Raisin's Plan

[terrycloth]

While I was down at chahala's place for the weekend, we played a short two-person World Tree module I wrote up based loosely on sythyry's visit to Floosh's village. In the sense that it took place in an Orren village. That's really about the only similarity.

Chahala's last adventure had ended ignominously, although neither she nor her companions had been seriously injured. Another team of adventurers, or perhaps the true owners of the ruin as they'd claimed, had incapacitated them and sent them packing, treasureless.

So, after a few weeks of bumming around town, supporting herself by lifting food and such from careless shopkeepers, Chahala was quite perplexed to find an invitation asking her to return to her hometown for a holiday celebration. After all, she'd been banished from her home village eight years ago, following 'The Incident'.

Still, she had nothing better to do, and it was only a day's walk. She could have swum in the river, but given the circumstances behind her leaving the village, she decided it was better to take her weapons and armor.

On the way out of town, she pickpocketed the wrong Mherobump and 'got in a fight', although she never actually swung at him, and he never actually connected. Then, on the road, she convinced a group of cani that she was the lookout for a bandit gang to distract them from her pickpoketing. And then somehow, she got on the bad side of a water elemental.

The elemental was a tougher fight -- a spray washed her into the river while she was crossing a bridge, and she swam to the surface to recover her things (which float) at exactly the right time (for her enemy), and was frozen in the crust of ice the elemental had meant to trap her underwater to drown.

Thus followed a mostly magical battle between Chahala's aquador magics and lack of concentration, as she tried to shift back out of water form to be able to cut at the ice more effectively, and the water elemental's... well, aquador magics. Chahala had a cruel ice fairy, the elemental had a winter serpent, and... well, it was basically kicking her tail, until (after losing its serpent) it tried to finish her off by pulling her underwater to (eventually) drown, and failed to keep hold of her.

Chahala was very injured by the time she finally managed to wiggle free and swim to safety, so she healed herself and tried to parley with the elemental.

The elemental was very upset, insisting that 'you Orren' had broken a deal with it -- in return for its kidnapping the child, they were supposed to have broken the dam. Chahala, of course, had no idea what it was talking about, but filed the information away for later and fled the scene.

When she got to the village, the situation was somewhat more clear. Clearcut, that is, in a mile radius around the one-lovely orren river village, with much of the wood having gone towards a leaky, rickety dam that many of the orren seemed to be spending all their time fixing. Others were out hunting for fish, or dredging out the swamplike mess that the dam had made of half the clearcut area. The whole fiasco seemed to be directed by one 'Raisin', an orren she didn't recognize, but most of the village orren seemed quite enthusiastic, if not supremely skilled at carpentry or earthmoving.

After being given a quick tour by her mother -- who, somewhat to Chahala's surprise, was very glad to see her again -- Chahala accepted Raisin's invitation to come into his hut to see the details of his plan. Only Chahala was invited in, however -- her mother was sent off on a thin pretense.

Inside, Raisin's hut was lined with valuables and trinkets, many of which Chahala pocketed while Raisin was busy admiring her. He showed her his plan -- the artist's conception as well as the list of tasks to achieve it, with new tasks like 'ongoing dam maintenance' and 'dredge swamp into habitable pools' penned in with arrows -- and invited her to dinner that night, so that he could have her try out the recipes he intended to use for the big holiday party coming up in a couple days. She accepted with pleasure, as he was both cute and rich.

There was something odd about him, though... and sensing her suspicion, Raisin changed forms, revealing that he was also a Rassimel -- a shifter hybrid, whose heritage would allow him (he claimed) to 'overcome the Orrens' weaknesses and make this the richest Orren village on the tree'.

It was clear, talking to her mother and the others, that they didn't know he wasn't just an Orren. Still, she kind of respected him for his sneaky underhandedness, and didn't reveal his secret right away. Instead, she decided to go looking for her old friend Sallie, whose child had gone missing (presumably, taken by the elemental) and was said to be searching the woods.

Chahala didn't buy that, and interrogated a group of scruffy, lazy orren who looked like they had nothing better to do but talk to her. They tried to get her to 'drive away' Raisin so that the town could go back to normal, but she refused, and insisted that they knew more than they were saying (since they were rather poor liars). The leader admitted that they know where Sallie was, and offered to lead Chahala to meet her. She agreed, and they picked up their weapons and headed out into the woods with Chahala.

Of course, this was a trap. Literally -- they had a hidden pit that they tried to lead Chahala over, but she spotted them jumping the trigger line and balked. The leader tried to Mentador her into walking over the bad stretch of ground anyway, but he botched the spell badly, and the gods of Mentador found it most amusing for all four of the ambushers to leap into their own pit.

