17. Smile

=== Respite ===
Kept in relative confinement
within the Crooked Warden’s subterranean warren, the crew of the Drunken Dragon had little to do for
a week. Clwyd busied herself with tinkering and artificery, regularly paying
some of the Warden’s worker children to get supplies from town for her. She
sketched out a number of designs, presented Pyt with a strangely flexible
rapier, and dabbled with a necklace as the days passed. Pyt, for the most part,
kept to himself, often in his drum-yurt. Those who passed close by started hearing
weird things: ‘oh that’s amazing! You dance? Haha!’ Malak did his best to keep
exercising and remain fighting fit. Clark tried to get some of the kids to
teach him some pastimes, but they were hospitably standoffish, and he didn’t
get far. He relented and approached Malak in a free moment to play cards
instead. The group also noticed their cat, Nimbus, was missing, and couldn’t
recall the last time they’d seen him.
Ingela’s ornate deck of cards was
whipped out in this manner a number of times through the week, though the group
only knew the one game they could play with them. On day, on a break from her
experimenting, Clwyd joined in for a hand or two. It just so happened that a
number of the three decks’ high cards were played at the same time, and as she
looked at them, the goblin noticed something of a pattern. The group went
through the decks and grabbed the four high cards from each one – 8s from the
blue deck, 6s from the red deck, and 4s from the green deck. Sure enough, with
some rearrangement, the pictures that decorated each card lined up, though the
border around the edge of the cards cut the whole image into sections. They looked
down at the 4X3 grid of cards and saw a small oasis in a desert of sand, dunes
rolling in the background. A curious sort of palm tree lined the pool, and
footprints traced its edge, leading to a hole that had been dug at the base of a
tree. In the hole, disguised in the display by straddling three different
cards, was unmistakably a treasure chest. A map of some sort, or perhaps
something else entirely?  
Wilfred joined the group after a
number of days, just as the Warden said he would. The gnome was acutely aware
that at this point magical practitioners were hunting him. He sat in a corner
and mostly didn’t move for his time underground, occupying himself with his
spellbooks – thus limiting what information any prying eyes would gleam from trying
to divine his location. When someone approached to speak with him, Wilfred
would detect magic to determine if any scrying sensors were present, ready to try
and dispel them if they were. 
The new man, Cormorant MacTavish,
not being watched on Tortuga as the party were, decided to leave the group and
do some investigating in the Pieces. He returned twice in the week, swapping
information and getting to know the little group a bit as he did. From speaking
with his friends and acquaintances, the man had learned that twelve children
were known to have gone missing in the last three weeks, all human. They were
all members of little street gangs that like to sneak out at night to fight
each other. Other than that, he’d only heard rumours of the nights being particularly
cold, even for winter, and that the stray cats were often being unusually loud.
He’d also spotted glimpses of a stranger at night he hadn’t seen before – a huge
half-orc. The Pieces being the maze of narrow streets that they are, Cormorant
and the half-orc had not yet met face-to-face. 
The Warden touched in with the
group a few times in the week. Early on, he took the instructions for the
misdirection the party decided on that they wanted him to spread: he was to say
he last saw the group heading to the docks and then lost sight of them. This,
combined with the week they had spent underground, would hopefully get the
watching eyes of their enemies off the party. The Warden also warned them that
they stand out a lot and they’d be wise to take measures against that. The way
they travelled, they were all armoured and weaponed, with a large blue man, a
small green woman with too many magic items slung around her person, a half-elf
with instruments strapped to him, a gnome, and a half-dwarf. Spotting such an
eclectic group from a thousand paces would be no challenge at all. 
Additionally, the Warden, being
the premium information network on Tortuga, was able to suss out that the party
had another obligation to the Proprietor. As a measure of good faith in starting
their business together, he said he’d do what he could to deal with it, coyly
sidestepping some assumed parameters of a Sylvan oath – the Warden apparently
knew Kind’s methodology fairly well. Later in the week, the Warden confirmed
that most of the issue in Riverside was dealt with. The last of it remained in
the Pieces in fact. There were a number of elemental creatures flying around at
night – ice mephiti. The Warden was confident these creatures weren’t the
source of the disappearances; they can be annoying and dangerous to the unwary,
but it’s pretty much unheard of for them to be truly malevolent creatures. However,
they were related to the party’s obligation. The Warden recommended they don’t
kill them if they can help it. Subduing the mephiti and travelling to the
Bathhouse with them would be best, he concluded. 
