Update 4: Lots And Lots Of ShriekingYou lie back down and try to relax, which isn't difficult on this
super soft bed for actual people. The cramping doesn't go away, but you drift off nonetheless. When you wake, you're able to eat delicious food, take a sumptuous bath, and otherwise behave like a human for a while. You also find that your dress has been cleaned and mended as well as could be expected, which is to say it's plastered with ugly brutish stitches instead of open gashes you might be able to pass off as alluring.
You know, objectively, that this place is survivable at best; the sheets are linen rather than silk, the bathtub is roughly cut base stone, the food is commoner fare. But after your ordeal, anything even approaching acceptable feels like a divine gift, so you don't mind indulging in faint scraps of comfort as though it were proper.
Finally, it's time to strike out into the world again. You don't want to, but you know that if you don't you'll be dragged screaming into whatever those charlatans have cooked up on their own.
You decide, after some careful thought, that your most pressing business is finding a proper architect for the structure. The cramps have gotten worse, but it's still bearable and you doubt it will prove a bigger issue than letting those beasts play at designing things.
[Seduction: 80/64]
+1 SeductionYour first attempt is in the inn's common room, where a scattering of upjumped peasants prove utterly uninterested in conversation. You manage to pry the mayor's name and location out of them, but even then only to be rid of you.
Unfortunately the mayor is 'very busy' at the moment, so you huff at his seneschal instead.
[Flattery: 38/58, pass]
Fawning over his importance to the mayor who is also very important finally gets you an audience. You find the mayor sitting in an acceptably furnished room within an acceptably furnished manor, for his station. He's short, rotund, and unusually clear-eyed for a peasant doofus, all of which makes you hesitant to try out your feminine wiles on him.
[Flattery: 41/58, pass]
It makes you want to vomit, but you convince him his town- and therefore his person- is the premiere staging point for the, and you wish you had not been able to make this up- 'Rising Star of the West'. If a playwright had penned that you'd have had him exiled to the Maw, but it works. The mayor offers to set you up with some of his contacts, so as to ensure the wilderness hovel vaguely near his town is properly magnificent and doesn't fall over.
With the future of the structure's design handled, you briefly inquire about laborers. The mayor shakes his head at this, insisting the town never has enough able-bodied workers. Apparently this place serves as a staging area for the little lumber mills, farms, hunting camps, and general riffraff establishments in the surrounding wilderness. As such, they're constantly cycling good workers around various places, and who goes where is largely between the peasants and the other peasants. The mayor and various other intermediaries serve some administrative and legal functions, but outside specific grievances they do not control anyone or thing directly.
You remark on the backwardsness of this arrangement, but the mayor just shrugs, somewhere between being used to it and finding advantages in it, you suspect. You then make the obvious inquiry- if one were willing to pay more, could laborers be routinely found then? The answer is another shrug and very mercenary yes- as he mentioned, the peasants do as the peasants do, so there's nothing stopping someone from swooping in with a better offer. He gives you a few starting contacts, but emphasizes that this is largely a labor town- if you want laborers, you should cast a wide net and see what's dredged up.
Your business with the mayor concluded, you set out to follow his advice and find yourself some workers. The cramping has gotten bad enough that you need to bend over and take a few deep breaths every so often, but not bad enough that you can't charm filthy animals into performing manual labor for your other filthy animals. Besides, maybe if you're lucky it'll transform you into a toad or werewolf or something that feels at home being dragged screaming through the woods for days at a time.
That was a joke. If that hag transforms you into anything you'll boil her in her own witch's cauldron, which in retrospect you probably saw in their stupid work-room.
[Seduction: 48/65, pass]
[Flattery: 22/58, pass]
[Eavesdropping: 67/30, fail]
[Torture: 34/30, fail]
[Vile Sorcery: 65/30, fail]
+1 Eavesdropping, Torture, Vile SorcerySure enough, you locate a
lot of laborers walking around, drinking in taverns, purchasing things in shops, and generally doing peasant things in peasant places. To the surprise of exactly no one, your flattery and flirtations instantly melt most of them, while your other talents are... less effective. Still, you round up a nice collection of potential flunkies to suggest to your larger, more aggressive flunkies.
