Finding the Spark (Pathfinder 1E Quest)

[DragonParadox]

The Work of Other Seers ​

26th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

" I think..." you weigh concern against the autonomy of one's own soul in your mind and find the scales tipping more towards the latter. "That Sirim is the foremost authority in matters of his own soul by both ownership and knowledge. If there is more to be said on the matter, the two of you should talk about it some place less dangerous than this."

Mina looks abashed for a moment, but Sirim must have said something for her alone because she looks back up at the shade with a firm nod of 'later' as Gorok approaches the door flanked by Cob in halfling form. The last thing you are looking for is trouble, but if you are to find it better that it be with Cob's dagger in arm's reach of the mage.

The door creeps open slowly to the sight of a familiar landing, seemingly without a soul in sight.

"Who calls?" A voice, deep and sonorous as a bell of brass, rings out onto the busy street, causing a nearby fellow who had been juggling yams for pennies to drop them and stare daggers into the back of your head.

"Ones seeking wisdom!" Gorok answers with perhaps more grandeur than sincerity. You need a scroll of the kind used by sea mages across Avistan and Garund, one that summons a false crew which is not dead and never had been alive.

Come to think of it, maybe that is a touch remarkable. How jaded I have grown of the wonders of world here under the empty heavens. Before the thought can bloom into introspection, the carpet in front of the door undulates like the tongue of some enormous frog. Isn't that a cheerful thought.

All of you step inside other than Sirim who can fly, the lucky bitter.

The door promptly slams shut, impelled by the same unseen force, and you are faced with a woman standing in the precise same spot Anippe once did with all the trap leavers and switches, as though her own magic isn't trouble enough. That Eshe River Runner is a mage could not be denied even if you had met her on the street. Garbed in robes of red and black set with golden geometric patterns the woman wears rings, talismans, and other adornments to match any of yours. But whereas you had acquired all them from places near and far under the earth and over it, all of her accoutrements speak to that far distant land from which her order had been banished long ago. That the arch-lords could keep so much of themselves for so long is admirable.

Spoiler: Eshe River Runner

"Well, are you going to keep on wearing those masks or show your true faces?"

"I fear, magistrix, that we have been here once before, though not in a manner of our choosing," Mina says as she disposes of her glamor along with all the rest of you.

"You're the ones who... with the goblin..." the mage seems taken aback. Evidently she is not one for whom this is commonplace, and ever less does she enjoy the novelty. "If nothing else I cannot fault your courage, though one might call it gal if unconstrained by the presence of guests. What manner of spell or enchantment do you seek of this disciple of Nex?"

Gorok explains what you need and the reasons for it, that you must leave soon for Cheliax to rescue some of those locked behind the borders of the devils worshippers' empire.

"West... you want to go west on the sea... by day's end..."

"If the craftsmen can deliver, yes," your friend says, though from the way his shoulders tense he doesn't like the tone.

"Of all the strange heralds that fate might have sent." Eshe shakes her head as though to clear cobwebs from her mind. "I will give you your spell and ask for no gold..."

Your stomach tightens even more than when you heard the word 'fate'.

"As long as you take my daughter Anippe with you."

Five questions are asked aloud, one only in the mind, all in essence the same: 'Why?'

With some reluctance she explains that an old rival of hers, who is counted among the Bloodlords of Geb, though not the most exalted of that damnable company, has vowed to claim Anippe's rites for his own dark purposes before the year is out. "I sought counsel, the divination of the genie lords who rule the high airs, and they said her fate was clouded save in one regard; if I would set her in the company of the first unbidden guest to come to through door heading west then she would be safe from Gebbite schemes."

"Pardon magistrix," you interject with just a touch of hesitation. "But there seems to be a flaw in that logic...?"

"I cannot come with you and he knows that. Why do you think he choose now of all time?" The question is heavy with anguish.

"No, I meant what of other dangers?"

"Have you made enemies of the Thrune dynasty? No, then that is less of a concern."

"I have made an enemy of the Black Triune," Sirim notes silently, though not as acerbically as you thought he might.

"Well, it would cost us no more time or delay at least," Gorok muses, though for the benefit of you and Cob as much as Mina since he speaks duergar.

"Sure, sure, I teach her how to skewer rats an' cook 'em, how to walk the lines, and pick locks," Cob is obviously up for the challenge while Mina looks torn, unsure if you would be taking the child into danger or away from it.

What does Kori think?

[] Take the girl along, if you managed to get a baby out of Cheliax you can take a child into it and back out again
-[] The scroll is enough
-[] The Ghosts should ask for more payment
--[] Write in what (Optional)

[] No, this is the last thing you need to be dealing with

[] Write in

OOC: Enjoy.

