The Great What-Is-It

An adventure for PCs based in London, possibly working for the Phantasmological Society.

Wakes Week in Blackpool. Thousands of industrial workers from the Lancashire mills flooding into the town, by train and charabanc, months of wages in their pockets to blow on the sideshows of the Golden Mile. Eight million visitors a year. A “great roaring spangled beast” of a city. 

J. B. Priestley in English Journey gives an unimprovable description of “its miles and miles of promenades, its three piers, its gigantic dance-halls, its variety shows, its switch-backs and helter-skelters, its array of wine bars and oyster saloons and cheap restaurants and tea houses and shops piled high and glittering with trash; its army of pierrots, bandsmen, clowns, fortune-tellers, auctioneers, dancing partners, animal trainers, itinerant singers, hawkers.” You have to force your way across the busy sands.

A wet half-circle cleared by the pier. The crowd makes a space for something dead.

Gelatinous, formless. Translucent in the cold evening light. Cobweb-tendril hair. A jellyfish has more shape than this does. It’s the size of a small horse and disintegrating as you watch, losing coherency, melting back into the sand. In half an hour or less it will be gone.

Except for a gleaming pearl bracelet, embedded in the greying, dimpled flesh of the thing. Too large for you. Hangs loosely around your wrist. Sized to fit somebody very fat. You’ve already seen it, though you might not remember - on the billboard of Jolly Alice, the British Giantess.

There have been six of these already. You read about them in the paper. BLACKPOOL BLOB PUZZLES POLICE. You can speak to the Deputy Chief Constable about it - he tried to preserve one in an ice chest borrowed from an oyster bar. Didn’t work. 

In a drawer he has more objects recovered from the blobs. A silver locket with a picture of a woman’s face inside, smiling, obviously in love. A novelty corkscrew. A Chinese coin, a hole drilled in it so it can be hung around the neck.

He hasn’t been able to figure out who they originally belonged to. Mostly it’s just workmen who haven’t yet been missed.

As you walk through Blackpool, men try to sell you stuff. Lucky charms, peppermint rock, dirty postcards, tarot readings. Hot dinners and guaranteed shares in profitable South American railroad concerns.

The one you can’t miss is the guy advertising the latest attraction of the Paradise Beach Amusement Park, by the South Pier.

“Come and see the Great What-Is-It! Captain Jack Jellicoe presents a marvel of the sea!”

Some time in the Eocene the continent we now know as Greenland was a temperate paradise, the capital of the world-spanning empire of Hyperborea, which was of course founded by a yeti sorcerer who’s been asleep since the end of the Proterozoic. In caves below the great capital city of Commoriom slumbered Abhoth, spawn of Vaalbara and pseudo-progenitor of all life.

The ice advanced. To save their city, the Hyperboreans called Abhoth forth.

Right now, under the ice sheet, at the base of the Grand Canyon of Greenland, there is a vast humid network of caves.

A primaeval jungle, oozing with bioluminescent mutants, the sky a single solid sheet of endlessly dripping blue glacial ice. A black city, its inhabitants regressed to morlocks, its avenues and temples overgrown.

A boiling red lake of ichorous blood, radiating heat, eternally and busily spawning new experimental forms of life. Grabbing them up in its pseudopods and reabsorbing their flesh.

Worshipped by the morlocks. Sacrifices poured into its maw from the floating pyramids of their subterranean Tenochtitlan, presided over by a pale queen.

Sometimes the mutants escape. They melt their way into the ice and freeze. The ice shifts. Thousands of years later, a berg the size of Manhattan crashes into the Arctic Ocean from the mouth of the Petermann Glacier.

The Labrador Current carries it down through Baffin Bay, to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and into the trans-Atlantic shipping lanes.

So all of Greenland is now one big geological machine for pumping frozen monsters into the world.

This should be its own post but in eastern Greenland, hewn into the peaks of the Gronau Nunatuks, you can find the ruins of an ancient starport. And caves that reach down through the mountain’s heart, to the secret under-ice trade tunnels maintained with heat rays by morlock slaves that take you all the way to Commoriom.

The Thule Society has a station at Eskimonaes, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and supported by the Sirius Patrol, from which they are preparing an expedition.

