The Others Of Corvinus

Mission Briefing:

Our Intelligence desk received an anonymous report:

You need to look at Corvinus Castle. It’s in Transylvania. People go in. They don’t come out. No one ever comes out. We don’t know how many. No one will talk about it.

The Covenant has been unable to trace the castle’s current owners. We dispatched a Hunter Squad to look into it, reasoning that it is better to check and find nothing than not to identify a potential source of concern.

 

Location:

Corvinus Castle is a 15th century fortress in the deep forests of the Carpathians, long abandoned. It suffered from extensive fire damage in the 17th century, and  some attempt to repair it was made in the mid 19th century, but this was never completed. The Covenant holds scant information about the Corvinus family, who had the castle built while their patriarch was a Prince of Transylvania, but the site has not given rise to any previous reports, nor is there any reason to believe the Corvinus family was particularly supernaturally active.

 

Squad:

Keira Sayles: One-time criminal, now working for the Covenant because the alternative is likely to be hazardous to her health.

Karl Novac: A scion of a long line of supernatural bodyguards and personal protection specialists. Notable for his custom chainsaw. Just don’t ask to see what he has in his case.

Rikka-chan: This Japanese, second year middle-school pupil transforms into the muscle-bound beefcake Subaru-kun.

Sally B.: An intern. An orphan of some means, she has demonstrated her persistence by convincing the Covenant to give her a chance to train as a Hunter. This is her first mission.

REPORT COMPILED FROM TEAM DEBRIEF

Note: interjections from Mission Debriefing officer labelled MD. Most of this interview was with Keira Sayles and Karl Novac. This has been abbreviated and redacted for clarity.

On arrival at the site, the weather turned rapidly from overcast to heavy rain of the kind that hurts when it hits you. It was cold, and we could hear howling in the trees. We collected our gear and proceeded at pace to the castle entrance. 

Immediately we entered the premises, the door shut behind us. There was a moment of disorientation. When we recovered ourselves, the door would not open. Some of our kit was scattered on the floor beside us. Karl’s weapons, Rikka-chan’s phone —anything that had been held in our hands or on our persons was on the ground, including the map provided in our briefing pack.

Rikka-chan attempted to pick up their phone, but their hand passed through it. Keira tried to retrieve her weapons, but again was incapable of going so. We spent approximately twenty minutes trying various ways to interact with our gear, but it was impossible.

At this point Karl and Keira decided the team should move on into the castle and try to find out what had happened. When we reached the chapel, we met a female human entity.

MD: Sayles and Novacs both described this entity as “dead goth girl” — further analysis suggests the identity of this entity to be a member of one of the various Endless Dreamer cults, possibly Gitta Schulte, one of five self-described tourists reported missing by the owner of a self-catering lodge in nearby Deva in 1987.

She explained we were — not to put too fine a point on it — dead. It took some persuasion, but eventually Subaru-kun charmed this ghost into explaining how we might be reunited with our bodies. We were lucky, apparently, as it had not been long since we were relieved of them. We needed to find our bodies, and use some blood from the creature living in the tunnels below the castle dungeons.

MD: At this point I asked if the entity was more specific.

No, we don’t recall her being any more specific than that. Just find the bodies and use the blood. Anyway. We went back to where we’d left our kit, because that was where the map was. We could, if we concentrated hard, interact with physical objects with as much strength as a moderate breeze, so we sort of… Well. Wafted the map towards the Knights Hall and the Tower of Lament, because that seemed a reasonable option.

MD: Is this when you met Kel Lupu?

No, not yet. We heard the front door slam, though, and almost immediately  there was a shotgun blast and one of the ghosts we’d been seeing — the place was heaving with them, some of them degraded to the point where you could hardly tell they’d ever been human — exploded into shreds.

KS: I said it was a salt-loaded shotgun.

KN: You did. You totally nailed that.

We headed down the stairs and were attacked almost immediately by Mr. Tentacles—

MD: You mean Azazoth the Endless Dreamer?

KS: I mean Mr. Tentacles.

KN: You called it bloody Cthulhu.

KS: Same thing, isn’t it?

KN: You said, “It’s Tuesday, must be Cthulhu.” But it wasn’t Tuesday. It was Monday.

KS: It was the start of the week! I had a hangover! It might as well have been Tuesday! It’s not important!

