Run away! No, not that way!
Aug. 23rd, 2003 12:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothTonight was Lazar's Friday game, in which all three of us demonstrated our unique abilities -- Kiet's ability to be passive aggressive, Tsuru's susceptibility to mind control, and Sophie's quick, mindless panic. Combined, our powers allowed us to steal from our employers and piss off our gods. All in a day's work for a trio of grade-school triple agents.
Before Tsuru could do anything, one of the grey walkers walked out of their room and headed down the hallway. The party followed, curious as to what it was up to and worried that it might be going to alert the people they'd heard talking through the door earlier.
When it was about to turn the last corner, Sophie decided that enough was enough, and that *one* grey walker probably couldn't stand up to her magic, not when said magic was magnified by the large mana crystal she'd just accidentally created. Asking for Flokin's help to make the spell more potent, in case it dodged, she sucked twice again her own magical strength from the stone (a tiny fraction of its total content) and poured it into a whip of flame powerful enough to incinerate a person instantly!
Unfortunately, Flokin's help, as always, came with the price of randomness -- the good news was that the spell, in addition to creating the blast of fire, toughened Sophie considerably, enabling her to take a large amount of damage without dying. The bad news was that the spell centered the blast of fire on Sophie herself, under her fireproof clothing, nearly killing her despite her increased toughness.
And the grey walker, which no one else was brave/stupid enough to attack, opened a currently nonexistant door (the door had been burned through with shadow fire to allow them entry) to let in about a hundred zombies. The grey-eyed, dirt-covered people of all races shuffled in in an orderly manner, walked carefully around the party, and returned to their abandoned, rotting rooms, out of which came the next shift to replace them.
After seeing that the zombie would not attack, Keit decided to heal Sophie at least back to consciousness. While this wasn't a mistake, as such, it was... unfortunate timing. Seeing the zombies' grey eyes panicked Sophie, and she fled to take refuge in the room with the massive glowing pit, which was the only place she saw that the zombies wouldn't enter.
After calming down a little, Sophie was able to notice that the pit was not, in fact, full of swarming bugs -- in fact, the fire at the bottom remained at the bottom, a little brighter but otherwise unchanged. She sent a smoke bird down to see what the fiery glow was, but it never came back.
Kiet knocked on the door until she let him in, and refused to heal her, in case he needed to use his magic for something else later. He tried to convince Sophie to abandon the pit, but she insisted on summoning a bird of fire to send after the bird of smoke -- figuring the smoke had been burned away (somehow) and that the fire would be immune, and this time making the spell 'maintained', meaning that instead of a duration it would continuously draw power from her, which would allow her to know if the spell was suddenly terminated.
Which it was. 'WOM' went the pit, just as it had a little earlier when, no doubt, the smoke bird was destroyed in the same manner. Whatever that manner might be.
Meanwhile, Lazarus and Tsuru were skulking about. First they snuck into one of the zombie rooms, where Tsuru found a female feriphal zombie wearing a suit of weaver silk -- something he'd been looking for for a while but hadn't been able to afford. He stripped her, and smelled her to see if she was alive... but couldn't tell. Lazarus informed him that she had no soul -- which didn't make sense. Undead were souls bound to dead bodies, while the living were souls attached normally to living bodies. Soulless bodies should just be dead, not walking around.
Next, they decided to explore the room with the sleeping Paracil past the grey walkers. Lazarus cast a spell to silence the room to avoid waking the Paracil up, and the two crept in to look for the vial. They didn't find it. They did, however, accidentally unleash a glowing yellow bird, which zipped down the hallway faster than they could follow, broke through the barred door into the pit room, flew past Sophie and Kiet, and vanished into the pit. Without a WOM.
This convinced Sophie and Kiet that it was time to leave the pit room, and they rejoined the others. A plan was concocted, sort of... rather, methods for stymieing the gray walkers without actually fighting them were discussed. They seemed to be corporeal, so a wall around them would keep them trapped, and they were supposed to have only the abilities they possessed in life, so Sophie, as a female Manis, should be able to outrun them, since all three were hannah-shaped, and no Hannah can run even half as fast as the average Manis.
So Sophie grabbed the unconscious sacrifice (whose name was Wesley) and ran out the door at top speed, while Lazarus encased them in a wall of stone five inches thick. It took them almost a minute to break through, by which time Sophie had long since discovered that they'd forgotten the key step in the plan, namely making sure that the lift was still at the bottom of the shaft.
