kiya | Stick 'em up! Put all your arithmetical operators in the bag! (Reply)

Gaaaaa-miiiiinnnnng.
I've been doing this for a while. It occurs to me that it would probably be worthwhile to pull up previous summary URLs. So:

Session 1: The wind and the dust go 'round and 'round
Session 2: Oh no. . . I just realised I named my horse 'Charlie'. . .
Session 3: Look, you got beaten up by a RICH ogre.
Session 4: Chief.
Session 5: Roight, Brain, but next time you're wearing the dress.
Session 6: Today was a very ranger day.
Session 7: God is dead. Long live God.
Session 8: More gaming. Damn, that was a boring session entry title.

So we'd been in Wave's Rest. We talked to people and got them doing things. And we talked about what we wanted to do.

There are people making war-noises in the baronies. This is not good. And the dwarven cities take a long time to think about things. So we decided we should probably get them started thinking earliest. Karas went up to the end of Wave's Rest where the dwarves go and talked to a boat captain and bought us passage upriver to Torvas'era, the nearest city. He was going to leave in a few days, so we had time.

I figured out the other spell-map that Adosar gave me to look at the second day or so, and went to show it to him and tell him I'd gotten it. And Renn and I spent most of the time we were there looking through the Elf-Wood and killing bad things. There weren't so many anymore now that the Rod of Mascana went away, but making some small subset of the bad things go away faster seemed good. Some of the stuff we dealt with had bits we could sell in Wave's Rest, so we did some of that. And Adosar made some gloves for Renn, and told us the story of the dwarven hero who was back in the time when magic things only worked two dozen times, who had his stop working at a bad time, so now it's always two dozen and one times, for luck. And Adosar had a sword, and I thought he didn't know how to use one like that. So I asked, and he said he didn't, and I asked if he wanted me to teach him, and he said the spirit of the sword would show him how to use it, so that was all right.

I need to think about what I think about things stopping working.

Then we went up to the boat. They all spoke dwarvish, which I only sort of understand anyway. But the captain seemed really surprised by Hethian, and made some comment about a horse. And Karas said he was about the size of a small horse. (I understand Karas better. He talks a little slower.) And we went up on deck, and the captain pointed us down a ramp into the hold, and Hethian just went down like that, and everyone stared. And Renn didn't giggle, but I think it was really, really hard for her to manage that. But the swarves were nonplussed.

The hold was pretty bright, but really crowded. Crates, sacks, barrels. I wanted to push them around into better things to sit on or climb on, but I thought the dwarves would be upset, so I didn't. We sat there for a bit, and then there was a thumping noise, and a shaking feeling, and the back wall made noises. I went and listened to it, and it rumbled lots. I listened to the side wall and could hear the water outside. I listened to the floor, but that wasn't very interesting at all. We asked Adosar what it was, and he said it was the thing that made the boat go. I asked him if it was magic or a made-thing like his bow, and he said he didn't know.

Adosar did a lot of working on the bone that he's making into a sword for Renn, and writing spell maps. I watched him make spell maps for a while, and then he gave me one to look at and told me to figure out what it was. When I figured it out I asked him if he wanted any of the maps back. He took the ones I had studied before, then thought about it and gave me one back. Karas was working on teaching dwarvish to Renn. I know enough dwarvish that it wasn't much useful, but I listened anyway, and studied the map that Adosar gave me. And then in the evenings Adosar worked with us on sounding right.

After a few days, we neard noises above, and went up. And the captain was pointing his crew to one side of the boat, and they were picking up clubs and things. So we went and looked, and there were three little boats -- narrow paddle boats, like normal people use -- coming at us from shore, with lots of hobgoblins in them, and two more of the lizard people in behind them.

Adosar shoved his way to a space at the railing, threw his hands out straight, and shouted something, and threw lightning at them, straight down one of the boats. Blam! All the hobgoblins fell over, and the boat caught on fire and started sinking. The lizard man jumped to the next boat over, though. Then Karas shouted at the next boat, and all the hobgoblins started trying to turn and run away. The lizard man started hitting the one he was behind with his sword to make him stop, but they kept turning to paddle away.

I looked at the other boat, and thought really hard, and pointed at the hobgoblin in front. But my lightning isn't a very big lightning. Bzzt. I waited until that boat hit the side of our boat to try the lightning again, so my spell could reach the lizard man. I did.

Renn was shooting arrows at the lizard men. Then Karas pulled out his little horn and made his roar magic, and all the hobgoblins in the boat that hit us winced. One of them even dropped his paddle. The others tried to climb up onto the boat, and the dwarves there hit their fingers with sticks. The lizard man in that boat got angry and jumped onto the deck right behind me. Eventually the one in the other boat gave up on making them stop running away and jumped up onto our boat too.

Renn was moving really fast. I think Adosar did a magic for her. (Session quote: Rogue, rogue, rogue your boat. . . .) She was shooting arrows at the lizardmen until the second one jumped up -- when he jumped up he hit one of the dwarves really bad and knocked him over the side, then another one. The third one he hit fell on the deck, and the fourth one backed away.