Anyway. Karl said he’d go and sort out Shotgun Sam, or whatever. Sally B. said she’d stay with him, because he was her supervisory officer, but she came back pretty quickly saying there was a werewolf upstairs shooting at Karl. We carried on down and found our bodies. Which is when we were attacked — by the way, it’s really weird seeing yourself from the outside like that. Subaru-kun grabbed one of the tentacles and, while it was draining energy out of them, mashed it against the old castle wall. Bit of a wrestling match, and then Subaru-kun had to have a nap. Keira smeared her hands in the blood on the wall, then touched her body with it, and that seemed to put herself back in her body. She sent Sally B. back upstairs to tell Karl to get his ass down there and sort himself out. Meanwhile—

MD: was that before or after Sally B had resurrected herself?

KS: You know, I really can’t remember. Must have been after, because we’d worked out that you couldn’t do it for someone else.

Meanwhile, Keira grabbed part of Subaru-kun that was skin but not… Grabbed their leg well away from the tutu and got blood on it, then poked the ghost version, and that seemed to work.

MD: What was Karl doing while this was happening?

KN: I was playing space invaders with some hairy motherfucker. Just yelling at him every time he looked like losing interest, dodging behind pillars and whatnot. I sent Sally B. back down to the others because it wasn’t safe. This was supposed to be a cake walk, and here we were already dead and being shot by a werewolf with a salt gun. Nobody mentioned that in the briefing pack.

MD: And this would be the Covenant Hunter Kel Lupu?

KN: I mean, I didn’t know that at the time. It was just some hairy dude trying to shoot me in a way that I did not find endearing.

Once Keira was back in her body, she recovered her weapons and went to support Karl. He was back towards the chapel, and she could see another combatant, so attracted the opponent’s attention.

KN: You yelled, “Hey asshole!”

KS: And you replied, “I’m busy!”

MD: Note, at this point both KS and KN are laughing.

Kel Lupu recognised Keira and ceased fire. Karl went to get his body back.

KN: And my gear.

And his gear. Then Kel told us that we’d been disappeared for about three weeks. Which was a surprise. It had only been, what, an hour at most? He also confirmed that he had been unable to get out through the castle gate. We figured him being a werewolf made him less tasty to Mr Tentacles or something? He also seemed to know quite a bit about the cult. Called them a bunch of incompetents. Gave us some of the information that the Maze monkeys—

MD: You mean the Research and Archive Division, RAAD.

Whatever. You guys had been so busy while were were vanished! So sweet. We looked at all the stuff, worked out that Mr Tentacles lived underneath the castle, and that we had to do a ritual to send him back where he came from. That was pretty much all there was to it, bar the fighting.

KN: There was quite a lot of fighting. Those tentacles were bastards. It would have gone a lot better if Subaru-kun had actually used all 300lbs of muscle instead of waving that stupid damn wand every time anything needed doing. And taking naps all the damn time.

KS: Huh. Did you go in the bear pit in the end?

KN: Did I… Why the fuck would I have gone in the bear pit? We killed one of those fuckers and it blocked the door. We just hung on there to keep the rest of them from getting in while you and Sally B did the finding of the graffiti and the yelling of the magic spells.

KS: Yeah. There was a magical symbol on the wall under each of the towers, and we had to say some words while destroying the symbols, but do it in the right order yada yada. And you’re never in the right place to start with. It’s always the same. This is why you need magic type people along on these things. That’s what I say. If it’s a magic thing, leave it to the people who know what they’re doing.

MD: And how did Kel Lupu actually die?

KN: Cthulhu ate him.

KS: Well, Mr Tentacles got him, anyway. Shame. He was kind of nice, once he stopped shooting.

 

MD Conclusion

It seems obvious that Kel Lupu’s death in the field was as a result of an encounter with Azazoth, rather than by any act or omission by the assigned Hunter squad. Some materials, notably an image of the  page of the spellbook and Kel Lupu’s notes, as well as a map and scan of the castle and photographs of the symbols in situ, have been lodged in Archives. Subsequent inspections of the site have not resulted in any phenomena of the sort described here. The castle remains under Covenant scrutiny.

Recommendation: All Hunters who participated in this mission to be given a full physical and psych evaluation before being allowed back on operational duties.