Backwater Static

Came to the Foundation as a title deed in a bankrupt estate, along with nine acres of marsh nobody could be persuaded to survey. It is the first thing on St. Bernard's list, which means the parish either has been quiet or has not been looked at.

A chapel on a shell mound seven miles out in the marsh, reachable at low water and cut off at high. It was a customs station before it was anything, handed on to an order that had already been asked to leave two parishes, and out of contact with anybody who might have corrected it long before the surveys stopped listing the mound at all.

There are no windows above waist height. What light gets in comes off the water and moves on the ceiling, and every image in the building is of somebody going under willingly: the plaster over the door, the painted boards behind the altar, the small figures worked into the rail. The font is full and has never been filled. It has been drained four times and was full again inside the hour, with water that is not the marsh's.

The floor is cut over with names. It has been relaid twice, each time because they ran out of floor, and the old slabs were not carried away: they were turned face down and laid under the new ones. The most recent name is cut in a hand nobody has matched to anybody living.

Held by owning the mound and the water around it. No permanent staff. Parties go in at low water, four at a time, and are counted out by name at the boat.

There is more mound underneath than on top, and the passages run below the waterline without being wet. People come out of them having been gone longer than they were, and the ones who come out singing are kept apart from the ones who do not. Count the party out by name yourself, out loud, at the boat: do it once when nothing is wrong so the players learn the ritual, and the second time will do all the work for you.

Acquired by not demolishing it. The buy-out took the whole street and the contractor's schedule has this address crossed out in a different pen. First on the Orleans Parish list, which surprises everybody who reads the file and is only because the parish list is new.

A single-story house on a street where the other eleven lots are slab and weeds. The neighbourhood was bought out after the water came through and everything else was taken down. The paperwork for this one exists, is signed by everybody it needed to be, and was never acted on.

Nothing in the house stays where it is put, and nothing in it will leave. Take a drawer handle, a doorstop, a jar of buttons: the house does not come after you, but the thing you took keeps doing the house's work wherever you set it down. A borrowed spoon turns a kitchen drawer into the sound of somebody going through it. Put it back and the kitchen is a kitchen again within the hour.

The plaster carries faces that surface and go under the way something does in water. None of them is anybody named on the deed.

The lot is fenced and the utilities are live, because the house is quieter with the power on. Anything removed is returned by the person who removed it, who is not disciplined for taking it, on the reasoning that discipline makes people hide things.

There is no plan to take it down, only drafts, and every one was written by somebody who went inside first to measure up. Let a player pocket something small without comment and do not mention it again for a session. The haunting is portable, it is theirs now, and the moment worth building to is the table working out which of them is carrying it.

Bought off a water board that was glad to be rid of it, for less than the land was worth, with no survey. Nobody recorded who identified it or how, so it sits at seventh on the unknowns. The purchase file is complete and the acquisition file is a single page.

A Victorian waterworks, decommissioned in the fifties, still drawing power from a supply that was cut in the same decade. Every room is exactly as cold as the room it was in an hour ago, so the building runs about a day behind the weather.

Contained by owning it, fencing it, and keeping it on the register as a listed building nobody may enter. Temperature is logged from outside, hourly, by an instrument on a pole.

The lag is not stable. Twice it has run three days behind, and on both occasions somebody inside reported hearing the building being used. That is the hook and it is better unexplained: a place that is a day behind is a curiosity, and a place that is three days behind has people in it. If the party go in during a drift, let them hear the pumps working and find the pumps cold.

Found because it ate a road. A county surveyor could not work out why a resurfacing job had come out eleven meters short of the survey and went to look at the ground. Ninety-fifth on the unknowns.

An irregular patch of ground about forty-five meters by thirty.

It converts what it touches. Soil, asphalt, brick, steel, standing water, anything at the edge becomes more of it, and what it becomes is not chemically or structurally related to what it was.

The rate is constant and it has been measured to four decimal places: a little under ninety centimeters an hour, in every direction, in all weathers.

Unrestrained it would leave any site inside four hours, cover four square kilometers in a day, and reach a thousand kilometers in under a month. Those figures are in the file, in that order, and they are the whole of the case for the arrangement described below.

Noise stops it.

Anything above about sixty decibels halts growth where the sound falls. Machinery works. Speakers work. So do voices, instruments, a dog, a television, and a room of people having an argument, and all of them work equally, and nobody has found a difference between a loudspeaker and a conversation.

There is a site on top of it.

That was the solution and it was arrived at after eleven years of loudspeakers, generators, standby generators and one power failure. A building with people in it is never quiet. A building with people in it has never once fallen below the threshold in forty years.

So the site is staffed above its operational need, deliberately, and the staff do not know why the canteen is open at four in the morning or why the gym is where it is.

The quiet hours are covered by rotation. There is a night shift whose duties are light and whose attendance is not.

A fire alarm test is conducted weekly and is not a test.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate 0.87m per hour

Traits: It Converts Everything - at eighty-seven centimeters an hour, in all directions, in any weather. Noise Holds It - anything over sixty decibels, and a conversation works as well as a speaker. Four Hours - is how long the site has if the building goes quiet.

The party work there for a year before anybody tells them. Let them complain about the noise.

The session is a power cut at three in the morning, and the answer is not equipment. The answer is that somebody has to go and wake everybody up and keep them talking until it is fixed.

Never let them see the edge move. They should hear the room go quiet and know what that means.

Located by pattern rather than by report: a square kilometer of wetland that turns up in satellite imagery in places that had no wetland the month before. Forty-ninth on the list of shapes.

A square kilometer of forested wetland with a round pond in the middle of it, walled all the way round by mangroves that push back anything trying to get between them.

It moves. It has been in the southeastern United States, in west Africa, and in south Asia, and it has never turned up anywhere that is not warm and wet. Nobody knows how far it can go or what decides.

There is one way in, on the south side, and it leads to a pontoon walkway across the pond.

At the end of the walkway there is a barn. Two hundred meters square, ten high, on a pier. It has no doors. The way in is a corrugated iron shack stuck onto the south wall.

Outside the shack there is a man on a lawn chair.

He looks like whatever the local people would expect a friendly, slightly odd bartender to look like, and he speaks whatever they speak, and this changes when the wetland changes continents. Nobody has seen him change. He is simply correct for wherever he is.

He is hospitable. He is funny. He is very pleased to see anybody who has got that far, and he has never asked anybody for anything.

The inside of the barn is not described in this entry.

It is not contained and cannot be.

It is tracked. Imagery, local reporting and one satellite pass a week, and a standing arrangement with two national mapping agencies who think they are helping with something else.

When it arrives somewhere, a team goes, and the team does not go in. They sit outside the mangroves, count who goes down the walkway and count who comes back, and the two numbers have always matched.

Personnel are not to accept a drink. The instruction is in the procedure and is not explained.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: It Moves - continents, without warning, always somewhere warm and wet. One Way In - the south gap, the walkway, the shack. Exactly The Host You Expected - in your language, with your kind of manner. Everybody Comes Back - so far, and the counts are in the file.

Play him as the best company in the register. He should be a relief.

Never describe the inside of the barn. Let a player go in and then cut to them coming out.

They will ask why not the drink. Nobody in the file knows either.

Found by a planning officer who could not work out which company had built a diner on a supermarket parking lot overnight, and who could not find it in any application, and who eventually went and asked them. Sixty-first on the list of shapes.

A flowering plant whose flower is a roadside diner.

