Sunrise, Sunset
Jul. 4th, 2004 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianWell, that was amusing. I got m'self killed.
We started out where we left off -- the Dragon-Blood Dynast had just turned up and the entire party we were at stopped dead for a moment. After one of those weird stilted silences, I just started playing my lute again and the party picked up where it had left off, with Mellin and the Dynast heading off into a corner to chat. I meandered in that direction with lute in a sort of wandering minstrel sort of way (that's what a lot of the musicians were doing) and listened in on the conversation enough to know that Mellin had stolen this item we were after specifically at the request of this Dynast -- it was supposed to be delivered the next day but the Dynast wanted it now. I wandered over to Valandil with that information and on the way got several people giving me coins; several were putting them down my cleavage (this is one of the two or three reasons why I hate playing pretty characters). When I explained to Valandil about this, he suggested a bit of play-acting to serve as an example to the others; he made a show of extracting a coin and then jammed the hand holding the coin down my cleavage. I was supposed to pull the slap I gave him but decided not to; he managed to soak but still, it must have hurt. Anyway, I then went to give that bit of news to White Moon Lotus, who was having a problem getting around under her thirty pounds of silver bells and chains. Eventually, she keeled over and had to be extricated from her costume; Rude Awakening at the Third Hour (yes, that's his name; we call him Rude for short, though he's anything but) managed to raid the kitchen for some cloth that they turned into a kimono for her.
While all this was going on, Narsil, our resident thief, had snuck his way upstairs and encountered a couple of guards on a room. Invisible to all intents and purposes, he tried the Kenobi Effect (toss a coin to somewhere and let them chase the noise, then go into the room the guards were standing by) ... but botched the roll. After a surprisingly long fight, they knocked him unconscious.
Meanwhile, I was still having some problem with unwanted advances. Some sleazy merchant guy was trying to engage my 'services' -- apparently, the Guild of Bards doesn't limit its activities to musical stuff. He offered me double Guild rate and my character ... well, you may remember a fortnight ago how she reacted when people just wanted to measure her for a dress. She gibbered in rage for a moment and he walked off; at this point, Valandil turned up and Kayla just said, "I am going to hit him". Valandil tried to stop me, but to no avail; I smacked him (but managed the Wits roll necessary not to brain him with my lute) and got myself thrown out of the party. Good thing, too, because a good Perception roll had me noticing that someone was being dragged around upstairs and that creepy Senechal guy was looking around shiftily. So I shredded my dress to the hips on either side and went up the wall, managed to escape detection and saw this Senechal torturing Narsil.
At this point, Valandil wandered out of the party. Toos botched about three Perception rolls until Valandil finally figured out what wall to climb, then used his Crane Stance charm to scale the wall. Right behind me. I didn't know who was up there so I just dropped a bracelet on his head. It bounced, he tried to catch it so it wouldn't clatter ... but didn't catch it well enough and our cover was well and truly blown. I managed a very good Athletics roll to vault the window sill and land on the Senechal with both feet ... then got kicked by Narsil, who was swinging from his chains. (Manacles affixed to the ceiling in the centre of the room.) After that, I went after the Senechal with a hairpin while he was trying to do a spell ... events became irchronicable and in the end, he summoned three demons, which went after us while he made his escape.
After a real comedy of errors involving a couple of tumbles down the main stairs and attracting the attention of the Dynast, who barged up the stairs to the source of the spellcaster noise, Lotus and Rude turned up. I won't go into details because no one could hope to remember them, but the two stragglers arrived with one demon attacking the Dynast (with Valandil trying to kill the demon in hopes that the Dynast would be somewhat lenient towards the three Solar Exalted, who're supposed to be hunted and killed on sight, in the room), Narsil leaping down from the ceiling with a sword to impale another one of the demons, and the third trying to take a bite out of me despite the purloined sword that had been punched through one of its lungs. Lotus used a nifty little charm called Sting of the Ice Hornets and turned the one attacking me into so much mulch, Valandil finally managed to kill his and Narsil hit the last one so hard that his eyeballs exited out the back of his head. We lost the Senechal but killed his little pet demons yay!
