RangerWickett
Legend
Chapter Four: Things to Possess
The group arrives back at the Bureau, and give their reports. Keira writes a favorable report of the new recruits, and they’re called in to talk with the Chief, apparently so he can congratulate them for their official entry into the Bureau.
They go into a room that the Chief’s in (the Chief doesn’t actually have an office, but instead just seems to roam the compound and picks rooms at random to do work in), and he’s reviewing the report. The group sits down in chairs in front of the desk, and wait, Keira standing in a corner of the room to oversee the meeting. Finally, the chief nods, lowers the papers, and looks up with a smile.
“I would like to-”
The door opens, and a tall man with long blonde hair walks in, wearing a long white trenchcoat. He bends over to the Chief’s ear and says quietly, “There was a murder. A . . . um, a lizard was involved.”
The smile on the Chief’s face fades, and instead he grimaces as he asks, “Who’d the Dragon kill?”
The blonde man glances nervously at the group of new recruits, then clears his throat. “The Dragon was the, um, victim, sir.”
The Chief swears under his breath, then nods to the knight. “Alright Michael. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
As Michael leaves, Cai, Iscalio, Tagin, Jenny, and Madeline can all see worry on his face, though he does smile briefly at Keira before closing the door behind himself.
Despite the obviously disturbing news, when they look back at the Chief, he seems fully composed. He shuffles the papers and sets them down, leaning back with a soft nod to them.
“Good job, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve proven yourselves in a crunch situation. And . . . until further notice, since things were relatively quiet until just now, you all have leave for at least a week or two. We’ll call you if anything comes up. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
And he leaves. Keira waits until he’s gone, then sighs. “This is going to be wretched. My parents were in the Bureau before me, and while they worked here—over 50 years—there hasn’t been a single Dragon-slaying.” She drums her fingers on the Chief’s recently vacated desk. “I hope they don’t call me in on this. At least you don’t have to worry.”
Iscalio smirks. “Yeah, we’re too novice to put on something like this, right?”
“Exactly.” Keira nods, then smiles. “But if we’re lucky, we might hear about what exactly’s going on. Cleaning out warehouses and tracking down petty thieves gets boring after a while. This should be interesting.”
“Who’s the guy?” Madeline asks, a slight grin on her face.
Keira lowers her face in modest embarrassment. “That’s Michael, my boyfriend. We’ve been together for three years now.”
“Very cute,” Jenny compliments.
Beside her, Iscalio groans. “Is there anything else? Or do we have to stay here and listen to you women gossip?”
Keira frowns at him, then shrugs. “Actually, you should probably all get cleaned up and rest. I was thinking we could all go out to eat tomorrow night. I’ve got a key, so we can go anywhere in the southern US, but we should probably stick near Savannah or Atlanta.”
Iscalio insists that they go to a Chinese/Japanese restaurant in Savannah so he can have sushi, and they eventually all agree. They take the generic gate back to Oglethorpe House (where they first met Balthazar, two weeks ago), and go take a break after their first real mission.
[meta: In this next adventure, we had to add in a new player, and make room for a visiting player. Chris came in full time to play Finagle P. Luckshore, while Trey was visiting and wanted to game, so he got to play Keira for a day. I have to commend them for both being really cool with how they handled their characters.]
* * *
The next night, rain pours upon the city of Savannah, thunder filling the air. In a store near the riverfront, a shopkeeper watches glumly as his sole customer this evening refuses to leave. By this time of night, about 10:30, almost every store in this district is closed, but the shopkeeper’s too polite to force the young man out into the storm.
His customer looks too young to be out of high school. A scrawny kid with bright blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, he can’t seem to get enough of peering at all the old computer parts this store has in stock. It almost lets the boy ignore the headache he’s been having for the past few weeks. Anyway, after the freak accident that caused his computer to explode, Finagle P. Luckshore hopes that he might be able to build a new computer more cheaply than ordering something from a company.
The storekeeper tries to discreetly indicate it’s past closing time. He walks around the store, turning off all the television sets in the windows. Finagle glances over and does a doubletake, thinking he saw a face peering through the window, but doesn’t notice the shopkeeper’s subtlety. Shaking his head, he turns back to examine the stripped motherboard of an oh-so-lovely-looking 286 com-
A loud crash fills the air, and shards of glass fly through the store.
The shopkeeper screams in terror as two large forms land amid the shattered glass of the main window, through which the storm pours rain. The creatures are hunched over, man-sized, but with claws, pale, scaly skin, dull yellow eyes, and crocodilian tails. Hissing, one knocks down the shopkeeper and then turns to stare at one of the few TVs still on, mezmerized by the moving pictures. After a moment it reaches out and grabs the TV, yanking the cord out of the wall socket. The image on the screen goes blank, and the creature snarls.
Finagle stares open-mouthed for a few moments, then jumps over the storekeeper’s counter and tries to hide. Glancing meekly over the edge of the counter, he sees the large creature with the TV snarl at the shopkeeper and throw the no-longer-shiny box at the man. The impact of the TV knocks the shopkeeper unconscious, and the two lizardmen bend over to pick him up.
Then the second one stops and sniffs the air, turning its face to look at the counter. Finagle ducks, but then a moment later the counter he’s hiding behind collapses under the weight of a pouncing lizardman. The young man screams as he’s carted out of the store (along with the glowing portable TV that has pretty pictures on it).
* * *
Sharing a few stories with each other over dinner, the group of recently recruited knights celebrates their first victory. Though the rain outside easily mutes the cries of panic from a nearby store, all the magic-users in the party suddenly become on edge. While trying to use chopsticks to eat rice, Iscalio stops and cocks his head, while Jenny, just on the way back from asking for a tea refill, starts to gaze into the distance for a moment, sensing something amiss.
