Glad my hopes of going alone failed, would have been awkward if Buffy managed to stumble onto our true form while we were too distracted to notice her. Plus we got to come across as pretty fricking cool! Liking the interaction so far but I would like to do a bit more snacking and Latria doesn't seem willing/able to do so in front of company.
[x] Go into the tunnels alone and kill what you find, seeking watcher things and a rat warrior corpse for further study
Glad my hopes of going alone failed, would have been awkward if Buffy managed to stumble onto our true form while we were too distracted to notice her. Plus we got to come across as pretty fricking cool! Liking the interaction so far but I would like to do a bit more snacking and Latria doesn't seem willing/able to do so in front of company.
[x] Go into the tunnels alone and kill what you find, seeking watcher things and a rat warrior corpse for further study
Your course turns as you run, toward another possible entrance to the under-ways. You will go down into them alone this time. This will give you the freedom to use your true form and proceed into the deeper depths of the catacombs. There are still many questions you have about your enemy and you must cull their numbers if you are going to maintain your domain and eventually drive the thing out.
Buildings flash past you in the dark as the shadows cling to your sprinting form. Your nose leading the way, a few minutes of running later has you at another entrance to the sewer. Popping open the cover in a rush you flit down into the darkness.
You drop silently and land gracefully in the dark, shadows pulled into a cloak around you, narrowly avoiding a puddle of something noxious. Straightening, you consider the current layout of the invader's territory as you understand it. Where you are now should put you a little bit closer to the graveyard and coming at the epicenter from a different direction.
The tunnel you are currently in leads off in three directions, left, right, and straight ahead. Down the righthand tunnel you smell mostly vampires. From the direction, it must head directly under the graveyard you arrived in. Left is quiet and the scents old. Straight ahead you can see a thickening of the invader's magic and can smell rat warriors.
You go straight, moving slowly, for you are interested in finding and catching a watcher creature. There are small rats moving in the corners and along pipes. You watch them carefully but feel nothing from them, yet. You would not be surprised if the Rat King can do something dangerous to you with them.
Pulling on your abilities at stealth you push deeper into the dark. The rot and gossamer of the thing slowly intensify as you go deeper into the under-roads. It begins to hang in a familiar invisible cloud near the ceiling. A few minutes of careful silence later you start to get a hint of flickers and the taste of a new creature.
Stalking the trace you head around several turns. What you find after the last one is another collection of small rats, except this time they are not entirely unaffected by the Rat King's magic. The taint of it hangs on their bodies like cloaks. And within the shadows, watching as they move is a tiny flicker. A watcher thing.
You watch it in turn from around a corner. It is maybe the size of your hand, covered in a dark brown hooded cloak and with furry gossamer covering its ratty snout. You slip along the wall towards where it sits, an utterly silent shadow. Ready, your hand lashes out to the thing and snatches it clean off its perch.
The thing squirms and attempts to wriggle out from your grip but you are far far far too strong for it. You pull it close as the disturbed rats scurry every which way into the dark. Its form is that of a tiny hunched rat man whose face is overtaken by enormous bulbous eyes and fuzz. You take extremely careful note of the connection it has to the power of the Rat King. Then, you loosen your grip slightly.
The moment you do it lets out an incredibly high pitched, "Eeeeeeeeeee! Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp Meeeeeeeeeee!" The squeaking scream is suitable to your plan. You let out your own eerie keening howl as you bear down on it with your grip and feel bones give way with a gur-crunch, before you slam it into the wall near you with a very final splat.
Wiping off the gore and tiny bone fragments you retreat around the corner and drop your seeming. Using the power that was devoted to that you draw in and manipulate the shadows around you further, approaching true concealment. You don't have to wait very long before you sense a change in the magic.
Peering into the darkness you see the knots of three warrior rats form and hear snapping and a strange ripping sound accompanied by squeaks sliding down the scale to growls and hissing buzzes. Then there is a clang of metal on stone and you hear them approach the corner. Moving slowly you retreat back down the way you came and create a static illusion of your human seeming in the middle of the corridor.
The three creatures barrel around the corner, and roar in ratty triumph upon seeing the image, raising their weapons and blasting it with their flaming bone bolts. While they are distracted by your decoy you fire off three Soul Arrows in quick succession. Zhew! Zhew! Zhew!
The first two arrows stave in and crush the torsos of the left and right rat warriors. They are sent flying by the force of your bolts and bounce off the walls, before landing, stunned. The middle demon has a rather comical look on its face before your last blast takes it in the legs, making a mess of the limbs and making it lose its grip on its weapon as it squeals.
