Team 3: Garland of Letters
This is the first post for Hellboy, Kate, Warren, and Leon. If you are on one of the other teams, please do not read this post until the game is over! The information contained herein could give some things away!
Hospital notes
Your characters begin in the locations as shown on the map. From there, your movements and movement speed are up to you. All of the location contents are described here. Hilite the text to read them. We recommend that you only check the contents of a location as you enter it; it is far more fun that way.
There are only two preset monster encounters. The rest are "wandering monsters." You may choose to encounter any of them anywhere at any time with any frequency. The monsters found in the hospital are described at the end of this post.
Wandering monsters do not appear until after you have visited the kitchen.
The environment in Walter's world is different from what any of your characters are used to (exception: HB, since he's been here before. :-P ). In addition to the overwhelming and nauseating omnipresent thick smell of rot and decay, the air is heavy and a bit like a fear drug. Even those who are usually calm will be afraid, find it difficult to keep a straight head, be clumsier than usual, etc. This is not a "fear gas sends everyone to huddling in the corner" situation, though for characters not used to threat, it may do that. Instead, call to mind the sensation of being ill, or of not having eaten for 24 hours. Everything seems more daunting, confusing, and claustrophobic. Your reflexes may be impaired, leading to slowed reactions, or your nerves may be shot, leading to overreactions. The particular effect on your character is your call.
You can always hear a hum of electricity at work, but the lights don't turn on anywhere in the hospital and no devices work except for the elevator as noted. All the rooms and hallways are dark, with the exception of some light visible under the door to the morgue.
Map key:
Black rectangles indicate doors that can open. Some of them may be sticky or heavy or otherwise difficult to open, at your discretion, but they can be opened. A red x indicates a door whose lock is jammed and it cannot be opened. A blue square on a door indicates a lock. This door can be opened with the correct key.
The map is for the convenience of you, the players. Because we love you. Unless otherwise noted, your characters do not have this map.
Hospital Basement map
Hospital Floor 1 map
Hospital Floor 2 map
Basement
Therapy Baths
When you pass through the hole formed by Henry Townshend's "key," everything is pitch dark, dark beyond the ability of even the most enhanced eyesight to penetrate, dark beyond the ability of any fire or light to dispel. The steps of your comrades fade, and does the sensation of their presence nearby. Before you have a chance to reach out or try to pursue them, though, you realize that there is a slightly metallic taste in your mouth, followed by the realization that it stings to have your eyes open.
Followed quickly by the realization that you feel suddenly very heavy.
Followed by the realization that you can't feel the ground beneath your feet.
The realization that your movements are slowed.
The realization that you can't breathe.
All within the space of a few seconds, realization that you are underwater, and about to drown.
But there are two saving graces. One, you can tell which way is up, though the distance to the surface of the water will prove to be quite some way away. If you're carrying weapons, ammunition, or armor, it's likely you'll have to drop some or even all in order to reach the top. Exactly what they lose is your discretion, but we recommend that you drop enough equipment so that your character is likely to be and feel threatened by what is to come. Two, you are in a pretty small shaft, and throwing out your arms or legs will make contact with the sides of it. Upon reaching the surface of the water, you find yourself in a therapy bath room.
Whether because they're waterlogged or because of interference from this world, your flashlight and walkie-talkie, and any other electrical or technological implements, will not work. These rooms are small, nearly pitch-black, and empty save for a bath set into the floor in the shape of a coffin. The water seems to go down forever, and the shape of the shaft remains constant. The water smells rancid, and bits of scalded flesh float on the surface. The walls and floor are concrete streaked with slippery mildew. The walls between the baths are fairly thick, but sound will not pass through them. The person in the room next to you could be screaming, and you will be unable to hear them.
Light is visible from beneath the morgue door.
Morgue
Bodies are littered haphazardly in here. A terribly burned corpse hangs half in and half out of a drawer, face twisted in agony. Several former patients are afflicted with hideous growths, lesions, and tumors. The sheet covering one body is too small, leaving his feet and face exposed. His feet are crusted with blood and missing several toes. His mouth is open in a wide grin, teeth clamped around what are presumably the missing digits. The smell is utterly overwhelming.
The source of the light that's seen under the door is immediately obvious. There's a hole in the wall, several inches in diameter, that the light is shining out of. At the far end of the hole is a flashlight. But the hole seems to be some kind of used needle depository. Old syringes, rusty and encrusted with blood and God knows what else and all around very sketchy looking, line the length of the passage. (Note: you cannot actually contract anything worse than the usual tetanus or an average wound infection from being punctured by one of these needles). The passage is pretty narrow and pretty deep; you'd need a long skinny arm to reach the flashlight.
Elevator
There are four buttons, but only two of them - "B" and "1" - are labeled. Pressing the other two does nothing; the elevator will only take you between the basement and first floor.
