Datasets:

mickume

/

alt_dnd

like 1

I’m almost certainly going to have to spend the next few days finding clever ways to hide from Tavrin. He has been just looking for an excuse to kill me and he probably won’t believe me when I say it was a mistake, that I missed by accident.

Anyways, we managed to beat the Vomit cats (Mirla took one down on her own and Asger one hit KOed another) and I did my best to hack off their tails. It was a bit of a bloody mess but I think I got some usable bits. Aerith briefly considered slicing them open to see what was inside but decided not to after seeing how much trouble I had. We are now continuing up the stairs, battered and a bit worse for wear, but alive and hopefully free of enemies.

DAY 11: Daylight at Last (12/5/16)

Staircase of Death, Boulder Cliff

So, Tavrin was absolutely livid and spent the rest of the walk out lecturing me. Thankfully we made it out of the lair without incident and were able to set up camp next to the base of the waterfall. We all immediately decided a wash was in order and despite my apprehension about the river, I decided to take a bath too. After all, prestidigitation can’t clean everything... Mirla and I ended up rinsing off in the shallows, while the others went deeper into the river by the waterfall to wash.

While everyone was getting ready for bed I spent some more time staring at the box and trying to figure out what was in it. I still can’t see any other way of opening it unless I kill Tavrin and Star and wait five hours. After the cats and what I did to Star, I am certain I don’t want to do that.

DAY 12: Tripping Balls (12/5/16)

This morning while we were packing up camp, we suddenly noticed six small, rotund beings with sharp claws and teeth coming towards us. They were carrying what looked like an unconscious human. A voice, the same as the one from the stairs yelled out "KILL THEM!!!" and the beings attacked, dropping their unconscious prisoner in the process.

Tavrin yelled out that they were evil, and then charged, braking the formation we had just assumed. He swung with all his might at one of the beings and missed.

While Tavrin tried to fight off two of them in an effort to get to the fallen man, we tried to repel the others. Once again Mirla was the MVP hitting and bringing down a being all on her own. I whiffed six arrows trying to back up Tavrin.

Star fell in the first six seconds. Asger ran up to check her and said she would be paralyzed for an entire day. Then Fluffy went down. At this point it was five against four. I was starting to get really worried. We had lost half our battle power and I had yet to hit anything.

Angrily Asger who had been hanging back in order to heal us moved forward and took a swing at the one who had took down fluffy. He missed, allowing the creature to strike out and paralyzed him. Then only several feet from the fallen man, Tavrin went down. Thankfully, Mirla took out the being in front of Asger.

It was now Aerith, Mirla, and myself against four beings. It didn’t look good. I was getting really nervous and contemplating running into the woods. You see, Mirla was out of never miss spells, I had whiffed four arrows in a row, the group as a whole had been having trouble just hitting those things.

Out of nowhere Aerith pulled out her staff and splattered the closest being’s head all over the riverbank. Mirla took out another and the two together manage to take out the remaining beings, while I whiffed another two arrows. My aim is starting to get me really depressed. You would think I could have at least hit one of them!

Anyways, somehow we managed to survive. That left Aerith, Mirla and myself up and responsible for the rest of the group. I could practically feel Tavrin glaring daggers at me the whole time. We decided the first order of business was to find more food, as we had eaten our last bit at breakfast. Then we would work on draging everyone into the woods where we could have more cover if we were attacked again.

Part of the way through the day, around lunch I think, Aerith found a strange mushroom and decided to eat it. She spent the next two hours "tripping balls" and muttering something about how everything looked yellow.

A little bit after Aerith stopped tripping the Being’s prisoner started to move again. We learned he was a Cleric of the deity Choranus and asked that we take the box to his temple to be destroyed instead of the 1000 eyes wizard guy. We told him we would have to wait to make a decision about that until everyone else had regained movement.

In the meantime we asked him to help us move the others into the woods so we could have some more cover. By the time we managed that, it was time to set up camp for the night. While we were setting it up, Aerith took me aside and we planned what to ask the Cleric over dinner. Among other things we wanted to know why he wanted the box and more about his god.

It is taking all my strength not to put Tavrin into a funny position. You know picking his nose or something. Just a second... Aerith is calling me to dinner. I’ll write more afterwards.