They tried to pull it down, but they weren't even close by the time the gray walkers caught up, and Sophie was forced to flee down an unknown tunnel, hoping that she could lose the gray walkers in a loop (since they seemed to be fairly mindless) and run back to the lift, which the others would hopefully have down by that point.
She *did* eventually find a loop in the branching, twisting tunnels, but got bored waiting for the grey walkers to find her and decided to sneak out past them, since they'd obviously taken a wrong turn somewhere. Unfortunately, while she did successfully miss the ones who'd come into the maze of twisty little passages, they'd been smart enough to leave one behind guarding the main tunnel.
Sophie tried to blind the grey walker with a 'ball of smoke', but discovered to her horror that grey walkers did not actually use sight. The walker snatched Wesley back from her, and walked off into the smoke. Sophie ran out of the smoke, past the walker (which, true to its name, was taking its sweet time and actually walking), and set up a trap -- seven fire cat elementals, the most she could summon using up the rest of her daily magic, which were to pounce on and destroy the walker as soon as it emerged.
They did so. However, the walker did not have Wesley. Sophie returned, elementals in tow, her mission failed, to where the party had finally gotten the lift down. Uncertain what to do next, she consulted her tarot deck, which warned her against false friends.
Sure enough, as she tried to organize her posse of fire cats to go searching through the smoke for the other walkers and Wesley, her control over them was broken, and they ran off, hissing and crackling, into the smoke.
Sophie sulked for a while while Tsuru (mostly) opened a few more locked doors in the continuing search for the vial. They found a statue of the Argent Claw -- an insane mage from long ago, that they were studying in school, the bedrooms of the apparent leaders of this cult with the very large diamond Sophie had sold to Glick (which they were unable to steal back), the golden staff they'd stolen being enchanted by seven zombies, and finally a large underground lake with a suspicious looking waterfall.
Obviously, the first place to search was behind the waterfall, but the water this far underground was chill. Sophie offered to open a hole so they could look to check for a cave with her 'Shadow Fire' spell -- the only spell she could still cast, crystallized into her mana crystal. Actually, she could cast any spell by using up the mana crystal, but the shadow fire spell was what the crystal was designed to do and could be used at will. But anyway, the spell opened a hole in the water... filled with the steam of the evaporated water, blocking all sight.
After a tossed rock revealed that there was a cave behind the waterfall after all, Lazarus agreed to fly through the hole and check it out. A voice intoned, "You are NOT allowed to touch him!", and Lazarus came flying back out, unconscious. Kiet was spooked by the voice (whom he recognized as Lord Aberhans, the high mage of the city) and fled, using the magic he'd saved by not healing Sophie to levitate himself into the air and fly off, not stopping until he was entirely outside.
Sophie and Tsuru dragged Lazarus out of the water and resuscitated him, but he didn't remember anything except that the vial of mist was, indeed, behind the waterfall. Figuring that they couldn't give up *that* easily, they decided to send Tsuru in next -- but stayed ready to catch him if he was ejected as well.
Tsuru was not ejected. He soon leapt back out of the cavern under his own power, with the vial. "We need to go that way," he said, pointing in the opposite direction as out. "Wesley's that way. You want to rescue Wesley, right?"
Sophie and Lazarus guessed immediately that Tsuru was being mind-controlled, but they *did* want to rescue Wesley, weren't *sure* that he was being controlled, and were even less sure that they could stop him, since they were both very injured and Sophie was (more or less) out of magic. So they let him lead them to another sacrifical chamber in the maze of twisty passages Sophie had tried to lose the walkers in, with the two remaining walkers standing guard over Wesley.
Tsuru walked immediately over to the unconscious Wesley and started to open the vial over him -- but this proved to his companions that he was indeed under someone's control, and Lazarus tackled him while Sophie grabbed Wesley and ran off, pursued again by the walkers. She quickly found a section of the twisty maze that she recognized, and managed to find her way out through the smoke without taking any wrong turns, ending up back at the lift, which was still at the bottom (as Kiet had floated up the shaft under his own power).