First Floor
Front Door
Directly across from the elevator is a large obvious metal door. There are two locks to it, each with a vertical line etched into the metal above it. A folded up piece of paper is wedged under the door. Unfolding it reveals a map of Silent Hill, with a building labeled "Alchemilla Hospital" circled in red crayon. Alchemilla is located on the east side of Old Silent Hill, which is on the north side of the lake. On the back of the map, also in red crayon, is a childish drawing of an angry-looking sun. (Map can be seen here: http://www.silenthill.co.za/map/ Ignore the "historical fact," "game event," and "character meeting" notes on this flash site. They are not on your map! Scroll straight north from the starting point to see Alchemilla Hospital.)
When you pass by the kitchen, you can hear a sound coming from inside. Some kind of static.
Kitchen
The kitchen is a predictable mess. There are a couple of half-burned corpses, probably kitchen staff, slumped in the corner and next to a stove. A lot of sausages were apparently being cooked, though, the long tubes of meat don't look quite like sausages...
The noise is easy to pinpoint. A small handheld radio is on one of the kitchen counters, and it's emitting a bizarre kind of static no matter what channel it's set to. As you investigate the radio, you'll hear a faint wet tearing sound from behind you. It may take a moment to locate with the flashlight, but you'll find that it comes from one of the corpses. The skin is slowly splitting, starting in the center of the forehead and running vertically along the face. Once the split is a few inches long, the whole body splits, as though the skin was just a bag containing the monster that emerges and attacks. This monster is called a gumhead; see the entry on it below for attack pattern. Once the gumhead is dead, the radio static cuts out on its own.
Now that the gumhead has emerged, wandering monsters are active throughout the hospital, and you may be attacked at any time by any one of them. The radio, if you choose to take it with you, behaves peculiarly. When there is a monster or ghost nearby, within about fifteen feet, it emits the static noise. The noise grows louder and louder the closer the monster gets to you. You can tell from the volume of the radio static approximately how close the creature is, but not what it is or what direction it's in. All monsters in the hospital are hostile to you, but some of them may draw near then withdraw, producing a radio static response but never being seen.
Doctor's Office
Severed hands and feet are wired to the ceiling. There are two 9mm clips in the desk drawers.
Medicine Room
This is mostly filled with cracked and very outdated bottles of prescription medications. You can probably scrounge up a bandage or two and some antiseptic that are functional.
Exam Room
The metal exam table bulges up oddly, almost like it bubbled or was poured over a mold when it was made. After a moment's look, it seems like the image of a person laying down, head tilted back and face twisted in agony. There's blood pooled on the table in the area of the "person's" stomach.
Women's Room
There are no mirrors. There's what looks like a greyish-purple huge worm or leech, several feet in diameter, that enters through a hole in the wall near the ceiling above one of the stalls and exits into a toilet bowl. It's a tight fit. The radio reacts to it, but it just pulses and makes sounds vaguely like digestion. It doesn't attack even if struck. The lead piping leading to one of the toilets is pretty loose, you could probably detach it if you want.
Staircase
The staircase only goes up.
Second Floor
Staircase
The staircase heading up to the third floor has collapsed on itself. The debris is impassable.
Hallway
The two sections of the building hallway are separated by a metal wall clearly different from the other building walls, and a jammed door.
Nurse Center
There's a sharp-looking scalpel and a hacksaw laid out on the head nurse's desk. Either could probably serve as a weapon.
Operating Prep Room
There is a cassette tape sitting atop a note on a table, but nothing here to play the tape in. The note is actually a childish drawing of what looks like a building on fire beneath an angry-looking sun. The building has a steeple with a cross on top of it; probably a church.
Operating Room
There are a dozen life-support machines scattered around the room, all cracked or smashed. None of the machines are plugged into the wall, and none have any power, except for one. The display shows faintly flickering numbers, and it sparks a little every now and then. There's a key lodged into one of the intake chambers, with a single vertical line scratched into the handle.
Many long cords run from the machines to an infant incubator. The plastic is clouded and opaque, there's no way to see inside.
Intensive Care Unit
Everything you'd expect to find here is here, albeit as dirty as everywhere else. Everything except the patient beds. Life-support machines, curtains, bedside tables, everything else is in place. You could probably liberate some minimal first aid supplies from here. On the floor, in the place of one of the beds, is a single 9mm clip. The absent patient's chart describes multiple gunshot wounds.
Room 201
The walls are bare when you enter, but they soon start to fill up with writing. It appears on the walls like charcoal written by an invisible hand. "COME BACK" "I'LL KILL YUO" "I'M WATCHING YOU" "STAY WIITH ME" "I HATE YOU" "I SEE YOU" "WHORE" "I LOVE YOU" If you remain long enough, the walls will be entirely covered, turning completely black.
Room 202
There is no floor in this room, only water, too deep and dark to tell how far down it goes. And yet, you can all walk on it as easily as thought it were a normal tile floor. Here and there, droplets of water separate themselves from the surface, and drip slowly upwards to the ceiling, as though gravity were reversed. They pass through the plaster as though it weren't even there, and from that spot, the ceiling seems to sweat a droplet of blood, which drops slowly down into the water along the exact same trajectory.
