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Sagiro's Story Hour: The FINAL Adventures of Abernathy's Company (FINISHED 7/3/14)
- Thread starter Sagiro
- Start date
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Hi everyone!
Can you do me a big favor?
As I mentioned previously, I have finally bit the proverbial bullet and started the project of turning my campaign into Epic Fantasy Novels(tm). (I'm actually done the initial draft of Book #1, and I'm guessing the entire thing will be 3-5 books total, depending on how long they are.) At some point I'll be pitching my manuscript to agents, and it will help that pitch if I could say something like "7 gazillion people follow my fantasy fiction on a popular gaming website, and many of them will probably buy my book if it gets published."
But I have no clear how idea how many people are reading this. It's less than 7 gazillion, but probably more than, say, fifty. As such, I'd like to measure you. How, you ask? By asking you to go to this Google Form:
Sagiro's Story Hour Reader Count
...and clicking the check-box followed by submit. It should take you about five seconds. (It doesn't matter if you're a registered ENWorld member or not, and no personal data is collected .)
One important request: ONLY CLICK ONCE! I can only get accurate data if each reader submits this form ONLY ONCE. PLEASE!
Thank you much for your cooperation.
And now, an update in which I commit rat-bastardy-ness of epic proportions.
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 371
Surface Tension
A’aatra adds detail to the stone map of the peshovar-infested temple. It has no doors; the only access is through a tunnel that comes up from below, angled to allow a gentle ingress that never places the visitor higher than the Sister Gods whose statues stand within. In various places are something akin to pillars or mounds, but A’aatra cannot translate these properly. Small alcoves in the walls, at varying heights, allow Stribe to meditate and worship. A’aatra begs the Company to cause as little damage to the Temple interior as possible when they fight the peshovar.
With no fanfare, Aravis appears in the floor next to Pewter, curled up and asleep. He opens his eyes and wonders where he is and why he’s on the floor. He doesn't recall going to sleep. Pewter meows joyously at his master’s return, while the others crowd around, spending an obligatory few seconds making sure he’s physically okay before pressing him with questions as to what happened.
“I…” He tries to remember. His memories are fuzzy but becoming clearer by the second. “I had a… a vision from inside the Maze. I think I was inside it.”
“How did you do that?” asks Ernie.
“I didn’t. Belshikun did. The Avatar of Drosh to whom we gave the Crosser’s Maze.”
Aravis stands up. The others can’t help but notice the grim expression on his face.
“Belshikun said they may need to call on me for help from time to time,” he tells them. “But… the Maze can reach across the Barrier, in a sense. In repayment for my help, Belshikun is going to give me visions of the world above.”
“Excellent,” says Dranko. The disconnectedness from the surface world had been weighing on him, on all of them, so any news, he thinks, is welcome.
“It’s not as nice as you might think. He gave me a first vision.”
And Aravis shares what he saw.
You are not in the inn.
There is no stranger sitting across from you, wearing your face.
But there is someone, a dark being, familiar – it is Belshikun, the Avatar of Drosh whom you encountered in the Shrine of Dralla, the being to whom you gave over the Crosser’s Maze. It is painful to look at him – painful just to be aware of someone here besides yourself. It suddenly becomes clear why your mysterious friend always appears to be you – it’s the only way that your fragment can make sense of other beings in the Maze. It’s just a tiny piece of you, after all.
But Belshikun is breaking that rule – you’re not sure how. His eyes glow hotly blue in his head, nearly impossible to look into.
“I am sorry not to have been free to offer you the help I promised,” he says. “Though what we have been doing instead, I hope you will be thankful for some day. We may need to borrow you from time to time to further our work. But I also offer you something unheard of and unknown to those beneath the Iron Barrier. I will give you visions of the world above.
“You may find them a curse, a blessing, a distraction, or only a curiosity, but I give them to you nonetheless. This is the first; I’m sorry that you will not find it pleasant. Attend.”
Belshikun touches your forehead, and you have a vision-within-a-vision.
There are two cloaked figures, furtive, sneaking, in a dark forest. It is dusk, and a pallid light barely penetrates the high branches of the trees. Both of these figures are invisible, but not to you and the Maze.
