Two Down...
Oct. 6th, 2007 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothFriday night we had a session of the Golden Compass themed Shadake game, in which the party took on the specter on the military base, and its attendant pixies.
Getting on the military base was a muddle, but not all that difficult in the end -- they remembered the names of some of the people who could identify who they were and that they were the same ones brought to look at the intention craft, which were currently disassembled and being looked at by members of the Royal Society, who'd previously (years ago) disassembled a much smaller and less advanced Intention Craft recovered by the church during the nonsense with Lord Asriel.
Notable discoveries:
(1) The craft seemed to be powered by the connection between a person and their daemon. Severing the connection was known to be a source of a sudden burst of great power, but this was less drastic.
(2) Unlike the older version, this one had a large Anbaric Spring (of sorts) that would keep it from instantly losing power and plummeting to the ground if the pilot expired.
(3) A lot of the complicated work wasn't done by circuitry or gears, but by 'little black boxes full of magic blue smoke'. They'd broken the previous ones for the old model and let the magic smoke out, so they knew not to mess with them this time.
(4) The weapon was powered directly by the not-quite-anbaric force that powered the whole craft, and couldn't be powered by normal means. It looked like a normal gun, but was completely internal -- somehow, it fired through the hull of the ship without hurting it, despite being perfectly capable of putting big holes in the hulls of other identical ships during the fight.
The party thought to take pictures of the ship using various exposures.
Magic: The ship used no magic whatsoever. This surprised everyone, since they'd assumed the magic blue smoke was a bound spirit of some sort.
Dust: The power system of the ship was faintly dusty, but the black boxes glowed brightly. Wren's prognosis was that they were, in some sense, conscious.
Random Exposure Number 2 (of 4 or so, of which this was the only one showing anything of interest): The entire ship, hull and all, glowed brightly... and so did the Order's anti-spectre zappy-probes.
Eric theorized that the last exposure was showing which things were from other worlds. Wren wasn't sure that the probes were from other worlds, but he did know that only a specific old Panzerbjorne knew how to forge weapons that (when suitably powered) would hurt spectres. Since he lived up north near where Asriel's giant portal of doom had been, the metal he used for them might very well have been otherworldly. Eric further theorized that the otherworldliness might be the key property that let them hurt spectres, and took some bits of scrap metal to test that with, for when they found the spectre that they were pretty sure was on the base somewhere.
Oh, and Taegan found some components spread throughout the intention craft that reminded him of Lord Wright's 'power source' that the order had called a portal device and forced him to shut down, only much larger and somewhat differently configured. He decided to try putting that together, while the others went looking for spectres.
The first stop was the infirmary on the base, where they didn't find any more spectre victims (although the doctors confirmed that the two top generals had had similar symptoms and had been sent to the Sisters of Mercy) but did find a strange number of poison victims. They ignored that and went looking near the generals' quarters for basements in which the spectres might be hiding.
There was a church nearby, which seemed like a likely place to have a mostly unattended basement. When they walked in, though, they saw that the inquisition was already there, asking similar questions, although they were following a different tack -- instead of looking for spectres, they were looking for the people who'd arranged for the generals' ailments, by whatever means. After some initial suspicions, they agreed to work with the inquisition for the moment.
The basement didn't have any strange symbols in it, but it did have some strange, tiny tunnels. Remembering the pixies, they decided to try sending someone's daemon through the tunnel while the daemon's person walked along the same route on the surface... unfortuantely, it didn't work that way. The key factor was 'how fast can I get back to my person', not 'how many yards away am I, ignoring intervening obstacles'.
It did look likely that the tunnels would go underneath the air wing headquarters, though, so they decided to check there. The officers didn't want to let them in, but, inquisition.
The basement of that building was a supply depot full of boxes. A little searching found that one of the tunnels did lead into that basement, and a little more (Eric decided to search the box *tops*) found that one big cluster of boxes was actually a shell surrounding an open area... with a magic circle, like the one they'd seen before.
The inquisition immediately arrested the supply officers and everyone in the chain of command above them (or, at least, took them into custody for 'questioning'), and then had a forklift driver move some boxes so that they could get at the circle to examine it. So of course there were a dozen likely food sources standing around when the spectre was exposed to people who could see it, with nary an anti-spectre weapon in sight!
After a few unproductive rounds of combat, in which Eric was almost eaten after making the thing visible to children again, everyone ran away... except for one soldier who ran the wrong way and got nabbed. Caihong went back for him and dragged him upstairs, thinking to drag him all the way to the hangar where the big zapper was sitting... only it was obvious that he'd be completely eaten before then. So instead, he sat him down and started moving his life force around to keep it away from the spectre and interrupt the feeding, which slowed down the process immensely -- there's no doubt that that saved the soldier's life, or at least his sanity.
Everyone else ran to the hangar to get the big zapper, then loaded it onto a gurney and wheeled it out to the soldier, who was curled up on the sidewalk with Caihong attending to him. Eric lured the spectre off the frustratingly slippery meal with a magic bullet, and then Jana zapped it to bits before it could reach him.