DAY 12 to 20: The End. (for now...) (12/8/16)

Boulder Cliff, woods, Kelli

So, over dinner we quizzed the Cleric on his deity (Choranus, Figurehead of law/ lawful neutral), where he was from (a small town called Kelli, that was about 3 days away), why his temple wanted the box (to watch it until it could be destroyed) and if her could heal us (yes, but not till the morning when his spells recharged). After that we ate a pleasant dinner, set up the watch schedule and went to bed. The only other interesting thing was trying to figure out how to feed our paralyzed members. Sadly, I don’t actually know solution the other three came up with. I was banned so that I wouldn’t harass Tavrin...

In the morning, just after breakfast, Starleaf and Fluffy started moving again. We were finally able to heal all the damage done by the Vomit Cats and then spent the rest of the day hunting for rations and keeping watch.

Two days later Tavrin and Asger started moving and we were able to finally make a decision about where to take the box. The four of us (Aerith, Star, Mirla and I) were already leaning toward taking the box to Kelli when they woke. After a quick explanation Tavrin and Asger agreed and we started on our way.

On the way there Tavin said he wanted to get an offering for Pelor which slowed us down a bit. Finally after two days of searching he settled on a fox pelt. Thankfully he managed to skin it alright, despite not having skinned one before. I don’t actually know how he skinned it because at the time I had a flashback of what I had done to the Vomit Cats and decided to look away.

The next morning Aerith excitedly told us all that while on watch she had heard Aquan coming from in the woods. Apparently when she had gone to investigate she discovered the Giant Leech hanging out in the river near by. She then ran back grabbed one of our fresh kills and gave the blood to the Leech.

After that the rest of the trip was kind of boring. We spent another three days traveling and finally arrived in Kelli. The Cleric took us to his temple (much less gold and finery than Pelor’s) and sat us all down for lunch with the high priests. Thankfully the priests didn’t argue with what we had negotiated back by the waterfall and we were given the agreed upon gold, a set of banded armor, half plate armor, a chest and an emblem of protection from the temple, that showed we were friends of Choranus and would allow us to get help from other members of the faith. (We were a little worried about 1000 eyes getting mad at us for not completing his job...) I can not wait to see Tavrin walk into a Temple of Pelor with it on!

Tavrin exchanged the Half Plate with his Scale Mail armor and we sold the rest. In the end I managed to go from 9 gold pieces to 83. I am so excited for the coming shopping spree!!!!

Only the barest edge of the storm giant’s kick catches him, but it still blows him off his feet and across the courtyard. He rolls to a stop, his breath whistling in his chest, god, god, it hurts, but there’s no way out but forward, so he plants his trembling arms beneath him and pushes himself back to his feet just as Helen lands beside him.

"Still up for more?" she asks, shooting him a look as she flips back her ponytail. She reaches out and squeezes his elbow, a fleeting touch. "Let’s do it again. I’ve almost got it."

Still breathless, he nods, and breaks into a run, back into the fray. Quick, quick, it needs to be quick, because Lorena can only survive distracting the cloud giant for so much longer. Outpacing him, Helen races back towards the storm giant, leaping at the last second as it begins to swing its massive sword.

From below, a strike to its chin—the Comet Hammer carries her up, far over the giant’s head, and she twists in the air with a skill far beyond the rudimentary martial arts she’d known all of two days ago. From above, a blow to its shoulder, and the Hammer jerks her onward; she catches its elbow on the way past, swings herself around as lightly as a maiden at a maypole, and drives her last attack into the bone of the giant’s wrist.

It bellows, fingers going slack, and swats at her, but the Hammer’s already pulling her away, and the sword clangs to the ground with a roar like cavalry at full gallop, and—

Keinan throws himself flat to avoid the backhanded swipe, and rolls to the side, finally, finally slapping a hand down across the immense surface of the blade. The colors begin to shift as he glares at it, storm-cloud gray darkening to black, the inlaid blue handle staining red. Mine, he thinks at it ferociously. Somewhere between his ears and the hair on the back of his neck, he can feel the thing that’s been watching him since they arrived in Carceri chortle. Good choice, it says in a lilting hiss at the back of his mind, and the sense of possession solidifies into certain ownership, a pact between him and the weapon and the voice in his head.

He closes his hand, and the sword vanishes, tucked into the back of his mind like his memories of home. The giant’s mouth falls open, a great blue cavern, and Keinan balls his hands into fists to hide his shaking at the size of its dull teeth.