Room 203
Before you is what looks like a very long and dark hallway. As you proceed down the hallway, it gradually narrows and grows smaller, until by the end, a couple blocks down, you must crawl on hands and knees. Also, the tile and plaster of the walls and floor and ceiling are gradually replaced with what feels and smells like hardened flesh. When you go through the door at the very end, you exit back into the second floor hallway you entered from, at the door to room 203.
Room 204
This room looks like an ordinary patient's room, except that the walls are made of mirrors, and there is no door. When you are in this room, you can neither see nor hear nor feel the other members of your mission group, even if they also entered the room with you. One of the mirrors on the wall, at random, will take you back out into the hallway if you should walk into it, as though it were the door. Exactly which mirror this is will be different for different people, and will be different upon different visits to the room.
Room 205
There's a person lying on the patient bed. Their wrists and chained together, and their ankles are chained to the bedpost. The person is completely covered in bandages, from head to toe. He's jerking around, writhing and trying to free himself, and a man's voice is muffled screaming beneath his covered face. A careful listening could make out pleas for help, though the tight-wound bandages prevent him from moving his jaw much.
If you try to unwrap him, he continues to scream for help. The bandages around his neck become soaked with blood as the seconds pass, but the ones over the rest of his body are completely clean. There are more bandages underneath the ones you pull away, and after a while, you may realize that you've unwrapped enough bandaging and gone far enough into the mess that no human being could possibly be so slim as to fit into what's left. When one of you comes to this realization, the man stops screaming and stops struggling, and the yet-unwrapped bandages on the bed seem to "deflate" and unwrap themselves. There is no one inside.
Room 206
There's a corpse suspended from the ceiling. She's hanging by what looks like a giant fishhook lodged in her lower back. Her hair is blood-soaked and covers her face. She is (was) very pregnant, probably nearly to term, and there's a gash across her stomach. A few scraps of flesh and inner organ bulge from the slash, and something there catches the light of the flashlight. There's a key jammed into the wound, with a single vertical line etched into the handle. She's about eleven feet off the ground. Upon removing the key, a faint sound like a death rattle sounds from one of the walls. There is no other reaction.
Monsters
All monsters can be killed. If you want to go for extra atmosphere, monsters may get back up again after being knocked down unless you stomp them good. ;-)
Gumhead (Grey or Red)
Appearance: It stands about 5'5'' and looks and sounds apelike. Its flesh seems to be rotting, and some of them have a second face apparently trying to emerge from its neck. Some of them carry long blunt weapons, lead pipes or branches or golf clubs or the like. Often appear in groups of 2-4.
Movement: They walk on two legs like a human, awkward-looking but surprisingly nimble on their feet. You can outrun them, but they're pretty good at dodging hits.
Attacks: Attacks with its blunt weapon, or just trying to pummel you with its hands. They're quiet adept at stealing a melee weapon from your hands and turning it against you.
Defenses: Tough to get solid hits on in melee, and because of its jerky movements, it's hard to shoot consistently. It takes a fair beating to take one down.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Patient
Appearance: Looks and smells like the mutilated corpse of a tall woman. Her face is half-stripped of flesh and her scalp doesn't sit quite right on her head. Her shirt is torn to bare her breasts, and there's a large hole low in her abdomen where her uterus was removed. She cries out like a human would when struck.
Movement: She only walks, and is easy to outrun.
Attacks: Most likely, she wields a small axe in one hand. She may have a scalpel instead.
Defenses: It'll take a little more damage to kill her than it would a real person in her place.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Toadstool or Whitestool
Appearance: A tube of brown or whitish flesh about six feet tall that rises up from the floor. Usually appears in clustered groups of a dozen or more, but sometimes sprouts all on its lonesome.
Movement: Can't move. Undulates in the air a bit.
Attacks: Doesn't attack unless you bump into it, in which case a mouth-like opening at its tip could take a little chunk out of you.
Defenses: A single blow causes it to wither.
Probable Location: Damp places. Locations with corpses or large chunks of flesh.
Tremer (Red or Blue)
Appearance: A leech, bluish or reddish in color. Varies in size from a few inches long to about the size of a small dog. There tend to be about a dozen of them in a location if they're there, and they especially will cluster around and feed upon the corpses of dead monsters.
Movement: It can inch along the walls, floor, or ceiling, leaving a trail of slime. Sometimes it loses its grip on the ceiling and falls to the floor, or onto you if you're unlucky.
Attacks: It may sluggishly try to latch onto exposed skin for a feeding.
Defenses: One blow causes it to splatter.
Probable Location: Damp places. Locations with corpses, human or monster.
