C: Terrain: Superdorf, Yellow Pixel
D: The use of spies: Naturegirl1999, Maximum Spin
E: The attack by fire: Stirk, King Zultan
F: High ground on town rooftops: VoidSlayer
Hurry and renew the blessing of silence now!: Superdorf, Maximum Spin, Yellow Pixel
No, don't!: King Zultan
You run off to find a suitably aligned church in which to renew your blessing of clarity before things start going topsy turvy again. After going through what feels like half of the churches in the city, you finally find one charging (!!) for substantial blessings like the Clarities. You offer up most of your wages and a cloth doll made from bits pieces of the large dress and the less fungible shinies from the Tunnel and feel a soothing stillness reassert itself over the increasingly noisy voices and thoughts as the priest recites the blessing. On the way back, you consider erecting a small shrine to the Chicken Gods back in the Tunnels and hiring a cleric to tend to it, but it'd probably be too pricey for now, and you're not sure how you'd justify the expense to the others.
Once you're back in your makeshift office, you continue planning out tomorrow's training scenario. Given the new recruits' background as purported thieves and your likely long-term stay in Inksworth, you feel it would be helpful for them to teach the Footchickens about the lay of the town and gathering information. To make it fair, you plan on randomly assigning everyone to one of two teams and essentially playing an elaborate game of capture the flag/hide and seek in the vicinity of the HQ on the first day and going out to do some more combat-focused training just outside of town (where the guards are less likely to stop the exercises) the next two days. You ponder giving them the fire lesson too but ultimately decide it's too risky for everyone involved. At dinner that evening, you describe the training plan for the next few days to a mixed reception. The Breadlambites are annoyed that the former Greenscarves get an advantage in the spying exercises, and the former Greenscarves consider the Breadlambites to be brutish yokels with more appetite for violence than pragmatism. All the locals (including the local chickens) agree that the lesson on the use of fire is incredibly risky and not of much practical use unless the Holy Exalted Order is planning to sack a village without bothering to pillage it (to which Cluck-Squawk-Cluck's response is that the correct order is to pillage
then burn). In light of this, you make sure to emphasize that both teams will be randomly selected and contain both waves of recruits, and that everyone should try to get along in order to get the best out of the training. You make a note to yourself about possibly adding trust falls at some point to help build team spirit.
The first day of training is going fairly well as Teams Brick and Block mingle and attempt to steal each others' scarves, but it devolves into a minor brawl after the more belligerent Breadlambites on both teams decide to just seize them by force after being subjected to a few hours of painfully slow waiting. A few hours in, you randomize the teams again and make sure the team members don't know anyone else's affiliation but that of their current leader. This seems to encourage the use of brains for a time until the more excitable chickens hit upon the idea of just torturing team affiliations out of everyone, at which point you call off the exercise and wonder what went wrong and where. You settle for just having everyone do target practice for the rest of the day.
The second day of training is a series of skirmishes in the nearby meadows. The former Greenscarves find themselves unable to contribute much on this front on account of their lack of training in direct combat, but they are surprisingly good at exploiting momentary inattention to devastating effect, and pelting the enemy with sticks and pebbles in spite of this ignoring things like basic non-primate anatomy, and misdirection. This exercise seems to be having a better effect on team cohesion, and the next day, you conduct the exercise in a nearby hilly forest. This inadvertently brings out the spying spirit in both teams, and they make good use of the fliers and diggers on their teams. Pleased with the results, you switch the teams' starting positions around after Team Brick occupies a small, fairly defensible hill.
The fourth day of training, at the Inksworth locals' frantic request, you give the teams colored rags instead of fire and make up a game of plant-the-flag except with "fire" rags instead of flags and give the teams tents and empty barrels of supplies to protect. Predictably, a real fire breaks out in your very real campsite, and everyone is called back to put it out. Doodle-Crow makes his displeasure at this and your training plan known, but it continues uneventfully for the rest of the day. The Order packs up and returns to the Tunnels with a small load of forage the next day to wait for the next mission.
Once back, you discover a note from Acolyte Peck saying that none of the items in the Greenscarves' hideout correspond to saintly relics belonging to nearby monasteries. Acolyte Peck goes on to list several known relics belonging to the monastery you described from an outdated catalog:
First Soil from the First Continent: A lavishly decorated urn purported to contain the first soil the gods created
The Death Cushionwife of Saint Cereus the Lesser: An embroidered cushion representing the wife of Saint Cereus the Lesser, known for his patronage of the arts
The Hand of Saint Gloriosus the Hanged: The bones of Saint Gloriosus' hand cast in wax
The Skull of Mother Scylla the Many: Said to be a skull from the celebrated Mother Scylla, who ministered to the creatures of the sea
The Finger of Saint Pampas the Silent: Finger bones from Saint Pampas the Silent, who stole sundry relics back after his home church was sacked and looted
Doodle-Crow calls a meeting with you and Goldteef about the next step. What will you suggest?
(A) More training (but what kind?)
(B) Hunt down the relic in nearby towns (Goldteef claims there aren't any other Greenscarf hideouts in Inksworth)
(C) Look for some other job (but what kind?)
Author
Topic: CHICKEN KNIGHT [SG] (Read 25711 times)