Yesterday we were supposed to play Chill, but as we're still in a pandemic despite most of the country's insistence on sticking their fingers in their ears and going "LA LA LA", sometimes plans change. So we played another session of H.P. Lovecraft Academy instead!
It's a bare month after the Night of the Festive Gourds, and five of our intrepid first-years - Alice Quinn, Trudy Dell (and her weird little servitor Glimmer), Ethan Grayson, Cassie Peterson, and Luna Lavender - have been chosen to take a field trip to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. (Please note: science leaves the building about now and doesn't show up again.) They fly out to Sault Ste Marie, and on the plane ride over, Alice regales everyone about all the fact she's learned about the shipwreck, and about the many occult conspiracies about what might have sunk the boat and whether the "witch of November" was a real witch.
The professor that's brought them on this trip, one Keziah Jenkins, is the chaperone, along with her husband and three seniors - Walter, Frank, and Mason - who are all very muscular and not overtly interested in history (Walter is strangely fuzzy all over, Frank just started classes this month despite school having been in session since August, and everyone says Mason has a servitor but is just really terrible at communicating with it). It occurs to the students that normally Prof Jenkins brings seniors on this trip, not first years, but they aren't sure why the change.
The students get driven from the airport to the docks and board a boat to take them out into Lake Superior. Cassie asks if they can go to the museum first, and Alice agrees enthusiastically, but Prof Jenkins tells them that their time to go out on the lake is limited - they'll have to hit the museum on the way out of town. Everyone gets on board and puts on a life vest. Ethan feels a little queasy, but keeps it under control. Cassie stands on the bow and sings "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" loudly, and then transitions to reciting "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" ("it's the only boat-poem I know!"). She also holds her pet rock, Felicity, up to let "her" see the water.
They arrive over the site of the wreck, and Prof Jenkins has her "assistants" pull tarps off a big conveyance hanging on the side of the boat. The students all stare. "What the heck is that?"
"It's a bathyscaphe," she says. "Hop in."
There is, um, a moment of consternation from the students, as a couple of them seem to remember a similar craft imploding in the deep ocean somewhat recently, but Prof Jenkins reassures them. First, that guy was an idiot. Second, I'm a witch. This convinces the students (well, mostly Alice; Cassie was the other one who was concerned but she needs the grade because social studies is her worst subject). They climb aboard, Prof Jenkins pulls a lever, and the bathyscaphe crashes down into the lake.
Prof Jenkins starts steering it downwards, everyone's ears pop, and then she levels it out and throws a level. Viewing windows open in the floor, and the students can look down at the wreck, the boat broken in half on the lake bed. Cassie, Luna, and Alice also see...light? Angles and circles and weird geometrical designs connected by the pieces of wreckage, forming shapes that have no business existing here. (Trudy tries to look, but Glimmer keeps getting in her way, almost like she doesn't want her to see.)
Alice looks up and sees Prof Jenkins looking at the students and holding a pendulum over her palm, clearing casting some kind of spell. Alice calls attention to it, but by now she's been talking so non-stop that no one really pays attention. The bathyscaphe continues into the dark, and pulls up next to the stern section of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Prof Jenkins throws yet another lever and a back section of the craft opens, revealing rows of suits and big glass bubbles helmets. There's a collective "WHAT" from the students, but the older kids start suiting up, and, shrugging, Luna and Ethan follow suit ("are these gonna fit us?" "Yes, they'll be fine, suit up"). Cassie and Trudy grudgingly go along with it (Cassie needs this grade, after all). Alice digs her heels in - this is a terrible idea and she doesn't want to drown - but finally Prof Jenkins opens a locket and blows something into Alice's face, and suddenly the suit doesn't seem like a bad idea, everything will be fine.
Ethan asks after oxygen tanks, but Mr. Jenkins affixes his helmet and writes some runes on the side with grease pencil, and suddenly Ethan feels a rush of air. He smudges off the runes just to see what will happen, and the runes reform themselves. Mr. Jenkins glares at him. "Don't do that."
Everyone crams into the back section of the bathyscaphe, and Prof Jenkins shuts them in and opens the airlock. They file out onto the bottom of Lake Superior, and following Jenkins' lead, tap a small box on their shoulders to turn lights on. Only Cassie and Alice have working lights, however. Cassie notices that Mr. Jenkins and the three upperclassmen head off in the other direction, and mentions it, but Prof Jenkins says they'll catch up with them later.
