Well. That was unexpected.
Mar. 22nd, 2004 06:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zebralittle52I'm in the middle of two games right now, one where I play an oriental half-elf rogue (Allium. Yes, Latin for garlic, but I like it and it could be Elvin, so there.) and in the other I play a dwarf fighter (Myra). Should probably mention which log goes with which, neh?
Allium, the half-elf
SO. We left off the game Friday night (Saturday morning) with Allium crouching low in the corner of a trap room in the gauntlet. She's down to 1 HP, and (in case I forgot to mention this last time) there's a private group of people watching her run the gauntlet via magic, including her adventuring companions. There's a betting pool going on, and only one person, the monk in her group, bets that she'll survive. (The other guys in her group don't bet at all.) Whirling blades spinning above her and to her side, blocking the door out. After getting a few hours sleep I head back over and we start up again.
Using a magical dagger, she flipped it between the wall and the blade closest to the door. (Magic in an item inherently makes the item stronger.) The blade's teeth dug into the dagger, but the dagger held, causing the blade to stop, grinding and wrecking the gears. She was able to squeeze through into the gauntlet's ninth room.
This room was nothing but a long hallway that continued to turn in on itself, like an inward spiral. The door slams shut and fire engulfs the space just behind her. Moving as slowly forward as she can without being caught in the growing blaze behind her, she's able to avoid a couple traps, dodge a few she can't jump over, and then click, a huge friggin' scythe springs out of the wall, hitting her right in the stomach. So she's hanging there dead, feet barely touching the floor, dangling over the blade like a string-cut marionette.
And I'm told to leave the room.
When the holler for me to come back, the other players look stunned. Why? Hell if I know! I sit down and am told she comes to sitting on! the blade, feeling very hot. Kind'a confused, she continues down the hall. The fire's at her back and she's running out of time. (I'm told she's back/still at 1 HP, and doesn't remember a thing after dying.)
Round and round the corridor turned and on she went, stumbling over more traps without losing that last HP, keeping one step ahead of the growing fire, and FINALLY she's at the last room! In she goes, the door slams behind her, and a giant dragon statue asks her a riddle. "Four brothers, The first brother... Who are they?" (It's late and I don't remember the whole thing just now.) The room starts to fill with water. She thinks about fours, Compass points, elements, seasons, etc, and decides that it has to do with the elements, water fire air and earth. Only after getting them in the right order does the water recede and the exit appear. Yay! Poison antidotes (damn hallway,) healing potions and dry clean clothes! More yay! (And on top of that, the monk agreed to give her a quarter of his winnings! Woot! Now she can afford some magical monk's tattoos she's been thinking about... IF she can find someone who can make 'em.)
She's still shaken up, and gets back with her companions (she'd be hard pressed to call 'em friends. Well, some of 'em. Maybe. If she was drunk.) Off they go to Raphael's (the guy who was running the gauntlet) to settle the reward. In the carriage, Raphael leans over and talks to Allium, and somehow they got to talking about dancing. As she's never learned to dance, he says the living should enjoy life. At Raphael's she takes some of the wine he offers, a little more than she's really up for handling after that much exertion and dehydration, and starts thinking about this.
Raphael tells them he's been offered a good sum of money for their heads, and was wondering what the group could offer to top it. We offer up the names of two of his competitors we're willing to remove from the living equation (who we have on tap to track down and slaughter for old reasons anyway, mostly because they've been trying to get the Keys before we can, and trying to kill us on and off for years. So hey, the deal works for all involved.) That settled, the group returned to their tavern for the night.
Upstairs, they discover someone's broken in and stolen the monk's animal companion (a winged cat) and his slave (to be fair, he was trying to free the little girl, she's just very young and still under the conditioning, so he's kind of stuck with her.) Allium tells the guys that near the end of the gauntlet there's some time that's a blank to her and asks if they noticed anything. Apparently they watched the fire slowly creep down the hall, and as soon as it hit her body it erupted into an inferno. They couldn't see anything past that, till she walked out of the fireball like nothing had happened. As the only time they've ever seen anything like it is when the group's fighter-cleric fell and divine intervention caused him to burst on fire, damn near quadruple in size, grab a fiery battle ax from thin air and slice his opponent like a holiday ham, they had a few questions of their own as well.
