Fruitless Chase
May. 17th, 2003 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothTonight was Murdock's BESM game, which was a little less frustrating than last week's, but still saw us make no progress whatsoever, and while we had some small, localized successes, our efforts were once again ultimately futile.
It was getting late, but one of the remaining shards was stored nearby, so the party climbed onto Umbra's giant bird, went incorporeal and invisible, and snatched the shard from its safe -- there was no magical security at all, so it was child's play. So long as the child was Umbra, at least.
But then Umbra had to go back home since 'school' was ending and his father would be suspicious if he didn't show, so the organization made him up a permission slip for the upcoming 'field trip' for his father to sign, as well as a note to the school that he was going on vacation.
Sam and Nathaniel spent the night studying the available lore on the crystal and assorted native american mythology, without much success. In the morning, they took out the crystal and tried to use it to locate more shards. In a particular position, it made a faint glimmer of light appear on the wall... obviously an indicator of some sort, but one pointing up into the air (although on its way it passed through a skyscraper). Nothing suspicious was found on its path.
That left them little choice but to follow up on their other pre-existing lead -- the shard supposedly stored in a museum in Albaquerque. The shard was long gone, although with a little mind-control they managed to get a printout of what it had looked like and where it had originally been found. A locator spell managed to get a VERY faint blip from far, far outside its range, to the south, but it wasn't designed for that sort of tracking and the direction wasn't precise enough to really follow up on.
There was another magical artifact in the museum, and they tried to recover it to at least salvage something from the trip, but turning it incorporeal released a demon from the painting which they were forced to exorcise. They managed it, but that left them with nothing but paint chips and a weird melty hole in the wall.
So they decided to go back to base and bug the hell out of the prisoner and the shard they'd rescued, hoping to track the attacking werewolves back to their base. Umbra tried to mind control the prisoner, but it wasn't clear if it had worked or not, but they also attached electronic bugs to her clothing, dispatched a spirit to follow her, and scryed her movements with a locator spell. All of these methods failed when she turned a corner and jumped through a window -- a closed window, backed by a solid wall. Nathaniel recalled something about werewolves using mirrors to reach a different world called the Umbra, but the party had no way of following, or even tracking.
Worse, a premonition revealed that the remaining chunk of rock in their possession, possibly the last piece required for the werewolves' ritual, was going to be stolen soon.
Things look extremely bleak.
last week next week
A lot of how Murdock's running the game seems to be completely contradictory to the rules, usually NOT in our favor, although sometimes it is (like his ruling that generic magic level 2 lets Umbra do *anything* at level 2, often for cheaper than a specific spell). Some of it is just plain outside the rules, like the werewolf-going-through-mirror-into-spirit-world thing that is, as far as we can tell, completely impossible for us to replicate.
Maybe there's a trick to it that we can discover... but seeing as we haven't gotten even a single character point so far (and why should we have? We haven't succeeded at anything) if it's a power then we're locked out of it anyway. Well, except for Umbra, who can do anything.
It was getting late, but one of the remaining shards was stored nearby, so the party climbed onto Umbra's giant bird, went incorporeal and invisible, and snatched the shard from its safe -- there was no magical security at all, so it was child's play. So long as the child was Umbra, at least.
But then Umbra had to go back home since 'school' was ending and his father would be suspicious if he didn't show, so the organization made him up a permission slip for the upcoming 'field trip' for his father to sign, as well as a note to the school that he was going on vacation.
Sam and Nathaniel spent the night studying the available lore on the crystal and assorted native american mythology, without much success. In the morning, they took out the crystal and tried to use it to locate more shards. In a particular position, it made a faint glimmer of light appear on the wall... obviously an indicator of some sort, but one pointing up into the air (although on its way it passed through a skyscraper). Nothing suspicious was found on its path.
That left them little choice but to follow up on their other pre-existing lead -- the shard supposedly stored in a museum in Albaquerque. The shard was long gone, although with a little mind-control they managed to get a printout of what it had looked like and where it had originally been found. A locator spell managed to get a VERY faint blip from far, far outside its range, to the south, but it wasn't designed for that sort of tracking and the direction wasn't precise enough to really follow up on.
There was another magical artifact in the museum, and they tried to recover it to at least salvage something from the trip, but turning it incorporeal released a demon from the painting which they were forced to exorcise. They managed it, but that left them with nothing but paint chips and a weird melty hole in the wall.
So they decided to go back to base and bug the hell out of the prisoner and the shard they'd rescued, hoping to track the attacking werewolves back to their base. Umbra tried to mind control the prisoner, but it wasn't clear if it had worked or not, but they also attached electronic bugs to her clothing, dispatched a spirit to follow her, and scryed her movements with a locator spell. All of these methods failed when she turned a corner and jumped through a window -- a closed window, backed by a solid wall. Nathaniel recalled something about werewolves using mirrors to reach a different world called the Umbra, but the party had no way of following, or even tracking.
Worse, a premonition revealed that the remaining chunk of rock in their possession, possibly the last piece required for the werewolves' ritual, was going to be stolen soon.
Things look extremely bleak.
last week next week
A lot of how Murdock's running the game seems to be completely contradictory to the rules, usually NOT in our favor, although sometimes it is (like his ruling that generic magic level 2 lets Umbra do *anything* at level 2, often for cheaper than a specific spell). Some of it is just plain outside the rules, like the werewolf-going-through-mirror-into-spirit-world thing that is, as far as we can tell, completely impossible for us to replicate.
Maybe there's a trick to it that we can discover... but seeing as we haven't gotten even a single character point so far (and why should we have? We haven't succeeded at anything) if it's a power then we're locked out of it anyway. Well, except for Umbra, who can do anything.