Twin Victim
Appearance: A large hulking creature with massive hands for feet, and two stuck together childlike faces that never change expression, frozen like porcelain masks. Its "footsteps" are surprisingly noisy; if you're in the dark, you will definitely be able to hear it clomping around. Sometimes, it attempts a vocalization, a human voice in an impossibly low register mumbling a word scrambled beyond recognition. It will also sometimes produce a dull roar when they attack or are attacked.
Movement: It gets around using its oversized hands, and has no problem balancing on one to take a swipe with the other. It can "sprint" at the same speed that a person can.
Attacks: It attacks by striking the target with one of its oversized hands, and packs a surprising amount of strength in the blow. Note that, because it attacks with what is effectively a leg, it cannot attack while on the move.
Defenses: Takes quite a bit of damage to go down. Bullets do deal damage to the Twin Victim, though they seem to pass through its burlap "body." This means that if you have one Twin Victim in front of another, one bullet can indeed hurt both.
Probable Location: Hallways.
Wall Man
Appearance: One minute, a space of wall is just a space of wall, and the next minute, it's the form of a man half in the wall, half out from the torso. Seems to be covered with a yellowish skin-type substance and has two claw hands. Makes strangle growling-like noises when it emerges from the wall, and when it swipes at you.
Movement: The creature is unable to move from the wall but can somewhat pivot from its torso, and also go back in the wall.
Attacks: Swipes with its clawed hands.
Defenses: The equivalent of a few axe blows are enough to fell it and cause it to retract back into the wall.
Probable Location: Anywhere with solid walls.
Ghosts
Although appearance, speed, and power vary by Victim, all ghosts behave essentially alike.
Appearance: Ghosts make low strange moaning noises from time to time, but are otherwise silent.
Movement: Ghosts float, sometimes just above ground, sometimes well above it. They can pass through walls, but it's a difficult process. They must struggle to pull themselves through, leaving trails behind them of what looks like molasses (see linked image). For this reason, most ghosts will not bother to pursue you if you go to another location.
Attacks: -An "aura of damage" surrounds all ghosts. If you are within about ten feet of the ghost, it begins to affect you, growing stronger the closer to the ghost that you are. Your life begins to literally leave you. This manifests as a feeling of weakness, red and blurred vision, a buzzing or ringing in your ears, and a headache so powerful that it can effectively paralyze you at close range to the ghost. Any open wounds that you have may begin to bleed badly, and you feel cold. A healthy person exposed to this effect uninterrupted for about three minutes, dies. If you are wearing a Saint Medallion, however, the effect on you is completely negated.
-The voluntary attack that ghosts use is to reach into your chest cavity and constrict your heart, paralyzing you and causing more and more harm the longer the contact is maintained. Sometimes this attack causes blood to appear over the entry point, but it does not actually cause a wound. Ghosts are reluctant to touch you if you're wearing a Saint Medallion.
Defenses: Ghosts cannot die. Dealing a sufficient amount of melee damage will cause them to fall to the ground and be inactive for about 15 seconds. Usually, this takes the equivalent of several axe blows, or a full clip of regular ammunition. Shooting a ghost with a single silver bullet causes them to the ground and writhe, gasping and making a strange sucking noise, for about 30 seconds.
Victim 01
Appearance: A tall bald man, dripping and decaying, in tattered black clothes.
Attacks: His "aura" and physical attack are the weakest of the ghosts, and he's not very fast, either.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 04
Appearance: A balding middle-aged man, wearing blue suspender trousers that are falling off one side. He carries a trowel.
Attacks: Victim 04 can use his trowel as a weapon in addition to normal ghost attacks. He prefers digging at one's face or chest with it. The damage inflicted by his "aura" and heart-constricting attacks are average.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 10
Appearance: A young man with short hair, wearing a green jacket and pants. Note: unlike in the image linked above, he does not have a sword in him.
Attacks: He's fairly fast, and his attacks deal moderate damage.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 12
Appearance: A teenage boy in a brown beanie hat, his head slowly wobbles from side-to-side in an unnatural way.
Attacks: His attacks deal moderate damage, but he's not very aggressive.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 13
Appearance: A middle-aged woman who makes gurgling noises sometimes. When she's knocked down, dark water sometimes bubbles up out of her nose and mouth.
Attacks: She's quite slow, and her aura causes minimal damage. Her heart-constricting attack is unusually powerful, though.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 14
Appearance: A man in a brown sweater. Sometimes, as he reaches for you, you can hear the sound of bones wetly cracking.
Attacks: Quite aggressive, and his "aura" saps life more quickly than those of the previous ghosts.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 16
Appearance: A young woman in a short skirt and a red blouse with a plunging neckline. She's covered in gashes, and the numbers "16121" are cut into the upper slope of her left breast. Her long black hair hangs down in front of her face. Sometimes, instead of floating, she crawls on all fours. In addition to the moans heard from all ghosts, she also sometimes makes a noise that sounds like crying and whimpering in reverse.