"What have you done?!" it demands, its voice rattling against the walls of the prison. "Where is it? What have you done with my father’s sword?!" Its hand rises, and Keinan pushes himself up and backward and—

—and straight into Helen’s arms, as she zips by behind him, just barely pulling him away from the new crater the giant’s fist leaves in the courtyard.

"Ready?" she asks, and despite everything, she’s grinning, tight and angry. "Grab on."

He hugs her around the shoulders and nods. He feels her catch her breath and bounce on her toes, testing his weight, before she mutters, just to herself, "Okay, Helen. One, and two, and—"

She whirls the Comet Hammer overhead again, and this close, he can feel the magic surge out of it, crackling over her orihalcum hand and raising a frisson of response down his metal-laced spine, the phylacteries of Zalivance humming with response to the proximity of other enchantments.

The world drops out from beneath him as the Hammer pulls them skyward, and Helen wraps her free arm around his back, tucking herself into a roll, pulling the both of them into a spiraling twist, and his stomach lurches with the spinning, and at the top of the arc, she yells, "Now!"

They release each other in the same moment.

Wind whistles in his ears as gravity takes him. Below him, the giant’s enormous white head begins to crane backwards, its eyes tracking Helen. Its forehead spreads out under Keinan like a chalk field. He raises his hands in matching arcs, then snaps them forward, fingers contorting in signs he learned in some dream he doesn’t remember having.

The air splits with a furious roar, a snarling blast of sound and burst of brimstone smell. In the back of Keinan’s head, the demon shrieks with laughter.

The sword reforms.

Where before it was sapphire blue and chill gray, it now cuts a red and black swathe in the sky, licks of fire emblazoned down the blade. A whorl of pipes the color of charcoal form the pommel; they rumble beneath Keinan’s hands and belch black smoke, hot to the touch even through the protection of the ifrit’s belt.

The giant looks up. Its eyes widen.

Keinan rides the sword down.

"The hero married the princess, and they ruled together wisely and well for the rest of their days, at least until the green dragon from the kingdom next door flew in and drowned the whole kingdom in acid. The End."

Kosei squints at the text in front of her, then turns in her mother’s lap, frowning. "It doesn’t say that last part, Mama."

Tamae sniffs, dismissive. "It might as well have. There’s no such thing as a happy-ever-after, my giblet." She closes the book with a firm snap. The lantern light gives the worn leather cover a dull gleam, and shines in Tamae’s looping black hair. The wagon cover curves close overhead, enclosing them in warm solitude, though Kosei can hear the odd murmur from the caravan guards or the horses away outside.

Kosei’s skin feels too tight. She scratches at her elbow, annoyed. "If there’s no such thing as a happy-ever-after, why do the stories all end with one? Why do you always have to change the ending?"

"Realistic expectations." Her mother sets the book aside and picks up a brush instead. She spreads her fingers—short and pale, and dull—across the top of Kosei’s head and turns it firmly back towards the front. "Trying to be a hero here will get you worse than killed."

"Then why don’t you get a different book to read to me out of?" Kosei fingers the edge of her mother’s kimono, turning it up to examine the recently redone hem.

"Firstly, because we’re still new here, and there’s only so much of the merchandise they’ll let me handle." The brushstrokes fall firm and steady through Kosei’s hair, but one of her mother’s hands remains braced gently across her skull. "Secondly, I’m teaching you to read; the caravan only has so many books that are appropriate."

"What’s in the other ones?" Her knuckles tingle, Kosei drops the kimono and balls up her hands into fists, tucking them hurriedly behind her elbows.

"Oh, diaries, treatises on the historical impact of dwarvish forging techniques, useless necromantic texts—that sort of thing. Let me see your hands, dear."

Kosei tightens her arms. Four needles prick at each of her palms; she’s tired, and she’s slipped again. "Whose diaries are they? Are they from here or outside?"

"...Kosei." Tamae pauses in her brushing, voice gone low and cold. "Your hands. Now."

Heat building in her face, Kosei turns out her hands. In the lamp light, her claws gleam, long and black, and sharp. Color suffuses her fingertips, bleeding out from her knuckles, a blue to match the true sky, or so her mother once told her.

