Winning Vote
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
Arc 2 Post 35: Incipient Introductions
Incipient Introductions
22st of July 2006 A.D.
Dismissing your sword this time not by stabbing yourself in the heart, but just throwing it away beyond the edge of your anima. "Sorry Usum..." you go down on one knee as she shrinks back against the wall in the light of your anima, feeling unaccountably old. Darn, she's barely older than Leech. "Hi, Cindy. I'm Molly. I visited your granpa yesterday with er... Warden Dresden. A very bad lady had you kidnapped and hidden away to blackmail your grandfather, and he asked for help to find you and get you out of here. That..." The pause as you motion to your dad is all she needs to cut in.
"What?" she turns and starts to get off the stone slab pushing a lock of dark hair out of her eyes. It sounds like your words had leeched some of the growing terror out of her voice, but little of the confusion. "Are we in the sewers?" Her hands spring up so fast she looks like she's been bitten. "Ew.... no wait don't answer that, what's with the light and the eyes and the..." she waves vaguely at the place where your sword had vanished. "That light was me wasn't it? I'm not dreaming am I? I don't think I've eaten anything weird enough for this."
"'Fraid not," You shake your head sadly and you sigh. You had only been a little older than her when you had found your own magic and as terrifying and awful as some of that had been at the end, it had at least started like a wonderful adventure. She doesn't even have that. "That's my dad and that's..." you are not sure how you would describe Gard so you just go with. "A lady you agreed to help and as for the dark thing that was sort of like a dementor." Might as well go whole hog... "Yer a wizard Cindy."
"Nope, nope, nope, can't be real," she mutters to herself, closes her eyes.
Come on the joke wasn't that bad, you think. Usum assuring you that you are the very pinacle of whit does not help that much alas.
For her part Cindy just sits there, her lips moving in what you think might be a countdown. When she opens them again and finds the drab sub-sub-basement of some bygone era, not a sewer, though it certainly smells like one thanks to the path leading up to the ghoul room she smacks her hand into the stone hard enough to hurt. "Shit, it's real." After another moment contemplating her surroundings she adds in that too-serious manner that not-so-little kinds have when trying to prove they are not little. "You're about eight times too small by volume to be Hagrid."
"Yeah well you're not wearing glasses and it's not your birthday either so let's call it even," you quip back.
"How do you know when my birthday is?" she asks bemused as she hope onto the floor with the thump of powder blue sneakers.
"MySpace," you reply honestly, not seeing any reason to keep it from her.
"So you really are as young as you look, you are not some kind of thousand year old witch?"
Graciously ignoring your dad's muffled laugh you reply seriously. "Nope, I'm really just Molly, I'm gonna be eighteen this year."
"Well I just turned thirteen already so if you wouldn't mind telling me who the 'bad lady' was?" She makes air quotes around the words. "I mean you guys killed that thing, but how do I know I can trust you?"
"You do not," Gard cuts in before you can reply. "You only have our word that we are who we say we are or that we mean to help you, but the alternative is to try to make your way to the surface, with nothing but your wits, your wyrd and power you have no mastery of. You would be fortunate to merely face a mortal death. "
"OK... you are a bazilion years old though," the girl says, peering at her curiously.
"That is not a number and we should be off before more danger can find us," comes the stiff reply followed by: "Can you walk?"
Cindy as it turns out can walk, she is only a little stiff from lying on that slab all this time. Thankfully the sleep spell she had been under had been the real sleeping beauty deal, beyond the reach of hunger, thirst or even age according to Gard, though that begs the question of why use it on the girl at all? Katrian could have just tied her up and handed her to the thugs up above. Was she expecting a rescue?
Well she could not have been expecting you.
Just as the thought passes through your mind Clippy starts to vibrate, subtle of her since faking a call down here would be about as believable as a water park in the Sahara.
You flip it open, as though cheeking it for damage from the fight. On the screen is a simple message:
Black Rider is Moving, destination the tattoo parlor. Passenger on left side of car not exhibiting ordinary signs of life yet there is motion. Entrance potentially compromised.
What do you argue for?
[] We need to find another way out to the city, we can't get into a fight while Cindy is with us
[] One of us can hang back with Cindy once we are closer to the surface and we can deal with Katrina once and for all
[] Write in
OOC: Well that could certainly have turned out worse.
Nice rolls Molly.
Im inclined to bail. The kid is obviouly vulnerable to possession, and I dont want a kid in the AoE.
No reason to bring the Grandfather, who is acting under duress and could betray her.
And a dead grandfather would not be able to use his magic skills on her behalf.
More likely she brought backup.
She's a necromancer; a superzombie of some sort is entirely within her capabilities.
Or a summoned demon, though I assume that Black Rider would recognize a spirit.
So Im thinking superzombie or magic golem.
Honestly we should fight, if she comes down here she becomes an enemy barring our exit from a prison. We can swing this to trigger CCC, and when that is active Molly makes abysmal's look week at killing.
Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
We are also 9/12 on Essence, so we are good to go on a fight. My suggestion?
[] One of us can hang back with Cindy once we are closer to the surface and we can deal with Katrina once and for all
-Michael Carpenter stays with Cindy while Gard and Molly confronts Kathrina.