At the bottom of the pit was a pool full of Orren. Chahala figured that only four of them were likely bad guys, and there seemed to be more than that. Mostly, that was an optical illusion, but there were, in fact, five orren in water form at the bottom of the pool.

Chahala recognized the first four as enemies, and knocked two back into the pit. The other two got out and menaced her. She pushed one of them back down into the otter-filled splashy area, and beat down the other with her saber (nearly killing him in the process). Sallie was, in fact, the fifth otter, and tried to help, but mostly just got herself injured.

As far as the interrogation, the leader told Chahala that they had indeed kidnapped Sallie, and Sallie filled in the rest (and dumped the leader into the hole as well, so that he could see how much he liked it). She'd been trapped in that little hole for days now, ever since she started tracking down evidence that the murders were by orren, rather than by the elementals, as everyone assumed, since the very next day the elementals had started attacking.

Before being dumped, the leader whined about being a good guy and always being beaten up. Apparently, he'd had the kid kidnapped to force Raisin to halt construction, but of course Raisin had and did insist that the elementals never came to him willingly. Since he was being whiny, he was summarily dumped.

Sallie and Chahala returned to the village, and Chahala decided to bring Sallie along to her private dinner with Raisin. Raisin was quite surprised and somewhat put out to see both of them standing there, but it proved to be a wise choice, in a way -- Sallie was able to talk intelligently to Raisin about how to prepare (or whether to prepare) various foods.

But after taking a few bites of the dessert course, Chahala finally recognized the odd spice that her and Sallie's ice cream had and Raisin's own lacked. It was Wenezza. Rather than confronting him directly, Chahala forced Raisin to eat his own date rape drug... Raisin seemed confused at her insistance that he eat *her* ice cream, but readily complied.

In the morning, they all woke up in a snuggling otter-pile in a sopping wet bed, with little memory of what had gone on the night before, after the dessert course, but with enough imgination to fill in some of the blanks. Raisin politely but quickly and firmly drove Chahala and Sallie away, so he could 'work on his plans' (Chahala figured: So he could turn into a rassimel).

Since there was a whole day before the feast, Chahala decided to have as many of the orren as possible come with her to track down the rumors of an old underwater cavern someone had reportedly seen the inside of, on the pretense of catching the giant Remorshka which was supposed to live there for the feast. Sallie came along because she thought such a place might be where the elemental had stashed her child, and a few other orren seemed excited about the idea of an 'adventure', and a few more were bribeable with trinkets taken out of Raisin's hut. All in all, she got 10 orren together to go take out the Remorshka (oh, and maybe look for treasure, and maybe rescue the kid).

The Remorshka proved to be long-since dead, but was still quite frightening -- the largest Remorshka none of them had ever seen in life. The real menace came from the water elemental, although with ten orren there he was quickly driven off.

But when Chahala's party tried to surface in the second chamber, they found the air blocked by ice. Cooperating, they cut a hole in the ice, and Chahala leaped up through it... losing her armor, as the rope by which she was dragging it ('just in case') was frozen solid as the surface refroze.

But Chahala was dryable at thie point, and after switching out of water-form, she was able to use her saber to chop through the ice quickly, and pull out another orren to support her (one try in six). They found no enemy, however -- only the missing child.

A few more quick holes were quickly dug in the ice, each freezing over quickly, but with enough time between that an orren could jump through. And so they did. Thus began a running battle with the elemental to get Sallie's kid (and later, Sallie's friends) out of the water before the elemental could manage to kill anyone. This was done, then the otters returned in force to scare away the elemental and search for treasure, some of which they found in the pile of Remorshka votes. The largets trophies were a pair of volkswavon sized pincers, and a collection of the little crabs that actually still walked around looking tasty, in the water cave.

Back in the village, Raisin seemed distraught by the redundant dinner plans, and (after catching Chahala trying to steal the key to his hut) retreated to his room to sulk. Later, during the party, an airship swooped less than secretly down, held the townsfolk at bay with arrow-fire, and dragged off Raisin's entire hut.

It wasn't until the next day that the villagers realized that Raisin had been in the hut... and probably in cahoots, since Sallie had seen the rich treasure too and didn't hesitate nearly as long as Chahala to let people know. Without Raisin to drive the project, the dam fell into disrepair and eventually broke and released the river, but the village was still trashed and had to be moved even further away from the city.

Later, Chahala discovered that she was pregnant. She had no idea who the father was, at first, but when Sallie, who *hadn't* been sleeping with every male in the village, showed up pregnant as well, it was obvious that it was Raisin's kid.

This module brought to you by the letter B.