Category:In Transit

The players are driving along the highway when a deer jumps out in front of the car - they hit it, hard, taking damage in the process. The deer's killed instantly.

When they look at the deer, they see that it's got a fifth leg, growing from the side of its stomach, dangling uselessly. It's obviously been born that way. But on their way to the next location, every other animal seems to have an extra appendage or mutation. Crows have beaks on the sides of their necks, squirrels drag an extra useless rat-tail. Not every animal, but a lot of them - and they didn't notice until now.

The last thing that they see before they arrive is a kid walking along the side of a road with his fishing pole over one shoulder, with his younger brother holding up the useless club of his third arm.

The investigator is sleeping in the back of the car, with another investigator driving. The investigator in the back drifts off to sleep. When he wakes up, there's somebody else driving the car - he looks like one of the other investigators, but he's not. He turns and smiles reassuringly at the investigator. If the investigator looks out the window, he sees that they're driving along a road lined with endless bare trees on either side, the color and texture of bone, submerged two feet deep in black water. When he looks back at the driver, it's the original driver - and the outside is normal.

The investigators drive underneath an overpass, but one of them sees some kind of bundle tied up in the metal girders above their heads. If they can figure out a way to get the bundle down - since it's directly over the highway - they find the corpse of a teenaged hitchhiker, mummified in road tar. Embedded in the road tar are snippets from dozens of maps, each of them with the only nearby town violently scratched out in black ink. If the investigators go up the road towards that town, they find that the road has been deliberately sabotaged, with the road signs torn out and the road itself covered with potholes. If they go further, then they find out why the town cut itself off.

They find out big time.

The investigators are driving down the highway when they see a car by the side of the road. The doors are open, but the engine is still running. If the investigators look around long enough, they find a single shoe - brand new - where the ditch ends and the woods begin.

--Darren MacLennan 20:26, 1 May 2005 (PDT)