The root system goes down into the water mains and the sewers under whatever paved ground it has taken, aggressively, and that is usually the first sign anybody has that it is there.

The flower is a building. It has the right shape, the right fittings, the right counter, the right signs, and it works. Everything in it is made of plant cells: mostly the sort found in leaves and petals, arranged into laminate, vinyl, steel and glass well enough to pass anything short of a microscope.

Looked at closely from outside, the details are slightly wrong, and the list of what is wrong is in an appendix and is worth reading.

It produces fruit that looks and tastes like the food on a diner menu, including things that should have meat in them and things that should be liquid. All of it is plant tissue. Each piece has a number of small black seeds in it.

The seeds only germinate after they have been through a person.

Eat, pass the seeds, and if that happens on a large enough piece of paved ground there is a new one there within six hours.

The fruit does not compel anybody to do anything. It does cause urgency, at a rate well above the control, and the file is dry about this.

The flower stays open for the life of the plant, except where local licensing says a place like that cannot open at certain hours, at which point it closes into a large bud until the hours are over.

It gives off something that smells of bacon fat.

Anybody breathing it finds that unusual things happening in or near the building are unremarkable and not worth looking at. It is a light touch and it is very effective, and it is why nobody has ever reported one.

Instances are identified through water authority reports of root damage, which is the only channel that has ever worked.

Removal is by root excavation followed by chemical treatment, and the paved area is relaid.

Staff working a site wear respirators, which is unpopular, and the reason is explained to them every time.

Nobody eats anything. The instruction is worded to include the phrase just to see.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: A Flower - about fifteen meters across, with parking. Seeded Through People - eat, and the ground does the rest. Six Hours - from seed to open. Nothing Odd Here - the smell sees to that, and it is why nobody calls it in.

Play it as a diner. The coffee is good and the staff are the plant.

Let the group eat before anybody has read the file.

The licensing detail is the joke and it is also the tell. Have one close at eleven.

Bought three years after the hospital went bankrupt, on the strength of a local story about it being haunted, which is normally the sort of report that goes in a drawer. This one was checked because the same drawer already had four accounts of the same noise from four people who had no reason to know each other. Fourteenth on the unknowns.

A closed hospital, kept in good repair by people who have never explained to the council why. Power on, roof sound, grass cut.

Some people who go inside hear crying. Not all of them, and there is no pattern anybody has found in who does: it is not hearing, because two of them were deaf, and it is not suggestion, because the first four did not know what they were walking into. Those who hear it describe it identically, which is the part of the file that ends arguments.

It comes from the old maternity floor. It is faint at the door and no louder anywhere, and the distance never closes no matter how far in you go.

People who hear it want to keep going. They do not describe this as fear. They describe it as being needed, and they are annoyed at being stopped.

The hospital's own records list every birth that did not survive it. The count in that ledger and the number of separate voices people report are the same number, and nobody has published that.

Fenced, locked, and two on the gate turning away anybody who comes to see the haunted hospital, which is a surprising number of people in October. Three more patrol the upper floors. Anybody who reports the noise is escorted out, whatever their seniority, and is not allowed back on the strength of feeling fine about it.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Nothing here can be fought, and nothing here has ever hurt anybody directly.

Traits: Some People Hear It - pick before play which characters can, and do not roll for it; it is not a perception check and there is no pattern to find. Never Closer - the sound is the same volume at the door and at the end of the corridor. Wanted - those who hear it read the pull as being needed rather than as being drawn, and will argue, reasonably and at length, with anybody who tries to take them out.

Tell one or two players privately that their character hears crying, and tell the rest nothing. Everything good about this location happens between the players: the ones who hear it have a reason to go up, the ones who do not think their friends are behaving strangely, and both are right. Do not put anything at the top of the stairs. The ledger is the payoff, and it should be found after they leave.

The arrangement, rather than the building. Four hospitals carry one of these and the paperwork is identical in all four, down to the wording of the lease. Twelfth on the shapes list. Which four is a separate document and a higher clearance.

A wing of a working hospital, entered through a door marked for medical records, staffed by people whose pay comes from somewhere the hospital has never audited. Four beds, two cells, an incinerator with its own chimney.

Useful because ambulances arrive there all night and nobody counts them.

Staff are hospital staff on paper and are rotated through real clinical work to keep it that way. Nothing is admitted during daylight. The incinerator is run on a schedule that matches the hospital's own.

It is inside a hospital. Everything that gets out is immediately among the most fragile people in the county, and the players will know that before you say it. Use this site when you want a containment problem the party cannot solve with force, because every loud answer is being given twenty feet from a ward. The four beds are for their own people, which is worth establishing before one of them needs it.

Reported by a mortuary technician who had called the orderlies four times about a drawer that would not stay shut and who, the fifth time, looked in it. Eighth on the Orleans Parish list.

A hospital morgue in a basement. It was an ordinary morgue for most of a century and then it was not, and nothing about the building changed.

Drawers open on their own.

One at a time, unpredictably, a few times a month. Inside there is a body under a sheet, and the body is not one of the hospital's and is not on any list.

It is somebody who is currently alive.

They are always a patient in that hospital or a member of its staff, and they are always somebody who will die there, and the drawer opens between four hours and nine days before they do.

The body in the drawer is accurate to the moment of death: the injuries, the color, the hospital gown, the cannula in the same arm. Two of them have been photographed and compared afterwards and the photographs match.

Interference has been attempted eleven times.

Seven of those people died anyway, of the thing in the drawer, on schedule. Three died of something else, sooner, and one of those was caused by the intervention. One lived, and the file notes that he was discharged, and notes what happened to him nine months later.

The body vanishes when the person dies. There is never anything to bury twice.

The basement is Foundation and the hospital thinks it is a plant room. The morgue above ground is new and is where the hospital's dead go.

The drawers are watched. When one opens, the person is identified from the face, which is usually quick, and the identification goes to one officer.

He does nothing with it. That is the procedure. It is reviewed annually, it has been upheld every year since the eleven, and the reasoning is the eleven.

The log of names is sealed and is kept, and the officer writes the date of death beside each one.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Four Hours To Nine Days - and it is always somebody who will die in that building. Accurate To The Moment - injuries, color, the cannula in the same arm. Eleven Attempts - seven unchanged, three worse, one discharged.

Open the drawer on somebody the party know. Let them look at the face.

The rule is do nothing. Make them argue about it at the table and make the counter-argument good: eleven attempts, and the file is on the wall.

Whatever they choose, do not tell them whether they were right. The officer with the log has been not knowing for nineteen years.

Reported by a survey team recording damaged tombs for a drainage project, who photographed the inscription because of the last line and sent it on because of the last line. Sixth on the Orleans Parish list.

A granite mausoleum, badly damaged, in a cemetery that has not taken a burial in a long time.

The inscription on one side gives a name, a date of birth in the eighteen forties, a date of death in the nineteen tens, and an age. Under that, cut in the same hand, at the same time, in letters the same size:

HE WAS RIGHT

The name is not a name anybody can place. The parish burial register for that year exists, in a church archive across the river, and does not contain it.

The grave was opened once. There is a body, of the right age, dead for about the right length of time, killed by gunfire at close range. Several shots.

That is all the mausoleum does now, and it is why the class reads DORMANT rather than STATIC: it did other things, for about eleven months after it was found, and then it stopped, and the eleven months are in the file.

The file gives them plainly and does not summarize them. Nobody has proposed an explanation and the last note on the matter is nine words long.

Fenced. The cemetery is bought and the drainage project was routed around it at a cost that is on the record as an environmental constraint.

