lent '97 - Session 28
28. The Elliptic

-- UNEXPECTED TENTACLE SESSION 28 --
--          THE ELLIPTIC          --
--             20.06.97           --

	Leaving our grief for later, we attended Allerton's trial. The
first couple of days were completely irrelevant to us, being mainly
concerned with large scale fraud and money laundering. We spent our time
plondering over what we knew and listening to the evidence against
Allerton.
	Faraday apparently had a massive amount of circumstancial
evidence; all he needed was something that connected Allerton to it. Now,
with the ship search, he had enough to put Allerton away for a long time.

	Considering the apparent correlation between the portals in the
dark path, their distribution on the map and the cave paintings, we
exptrapolated where we considered the remaining two portals to be from the
three we knew (consulting the Miskatonic's mathematics department, the
three points we had are enough to enscribe a circle and hence a regular
pentagon).

/( This is a good reason for not playing with a group of mathematicians,
although the GM was prepared for this extrapolation and had already
checked it independently, he had banked on spending the next hour
listening to the players arguing over the best way to estimate the
position of the portal in Eanston - underground in some cave we didn't
know the exact position of. Thank God one of the player hadn't studied
cartography, otherwise the next week would have spent attempting to
compensate for the errors introduced by the projection onto the paper. I
guess it's all a bit spherical and probably plurally so. )\ :)

	The two towns located by these mathematical jugglings were: 
Barenston and Iningsham. There was an obvious connection between the
phonetic similarities between Eanston, Eynsham and Iningsham: all
apparently derived from the same root, "Town where populations were
resident." The other two posed a sightly larger problem, not being
obviously connected, to these three, but in themselves, derived from a
common root as well.

	Our Latin pursuits also continued: the Arabic inscribed in the
Hungarian "copy" of Liber Ritualis apparently had to do with spells of
entrapment - describing similar devices as we suspect the chess set
possible of. Small 'souls' could apparently be held indefinitely, but the
more powerful had to be let out every so often to feed. It was immediately
conjectured that this may have happened to Christian's friends in the
cave. Also, we established that creatures freed had to perform a service
for the person who had freed the creature, similar to the genies of
Arabian folklore.

	Allerton's trial continued and eventually we had to testify,
although without our star witness, Jon Aintree. We decided it was prudent
to tell of our imprisonment by Allerton, due to our helping an escaped
slave. We hadn't reported this for fear of disrupting the police
investigation into Allerton's affairs (spot the lie). The evidence was
overwelming. Allerton, a now broken man, was convicted for 30 years and
led away to start his sentence in a secure prison at New York. 

	We travelled to all the towns on our map, examining all the church
records, hoping to gain some insight into their foundation. One after the
other, we discovered that the native inhabitants had been forced off the
land to make way for the settlement, in most case forcibly. The only
exception was Eanston; an old Indian site, but apparently abandoned just
before the settlers arrived. Something that should perhaps be interjected
at this point was the priest's lack of recognition of Jeremiah: odd, since
it had only been a few months since he'd locked the antiquarian inside the
church's crypt.

	Arriving back in Boston, Allerton had been found dead in his cell. 
Suspected heart attack.
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