Not so yay, actually. The Dynast's 'leniency' was a ten second head start before he summoned the Wyld Hunt. I did head for the door but everyone else stood firm, so there were we fucked. Rolled for initiative and Valandil used another little nifty charm called Obsidian Butterflies; they scarred the Dynast badly but didn't do any permanent damage and boy was he pissed off. Narsil, Lotus and I went on the same turn after that, but since I'm basically leading the party and, as closest to the door, I was nearest him, I went next; went to cut his head off. God, I missed my daiklaive at that moment -- bearing a borrowed sword and already three lethal wounds down (bouncing down the stairs, poked at by Senechal, pummeled on by demon) so down one die on everything I did. But that's Kayla for you; she never counts the cost.
I botched. The sword got wedged between a couple of plates of the Dynast's armour without doing a jot of damage. And then...
Okay, here's how it works. You can attack someone with your Essence directly; it's painful, it's nasty and you can't fight it. I didn't get the exact mechanics of it because I didn't have the time. Hell, Kayla didn't even have time to scream, and no way in hell she could dodge or block. Four lethal. Time to play Taps for poor Kayla; he dropped her smoking body like a rag doll.
Which was the point where Lotus got pissed off. More Sting of the Ice Hornets and now she was glowing like a fucking neon sign. Meanwhile, Narsil was bouncing off walls and ceiling with Spider Step and went to kick this guy's head off, but with the Ice Hornets, all he got to kick was mulch. So the gang killed a Dragon Blood Exalt and a Dynast of the Realm and boy were they in trouble. Not that I much cared; I was dead, after all. Narsil grabbed the item we were after (the Dynast had it and had obviously dropped it when he got Ice Hornet Stung into oblivion) and Rude grabbed my corpse (very, very light -- bad sign) and they all went out the window, where our gracious employer had a coach speed up to get us the hell out of there. And away we went -- right down a very steep cliff and away, with our employer railing the whole way.
'The whole way' took us a hundred miles out of Nexus; Lotus was still glowing like a homing beacon and our employer was still pissed off and I, of course, was still dead. He let them off and said he was going to have to leave Nexus and we were going to have to go farther away, but the first thing he was going to do was take me back to Nexus and try to fix me. "I'll send her back here in whatever shape I can get her here in," he said, "and she'll come with the rest of your things and your birds. If you can keep your bloody heads down..." And then he was gone, leaving the rest of the party to their own commentary on the matter. Valandil had been hoping that all could be resolved peacefully with the Dragon Blood while Lotus kept saying, "Yeah, but ... look what he did to Kayla!"
Death's not nice in this world -- I found myself on a vast wasteland with dismembered corpses ... and some of them had my face. It was the kind of thing Kayla, with her near-death experience with the river dragon, had nightmares about on a regular basis. Then there was the voice -- the Unconquered Sun itself, telling me that He was sending me back; I was fit and worthy to lead but had to get on and do it, already. I came back without a mark on me with our employer's creepy little daughter looking at me, pointing at the bemused healer and giggling soundlessly. I just bent the knee to her; figured she had more to do with my resurrection than the bloody healer had. Then our employer came in, told me the situation, gave me directions and sent me back to the group to let people know the score.
Apparently, the item we'd been sent to retrieve was a hearthstone -- they store Essence and have powers, to a point ... at least, that's what I know of them. There are four more out there that resonate with that one, and we have to find them, even if the search takes us to the ends of the earth. And I was sent back to lead the search. This changes Kayla's character a lot. She's had a hard time dealing with people since her Exaltation, because she doesn't want to get close to people -- her sister dying right in front of her took its toll hard, and her Virtue Flaw is "Heart of Flint"; it's been active since her Exaltation and is only now gone. So Kayla came back to the party, without a mark and very different, bearing this message and these instructions from the Unconquered Sun Himself. She told them what they needed to know, then took Lotus aside and gave her a righteous bollocking for letting her heart think for her instead of using her head ... and then thanked Lotus for the vengeance she enacted on Kayla's behalf. Meanwhile, she asked Valandil to tell her when he had information like, for example, that she was supposed to be leading the party, instead of just holding the group together until Kayla started to actually lead.
So now we're on our merry way to Great Forks, avoiding the roads ... and hopefully, the Shadowlands in our path. I'm now the leader in more than name -- the Unconquered Sun brought me back and they all know why. Narsil's not very happy about the trailblazing -- he's been living in Nexus his whole life and he doesn't much care for the country -- and Lotus is a scholar and so not going to fare much better, but we'll take care of them. Hell, survival's one of my main skills, so there ya go. We also each got an extra XP for getting ourselves into such an unholy mess. This is going to be amusing...
The rest of it was pretty good -- we wandered through Sainsburys chatting about all manner of stuff that must have made the rest of the shoppers think that we were complete freaks. Well, since that's what we are, that's okay.