Nothing is excavated. Nothing is repaired: the damage is original and is documented and the instruction is that it stays as it is.

The inscription is photographed annually and the photographs are compared. It has not changed.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Three Words - cut at the same time as the dates, by the same hand. Not In The Register - the name is in no burial record anywhere. Eleven Months - of something, and then nothing, for decades.

The whole entry is a photograph. Show them the inscription and let them read the last line, and do not explain it, ever.

The eleven months should be a folder the party find and read in the car. Write four incidents, make them small and specific, and stop.

If a player asks what he was right about, that is the campaign, and the answer is that the file does not know either.

Came in when a contractor laying a drain under the north- east corner of a disused pet cemetery found a human femur and did the right thing. Fourth on the Florida list.

A pet memorial park of about four acres, closed for decades, with a few hundred small headstones under live oaks.

Most of it is what it says it is. Dogs, cats, birds, and one horse, buried properly, with stones cut by a local mason whose order books survive.

Under the north-east corner there are people.

Nine so far. They are buried at the ordinary depth, without coffins, in the clothes they died in, under headstones that give a pet's name and a pet's dates and a short line of the kind people put on a pet's grave.

Four of them are the same person.

Genetically identical, buried under the same name, on four different dates across nineteen years, and the pathology puts the age at death within a couple of years each time. The mason's order book has all four entries, placed by hand, and the handwriting in the book is the same each time and is not the mason's.

The remaining five are five different people and none of them matches a missing person.

Nothing happens at the site. There are no manifestations, no effects, and nothing has been observed in eleven years of monitoring. New stones do not appear.

What appears is the order book.

It is in the county archive, it is a real Victorian ledger that has been there since the practice closed, and about once a year there is a new entry in it in that same hand, dated for a burial that has not happened.

The park is owned and fenced and maintained as a nature reserve.

Nothing is exhumed. The nine were recovered before the current instruction and are held, and the instruction now says they are to be reinterred where they were, and that has not been done, and the reason is in the file and is a disagreement between two departments.

The order book is checked monthly. It is not removed from the archive, because the archive is where the entries appear, and this was tested once.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Nine People Under The Corner - with pets' names on the stones. Four Of Them Are One Man - nineteen years apart, the same age each time. The Book Is Still Being Written In - once a year, for a burial that has not happened.

Run the archive, not the cemetery. A reading room, a ledger, and a party comparing handwriting.

The new entry is the session. A date, a name, a line about a good dog, and the date is eleven weeks away.

Do not tell them whether anything will be there on the day. Take them to the corner and let them dig.

A town in Missouri where the undertaker's paperwork did not add up, and had not added up for a long time, and nobody had ever queried it. Third in Missouri.

About one in five people who die in that town get up again.

It happens between eleven at night and three in the morning, usually within a few days of death. There is no pattern in who: age, health, manner of death, none of it predicts anything.

They walk to the nearest concentration of trash. Mostly that means the town dump, which is at the end of the county road, and lately it has meant smaller things: a dumpster, a trash enclosure, the bottom of somebody's garden.

When they get there they get into it and cover themselves over.

Then they stop, and they are a body again, and they can be taken back and buried and nothing further happens.

Ninety-five of them are on record.

The town calls them lost souls.

The town is not frightened of this. It has been happening long enough to be part of how the place works. People see one on the road at night and do not stop and do not talk about it the next day, and when asked why, the answers given are about respect, and are given in a tone that does not invite a second question.

Some of the interviews suggest that people are not always able to tell the difference between one of them and somebody out walking.

The file is careful about that suggestion and does not extend it.

The town is monitored through the surgery, the funeral director and the county dump, all of which are on the payroll.

Nothing is interfered with. Bodies are recovered from the waste after they have settled and are returned to the families, who receive them without comment.

There was a plan to move the town. It is in the file, struck through, with the date and the name of the person who struck it through.

The dump is not closed. There was a proposal for that too.

Hardness 2 · Attack 1 · Defense 2 · Health Levels 4 · Movement Rate 4

They have never attacked anybody. They are going somewhere.

Traits: One In Five - and nothing predicts which. Between Eleven And Three - and they walk, and they do not hurry. To The Trash - the dump, a dumpster, whatever is nearest. The Town Knows - and the town lets them go.

Play the town first. It is friendly and it is normal and it is not hiding anything.

Somebody walks past the car at night. Do not say which they were.

The struck-through plan is the entry. Somebody decided to leave these people alone.

A mass grave outside New Orleans was found in nineteen ten and the structures beside it were still standing and are still standing. Fourth in Louisiana.

A set of gallows put up in the eighteen fifties, close together, next to ground where a great many people were buried without names.

The timber has not rotted. It has been out in that climate for a hundred and seventy years and it is sound.

Hang somebody from one and they do not die.

They go on breathing. The lungs work and the air goes in and out and the blood carries it, and every measurement anybody can take says the person is fine.

They experience strangulation. All of it, continuously, at full strength.

Four to six minutes in, they stop responding and appear to be dead. Pulse, pupils, everything: a competent doctor will certify it.

They are not dead. What is happening inside is in the medical annex and the annex is short because everything in it is one sentence repeated with different measurements.

Cutting them down ends it. They come round in a few minutes and they remember every second of it and they are able to say how long it felt.

Nobody has been left on one. The prohibition is absolute and predates our involvement.

There are eleven of them and all eleven work.

The site is fenced and is held under a historical preservation designation that is genuine and is administered by us.

Nothing is hung from them. Not a person, not an animal, not a weight.

The timber is not removed, sampled, treated or repaired.

The ground is not disturbed. The mass grave is mapped and is left, and the names that have been recovered are on a list that is kept with the file.

The site is visited annually and the visit is a condition check.

Hardness - · Attack 8 · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: A Hundred And Seventy Years, No Rot - in that climate, outdoors. You Do Not Die - the breathing continues and the blood carries air. You Feel All Of It - continuously, and you can say how long it felt. Cut Them Down And They Come Back - remembering every second.

Nobody is hanged in the session. The horror is that the ropes are still there.

Somebody will ask what happens if you leave a person on one. Nobody knows.

Read out the list of recovered names. That is the end of the scene.

Condemned decades ago after a surveyor found that the floor plan did not agree with the drawings, and acquired properly after four local disappearances were all traced back to an afternoon in the building. One hundred and forty-first on the unknowns.

A three-story school with two wings and a foyer between them, boarded, on a site nobody has redeveloped.

Inside it is bigger. Corridors run further than the wing does, there are more classrooms than there are windows, and the staircases arrive on floors that the outside does not have.

The extra space is school. Not a maze and not a distortion: proper rooms, properly fitted out, with desks and boards and coat hooks at the right height, in the same period as the rest of the building.

They are in use.

Not by anybody visible. The boards have work on them, in chalk, in a teacher's hand, and the work changes. Desks have bags under them. There are coats on the hooks in October that are not there in June.

The bell rings. It is on a schedule that has been recorded and is consistent, and it is not the schedule the school used when it was open.

Nothing has ever been seen. Cameras left running produce eight hours of empty rooms and a bell.

People go missing in it. Not many and not often: four before acquisition and two since, all of them alone, all of them in the extra space rather than the real building.

Nobody has come back and nothing has been found.

Sealed, fenced, alarmed, and patrolled by a firm that believes it is preventing vandalism.

Entry is in threes, roped, with the rule that nobody passes out of sight of the person behind them. The rope is not symbolic and has been used.

