*(or "Timmy the Magic Shrimp and his Kiddie Kowboys")*

 We get the strangest calls sometimes.  This morning, A' (who has been answering the phones since we scared off our latest receptionist--they never stick around long) picked up a call on the listed Emergency line. "Hello, Oracle Corperation Paranormal Hotline, how may I direct your call?"
A rather stressed and harried male voice came over the line.  

"We're from the Bubba Gump Shrimp Corperation.  We have a bit of a situation at our downtown warehouse that we were hoping you all could help us out with."

"All right.  Do you have any idea what sort of paranormal activity you might be dealing with, so we can better assemble a team from our trained supernatural specialists?"

"Um... giant shrimp.  They seem to be < armed sounds of automatic gunfire in the background >  and... we're getting out of here.  Here's our address..." 

He rattled off the address of a warehouse along the waterfront, and A' assured him that we would deploy a team immediately to address the situation.  Fox is spouting some off-the-wall theory about black-ops corperate genetics experament forcing lesser creatures to evolve into humanoid form, but my bet for this adventure is on spirits.

Gwenn (the big boss at Oracle, the daughter of a businessman who played dirty and made it big) just bought us all new armor, stunners, tanglers, and some kritters-only lethal weapons, so we all picked out our weapon-of-choice and piled into the vans. 
 *I hate wearing the heavy armor--I can barely move in the stuff, even if it is fitted to me, but it's saved me more than once already.*  
Koda "faded out" 
*(She's so much better at that than I am---I should practice more)*
 and I just cast "Sight Singing" and headed into the building "astrally" as they say 
(I always called it modal-space, because there you can see the music of the universe, but hey, to each their own)
.  There were a lot of fish in crates, but the prevailing mode was definately minor and the tempo racing.  (That's usually an indication of recent or ongoing violence)
A subtle undertheme sang like a Siren, calling me (or someone) in.

*"This way," it whispered, "Right here, into the net. PAIN"*

The second floor was louder, and the mood darker.  There are a lot of not-dead (though not really live) shrimp on the floor here.  I guess I never realized that the fish weren't dead until long after they are caught...  Kinda disturbing, hearing millions of tiny voices like high-pitched chimes, crying out their death-knolls.  But I can't afford to be sympathetic to the shrimp. I have to be "Professional."  < sigh > Something just went "POP" around the corner.  Fox (who is also scouting in  modal-space with me)  said "There was something there." He had been in communion with the shrimp on the floor (He can get away with that, he's a shaman, though I don't know what Foxes and shrimp have in common.  He seems to have more empathy for animals than most people) and apparently the Something noticed him and left.  

I returned to the van and my body, and relayed the news.  A' informed me that his droids had noticed something moving on the second floor, human child or dwarf sized, cowering behind some boxes.  There are several more child forms inside tentlike structure made of fishing net in the far corner.  One of the figures has a ponytail, and another has shoulder-length hair (which probably rules out dwarves, but you never know).  There is also a pile of shrimp with an assault rifle.  *(The way he says everything completely deadpan, as if it were all completely natural, confuses me sometimes.  It's occasionally hard to remember A' is just a computer, but when he says things like that, suddenly it's easy.)*

I'm watching the figures through a video-moniitor in the van as they start to clap their hands together.  It looks like they are playing patty-cake, but I'm willing to bet there's more to it than that.  Fox exclaims 
*"My God, an entire army's been turned into shrimp!"*
I ignore him and go back to sight-singing in modal-space.
There is a pillar of shrimp, like a giant Roman column, on the 1st floor.  I want *nothing* to do with that right now, so I slipped past it to the second floor.  Things are not too much better up here.  There are big beatle-like things running about.  One of them ran out through the wall up to the van, where Koda took a note from it.  That's weird enough that I ought to go back to look at it.

I return to my body just in time to discover that the "beatles" look like shrimp in normalspace.  That's really odd, but ok. The note says, in childlike print,

<blockquote>
<pre>
This Place is the Fishies's now. They need it,
to get their freinds. The fisherman were bad
and mean so we made them go away. The
fishies don't want to hurt anyone. Some of them are
mad now. But they'll be happy again when
their freinds show up and it will be all OK but
the bad fisherman should stay away and not
hurt the fishies. And Jill says we should make demands 
so we want 5 happy meals and a pizza and some
mint ice-cream with no chocolate and a tally isham doll 
and a suitcase of a million dollars.

</pre>
</blockquote>

We talk a bit about what we should do, and decide to bring them the food, if nothing else.  I head back inside, sight-singing, and the music has changed to chaotic, atonal, and... fishy.  The beatle-shrimp have interesting banding patterns.  I can talk to Sarah, the little girl with the ponytail who appears to be about 10, but she seems to be having trouble staying in tune.  I asked her how they ended up here...

