Unwelcome Guests
Jun. 10th, 2006 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothLazar couldn't play this week either, since his work called him in at the last minute again. That meant it was another session with just me and Snowwy and Murdock at my place... sigh.
For dinner we tried to go to Coyote Crossing, but it was missing, replaced with a rather horrible italian-themed pizza place called Guido's. It's not that the food was bad, precisely... it was well executed but badly conceived, I guess I'd call it. Plus, they'd let you order a pizza in the ordinary way most places do, instead of picking one from their list, but if you did they'd rape you on the bill. $3.50 for an extra topping on a personal pizza? Seriously WTF!
After talking about the options, and flipping a coin, the party decided to keep mining in the direction they'd been going, in the hope of finding more metal. They sort of succeeded... they hit a vein of what seemed like petrified garbage (as impossible as that was), full of scraps of unidentifiable stuff, and less unidentifiable bits of metal -- little keys, and metal clips, and coins. It also smelled really awful, in the enclosed space, and the occasional pocket of goo couldn't be healthy. By the end of the day they had a small bag full of metal bits, but were absolutely coated in filth.
The camp was strangely quiet when they emerged from the mine -- usually, various animals were making noise nearby or otherwise being a nuisance. Zedd and Grey decided to check the top of the cliff to see if the cause was up there, but found only angry wolves. Searching a wolf's recent memory revealed that one of them had seen another human enter their camp...
So they approached the smelter building where they'd been living for the past week, and heard a man inside threaten to kill the people in there if they didn't tell him where to find the 'oracle'. "It's south of here, just go up the path and head up the mountain," Zedd replied, sending him towards the angry animals.
Unfortunately, it looked like he was going to take the blacksmith's wife along with him as a hostage, which the blacksmith wouldn't stand for. He attacked, and while Grey was able to get the woman away from the giant ratlike assailant before she was killed, it wasn't before she was stabbed.
After a short and pointless fight on top of the roof, where they discovered that the man regenerated very, very fast, the rat ran away up the path towards the wolves. Grey followed and saw him fighting off the entire pack. Or, more accurately, being bitten repeatedly, and healing, and being bitten, and healing... he tried to help the wolves take the guy down, but the wolves weren't interested in his help, and one of them turned on him and bit him viciously, driving him back to the camp.
They decided to keep a watch that night. That turned out to be wise, if not terribly effective. Not only did it alert them to the wasp attack almost (but not quite) in time to keep Grey from being stung, but the crazy rat was forced to sneak past the rather oblivious blacksmith when he came back.
The fight went badly from the rat from the start. He was quiet, but Zedd woke up before he could do any damage, and threw his blanket over the rat's head, then tried to wrap him up in it and trap him. The rat got away, but by that time everyone was awake, and they cornered him in the tight crawlway behind the smelter and made him tell his story.
Apparently, he was from a technological city that was having trouble with the gods -- the rabbits wouldn't give them children, and hadn't for two years, but that wasn't the worst problem. Lately, wild animals had started wandering the streets, their domestic gods had begun to vanish, and a wolverine had gone into the suburbs and eaten a family of five.
A month ago, the man (possibly as part of a group, depending on which version of the story you beleived, since he kept repeating himself but changing the story slightly) had gone out to find an answer to this problem. His journeys had eventually taken him to a village near here, that had told him about a famous oracle in the mountains that would answer any question. He was convinced that the people in the camp knew about the oracle, but were in league with the gods who wanted to destroy his city, and were therefore refusing to tell.
After that they stopped fighting, although the blacksmith wanted to kill him for stabbing his wife. Zedd suggested (based on something the man had said about the oracle's 'silent servants') that the carnival they'd been attacked by might be the oracle, but the rat was able to disassemble the silence device from the carnival -- it was technology, not the heathen animal-worshipping magic the oracle was supposed to use. Besides, the oracle lived on top of a mountain, everyone knew that.
After a day or so of the rat hanging around and refusing to leave (because, well, he'd been wandering in the wilderness being attacked by every animal he came across for a while), Zedd mentioned a village he'd heard of that was sort of near there (about as far away as their village, but actually in the mountains instead of just near them) where the man might be able to find answers. The rat refused to go out into the wilderness again, so to get rid of him Zedd and Grey agreed to take him there.
First they made a trip downstream to where the stream actually still had water in it, to replenish their supplies. On the way back, they saw the bear leaving the cave they'd originally intended to use to get up the lower cliff, so it was safe to take the stairs instead of climbing up a rope. Inside the cave, it was obviously manmade -- there was a huge metal door (rusted shut), and a plaque on one of the doors to another (collapsed) floor from the stairwell that labelled it as the Michael Moore Memorial Nuclear Waste Dump. Seeing that, they decided it was a good thing they hadn't managed to get through the door.
That trip went smoothly... but the trip towards the mountain village ran into more problems. They wandered right into a nest of vicious centipedes, and were forced to flee for their lives... then spotted a hawk following them, who waited until they were in a dangerous place before bringing down a massive deluge. They weren't washed off the ledge, but when they tried to climb up a muddy hill, they ended up sliding into a river and over a waterfall. Zedd teleported ahead to drop them a rope to grab onto, but neither the rat ('Anon A Mouse' and 'Seek Rat' were names he'd given them, when they asked) nor Grey managed to actually grab on, so over they went.