Tamae sighs, the air tickling at Kosei’s ear. "Well," she says quietly, "you’ve kept them the right size, at least. You remember how to put them away?"

Kosei does, she thinks, but she shakes her head anyway. Her mother keeps form perfectly—a human woman with languid brown eyes and a sad, refined smile, hair smooth as a stream and black as a crack in stone, teeth straight and white. Kosei misses her real form, the pale ring of her eyes, the shining black of her claws and her teeth.

Kosei misses truth in a way she guesses her mother must miss freedom.

Tamae sets the brush down and tucks one arm around her daughter’s waist, reaching her other hand out where Kosei can see it. Dark blue spills across her skin; her fingers lengthen and harden, and her nails shift to black, gleaming as they narrow down to knife-edge sharpness. When the change is complete, she rests her cheek lightly against the top of Kosei’s head.

"It’s like walking. You decide where you want to go, put your foot out in that direction, and move your weight from one leg to the other. Keep doing that until you’re there. We want to look human, so we remember what humans look like, and we take it one step at a time until we’re there." As she talks, the words whispered into Kosei’s hair, she turns her palm upward, taking Kosei’s smaller hand in her own. "The humans we want to be have skin much paler than ours, so first we pull out the color until it matches. You’re already much closer than me, so just follow my lead."

She circles her thumb across Kosei’s knuckles; kneads at Kosei’s fingers with her own. Kosei sighs, small and unhappy, and follows her mother’s directions.

"So how does chicken taste, then?"

"Eh, some people say it tastes like humans."

Kosei sighs, heavier than she’d intended, and looks gloomily at Orthin through the maze of pipes and metalwork that make up his still. "So that’s no good either."

The dwarf shrugs, busy with his mortar and pestle. The rods of cinnamon he’d traded a gallon of his last brew for filled the inside of his wagon with their scent, and dusted his hands with a fine reddish powder. "We’re a little limited on fine cuisine here, my girl. But that said, it seems to me that the answer to your dilemma is to cultivate a connoisseur’s palate."

"What does that mean?"

"Give the batch a stir, will you?" He elbows a glass rod dangling from the array of rods, reeds, measures, mugs, and tools suspended along his ceiling. "It’s like this: back where I come from, if you walked into a tavern, put a coin down on the bar, and said, "Gimme a flagon o’ your finest ale,’ you’d get an ale. But how it tasted, that’d depend on the bar and the coin. And if you were a no-account amateur drinker, you’d maybe think your copper-piece flagon from the dive tasted about the same as your gold-crown top-shelf from the king’s row. But as a connoisseur, you’d know the first one was swill, just—" he pauses to make a face at her, eyes rolling back beneath his heavy white brows, tongue sticking out one side of his mouth "—complete goat piss. And the second one, well, you’d be able to pick out ingredients, you could tell what mountain it was made under, you could guess the type of wood it distilled in—ah, Kosei, I could go on for hours." He shakes his head, sighing with a note of mourning. "And if someone told you, "Well, they taste about the same to me,’ you’d say, "You slanderous rotter, I challenge you to say that to me when I have an axe in my hand!’"

Kosei, kneeling on the workbench and swishing the rod around the inside of the still, listens in interest. She isn’t certain about all the words—a copper-piece sounds different than an ingot of copper, and she has no idea what a tavern is, other than some kind of building, nor does she know how a tavern bar might be different from, say, a wooden beam or a crowbar—but Orthin is telling her a sort of story anyway, even if he wouldn’t think of it that way. Not everyone in the caravan is so willing to talk about The Outside.

"So..." She trails off, frowning. "But Mother says babies are delicious. Wouldn’t they be the—top-shelf gold-crown, compared to things that just taste like them?"

Orthin waves this off, and sets the pestle full of cinnamon down at the far side of his bench. "Pass me the rod and put the lid back on," he instructs, and takes the tool from her when she obediently pulls it out of the still and holds it out to him. He runs it under his nose, sniffing at it, then touches his tongue delicately to the smooth surface. "Good, good," he murmurs. "Coming along well.

"I’ve never had one," he continues, turning his attention back to her, "but I’m sure and certain babies would be too fatty to be any good. It’s just a matter of getting you used to leaner meats. And more cooked ones, at that. I’m sure we can do it."

"And that will mean Mother and I can stay?" Kosei presses. "In our true forms?"

