Ekoka misplaces his hand
again, Baldur gets someone else drunk and Thuun has a good time.
- Turn 39: Revelations -
Your morning passed relatively uneventfully, but that won’t last forever. Shas Ria is a cosmopolitan city, but even it has its prejudices. Be careful…Day 1: AfternoonLocate some rocks/pebbles. Take them to my room. Repeat until I have a pretty good number of them. Use Clayform to lump rocks together until I have a chunk of stone about as big as my head, then rest until any aftereffects have faded. Once I have done so, use Clayform to shape the rock into the form of a book, partly open.
Don't take the long, multi-Clayform route if I can do all this with one casting of the spell.
"Interesting. I wonder what I could do with this..." you mutter, ideas for using the spell running through your head. You pass the Earth magic book to Lyu, who seems most interested in the tome, before heading downstairs.
On your way back in, the innkeeper gives you a bit of a weird look when he sees that one of your hands - currently made out of rocks - is itself carrying
more rocks. But he declines to comment, figuring it’s for some obscure Southlander ritual. You find your way back to the bedroom and drop the large armful of rocks onto the floor, shaping them into a rough pile. Back and forth you go, pointedly ignoring the incredulous looks that the innkeeper is giving you, until you have a pile of rocks about as big as a pumpkin.
Before you’re about to start, Lyu suddenly interrupts you to share his current theory on the demons. It sounds plausible.
You mutter the incantation under your breath. (4) Your tongue almost trips over some of the words, but you make it through. Both of your arms begin to shimmer with a dull light, but (1) the light reacts oddly with your rockhand. Your left hand is nicely glowing now, but your right hand doesn’t look quite right. You decide to give it a go anyway.
You pick up a good-sized rock in your right hand and try and squeeze it. Nothing happens. “Damn!” you growl and pick up a rock with your glowing left hand. It feels ever so slightly squishy, so you give it an experimental squeeze. It sort of oozes between your fingers; the harder you push, the more malleable the rock becomes. You smile and begin to force the squishy rock into the one you’re holding in your right hand. It squelches satisfyingly and crushes against the other rock, blending in just like clay. You can’t help but grin as you realise that the spell went off without a hitch!
You hurry along, steadying the one big rock in your right hand against the ground and using your glowing left hand to smash all of the other rocks into it. Pretty soon you have a lumpy, sized rock that’s about a dozen different colours. Grains of sand and dust litter the floor. You let go of the big rock… only to find that you can’t. Ah, right - your hand is
made of rocks, and thus is susceptible to the spell! You’ve managed to partially embed your rockhand in the rockpile! Oops.
You sigh and release the clayform spell within your mind as well as mentally disassemble your rockhand. You sit back on your haunches to assess the lumpy rock and look at what’s left of your hand. The quartz rock is still present, thank goodness, and the green spark inside is still strong. Four other smallish rocks are also present, so you have about a third of the hand part present and no fingers.
You shake your head and get up. Lyu is still engrossed in the Earth magic book and doesn’t seem to have even noticed what occurred. You slip out the door and head back down to the street to find more pebbles.
(4) Once your rockhand is rebuilt, you head back inside, flexing the new pebble-fingers experimentally. It feels much like the old one did, although it’s now a riot of colours ranging from golden sandstone to greyish granite. You sit yourself down in front of the lumpy rock and look about for a model.
"Hm. What should I make this?" You eye your Earth magic book. "Might as well start with something...relatively simple." Since Lyu seems unwilling to give it up for your modelling purposes, you search the room until you find a simple Cylenian bible. Figuring it would do, you sit yourself back down next to the lump and re-cast the spell.
(6) The incantations fall off your tongue effortlessly! Within moments both of your arms are afire with the ochre colour of Earth magic - and you are pleasantly surprised to note that your rockhand appears to have taken up the magic properly this time too! Excellent.
You rapidly reshape the lump, marvelling at how easily it moulds to your touch. Soon you have the rough model of a book sitting in front of you. If you were a better craftsman you could make a truly lifelike work of art, but for now you’ll have to settle for being able to crudely beat whatever rock or stone you want into whatever shape you want.