Karas and I were hitting one of the lizardmen, and Renn was rolling and spinning around the other one and hitting it -- she'd put down her bow. Adosar was helping her, staying on the other side of him. Eventually both of them jumped overboard. I don't know how well they swim, or if they drowned, or if we hurt them enough to make them fall as they were getting away.

The boatful of scared hobgoblins kept going when the spell stopped. I don't blame them. I took off my armour and dropped my stuff and everything and jumped into the water to try to get the two who had been knocked overboard. Adosar made a magic to climb down the side and hold a rope, and I got one and pulled him back, and then I got the other, but it was harder. And it was like a little water current pushed him over to me when I thought I couldn't reach him at all. Then I made the climbing magic and climbed up the boat.

I didn't climb up the big, thick hollow mast that goes down into the place where the magics that make the boat go to see what was inside while the magic was still there. I wanted to, but I thought the dwarves would be upset.

Renn and Karas helped get the people who were unconscious so they weren't dying anymore. The people who fell in the river wound up all right, even the one who was hurt really, really bad. And the captain thanked us. I don't think he knew quite what to say to us, but he bowed, and then said he had to go look after his people. We bowed back. Then we went back downstairs and Renn told Hethian what had happened.

Next day we got to a dock, and they unloaded everything and put it on wagons, and we started up the road into the city. It was a big road, and very flat and strange, but the land was very, very wide, and eventually very, very tall. We talked about what were the proper ways to introduce ourselves properly to dwarves, and eventually settled on going back a few generations, and then adding, "Of the Breveddi, the people of Torvardi", because when talking to a dwarf you're supposed to give your lineage back to someone they should have heard of, and I don't think dwarves would have heard of any humans, but they should have heard of an Alar. And eventually we got to a cliff with doors carved into it. The doors were open, and there were guards.

Korvas -- Korvas was the caravan master -- he talked to the guard at the gate. And then the guard came and talked to Adosar, and asked us questions, and said a lot of things, like how we were Adosar's responsibility, and suggested we should stay with Korvas until we could talk to the councilman that he was going to ask to see us and everything. And then he muttered and let us go in, after Adosar made sure it was all right to stay at the offices. He was nonplussed too.

So we went into Torvas'era. There was a tunnel, and then it opened out into a cave. A big cave, though not as big as the one on the Dark Road, I think, full of buildings, big ones, with more buildings carved into the wall.

They didn't have any houses carved into stalagmites. I think that's a shame.

The road went down a ramp into a place full of blocky buildings, and we went around those for a while until we got to a blocky building that I guess was Korvas's blocky building, and we were put in a room and sat down, except for Hethian, who lay down outside the building and watched the people.

After a while, the messenger came back from the councilman, and we went to see him. We got there, and showed the message to the guard, who went inside, and there was a great deal of passing messages around and waiting for someone to remember that they'd sent them, and I wonder why they couldn't remember that they'd wanted us to come talk to them already since they'd only just told us to come. And they asked if Hethian should go in the stables, and Renn asked him, and a dwarf took a grab for his bridle only he hasn't got one, and he just walked around the corner towards the stables and the dwarf ran after him.

So we went in, and we were put to sit down, and the councilman worked for a bit on moving pieces of paper around and writing on them, and then came and sat and stared at us and said he'd never seen anything like it. He asked Adosar who he was, and when Karas told him who we were he said "I didn't ask you," and Karas was very grumpy afters.

And Adosar said we were here with a message, and then told the whole story, which took a while, because the councilman said to start at the beginning, and that means going back at least to before the war. And after he was done, the councilman told people to go get food, and sat until it was there, and we had food, and he asked questions, and said he wasn't sure if we were telling the truth, lying to try to get something he couldn't figure out out of him, or crazy. And Karas sounded all mad and said it was stupid and he'd said we shouldn't come here, and Adosar told him to shut up. And then Adosar said he figured they were smart enough to figure out if it was the truth or not, and anyway he said there were magickers who could look in his head and tell.

I need to think about what I think about that, too.

So he told us that anyway we had to stay with him, and showed us to rooms, and we went to the rooms, and Renn asked me what he'd said because my dwarvish is still better than hers, and I told her. And after a bit, Karas came in and said that Adosar had gone off to see someone else, and he wanted to apologise for getting all mad.

And I had thought he was doing it to make Adosar sound better, because that's politics, to make it look like the person they're talking to has managed to convince unwilling people to go talk to the people that aren't going to listen, to make them feel that they were important enough to win a fight over. He does that sort of thing all the time. And I said so, and he said he'd have used that explanation if he'd thought of it, but it was because he was feeling how much they weren't paying attention to us -- us the humans, not Adosar so much -- and it made him feel like they weren't worth paying attention to.

Then Renn and I discussed whether or not he'd look good in the rug. Or if he grew a beard like the dwarves and we braided it nice with ribbons. Adosar came back and said they'd magicked him and he told them all of it over again, and now they were trying to figure out if we were crazy or telling the truth.