Once Wesley was gone, Tsuru snapped out of his controlled state, and he and Lazarus headed out of the mine as well, relying on Lazarus' wings to fly over the water and up the shaft... in passing, Tsuru snatched up the golden staff 'because it's shiny!' They caught up to Sophie, and everyone (including Keit) met back up at the top of the mine, where it was pouring rain.
As they headed back to the school to return the vial, which Tsuru had put back in his pouch, and petition the teacher to revive Wesley, who Lazarus has stored in his Mappy box, Tsuru noticed that the rain was unsually heavy, and was causing an awful lot of mist, which the grey walkers could emerge from at will, almost like they were teleporting. Everyone looked at him, and started running -- Kiet and Lazarus through the air, Sophie and Tsuru on the ground -- much faster, but with a much longer distance to cover as they had to follow the roads.
Before they got a tenth of the distance, Sophie found herself being attacked by gray walkers lunging from the mist. Knowing it was only a matter of time before the mist got thick enough for them to grab her before she could run out of reach, she used her Shadow Fire materia to open a hole into the sewers (which ran down the center of all major streets), which were not misty.
The plan was to follow them to the magic school, but the magic section of the city was cut off from the rest, at least via sewer, so instead they headed for the castle to take refuge from the storm. The mist seemed unable to approach within a wide radius of the castle, so for the moment they were safe.
Tsuru remembered that Sophie had asked that they be allowed to check out the drak wings from combat class for off-hours practice, so they headed to the stables... but Sophie was too hurt (and too naturally clumsy and unskilled) to even get off the ground, so she sent Tsuru by himself, with the vial, to deliver it to their teacher while she went to the castle healer to get her burns cured.
So Tsuru arrived at the magic class first, alone, with the vial... and with a mental compulsion not to reveal that he had it. So he told the teacher that the person they'd been following had gotten away, and that they'd explored the underground temple but hadn't found the vial... and Kiet and Lazarus arrived, with Wesley, whom the teacher immediately took off to the lab to try to revive. Kiet saw that Tsuru and Lazarus seemed to be handling things and wandered off almost immediately, and Lazarus was more concerned with Wesley's state than with the vial, assuming that Tsuru had already turned it in.
By the time Sophie finally straggled in, Tsuru had had plenty of time to work mischief, under the direction of... someone.
last session next week
I'm guessing that it's the Argent Claw in the vial mind-controlling Tsuru, and that the voice that spooked Kiet was the high mage protecting Lazarus from the same mind control, as Lazarus is the son of one of his colleagues.
Before Tsuru could do anything, one of the grey walkers walked out of their room and headed down the hallway. The party followed, curious as to what it was up to and worried that it might be going to alert the people they'd heard talking through the door earlier.
When it was about to turn the last corner, Sophie decided that enough was enough, and that *one* grey walker probably couldn't stand up to her magic, not when said magic was magnified by the large mana crystal she'd just accidentally created. Asking for Flokin's help to make the spell more potent, in case it dodged, she sucked twice again her own magical strength from the stone (a tiny fraction of its total content) and poured it into a whip of flame powerful enough to incinerate a person instantly!
Unfortunately, Flokin's help, as always, came with the price of randomness -- the good news was that the spell, in addition to creating the blast of fire, toughened Sophie considerably, enabling her to take a large amount of damage without dying. The bad news was that the spell centered the blast of fire on Sophie herself, under her fireproof clothing, nearly killing her despite her increased toughness.
And the grey walker, which no one else was brave/stupid enough to attack, opened a currently nonexistant door (the door had been burned through with shadow fire to allow them entry) to let in about a hundred zombies. The grey-eyed, dirt-covered people of all races shuffled in in an orderly manner, walked carefully around the party, and returned to their abandoned, rotting rooms, out of which came the next shift to replace them.
After seeing that the zombie would not attack, Keit decided to heal Sophie at least back to consciousness. While this wasn't a mistake, as such, it was... unfortunate timing. Seeing the zombies' grey eyes panicked Sophie, and she fled to take refuge in the room with the massive glowing pit, which was the only place she saw that the zombies wouldn't enter.
After calming down a little, Sophie was able to notice that the pit was not, in fact, full of swarming bugs -- in fact, the fire at the bottom remained at the bottom, a little brighter but otherwise unchanged. She sent a smoke bird down to see what the fiery glow was, but it never came back.
