Ninja Olympics
Apr. 3rd, 2004 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothLast night we had a session of the Sci-Fi themed Shadake game I've been running. Shadarack *was* back in town; apparently he hadn't contacted anyone because he'd lost internet access while down in California and hadn't had time to get it set up again yet.
Snowwy arranged for his character to part ways with the party, since he's apparently sick of playing on Fridays. He was also very distracted during the session, several times wandering off to the back room to talk to Sandy while I was in the middle of recapping what he'd missed the last time he'd wandered off to the back room to talk to Sandy.
Shadarack said he'd play until the end of this campaign, but then he'd have to think about whether he wanted to continue with the group or go do something else on Fridays. Or, you know, move to California to be with his sugar-mommy. And of course, if he got a job that made him work early on Saturday, he'd have to stop coming immediately.
I asked if maybe we could switch to some other night of the week, since Friday was so awful for everyone, but basically the answer was 'no'. Seems most of the people have to get up really early most days of the week, and I think Snowwy might actually have to *work* the other weeknights around the time we game. Saturday and Sunday are also booked.
So it looks like we'll probably have to look for someone else by the end of this game, or try to keep playing with three.
Anyway, there was also a game...
After the incompetent ninja attack, the party surrepetitiously removed their things from their hotel room, and got a room at a different hotel, careful not to be followed. That night, Meepas and Adam were both woken up by horrible nightmares of burning agony... and Adam noticed that he couldn't feel Jackie anymore. But, strangely enough, he could feel Meepas now. Hesperius told him to go back to bed, and they could deal with it in the morning.
In the morning, they were told that Shadarack had finally been cured and released from the hospital, but he was 900k short paying his bill. Could Adam cover the rest? Adam agreed to, but then neither he or Hesperius did anything to try to contact Shadarack or, you know, go pick him up, too afraid of being ambushed by more ninjas.
So Shadarack was ejected from the hospital without any of his possessions (they'd all been destroyed, since they were contaminated), wearing nothing but a hospital gown, and with negative 900k in his account. He knew which hotel Hesperius was staying in, since they'd been in sporadic contact on the inside, so he caught a bus over to the hotel (he did have a few dozen bits in cash-equivalent currency that hadn't been destroyed).
The front door of the hotel was mostly cleaned up, but still showed some signs of the fight against the ninjas. Shadarack picked up a couple discharged ninja stars, and headed up to the room. Which was locked. Not that he had a key anyway.
The hotel staff was less than helpful ("Can I use your public phone?" "I'm sorry, our net terminal is for paying customers only." "Well, where's the nearest library?" "I'm sorry, but our concierge services are for paying customers only."), so he wandered out onto the streets at random, looking for something to help.
Instead, he found a black limosine with tinted windows, which started following him around, then tried to run him over. He managed to dart through the door of a nearby coffee shop, though, and for the price of a cup of coffee, got access to a net terminal, which he used to call Jackie. "We're sorry, but this account is out of service because the account owner is deceased. Please leave a message, which will be delivered to his next of kin." So he called Adam instead.
Adam still wouldn't come out to pick him up (not wanting to be seen by ninjas, and not trusting the dragon spirit in his van to warn them if someone had planted bugs or bombs), but wired him cab fare, at least. So Shadarack caught a taxi, and was immediately followed by the evil black limosine.
"Driver, can you lose him?" Shadarack asked.
The cab didn't have a driver, exactly, and the rat spirit bound as its autopilot responded that it was bound to obey all traffic laws. But it'd give it a try.
It took a while, but the spirit *was* a rat, and knew some sleazy loopholes and little known technicalities that let it pull some clever tricks, and they managed to lose their tail without even speeding. The cab fare was a little more than anticipated, but Shadarack was happy to pay. The rat dropped him off in the alley behind the hotel.
So the party was together again, except for Jackie, and they compared notes and filled each other in on what had transpired. This is when they discovered that Meepas could talk, now. Adam called the spirit mage they'd gone to the day before and asked him what the hell is up with that, and after describing the symptoms was told that it was a clear case of soul-entanglement, and that there was probably nothing they could do to get Jackie himself back without killing Meepas at this point. And since Meepas was intelligent enough to talk, now, tearing his spirit apart to get Jackie back would require his consent.
So the question was, who would tell Kirin? Everyone had their reasons not to, so Karada, disgusted with all the excuses, appeared and went to do it herself. She found Kirin hooked up to a ludicrously complicated computer setup, not acting entirely sane. She took Jackie's death remarkably well, in the sense that rather than lashing out or sinking into depression, she made some vague pronouncement about having discovered 'the secret', and sucked all the 'computers' into herself and vanished 'into the net'.