We started out where we left off -- the Dragon-Blood Dynast had just turned up and the entire party we were at stopped dead for a moment. After one of those weird stilted silences, I just started playing my lute again and the party picked up where it had left off, with Mellin and the Dynast heading off into a corner to chat. I meandered in that direction with lute in a sort of wandering minstrel sort of way (that's what a lot of the musicians were doing) and listened in on the conversation enough to know that Mellin had stolen this item we were after specifically at the request of this Dynast -- it was supposed to be delivered the next day but the Dynast wanted it now. I wandered over to Valandil with that information and on the way got several people giving me coins; several were putting them down my cleavage (this is one of the two or three reasons why I hate playing pretty characters). When I explained to Valandil about this, he suggested a bit of play-acting to serve as an example to the others; he made a show of extracting a coin and then jammed the hand holding the coin down my cleavage. I was supposed to pull the slap I gave him but decided not to; he managed to soak but still, it must have hurt. Anyway, I then went to give that bit of news to White Moon Lotus, who was having a problem getting around under her thirty pounds of silver bells and chains. Eventually, she keeled over and had to be extricated from her costume; Rude Awakening at the Third Hour (yes, that's his name; we call him Rude for short, though he's anything but) managed to raid the kitchen for some cloth that they turned into a kimono for her.
While all this was going on, Narsil, our resident thief, had snuck his way upstairs and encountered a couple of guards on a room. Invisible to all intents and purposes, he tried the Kenobi Effect (toss a coin to somewhere and let them chase the noise, then go into the room the guards were standing by) ... but botched the roll. After a surprisingly long fight, they knocked him unconscious.
Meanwhile, I was still having some problem with unwanted advances. Some sleazy merchant guy was trying to engage my 'services' -- apparently, the Guild of Bards doesn't limit its activities to musical stuff. He offered me double Guild rate and my character ... well, you may remember a fortnight ago how she reacted when people just wanted to measure her for a dress. She gibbered in rage for a moment and he walked off; at this point, Valandil turned up and Kayla just said, "I am going to hit him". Valandil tried to stop me, but to no avail; I smacked him (but managed the Wits roll necessary not to brain him with my lute) and got myself thrown out of the party. Good thing, too, because a good Perception roll had me noticing that someone was being dragged around upstairs and that creepy Senechal guy was looking around shiftily. So I shredded my dress to the hips on either side and went up the wall, managed to escape detection and saw this Senechal torturing Narsil.
At this point, Valandil wandered out of the party. Toos botched about three Perception rolls until Valandil finally figured out what wall to climb, then used his Crane Stance charm to scale the wall. Right behind me. I didn't know who was up there so I just dropped a bracelet on his head. It bounced, he tried to catch it so it wouldn't clatter ... but didn't catch it well enough and our cover was well and truly blown. I managed a very good Athletics roll to vault the window sill and land on the Senechal with both feet ... then got kicked by Narsil, who was swinging from his chains. (Manacles affixed to the ceiling in the centre of the room.) After that, I went after the Senechal with a hairpin while he was trying to do a spell ... events became irchronicable and in the end, he summoned three demons, which went after us while he made his escape.
After a real comedy of errors involving a couple of tumbles down the main stairs and attracting the attention of the Dynast, who barged up the stairs to the source of the spellcaster noise, Lotus and Rude turned up. I won't go into details because no one could hope to remember them, but the two stragglers arrived with one demon attacking the Dynast (with Valandil trying to kill the demon in hopes that the Dynast would be somewhat lenient towards the three Solar Exalted, who're supposed to be hunted and killed on sight, in the room), Narsil leaping down from the ceiling with a sword to impale another one of the demons, and the third trying to take a bite out of me despite the purloined sword that had been punched through one of its lungs. Lotus used a nifty little charm called Sting of the Ice Hornets and turned the one attacking me into so much mulch, Valandil finally managed to kill his and Narsil hit the last one so hard that his eyeballs exited out the back of his head. We lost the Senechal but killed his little pet demons yay!
Not so yay, actually. The Dynast's 'leniency' was a ten second head start before he summoned the Wyld Hunt. I did head for the door but everyone else stood firm, so there were we fucked. Rolled for initiative and Valandil used another little nifty charm called Obsidian Butterflies; they scarred the Dynast badly but didn't do any permanent damage and boy was he pissed off. Narsil, Lotus and I went on the same turn after that, but since I'm basically leading the party and, as closest to the door, I was nearest him, I went next; went to cut his head off. God, I missed my daiklaive at that moment -- bearing a borrowed sword and already three lethal wounds down (bouncing down the stairs, poked at by Senechal, pummeled on by demon) so down one die on everything I did. But that's Kayla for you; she never counts the cost.
