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Dramatis Personae
Izgil, who is profoundly offended by the irrationality of these accusations
Viepuck, who manages PR rather a lot for a twelve-year-old
Celyn, who has a little box of white-hot rage that he opens up, for a treat
Robin, who as always really wants to protect everyone
When we left off we were about to be tried on a trumped-up necromancy accusation put together by a person we were pretty sure was an actual necromancer.
We are being Watched Uncomfortably. People are scared of us, which frankly we find a little insulting, a little frustrating, and a lot exhausting; these people include a number who literally witnessed us charging out of an upper-story window to pursue a murderous fey to her death. You know, the sorts of things that ought to set a reputation and make people go "Uhhhh...."
Viepuck does his best to collect a little information about the guard that died - a young woman named Vivian who had been well spoken of, we recognized the name, but we hadn't met her. And generally to be publicly playing the falsely accused hero with great sympathy for the tragedy here, which I think nobody else was feeling up for, much.
There are people who aren't going "Uhhhh...." to be fair, but they do not in fact bring us any damn dinner, which was the reason we'd left the tower in the first place. Robin pulls some trail rations off Greymalkin's saddlebags, and we eat with standard set watches because like hell are we going to trust that this isn't going to go further off the rails while we're unconscious.
Towards the end of Robin's watch, the circuit magistrate who we have allied with (by helping him solve a hairy murder case by pointing out it was fairies) came out with the actual indictment, commenting that "The Baroness insisted," in a way that makes it clear that he thinks she's full of shit, and gave it to Robin under the principle that even if this was being done in a way that is a total violation of procedure we have the right to see the charges.
Viepuck - who established readers will recall is accidentally an entire competent lawyer despite being literally too young to sign contracts on his own recognizance - appears to be keeping detailed mental lists of all the ways this particular sham trial is violating procedure in case they might turn out to be useful. It turns out that everyone involved in the actual legal system is deeply uncomfortable.
Marian, the disciple of the Warlord who has the power of compelling truth (at a personal price), has had Viepuck's familiar watching over her to make sure nobody sneaks in and stabs her or something. She has awakened from the sleep in which Celyn gave her a prophetic dream and is pacing restlessly, occasionally trying to write something and scratching it out, and very agitated. Prophetic dreams are not always restful. She does start up towards the keep at nearly trial time, though.
In the morning Celyn asks if he can speak, even though he's not as eloquent as Robin or as tricksy with things as Viepuck, but he has some things he'd like to get off his chest. He offers to explain their arc from the necromantic upsurge in Cleenseau without triggering the Drama Bomb of saying "By the way, the king has been replaced with a lich", he will leave the Drama Bomb to someone who is a better public speaker. As the time for the trial approaches, he withdraws somewhat to spend some time in prayer, coming out of it with a deep resolve and a certain inner light.
The Captain of the Guard turns up to arrange the trial setup, and he is amongst the people who is deeply uncomfortable. Fidgeting with his sword hilt, because he would feel better if he drew it, but he refuses to draw on the party even for the look and his own personal comfort, and so on.
We all arrange (with Greymalkin) in front of the magistrate and the bench of local nobles who serve as the effective jury, because that's what you get when you're still feudal. Amongst the irregularities that go into Viepuck's collection of ways in which this trial is not proper procedure, that the magistrate, who should be prosecuting after a reasonable investigation, is being railroaded by the baroness - on the jury bench - who is presenting the case. And she is furious, furious and scared; the emotion appears legitimate, though we do not believe that it is at what she claims. (Celyn had made a study of her tells when we were having a conversation in which he knew, specifically, that she was lying, and what she was lying about. He thought it might be useful later. Celyn has a very high wisdom stat.)
So the indictment claimed we killed this guard and were planning to murder and raise as a zombie army the inhabitants of the area. The Baroness's companion (I don't remember her actual title but the Victorian era implications are reasonably accurate) claims to have seen Viepuck puppeting the young woman's corpse with black bands of magic while Celyn sharpened a knife like a stabby mob enforcer from a B movie.
