Betrayal: Silent Night

It took Bee a couple of minutes to get the door to the south open. Balancing everything she was carrying and trying to turn a high-up handle proved impossible, so she set her things down and glared at it. Upon closer inspection, this door was slightly bent out of shape. It'd warped slightly with age, and no longer fit into its equally-wonky frame. Good, she thought. At least it wasn't just her height that was the problem here.

Bee took a step back. As she paused, she couldn't help but overhear the chatter coming from the radio. From the sounds of it, the others were still looking for her. Bee chewed her lip.

That was... new. Adults usually weren't all that concerned about her safety. Maybe she'd go back later, just to say hi. But that could wait until after she was done scouting ahead.

Bee kicked the door. Though she wasn't particularly strong, it was enough to pop it back into alignment. She gathered her things and pressed onwards.

...Huh. That was odd. Save for a few furnishings around the sides, this room seemed entirely empty. The floor didn't seem anywhere near nice enough to be a hallway, either. It was all scuffed up, and the boards were even creakier than usual.

Well, whatever. If there was nothing to see here, she may as well keep heading south.

Bee made it halfway across the floor when she felt one of the planks drop out from under her.

- Room: The Collapsed Room -
Old house. Old floors. New concussions.
(Speed check: 0, 0, 1, 0 = 1)
(Damage roll: 1 = 1)

Bee pinwheeled her arms and tried to keep her balance. Too little, too late, she'd realized her mistake -- no WONDER there wasn't any furniture in here!

With another sickening crack, the entire central portion of the floor fell into darkness. Bee yelped and flung herself towards the nearest door but it was no use. The rest of the planks were equally brittle and as they crumbled away she lost her balance. Her torch fell from her grip, and she found herself tumbling down, down, down...

Instead she landed in the middle of a summoning circle.

You might not want to stay, but the room doesn't want you to leave.

Bee's head swam as she sat up. She hadn't hit her head during the fall - of that, she was certain - but something about the room was disorienting her. It was making it hard to think, let alone see, like the world's absolute worst headache. It took a moment for her eyes to focus. It took another moment for her to realize what was engraved in the stone beneath her feet.

When it all finally clicked, it took Bee three seconds flat to grab her torch and scramble to the corner of the room.

She kept the torch focused on the circle, her eyes flicking back and forth from every corner of the room to see if her sudden intrusion had woken anything up. The pounding in her head had dulled, but not stopped. Was it magic? Was it the stagnant air of the basement? Either way, being down here was felt like a bad, bad idea.

Nothing stirred; not even so much as a cloud of dust from the collapse of the floor. All was unnaturally still and quiet. Gradually, Bee's breathing slowed, and she turned her attention upwards. The roof of the collapsed room seemed so very far away now. There was no chance of her going back the way she came.

It was sort of funny, in a twisted way. She'd thought she might find something like this -- heck, she'd hoped she would. Being right about the sorts of people who had lived here must mean she was right about what had happened to her sister. It meant she still had a chance of bringing her home.

...But it also meant that she might be in real danger after all.

Bee whimpered softly. Gotta get out of here.

The chamber she was in was scarcely furnished save for a lone door, a couple of candlesticks, the pentagram she did not dare go near, and a dark stone slab along the northern-most wall of the room. It was the slab that immediately caught her attention. It appeared to have been carved into an altar of sorts; lacking in any sort of fine decoration, but stained with dust and candle wax and old dried blood. It was only when she went to look away that she noticed that it wasn't her torch that was lighting the crystal ball up.

- Omen: Crystal Ball -
(Haunt Roll: 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 0 = 8)
Hazy images appear in the glass.

Faint whispers and blurry images emanated from the glass. Bee dared not look too closely, but even from where she was standing she could just barely make out two figures. A man and a woman, distorted beyond recognition, appeared to be quite deep in conversation. Carefully, Bee reached out and touched the glass--

--she ripped her fingers away.

She shouldn't be listening to this. Eavesdropping was rude, according to her parents, but more importantly it was making the headache she had even worse.

And yet... she couldn't deny that there was something familiar about those words...

Out of the corner of her eye, Bee spotted a backpack lying not far from where she stood. It was bright blue, and was clearly far too new to have been belonging to the previous owners. It was also empty, save for a bottle of water and a very moldy lunchbox. She dunked both on the floor, before stuffing the crystal ball inside.

Bee headed for the exit, but paused one final time to investigate the rope that lay on the south side of the room. The middle of the length was still tied into an overly-elaborate knot. The edges were messy and frayed, as if ripped apart.

Bee looked warily at the door, and hoped whatever had gotten loose down here was either friendly, or dead.

Omens & Haunt Rolls: Entering a room with a raven symbol on it indicates that your character has found an Omen -- a powerful item that foretells a future disaster. For the most part, Omens are treated like regular items. They can be given away, pick-pocketed, and dropped at will, unless otherwise specified.

