T^Boan Prods prezents…

Miskatonic University

PROLOGUE

Having spent all morning lingering about the Kingsport library and nearby coffee, trinkets, and sandwich shops, idly chatting with the locals whilst information gathering regarding your day’s journey… you thusly obtained a much late start, and therefore stood not a hibernating desert toad’s over-wintering-and-summering estivious anticipation of monsoon rains turning its sun-baked earthly protective prison into soft mud’s chance of having made the next nearest town’s epicenter… “oh, what is its name!?”… where surely you would find a hotel befitting of your need for a well earned rest of both body and mind. And to result in further delay of your reaching your jaunt’s destination, you chose to accept the advice of a Kingsport local aesthete and thus sojourn by way of a somewhat cobbled-in places-footpath not travelled by drivers that meanders slowly through those few miles of countryside beside and amid places of rich archaic natural beauty as well as scattered contemporary rural charm. And so being the adventurer you are, the sun did set beautifully upon you along a barely civilized yet wholly unknown path, now unlit save by the moon, which happened to be quite full enough to prevent any real fear of that dreaded nighttime unknown common to all men, which might or might not be lurking and spying upon you in this mostly wild place. Funny how bright moonlight has a way of taming the otherwise unfettered imagination, and allowing those strange sounds to exist as nothing more than the critters more common than man waking from their daytime dreams to feed upon each other. What man’s mind would have men believe what menus men are on, if not for our ally the moon! After a few hours of both serenely calm and franticly hurried walking… you approach what appears to be an acceptable outcome of your anticipatory yearn for some respite from your now weary travel, and just in time too! For the storm doth approacheth and promises to hit hard.

At first you think your eyes are playing tricks on you! The enveloping darkness of black stormclouds quickly gathering around and extinguishing the friendly light of the moon yields to a small yet growing swash of itermittent colour in front of your beleaguered eyes. You calm yourself as you realize the static energy manifesting before you appears to form … a crack… between your world and what beyond appears to be an~other!

And just when you thought this break from reality was too much, upon looking down steadily, focusing at your feet upon the path, the path becomes suddenly more cobblestoned at a symbolic… or intended… boundary of a sharp turn, and before far too long on your strained peace of mind, the moon reveals itself in a circle, now the only patch of sky bereft of clouds, the path emerging from the treeline like an exhalation, continues and splits here and there as huge old buildings of an apparent academic nature loom before you in the dark at either side of the wandering stone paths amid what arise to be oil lamps, most unlit… and although one of the few windows emitting any light from the closest building, otherwise characterized by a seven story high square clock tower, is strange to be sure… an illuminating green the surmiseable source of eludes your rationale… yet, the presence of these professional inhabitations containing much cognitive labor to be sure, is all the enticing invitation you need to savour immediate shelter… for even yea it seems your very soul, from the increasingly gathering and threatening elemental chaos… by opening one of the large wooden double doors leading into the stony comfort that surely must wait beyond that heavy thundering door of that nearmost mysterious beckoning structure.