Captain Jack Jellicoe of Gloucester, Massachusetts, was once a humble cod fisherman. Though he swears up and down that his mother Martha is one of the famous Dogtown witches, and his uncle a man of importance at the Gravity Research Foundation. 

He was no more than a hired hand when the coffin-sized chunk of ice came lurching out of the Grand Banks fog, almost colliding with the Pretty Jim. The men hauled it aboard. They could tell something was frozen inside it. Something strange.

The ice was cloudy and refused to melt. They couldn’t get a good sense of its form.

The captain wanted to sell it for dog food, so Jack and a few cronies hit him on the head and tossed him over the side. They sailed the Pretty Jim across the sea, to Blackpool. They knew what the frozen creature wanted. When they looked at it they could feel it fishing around inside their minds. It felt nice.

It wasn’t yet ready to come out.

Ron Quimby, impresario and former circus dwarf, greasy suit and top hat, his office behind the menagerie underneath the Blackpool Tower full of props and costumes seized as cruel collateral from debt-ridden showmen with nowhere else to turn, has been trying for years to get his hands on the Paradise Beach Amusement Park.

His campaign of reputational sabotage drove park founder Arnold Bean into an early grave. Now he wants to go to work on Bean’s daughter, Ethel, a washed-up fortune teller in her forties with no assets other than the Park, and no job experience or children. She’s deep in debt and it should be an easy matter to get her to sign over the deeds.

But then up shows Jellicoe with his Great What-Is-It, and all of a sudden the crowds are thronging in. Ron went to see it and was infuriated by the fact that he couldn’t figure out how the trick was done.

He sent one of his enforcers, a cut-throat Malay knife thrower named Hakim Hassan, who he picked up for a song on the Liverpool docks, to break into the park at night and see what made it tick.

Hassan never came back. Ron is hoping he’s in an opium den somewhere.

The What-Is-It, still in its lump of ice, is on display in the House of Nonsense, the park’s funhouse, at the heart of a mirrored labyrinth containing more strange artefacts allegedly procured by Jellicoe in the course of his (fictitious) travels around the world.

A live octopus, a whale-tooth tupilaq, a Viking axe. The central chamber has been decorated to look like an Egyptian temple. Only a couple of people are allowed inside at a time.

Look at it. A lizard? No, a squid. Is that its eye? No way that’s a hand, right? Could be mandibles. I think that’s probably a tube, or is it… no, too rude, it can’t be that. The council wouldn’t let it be displayed. Of course it has feathers, I always thought it had feathers, or are they velvet? Or words?

Now roll a Sanity check. If you fail the thing has its hooks in your mind. You will want to come back later. Fail too many times and it eats your form and you are reduced to a gelatinous blob, lumbering towards the sea. The water lets you hold together a while longer and you can eat other people’s forms as well.

Order in the funhouse is maintained by Chief Big Crow, another deckhand from the Pretty Jim. It’s not his real name. He’s a full-blooded Cree from the country north of Lake Superior, expert harpoonist and stone cold serial killer.

You may also meet Crazy Louis, a cock-eyed little Frenchman from St. Pierre and Miquelon who used to work for the bootleggers and has decided to learn the trade of the clown. And a bunch of tough fishermen dressed as clowns who work security, and drown those they catch.

Jellicoe has seduced Ethel and is planning to marry her. Why not? It won’t stick. Once the What-Is-It has eaten enough forms to stabilise itself it will coalesce into a beautiful starry-eyed priestess, emerge from the ice, teach him sorcery and set about conquering the world.

Hakim Hassan is currently flopping about in the pools of the River Caves ride, which features a motorised boat tour around the world - from Mysterious China to the Land of the Dinosaurs. He’s scaring guests and trying to eat their forms. Crazy Louis has been tasked with getting him out, a task that he approaches with a long stick.

Luke Gannon, the Barnum of Blackpool, owns the contracts of half the freaks and circus folk along the Golden Mile. 

A thin man from Burnley with a pencil moustache and neatly pressed suit. Served four years in Portland Prison in 1901 for impersonating a policeman and shaking down an old bloke by threatening to arrest him for lewd behaviour in a public park. Well known to the Blackpool authorities. Operates out of a wax museum on the Golden Mile.