Meepas and Hesperius heard her stalking out of the hotel; her 'Nobody Home' illusion wasn't that good. But they realized that as a proper Illiski, she probably wouldn't be willing to acknowledge anyone's presence until she believed she existed in the physical world again. Meepas put a tracking spell on her so that he could find her, if he needed.
The meeting with the people from the museum and the university to sell the martian artifacts wasn't until the next day, but they were contacted by the Constantines and asked to come to the family estate in New Skypass if they were interested in a job. Martian airport security, at least for the suborbital shuttles, was bad enough that they managed to get on the plane under assumed names, without showing ID, carrying all their weapons.
The Constantine mage who briefed them told them that the family needed to hire someone secretly to go to Luna to investigate and resolve the beurocratic mess that was keeping them from getting their recently completed prototype out of drydock. The company they were dealing with wouldn't tell them where the ship was being kept -- there were 347 drydocks large enough to handle a ship of their specifications -- and Luna's financial system had apparently decided that it was in everyone's best interests if the Constantines were kept off the moon, because any of their known agents were attacked or mysteriously vanished just after setting foot on Luna, and the computer didn't seem to have any interest in punishing the assailants.
So with Adam's experience with the odd Lunar financial system -- where money was outlawed, and security cameras were everywhere recording and analyzing everything that happened in order to track who owed who how much of a favor -- and the party's generally loose association with the Constantines, they should be able to figure out what was going on and retrive the prototype.
Adam was despondant about Jackie's death, however, and refused the mission. "Wipe my memory if you want, and I'll leave." So the mage did, and Adam got to wait outside in the hall while the others were given the names of the contacts the Constantines had been working with, and the corporation that supposedly had their ship, and other details like the command codes for the ship. Their passage to Luna would of course be paid, and when would they want to leave?
The party arranged to set off the next night, after the meeting they'd arranged to sell the martian artifacts, and the deal was sealed. On the way back to New Quahog, they saw an ominous pink glow on the horizon, from the general direction of the mines.
The next day was spent getting ready for the presentation. The delegation from the Venusian museum arrived an hour early. He was a somewhat scatterbrained procyonisk, who seemed fascinated by the artifacts and not entirely competent in martian archaeology. The other delegation, an imperious (if tiny) feriphal and her soft-spoken drakivolki servant arrived on time, and Shadarack gave his spiel.
The feriphal asked probing questions -- obviously, she *did* know what she was talking about -- and eventually had her servant set up a device to send out a tiny pulse of the same type and frequency as the martians used for their broadcast power, as an initial test of the devices' authenticity. The devices lit up for a second, and quivered...
...and there was a wet squelching noise as the two halves of the Venusian plopped to the ground.
Meepas wasted no time leaping to heal him, reattaching his severed guts before he had the chance to die, while Hesperius summoned armor and weapons, and the feriphal scurried under the bed to hide (they were too cheap to rent a proper conference room, and were holding the presentation in a hotel room in yet another hotel). While the assailant was invisible, he wasn't completely silent, and Hesperius heard him coming in time to dodge out of the way of his second attack.
After that, Jackie -- who managed to spot the ninja even when he wasn't rushig to attack -- tried to faerie-fire the invisible attacker, but the spell was parried and sliced to bits by an invisible sword. Hesperius tried a much easier spell along the same lines, and splattered everything in the room with glittering, fractal-patterned, shimmering paint. That spell wasn't parried, and left the ninja all too visible.
The ninja was not prepared to face a room full of mages 'naked', and sliced a hole in the outer wall of the building, then leaped out and flew off, being a drakivolki and therefore having wings to fly with. Hesperius flung off a couple shots at him, which bounced off his PPF, and Shadarack tried to throw the discharged ninja stars after him, but he'd never bothered to recharge them, and they ended up plummeting towards the ground, where they took out some confused motorist's windshield.
Meepas, on the other hand, summoned up a gust of wind, which disarmed the ninja of his sword and sent it flying back to thunk into the ground at his feet. The disarmed ninja flew around a building and disappeared.
The feriphal from the university was livid, accusing the party of being in league with the attackers until she calmed down enough to listen to reason. At which point she called the cops. The local cops, a pair of drakivolki, arrived a bit later, after the paint spell had faded, and confiscated a sample of blood from the crime scene, and the expensive-looking sword, as evidence.