 

[DragonParadox]

When Questions Abound ​

26th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

Somehow you'd managed to get a babe out of Cheliax, surely you can take a child to its shores and back, you reason, leaving aside for now the fact that the child is being hunted.

So when Gorok asks about the nature of the payment and Sirim starts asking about obscure spells you raise no objections.

Surprised, Mina looks back at you. "No words of caution Kori?"

Spoiler: Acquisitions

Scroll Rolls (DC 20, 30, 90, 10): 67, 35, 84, 43
Gain 1x Lucky Number, 1x Rope Trick, and 4x Mirror Sight
Lost 1,675 gp
Gain 3x Greater False Vision Scrolls*
Gain 3x Unseen Crew Scrolls (Payment)
*DC 0 roll effectively since it makes sense for her to have something like that for the purpose.

"Sometimes the cautious approach is knowing which risks to take," you shrug.

As the mistress of the house leads you into her private rooms and laboratories above the main shop floor, you glad to find them draped in relative modesty of substance and form; tan sandstone polished and marked with geometric patterns and some dark woods polished to a luster with aromatic oils. The vibrant hues of the upper world sometimes exhaust the eyes.

Perhaps to compensate for that fact, Anippe doesn't so much walk in as burst onto the scene like the Chelish Cavalry in the Trials of Darl Jubannich: "Oh, it's you! Didn't break in this time, I bet? 'Cause you'd be in a lot worse shape if you did that while Mom was home. Woah, you're a lot shinier than last time. Hey, what's that floating around you're head, master goblin? It looks kind of like an ioun stone, but the colors are all wrong."

It turns out that when one combines the boundless curiosity of an eight year old skillful enough to advance in the arcane arts with the lack of any worries for herself or her mother's reaction, what you get are questions, lots and lots of questions. At the very least you don't have to worry about needing to pry a tearful child from her home. In fact, the greatest issue that seems to arise from the conversation is Anippe's concern that she's going to be a burden because she doesn't know any 'sailing magic,' to which Sirim outright laughs, an eerie hollow sound that nonetheless carries genuine mirth.

"Child, that you have mastered any spells beyond a cantrip at your age is remarkable, a sign of great talent or dedication, both precious beyond gold."

"Really, you mean that?" she looks up at him with some suspicion, not for being a living coil of smoke, but doubting his compliments. As though to push for a more sincere one, she adds. "Sometimes I can cast a spell without casting it. Chaos magic is supposed to be really rare this far from the Mana Wastes, but I have a knack for it. Mother says it's because I was born there."

"Conceived, technically," Eshe cuts in judiciously.

Judging from the face her daughter makes you suspect it was intentional to cut off the torrent of words as best she could. With a fond but sad smile she hands the child a bundle of essentials, secreted among them the wards against far-sight and foresight, even a ring with the particular power to guard one from the eyes of the dead, though more the lesser than the greater. Thus Anippe dons a hat bearing an improbably bright red feather and in moment takes on the guise of a gnome in... the same recognizable hat.

"That is not quite how you do it," you inform the child solemnly. "The point is to blur into the crowds, see..."

Spoiler: Anippe Equipment

• Protection from Evil Ring
• Cloak of Mind Shielding
• Ring of Hide from Undead (x3 Day)
• Hat of Disguise

Alas, you think, that guarding her is going to be more than a matter of teaching good tradecraft.

Once all farewells are said your company of five is left with a sixth who while not a helpless babe is still going to need more protection, waking and sleeping.

Who among the party is going to stick with the kid most of all?

[] Akorian

[] Mina

[] Cob

[] Sirim

[] Gorok

OOC: I spent way too long trying to find a way for a wizard to cast Hide from Undead, but the only way I was able to find that could have worked at level 3 is Arcane Domain which requires that there be a domain with the spell you are interested in and as far as I call tell no domain has Hide from Undead.

 

[DragonParadox]

Guest Unbidden ​

27th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

The beat of wings against his window window woke Cob, ears already perked and aimed in the direction of the window. He recognized the flappy outline of bat wings, familiar from his time with the Stone Munchers, the creatures had sometimes roosted in the shallow caves where the tribe sometimes overwintered, good eating for when you could catch them napping, but of course a growling belly wasn't something Cob would have to worry about today so he approached the window to shoo away the bat who probably just got confused at all the clear stuff. Nimbly he flipped open the window and started to shoo the...

Huh, what was that longshanks doing over there? Between one blink and the next there was a longshanks hanging upside down over his window, poking his head down. Now Cob wasn't one to miss a whole longshanks, but it would've been downright unmannerly, he'd just learned the word, to try stabbing em the eye just for showing up. After all, he sneaked up on folks too.

The pale face formed into an upside down smile with with sharp wolf-fangs before he skittered through the window over the ceiling of the room.

"Hey, you're not supposed to just barge in!" Cob protested.