The Baroness said that she had no evidence against Robin and Izgil and asked Robin if he would disavow his companions accordingly and be counted innocent. Robin quoted her words back to her - about standing for truth and justice and the protection of the innocent - and said that therefore he would not disavow his companions. Izgil said the same, and the Baroness said, "Okay, then, you're clearly complicit despite our inability to find evidence for it, we'll take that as a confession of conspiracy," more or less.
We are invited to speak, and Celyn turns to Marian and draws her out of the crowd, asking to be bound by the will of the gods. She is visibly terrified, but steels herself and does the thing. He asks her to verify that he is bound by the Warlord's will, demonstrates a lie and his inability to say it, and then laughs and says he claimed to be taller than his brothers, adding that he is taller than his sister by thiiiiis much before he gets serious. (Note: Celyn's like five foot two, maybe three. Call it 158-160 cm for people who think in metric.)
(Side note: Celyn demanded that I draft a version of his speech in advance because he spent basically the entire time between last session and thus one yelling at me about it, and 70% of it was about this, and 30% about it was that he wanted the plot to stop happening so he could snuggle with his boyfriend and maybe have a vacation. It was good to have a framework prepped?)
I made clear that Celyn was furious, in a tightly controlled way, but the boy is in fact an optimistic little ray of sunshine which I just typoed to "rage of sunshine" who is also a tightly wound coil of violence, it's just that he doesn't usually let the violence out when he's not actively in the process of stabbing something that needs to be stabbed.
Celyn explained that the party first encountered necromancy with the disease in January that spread through one neighborhood Cleenseau, afflicting primarily the very young and the very old, including the unborn. (Yes, that is as horrifying as it sounds, I think that was before I was doing session summaries.) He noted that they dealt with the immediate source of the infection (Robin and the Wanderer did that part) and notable people died, but also - and this is the thing he's Big Mad about - not notable people, most particularly a young man named Cedric who he had been unable to protect, who died alone (because foolish orders had the army, with his partner in it, marching willy-nilly around the countryside) because he was, as Celyn said, "doing the bravest thing I can imagine" and his pregnancy turned zombie on him.
Celyn has been, in fact, looking for hints about what woke up the orb and what was going on there but the plot has not brought him near any of them. (He had, at one point, had hope that the Baroness (with her known paranoia of necromancers) would have had thoughts about this, but that was before she started trying to wipe out the followers of the Night Queen (accusing them of necromancy), who is the goddess of undead should rest in peace already, so that 'fear of necromancy' thing was clearly a front.) He outright mocked the "ritual space" we found, noting that he couldn't have stood up in it so clearly it didn't display the competence required to awaken undead several days' ride away. (Apparently it was a day for Celyn to make short jokes about himself.) He noted that other events overcame that search, that he had personally killed several fey, one of whom cursed him with her dying breath, and he still hadn't found any goddamn necromancers, and would really like to have words with whatever was responsible for that orb.
(Obviously I have a lot of details from his speech because I wasn't off the cuff.)
The Baroness proceeded to try cross-examining him, saying "But you haven't denied the charges," to which he scoffed and said "I deny the charges" and noted he was up in the tower playing dice at the time that the crime occurred. I forget what got him off on "the gods aren't stupid, they wouldn't lend their power to people who would do that" because he's absolutely off on a sacrilege angle in bits of his "I wanted to find the necromancers so I could stab them for Cedric and now some asshole is accusing me of necromancy" fury but when she said how would they know who the gods had denied their power he cast a light spell. Tehre was a whole thing about his capacities, and couldn't you be using fairy magic to trick us, and Celyn does not, in fact, have that sort of fairy magic and said so.