Performers on his books include:

Jolly Alice, the British Giantess. Five hundred pounds and wanted to get bigger. Divorced from Rex Tilby, the Human Corkscrew, because she had to be her own woman. Loved by everyone. Went to see the What-Is-It three days running, secluded herself in an upstairs room, collapsed into a shapeless mass, slithered out a back window and died trying to make it to the sea.

Mariana, the Gorilla Girl. Covered with hair. Fourteen years old. Shared a tiny flat with Alice and two other women. Remembers helping Alice wash the dishes and seeing her fingers start to drip into the sink. Has some complex backstory made up for her by Bannon where she’s supposed to be a Russian countess, but keeps forgetting the details.

Joyce Fairbanks, the Starving Bride. Being paid by Gannon to live in a glass coffin and consume nothing but lemonade for ten days. Money will go to a first home. Husband Walter turns up now and then to keep her company. Furious at the What-Is-It for stealing her customers - thinks somebody should get rid of it.

David Haroldson, the Rector of Stiffley. Defrocked for spending far too much time in the company of teenage prostitutes whose souls he claimed he was trying to save. Paid by Gannon to share a cage on the promenade with a full-grown African lion. Flirts a lot with Joyce, who’s next to his spot. Knows a lot about Gannon’s debt.

Victor Valerie Baker. Biological woman who successfully passed herself off as a man for ten years and two marriages. Told both wives she’d lost her balls in the war. Joined the British Fascisti and beat up Communists because she enjoyed hanging out with the lads. Plotting with Gannon to steal the What-Is-It.

Madame Kusharney. Claims to be the Empress of Abyssinia, and to read minds. Married to Gannon but cheating on him with Baker. They would already have poisoned him but they believe he has a large sum of money buried in a hole somewhere that he’s not telling them about. Asked Alice to scope out the What-Is-It. Knows enough real magic to be scared. 

Gannon is deep in debt to Ron for a failed theatrical venture called Lady Godiva’s Last Ride, which cost thousands of pounds in props and scenery and was shut down by the authorities on the second day. He owns a mummified whale but the What-Is-It is better and nobody cares. He and all the other showmen on the Mile agree that the thing in the ice has to go.

Of course if he succeeds in stealing it he’ll just move to another town and start exhibiting it himself.

The What-Is-It can’t be killed unless it takes a form. You could melt it out of the ice with enough concentrated fire but then it would just flop around eating people. It has no organs, no internal structure to disrupt. It needs sapient beings. Best thing to do might be to find a secure place to lock it up.

Susan Morris, twenty-one years old, has been asking around Blackpool after her husband, Sam. They came to Blackpool last month and saw the What-Is-It, twice, before heading back to their mill town.

Sam couldn’t stop talking about it. She woke up one morning and found him leaning against the wall outside the house with something long and grey dripping out of his nose. It frightened her.

She knows he came back to Blackpool. It’s her face in the constable’s locket. She’s talked to some of the freaks and she has no idea what to do next. A tramp outside her husband’s boarding house told her he saw a grey creature galumphing down the road at three in the morning.

Hermann Voss, of the Thule Society, is staying in the same boarding house, so he can test the strange translucent residue he found on the walls. He has a pocket-sized laser gun, powered by Vril energy, which he has to jack off into to reload.

Once he confirms the What-Is-It is Hyperborean he’ll ring for four blonde supermen as backup and try to steal it himself. If he gets it he’ll use it to assist Hitler in some way.

Wilson Lloyd, a grey-faced Bostonian with a bald spot and a hangdog expression, is staying in the next room. He noticed that Voss was asking a lot of the same questions he was asking, and decided to follow him around. Voss hasn’t noticed him yet.

He’s an investigator for the maritime insurance company who underwrote the Pretty Jim, and he is the smartest and most persistent man in the world.

Greenland should be a megadungeon. It’s easy to see this as the beginning of a whole Thule Society campaign.

Gannon and many of the freaks are real or quasi-real people. I’ve blended fiction and reality, work it out for yourself.

The investigation’s less important than the heist. How do you steal a heavy man-sized object you can’t look at? Or do you go at Jellicoe some other way?

Watch this video and this video of Blackpool Pleasure Beach in the relevant time period. Then you will be mentally prepared.