One of the figures is Etria, Duke Nigel’s court wizardess, and confidante of Rosetta of the Silver Shell. The other is Rosetta herself, her hard face dark with worry.
“We should have seen something by now,” Rosetta mutters. “Heard something, at least.”
They are speaking telepathically, but the Maze hears them. Otherwise they are perfectly silent, wrapped in enchantments of stealth.
Etria instinctively steps over a pile of dry leaves anyway. “Maybe your calculations are off.”
“They are not,” Rosetta asserts.
“I wish you would have had Ozilinsh check them before…”
Rosetta stops short, and turns to Etria with a look both tired and angry. “No. It could be him, for all we know! We’ve been over this before. If I was willing to turn to others in the Spire for help, I’d have brought Attrius and Portia along, and had the whole damn lot of the archmagi checking my math.”
Etria lets out a long breath. “I still think you must be mistaken. It makes no sense that someone in the Spire is actually a Black Circle spy. It’s not that I don’t trust the Shell, but just about everyone in the Spire has been in a position to sabotage all our efforts a dozen times before now. Why didn’t they do something when we stopped Mokad? Why didn’t they sabotage Aravis at Verdshane? If there’s a traitor, what the hell are they waiting for?”
Rosetta shrugs, turns, and keeps moving. “The Black Circle takes the long view,” she says. “They’re diviners, remember? Maybe they foresaw that trying anything before now would have ultimately failed them? Or that waiting would eventually serve their ends better? My personal theory is that whoever it is wanted to lay low until Ozilinsh’s band was out of the picture; they did have a way of screwing up the Black Circle’s best laid plans. I think the Circle’s timing for this is similarly motivated; they’ve been biding their time until our strongest pieces were no longer on the board.”
“And now they’re gone,” says Etria.
“And now they’re gone,” Rosetta repeats. “Which is why, especially now, I’m not willing to trust the Spire. Anyway, given the nature of this mission, fewer is better. It’s not like we can fight all of them. The only reason you’re here is to escape with news if anything goes wrong. No, all we can do is hope our wards are strong enough, march into their midst, and read the scroll before they know we’re here.”
They walk in silence for another minute or two. Rosetta stops, concentrates upon the dead quiet in the forest, and swears.
“We should be quite close now. We should be hearing the sound of a dozen dozen acolytes chanting.”
Etria cocks an ear. “Then your calculations must be off, like I said. If you had only…”
“What’s that?” Rosetta holds up a hand. With the other she points into the gloom of the darkening wood.
Slowly, slowly, they creep forward. What they find, staked out to the forest floor, is the body of a man wearing the robes of a Black Circle adherent. Rosetta frowns, and thinks, and…
“There’s another one over there,” whispers Etria. “And a third… and…”
“No!” Rosetta has nearly stopped breathing. Her eyes have gone wide. “No, no, no, no!”
She breaks into a run, no longer trying to stay quiet.
“What is it?” Etria gasps, sprinting to keep up.
But Rosetta doesn’t answer; she’s dashing through the woods at top speed, following a row of staked bodies, one every ten yards. Suddenly the two of them burst into a clearing, where twelve rows of bodies converge, a starburst of mutilated corpses radiating out from a central point.
At that convergence, a shimmering portal hangs in the air, twelve feet high and twelve across.
Rosetta swears again. “We’ve been assuming that all 144 would be performing their Astral Tunneling ritual right up until the last moment. All of my calculations were based on that. But they must have discovered a tipping point where sacrificing the casters and channeling their life energy was more efficient than keeping them alive and casting.”
Etria looks down and notices that all of the bodies are staked five times, hands, feet and heart, except for one of the twelve next to the portal. That one has one hand still free… a hand holding a mallet.
“Then the Astral tunnel could open sooner than you thought?”
“We probably don’t have 12 hours, that’s for sure. Just keep a sharp eye out. With luck, I still have time.”
Rosetta stands before the portal, its surface opaque like rushing water. She fishes out a string of beads and hastily drapes it around her neck, then unrolls a long scroll that extends from her eye level all the way to the ground. She begins to murmur words of power, and small yellow lights begin to play along the surface of the portal. These become increasingly numerous as Rosetta invokes her potent magics.
