Disclaimer: Not mine, not owned by me, not rented, leased, nor borrowed by me. Nope.

They're in Fraser's apartment watching a hockey game, and Ray is yelling excitedly because there's blood on the ice and Fraser is giving him that reproachful look because apparently he thinks that is not what you watch hockey for, when there's this huge sound outside. Giant, giant wet sucky squelchy sound, and then a lot of screaming in the street, and then there's a howl from the apartment below them, a guy yelling, "Jesus, it's Cthulhu!"

A tool who? Ray thinks, and bolts for the window, actually beating Benny somewhere for once because Benny gets tangled up in Dief trying to get off the couch, and when he looks out there are tentacles. Big fucking tentacles, one thrashing out of each manhole on the street. People are running and howling, and, oh shit, a couple of them have gotten grabbed and the tentacles are wrapped around and it looks like they're being crushed.

Benny gets to the window, takes it in; he and Ray look at each other and then they both have the Cop Reflex---run toward the Horrible Scary Thing happening, fast as you can.

When they hit the street most of the people have made it into the buildings already but there's a couple of teenage girls standing frozen, just holding on to each other and staring at the thrashing tentacles. Fraser starts talking to them about the advisability of seeking shelter, and Ray rolls his eyes and just grabs one of them, slings her over his shoulders in a fireman's carry and sprints for the nearest building. He drops her in the lobby and starts to go back for the other one but is surprised to see Benny popping in the door with her slung over his shoulders. "I believe you chose the appropriate course of action there, Ray," he says, dropping his teen, and Ray files that away to gloat over later when they've got time.

He peeks out the door. The street is clear of people now; the poor bastards who got caught are flopping around in the tentacles, broken-looking, and he's pretty sure there's nothing they can do for them. He can hear far-off sirens and wonders how widespread this is---is there a tentacle for every manhole in Chicago?

"I believe I need to inspect this creature more closely to figure out its origins," Fraser says. Because he's crazy.

"What are you going to do, count its suckers? Jesus. Stay in here. You can't do anything. This is gonna require--SWAT helicopters, and the Army. Monster-movie stuff. Besides, your sweatpants will probably enrage it, or something."

Fraser looks at him blankly.

"They're red, Benny."

Fraser cocks his head. "That's a myth about bulls, and in this case an emotional response is highly unlikely. Though I do find myself unable to remember whether cephalopods have color vision." He actually looks disappointed in himself for that, and Ray drops his face into his hands and groans, and Fraser, the bastard, takes advantage of that to sprint past him, out into the street again.

So Ray runs out too. Fraser stops and crouches by a slime trail the beast left, runs his finger through the silvery stuff and sniffs it. If he licks his finger Ray will KILL him.

But then a tentacle tip shoots out of nowhere, Jesus those things are fast, and before Ray can even move it's got Benny's arms pinned to his sides and is slamming him against a wall, and fuck Ray hasn't got his gun, not that that would probably help anyway, so he grabs the nearest manhole cover and just slams the edge against the tentacle right next to where Benny's wrapped up in it, over and over, there's goo flying everywhere and at least for once he's not wearing a nice suit, and finally the tip parts from the rest of the tentacle with a godawful gristly noise, and drops off and the tentacle goes thrashing away. He pulls the curled tip off of Benny and yanks him up and they stagger back into the lobby where the girls are still sitting on the floor, just staring.

"I think maybe you should choose a course of action that includes fucking listening to me once in a while," he says.

"Understood."

They just stand there for a while, watching out the door, and Ray's thinking anytime the SWAT teams want to arrive would be just fine. But then things get even weirder. Something else starts coming out of the manholes, squeezing out around the thrashing tentacles, and it's...frogmen. Not like Navy frogmen, like men turned into frogs. Or frogs turned into men, maybe. They seem to be gathering, getting a little frogman meeting going in the middle of the street, talking to each other in an unpleasant wet croak. And Ray is not liking this at all, because they look a whole lot more capable of turning doorknobs than the tentacles did. This is not good.

"Ahhhhh," Fraser says happily next to him.

"AH? What ah? Ah, shit, we're all gonna die when they start coming into the buildings?"

"No, no. `Ahhhh, I thought the young man in 2B was being fantastical when he described the creature as an elder god, but I am revising that assessment in light of the fact that his minions do seem to be eldritch and batrachian,' that ah."

"Fraser. This is no time to start speaking Eskimo."

"Inuit, and it's not---never mind. This is a monster out of H.P. Lovecraft, Ray."

"Huh?"

"A horror writer, turgid and anti-Semitic, inarguably. But also extremely frightening, and this is only going to get worse if we don't do something about it."

And Ray knows this is totally stupid timing but he just can't take it any more, it is so fucking frustrating working with Answer Man, and he blurts out, "You have read everything, dammit! Why have you read everything?"

Fraser blinks at him, and to Ray's astonishment he actually looks a little...hurt. "I have read everything," he says, slowly, "because I spent most of my adolescence with my grandparents on the tundra in a village with fourteen people, and I was very, very bored."