The boards are photographed on every visit. The work on them is at about the level of a nine-year-old and it is marked.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: More School Than Building - proper rooms, correctly fitted, in the right period. Somebody Is Teaching - the boards change, the coats are seasonal, the bell has its own schedule. Six Gone - all alone, all in the extra space.

Run the visit by the rules: three people, a rope, nobody out of sight. Make the players enforce it on each other.

The marking is the detail. Photograph a board one month and the same board the next, and have the work corrected in red.

Nobody appears, ever. If the party break the rule, the character is simply not behind them any more, and the rope is on the floor.

Secured in 1908, in circumstances that are in an addendum and are not creditable. Sixty-ninth on the unknowns, and the oldest continuous holding on the list.

A six-story apartment building of sixty rooms, in a city, between other buildings that look like it.

Anybody can walk in. The door is a door.

Inside, nobody can perceive anybody else. Not invisibility: the whole of it. Sound, touch, the smell of somebody's cooking, the evidence of a person having been in a room. A resident standing in a doorway is not there to anybody else in the building and nothing they do is either.

From outside it works the other way. Nobody out in the street can perceive anybody inside, through a window, on a camera, or in any other way anybody has tried.

Something gets through. People inside report a sense of not being alone, consistently, and describe it in the same terms, and a few have put out food.

It is fully occupied. It has been for a very long time.

The Foundation keeps it to code. Wiring, plumbing, fire doors, inspections, and a managing agent who is a member of staff and who has never met a single tenant.

Rent is collected by standing order. Nobody is ever behind.

When somebody dies in there, nobody notices. That is in the file in one line and the procedure that follows from it is two pages long.

Owned, maintained, and let at market rates through an agency that is Foundation from the top down.

Applications are screened. Nobody is placed there and nobody is prevented from applying, and the screening is to keep out people who would be missed.

Occupancy is tracked by utilities and by post. The two-page procedure covers what to do when a apartment's consumption stops.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Nobody Is There - completely, in both directions, including traces and sound. It Is Full - sixty rooms, occupied, for over a century. Not Alone - everybody inside says so, in the same words, and some of them leave food out.

Send one player in on an errand and run them alone, out of the room if you can. Empty corridors, sixty doors, and somebody's dinner going cold on a landing.

The rest of the party are outside watching the window and see nothing, and you should keep cutting back to them so the table feels both halves.

The utilities procedure is the entry. A apartment's meter stops. Somebody has to go and open the door, and nobody has been able to see the inside of that room for a century.

A missing persons cluster in one city, every one of whom had been shown the same photograph in the week before they went. Two hundred and seventy-seventh on the unplaced list.

A six-story building, exposed concrete, windows painted out, in poor repair.

One way in: a smooth white double door at the front with no handles. It pushes open.

The lobby inside is not that building's lobby. It is an exact copy of the lobby of a real and pleasant hotel in Bangkok, which is still standing and is unaffected.

Nothing else gets in. Walls, roof, basement: all tried.

Seeing a picture of the place, or hearing its full name, makes you want to stay there.

Not idly. People become elated and talk fast and make arrangements. It wears off after a day, or it stops the moment they are inside the lift, and memory treatment clears it.

Inside, a man appears. He is in his thirties, in a beige suit, and he is welcoming, and only the person he is speaking to can hear him.

He hands over a key card and walks you to the lift, and then he is not there until somebody else comes in.

The lift has one button.

Everybody who has pressed it is gone.

The floor it opens onto is a corridor. Three kilometers of it have been walked and it does not end.

It has doors down both sides like a hotel. Most of the doors are lifts.

The rooms, when there is one, are rare and in no order, and the fittings in them include lift doors and lift mechanisms built into the furniture.

The lifts have more than two thousand buttons each. The floor numbers do not agree between them and the highest recorded has twelve digits.

The building is owned and the street is managed.

The name is not written down in full anywhere in this register, and the photograph is not attached, and both of those are deliberate.

Nobody goes in. That was signed by a site director in August and it has not been revisited.

Twenty-nine people are inside.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Hear The Name And You Want To Stay - for a day, until you are in the lift. He Is Very Welcoming - and nobody else can hear him. One Button - and everybody who pressed it is still in there. Two Thousand Buttons - on the next one, and none of them agree.

The lobby should be lovely. Somebody has been kind to them.

Give them the corridor and let them open doors until they understand.

Twenty-nine people. Decide whether they are still walking.

Reported by a county wildlife officer who had been called out four times in a month about birds going into the same building and not coming out. Second on the New Jersey list.

A two-story house in rural New Jersey.

Anything alive inside it comes apart. Rot, decay, deterioration, at a speed that shows within about seven minutes, and after that it does not matter where the thing is taken: it dies inside twelve hours.

Cold slows it. Below freezing outside, the effect is noticeably weaker, and the file notes that those spells are getting rarer and that the containment plan depends on them.

When there is not enough living matter inside, the edge of it moves outward, at a little over a meter a second, until there is.

When there is enough, it comes back in.

Within about thirty-five kilometers, animals that are about to die want to come to it.

Most of them do. Birds always do. Every bird in that radius that is dying, whatever it is dying of, makes its way to the house and gets inside and is dead within seven minutes.

The floors are not covered with them. Whatever else the house does, it deals with that.

One man lives there.

He has lived there all his life, the effect started while he was in it, and it does not touch him. He has not aged since it began.

If he goes more than three meters from the house he collapses and stays collapsed until he is brought back, and the episodes hurt him a great deal.

So he stays. That is in the procedure as a permission rather than an instruction, and the wording was argued over.

The property and the land round it are owned. The fence is at four hundred meters and there is a second one at eight hundred.

Livestock are kept in the inner ring. That is the containment: enough living matter inside the boundary that the edge never has a reason to go looking.

The count is maintained daily and is adjusted for the weather.

He has a telephone, a television, deliveries, and a visitor twice a week who is a member of staff and who is chosen for being good company.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Seven Minutes - and it shows, and twelve hours later it is over wherever you are. It Reaches - a meter a second, outward, until it has enough. They Come To It - everything dying within thirty-five kilometers, and every bird. He Cannot Leave - three meters, and it puts him down.

The birds are the image. Play a still afternoon and a steady arrival.

He is the entry. A man who has been alone in a house for a very long time and is glad of visitors.

The livestock count is the horror. Somebody works out the number every morning.

A small town in Missouri reported that people kept walking into a closed grocery and not coming out until nine o'clock. Second in Missouri.

A grocery store that shut when the town's money ran out, and that has been standing empty since.

Every day, from eight minutes to eight until eight minutes to nine, it does this.

No light from outside gets in. Not sun, not headlights, not a flashlight held at the glass.

Nobody can go in or out. Ask somebody inside why and they will tell you there is no door, and they will be telling the truth as far as they can tell, because the cameras show the door exactly where it has always been and show people walking past it.

Everybody in there during the hour gets the same things, in their own order.

Sudden drops into misery, arriving without cause and lifting the same way.

A deep and specific resentment toward the town, which does not fade when the hour ends, and which has cost the town several families.

And other people's memories. They belong to the regulars, the ones who came in every week for years, and they are ordinary: a shopping list, a conversation at the register, somebody's hand on a cart. They arrive as your own and they stay.

The store does not appear to want anything and nothing in it has ever moved.

The building is owned and boarded and alarmed, and the alarm is on a timer that matters.

The perimeter is checked at half past seven and again at nine.

