You open the book - being a well-designed tome of fell and terrible power, it readily opens to a page full of scrawlings it feels would be pertinent to your interests. In this case, the power to take control of this situation!
3
The shadows grin and fly in your direction as you begin to read, and converge into your form through old wounds. You feel possessed by a strange and alien energy, joints snapping and arms moving involuntarily as a dozen minor demons begin to try your body on for size.
The master of assassins has not wasted any time, and collides with you in mere seconds, covering you with yet more stab wounds that leak black blood forming delicate webbings as your bones dislocate and your form twists into a more pleasing, deadly shape to the forces animating you. Your hand forms a spike that drives itself into the man's arm - he hisses and lets go of a blade, and goes for another among his vast collection.
2
Even with the help from supernatural forces, however, he is more than a match for whatever tricks you possess, and you manage to fight him to a standstill, you accumulating increasingly grisly and seemingly ineffectual wounds at his hands, him getting grazed and occasionally lightly jabbed with the horrific weapons the demons choose to make out of you. Neither appear ready to back down.
Then Sir Ludovic stabs you through the back with his sword, and the powers animating you are momentarily distracted. It takes them a second or less to twist your head a full one hundred and eighty degrees, and then crush his head between your fingers like a hairy grape.
The Spymaster, not about to let your distraction go to waste, stabs two of his remaining daggers straight into your eyes, the meat around your bones at this point shredded and sloughing off in blackened chunks. The demons within you scream in unison, and suddenly every shadow in the clearing flows into you, shouting the Spymaster out of this plane of existence, content with wishing him away instead of wishing him dead at this point - you see nothing, but feel the plane around you melt away, and the familiar feelings and smells of Bald Mountain come flooding back in as you find yourself, blinded and bleeding from every inch of your body, deposited back into the world of the living, the Book of Hez-Shalhoub held in a death grip in your hands.
-1
The shadows flow out of you back to their realm, disgusted at the fragility of your body as you crumple to the ground, almost literally cut to ribbons and broken in every possible way.
You don't look so good, Princess Annika says conversationally, wondering if poking you with her foot wouldn't get too messy. At least you got rid of Szabo there.
Now, she says as you feel every piece of you slowly slide off every other piece, what was it you said back there? Klaatu barrada nikto? She places her hands on the Book of Hez-Shalhoub, wrenching it from your disintegrating fingers. Yeah, looks like that was it.
Anyway, you hear her shrug and start to walk away, was great working with you.
The last remaining demon in your body, perversely satisfied with this as a dramatic ending, finally lets go and permits your body to die.
257 S.I., The Bleak Mid-Winter
You are now Kalja, the lovely and charming lieutenant of Spymaster Vaskir Sitar of Ortfast. You've quite enjoyed running the home office in his stead even if you don't have the run of his office, and luckily the Queen has taken well to you presenting yourself as her go-between. Of course, you're little bit short-handed presently on account of the Spymaster taking a large proportion of the agents out to his hellmouth business, but that's just another professional challenge that gives you a chance to work that old Kalja magic. Luckily there hasn't been much in the way of troubles just yet.
7!
You walk into your office, adjacent to and much less opulent than the Spymaster's own, and are met with the sight of Princess Annika sitting back in the comfy chair you had installed a couple weeks ago.
Princess Annika, you say a little incredulously, how did you get in here?
Oh, she says, Captain Bukhar let her in. The man's quite good with a lock, as it turns out - good to see you, Kalja!
You nod back after you take a moment to regain your composure - good to see you too, Annika. How did the, er, mission go?
It was the best time she's had in her life, Annika responds, absolutely brilliant. They went in there and there were demons, Hell looks a lot like a forest, did you know, but Szabo came along, she's told you about that creepy bastard, and also his friends and there was a bit of trouble and they met the devil and it was all a very cool adventure and really made her grow as a person, she thinks. You've not lived until you've spilled a pint of your blood to rip open a hole in time and space and stood on the precipice of terrible doom. Oh yeah, and that Spymaster guy you sent off with her suddenly turned old and then filled himself with demons and got stabbed a lot by Szabo, he's kind of dead now. Sorry about that. She did get the book - sorry, the
Book though!
She unwraps a satchel in her possession, presenting the flesh-bound, blood-writ horror that is the Book of Hez-Shalhoub. You stare at it agape, and it stares back. Your hand involuntarily extends toward it, and Annika pulls it back away from you. Don't touch the book, she says, it's kind of sensitive to that. This one highwayman on the road back here tried to take it from her and woof, this one tree did things to him she's pretty sure she'll never fully unsee.
A) Annika, we need to take you and this book to the Queen right away! She's going to
flip her shit at this!
B) Brilliant! Give the Book here (you're the one who got the words for it to begin with), Annika, and stay put for now - you need to deliver this to the Queen as soon as possible!
C) Let's keep the Book under wraps for now, and get you to the Queen to present you properly before she finds out from another source.
D) Surely the Queen doesn't need to know about
everything you get up to here, right? Especially if it might compromise her safety to know about it!
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Topic: SPAMMASTER: Spymistress Kalja the Bewitched (Read 36897 times)