When you draw an Omen card, you must make a Haunt Roll by rolling eight dice. If the total rolled is above the number of Omen cards currently in play (i.e. the current "Haunt Meter" number), you succeed and nothing happens. But if you roll under the current Omen count... the House, and the Traitor, reveal their true colours.

The more Omens you find, the closer everyone inches towards their doom. Be careful!

"Jesus Christ," Morris muttered as he passed a portrait of the Christian messiah. "This is getting a bit excessive."

Morris glared at the rows of pews in front of him. He wasn't sure what to make of the fact that the building had two churches in it, let alone two that were side-by-side but otherwise entirely unconnected. If the architect had asked him for advice, he would have just told them to put the organ in the same room as the stained glass windows and call it a day.

It quickly became apparent that Bee was not in this room. Nor did there appear to be any noteworthy paintings, or artifacts, or shiny objects, or anything related to their investigation. Technically that meant there was no reason for him to stick around any longer than he already had, but Morris found himself lingering all the same. As he did, he began to take in some of the finer details of the room's decor.

Unlike the Chapel, the Organ Room lacked grand stained-glass windows (or any sort of natural lighting, really). The candlesticks were simpler, the floor underfoot was uncarpeted stone, and there was (thankfully) not a mirror in sight. Aside from the grand pipe organ that dominated the northern wall and a few pictures of various saints, the room lacked any sort of decoration at all. It was very... restrained.

Morris pondered this. His brain wanted to pass this off as a rich person thing; a family with too much money turns the entire north wing of their house into a church. But his gut told him there was something more at work here. Come to think of it, he hadn't recognized any of the imagery in the Chapel at all. Perhaps more than one religion had been practiced by the family who had lived here? Though he hadn't the faintest clue of what, or why.

Both questions for another time, perhaps.

Morris spied some sheet music laying on the floor near the keyboard. It looked like a standard keyboard arrangement for a hymn, with choir chords scribbled underneath. He found himself humming a few bars, and was disappointed with how off-key he sounded.

"Sheesh. I'm outta practice." Satomi would give him such a lungful if she found out. He flexed his fingers and played a simple scale on the organ's keys. Though the pipes were old and the notes were little more than a wheeze, it was just loud enough for him to compare and tune his voice to.

A pillar on the North wall slides away, revealing the room beyond.

Morris stared. A secret room in an empty church wasn't the oddest thing he'd seen in his career -- hell, he'd had a conversation with his own reflection mere minutes ago. But he'd seen the house from the outside, and was positive it shouldn't have extended so far in this direction.

Curious, Morris stepped through. The passage snapped shut behind him.

The new room was... odd. Not because it was full of statues, and not because many of them were broken. But because it was otherwise a totally ordinary hallway that stretched from East to West.

Morris had been in the Chapel to the East mere minutes ago. He'd seen the moonlight coming in through the window. There was no way there was a room behind that, was there?

Morris tried the handle.

- Event: What The--? -
What is with the architecture here?

Pick up the tile for the room you are in (after setting everything on it aside).
Put it somewhere else on the same floor of the house so its door is attached to a different unexplored doorway (and put back everything you set aside).
If there isn't an unexplored doorway on this floor, move the room to a different floor.

--And not only was there a room here, there was a gigantic hole right in the middle of it.

"This building makes no fucking sense," Morris grumbled.
"U-um," replied a squeaky voice from below. "Who said that?"

Morris did a double take.

"Kid?" He crouched down -- ignoring the shooting pain in his bad leg -- and shone his torch over the Collapsed Room's ledge. Two very wide eyes stared back up at him. Jesus, he thought. If the whole building is this crazy, it's no wonder we couldn't find her.

"It's me." He called, when Bee made no attempt to talk back. Then he realized he hadn't actually introduced himself when they'd met. "Uh, it's Morris Harris. Are you all right? What the hell happened here?"
"I- I'm okay Mister Morris. I scraped my knee when the floor gave out but I can still walk."

Morris grimaced. Kids always got his first and last names mixed up the first time, but it wasn't worth complaining about. At least this meant the girl was well enough to talk.

"So," he said. "Do you understand why we need our radios, now?"
"Yes." Bee snapped. "I'm not stupid. I was GONNA call."
"Never said you were. But why didn't you?"

Bee did not have a response to that, beyond fiddling nervously with the straps of her backpack. (Did she have that before? He couldn't remember.) With an exaggerated sigh, Morris peeled himself away from the ledge and retrieved his own radio from its holster. Though he could faintly make out the chattering of his teammates, the audio sputtered constantly. Something here was messing with the signal.

He wondered if it had anything to do with that pentagram Bee was standing near...

"Sit tight, kid. I'll call the others and let them know what happened." He placed his handle on the knob to the statuary corridor, but paused one last time. "...Try not to go wandering around. Basements are way more dangerous than rickety floors."

Bee gave no reply.