(Celyn's light spell, for the record, tends to have all the subtlety of a disco ball made of rainbows. God of chaos, after all. And hope. It has a very specific vibe.)
Eventually Izgil took over the conversation because Izgil had also lost his rather gruff temper and pointed out several logical failings and a great deal of foolhardiness, talking about obvious insinuation of dark influences in place, and nearly but not quite setting off the aforementioned Drama Bomb. But he was cranky. (I think it was when she said she was unimpressed by Celyn's theatrics when he did the light spell and he just went, "THEATRICS?" and started running down the sham trial.)
Then we got Viepuck, who said "I am accused of necromancy, but I am an entertainer, brought here for this sham trial to be entertaining, so let me tell you a story." And he proceeds to spin a tale of corruption and a possibly-innocent party being led into perdition and a wide variety of other things, culminating in declaring that King Robert is a lich and when we're sorted here we're dealing with him, which is one of those hair-splitting truths that depends on an expansive value of 'we'.
You see, the lich had cast a spell such that anyone who talked about him as a lich would be drawn to his attention and he might well intervene. Which meant, of course, that we had just waved a big red cape at a distant, undead bull. In order to draw his attention. So the team of adventurers who were higher level than we are and had just destroyed his anchor could sneak in and kick his ass while he was distracted. So Viepuck was in fact speaking truly, for ... large values of "we".
This of course sends ripples through the crowd, there are mutterings of treason, general uncertainty, general chaos, and then Marian, terror in her eyes, affirms that the Warlord agrees that we spoke truly.
"Roll initiative."
A rip opens above the party, and a vaguely humanoid, immense shadow figure appears there. There is screaming chaos from the onlookers; the Baroness takes mild cover but watches intensely. The shadow figure has bands of shadow that appear to originate at Viepuck as if to riff the described scene from the murder trial; it blasts out dark beams of energy at the front row of the crowd, several of our allies, and such; Robin flings himself between one of the beams and Marian, taking the hit for her. Celyn, being of a practical bent and being able to reach the thing, stabs it, which appears to do damage. Viepuck's familiar feeds a weirdberry to one of the fallen guards, reviving him, and Viepuck basically yells, "Oh, come on, anyone can make a scene" and shoots rainbows into the sky from his hands rather than attack.
The shadow thing makes a point of not attacking either Viepuck or Celyn, in order to maintain the ruse of the trial, which honestly seems a lot of very silly effort to go to given all the everything and a generally doomed proposition. All the people who fell down and weren't revived get up as zombies, which is deeply aggravating given the general nature of 'innocent bystanders', so we start yelling at people to fucking move already. Marian gets on Greymalkin and Greymalkin Removes Her From The Scene At Speed. Izgil sets off a few luminous fireballs to hit the big bad and the zombies; Celyn stabs things. There is immense chaos. The big bad tries to do something horrible to Robin, who fails his save, and then Celyn uses one of his cleric powers to unfail the save for him.
The shadow thing, mimicking Viepuck's voice - which you know probably sounds very unmenacing at base because Viepuck is, I repeat, twelve - says something about false Wyrdling will not defeat him, and Celyn responds by blasting the shadow with literal divine light, because he will make a point. There is a lot of blasting (Viepuck and Izgil) and repositioning. Izgil casts Haste on Robin. (Yes I do not remember the exact round sequence it was very messy.)
Robin bangs his shield with his hammer and yells at the big bad, "I will be your opponent!" and locks it into a duel, telling the rest of the party, "Don't attack it while I'm standing, get everyone out!" (Celyn does some reprioritization in his head.)
Much of the crowd clears out or at least takes cover, though some people are still frozen in shock. Viepuck's familiar smacks into the face of one of them. ("Hit in the face with a flying squid!") Another wave of zombies happens; Izgil's blast clears out most of them. Celyn deletes one of the survivors, while Greymalkin barrels into the others to both startle the people into running away and protect them.