You sit back and smile, content with how your experiment went.
Outside the window, the sun is just beginning to set. You wonder where the afternoon went.
Watch what Ekoka's doing. Provide moral support. Read more of his earth magic book if he's not using it. Not to learn magic, oh no, gods forbid. Just see if there are more interesting tidbits about angels and whatnot there, or maybe generally practical advice.
You greedily tear into the Earth book, hungrily devouring the words on the pages. It’s a little pedestrian in its language, nowhere near a challenge for a well-learned priest, but the ideas are fascinating and the insight given to Earth mages is quite astounding. It seems that Earth mages must have a direct connection of some kind to the earth they are trying to manipulate; in fact, any solid route will suffice for their magic to pass through into the earth.
It seems, then, that this would be quite the useful technique to fight Earth mages; by breaking their connection to the earth, one could disrupt their ability to attack and defend. Other than that, you don’t find too much more interesting. Not like that treatise on parsley that you read while on the carriage from Shas Isa… the writing in that was exquisite. You daydream for a time about that particular scroll.
Once the book is finished, you turn to watching Ekoka. He is methodically sculpting rock into the shape of a book; it’s really quite astounding to watch him work. His glowing hands seem capable of deforming rock at a mere touch! You wonder if he could do the same to bricks or even metal, since both would logically be altered by Earth magic.
Ekoka doesn’t finish until the sun is just setting and you sit and offer him silent moral support the whole time.
Read the fire book, try not to burn out my brain this time. After this, go ask the innkeeper if he knows if there's a place to train my bows skills around here.
“Ow, fuck me sideways, that wasn't all that pleasant..." you groan, holding your aching head. You can’t shake the image of that icy blue orb from your mind. Just what the hell is that thing? You put it out of your mind and pull out the scarlet-coloured Fire magic book and flick through it. Unfortunately, there’s nothing of interest in the book. There’s a little bit on the properties of fire and how to make explosions by mixing powders, which seems interesting, but also a damn good way to blow your fingers off. You shrug and put the book aside before rubbing your sore eyes.
You decide it’s time for a good stretch, so you sling your bow and quiver over your shoulder and head downstairs. On the advice of the innkeeper, you head to a public archery range and while away a few hours practicing your shooting. (5) You’re pleasantly surprised to find that three of your arrows are of really high quality! They fly almost perfectly true whenever you fire them.
Three of your arrows are High Quality Arrows and gain a dynamic bonus to hit.The range shuts as the sun kisses the top of the decorative walls around the city, so you decide to head towards the inn.
Baldur chuckles grimly to himself and goes to drink with the messenger to pump him for more information about what happened to Waterstone and everything else. Keep an ear open for anything else too.
You chuckle into your tankard before finishing it off. it seems that Felice doesn’t have all of the luck in the party! You stand and wander over to the bar, setting down a handful of gold. “Leave me the bottle,” you ask the bartender. “Actually,” you put a few more coins on the pile; “Give us a fresh one.”
The bartender shrugs and cracks open a fresh bottle of the clear, apparently potent liquor and sets it in front of you. “It’s your casket,” he says before heading down the bar to greet the lunchtime arrivals.
You top up the messenger’s glass, who smiles gratefully at you. “I knew the baron,” you say. “Doesn’t seem like he’d be easy to kill.”
The messenger tosses back a third of the glass. “He was a freaking bear is what he was. I thought nothing but a damn mountain falling on him could kill him. We all did.” He shudders. “The creature, though… It was horrid. Had skin the colour of rotted meat.” You feel a shiver go down your spine. This is beginning to sound a little too familiar. “I was speakin’ to the baron, he wan’d me to ride north. I was a tellin’ him, no way, all the other messengers are dead!” He finishes off his glass; he’s looking much more mellow now.