"Oh," Ray says, and can't think of anything else to say, because it sounds a lot more human when you put it like that, and also kind of pathetic. But he doesn't have time to really feel bad about it because Fraser's grabbing his arm and saying, "We have to get back to my building," and then they're in the street again, setting landspeed records, and then slamming the door in Benny's lobby, thank God.

"I believe Darryl in 2B is our prime suspect," Benny says, "both because of the Lovecraft reference and because, in passing his door, I have occasionally heard dice." He said it in his "I am explaining now," voice, and Ray waits a couple of seconds for his brain to convert this into ANY kind of an explanation, but it doesn't, and finally he just follows Benny up the stairs, shaking his head because they're up against the Calamari that Ate Chicago and they're stopping to break up a craps game?

But the second they throw open 2B's door he starts to agree with Benny on the prime suspect thing, because even before they've gotten in the room good this twenty-something guy---Darryl, presumably--is jumping back from the window and yelling, "I didn't do it! I had NOTHING TO DO with this!" Which Ray's keen cop senses tell him is a little suspicious.

He does a quick scan of the room, hand to his hip pretending he's got a gun under his shirt somewhere. Two other young guys, one young girl. A table full of pizzas and soda cans and books and, yeah, dice.

"I believe you are mistaken," Benny says, politely, and starts rummaging through the stacks of books. "Ah," he says, picking one up. "I see you have the first edition Deities and Demigods supplemental manual, from before the Lovecraft estate had his mythology removed from the text and all unsold copies destroyed."

Light is dawning on Ray. "Benny," he says, "you played--"

"Shush, Ray. Of course the copyright problems were the official reason for the withdrawal, but I've heard rumors that this edition had some occult properties. I didn't think there were many of these around anymore."

"I got it from my cousin," Darryl says, "because after he had kids he didn't have time to play anymore and he had all this first edition stuff, and the combat mechanics are shit but the monsters are way cooler, and..."

"We are in something of a crisis here and your cousin is not really germane," Benny says.

"No, he's from Jersey."

Benny pinches the bridge of his nose and looks really tired for a second, then shakes it off. "Still," he says, "the bells of R'lyeh shouldn't have woken Him unless there was more occult input than that--" He stops suddenly, glares at Darryl. "Young man," he says in that voice that Ray thinks of as Somewhere Past Snippy Fraser, "do you have the Necronomicon?"

"No!"

Benny is in full-on glare mode now. "Everyone's coming, you know. Are you ready for Nyarlathotep? Or the Goat of a Thousand Young?"

"No---oh, fuck," Darryl says. "It's just a little piece, just a chunk of the front cover with some of the teeth, y'know, and I found it in this junk shop and I thought it was maybe a piece of a prop from Army of Darkness, and after it started talking I tried to take it back, but the shop had vanished, and then today when we were playing it started yelling that it wanted to be on the table with the Deities book, and--"

"Everyone knows," Benny says hotly, "that you should NOT PURCHASE items from shops that then vanish."

"But---but---how are you supposed to know it's gonna vanish later when you're buying?" Darryl says, but Ray's losing track of the argument because he's looking out the window and there are a couple of hundred frogmen now, and they've stopped chatting and started chanting, they're all in a circle croaking in unison and stomping their...flippers, and Ray has the sick feeling this is a war chant, a "Let's go pull the humans into tiny pieces now!" sort of chant.

"Benny?" he says. "Lecture moron later. Fix monster invasion now."

"Right, of course, Ray. Right you are." And Fraser starts rallying the troops, getting them to gather up candles and incense and some wine, and draw chalk lines on the floor. Ray's alternating between watching the preparations and looking out at the increasing numbers of frogmen, who are starting to gather into separated rows, like battalions, shit.

Then Fraser sends all the guys out to other apartments with instructions to bring back garlic and poppyseeds and curry powder. Ray turns around to ask him what's that about, and to his astonishment Benny is blushing so hard he's almost purple. And when the gamer girl says, "Curry powder is magic?" Benny actually closes his eyes before he says, "Um, no. I wanted the--males to leave, because what I actually need to complete the circle is a...particular sort...of blood, and." He stops, takes a deep breath. "I have a--very keen sense of smell, and I thought you might be able to---provide---"

"Oh," says the girl. "Oh," and turns the same color as Benny and disappears into the bathroom.

After that Ray just keeps looking out the window and doesn't turn around anymore.

The guys come back, and Ray hears some poetry chanting behind him with lots of undersea towers in it, and there are weird smells and finally a big flash of light, everything's blinding and white and flat and it's probably only a second that Ray's in that light but it feels like years, no one else there with him and he can't even see his own body, and he tries to say "Benny?" but he hasn't got a throat.

And then he lands back in himself. The world is back too, full-color, and the street is covered with bits of blubbery tentacle and frogmen parts.

The gamers behind him are shrieking with glee and Fraser gives them a brief lecture about "meddling with things beyond one's ken," and then comes over and nudges Ray away from the window and they walk out in the hall.

"I suppose we should go deal with the---human corpses," Fraser says, "and organize clean-up teams for the--other things--before they begin to smell."

"Benny," Ray says. "You just saved the world. When you're the one who saves the world, other people should clean it up."

Benny considers this, gives a tired nod. And they go upstairs and finish watching hockey.