Dekana
Explorer
A minute or two later, Toeto returns from the quarterdeck with the man in the blue overcoat. He welcomes you all aboard and introduces himself as Captain Soule. He apologizes in advance for any discomfort you may experience during the trip; the Bloated Whale is not a passenger ship, after all. He sets some basic rules that you should follow during the voyage, the most important of which is "stay out of the way." The trip will take a little less than two weeks.
The captain then finds an idle crewmember and has him show you to your cabin. It is a tightly packed with all seven bunks and a few pieces of cheap furniture, including decently sized table. The whole room is divided in half by a curtain across its entire length. Apparently, the men and women will have to share.
The ship departs the harbor while you are still unpacking.
---
After everyone is settled in, Toeto calls everyone to the table.
"Great, thanks for coming. I, ah, first wanted to apologize again for the room. It is, um, smaller than I was expecting." She looks specifically at the curtain. "A-and, I know I did not say much before. About the plague, I mean."
She leads into a detailed account of the disaster that struck her village. It takes the better part of the morning to get the whole tale out of her, although she stutters a little less after she gets into the story.
Three or four months ago, rumors began to reach the village about a great sickness ravaging the nearby blackscale tribes. It was no ordinary illness like Scalerot or Gasping Breath - no, this plague was much more insidious. Those affected by it began to see dark shadows moving instead of people, as if experiencing a waking nightmare. Each victim responded differently, but most became increasingly paranoid and violent until they finally succumbed to madness. Worse yet, the cause of the plague could never be determined - it spread even when the sick were banished or quarantined. Contact was lost from the surrounding tribes one by one, until hunters from Toeto's village found themselves being attacked by roving bands of mindless lizardfolk. Then the plague spread to her own tribe.
The most powerful shaman of the tribe, an older lizardfolk named Sliska, advised Chieftain Dartak to order a mass exodus from the region. The Chieftain, a strong warrior, would permit nothing less than a stoic last stand. He dealt harshly with the sickened, ordering them executed and the bodies burned. He had defensive pikes constructed to surround the entire village and let the hunters kill anyone they encountered. And so the village slowly withered, both from sickness and tyrannical violence. For her own part, Toeto tried to come up with new grindings of plants as medicine. However, the spirits eventually revealed to the young shaman that the plague was a "sickness of the mind," not of the physical world. No cure could be manufactured.
One night, the situation came to a terrible conclusion. The Chieftain himself had been taken by the madness. Backed by his guard (perhaps also ill, perhaps not), he personally began to slaughter every member of the village, sick or not. At this sight, most villagers panicked and ran deep into the swamp to hide. Toeto herself was teleported by Sliska out of the tribe to Daunton. Sliska declared that there was still hope for the Lizardfolk - the spirits had revealed as much. The cure lay in an entirely different land, and it would be Toeto's destiny to find it after a long quest.
Toeto looks to Scarm and adds, "It wasn't that I didn't trust you. I j-just didn't think I was ready to return until now."
The captain then finds an idle crewmember and has him show you to your cabin. It is a tightly packed with all seven bunks and a few pieces of cheap furniture, including decently sized table. The whole room is divided in half by a curtain across its entire length. Apparently, the men and women will have to share.
The ship departs the harbor while you are still unpacking.
---
After everyone is settled in, Toeto calls everyone to the table.
"Great, thanks for coming. I, ah, first wanted to apologize again for the room. It is, um, smaller than I was expecting." She looks specifically at the curtain. "A-and, I know I did not say much before. About the plague, I mean."
She leads into a detailed account of the disaster that struck her village. It takes the better part of the morning to get the whole tale out of her, although she stutters a little less after she gets into the story.
Three or four months ago, rumors began to reach the village about a great sickness ravaging the nearby blackscale tribes. It was no ordinary illness like Scalerot or Gasping Breath - no, this plague was much more insidious. Those affected by it began to see dark shadows moving instead of people, as if experiencing a waking nightmare. Each victim responded differently, but most became increasingly paranoid and violent until they finally succumbed to madness. Worse yet, the cause of the plague could never be determined - it spread even when the sick were banished or quarantined. Contact was lost from the surrounding tribes one by one, until hunters from Toeto's village found themselves being attacked by roving bands of mindless lizardfolk. Then the plague spread to her own tribe.
The most powerful shaman of the tribe, an older lizardfolk named Sliska, advised Chieftain Dartak to order a mass exodus from the region. The Chieftain, a strong warrior, would permit nothing less than a stoic last stand. He dealt harshly with the sickened, ordering them executed and the bodies burned. He had defensive pikes constructed to surround the entire village and let the hunters kill anyone they encountered. And so the village slowly withered, both from sickness and tyrannical violence. For her own part, Toeto tried to come up with new grindings of plants as medicine. However, the spirits eventually revealed to the young shaman that the plague was a "sickness of the mind," not of the physical world. No cure could be manufactured.
One night, the situation came to a terrible conclusion. The Chieftain himself had been taken by the madness. Backed by his guard (perhaps also ill, perhaps not), he personally began to slaughter every member of the village, sick or not. At this sight, most villagers panicked and ran deep into the swamp to hide. Toeto herself was teleported by Sliska out of the tribe to Daunton. Sliska declared that there was still hope for the Lizardfolk - the spirits had revealed as much. The cure lay in an entirely different land, and it would be Toeto's destiny to find it after a long quest.
Toeto looks to Scarm and adds, "It wasn't that I didn't trust you. I j-just didn't think I was ready to return until now."
[/sblock]
