Count Otto Black
Active Pubber
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2019
- Messages
- 36
- Reaction score
- 41
It is early afternoon. The weather is quite pleasant for this time of year, which is just as well if you came by car, since the roads around Knossos look as though it wouldn't take much rain to render them impassable by any vehicle less versatile than a mule. If you came by train you had a less bumpy ride, but you noticed the general air of run-down decrepitude. None of you are surprised by this. Even if you don't specifically know the local economy went into an irreversible decline when slavery was abolished, you've seen enough small towns to recognise one which, if it was human, would spend most of its time in a rocking-chair on the porch quietly awaiting death, and if it was a dog would have been put to sleep long ago.
However, there's nothing sinister about the place, even if more than half the buildings have boarded-up windows, and the inhabitants don't seem very friendly. They're no more unwelcoming than you might expect, given that their sleepy little town has been invaded by very odd people for an incredibly strange reason. The more devout Baptists among them probably think you're all in league with the Devil. In fact, Amthor proudly boasts of having made a pact with Satan as part of his show-biz persona, which tends not to make him all that popular in places like this.
You all arrive at roughly the same time. The train, which was specially chartered for the occasion because very few ordinary trains use this obscure branch-line any more, was quite crowded so you wouldn't necessarily have met one another on it, then again you might have. A small fleet of vehicles is shuttling the guests to the mansion, which is about three miles from the town, but this is taking a while, since some of the less robust hired cars couldn't cope with the twenty miles of potholed dirt-track between here and the highway.
There is some time to spare, and if you wish you may look around the town, though there's no obvious reason to do so. It looks as though it was once home to a few thousand people, but these days the population is probably in the low hundreds at best, and apart from the usual shops you find in every town, there's basically nothing here. None of the people you already know are important are at the station.