text: [Themes: horror, Comedy]
  
  > Look around
  River Walk (Adam Whybray)
  A dirt path along the west bank of the Makaskuta - or Blackgourd - River. The air is motionless and sweltry, the urticariate heat drawing sweat profusely from your prickling glands.
  
  Just below you, to your side, the river burbles in vainglorious stupor, foaming in bright patches from the surfacants released from the rotting deposits of the red maples and poplars that line its banks. A single black ash, denuded of leaves, its corky bark blighted with the telltale signs of parasitic infection, quietly interrupts the Autumnal foliage of its deciduous cousins.
  
  The river's waters slith over rocks as lustrous-gray as seal skin, rending them freshly burnished for the mid-September sun, which casts Her rays in refulgent slats through the rust-honey colored trees. It is though Nature, in celebration of Her own fecundity, has chosen to offer Herself up in Equinoxical sacrifice - the rocks laid out before the blazing altar of the sun.
  
  There is a forbidding sign on the bank of the river.
  
  The way up to Backwater town square is northwest. Following the path north leads under the bridge.
  
  On the Makaskuta river is a buoy.
  
  You can also see a grimy rock, a long hooked pole, a dying crawfish and a soggy tome here.
  
  An insubstantial trolley stop sign reads Aqua Line -- River Walk.
  
  > examine the rock
  A solitary rock squats at the edge of the river bank, sullenly surveying the fresh, water-slick countenances of its semi-subnautical brethren.
  
  > look at the pole
  (the long hooked pole)
  A long stick of wood with a rusted copper fishing hook of approximately six inches attached to the end of it with thickly knotted twine. This is known to New England lobster trappers as a "gaff".
  
  > examine the crawfish
  A crawfish of unimaginable proportions skulks in a clump of weedy grass at the side of the path closest to the river. The fact that he is out of the water, just perceptibly twitching like a half-squashed insect and slowly drumming his spiny legs like an office worker pensively tapping his fingers on a desk, is a strong indication that under his hard carapace he is crawling with infection. He is broken, mouldering, no damn good despite his considerable size.
  
  As though sensing your judgment, the crawldad's antennae tremble ineffectually.
  
  > get all
  grimy rock: Taken.
  
  long hooked pole: Taken.
  
  soggy tome: Taken.
  
  > put the powder on the tome
  You rub the powder off your fingers into the soggy tome. It dissipates without effect.
  
  > read tome
  You open to the first page of the book and read...
  
  "Crawfish, crawldads, mountain lobsters, mudbugs, yabbies, or however you know these mighty members of the Astacoidea and
  Parastacoidea superfamilies, have long been kin to the men of the
  New England, forging communities of inviolable hierarchy below water, much as we build and sustain such communities above. As with men, dominance determines these bio-mythic structures..."
  
  You skip ahead.
  
  "Those crawfish stricken by the plague must invariably fall by the wayside much as the Spartans would throw weak and crippled newborn from the top of Mount Taygete, dashing the runts and striplings upon the rocks below."
  
  Rhetoric of this nature seems to continue for several pages.
  
  "My father and I would sit together at the bank of the river and while father told me of the venal deceits of his wife we would catch those smallest crawfish - invariably the females of the species - which attempted to escape from the exit hole of the parlor, and father would delight me by cracking them upon his great bony knees. Later, when confronted with the disappointments of my youngest son, I would imagine taking him as my father had done the runtish bints, cracking him with satisfaction upon my own knee."
  
  You flick ahead to the middle of the book.
  
  "By means of these simple hand-binding exercises you will be able to Set your Claws in Order. While the experience will be painful at first, you must NEVER INDUCE YOURSELF INTO THINKING THAT LIFE IS ANYTHING OTHER THAN PAIN."
  
  There follows pages of bewildering diagrams which seem to depict men with lobster appendages fighting the Swimmerets of Chaos.
  
  "... until the blood takes the form of a transluscent white gel, which you should then inject ... commercial fishing licences ... scream in the water like egg-burst women ... telomerase now in the DNA of your cells is the Chrysopoeia ... baptized by briny Neptune ...
  dying and molting and eating oneself in the charnel house of bloodied bones ... "
  
  From hereon in the words become incomprehensible.
  
  Intellectual stuff.
  
  > hit the crawfish with the rock
  You raise the grimy rock high above your head and bring it crashing down upon the dying crawfish immediately splitting open its carapace revealing diseased creamy flesh the color of cooked chicken. Its eyestalks swivel wildly towards you and its periopods flicker like the eyelashes of a man trying desperately to awake from a nightmare.
  
  You bring the rock down again and again, smashing rostrum and cephalothorax to shribbons until all that remains are fragments of shell, with a tail and two front claws emerging from a pulped mound of rotting flesh. The stench is intolerable.
  
  While most of the shell of the dead crawfish is riven into tiny pieces, one especially sharp looking shard stands out from the rest.
  
  > look at the shard
  An especially sharp and vicious looking shard of shattered crawfish carapace.
  
  > eat crawfish
  You choke back vomit.
  
  > examine the crawfish
  The giant crawfish is laid splayed and beaten before you, eyestalks rent from his pulverized body. The opaque milky whiteness of its flesh is a telltale sign of aphanomyces astaci aka "crayfish
  plague".
  
  The crawfish was clearly a member of some Old Order of crustacean patriarchs, grown huge over perhaps more than a century, year after year shedding his shell for a larger carapace until his metabolism was no longer a match for his hulking ambitions.