Our Heroes Are Assassinated
10/24/370 O.L.G., 11:30 a.m., the streets of Var
Veil and Lillamere are walking towards the shrine of Na’Rat when the first assassination happens.
The sorcerer is earnestly trying to get Veil to see that touching the obelisk of Na’Rat- and thereby becoming further warped by Chaos- may not be such a good idea. Even her time as an ooze has not persuaded Veil of the error of her ways, however, so she instead urges Lillamere to touch the obelisk himself. They kid each other with in humor; and they are in the middle of the street in broad daylight when suddenly someone stabs Lillamere in the kidneys from behind. A single swift blow and the sorcerer falls to the ground dead.
“Lillamere!” cries Veil.
The assassin, tall and thin, is strange looking. Not human- its face is mostly a needled grin- it is grey through and through. A long coat that almost reaches the ground trails around it.
“Flee,” it hisses to Veil.
Instead she attacks, unlimbering her sword and aiming a vicious head cut at the assassin, but it seems to slide aside at the last moment and Veil’s blow misses.
The assassin laughs harshly. “Maybe next time it will be you.” With that, it steps back into the shadow of a building nearby and vanishes.
Veil pops up her mindscan, looking for any sign of it, but to her dismay there is nothing. She scoops up Lillamere’s body and hustles back to Horbin’s Halls of Healing.
***
5 p.m., the Halls of Healing
“AHHH!” Lillamere sits up in shock, his hand swiftly rushing to his back where he was stabbed. “What- where-“
“It’s okay,” Horbin soothes. “I’ve true resurrected you.”
”What the hell happened?” Baron Lillamere exclaims.
Veil repeats the events of earlier in the day. “What the hell was that thing?” she asks worriedly. Nobody knows.
“Maybe I can check with Ten Buck Tom later,” muses Horbin.
***
5:30 p.m., Valonia
Gerontius has asked the party if they would be willing to help some of his folk, who, on the continent of Valonia, are being abused by orcs. Valonian orcs are recognized almost as a civilized people, and they have thrown in their lot with the forces of Law in the Great War roiling Cydra. (One way they have struggled to gain acceptance was to adopt the worship of Galador.) It is the Valonian orcs who have developed the strange and deadly substance called sunpowder, with which they have constructed strange projectile hurling weapons. Since the black cathedral beneath the Stinking Pit led, via one of its strange confessionals, to Valonia, a trip there would coincide with some of Horbin’s interests. Our heroes thus arrive via a quick trip through the confessional, but to their surprise, the small church they arrive at is a burned-out shell! It’s still hot, though there isn’t enough left to actually burn.
“What happened here?” wonders Horbin, his voice choking.
Outside the party finds several bodies, strung from a tree. One of them is an orcish cleric of Galador.
Our heroes solemnly decide to bury the bodies; it’s only right. As they dig graves, the second assassination comes.
Inoke has expanded to make the digging easier. He’s using a shield to dig with. The mace of St. John, hanging at his belt, exhorts Horbin to perform the proper rites, as a good Galadorian should. It talks an awful lot, and it has an ultra-fundamentalist Galadorian attitude and an opinion about everything. Inoke has agreed to let it preach to him for an hour each day, and he invites the others to join him and the mace; but so far everyone else, even Horbin, merely finds it annoying.
Suddenly Inoke feels a cold sensation in his side, then in his other side, and he realizes that he’s bleeding. He looks down in horror and realizes that he’s flanked by two grey-coated, big-grinned things- then he is dead.
“He’s back, and he brought a friend!” cries Veil. She clambers over Inoke’s huge form and moves in to attack.
“Good,” Gerontius says enthusiastically. “I was hoping I’d get to match blades against this thing!” Then he sprinkles himself with some dust of disappearance and vanishes from view.
“Oh crap! This isn’t good!” Lillamere steps back and conjures up a prismatic sphere. “These are the guys that killed me?”
One of the grey things points a dagger at Horbin. “You will be next,” it hisses, and steps into the shadows and vanishes. Horbin fires with both barrels, casting both a quickened flame strike and a destruction at the other assassin before it can depart, but it survives. It grins at Horbin, then turns its attention to the oncoming Veil and cuts her up badly. She is surprised at the strength of the thing’s blows; a mere dagger, and she’s almost done for already! Staggering, the mindspy moves away from the assassin, withdrawing carefully.
Lillamere repeats, “This is not good!” He fires a puncture at the assassin but it jerks out of the way. A volley of seeker missiles fails to penetrate its spell resistance. Another puncture, this one aimed perfectly, and again the thing manages to hurl itself aside! The Baron curses long and loud.*
Gerontius engages his foe. It seems to have no eyes, and therefore no trouble locating him, but he manages to bluff it and get past his guard with his sneaky strikes to its softer parts. The two duel dagger to dagger for a few moments, until the assassin mutters, “Flee,” to Gerontius.
”You flee,” the halfling answers cheerfully. He’s keeping up a brave facade, but the assassin is whittling him down. Still, he’s cut many ribbons across it as well. Behind his smile his teeth grind together. Got to take him down! he thinks.
But the assassin, smarting from his wounds, whispers, “Next time.” Then he’s gone, fading into the shadows.
***
The Plane of Shadow
The assassin arrives on the grey plane of Shadow, then groans and collapses.**
***
Valonia
In a flash the other assassin re-emerges. “You killed my brother,” it hisses, slashing at Gerontius. Fear takes hold of the halfling, and he flees away from the scene.
“Hey!” cries Horbin, suddenly bleeding from multiple wounds as the assassin’s deadly knives turn on him. He wavers on the edge of consciousness and just manages to invoke a prismatic sphere before collapsing into an unmoving form at the center of the colorful ward.
“Oh crap,” says Lillamere, turning to follow Gerontius. He shape changes into a planetar and is off in pursuit.
Behind him, the assassin grins at Horbin’s body in the sphere.
Next Time: The resolution of this battle! What will happen? Find out next time!
*The ranged touch on that last puncture was a natural 20. We use exploding dice rather than alway-hit on 20- so he rolled another d20 and added it, etc. He still missed.
**Gerontius’ new epic feat, Lingering Damage, comes into play!
Yes, I’m a mean bastard.