After the meal the waiter took Boomeron and me aside and took us to a side room. In the room the Captain’s Table itself spoke to us and offered us a job. It seemed to represent itself as a blob of light that moved in time with its voice. Boomeron asked it what we were actually talking to and it said it was a mimetically adapted construct that would adapt itself to our visual system. It wanted to acquire some live zombie samples, but was unable to spare much of its own resources to do so. It seemed like an honest enough technological artefact. It didn’t want to open the doors to downstairs but it said it had a way of transporting us down there using some advanced alien technology, which would also allow us to send some zombies back. It said something about cauls remaining for a certain time and it could recall them on our successful completion of the snatch mission, but I don’t really know what it was talking about.
It said it would transport us to some buildings around the base of the tower which held a load of supplies for the tower. Boomeron was pretty enthusiastic about looting them until the Captain’s Table told us they were mostly filled with housewares. Might be able to get some fancy bog roll though! It said that the supply houses were in a separate compound that should be pretty free of zombies other than the staff, so we’d have to leave that area to find more interesting specimens. It then said it would be expending a considerable portion of its energy to send us there so we had better bring back something interesting. I was a bit worried by the way it said that but Boomeron didn’t seem to think anything of it.
The butler led us to some weird sarcophagus things in the wall which seemed to be shaped for me and Boomeron, with space for our armour and weapons. We stepped inside the sarcophagi, I guess these were the cauls the Captain’s Table was talking about, there was a blinding flash and suddenly we were in the middle of a warehouse room, filled with broken tea-sets and some fused, broken shelves in a circle around us. Boomeron said it reminded him of some old movie, but I’d never heard of it. He had some plan about making giant fly-paper to catch the zombies so we set off in opposite directions to look for some carpet and some glue. We were talking about how we should sneak around this place to avoid attracting too much attention when Boomeron suddenly disappeared! I think he said he was as stealthy as a black ninja cat in the forest at night. I’m not sure what a ninja is and I’ve never seen a forest, let alone at night, but I know cats are some kind of domestic animals on some planets so that’s pretty cool I guess.
I found some slow-drying glue that should be tacky for a while, but wouldn’t be enough to stick a zombie down, and some long but quite thin strips of carpet. I started looking for Boomeron but couldn’t find him at all. Eventually he jumped out in front of me and he’d got some other kind of glue that set faster and some drapes. He started mixing the glues together but after a while his mixture set solid, though it turned out it was only the top that had set when he smashed the fancy plant pot he was mixing it in. I had a go at mixing them myself and managed to make something a bit less solid but plenty sticky. I figured we should hang the drapes between our weapons and then flank the zombies we wanted to capture. With Boomeron’s microphone boom and my sewer scraper we wouldn’t have to get too close.
We headed to the main warehouse entrance and pushed the door opening button. The machinery was pretty loud. We waited in the shadows either side of the door, and after a few moments four zombies came in through the door. They seemed to be moving more coherently than last time we’d seen any as there seemed to be some kind of pattern to their group movement, though the one nearest us walked into and started head butting a shelf. I wasn’t sure exactly what to do, but then the door started closing and I saw Boomeron by it. He started waving towards a darkened corner so I tried to sneak over there. Unfortunately my sewer scraper hit a piece of shelving and the zombie started jogging towards me. They’ve definitely never moved that fast before! I was a way ahead of it so I started pouring some of the glue onto the drape. Boomeron ran up behind it and swung his microphone boom at its legs. It turned round to defend at just the wrong moment and he ended up taking out its legs. We wrapped it up in the drape and parcelled it up, with a doubled over piece of drape in front it its mouth to stop it biting.
We glued up another drape and hung it from the end of our weapons and headed after the only zombie we could see. We were sneaking up on it pretty well, but then I accidentally scraped the ceiling. The zombie noticed us and started moving towards us. We checked around and couldn’t see any of the other zombies, though I did notice that one of the sets of footsteps I could hear before had stopped. We wrapped the zombie without any further trouble and bagged it up like the last one, though I did all the bagging this time. Boomeron seemed pretty impressed by the way I’d unhooked the drape from his boom just using my scraper!