Flopping over onto its face it slides for a bit before being stopped by your foot on the top of its head. By this point the other two are starting to get up, torsos oddly shaped from your blows. Zhew! Zhew! Your next two arrows catch them in the heads, snapping their necks and pulping them. They are dead before they finish falling over.
The thing you are stepping on dies to a bolt to the neck. You watch them shrivel and intercept their essences with the Fog you release. Still not very helpful to your recovery, but better than nothing. You can feel the Rat King begin to howl in impotent fury at this turn of events while the magic he has fluctuates wildly.
You ignore it, beyond noting where it comes from.
The corpse closest to you, you pick up and drag after yourself as you move on down the tunnel they came from. You wish to study these things in more detail, to learn of their weaknesses. Additionally, their skulls will provide you with half of the ritual components you need to open a portal to the Pit. Prison of the Pretender to the throne of the Old One Tol'Ur and home to a species of demon you have interest in for their hearts and the mention of powerful items stored within the prison dimension. For now though you must do more damage and cull the rats within these tunnels.
You discard the shadows and walk openly through the domain of your enemy, head held high in queenly stature. It doesn't take long for you to feel the coming of several more rat warriors. As you approach a cross tunnel a volley of flaming bone bolts shoots past your nose. You look right, and launch several Soul Arrows in response.
Zhew! Zhew! Zhew!
You dodge another flurry as your bolts kill two of the creatures instantly by pulping their skulls. The other three you face are hidden behind cover. Drawing the shadows around you, you dash into the corridor with inhuman swiftness, upper hands full of Soul Arrows.
Zhew! Zhew! Zhew!
What follows is a rapid shoot out between you and the rat warriors as you flicker in and out of the shadows to entice out shots and respond with your own punishingly lethal bolts of Soul Magic. None of the bolts they fire hit you and you walk out the other side of the hall as their smoking corpses slump to the ground.
Pausing only to consume their essence, you continue moving deeper. Several minutes later you begin to hear chittering and the scrambling scratch of tiny claws on stone after another new twist of magical energy. Around a corner ahead pours a flood of tiny rat bodies. You are already blasting away and retreating backwards before they fully round the corner, and your powerful Soul Arrows carve chunks out of the horde of little vermin.
You laugh at the base idiocy of what you face. Pitiful and unsuitable magics. The flood is blunted but not stopped by the arrows you fire into it, so you jump with inhuman strength up to the ceiling and clutch a pipe there with your two lower arms while the corpse dangles from one hand and the final one blasts away with magic.
Back against the pipe you decimate the local rat population below you with bolts of white fire. The flood doesn't really stop however, and a change begins to come over some of the rats. Below you, you see certain rats begin to distort and grow in size explosively, as rat warriors begin to tear out of the tiny rat bodies, weapons in hand and the surrounding magic fluctuating madly. While all of this is happening the swarm of lesser rats is starting to climb the walls towards the pipe you hang on.
Judging the pipe stable you begin to scuttle, spider-like, along it while killing the half a dozen rat warriors that are forming with Soul Arrows. The flood follows you in a wave of black and brown furred squeaking rage. Flame magic would be rather suitable right now, you muse to yourself. Sadly such things are not in your repertoire at the current time.
Trimming the edges of the flood as it crawls along the walls you begin to hum your hymn. You can feel the fury of the Rat King building almost immeasurably quickly as his minions die beneath the power of your magic. Then you feel it almost explode with magic in a massive wave of intense rot stink, the smothering feeling of gossamer and an inhuman roar of insane rage.
The flood below dies in a wave, and then an unholy shrieking and ripping rises up from the depths of the mass of tiny corpses. You drop from the pipe and start firing arrows into the shuddering mass. It doesn't do very much, and a moment later a massive creature burst out of it, seemingly formed of multiple warriors fused together into a giant form.
It is in a word, huge. So tall it has to hunch on four feet in the tunnels and as wide as three of you standing shoulder to shoulder, it must weigh as much as a small car. The giant rat, for it is not really describable as anything else, roars with a sound like a coughing car engine and rushes for you. It is far far faster than you anticipated and you barely have time to dodge around it while riddling its sides with arrows.
This is annoying, you think to yourself.