As she isn't some secret cleric of some god, (she doesn't follow any of 'em) they were clueless and most of 'em headed downstairs for a drink. Allium was still feeling tipsy and stayed upstairs, and got to talking with Marius, the group's dualist, about what happened in the fire. As the monk is part dragon (long story,) he asked if she might be part phoenix, and she says no. He asks if she knew her parents well, and she nodded, mentioning the door riddle that had stumped her, how her hand had glowed the phoenix shape, feeling her mother's warmth.
I'm going to write out what I can from this scene, 'cause I'm really proud of how it went and don't want to forget any more than I already have. (There was a lot more give and take in the conversation, but most of Marius's side is lost... Lack of sleep kills brain cells, I'm sure of it.)
"Do you remember your parents?" Marius asked.
"Yes. I was fifteen when they were killed. There were plenty of years to discover anything, and I've read my mothers diary, nothing like that was mentioned." She curled in on herself a little, looking over at him. "I read about how they met. Mother was member of an... elite force in the far East, but they were betrayed. She was the only one to survive, escaping along the Golden Way, hiding in this caravan or that, sometimes keeping off the road all together. When she got to Thesk, she could barely speak a handful of common words, didn't know or trust anyone, and hid up in the mountains."
She shook her head. "Daddy was tracking something he'd never seen before... trails of broken bush, bits of dead animal... eventually he found this cave, and there was mother. She'd wrapped herself in a pelt for warmth, and he'd been tracking her steps wrapped in hide. She tried to attack if he got to near but she was tired and weak, so he sat outside and waited her out... Always said that, of everything he'd ever tracked, she was the most rare, exotic, and deadly."
"They eventually... Well, you can guess what eventually happened." He laughed a little, encouraging her to go on. "After a couple years I came along, and they decided to settle down. We'd moved here and there, but I was pretty oblivious, just happy to sit on Daddy's lap and listen to his stories. But a phoenix? In all that time, and after I came back to myself, there was never a sign of..."
He frowned. "Came back? What do you mean?"
Allium paused, gave him a look, and took a deep breath. "There were powerful men... well, there are always men if you have skills that they want. My parents kept saying no, but one night... There were too many of them. They refused, and were attacked. I'd been told to hide in this... hidden room? A bolt hole, I guess."
He nodded. "Yes, I'm familiar with them."
"I could hear everything. And I'd cracked the door just enough to see. They. My mother. They... abused her, like the story that imposter told you about what happened to me, but they didn't stop when she died. They didn't stop..." Marius reached out, touching her arm as she gathered herself. "I waited hours after they left, I couldn't move, couldn't think... just wanted to find Daddy. The house was in shambles, everything broken, but I couldn't see him. I don't think I really saw anything... and then... It felt like they'd broken a hole in the roof, and the rain was getting in." She looked down at her hand, then up at the ceiling. "They'd strung him up by the rafters, slit him open... I think I caught the last few drops. I didn't... come back to myself for a very long time."
His quiet whisper fell. "What did you do?"
"I went to the Elves; thought Grandmother would help me... She never wanted anything to do with me before, but I thought she'd want to know what happened to her son."
She shook her head, shrugging. "I was thrown to the curb with the trash." Sitting straighter, she looked Marius in the eye. "I did what I had to do, I got by... and I had the diary. It was in the bolt hole with me, the only thing that survived. It talked about Mother's people, strong, independent... in control of their lives. I grabbed onto the idea of living like that, and well..." She paused, thinking. "I always saw it as a way of bringing back my Mother's way of life... of bringing back my Mother. I imagine it's like from the ashes of the Phoenix. But believe me, that's the closest I've ever gotten."
They talked some more, Allium asking Marius about his past in return for her story, and he talked about living on his own, very young... wandering from place to place, trying to learn fighting and, of all things, the fiddle. It was on one of these journeys he first met Jeffery, our bard. He also talked of bartering passage on ships for his songs, of wanting to go back... And he offered to play something. Taking out his fiddle, blowing off some dust, he tuned it up and began. Something slow at first, mellow and sad, he raised the tempo till it could lift both their moods. He said she'd have to dance, the next time he played, and she nodded, saying it was about time she started living again... Then he began to sing. By the time the monk poked his head into the room looking for them Allium was truly smiling.
