Jack snaps back into focus.
"Eh? Oh yeah right right. By the chapel I assume you mean the place with the stained glass windows? Yeah that got robbed by some other guy. Or girl, I didn't see them. I dunno about any priestess, I'm here looking for a sliver of perfection, whatever you might call that. I need it for an armor-smithing project that I convinced the blacksmith to do for me. He already got me a weapon, after all. I don't really have an overarching purpose as such, but I'll probably exterminate the stoatpeople after I get my armor for you guys. They suck at negotiating. What are you doing here? You a devout person, looking to defend your place of worship? I can admire the gesture, but put your sword away, please. I'm not a fight you can win, and I'm not here to harm your chapel or what-have-you. Do you know where anything perfect is? If you can direct me there, I'll go."
Attempt to defuse situation, lie out my ass about not looting the chapel, ask for directions to something perfect. If I'm attacked, remove the offending limb with my murder-thought and keep my distance.
[Is That A Challenge I Hear: 1]
For some reason a naked man with a mangled hand does not inspire much in the way of respect in the Worm-knight. She inclines her head, twirling the sword a little. Perhaps you are correct. But it would be remiss of her not to put your bold claim to the test. With an air of offense taken and more about to be dished out, she approaches with measured haste.
[A Test of Skill: 4 vs. 6]
The speed of thought is perhaps nothing impressive in physical terms. In a straight-up fight, however, very little can beat it. Before she has taken a step, you snake your lethal notion around her sword arm and pull hard, her armor screeching as an invisible force grinds along it like a spool of razor wire. It is perhaps less effective than you would hope, but even without visual confirmation you can see it all too clearly, her arm denoted with tracings of muscle and nerves that glow invisibly with pain. Her armor padding grows wet with blood.
[Striving for Freedom: 5]
To her credit, she reacts quickly. The downside of operating with thought is that it can be all too easily understood. Before you can fix the limb properly, she has already gone to the ground, freeing her arm through an uncommon display of flexibility and discipline. You raise an eyebrow as she gets to her feet. You don't suppose she's taken the point yet. Sorcery, she seems to think. How very unappreciative. Need you provide a more effective demonstration?
((Yay!))
"Sure. Why not? Let's. Unfinished business shouldn't be left behind, but I'm not exactly the role model here."
To the town! Into survey distance. While proudly marching forward, think about minding: Since the method of inducing sensory feed is familiar, it shouldn't be too different to rob same sensory feeds. Adding visual component of grapefruit is pretty much same as adding completely black overlay to rob vision. For example to make one stop feeling their legs just long enough to make them trip over. Overwriting... whatever senses are used there. Let's try this on first animal/bird/stoat we see.
She nods at this, a small amount of appreciation cracking her perpetually stone-faced expression. It is good to have associates on the long road. With this in mind, she shall share something with you - a stoppered clay vial seems to have appeared in her hand. A tonic, she says. Rather potent. You appear to be in need of some.
Experimentally you unstop the vial and take a whiff of the contents. Your well-trained nose anticipates an alcoholic content of at least 80%. And a little something more exotic, you suspect. It smells unusually good, you would say. With uncommon restraint you do not empty it quite yet. You will need to find a way to town, after all, and there's a bit of thinking you need to do on the way. This you do, letting the fine lady take the lead for now - she elects to go through the woods and then slink through the vineyards nearer to the town, and you find yourself a little lost in thought as questions of minding consume your attention, taking cues from her as she ducks down in places, weaves through hedges and finally edges along paths between houses.
[The Power of the Mind: 2]
Animal minds, you discover, tend to be a little difficult to reliably influence. Their thought output is a little too predictable. Fear, mostly. To the point where it's hard to tell if you're doing anything at all - a blind bird, when threatened, seems to fly just as well as any other. That is, if you did blind one. Feedback is a little hard to assess if you haven't exactly secured the specimen beforehand. Like administering heart medication to a wild sparrow, to use an unusual and, as it turns out, highly distracting analogy.