"That is where you are wrong, little pest. This is no home, only a common inn. Now, why don't you tell me everything about your traveling companions and then you can help me kill them! Won't that be fun?" The smile only grew as Cob felt a lance of spike of pain drive into his mind, but this wasn't the first time Cob had been stabbed in the brain, nor the second, nor even the third. His brain had grown tough, his brain had grown spikes.

"How about I kill you instead?!" Cob jumped faster than the stranger expected, putting all his skill and hate into a slash across his throat and one across his cheek.

The goblin and the trespasser then looked at each other in shock for a moment frozen between them, the former at the fact that opening the man's throat hadn't killed him, just made slow black blood dribble onto the floor, the latter that he had been wounded at all.

"Shoffe, tell 'em it's a dead 'un!" he called out to his mind friend even as the room filled with screaming screeching bats so thick he couldn't see the stranger anymore.

Spoiler: Mechanics

Cob Will Save (DC 17): Immune PfE
Cob Uses Mythic Surge
Cob Attacks (Vs AC 22/29): 28, 34 (Success, Success)
Damage: 26; -1 (After DR)
Intruder now at 61/77
Swarm Attack: Cob Takes 7 Damage -> Now at 68/75

What does Cob until the others arrive?

[] Retreat, he isn't Gorok to fight fair face to face, plus he can't even see him

[] Start throwing acid, it's bound to hit something and should at least distract the dead man from going after someone else

[] Write in

OOC: What happened with the bats is there were two full swarms outside, but the vampire just had all but one bat lie flat on the street, Cob failed his Perception roll to notice them, and then one bat was sent up to draw his attention and get him to open the window.

 

[DragonParadox]

Burnt Trail ​

27th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

As Cob backed into the corridor he practically tripped into Gorok, sword at the ready.

"Bloodsucker!" he shouted.

Unfortunately for all concerned, he shouted in Taldan, the better to make himself understood, and doubly so, he had not thought to summon his halfling disguise again.

Vampires, as Cob would later learn, were more the stuff of children's stories and penny dreadfuls set in distant lands shrouded in mists than they are reality red in tooth and claw in the sun-streaked southern Andoran coast. The best reaction he got was being called 'liar,' 'rat,' and 'dog-killer.' The worst was a fellow with the proportions of a dwarf expanded threefold trying to kick him. He managed to dodge numbly aside, but by the time Gorok had scared the fat man back with a mock lash of his left claw the patrons started screaming as the bats got in their hair, scratching and clawing and shitting all over.

Spoiler: Mechanics

Cob Wisdom: 1d20+2 = 7 (Failure)

By the time the Ghosts, absent only Sirim who stuck back with the girl, pushed themselves into the room among the sound of fading bats, the power that had called them here spent, there was no sight of the vampire, not even to Mina's witchy eyes. Indeed, the only sign that anyone but Cob had been here was the vitriol-mark on the ground where they had fought.

"It... scorched the blood it shed so we couldn't use it for tracking," Mina said slowly, worried. "I... don't think it's going to keep running."

"Maybe it just didn't want to pay the damages," Kori said darkly. "The innkeeper says we owe him two hundred sails for the damage to the room and his reputation."

For his part, Cob still wasn't entirely clear on how the bar-longshanks, bar-shanks, yeah, that sounded better, could make them pay for anything, but he was content to leave law things up to Sirim and Mina. When the latter had tried to explain it to him once he felt like chewing off his own left ear in boredom. Not the right of course, that would be silly.

"Vampires are careful hunters, the ones who endure at least," Sirim said without words. "This one had failed its opening move and been worse wounded than it expected. No reason to push it's luck. The question now is... which of us was it hunting?"

What does Kori think?

[] The vampire was most likely after Anippe, you already know she was being hunted by the undead

[] You have had trouble with the servants of Urgathoa in the past

[] There are many vampires in the Umbral Court and more yet of their spawn in their service

[] Write in

OOC: I know this is short, but with the vampire deciding to break contact given the goblin not only resisted Dominate but somehow stabbed though his DR (Mythic Power) you guys now have to choose how to deal this. Also, the innkeeper wants you to pay for damages.

 

[DragonParadox]

Other Side of the Coin ​

27th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

"Anippe, her mother said undead would be after her..." you feel a sudden pang of guilt at the almost inaudible gasp behind you as a sleepy girl emerges from from the corridor, following Sirim no doubt. "We need to lose our tail."

After dropping the bag of gold in front of the suspicious innkeeper with warning about gossip he'll probably breach before your shadow is even off his threshold, you get to work. First Mina wards against mundane senses, then Pepper with a touch of his nose gives some small arcane protection against blows to both his mistress and the suddenly all too quiet child. She's heard a tale or three about vampires, no doubt.