Something happens to the shadow thing, and it shrinks. THe Baroness is looking concerned about the situation. (She had started out at "there's no way they can win" and was working her way around to "... but what if they do.")
Celyn, who can sprint like whoa, loops out, snaps someone out of it, reverses course on a dime to get to right behind Robin and drops a heal on him, because he can do that without breaking the Forced Duel. Viepuck, after failing to get off a faerie fire, tells the Baroness to help her allies with a magical suggestion behind it, and nearly gets blasted for his trouble (which was the point) only Izgil counterspelled it (and then immediately regretted it because it meant there was no evidence).
Robin's third strike on the shadow thing dissipates it into a cloud of cursed smoke. THe Baroness faints dead away. Celyn deletes the last zombie, then whirls around to run back, hug Robin, and drop another large heal on him.
The aftermath has a number of traumatized people, and a number of dead. Robin starts carefully laying out the dead, and Celyn joins him. The godtouched people can deal with the dead, Viepuck and Izgil can go with the people who are taking the fainted-away Baroness to her room. Someone tries to get Robin to go into the keep, and he doesn't want to, and Celyn pulls the guy aside to explain that Robin gets upset at everyone he couldn't protect (and there were a number of those); he doesn't know for sure that that's what's eating at Robin but he's pretty sure that it's not not what's the problem.
The Baroness wakes up, claiming amnesia, so there is a theory floated that she might have been enthralled. As the actual townsfolk, including Marian, come help tend to the dead, Celyn and Robin have a small conversation, and then Celyn reluctantly goes up to find the others. (Marian expresses confusion that what she saw in her prophetic dream did not come to pass. Celyn will talk to her in the interim time at the end of the session, but I haven't talked to Mike about that yet, he just told me what he would tell her while I was washing my hair, heh.)
There is some general "could you stick around for a bit" conversation, and the party remains in Veltor as the chaos and gossip swarm. Robin is exceptionally annoyed that the Baroness's companion is sort of being treated as a subset of the Baroness's potential crimes and not being independently tried for perjury; she admitted that her story of seeing Viepuck and Celyn was something that Baroness told her to say. (The Baroness claimed that she'd seen it but it'd 'sound wrong' if she said it, so got her companion to tell the tale for her.) A complaint is formally written up (by Viepuck) and delivered to the magistrate.
Eventually a messenger from the Queen arrives. (The Heir to the throne of Sembara is the Queen of Tyrwingha, where Celyn and Robin are from; the two kingdoms are often but not always a joint crown.) She has sent troops to take the Baroness into custody for trial in the capital (the Baroness is still claiming fatigue and amnesia and Celyn does not believe her at all) and they are warned taht the Baroness at least had the power to do magic. They said they were prepared for that eventuality.
The Queen's messenger also asked if Robin would be willing to accept the lordship of Asineau. (Asineau being the small town near Cleenseau that was burdened with a corrupt, embezzling lord who didn't want to be there, that Viepuck ... encouraged ... to resign as lord and renounce the title both for himself and his heirs as he fled back to the capital. It has a Wyrdling temple and a really fucked-up economic situation due to the perfidies of said lord.) Robin has to take a moment or five, but then says he would. Celyn, a little - a lot - unsettled, notes that he can no longer say that he is from nowhere.
The messenger informs us that the Queen would like us to accompany her on the portion of her circuit through the realm that touches on the lands under our particular protection (the Cleenseau region) when she does her circuit walk in October. Assuming the evil fey looking for a blood sacrifice from a Tyrwinghan don't try to abduct her before then, we are assuming that will be the problem we have to deal with then.
But also...
... maybe we get some time off until then?
Izgil, who is profoundly offended by the irrationality of these accusations
Viepuck, who manages PR rather a lot for a twelve-year-old
Celyn, who has a little box of white-hot rage that he opens up, for a treat
Robin, who as always really wants to protect everyone
When we left off we were about to be tried on a trumped-up necromancy accusation put together by a person we were pretty sure was an actual necromancer.