She is maybe three-quarters of the way through the scroll when a massive arm reaches through the shimmer and a thick, gauntleted hand grabs her throat. Rosetta merely tenses her neck and continues reading, her face reddening as powerful fingers squeeze her gullet. Tears roll from her eyes, and desperation conquers her features as she realizes how much she still has to read. Etria flinches, takes a step back, horrified, before drawing a dagger and hacking fruitlessly at the arm. She dares not cast any spells, lest they disrupt Rosetta’s own incantation.
It doesn’t matter. Seconds later the hand clenches, there is a sickening snap, and Rosetta’s body goes limp, the scroll dropping unfinished from her hands. Etria mumbles a quick spell and vanishes.
A towering, muscular figure, clad in steel mail, steps the rest of the way through the portal. You have seen this being before, as it looked helplessly through the Skysteel Hole in eastern Kivia, when you thwarted his previous attempt to make egress into Abernia.
The figure takes off his helmet, revealing a cruel dark-blue face pocked with crawling black lesions.
Naradawk Skewn gazes upon at the bodies piled up around him, gives a satisfied grunt, and tosses Rosetta aside.
“It’s about time.”
/*/
There is a shell-shocked silence. After all their many efforts to prevent Naradawk Skewn from gaining access to Abernia, the Emperor has at last succeeded, and the Company is helpless to do anything about it.
“I can’t believe Rosetta wasn’t a spy!” blurts Dranko.
Morningstar shakes her head. “So there’s an unknown traitor in the Spire, Rosetta is dead, and the Emperor is walking around on Charagan.”
“I thought we killed all the Black Circle people up there!” says Ernie, his voice more shrill than he probably intends.
“Only those at the top of the hierarchy,” says Grey Wolf. “They still had plenty of minions.”
“He was scared of us!” says Dranko. “He waited until we were gone before crossing.”
“Couldn’t Belshikun have only sent us happy visions?” Ernie complains.
“He did say I might find them “a curse, a blessing, a distraction or a curiosity” says Aravis. “It’s possible he doesn’t even have control over the visions.”
Dranko seethes. “Gods, that makes me want to kill bad guys right now!
“Then let’s go disrupt the Black Circle’s plans,” says Aravis.
A’aatra scuttles over to regard Aravis. “Are you a good number?” she asks.
Aravis blinks. “Yes. A very good one.”
/*/
The Temple of the Sisters is a day’s journey from the Queen’s Pit. A’aatra lends the Company an entourage of stribe escorts and offers her sincere thanks.
“We are in your debt,” says Grey Wolf, bowing to her.
En route, as the group winds through twisty tunnels and chambers that must be what the inside of a huge anthill would look like, they pass another flock of light-eating manta rays. The stribe call them “vish,” and as the party did before, they stand aside to let the strange creatures pass.
“They can be dangerous if provoked,” warns one of the stribe.
“Can they be cooked and eaten?” asks Ernie.
The stribe stops and stares at Ernie for a moment. “Maybe,” it says. “But the vish wouldn’t like it. Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” says Ernie.
“We are an hour from fungus. We will fungus you.”
Sure enough, they soon arrive at a huge subterranean farm, a cavern in which the stone has been shaped into parallel walls, arranged like library shelves. Each wall has fungus growing upon it, and an irrigation system is channeling water from a nearby river to sheet down the patches of crops. Dozens of stribe tend to the fungus walls, collecting ripe (?) fungus into stone baskets that they keep aloft with telekinesis. (The stribe’s TK ability seems keenly attuned to stone; they can lift it with an almost careless ease. On the way to the farm, at certain difficult vertical stretches, the stribe TK-ed the party to help them progress, and that they found more difficult, even though the members of the Company were much lighter than, for instance, the stone spheres.)
“What is your fungus preference?” asks the stribe.
“Surprise us,” says Ernie. “Pick something you think we’d find pleasant.”
“We will fungus you pleasantly,” says the stribe. “Come this way.”
