HHN29 is making me revisit some old concepts that I'm gonna try to do some write-ups for this season. Here's one that I started like last year and just got back to yesterday.
LIVING ROOMS
Description: A particularly malicious group of spirits has come in storm upon this apartment complex. Once inside, instead of taking human bodies, they take possession of the various inanimate objects around. The term “living room” is about to take on a whole new meaning….
0. Facade
We approach the two story apartment complex at midnight. The building appears to be in as pristine a condition as it could be. Owl hoots and crickets are heard, with the occasional noise of a news chopper of sorts overhead. Something has attracted the chopper’s attention, but not anything we can see at this point. Not wasting anymore time, we walk up the single step and make our way in….
1. Kitchen Spirits
Immediately in the door is the kitchen, food and drink spread on the floor, as if dropped suddenly with no warning. On the wall to the immediate right is a window showing daylight outside, impossible with the layout of the room and time, which makes sense as the whole window opens off the wall, revealing a Spirit, who reaches for us with a yell.
To our left, counters have gunk and debris spread on them. Below the counters, an open oven which generates heat, perhaps driving the weary away. Those keeping close will be shocked as a charred hand reaches out from within, yelling. We quickly run out a hallway on the left….
2. “Living” Room
We enter a normal apartment living room. To the left, a TV with a big chair on each side. To the right, a couch with a door to another room to our immediate right. The TV is generating a massive amount of static, and it’s likely been at this for several minutes now.
Suddenly, one of the two chairs jumps up, a spirit having taken hold of its’ form. That sends us to try and hug the couch, but suddenly we hear lightning strikes shaking the room, and we are (perhaps literally) shocked as a Living Bolt, a live form of the lightning assault us from the room to our right. The Living Bolt’s presence sends the lights off as well as the TV, as the Bolt takes all light for itself.
Not wanting to have our own light stolen, we proceed quickly into a hallway that simulates us heading up to the second floor of the complex, before we round the corner…
3. Lightning Balcony
We turn outside onto a balcony hanging over the complex. Down below, peeking through some broken glass windows, we can see the garden of the complex as well as the streets, the noises we hear suggesting the chaos in the complex is beginning to spread.
Suddenly, more lightning strikes, causing a flash, cuing a Living Bolt to come flying in from the sky and come at us through the large broken hole in the window. This sends us backwards, as we find another entrance back inside quickly.
4. Bedroom
We head into a bedroom that is playing host to a large amount of spiritual activity, all the picture frames on the wall are spinning in tune with each other. The room generally feels like it’s shaking, as if it can barely take the mass amount of energy being channeled within it.
The only thing that isn’t moving when we walk in is the bed itself, suspiciously calm in comparison to its’ surroundings. We are correct to be suspicious, as the bottom half of the bed lifts up, revealing a wooden skeleton of sorts that has taken over the bed frame. Its’ eyes and mouth glow as it screams at us, sending us towards the inside entrance to the bedroom.
This turns out to be a trap, as a monstrous face projects on the door, which jump off of its hinges at us, and this sends us running to the right, where the closet is our only option left for refuge.
5. Claustrophobic Closet
The closet is very tight, rows of clothes pressing in on us from both sides. At a glance, it almost appears the closet is endless, just looking into the back of the room and seeing the rows continue to go on with no end in sight.
As we walk through the closet, the lone lightbulb above us appears to be sending sparks out dangerously. But this is a mere distraction, as base Spirits on either side of us push clothing out of the way from the other side to get to us, retracting back in and covering their holes when they fail.
We get to a point in the closet, where a hole on our left offers us an escape from the closet’s infinite nature. A spirit made of clothing unveils himself to the right of the hole, giving us good reason to use that hole ASAP.
A brief transitional hallway has a wet floor, a sign of flooding ahead...
6. Flooding Bathroom
The second we walked into the bathroom, it’s clearly dripping everywhere. The sink is shooting out water at us on a consistent basis. We see the shadow of water flooding from the bathtub through the shower curtain covering the whole area.
The shadow of a woman also appears in the shower, still going about her business as if things haven’t gone horribly wrong around her. However, a skeletal face and body suddenly press into the shower curtain, popping out towards us and spooking us out of the bathroom.
Unfortunately, the floor below us flashes and disappears, showing nothing under us and sending us tumbling down...
7. Basement
The basement is filled to the brim, only a thin path giving us a lead through the clutter. Before we can worry about that though, the shower curtain spirit reaches out at us from the hole we fell in from above, attempting to get a last swipe in on us as we leave her behind.
This forces us to quickly head into the path we’ve been given, as we try to navigate through the sheer amount of trash in our way, including things hanging in our face that we have to push to the side.
As we do that, the spirits have a treasure trove of items to possess to make our time in the basement a living hell. An even older, decaying chair jumps up at us. A spirit constructed out of random bits of trash pops the top off of its’ can to “greet” us. The worst is yet to come as a spirit constructing itself out of bugs and spiders jumps out at us from behind a dirty toilet.
Thankfully, this last spirit sends us towards the light, as we escape from the basement’s clutches.
8. Through The Garden
We pop out of the basement and into the large community garden for the complex. Large hedges line the sides as branches hang down, putting more stuff in our faces as we walk in between small fences separating flower beds. A spirit has taken possession of the flowers, as the left bed jumps up at us, having grown into something monstrous.
We then walk past a large human looking statue...which surprisingly, is just a distraction as lightning strikes the hedge to our right, causing a fiery Living Bolt to burst out of the hedge and roared at us. We exit through another fiery hole in the hedges.
9. Chaos In The Streets
Entering into the street we saw from the balcony earlier, we can see that the spiritual invasion extends now even further than the complex. The power lines have a never ending stream of electricity going through them.
A woman is crushed between two cars, which are glowing ominously, projections showing us that spirits were driving them. The top half of the woman, just sitting on top of the fronts of both cars, reaches for us and asks for help.
To our right, the news chopper we heard when first walking in has crashed to our right. The pilot tries to crawl out the copter, but we see ghostly hands drag him back with along with some...unsavory sounds.
We quickly move past that as we loop around back towards the house…
10. Into Its Mouth
We revisit the facade, but things have now drastically changed. The yard is now polluted with mini structures of trash, with a trail noticeably leading back to the basement. The trash spirit from before is now free from his can, and he attacks us from the left.
On the right, a plain spirit appears holding the head of the pilot from the previous scene, taunting us and pointing us towards the complex...which has gone under a massive transformation.
The complex now is showing fire in its’ windows, as the doors at the bottom have now formed into a large mouth looking structure. Beams are now poking out from holes in the complex’s sides as the spirits generate enough power to take the whole thing over. Shadows of spirits and living bolts fly across the complex’s new facade.
We brace ourselves and go headlong into its’ mouth, as fire engulfs us...
11. Fake Out Finale
We get through the fire and we come into a larger, normal looking version of the living room scene from before. Things almost seem as if they were a dream. The TV is playing a news report about a massive fire late last night, before the newscaster suddenly stares right at the screen, telling us that we didn’t win or escape, and that entering the mouth has made us part of this home.
The walls fade around us as we see a lineup of different spirits in different forms, all just behind the walls. Both chairs in the room jump up to accost us, and we make a last attempt to flee, but the charred spirit from the kitchen at the beginning, now fully formed, attacks us from a window in a final attempt to claim us.
We’re able to just avoid his burning grasp...and we are able to escape into the night for now...