No Surprises
Dec. 31st, 2005 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothHad a session of Lazar's game last night. Everyone was there this time, but we didn't seem to really get much done. I blame city of heroes and its playability over wireless connections.
The first priority was questioning all the witnesses to the murder, to see if there was anyone without an alibi. Unfortunately, it turned out that *nobody* had an alabi -- including Balthazaar, the person who claimed to be Ka'Sa, and the rest of the party -- and there were no witnesses. Apparently, the murder had happened after lunch, when everyone was scattered to the four winds or sleeping in their rooms, and an obviously magical silence had been cast on the cargo bay to keep the people in the hallway and forge adjacent to it from noticing anything.
There was one witness, actually -- and because they'd wanted to question the least likely killers first, Roshan, as the prime suspect, had been saved for last. When Wayne went to fetch her from her room, where she'd been living a hermit-like existence ever since the last fight against the pirates, he found her braiding the missing hide of the dead pirate into some sort of magitech.
Questioning her revealed that she was, first, completely insane -- but if anything she said could be trusted, she remembered wandering into the cargo bay, suddenly hearing screaming as she passed through the silence-ward, and stabbing the already-skinned pirate in the head to shut him up. Then, she took his skin back to her room and started weaving it into a magitech device to 'fix' him -- studying it, Wayne recognized that it was a pattern designed to ressurect a person, and her frustration was probably because that was a very hard thing to do, especially using nothing but a person's hide as material.
He also noticed some things in her pattern that he didn't recognize, so after they locked her up in her room (since she was obviously insane, and may very well have killed the person while in her extra-insane personality before reverting to her merely batshit loco personality) Balthazaar said he'd interview her about these weird magitech skills she was 'remembering'.
During the questioning, some revelations came out that convinced them (if the ability to still use magitech wasn't enough) that the Glazend was actually Ka'sa. See here for details, but the summary is that he possesses and takes control of anyone that picks up his treasured and rather dangerous dagger. He refused to answer "So if you drop the dagger, does the person you took over come back?", so their working plan for bringing him back if he got killed again involved building clockwork robots.
At any rate, they continued travelling after the little 'murder mystery'. And during it, really. But in another day or two they'd crossed the ocean, and after skirting around a massive armed collossus (which Perrel said was still active) they found themselves in a little bay surrounded by cliffs and mountains. Their canopy hadn't yet fully recovered from all the damage that had been done to it, but even if it had they'd need to bounce up a few hundred feet to get through even the lowest pass.
So they landed on a huge wooden bridge across the bay, near a deserted city built into the cliff, planning to tie down for a week while exploring the city. Jardin was in charge of this stop, although he grumbled about being put in charge of a pointless waste of time, since there was no one there to sell to.
The outer regions of the city (which was made up of tunnel-like 'streets' with 'buildings' to either side) were in terrible shape, blasted by some sort of explosion and exposed to the weather. Deep inside they found an intersection guarded by a long-defunct jury-rigged war machine, with barricades guarding all the spaces farther in. Ka'sa, as the designated scout... couldn't squeeze through the gap because of his dratted butterfly wings, so they spent some time widening the passage.
On the other side, the bodies were better preserved and he could see signs of a battle fought without magic -- everyone was dead from ordinary sword and axe wounds, except for a few that were dead for no apparent reason. He found one book held open to a page, in the hands of a corpse near the barricade, and its message spoke of finding out that someone ('Cromag?') was alive, and that perhaps they could 'get to' him, but all their magi were gone. The entry did not appear to end at the end of the page, but while the book was already open, no one was confident that it wasn't cursed (like most books in the world) or that turning the page wouldn't set that curse off.
So they took the book to the already blasted entrance to the city, glued a bit of twine to the page, and flew off a couple hundred feet until they were out of range of the book curse, and tugged to open it.
KABOOOM!
Apparently, they'd have to continue their exploration without the benefit of the rest of the diary's contents.
last session | next session
The first priority was questioning all the witnesses to the murder, to see if there was anyone without an alibi. Unfortunately, it turned out that *nobody* had an alabi -- including Balthazaar, the person who claimed to be Ka'Sa, and the rest of the party -- and there were no witnesses. Apparently, the murder had happened after lunch, when everyone was scattered to the four winds or sleeping in their rooms, and an obviously magical silence had been cast on the cargo bay to keep the people in the hallway and forge adjacent to it from noticing anything.
There was one witness, actually -- and because they'd wanted to question the least likely killers first, Roshan, as the prime suspect, had been saved for last. When Wayne went to fetch her from her room, where she'd been living a hermit-like existence ever since the last fight against the pirates, he found her braiding the missing hide of the dead pirate into some sort of magitech.
Questioning her revealed that she was, first, completely insane -- but if anything she said could be trusted, she remembered wandering into the cargo bay, suddenly hearing screaming as she passed through the silence-ward, and stabbing the already-skinned pirate in the head to shut him up. Then, she took his skin back to her room and started weaving it into a magitech device to 'fix' him -- studying it, Wayne recognized that it was a pattern designed to ressurect a person, and her frustration was probably because that was a very hard thing to do, especially using nothing but a person's hide as material.
He also noticed some things in her pattern that he didn't recognize, so after they locked her up in her room (since she was obviously insane, and may very well have killed the person while in her extra-insane personality before reverting to her merely batshit loco personality) Balthazaar said he'd interview her about these weird magitech skills she was 'remembering'.
During the questioning, some revelations came out that convinced them (if the ability to still use magitech wasn't enough) that the Glazend was actually Ka'sa. See here for details, but the summary is that he possesses and takes control of anyone that picks up his treasured and rather dangerous dagger. He refused to answer "So if you drop the dagger, does the person you took over come back?", so their working plan for bringing him back if he got killed again involved building clockwork robots.
At any rate, they continued travelling after the little 'murder mystery'. And during it, really. But in another day or two they'd crossed the ocean, and after skirting around a massive armed collossus (which Perrel said was still active) they found themselves in a little bay surrounded by cliffs and mountains. Their canopy hadn't yet fully recovered from all the damage that had been done to it, but even if it had they'd need to bounce up a few hundred feet to get through even the lowest pass.
So they landed on a huge wooden bridge across the bay, near a deserted city built into the cliff, planning to tie down for a week while exploring the city. Jardin was in charge of this stop, although he grumbled about being put in charge of a pointless waste of time, since there was no one there to sell to.
The outer regions of the city (which was made up of tunnel-like 'streets' with 'buildings' to either side) were in terrible shape, blasted by some sort of explosion and exposed to the weather. Deep inside they found an intersection guarded by a long-defunct jury-rigged war machine, with barricades guarding all the spaces farther in. Ka'sa, as the designated scout... couldn't squeeze through the gap because of his dratted butterfly wings, so they spent some time widening the passage.
On the other side, the bodies were better preserved and he could see signs of a battle fought without magic -- everyone was dead from ordinary sword and axe wounds, except for a few that were dead for no apparent reason. He found one book held open to a page, in the hands of a corpse near the barricade, and its message spoke of finding out that someone ('Cromag?') was alive, and that perhaps they could 'get to' him, but all their magi were gone. The entry did not appear to end at the end of the page, but while the book was already open, no one was confident that it wasn't cursed (like most books in the world) or that turning the page wouldn't set that curse off.
So they took the book to the already blasted entrance to the city, glued a bit of twine to the page, and flew off a couple hundred feet until they were out of range of the book curse, and tugged to open it.
KABOOOM!
Apparently, they'd have to continue their exploration without the benefit of the rest of the diary's contents.
last session | next session