Attacks: She's fairly slow, and her heart-constricting grab attack isn't terribly powerful, but her aura is very damaging and it takes more damage than usual to take her down. Those fighting her at close range can also sometimes find a hand or foot entangled in her hair.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Hospital notes
Your characters begin in the locations as shown on the map. From there, your movements and movement speed are up to you. All of the location contents are described here. Hilite the text to read them. We recommend that you only check the contents of a location as you enter it; it is far more fun that way.
There are only two preset monster encounters. The rest are "wandering monsters." You may choose to encounter any of them anywhere at any time with any frequency. The monsters found in the hospital are described at the end of this post.
Wandering monsters do not appear until after you have visited the kitchen.
The environment in Walter's world is different from what any of your characters are used to (exception: HB, since he's been here before. :-P ). In addition to the overwhelming and nauseating omnipresent thick smell of rot and decay, the air is heavy and a bit like a fear drug. Even those who are usually calm will be afraid, find it difficult to keep a straight head, be clumsier than usual, etc. This is not a "fear gas sends everyone to huddling in the corner" situation, though for characters not used to threat, it may do that. Instead, call to mind the sensation of being ill, or of not having eaten for 24 hours. Everything seems more daunting, confusing, and claustrophobic. Your reflexes may be impaired, leading to slowed reactions, or your nerves may be shot, leading to overreactions. The particular effect on your character is your call.
You can always hear a hum of electricity at work, but the lights don't turn on anywhere in the hospital and no devices work except for the elevator as noted. All the rooms and hallways are dark, with the exception of some light visible under the door to the morgue.
Map key:
Black rectangles indicate doors that can open. Some of them may be sticky or heavy or otherwise difficult to open, at your discretion, but they can be opened. A red x indicates a door whose lock is jammed and it cannot be opened. A blue square on a door indicates a lock. This door can be opened with the correct key.
The map is for the convenience of you, the players. Because we love you. Unless otherwise noted, your characters do not have this map.
Hospital Basement map
Hospital Floor 1 map
Hospital Floor 2 map
Basement
Therapy Baths
When you pass through the hole formed by Henry Townshend's "key," everything is pitch dark, dark beyond the ability of even the most enhanced eyesight to penetrate, dark beyond the ability of any fire or light to dispel. The steps of your comrades fade, and does the sensation of their presence nearby. Before you have a chance to reach out or try to pursue them, though, you realize that there is a slightly metallic taste in your mouth, followed by the realization that it stings to have your eyes open.
Followed quickly by the realization that you feel suddenly very heavy.
Followed by the realization that you can't feel the ground beneath your feet.
The realization that your movements are slowed.
The realization that you can't breathe.
All within the space of a few seconds, realization that you are underwater, and about to drown.
But there are two saving graces. One, you can tell which way is up, though the distance to the surface of the water will prove to be quite some way away. If you're carrying weapons, ammunition, or armor, it's likely you'll have to drop some or even all in order to reach the top. Exactly what they lose is your discretion, but we recommend that you drop enough equipment so that your character is likely to be and feel threatened by what is to come. Two, you are in a pretty small shaft, and throwing out your arms or legs will make contact with the sides of it. Upon reaching the surface of the water, you find yourself in a therapy bath room.
Whether because they're waterlogged or because of interference from this world, your flashlight and walkie-talkie, and any other electrical or technological implements, will not work. These rooms are small, nearly pitch-black, and empty save for a bath set into the floor in the shape of a coffin. The water seems to go down forever, and the shape of the shaft remains constant. The water smells rancid, and bits of scalded flesh float on the surface. The walls and floor are concrete streaked with slippery mildew. The walls between the baths are fairly thick, but sound will not pass through them. The person in the room next to you could be screaming, and you will be unable to hear them.
Light is visible from beneath the morgue door.
Morgue
Bodies are littered haphazardly in here. A terribly burned corpse hangs half in and half out of a drawer, face twisted in agony. Several former patients are afflicted with hideous growths, lesions, and tumors. The sheet covering one body is too small, leaving his feet and face exposed. His feet are crusted with blood and missing several toes. His mouth is open in a wide grin, teeth clamped around what are presumably the missing digits. The smell is utterly overwhelming.
The source of the light that's seen under the door is immediately obvious. There's a hole in the wall, several inches in diameter, that the light is shining out of. At the far end of the hole is a flashlight. But the hole seems to be some kind of used needle depository. Old syringes, rusty and encrusted with blood and God knows what else and all around very sketchy looking, line the length of the passage. (Note: you cannot actually contract anything worse than the usual tetanus or an average wound infection from being punctured by one of these needles). The passage is pretty narrow and pretty deep; you'd need a long skinny arm to reach the flashlight.
Elevator
There are four buttons, but only two of them - "B" and "1" - are labeled. Pressing the other two does nothing; the elevator will only take you between the basement and first floor.