Before any keen insights come to you, you are unfortunately on a bluff very near the center, where your companion carefully guides you to stand mostly behind a convenient tree as the two of you survey the town center from afar. There are the docks, a market square, rows of stately houses, a pair of large warehouses near the river, and finally a considerable area of burned and blasted wasteland that seems to have caught the part of town that's nearest the castle and, no doubt much to the dismay of the residents, incinerated a good third of the once-proud town. There is some activity near there that you can discern from your vantage point, people moving around in decent number. The tail end of a firefighting effort, you suspect. The rest of the town is rather quiet - it may have as many as a thousand residents, you judge from its size, but you don't think you see more than a dozen altogether in the parts that aren't the burned bits. Come to think of it, there's scarcely more than two hundred over in the burned-out areas.
Uninformative, your companion says. A closer look is in order. The populace will need to be engaged.
Okay, still in a bag. I try to find the opening and get it open.
It's not really tied up, so naturally you can find a way out with some doing and quite a lot of squirming. You find yourself, naturally, in the masons' hovel, strewn with long-unused tools. Each movement of yours stirs up dust from the floor that nobody's bothered to clean up in months. The whole place confirms the impression of a dismal hovel that the exterior so convincingly gave you, the closest thing to proper furniture in the place being three corners filled with straw and blankets, with you resting in the fourth.
Currently a scene appears to be unfolding before you. The resolute youth from before - the blacksmith, you'd say - is currently being held up by the larger mason by his shoulders so as to better convey their obvious difference in size and strength, the small mason standing behind him with a look of intense disdain on his face. The blacksmith seems almost tranquil in how unimpressed he seems to be by this, to which the mason seems to be replying with a stern shaking and some very choice words being said. The third, dull-faced mason sits nearby. There is an oddly animated quality to his face now as he stares at the blacksmith, who asks
one last time to be let go.
You don't really need to be a genius to figure out what the masons have to say about that, but the blacksmith seems earnestly dedicated to hearing the reply nevertheless.
"Hmm. Might as well check out the screaming - it should be good news if it's coming from the stoats, right? While we're at it, perhaps you could describe these masons for me? Anyone important?"
Chat a bit more whilst ascending to the battlements to check out the screaming. Crouch behind the ramparts and poke head over slowly. Can't be too careful.
The girl follows very uncertainly. It's not good practice to go in the direction of the screaming. Not good practice at all. Something's always causing the screaming, you know. You brush off her concern with a question about the masons.
The masons, hm. Unsavory types. The large one's good if you need something - takes rats for favors and procurement of goods. The small one's kind of a useless outgrowth of his brother, pretty much. And the third one, well. There's rumors about him. About this thing he did. Must have been a year ago. Used to be like his younger brothers. Now he's been quiet. And mostly very drunk, too. Most say it was murder. A couple make noises about something
worse, even. Nobody knows what exactly, but-
The girl momentarily notices that you're on the battlements. She dares not follow further than the tower, keeping herself close to both a tower wall and a parapet. You... go ahead and take a look, okay? Fine, you suppose. You slink along the parapets, noting a conspicuous lack of short-limbed stoatmen in the field, bent and twisted weapons and armor strewn about the battlefield. It takes a moment to nail down where these stoatmen might be, but you soon see them -
all of them, less than three hundred in number now, all grouped up in failing formations around the remnants of their siege camp, making a valiant effort at fending off the thing you lay your eyes on next.
It looks a lot like a skeletal hound if skeletal hounds came in the size of a house, blackened bones stitched together with twitching, pulsing knots of a million intertwined arteries. It moves almost faster than you can register, a multitude of forked tongues lashing out from its wide-open maw and tearing stoatmen to shreds, grabbing each piece with newly-forming branches on the backswing. The air turns red and liquid with disintegrating stoatmen as it inhales it with an ungodly howling noise and rips through ranks with effortless ease even as troops with no other escape do their damnedest to throw themselves at it in an attempt to delay. A trail of undigested matter and screaming echoes of its victims flies every which way as the creature continues its reign of terror.
