January 13, 1926

Tortured for months at the hands of Ho Fong, the investigators are finally rescued by Thomas – sleeves ripped off to the shoulders – and Jack Brady, along with a healthy compliment of Japanese soldiers. Jack Bing is unresponsive, and the soldiers attend to him while Tam, Henry, Iris, and Marvo listen to Thomas and Brady’s story.

Thomas explains that he has been trying to find them for months. He was unable to reach Jonah, but fortunately Brady made contact with him, and eventually they were able to conduct a rescue operation with the imperial army’s help.

Brady explains his understanding of the cult’s plans: the cult, under Penhew’s leadership, intends to open a “gate” from Grey Dragon Island to let untold horror into the world. As it happens, tomorrow at noon a solar eclipse will occur. Brady believes this is no coincidence.

Despite Tam dislocating his arm, the captured Ho Fong laughs and refuses to provide more information, attempting to crush a false tooth with cyanide before they can question him further. Marvo splashes wine in his mouth, delaying the reaction… and giving Brady enough time to turn Ho Fong into a sacrificial font of health.

Brady believes he can ward Grey Dragon Island, potentially preventing the gate from opening. But he will need their help.

The investigators realize time is of the essence, and decide to try to raid the island by stealing Penhew’s boat The Dark Mistress and using it to navigate to the island. Tam, once abducted by the leader of the Japanese soldiers before being released for clearly being too dumb to know anything, manages to convince that same leader to potentially provide his help.

The investigators head to dock and find the strange crew of the boat fast asleep. Marvo, recalling an incident by one of Jonah’s teams recently on an island off the coast of Maine, recognizes them as Deep One half-breeds. Tam falls in the water. The crew wakes up. The investigators take the crew and captain hostage. Marvo inspects the engine and discovers a strange, glowing green lump of coal in the coalbox. He begins to feel ill, but fails to realize he is now dying of alien radiation poisoning.

Tam attempts to commandeer the boat herself. Marvo punches her in the nose.

The boat, powered by this alien meteorite, cruises to Grey Dragon Island. The island is small, centered around a dormant volcano several hundred feet high. They dock and put on the captured crews’ clothes, hoping to blend in, then head up the path toward the volcano. Before leaving, Marvo disables the boat so it can’t leave without them. This proves unnecessary, as Thomas – once a gentle, honorable butler for a minor british lord – sneaks back into the hold and sadistically and quietly slits the throat of each captured crew member.

They find a cave at the base of the volcano, and a path leading inside. In the center chamber they discover what can only be described as a towering “bullet” made of alien metal with fins at the base, at least a hundred feet tall, suspended via scaffolding over a magma pool below. Cultists are scurrying around on the scaffolding platforms, frantically welding metal plates to the rocket and configuring wiring. Beyond, at the end of the chamber, stands an enormous black statue of The Bloated Woman – yet another aspect of Nyarlathotep. Dozens of feet high, tentacles protruding where limbs should be, and covered in decaying human arms, the statue is not particularly welcoming to the group.

Attempting to not draw attention to themselves, they move quickly into an adjoining room.  It is filled with Egyptian artifacts that Iris appraises to be worth millions of dollars. They also discover a hidden room with a sarcophagus that Brady suggests is shaped like Penhew. Marvo gets inside and enters suspended animation for 15 seconds. Nobody realizes it, least of all him.

They head to the other room and discover Penhew’s workshop. There they confirm his evil plans: launch the rocket at the center of the now de-warded triangle (between the Red Pyramid, Australia, and Grey Dragon Island) to presumably open up the gate. This is not particularly comforting. Even less comforting is Penhew’s presence as he walks into the workshop moments later.

Without hestitation, Brady opens fire and misses Penhew. Penhew attempts to cast some sort of spell in response but fails, and is forced to dive behind an overturned table for cover as Thomas’s Thomas [sic] gun leaves a string of bullets in the air behind him. Tam slams against the table, and Henry and Iris run over to help put bullets in Penhew. Before they can, he mutters some Eldritch words punctuated by “Nyarlathotep,” and suddenly they hear screams of fear and ecstasy erupt from the main chamber.