When a week had passed, the group
of six readied themselves to leave the warren through the sewers and go looking
for the cause of the disappearing children. They placed a lot of their obvious
wealth in the portable hole, including some armour and the folding boat. Wilfred
cast his nondetection spell. Malak
showcased a new spell he’d developed, physically altering his body from its
piscine form to that of a human. Clwyd disguised herself in the illusion of an
urchin human child. Then they all strode out into the evening air. 
=== The Hunt ===
The children never disappeared on
consecutive nights, but a pattern was quite hard to discern. Still, the last
one had gone missing two nights past so that evening was prime time for another
one. Nearly all the disappearances were happening near Shaky Bend, a part of
the Pieces rife with the childish gangs. Before heading there though, Cormorant
lead the group to a domino parlour and chatted briefly with an acquaintance, a
man named Cap. He didn’t glean much more information that what he’d already uncovered
or the Warden had provided them with. During the trip, Pyt touched an
earthenware cup that piss-water beer had been served in and imbued it with some
magic, making it sprout little arms and legs, rising as a tiny servant named Jackson
that did his bidding. 
The group went to Shaky Bend.
Clwyd in her disguise as an urchin Vic went and sat down on an intersection of
the street. The others watched her briefly before fucking off and doing their
own thing, leaving her alone. Pyt had sent Jackson to explore a bit and the
little man, possessing the uncanny ability to see without using sight, quickly
came across the ice mephiti the Warden had told the group about. They were crowded
around a small house, playing with the icicles and chatting in their guttural creole
mix of the Aquan and Auran languages. Pyt sent Jackson out to them, hoping to
lead them into his waiting trap, but most of the icicles revealed themselves to
be mephiti! There were six in total, and Pyt opted to just have Jackson keep
running rather than lead them to him. They flew impishly, lobbing snowballs and
curses at the little cup man and he dashed through the streets. They gave up
their pursuit and started returning to the cold house when Jackson found
Cormorant and dove into his pocket.  
Others in the group found and
followed a little street gang. Clark made good use of Flekk for spying purposes
and learned that one of the gang’s number was missing that night and that they
were going to fight a different gang. The group of four human children, none older
than 12 or 13, eventually met up with a different group, twice their number, and
headed by a large Reefbeard boy. The humans got their asses kicked and were
spat and pissed on before the dwarf boy declared their territory belonged to
him now. When they eventually peeled themselves off the floor, they trudged
over to a nearby house – in fact, the same house where the mephiti had been –
and banged on the door. The apparent leader of the group shouted that ‘Feeler’
wasn’t in the gang any more because he’d abandoned them, even after they had
the fight near his house. 
=== The Oni ===
Clwyd, alone, encountered a few people.
An old woman walked past her as the sun was setting, telling her not to dally.
Clwyd paid the woman little mind, and she tutted and walked off. In the early
night, a little human girl rounded a corner and told her not to stay out at
night. Again, Clwyd didn’t take heed of what she was told. Finally, a human boy
approached her and told her she couldn’t stay in gang territory on her own.
Through the conversation he learned that she was new to these parts, not in a
gang, and on her own. A wide grin crept onto his boyish face and he quickly
subdued Clwyd in a charm spell, telling her to follow him to somewhere safe.
She obediently followed, eventually arriving at the same house the others had
each visited in the same evening – though the three groups had all just missed
each other. Clwyd was taken inside and told to lie down and sleep. The boy left
the room and picked up something heavy and metal before coming back. His grin
was now a crescent moon, stretching ear to ear and showing off rows of sharp
fangs. His body began to shift, to grow and swell in size, skin changing to a shade of blue. He sang a little rhyme as he approached the defenceless Clwyd:Lock the door, blow out the light;A hungry beast haunts the night.  Hide and tremble, little one;The creature's grinning, he's having fun.  Hear claws scratching on the door,Hear his club scrape the floor. Try and hide or try and flee;It doesn't matter. You shan't escape the oni. The hulking blue ogre mage loomed over Clwyd, enormous, ice-encrusted club raised above his
head. He struck down on her prone form brutally, shattering the charm spell and
most of Clwyd’s shoulder. She sprang to her senses, nimbly getting out the way
of another strike and dashing out the house. She was sprinting through the
Pieces, screaming at the top of her lungs in the moments she wasn’t chugging
down a bubbling healing draught from her alchemical satchel. The rest of the
party convened on her screaming, with Pyt mending her wounds further with his
bardic magic. Just as Clwyd passed on what information she had about the creature,
a roar of winter wind signalled a powerful spell being cast directly above
them. An isolated blizzard blasted down on the group, layering all the
buildings in the area with frost and snow and nearly ending a number of the
party. Directly above them, hanging in the sky atop billowing wisps of winter
air, the grinning oni looked down at them.