Soon the Company is munching on a tasty (if a bit chewy) purple fungus, served on stone platters. Water is served in stone cups the party can barely lift. After refreshing themselves, the group continues, past more farms, through some sizeable settlements, and along countless stretches of tunnel.
Seven hours out from the Queen’s Pit, they reach the wide tunnel that, according to the stribe, leads to the Temple of the Sisters. The stribe guides decline to go further, but convey the thanks of their people before retreating back the way they had come. The Company walks cautiously down the tunnel, and in a minute or two it ends at a wide opening onto an enormous cavern, easily a hundred feet on a side and two hundred high. They can’t simply walk out, as the tunnel mouth is about half-way up the height of the cavern. Its walls, the party sees, are covered in intricate abstract carvings, in such prodigious quantity and exquisite detail, it must have taken dozens of stribe decades of labor.
In the middle of the vast, dimly lit space is the Temple of the Sisters, a tall conical structure, its surface mottled like a drip-sandcastle, with a four-chambered clover-leaf-shaped base. As A’aatra warned, the temple has no door, but some twenty feet out from it is a large hole which, they presume, leads to a tunnel that emerges up through the floor inside.
The air in the cavern carries the distinctively unpleasant tang of Adversary blood.
…to be continued…
Can you do me a big favor?
As I mentioned previously, I have finally bit the proverbial bullet and started the project of turning my campaign into Epic Fantasy Novels(tm). (I'm actually done the initial draft of Book #1, and I'm guessing the entire thing will be 3-5 books total, depending on how long they are.) At some point I'll be pitching my manuscript to agents, and it will help that pitch if I could say something like "7 gazillion people follow my fantasy fiction on a popular gaming website, and many of them will probably buy my book if it gets published."
But I have no clear how idea how many people are reading this. It's less than 7 gazillion, but probably more than, say, fifty. As such, I'd like to measure you. How, you ask? By asking you to go to this Google Form:
Sagiro's Story Hour Reader Count
...and clicking the check-box followed by submit. It should take you about five seconds. (It doesn't matter if you're a registered ENWorld member or not, and no personal data is collected .)
One important request: ONLY CLICK ONCE! I can only get accurate data if each reader submits this form ONLY ONCE. PLEASE!
Thank you much for your cooperation.
And now, an update in which I commit rat-bastardy-ness of epic proportions.
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 371
Surface Tension
A’aatra adds detail to the stone map of the peshovar-infested temple. It has no doors; the only access is through a tunnel that comes up from below, angled to allow a gentle ingress that never places the visitor higher than the Sister Gods whose statues stand within. In various places are something akin to pillars or mounds, but A’aatra cannot translate these properly. Small alcoves in the walls, at varying heights, allow Stribe to meditate and worship. A’aatra begs the Company to cause as little damage to the Temple interior as possible when they fight the peshovar.
With no fanfare, Aravis appears in the floor next to Pewter, curled up and asleep. He opens his eyes and wonders where he is and why he’s on the floor. He doesn't recall going to sleep. Pewter meows joyously at his master’s return, while the others crowd around, spending an obligatory few seconds making sure he’s physically okay before pressing him with questions as to what happened.
“I…” He tries to remember. His memories are fuzzy but becoming clearer by the second. “I had a… a vision from inside the Maze. I think I was inside it.”
“How did you do that?” asks Ernie.
“I didn’t. Belshikun did. The Avatar of Drosh to whom we gave the Crosser’s Maze.”
Aravis stands up. The others can’t help but notice the grim expression on his face.
“Belshikun said they may need to call on me for help from time to time,” he tells them. “But… the Maze can reach across the Barrier, in a sense. In repayment for my help, Belshikun is going to give me visions of the world above.”
“Excellent,” says Dranko. The disconnectedness from the surface world had been weighing on him, on all of them, so any news, he thinks, is welcome.
“It’s not as nice as you might think. He gave me a first vision.”
And Aravis shares what he saw.
You are not in the inn.
There is no stranger sitting across from you, wearing your face.