Brady realizes his time is up and runs to cover on the other side of the room and slowly begins the spell to place the ward. As Tam crushes Penhew’s windpipe with her elbow, killing him, Marvo runs over to help Brady finish the spell. Both Marvo and Brady can feel the spell fading, despite their best efforts. Realization washes over Brady, and he sadly hands a knife to Marvo, explaining the spell needs blood to work.

He asks Marvo to take care of Roger Carlyle, currently housed in a sanatorium in Hong Kong. Marvo nods, and slits Brady’s throat. Marvo feels the ward get set, but has no way of knowing if it will work correctly.

Iris grabs a strange black cube covered in occult symbols from Penhew’s body.

The group, realizing their time is nearly up, runs back into the main chamber. There they find Japanese soldiers engaging in combat with cultists – it appears Tam’s request for assistance was answered. This, on the whole, is good news. They also discover that Nyarlathotep answered Penhew’s call by entering this reality through the Bloated Woman statue. This is not good news.

The sight of this corporeal form affects the group differently. Henry, Tam, and Thomas shrug it off, too focused on the impending apocalypse. Iris acquires mad determination for her task, and psychotically runs to the scaffolding that surrounds the rocket, ascending it as quickly as she can. And Marvo, at Tam’s suggestion, recklessly attempts to attack Nyarlathotep himself.

Thomas and Henry, recognizing Iris’s crazed ascension, attempt to protect her from harm and mercilessly attack any cultist in her way. Henry takes a sword wound to the arm but keeps going. Iris, in her panic, throws the black navigational cube into the magma below. Magma erupts and begins to melt the support beams, slowly sinking the Rocket toward the magma. Henry, however, seems unconvinced that magma can melt steel beams.

Back on the ground, Tam seems uncertain on what she should be doing. She briefly ponders the idea of collapsing the rocket into the magma pool below as the support the girders weaken… but then she takes a sword to the side and decides that she’d really prefer to hang out alone in the room with the Egyptian artifacts. Tam hides there, nursing her wounds.

Marvo, a now insane untrained sorcerer, materializes crocodiles from thin air and commands them to attack the Bloated Woman aspect of Nyarlathotep. This plan fails, and a tentacle wraps around him and brings him into the mouth of the Bloated Woman, where a “kiss” causes him to convulse painfully. He begins to be sucked into her gaping mouth….

Thomas, Iris, and Henry finally reach the the top of the rocket, where a gangplank leads into a small room in the nose of the rocket. They find dynamite littered all over the gangplank and in the rocket itself. It is clear Penhew intended to use this explosive power to detonate the rocket when the time came.

However, before they have time to fully digest this information, timed charges trigger around the top of the volcano, and the chamber’s ceiling opens up to reveal the nearly full solar-eclipse directly above them. The explosions cause sticks of dynamite to fall off the gangplank… and somehow land directly in Marvo’s hands below, moments before he gets swallowed by the Bloated Woman.

Marvo does not hesitate. While being swallowed he casts the wasting burn… and turns himself and the dynamite into a living radiation bomb.

The Bloated Woman explodes, and cultists and soldiers alike are blown apart. The door to the Egyptian room where Tam is hiding flies open and bodies and heat fly through. Nyarlathotep leaves the form of the Bloated Woman in irradiated pieces. Marvo dies, again, for the last time.

The eclipse approaches totality. Thomas, with incredible rationality, tries to shoot the dynamite inside the rocket. This does not work. Thomas apparently had never used a gun before, and didn’t realize they needed to be reloaded.

Henry, finally realizing that perhaps he had made a mistake joining in on this “adventure,” decides to try to jump back down to the ground below and make a run for it. He leaps off the platform, realizing as he does that his trajectory is actually sending him toward the magma pit below.

