They've got soul!
Jan. 14th, 2006 09:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothHad a session of Lazar's game last night. Snowwy didn't show because Lazar had mentioned that it would be convenient if someone wanted to not show up for some reason, because he could have their soul stolen. Snowwy interpreted that as 'someone don't show up so that I can steal your soul', so when he didn't come, his soul was indeed taken.
Snowwy, if you want it back, come around next week and we'll work something out. Otherwise I'm putting it up on e-bay.
The party made their preparations -- wall of stone tarps, glue bombs, explosive bombs, and SEP fields ('Someone Else's Problem': basically, insignificance devices that made people ignore your presence unless they rolled really well or you went out of your way to get their attention) -- and headed out to find Mr. Beer's lab. Notes around his house seemed to indicate that the lab had, in fact, been studying the attacking junkyard robots, so it seemed a likely place to look for more information on them, even if it wasn't going to be their nest.
Unfortunately, they neglected to consider the effect of each of them activating their SEP field, and so they ignored each other as each individually attempted to follow the rather badly-done map to the lab.
Perrel and Wayne did the worst, completely missing the section where they were supposed to find a door to a stair to transfer to a lower floor, and the two of them ended up running into a pair of war machines guarding the hallway. The SEP fields kept the machines from noticing them (and them noticing each other) at first, but as Wayne (to pick a viewpoint) tried to sneak past them, they activated and gave a warning, charging to fire.
Wayne also noticed an orange buglike creature -- only a robot under close examination, and most definately NOT made out of junk -- stalking its prey. As he watched, it leaped at its target, but Wayne intercepted it, wrapping it up in one of the rock tarps (rock side inside) and activating it.
This would have worked, if the war machine hadn't finally fired. Wayne dodged the beam, dropping the rocked up bug (which was the machine's target), and to his vast annoyance the beam hit the bug, vaporizing the tarp and the rock but leaving the bug unhurt.
The bug proceeded to suck out Perrel's soul -- for as Perrel collapsed, he dropped the SEP field, and Wayne was able to notice that it was him at that point. Perrel's soul flew out of his body as a glowing blue sphere, and vanished into the soul-stealer's mouth, as if it was eaten. In case it wasn't, Wayne tried to capture the bug, but it got away, scuttling along the ceiling as fast as a sky manta.
Wayne picked up Perrel's body (they'd left most of their loot tucked away in Dr. Beer's house, since lugging a ton of crap was inconvenient and the house was on the only way out of the city they knew, blocked off or not) and headed out of line of sight of the war machines before deactivating his SEP field for a second time. "Jardin? Ka'sa? Are you there?"
His yelling managed to attract Ka'sa's attention. Ka'sa was pretty sure he was in the right area, but couldn't find the right door, so they decided to reactivate the fields and split up, with whoever found the stairs promising to deactivate the field and signal the others. While they were doing that, a swarm of junk-bots scuttled through the hallway, looking for the disturbance Wayne had caused, but the SEP fields protected them. Eventually, they found the stairs, got together, and went down.
In the lower hallway, the lab was obvious -- the doors were barricaded, although one of the barricades was suspiciously open. They crept into the lab and searched it carefully for enemies -- especially after the barricade closed itself behind them! Then, Jardin turned off his SEP field, and they realized that he'd been the one disassembling and reassembling it.
The notes around the lab -- there were enough on single sheets, or in journals left open to the last used page, that the book curse didn't completely deny them information -- indicated that the lab had, in fact, been studying nothing but the junk-bot and soul-stealer infestation for a few weeks before everything went to hell. They didn't know which mage was attacking them, but the situation got progressively worse until, apparently, the lab itself was overrun, judging by the dead bodies lying around the floor. The lab equipment was intact, though, as were a lot of sample magical weapons (not useful against the junk-bots, according to their notes) and a live soul-stealer, kept in an electric cage in the middle of the room. There was also a messenger spell already completed and targetted at Gerold (or whoever, the city's head mage whose name they'd heard several times before) which only needed a mage to infuse it with mana to fold itself into a paper bird and fly off to find him. Damn it.
Anyway, they decided to study the soul-stealer. They built a box with waldos and a magic-analyzing screen for the purpose, which sucked it inside as soon as it was released (they stood back out of range of its soul-sucking), then spent a while picking it apart while studying its magical patterns. It seemed to be a combination of rune magic and clockwork -- as the gears turned and meshed, the runes etched on them formed new patterns to control its behavior and abilities -- truly a masterwork, whose construction they could only barely comprehend, let alone duplicate. The soul-sucking ability would penetrate most any barrier, and its defenses would render it immune to any magical attack which sought to damage it... and as a cute little addition, putting it in an antimagic field would leave it as a nonmagical clockwork, which would continue walking forwards until it got out of the field. That trick had been noted in the lab's report on the creatures in combat as 'even antimagic doesn't work on them!', presumably the intended effect.
In fact, the only things stopping it from sucking their souls through the box were that (a) the box was covered in magic, and it saw only magic, so it was possibly blinded, and (b) it already *had* a soul, and could only carry one at a time.