[] One of us can hang back with Cindy once we are closer to the surface and we can deal with Katrina once and for all
-Michael Carpenter stays with Cindy while Gard and Molly confronts Kathrina.
If it happens it happens, but we shouldn't seek out such a gamble. By it's nature if it fails we are trapped.
What more, the longer that trump card stays in our pocket the more we can be sure that whoever tries to trap us in a corner with sufficient force to kill us will ABSOLUTELY fail to account for us turning into a murder blender.
We want to preserve that element of surprise as long as possible.
Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
We can do that by buying new charms. It is not as if we can avoid fighting forever. Our Shintai is also not that gamebreaking as people in the World have similar abilities.
@DragonParadox
QUESTION
Do we have confirmation that the driver is Kattrin?
And that the passenger is NOT Mathews? Rider knows what Mathews looks like after all.
More importantly, she's apparently bringing surprise backup that we have no information on.
I much prefer to surprise others than to be surprised.
We have gotten this far on information dominance after all.
We did.
Kattrin has time stop and can presumably use stealth magic; Gard had a stealth magic rune in canon that fooled a pack of malks.
There's a good chance she can walk unseen through the store to get to the backroom door.
- Location
- Who knows?
Wait I'm confused by something in the character sheet:
" -3 to all attempts to escape confinement (Charm)"
Don't we get bonuses to this? Why is it shown as a malus?
" -3 to all attempts to escape confinement (Charm)"
Don't we get bonuses to this? Why is it shown as a malus?
Yzarc
The Spark of Madness
It is a -3 to difficulty i.e. it lowers the difficulty of the said actions.
- Location
- Earth
I don't expect that to kill her.
It would cost us our way to track her.
The only way we have to track her.
- Location
- Who knows?
Oh, I think the sheet could be edited to make that more clear
@DragonParadox
The " -3 to all attempts to escape confinement (Charm)" line on the sheet makes it look like Molly takes a malus to excape attempts, especially since it's right below various +2 lines. Could you add " -3 DC on all attempts to escape confinement (Charm)"
Yep, it's her and the dead-but-moving passenger does not look like Mathews.
- Location
- Hive City Ares, Armageddon, Segmentum Solar
What happened to Lydia? And should we go back and try to find her?
Goldfish
Friendly Spider-Fish Abomination
- Location
- Formerly of the Far Realm
It doesn't have to kill her to significantly impair her ability to use magic or engage in melee combat.
An airbag prematurely detonating in her face followed by a high speed collision will at the absolute minimum inflict a lot of damage on her, possibly even crippling injuries, at least in the short term.
If we use that opportunity to deal with her more permanently, tracking her isn't much of a concern after that point. Better to nip this shit in the bud before we end up having to race against time to stop a ritual already in progress. Tracking might not even be necessary, since Black Rider can share GPS says with us, including where he just left from.
Passenger might be capricorpus in a zombie suit.
Thanks.
Isnt likely to be Lydia's dad either, because if she'd successfully pulled off the ritual, she wouldnt care about Cindy.
So its backup.
Can we use the room as a focus for Crown of Eyes plotting us a route to the surface, intersecting Lydia?
Yeah, good point.
And if so, we definitely do not want her anywhere near a new kid like Cindy or a potential demigod like Lydia.
Im considering doing a run for it.
Getting to the surface yes, Lydia probably not, people on the move are hard to find because where they move next is dictated by their free will.
Leveraging CCC seems like a reasonable idea if we can manage it. It's a huge buff and we'll want whatever help we can get.
Not sure if this is the place for it, but maybe?
I get the idea of keeping the kid out of harm's way, but Gard is looking for a fight, we're not going to be able to avoid one for long.
I'd suggest Michael hides with/guards/escapes with the kid while Gard and Molly deal with the evil valkyrie and superzombie/Capricorpus.
Not sure if this is the place for it, but maybe?
I get the idea of keeping the kid out of harm's way, but Gard is looking for a fight, we're not going to be able to avoid one for long.
I'd suggest Michael hides with/guards/escapes with the kid while Gard and Molly deal with the evil valkyrie and superzombie/Capricorpus.
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If we stick around to fight then this would be an excellent time to give Kat a surprise dynamic entry into the tattoo parlor. The passenger is dead, so we just have to worry about making sure the cyber devil doesn't run anyone over when it slams into the building at 90 mph with the safety features disabled.
It also might mess with her control of the zombie. DF necromancy, and in particular her tradition of it through kemmler, uses a drum beat of some kind as a sympathetic association with a heartbeat to control their minions. Stop the drum, and you kill their control.
At which point the zombie either stops doing anything or goes feral. Ideally it'd go feral while she's trapped in the wreck with it, but I'll take inaction too.
We can pop up and stab her in the back while she crawls from the wreck instead of trying to win a straight sword fight.
It also might mess with her control of the zombie. DF necromancy, and in particular her tradition of it through kemmler, uses a drum beat of some kind as a sympathetic association with a heartbeat to control their minions. Stop the drum, and you kill their control.
At which point the zombie either stops doing anything or goes feral. Ideally it'd go feral while she's trapped in the wreck with it, but I'll take inaction too.
We can pop up and stab her in the back while she crawls from the wreck instead of trying to win a straight sword fight.