We are being Watched Uncomfortably. People are scared of us, which frankly we find a little insulting, a little frustrating, and a lot exhausting; these people include a number who literally witnessed us charging out of an upper-story window to pursue a murderous fey to her death. You know, the sorts of things that ought to set a reputation and make people go "Uhhhh...."
Viepuck does his best to collect a little information about the guard that died - a young woman named Vivian who had been well spoken of, we recognized the name, but we hadn't met her. And generally to be publicly playing the falsely accused hero with great sympathy for the tragedy here, which I think nobody else was feeling up for, much.
There are people who aren't going "Uhhhh...." to be fair, but they do not in fact bring us any damn dinner, which was the reason we'd left the tower in the first place. Robin pulls some trail rations off Greymalkin's saddlebags, and we eat with standard set watches because like hell are we going to trust that this isn't going to go further off the rails while we're unconscious.
Towards the end of Robin's watch, the circuit magistrate who we have allied with (by helping him solve a hairy murder case by pointing out it was fairies) came out with the actual indictment, commenting that "The Baroness insisted," in a way that makes it clear that he thinks she's full of shit, and gave it to Robin under the principle that even if this was being done in a way that is a total violation of procedure we have the right to see the charges.
Viepuck - who established readers will recall is accidentally an entire competent lawyer despite being literally too young to sign contracts on his own recognizance - appears to be keeping detailed mental lists of all the ways this particular sham trial is violating procedure in case they might turn out to be useful. It turns out that everyone involved in the actual legal system is deeply uncomfortable.
Marian, the disciple of the Warlord who has the power of compelling truth (at a personal price), has had Viepuck's familiar watching over her to make sure nobody sneaks in and stabs her or something. She has awakened from the sleep in which Celyn gave her a prophetic dream and is pacing restlessly, occasionally trying to write something and scratching it out, and very agitated. Prophetic dreams are not always restful. She does start up towards the keep at nearly trial time, though.
In the morning Celyn asks if he can speak, even though he's not as eloquent as Robin or as tricksy with things as Viepuck, but he has some things he'd like to get off his chest. He offers to explain their arc from the necromantic upsurge in Cleenseau without triggering the Drama Bomb of saying "By the way, the king has been replaced with a lich", he will leave the Drama Bomb to someone who is a better public speaker. As the time for the trial approaches, he withdraws somewhat to spend some time in prayer, coming out of it with a deep resolve and a certain inner light.
The Captain of the Guard turns up to arrange the trial setup, and he is amongst the people who is deeply uncomfortable. Fidgeting with his sword hilt, because he would feel better if he drew it, but he refuses to draw on the party even for the look and his own personal comfort, and so on.
We all arrange (with Greymalkin) in front of the magistrate and the bench of local nobles who serve as the effective jury, because that's what you get when you're still feudal. Amongst the irregularities that go into Viepuck's collection of ways in which this trial is not proper procedure, that the magistrate, who should be prosecuting after a reasonable investigation, is being railroaded by the baroness - on the jury bench - who is presenting the case. And she is furious, furious and scared; the emotion appears legitimate, though we do not believe that it is at what she claims. (Celyn had made a study of her tells when we were having a conversation in which he knew, specifically, that she was lying, and what she was lying about. He thought it might be useful later. Celyn has a very high wisdom stat.)
So the indictment claimed we killed this guard and were planning to murder and raise as a zombie army the inhabitants of the area. The Baroness's companion (I don't remember her actual title but the Victorian era implications are reasonably accurate) claims to have seen Viepuck puppeting the young woman's corpse with black bands of magic while Celyn sharpened a knife like a stabby mob enforcer from a B movie.
