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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 1646613" data-attributes="member: 726">Thanks for the birthday wishes!  35.  <shudder>  Fortuately, the games keep me young.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 215Party in the Dwarf’s Room!When one is in the adventuring business, one tends to develop an uncanny ability to go from slumberous to battle-ready at even the slightest nearby scream.  Dranko hardly realizes he’s awake before he finds himself on his feet and grabbing his Heward’s wide-mouth pouch from his bedside.  He listens long enough to discern that the cries are those of a dwarf, and even as he heads for the window (figuring even in his groggy head that the hallway is going to be choked with would-be rescuers), he starts shouting at the top of his lungs.“Wake up!  Kibi’s under attack!”He slips out the window and quickly shimmies along the outside wall of the Inn toward Kibi’s window.  He almost bumps into Flicker, who had the same idea and is moving from the other side, a dagger clenched in his teeth.With Kibi and Dranko both raising a racket, everyone else is up and moving in a matter of seconds.   Grey Wolf grabs his sword and shield from the floor even as Edghar snags the spell-component bag and hops on his master’s shoulder; they burst into the hallway.   In his own room Aravis leaps to his feet, and much like Edghar, Pewter grabs the spell-components and leaps onto Aravis’ back.  “Ready, boss!” thinks the cat.  Aravis casts teleport directly into Kibi’s room.  He sees the black-clad assassin and Scree on top of Kibi.  The assassin has one knee up on the bed, and is pulling a dagger out of the dwarf’s body.“I wouldn’t do that again,” says Aravis angrily.Morningstar just rolls out of bed and charges into the hallway, dressed only in her nightshirt.  She doesn’t bother to bring anything from her room; she sleeps with her holy symbol around her neck, and that’s all she needs.  Kibi’s room is directly opposite her own, so she slams her body into the door, sending it flying open.  She sees Aravis, and beyond him the dwarf, earth elemental and assassin.  The floor around the bed is slick with blood.  As she watches the assassin raises his dagger again, but with Kibi now struggling and Scree still trying to protect his master, the strike goes wide and the blade plunges into the bed right next to Kibi’s head.Thinking that he needs as much help as possible, Kibi tries to summon another earth elemental to help protect him.  (And his Earth Mage powers allow him to perform such a summoning in less time that it would take others.)  But the struggling of  Scree and the Assassin on top of him knocks his hands awry as he casts, and the spell fizzles out.Ernie, Snokas and Step come crashing out of their rooms into the hallway, all armed with grabbed weapons but otherwise just in nightclothes.  (Ernie is wearing red footie pajamas with a flap in the back.)  Step reacts the fastest and barges into Kibi’s room on Morningstar’s heels.  After a second of assessing the situation, he shoulders past Morningstar and Aravis and leaps onto the assassin, wrapping his arms around the man and trying to wrestle him off the bed..  Watching from outside on the wall, Dranko and Flicker suddenly see Step’s arm flail against the half-open shutters. Kibi grimaces in pain as the extra weight stresses his wound.Dranko wrenches the shutters the rest of the way open and gets a good view of the tussle.   “Step, duck your head to the left!” he shouts, even as he instantly calls his mace from the widemouth pouch.  Dranko dives halfway into the room and swings the mace, grunting in satisfaction at the impact with the back of the assassin’s head.  There’s a meaty “thump,” but not quite the gush of blood he was expecting, and the man in black doesn’t even seem to notice. Aravis decides that enough is enough, and pulls out the big gun – power word stun.“STOP!”His allies in the room can feel the ripple of power sweep over them, but Aravis is appalled to see that the assassin isn’t fazed in the slightest, and just continues to try wrestling free of Step’s grasp.The hallway outside is starting fill up, not only with various members of the Company, but also with other guests.  Omar is one of the first on the scene, dressed in a sleeping robe and clutching his rapier.  He’s babbling in a strange tongue – whatever translation effect he was using earlier isn’t turned on.  Grey Wolf, unable to squeeze into Kibi’s room, is standing guard outside, looking for other assassins.  When Omar looks at him expectantly, Grey Wolf uses hand gestures to indicate that there could be more hostiles about.  Omar nods and moves to the other end of the hall, weaving through other sleepy but curious guests.   Snokas goes with him.  Ernie realizes he’ll do no good either in the hallway or Kibi’s room, so he activates the flying ability of his shield and flies back to his own room and out the window.  In the light of the moon and some outside torchlight, he starts to scan the grounds for suspicious figures.Morningstar squeezes toward the bed, intending to use her power of protective sleep on Kibi.  But luck isn’t with her; with her fingers less than an inch from Kibi’s shoulder, the scrum atop the bed suddenly shifts position, and the power is dissipated instead into the assassin – again, with no effect.  “Sorry Kibi!” she blurts.Flicker squeezes into window next to Dranko and takes a stab with his dagger, but it proves too difficulty to strike the assassin while avoiding Step, Kibi and Dranko.  The blade goes wide, tears the mattress, and Flicker himself becomes overbalanced.  He falls into the room, on top of the bed.   Kibi hears the bed start to groan and splinter under the combined weight of five people plus Scree.  He’s starting to feel light-headed with blood loss.  With a flailing grasp he wraps his fingers around his spell-component pouch on a small bedside table, and casts dimension door.  Having seen Morningstar in the room with him, he chooses her room as a destination, guessing it will be empty.   The chaos around him vanishes, and in an instant he is lying on the wood floor of the room across the hall, Scree piled up next to him.  He rolls onto his back, gasping in pain, and jams his fist into the wound to staunch the bleeding.   With his other hand he reaches instinctively for a healing potion, which of course he doesn’t have on him. Back in his room, Step, the assassin, Dranko and Flicker all drop eight inches through the space left by Kibi.  That’s all for the bed – its legs crack and splay out and the frame breaks in two, dropping them all another three feet.  Step continues to grapple the assassin, who can’t escape the paladin’s determined grip.  In Kivian common, Morningstar cries out, “Kibi just dim doored out!  Someone find him!”Dranko doesn’t lose focus.  He lands two more telling blows with his mace, the second of which knocks a large chunk out of the assassin’s neck.  He stares, morbidly fascinated, at the hole he made.  It’s flesh, and  some blood, but there are no veins or arteries or muscle showing in the gaping wound.   Aravis makes himself useful by casting mass haste.  He along with Step, Dranko, Flicker and Morningstar all get hasty.  With muscles a-quiver, Morningstar lands three powerful blows with her morningstar.  The first opens a gash in the assassin’s side.  The second shears away a chunk of flesh from its shoulder, which sticks on one of the weapon’s spikes.  The third smacks it in the head, tearing away the wrappings that cover its face.  She recoils instinctively at the sight of a face with no nose, no mouth, no ears – no features at all except the eyes, and from this close view, she can see that the eyes look like they’ve just been jammed into a head-shaped lump of molded flesh.Grey Wolf spots movement across the hall.“Found him!” he yells to the others.  “Morningstar’s room!”Aristus Fuller finishes pushing his way through the crowd and reaches Grey Wolf in the hall.  “What’s going on?” he asks breathlessly, his voice translated on time-delay into Charagan common.“My friend has been attacked!”“By whom?  By what?”Kibi turns his head and sees Aristus and Grey Wolf.  “Aristus!  I was attacked by an assassin!” groans the dwarf.  “Do you know anything about it?”“No, of course not!” replies the gnome, affronted, but moving into the room and kneeling with Grey Wolf by Kibi’s side.“No, I didn’t mean…” says Kibi.“Are you going to be okay?” asks Grey Wolf?“I could use some healing, but I’ll live,” says Kibi.Aristus leaps to his feet.  “There could be more attackers around.  I’m going to go organize search parties.”  He dashes out into the hallway.Back in Kibi’s room the assassin still struggles in Step’s iron grip.“You’re not going anywhere!” shouts the paladin angrily, as the two roll around atop the bed’s wreckage.Dranko calls for ‘manacles and leg irons’ from his widemouth pouch.   The leg irons will be impossible with all the thrashing, but Step has the assassin’s arms clamped in front of his body.   With a deft maneuver, Dranko is able to manacle the assassin’s wrists together.  It turns out to a moot point, as Aravis fires off a greater dispelling followed immediately by a single-target sonic chain-lightning.  Wa-BOOM!What’s left of the bed shatters, the shutters are blown out of the window, and the assassin explodes.   Flesh splatters everywhere, even out the open doorway into the hall.  The manacles fall to the ground a second later, still with wrists bound inside them.  In the silence that follows, Dranko picks up the manacles.“Look, I disarmed him!”* *Morningstar heals Kibi’s wounds, but the dwarf still looks weak and feverish.   She guesses poison, so Grey Wolf runs to his room and fetches the undead-bane sword that casts restoration once per day.  Soon Kibi is back to full health.Morningstar also manages to shoo everyone out of the dwarf’s blasted room.  She steps gingerly across the threshold, trying not to step on the larger pieces of meat.  The smell is horrific; the bits of the assassin are visibly decaying and the stench is nearly overpowering.   She blankets the room with thought captures, but gets nothing from the assassin.  The thoughts she picks up are mostly panicky ones from Kibi.  It’s now obvious to all that the attacker was some kind of necromantic construct – maybe a flesh golem?Flicker examines the lock on Kibi’s door and concludes that it was expertly picked.  He searches for a few minutes in the fleshy muck and finds a set of thieves’ tools, as well as a rolled up piece of leather with two small glass vials.  The vials contain a dark slimy substance that matches what he finds on the bloody dagger.  