The party
scattered, some mending their wounds. Cormorant produced a heavy flintlock
pistol from within his clothes and sent a fiery roar through the night. Others
in the group let loose with their ranged attacks also. Wilfred materialised six
streaks of burning blue fire that orbited him as he ran before screaming off through
the air and blasting the flying creature. The oni turned invisible and started
flying away, only the whipping of the wind at his heels betraying his position.
In the pursuit, he blasted a number of the shacks the party were standing on
with some sort of force magic originating from a ring on his finger, sending
Cormorant and Clark crashing down through the homes of two separate, terrified
families. The group eventually lost all trace of the creature near the end of
Shandy Bend and had to regroup. They searched the area a little, putting
Jackson atop Flekk and doing a few loops of town. As they did so, a large half-orc
sporting a greataxe approached the group cautiously, then, with a little surprise,
greeted Malak. Fang, from the Banshee.
His crew had apparently been holed up in the Pieces, with friends they knew.
Fang was reluctant to lead the party back to their safe house if there was an
angry oni out hunting for them and was also keen to catch and kill the thing
himself. He didn’t stop to chat for long, eventually rushing off to keep looking
for the giant-kin.
=== The Pursuit ===
The party
went into the building that Clwyd had been taken too and did some snooping
around. Cormorant knew the occupants – or rather, former occupants. They were
dead, their bodies left rotting in the upstairs room. Feeler’s parents. They
also found the remnants of a number of dead children, 14 pairs of feet in
various states of festering and a lot of bones that had gnaw and bite marks on
them. He’d been eating them then. 
The party
didn’t think stopping to rest would be prudent, and instead pushed back out
into the streets. They decided to look for the ice mephiti since they crowded
around cold places. Clark, through Flekk’s eyes, spotted the ice imps in the
area where the cone of cold had blasted
down on them. They quickly headed over there. Those who understood Aquan bore witness to the following exchange between the imps:“It’s cold.”“Yeah, well
cold.”“U-huh. Love
the cold.”The group also saw Fang again, though Wilfred, who had detect magic active, could see the aura of transmutation that wreathed the ‘half-orc’s’
body. The gnome struck without hesitation, hurtling a bolt of blue fire at the
oni before shouting to inform the group. The fighting broke out again suddenly.
The party did their best to surround the oni in the alleyway. At one point, Pyt
thrust with his new rapier and the blade bent on impact, the grip almost
touching the giant’s body. Pyt activated the magic Clwyd had imbedded into the
blade and, based on the goblin’s jump
spell as it was, the oni was hurled upwards into the air as the rapier’s blade
straightened. However, he didn’t tumble back to the ground, instead he just
hung there. He could fly. Wilfred tried to wrap the beast in his web spell but the oni avoided it. However,
Cormorant, whipping out a two-handed flintlock blasted the creature out the
sky, sending him tumbling down to tangle in the sticky webs. Malak was up on
the side of a building, grappling with the oni to try and keep him in place.
The ogre mage snarled, then cast a spell. His whole body fizzled into gas and
he retreated into one of the nearby houses, seeping through cracks in the roof.
The party
struggled to break into the building. The family inside weren’t opening the
door to these terrifying strangers banging and shouting on it. Cormorant and
Malak both had a go at breaking the door down but were unsuccessful. Fang
rounded the corner, assessed the situation, and swiftly kicked the door down.
The occupying family were huddled inside, small 14-year-old boy at the front
with a stool in shaking hands that he levelled towards Pyt as the bard strode
in, menacingly, rapier in hand. Pyt made for the stairs and the boy didn’t lash
out at him. Meanwhile, Clwyd had melted through the roof with acid, inadvertently
giving the oni a route to escape. He turned invisible again and flew out into
the night. 
The chase
continued through a few more streets. Cats hissed as the invisible ogre flew
past them. Wilfred, small meteors of blue fire swirling around his body, did
his best to keep up with the flying giant and blast him with spell after spell.
The oni doubled back to smack Wilfred lethally with two mighty blows of his icy
club cracking the wizard’s arcane ward like an eggshell. 
The oni had
put enough distance between himself and his pursuers by flying over walls they
had to climb over. He turned invisible and took to hiding again. In the final
moments before he would get away, Pyt sent Jackson around a corner and cast catapult
on the little guy, sending him hurling with all the force of a cup-sized comet
at the oni. Jackson put a fist out in front of him, superman style, but sadly
missed the wounded creature, smashing against a wall and falling to the floor
in pieces of pottery. He made a thumbs up as the spell that animated him faded.
The oni looked to be getting away. He was invisible and his location unknown. But Wilfred was still detecting magic. 
 
Category:Part Two