Iscalio mutters in frustration, and then Jenny begins to run for the door of the restaurant, shouting back, “Someone’s in danger outside!”
Iscalio curses, not wanting to disrupt his dinner, and only when Madeline admits her ghost told her the same thing as Jenny’s does everyone get up. Cai has to drag his brother from the food, but within a few moments they’re all out the door into the storm, except for Tagin, who’s in the bathroom.
Jenny bursts out the door, staring down the street in the direction of the screams. The streets are fairly empty at this time of night, so she can see clearly two large figures dragging a kicking and screaming person down the street. She pulls out the wide stone spearhead of her weapon and activates it. A shaft of arcane energy extends outward, materializing into a wooden spear’s haft. Then, just as everyone else finally makes it out of the resturaunt, she rushes down the street, shouting for the creatures to stop. Behind her, everyone starts to run after, lightswords and scythes giving off brilliant glows in the dark night streets as the blades flare outward, then materialize into solid metal.
Tagin steps out of the restroom, seeing the store owner swearing at the patrons who just skipped out on the bill. The hacker shrugs and casually walks past the man, picking up an umbrella in the umbrella stand as he slips out the door.
Outside, half a block away, Jenny closes to within thirty feet of the creatures, which she can barely make out in the rain.
“Stop and let him go!” she demands in a shout. The two monsters stop and look at her momentarily, then break into a run toward one of the squares, moving quickly despite what they’re carrying.
[meta: Quick note on Savannah, GA street layout. Savannah was one of the earliest cities to have its streets planned before construction. In many of the older areas in Savannah you can find park squares, sections where cross-streets detour around a square patch of woodlands. Parks dot Savannah all over the place.]
The reptilian humanoids scramble toward the nearest square, finally knocking Finagle unconscious to stop his screaming. The monster with Finagle slowly begins to lag behind the monster just carrying the portable TV, so when the TV-bearing monster reaches the wooded square, he has time to yank off a manhole cover to open a path to the city sewers. The monster with Finagle starts to go in first, but Jenny hurls her spear and catches the monster square in the back. It topples forward and drops Finagle, trying briefly to pull the spear out of its back before it dies.
Growling at Jenny, the second monster grabs the manhole cover and flings it at her like a frizbee. Gasping in surprise, Jenny tries to flatten herself to the ground to let the huge metal object fly over her. Of course, even a massively strong monster can’t throw a 50 pound manhole cover too far, and it falls at just the right rate to hit Jenny in the chest as she drops to the ground. Jenny rolls back, too stunned to push the metal disk off her.
Snarling contentedly, the second monster grabs its human meal and drops into the sewer.
Cai and Keira run up next, and while Keira helps Jenny to her feet, Cai jumps and executes a wonderful aerial somersault to descend with ease through the hole down into the sewer below. Madeline and Iscalio follow next, but an inhuman shriek of pain echoes from the sewer, and they hear Cai shout that all is clear.
“What the heck are those things?” Jenny and Madeline both ask, looking to Keira.
“They’re a unique type of gremlin,” she replies. “We call them sewer demons. Every major city gets them from time to time, though the Bureau tries to clean them out wherever they go. Just think of them as really big rats.”
Iscalio and Madeline warily begin head down into the tunnel, and Jenny asks why the sewer demons would come out and rob a store. Keira answers that they like shiny things, and they have a special taste for magical items and people. More than likely, she suggests, the hostage has some magic on him. Keira pulls out her cel and puts in a call for a clean-up crew.
Iscalio reaches the bottom of the sewer first, followed by Madeline. A ten-foot wide path of urine and fecal matter fills the center, but narrow walkways line either side. A disemboweled sewer demon lays in the slush, and an unconscious (and slightly slimy) young man lies at Cai’s feet. Cai says that he saw a few other sewer demons in the shadows, but they ran off when he killed the first one.
Iscalio casts a healing spell on the young man, then slaps him to wake him up. Madeline makes it down next, followed by Jenny, Keira, and Tagin. The frightened young man (he’s 16) blabbers out what just happened, and the ghosts of the Knights confirm that young Finagle does have a ghost of his own.
Keira, since she is the ranking Knight in the group, orders Jenny and Tagin to keep Finagle calm while they wait for the clean-up crew to arrive, then orders Madeline, Cai, and Iscalio to come with her and track down the remaining sewer demons, before they can get out too far out of sight.
Keira, Iscalio, Cai, and Madeline head down the sewer tunnel in the direction of some faint hissing and growling, Madeline lighting the way with a cantrip. [meta: Remember that this game was back at the beginning of 3rd edition. It was at this point that I realized how cool cantrips were.]
As the others head off, Jenny tries to engage Finagle in conversation to keep him calm. Finagle, for good reason, doesn’t want to be anywhere near these people, so he keeps trying to climb his way out of the sewer, while Tagin keeps pulling him down. Finally, a shotgun blast echoes down the tunnel from the distance, and when Tagin and Jenny glance to see what’s going on, Finagle makes his move.
[meta: This is the out of character discussion that took place.
Chris, Finagle’s player: “I’m gonna give Jenny a wedgie then run!”
Everyone else except me (I played Jenny) laughs, and then Jessie, our DM, tells him to roll.
* . . . rattle rattle . . . 20!*
Nic, Cai’s player: “Critical wedgie!”
As you might guess, I was the butt of many jokes later because of this.]
Finagle grabs Jenny’s pants and yanks them up while she’s distracted, and manage to catch her so off guard that she staggers forward and trips. Then Finagle leaps out into the sludge of the sewer, using the sewer demon corpse as a stepping stone to get to the walkway on the opposite side. Then he bolts, hoping to find the nearest exit.