But there is someone, a dark being, familiar – it is Belshikun, the Avatar of Drosh whom you encountered in the Shrine of Dralla, the being to whom you gave over the Crosser’s Maze. It is painful to look at him – painful just to be aware of someone here besides yourself. It suddenly becomes clear why your mysterious friend always appears to be you – it’s the only way that your fragment can make sense of other beings in the Maze. It’s just a tiny piece of you, after all.
But Belshikun is breaking that rule – you’re not sure how. His eyes glow hotly blue in his head, nearly impossible to look into.
“I am sorry not to have been free to offer you the help I promised,” he says. “Though what we have been doing instead, I hope you will be thankful for some day. We may need to borrow you from time to time to further our work. But I also offer you something unheard of and unknown to those beneath the Iron Barrier. I will give you visions of the world above.
“You may find them a curse, a blessing, a distraction, or only a curiosity, but I give them to you nonetheless. This is the first; I’m sorry that you will not find it pleasant. Attend.”
Belshikun touches your forehead, and you have a vision-within-a-vision.
There are two cloaked figures, furtive, sneaking, in a dark forest. It is dusk, and a pallid light barely penetrates the high branches of the trees. Both of these figures are invisible, but not to you and the Maze.
One of the figures is Etria, Duke Nigel’s court wizardess, and confidante of Rosetta of the Silver Shell. The other is Rosetta herself, her hard face dark with worry.
“We should have seen something by now,” Rosetta mutters. “Heard something, at least.”
They are speaking telepathically, but the Maze hears them. Otherwise they are perfectly silent, wrapped in enchantments of stealth.
Etria instinctively steps over a pile of dry leaves anyway. “Maybe your calculations are off.”
“They are not,” Rosetta asserts.
“I wish you would have had Ozilinsh check them before…”
Rosetta stops short, and turns to Etria with a look both tired and angry. “No. It could be him, for all we know! We’ve been over this before. If I was willing to turn to others in the Spire for help, I’d have brought Attrius and Portia along, and had the whole damn lot of the archmagi checking my math.”
Etria lets out a long breath. “I still think you must be mistaken. It makes no sense that someone in the Spire is actually a Black Circle spy. It’s not that I don’t trust the Shell, but just about everyone in the Spire has been in a position to sabotage all our efforts a dozen times before now. Why didn’t they do something when we stopped Mokad? Why didn’t they sabotage Aravis at Verdshane? If there’s a traitor, what the hell are they waiting for?”
Rosetta shrugs, turns, and keeps moving. “The Black Circle takes the long view,” she says. “They’re diviners, remember? Maybe they foresaw that trying anything before now would have ultimately failed them? Or that waiting would eventually serve their ends better? My personal theory is that whoever it is wanted to lay low until Ozilinsh’s band was out of the picture; they did have a way of screwing up the Black Circle’s best laid plans. I think the Circle’s timing for this is similarly motivated; they’ve been biding their time until our strongest pieces were no longer on the board.”
“And now they’re gone,” says Etria.
“And now they’re gone,” Rosetta repeats. “Which is why, especially now, I’m not willing to trust the Spire. Anyway, given the nature of this mission, fewer is better. It’s not like we can fight all of them. The only reason you’re here is to escape with news if anything goes wrong. No, all we can do is hope our wards are strong enough, march into their midst, and read the scroll before they know we’re here.”
They walk in silence for another minute or two. Rosetta stops, concentrates upon the dead quiet in the forest, and swears.
“We should be quite close now. We should be hearing the sound of a dozen dozen acolytes chanting.”
Etria cocks an ear. “Then your calculations must be off, like I said. If you had only…”
“What’s that?” Rosetta holds up a hand. With the other she points into the gloom of the darkening wood.
Slowly, slowly, they creep forward. What they find, staked out to the forest floor, is the body of a man wearing the robes of a Black Circle adherent. Rosetta frowns, and thinks, and…
“There’s another one over there,” whispers Etria. “And a third… and…”
“No!” Rosetta has nearly stopped breathing. Her eyes have gone wide. “No, no, no, no!”
She breaks into a run, no longer trying to stay quiet.
“What is it?” Etria gasps, sprinting to keep up.
