Congratulations on Going Vegan!

We’re just going to lay it out. It was a huge fucking mistake for you to go on this expedition to the Arctic Circle. It doesn’t relate to your major and the whole mission statement was dubious at best (The Mountains of Madness? Puh-leez!) You really just did it for the credit, and to hang out with that freshman chick, Shelly, you had a thing for.

It was going pretty well until the professor leading the trip was eaten by a bear around two weeks back. After that his grad students became embroiled in a brief, furious power struggle which killed a third of the students, including your beloved Shelly.

After the protracted battle the surviving students split in to two parties: one who would head back home for help and another who would press on towards your destination, high, high in the frozen wastes of the North Pole, where scientists have postulated mountains might one day exist.

They don’t, really, but don’t worry. Shit’s going to get pretty crazy anyhow.

You opted to stick with the group heading north, towards god knows what. You really didn’t want to be immersed in society again, so soon after the death of Shelly (just because she never spoke to you doesn’t make your feelings any less meaningful) and also you thought you might still be able to get credit for the trip if you and your companions found the Mountains.

So onward you will press, guided by nothing more than a tiny shard of what appears to be obsidian and your collective “guts.” Unfortunately, they’re a bunch of anthropology majors, so their “guts” are less finely tuned instincts which guide them towards and through adventure with a lesson learned and a story to tell and more disastrous, onanistic voices routinely guiding them towards the most self-destructive behavior imaginable.

As a result most of your party will be decimated by a combination of unprotected sex, poor study habits and wolves. By the time you reach the mysterious, alien rock formation your party will consist of a lone TA, yourself, and a pair of Asian-American twins who only talk about Naruto.

You’ll all be super surprised that you found anything at all, and when you discover a cave leading deep into the earth you’ll all be positively floored. Becki the TA, though, will still remember her basic field procedure. She’ll insist that you establish a camp and survey the area for a day before you go inside.

You and your “friends” will do just that, picking over the ruins carefully for the first day. You’ll find some cool symbols and the corpse of a hellish, almost indescribably hideous creature. We’d “lay it down” for you, but if you have internet access you’re better off just wiki-ing “old ones” and going with that.

Still, you’ve all been through a lot by this point so none of you will be too rattled by the whole thing. You’ll just go to bed, dreams of twisted passages and shapeless danger filing your mind. When you wake up the next day you won’t be too surprised when one of the Asian twins has gone missing from your camp.

His brother will be catatonic with grief, but you and Becki will both know that your only hope is in entering and exploring the ruins, finding something in there to give you a fighting chance against the elements and the menace assailing you.

We’d love to go through the whole story here, but it gets pretty involved. So we’ll just fast forward to the important part.

After two days, weeks to your mind, spent in the catacombs you and Becki will have been separated. For all you know she’s dead. She won’t be, but you’ll be operating under that assumption. You’ll have run out of your meager rations, pursued by a shapeless creature mewling at you occasionally in the darkness. Only the fiend’s blindness has spared you its terrible wrath so far.

Constantly running and staying awake will have taken its toll, and you’ll be beyond famished. You’d eat Shelly’s corpse if you had the chance, you’re so hungry. But you’ve got no classmates left to cannibalize. All you have is your nearly empty backpack and the catacombs.

You’ll be bracing yourself breathlessly against a wall when the solution finally comes to you: the soft, dimly glowing moss lining the walls of the cavern. You’ll grab a handful and cram it into your mouth and it will taste better than anything else you’ve ever eaten, and the radiation won’t be nearly as bad as you thought it would be. It'll be a tingle, at best, not a hint of burn.

This is how you’ll sustain yourself over the next week and a half, surviving in constant fear and tattered rags until Becki and some of the kids who went back towards civilization find you in a daring rescue effort. You’ll spend a few weeks in therapy and grief counseling but aside from that you’ll be fine.

The Asian twins, however, will never be seen again.

We’ll just close, as always, by offering our sincerest congratulations on going vegan. It wasn’t easy, but you look really great, and we hoped you learned your lesson about Icarian expeditions into hellish places in order to woo artifact obsessed ladies. They never work out the way you plan.