Lost 200 gp

Looking down at the ring on her left hand a thought comes to mind. I can do that too... maybe even better. Energies twist in unaccustomed ways in your mind, whispering half-understandable pleas to gods long dead. But still you fill them with a shadow of their old power. "There, now it won't be able to sense us for a time."

"What if has living eyes, thralls?" she asks seriously.

"Puppets are easily blinded," Sirim reassures her as he seems to exhale, though he has no breath, and a mist like a translucent dew descends, letting the moonlight glide through your flesh.

"Git in here, it's in another... er, hedge? Field?" Cob offers, opening his arcane bag.

"Another plane, silly," the girl seems happy to be able to correct someone about magic, taking on what one a more of a tutor's tone as she adds: "It's not really a plane though, more of a pocked dimension, that is to a plane what a grain of sand is to a whole wide beach. You ever been to the... oh right, get in." Even though you can't see her getting in you can hear her moving aside vials, trinkets, and spare knives.

"Guess we can add stealing children away in our sack to our list of 'misdeeds'," Mina's tries to humor, and the fact Sirim laughs makes it clear it's some kind of jape the rest of you aren't privy to.

Holding hands in a circle you feel the breath of Elsewhere's currents for three long heartbeats that seem to stretch in the thinking... and then you come to regret their absence as Mina had sent you behind one of the city's glue-makers, turning amble fish bone into useful product and the kind of reek that almost brings one of a mind to the xulgath. Thankfully that is not the last of the spells Mina had studied over the past several days in the city. At her command a cartridge of iron and wood stained back emerges onto the street, met with garbled curses by the pair of drunk sailors holding each other up in an unsteady embrace at the end of the street.

Spoiler: Carriage

Piling in quickly to escape the smell as much as prying eyes, everyone but Gorok, who had taken on the role of driver, tries to find a comfortable seat.

"Sirim, you can use..." It's still bizarre to think of your body as something apart from yourself, as true as it might be. Sentence unfinished, you center yourself and breathe out the shadow of your soul to an awed gasp from Anippe.

As you float above a the meandering conveyance the sound of Sirim casting one more spell on the girl herself reaches your ears, but you're already fixed upon the road ahead even before you are treated to the unsettling sight of your own body moving to another's will. A long way from not having anyone I'd trust with a rock behind my back.

The thought comes and goes like the swiftly moving streets, Copperdown giving way to Fleet. These streets are peopled even at this late hour by a motley assortment of dung-gatherers, hawkers as unlucky as they are stubborn, and those who are selling things best not shown 'in the light of day'. One wonders just how many of those whose eyes can pierce the so-called-darkness under the moon laugh under their hands at the pretense. At least the carriage, in the style of old Ustalav, is looked upon in less askance here, though one does have to wonder when Gorok gets off the driver's seat to knock one beglamoured hand on the door of the carpenter carrying your order what do they see?

"Bet they think we're the vampires now," Anippe whispers, not quite daring to find it funny.

"Come now child, it's a perfectly respectable conveyance," Sirim says with your voice.

"With a ghost horse," she presses from inside the bag.

Still, no actual vampires find you. Maybe your efforts that had been enough to slip away.

The craftsman had finished his work and he seems quite happy to have both models off his hands if it also means he can see the last of strangers on his pouch. Amusingly, he even seems eager to pay you back some of the extra coin he'd taken from the 'Galtan lady'. You wonder for a moment at the fear that lingers in the city's air and fogs the eyes of her people. Surely 'tis more than just poor fishing...

Spoiler: Mechanics

Foci Creation (DC 20): 1d100: 63 (Success)
Gained 500 gp

"Why's that coin got magic on it? Look, that one there shines sorta blue in the deep sight, divination magic."

Sirim then proceeds to teach her several words in Nidalese, which from the tone one would guess are not meant for children's ears. "Someone's looking to track us with the coin, counting on us not questioning good luck. "

Spoiler: Mechanics

Anippe Perception* (DC 20): 1d20+5 = 23 (Success)
Sirim Spellcraft (DC 15): 1d20+14 = Automatic Success
*only one who had her mage sight active to look at the coin pouch

"Not opportunistic, from the start," Gorok proclaims. "Thrall?" he tries out the new word with the care of a hunter considering his next quarry. "Tell them take more coin, give some back with spell."

"If it's the vampire we should go back and save..." Mina says, or starts to as she looks down at the girl still inside a bag for her own safety. "Maybe we should just get rid of it."

What do you do about the marked coin?

[] Just get rid of it

[] Go back to the carpenter, see if he's dominated and break the spell

[] Write in

OOC: Enjoy.

 

[DragonParadox]

From Shore to Swamp​

27th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

"We do not know if it's the same foe," Gorok tips his head as though listening for a distant horncall through the moonlit streets. "Could be another, could find more trouble."