They enter the stern section of the boat, and Prof Jenkins tells them to look around, see what they see, find interesting stuff. Alice doesn't want to get any further into this than she has to, and hangs around back by Jenkins. The others go exploring, though, and Cassie goes to pick up a weird-looking rock. She quickly realizes, however, that it's a skull! She pulls up and discovers the body of a man dressed in a cook's apron, and yells "Body! We've got a body! A cook!"
Everyone looks over, but the cook suddenly moves! It bangs its ladle on the rubble and yells "Fellas, it's finally time to feed ya!" And more corpses start squirming out of the rubble.
The zombies converge on the students and try to grab them. A couple manage to grapple with Ethan and Luna, but Ethan wriggles free and Luna kicks one of them in half! Some of them head toward Alice and Jenkins, but Jenkins steps in front of Alice and unleashes a blast of light at the cook. It glances off without hurting it, and Jenkins curses under her breath.
Cassie calls on her power of oneiromancy to put zombies to sleep, figuring they were in a kind of sleep down here anyway, and manages to make a couple of them collapses. Trudy sends Glimmer to frighten them away, and Glimmer pulses with all of the weird, otherworldly "color" she can manage, and a bunch of the zombies flee. Trudy also realizes that a powerful enough spell could probably put these zombies down, and yells out to Alice.
Alice, initially, is too focused on her immediate issue to listen - she casts magical blasts at some zombies but doesn't manage to slow them. Luna dismembers another one ("Did you join the Karate Club or something?"), and Cassie clunks the cook-zombie on the head with Felicity. Prof Jenkins, now being grabbed by said cook, casts a spell and a speargun appears in Cassie's hands.
Jenkins and Alice finally manage to get on the same page and cast a banishing spell together, destroying a bunch of the zombies. Cassie fires a spear at one, but misses and nearly hits Luna ("Watch it!"). Finally, though, the cook falls inert, and with it, the rest of the zombies.
The students pull themselves together and confirm there are not rips in their suits. Someone asks Prof Jenkins if this happens every year; she says that it's a first. She conjures up some light in the room so they can poke around more, if they want, but mostly they're looking to get out (after all, there were 29 men on the Fitzgerald and that was only 11). Cassie spots something - an eyeglass case, much too new to belong to one of these men. It has the letters "CQ" written on it.
Alice sees it, and realizes it might belong to her brother, Charlie Quinn. He disappeared when he was a senior at HPL Academy, and while he never mentioned this field trip, he was taking history that year! Cassie doesn't want to give up her find, initially ("I need this grade!"), but then it's suggested that Alice might be able to use magic to "read" the object, and Cassie relents.
Alice casts the spell, and sees Charlie, Prof Jenkins, and some other seniors down here in the stern. They find the bodies, but the zombies don't stir. Charlie opens a pouch on the side of his suit to retrieve something, and his eyeglass case falls out, unnoticed. In the memory, Jenkins starts ushering them toward the bow of the boat, walking across the riverbed, and Alice follows, focused and entranced. In the present, Jenkins bids the other students to follow, and they all walk toward the bow section.
In the memory, Alice hears what she thinks is a scream, but it's memory through the weird communication of the helmet, so she can't be sure. She arrives at the bow and finds that there's a barrier, beyond which there's...no water. She steps through it and drops a few inches to the ground (no longer buoyant) and looks around.
She sees three big stone slabs with manacles attached. The three upperclassmen and Mr. Jenkins are fiddling with them, preparing...some sort of ritual? Everything here is lit by bio-luminescent fungus and plants, and Alice can see the connections of the weird, eldritch angles and curves that all of this produces.
The other students and Prof Jenkins enter, and Jenkins takes off her helmet and suit, and motions of the students to do the same (some of them take off the helmet, but no one is quite brave enough to remove the suit). Cassie looks around and, drawing on her Eldritch Lore, quickly realizes that stone slabs with manacles typically mean someone's getting chained to said slabs, and nothing good happens after that.
And indeed, Prof Jenkins very matter-of-factly tells Luna, Alice, and Cassie to get on the slabs (Ethan and Trudy can go back to the bathyscaphe and wait, if they want, she says dismissively). When they ask why, she replies that she needs their "insight" to open "the gateway to the City of the Elder Gods." Alice asks if she needed Charlie's insight, and she looks confused for a moment, and then smiles. "Oh, yes. He was very insightful."