Unfortunately, all this took about five minutes, and even with Caihong's attention the soldier was about half eaten. Which manifested itself as 'missing' bits of his mind -- he couldn't fire a gun, for example, or understand when people tried to teach him how to fire a gun. Still, he was sane, if crippled, and not the total zombie he would have been if the spectre had had its way.
Oh, and during the fight Eric tested the scrap metal -- it did seem to be slightly tangible to the spectre, unlike mundane attacks, but throwing it by hand without any sort of spiritual or anbaric charge wasn't enough to do any noticeable damage.
Afterwards, they wanted to take some pictures of the whole base from a guard tower using the special exposures. And sure enough, it showed little specks of 'magic' and 'otherworldliness' scattered all over. Approximately dragonfly sized. Dozens and dozens of them, although they couldn't remember ever actually seeing one, and when they went to the locations to look, they saw nothing.
So Caihong and Eric got Wren up there to try to get a clearer exposure (while Taegan and Jana stayed in the hangar, messing around with the Wright-style 'power source'), and everyone was attacked by pixies.
In the tower, two pixies attacked -- one went for Eric, the other for Wren. Eric was nearly hit by one, but managed to swat it right afterwards... except that he noticed then that he'd only swatted the mount -- the pixie had jumped off and crawled into his clothing! He rolled around to try to squish it, but it got away, and managed to sting him in the process. The other pixie buzzed the group a few times, but never managed to sting anyone and *nearly* got shot a few times, so eventually it buzzed off, and Caihong turned to trying to save Eric's life from the poison sting.
In the hangar, the first sign of trouble was that one of the scientists from the Royal Society fell over, clutching at his neck and foaming at the mouth. Jana and Taegan spotted the pixie, and Taegan decided to modify one of the anti-spectre probes into a sort of anbaric flyswatter using a bandsaw, while Jana tried to kill the pixie with her sword. The pixie dodged her clumsy swings easily (she was still a bit stiff from the sniper's bullet), killed the other scientist, and then did the same 'jump off onto the opponent after a near miss' on Taegan that the other one had pulled on Eric, except that he didn't do it nearly as stealthily, and both Jana and Taegan noticed.
Jana: "Hold perfectly still..." WHACK!
She judged her strength well, and managed to kill the pixie while not *quite* shattering Taegan's skull, by hitting him over the head with the flat of her blade. For her valiant efforts, she was taken in for questioning by the Inquisition (who had also been attacked by pixies, but fought off their attackers with no one on either side hurt), just in case she was a spy who purposely knocked out Taegan to help her pixie allies attack, or something.
last session | next session
Getting on the military base was a muddle, but not all that difficult in the end -- they remembered the names of some of the people who could identify who they were and that they were the same ones brought to look at the intention craft, which were currently disassembled and being looked at by members of the Royal Society, who'd previously (years ago) disassembled a much smaller and less advanced Intention Craft recovered by the church during the nonsense with Lord Asriel.
Notable discoveries:
(1) The craft seemed to be powered by the connection between a person and their daemon. Severing the connection was known to be a source of a sudden burst of great power, but this was less drastic.
(2) Unlike the older version, this one had a large Anbaric Spring (of sorts) that would keep it from instantly losing power and plummeting to the ground if the pilot expired.
(3) A lot of the complicated work wasn't done by circuitry or gears, but by 'little black boxes full of magic blue smoke'. They'd broken the previous ones for the old model and let the magic smoke out, so they knew not to mess with them this time.
(4) The weapon was powered directly by the not-quite-anbaric force that powered the whole craft, and couldn't be powered by normal means. It looked like a normal gun, but was completely internal -- somehow, it fired through the hull of the ship without hurting it, despite being perfectly capable of putting big holes in the hulls of other identical ships during the fight.
The party thought to take pictures of the ship using various exposures.
Magic: The ship used no magic whatsoever. This surprised everyone, since they'd assumed the magic blue smoke was a bound spirit of some sort.
Dust: The power system of the ship was faintly dusty, but the black boxes glowed brightly. Wren's prognosis was that they were, in some sense, conscious.
Random Exposure Number 2 (of 4 or so, of which this was the only one showing anything of interest): The entire ship, hull and all, glowed brightly... and so did the Order's anti-spectre zappy-probes.
Eric theorized that the last exposure was showing which things were from other worlds. Wren wasn't sure that the probes were from other worlds, but he did know that only a specific old Panzerbjorne knew how to forge weapons that (when suitably powered) would hurt spectres. Since he lived up north near where Asriel's giant portal of doom had been, the metal he used for them might very well have been otherworldly. Eric further theorized that the otherworldliness might be the key property that let them hurt spectres, and took some bits of scrap metal to test that with, for when they found the spectre that they were pretty sure was on the base somewhere.
Oh, and Taegan found some components spread throughout the intention craft that reminded him of Lord Wright's 'power source' that the order had called a portal device and forced him to shut down, only much larger and somewhat differently configured. He decided to try putting that together, while the others went looking for spectres.