They both followed the monk (his name's Ryo, but she calls him The Monk.) down to the main tavern room, discovering that he'd gone walk, hoping to clear his head and come up with a course of action to get the child and cat back, gotten into trouble (nothing new there) and was helped out by a stranger... who he decided to bring back with him. This guy looked like money, fancy clothes and shiny rapier, jewelry and polish, the whole bit... An adventurer who'd stumbled across the monk while in the middle of barhopping, he started telling stories of some of the places he's been, how his home land (described as the equivalent of Spain) was beautiful, full of beaches and forests... Arrmando Castillion de Velen was interested in wine and song for the night, and insisted his new friends join in. After the kind of day Allium just had, and the rather cathartic talk with Marius, she joined in the drinking... and then Marius said he'd get his fiddle if Arrmando showed Allium how to dance. (She would have kicked him, but settled on a glare instead.) Jeffery was woken up to play, Marius sang, and Allium promised to try and not step on Arrmando's toes.
And they danced.
To make a long story short, she woke up the next morning with a hangover, naked as the day she was born, curled around an equally naked Arrmando. Memory was hazy, but she thought she remembered enjoying it... unfortunately, he didn't remember squat. She reassured him that, if he had a problem with it, they'd never mention it again... but frankly the only thing she regretted was not remembering all the fun. They both realized everyone else was downstairs nursing their hangovers, and well... they'd be sure to remember now.
Unfortunately, Marius interrupted them by banging on the door, and there was work to be done, so they took a rain check. (This was cashed in as soon as they had an hour to themselves and a private room with a lock. ^_~)
Our cleric went off to scry on our target's whereabouts (Hey, the spell takes an hour! What a coincidence!) and *deep breath* we called it a day.
This is where I mention the three hour nap I took in their guest room, 'cause we didn't want to end there, right? I'll type up what happened the next day later this week.
Allium, the half-elf
SO. We left off the game Friday night (Saturday morning) with Allium crouching low in the corner of a trap room in the gauntlet. She's down to 1 HP, and (in case I forgot to mention this last time) there's a private group of people watching her run the gauntlet via magic, including her adventuring companions. There's a betting pool going on, and only one person, the monk in her group, bets that she'll survive. (The other guys in her group don't bet at all.) Whirling blades spinning above her and to her side, blocking the door out. After getting a few hours sleep I head back over and we start up again.
Using a magical dagger, she flipped it between the wall and the blade closest to the door. (Magic in an item inherently makes the item stronger.) The blade's teeth dug into the dagger, but the dagger held, causing the blade to stop, grinding and wrecking the gears. She was able to squeeze through into the gauntlet's ninth room.
This room was nothing but a long hallway that continued to turn in on itself, like an inward spiral. The door slams shut and fire engulfs the space just behind her. Moving as slowly forward as she can without being caught in the growing blaze behind her, she's able to avoid a couple traps, dodge a few she can't jump over, and then click, a huge friggin' scythe springs out of the wall, hitting her right in the stomach. So she's hanging there dead, feet barely touching the floor, dangling over the blade like a string-cut marionette.
And I'm told to leave the room.
When the holler for me to come back, the other players look stunned. Why? Hell if I know! I sit down and am told she comes to sitting on! the blade, feeling very hot. Kind'a confused, she continues down the hall. The fire's at her back and she's running out of time. (I'm told she's back/still at 1 HP, and doesn't remember a thing after dying.)
Round and round the corridor turned and on she went, stumbling over more traps without losing that last HP, keeping one step ahead of the growing fire, and FINALLY she's at the last room! In she goes, the door slams behind her, and a giant dragon statue asks her a riddle. "Four brothers, The first brother... Who are they?" (It's late and I don't remember the whole thing just now.) The room starts to fill with water. She thinks about fours, Compass points, elements, seasons, etc, and decides that it has to do with the elements, water fire air and earth. Only after getting them in the right order does the water recede and the exit appear. Yay! Poison antidotes (damn hallway,) healing potions and dry clean clothes! More yay! (And on top of that, the monk agreed to give her a quarter of his winnings! Woot! Now she can afford some magical monk's tattoos she's been thinking about... IF she can find someone who can make 'em.)