Nobody is inside during the hour. Six people have been, and all six left the town within the year, and two of them wrote afterwards and both letters are on the file.

The town is not told. That decision is reviewed annually and has been upheld every time.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Eight Minutes To Eight - and then nothing gets in and nobody gets out. There Is No Door - and they mean it, and the camera disagrees. It Hates The Town - and you will, afterwards, and it will not lift. Somebody Else's Shopping - small, ordinary memories, and they are yours now.

Run the hour in real time if you can. Nothing chases them.

Hand each player a memory that is not theirs and have them use it casually later.

The two letters are the entry. They both say the same thing about the town.

A cottage at the end of a parish road, on the missing persons map before anybody thought to put it there. Third on St. Bernard's list.

A two-story carpenter gothic cottage, built in the eighteen hundreds, with the fretwork those have.

Nobody has ever lived in it on any record.

Sent a camera in on a rover and it is derelict: damp, bare, coming apart. Look in the ground floor windows and something is always in the way, a curtain or a chair, and the upstairs windows are the same.

Walk in and it is a house.

Furnished, warm, in good repair, decorated in whatever period it currently is, and it updates: the fittings now are the fittings of this decade. There is nothing electronic anywhere in it.

There is food on the table and there are seven people at it.

They will welcome you in and ask you to sit down and eat, whatever time of day you came.

Six of the seven match missing persons cases from that parish, spread across a hundred and fifty years, and every one of them either lived there or had family who did.

The seventh does not match anything, is a man in his fifties, and is the father.

They are a family. They behave as a family: ages and roles sorted out between them, in-jokes, an order to the conversation. One of them does not speak and signs in Brazilian sign language, and another translates without being asked.

They know what year it is and what has happened in the world, without anybody telling them.

Anything in the house can be taken out of it, and it is ordinary, and it is back the next time somebody goes in.

The property is owned, fenced and posted.

Visits are permitted and are logged and are not encouraged.

Nobody stays the night. That rule was written early and there is no incident behind it, which is on the file as a note.

The missing persons cases remain open with the relevant authorities. Six families have never been told.

Hardness 2 · Attack 2 · Defense 2 · Health Levels 5 · Movement Rate 7

Nobody in there has ever raised a hand to anybody.

Traits: Derelict Until You Walk In - and then furnished, current, and warm. Seven At The Table - and six of them are on a list. They Are A Family - and they are good at it. Sit Down And Eat - which is the whole of what they want.

Play the dinner. Make it the best hospitality in the campaign.

Nobody explains anything and nobody is evasive about it either.

Six families were never told. That is the entry, not the house.

A vacant lot in a city center had a bar on it for three nights and then did not, and eleven people were seen going in. Hundred and sixty-fifth on the list of shapes.

A bar, about seventy-five square meters, which appears in vacant ground in cities.

It looks like a bar. Fittings, a counter, taps, tables, a back room. It is warm and it is comfortable and it smells like one.

It stays for a few days and then it is not there, and the ground is the ground.

It is busy.

The people in it are not from here. Most of them are human-shaped and some are not, and the file has descriptions and the descriptions are not the point.

They come from elsewhere. Several have said so, in ordinary conversation, without any sense that it is remarkable.

It is a bar. People are drinking, talking, playing cards, arguing about things that do not translate, and complaining about work.

They are not hostile. Anybody who comes in is served.

Nothing in there has ever hurt anybody, and our people have been going in for eleven years.

Money is accepted. So are several other things, and the list behind the counter is the most useful document this file has produced.

Nobody has established who runs it. There is somebody behind the bar and the description changes and nobody has got a straight answer out of them, though they are perfectly friendly about it.

Manifestations are detected by ground survey and by the fact that a building has appeared.

The site is cordoned at a distance that does not interfere with custom.

Personnel may enter. They may drink, and they may talk, and they may not ask operational questions, and that rule is about being welcome next time.

Nothing is taken out without paying for it.

The transcripts are the file and they are the most cheerful documents in the register.

Hardness 3 · Attack 3 · Defense 3 · Health Levels 5 · Movement Rate 6

Traits: It Turns Up For A Few Days - on a vacant lot, and then it does not. Everybody In There Is From Somewhere Else - and they do not think that is interesting. Anybody Who Comes In Is Served - and nothing has ever happened. They Take Money And Other Things - and the list is behind the counter.

Run a whole session as drinks and conversation.

Nobody is a threat. The information is the reward and it is given freely.

Do not explain who is behind the bar. They will not either.

Reported by a woman who had dreamed about a market for a week, went to where it had been in the dream, and found it, and came back with a hairbrush she had lost in nineteen eighty-two. Hundred and thirty- ninth on the list of shapes.

An indoor market that turns up in a building that was empty the day before. It happens somewhere in the world a few times a month, lasts a night or two, and then the building is empty again.

It sells things that do things. Stalls, trestle tables, handwritten prices, and a lot of objects that belong in this register.

The traders are people, more or less. There are the same ones every time. They are civil, they haggle, they will explain what something does if you ask, and they are honest about it, which is the part that takes getting used to.

They take money and they take other things.

Before it appears, a very small number of people nearby dream about it.

In the dream they are walking through the market looking for one object: something they lost, something they were given, something they should not have thrown away.

If they find it in the dream, they can buy it when the market comes.

They always find it. That is what the file says and the file has three hundred and eleven cases.

What is being bought is not the object. The object is real and is theirs and works. What the traders take is the thing the object was standing in for, and they say so, and people agree anyway.

Prediction is through the dreams. A panel of people who have dreamed before are contacted monthly and are asked what they dreamed about, and that gives about eleven hours of warning.

The building is identified and is cordoned as a structural risk.

Nothing is purchased by us. That instruction has been broken twice and both acquisitions are in the register.

The traders may be spoken to and they will speak. The transcripts are the most useful documents attached to this file.

Civilians who arrive are turned away at the cordon. Those who get past are not pursued inside.

Hardness 3 · Attack 3 · Defense 4 · Health Levels 5 · Movement Rate 7

Traits: It Is There For A Night - and then the building is empty again. They Will Tell You What It Does - honestly, and in detail. You Dreamed About It First - and you found the thing you lost. They Take Something Else - and they say what, and you will still agree.

Ask a player what their character lost. Put it on a table with a price on it.

The traders are pleasant and straight with them. Do not make them sinister.

They have eleven hours. Most of it is spent arguing about whether to let people in.

A burger place appeared overnight between a pharmacy and a laundromat, and the city had no record of the application, and the pharmacy had been there the day before. One hundred and fourteenth on the list of shapes.

A fast food restaurant, of a chain that does not exist, with a name on the front and a sign outside.

It works. The fryers work, the grills work, the machines work, and it does breakfast and lunch.

When one appears, it puts out pipes and cables and joins itself to the water and the electricity like any other building.

There are at least four staff inside.

They have no sense of who they are. They know that they work there and that is the whole of it. They do not leave, including after closing, and taking one out of the building puts it back in the kitchen.

If the building is destroyed the staff come apart into tissue and fluid, and that material matches other material found in the walls.

The food is fine. There is nothing wrong with the food and people eat there for years.

Once a year, in each one, thirty customers are picked.

They are told there is an offer on and given a free burger and a drink of their choice. Refuse and somebody else nearby is picked instead.

Five hours after eating it, that person wants to travel. Usually to a large city with no branch in it.

When they find a spot they like, they become one.

Nobody who watches it remembers it and no recording survives it: the footage is replaced by static that occasionally shows the company logo.