Tagin glances down at Jenny, smirks, then draws his gun and runs after Finagle. Finagle Tagin quickly get lost in the nearly pitch-black sewer, and eventually resort to just trying to find the sources of the gunshots in the distance.
* * *
Several hundred feet down the tunnels, Keira and company had walked into an ambush, with a half-dozen sewer demons bursting from the sludge between the walkways, dropping from the ceiling above, and stepping out of side tunnels. Cai had blasted away one of the demons, and Madeline and Iscalio took down another one with spells, clearing a path that they could flee down.
Now they flee from the overwhelming numbers of sewer demons, realizing they’re lost but more concerned in keeping from being flanked. They run for a minute or so, then get to an area where the sewer demons can only come from one direction. Keira states that they’ll make their stand here, and she casually replaces her clip of fireball bullets with standard ones, to avoid incinerating them all.
The sewer demons manage to sneak within ten feet before Cai spots them swimming through the sludge, and shots ring out, echoing cacophonously through the tunnels as the sewer demons burst forth to attack, now with reinforcements, totalling nearly a dozen.
Five already lay dead when Tagin reaches the battle, having guessed the right direction toward the gunshots. He begins to run forward to help, but then he hears the sound of a manhole cover being moved behind him. He turns and looks up to see in faint light Finagle, hanging onto a ladder leading out of the sewer. Ignoring the battle, Tagin levels the gun at Finagle.
“Put the manhole back in place and come down, or I’ll shoot.”
Finagle blanches, then sees a sewer demon swinging down from the ceiling to attack Tagin. “Look out behind you!” he shouts, pointing.
Rolling his eyes at the ‘obvious’ bluff, Tagin keeps staring at Finagle, but fires a blind shot off behind his shoulder and then returns the gun to cover Finagle. A spurt of demon brains peppers him, but he doesn’t flinch.
Keira and the others begin to force their way through the demons to get to Tagin, and just then Jenny shows up, having been slowed down by the need to adjust her underpants. She covers Tagin’s back from demons while the hacker talks Finagle off the ladder, which basically consists of continuing to threaten to shoot the kid if he doesn’t obey.
Keira switches clips to lightning bullets, and tells Cai and Iscalio to drive the demons into the sludge. They proceed to do so, but just when Keira’s about to fire a demon swings from pipes running above, kicking her and knocking her in after them. She splashes into the slime, then stands up, holding her gun in one hand and drawing a comb in the other to get her hair out of her eyes.
Jenny spears the demon hanging onto the pipes and flings it into the slime beside Keira, and Keira casually pistolwhips the thing as she climbs back out of the sludge. As Cai, Iscalio, and Jenny use their weapons to keep the sewer demons in the canal, Keira prepares to fire again, but Finagle again makes a break for it, trying to jump again to the opposite side of the walkway. Instead he ungracefully falls into the muck just as Keira shoots. Keira jerks to try to not hit, and the bullet imbeds itself into the concrete right beside the young man. A burst of electricity shatters the walkway and part of the wall, and Finagle begins to twitch in fear.
He begins to gibber, and just as a sewer demon is about to rip his throat out, Finagle screams at the top of his lungs in pure frustration, fear, and anger. Sparks burst from his body and fill the air, and electricity courses through the sludge, frying all the remaining demons. Finagle stops sparking, and he looks around with a whimper, totally confused. Cai leaps to his side and drags him out of the water, leaving only Madeline and Iscalio undrenched in sewer slime (Finagle, Tagin, and Jenny all stumbled in a couple times while trying to find their way in the dark).
Keira climbs topside and figures out where they ended up, about five blocks from where they had gone in. She tells everyone to scout around real quick while she calls for a pick-up.
They find the warren of the sewer demons, which is abandoned except for a few eggs and various “shiny things” they had pilfered over the past few years. Tellingly there’s a small black leather jacket, magical, implying that at least one magi has fallen to these creatures.
When the clean-up crew arrives, they give Madeline and Iscalio a ride back to the restaurant to pay the bill and get their cars, while everyone else has to hike a few miles across town to the doorway to the Bureau. None of the clean-up crew wants to get their vehicles all smelly, and even Iscalio and Madeline are pushing it for just having been down there.
Mildly frustrated, Keira, Cai, Jenny, and Tagin walk toward Oglethorpe House where the gate is, dragging a jittery Finagle along with them. Jenny, though normally diplomatic and caring, is too frustrated and disturbed that Finagle grabbed her underwear to try to calm him down, so they walk in uncomfortable silence for nearly a mile, through the rain. They’re still far from Oglethorpe House when a bright flash of lightning illuminates the late night road, revealing a man staggering out onto the street from an alley near an expensive house. Everyone stares at him.
He’s haggard, his well-tailored clothes soaked with rain but even more deeply stained with dark blood. He leans against the wall of the house, then spots the party staring at him. He crouches backward and looks around nervously, then screams at them, “Don’t look at me! I didn’t do it!”
After a moment of surprise at the man’s sudden appearance, Jenny calls out to ask if he needs help, but the man’s face suddenly twists to an expression of anger. He shouts in rage, thrusting out his hands palm first, and a sudden gust of wind knocks Jenny backward into a parked car. The man bolts across the street, nearly getting hit by a truck in the process.
Cai swears that they will have to deal with another crazy tonight, but he leads the way on a chase after him. Tagin follows, but as Keira helps Jenny get her feet, Finagle shoves her and yanks her gun out of her shoulder holster (apparently he has no qualms about touching women in personal places).