Sirim nods... with your head. That will never not feel odd, you are beginning to suspect. To seek from dwelling on it you add your own voice with a plan. "Don't throw it away, leave it in the carriage and have it lead whoever's scrying it on a dead rat hunt." You pause. "Well, absent the ghouls."

"Ghouls?" Anippe asks with a sort of fascinated dread. So you explain the habit of the Darkland-ghouls to find and kill dire rats or other common prey beasts then reanimate in their old ranger, the better to draw two-legged hunters away that the ghouls may make of them prey in turn.

"There's whole cities of ghouls under the ground?" she looks down at her feet resting on the floor of the caridge as though expecting an emaciated ghoul arm to come tearing out of it.

"Aye, and that's not the worst of it," you shake your head, thinking of the drow and the horrors of their crafting. Some things aren't for sharing with children. Thankfully, Anippe doesn't have an interest in that. She confesses instead that her her mother had taught her little of the theory of necromancy, the craft of Geb. True, Eshe did not use it herself, but she had spent long years dueling Gebbites openly upon the shifting sands of the Mana Wastes and in secret in the bazaars of Absalom.

Were you to make a guess, and the child is skilled in many things but not keeping her feelings off her face so tis a good one, you'd say Anippe is interested in necromancy mostly as a proxy for her mother's history before she was born. As far as she could remember they had always lived in the self styled 'City at the Center of the World,' the amenities of the city's foreign quarter ensuring that her daughter would be raised in the traditions of distant Nex, until about half a year ago they had been moved in haste here to Augustana where they had been safe from whoever had been chasing them, at least until now. The girl tries to put on a brave face when it comes to her mother's skills as a duelist, but it's hard not to notice the worry shadowing her gaze.

Truth be told you are not sure what to do about it, and for once Sirim's silver tongue seems to have deserted him as well since the most he can do is offer those necromancy lessons she said she lacked once you are in Cheliax. Again all of you array in a circle, this time within the confines of the carriage just as it is turning towards the gate. Mina unrolls one of the precious scrolls you'd acquired in Cassomir, words of power upon it gleaming the color of old gold. Thus she utters with conviction the words of translocation.

This time it is less a wind from Elsewhere and more a storm to match the most vicious you've had the displeasure of encountering upon the face of Golarion, and yet it deposits all of you safely at under the boughs of thick growing cypress... at least you think that's what the tree above you is called.

Spoiler: Mechanics

Lost Greater Teleport Scroll
Mina Casting Check (DC 14): 1d20+6 = 26 (Success)

***​

"Ooh! Is this a swamp?" Annipe asks, in the tone of someone who has never encountered the kinds of things that live in a swamp.

"Yup, swamp stuff's good eating," Cob declares with almost as much good cheer as Gorok and the other iruxi take the lead in heading down what you are informed is a 'game trail,' for all that the only game you can see are sleepy birds perched on the gnarled branches of the Whisperwood.

You let out a breath you had not known you were holding at the sight of the reed shelters and iruxi guards scrambling to get the chief. The wrath of Cheliax had not fallen on Gorok's people while you were half a world away, not even the wrath of Longacre. They seem awed to see you return after all this time, though you are not sure why. Certainly it doesn't extend to Annipe, so it cannot just be the magic you bear.

An entire tribe of iruxi, eggs and all, isn't moved in the span of a few hours. Gorok has some explaining to do to his kin, quite a lot of it in fact. In the meantime, you could do some scouting on the path south towards the sea, speak to Annipe again to learn more about her and her mother, or even find what rest you can. Something tells you there won't be much of that ahead.

What do you do?

[] Scout in shadow form

[] Talk to Annipe, the girl is interested in stories of Nar Voth, not something you've dealt with before

[] Rest while you can, the road stretches out before you long and full of obstacles

[] Write in

OOC: Background dice for Cheliax not shown because you guys would have no way to know that in character.

 

[DragonParadox]

Magic with Meaning and Magic Without ​

27th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

As you recount your childhood to a very attentive audience of one, it occurs to you just how narrow that world had been, concerned with the scramble for the next meal or the best watering spot as the uneven streams wound their way under the surface of Golarion. It had more in common with the lives of the irux,i though even then there was a kind of isolation to it that perhaps with the distance of seasons and miles might help you understand if not ever forgive your own estrangement. When all around you seems hostile and shaped by distant and uncaring powers, tis easy to direct the rage it brings to one who seems to invite those inscrutable terrors into halls of home. Anippe seems sensitive to the mood and loses some of her irrepressible good cheer, though nothing of her interest:

"The elder blood?" she asks intrigued. "A sorcerer they call it in the northern lands, those touched by the power of the All Seeing Eye with eyes still closed."

"I... do not think so," you look towards where Sirim is conversing with the chief, weaving glamors to show him by glamor-craft the Blackwood Swamp as well as the forests of Verduran and the plains of Carpenden. "I can heal and foretell the future, more akin to the powers of priests than wizards."

