Homecoming from Hell
Jun. 21st, 2008 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothLast night we had a session of the shadake game... the players needed to invade Kit's old palace to try to get back Bob's real body. And discovered that in his absence, the defenses had been somewhat upgraded. They also discovered where Kit's other enemy (besides his son) was living now, and just who exactly the dragon had intended to have enchant Kit's staff. Oh, and where another of Leen's siblings was bound. And a way to definately, positively break Kit's curse.
From the briar-covered ridge overlooking the town of Briarridge, Kit opened another decoy portal leading... somewhere unspecified (probably to the forest in the middle of nowhere in Razia where they'd teleported to Trepani fromm) and animated some big wooden wheels to leave wagon tracks going down said path, while levitating the real wagon and the entire party a ways to break the trail.
They were in a hurry then, though, so they headed quickly through the city towards the palace.
GM: "How are you going to get in?"
Bob: "I'm going in through the front gate."
Kit: "I'll take the secret passage. There's always a secret passage."
As it turns out, there was -- from the wine cellar of the palace to the wine cellar of Kit's favorite inn, a few blocks from the palace. While Bob disguised himself as a beggar and snuck in through the front gate and the servant's entrance, the rest of the party (most of whom were inconspicuous) used the basement route.
Bob quickly managed to get the run of the palace, but almost immediately ran right into the Duke, who recognized either him or his body, it was hard to say which. The ensuing conversation revealed that, whoever the Duke recognized, he didn't like at all. Phrases like "price on your head" were tossed around, and before long the Duke was summoning Siren, one of Leen's kind, to put Bob to sleep. Bob fled his body to avoid being knocked unconscious, but that freed the previous tenant of his body, who was not at all happy at any of this, but decided to start out by using Turn Undead on Bob. Bob got slammed into the palace wall, which was solid on the astral plane, and pinned there by the turn spell, but not before seeing the Duke fall asleep as Siren's spell went haywire (due to Leen's proximity).
Bob couldn't penetrate the turn barrier, but he did manage to squiggle around and find the assassin who, in the mirror, had been stalking his body. She still seemed to be doing that... and was armed with an artifact that screamed DEATH DEATH DEATH on the astral plane -- a morganti dagger, which would destroy any soul at the slightest touch. Cut yourself shaving with a morganti dagger, NO SOUL FOR YOU. Not that anyone in their right mind would ever do that.
Bob tried to convince her to just use the dagger on his body and not any of her other weapons or poisons or whatever, because if only the interloper's soul was destroyed, he could reoccupy the body and everyone (who still existed) would be happy. The assassin refused to in any way accept any priorities other than the interloper's death, because if she tried, she was certain to fail. And she told Bob that under NO circumstances should he dislodge the interloper's soul from the body -- because if he was a ghost again, the assassin would have no way of finding him.
Meanwhile, the rest of the party snuck in through the cellars. While they were in the wine cellar, Kit picked out a few nice bottles of wine from his former collection -- one for Mira to carry to pretend to be on an errand that would give her an excuse to be in the nice areas of the castle, one for him to take with him and sell for some cash, elsewhere. Or maybe drink on a special occasion.
Unfortunately, as they left the cellar, a magic trap went off. On Kit only. Probably specifically tuned to Kit, or at least to something that only Kit satisfied. He managed to resist the trap, whatever it was, but not well enough to keep whoever'd left it from being alerted.
So they *hurried* to the study. Which was empty -- no assassin, no Bob's body. Mira asked the nearest servant where 'the person in this room who'd asked for a bottle of wine' had gone, and the butler scolded her from showing up ahead of schedule ("The new servants weren't supposed to be here until Wednesday.") and told her that *he'd* take the wine to 'The King's Advisor' himself.
So they all followed him, stealthily. Or at least insignificantly, until he knocked on the advisor's door.
Evil Wizard: *FOOOSH* powerful holy magic binding spell, along the same lines as the curse on Kit
Butler: *doesn't notice*
Evil Wizard: "What do you want?"
Butler: "I have the wine you requested, sir."
Evil Wizard: "I requested no wine. Who told you that I had?"
Butler: "One of the new servants told me you'd asked her to bring it."