Finagle runs after Tagin and Cai, and then Keira and Jenny run after them. (Finagle later claimed that he wanted to help, but everyone’s pretty sure he actually planned to vent his frustrations on Tagin; there are no hard feelings now)
The man they’re chasing stops for a moment to shoot a small sphere of flame at Cai and Tagin, which they dodge. The ball of flame rolls over a parked car and sets it afire, but the rain sizzles it out before the car can explode. Apparently tireless, the fleeing magic-user leads them on a chase through the city for almost five minutes, but he’s heading toward the river, which will cut off his escape.
He leads them into Bonaventure cemetery, a wooded cemetery overlooking the river, with hundreds of expensive tombstones and obelisk-like gravemarkers. Finally, Cai gets fed up with running, and he burst into one final sprint to catch up with the man for just a moment.
Cai closes to within 15 feet, and then when the man next approaches one of the tall stone obelisk gravemarkers, Cai fires off a blast of his shotgun, cracking the base of the obelisk. The 20-foot tall stone pillar topples onto the fleeing man, dropping him to the ground with a scream.
Cai and Jenny run up (Tagin was too tired to keep running, and fell behind a few minutes ago), and see the man crawling out from under the obelisk. Another figure is running in their direction from across the cemetery, but they’re more concerned about the one who has been firing spells at them.
He cowers as Cai and Jenny advance, appearing frightened again instead of angry. Jenny asks him to just surrender and go along quietly, but he tries to scramble free from the obelisk, and both Cai and Jenny lunge for him. She tries to pin him with the haft of her spear over his throat, but he ducks out of the way and throws out his hands at the sandy ground of the graveyard. A tiny bead glowing incandescent red drops at their feet, then explodes in a massive ball of flames. The fire scorches nearby tombstones and knocks Jenny away from the man, but Cai, ignoring the fact that he’s on fire, stabs out with his katana and drives it through the man’s chest.
The man slumps to the ground, gasping, and just then Finagle, Tagin, and Keira run up. Finagle stares wide-eyed at the magical flames, and then wildly shoots at the already-dying man, hitting him in the leg with an explosive lightning bullet. Tagin and Keira tackle him to stop him from firing any more of the magical bullets, and Jenny blanches. She had been about to try to heal him enough so he wouldn’t die, but the explosion from the bullet mangled his leg and seared his body beyond repair.
The figure who had been running toward them from deeper in the cemetery arrives. It’s Michael, the tall blonde Knight who had informed the Chief about the murder of a Dragon. He carries a glowing white scimitar, which illuminates the bloody scene. At the sight of the unconscious and dying man on the ground, he winces.
“Keira,” he asks, seeing her among the part, “what’s going on?”
Keira shakes her head, not knowing herself. Michael glares accusingly at the rest of the Knights, then grimaces at the gasps of pain coming from the dying man. Gritting his teeth, Michael quickly slashes off the man’s head to end his suffering.
Confused, everyone mutters questions, wondering what the man had done that had made him flee. Then, seemingly sick from the sight at his feet, Michael passes out, falling beside the murdered man in the rain-soaked grass.
Keira crouches next to Michael in concern, then pulls out her cel phone and hands it to Jenny.
* * *
That night everyone sleeps uneasily. Though they eventually calmed Finagle down enough to explain to him what had happened, and though no Knights died, the mystery of the fleeing man gnaws at them. They’re not sure what happened, even whether they killed an innocent man, but one thing worries them the most. That night they learn that a second Dragon was killed, this one in Savannah, right before they ran into the fugitive. No Dragon has been slain in over fifty years, and now two have been killed in less than a week.
* * *
When he collects himself enough to understand what has happened to him, Finagle P. Luckshore decides to join the Bureau, effectively running away from home. He plans to return home occasionally, but he’s already graduated high school, so his parents probably won’t mind much anyway. Finagle’s ghost is his late uncle, an inventor who electrocuted himself. Most of Finagle’s magic involves technology and a more deliberate form of casting, so though the ghost inspires his more basic powers, he actually starts studying magic to learn how to do it himself. He becomes a wizard, not a sorcerer, even though he could’ve been a sorcerer since he bonded with a ghost. Instead, he keeps all his spells written down in .pdf format in a palm-top computer.
When Tagin gets a chance, he apologizes to Finagle for not believing him when he said the sewer demon was going to attack. He agrees to trust the kid more in the future.
Michael Dunne, a fairly experienced Knight, works the graveyard shift, literally. He’s a paladin, primarily involved in dealing with uneasy spirits. Savannah has a lot of ghosts, and he tends to spend time between Savannah and New Orleans, making sure the dead don’t make life difficult for the living. After passing out, he woke up soon after they all got back to the Bureau, claiming he didn’t remember anything beyond hearing the sound of Cai’s shotgun blast. The Chief ordered him to see Autumn Yeiotana, one of the top-ranked telepaths in the Bureau, to make sure he hadn’t been affected by some kind of memory-erasing magic or psionic ability.
Autumn, an Elvish telepath (and, at least according to the picture Jessie drew of her, very hot), scans Michael, then scans all the other knights in the group to make sure none of them were affected either. Jenny inquires about how Michael’s doing, and Autumn smiles.
“He’s doing fine. Better than usual, actually.” Then she shushes Jenny and scans her, shrugging. “And you’re doing fine too. . . . Except it looks like you’re a bit angry at your new associate Finagle?”
Jenny grimaces at her. “I don’t appreciate you digging into my thoughts. Aren’t you just supposed to look for magic on me?”
Autumn shrugs, smiling with a near-smirk. “Sorry, I usually try not to pry. It is pretty funny, though. A wedgie and all.”
