Carrion Luggage
A gruesome scene at Chicago O’Hare Airport this morning after the 10:02am flight from St. Louis. Cleaning the cabin for the next flight, the attendants discovered the belongings of one passenger still remained. Worse, one of the two rear lavatories was filled with blood splatters.
Airport security was dispatched to detain as many passengers as possible, who had scattered toward baggage claim, outside pick-up, and to other gates. None of them seemed to have any inkling of what happened, despite a scene of evidently great violence.
The belongings still on the plane were linked to an Annette Summers, who sat near the rear, leaving a backpack with a journal stuffed in the seatback pocket. Her whereabouts were soon discovered as the luggage was unloaded: a heavy suitcase laden with a woman’s dismembered body parts tucked among the clothes. Resting among the parts was a rough-hewn curved dagger of some metal alloy that might seem ancient and iridescent.
The woman was vaguely remembered as blonde, in her thirties, nondescript and keeping to herself. Not unusual for such a short flight, although some might remember her distraught and frantically writing in her journal.
To keep the airport humming without alarm, the plane has been towed to a distant repair hangar and turned into a crime scene. Some passengers have faint memories of the woman screaming horrifically, wrestling and fighting with some of them, but none of them truly believe anything happened and no two details can be corroborated. The flight attendants are in psychological hold, overwhelmed by what they’ve seen.
The Delta Green agents could be part of airport security or are called in by friendlies due to the unusual nature of events. The relationship should be such that they are granted access.
The Investigation
With curious airline employees circulating in the distance, the plane is circled by crime scene tape and card tables set up with the woman’s belongings placed on them near several empty evidence bins.
Two heavy personalities are squabbling over the investigation. The first is John Ramos, Lead Security Officer of the Transportation Security Administration. The second is Anne Patrick, Airport Operations Commander of The City of Chicago Department of Aviation Police. This seems to be the latest episode in a long history of butting heads. Assorted personnel should be around.
The agents should be permitted to inspect the scene, including the aircraft. Regard them as a welcome break to the impasse - and a new view on the stress of a bizarre situation.
Use judicious Forensics checks to piece together the carnage in the lavatory. Most of the spatters were downward or at most sideways from about shoulder height. There are no blood splatters outside the lavatory.
The unfortunate remains inside the suitcase match Annette Scoggins’ picture on file and on her ID. Her torn clothes match what she was wearing. The body has been hacked apart at every joint, with the head severed, except for the left arm, which is intact to the shoulder. SAN loss for gore. It is impossible not to think the parts were chopped off within the lavatory and then teleported into the closed suitcase, covered with other pieces of luggage. There is no connection between the cabin and the luggage hold within the airplane and no trace of blood or gore whatsoever in between.
Annette Summers’ belongings show a local address and an ID as instructor at a nearby college. Parsing through her journal shows a developing dispute with her long-term boyfriend, Greg Palmer, after she refused his proposal. The language in these sections are highly self-accusatory, trying to make sense of her decision.
More recently, there is jagged invective against her mother, here unnamed, detailing nearly illegible abuses or evils and “what she did to dad.” The last entries, from during the flight, are incoherent and confused references to righting wrongs and putting things in order. A perspicacious agent will realize the writing is left-handed. They may surmise that she could not cut off her own arm with her dominant hand.
The Confrontation
The crux of the dispute between John Ramos and Anne Patrick is whether the passenger roster should have been detained or released, the latter of which is the case. This spills into a duel of further accusations of previous incompetence. Make him belittling and authoritative. Make her adept at needling his vanity.
He is holding the curved dagger throughout, wearing examination gloves and still in its evidence bag, as if this totem gives him control, and continues to do this while speaking with the agents - he will quiz them for opinions. Eventually, the absurdity of the situation causes him to start accusing Anne Patrick for staging a grotesque, inappropriate prank. He will not relinquish the dagger.
In mounting rage, livid with some new force, he thrusts the curved dagger through the bag and begins to attack her. He does this relentlessly.
Let the agents react as they wish. Presumably they will try to protect her and stop Ramos in his newfound, brutal state. If not, Patrick will manage at least in some regard, as well as other security personnel.
Play out the battle against a well-skilled if ordinary and somewhat over-the-hill security officer. He will parry, deflect, try to avoid resistance in his determination to hack Anne Patrick to pieces. He can be grappled, disarmed, detained, shot, killed, to no avail.
Anne Patrick is doomed. Play out combat until a point in which he is stopped (killed, halted). Then, there is a tangible waver in the air as things re-set around them to moments just before the success; the action is now a failure, a fatal gunshot now lodged just below the organs and what not.
Play this as you wish, with the aim of time reverting to keep giving Ramos more chances. If he ‘misses’ a certain stage of progress in his dismembering goals, then time gives him another chance. This should be disorienting and fearsome to the agents.
As Ramos continues to succeed in severing a new part of Patrick’s body off, they vanish, only to appear in one of the empty evidence bins. Once everything is savagely and awfully broken free from her torso and tucks into place in the bin, the curved dagger disappears from his hand and appears on top of her neatly tucked body.
Throughout the fight, there seems to be streaks or blurriness in their surroundings and distress to nearby objects. This isn’t overt so much as vaguely material, as if one of the card tables is losing molecules or molecular structure, for example, or a shelf nearby collapses.
In the middle of the fight, the tail end of the nearby plane, equivalent to where the lavatory and rear seats are, starts to show similar temporal-structural stress, with pieces tumbling off. If appropriately dramatic, the entire tail end can crash to the ground. Or, the structural integrity may be clearly compromised and any movement upstairs will crack it.
Use SAN costs throughout for gore, death, and helplessness.
Duty done, whatever possessed Ramos dissipates. He can then be killed. If not, he is suffering a clear break with sanity and cannot explain what he did.
Aftermath
The dagger is clearly very dangerous. If the agents take possession or allow someone to handle it for very long, the event will happen again. The thing feeds on enmity and dislike, will find a familiar, nearby location for its victim, and engage the wielder to carve them up. The energy then passes out of them, unless they keep possession.
If the agents are sloppy, this may lead to more deaths. To stop the carnage, the dagger must be locked or encased away from the person who last held it and that person removed a good distance away, perhaps forever.
Intrepid agents may realize there is a history to Annette Summers and the dagger. Any check with her boyfriend will reveal no knowledge of this whatsoever: only that she was visiting her mother after her refusal to marry him. Any other check into her relationship with St Louis will reveal that her parents, Ron and Margaret Summers, live there.
Their house reveals a landing at the top of the stairs as distressed as the plane fuselage; too much weight will fall through. This is where Annette attacked her mother, whose body parts are nestled inside a large nearby sewing basket.
Ron’s body is contained in his tool cabinet in the garage, where Margaret killed him. The car and workbench signal the same temporal distress as other areas. If you’d like, evidence of local murders tied to him can emerge: he found the blade, which forced him to kill business associates and the like. His wife, discovering the fact, was overcome and then killed him. Then, the daughter discovered her mother, killed her and then, overwhelmed, herself on the plane home
There is no discoverable reason for what the dagger is, its origins, or even its name. This is just what it does.
Credits
Carrion Luggage was written by Eric Wojcik for the 2024 Shotgun Scenario contest.
Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QGrO1oJ5wy4TCdVOCI-BwKeL9XLR26JciizTdI7T_2c/edit