Yep. Poison, all right.Aristus’s search parties don’t turn up any sign of other assassins.  After an hour or two, most of the other guests have gone back to bed, the excitement seemingly over.  But Aravis decides to cast one more spell before going back to sleep.  He casts vision, hoping to learn something of the assassin.>> Aravis’s player:  “Is it considered to be ‘at hand?’”>>DM: “It’s kind of a rotting hand, but yes.”He sits down next to the decaying wrist and hand still clamped inside Dranko’s manacles.   As he casts the spell, a small portion of his life force escapes through his fingertips and settles into the assassin’s remnants.  Everything around him grows white, and the vision begins.The world fades back to near-darkness.  He’s underground.  All around him is a chittering, insect-like sound.  Is it language?  His sight adjusts to the dark.  There are many strange creatures around him, ant-centaurs, the formians he has heard about.  Their insectoid faces are inscrutable.  They are looking down at strange books, and they are sculpting something.The vision fades, and then refocuses on a different cavern in the dark.  Another insect creature is reading from a cracked stone tablet, and chittering at a naked humanoid figure whose only features are human eyes jammed into the flesh-head.  The vision fades, but there is still more.  Now Aravis sees a group of creatures, mostly humanoids of various types, and also a small intelligent lizard.  There are maybe a dozen people altogether, some of whom he recognizes from the Inn.   In his vision there’s a space among them, which they all avoid but don’t notice, as if there’s someone invisible in their midst.   There’s a blue portal in front of this group, and a formian gestures to it, and the whole bunch moves through the portal.Aravis’s eyes snap open; he finds himself lying on the ground.  He sits up, blinks, and recites every detail of his vision to the others while it’s still fresh.   The Company knows that every few weeks, the formians round up people that have stumbled into their territory and send through the Way that connects to the Inn’s Slice.   But why would the formians want to kill Kibi?  How did they find out about him, if divinations don’t cross the Ways, and the Way into the formian-controlled territory is always guarded?  Grey Wolf, thinking about Kibi’s off-again, on-again excursion (back when he had been summoned), speculates that maybe there are prophecies about Kibi in any number of worlds.They talk with Aristus, Gloriana and Mercury.  The formians have never given them any trouble before.  Their relationship with the ant-creatures is not exactly congenial, but there have never been hostilities, and the folk expelled from their Slices have always reported good treatment.  While some in the Company contemplate a foray into the formian Slices, Ernie points out that it could upset the relationship between the insects and the Inn, which in turn could put more innocent people in jeopardy.Morningstar admits right away to their hosts that she used thought captures in Kibi’s room after the attack, and Mercury is forgiving given the circumstances, though Gloriana shakes her head and says nothing.“I’m sorry that our Inn was not secure,” says the centaur.  “We’ve never had anything like this happen.  Oh, our Slice has come under attack, but always through the Ways, overtly.”“Do formians ever stay here, at the Inn?” asks Morningstar.“The last time that happened, it was over six years ago,” says Mercury.“It could be the Black Circle,” says Morningstar, thinking.  “If they knew Kibi was prophesied to ruin their plans, they may have placed safeguards here against him.” The next morning Dranko decides to have a chat with one of the people who came into the Slice with the assassin.   He finds a peasant woman who looks about thirty, with her two-year-old son.   He starts to talk and the woman babbles back at him in a foreign tongue, so Dranko casts a pair of comprehend language spells to expedite discussion.“You understand me now?”“Yes, yes!” says the woman.“You came in with the others, from the place with the formians, right?”The woman nods.“How many came in with your group?”“When they sent us through?  Twelve, I think.  I did not make careful count.”“How long did the journey take?”“We passed through four of the portals.  Maybe… a week?”  She scrunches up her face, trying to remember.“What do you think the chances were that you had an invisible assassin with you the entire time?”Dranko leans in as he asks the question.  The two-year-old son in her arms doesn’t cry, and it occurs to Dranko that the kid could be much older than that.“Invisible Assassin?  The assassin was invisible?  I heard about what happened!  But no, I didn’t see anything…er… invisible.”“Did you notice anything else odd?” asks Dranko.“Yes!  There was a small talking lizard in the group.  Very odd, very odd!” “Small talking lizard.  Who’d he belong to?”“He didn’t belong to anyone.  He was a person, like you or me.  And he could talk.  If I understand correctly, he decided to go through the Way of No Return.”“Huh.  Fascinating.  You know anything about how to fight Formians?”“Fight them?  Heavens no!  I make sweaters.”Dranko sighs.…to be continued…</blockquote>

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