Before they could work out what to do next at their leisure, they were attacked! Something (gee, I wonder what) started picking at the barricade Jardin had temporarily taken down to let them through, and Wayne managed to badly screw up putting a layer of rock over it with one of his remaining tarps, tangling himself up in his own magic item. Ka'sa rescued him and put up the rock, but not before a pair of tiny spidery robots had jumped through a hole in the original barricade. Jardin killed one of them with his naginata, but the other ran to one of the other barricades and detonated!
This left a hole, behind which they could see an army of larger bots, armed with various scary weapons -- scimitars, pistols, clay... lances? Bottles? At any rate, Ka'sa panicked and threw a grenade into the horde. While it hissed and sputtered, preparing to explode, Jardin and Wayne used the other tarp to seal off the hole the spider had opened. The grenade's explosion cracked the rock wall, so they used the same tarp to put up another layer.
Unfortunately, it looked like the robots hadn't all been finished off, as something was melting a new hole in the wall, next to the barricade they'd rebarricaded! Jardin tossed a glue bomb through it... and glued the party, as the wall was thin as a soap bubble by the time they'd noticed it. As it turned out, the grenade *had* splashed the robots, but the one with bottles had had bottles full of STUFF.
As the original assailants were still picking at the barricade on the far side, they gathered up the rock tarps, some sample magic weapons, the bits of the soul-stealer in the box, and Balthazaar and Perrel's bodies, and (all glued together, as Jardin was the only one strong enough to move around despite the glue) left through the new hole, activating their SEP fields for protection and sticking to the left wall, since that seemed less likely to lead deeper into the city's maze of 'streets'.
This took them eventually to what looked like it might be the 'inner sanctum' where the mage used to live, but had left at some point during the insurrection. The reason he'd left was obvious -- this seemed to be junk-bot central, where a hundred soul-stealers were scattered around near a bunch of fixers and junk bots and war machines. The SEP fields seemed to hold, though, and they were able to watch without being attacked.
Two of the fixers were particularly active, building the best and most dangerous looking war machines. "That one's got Balthazaar's soul," Ka'sa informed them, "And that one has Perrel's." Other members of their crew were stuck in assorted war machines... apparently their ship had been attacked. The problem was that, as noted, there were hundreds of soul-stealers around, so anything they did that got the attention of that horde was a one-way ticket to roboticization. The captured souls animating the various bots didn't have the usual signs of emotion, so they probably weren't exactly conscious...
But clearly, they needed to get their friends souls back, and then probably get the hell out of here. In a week, when the canopy had recovered. Assuming the ship was still mostly intact, and hadn't been disassembled.
last session | next session
Twidget, while I like being all cuddly and stuff, doing it *during the game* is a leetle distracting, you know? 9.9
Snowwy, if you want it back, come around next week and we'll work something out. Otherwise I'm putting it up on e-bay.
The party made their preparations -- wall of stone tarps, glue bombs, explosive bombs, and SEP fields ('Someone Else's Problem': basically, insignificance devices that made people ignore your presence unless they rolled really well or you went out of your way to get their attention) -- and headed out to find Mr. Beer's lab. Notes around his house seemed to indicate that the lab had, in fact, been studying the attacking junkyard robots, so it seemed a likely place to look for more information on them, even if it wasn't going to be their nest.
Unfortunately, they neglected to consider the effect of each of them activating their SEP field, and so they ignored each other as each individually attempted to follow the rather badly-done map to the lab.
Perrel and Wayne did the worst, completely missing the section where they were supposed to find a door to a stair to transfer to a lower floor, and the two of them ended up running into a pair of war machines guarding the hallway. The SEP fields kept the machines from noticing them (and them noticing each other) at first, but as Wayne (to pick a viewpoint) tried to sneak past them, they activated and gave a warning, charging to fire.
Wayne also noticed an orange buglike creature -- only a robot under close examination, and most definately NOT made out of junk -- stalking its prey. As he watched, it leaped at its target, but Wayne intercepted it, wrapping it up in one of the rock tarps (rock side inside) and activating it.
This would have worked, if the war machine hadn't finally fired. Wayne dodged the beam, dropping the rocked up bug (which was the machine's target), and to his vast annoyance the beam hit the bug, vaporizing the tarp and the rock but leaving the bug unhurt.
The bug proceeded to suck out Perrel's soul -- for as Perrel collapsed, he dropped the SEP field, and Wayne was able to notice that it was him at that point. Perrel's soul flew out of his body as a glowing blue sphere, and vanished into the soul-stealer's mouth, as if it was eaten. In case it wasn't, Wayne tried to capture the bug, but it got away, scuttling along the ceiling as fast as a sky manta.
Wayne picked up Perrel's body (they'd left most of their loot tucked away in Dr. Beer's house, since lugging a ton of crap was inconvenient and the house was on the only way out of the city they knew, blocked off or not) and headed out of line of sight of the war machines before deactivating his SEP field for a second time. "Jardin? Ka'sa? Are you there?"
