Enter the Roach
You feel a little bit better after washing off the grotesque human contact with the nice, clean fluids you secrete. As you're looking for a garbage can or sewer pipe to hide in, you become aware of a high-pitched whistling noise somewhere far above you. Your cockroach senses start tingling, but they're not being overly specific. What do you want to do?
| Head towards the noise (1) |
You scuttle closer to the source of the sound, trying to get right under whatever it is that's making the noise. The high-pitched whistle drops slowly in pitch as a shadow grows on the ground around you. You look up and see a huge curving expanse of metal with a pretty symbol on it: yellow, black, and triangular. You swear you hear someone shout "Yeee-haaa!" before your world turns into an explosion of -- well, explosion.You pick yourself off the ground and look around. A cloud shaped like a mushroom looms high in the sky above you, and everything else is silent. Congratulations, you've just survived a nuclear apocalypse! You feel your body absorbing a little of the radiation, not killing you, but making you stronger.
| You gain <mainstat> ± 0 to 5 (capped at 200) Fortitude. |
| Find a hiding place (1) |
You scuttle wildly about looking for something under which to hide under. You finally find a decent-sized glass mixing bowl from the pastamancer's guild, and manage to flip it over on top of you, just as the whistling noise ends with an earth-shattering BOOM. That noise was a bomb falling from the sky! The bright flash of the bomb's explosion filters through the glass, refracting in odd ways, bending space and time around you. Maybe a bowl from a sorcerer's kitchen wasn't the greatest hiding place, after all. Everything goes white as the very fabric of space-time rips around you and mystical energy pours through you into another dimension.
| You gain <mainstat> ± 0 to 5 (capped at 200) Magicalness. |
| Head away from the noise (1) |
You skitter as fast as you can away from the whistling noise, and for good reason: as you glance back over your shoulder, or whatever the roach equivalent might be, you see a bomb streaking down out of the sky. You'd swear there was a guy riding it like a horse as it came down, but maybe that was your imagination.
The world goes white, the blast from the explosion catching you mid-skitter (somewhere between the two 't's, I think). Your thoughts dissolve in a maelstrom of color, sound, and ridiculous levels of radiation, and you lose consciousness.
You awake from uneasy dreams to find that you have transformed into a giant cockroach.
Since you were just a normal-sized cockroach before, it's actually kind of awesome. What's more, you're sleeping in a nice, comfortable bed instead of out on the street. On the whole, you feel pretty good about the change.
| You gain <mainstat> ± 0 to 5 (capped at 200) Sarcasm. |
Occurs on approaching the roach during The Gong Has Been Bung.
Notes
- Path of the Roach maps out the possible rewards from roaching.
References
- The sentence "You awake from uneasy dreams to find that you have transformed into a giant cockroach." is a reference to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, wherein Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, is turned into a giant cockroach.
- The cowboy riding an atomic bomb is a reference to the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; the penultimate scene features exactly the same thing.
- The "tingling cockroach sense" references Spider-Man and his "spider-sense".
- The phrase "yellow, black, and triangular" is a line from a Negativland song, and is used to described a Nuclear Symbol.
