When we last left our hero, Norfolk N. Chance had fallen through a rotted floor into the nasty dungeon of the mansion. He realizes he needs to get back to the first floor, as the nasties that inhabit the basement are far too powerful to take on.
Down on hallway, he comes upon a large cavern. The room has four other doors, and Chance finds himself wondering if any of the flour might lead to back to the first floor. Yet his health is down to four, and he continues sweating profusely under the trench coat. Should he venture in?
“Discretion is the better part of valor,” he remembers his father once telling him. “To hell with that, Pops,” he mutters under his breath, and promptly makes his way inside.
Carefully opening each, he finds that the four doors lead to a number of small caves. In one he meets – and quickly dispatches – another group of zombies. But just after congratulating himself on that victory, Chance chances upon a far more ominous creature.
Jell-O.
After failing to resist the horror, Chance faces three choices: attack, flee, or try a shotgun blast. He can’t quite imaging how a shotgun blast would decimate Jell-O, so he opts for an attack.
The odds are not good. The target is 6, but there’s only one trick to win to achieve that, with a draw of four. It does not go well. The single trick card is a Pentacles, which is not represented among the four draw cards, so the battle is lost immediately.
Chances muses that perhaps he should have heeded his father’s advice and stayed out of the cavern room. But then again, he never forgave his father for the name Norfolk, which apparently was some kind of inside joke.
The penalty cards are like a knife to his heart. Literally. Chance’s health is now down to 3. He must quickly find a way out of the dungeon with as few encounters as possible.
Problem is, he’s still stuck. In the friggin’ Jello.
One more encounter with gelatinous cube. And it won’t be pretty, Chance realizes. He must hit a target of 7 by winning a single trick card, and by only drawing three.
His shotgun is out of ammo, and could be of no use. Chance wins the trick but only with two points, far short of the target. Penalties await.
Norfolk N. Chance, macho adventuring soldier-for-hire, finds his breath being sucked out of him by a Jell-O cube. And lime flavored, to boot. This is not how he expected to go.
His life flashes before his eyes. He remembers being forced to eat Jell-O as a kid. He remembers his mother, baking a bourbon bundt cake each day and polishing off the bourbon. He remembers discovering his father’s secret stash of high heeled shoes. He remembers…
He’s losing his mind.
Then, suddenly, the green gelatinous cube promptly explodes, perhaps under the weight of Chance’s lifetime of disappointments, and our hero finds himself still standing in the dungeon cavern, green slime dripping from his flat nose.
Exhausted, depressed, Chance pushes on through the dungeon, and he wonders why he got into the private eye business in the first place. “I coulda been a dentist,” he mutters to himself.
[CENTER]