*"The fishies came when I was dreaming, and told me that I could help them.  Timmy the Magic Shrimp, from the TV show, said he needed our help to defeat the Evil _______.  The fishermen did bad things with the boats. This place belongs to the fishies now.  Their friends are swimming here through fuzzyspace."*

I wonder if the "fishermen being mean"  is a boat leaking oil?  The "banding" actually looks like oil... it's dripping out of the ripples on the backs of the shrimp.  
I went back to the van, where the rest of the party was preparing to send off a group to get Happy Meals, ice-cream, and pizza.  We attempted to come up with some sort of "clever plan" of how to get the children out of the building and away from the Toxic Shrimp Spirits.    I went back into the building to let Jill (the 10-year old girl with shoulder-length hair) and Mark (the 10 year old boy) know that we had their food downstairs.  She was smart-enough to ask me to stay with her  (and pet the shrimp spirit) while she sent Mark downstairs,  but once they got their food I went back to my body.

Fox, Koda, and I went to open one of the loading dock doors to get in to the first floor, but we couldn't get it open.  Elana came and started working on that door, while Koda went to work on another one.  She managed to get past the lock, but the door was still wedged closed.  

While we were working on doors and locks, the others went in through the second-floor roof, trying to "rescue" the children.  The toxic shrimp-spirits attacked them, but weren't very successful--Jonathan was really good at dealing with them.  I'm not sure what happened next, because we were out-of-radio contact, but they somehow managed to get the kids out to the roof.

Meanwhile, back downstairs, we got one of the doors open.  One of the pillars of shrimp, which the kids had called "Timmy"  was right in front of us, so Koda rolled around to the other side of it while I attacked it with a Karate hand-move I've been practicing.  Koda stabbed it, but lost her knife as it got sucked into the monster, and though I did damage to it, my arm got pulled in, too.

Koda tackled me to get me away from it, just as A' reported that there was water pouring into the building from somewhere on the first floor. The sound of waves was coming from the center of the first floor, as if someone had gone to a rocky coast as a storm was moving in and recorded the sound to play back.  Suddenly, I had a vision: 
*an old man with white hair and beard telling someone* 
**"This ... greatest cross-dimensional rift since the Tunguska blast of 1909".**
I'm not sure what that means, but it can't be good...

Fox tried to mind-control the Timmy, but didn't manage it (it can't have much of a mind to control... it's a pillar of shrimp, for goodness' sake!) He did, however, manage to anger it into moving a foot towards us.  After a few tries, Koda and I managed to get into astral space and discovered that the building was flooding, in astral and in realspace at about an inch/second from a green beacon.  

Koda and I attacked the Timmy-pillar, just as a tentacle reached out of the green beacon.  I moved over and attacked it, and it withdrew when I hit it.  Then, the giant claw of a crab came out of the hole, and withdrew.  Finally, a creature in medieval armor came out, carrying an 8 ft sword. It pulled itself out of the beacon, onto the floor, and started moving out 

I have another vision of 
**EVIL! Cities falling, BAD! Millions of people dying, and this creature was gloating over the wreckage, enslaving the rest of the people and ruling over them with an iron fist**

He began to hack at the pillars, shouting "Water! I hate the ocean!"  I moved towards him and tried to hit him astrally as Jonathan shot him, leaving a huge hole in
the armor, but he ignored us and turned back to the portal

**THE REST OF YOU CAN WAIT!**
Holding his sword with both hands, he turned it downward and stabbed it into the portal.  The sword is solid in astral space, as is this creature. Koda flew at the sword and missed, and I moved over to pull it .  

*I am standing on the helmet of a vanquished hero, in the burning rubble of a French city.  I am the General--the Evil Queen--the Conqueror of this land*

I pulled my hand back, and stared at the sword.

"What is this thing?"

Someone tangled the creature, and with it's untangled hand it flipped it's faceplate back.  Someone screamed, and I turned to see it.  *My god. It's head is made of worms.  Entirely of squiggly, twisty, writhing worms. eegh!* 

It began to speak...
**Times have changed....times have definately changed. But perhaps some things are still the same"**
and twisted it's hand, as if opening a door.
A glowing blue thing flashed into space in front of him.  I flew over to him and tried to hit that hand, shouting 
**STOP!**
Jonathan shouted 
*Mind Dagger*
 and then 
*DIE, NEVERBORN* 
but it appeared to not care.  

*Thanks.  See you when the sun falls* 
A blue bubble formed around him, and I kicked him.  My leg went numb, and Dargo's blow just glanced off it.

<hr>

*Silence.*
The spirits are gone. There are piles of rotting shrimp and broken semiautomatic weapons all over the floor, and there are holes in the floor where the creature vanished and an indentation where the beacon was. In the middle of the indentation is the sword, imbedded three feet into the concrete.

My leg isn't working, though it will be alright in a while.  The sword is made of stone, with writing across the hilt, and down the blade, which is made of brown, blooodstained rock.  Even in modalspace, the glyphs are legible and has embedded, "alchemically-enhanced radicals" of pure earth.  The portal may be gone--it is certainly not in evidence anymore.  

We collected ourselves, Docwagon came and took away the children, and we cut the sword and it's block of stone out of the floor and took it home, since we couldn't very well leave it there.  Now its in our building, and my dreams are haunted with echoes of that vision.

*France*

*Fire*

*Fear*

*Finished*