We headed off to hunt down the remaining zombies and Boomeron disappeared again. I heard a splattering noise in the distance so I guess he found one. I stomped up behind the other one and it didn’t seem to notice me, so I split it in half with my scraper. It was pretty damned disgusting! Blood, guts and rotting flesh everywhere. Seen a lot of this stuff, but it still gets to you every once in a while.
We dragged the wrapped up zombies back to the cauls and stuck them on top. Then we decided we’d better do some reconnaissance to find some special zombies. Boomeron said we’d had some success with roofs before, so he climbed up one of the shelving units and tried to smash open the skylight. After a few minutes he gave up and so I opened it with my scraper. It took me a while to get through as I forgot to stow my sewer scraper first, but Boomeron made it up pretty quick after handing me his microphone boom.
We headed to the edge of the roof to check out what the zombies nearby were doing. There were three around the door to our warehouse so we tried to stay out of view. I had a peak over the edge and there were definitely 3 zombies, though one of them seemed to be losing interest. I also spotted an unnatural greenish glow coming from around the corner which reminded me of the weird glowing zombies. That made me think about those times when we’d met those filthy bastards before, especially the time they made weird green stuff ooze out of my ribs. I got really mad and furied, though fortunately even though I really wanted to destroy the glowing zombie I was still thinking about the Captain’s Table wanting us to capture it. In retrospect that was a bit weird, normally when furying you just want to smash everything.
I jumped off the corner of the building to go hit the green thing but I didn’t land very well so I made a massive dent in the ground. Boomeron shot the 3 zombies by the warehouse door in their heads. The three nearest zombies started shambling towards me. Boomeron shot two before they got to me but one made it close enough to attack me. I decapitated it, flipped its body up in the air and sliced it into several pieces, which flew into and knocked over the zombies nearest me. Boomeron said he was pretty impressed by that!
I ran on towards the green glow, still carrying the bucket of glue and the drapes, and pretty much cut one of the next three in half with my laser finger. Boomeron said it looked pretty gross through his scope. He shot the next closest zombie just as it swung at me. I slashed its torso open with my scraper just before his rounds exploded the corpse all over the pavement. I carried on towards the next load of zombies and splattered the closest one just after Boomeron shot down the one next to it. I got close to the corner the glow was coming from when I spotted a bound up sheet of lead. I managed to grab it as I ran past and flipped the glued up drape over the lead. Just as I got round the corner the zombie started glowing more brightly like it did when it hurt us before, so I charged it with the sheet spread in front of me. While I was running, Boomeron did some crazy ninja leaps and rolls across the roofs and came up with his scope pointing at the glowing zombie ready to fire.
I grabbed the zombie with the lead sheet just as a bright green flash went off. Boomeron said later on there was roughly a 15 metre sphere of sickly green light, but I guess I was shielded by the lead, or just didn’t care because I was in fury. I leapt up into the air and folded the sheet around it like a Christmas present box, tying a bow round it with the steel cable the sheet had been tied with, before lobbing it through the skylight of the building with the cauls in. (rolled 32) Then I charged off around the corner looking for more zombies to kill.
I spotted one looking down at me from a roof and it had weird, puffed out cheeks that made it look like it was going to spit something at me. I lobbed the glue bucket at it. I didn’t quite get the bucket over its head, but it hit it in the side of the head and a load of noxious fluids spewed out of its mouth and started dissolving the masonry next to it. Boomeron shot it in the leg with his rifle, which pretty much liquidised its leg. I leapt up the walls of the building and wrapped the glue soaked zombie in the final drape, tying it into a sack with some rope from my backpack. Even despite my fury, I still got the sense from my inner daemon that I should probably take this back to the cauls. In all our travels, we hadn’t seen anything like this before! I flipped myself down the end of the building and stomped to the warehouse with the cauls in, slaughtering zombies on the way and slicing the last one so that its hand hit the door opening mechanism. I just made it back to the cauls and dumped the bagged-up zombie on top of one of the cauls before my fury wore off and I reverted to normal size, whereupon I sat down and sparked up a smoke. At this point Boomeron emerged from the shadows.
We chucked one of the normal zombies and stepped back into the cauls. As before, a bright flash enveloped everything and we were back at the Captain’s table. The zombies disappeared into the floor and the Captain’s table seemed pretty grateful. It offered us two more tapas portions from the menu. We both had the eye stalks, and Boomeron had the mind prawns whilst I had the sky whale loin.
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