Bigtorch
A rather handsomely roguish looking fellow leading a gaggle of restless workers. Supposedly they're big on hard work for hard payoff, largely being disinterested in their current form of honest labor. Most them instead seek to launch themselves to better things using this money and experience, and so are more amenable to unpleasant conditions so long as they're properly compensated. Their leader is also apparently interested in elegant young noblewomen, because you were able to get him to give you a better deal and more thorough appraisal of their abilities by flirting with him. Apparently their work is good in general, but their members do sometimes wander off or perform unwise gambits, especially if they've been with the group for a while and so are closer to being burned out or accomplishing all they wanted to.
Topnotch
A muscular grey-bearded man who claims to run a guild of some sort. He and his band pride themselves on their superior workmanship, which made it a simple matter to flatter him into practically begging you for a chance to build your precious castle. His workers are expensive but skilled, and they're relatively hardy but have little patience for employers who allow dangerous or needlessly difficult working conditions.
Pigfeed
You try to listen in on some boasting and scheming, but are apparently not very subtle about it. You end up pulled into the embrace of a pirate and rogue who has clearly never heard of personal space, hygiene, or being hanged in the town square for groping a noblewoman. You eventually manage to learn that his band of rogues are hardened thugs with no morals, and thus ideal for harsh or illegal projects. When you finally pry yourself out of his filthy grip, you reflect on how ideally suited they'd be for the pig woods, since you wouldn't have to worry about them being eaten. Both because it's less likely and because it'd be doing you a favor.
Heartbreak
You somehow end up with a farmboy following you around like a puppy. Already as seduced as he's going to get, you instead resort to twisting his ears to spill the beans. He shockingly reveals his family tends towards menial labor, and confesses his extended contacts form a rather large but unofficial laborer group. He doesn't have much authority to negotiate for them on the whole- no one does- but under appropriate persuasion rats out their exact financial situation (hint: they're peasants, they don't have one) and tastes (hint: see previous). You suspect they'd make a disorganized but otherwise cost-efficient group, since they don't have the contacts or structure to demand higher wages or special treatment.
Upjump
You locate a stuck-up good-for-nothing harlot with ambitions above her station, but whose father runs an actual mason's guild. You sort of get into an argument with her over which of you owes the other appropriate respect, advance to trying to curse each other with foul magic, and end up on the ground trying to breathe and see again because unlike this forest hag you are not very good with dark magic. From there, you learn the worthless tart thinks she's special because her father has a great deal of money and her mother is a witch who eats children. Her father also owns the aforementioned mason's guild, which is small but more skilled in the direct stonework aspects than most of the laborers you'd find elsewhere. She boasts that she'd be willing to arrange a deal if you needed a hovel to cower in.
Laborers located, you take a moment to double over in... something. It's not pain exactly, or some of it is but most is something else. Cramps worked for a while, but there's more to it than that either. You'd say
hunger (damn that witch!) but it's not that all the way or all the time either. So you feel 'strange' and it's gotten to the point where you think you have to deal with it.
You try to think of ways to handle this, maybe foul sorcery to use on it or where to find that damned bat. You find it hard to focus, your mind drifting towards how nice it'd be to press yourself against a handsome man, maybe gnaw on his delicious flesh-
. . .
. . ."The hungeeeeeeeeer," a familiar voice warbles at you from nearby. You lunge immediately, but she's too far away to catch in one motion, so you end up flopping onto the ground.
"WHAT," you shriek at the top of your lungs,
"DID YOU DO TO ME?!""It's the hungeeeeeeeeeer," she says again, hobbling back with infuriating agility as you scramble after her.
"You must absorb the mystic strength of men, by harvesting their potent seed or feasting upon their delicious flesh. Only then will you gain the power you seek.""WHAT POWER?! I DIDN'T WANT ANY POWER! I'LL WRING YOU LIKE A CLOTH! IDIOT! CHARLATAN! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!"The nearby peasants wisely give a wide but disinterested berth to a noblewoman scrambling on all fours after a crazy old hag hopping backwards. You find that despite your earlier discomfort, having a coherent goal like
strangling that godsdamned hag makes you feel surprisingly agile and tireless.