His yelling managed to attract Ka'sa's attention. Ka'sa was pretty sure he was in the right area, but couldn't find the right door, so they decided to reactivate the fields and split up, with whoever found the stairs promising to deactivate the field and signal the others. While they were doing that, a swarm of junk-bots scuttled through the hallway, looking for the disturbance Wayne had caused, but the SEP fields protected them. Eventually, they found the stairs, got together, and went down.
In the lower hallway, the lab was obvious -- the doors were barricaded, although one of the barricades was suspiciously open. They crept into the lab and searched it carefully for enemies -- especially after the barricade closed itself behind them! Then, Jardin turned off his SEP field, and they realized that he'd been the one disassembling and reassembling it.
The notes around the lab -- there were enough on single sheets, or in journals left open to the last used page, that the book curse didn't completely deny them information -- indicated that the lab had, in fact, been studying nothing but the junk-bot and soul-stealer infestation for a few weeks before everything went to hell. They didn't know which mage was attacking them, but the situation got progressively worse until, apparently, the lab itself was overrun, judging by the dead bodies lying around the floor. The lab equipment was intact, though, as were a lot of sample magical weapons (not useful against the junk-bots, according to their notes) and a live soul-stealer, kept in an electric cage in the middle of the room. There was also a messenger spell already completed and targetted at Gerold (or whoever, the city's head mage whose name they'd heard several times before) which only needed a mage to infuse it with mana to fold itself into a paper bird and fly off to find him. Damn it.
Anyway, they decided to study the soul-stealer. They built a box with waldos and a magic-analyzing screen for the purpose, which sucked it inside as soon as it was released (they stood back out of range of its soul-sucking), then spent a while picking it apart while studying its magical patterns. It seemed to be a combination of rune magic and clockwork -- as the gears turned and meshed, the runes etched on them formed new patterns to control its behavior and abilities -- truly a masterwork, whose construction they could only barely comprehend, let alone duplicate. The soul-sucking ability would penetrate most any barrier, and its defenses would render it immune to any magical attack which sought to damage it... and as a cute little addition, putting it in an antimagic field would leave it as a nonmagical clockwork, which would continue walking forwards until it got out of the field. That trick had been noted in the lab's report on the creatures in combat as 'even antimagic doesn't work on them!', presumably the intended effect.
In fact, the only things stopping it from sucking their souls through the box were that (a) the box was covered in magic, and it saw only magic, so it was possibly blinded, and (b) it already *had* a soul, and could only carry one at a time.
Before they could work out what to do next at their leisure, they were attacked! Something (gee, I wonder what) started picking at the barricade Jardin had temporarily taken down to let them through, and Wayne managed to badly screw up putting a layer of rock over it with one of his remaining tarps, tangling himself up in his own magic item. Ka'sa rescued him and put up the rock, but not before a pair of tiny spidery robots had jumped through a hole in the original barricade. Jardin killed one of them with his naginata, but the other ran to one of the other barricades and detonated!
This left a hole, behind which they could see an army of larger bots, armed with various scary weapons -- scimitars, pistols, clay... lances? Bottles? At any rate, Ka'sa panicked and threw a grenade into the horde. While it hissed and sputtered, preparing to explode, Jardin and Wayne used the other tarp to seal off the hole the spider had opened. The grenade's explosion cracked the rock wall, so they used the same tarp to put up another layer.
Unfortunately, it looked like the robots hadn't all been finished off, as something was melting a new hole in the wall, next to the barricade they'd rebarricaded! Jardin tossed a glue bomb through it... and glued the party, as the wall was thin as a soap bubble by the time they'd noticed it. As it turned out, the grenade *had* splashed the robots, but the one with bottles had had bottles full of STUFF.
As the original assailants were still picking at the barricade on the far side, they gathered up the rock tarps, some sample magic weapons, the bits of the soul-stealer in the box, and Balthazaar and Perrel's bodies, and (all glued together, as Jardin was the only one strong enough to move around despite the glue) left through the new hole, activating their SEP fields for protection and sticking to the left wall, since that seemed less likely to lead deeper into the city's maze of 'streets'.
This took them eventually to what looked like it might be the 'inner sanctum' where the mage used to live, but had left at some point during the insurrection. The reason he'd left was obvious -- this seemed to be junk-bot central, where a hundred soul-stealers were scattered around near a bunch of fixers and junk bots and war machines. The SEP fields seemed to hold, though, and they were able to watch without being attacked.
Two of the fixers were particularly active, building the best and most dangerous looking war machines. "That one's got Balthazaar's soul," Ka'sa informed them, "And that one has Perrel's." Other members of their crew were stuck in assorted war machines... apparently their ship had been attacked. The problem was that, as noted, there were hundreds of soul-stealers around, so anything they did that got the attention of that horde was a one-way ticket to roboticization. The captured souls animating the various bots didn't have the usual signs of emotion, so they probably weren't exactly conscious...
But clearly, they needed to get their friends souls back, and then probably get the hell out of here. In a week, when the canopy had recovered. Assuming the ship was still mostly intact, and hadn't been disassembled.
last session | next session
Twidget, while I like being all cuddly and stuff, doing it *during the game* is a leetle distracting, you know? 9.9