But Rosetta doesn’t answer; she’s dashing through the woods at top speed, following a row of staked bodies, one every ten yards. Suddenly the two of them burst into a clearing, where twelve rows of bodies converge, a starburst of mutilated corpses radiating out from a central point.
At that convergence, a shimmering portal hangs in the air, twelve feet high and twelve across.
Rosetta swears again. “We’ve been assuming that all 144 would be performing their Astral Tunneling ritual right up until the last moment. All of my calculations were based on that. But they must have discovered a tipping point where sacrificing the casters and channeling their life energy was more efficient than keeping them alive and casting.”
Etria looks down and notices that all of the bodies are staked five times, hands, feet and heart, except for one of the twelve next to the portal. That one has one hand still free… a hand holding a mallet.
“Then the Astral tunnel could open sooner than you thought?”
“We probably don’t have 12 hours, that’s for sure. Just keep a sharp eye out. With luck, I still have time.”
Rosetta stands before the portal, its surface opaque like rushing water. She fishes out a string of beads and hastily drapes it around her neck, then unrolls a long scroll that extends from her eye level all the way to the ground. She begins to murmur words of power, and small yellow lights begin to play along the surface of the portal. These become increasingly numerous as Rosetta invokes her potent magics.
She is maybe three-quarters of the way through the scroll when a massive arm reaches through the shimmer and a thick, gauntleted hand grabs her throat. Rosetta merely tenses her neck and continues reading, her face reddening as powerful fingers squeeze her gullet. Tears roll from her eyes, and desperation conquers her features as she realizes how much she still has to read. Etria flinches, takes a step back, horrified, before drawing a dagger and hacking fruitlessly at the arm. She dares not cast any spells, lest they disrupt Rosetta’s own incantation.
It doesn’t matter. Seconds later the hand clenches, there is a sickening snap, and Rosetta’s body goes limp, the scroll dropping unfinished from her hands. Etria mumbles a quick spell and vanishes.
A towering, muscular figure, clad in steel mail, steps the rest of the way through the portal. You have seen this being before, as it looked helplessly through the Skysteel Hole in eastern Kivia, when you thwarted his previous attempt to make egress into Abernia.
The figure takes off his helmet, revealing a cruel dark-blue face pocked with crawling black lesions.
Naradawk Skewn gazes upon at the bodies piled up around him, gives a satisfied grunt, and tosses Rosetta aside.
“It’s about time.”
/*/
There is a shell-shocked silence. After all their many efforts to prevent Naradawk Skewn from gaining access to Abernia, the Emperor has at last succeeded, and the Company is helpless to do anything about it.
“I can’t believe Rosetta wasn’t a spy!” blurts Dranko.
Morningstar shakes her head. “So there’s an unknown traitor in the Spire, Rosetta is dead, and the Emperor is walking around on Charagan.”
“I thought we killed all the Black Circle people up there!” says Ernie, his voice more shrill than he probably intends.
“Only those at the top of the hierarchy,” says Grey Wolf. “They still had plenty of minions.”
“He was scared of us!” says Dranko. “He waited until we were gone before crossing.”
“Couldn’t Belshikun have only sent us happy visions?” Ernie complains.
“He did say I might find them “a curse, a blessing, a distraction or a curiosity” says Aravis. “It’s possible he doesn’t even have control over the visions.”
Dranko seethes. “Gods, that makes me want to kill bad guys right now!
“Then let’s go disrupt the Black Circle’s plans,” says Aravis.
A’aatra scuttles over to regard Aravis. “Are you a good number?” she asks.
Aravis blinks. “Yes. A very good one.”
/*/
The Temple of the Sisters is a day’s journey from the Queen’s Pit. A’aatra lends the Company an entourage of stribe escorts and offers her sincere thanks.
“We are in your debt,” says Grey Wolf, bowing to her.
En route, as the group winds through twisty tunnels and chambers that must be what the inside of a huge anthill would look like, they pass another flock of light-eating manta rays. The stribe call them “vish,” and as the party did before, they stand aside to let the strange creatures pass.
“They can be dangerous if provoked,” warns one of the stribe.