Evil Wizard: "Would you recognize her if you saw her again?"
Butler: "Of course."
Evil Wizard: "EXCELLENT."
...so he turned the butler into a soot-covered wrath-zombie knowing nothing but hate, like the ones that had tried to destroy the dryads, and set him loose to kill Mira. Normally, he would have been able to seek her out with preternatural ease, but she was still in her antimagic field, so he wandered off down the hall, smashing things. The party made sure to stay out of his way.
Kit, seeing the spell cast, realized how it worked -- the wizard was tapping into Kit's bound kitsune soul, and reversing the flow of stored pain energy back into the human shell, driving him mad with agony but also granting great power. Kit, with no access to his kisune soul because of the curse, had no way of stopping this, other than perhaps dispelling the butler, or touching him and using him as an arcane link back to the source. For the moment, avoiding him seemed better.
But right about then, the Razian swat team assaulted the castle. The wizard, distracted, animated everything in the castle that could be animated to fight the intruders, and stalked off to aid in the defense. Kit suggested that while getting Bob's body back was probably a lost cause, since a hideously powerful wizard, perhaps a lich, was inhabiting it, they could at least destroy any arcane links to Kit that he had stored in his room, while he was distracted.
Mira, safe from magical traps thanks to her antimagic, robbed the room first, of course. Then she set a cannister of dehydrated steam in the room, and Cho incinerated everything with a massive arc of lightning from his sword. It worked, for the most part -- the room was annihilated except for the outer wall of the castle (which was apparently impervious) and a demon floating in midair, who thanked Cho for releasing him. Using his true name.
"That's not my *whole* name," Cho protested, when Kit went to write it down.
Then the wizard came back, apparently noticing the destruction of his stuff. Mira, the only one he could see, tried to teleport away using the caster, but the wizard counterspelled it. Kit tried to counterspell his counterspell, but saying that the wizard was out of Kit's league wasn't really even scratching the surface. If the wizard critically failed and Kit critically succeeded, it might be a tie.
So Cho decided to blast the wizard with the same sort of giant electrical arc of doom that had destroyed his room. The assassin, who'd been watching all along, could not allow this, since it would only destroy Bob's body and not the evil wizard himself, so she sank her morganti dagger into Cho's back to stop him. Cho barely noticed -- later, theories about why were bantered around, ranging from 'he's operating that suit of armor remotely' to 'he's actually a colony of rabbits, and only the one rabbit got desouled'. The electrical arc went off.
Unfortunately, the wizard dodged with a timeslip, although his escort was annihilated. The assassin -- that Kit noticed was a three-tailed Kitsune as he stared in shock at the dagger, which he also recognized -- ran off, Mira drew the artifact dagger out of Cho's back, and... Charon, the invisible dragon that Kit had run into previously, arrived.
Dragon: "Ethelred! I have a task for you. This will be one of the favors you owe me."
Ethelred (the wizard), ignoring the party and, in fact, turning his back on them: "What is it?"
Mira: *throws the morganti dagger at his back*
Ethelred: *timeslip-dodges, perhaps automatically*
Dragon: *catches the dagger* "A wizard wants you to enchant his staff to aid in his magic, and return to him on command. DO YOUR BEST."
Kit felt a tug at his staff, and with a frustrated grumble let it fly across the chamber to the dragon, who proceeded to continue to talk to Ethelred in a more inside-voice.
So they all ran away, Kit grumbling about how much of a jerk the dragon was.
Kit: "He waited until we were fighting."
Mira: "Ha ha, 'your enemy wants a better tool to do magic, help him out!'"
Kit: "He's such a dick. Dragons are all jerks. If I ever get the staff back it'll probably be booby-trapped."
There was one final thing to take care of before leaving the castle the way most of them had come in -- Bob wanted a new temporary body (the feriphal hadn't survived), but didn't want to take one from someone innocent. There were prisoners in the dungeon, but with the castle in the hands of an evil, evil EVIL EVIL EVIL wizard, that wasn't necessarily enough to tell. So he asked Kit to assist, since he was an empath.