In the very back of the stoatman formation, however, you notice a peculiar figure, separate from the rest, hiding behind a tent. Not cowering. Biding its time. Terribly still. At its heart you discern a spot of supernaturally luminous gray, infinitesimal in size yet clearly visible from this distance. In the middle of the carnage you can see it do something most unusual - had you blinked, you would have missed it drawing in the shape of a nearby stoatman. Your attention caught, you see it happen again, and then again, and continue at an escalating pace. Six. Then a dozen. Then two dozen. From the back the stoatmen continue to disappear. The hidden shape grows indistinct and colorless in its center. Its silhouette, however, becomes ever clearer, like a short-limbed mannequin in the making.
The removal of stoatmen quickly outpaces the beast. Its swipes start to hit nothing at all. And soon enough there are no targets left. Just the gray shape, standing behind the tent, looking about impassively. The beast howls with insatiable hunger. The figure steps out from the shadows, looking at it straight-on. You get the feeling a confrontation is about to begin.
"Terribly sorry if that hurt! Just trying to get into the spirit, as you say."
Keep at it, I suppose? It couldn't have hurt that badly; obviously a wood sword wouldn't do anything!
[Surely It Couldn't Hurt That Much: 5 vs. 5+1]
It seems the guard wasn't taking you very seriously at first. She seems to have corrected this misconception. She launches herself at you, raining down blows with the sword. You go on the defensive, and manage to deflect most of the hits. That is, until you miss one particular one. It gets you in the leg quite painfully. The followup as she outmaneuvers you in the distraction gets you in the back. So does the next one. The one after that diagonally digs into your collarbone, nearly forcing you to your knees. She then smashes her shield into you and makes you tumble into the dirt. She doesn't seem inclined to stop beating on you at that point, given that the next five blows, each one more unpleasant than the last, come while you're trying to get to your feet again, each one imparting greater urgency to your efforts.
[Oblivious Endurance: 4]
You believe you maybe underestimated how much getting hit by a large and heavy stick would hurt. Feels a little bit excessive to conduct oneself like this, you would say.
Leif Erikson, Miner
- A Word: INEVITABLE
- Clanlands Tonic (1 vial)
- Body Count: 1
- Wounds: 3
- 4 large red berries
- Damp and moldy fuel
- The Queen's Guard: A Roaring Good Time
- Reappropriated, Clean Skirt
- Inscribed Wooden Stylus
- Iron Spearhead
- 1.03 gp
- Anglefork Castle: A Free Man
- The Box: ?
- Tower of the Mind: Convenient Relocation
- Induced Inebriation: Comfortably Drunk
- Induced Lucidity: A Concert For The Gods
- Elongated Affairs: Cheerio!
- Compatibility: Minding
- Tricks of the Mind: Cormick's Condescending Riddle
- Tricks of the Mind: Perceptual Rebuke
- Tricks of the Mind: Erikson's Inexplicable Grapefruit
- Tricks of the Mind: Speak With The Mob
- Party in the Courtyard: Celebration in Earnest
- Never In: Swallowed By The Pit
- Gods of the Underground: Did You Just What
- Labyrinths of Anglefork: Tunnel-Literate
- The Voracious Dark: Two Deals Made
- The Voracious Dark: The Promised Sixth
- Moth's Flight: A Stop In The Danger Zone
- Troubles In Anglefork Town: Nothing To See Here
Eileen Minett, Vinyl Collector
- Wounds: 2
- Traces of Mischief: A Bubbling Scar
- Reclaimed Hooded Robe (worn, torn)
- Giant White Mushroom
- A Word: SEA
- A Word: HUNGER
- A Word: CHAOS
- A Weapon: Explosive Cysts
- Rat Pantheon: Disliked
- Origins: Witness to Dissolution
- Tower of the Mind: There's Something To Remember
- The New Queen: And Something To Forget
- The Queen's Guard: Bringer of Doom
- Touch of Flame: the Secrets of Flammability
- The Voracious Dark: Three Connections Given
- The Voracious Dark: A Special Offer, Limited Time Only
- Stone's Glory: An Uncivil Disagreement
- Body Count: 1
- Never In: the Obvious Candidates
- Labyrinths of Anglefork: Tunnel-Literate
- The Impromptu Prophecy: ?