I botched. The sword got wedged between a couple of plates of the Dynast's armour without doing a jot of damage. And then...
Okay, here's how it works. You can attack someone with your Essence directly; it's painful, it's nasty and you can't fight it. I didn't get the exact mechanics of it because I didn't have the time. Hell, Kayla didn't even have time to scream, and no way in hell she could dodge or block. Four lethal. Time to play Taps for poor Kayla; he dropped her smoking body like a rag doll.
Which was the point where Lotus got pissed off. More Sting of the Ice Hornets and now she was glowing like a fucking neon sign. Meanwhile, Narsil was bouncing off walls and ceiling with Spider Step and went to kick this guy's head off, but with the Ice Hornets, all he got to kick was mulch. So the gang killed a Dragon Blood Exalt and a Dynast of the Realm and boy were they in trouble. Not that I much cared; I was dead, after all. Narsil grabbed the item we were after (the Dynast had it and had obviously dropped it when he got Ice Hornet Stung into oblivion) and Rude grabbed my corpse (very, very light -- bad sign) and they all went out the window, where our gracious employer had a coach speed up to get us the hell out of there. And away we went -- right down a very steep cliff and away, with our employer railing the whole way.
'The whole way' took us a hundred miles out of Nexus; Lotus was still glowing like a homing beacon and our employer was still pissed off and I, of course, was still dead. He let them off and said he was going to have to leave Nexus and we were going to have to go farther away, but the first thing he was going to do was take me back to Nexus and try to fix me. "I'll send her back here in whatever shape I can get her here in," he said, "and she'll come with the rest of your things and your birds. If you can keep your bloody heads down..." And then he was gone, leaving the rest of the party to their own commentary on the matter. Valandil had been hoping that all could be resolved peacefully with the Dragon Blood while Lotus kept saying, "Yeah, but ... look what he did to Kayla!"
Death's not nice in this world -- I found myself on a vast wasteland with dismembered corpses ... and some of them had my face. It was the kind of thing Kayla, with her near-death experience with the river dragon, had nightmares about on a regular basis. Then there was the voice -- the Unconquered Sun itself, telling me that He was sending me back; I was fit and worthy to lead but had to get on and do it, already. I came back without a mark on me with our employer's creepy little daughter looking at me, pointing at the bemused healer and giggling soundlessly. I just bent the knee to her; figured she had more to do with my resurrection than the bloody healer had. Then our employer came in, told me the situation, gave me directions and sent me back to the group to let people know the score.
Apparently, the item we'd been sent to retrieve was a hearthstone -- they store Essence and have powers, to a point ... at least, that's what I know of them. There are four more out there that resonate with that one, and we have to find them, even if the search takes us to the ends of the earth. And I was sent back to lead the search. This changes Kayla's character a lot. She's had a hard time dealing with people since her Exaltation, because she doesn't want to get close to people -- her sister dying right in front of her took its toll hard, and her Virtue Flaw is "Heart of Flint"; it's been active since her Exaltation and is only now gone. So Kayla came back to the party, without a mark and very different, bearing this message and these instructions from the Unconquered Sun Himself. She told them what they needed to know, then took Lotus aside and gave her a righteous bollocking for letting her heart think for her instead of using her head ... and then thanked Lotus for the vengeance she enacted on Kayla's behalf. Meanwhile, she asked Valandil to tell her when he had information like, for example, that she was supposed to be leading the party, instead of just holding the group together until Kayla started to actually lead.
So now we're on our merry way to Great Forks, avoiding the roads ... and hopefully, the Shadowlands in our path. I'm now the leader in more than name -- the Unconquered Sun brought me back and they all know why. Narsil's not very happy about the trailblazing -- he's been living in Nexus his whole life and he doesn't much care for the country -- and Lotus is a scholar and so not going to fare much better, but we'll take care of them. Hell, survival's one of my main skills, so there ya go. We also each got an extra XP for getting ourselves into such an unholy mess. This is going to be amusing...
The rest of it was pretty good -- we wandered through Sainsburys chatting about all manner of stuff that must have made the rest of the shoppers think that we were complete freaks. Well, since that's what we are, that's okay.