She's still shaken up, and gets back with her companions (she'd be hard pressed to call 'em friends. Well, some of 'em. Maybe. If she was drunk.) Off they go to Raphael's (the guy who was running the gauntlet) to settle the reward. In the carriage, Raphael leans over and talks to Allium, and somehow they got to talking about dancing. As she's never learned to dance, he says the living should enjoy life. At Raphael's she takes some of the wine he offers, a little more than she's really up for handling after that much exertion and dehydration, and starts thinking about this.
Raphael tells them he's been offered a good sum of money for their heads, and was wondering what the group could offer to top it. We offer up the names of two of his competitors we're willing to remove from the living equation (who we have on tap to track down and slaughter for old reasons anyway, mostly because they've been trying to get the Keys before we can, and trying to kill us on and off for years. So hey, the deal works for all involved.) That settled, the group returned to their tavern for the night.
Upstairs, they discover someone's broken in and stolen the monk's animal companion (a winged cat) and his slave (to be fair, he was trying to free the little girl, she's just very young and still under the conditioning, so he's kind of stuck with her.) Allium tells the guys that near the end of the gauntlet there's some time that's a blank to her and asks if they noticed anything. Apparently they watched the fire slowly creep down the hall, and as soon as it hit her body it erupted into an inferno. They couldn't see anything past that, till she walked out of the fireball like nothing had happened. As the only time they've ever seen anything like it is when the group's fighter-cleric fell and divine intervention caused him to burst on fire, damn near quadruple in size, grab a fiery battle ax from thin air and slice his opponent like a holiday ham, they had a few questions of their own as well.
As she isn't some secret cleric of some god, (she doesn't follow any of 'em) they were clueless and most of 'em headed downstairs for a drink. Allium was still feeling tipsy and stayed upstairs, and got to talking with Marius, the group's dualist, about what happened in the fire. As the monk is part dragon (long story,) he asked if she might be part phoenix, and she says no. He asks if she knew her parents well, and she nodded, mentioning the door riddle that had stumped her, how her hand had glowed the phoenix shape, feeling her mother's warmth.
I'm going to write out what I can from this scene, 'cause I'm really proud of how it went and don't want to forget any more than I already have. (There was a lot more give and take in the conversation, but most of Marius's side is lost... Lack of sleep kills brain cells, I'm sure of it.)
"Do you remember your parents?" Marius asked.
"Yes. I was fifteen when they were killed. There were plenty of years to discover anything, and I've read my mothers diary, nothing like that was mentioned." She curled in on herself a little, looking over at him. "I read about how they met. Mother was member of an... elite force in the far East, but they were betrayed. She was the only one to survive, escaping along the Golden Way, hiding in this caravan or that, sometimes keeping off the road all together. When she got to Thesk, she could barely speak a handful of common words, didn't know or trust anyone, and hid up in the mountains."
She shook her head. "Daddy was tracking something he'd never seen before... trails of broken bush, bits of dead animal... eventually he found this cave, and there was mother. She'd wrapped herself in a pelt for warmth, and he'd been tracking her steps wrapped in hide. She tried to attack if he got to near but she was tired and weak, so he sat outside and waited her out... Always said that, of everything he'd ever tracked, she was the most rare, exotic, and deadly."
"They eventually... Well, you can guess what eventually happened." He laughed a little, encouraging her to go on. "After a couple years I came along, and they decided to settle down. We'd moved here and there, but I was pretty oblivious, just happy to sit on Daddy's lap and listen to his stories. But a phoenix? In all that time, and after I came back to myself, there was never a sign of..."
He frowned. "Came back? What do you mean?"
Allium paused, gave him a look, and took a deep breath. "There were powerful men... well, there are always men if you have skills that they want. My parents kept saying no, but one night... There were too many of them. They refused, and were attacked. I'd been told to hide in this... hidden room? A bolt hole, I guess."
He nodded. "Yes, I'm familiar with them."
