The Lady or the Tiger

Our WaRP Weird Adventures game resumed yesterday and found our heroes re-united, but no closer to finding Urst's treasure. As an eldritch darkness seemed to be growing in the shadowy corners of the upstairs, they decide to make a hasty retreat to the downstairs and recover Rue's body--and maybe reintegrate her spirit.

It's not going to be so easy. When they get back to the rectory, the cat-headed man is leaning against the dying table near Rue's body, smoking a cigarette. He's with his apartment cronies: Camilla, the card-sharp and the Ogre in women's clothes. The man gives his name as Bagh. He says he's an associated of Urst's. He's been trapped in the mansion since Urst's death and he needs to snowglobe to get out.

The gang is disinclined to give it to them. He tells them to think it over, and says he meet them later in the gameroom. Rue is impatient to get her body back. She makes a run for it, using her ghost abilities to take a big flying leap toward it. Bagh suddenly transforms from a cat-headed man in a fez and a natty suit into a giant anthropomorphic tiger. He grabs Rue's spirit and pulls her off her body.

The others come rushing to help her. Gossamer (the Ogre) rushes to meet them. Rob dodges Gossamer's charge. Jacques runs past them to grab Camilla. Pao shoots Bagh, but the bullet goes right through him.

Jacques threatens to kill Camilla if the tiger man doesn't release Rue. Bagh calls Camilla "the help" and doesn't bite. Pao threatens to destroy the snowglobe. That get's Bagh's attention--but he still throws Rue's ghostly body through the ceiling. (She lands on the second floor, feeling bruised until she recalls she doesn't have a physical body to be bruised at the moment.)

Gossamer is pummeling Rob, and Camilla has twisted free and paralyzed Jacques with a magic playing card. Going for broke, Pao throws down the snowglobe then shoots it.

Bagh arms covering his head Bagh shrinks down to human-size. He might be sobbing, but no--he's laughing. "Free!" he shouts as he turns into a shadow in the shape of a tiger and bounds up through the ceiling. On the second floor, Rue sees he past and also sees the house and his furnishings appear to be attacking him.

Rue slips through the floor back to the level where her friends are. She's just in time to see the fireplace transmogrify into a caricature of a human face--Urst's face. He thanks them for returning the snowglobe. He also says he's captured Bagh and sent him somewhere where he won't get out for another millennia or so. He returns Gossamer and Camilla to their own worlds, too. Soon he says, the house will have rotated back to the Earth of the City and our heroes can go home.

Urst explains his death was only part of a ritual to gain immortality--not bodily immortality, but immortality nonetheless. His made had actually disrupted it by stealing the snowglobe that held the central element of his soul. Now, Urst is his estate. Bagh was a demon he had enslaved back in his days as a human sorcerer.

Urst allows them to leave the house with a letter to take to his dishonest lawyers that started this whole thing. When they do so, the lawyer's write them each a check for $2000 from Urst's account. Then, as they pour over the fine print, they disintegrate for the eyes of our protagonists.