Kit decided to use magic to make it a little more certain, and charmed the prisoners to tell them what they were in for and whether they were innocent. And one of the wild surges from Leen using her powers to help Cho make his giant electric arcs of doom while Siren was nearby triggered, casting the spell on everyone in a mile radius.
Bob did manage to find a suitable victim (a female manis -- a pangolintaur like http://home.earthlink.net/~aaronm1/pics/sophie-pencil.jpg -- who'd done lots of evil things), although she was a member of his church and knew what he was planning, and tried to resist. In vain!
Kit: "You outrank her. So you're not stealing her body, you're just commandeering it."
Bob: "No, I'm stealing it. She was evil."
It took more charm spells to get out the dungeon through the press of bodies, though. And in the inn, some of the drunks started confessing their sins to Kit, most of those sins being 'I'm an alcoholic'. Kit cured enough of their mental anguish to need a drink himself, although he bought a cheap bottle of wine instead of using the expensive one he'd salvaged from the wine cellar.
Then got talked into selling the expensive one to the bartender for cheap, because he was too drunk to remember which way he was supposed to be haggling.
And about then, the insignificance spell wore off, and everyone recognized him as the old Duke. Apparently, the people of Briarridge had assumed that he'd faked his own death on purpose in order to step down for his son, and was back in disguise to check on things but had screwed up the disguise spell and dropped it early. Kit did nothing to dissuade this interpretation, especially since it meant a lot of attention from comely wenches, etc, and he was drunk enough to think that flirting and groping (and drinking more) was a good idea while Razian swat teams hunted them for their actions in the Razian capital, Ethelred and Charon no doubt plotted his doom, etc.
Oh, and he bought the expensive bottle of wine back for 50 times more than he'd sold it for, on the palace expense account.
He did want to get out of the city, though, so he led the party and a bunch of hangers on who'd been flirting with various party members to the woods on the edge of town, where he tried to open a portal to Alexandria, the dryad library -- a good place to have sex, since the dryads kept those sorts of things well stocked. He... didn't quite get there. He was a little too drunk. Instead, they ended up in one of his old hideaways to the far south of the empire, from back when he was the Benevolent Father of the great empire that predated Taforia and Razia both.
Which was a perfectly reasonable place to hide and/or make out (with some magical defenses to keep it from being found, even), but didn't *actually* have any forests nearby to send people back with. He wasn't really sure how he'd opened a portal there in the first place.
last session | next session
From the briar-covered ridge overlooking the town of Briarridge, Kit opened another decoy portal leading... somewhere unspecified (probably to the forest in the middle of nowhere in Razia where they'd teleported to Trepani fromm) and animated some big wooden wheels to leave wagon tracks going down said path, while levitating the real wagon and the entire party a ways to break the trail.
They were in a hurry then, though, so they headed quickly through the city towards the palace.
GM: "How are you going to get in?"
Bob: "I'm going in through the front gate."
Kit: "I'll take the secret passage. There's always a secret passage."
As it turns out, there was -- from the wine cellar of the palace to the wine cellar of Kit's favorite inn, a few blocks from the palace. While Bob disguised himself as a beggar and snuck in through the front gate and the servant's entrance, the rest of the party (most of whom were inconspicuous) used the basement route.
Bob quickly managed to get the run of the palace, but almost immediately ran right into the Duke, who recognized either him or his body, it was hard to say which. The ensuing conversation revealed that, whoever the Duke recognized, he didn't like at all. Phrases like "price on your head" were tossed around, and before long the Duke was summoning Siren, one of Leen's kind, to put Bob to sleep. Bob fled his body to avoid being knocked unconscious, but that freed the previous tenant of his body, who was not at all happy at any of this, but decided to start out by using Turn Undead on Bob. Bob got slammed into the palace wall, which was solid on the astral plane, and pinned there by the turn spell, but not before seeing the Duke fall asleep as Siren's spell went haywire (due to Leen's proximity).
Bob couldn't penetrate the turn barrier, but he did manage to squiggle around and find the assassin who, in the mirror, had been stalking his body. She still seemed to be doing that... and was armed with an artifact that screamed DEATH DEATH DEATH on the astral plane -- a morganti dagger, which would destroy any soul at the slightest touch. Cut yourself shaving with a morganti dagger, NO SOUL FOR YOU. Not that anyone in their right mind would ever do that.
