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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ralts Bloodthorne" data-source="post: 4008752" data-attributes="member: 6390">The Chicken, the Farm, & the Endevour ReturnsDuring the night, in the wind and rain, the Storm Witch went out and danced in the wind and rain, and although some of the villagers saw her, the Bishop reassured them that she had absolution by the church to perform such pagan actions, and assured the colonists that should the Storm Witch try anything against the town, or against the worshippers of Pelor, Pelor would punish her severely.The Storm Witch saw, out in the distance, in the ocean, a low red glow appear slightly under the horizon, which stayed for over an hour. Just after her first sighting of the red glow, she heard the church bells heavy steel chains jangle.The next morning, our intrepid group of heroes/colonists/criminals went outside the colony pallisade and began searching out a suitable location for their farm, agreeing to pool their resources. The rain was cold and dripping off of every single branch, and the only one who seemed happy was the witch, who was flushed and excited, running to everything to check out whatever caught her eye.It took them most of the day, but a site had been selected. A good site was turned down when Hoggle noticed bear claw marks over 14 feet off the ground on a bunch of trees, one of the markings only about a week old.They tied thier ribbons to a huge oak tree, and returned to file their claim. Due to the distance, they were allowed to grab nearly 80 acres of land, and were quite pleased with themselves. The Mayor-Governor told them that once they cleared the land for their home, the other men of the colony would help them build it, so they would have a livable area as soon as possible. They would be able to draw tools from the community.Hoggle admitted to being able to forge plows, hoes, pitchforks, axes, and the like, and the mayor promised him that he would be sold, on credit, the things he needed for a forge, since the ship carrying the second blacksmith for the colony had never arrived.Ambrosia was informed by the Bishop that once the house was finished, she'd be in charge of the souls outside the colony, the six families that had outside farms, and the township would build her a little school to teach at.However, looking at the Bishop gave Ambrosia the chills. He had a mighty monobrow, and beneath his thick beard his jaw seemed large and imposing, his black eyes flashing with zeal as he spoke of Pelor and how the light of Pelor would be cast over this entire new world. She shrugged off his attitude as personal paranioa after how her nunnery was treated after charges of heresy.Verdoon stayed at the site of their future home, curling up in the branches of a huge oak tree that the group decided would sit about 30 feet from their new home, and watching a storm sweep off of the ocean.Kalife managed to encourage "Acorn" to suddenly sprout eight little legs and run around, the small fragment of his personality he'd placed within the stone fully awakening and becoming its own creature. He quickly hid Acorn in his pocket, and went out to look around.The colony was not big enough to rate stores or anything like that, everything excess being held in a communal pot and given out by the Mayor Governor as he saw fit for the good of the colony. He asked around, and discovered that during the previous winter, snow got as deep as 22 feet, and nearly a third of the colonists either starved or froze to death.A little bit of gossiping, and he discovered that the colony had virtually NO Old Kingdom soldiers left. Apparently in the last recent months the Governor General of the Legions had sent out manipiles that never returned. Over a centuries worth the men had entered the dark and forboding woods and had never returned. Despite this occurance, the Governor General had seceded power to the Mayor Govenor, boarded the ship with his men and the Militant Cardinal, and had left Charlotte's Port.He took a good look at the buildings, and began to seriously doubt the claims that the legion had built all of the buildings. The colonists knew of no quarry, nor had they ever seen the legion bring in any stone, and on the corner of one of the larger buildings, in the basement, he discovered three strange runes on the cornerstone. Making sure nobody saw him, he quickly did a rubbing of the three runes, each the size of a man's palm, to show both Ambrosia and Verdoon. However, he didn't bother to show them to Hoggle.Hoggle went out to one of the outlying farms to talk to the family that worked the farm, and on the way heard rustling in the bushes. A paraniod and seasoned soldier, he drew his sword and put his back to a tree, waiting silently for whatever was in the bushes to show itself.With a loud clucking a rooster, with red and black feathers with white spots, burst out of the bushes hot on the trail of a large bug. Hoggle tried to grab it but it agilly avoided his hand and ran back into the foilage.The family he visited informed him that they saw those chickens once in awhile too, but all the chickens of the colony were white and quite large, not the small chickens like he saw. The farmer also warned Hoggle that the red and black roosters would kill a white rooster and try to take over the hens.Something about that fact bothered Hoggle as he walked back to Charlotte's Port.That night, after looking at the three symbols, the nun was heading toward the library to look at a book of saints to see if the three tantalizing symbols matched anything, Ambrosia hear weird noises coming from the cell of the other nun, and peeked inside. The nun within was stripped to the waist, facing the symbol of Pelor on her wall, and flagellating herself.Ambrosia quietly snuck away.She startled the Bishop, who was eating a sandwich and reading from a Bible, who quickly excused himself and moved away. For some reason, he gave Ambrosia the creeps.The library, however, proved next to useless. The book of Saints was missing, and upon questioning the Bishop, Ambrosia learned that the full religious library had never arrived.Unsettled, Ambrosia did