The medical reading is that the heart fails first. Then the body grows, to about four meters in each direction, and then the tissue turns into the materials a building is made of.

Whatever is standing in the way is absorbed into it or moved somewhere else. It has done this to a supermarket, a gas station, a church and a library.

Anybody inside at the time is put down somewhere nearby, unharmed.

The structure contains bone marrow, spinal fluid and human skin, and the skin is used as insulation on the wiring, and all of it matches the customer.

One demolished branch had a brain in it, enlarged, still firing.

It was being monitored, and the trace stayed steady all morning, and then at a particular minute it went wild and stopped. That minute is the minute a team went to arrest one of the staff at a different branch.

Known branches are bought through shell companies and are kept open and trading, because closing one has never been attempted and nobody wants to be the first.

The thirty are identified from register records and are intercepted, and interception works if it is inside five hours.

Demolition is not authorized.

There are nineteen branches. There were eleven in 2009.

Hardness 8 · Attack 3 · Defense 2 · Health Levels 30 · Movement Rate -

The staff will restrain somebody and have never killed anybody.

Traits: It Plumbs Itself In - pipes and cables, overnight, like a building. The Staff Are Not People - and they cannot leave, and they come apart if it does. A Free Burger - thirty a year, and refusing passes it to the next person. It Is Made Of The Customer - marrow, fluid, and skin on the wiring.

Eat there first. It is fine. Everyone in the area eats there.

The offer is the scene. Somebody at the table will take a free meal.

Nineteen branches now. Eleven in 2009. Say both numbers.

Not contained. Identified after four separate teams were sent to close it and all four came back having had lunch. Fourth on the Alabama list.

A roadside diner two miles north of a small Alabama town. Parking lot, sign, tinted windows.

For about a hundred and twenty meters around it, nobody can register anything as wrong.

Not memory and not the senses. People see exactly what is in front of them, in full detail, and they simply cannot attach to it that it is unusual, or unacceptable, or illegal, or bad. Inside the radius, everything that happens is fine.

Step back outside the line and it all lands at once, with everything intact, and people are ill for a long time afterwards. Memory treatment works and is used.

The same effect eats any intention to interfere with how the place runs. Teams briefed, armed and tasked to close it have crossed the line, forgotten the task, and gone in as customers. That is not a lapse in discipline and it has happened every time.

Recording equipment carried in works perfectly well, which is the only reason anybody knows what is in there.

The place is otherwise a diner. The staff are not anomalous and neither is the furniture or the fryer or the register. Customers come in, order off the menu, eat, pay and leave.

The menu lists what any diner's menu lists.

What arrives is human. Raw, roughly butchered, sometimes with other things alongside it, and arranged in a way that makes no attempt to hide what it is.

Everybody eats what they ordered.

There is no containment. Four attempts, four failures, and the current standing instruction is that no further attempt is to be made without a method that does not require anybody to cross the line intending anything.

The road is monitored from outside the radius. Numbers in and numbers out are counted nightly.

The counts match.

Cameras at the town end pick up the customers. They are locals, and they are regulars, and several of them have been going for years.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: A Hundred And Twenty Meters - and nothing inside it is wrong. You Will Remember All Of It - perfectly, the moment you step out. Your Orders Go - every team, every time, and they order the special. Regulars - who have been coming for years.

Run the meal properly. Describe the plate and let the players enjoy it, because their characters will.

The scene is the parking lot afterwards. Ten steps, and then stop and ask them what they just did.

The counts match. Nobody is being taken there. Work out where the food comes from.

Four of our own people, over eleven years, stopped answering their telephones on long drives, and one of them came back and wrote down what he had done to get out. Hundred and thirty-third on the list of shapes.

A small roadside motel that turns up at the exits of main roads, advertising rooms free.

It is always the same place under the same name, however different the layout is.

It does not turn up for everybody. The conditions are known and they are narrow.

It has to be between midnight and four in the morning. The driver has to have been going for more than five hours. The driver has to be alone in the vehicle.

And the driver has to work for us, or have worked for us.

As you come up on it you get tired. Whether that is the five hours or whether it is the place is not settled and the argument is in the file.

Drive past and you do not get past. The vehicle is put back a few miles, without a join, usually without the driver noticing, and the exit comes up again. And again.

The only way out is to stop, go in, and do what the place wants.

What it wants varies. It is not random, and enough people have survived it that there is a procedure, and the procedure is written as a guide rather than as an order because the person reading it will be alone.

The guide covers the parking lot, the desk, the corridor, the room, and the last part, which is leaving.

It is kept current. The version in the file is dated and there is a note on the front about which parts have changed since and why.

There is no containment and no site.

Every member of staff who drives is issued the guide and is required to carry it in the vehicle, on paper, and to have read it.

Nobody drives alone at night on duty. That is a standing order and it is the actual containment and it is widely ignored.

Where somebody has been through it, the debrief is added to the guide and the guide goes out again.

Former staff are covered as far as they can be traced. The list of the ones who cannot be is at the back.

Hardness - · Attack 9 · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: After Midnight, Five Hours In, On Your Own - and it is there. It Only Wants Us - present or former, nobody else. You Cannot Drive Past - the road puts you back, and it will do it all night. There Is A Guide - and it is up to date, and it is on paper in the glovebox.

Read the guide to the player. Then run the motel and change one thing.

The rest of the party are not in the car. That is the point.

Somebody who left the organization years ago is still eligible. Let them find out.

A closed nightclub off a main street, bought by a developer who went in with an electrician to price the rewiring and came out asking for the building to be landmarked. Seventh on the Orleans Parish list.

A disused club four blocks off the water. The original lighting rig and sound system are still in it and still work.

Run one particular sequence of the strobe presets and there are people on the dance floor.

There are thirteen of them at present. They are young, in the clothes of about nineteen eighty, and they have been arriving at the rate of roughly one every three years.

They know the room. They step aside to let you past and they make space at the edge, and they have never tried to speak to anybody or acknowledge anybody.

If one of them is not expecting you, you can walk through them.

Put on music of the right sort and period and they dance, and they will carry on doing it for as long as it plays.

Change the music to anything else, or turn it off, and they are not pleased. They get restless and they turn toward the booth and some of them shout at it, and none of the shouting has ever been audible.

They do not leave the floor.

Turn the strobe sequence off and they are gone.

Whoever they were, the club shut in the eighties, and nobody local recognizes any of them.

The building is owned through a property company and the services are maintained.

The lighting desk is locked and the preset sequence is not written down anywhere outside the file.

Visits are twice a year, for count and condition, and the music used is the same three records each time.

Nothing else is played. That is a rule and the file gives a date for it.

If the count passes twenty, the procedure changes, and the changed procedure is held with the site file.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate 6

Traits: Thirteen And Counting - one more every three years or so. They Make Room For You - and you can walk through them if they have not seen you. Play The Right Records - and they will dance until you stop. They Do Not Like The Booth - and nobody can hear what they are shouting.

It is a nice room and they are having a nice time. Do not undercut that.

Somebody will change the record. Everybody will regret it.

Where do the new ones come from. Nobody at the site has an answer.

Reported by a fisheries officer in southern Louisiana who had been asked for three dollars by a man in a zoot suit leaning out of a serving hatch in a brick outbuilding. Second on the Louisiana list.

A brick shack two meters high on a river bank. Nothing marks it and nothing damages it. The door does not open.

The window does, from the inside, and when it does you can see in.

The inside is enormously bigger than the outside and it is a soda fountain, fitted out properly, with the window used as a serving hatch.