"An oracle then, a mouthpiece of the magic of voiceless things," she nods firmly, then seeing that you apparently do not know something she does, as children often do, begins to recount, not even showing off that much. "When Lord Nethys descended onto Osyrion from the Western Desert he taught Pharaoh Azghaad the All-Seeing how to set magic to parchment and carve it into stone, thus all who follow in that art like me and the lady Mina are the students of Lord Nethys. But magic itself there was before him in the bones of the land and in the blood of great dragons, in the screams of the damned and the voices of angels, so it came into the blood of mortals. This was the Elder Blood, which makes those who bear it feel like their ancestors and it was good, but magic does not just feel, it thinks and speaks, and so it thought and spoke even in the days before Lord Nethys. So some there were who heard its voice like onto the voice of the gods and through them it spoke, but of them it asked a higher price for men are not gods to be spoken through by the soul of the universe lightly. Some age before their time, others wither under the sun or fear the touch of water, some even go mad. There is a story among the less... orthodox sects of the Nethysian Creed that the Lord of Magic himself was one such oracle before he transcended mortality and became the soul of the universe itself, so of course his madness grew with him." She pauses for breath. "That's not really the order in which it normally goes, and there's a lot of stuff about genealogies and who made what temple and when they burned down.... Did you know Nethys drove the Naga Pharaoh mad after he chose him as his successor to teach him a lesson?"

"What lesson was that?" you ask, unsure of how to take the legend, but quite sure there had been wizards before Ancient Osyrion, the High Realm had run in part by their power.

"That magic's dangerous." She looks around almost as though embarrassed for her homeland's patron god. "I know that sounds a bit ridiculous, but I think that's the point. I never quite understood that bit."

"Never mind. And here I thought I was going to be the one telling tales," you laugh, surprised at how easy the child is to talk to.

Before setting out you are asked to divine the road ahead, but Gorok is unsure what danger to ask of. The Chelish had been oddly subdued since the death of Vicio at your hands, and the iruxi even speak of the local castle lighting up the skyline with flame soon afterwards as the woodsmen of Longacre shunned the woods. Some of the hunters swear they have felt the presence of dark spirits following them, befouling their kills before they can be processed and erasing trail markers where the swamp is at its most treacherous. Devils perhaps, Sirim guesses, though if that's the case they are uncommonly shy about their displeasure with the Blackscales.

What does Akorian divine?

[] The road ahead

[] Any devils nearby

[] What happened to the local baron

[] How the Church of Asmodeus had taken one of their own being killed here not so long ago

[] Write in

OOC: Enjoy.

 

[DragonParadox]

To the Sky's Drums Marching ​

28th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

Words bubble to your lips like tar, a sting upon the lips and weight unbearable in the mind:

Flesh torn bones crushed to dust
Hunger to the wheel of agony broken
Naught but agony left of power's lust
Of pale wings a curse unceasing spoken
Drown in Old Blood

You stumble forward, stomach twisting and a bitter taste invading your mouth like drinking swamp water as you struggle to expel a phantom foulness. "That didn't taste like devils," you say slowly.

"I did not know thou for a connoisseur of devil flesh," Sirim jests, drawing a vaguely horrified look from Mina and a surprised giggle from Anippe.

"I'm not seeing anything around the camp," Pepper calls. The iruxi had taken the sight of a winged-cat with surprisingly few questions, less than Cob's new knives had in fact. But then the knives had an obvious use and the cat only now proves the same, eyes alight with piercing sight.

Gorok can be heard musing, half to himself: "Hunters said it comes to them when alone. Afraid of numbers? Fire? Ancestors?"

"Maybe it's nothing." Mina's words have more of hope than conviction as the Blackscales begin to move with Gorok at the chief's left side. 'Shaman's place,' you hear one of the others who had accompanied you to east say, surprisingly.

As you look towards them they explain, "Gorok Eagle-Friend two-kinds strong, arm and... dream?"

It's clear that wasn't quite the word he was looking for, though thankfully Mina is still close enough to explain. To the iruxi, magic is not a thing apart to be called with relic and ritual, it is simply a part of the world under the surface, just as the great swamp lizards of the Whisper River do and is equally dangerous

"There's crocodiles?" Annipe asks with worry that had not been there when Sirim had joked about tasting devils. "Mother told me about crocodiles, they are sacred to Sotek, but their hunger is bigger than their holiness. Maybe that's what you're seeing. Old Blood... cold blood maybe? Like your friend Gorok?"

"You think we should be 'fraid of iruxi?" Cob asks her, seeming to materialize out of the shadows under the trees, as is his wont.

"Well, not these ones. Mother said the greatest danger to man is not angels nor devils nor demons, but man himself. So I figured the same is true for the scaled folks."

