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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 299146" data-attributes="member: 150">He ain’t heavy, he’s my dwarf, part 1He ain’t heavy, he’s my dwarf, part 1So Eli, Uri, Pah, Ulric, Crys, and Minimonk donned the amber amulets that Solen gave them and sent them on their blind teleportation-gate-planeshifty journey on Irks trail.  They felt the pull of the currents in the ether, the odd smells, and had some odd visions, and then they found themselves standing in a shallow crater in the soggy midst of a blasted, charred destroyed barn and the bits of dairy cow carcass that had been left behind by a day’s worth of scavengers.  “Well, for one, thing, it looks like Irk was here,” said Uri.Near the wreck of the barn there was a farmhouse, a road that wound out of sight to the east and west, and a clump of forest near the house.  The house looked deserted.  The trackers immediately started looking around for some sign of Irk.  The ground around the barn was a muddy mess – the barn fire had been put out by a lot of water, and the ground was still pretty wet.  But a little beyond the muddy mess they found some tracks that must have been Irk’s feet.  They followed the tracks into the woods and found a spot where he must have hidden for few hours.  Then he moved on from there – at first slowly, then running.  Joining his tracks on the trail there were four sets of bare human footprints.  As Irk’s tracks indicated he’s started to run faster, the human footprints changed in a few strides into wolfprints.They followed the tracks of the chase to a small clearing where Irk put his back to a tree and fought off the wolves.  Judging by the tracks leaving the area of the fight, Irk drove off the wolves, but he was limping as he move away.  Then, a bit later, there was another fight – the wolves had returned, this time with an Ally of some sort, wearing boots, who stood near the fight but didn’t seem to get involved.  In this fight Irk fell, but there was no body. There was enough dried blood on the packed earth that it was hard to imagine Irk made a good getaway. The wolf tracks did not leave the scene, but four barefoot sets of human tracks did, and their prints were deeper now.  They were carrying a heavy load of some sort.They followed those barefoot human tracks back to the farmhouse, where they walked right up to the road and disappeared.  The party’s next avenue of investigation was the house.  Peeking in the windows at first, and then poking around inside, they found a house that had been ransacked and searched – perhaps a couple of times.  Most of the food in the kitchen was gone, the upholstery on the furniture had been slashed and just about everything had been over turned.  There was a library, walls lined with bookshelves, but there were almost no books in the room – a few children’s books, and a reading primer, all in a language that they could not comprehend.  A careful searchof the room found a false panel behind one of the bookcases, in which they found another book in a very cryptic language, this one looked like math, but like no math any of them had seen before.With the downstairs searched they moved upstairs. One of the first things Eli noticed up there was that the floor seemed inordinately high.  A little poking around revealed a trap door cut cleverly into the floor.  It was locked shut, so Pah set about trying to pick it.The lock was a simple deadbolt on the other side of the door.  Pah looped some wires through the thin gap and started to move the bolt gently out of the way.  All of a sudden there was a sqeal – unmistakably the squeal of a young girl – and the bolt was quickly shoved back into place, almost breaking Pah’s tools.  Pah tried several more times, each time the bolt was shoved back into place before Pah could get it open.  Frustrated, she nodded, and Eli pulled the door open despite the lock, ripping up a few of the floorboards with it.A young girl, perhaps 8 or ten years old, looked up at the party.  She was screaming already, but when she saw the strange faces looking at them – the little halflings, the elf, and the druid (who happened to have chosen Panther form to search the house) she screamed louder, uncontrollably, for many long minutes, while the party tried to calm her down.Crys, who had been waiting out by the barn, keeping a lookout  while the party searched the house, heard the screams and came running.  When she saw the girl backed into a corner by the menagerie that was trying to calm her down, she pushed her way through, touched the girl’s arm, and cast Tongues.  The first thing Crys noticed was a powerful drain – she felt her strength sap away as she cast the spell, but she ignored it and turned to talk to the girl.  Once the girl had screamed herself hoarse, she finally allowed herself to be talked to.  Crys interpreted for the party, editing some comments out.  Her name was Gortie Benecek.The girl didn’t know a lot about the night before.  The barn had exploded.  Neighbors had come with a pumpwagon to put out the fire on what was left.  Her parents had been very upset.  And then they’d heard the truck coming.“Truck?” Pah asked.Crys asked, and the little girl explained that trucks were like big cars.“Cars?” Pah asked.Crys asked, and the little girl explained that cars were like wagons, but had motors and could go on their own.“Motors?” Pah asked, but no one got a answer from the girl that made any sense. When they had heard the truck, her parents had taken her up to the hiding hole and told her to stay there until one of her parents came for her.  She waited there, and her parents never came.She had heard other people in the house – a couple of times – but never her parents.The girl was able to lay out the rudiments of the history of the place – the Germans were the soldiers in the trucks, they were bad, worse than the Russians who had been here last year after they had invaded.  The germans had better tanks, and had been able to defeat the Poles and then the Russians to take over the country.“Tanks?” asked Pah.Crys asked, and the girl explained that tanks were like big cars with lots and lots of metal armor and a big cannon on top that spun around and machine guns and tracks not wheels and they were very very scary and bad.“Hm,” said Pah.  “I want a Tank.”They got a bit more information from the girl – about three different groups of germans.  Selinka, the town she lived near, was an R&R station for Wehrmacht soldiers, who wore grey uniforms and crosses.  There were lots of them getting drunk and sleeping a lot in Selinka.  Then there were the SS, called the Einsatzgruppe, who were supposed to be there keeping order and rounding up all the undesirables.  For a while they had been shooting the people they rounded up, but now things were better, they were just being put on trains and taken away by train to relocation camps, so they could be sent away.“Undesireables?” asked Eli.  Gortie explained that the Germans hated the Jews, and the gypsies, and anyone who was disabled, or weak.  “Yeah, and I’m pretty sure they’re gonna hate us, too,” said Uri.“Train?” asked Pah.  Gortie described a train and tracks.  Pah preferred the idea of a tank.And then there were the Gestapo, the secret police, who worked with the SS and who everyone was afraid of.  The little girl asked if the Goonies were Roma.  When that didn’t mean anything to them, she said, “You know, Gypsies.”  They said they were not.  She went on to explain that Gypies were very outlandish people, who traveled around in wagons, who had all kinds of different shapes and sizes, much like the Goonies.  “Some are really big and fat, some are really small.  I saw a boy with a dog face once.  And some women with beards.”“Bearded women?” Uri said.  “Irk is HOME.”</blockquote>

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