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* MECHANICS: RP assembling a team, as necessary, before heading towards the Lighthouse portal to request a portal to Survey Mission 6C. Once there, roll a 100-sided dice and match the roleplay to the results below, as well as any reactions. Players can continue rolling until any of the players roll a BOSS ENCOUNTER, in which case the BATTLE PHASE begins. See below for battle phase mechanics.
1 - 20: While investigating a fissure in the concrete that is emitting a steady stream of smoke (although it has no smell, making it seem more like fog), you realize you are being watched by a skinny old woman on the sidewalk, in bare feet and wearing a bathrobe. She stares at you, retrieves mail from a mailbox, and then crosses the street to enter a ramshackle home you'd taken to be abandoned, all the while muttering something about "damn trespassing tourists." If you choose to pursue the matter:

21 - 40: You find one of the town's many enormous sinkholes, clouded with smoke and smelling noxious. From the corner of your eye you see a black shape scuttling across the rim, but by the time you turn to see what it is it has disappeared down into the hole.
41 - 60: The town is in a haze of mist or fog or perhaps low-lying smoke. A mangy feral dog half-lopes, half-limps down the street before disappearing into the rubble of an overgrown lot. If you follow it, you find that it has left charred pawprints that smoke where they pass through the brittle grass.
61 - 70: You find a smoking fissure in the earth, and inadvertently inhale a lungful. You are immediately beset by painful, terrifying hallucinations of twisted faces and the sensation that your skin or internal organs are on fire, burning abruptly and uncontrollably. The illusion is utterly realistic but fortunately short-lived: it passes within five or ten seconds.
71 - 80: Jokesters leave ominous graffiti all over Centralia--"HELP" and "I've Fallen In" next to deep crevices in old roadways--and so it is easy to ignore it. A particular neon green patch of it, however, is scored through again and again (straight through concrete) until it has been almost entirely defaced, and a shredded spray paint can lies nearby. A large streak of neon green paint runs from the ruined graffiti to the lip of a particularly dangerous-looking fissure.
81- 100: BOSS ENCOUNTER:
- You spy what appears to be an explorer or perhaps a resident: a young man of perhaps twenty in hipster glasses, smoking a cigarette and gazing down into a sinkhole. He looks up at you and smiles as the earth crumbles beneath his feet, sending him plunging down. You see him take a calm drag before he's swallowed up.
Barely a second passes before a great crawling shape heaves itself out of the sinkhole: a charred black being perhaps ten feet tall with a fiery gleam in the cracks of its joints, accompanied by little skittering, emberlike shapes that immediately launch themselves in your direction. It opens its glowing red mouth to roar at you, belching smoke and steam and the smell of sulfur.

- BOSS MECHANICS: This boss is a mob with a collective 100 HP. Every time you attack it (following the general battle rules), you TAKE 8 damage. You will need to deal with both the main monster and also the smaller living embers flanking it, although the latter can actually be stomped out as though they were cigarette butts, if they're in reach. Make sure to tally the boss's total HP (the damage you did to it) at the bottom of your post as well as your total HP and the damage you did that round. If the boss's HP hits 0, you have defeated it, and your team can now take the portal back.