"Warmblood talk," Gorok says from atop a newly restored Warty, though without rancor, more like he's trying to show her how to fish or read a trail. "It would be good for there to be so many for us to be our own worst trouble."

In the distance all you can hear is a chorus of frogs and, of course, rain just starting up. Too much to hope for that it not rain in this damnable place. At least the air's still, unlike the last time passing through here. That makes it merely miserable under oiled canvas as opposed to setting one wondering how anyone could think to live here.

Gorok had chosen to organize the tribe into a roughly arrow shaped formation, with the youngest and oldest in the middle and the most skilled warriors in front. With some reluctance you volunteer to take one of the points just as he and Cob had done. True, you can't say you're much good with a sword, but at least you can take a hit or three more than the iruxi around you, and with Pepper and Avarice patrolling in the sky above you're never too far from help.

The rain, if not the frogs, stops as the whole gathering gets moving at last while thunder booms in the distance, almost like a warning, though for all your omen-craft you cannot say if it's to stop or go. You had been walking across the swamp perhaps an hour when the warning goes up from Pepper.

"Fire! Fire to the south!" Turning quickly you realize what you had taken for thickening clouds is in fact a pal of smoke and there is only one thing there that could be burning.

"Longacre, Longacre is burning," the spectral feline adds.

"Let it burn!" the old chief hisses and many of his people seems to agree, but Gorok stops, one claw tapping the underside of his jaw in thought.

"Might be dangerous, we should see what it is at least."

To no one's surprise Cob volunteers, but should he?

[] Say nothing, Cob goes scouting

[] Argue that you should stick together, what do you care if the lumbermen who have been bedeviling Gorok's tribe for so long die

[] Write in

OOC: No visible rolls this time since you do not know what you do not know in character.

 

[DragonParadox]

A Glimpse Through the Bottle ​

28th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

"We should move on..." You add your voice to Sirim's. and after a moment Gorok agrees.

For his part Cob isn't happy at the decision. but he consoles himself by clambering atop Warty and giving the slurk a good scratch, much to the interest of Anippe, though it doesn't quite extend as far as asking for a slurk-back ride.

Still, at Mina's request Pepper sets out to have a look at the town from above. He comes back with strange and worrying news. The people of Longacre; veterans, woodsmen, and even the priest who helped you before seem to be standing in front of their houses and watching them burn. A rite perhaps? Some manner of curse? Regardless, by the time Pepper had gotten there most had started shuffling into the woods. All the more reason to quicken the pace.

Over the remainder of the day and much of the night that follows no more troubling signs show themselves as the iruxi keep on the move with all the hardiness you had come to expect of the scaled folk. Even the hatchlings, with their bright colored scales, barely chirp a complaint as they doze off on the adults' shoulders. The most commotion they make is when one of them apparently cheated at some obscure child's game played with colored river-pebbles and dry sticks of the kind children seem to invent as easily as breathing. Thankfully, their elders have the patience to untangle what had gone wrong and deal with the complaint before it gets too loud.

At Gorok's suggestion the tribe had not sent out hunters after seeing the burning village, instead making due with their supplies of dried meat, pickled eggs, and bone broth. Iruxi cuisine isn't the most flavorful, the winter-shrouded woods and half-frozen marshlands having nothing to season them with but roots and cattail stalks.

***​

29th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

It's around mid-evening on the following day that you find something and it doesn't take much searching, for in a follow in by the river not far from the point where it meets the wider Iseld someone is singing very, very badly.

Be merry my hearts, and call for your quarts,
and let no liquor be lacking,
We have gold in store, we purpose to roare,
untill we set care a packing.
Then Hostis make haste, and let no time waste,
let every man have his due,
To save shooes and trouble, bring in the pots double
for he that made one, made two.

It surely has the ring of a tavern song, though there's no drinking house in sight, nothing but slimy fish in sluggish green waters and clouds of stinging things above. Cob rushes forward and finds a whether-beaten man, his dark hair slick to his scalp from the humid air, clambering to his feet, a bottle still clutched in one hand. The filigreed breastplate he's wearing certainly speaks of wealth, or at least a very competent thief, but he shows none of the arrogance that made Chelish aristocrats disliked across the inner sea long before they took up devil worship.

"F... fudge me... that's a big fucking frog you got there... Or is it a toad? Heard a toad was the same as a frog... just... just more nasty... kind a like them. Yer not one of them are ye?" The man then huffs at Cob and sprawls back on the ground with what could only generally be called intent.

Gorok would have been happy to pass the man by, counting him no threat and less use, but something about the way he first looked at Cob with bleary suspicion then seemed content to lay down in front of a goblin on a gigantic toad strikes you as odd enough to investigate, and since you don't have much confidence in him being able to string two words together you decide to look into his thoughts for what he'd meant.