“Can they be cooked and eaten?” asks Ernie.
The stribe stops and stares at Ernie for a moment. “Maybe,” it says. “But the vish wouldn’t like it. Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” says Ernie.
“We are an hour from fungus. We will fungus you.”
Sure enough, they soon arrive at a huge subterranean farm, a cavern in which the stone has been shaped into parallel walls, arranged like library shelves. Each wall has fungus growing upon it, and an irrigation system is channeling water from a nearby river to sheet down the patches of crops. Dozens of stribe tend to the fungus walls, collecting ripe (?) fungus into stone baskets that they keep aloft with telekinesis. (The stribe’s TK ability seems keenly attuned to stone; they can lift it with an almost careless ease. On the way to the farm, at certain difficult vertical stretches, the stribe TK-ed the party to help them progress, and that they found more difficult, even though the members of the Company were much lighter than, for instance, the stone spheres.)
“What is your fungus preference?” asks the stribe.
“Surprise us,” says Ernie. “Pick something you think we’d find pleasant.”
“We will fungus you pleasantly,” says the stribe. “Come this way.”
Soon the Company is munching on a tasty (if a bit chewy) purple fungus, served on stone platters. Water is served in stone cups the party can barely lift. After refreshing themselves, the group continues, past more farms, through some sizeable settlements, and along countless stretches of tunnel.
Seven hours out from the Queen’s Pit, they reach the wide tunnel that, according to the stribe, leads to the Temple of the Sisters. The stribe guides decline to go further, but convey the thanks of their people before retreating back the way they had come. The Company walks cautiously down the tunnel, and in a minute or two it ends at a wide opening onto an enormous cavern, easily a hundred feet on a side and two hundred high. They can’t simply walk out, as the tunnel mouth is about half-way up the height of the cavern. Its walls, the party sees, are covered in intricate abstract carvings, in such prodigious quantity and exquisite detail, it must have taken dozens of stribe decades of labor.
In the middle of the vast, dimly lit space is the Temple of the Sisters, a tall conical structure, its surface mottled like a drip-sandcastle, with a four-chambered clover-leaf-shaped base. As A’aatra warned, the temple has no door, but some twenty feet out from it is a large hole which, they presume, leads to a tunnel that emerges up through the floor inside.
The air in the cavern carries the distinctively unpleasant tang of Adversary blood.
…to be continued…
Last edited:
Ouch. Too soon, Sagiro, too soon. RIP, Rosetta...
That was indeed a true RBDM act. I take it this was the plot development that had you worried you'd pissed off your players when you dropped it on them? (See the discussion on page 230 and following of Part Three of the collected Story Hour.)
As an aside, it's great fun to finally see the events mentioned in those posts from you and the players around that time, when you were playing through the sessions we're only now getting to read about. For instance, this is what should be coming up fairly soon:
Can't wait...Piratecat said:
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Since I posted last night, this thread has gotten over a 1000 views, but only 12 people have gone to my "do you read this story hour" Google Form.
In case you missed it at the start of the previous post, here's the link:
Do you read this Story Hour?
Remember, only go to this form once, so I can get an accurate-ish count!
Thanks!
-Sagiro
In case you missed it at the start of the previous post, here's the link:
Do you read this Story Hour?
Remember, only go to this form once, so I can get an accurate-ish count!
Thanks!
-Sagiro
I do! And I told the link so. Y'all should do the same.
The Emperor sneaking in behind the party's back was RBastardy enough, I suppose, but it's FAR meaner of Sagiro to post three times in a week, thus getting my hopes up that updates will continue at a similar frequency...
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
Sagiro will hopefully forgive my gratuitous plug; for those who haven't seen it, I have a new Kickstarter for an investigative time travel game through Pelgrane Press. Come look! The EN World thread can be found here.
Now, I happily return you to Sagiro beating on Dranko.
Now, I happily return you to Sagiro beating on Dranko.
blargney the second
blargney the minute's son
Sagiro, I think it's awesome that you're going to publish this story. Your writing is extremely enjoyable, and I'll be encouraging my friends to buy your books.
Keep it up!
Keep it up!