The man inside sells boat rides. He gives a name, he is delighted to see anybody, and he does not age and does not eat.

The boats are moored around the shack. They are pleasure craft shaped like sea animals, of the sort that used to sit on a lake in a park, and all of them are wrecked. Take one away and another comes up off the river bottom within the day.

Pay him three dollars and one of them repairs itself and drifts in to the bank.

One person per boat. Two and it comes apart. Take it more than eighty meters from the shack without having paid and it rams another one and sinks.

Board it and it goes off downriver on its own and is out of sight after twenty meters.

Remote telemetry still works, which is the only reason anybody knows the rest.

It goes to a group of islands that are not anywhere. The number of islands is the number of people on them, which is currently four. The boat runs itself onto the beach of the newest one and sinks.

One island has spacetime faults all over it and a device on it.

One is full of featureless people who are violent and are not strong. A French soldier has been there since 1801.

One has something in the air that takes your memory, and the only fruit that grows there is apples, and eating them holds it off. A priest has been there since 1954.

One is a market run by featureless people trading in a currency nobody recognizes, and it is the only food on the island.

One has something on it that says it is a god, has no body, and casts a shadow that is not lit by the sun.

The device on the first island resets the archipelago. The islands rearrange, everybody is returned to the boat they came in on, and everybody loses the memory of everything that happened except whoever used the device.

Then the boats crash again.

The bank is closed as a hazardous industrial site and the river is buoyed off.

Nobody pays him. Nobody carries cash within eighty meters.

He is spoken to through the window, at twenty meters, by two people, and the conversations are logged and are cheerful and give nothing away.

The four occupants are known by name where names exist. There is no recovery plan. The paper that would have been a recovery plan is a list of the four with dates against them.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Three Dollars - and one boat, for one person, one way. Five Islands - and the number of them is the number of you. The Device - shuffles everything and takes everybody's memory but the user's. Since 1801 - and he is still there.

Play the salesman warmly. He is the friendliest thing in the register.

The price is the hook. It is three dollars and the players will have three dollars.

Somebody will find the device. Ask them, before they use it, whether they have written anything down.

A carnival tent appeared in a parking lot in nineteen ninety- one and again in two thousand and three and again in two thousand and fourteen, and the file was opened after the second one. Hundred and seventy- eighth on the list of shapes.

A carnival tent, ordinary size, red and white, which appears somewhere in the United States about once every ten years.

It stays for up to two days.

There is somebody in it. He is a thin man, starved-looking, in a Venetian carnival mask, and he does not take it off.

Meeting his eyes does something and the file does not describe what it does beyond saying that it is not recoverable.

The tent is open. People go in.

What is inside is a show. There are acts, there is an audience, and the audience is made up of the people who went in that night.

It is a good show. Every account says so and several of the accounts are from people who lost somebody in there.

At the end of it, somebody does not come out. One person, each night, and the selection is not understood, and everybody else leaves and is unharmed and remembers the evening as a good one.

They do not remember the person who did not come out, and neither does anybody else, and the file exists because of the people who noticed afterwards that there was a gap in a family.

The tent is gone by the third morning.

Detection is by the tent. Nothing predicts it and nothing has ever given warning.

Response is a cordon and an evacuation of the area, which has been achieved once.

Nobody enters. The instruction is absolute and it names the four who did.

Nobody looks at his face.

The missing are identified afterwards through records work, because nobody remembers them, and the names are kept in the file so that somebody does.

Hardness 5 · Attack - · Defense 7 · Health Levels 8 · Movement Rate 6

Traits: Once A Decade - two days, in a parking lot, in the ordinary way. It Is A Good Show - and everybody says so afterwards. One Person Does Not Come Out - each night, and nobody misses them. Do Not Meet His Eyes - and the file does not say why.

Run the show. Let the players enjoy it.

At the end, quietly stop including one of the NPCs they met inside.

Somebody keeps the names. That is the only thing anybody has managed.

Bought out of a bankruptcy in 2014, with the land, after the second closure. Twenty-third on the American unknowns.

A fairground that ran from the mid fifties to the end of the seventies, and then again for five years in the twenty tens, under half a dozen names.

It was built without permission, in pieces, over decades, by whoever was there at the time. Nothing in it meets any building code. Everything in it is falling down, and everything that has been done to stop that has failed, and the work was stopped.

There is a main walk with everything arranged off it. A carousel. Two theaters. Stalls, kiosks, a food row, a souvenir shop. Each built in the style of its own decade, so walking the length of it goes through forty years and back.

Sixty-eight percent of it worked when the Foundation took it. Rather less does now.

The work was done by machines.

They are still there. Some are person-shaped, in painted copper. Some are animals. Some are nothing in particular and were built to do one job. All of them stopped on the day it closed and none has moved since.

And the place produces people.

Not ghosts, though that is what everybody calls them. Something in the ground reads what was remembered by the people who lived and worked and visited there, and puts it back: figures walking the midway, a line at a stall, two of the machines painting a billboard, a show in progress in the smaller theater.

They are see-through and they are not there. They make sound, and they smell of what they were, and once somebody tasted something.

Nobody controls when they appear.

They have been getting fainter since the Foundation arrived.

The land is owned and posted and the fence is kept up, and that is nearly all.

Nothing is restored. That was tried and it failed and the failures are catalogued.

The machines are not repaired. A proposal to restart one was refused on the grounds that the file cannot say what it would do, and the refusal is honest about that being a guess.

Echoes are recorded when they occur, by equipment left running, and the archive is large and is getting quieter.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Nothing here has ever touched anybody.

Traits: Forty Years Down One Walk - each part built in its own decade. The Machines Stopped - all of them, on the last day, and none has moved. It Plays Back - crowds, shows, work, from what people remembered. It Is Fading - a little every year, and nobody can stop that either.

Let them walk it in daylight first. It is a beautiful ruin.

The echoes should be ordinary. A line. Somebody arguing about change.

It is getting fainter. Somebody is recording it before it goes.

A transit maintenance depot reported a car on the roster that was not on the order, had no build record, and had been in service for two years. Fourth on the Orleans Parish list.

A streetcar of the standard pattern, running a normal route on a normal schedule.

From outside and from inside it is what it appears to be. Passengers ride it every day.

The machinery is not machinery.

Where the mechanisms should be there is structure made of human bone, carefully shaped and fitted and covered over with the thin plastic and metal panels the real vehicle has.

There are symbols cut into the inside of several of the assemblies, of a kind associated with alchemy, and no two of them are the same.

Power comes from a device built out of sulfur compounds which pumps human blood around the vehicle continuously. It does not draw from the overhead line. The line is connected and carries no current through it.

There is a small hole in the fare machine. Every twelve hours it takes a tenth of the money that has been put in and puts it somewhere else in the city, into the pockets and the collection tins of people who need it.

It has been doing that for as long as anybody has been watching.

The driver is not a person. They look like one, and they look like a different member of transit staff every day, and the uniform and the badge and the manner are always right.

With nobody aboard, they stop being shaped like a person. From outside the windows they simply are not there at those times.

They drive well. Complaints against that vehicle are the lowest on the line.

It runs. That is the containment and the decision is in the file with three signatures on it.

Maintenance is done by a Foundation crew inside the transit authority, who sign the sheets and do nothing.

The blood is not sampled. That was done once.

The fare machine is not emptied by the ordinary schedule and the accounts are balanced from a Foundation budget line, which means the tenth comes out of us, which is in the file, which nobody has raised.