Spoiler: Drunken Fellow

??? Will Save: 1d20+1 = 7 (Failure)

More of the same filters before your mind's eye. Familiar faces turned stilted. Milkmaids trying to milk cows without milk to give. Men trying to harvest a fallow field full of weeds. Children turning 'round and 'round in games no one was winning or losing. Drawing water from dry wells.

Only Tysus and his drinking buddies were normal. then the next day one by one them too. When he'd tried to get close to one of them to shake him out of the spell he flinched and started hacking.

It was the drink... the drink kept him safe.

"Infiltration," Sirim hisses aloud. "Something's gotten at the locals. Burning it out is about what one would expect from the lords of Cheliax..."

"In cruelty, ineffectiveness, or both?" Mina asks, an uncommon edge of contempt in her voice. "We should load him into one of the carriages."

"We do not know if he is safe," Sirim's 'dragon' speaks for him, though it's clear the shade is in agreement of the fact. "He could be a plant, an unknowing bearer of a curse that has just not manifested yet."

What does Kori think?

[] Take him with you, but watch him carefully

[] Leave him

[] Stop to study his condition
-[] Write in how

[] Write in

OOC: Kori does not have the knowledge skill he would have needed to roll on figuring out what got to the locals from Tysus' memories.

 

[DragonParadox]

Intoxicating Purpose​

29th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

Your new... 'traveling companion' doesn't seem to be possessed by any spirits beyond those he's been imbibing, and the only change after Sirim casts a ward against compulsion on him is a nervous snore and clumsy wave in your general direction. Over the next few hours you come to suspect Sirim might have preferred a duel with a devil to having to explain drunkenness to a child who has been taught extensive alchemical safety procedures and nothing about alcohol. It eventually gets to the point of: "But... but it doesn't make any sense... why don't they just use magic to feel the good parts instead of poisoning themselves?"

Which in turn leads to a very long and meandering conversation about what magic is available to the ordinary people of Golarion. Born in Nex and raised in the Nexian manner, Anippe had previously believed that the Andorans were just being 'stubborn or something' about sweeping their own streets instead of having a spell-forged servitor do it. The idea that her budding talents would be remarked upon in a town the size of ill-favored Longacre and not just for her age is something of a revelation, though she takes it with less pride and more distress than the shade had expected her to, you judge.

"People have so much potential though and everyone can learn wizardry, that's the whole point of it! Why don't more of them learn how to do it?"

To that, of course, Sirim explains there is no obvious answer; the Ulfen distrust all arcane magic, the Chelish maintain strict state control partly as a mechanism of control and partly because to be a wizard in Cheliax means to be a devil summoner with all the dangers that implies, the Taldans once held the arcane arts in almost as high of a regard as the Nexians due to the Last Azlanti's history as a spell-sword hero, though that has soured with his death, and in Ustalav where the shadows of the Tyrant linger and the ruins of his realm call out to all manner of unwholesome scholars a wizard had best be on his guard on the road and not linger too long in any village unless they have papers approved by the local clerics of Pharasma or the local lord. On and on it goes...

"Societies rarely follow the straightest path to truest ease for all, for each one looks first upon the path before their own feet... and then of course there is Nidal."

"What about Nidal?" the girl asks. She's learned enough about your shadowy companion to sound worried.

"Suffering is sacred to Zon-Kuthon," he answers without artifice. He waits expectantly for her reaction.

"Well that's very dumb of him, to make enemies like that. At least when Geb, may his name be accursed, does it that its because he gets the bones of the dead to work his fields an' stuff."

Your friend nods slowly, trailing smoke in his wake. "According to some quite reputable scholars gods are bound to their domains, meaning that for many of them personal satisfaction is power, so 'tis less 'dumb' in the way you mean it, though self-limiting. In a sense, I suppose it's somewhat like getting drunk on power itself."

Spoiler: Mechanics

Sense Motive (DC 15): 1d20+2 = 15 (Success)

***​

30th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

Alas, that's not the only uncommon drink you hear of in the days to come. Next evening Pepper comes back with news of having found two of the enthralled villagers dead along the riverbank, not far from where you had set up camp, pale and bloodless.

"It could've been stirges again," Mina says, though more in hope than conviction.

Gorok follows with what all of you had been thinking. "The dead one follows, and he is no careless hunter. The bodies were left for us to find, a mark to sow fear. We should move during the day."

The thought already gives you a migraine, but that is not all that gives you pause. If the vampire indeed meant for you to find the corpses, than he had meant for you to react in some way. Might this not be how?

[] Kori agrees with Gorok that it is best to start moving during the day, for all it opens the caravan to more danger from the strange thralls and any Chelish forces

[] Kori argues that they should keep moving at night, to not let the vampire push you into rash action

[] Write in

OOC: Enjoy.