The Baroness said that she had no evidence against Robin and Izgil and asked Robin if he would disavow his companions accordingly and be counted innocent. Robin quoted her words back to her - about standing for truth and justice and the protection of the innocent - and said that therefore he would not disavow his companions. Izgil said the same, and the Baroness said, "Okay, then, you're clearly complicit despite our inability to find evidence for it, we'll take that as a confession of conspiracy," more or less.
We are invited to speak, and Celyn turns to Marian and draws her out of the crowd, asking to be bound by the will of the gods. She is visibly terrified, but steels herself and does the thing. He asks her to verify that he is bound by the Warlord's will, demonstrates a lie and his inability to say it, and then laughs and says he claimed to be taller than his brothers, adding that he is taller than his sister by thiiiiis much before he gets serious. (Note: Celyn's like five foot two, maybe three. Call it 158-160 cm for people who think in metric.)
(Side note: Celyn demanded that I draft a version of his speech in advance because he spent basically the entire time between last session and thus one yelling at me about it, and 70% of it was about this, and 30% about it was that he wanted the plot to stop happening so he could snuggle with his boyfriend and maybe have a vacation. It was good to have a framework prepped?)
I made clear that Celyn was furious, in a tightly controlled way, but the boy is in fact an optimistic little ray of sunshine which I just typoed to "rage of sunshine" who is also a tightly wound coil of violence, it's just that he doesn't usually let the violence out when he's not actively in the process of stabbing something that needs to be stabbed.
Celyn explained that the party first encountered necromancy with the disease in January that spread through one neighborhood Cleenseau, afflicting primarily the very young and the very old, including the unborn. (Yes, that is as horrifying as it sounds, I think that was before I was doing session summaries.) He noted that they dealt with the immediate source of the infection (Robin and the Wanderer did that part) and notable people died, but also - and this is the thing he's Big Mad about - not notable people, most particularly a young man named Cedric who he had been unable to protect, who died alone (because foolish orders had the army, with his partner in it, marching willy-nilly around the countryside) because he was, as Celyn said, "doing the bravest thing I can imagine" and his pregnancy turned zombie on him.
Celyn has been, in fact, looking for hints about what woke up the orb and what was going on there but the plot has not brought him near any of them. (He had, at one point, had hope that the Baroness (with her known paranoia of necromancers) would have had thoughts about this, but that was before she started trying to wipe out the followers of the Night Queen (accusing them of necromancy), who is the goddess of undead should rest in peace already, so that 'fear of necromancy' thing was clearly a front.) He outright mocked the "ritual space" we found, noting that he couldn't have stood up in it so clearly it didn't display the competence required to awaken undead several days' ride away. (Apparently it was a day for Celyn to make short jokes about himself.) He noted that other events overcame that search, that he had personally killed several fey, one of whom cursed him with her dying breath, and he still hadn't found any goddamn necromancers, and would really like to have words with whatever was responsible for that orb.
(Obviously I have a lot of details from his speech because I wasn't off the cuff.)
The Baroness proceeded to try cross-examining him, saying "But you haven't denied the charges," to which he scoffed and said "I deny the charges" and noted he was up in the tower playing dice at the time that the crime occurred. I forget what got him off on "the gods aren't stupid, they wouldn't lend their power to people who would do that" because he's absolutely off on a sacrilege angle in bits of his "I wanted to find the necromancers so I could stab them for Cedric and now some asshole is accusing me of necromancy" fury but when she said how would they know who the gods had denied their power he cast a light spell. Tehre was a whole thing about his capacities, and couldn't you be using fairy magic to trick us, and Celyn does not, in fact, have that sort of fairy magic and said so.
(Celyn's light spell, for the record, tends to have all the subtlety of a disco ball made of rainbows. God of chaos, after all. And hope. It has a very specific vibe.)
Eventually Izgil took over the conversation because Izgil had also lost his rather gruff temper and pointed out several logical failings and a great deal of foolhardiness, talking about obvious insinuation of dark influences in place, and nearly but not quite setting off the aforementioned Drama Bomb. But he was cranky. (I think it was when she said she was unimpressed by Celyn's theatrics when he did the light spell and he just went, "THEATRICS?" and started running down the sham trial.)