“Then this damn thing just kicks in the fucking front door like it’s a goddamn mammoth. Y’ever seen his front doors? They’re twenty feet tall, a foot thick and weighs as much as two dozen cows. And this goddamn thing just boots it off the hinges. Whole building shook. Next second, the damn thing punches through the door into the baron’s main hall. Crosses the room to me in an eyeblink. All I see are it’s eyes. Yellow as a scared Limerete’s belly and full o’ anger and hunger. Then the baron just tosses me over his shoulder and through the window, yellin’ at me to ride like me life is dependin’ on it. Then that beastie appears behind the baron and just picks him up by each shoulder and…” he mimes a tearing motion.
You shudder and fill up his glass again before swigging back a full one for yourself. “What happened in town?” you press.
“When I got to town, they hadn’t heard yet. But it was pretty crazy there too. Shas Isa’s never liked mages too much, y’know? But they’s worth something. Ol’ Cyrus kept our wells defrosted and the streets mostly free o’ ice. Nice fellow, bit prim and proper though.”
You don’t say anything.
“Fun to drink with. When he’s drunk, he c’n do this trick where he belches out fire into all sorts of shapes and colours! He mighta burned down a tavern once or twice. Anyway, them townspeople was runnin’ around, screamin’ about witches. If a buncha them started callin’ the same name as a witch, they’d have him or her up on a bonfire lickedy-spit.” The messenger shudders. “It’s like they’s all crazy. I saw them all burn one dear old man who’s too simple to even know the day of the week! The only sane one was that damn brute of a mayor they has. Y’seen him? Grew a foot overnight and suddenly has hisself a whole
passel of pretty girls workin’ for him. Word I hear is their pay ain’t amazin’, but sommin’ about him must be. Anyway, he’s like the only normal person in the whole town, which is sayin’ something!”
He swigs back the last of his glass of vodka. “Say, this is really fine stuff. Y’got any more, my friend?” You smile and set the bottle next to him invitingly. “Mighty kind of you!” he slurs. You chuckle and get to your feet, backing away before he can get to the drunken hugging.
Time to find a new information source, though. This guy is way too drunk.
(35 gold spent on vodka bottle)You wander the streets, wrapped against the afternoon chill in your cloak. Nobody is talking about Shas Isa, which means word hasn’t gotten out of the Ducal Palace yet following the messenger’s delivery. Given the messenger was currently passed out in a bar after telling his whole story in a loud voice, you figure by tomorrow’s end most of the town would know about the craziness.
You find yourself on the northern side of the great square. (3) After making a few more circuits and stopping in at random taverns, you hear nothing more of interest. You do hear a few professional messengers discussing routes, but that does nothing more than confirm your knowledge that they’re pretty widespread.
Well, that was mostly a waste of an afternoon. You shrug and head back in the general direction of the inn as the sun begins to set.
Well, assuming I can have conversations without falling comatose:
Talk to University lecturers/leaders about the devilings that our group encountered. Attempt to group-theorize what they are and what their purpose is.
*Relevant Information Thuun Currently Knows:
They are normal men and women "cursed" by some unknown quasi-magical force that doesn't conform to normal magic laws.
Most are feral, but one among them, encountered by the other members of the group was intelligent and used the quasi-magic to attack and sustain itself.
They are entirely separate from the typical demons encountered in Yagalia normally.
They are cutting off messages between cities, indicating some degree of organization.
They are resistant to normal magical power.
They can use runes and other means of magical projection to drive others insane.
They use Iron Weapons
You roll your neck to try and dispel the rather annoying pain of your headache and decide to head for the university. A nice long walk will sort your head out!
The very second you step outside, a gang of vicious thugs descends on you! (1, 1, 2) Three knives find their way into fleshy parts of your body.
You fall to the ground and wake up on the floor of the room, soaked in sweat. Ow. Your head still hurts. Judging from the sun, you were only asleep for a few minutes. You get to your feet and head for the door. What are the odds of that
actually happening?