Bob tried to convince her to just use the dagger on his body and not any of her other weapons or poisons or whatever, because if only the interloper's soul was destroyed, he could reoccupy the body and everyone (who still existed) would be happy. The assassin refused to in any way accept any priorities other than the interloper's death, because if she tried, she was certain to fail. And she told Bob that under NO circumstances should he dislodge the interloper's soul from the body -- because if he was a ghost again, the assassin would have no way of finding him.
Meanwhile, the rest of the party snuck in through the cellars. While they were in the wine cellar, Kit picked out a few nice bottles of wine from his former collection -- one for Mira to carry to pretend to be on an errand that would give her an excuse to be in the nice areas of the castle, one for him to take with him and sell for some cash, elsewhere. Or maybe drink on a special occasion.
Unfortunately, as they left the cellar, a magic trap went off. On Kit only. Probably specifically tuned to Kit, or at least to something that only Kit satisfied. He managed to resist the trap, whatever it was, but not well enough to keep whoever'd left it from being alerted.
So they *hurried* to the study. Which was empty -- no assassin, no Bob's body. Mira asked the nearest servant where 'the person in this room who'd asked for a bottle of wine' had gone, and the butler scolded her from showing up ahead of schedule ("The new servants weren't supposed to be here until Wednesday.") and told her that *he'd* take the wine to 'The King's Advisor' himself.
So they all followed him, stealthily. Or at least insignificantly, until he knocked on the advisor's door.
Evil Wizard: *FOOOSH* powerful holy magic binding spell, along the same lines as the curse on Kit
Butler: *doesn't notice*
Evil Wizard: "What do you want?"
Butler: "I have the wine you requested, sir."
Evil Wizard: "I requested no wine. Who told you that I had?"
Butler: "One of the new servants told me you'd asked her to bring it."
Evil Wizard: "Would you recognize her if you saw her again?"
Butler: "Of course."
Evil Wizard: "EXCELLENT."
...so he turned the butler into a soot-covered wrath-zombie knowing nothing but hate, like the ones that had tried to destroy the dryads, and set him loose to kill Mira. Normally, he would have been able to seek her out with preternatural ease, but she was still in her antimagic field, so he wandered off down the hall, smashing things. The party made sure to stay out of his way.
Kit, seeing the spell cast, realized how it worked -- the wizard was tapping into Kit's bound kitsune soul, and reversing the flow of stored pain energy back into the human shell, driving him mad with agony but also granting great power. Kit, with no access to his kisune soul because of the curse, had no way of stopping this, other than perhaps dispelling the butler, or touching him and using him as an arcane link back to the source. For the moment, avoiding him seemed better.
But right about then, the Razian swat team assaulted the castle. The wizard, distracted, animated everything in the castle that could be animated to fight the intruders, and stalked off to aid in the defense. Kit suggested that while getting Bob's body back was probably a lost cause, since a hideously powerful wizard, perhaps a lich, was inhabiting it, they could at least destroy any arcane links to Kit that he had stored in his room, while he was distracted.
Mira, safe from magical traps thanks to her antimagic, robbed the room first, of course. Then she set a cannister of dehydrated steam in the room, and Cho incinerated everything with a massive arc of lightning from his sword. It worked, for the most part -- the room was annihilated except for the outer wall of the castle (which was apparently impervious) and a demon floating in midair, who thanked Cho for releasing him. Using his true name.
"That's not my *whole* name," Cho protested, when Kit went to write it down.
Then the wizard came back, apparently noticing the destruction of his stuff. Mira, the only one he could see, tried to teleport away using the caster, but the wizard counterspelled it. Kit tried to counterspell his counterspell, but saying that the wizard was out of Kit's league wasn't really even scratching the surface. If the wizard critically failed and Kit critically succeeded, it might be a tie.
So Cho decided to blast the wizard with the same sort of giant electrical arc of doom that had destroyed his room. The assassin, who'd been watching all along, could not allow this, since it would only destroy Bob's body and not the evil wizard himself, so she sank her morganti dagger into Cho's back to stop him. Cho barely noticed -- later, theories about why were bantered around, ranging from 'he's operating that suit of armor remotely' to 'he's actually a colony of rabbits, and only the one rabbit got desouled'. The electrical arc went off.