After negotiating a price for the Venusian to buy a few pieces for his display, and for the university to put in escrow pending verification of the other artifacts' authenticity, Hesperius and Adam led them downstairs to escort them to their car. Where they saw a second cop car investigating the death of the cops from the first cop car. Apparently, the ninja had come back for his sword. Hesperius turned the whole group invisible (with an area-of-effect illusion of invisibility centered on himself) and they snuck out towards their rental car.
Meanwhile, someone knocked on the door of the apartment where Shadarack and Meepas were cleaning up the mess. Meepas flew over to the peephole to look out, but so no one in the hallway... and as soon as his eye came up to the peephole, a sword slid through the door and opened a hole exactly where his vitals would have been if he was a hannah or the like instead of a tiny flying squirrel. And in came the ninja, again.
The main duel was between Meepas and the ninja, this time, and they seemed relatively evenly matched, in the sense that neither could do much to hurt the other (Meepas kept dodging, and the ninja had a PPF). The ninja kept wasting time killing Shadarack (who tried to attack with a lamp) over and over again, but not being able to finish the job because (a) Meepas kept healing him, and (b) Shadarack was just too goddamn lucky to die.
Eventually, the ninja sliced open another hole in the wall of the hotel room, as if to escape, but Meepas didn't fall for that trick, and wasn't surprised when a few seconds later he was attacked again, this time with throwing darts. Hesperius, who'd managed to get the scholars to their cars safely, noticed the hole he'd patched re-open, and rushed back up to take care of business again. Or at least to re-paint the ninja again.
Between Hesperius and Adam and Meepas, the ninja was slain, and his body fell to the ground in the hallway. At which point Adam's danger sense started going off like a klaxon. "Guys, we should run away, NOW."
So they did. Meepas took the time to disarm the dead ninja of his sword, and nearly got caught in the massive explosion that took out half the hotel, as the ninja's body detonated.
"You see a symbol on the sword's hilt -- five linked rings, all different colors. White, Black, Green, Red, and Blue."
"Oh no! We killed the olympic ninja team!"
A few hours later, they caught the shuttle up to the Artican that would take them to Luna, not unhappy to be leaving Mars behind. On the way, Adam (who was heading to the Earth's surface instead, to try to find his old friends from a decade ago when he'd first appeared from Xanth) planned to give Shadarack some self-defense lessons with the ninja sword, so that he'd wouldn't have to feel quite as useless in combat. With learning drugs, the 13 hour trip would be plenty long enough to impart a good working knowledge.
last session next session
Snowwy arranged for his character to part ways with the party, since he's apparently sick of playing on Fridays. He was also very distracted during the session, several times wandering off to the back room to talk to Sandy while I was in the middle of recapping what he'd missed the last time he'd wandered off to the back room to talk to Sandy.
Shadarack said he'd play until the end of this campaign, but then he'd have to think about whether he wanted to continue with the group or go do something else on Fridays. Or, you know, move to California to be with his sugar-mommy. And of course, if he got a job that made him work early on Saturday, he'd have to stop coming immediately.
I asked if maybe we could switch to some other night of the week, since Friday was so awful for everyone, but basically the answer was 'no'. Seems most of the people have to get up really early most days of the week, and I think Snowwy might actually have to *work* the other weeknights around the time we game. Saturday and Sunday are also booked.
So it looks like we'll probably have to look for someone else by the end of this game, or try to keep playing with three.
Anyway, there was also a game...
After the incompetent ninja attack, the party surrepetitiously removed their things from their hotel room, and got a room at a different hotel, careful not to be followed. That night, Meepas and Adam were both woken up by horrible nightmares of burning agony... and Adam noticed that he couldn't feel Jackie anymore. But, strangely enough, he could feel Meepas now. Hesperius told him to go back to bed, and they could deal with it in the morning.
In the morning, they were told that Shadarack had finally been cured and released from the hospital, but he was 900k short paying his bill. Could Adam cover the rest? Adam agreed to, but then neither he or Hesperius did anything to try to contact Shadarack or, you know, go pick him up, too afraid of being ambushed by more ninjas.
So Shadarack was ejected from the hospital without any of his possessions (they'd all been destroyed, since they were contaminated), wearing nothing but a hospital gown, and with negative 900k in his account. He knew which hotel Hesperius was staying in, since they'd been in sporadic contact on the inside, so he caught a bus over to the hotel (he did have a few dozen bits in cash-equivalent currency that hadn't been destroyed).
The front door of the hotel was mostly cleaned up, but still showed some signs of the fight against the ninjas. Shadarack picked up a couple discharged ninja stars, and headed up to the room. Which was locked. Not that he had a key anyway.
