Pro-Tip: Pick your battles – sometimes it might be better to return when you're stronger!

Awkward and disjointed, the shape drops from the branches and swoops in to attack, filling the air with its syncopated flapping. Ava is discombobulated—it's like standing directly beneath a low-flying helicopter—and for a moment her focus wanes and the light from her hand flickers and then it ceases entirely. Suddenly there is only the pitch black of midnight and Uri is screaming.

She concentrates and the hand glows brightly again and instantly she wishes it hadn't:

A man-sized bat has latched onto Uri's back. He struggles but can't shake it and Ava seizes upon its leg and tugs but its too strong. She's too weak. She can't slow it in the least. It beats its wings and takes flight with Uri still in its clutch, hovering out of Ava's reach.

And now she can tell it's not a man-sized bat at all—it's a man with mechanical bat-wings sprouted from between his shoulder blades—but he's still mostly human. He's even wearing blue jeans and a black-and-red checkered flannel shirt but his face is gruesomely twisted machinery, greasy and glistening, perpetually shifting and sucking. From the knee down his pants-legs are brown with old oxidized blood because his human feet are simply gone, sloughed off and replaced with wickedly sharp clamps.That's how he was hanging upside-down in the trees. That's how he sleeps – and Ava has to wonder, do Scums really sleep?

But there's no time to ponder such trivialities when a host of clear plastic tubes snake out from the center of the Scum-bat's face—slithering into Uri's throat and chest—hissing and burrowing into the skin like some sort of high-tech maggots. Then blood begins to spurt into the tubes and Ava swoons:

Vampire, gargoyle—whatever he is—he's draining Uri and Ava can only watch. She's learned another ability but all she has to do is remember the cold metal motor in her gut and she knows to never execute this new skill. The last thing she needs is a maxillofacial vacuum modification.

No, what she needs more than anything right now is simply help.

Pro-Tip: The odds are stacked against you – Elite monsters might require a party to defeat!

“Uri!” she shrieks and Javors is startled awake.

He springs up from where he's been sleeping and slips his stiletto from its scabbard. Then Ava has no choice but to box her hands over her ears to block out the high-pitched squealing. Her heart sinks—what's next? What sinister trick is the Scum-bat up to now?—but then she's suddenly aware that the sound is actually coming from Javors.

He emits a piercing stream of machine-gun quick squeaking and Ava realizes what he's up to – he's scrambling the bat's echo-location. And it's working! The Scum-bat releases Uri and he drops, thudding to the ground, motionless. Ava rushes to him and feels for a pulse and it is there but only faintly. Still, she exhales, briefly relieved.

But there's never time to relax. Javors is now locked into combat with the Scum:

He stabs but the Scum-bat is too quick and counters with a strike of its own:

And so on they continue, each too quick for the other to land a blow, tied together in a deadly tango. Ava takes the opportunity to drag Uri away from the danger, back toward the campfire and the riverbank. He is pale and convulsing, white foam flecked with blood seeping from the corners of his mouth. More foam froths out from the puncture wounds in his throat and upper-chest. The Scum is like five vampires in one, feasting with as many tubular-maggot mouths – how long can Javors handle him alone?

And just as she's having that thought she hears the Scum-bat shriek. Javors has managed to sink his stiletto into its gut and all at once Ava's spirit lifts. The batman rockets into the sky. If a moon were visible he might cut a striking silhouette.

“Have at ye, you bat-shit bastard!” Javors shouts – but right then a red beam of focused light zaps him in the chest.

Pro-Tip: If the worst happens, you can give another player /consent to drag your corpse to a safe place.

The forest rustles and a hulking figure emerges, a rider upon the back of a towering horse. And Ava expects this ambush to be another trap set by Ostby Channing—whom she knows is a talented tracker—but it's someone else. Someone she doesn't recognize, someone riding a massive mechanical equestrian, a cyberpunk Clydesdale covered in chrome. And there emblazoned on its breast: a letter 'H' with the horizontal line replaced by a lightning bolt.

This must be Horst – or perhaps one of his henchmen. It's impossible to make out his face in the shadows, but he wields a sleek silver zap-gun and Ava drops onto her stomach right there on the river's muddy bank. She'll be tough to hit with the laser pistol but if that Scum-bat comes swooping in for an attack then she's cooked.