Jenny grimaces again and leaves as soon as she can.
The group arrives back at the Bureau, and give their reports. Keira writes a favorable report of the new recruits, and they’re called in to talk with the Chief, apparently so he can congratulate them for their official entry into the Bureau.
They go into a room that the Chief’s in (the Chief doesn’t actually have an office, but instead just seems to roam the compound and picks rooms at random to do work in), and he’s reviewing the report. The group sits down in chairs in front of the desk, and wait, Keira standing in a corner of the room to oversee the meeting. Finally, the chief nods, lowers the papers, and looks up with a smile.
“I would like to-”
The door opens, and a tall man with long blonde hair walks in, wearing a long white trenchcoat. He bends over to the Chief’s ear and says quietly, “There was a murder. A . . . um, a lizard was involved.”
The smile on the Chief’s face fades, and instead he grimaces as he asks, “Who’d the Dragon kill?”
The blonde man glances nervously at the group of new recruits, then clears his throat. “The Dragon was the, um, victim, sir.”
The Chief swears under his breath, then nods to the knight. “Alright Michael. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
As Michael leaves, Cai, Iscalio, Tagin, Jenny, and Madeline can all see worry on his face, though he does smile briefly at Keira before closing the door behind himself.
Despite the obviously disturbing news, when they look back at the Chief, he seems fully composed. He shuffles the papers and sets them down, leaning back with a soft nod to them.
“Good job, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve proven yourselves in a crunch situation. And . . . until further notice, since things were relatively quiet until just now, you all have leave for at least a week or two. We’ll call you if anything comes up. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
And he leaves. Keira waits until he’s gone, then sighs. “This is going to be wretched. My parents were in the Bureau before me, and while they worked here—over 50 years—there hasn’t been a single Dragon-slaying.” She drums her fingers on the Chief’s recently vacated desk. “I hope they don’t call me in on this. At least you don’t have to worry.”
Iscalio smirks. “Yeah, we’re too novice to put on something like this, right?”
“Exactly.” Keira nods, then smiles. “But if we’re lucky, we might hear about what exactly’s going on. Cleaning out warehouses and tracking down petty thieves gets boring after a while. This should be interesting.”
“Who’s the guy?” Madeline asks, a slight grin on her face.
Keira lowers her face in modest embarrassment. “That’s Michael, my boyfriend. We’ve been together for three years now.”
“Very cute,” Jenny compliments.
Beside her, Iscalio groans. “Is there anything else? Or do we have to stay here and listen to you women gossip?”
Keira frowns at him, then shrugs. “Actually, you should probably all get cleaned up and rest. I was thinking we could all go out to eat tomorrow night. I’ve got a key, so we can go anywhere in the southern US, but we should probably stick near Savannah or Atlanta.”
Iscalio insists that they go to a Chinese/Japanese restaurant in Savannah so he can have sushi, and they eventually all agree. They take the generic gate back to Oglethorpe House (where they first met Balthazar, two weeks ago), and go take a break after their first real mission.
[meta: In this next adventure, we had to add in a new player, and make room for a visiting player. Chris came in full time to play Finagle P. Luckshore, while Trey was visiting and wanted to game, so he got to play Keira for a day. I have to commend them for both being really cool with how they handled their characters.]
* * *
The next night, rain pours upon the city of Savannah, thunder filling the air. In a store near the riverfront, a shopkeeper watches glumly as his sole customer this evening refuses to leave. By this time of night, about 10:30, almost every store in this district is closed, but the shopkeeper’s too polite to force the young man out into the storm.
His customer looks too young to be out of high school. A scrawny kid with bright blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, he can’t seem to get enough of peering at all the old computer parts this store has in stock. It almost lets the boy ignore the headache he’s been having for the past few weeks. Anyway, after the freak accident that caused his computer to explode, Finagle P. Luckshore hopes that he might be able to build a new computer more cheaply than ordering something from a company.
The storekeeper tries to discreetly indicate it’s past closing time. He walks around the store, turning off all the television sets in the windows. Finagle glances over and does a doubletake, thinking he saw a face peering through the window, but doesn’t notice the shopkeeper’s subtlety. Shaking his head, he turns back to examine the stripped motherboard of an oh-so-lovely-looking 286 com-
A loud crash fills the air, and shards of glass fly through the store.
The shopkeeper screams in terror as two large forms land amid the shattered glass of the main window, through which the storm pours rain. The creatures are hunched over, man-sized, but with claws, pale, scaly skin, dull yellow eyes, and crocodilian tails. Hissing, one knocks down the shopkeeper and then turns to stare at one of the few TVs still on, mezmerized by the moving pictures. After a moment it reaches out and grabs the TV, yanking the cord out of the wall socket. The image on the screen goes blank, and the creature snarls.
Finagle stares open-mouthed for a few moments, then jumps over the storekeeper’s counter and tries to hide. Glancing meekly over the edge of the counter, he sees the large creature with the TV snarl at the shopkeeper and throw the no-longer-shiny box at the man. The impact of the TV knocks the shopkeeper unconscious, and the two lizardmen bend over to pick him up.
Then the second one stops and sniffs the air, turning its face to look at the counter. Finagle ducks, but then a moment later the counter he’s hiding behind collapses under the weight of a pouncing lizardman. The young man screams as he’s carted out of the store (along with the glowing portable TV that has pretty pictures on it).
* * *
Sharing a few stories with each other over dinner, the group of recently recruited knights celebrates their first victory. Though the rain outside easily mutes the cries of panic from a nearby store, all the magic-users in the party suddenly become on edge. While trying to use chopsticks to eat rice, Iscalio stops and cocks his head, while Jenny, just on the way back from asking for a tea refill, starts to gaze into the distance for a moment, sensing something amiss.