"Mondon never goes back on a deal." Orthin wipes the rod down with a cloth, then tips it into a bucket of water under his bench. "You’re getting old enough that he’s going to want you picking a trade soon, though."

Suppressing her smile, Kosei lets him sit on the words, and mulls them over herself. He goes on working, scooping a container out from under the table and beginning to tap the cinnamon into it, his lined hands rocking in time with the even sway of the wagon. When he’s finished—container back under the workbench, mortar and pestle wiped off and added to the wash pail—he finally shoots her a glance, raising a heavy eyebrow.

"What, no ideas at all?" he prompts.

"I like your stories," she answers. "And how you work so hard on..." She lines the words up in her head, testing the sound of them before she lets them go. "On making your drinks special even though—"

"No one else cares?" he asks, but she shakes her head.

"Even though they’d drink them anyway," she finishes.

"Well," he says, short and dry. "I don’t know if your mother’s told you this yet, my girl, but everyone in Carceri needs something to care about. If you don’t have that, eventually, you just..." He trails off then, frowning down vaguely at his work bench.

"You just what?" she asks him after a few seconds.

"...You like my stories, you say?" he asks, looking over at her. "This isn’t a nice one."

"I want to hear it anyway." Kosei presses her hands down flat on the surface of the workbench, gingerly pushing herself into levitation. She’s been kneeling for a while now, and her knees are sore. Unbending them from beneath her, she stretches her legs once, then settles back down on the wood and looks back at Orthin expectantly. "Please."

"Right. Well, I wasn’t always with the caravan, of course. When I was first magicked here, it was with a—lets call him a partner of mine. We’d been getting ourselves in a lot of trouble that winter, and..."

Kosei listens, attentive, as his story unfolds.

Every six months or so, the caravan stops for a few days, and everything that needs stillness and rest is done all at once. Mostly this means repairs, for the wagons’ taxed axles and splintering wheels, metalwork that needs to be forged away from flammable wood and cloth, but also horse foaling and delicate alchemical work. The drivers find as safe a place as they can, trade with anything already living there for a few days of alliance, and for a little while, the caravan lets down its guard.

This time, they’ve spread out at the base of a harpy lair, a cavern in the prison ringed with nests and alcoves rising hundreds of feet up towards the distant ceiling. Carceri’s ambient light is dim here, and only a few torches waver amidst the wagons, where several of the inhabitants have already gone to bed.

Kosei has been practicing for weeks. She and Karsha have tucked themselves in a secluded alcove of rock, some ways away from the caravan. A silk-wrapped instrument lies on the ground between them, tied closed with red cording. Karsha sits with an unsheathed longsword laid bare over her knees, the blade glimmering faintly blue. Swathed in her dark robes, she seems to bleed into the shadows at the edges. She looks at Kosei with inscrutable eyes, liquid black, and says, softly:

Kosei nods and takes a steadying breath. One step at a time, unhurried—the preparation is as much a part of the show as the playing is. She reaches out and begins to untie the cords around her instrument—Karsha’s instrument, still—unwrapping the pale silk and laying it flat across the stone until the koto stands revealed. Its polished body gleams, ivory bridges curving across its surface like exposed vertebrae, its thirteen yellowing strings wound taut.

Kosei pushes back the sleeves of her kimono to bare her wrists, then pulls out a small pouch tucked inside her obi. From it, she removes the three fingerpicks, carefully pressing them over her claws—sharp enough to sever the koto strings in a single stroke. In front of her, the strings hum, teased by licks of wind from the outside.

She lays her right palm over the strings, stilling them with a touch. Whole focus narrowed down to the instrument before her, she begins to play.

When she’s finished, Kosei stills the strings again, listening to the echoes fade off into the cliffs. She breathes out and looks up, expectant.

"Very good, Kosei," Karsha tells her, but her eyes are elsewhere, turned upward. "Wouldn’t you say so?"

Kosei follows the gaze and spots the clutch of harpies roosting at the edge of her darkvision—two females and one male, all of them sleek and lovely.

"It’s not really our style." The one in the center shrugs, her speckled wings lifting and resettling behind her. "But it’s nice enough. What sort of instrument is that?"

"A koto," Karsha answers, her hands resting lightly but prominently over the blade in her lap. "It comes from the outside. I’ll be passing it on to her, in time." She lifts one hand and gestures to Kosei.