Iris, visions of an underground Egyptian temple and fire dancing in her eyes, pulls out her lighter and gives one sad sigh. She brings the lighter toward the dynamite right as the eclipse reaches totality…

A mushroom cloud escapes from the volcano, and the island explodes.

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Several weeks later, Jonah Kensington finally comes out of hiding after being targeted by the Cult of the Bloody Tongue. Flanked by Anastasia and Sloppy Joe, he returns to his ransacked office, and begins the arduous task of cleaning it up.

Sloppy Joe helps him lift the enormous bulletin board where he had been tracking the progress of the Yellow King Company. In the bottom right corner are headshots of every investigator that had traveled the world as part of that fabled Yellow King Company, all trying to uncover the mystery of Jackson Elias’ death:

• Marvo – the “train engineer” who went into a painting and survived the time of serpent people before returning; fell into the dreamlands while turning to stone before rescuing his wife with a ghoul army, raiding the dreamlands moon and entering the previous universe before surviving the heat death of that universe and creation of a new one; and then ultimately died as a living radiation bomb inside the Bloated Woman aspect of Nyarlathotep
• Peter – the bishop of New York who was ripped to shreds by a werewolf in an English dungeon he had willingly locked himself in
• Millie – the teacher and Marvo’s wife, tragically killed by her own husband’s bullet as she desperately attempted to return him from the time of serpent people to her horrifying present: surrounded by insane cultists on an English island during a cult sex ritual to summon flying horrors
• Addison – the minor English viscount who went mad translating “cat scrolls” and then had his head implode into a maw of death while wearing an ancient mask in an Egyptian hotel lobby
• Riley – the fisherman that folded inside the maw of death that had previously been Addison’s head before his body parts (and others) exploded out of it… ironically after being the person to place the mask on Addison’s insane face
• Rory – the photo journalist who attempted to improvise a molotov cocktail attack on the Black Pharaoh aspect of Nyarlathotep before getting casually and indiscriminately vaporized by Nyarlathotep’s wrath
• Harvey – the Arkham librarian who, in the insanity of the birth of the spawn of Nyarlathotep, succumbed and became a devoted member of the Cult of the Bloody Tongue
• Marvolo – the Big Game Hunter who missed a once-in-a-lifetime Safari before following in Harvey’s footsteps and joining the Cult of the Bloody Tongue
• Johann-Sebastian Devito – the policeman who had a foot then didn’t have a foot then had a ghoul foot and then was consumed by the eyelid of the Spawn of Nyarlathotep, leaving only that ghoulish foot behind
• Gene – the cobbler who had apparently never made a single pair of shoes and finally found peace inside the stomach of a giant Chameleon
• Jack Bing – the New York reporter, currently MIA, last seen in a Shanghai hospital
• Henry – the rich dilettante and partner of Kensington, who threw himself off a rocket into a magma pool
• Tam – the Wisconsin crop duster that had a chance to survive the Grey Dragon Island explosion by hiding in Penhew’s sarcophagus, but instead exploded into pieces while hiding in the Egyptian artifact room
• Thomas – Addison’s butler, perhaps the most irrationally rational member of the YKC and known for dealing with visual horror by actively blindfolding himself, who finally died reloading his gun while trying to blow Penhew’s rocket up
• Iris – the Chinese bookseller who had been burned alive at the base of the Giza pyramids and ultimately took fate into her own hands by blowing up Penhew’s rocket, Grey Dragon Island, and ultimately Nyarlathotep’s most recent, but perhaps not the last, attempt to open a “gate….”

Jonah, sighs sadly, and slowly begins dismantling the board. He finally closes  The Yellow King Company’s investigation into the death of his dear friend, Jackson Elias.

Anastasia picks up a leather bound book in the corner of the room. Jonah explains it had been anonymously sent to him recently, but that he hadn’t been able to make sense of it yet.

She opens the journal and begins reading.

The Simplon Orient Express

Jan 1, 1923….