The hotel staff was less than helpful ("Can I use your public phone?" "I'm sorry, our net terminal is for paying customers only." "Well, where's the nearest library?" "I'm sorry, but our concierge services are for paying customers only."), so he wandered out onto the streets at random, looking for something to help.
Instead, he found a black limosine with tinted windows, which started following him around, then tried to run him over. He managed to dart through the door of a nearby coffee shop, though, and for the price of a cup of coffee, got access to a net terminal, which he used to call Jackie. "We're sorry, but this account is out of service because the account owner is deceased. Please leave a message, which will be delivered to his next of kin." So he called Adam instead.
Adam still wouldn't come out to pick him up (not wanting to be seen by ninjas, and not trusting the dragon spirit in his van to warn them if someone had planted bugs or bombs), but wired him cab fare, at least. So Shadarack caught a taxi, and was immediately followed by the evil black limosine.
"Driver, can you lose him?" Shadarack asked.
The cab didn't have a driver, exactly, and the rat spirit bound as its autopilot responded that it was bound to obey all traffic laws. But it'd give it a try.
It took a while, but the spirit *was* a rat, and knew some sleazy loopholes and little known technicalities that let it pull some clever tricks, and they managed to lose their tail without even speeding. The cab fare was a little more than anticipated, but Shadarack was happy to pay. The rat dropped him off in the alley behind the hotel.
So the party was together again, except for Jackie, and they compared notes and filled each other in on what had transpired. This is when they discovered that Meepas could talk, now. Adam called the spirit mage they'd gone to the day before and asked him what the hell is up with that, and after describing the symptoms was told that it was a clear case of soul-entanglement, and that there was probably nothing they could do to get Jackie himself back without killing Meepas at this point. And since Meepas was intelligent enough to talk, now, tearing his spirit apart to get Jackie back would require his consent.
So the question was, who would tell Kirin? Everyone had their reasons not to, so Karada, disgusted with all the excuses, appeared and went to do it herself. She found Kirin hooked up to a ludicrously complicated computer setup, not acting entirely sane. She took Jackie's death remarkably well, in the sense that rather than lashing out or sinking into depression, she made some vague pronouncement about having discovered 'the secret', and sucked all the 'computers' into herself and vanished 'into the net'.
Meepas and Hesperius heard her stalking out of the hotel; her 'Nobody Home' illusion wasn't that good. But they realized that as a proper Illiski, she probably wouldn't be willing to acknowledge anyone's presence until she believed she existed in the physical world again. Meepas put a tracking spell on her so that he could find her, if he needed.
The meeting with the people from the museum and the university to sell the martian artifacts wasn't until the next day, but they were contacted by the Constantines and asked to come to the family estate in New Skypass if they were interested in a job. Martian airport security, at least for the suborbital shuttles, was bad enough that they managed to get on the plane under assumed names, without showing ID, carrying all their weapons.
The Constantine mage who briefed them told them that the family needed to hire someone secretly to go to Luna to investigate and resolve the beurocratic mess that was keeping them from getting their recently completed prototype out of drydock. The company they were dealing with wouldn't tell them where the ship was being kept -- there were 347 drydocks large enough to handle a ship of their specifications -- and Luna's financial system had apparently decided that it was in everyone's best interests if the Constantines were kept off the moon, because any of their known agents were attacked or mysteriously vanished just after setting foot on Luna, and the computer didn't seem to have any interest in punishing the assailants.
So with Adam's experience with the odd Lunar financial system -- where money was outlawed, and security cameras were everywhere recording and analyzing everything that happened in order to track who owed who how much of a favor -- and the party's generally loose association with the Constantines, they should be able to figure out what was going on and retrive the prototype.
Adam was despondant about Jackie's death, however, and refused the mission. "Wipe my memory if you want, and I'll leave." So the mage did, and Adam got to wait outside in the hall while the others were given the names of the contacts the Constantines had been working with, and the corporation that supposedly had their ship, and other details like the command codes for the ship. Their passage to Luna would of course be paid, and when would they want to leave?
The party arranged to set off the next night, after the meeting they'd arranged to sell the martian artifacts, and the deal was sealed. On the way back to New Quahog, they saw an ominous pink glow on the horizon, from the general direction of the mines.
The next day was spent getting ready for the presentation. The delegation from the Venusian museum arrived an hour early. He was a somewhat scatterbrained procyonisk, who seemed fascinated by the artifacts and not entirely competent in martian archaeology. The other delegation, an imperious (if tiny) feriphal and her soft-spoken drakivolki servant arrived on time, and Shadarack gave his spiel.