The first stop was the infirmary on the base, where they didn't find any more spectre victims (although the doctors confirmed that the two top generals had had similar symptoms and had been sent to the Sisters of Mercy) but did find a strange number of poison victims. They ignored that and went looking near the generals' quarters for basements in which the spectres might be hiding.
There was a church nearby, which seemed like a likely place to have a mostly unattended basement. When they walked in, though, they saw that the inquisition was already there, asking similar questions, although they were following a different tack -- instead of looking for spectres, they were looking for the people who'd arranged for the generals' ailments, by whatever means. After some initial suspicions, they agreed to work with the inquisition for the moment.
The basement didn't have any strange symbols in it, but it did have some strange, tiny tunnels. Remembering the pixies, they decided to try sending someone's daemon through the tunnel while the daemon's person walked along the same route on the surface... unfortuantely, it didn't work that way. The key factor was 'how fast can I get back to my person', not 'how many yards away am I, ignoring intervening obstacles'.
It did look likely that the tunnels would go underneath the air wing headquarters, though, so they decided to check there. The officers didn't want to let them in, but, inquisition.
The basement of that building was a supply depot full of boxes. A little searching found that one of the tunnels did lead into that basement, and a little more (Eric decided to search the box *tops*) found that one big cluster of boxes was actually a shell surrounding an open area... with a magic circle, like the one they'd seen before.
The inquisition immediately arrested the supply officers and everyone in the chain of command above them (or, at least, took them into custody for 'questioning'), and then had a forklift driver move some boxes so that they could get at the circle to examine it. So of course there were a dozen likely food sources standing around when the spectre was exposed to people who could see it, with nary an anti-spectre weapon in sight!
After a few unproductive rounds of combat, in which Eric was almost eaten after making the thing visible to children again, everyone ran away... except for one soldier who ran the wrong way and got nabbed. Caihong went back for him and dragged him upstairs, thinking to drag him all the way to the hangar where the big zapper was sitting... only it was obvious that he'd be completely eaten before then. So instead, he sat him down and started moving his life force around to keep it away from the spectre and interrupt the feeding, which slowed down the process immensely -- there's no doubt that that saved the soldier's life, or at least his sanity.
Everyone else ran to the hangar to get the big zapper, then loaded it onto a gurney and wheeled it out to the soldier, who was curled up on the sidewalk with Caihong attending to him. Eric lured the spectre off the frustratingly slippery meal with a magic bullet, and then Jana zapped it to bits before it could reach him.
Unfortunately, all this took about five minutes, and even with Caihong's attention the soldier was about half eaten. Which manifested itself as 'missing' bits of his mind -- he couldn't fire a gun, for example, or understand when people tried to teach him how to fire a gun. Still, he was sane, if crippled, and not the total zombie he would have been if the spectre had had its way.
Oh, and during the fight Eric tested the scrap metal -- it did seem to be slightly tangible to the spectre, unlike mundane attacks, but throwing it by hand without any sort of spiritual or anbaric charge wasn't enough to do any noticeable damage.
Afterwards, they wanted to take some pictures of the whole base from a guard tower using the special exposures. And sure enough, it showed little specks of 'magic' and 'otherworldliness' scattered all over. Approximately dragonfly sized. Dozens and dozens of them, although they couldn't remember ever actually seeing one, and when they went to the locations to look, they saw nothing.
So Caihong and Eric got Wren up there to try to get a clearer exposure (while Taegan and Jana stayed in the hangar, messing around with the Wright-style 'power source'), and everyone was attacked by pixies.
In the tower, two pixies attacked -- one went for Eric, the other for Wren. Eric was nearly hit by one, but managed to swat it right afterwards... except that he noticed then that he'd only swatted the mount -- the pixie had jumped off and crawled into his clothing! He rolled around to try to squish it, but it got away, and managed to sting him in the process. The other pixie buzzed the group a few times, but never managed to sting anyone and *nearly* got shot a few times, so eventually it buzzed off, and Caihong turned to trying to save Eric's life from the poison sting.
In the hangar, the first sign of trouble was that one of the scientists from the Royal Society fell over, clutching at his neck and foaming at the mouth. Jana and Taegan spotted the pixie, and Taegan decided to modify one of the anti-spectre probes into a sort of anbaric flyswatter using a bandsaw, while Jana tried to kill the pixie with her sword. The pixie dodged her clumsy swings easily (she was still a bit stiff from the sniper's bullet), killed the other scientist, and then did the same 'jump off onto the opponent after a near miss' on Taegan that the other one had pulled on Eric, except that he didn't do it nearly as stealthily, and both Jana and Taegan noticed.
Jana: "Hold perfectly still..." WHACK!
She judged her strength well, and managed to kill the pixie while not *quite* shattering Taegan's skull, by hitting him over the head with the flat of her blade. For her valiant efforts, she was taken in for questioning by the Inquisition (who had also been attacked by pixies, but fought off their attackers with no one on either side hurt), just in case she was a spy who purposely knocked out Taegan to help her pixie allies attack, or something.
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