………
You find your way to the university without incident. The walk is brisk, pleasant even. The campus is rather large, the buildings made of expensive marble. What is it about universities that makes them think they must be built out of marble? You sigh and shake your head before making for the Department of Magical Studies.
The department is… rather empty. There are very few professors wandering around and any you try to stop just act scared and scurry away. You finally get annoyed and corner a student. “Where the hell are all the magical professors?!” you bark at the somewhat cowed student.
The boy cowers and squeaks slightly. “They all ran! City folks were gettin’ real angry with them, so most o’ them left. There’s only old Gromvell still here.” He points at a window. “That’s his office. Can I please go?” You let him leave and stalk towards the office.
You finally find his door and knock. “Professor Gromvell?” you call.
“Go away or I’ll burn you to cinders!” a voice roars. Charming.
“Professor Gromvell, my name is Lao Thuun. I’m a mage from the Temple of the Setting Sun. I’d like to talk to you,” you espouse hurriedly, hopnig he doesn’t decide to follow through on his threats and the burning.
The door creaks open. “You’re a mage?” he asks suspiciously. His face peers out. It’s got a neat, well-trimmed grey beard framing a hard, sturdy jaw. His eyes are bottle-green and watching you closely. You note that he’s surprisingly fit for a man supposedly given over to naught but teaching.
You nod. He grunts and holds up a short bronze rod. “Prove it.” Before you can ask, he jabs you with the rod! As it nears you feel a peculiar wrenching in your… everywhere. The rod raps against your hand painfully and there’s a shower of sparks. “Good enough,” he remarks, eyeing the sparks. He holds the rod so you can see the end. “Got a bit of lodestone in the end of the rod. Come in.”
You follow the gruff old man in and take a seat opposite him. “I’ve just come from the south,” you begin. “And on my way north, I met… Well. It’s like a demon, but not a demon. It’s a human with ferocious strength, speed and quasi-magical power.”
(4) The old man glares at you for a second before gesturing with the rod. “Get out. I don’t have time for your nonsense. Go bother someone at the zoology department with your crap.”
You stand and slowly unlace the top of your shirt. “Okay… What if I…” You wriggle your hips rhythmically as you delicately slide the laces of your shirt apart. “Dance a little? Does that… get you in the mood to talk?”
The gruff professor reddens slightly. “What makes you think that’ll do anything?” he mutters, but it doesn’t have much ire to it. You give him a sly smile when he settles back in his chair. You watch him through heavy-lidded eyes as your arms slowly slip out of the shirt. You continue to move sensuously to an unheard beat, gradually moving closer to the man.
He’s panting ever so slightly as you delicately perch yourself on his knee. With one finger you trace the edge of his jaw. “Tell me, how can I convince you to help me?”
His answering smile is one of a cat that’s stolen a pint of cream. “Well, let’s talk a little about that…
You’re lying on the floor, gasping for breath and soaked through in sweat. You look up to see him sitting back in his chair, packing tobacco into his pipe. His finger sparks for a second and a thin tendril of smoke curls up from his pipe as he puffs. “Ah,” he murmurs as you shakily climb to your feet and begin to pull your clothes on. "Hmm," he murmurs, eyeing you. "Before you do that, why don't you come over here again..."NOPENOPENOPE
You growl and grab a piece of paper. “Damn it, at least tell me what this is!” you snap as you sketch one of the runes that were drawn on the buildings in Cnoc Adh. “These runes were designed to make someone go insane. I’ve never seen their like. Have you?”
You seem to have the professor’s attention now. He takes the paper from you and looks it over. “It looks… Almost like a fusion of Light and Shadow principles, but not quite. They don’t look at all right. And you say these made people mad?”
You spend the next several hours recounting your journey to the professor and describing the magics you had encountered. Sadly, the professor had not heard of anything similar. He did offer some advice, though, and with him you manage to devise a spell that should destroy any more of the crazy-making runes that you come across. It’ll take some strong skill in Light and Shadow magic, though.