Hardness 8 · Attack 3 · Defense 3 · Health Levels 20 · Movement Rate road speed

The driver has never touched anybody.

Traits: Bone Where The Machinery Should Be - shaped, fitted, paneled over. It Runs On Blood - a pump, and no current in the wire. A Tenth Of The Fares - to whoever needs it, every twelve hours. A Different Driver Every Day - and none of them work here.

Ride it. Nothing happens. That is the scene.

Let a player watch the driver through the window after the last stop.

Somebody built this to run a streetcar route properly and give money away. Sit with that.

A city works department broke into a brick passage under a street that no plan showed, found it half full of syrup, and sealed it again before making a call. Fifth on the Orleans Parish list.

A tunnel system under one district of a city, brick to begin with, and much larger now than it was built.

The walls and ceiling give off molasses and take it back in, steadily, the way breathing works. There is never less than forty centimeters of it on the floor and it has been as deep as a meter and a half.

It spreads by taking other things underground.

The surface of a wall softens and comes away in layers, working toward the nearest pipe, cellar, sewer or disused line, until it gets through. Then that structure starts becoming part of this one, slowly, a few square centimeters an hour.

Most of what is down there now was something else first.

Seal a breach properly and the part that was taken goes back to being ordinary within a month. Anything carried out is ordinary too.

Except the molasses.

Put an animal in it, whole, and the animal does not die. If it was already dead it starts moving again. It struggles, continuously, and it does not stop and it does not weaken and it does not expire, however long it is left.

Three weeks in and the flesh joins to whatever it is resting against, and after that it gives off molasses itself, and if its mouth comes clear of the surface it will talk, and almost all of them ask to be killed.

There is also the thing that lives down there.

It is made of dozens of bodies: people, horses, dogs and cats, dried out and grafted together with organs running between them through wounds and openings. It does not breathe and has no pulse and does not eat.

Damage does not slow it down.

It moves through the tunnels all the time with no pattern anybody has found, and it takes an interest in breaches, and when one opens it tries to get out through it.

Most of what it is made of came from a disaster in the last century, when a refinery tank gave way and nineteen people drowned in the street.

Some of it is more recent. A family, from a house whose sub-basement was breached in the nineties. One of our own.

Every entrance is sealed and the seals are inspected monthly from the city side.

Breach detection is by survey of the surrounding utilities. A suspected breach is sealed within seventy-two hours, and the seventy-two hours is a maximum and has twice been missed.

Nothing is removed. No sampling of the molasses, for any purpose, under any authorization.

No entry. The list of what was lost establishing that is at the back.

Properties above the affected area are bought as they come up, which is an expensive and permanent program.

Hardness 9 · Attack 8 · Defense 2 · Health Levels 16 · Movement Rate 4

The numbers are for the thing in the tunnels.

Traits: The Walls Breathe Syrup - never less than knee deep. It Eats The Pipes - and the cellars, and the old lines, a few centimeters an hour. You Will Not Drown - you will struggle in it for as long as it takes. It Wants The Breach - and it will be there before you have finished cutting.

The breach is in somebody's cellar. Start there, with a homeowner who has noticed a smell.

Something talks to them out of the syrup. It knows what it is asking for.

One of the bodies in it is ours. Put the name on a plaque somewhere in the session.

Came in through an electoral commission. A routine audit of small-town returns flagged one municipality for a turnout figure that was too good, and the officer who went to check it came back and asked for a meeting. One hundred and twenty-third on the unknowns.

A town of about two and a half thousand people, with a main street, a school, two churches and a working economy.

Its mayor has been dead for about thirty years.

He sits in a wheelchair in the office at the town hall, in a gray suit and a red tie, leaning to one side. He is mummified, well preserved, and he was about seventy-nine when he died. He does not move, speak, sign or do anything at all.

He is re-elected. Six consecutive terms, in proper elections, with real ballots, real counts, real turnout and real opponents who campaign and lose.

The people of the town are not deluded. They know he is dead. They will tell you, plainly and without embarrassment, that the mayor passed some time ago, and then they will tell you what the mayor has decided about the drainage.

Decisions come out of that office. Minuted, signed with a mark, sensible, and occasionally unpopular. The town is well run. The accounts are in order. The drainage was in fact a problem and is now not.

Nobody has ever been seen operating him. The office is observed and has been for years.

Visitors from outside find all of this normal while they are in the town and do not, afterwards.

The town is left alone.

That decision has been reviewed four times. It survives each review on the same two grounds: nobody is being harmed, and the alternative requires somebody to explain to two and a half thousand people why their mayor is being taken away.

The Foundation owns a hardware store on the main street and a house on the edge, and two members of staff live there and are part of the town. One of them has been on the council for eleven years.

She has voted for him twice and has written about that in her reports.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Properly Elected - real ballots, real counts, real opponents. They Know He Is Dead - all of them, and it does not signify. **The Town Works** - the accounts balance and the drainage is fixed.

Run the town as pleasant. The party arrive on some other business and are made welcome, and the strangeness has to be noticed rather than announced.

The moment is somebody saying, in the store, without any weight on it, that the mayor won't like that.

The member of staff who has voted for him twice is the entry. She is not compromised and she is not wrong, and she will explain her reasoning, and it is good.

Traced through a cosmetics chain. Two products in one seasonal range used an oil bought from a small Louisiana supplier, and the customers who used them went missing inside three days, and all of them were last seen in the same town. Eighth in Louisiana.

A town in south Louisiana with a cypress plantation behind it.

The trees grow twenty times faster than they should anywhere. The town logs them, sells the timber, and distills the oil, and every building in the town is made of that wood.

There is a tourist season in the weeks before the harvest.

The oil has several of the compounds that are in human tears.

Smell it once and you are taken with it. Everybody describes it the same way, as a sweet clean smell, and they use the town's name to do it because that is what is on the bottle.

Over one to three days it becomes the only thing you can smell. Everything smells of it.

Then you go there. People do not have to be told where: it is on the label, it is on the website, and it is a nice drive.

The townspeople are welcoming. They will tell an affected newcomer exactly where the forest is and how to get to it.

Nobody comes back out.

The people who live there are not affected and they know they are not. Asked why, they give the name of an ancestor, and they give three different names for that ancestor, and asked what the connection is to the people who go into the trees they stop talking and they do not start again.

They are closely related to each other. The genetics show that plainly, and they also show sequences that are closer to red deer than they should be in anybody.

Hunting is banned in the town. Killing a deer there is punished the way killing a person is punished, and the ordinance is old.

Two weeks on the perimeter and a member of staff has the oil in them instead of blood. It does them no harm at all and it cannot be undone. It is not cumulative, so the teams work a week on and a week off and have done for nine years.

A perimeter, worked in alternating weeks, with the rotation treated as a safety-critical procedure rather than an administrative one.

The supplier no longer sells. The chain was bought and the range was withdrawn and the recall was genuine.

Nobody enters the forest. The count of people believed to have gone in is on the file and is not a small number.

The town is left alone. Every proposal to do otherwise has run into the same objection, which is that they have not done anything, and that the people who went in were not sent.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: One Breath - and in three days it is the only smell there is. You Will Want To Go - and the directions are on the bottle. They Are Immune - and they know it, and they will point the way. Two Weeks - and your blood is oil, permanently, harmlessly.

The town should be lovely. Bunting, a farm stand, good coffee.

Have somebody kind give a player directions to the forest.

Nobody in the town has broken any law. Let the players work out what that means for what they can do.