the addictive Rotblack Sludge.

Down the Hall…

A surprise awaits Cat, Bubble Guy, and Invisible in what appears to be a pump room: four more guards.

Thinking quick, Invisible, still in the hallway, drops weapons and listens unnoticed. Bubble Guy carries the old man, so is in an awkward position. Though Cat can still fight, the band would be vastly overwhelmed.

Using talk, Bubble Guy asks after Aldor. The guards, unimpressed, take Bubble Guy and Cat prisoner. Through a trap door in the same room, all but Invisible are led into parts reeking and sweltering.

Invisible is left behind as the trap shuts. Horror awaits the other two.

Chains with hooked flesh hang from the ceiling, tables crusted with viscera carry jagged implements, fires burn hot in open furnaces, a yawning pit to where the great worm drops from where a wall ought be, and working among it all: a giant of a man, bald and tattooed and sweating, the master of this place, the boss, Fletcher.

Fletcher and Bubble Guy question each other on what they are doing there. With some charisma, Bubble Guy gains Fletcher’s liking after disclaiming any knowledge of Lesdy, the troublesome witch who has been Fletcher’s bane.

Only a minor interruption of Invisible botching a silent entry through the trap door sends two of the guards to investigate. Bubble Guy claiming it is only they and Cat, a deception believed by the boss.

Fletcher continues his work while monologuing the process of creating Rotblack Sludge and the incompetences of the Shadow King. From chains dangled into the depths of the pit, skulls and ribcages are drawn up. Cracking these vessels on his workbench, Fletcher shows off the crystalized black material that is Rotblack.

The drug is a source of control over others for him with the added benefit that users will eventually return to the place it is made. Fletcher emphasizes his points with grand gestures to the dripping pieces hung from the ceiling.

Through the trap door two guards return with word of a massacre of the other guards in the complex. Fletcher turns dark in tone at this not because he now disbelieves his guests, but when he understands that all the meat on those bodies was, with remorse, wasted.

Waste is something Fletcher cannot abide by. No, not at all.

Not. At. All.

Cue the music.

From a furnace Fletcher pulls a white-hot rod out with but one huge hand. From it rattles a fiery chain and the bright, spiked ball of a massive flail.

Swoosh. Swoosh. Swoosh.

The flail gently swings in the air.

Bubble Guy puts the old man down, trying to explain away things going awry. A guard points out the sword Bubble Guy carried was one of their own.

Swoosh swoosh swoosh.

Unarmed, surrounded, Cat and Bubble Guy edge away towards the pit. Begging and promises go nowhere.

Swooshswooshswoosh.

Fletcher gags! A chain is tight around his neck! Invisible, high on the giant’s back, causes a distraction to both Fletcher and the guards, letting Cat and Bubble Guy pounce.

The beast of a man Fletcher is hardly harmed by the chain around his trunk of a neck, nor the clawing of a cat, nor an unarmed magician. Yet also Fletcher fails to grab Invisible off his back or Cat off his chest. The guards are hardly about to slash at their leader, so stand at length away from the thrashing melee.

Bubble Guy thinks of what is available… The urn! This is thrown into Fletcher’s face as further distraction, perhaps incurring blindness until something better can be found. Effects are…

Incredible.

The powder is variably poisonous. To Fletcher, it happens to be maximally poisonous in just the same amount as Fletcher has hit points!

(I, the GM, unbelieving that through very rare cases the ‘big boss’ has been downed in one shot,) Fletcher takes a saving action to perhaps retain at least a single hit point from the poison.

In that too, Fletcher fails.

Eyes and nose and teeth and tongue and all things melting from his bones, Fletcher dies horribly on the very floor he had done such wrong over. Cat and Bubble Guy barely escape the collapse. A great gurgling death-cry rises from the pit as the sound of sucking muck deafens the chamber as Fletcher sputters his last.

Prisoners

In short order, the frightened guards are slain one by one. However, the last guard surrenders, offering to tell all!

With him, the trio march through an unexplored room of junk and into what must have been a statue room before its backside collapsed into the pit. The only things there are another door, some scuffed cobblestones, and a monument to a one-eyed king.

Finding nothing but a bloody eye-socket in the room’s statue, the trio head through the far door. There they find a screaming man who attempts to crawl away shrieking.

This distraction gives the former guard a chance to flee back through the statue room. After a messy chase of the crawling man and killing the guard as the guard took the chance to flee, the crawling man calms knowing the trio is not sent from Fletcher nor will they eat him. He lets know he is a Shadow King agent who was the last survivor of his particular group. The rest?

Eaten.

The man is starving and can offer little new information. No child of the King was ever encountered, nor clues to any whereabouts. As the party decides what to do (they have no food to feed the man), the agent dies in the bounty of filth.

Without more clues, the party heads back to the garden to council with Lesdy again. However, only her caldron of roots and mushrooms remains in the garden.

Now sampling the food once before offered, the group regains much of their lost health. Without Aldor, they may not return above. But here below, there is water, food in the garden… Could they live there indefinitely?

A decision for the morrow. As the day wanes, two sleep with a guard, Cat, posted.

Not even the strong Cat can stay awake as the room swims and shimmers before Cat’s very eyes. The stew! The. Stew…

With no guard standing, not even nightmares disturb the company’s slumber, though they are not alone…

–

Dun dun dun!

Stay tuned for Part 3: Eyes and Ash next week! A… deadly conclusion to the rampages in Mork Borg‘s Rotblack Sludge 🔥🤘💀🤘🔥

Cheers to the grim and the dark ~