Once upon a time, in a land not so far away...
You wake to the feeling of being watched. Of a set of unfamiliar eyes, of warm breath on the back of your neck. A jolt back to the land of the living, and it's gone. No matter how quick you are, how sneaky, the source of the disruption has long since disappeared, so you have no choice but to try and ignore it. To continue on with your day and try to set that moment of strangeness aside.
You eat, drink, speak with others. Perhaps you explore a little. Whatever it is you choose to do for the day, that feeling from the morning won't return. And by the time the sun sets and the moon glows brightly above, you've likely set those moments of strangeness aside. It's not like it's anything new, after all.
It's the same again for the next few days. No better, no worse. Something best ignored, right?
A speck of blood on the doorframe. That wasn't there before, was it?
A snap of twigs in the distance. A crunch of leaves.
Claw marks gouged deeply into the door.
Into the wall above your bed.
Scraps of red fabric, turned darker with blood. Pieces of fur. Of flesh.
Do you run and hide? Do you fight? Whatever you choose, it's definitely time to make sure your body parts aren't scattered next...
...what a horribly big mouth you have.
--------------------
Since first waking up on the island, characters have been stuck with that feeling of being watched. It isn't a constant. Isn't more than a few seconds at a time, dotted throughout the day. Investigation has never turned up much, and there's never been any sightings of the cause of it all.
Until now.
Throughout the first half of the week, characters will find themselves suffering from that feeling of being watched on a far more constant basis. Rather than it being a one-off, few seconds occurrence each day, that feeling will last for minutes at a time, and on multiple occasions.
However, it isn't until the fifth day that they'll start stumbling across physical signs of their monitoring. There are claw marks on doors. Spots of blood on the paths outside. A crack of twigs in the forests, or the imprint of bloodied paws in the snow.
Ten days in and those signs start finding their way indoors. Wet footprints, tinged with red. Claw marks in the walls, the floor. Torn sheets and the smell of wet...something. Whatever it is that's been watching you, its finally decided to come and say hello.
Two weeks in and characters will begin to have sightings of the creature, its fur dark and its eyes a glowing yellow. At times it looks like a wolf, prowling in the distance. At other times, it's walking on its hind legs, almost human were it not for the muzzle full of gleaming sharp teeth. Get too close, and it slips away like a shadow, gone between one blink and the next. It decides when to reach out to characters, not the other way round.
It's after characters finally get a good look at the creature that it starts leaving...gifts. Characters will start to find familiar items from their home worlds amidst the mess. The remains of a childhood pet, perhaps. Photographs of loved ones, faces torn almost beyond recognition. It's only once it delivers its final gift that the creature retreats to the trees again: a blood-splattered item of clothing that clearly belongs to the person the character misses the most at the time, alive or dead.
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Gobbet | Shadowrun: Hong Kong
[This is not Hong Kong.]
[Gobbet knows this before she even opens her eyes. It's the feeling of solid ground beneath her that tells her she's not in the hammock she fell asleep in. It's the scent of pine and the sound of birdsong that warns her she's been taken from the boat, from Heoi altogether, and brought somewhere very far away. It takes her a few moments to convince herself to open her eyes. To break the illusion that this is just a lingering dream.]
[Her attention is drawn immediately to the pack beneath her head. Besides the clothes, there's a bit of food and some items she doesn't recognize. She turns the wooden coins over in her hands, examines herself in the shard of mirror. Does find comfort in the little red orb tucked away at the bottom, when she finally notices it. Wherever she was, perhaps she was not beyond Rat's reach, if this little blessing could follow her here.]
[It's not often something gets the jump on her. The feeling of eyes on her back is unfamiliar. Unwelcome.]
[Gobbet freezes, getting the sudden inescapable notion that she is prey. Her eyes scan the brush, her ears strain to hear footsteps, breathing, anything - nothing is there. Not anymore, anyway. And that is her cue to get lost in this new, strange land. Somewhere that sensation can't find her. Literally anywhere else but this little exposed clearing in the woods.]
[With her new bag slung over her shoulder, the ork picks her way through the unfamiliar terrain towards...where is she going exactly? It's not unusual for her to have this feeling of being guided somewhere. But the pull is almost from the ground, not her gut, and that's what worries her. This isn't Rat telling her where to go, it's the land. And she doesn't much like that, but what choice does she have? She deals with it the same way she deals with every other problem she can't be assed to address: She tunes out and lets life take her wherever it's going to take her.]
[Unfortunately by the time she emerges from the woods to the lake's shore, she's not paying any attention whatsoever to where she's going.]
Day 5: Tension
[She nearly drops the food she's foraged. Gobbet thought being in the middle of this little village would be safe. Would shield her from the prying eyes of whatever has been hunting her. It wouldn't be able to slip past the others who lived there. It wouldn't leave big, red-tinged gouges on the doorframe. And it certainly wouldn't leave smears of blood on the pathway leading up to her door.]
[Okay, it might not be blood. It might be an elaborate prank. A joke. Or a warning that the others didn't want her here. Be reasonable. Think about it a bit.]
[She's just standing there, staring at the claw marks, feeling that feeling again. That she's prey. That there are eyes hot on her back, searing and hungry. And that's why she wheels around on the first noise she hears, eyes wide, stumbling backwards.]
Day 14: Critical Mass
No. Fuck this!
[The yell of frustration comes as Gobbet kicks open her door and chucks the mangled, blood soaked remains of her best friend's cyberdeck out into the snow.]
You're fucking with me! Whoever, whatever you are, you're not fucking funny!
[She's not paying much attention to where she's going or who might be around. She's just hauling ass down the path towards the forest. She's holding something in her hand so tightly that her knuckles are white. At the first snap of twigs, she cocks her arm back and hurls the item - an...apple? - towards the sound.]
Fuck you!
Wildcard
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