Well, you WERE running low on drider venom. Best to get the stuff you can, although you suspect that it’ll be hard to even find the desired victims among the piles of rot. You’ve got more than enough artificial rot that you can make all manner of fun stuff later, although you’ll keep one vial of the stuff around for research purposes. Dedicating all your resources towards poisoning and killing your opponents is fun for a while, but soon that becomes boring. Especially when the amount of research subjects dry up. It’s better to look into the different types of poison, rot and diseases. It occurs to you that you should probably grab some leather gloves soon, considering that artificial rot harkens back to diseases rather than the known flora and fauna poisons you spent the last four years on. You look from corpse to corpse, trying to find something unusual about the wounds. Any type of extensive slashing is ignored outright. At one point, you see a survivor, doing her best to close the wound on her stomach. It’s a valiant effort, you admit. Gut wounds take a while to kill their victims, and with some proper care this lady could probably be saved.
The orcs would likely do so, to try and talk her out of going with the cult, assuming she even speaks the language. She’s trying to crawl away now that you came close, of course. Your half-lidded eyes and pale complexion hardly inspire confidence in survival, but usually she’d be in good hands indeed. Eveline would probably save her, even if it was just to interrogate her. The tin woman would interrogate her, and let her crawl away. Goodie two-shoes would fix her up and help the orcs in talking her out. The drider- Sydney, you mentally correct yourself, would… It’s hard to tell, really. She has a VERY strong dislike towards all cultists, but when they’re crawling so pitifully, leaving a little trail of blood like this? She may show mercy. That uncertainty is what makes her so intoxicating to you.
You pull out your little scalpel from your boot. It’s not a big blade, but unbelievably sharp. You’ve done your fair share of autopsies at the tower, and the Order of the Blighted Beak was glad to see you coming. You may not be a necromancer, but your knowledge of what makes a body tick made you rather popular. Well, it’s more accurate to say you knew what made it STOP ticking. A little grin appears on your face as the cultist keeps pleading something… You can’t understand her weird little language. On a whim, however, you decide to take her mask off. The second the mask is off, her guttural black speech is transformed into a weaksounding common tongue. She’s speaking orcish right now, the modern type in the cities. She’s pleading for her life, promising that she understands her mistake. She’ll go back to her mother, help out the farm, bla bla bla…
A quick strike to her jugular. You don’t need to cut too deep to reach it. You cut her windpipe open while you’re at it, to prevent the screaming. You had your hand on her mouth of course, to stop her from yelling. You don’t need the extra attention. You keep the mask, though. The metal looks rough and simple, but you’ve never seen anything quite like it. It reminds you of bronze, in a way, but it looks discoloured. It’s a dull, ugly thing, though. It uses simple straps to keep it attached to the face. It looks like a human skull, with a circular crown over it. At set distances, you can see some kind of ray head towards the head. You don’t fully understand what it represents, but it should prove interesting to melt. You’ll need a lot of time to get that stuff to melt, but your little burner should be able to handle it. You click your tongue in annoyance when you notice the little cultist bled on your boots. While you are fairly prepared for that, you only have so much of that cleaning product, and you need to get that done soon before the blood dries entirely. You’ll get it done later. It’s a little bit of a shame, though, she was a pretty girl. The textbook example of a pretty farmgirl, fairly toned and built big. It’s no wonder she thought she could make it in a violent cult. But strength does not make a warrior. Besides, women need to work far harder for the strength a man can just about expect. Far better to invest in brains.
You look around a little more, to see if you can’t find some sort of stabbed corpse. You saw Sydney’s new stinger, it should be rather deep stings. You suspect that it’s less for poison and more for stabbing, but she is most certainly a black widow type drider. Fairly common, all things considered, but the poison varies from “horribly lethal” to “cooking ingredient”. You hope it’s worth the time it will take to extract some of the stuff. You’ll need to grab one of your biggest syringes and drain a ton of blood. Usually, blood takes on a more black hue when exposed to poison, but even that’s not sure… Considering her experience, you already know the commercially available drider venom (from the Sydney-esque driders, most certainly) will differ from hers. You lick your teeth as you stick the massive needle inside the most promising corpse thus far. He died in the middle of a pile-up, from what you can tell, and he bears MANY different stab wounds. The syringe fills up with all sorts of fluids, and it takes three tries before you get a clean shot without unneeded bits. The blood looks discoloured. Then again, he has been dead for a while. Most likely long enough for some discoloration to happen naturally. Although… The colour is off even for rot, so you suspect you have at least some of the stuff in there. You’ll have to split the stuff, and hope it doesn’t bind too tightly to the blood itself. But, those are issues for later. Two more vials filled with potential fun, and you’re done with these corpses. There are no other survivors around, so you don’t need to worry about any other loose ends.
The rest of the group seems to have decided on what to do with Sydney. The shaman is bellowing something in tribal orcish, and all the other orcs come crawling out of the woodwork to carry the drider away. You walk up to Eveline, and tap her on the shoulder before asking what’s going to happen. She explains in a concise manner that the group will stay the night so Sydney can return to normal. Since the vampirism, it takes a bit longer for her to get out of this kind of thing. You talk to Evi about what other experiments were done with your new favourite drider, and you regret that you never looked into her more at the tower. The fact that she actually was a test subject for a living means you could have done a LOT her, but alas, you only saw her as a way to manipulate Eveline helping out for some pranks. You never suspected you could turn people into so many different varieties of barn animals, although the common Llama was the most popular. You laugh to yourself again, your teeth visible and managing to scare some orc child that was staring at you. You were born with these teeth, and by golly, do you love them. They’re sturdy, and you can bite your lip for some blood on demand. Most other alchemists need to use a knife, and those wounds leave more noticeable scars if they’re not careful. And the intimidation potential is great.
And, deep down, you think they look cute.
You’ve got a long amount of time to kill. They put Sydney is a cage, reinforced with all sorts of vines and fetishes from the shaman. You suspect it will be more than sufficient to keep her in there.
Oh! You took a look at that totem as well, but the plant things are far beyond your level. You may have the talent, but you never even bothered to train the stuff. Alchemy seemed far more interesting, and you knew enough floramancy to make that work. But, you could always ask Goodie Two-Shoes. You don’t hate her or anything, but you do think she is almost sickeningly naïve about the world. “Proper morals” don’t last that long.
You should decide on who to talk to, or the night will be long and boring
Tin WomanYou don't even know what to talk about with that lady. EvelineYou should pick something to talk about, or she'll just talk about Sydney all the time. Goodie Two-shoesYou could ask about the totem, probably. Although you really should think of something beside that, it may not take as long as you hopeSydneyShe's a little nuts right now, but...Experiment with your stuff instead of talking to somebody.Social activity is for scrubs.Stats
HP: 13/15
Mana 80/80
Items:
7 Lethal injections (random cause of death)
5 Delayed lethal injections
4 Toxic gas pouches
2 Flashy pouches
Boot Scalpel
4 Empty vials
2 Vials of artificially rotted gunk
2 Vials of unclean blood/venom mix
Custom-tooled alchemist's kit
Equipment
Soft robe
Utility belts (under the robe, contains most of the items. Around the hips and upper arms. Can be accessed with a controlled flick)
Spells
Enhance growth: accelerates the speed at which plants grow
Mutate: allows you to change the effects of the plant.
Toxic: Turns a small patch of ground toxic to the touch. Of course, it just causes some minor irritation of the skin...
EDIT: Fixed the stats and some of the text.
I will now return to the shame cube and wail like a goblin.
Author
Topic: Web of Life: A Drider's Adventure (Ended) (Read 189909 times)