Iscalio mutters in frustration, and then Jenny begins to run for the door of the restaurant, shouting back, “Someone’s in danger outside!”
Iscalio curses, not wanting to disrupt his dinner, and only when Madeline admits her ghost told her the same thing as Jenny’s does everyone get up. Cai has to drag his brother from the food, but within a few moments they’re all out the door into the storm, except for Tagin, who’s in the bathroom.
Jenny bursts out the door, staring down the street in the direction of the screams. The streets are fairly empty at this time of night, so she can see clearly two large figures dragging a kicking and screaming person down the street. She pulls out the wide stone spearhead of her weapon and activates it. A shaft of arcane energy extends outward, materializing into a wooden spear’s haft. Then, just as everyone else finally makes it out of the resturaunt, she rushes down the street, shouting for the creatures to stop. Behind her, everyone starts to run after, lightswords and scythes giving off brilliant glows in the dark night streets as the blades flare outward, then materialize into solid metal.
Tagin steps out of the restroom, seeing the store owner swearing at the patrons who just skipped out on the bill. The hacker shrugs and casually walks past the man, picking up an umbrella in the umbrella stand as he slips out the door.
Outside, half a block away, Jenny closes to within thirty feet of the creatures, which she can barely make out in the rain.
“Stop and let him go!” she demands in a shout. The two monsters stop and look at her momentarily, then break into a run toward one of the squares, moving quickly despite what they’re carrying.
[meta: Quick note on Savannah, GA street layout. Savannah was one of the earliest cities to have its streets planned before construction. In many of the older areas in Savannah you can find park squares, sections where cross-streets detour around a square patch of woodlands. Parks dot Savannah all over the place.]
The reptilian humanoids scramble toward the nearest square, finally knocking Finagle unconscious to stop his screaming. The monster with Finagle slowly begins to lag behind the monster just carrying the portable TV, so when the TV-bearing monster reaches the wooded square, he has time to yank off a manhole cover to open a path to the city sewers. The monster with Finagle starts to go in first, but Jenny hurls her spear and catches the monster square in the back. It topples forward and drops Finagle, trying briefly to pull the spear out of its back before it dies.
Growling at Jenny, the second monster grabs the manhole cover and flings it at her like a frizbee. Gasping in surprise, Jenny tries to flatten herself to the ground to let the huge metal object fly over her. Of course, even a massively strong monster can’t throw a 50 pound manhole cover too far, and it falls at just the right rate to hit Jenny in the chest as she drops to the ground. Jenny rolls back, too stunned to push the metal disk off her.
Snarling contentedly, the second monster grabs its human meal and drops into the sewer.
Cai and Keira run up next, and while Keira helps Jenny to her feet, Cai jumps and executes a wonderful aerial somersault to descend with ease through the hole down into the sewer below. Madeline and Iscalio follow next, but an inhuman shriek of pain echoes from the sewer, and they hear Cai shout that all is clear.
“What the heck are those things?” Jenny and Madeline both ask, looking to Keira.
“They’re a unique type of gremlin,” she replies. “We call them sewer demons. Every major city gets them from time to time, though the Bureau tries to clean them out wherever they go. Just think of them as really big rats.”
Iscalio and Madeline warily begin head down into the tunnel, and Jenny asks why the sewer demons would come out and rob a store. Keira answers that they like shiny things, and they have a special taste for magical items and people. More than likely, she suggests, the hostage has some magic on him. Keira pulls out her cel and puts in a call for a clean-up crew.
Iscalio reaches the bottom of the sewer first, followed by Madeline. A ten-foot wide path of urine and fecal matter fills the center, but narrow walkways line either side. A disemboweled sewer demon lays in the slush, and an unconscious (and slightly slimy) young man lies at Cai’s feet. Cai says that he saw a few other sewer demons in the shadows, but they ran off when he killed the first one.
Iscalio casts a healing spell on the young man, then slaps him to wake him up. Madeline makes it down next, followed by Jenny, Keira, and Tagin. The frightened young man (he’s 16) blabbers out what just happened, and the ghosts of the Knights confirm that young Finagle does have a ghost of his own.
Keira, since she is the ranking Knight in the group, orders Jenny and Tagin to keep Finagle calm while they wait for the clean-up crew to arrive, then orders Madeline, Cai, and Iscalio to come with her and track down the remaining sewer demons, before they can get out too far out of sight.
Keira, Iscalio, Cai, and Madeline head down the sewer tunnel in the direction of some faint hissing and growling, Madeline lighting the way with a cantrip. [meta: Remember that this game was back at the beginning of 3rd edition. It was at this point that I realized how cool cantrips were.]
As the others head off, Jenny tries to engage Finagle in conversation to keep him calm. Finagle, for good reason, doesn’t want to be anywhere near these people, so he keeps trying to climb his way out of the sewer, while Tagin keeps pulling him down. Finally, a shotgun blast echoes down the tunnel from the distance, and when Tagin and Jenny glance to see what’s going on, Finagle makes his move.
[meta: This is the out of character discussion that took place.
Chris, Finagle’s player: “I’m gonna give Jenny a wedgie then run!”
Everyone else except me (I played Jenny) laughs, and then Jessie, our DM, tells him to roll.
* . . . rattle rattle . . . 20!*
Nic, Cai’s player: “Critical wedgie!”
As you might guess, I was the butt of many jokes later because of this.]
Finagle grabs Jenny’s pants and yanks them up while she’s distracted, and manage to catch her so off guard that she staggers forward and trips. Then Finagle leaps out into the sludge of the sewer, using the sewer demon corpse as a stepping stone to get to the walkway on the opposite side. Then he bolts, hoping to find the nearest exit.