First Floor
Front Door
Directly across from the elevator is a large obvious metal door. There are two locks to it, each with a vertical line etched into the metal above it. A folded up piece of paper is wedged under the door. Unfolding it reveals a map of Silent Hill, with a building labeled "Alchemilla Hospital" circled in red crayon. Alchemilla is located on the east side of Old Silent Hill, which is on the north side of the lake. On the back of the map, also in red crayon, is a childish drawing of an angry-looking sun. (Map can be seen here: http://www.silenthill.co.za/map/ Ignore the "historical fact," "game event," and "character meeting" notes on this flash site. They are not on your map! Scroll straight north from the starting point to see Alchemilla Hospital.)
When you pass by the kitchen, you can hear a sound coming from inside. Some kind of static.
Kitchen
The kitchen is a predictable mess. There are a couple of half-burned corpses, probably kitchen staff, slumped in the corner and next to a stove. A lot of sausages were apparently being cooked, though, the long tubes of meat don't look quite like sausages...
The noise is easy to pinpoint. A small handheld radio is on one of the kitchen counters, and it's emitting a bizarre kind of static no matter what channel it's set to. As you investigate the radio, you'll hear a faint wet tearing sound from behind you. It may take a moment to locate with the flashlight, but you'll find that it comes from one of the corpses. The skin is slowly splitting, starting in the center of the forehead and running vertically along the face. Once the split is a few inches long, the whole body splits, as though the skin was just a bag containing the monster that emerges and attacks. This monster is called a gumhead; see the entry on it below for attack pattern. Once the gumhead is dead, the radio static cuts out on its own.
Now that the gumhead has emerged, wandering monsters are active throughout the hospital, and you may be attacked at any time by any one of them. The radio, if you choose to take it with you, behaves peculiarly. When there is a monster or ghost nearby, within about fifteen feet, it emits the static noise. The noise grows louder and louder the closer the monster gets to you. You can tell from the volume of the radio static approximately how close the creature is, but not what it is or what direction it's in. All monsters in the hospital are hostile to you, but some of them may draw near then withdraw, producing a radio static response but never being seen.
Doctor's Office
Severed hands and feet are wired to the ceiling. There are two 9mm clips in the desk drawers.
Medicine Room
This is mostly filled with cracked and very outdated bottles of prescription medications. You can probably scrounge up a bandage or two and some antiseptic that are functional.
Exam Room
The metal exam table bulges up oddly, almost like it bubbled or was poured over a mold when it was made. After a moment's look, it seems like the image of a person laying down, head tilted back and face twisted in agony. There's blood pooled on the table in the area of the "person's" stomach.
Women's Room
There are no mirrors. There's what looks like a greyish-purple huge worm or leech, several feet in diameter, that enters through a hole in the wall near the ceiling above one of the stalls and exits into a toilet bowl. It's a tight fit. The radio reacts to it, but it just pulses and makes sounds vaguely like digestion. It doesn't attack even if struck. The lead piping leading to one of the toilets is pretty loose, you could probably detach it if you want.
Staircase
The staircase only goes up.
Second Floor
Staircase
The staircase heading up to the third floor has collapsed on itself. The debris is impassable.
Hallway
The two sections of the building hallway are separated by a metal wall clearly different from the other building walls, and a jammed door.
Nurse Center
There's a sharp-looking scalpel and a hacksaw laid out on the head nurse's desk. Either could probably serve as a weapon.
Operating Prep Room
There is a cassette tape sitting atop a note on a table, but nothing here to play the tape in. The note is actually a childish drawing of what looks like a building on fire beneath an angry-looking sun. The building has a steeple with a cross on top of it; probably a church.
Operating Room
There are a dozen life-support machines scattered around the room, all cracked or smashed. None of the machines are plugged into the wall, and none have any power, except for one. The display shows faintly flickering numbers, and it sparks a little every now and then. There's a key lodged into one of the intake chambers, with a single vertical line scratched into the handle.
Many long cords run from the machines to an infant incubator. The plastic is clouded and opaque, there's no way to see inside.
Intensive Care Unit
Everything you'd expect to find here is here, albeit as dirty as everywhere else. Everything except the patient beds. Life-support machines, curtains, bedside tables, everything else is in place. You could probably liberate some minimal first aid supplies from here. On the floor, in the place of one of the beds, is a single 9mm clip. The absent patient's chart describes multiple gunshot wounds.
Room 201
The walls are bare when you enter, but they soon start to fill up with writing. It appears on the walls like charcoal written by an invisible hand. "COME BACK" "I'LL KILL YUO" "I'M WATCHING YOU" "STAY WIITH ME" "I HATE YOU" "I SEE YOU" "WHORE" "I LOVE YOU" If you remain long enough, the walls will be entirely covered, turning completely black.
Room 202
There is no floor in this room, only water, too deep and dark to tell how far down it goes. And yet, you can all walk on it as easily as thought it were a normal tile floor. Here and there, droplets of water separate themselves from the surface, and drip slowly upwards to the ceiling, as though gravity were reversed. They pass through the plaster as though it weren't even there, and from that spot, the ceiling seems to sweat a droplet of blood, which drops slowly down into the water along the exact same trajectory.