Kiet knocked on the door until she let him in, and refused to heal her, in case he needed to use his magic for something else later. He tried to convince Sophie to abandon the pit, but she insisted on summoning a bird of fire to send after the bird of smoke -- figuring the smoke had been burned away (somehow) and that the fire would be immune, and this time making the spell 'maintained', meaning that instead of a duration it would continuously draw power from her, which would allow her to know if the spell was suddenly terminated.
Which it was. 'WOM' went the pit, just as it had a little earlier when, no doubt, the smoke bird was destroyed in the same manner. Whatever that manner might be.
Meanwhile, Lazarus and Tsuru were skulking about. First they snuck into one of the zombie rooms, where Tsuru found a female feriphal zombie wearing a suit of weaver silk -- something he'd been looking for for a while but hadn't been able to afford. He stripped her, and smelled her to see if she was alive... but couldn't tell. Lazarus informed him that she had no soul -- which didn't make sense. Undead were souls bound to dead bodies, while the living were souls attached normally to living bodies. Soulless bodies should just be dead, not walking around.
Next, they decided to explore the room with the sleeping Paracil past the grey walkers. Lazarus cast a spell to silence the room to avoid waking the Paracil up, and the two crept in to look for the vial. They didn't find it. They did, however, accidentally unleash a glowing yellow bird, which zipped down the hallway faster than they could follow, broke through the barred door into the pit room, flew past Sophie and Kiet, and vanished into the pit. Without a WOM.
This convinced Sophie and Kiet that it was time to leave the pit room, and they rejoined the others. A plan was concocted, sort of... rather, methods for stymieing the gray walkers without actually fighting them were discussed. They seemed to be corporeal, so a wall around them would keep them trapped, and they were supposed to have only the abilities they possessed in life, so Sophie, as a female Manis, should be able to outrun them, since all three were hannah-shaped, and no Hannah can run even half as fast as the average Manis.
So Sophie grabbed the unconscious sacrifice (whose name was Wesley) and ran out the door at top speed, while Lazarus encased them in a wall of stone five inches thick. It took them almost a minute to break through, by which time Sophie had long since discovered that they'd forgotten the key step in the plan, namely making sure that the lift was still at the bottom of the shaft.
They tried to pull it down, but they weren't even close by the time the gray walkers caught up, and Sophie was forced to flee down an unknown tunnel, hoping that she could lose the gray walkers in a loop (since they seemed to be fairly mindless) and run back to the lift, which the others would hopefully have down by that point.
She *did* eventually find a loop in the branching, twisting tunnels, but got bored waiting for the grey walkers to find her and decided to sneak out past them, since they'd obviously taken a wrong turn somewhere. Unfortunately, while she did successfully miss the ones who'd come into the maze of twisty little passages, they'd been smart enough to leave one behind guarding the main tunnel.
Sophie tried to blind the grey walker with a 'ball of smoke', but discovered to her horror that grey walkers did not actually use sight. The walker snatched Wesley back from her, and walked off into the smoke. Sophie ran out of the smoke, past the walker (which, true to its name, was taking its sweet time and actually walking), and set up a trap -- seven fire cat elementals, the most she could summon using up the rest of her daily magic, which were to pounce on and destroy the walker as soon as it emerged.
They did so. However, the walker did not have Wesley. Sophie returned, elementals in tow, her mission failed, to where the party had finally gotten the lift down. Uncertain what to do next, she consulted her tarot deck, which warned her against false friends.
Sure enough, as she tried to organize her posse of fire cats to go searching through the smoke for the other walkers and Wesley, her control over them was broken, and they ran off, hissing and crackling, into the smoke.
Sophie sulked for a while while Tsuru (mostly) opened a few more locked doors in the continuing search for the vial. They found a statue of the Argent Claw -- an insane mage from long ago, that they were studying in school, the bedrooms of the apparent leaders of this cult with the very large diamond Sophie had sold to Glick (which they were unable to steal back), the golden staff they'd stolen being enchanted by seven zombies, and finally a large underground lake with a suspicious looking waterfall.
Obviously, the first place to search was behind the waterfall, but the water this far underground was chill. Sophie offered to open a hole so they could look to check for a cave with her 'Shadow Fire' spell -- the only spell she could still cast, crystallized into her mana crystal. Actually, she could cast any spell by using up the mana crystal, but the shadow fire spell was what the crystal was designed to do and could be used at will. But anyway, the spell opened a hole in the water... filled with the steam of the evaporated water, blocking all sight.
