Episode 58: Lying with Snakes

The battle at sea against the Nameless Few has left the Heroes of Bingle battered and their ship badly damaged. But with nowhere to go for help except into an enemy’s secret hideout, will this simple repair mission turn very dangerous, very quickly?

#### **DM/GM Intro**

*It started as a simple dungeon run…*

*But that was 22 years in the future.  The Heroes of Bingle have found themselves time-traveling, quite against their will, into a place and time fraught with danger.*

*On the path of their epic quest, they were displaced.  Hurtled 22 years into the past, before many of them were even born, and into the bodies of 5 sellswords.  Mercenaries hired by the ruthless pirate captain, Whitebeard.  A notorious scoundrel of the high seas who was hunting a fugitive of the Shaxen Gao empire.  That dragonborn dynasty had put a large bounty on a Triton named Cho’Ran, who had helped them hide a mysterious treasure cache. This collection of riches and magical items was of such value to the throne, that they moved it every few years - the locations known only to a select few.  Cho’Ran claimed that the dynasty even feared this treasure, and used the Tritons to secret it away for them.  As one of the Tritons charged with that task, Cho’Ran met and fell in love with Baozhai, a princess of the Shaxen Gao, and together they had a son.  A boy whose claim to the throne was a threat to the Dragonborn dynasty.  So they fled east, hoping to escape the bounty hunters pursuing them.*

*But gold is a great motivator, especially to a pirate.  And Whitebeard chased Cho’Ran all the way to the Deserted Island, a dry, arid dot in the sea.  There, Whitebeard and his crew apprehended the Triton, who begged them to forego the bounty and reunite him with his family.  In exchange, he offered the location of the Shaxen Gao’s treasure cache, which he said would be far more valuable than the 5,000 gold on his head.  To prove it, he used an extraordinary magical bracelet to transform the entire Deserted Island into a lush, flowing paradise, crowned with waterfalls.*

*The Heroes of Bingle persuaded Whitebeard to take them to the Isle of Rum, where they rescued Baozhai and her son and made plans to deliver them safely to Lily’s home.  But before they could depart, Whitebeard’s son changed everything.  Unbeknownst to Whitebeard, his first mate, a loquacious pirate named Loudmouth, helped the young man steal one of Whitebeard’s ships and abscond with half of his crew.  Whitebeard was furious, and decided to cash in on the bounty after all, hiring new, nastier criminals to fill out his crew, and making arrangements to hand over Cho’Ran and his family at the edge of the Deep Reef.*

*But the Shaxen Gao who arrived to complete the transaction were no ordinary dragonborn.  They were the Nameless Few, the Dynasty’s merciless assassins - shadow monks skilled in the art of death.  They arrived in two attack frigates, armed and dangerous.*

*As the trade of prisoners for gold commenced, the Heroes of Bingle found themselves at a crossroads, both figurative and literal.  They were once again plucked out of time and came face to face with a being of incredible power.  A Chronodragon. An immense, eternal creature calling itself Nonezzeron.  Nonezzeron gave the team a glimpse into a possible future where they stopped the Shaxen Gao from taking Cho’Ran’s family.  Where they managed to make it safely to Bingle and allow the young boy to grow up happy, as Lily’s older brother.  But this sequence of events also meant that the Heroes of Bingle would never meet one another.  Would never become a team.  Would never start their epic quest or have a chance to save the world like the Heroes of the Aureate Age did before them.*

*And so, when placing those consequences on the scale, it was Siv who spoke up.  Who voiced his reluctance to sacrifice his identity and his friends.  Who answered for himself, when no one else would.*

*But when the team returned to the moment of decision, transported back into the bodies of the sellswords on Whitebeard’s ship, facing the exchange of prisoners for gold once again, they discovered that they were not the only ones capable of making a choice.*

*Cho’Ran’s son ran to his mother’s arms, across the deck and onto the  attack frigate of the Nameless Few.  She swept him up into her embrace and triggered her own magical item.  A belt - as powerful and awesome as the bracer Cho’Ran had used to turn a desert into an oasis - turned Baozhai into a stone, a weight, a torpedo that tore the Shaxen Gao’s vessel in half and sent her and her son rocketing to the bottom of the ocean.*

*But the Nameless Few would not go down without a fight.  The dragonborn fighters fired off a signal arrow, alerting the trailing vessel, and lept from the sinking wreckage and onto the deck of Whitebeard’s Itch.  Highly skilled, relentless, and deadly, the assassins made short work of Whitebeard’s rough-and-tumble new recruits - and plunged a spear through Cho’Ran’s heart.*

*As Whitebeard’s Itch opened its sails and attempted to outrun the second Shaxen Gao ship, the Heroes of Bingle mounted an incredible defense on its decks, caging, crushing, and confounding the fearsome Nameless Few.*

*Lily’s Spirit Guardians and Siv’s newly ravened familiar kept the assassins reeling, as Uggo absorbed and dished out damage in equal measure.  When canons from the trailing vessel blasted projectiles through the hull of their ship, Fahima hung from the ladder of the crow’s nest, sending fireballs back to engulf them. And when the Shaxen Gao rammed them and attempted to leap aboard, James’ Hunger of Hadar created a dark, tentacled barrier to writhe and moan in their path.*

*In the end, it was the jagged rocks of the Deep Reef that landed the final blow to the Nameless Few, and the Heroes of Bingle were left to mourn the fallen.  A sip of the liquor of the dead provided a final connection with Cho’Ran, who revealed that the Tritons hid the treasure cache in a place they called The Mantle.  A place that exists beneath the town of Kingdon.  If the heroes were to finally discover the contents of that fateful cache, that would be their destination.*