Tagin glances down at Jenny, smirks, then draws his gun and runs after Finagle. Finagle Tagin quickly get lost in the nearly pitch-black sewer, and eventually resort to just trying to find the sources of the gunshots in the distance.
* * *
Several hundred feet down the tunnels, Keira and company had walked into an ambush, with a half-dozen sewer demons bursting from the sludge between the walkways, dropping from the ceiling above, and stepping out of side tunnels. Cai had blasted away one of the demons, and Madeline and Iscalio took down another one with spells, clearing a path that they could flee down.
Now they flee from the overwhelming numbers of sewer demons, realizing they’re lost but more concerned in keeping from being flanked. They run for a minute or so, then get to an area where the sewer demons can only come from one direction. Keira states that they’ll make their stand here, and she casually replaces her clip of fireball bullets with standard ones, to avoid incinerating them all.
The sewer demons manage to sneak within ten feet before Cai spots them swimming through the sludge, and shots ring out, echoing cacophonously through the tunnels as the sewer demons burst forth to attack, now with reinforcements, totalling nearly a dozen.
Five already lay dead when Tagin reaches the battle, having guessed the right direction toward the gunshots. He begins to run forward to help, but then he hears the sound of a manhole cover being moved behind him. He turns and looks up to see in faint light Finagle, hanging onto a ladder leading out of the sewer. Ignoring the battle, Tagin levels the gun at Finagle.
“Put the manhole back in place and come down, or I’ll shoot.”
Finagle blanches, then sees a sewer demon swinging down from the ceiling to attack Tagin. “Look out behind you!” he shouts, pointing.
Rolling his eyes at the ‘obvious’ bluff, Tagin keeps staring at Finagle, but fires a blind shot off behind his shoulder and then returns the gun to cover Finagle. A spurt of demon brains peppers him, but he doesn’t flinch.
Keira and the others begin to force their way through the demons to get to Tagin, and just then Jenny shows up, having been slowed down by the need to adjust her underpants. She covers Tagin’s back from demons while the hacker talks Finagle off the ladder, which basically consists of continuing to threaten to shoot the kid if he doesn’t obey.
Keira switches clips to lightning bullets, and tells Cai and Iscalio to drive the demons into the sludge. They proceed to do so, but just when Keira’s about to fire a demon swings from pipes running above, kicking her and knocking her in after them. She splashes into the slime, then stands up, holding her gun in one hand and drawing a comb in the other to get her hair out of her eyes.
Jenny spears the demon hanging onto the pipes and flings it into the slime beside Keira, and Keira casually pistolwhips the thing as she climbs back out of the sludge. As Cai, Iscalio, and Jenny use their weapons to keep the sewer demons in the canal, Keira prepares to fire again, but Finagle again makes a break for it, trying to jump again to the opposite side of the walkway. Instead he ungracefully falls into the muck just as Keira shoots. Keira jerks to try to not hit, and the bullet imbeds itself into the concrete right beside the young man. A burst of electricity shatters the walkway and part of the wall, and Finagle begins to twitch in fear.
He begins to gibber, and just as a sewer demon is about to rip his throat out, Finagle screams at the top of his lungs in pure frustration, fear, and anger. Sparks burst from his body and fill the air, and electricity courses through the sludge, frying all the remaining demons. Finagle stops sparking, and he looks around with a whimper, totally confused. Cai leaps to his side and drags him out of the water, leaving only Madeline and Iscalio undrenched in sewer slime (Finagle, Tagin, and Jenny all stumbled in a couple times while trying to find their way in the dark).
Keira climbs topside and figures out where they ended up, about five blocks from where they had gone in. She tells everyone to scout around real quick while she calls for a pick-up.
They find the warren of the sewer demons, which is abandoned except for a few eggs and various “shiny things” they had pilfered over the past few years. Tellingly there’s a small black leather jacket, magical, implying that at least one magi has fallen to these creatures.
When the clean-up crew arrives, they give Madeline and Iscalio a ride back to the restaurant to pay the bill and get their cars, while everyone else has to hike a few miles across town to the doorway to the Bureau. None of the clean-up crew wants to get their vehicles all smelly, and even Iscalio and Madeline are pushing it for just having been down there.
Mildly frustrated, Keira, Cai, Jenny, and Tagin walk toward Oglethorpe House where the gate is, dragging a jittery Finagle along with them. Jenny, though normally diplomatic and caring, is too frustrated and disturbed that Finagle grabbed her underwear to try to calm him down, so they walk in uncomfortable silence for nearly a mile, through the rain. They’re still far from Oglethorpe House when a bright flash of lightning illuminates the late night road, revealing a man staggering out onto the street from an alley near an expensive house. Everyone stares at him.
He’s haggard, his well-tailored clothes soaked with rain but even more deeply stained with dark blood. He leans against the wall of the house, then spots the party staring at him. He crouches backward and looks around nervously, then screams at them, “Don’t look at me! I didn’t do it!”
After a moment of surprise at the man’s sudden appearance, Jenny calls out to ask if he needs help, but the man’s face suddenly twists to an expression of anger. He shouts in rage, thrusting out his hands palm first, and a sudden gust of wind knocks Jenny backward into a parked car. The man bolts across the street, nearly getting hit by a truck in the process.
Cai swears that they will have to deal with another crazy tonight, but he leads the way on a chase after him. Tagin follows, but as Keira helps Jenny get her feet, Finagle shoves her and yanks her gun out of her shoulder holster (apparently he has no qualms about touching women in personal places).