Then we got Viepuck, who said "I am accused of necromancy, but I am an entertainer, brought here for this sham trial to be entertaining, so let me tell you a story." And he proceeds to spin a tale of corruption and a possibly-innocent party being led into perdition and a wide variety of other things, culminating in declaring that King Robert is a lich and when we're sorted here we're dealing with him, which is one of those hair-splitting truths that depends on an expansive value of 'we'.
You see, the lich had cast a spell such that anyone who talked about him as a lich would be drawn to his attention and he might well intervene. Which meant, of course, that we had just waved a big red cape at a distant, undead bull. In order to draw his attention. So the team of adventurers who were higher level than we are and had just destroyed his anchor could sneak in and kick his ass while he was distracted. So Viepuck was in fact speaking truly, for ... large values of "we".
This of course sends ripples through the crowd, there are mutterings of treason, general uncertainty, general chaos, and then Marian, terror in her eyes, affirms that the Warlord agrees that we spoke truly.
"Roll initiative."
A rip opens above the party, and a vaguely humanoid, immense shadow figure appears there. There is screaming chaos from the onlookers; the Baroness takes mild cover but watches intensely. The shadow figure has bands of shadow that appear to originate at Viepuck as if to riff the described scene from the murder trial; it blasts out dark beams of energy at the front row of the crowd, several of our allies, and such; Robin flings himself between one of the beams and Marian, taking the hit for her. Celyn, being of a practical bent and being able to reach the thing, stabs it, which appears to do damage. Viepuck's familiar feeds a weirdberry to one of the fallen guards, reviving him, and Viepuck basically yells, "Oh, come on, anyone can make a scene" and shoots rainbows into the sky from his hands rather than attack.
The shadow thing makes a point of not attacking either Viepuck or Celyn, in order to maintain the ruse of the trial, which honestly seems a lot of very silly effort to go to given all the everything and a generally doomed proposition. All the people who fell down and weren't revived get up as zombies, which is deeply aggravating given the general nature of 'innocent bystanders', so we start yelling at people to fucking move already. Marian gets on Greymalkin and Greymalkin Removes Her From The Scene At Speed. Izgil sets off a few luminous fireballs to hit the big bad and the zombies; Celyn stabs things. There is immense chaos. The big bad tries to do something horrible to Robin, who fails his save, and then Celyn uses one of his cleric powers to unfail the save for him.
The shadow thing, mimicking Viepuck's voice - which you know probably sounds very unmenacing at base because Viepuck is, I repeat, twelve - says something about false Wyrdling will not defeat him, and Celyn responds by blasting the shadow with literal divine light, because he will make a point. There is a lot of blasting (Viepuck and Izgil) and repositioning. Izgil casts Haste on Robin. (Yes I do not remember the exact round sequence it was very messy.)
Robin bangs his shield with his hammer and yells at the big bad, "I will be your opponent!" and locks it into a duel, telling the rest of the party, "Don't attack it while I'm standing, get everyone out!" (Celyn does some reprioritization in his head.)
Much of the crowd clears out or at least takes cover, though some people are still frozen in shock. Viepuck's familiar smacks into the face of one of them. ("Hit in the face with a flying squid!") Another wave of zombies happens; Izgil's blast clears out most of them. Celyn deletes one of the survivors, while Greymalkin barrels into the others to both startle the people into running away and protect them.
Something happens to the shadow thing, and it shrinks. THe Baroness is looking concerned about the situation. (She had started out at "there's no way they can win" and was working her way around to "... but what if they do.")