Luckily, it wasn't a very large or steep waterfall, and they washed up on the shore of the pool at the bottom only half-drowned. As Zedd made his way down to join them, he spotted a raccoonish man in bright blue robes hovering over them, who fled as soon as he saw Zedd watching, with no sound (although the waterfall and the rain could have covered it) and leaving no tracks.
last session | next session
For dinner we tried to go to Coyote Crossing, but it was missing, replaced with a rather horrible italian-themed pizza place called Guido's. It's not that the food was bad, precisely... it was well executed but badly conceived, I guess I'd call it. Plus, they'd let you order a pizza in the ordinary way most places do, instead of picking one from their list, but if you did they'd rape you on the bill. $3.50 for an extra topping on a personal pizza? Seriously WTF!
After talking about the options, and flipping a coin, the party decided to keep mining in the direction they'd been going, in the hope of finding more metal. They sort of succeeded... they hit a vein of what seemed like petrified garbage (as impossible as that was), full of scraps of unidentifiable stuff, and less unidentifiable bits of metal -- little keys, and metal clips, and coins. It also smelled really awful, in the enclosed space, and the occasional pocket of goo couldn't be healthy. By the end of the day they had a small bag full of metal bits, but were absolutely coated in filth.
The camp was strangely quiet when they emerged from the mine -- usually, various animals were making noise nearby or otherwise being a nuisance. Zedd and Grey decided to check the top of the cliff to see if the cause was up there, but found only angry wolves. Searching a wolf's recent memory revealed that one of them had seen another human enter their camp...
So they approached the smelter building where they'd been living for the past week, and heard a man inside threaten to kill the people in there if they didn't tell him where to find the 'oracle'. "It's south of here, just go up the path and head up the mountain," Zedd replied, sending him towards the angry animals.
Unfortunately, it looked like he was going to take the blacksmith's wife along with him as a hostage, which the blacksmith wouldn't stand for. He attacked, and while Grey was able to get the woman away from the giant ratlike assailant before she was killed, it wasn't before she was stabbed.
After a short and pointless fight on top of the roof, where they discovered that the man regenerated very, very fast, the rat ran away up the path towards the wolves. Grey followed and saw him fighting off the entire pack. Or, more accurately, being bitten repeatedly, and healing, and being bitten, and healing... he tried to help the wolves take the guy down, but the wolves weren't interested in his help, and one of them turned on him and bit him viciously, driving him back to the camp.
They decided to keep a watch that night. That turned out to be wise, if not terribly effective. Not only did it alert them to the wasp attack almost (but not quite) in time to keep Grey from being stung, but the crazy rat was forced to sneak past the rather oblivious blacksmith when he came back.
The fight went badly from the rat from the start. He was quiet, but Zedd woke up before he could do any damage, and threw his blanket over the rat's head, then tried to wrap him up in it and trap him. The rat got away, but by that time everyone was awake, and they cornered him in the tight crawlway behind the smelter and made him tell his story.
Apparently, he was from a technological city that was having trouble with the gods -- the rabbits wouldn't give them children, and hadn't for two years, but that wasn't the worst problem. Lately, wild animals had started wandering the streets, their domestic gods had begun to vanish, and a wolverine had gone into the suburbs and eaten a family of five.
A month ago, the man (possibly as part of a group, depending on which version of the story you beleived, since he kept repeating himself but changing the story slightly) had gone out to find an answer to this problem. His journeys had eventually taken him to a village near here, that had told him about a famous oracle in the mountains that would answer any question. He was convinced that the people in the camp knew about the oracle, but were in league with the gods who wanted to destroy his city, and were therefore refusing to tell.
After that they stopped fighting, although the blacksmith wanted to kill him for stabbing his wife. Zedd suggested (based on something the man had said about the oracle's 'silent servants') that the carnival they'd been attacked by might be the oracle, but the rat was able to disassemble the silence device from the carnival -- it was technology, not the heathen animal-worshipping magic the oracle was supposed to use. Besides, the oracle lived on top of a mountain, everyone knew that.
After a day or so of the rat hanging around and refusing to leave (because, well, he'd been wandering in the wilderness being attacked by every animal he came across for a while), Zedd mentioned a village he'd heard of that was sort of near there (about as far away as their village, but actually in the mountains instead of just near them) where the man might be able to find answers. The rat refused to go out into the wilderness again, so to get rid of him Zedd and Grey agreed to take him there.
First they made a trip downstream to where the stream actually still had water in it, to replenish their supplies. On the way back, they saw the bear leaving the cave they'd originally intended to use to get up the lower cliff, so it was safe to take the stairs instead of climbing up a rope. Inside the cave, it was obviously manmade -- there was a huge metal door (rusted shut), and a plaque on one of the doors to another (collapsed) floor from the stairwell that labelled it as the Michael Moore Memorial Nuclear Waste Dump. Seeing that, they decided it was a good thing they hadn't managed to get through the door.
That trip went smoothly... but the trip towards the mountain village ran into more problems. They wandered right into a nest of vicious centipedes, and were forced to flee for their lives... then spotted a hawk following them, who waited until they were in a dangerous place before bringing down a massive deluge. They weren't washed off the ledge, but when they tried to climb up a muddy hill, they ended up sliding into a river and over a waterfall. Zedd teleported ahead to drop them a rope to grab onto, but neither the rat ('Anon A Mouse' and 'Seek Rat' were names he'd given them, when they asked) nor Grey managed to actually grab on, so over they went.
Luckily, it wasn't a very large or steep waterfall, and they washed up on the shore of the pool at the bottom only half-drowned. As Zedd made his way down to join them, he spotted a raccoonish man in bright blue robes hovering over them, who fled as soon as he saw Zedd watching, with no sound (although the waterfall and the rain could have covered it) and leaving no tracks.
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