We went to sleep. I thought a lot about how old the building was, and I got a sense of . . . construction . . . from it. Buildings talk too! Next day they said they couldn't see us being a harm to the city, so they gave Adosar a piece of paper with inn names mapped on it, and us all pieces of paper that said to talk to the councilman if there was trouble, and asked us to tell them if we were going to go, and they told Adosar he should go talk to the people in the library because he's a wizard.

So we picked an inn and stayed there and Adosar went to the library, and made an appointment to be all checked out as a wizard. And he asked about people who could teach Renn dwarvish better, and people who might be interested in learning from Karas. He couldn't find anything for me to do, though. So I spent some time with Renn's language lessons -- she was trading teaching some elvish for some dwarvish. And I talked to the library a little. And I went looking at things in the city, through the shops, and the people, and all.

Eventually we asked Korvas if he had another caravan going out any time soon. The council wasn't meeting for three weeks. And Karas said that people were talking about people disappearing or getting killed and how there were more guards than there used to be. But I don't think they'd have liked us poking around trying to figure that out, not unless they knew us better. So we told the councilman when we were going in case he wanted to ask us more questions. He didn't, so we left.

We were going with the wagons when something came out of the trees. It was big, huge, a flying thing. Wyvern. It swooped down at us taking swipes at people a few times, and the mules tried to run, and some of the dwarves threw rocks at it with slings.

Then it landed on one of the people trying to guard the wagons. Right in front of me.

And that was an awful, awful sound.

I hit it.

I think other people hit it too. It slapped its wings at me, which hurt, and then it came down to bite at me, and I cut its throat open.

After it fell over, I made sure it was dead.

We pushed it off the body, and the other dwarves buried him.

After a little bit, Korvas said that by rights it was our wyvern, but he didn't think we could carry it after all. (Session quote: "Hey Korvas! Wanna buy a wyvern?" --Adosar) We worked on cutting it up right, and took some of the skin to have armour made from, and he took the poison sacs and the rest of the skin and gave Adosar and Karas big pouches of coin.

I took a couple of teeth.

We went down the rest of the way to the boat. And then we went back to Wave's Rest. And we decided to go towards Lord Kynnan's territory to see if we could do anything about the trouble there.

We were a bit into his territory when we saw the smoke. Renn rode Hethian fast towards the burning village, and we ran after her, but Hethian runs much, much faster than we do. She says there was an owlbear there, with a bracelet on its wrist, and about ten raiders with bows throwing torches into buildings. And the villagers ran, and one of the raiders shot one in the back in front of her. She tried to ride by and pick him up and run away with him, but she couldn't get a hold of him, and he was dead by the time we could get to him afterwards. She said they were wearing mail under their ragged shirts, too.

She watched them set the rest of the village on fire, shoot at her a little, and then turn and ride away, bringing the owlbear with them. She'd fought with it a little, and was some hurt. Karas went to talk to the villagers, told them to take a message to Lord Kynnan, and told them we were going to deal with the raiders. They found a building that wasn't too badly ruined and planned to spend the night there, because it was getting dark, and walking to the big town in the dark wasn't something they wanted to do.

I could have followed that trail blindfold.

We walked.

Renn saw light in a copse of trees and stopped me. We watched until they settled down to sleep. And Renn saw their camp, she said, through the eyes of the horses -- they were on the far side from the owlbear, but she wasn't sure which side was which.

After they settled down, we spread out some and started sneaking towards the copse.

They heard Adosar, which he had thought they might, which was why he went furthest away from us all, so if he got heard, the rest of us could get them in back. Karas made a sleep magic, and then Renn had the trees and grass twine them all up. I could see the fellow that Karas put to sleep plain as plain, slumped up against a tree that decided to twist all around him. (Session quote: As he's leaned against a sapling which has said . . . "I LOVE YOU!" --

jikharra)

Someone came out of the copse right next to me, so I hit him. Karas made his roar spell in the middle of the camp, since people were waking other people up anyway. And Adosar made lightning, which was another big noise. He did it twice.

Another man came out of the copse on the other side of the tree, and Karas killed him. Karas has the glove Semtek gave him, that he can hide his spear in when he wants to, and the man came up to him like he thought he didn't have anything to fight with.

teinedreugan

Karas and I got the one I had been fighting. Then there was another bright light, and Adosar came over with his big long sword in his hand, all covered in blood.

He'd killed the owlbear, and he was a little wound up by it. The owlbear had a hole burned right through its chest -- he'd hit it with lightning twice, and it had grabbed him, and the circlet that Semtek gave him just burned it right through. (Session quote: We are having anime combat.)

The copse was on fire, though, and the people who were all tangled up were stuck in it. (Session quote: In bed! On fire!) I shouted in there to ask them if they wanted to surrender. Renn made water fall on the fire where they were. So now we have people to talk to later.

I think . . . I wonder if that hill over there would be sympathetic.

My head hurts. I'd think about what I want to take for my feat (we made sixth level) but I think I would rather sleep and hope that that makes my head not hurt. But I've finished the summary, so

oneironaut won't throttle me. ;)

Stick 'em up! Put all your arithmetical operators in the bag!

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