Room 203
Before you is what looks like a very long and dark hallway. As you proceed down the hallway, it gradually narrows and grows smaller, until by the end, a couple blocks down, you must crawl on hands and knees. Also, the tile and plaster of the walls and floor and ceiling are gradually replaced with what feels and smells like hardened flesh. When you go through the door at the very end, you exit back into the second floor hallway you entered from, at the door to room 203.
Room 204
This room looks like an ordinary patient's room, except that the walls are made of mirrors, and there is no door. When you are in this room, you can neither see nor hear nor feel the other members of your mission group, even if they also entered the room with you. One of the mirrors on the wall, at random, will take you back out into the hallway if you should walk into it, as though it were the door. Exactly which mirror this is will be different for different people, and will be different upon different visits to the room.
Room 205
There's a person lying on the patient bed. Their wrists and chained together, and their ankles are chained to the bedpost. The person is completely covered in bandages, from head to toe. He's jerking around, writhing and trying to free himself, and a man's voice is muffled screaming beneath his covered face. A careful listening could make out pleas for help, though the tight-wound bandages prevent him from moving his jaw much.
If you try to unwrap him, he continues to scream for help. The bandages around his neck become soaked with blood as the seconds pass, but the ones over the rest of his body are completely clean. There are more bandages underneath the ones you pull away, and after a while, you may realize that you've unwrapped enough bandaging and gone far enough into the mess that no human being could possibly be so slim as to fit into what's left. When one of you comes to this realization, the man stops screaming and stops struggling, and the yet-unwrapped bandages on the bed seem to "deflate" and unwrap themselves. There is no one inside.
Room 206
There's a corpse suspended from the ceiling. She's hanging by what looks like a giant fishhook lodged in her lower back. Her hair is blood-soaked and covers her face. She is (was) very pregnant, probably nearly to term, and there's a gash across her stomach. A few scraps of flesh and inner organ bulge from the slash, and something there catches the light of the flashlight. There's a key jammed into the wound, with a single vertical line etched into the handle. She's about eleven feet off the ground. Upon removing the key, a faint sound like a death rattle sounds from one of the walls. There is no other reaction.
Monsters
All monsters can be killed. If you want to go for extra atmosphere, monsters may get back up again after being knocked down unless you stomp them good. ;-)
Gumhead (Grey or Red)
Appearance: It stands about 5'5'' and looks and sounds apelike. Its flesh seems to be rotting, and some of them have a second face apparently trying to emerge from its neck. Some of them carry long blunt weapons, lead pipes or branches or golf clubs or the like. Often appear in groups of 2-4.
Movement: They walk on two legs like a human, awkward-looking but surprisingly nimble on their feet. You can outrun them, but they're pretty good at dodging hits.
Attacks: Attacks with its blunt weapon, or just trying to pummel you with its hands. They're quiet adept at stealing a melee weapon from your hands and turning it against you.
Defenses: Tough to get solid hits on in melee, and because of its jerky movements, it's hard to shoot consistently. It takes a fair beating to take one down.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Patient
Appearance: Looks and smells like the mutilated corpse of a tall woman. Her face is half-stripped of flesh and her scalp doesn't sit quite right on her head. Her shirt is torn to bare her breasts, and there's a large hole low in her abdomen where her uterus was removed. She cries out like a human would when struck.
Movement: She only walks, and is easy to outrun.
Attacks: Most likely, she wields a small axe in one hand. She may have a scalpel instead.
Defenses: It'll take a little more damage to kill her than it would a real person in her place.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Toadstool or Whitestool
Appearance: A tube of brown or whitish flesh about six feet tall that rises up from the floor. Usually appears in clustered groups of a dozen or more, but sometimes sprouts all on its lonesome.
Movement: Can't move. Undulates in the air a bit.
Attacks: Doesn't attack unless you bump into it, in which case a mouth-like opening at its tip could take a little chunk out of you.
Defenses: A single blow causes it to wither.
Probable Location: Damp places. Locations with corpses or large chunks of flesh.
Tremer (Red or Blue)
Appearance: A leech, bluish or reddish in color. Varies in size from a few inches long to about the size of a small dog. There tend to be about a dozen of them in a location if they're there, and they especially will cluster around and feed upon the corpses of dead monsters.
Movement: It can inch along the walls, floor, or ceiling, leaving a trail of slime. Sometimes it loses its grip on the ceiling and falls to the floor, or onto you if you're unlucky.
Attacks: It may sluggishly try to latch onto exposed skin for a feeding.
Defenses: One blow causes it to splatter.
Probable Location: Damp places. Locations with corpses, human or monster.
Twin Victim
Appearance: A large hulking creature with massive hands for feet, and two stuck together childlike faces that never change expression, frozen like porcelain masks. Its "footsteps" are surprisingly noisy; if you're in the dark, you will definitely be able to hear it clomping around. Sometimes, it attempts a vocalization, a human voice in an impossibly low register mumbling a word scrambled beyond recognition. It will also sometimes produce a dull roar when they attack or are attacked.