After a tossed rock revealed that there was a cave behind the waterfall after all, Lazarus agreed to fly through the hole and check it out. A voice intoned, "You are NOT allowed to touch him!", and Lazarus came flying back out, unconscious. Kiet was spooked by the voice (whom he recognized as Lord Aberhans, the high mage of the city) and fled, using the magic he'd saved by not healing Sophie to levitate himself into the air and fly off, not stopping until he was entirely outside.
Sophie and Tsuru dragged Lazarus out of the water and resuscitated him, but he didn't remember anything except that the vial of mist was, indeed, behind the waterfall. Figuring that they couldn't give up *that* easily, they decided to send Tsuru in next -- but stayed ready to catch him if he was ejected as well.
Tsuru was not ejected. He soon leapt back out of the cavern under his own power, with the vial. "We need to go that way," he said, pointing in the opposite direction as out. "Wesley's that way. You want to rescue Wesley, right?"
Sophie and Lazarus guessed immediately that Tsuru was being mind-controlled, but they *did* want to rescue Wesley, weren't *sure* that he was being controlled, and were even less sure that they could stop him, since they were both very injured and Sophie was (more or less) out of magic. So they let him lead them to another sacrifical chamber in the maze of twisty passages Sophie had tried to lose the walkers in, with the two remaining walkers standing guard over Wesley.
Tsuru walked immediately over to the unconscious Wesley and started to open the vial over him -- but this proved to his companions that he was indeed under someone's control, and Lazarus tackled him while Sophie grabbed Wesley and ran off, pursued again by the walkers. She quickly found a section of the twisty maze that she recognized, and managed to find her way out through the smoke without taking any wrong turns, ending up back at the lift, which was still at the bottom (as Kiet had floated up the shaft under his own power).
Once Wesley was gone, Tsuru snapped out of his controlled state, and he and Lazarus headed out of the mine as well, relying on Lazarus' wings to fly over the water and up the shaft... in passing, Tsuru snatched up the golden staff 'because it's shiny!' They caught up to Sophie, and everyone (including Keit) met back up at the top of the mine, where it was pouring rain.
As they headed back to the school to return the vial, which Tsuru had put back in his pouch, and petition the teacher to revive Wesley, who Lazarus has stored in his Mappy box, Tsuru noticed that the rain was unsually heavy, and was causing an awful lot of mist, which the grey walkers could emerge from at will, almost like they were teleporting. Everyone looked at him, and started running -- Kiet and Lazarus through the air, Sophie and Tsuru on the ground -- much faster, but with a much longer distance to cover as they had to follow the roads.
Before they got a tenth of the distance, Sophie found herself being attacked by gray walkers lunging from the mist. Knowing it was only a matter of time before the mist got thick enough for them to grab her before she could run out of reach, she used her Shadow Fire materia to open a hole into the sewers (which ran down the center of all major streets), which were not misty.
The plan was to follow them to the magic school, but the magic section of the city was cut off from the rest, at least via sewer, so instead they headed for the castle to take refuge from the storm. The mist seemed unable to approach within a wide radius of the castle, so for the moment they were safe.
Tsuru remembered that Sophie had asked that they be allowed to check out the drak wings from combat class for off-hours practice, so they headed to the stables... but Sophie was too hurt (and too naturally clumsy and unskilled) to even get off the ground, so she sent Tsuru by himself, with the vial, to deliver it to their teacher while she went to the castle healer to get her burns cured.
So Tsuru arrived at the magic class first, alone, with the vial... and with a mental compulsion not to reveal that he had it. So he told the teacher that the person they'd been following had gotten away, and that they'd explored the underground temple but hadn't found the vial... and Kiet and Lazarus arrived, with Wesley, whom the teacher immediately took off to the lab to try to revive. Kiet saw that Tsuru and Lazarus seemed to be handling things and wandered off almost immediately, and Lazarus was more concerned with Wesley's state than with the vial, assuming that Tsuru had already turned it in.
By the time Sophie finally straggled in, Tsuru had had plenty of time to work mischief, under the direction of... someone.
last session next week
I'm guessing that it's the Argent Claw in the vial mind-controlling Tsuru, and that the voice that spooked Kiet was the high mage protecting Lazarus from the same mind control, as Lazarus is the son of one of his colleagues.
