After returning the beast to it's
owner, the party turned in their bounties and set about looking to
spend their fortune in the small town of Rustwall. Seeking upgrades
for his firearm, Sneaky Pete went to haggle with the gunsmith. While
there, he ran into Levin, a knightly Slee'gir in heavy armor, who was
testing out his new gunlance on the dummy in the shooting range,
blowing it to bits in the process. The two of them quickly bonded
over their shared interest in boomsticks. Meanwhile, Phylip returned
to the Slagheap Bar and got into a drinking contest with a couple of
gnomish patrons. Despite their size, gnomes can really pack it away,
and the poor Phyrtha spent the better part of a day sleeping off the
booze in a back room at the bar.
The rest of the party sought out more
adventure, rallying at the bounty booth in the town square. Poor lady
there has to deal with these guys more and more often. While
purveying the available quests, something caught Cabella's eye: a
wanted poster, featuring a drafted 3-D sketch of a Din'giri human
female, with the unmistakable mark of one of the Touched burnt into
her left cheekbone. What was so salient about it, however, was the
murky brown glow emanating from the mark, a far cry from the normal
blue-black of a Touched. He pocketed a copy of the poster, in case
they ran into this woman called Mutt. The young boy with the Yakguana
walked into the booth about the time the party was getting bored, and
greeted them cheerily. He had a escort job from his father to post,
and Pete jumped on it, trying to bargain for better rewards. The boy
paid to post it and turned half the reward money over in advance to
the excitable bunch, who did another round of shopping before
following up on a rumor posted on the board.
Levin, always the honorable sort,
dragged the group to investigate rumors of shady goings-on in a town
to the south. Upon arrival, they asked around for information from
the locals, before finding a man on his smoke break that readily
pointed them in the right direction, towards an abandoned cannery in
the scummier, northern part of town. Upon arrival, they found the
door broken off the hinges, and a basic trap, a magic rope placed
across the hallway leading out of the lobby. Levin readily demolished
the thing with his lance. Arcane chanting carried down the hallway,
alongside the muffled whimpers of a damsel in distress. Springing
into action, the party entered the cannery working floor, guns
blazing. Three men, heavy cloaks obscuring their deformed bodies and
faces, stood around a girl, chanting and sharpening a machete blade.
The girl was already missing an arm and a leg, though she didn't
bleed from either, and drifted in and out of consciousness. After the
initial volley from the party, the tallest of the three ducked behind
a stack of loading pallets, slinging spell after spell at the group.
As the vanguard, Levin got the brunt of the barrage, being held in
place by one, preventing the others from leaving into the room.
Thinking quickly, Cabella cast an illusion, dropping barred cages
around the advancing cultists, keeping them in place long enough for
Levin to shrug off his paralytic state.
The magically inclined cultist kept
his cover behind the pallets, and summoned a cloud of mist to hide
his movements, then set to work forcing a loading dock door to open
despite years of rust and disuse. Asheed and Pete took turns
pot-shotting the one cultist over Levins shoulders, until the other
one, wielding a wicked machete broke free from Cabella's illusion,
charging at Levin. He got in several good hits before being put down,
leaving Levin bloody. Cabella pushed his way past the crowd,
sprinting to the girl, and plucked her up from the instrument strewn
table. The hallway bottleneck broken, the other members took up
positions inside the room. Reckless as always, Sneaky Pete swapped
out his aether cartridge for a spreadshot variant, and approached the
mist cloud, firing blindly at the last cultist. He was met with the
crackling black energy of the clerics wounding grasp. Luckily, most
of the energy discharged through the metal at his feet, so Pete was
just left feeling dead on the inside instead of dead as a door-nail.
The cleric's position revealed, Levin charged across the room
plunging his gunlance into the man's chest. He locked eyes with the
twisted monster of a man and pulled the trigger, sending him flying
against the wall, and crumpling to the floor. The day saved, Asheed
patched up the girl as the party searched the area, finding a
floor-safe under a desk in an office room. The lot of them tied a
rope to it's handle and forced it up out of the hole to pick their
way into later. They found an abandoned pallet jack in the alley
behind the building and rigged up a cart to carry their prize and the
wounded girl back to Rustwall, where they turned her in and accepted
their reward. The garrison captain from the Morcinian army came to
personally thank them for their efforts, apparently the cult they
fought had been trafficking girls from the area for a while, but
always proved elusive to the loose militia that kept law in these
parts. Happy with their good deed, the party settled in at the Inn
and reunited with Phylip, while Levin took his leave and went off on
a side quest of his own. They took a night of rest before preparing
for the upcoming caravan escort mission.
The morning sun beat down on our
travelers as they headed west. Raikon, the father of Paul, drove his
truck along slowly with the yakguana-pulled carriage, laden with
supplies, following behind. All was calm for a while, until farmland
gave way to forest, and Phylip's keen eyes spotted a pillar of smoke
ahead, in the distance. Cautiously scouting ahead, he spotted a group
of wild-eyed men dancing and shouting around a truck filled with
burning lumber. Hatching a plan, the party took up position in the
bushes, ready to snipe the men if things went awry. Raikon and his
caravan stayed back, and the hardy Carracan took up position on top
of his truck, pulling out a wicked looking heavy rifle of Carracan
make.
Cabella approached the group, noticing
almost immediately the murky brown glow from their eyes. These men
were Touched, alright, but like the woman from the bounty board,
something was off about them. When Cabella tried to make
conversation, they talked as if they recognized him, then switched to
hostile and friendly again in the blink of an eye. Some of them
talked to each other as if they were replying to unasked questions,
and the whole lot were acting crazy in general. Making no headway in
conversation, Cabella took his leave of the men, backing away. One of
them followed after him, grabbing at an axe from the read tire of the
burning car. The centaur wizard, thinking quickly as usual, cast a
massive illusion spell, trapping the crazed men in a virtual maze of
earthen walls. Through sheer attrition, the party managed to funnel
the men towards the exit, into the waiting sights of a firing squad.
One of the men thought he'd get into the burning truck and drive it
through the wall. The aethersand in the engine sprayed out into the
heat of the flame and exploded, destroying the front-end of the
vehicle and sending a couple flying. Most of the men were so
convinced of the earthen illusion, they were trapped and had to be
coerced out to finish them off.
Two men, wrapped in conversation and
oblivious to the whole fight, took off running down a frontage road.
As the party finished off the last of the crazed fighters, they heard
a distant crash and screaming. Pete climbed onto Cabella's back,
casting a spell of speed on him, and the two rode off towards the
sound, Phylip and Asheed following after. They came upon a wild
sight, one man had driven a small transport bus into the side of a
cabin, pinning the other man under the wheel. The last surviving
woodsman jumped up and down, hooting at his dead comrade. Phylip,
riding up on wizard-back, took aim and blew off the nutter's head
with his Baby-Killer rounds.
The aethersand from the bus's engine
sprayed through the hole in the cabin, and as the party investigated,
aka looted this cabin, they found several corpses, lying in every
other bed. At the end of the building, billowing up from the chest of
a dead gnome, a smoky elemental bared it's fangs at the party. Phylip
quickly took aim at the thing, and the party took turns murdering it
via firing squad. All said and done, they walked away with a fat
chunk of loot from the personal possessions of these poor, crazy
lumberjacks.
No comments:
Post a Comment