- Sweet Little Children: Fond Farewell
Jack Daniels, Karate Man
- Naked
- Dusty Wooden Speaking-Trumpet
- Crossbow Bolt (in throat)
- A Word: REND
- A Word: SILENCE
- A Weapon: Murder-Thought
- Traces of Mischief: A Bisected Left Kidney
- Traces of Mischief: Ruined Left Hand
- Uncoupled: Strength
- Wooden Door (held)
- The Majordomo: ?
- The Winding Path of Inspiration: the Armor of God
- The Winding Path of Inspiration: A Master's In Chemistry
- The Winding Path of Inspiration: A Sliver of Perfection!
- The Winding Path of Inspiration: The Beauty of the Material
- Tower of the Mind: Endless Well of Mystery
- Induced Lucidity: A Garden Well-Tended
- Elongated Affairs: Enemy of the New State
- Doomstones: ?
- A Place In History: Taking Offense
- Anglefork Castle: the Great Serpent
- The Obsolete Class: Suggested Victims
- 2 rats, crushed
- 1 rat, strangled
- 1 rat, live
- Touch of Flame: the Second Degree
- Travels In The Fourth Dimension: Sunday ± 2 Days
- The Impromptu Prophecy: There's A Mountain Higher Than We Knew
- The Voracious Dark: Three Connections Given
- The Good Doctor: A Recommendation
- Labyrinths of Anglefork: Suspended Above
- Body Count: 3
- Wounds: 2
Thomas Minstep, Insurance Agent
- A Word: ABSENCE
- Traces of Mischief: Nausea's Depths
- A Bowl, Black and Knobby
- Anglefork Castle: From Another Time, Another Land
- Gross Incandescence: Partly Illuminated
- Tight Leather Pants (worn, wet)
- Incredibly Tight Blue Dress (worn, mutilated, mildly provocative)
- Travels In The Fourth Dimension: Saturday, July 24th, 409 S.D.
- The Majordomo: Busy Morning
- The Good Doctor: House Call
- The Queen's Guard: Space Among The Ranks
- Make A Man Out Of You: A Less Instructive Approach
- The New Queen: Strategic Meeting
- Tower of the Mind: Advice Given
- The Obsolete Class: Let Them Be
- Cruelty-Free Foods: Treats Survived
- Body Count: 2
Oscar Wilde, Chemistry Teacher
- A Word: REVELATION
- Wounds: 1
- 1 rat, skinless and smoked
- 6 gp
- Poor Misshapen Dice
- Lock of Hair (unidentified)
- Iron nail, unused
- An Inauspicious Key
- Burlap Foot Wrappings (worn)
- Burlap Hand Wrappings (worn)
- Moth-Eaten Hat (worn)
- Respectable Brown Skirt (worn)
- Old Brown Waistcoat (worn)
- Bright Yellow Tunic (worn)
- Blue Shards of a Probable Bottle
- Blue Glass Shiv
- A Wealth of Burlap Ribbons
- An Obsolete Class: Trustworthy Individual
- The Flip Side: A Strange Day In The Making
- The Doom Guard: the Inquisition
- Tower of the Mind: An Interruption
- A Frightening Door: An Understanding
- The Voracious Dark: Backed Away
- The Winding Path of Inspiration: The Measure
- The One They Fear: A Desperate Plea
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Topic: Our Salvation: It Is Written (Read 258771 times)