Finagle runs after Tagin and Cai, and then Keira and Jenny run after them. (Finagle later claimed that he wanted to help, but everyone’s pretty sure he actually planned to vent his frustrations on Tagin; there are no hard feelings now)
The man they’re chasing stops for a moment to shoot a small sphere of flame at Cai and Tagin, which they dodge. The ball of flame rolls over a parked car and sets it afire, but the rain sizzles it out before the car can explode. Apparently tireless, the fleeing magic-user leads them on a chase through the city for almost five minutes, but he’s heading toward the river, which will cut off his escape.
He leads them into Bonaventure cemetery, a wooded cemetery overlooking the river, with hundreds of expensive tombstones and obelisk-like gravemarkers. Finally, Cai gets fed up with running, and he burst into one final sprint to catch up with the man for just a moment.
Cai closes to within 15 feet, and then when the man next approaches one of the tall stone obelisk gravemarkers, Cai fires off a blast of his shotgun, cracking the base of the obelisk. The 20-foot tall stone pillar topples onto the fleeing man, dropping him to the ground with a scream.
Cai and Jenny run up (Tagin was too tired to keep running, and fell behind a few minutes ago), and see the man crawling out from under the obelisk. Another figure is running in their direction from across the cemetery, but they’re more concerned about the one who has been firing spells at them.
He cowers as Cai and Jenny advance, appearing frightened again instead of angry. Jenny asks him to just surrender and go along quietly, but he tries to scramble free from the obelisk, and both Cai and Jenny lunge for him. She tries to pin him with the haft of her spear over his throat, but he ducks out of the way and throws out his hands at the sandy ground of the graveyard. A tiny bead glowing incandescent red drops at their feet, then explodes in a massive ball of flames. The fire scorches nearby tombstones and knocks Jenny away from the man, but Cai, ignoring the fact that he’s on fire, stabs out with his katana and drives it through the man’s chest.
The man slumps to the ground, gasping, and just then Finagle, Tagin, and Keira run up. Finagle stares wide-eyed at the magical flames, and then wildly shoots at the already-dying man, hitting him in the leg with an explosive lightning bullet. Tagin and Keira tackle him to stop him from firing any more of the magical bullets, and Jenny blanches. She had been about to try to heal him enough so he wouldn’t die, but the explosion from the bullet mangled his leg and seared his body beyond repair.
The figure who had been running toward them from deeper in the cemetery arrives. It’s Michael, the tall blonde Knight who had informed the Chief about the murder of a Dragon. He carries a glowing white scimitar, which illuminates the bloody scene. At the sight of the unconscious and dying man on the ground, he winces.
“Keira,” he asks, seeing her among the part, “what’s going on?”
Keira shakes her head, not knowing herself. Michael glares accusingly at the rest of the Knights, then grimaces at the gasps of pain coming from the dying man. Gritting his teeth, Michael quickly slashes off the man’s head to end his suffering.
Confused, everyone mutters questions, wondering what the man had done that had made him flee. Then, seemingly sick from the sight at his feet, Michael passes out, falling beside the murdered man in the rain-soaked grass.
Keira crouches next to Michael in concern, then pulls out her cel phone and hands it to Jenny.
* * *
That night everyone sleeps uneasily. Though they eventually calmed Finagle down enough to explain to him what had happened, and though no Knights died, the mystery of the fleeing man gnaws at them. They’re not sure what happened, even whether they killed an innocent man, but one thing worries them the most. That night they learn that a second Dragon was killed, this one in Savannah, right before they ran into the fugitive. No Dragon has been slain in over fifty years, and now two have been killed in less than a week.
* * *
When he collects himself enough to understand what has happened to him, Finagle P. Luckshore decides to join the Bureau, effectively running away from home. He plans to return home occasionally, but he’s already graduated high school, so his parents probably won’t mind much anyway. Finagle’s ghost is his late uncle, an inventor who electrocuted himself. Most of Finagle’s magic involves technology and a more deliberate form of casting, so though the ghost inspires his more basic powers, he actually starts studying magic to learn how to do it himself. He becomes a wizard, not a sorcerer, even though he could’ve been a sorcerer since he bonded with a ghost. Instead, he keeps all his spells written down in .pdf format in a palm-top computer.
When Tagin gets a chance, he apologizes to Finagle for not believing him when he said the sewer demon was going to attack. He agrees to trust the kid more in the future.
Michael Dunne, a fairly experienced Knight, works the graveyard shift, literally. He’s a paladin, primarily involved in dealing with uneasy spirits. Savannah has a lot of ghosts, and he tends to spend time between Savannah and New Orleans, making sure the dead don’t make life difficult for the living. After passing out, he woke up soon after they all got back to the Bureau, claiming he didn’t remember anything beyond hearing the sound of Cai’s shotgun blast. The Chief ordered him to see Autumn Yeiotana, one of the top-ranked telepaths in the Bureau, to make sure he hadn’t been affected by some kind of memory-erasing magic or psionic ability.
Autumn, an Elvish telepath (and, at least according to the picture Jessie drew of her, very hot), scans Michael, then scans all the other knights in the group to make sure none of them were affected either. Jenny inquires about how Michael’s doing, and Autumn smiles.
“He’s doing fine. Better than usual, actually.” Then she shushes Jenny and scans her, shrugging. “And you’re doing fine too. . . . Except it looks like you’re a bit angry at your new associate Finagle?”
Jenny grimaces at her. “I don’t appreciate you digging into my thoughts. Aren’t you just supposed to look for magic on me?”
Autumn shrugs, smiling with a near-smirk. “Sorry, I usually try not to pry. It is pretty funny, though. A wedgie and all.”
Jenny grimaces again and leaves as soon as she can.