Celyn, who can sprint like whoa, loops out, snaps someone out of it, reverses course on a dime to get to right behind Robin and drops a heal on him, because he can do that without breaking the Forced Duel. Viepuck, after failing to get off a faerie fire, tells the Baroness to help her allies with a magical suggestion behind it, and nearly gets blasted for his trouble (which was the point) only Izgil counterspelled it (and then immediately regretted it because it meant there was no evidence).
Robin's third strike on the shadow thing dissipates it into a cloud of cursed smoke. THe Baroness faints dead away. Celyn deletes the last zombie, then whirls around to run back, hug Robin, and drop another large heal on him.
The aftermath has a number of traumatized people, and a number of dead. Robin starts carefully laying out the dead, and Celyn joins him. The godtouched people can deal with the dead, Viepuck and Izgil can go with the people who are taking the fainted-away Baroness to her room. Someone tries to get Robin to go into the keep, and he doesn't want to, and Celyn pulls the guy aside to explain that Robin gets upset at everyone he couldn't protect (and there were a number of those); he doesn't know for sure that that's what's eating at Robin but he's pretty sure that it's not not what's the problem.
The Baroness wakes up, claiming amnesia, so there is a theory floated that she might have been enthralled. As the actual townsfolk, including Marian, come help tend to the dead, Celyn and Robin have a small conversation, and then Celyn reluctantly goes up to find the others. (Marian expresses confusion that what she saw in her prophetic dream did not come to pass. Celyn will talk to her in the interim time at the end of the session, but I haven't talked to Mike about that yet, he just told me what he would tell her while I was washing my hair, heh.)
There is some general "could you stick around for a bit" conversation, and the party remains in Veltor as the chaos and gossip swarm. Robin is exceptionally annoyed that the Baroness's companion is sort of being treated as a subset of the Baroness's potential crimes and not being independently tried for perjury; she admitted that her story of seeing Viepuck and Celyn was something that Baroness told her to say. (The Baroness claimed that she'd seen it but it'd 'sound wrong' if she said it, so got her companion to tell the tale for her.) A complaint is formally written up (by Viepuck) and delivered to the magistrate.
Eventually a messenger from the Queen arrives. (The Heir to the throne of Sembara is the Queen of Tyrwingha, where Celyn and Robin are from; the two kingdoms are often but not always a joint crown.) She has sent troops to take the Baroness into custody for trial in the capital (the Baroness is still claiming fatigue and amnesia and Celyn does not believe her at all) and they are warned taht the Baroness at least had the power to do magic. They said they were prepared for that eventuality.
The Queen's messenger also asked if Robin would be willing to accept the lordship of Asineau. (Asineau being the small town near Cleenseau that was burdened with a corrupt, embezzling lord who didn't want to be there, that Viepuck ... encouraged ... to resign as lord and renounce the title both for himself and his heirs as he fled back to the capital. It has a Wyrdling temple and a really fucked-up economic situation due to the perfidies of said lord.) Robin has to take a moment or five, but then says he would. Celyn, a little - a lot - unsettled, notes that he can no longer say that he is from nowhere.
The messenger informs us that the Queen would like us to accompany her on the portion of her circuit through the realm that touches on the lands under our particular protection (the Cleenseau region) when she does her circuit walk in October. Assuming the evil fey looking for a blood sacrifice from a Tyrwinghan don't try to abduct her before then, we are assuming that will be the problem we have to deal with then.
But also...
... maybe we get some time off until then?
From:
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From:
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But also: the events in there were a couple of RL years ago, several months in gameworld, and he has both been incandescently furious about it for the entire time, and completely not bringing that up or out because not relevant to the current situation. Keeping his eyes out for things that might give him more information about what woke up the orb so he knows who to stab, yes. But focusing on it, no.
His mind is a fairy wonderland.
(He is pretty sure at this point that who he needs to stab is that lich, and unfortunately that was not something he was skilled enough to do meaningfully, but stabbing the lich simulacrum and then keeping Robin steady while Robin demolished the lich simulacrum is at least something. He does not feel resolved yet.)