her evening prayers and went to bed.The next morning, the party had lucked out. They'd won a rather foul tempered donkey, two oxen, a brace of piglets, twelve chickens, four bags of feed, a steel crowbar, and a stack of wool blankets in the "newcomer lottery" and they loaded their stuff up on a borrowed cart and headed out to the sight of their new home, their spirits high despite the dripping rain.That day, the foursome spent time cutting down trees and pulling free stumps. However, when the third stump was pulled, all work stopped.A skull was entangled in the roots. Looking into the hole, the group saw that the tree had managed to thrust its taproot through some tightly interlocked cobbled, upon which several skeletons were still laying.Careful digging managed to pull five skeletons up. One was taller than a man, covered in rust, a flint arrowhead rattling around in his skull, the other four were small heads, blocky, from four short bowlegged creatures. Verdoon estimated the age of the skeletons, based on the ground, as around 300 years.Digging up tree stumps all day, the group encountered more skeletons, more flagstones, and what they swore was foundations of two large buildings.After services, rather than return to their inn rooms, the group returned to their house site, and began salvaging the heavy stone for their own house. They worked until the moon had gone down, then returned to Charlotte's Port, waving at the two young boys inside the blockhouse who were armed with crossbows and staring at the spooky woods.Kalife noticed something weird down at the docks, and the group walked down to the dock and stared in shock.While the pilings were stone, the dock itself was wood, and a huge shipmast had slammed into the wood of the dock, splintering and destroying it. The copper banding around the mast gleaming dimly.Looking around, they found out (via the carved nameplate) that the Endevour had somehow broken up. They found drowed soldiers, several large crates, and some salvage. Verdoon woke up the colony to help drag the salvage from the pounding surf.The colonists were visibly upset, some of them nearly hysterical, that the Endevour had broken up, but Ambrosia was postive she saw a sly smile flicker across the face of the bishop.The cargo was sequestered within the basement of the Mayor Govenor's house, and everyone returned to bed, with the exception of Verdoon, who sat on top of the inn and stared thoughtfully out to sea in the pouring rain and flickering lightning of the storm. On the horizon the red glow flickered and eventually went away.The next day, despite the wind and rain, the group went to their homestead sight. Looking down to the rocks, they saw several crates, part of a mast, several of the great oars, and a few bodies in the rocks at the base of the cliff.Using a rope harness tied by Hoggle, Kalife was lowered down to attach ropes to the various items and haul them up. Verdoon was anxious to look at the bodies, as they looked strange to her eyes.Ambrosia noted one of the red and black speckled roosters watching them but disregarded it.The bodies turned out to have been boiled, as if they had been plunged into a great pot, and the group marvelled over the strange occurance. What could have boiled bodies far out to sea? Unsure of what might have happened to the sailors, Ambrosia gave them the last rites and the group wrapped them up for burial behind the church.The crates contained oddities. Sheer fabric lighter than even cotton, smooth on the skin, and very strong. The light danced on it, and it seemed otherwordly. Verdoon wanted to keep it, and after a impassioned arguement, her desires were seen as valid, and the two crates containing the sheer fabric were buried by a wild rosebush.Another crate contained waterlogged papers, completely ruined by the seawater. However, the items wrapped within the paper were found, and marvelled over. Delicate glass sculptures of deer, bear, trees, and even mythical creatures like unicorns and dragons.Hoggle brought up the fact that there was no glass blower in the village. Despite the fact that the colony had a glazier who could make windows, he couldn't create a passible blob, much less the delicate swan.It was agreed to uncover one of the boxes of sheer material and hide the glassworks within the material.Inside the last crate was wooden children's toys, but buried within the toys they found a locked box, and busted off the lock. Inside were several handfulls of coins. Unlike the Old Kingdom coins, which were oval, these coins were hexagonal, smaller, with milled edges, and a sheaf of wheat on one side, and a fearsome looking single eye on the other. The coins seemed to emenate malevolence to Ambrosia, so the group agreed to throw them off the cliff and into the sea.Money had no value in Charlotte's Port.Ripping up a stump, the characters found another group of skeletons. This one was laying on dried and dead grass, his skeletal hand tight around the neck vertebrae of one of the small bow legged ones. His sword was rusted, but identifiable, and Hoggle was able to find scraps of chainmail on the larger one. They seperated the skeletons, and buried the bigger one with the few big skeletons they'd found, and the smaller one with the small skeletons they'd found.The rain had stopped, and Verdoon got into the hole, and patted the grass, raising a puff of ash that made her cough. Looking carefully at the exposed dirt, she discovered two small lines of what looked like ash several inches apart in the exposed wall of dirt.She climbed out of the hole and went to look at one of the larger trees they'd cut down. Counting the rings, she discovered that about 300 years ago, the tree had suffered from a fire, then 200 years ago, then roughly 80 years ago.She looked at the blocks of granite and basalt they'd pulled from the ground, looking at the careful quarrying marks on them, and brushing all the dirt from them.The group agreed.Someone had once lived here. A Civilization had flourished here, and volanic activity had killed it.Verdoon kept the knowledge of the sullen red glow far off into the ocean to herself.</blockquote>

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