Adventure 03: Nobody's Shadow
The windmill above the village has started turning with no wind, and the shadows go up the hill at night to play in it. This morning one of them didn't come home. It belongs to a girl called Wren, who is seven, and cross, and paying in buttons.
Download free (PDF)Scary things usually just want something
The door is hungry. The shadows want to play. Nobody wants somebody.
Some kid at your table will work that out and say it out loud, probably about twenty minutes in. Tell them they're right. They've just solved the rest of the evening, and they should get to be smug about it over breakfast.
Never done this before?
Nor has anyone else at the table, probably. You don't need Adventure 01 or 02, and the only thing this one leans on is somebody having rolled a twenty-sided die at some point.
If nobody has, you'll teach it at the mill door in Beat 2, against a thing that is pretending to be a door.
Scariness level: the shadows are the shadows of nice people, and they wave first. They're the village's shadows, gone up the hill to play, and they're having a wonderful time.
Nobody, who lives in the mill, was never a person and isn't anybody's ghost. It's a shadow that came down with a moonbeam and has nobody to belong to. It's lonely the way a kid is lonely when they don't want the sleepover to end, and it says stay the way that kid says it when you reach for your coat. Its touch is cold, like a snowball down the collar. That's as scary as it gets.