Pinned down, she looks back to where Javors has been shot. He kneels, clutching his chest where the wound is still smoking, but then he lifts his shirt to reveal a glittering armored undershirt:

“Close one,” he quips.

The Scum-bat comes swooping back down, seemingly out of control, a catastrophe of mad-cap flapping. But it stops just before smashing into the ground and hovers before Javors, picking up their dance where they left off. The rider of the clockwork Clydesdale—Horst or whoever it might be—continues taking shots with his pistol, keeping Ava pinned where she is and removed from the melee.

This situation is hopeless and the darkness crowds in again at the edges of her vision; Dread encasing her the way it did back when she faced her mother's walking weapon of mass destruction. Could it be that she is being affected by another horrible aura? Or is this terror more organic and earned? Is this simply a deadly situation that truly feels as though she will die?

Uri for one is already dying nearby, caked in mud. Javors trades misses with the shockingly quick vampire bat scum but Ava knows its [Sanguine Extraction] will be off cool-down soon – will the ratman stand any chance against it? And complicating matters beyond comprehension or control is the rider she assumes is Horst – zapping away with his futuristic pistol, keeping her cordoned off from the battle.

Ava, Javors, and Uri – they're all going to die here. And what happens then? That's one of the oldest questions known to Mankind.

But what she really means isn't: is there an afterlife?

It's more like: how many lives do I get?

Pro-tip: You can't win them all – sometimes [Retreat] might be the best option.

A laser blast sizzles just over Javors' shoulder, unbalancing him. He trips and thuds on his rump and sensing his vulnerability the Scum-bat becomes frenzied. It lands flat on its prey and envelops him before lifting him into the air. The blood-seeking tubes begin to unfurl and all hope is lost.

But then Javors begins to sing a new song. It's different – not his voice, but a computerized, auto-tuned sound. It's awful, truth be told; like an android singing with the squelch of an old-school modem. But suddenly time has slowed to a molasses crawl. Ava can simply side-step shots from the laser-pistol. Javors pries himself loose from the bat and drops the few feet back to the ground.

“How're you doing that?” Ava asks.

Javors can only shrug. He can't seem to control the song.

>>>>JAVORS executes GM COMMAND: [STOP/RETURN]

“What?” Ava wonders, but Javors can't answer. All at once he's in his trance again – like the other night in the tunnel. He's drawing those weird runes and symbols in the air, using the [Omega Key] like a quill dipped in luminescent ink. Turns out Ava hadn't hallucinated it back then after all – unless she still is.

Once more he draws a circle and stabs the center, then slowly pulls it out like a cork and once again light shines through from someplace – an adjacent dimension on the other side of the portal. And then in the next instant Javors begins to bend – the portal is sucking him in and distorting his image, warping him the way a black hole bends light at the event horizon.

“Javors!” Ava cries, but it's no use. He's in his black-eyed trance, unable to resist, unable to perceive the world around him. The portal drags him in and only at the final moment does Ava see his face return to normal, his eyes back to their familiar blood-red – and then they open wide with fear as he enters some other realm and he screams, “no! Please no! I can't go back there!” and the portal zips shut behind him. The [Omega Key] thuds to the dirt.

Then Ava is on her own. Time continues to grind along, crawling slowly – but is it already beginning to resume its prior pace? She studies the Scum-bat's wings. They are definitely starting to pump a little quicker. She looks at the laser pistol in the hand of the unknown rider. She'd love to take it from him but it's too great a risk.

She sprints to retrieve the [Omega Key], and then to where Uri lays, still cold and pale but with a tenuous pulse. She drags him further down the river bank. He sticks in the mud and she crushes down reeds to conceal him. His eyes stare at the night sky. Is he already gone? And then another, more horrible question:

Will he become a vampire Scum-bat, too?

“I'm so sorry,” Ava says, unsure if she's talking to a friend or a corpse or a future member of the techno-undead. “I'm not strong enough to carry you to the village. But I will return with help once I prove to the villagers that Horst has been lying to them.”

And with that there is nothing left but to collect the piece of stamped sheet metal before dashing headlong into the woods, hoping she can find the road before the hungry things in the forest find her.