Unfortunately, the wizard dodged with a timeslip, although his escort was annihilated. The assassin -- that Kit noticed was a three-tailed Kitsune as he stared in shock at the dagger, which he also recognized -- ran off, Mira drew the artifact dagger out of Cho's back, and... Charon, the invisible dragon that Kit had run into previously, arrived.
Dragon: "Ethelred! I have a task for you. This will be one of the favors you owe me."
Ethelred (the wizard), ignoring the party and, in fact, turning his back on them: "What is it?"
Mira: *throws the morganti dagger at his back*
Ethelred: *timeslip-dodges, perhaps automatically*
Dragon: *catches the dagger* "A wizard wants you to enchant his staff to aid in his magic, and return to him on command. DO YOUR BEST."
Kit felt a tug at his staff, and with a frustrated grumble let it fly across the chamber to the dragon, who proceeded to continue to talk to Ethelred in a more inside-voice.
So they all ran away, Kit grumbling about how much of a jerk the dragon was.
Kit: "He waited until we were fighting."
Mira: "Ha ha, 'your enemy wants a better tool to do magic, help him out!'"
Kit: "He's such a dick. Dragons are all jerks. If I ever get the staff back it'll probably be booby-trapped."
There was one final thing to take care of before leaving the castle the way most of them had come in -- Bob wanted a new temporary body (the feriphal hadn't survived), but didn't want to take one from someone innocent. There were prisoners in the dungeon, but with the castle in the hands of an evil, evil EVIL EVIL EVIL wizard, that wasn't necessarily enough to tell. So he asked Kit to assist, since he was an empath.
Kit decided to use magic to make it a little more certain, and charmed the prisoners to tell them what they were in for and whether they were innocent. And one of the wild surges from Leen using her powers to help Cho make his giant electric arcs of doom while Siren was nearby triggered, casting the spell on everyone in a mile radius.
Bob did manage to find a suitable victim (a female manis -- a pangolintaur like http://home.earthlink.net/~aaronm1/pics/sophie-pencil.jpg -- who'd done lots of evil things), although she was a member of his church and knew what he was planning, and tried to resist. In vain!
Kit: "You outrank her. So you're not stealing her body, you're just commandeering it."
Bob: "No, I'm stealing it. She was evil."
It took more charm spells to get out the dungeon through the press of bodies, though. And in the inn, some of the drunks started confessing their sins to Kit, most of those sins being 'I'm an alcoholic'. Kit cured enough of their mental anguish to need a drink himself, although he bought a cheap bottle of wine instead of using the expensive one he'd salvaged from the wine cellar.
Then got talked into selling the expensive one to the bartender for cheap, because he was too drunk to remember which way he was supposed to be haggling.
And about then, the insignificance spell wore off, and everyone recognized him as the old Duke. Apparently, the people of Briarridge had assumed that he'd faked his own death on purpose in order to step down for his son, and was back in disguise to check on things but had screwed up the disguise spell and dropped it early. Kit did nothing to dissuade this interpretation, especially since it meant a lot of attention from comely wenches, etc, and he was drunk enough to think that flirting and groping (and drinking more) was a good idea while Razian swat teams hunted them for their actions in the Razian capital, Ethelred and Charon no doubt plotted his doom, etc.
Oh, and he bought the expensive bottle of wine back for 50 times more than he'd sold it for, on the palace expense account.
He did want to get out of the city, though, so he led the party and a bunch of hangers on who'd been flirting with various party members to the woods on the edge of town, where he tried to open a portal to Alexandria, the dryad library -- a good place to have sex, since the dryads kept those sorts of things well stocked. He... didn't quite get there. He was a little too drunk. Instead, they ended up in one of his old hideaways to the far south of the empire, from back when he was the Benevolent Father of the great empire that predated Taforia and Razia both.
Which was a perfectly reasonable place to hide and/or make out (with some magical defenses to keep it from being found, even), but didn't *actually* have any forests nearby to send people back with. He wasn't really sure how he'd opened a portal there in the first place.
last session | next session
