Time again for another wondrous story of players gone afoul in a situation where the stakes for failure could well be life and death, once more borrowed the urban supernatural setting. This particular one is born of the reality that some players, many, all too often forget their abilities or how they function, as well as their mission objective. Mind you, the latter's few rules consisted of, in this case at least, bringing the least amount of attention to one's self as possible, while the former is simply absentmindedness and the power of legitimate autism, namely its obsessive component.

The aforementioned psion in my other stories was indeed autistic and his favorite thing was in Dungeons and Dragons the system of psionics, the powers of the mind. However, he was not so interested in the mind-bending components, no, he loved the idea of being able to just think things into reality, namely elemental forces. He did not want to be a sorcerer, much too introverted for that and disliked magic as a whole, but powers of the brain? Any and every excuse in game to telekinetically move things, spontaneously combust things, flash freeze enemies, create storms of pure electrical energy among others. So we entertained his eccentrics and he was certainly one of the best players we had, memorizing just about everything in the game but suffering with deciding what he would do each turn - the "short" turns of his were five minutes long at times.

So he, the two rangers, and the occultist ventured into a drug den that had become the lair of "crazies", sent there by their mysterious benefactor to put down whatever unnatural threats were arising. The most important part of all of this? The building was a cluttered mess and a fire hazard. After encountering the first slavering lunatic, who died only to a hail of panicked gunfire over the course of a few turns and beat the pointman senseless, the party was nervous. Nothing but rooms and doors ahead of them, some old apartment building gone awry. They could hear their almost zombified foes above, screaming, yelling, flailing, but had discovered they fell silent whenever they discovered their prey.

The cleared all the rooms, tediously, and shot anything that wasn't them copiously, all while trying to find the source and working up. Soon they came to the stairwell, the dreaded, dreaded stairwell, which they wished not to fight upon, lest they be knocked down them and swarmed, but they had nowhere to go but up - the crazies unaware of how to open the door and reach them, too addled in the brain. So they were forced to stage, for one reason or another deciding to set the psion up there to spring the trap while the rest of them waited down below, guns at the ready, hoping he would open the door, attract them, sprint down and run into an open room while they would unload upon the madmen with a barrage of rifles and shotguns when they chased him.

Solid plan one might think, but the psion had decided to attract the attention of the crazies in a way they hadn't expected and he had forgot about.

As soon as he flung the door open and saw one of several meandering the hall, his mind reached out and manifest a massive detonation. Not of utter cold or crackling electricity, not even acid or a blast of sonic vibration, no, he chose fire. Because of course fire would do the most damage and that was his role as a damage dealing class, so it would surely get their attention and do the most harm, making them easier to kill, no? No less it had escaped him the exact details of his powers not including the line that they do not set things aflame. His pyrokinetic power unleashed, all of the crazies immediately combust and were ignited... along with the building. But things did not end there, oh no. Maddened by alchemical concoction and gibbering mad, the lunatics frenzied like barbarians. Some sprinted into rooms, others charged him, some screamed and thrashed, but their burning bodies soon ignited the floor they were on.

The party downstairs, hearing the madness up and above and the psion running desperately to them wondered, wisely, what in the devil had happened up there. What did he [i]do[/i]? When the old, rickety fire sprinklers and alarm came on, they soon realized all hell had broken lose, especially as the psion ran down the stairs and to safety, a few flaming bodies after him - one falling down the railing and smashing twenty or so feet into the concrete before peeling himself off. The cacophony of gunfire erupted as planned, but they worried and for good reason.

Not because the building was a neck and neck battle between small, starting fires and the sprinkler systems, but because of two things. If a crazy leapt out the window and began running amok would it spread? Mind you they had no idea [i]yet[/i] what caused the near zombie-like attitude and madness, rabidness almost, but another, certain danger was the fire alarm would reach the authorities and they would be here in minutes, bad side of town or not.

Needless to say they hustled and soon opted for the worst; they burnt the entire building down to destroy all the evidence, losing nearly all the loot in the process and never quite answering what happened there, though an explosion in a part of it would come back to inform them another day on a separate mission.