"I could hear everything. And I'd cracked the door just enough to see. They. My mother. They... abused her, like the story that imposter told you about what happened to me, but they didn't stop when she died. They didn't stop..." Marius reached out, touching her arm as she gathered herself. "I waited hours after they left, I couldn't move, couldn't think... just wanted to find Daddy. The house was in shambles, everything broken, but I couldn't see him. I don't think I really saw anything... and then... It felt like they'd broken a hole in the roof, and the rain was getting in." She looked down at her hand, then up at the ceiling. "They'd strung him up by the rafters, slit him open... I think I caught the last few drops. I didn't... come back to myself for a very long time."
His quiet whisper fell. "What did you do?"
"I went to the Elves; thought Grandmother would help me... She never wanted anything to do with me before, but I thought she'd want to know what happened to her son."
She shook her head, shrugging. "I was thrown to the curb with the trash." Sitting straighter, she looked Marius in the eye. "I did what I had to do, I got by... and I had the diary. It was in the bolt hole with me, the only thing that survived. It talked about Mother's people, strong, independent... in control of their lives. I grabbed onto the idea of living like that, and well..." She paused, thinking. "I always saw it as a way of bringing back my Mother's way of life... of bringing back my Mother. I imagine it's like from the ashes of the Phoenix. But believe me, that's the closest I've ever gotten."
They talked some more, Allium asking Marius about his past in return for her story, and he talked about living on his own, very young... wandering from place to place, trying to learn fighting and, of all things, the fiddle. It was on one of these journeys he first met Jeffery, our bard. He also talked of bartering passage on ships for his songs, of wanting to go back... And he offered to play something. Taking out his fiddle, blowing off some dust, he tuned it up and began. Something slow at first, mellow and sad, he raised the tempo till it could lift both their moods. He said she'd have to dance, the next time he played, and she nodded, saying it was about time she started living again... Then he began to sing. By the time the monk poked his head into the room looking for them Allium was truly smiling.
They both followed the monk (his name's Ryo, but she calls him The Monk.) down to the main tavern room, discovering that he'd gone walk, hoping to clear his head and come up with a course of action to get the child and cat back, gotten into trouble (nothing new there) and was helped out by a stranger... who he decided to bring back with him. This guy looked like money, fancy clothes and shiny rapier, jewelry and polish, the whole bit... An adventurer who'd stumbled across the monk while in the middle of barhopping, he started telling stories of some of the places he's been, how his home land (described as the equivalent of Spain) was beautiful, full of beaches and forests... Arrmando Castillion de Velen was interested in wine and song for the night, and insisted his new friends join in. After the kind of day Allium just had, and the rather cathartic talk with Marius, she joined in the drinking... and then Marius said he'd get his fiddle if Arrmando showed Allium how to dance. (She would have kicked him, but settled on a glare instead.) Jeffery was woken up to play, Marius sang, and Allium promised to try and not step on Arrmando's toes.
And they danced.
To make a long story short, she woke up the next morning with a hangover, naked as the day she was born, curled around an equally naked Arrmando. Memory was hazy, but she thought she remembered enjoying it... unfortunately, he didn't remember squat. She reassured him that, if he had a problem with it, they'd never mention it again... but frankly the only thing she regretted was not remembering all the fun. They both realized everyone else was downstairs nursing their hangovers, and well... they'd be sure to remember now.
Unfortunately, Marius interrupted them by banging on the door, and there was work to be done, so they took a rain check. (This was cashed in as soon as they had an hour to themselves and a private room with a lock. ^_~)
Our cleric went off to scry on our target's whereabouts (Hey, the spell takes an hour! What a coincidence!) and *deep breath* we called it a day.
This is where I mention the three hour nap I took in their guest room, 'cause we didn't want to end there, right? I'll type up what happened the next day later this week.
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WOW!
I love the smell of subplot in the morning
Date: 2004-03-22 01:32 pm (UTC)There were so many little things I left out (like one of the traps she sprung in the gauntlet hallway tried to inflict fear but she shook it off and growled "Get in line.",) but I was up till 6 typing all that as it was... and that's only her story! There was the monk's walk, the elf and the cleric playing quarters in the tavern, all of 'em waking up with arcane mark tattoos after the monk got tanked (Armando was the toreador, while Ryo wrote Toro on his forehead with little horns drawn on either side and rushed for his cape.) It was a hell of a night!