All Hat, No Cattle

When Jen’s phone light fell on the form of a large, muscular, bare-chested man with a bull’s head, you might think she stumbled into a cut scene from Eyes Wide Shut, but you’d be wrong. Like, really wrong. Seriously, why did that even occur to you? That movie was trash when it came out, why is it still in your head after all these years? You’ve got issues…

Anyway…

Fortunately for Jen it was not, in fact, a minotaur, but rather a statue of a minotaur. Pulse back to normal, she realized she was in something of a shrine/recovery room dedicated to the minotaur. A search of the remainder of the house by Jen and Demington turned up little of interest, though Pfutz found a very old necklace with a minotaur symbol on it and gave it to Parisia. And they say crime doesn’t pay.

Meanwhile, Marston was doing a recon of the back yard and outbuildings. He spotted the old farmer coming from the barn with a shotgun and a sledgehammer and heading into the corn field. While farming is not Marston’s area of expertise, he does know that those are tools that are ill-suited to harvesting corn. So, he headed in after the farmer, followed by the rest of the crew.

After entering the corn labyrinth, the group became disoriented and confused. Fortunately, Demington had been unspooling his twine so they could find their way back out afterwards. Unfortunately, a confused Parisia was taking the twine and using it to knit a sweater for Pfutz. Demington was forced to admit her crocheting skills were really coming along nicely.

Marston reached the center of the labyrinth first and was greeted by the sight of the old farmer smashing a pile of camera equipment while a very large creature was hunched on the ground dining on what appeared to be the earthly remains of one Paddington Reynolds, UFO enthusiast and YouTube D-lister. Using his ability to reason with monsters, Marston learned the minotaur needs to feed every seven years. He also learned that the missing teens are still alive, and Paddington is just the starter. The rest of the hunters arrived shortly thereafter, and the typical endgame began to play out, with the yelling, and the shooting, and the flaming swording and the whipping of the magic chain. Standard stuff really.

Then Marston, ever the paradigm-breaker, came to the realization that it didn’t have to be this way. What if this thing could be contained somewhere and every seven years fed a few bad guys? Even if he needed three or four each time, he reasoned, we would never run out of politicians, news pundits, or Freemasons. The idea had merit for a time, but as with most diplomatic efforts, talks broke down and the hunters made short work of both the minotaur and the old man. During the melee, Marston decided setting the corn on fire with his ray gun, Ronald, was a solid plan, and perhaps it was.

A further search of the farmhouse grounds found the missing boys, bound, hungry, and exhausted, but otherwise safe. Smoke from the corn brought the local fire brigade out to the scene, so the group, anxious to not be anywhere near a burning field with three murdered corpses in it, grabbed the boys and high-tailed it back to town. There they unceremoniously deposited the teens in their front yard and headed back to Minnesota, and civilization.

During the ride back, Marston stared out the window at the passing fields, deep in thought. Maybe we’ve been going about this all wrong…