the_gneech | Will the Real pholph Please Stand Up?

The portion with

codyvfrost took place in an airport but is now pretty much lost to memory. The portion that remains, however, has a bit more detail left.

pocket_entropy and I were in a large, boxy quasi-Victorian mansion akin to the Branch House in Richmond, except dark gray stone instead of red brick. We were there to destroy the legion of

pholph clones.

I'm not sure where the

pholph clones came from; there was one major one, who was basically just an evil version of

pholph -- the smartest one. He, like the actual

pholph, was wearing a blue t-shirt. The sub-clones wore green t-shirts, and had weird mutations. One stretched his limbs like that guy in One-Piece for instance; whereas another one sprouted poisonous spines from his knees and elbows; and a third was just indestructible, like he had a bazillion hit points. Shoot him, punch him, burn him up, he kept on coming. And as these were variations on the major

pholph-clone, they were also evil. But because they were copies, they weren't very smart. Once you figured out a way around their gimmick, they were pretty easy to kill.

So as I say,

pocket_entropy and I teamed up to take them out, one at a time. Usually she would jump out as bait, and once the clone went after her, I'd come up from behind and shoot/stab/club/choke him. I remember in one instance she bungee-jumped from the roof to appear outside a high window -- and when the clone opened the window to reach for her, I bull-rushed him from behind to push him out, to fall screaming to a broken neck on the sidewalk below.

Finally, only a few of the sub-clones were left, and they started coming in wave after wave, taking the forms of John Carpenter/Sam Raimi movie villains. Evil-

pholph-clone version of Ash! Evil-

pholph-clone version of Lo Pan! Evil-

pholph-clone zombie! Fortunately, the real

pholph joined us at this stage, and armed with shotguns, fire axes, and boot-reinforced kung fu kicks, we obliterated them one after the other.

Then, there was only the master clone. He started trying to play mind-games with us, of the "I'm the real

pholph, THAT guy's the clone!" variety, then "You can't destroy me! I'm the first successful human clone! I'm too valuable to science!" There was a third method which I've forgotten now, but apparently it was effective on the real

pholph, who decided to sit out the fight. (Maybe it was "I'm like your twin brother!" or something similar?)

pocket_entropy, on the other hand, was having nothing of it. There was only room in her world for one

pholph, and so the evil

pholph-clone had to die! Producing a Chinese-style longsword from ... er, somewhere ... she charged at the clone screaming in rage--

...and I woke up to the sound of

lythandra telling me that the alarm had been going for half an hour.

-The Gneech