The feriphal asked probing questions -- obviously, she *did* know what she was talking about -- and eventually had her servant set up a device to send out a tiny pulse of the same type and frequency as the martians used for their broadcast power, as an initial test of the devices' authenticity. The devices lit up for a second, and quivered...
...and there was a wet squelching noise as the two halves of the Venusian plopped to the ground.
Meepas wasted no time leaping to heal him, reattaching his severed guts before he had the chance to die, while Hesperius summoned armor and weapons, and the feriphal scurried under the bed to hide (they were too cheap to rent a proper conference room, and were holding the presentation in a hotel room in yet another hotel). While the assailant was invisible, he wasn't completely silent, and Hesperius heard him coming in time to dodge out of the way of his second attack.
After that, Jackie -- who managed to spot the ninja even when he wasn't rushig to attack -- tried to faerie-fire the invisible attacker, but the spell was parried and sliced to bits by an invisible sword. Hesperius tried a much easier spell along the same lines, and splattered everything in the room with glittering, fractal-patterned, shimmering paint. That spell wasn't parried, and left the ninja all too visible.
The ninja was not prepared to face a room full of mages 'naked', and sliced a hole in the outer wall of the building, then leaped out and flew off, being a drakivolki and therefore having wings to fly with. Hesperius flung off a couple shots at him, which bounced off his PPF, and Shadarack tried to throw the discharged ninja stars after him, but he'd never bothered to recharge them, and they ended up plummeting towards the ground, where they took out some confused motorist's windshield.
Meepas, on the other hand, summoned up a gust of wind, which disarmed the ninja of his sword and sent it flying back to thunk into the ground at his feet. The disarmed ninja flew around a building and disappeared.
The feriphal from the university was livid, accusing the party of being in league with the attackers until she calmed down enough to listen to reason. At which point she called the cops. The local cops, a pair of drakivolki, arrived a bit later, after the paint spell had faded, and confiscated a sample of blood from the crime scene, and the expensive-looking sword, as evidence.
After negotiating a price for the Venusian to buy a few pieces for his display, and for the university to put in escrow pending verification of the other artifacts' authenticity, Hesperius and Adam led them downstairs to escort them to their car. Where they saw a second cop car investigating the death of the cops from the first cop car. Apparently, the ninja had come back for his sword. Hesperius turned the whole group invisible (with an area-of-effect illusion of invisibility centered on himself) and they snuck out towards their rental car.
Meanwhile, someone knocked on the door of the apartment where Shadarack and Meepas were cleaning up the mess. Meepas flew over to the peephole to look out, but so no one in the hallway... and as soon as his eye came up to the peephole, a sword slid through the door and opened a hole exactly where his vitals would have been if he was a hannah or the like instead of a tiny flying squirrel. And in came the ninja, again.
The main duel was between Meepas and the ninja, this time, and they seemed relatively evenly matched, in the sense that neither could do much to hurt the other (Meepas kept dodging, and the ninja had a PPF). The ninja kept wasting time killing Shadarack (who tried to attack with a lamp) over and over again, but not being able to finish the job because (a) Meepas kept healing him, and (b) Shadarack was just too goddamn lucky to die.
Eventually, the ninja sliced open another hole in the wall of the hotel room, as if to escape, but Meepas didn't fall for that trick, and wasn't surprised when a few seconds later he was attacked again, this time with throwing darts. Hesperius, who'd managed to get the scholars to their cars safely, noticed the hole he'd patched re-open, and rushed back up to take care of business again. Or at least to re-paint the ninja again.
Between Hesperius and Adam and Meepas, the ninja was slain, and his body fell to the ground in the hallway. At which point Adam's danger sense started going off like a klaxon. "Guys, we should run away, NOW."
So they did. Meepas took the time to disarm the dead ninja of his sword, and nearly got caught in the massive explosion that took out half the hotel, as the ninja's body detonated.
"You see a symbol on the sword's hilt -- five linked rings, all different colors. White, Black, Green, Red, and Blue."
"Oh no! We killed the olympic ninja team!"
A few hours later, they caught the shuttle up to the Artican that would take them to Luna, not unhappy to be leaving Mars behind. On the way, Adam (who was heading to the Earth's surface instead, to try to find his old friends from a decade ago when he'd first appeared from Xanth) planned to give Shadarack some self-defense lessons with the ninja sword, so that he'd wouldn't have to feel quite as useless in combat. With learning drugs, the 13 hour trip would be plenty long enough to impart a good working knowledge.
last session next session