“If angels are getting involved, it’s big. They don’t stick their feathered fingers in for garnets, you know?” he says as you’re getting ready to leave. “And if they’re involved so soon after their ma and pa are killed… you can be sure it’s all related.” The realisation of what he’s saying dawns on his face. “Oh, saints preserve me.” His face is ashen beneath the beard. “You had best be careful, boy. Could be whatever is controlling these beasties is the same as what went and killed the sun and cracked the moon. If you screw up, Maska could be next!”
Shaken, you leave the old man’s office. The sun is setting as you head towards the inn.
Spell Tome found! It teaches Lucidity. This powerful spell can, in its most basic form, destroy the crazy-magic of the ‘devilings’. At it’s simplest it only requires Light or Shadow magic skill, but the spell won’t be able to reach its full potential until you are quite skilled in both. You need at least one rank in either Light or Shadow to learn and cast it.
The newborn sun sets on the city of Shas Ria. Predators, both human and not, stir in the shadows. Tread carefully.
Lyu Brak (Harry Baldman)Profession: Priest
Status: Reading
Inventory:Staff (Bronze-Capped)Gnarled Old Staff
Skull Covered in Rude Words
Religious Necklace
Warm Priestly Robes and Pants
Warm Priestly Shoes
Inscribed Leather Cuirass and Greaves35 gold
10 Jimsonweed Fruit
Many bits of Thuun’s legs
Jagged shard of bone
Curious dagger
Earth Magic Book
Wounds/Status: You’re all good!
Abilities: [Boundlessly Cheerful] [The Good Priest] [Life Channels: Head, Chest, Left Arm] [Obdurate] [Not that faithful] [Righteous Litany ]Baldur Bergfalk (USEC_OFFICER)Profession: Mercenary
Status: Listening and Drinking
Inventory:Reforged, Really Sharp GreatswordWorn leather jerkin (and normal clothes)
Worn leather boots
Booze
Bear fur cloak265 gold
Wounds/Status: You’re all good!
Abilities: [Skilled Bargainer] [Guileless] [I'm Not Right Handed] Lao Thuun (BFEL)Profession: Warrior Mage
Status: Learning
and dancingInventory: Blunted bronze sword
Warrior’s Broadsword
Leather armour
Acolyte's SuncloakReligious Necklace
210 gold
Lucidity Spell Tome
Wounds/Status: [Crippling HeadacheAbilities:[Enduring] [Dragon Aspect: 1] [Slow Cast] [Atoner] [Spellsword ]Spells:[Life Spell: Wisp] [Flame Cloak] Magical Experience:[Ea: 1] [Wi: 0] [Fi: 1] [Wa: 0] [Li: 2] [Fo: -1] [Lt: 0] [Sh: 0] Felice Nasib (Pancaek)Profession: Seaman
Status: Reading
Inventory: Repaired Shortbow
Twelve Arrows
Three High Quality Arrows
Five Explosive Arrows
Sharp DirkWater Magic Book
Fire Magic Book
Light Magic Book
Force Magic Book
Warrior’s Broadsword
Silken Underwear
Nautical Longcoat
Leather Armour Set63 gold
Wounds/Status: You’re all good!
Abilities: [Fearless] [Comprehension] [Mysterious Orb in your Mind’s Eye] [Not a Landlubber] [Trick Shot] Ekoka (GreatWyrmGold)Profession: Wanderer
Status: Clayformin’
Inventory: Cracked shillelagh
Wanderer's Cloak
Sturdy Clothes and Boots
Length of Rope
Flint and Tinder
380 gold
Clay Book
Wounds/Status: You’re all good!
Abilities: [Survivalist] [Dual Focus] [Slow Cast] [Rock Hand] [Maladjusted to heat] [Guiding Spirit] Spells:[Wind Spell: Alacrity] [Clayform]Magical Experience:[Ea: 1] [Wi: 1] [Fi: 0] [Wa: 0] [Li: 1] [Fo: 0] [Lt: 1] [Sh: 0] 
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Topic: Roll to Go Mad: Turn 44 - The Markets (Read 142634 times)