Eventually, you apparently cover enough ground to reunite with the group, because you hear your stepfather trying to reason with that miserable witch.
"Gurdy no. Gurdy why! Gurdy this is exactly what Nala keeps talking about.""The hungeeeeeeeeeer~""Agh, Gurdy! I know we talked about this, but we never decided on it! What if we want her to be something other than a witch?""The hungeeeeeeeeeeeeer~"Your stepfather just sighs as you continue to chase the crone around in circles.
The Only Cure (pick any number):A. Loss Of Virtue: There is no possible way you can
eat people. That leaves debasing yourself with vile commoners, or at least looking into the possibility of debasing yourself with vile commoners. Maybe you could find someone halfway respectable? It's probably too much to hope for a handsome wandering knight willing to do anything to save you from the grip of vile sorcery and then marry you to preserve your honor.
B. To Serve Man: There is no way you can lose your virginity; your marriage prospects are in a shallow grave as is, you can't afford to add being a slut on top of that. That leaves... uh... maybe... maybe if you didn't eat all of them, or... could you find a condemned criminal or something? Just, you know, it's not immoral to... perform cannibalism... if there's no other way, right...?
C. Third Option: There's another way out of this, you just know it. You also know that if it was any better than the previous two your stepfather wouldn't be so upset with his pet lunatic. You also know that there is no possible way for you to perform either of the aforementioned unthinkable acts, so this is it.
D. Tough It Out: They're called 'unthinkable' because normal people can't even think of them, let alone do them, so you're just going to have to live with it! 'Incurable,' pah! Nothing's incurable when you're this noble and have literally no other options! What's the worst- you don't want to finish that sentence.
Crime And Punishment (pick any number):A. Beat Her With A Stick: That crone cursed you! Demand she be beaten, thrown in a gibbet,
something to punish her inexcusable offense!
B. Gimme Stuff: That hag hexed you! Demand you receive money, special treatment,
something to compensate you for her inexcusable trespass!
C. Pity Party: That bat bedeviled you! Cry like a baby in order to generate sympathy, hoping it'll pay dividends later.
Grand Designs (pick any number):A. In The Bag: Smugly inform them that you've got several potential architects lined up, which should convince them to use one at all.
B. You Said It: Try to persuade one or more of them to have the idea to use an architect, at which point you can know of some leads.
C. Gonna Cost You: Offer to find them an architect... for a price. If it works, you'll get paid for making the project not a failure. If it fails, the project will be a failure!
D. Design By Committee: Try to figure out what each of them actually wants in their structure. While this won't help you directly as much, it'll help you select the right architect for the job.
Middle Management (pick any number):A. Bigtorch: Recommend the risk-taking laborers you buttered up by seducing their leader.
B. Topnotch: Recommend the high-quality laborers you buttered up by flattering their leader.
C. Pigfeed: Recommend the hardened laborers you found by eavesdropping on their leader.
D. Heartbreak: Recommend the numerous laborers you found by torturing their leader. Well, one of their number, which is as much of a leader as they have.
E. Upjump: Recommend the focused laborers you found by using vile magic on their leader. Well, the pompous slut her buffoon of a father allows to function as leader.
Exile Alicia Denrose Nithrilium Addoir-Tarkon
Poor Health, Horrible Unknown Condition
Shattered And Then Ground Into A Fine Dust Morale
-
10+1 Diplomacy
10 Conversation
41+3 Seduction
10+1 Court Manners
36 Flattery
0 Administration
0 Organization
1 Bookkeeping
10 Intrigue
10 Sneaking
11 Eavesdropping
10 Coercion
11 Torture
10 Knowledge
10 Sorcery
11 Vile Sorcery
-
Stitched Cornflower Blue Tight Silk Dress [+1 Court Manners, +3 Seduction]
Fine Copper Turquoise Necklace [+1 Diplomacy]
Author
Topic: [SG] Stepdaughter to Adventure [Update 5: Dealing With Devils] (Read 2618 times)