Movement: It gets around using its oversized hands, and has no problem balancing on one to take a swipe with the other. It can "sprint" at the same speed that a person can.
Attacks: It attacks by striking the target with one of its oversized hands, and packs a surprising amount of strength in the blow. Note that, because it attacks with what is effectively a leg, it cannot attack while on the move.
Defenses: Takes quite a bit of damage to go down. Bullets do deal damage to the Twin Victim, though they seem to pass through its burlap "body." This means that if you have one Twin Victim in front of another, one bullet can indeed hurt both.
Probable Location: Hallways.
Wall Man
Appearance: One minute, a space of wall is just a space of wall, and the next minute, it's the form of a man half in the wall, half out from the torso. Seems to be covered with a yellowish skin-type substance and has two claw hands. Makes strangle growling-like noises when it emerges from the wall, and when it swipes at you.
Movement: The creature is unable to move from the wall but can somewhat pivot from its torso, and also go back in the wall.
Attacks: Swipes with its clawed hands.
Defenses: The equivalent of a few axe blows are enough to fell it and cause it to retract back into the wall.
Probable Location: Anywhere with solid walls.
Ghosts
Although appearance, speed, and power vary by Victim, all ghosts behave essentially alike.
Appearance: Ghosts make low strange moaning noises from time to time, but are otherwise silent.
Movement: Ghosts float, sometimes just above ground, sometimes well above it. They can pass through walls, but it's a difficult process. They must struggle to pull themselves through, leaving trails behind them of what looks like molasses (see linked image). For this reason, most ghosts will not bother to pursue you if you go to another location.
Attacks: -An "aura of damage" surrounds all ghosts. If you are within about ten feet of the ghost, it begins to affect you, growing stronger the closer to the ghost that you are. Your life begins to literally leave you. This manifests as a feeling of weakness, red and blurred vision, a buzzing or ringing in your ears, and a headache so powerful that it can effectively paralyze you at close range to the ghost. Any open wounds that you have may begin to bleed badly, and you feel cold. A healthy person exposed to this effect uninterrupted for about three minutes, dies. If you are wearing a Saint Medallion, however, the effect on you is completely negated.
-The voluntary attack that ghosts use is to reach into your chest cavity and constrict your heart, paralyzing you and causing more and more harm the longer the contact is maintained. Sometimes this attack causes blood to appear over the entry point, but it does not actually cause a wound. Ghosts are reluctant to touch you if you're wearing a Saint Medallion.
Defenses: Ghosts cannot die. Dealing a sufficient amount of melee damage will cause them to fall to the ground and be inactive for about 15 seconds. Usually, this takes the equivalent of several axe blows, or a full clip of regular ammunition. Shooting a ghost with a single silver bullet causes them to the ground and writhe, gasping and making a strange sucking noise, for about 30 seconds.
Victim 01
Appearance: A tall bald man, dripping and decaying, in tattered black clothes.
Attacks: His "aura" and physical attack are the weakest of the ghosts, and he's not very fast, either.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 04
Appearance: A balding middle-aged man, wearing blue suspender trousers that are falling off one side. He carries a trowel.
Attacks: Victim 04 can use his trowel as a weapon in addition to normal ghost attacks. He prefers digging at one's face or chest with it. The damage inflicted by his "aura" and heart-constricting attacks are average.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 10
Appearance: A young man with short hair, wearing a green jacket and pants. Note: unlike in the image linked above, he does not have a sword in him.
Attacks: He's fairly fast, and his attacks deal moderate damage.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 12
Appearance: A teenage boy in a brown beanie hat, his head slowly wobbles from side-to-side in an unnatural way.
Attacks: His attacks deal moderate damage, but he's not very aggressive.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 13
Appearance: A middle-aged woman who makes gurgling noises sometimes. When she's knocked down, dark water sometimes bubbles up out of her nose and mouth.
Attacks: She's quite slow, and her aura causes minimal damage. Her heart-constricting attack is unusually powerful, though.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 14
Appearance: A man in a brown sweater. Sometimes, as he reaches for you, you can hear the sound of bones wetly cracking.
Attacks: Quite aggressive, and his "aura" saps life more quickly than those of the previous ghosts.
Probable Location: Anywhere.
Victim 16
Appearance: A young woman in a short skirt and a red blouse with a plunging neckline. She's covered in gashes, and the numbers "16121" are cut into the upper slope of her left breast. Her long black hair hangs down in front of her face. Sometimes, instead of floating, she crawls on all fours. In addition to the moans heard from all ghosts, she also sometimes makes a noise that sounds like crying and whimpering in reverse.
Attacks: She's fairly slow, and her heart-constricting grab attack isn't terribly powerful, but her aura is very damaging and it takes more damage than usual to take her down. Those fighting her at close range can also sometimes find a hand or foot entangled in her hair.
Probable Location: Anywhere.