Retreating with your own inhuman speed, still managing to hold on to the corpse you have, you gather up as much power as you can and aim Soul Arrows at the creature's back legs. The arrows finally do appreciable damage and burn away most of the muscle on its legs. Squealing like a stuck pig, it thrashes madly, shaking dust from the walls and crumbling stone as it struggles around to face you, fury in its tiny ratty eyes.
Before you can do anything else it lunges at you and you feel a tearing and crunching sensation as its mangled teeth slam down on your upper right arm and then turn to fling you into a wall. You shriek in instinct ask your impact shakes dust from the wall, the sound of immaterial metal gears grinding together bursting from your throat. Before the thing can pull your arm off, you twist the bitten arm around inside its mouth and start shooting Soul Arrows down its throat.
Its head promptly explodes in a puff of Fog light and Soul magic. Dropping easily to the floor of the tunnel again you shake off your arm and examine it while the tunnel quiets around you. What you find is bad, but not catastrophic. The ivory skin you have is torn and splintered in multiple places, blackish gray ichor oozing out of the injuries, and from the range of motion you have it seems your elbow has been broken.
Hmm.
You are still able to fight near peak capacity you judge. But that arm will not be usable for at least a day, and probably more like two, though you can hide the damage with a seeming if needs must. Reaching out with a hand you jam it into the creature and absorb its essence before it can even attempt to flee back to its king.
Small crackles and pops emerge from your injured arm as you absorb the essence of the creature and it heals somewhat. The corpse shrivels as Fog light flickers beneath its skin. You are done a moment later. Oddly, the Rat King is silent at this turn of events. Hmm? You peer closer.
It seems diminished, weakened in the flows of magic. Considering that the essence tries to return to it, it is likely splitting off pieces of itself to empower normal rats and when I consume them… you smile slightly at this confirmation you were seeking. You can already feel it recovering as it draws inwards and seems to pull on magic from a place you cannot sense. It will recover, but you have wounded it on the mystic plane.
That leaves you with a few options.
Firstly, you could continue the current one demon crusade you are persecuting on the invader to kill as many of its soldiers as you can to slow its plans. There is a risk of further injury, however, and this is not exactly ousting the creature from its footholds.
Another option is to try to find Angel while in a seeming. Enlist his aid in fighting the creatures and tell him of what you have found. Given what he has said, it is somewhat likely he is somehow connected to the Warrior and her companions, and as a fellow demon he will be interested in ousting these beasts. Perhaps you can root out the influence near the Bronze with him.
Your final option is to retreat for now, back to your lair. There are tantalizing possibilities teasing at the edges of your demonic mind for how you could use the corpse you still possess. As your mind turns over you also consider how you might use your minion to aid you in this battle, now that you have a proper measure of the enemy you face.
Hmmm…
What do you do?
[] You go deeper, risking further injury, but doing damage to the Rat King's forces and slowing whatever it is planning.
[] You hide the corpse in a safe place and find Angel, and enlist his aid in clearing the area near him and possibly near the Bronze whilst concealed in a seeming.
[] You return home, to study the corpse you have found, heal, and potentially see how your minion could help you in this battle.
Heh. Still fell asleep while writing this one but ah well. C'est la vie.
I honestly didn't expect the Giant Rat to show up, but it worked out well in the scene to have it appear as the Rat King finally got fed up with your shit.
Still got a ways to go though so have fun!
Vote lock is as usual 6:00 pm UTC Sunday June 10th.
Adhoc vote count started by BungieONI on Jun 9, 2018 at 1:35 AM, finished with 565 posts and 8 votes.
[X] You return home, to study the corpse you have found, heal, and potentially see how your minion could help you in this battle.
[X] You hide the corpse in a safe place and find Angel, and enlist his aid in clearing the area near him and possibly near the Bronze whilst concealed in a seeming.
[X] You hide the corpse in a safe place and find Angel, and enlist his aid in clearing the area near him and possibly near the Bronze whilst concealed in a seeming.
I know. Apparently the Rat King mutates normal rats, by pouring some of its magic and essence into them. That practically SCREAMS options for sympathetic magic to me.
[X] You hide the corpse in a safe place and find Angel, and enlist his aid in clearing the area near him and possibly near the Bronze whilst concealed in a seeming.
I want to weaken the Rat King so what ever drastic response he will have to something nomming on his power will not be as effective. We have seen that the Bronze is viewed as decent hunting ground so it makes sense to weaken his forces there so he is forced to go with less efficient sites. This also provides potential for Idol's nature to be revealed to an associate of the scoobies more likely to be sympathetic to her nature.