"I think this is more about our insides than our insight!" says Cassie, pointing to the shackles. As if to prove the point, Frank and Walter grab Alice and yank her towards a slab to chain her down! Ethan, now able to make best use of his mutation, stretches over and grabs all of the suits (the ones belonging to the Jenkins and their henchmen), figuring to hold them hostage. Alice tries to blind her captors with magic, but doesn't manage to get free in the process. Mr. Jenkins leaps up on the slab and pulls Alice further along, and Mason charges for Cassie, but Cassie calls on her powers of Oneiromancy and puts Mason into a deep sleep.
Trudy reaches out to Mason's erstwhile servitor and finds it - a great, big, squishy, conical creature with lots of flat limbs. It's very enthusiastic to have someone to talk to, and apparently not very bright, as Trudy cannot get it to do anything useful. Ethan stretches out and tries to leech life out of Mr. Jenkins, but upon touching him realizes that his body is dead. "He's a zombie!" yells Ethan. "Focus on the prof!"
Luna, figuring it worked on zombies, kicks Prof Jenkins in stomach. Alice angrily centers a blast on herself, but only damages her own body more than her captors. Cassie pushes her Sandman power on Prof Jenkins to make her sleepier, and Ethan grabs the Prof and sucks the life out of her. She collapses, weak and nearly dead, and Mr. Jenkins leaps on Ethan's back and starts trying to chew into his suit.
Ethan shoves him off and pulls Jenkins to a slab to chain her down. Mr. Jenkins leaps on the chain and tries to chew through it, but his teeth crack and break. Alice manages to get a hand free and blasts Walter and Frank into unconsciousness, and joins the others.
The students discuss what to do. Alice demands to know what happened to Charlie, but Jenkins isn't talking and Prof Jenkins is unconscious. Trudy sends Glimmer to use her weird, eldritch glowing powers to intimidate Jenkins, and Jenkins' mouth opens wide and a huge rat-creature with a human face pulls itself out of him. It sits on the slab and demands that they don't harm his wife, and Cassie says that she's amenable to an agreement.
But Alice isn't. She uses her object reading spell again and sees what happened to Charlie. In the vision, he is chained down and Prof Jenkins touches his temples. Light streams out of his nose and mouth, and for just a moment the angles and curves are illuminated...but then they fade. Prof Jenkins cries out in disgust. "Damn! Next year, then."
The vision fades, and in a fury, Alice blasts Prof Jenkins with a magical bolt. Her body bursts into flame, and the Jenkins-rat leaps on her body, screaming "NOOOO!" They both burn together, and everyone turns and glares at Alice.
"Now who's going to give us a grade!?" demands Trudy. "Also, how are we getting out of here?"
"Yeah," says Cassie. "You know how to drive a bathy-thingie?"
Ethan glances over and sees that the barrier that keeps all of Lake Superior out is starting to waver. "Um, guys?" They quickly stuff Frank and Walter into suits, and wake Mason so that he can put his own on. Ethan wraps up the two unconscious ones in his floppy arms and they all get their helmets situation just as the water rushes in.
They swim against the sudden current back to the bathyscaphe, and are faced with another problem: there are a bunch of levers and they don't know which one closes the door and opens the airlock. Ethan tries one, and the whole thing starts to ascend. (Trudy: "WHY WOULD YOU PUT A LEVER THAT DOES THIS ON THE EXTERIOR?!") Ethan, Cassie, and Alice hold on tight, but Luna and Trudy lose their grip. Alice tries to cast a spell to save them, but she's tired and out of components (and Bennies). Trudy just holds on to Glimmer, who can float if she wants, but Luna starts to get left behind in the dark waters.
Trudy, desperate, reaches out to Mason's weird servitor and asks for help. A few moments later, the bathyscaphe surfaces and the students flag down the boat they were on. They're hauled up, and as they're pulling off their helmets, a flower-like spout of gelatinous water erupts and the servitor spits Luna out onto the deck ("pleah").
"Weren't there more of you?" asks the captain.
"Yeah, we lost a few," says Ethan.
"Ugh, you damn people from Lovecraft Academy," he mutters. "Every year this happens." He throws the boat into gear, and starts heading back to port.
