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<blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 30432" data-attributes="member: 63"><p><span style="font-size: 12px"><strong>Chapter Thirteen: A Moon Over Bourbon Street</strong></span></p><p></p><p>They have been on the run for three days, avoiding capture by the Bureau for the Management of Magicks. Once knights, they are now rogues, hunted by other knights they would once have called allies. The Bureau they once worked for holds them responsible for the murder of its head telepath, J’Qwuan, who was an old friend and companion of the Bureau’s Chief. The Chief wants revenge, and judging by the hassle they’ve gone through lately, sooner or later he’s probably going to get it. </p><p></p><p>Jenny Windgrave, the party’s paladin, first wanted to return to the Bureau and try to explain what happened, but the group quickly realized that by now the Chief has probably been telepathically charmed by Autumn Yeiotana, the Elvish telepath who really killed J’Qwuan. If they went back, they’d have no chance.</p><p></p><p>Tagin, the party’s hacker, has been busy making sure they can survive while on the run. If they use credit cards or cash cards, the Bureau will track the transaction and find them, so Tagin has been using his talents to garner them free cash, free motel rooms, and most importantly, anonymity. Jenny understands the necessity to do these illegal things, but she doesn’t like it. Still, they’re surviving, with hopes that they’ll get a break and be able to do something to stop whatever is going on at the Bureau.</p><p></p><p>And speaking of the Bureau, Cai Maxwell, a martial artist with an intense sense of discipline, has had to revise his theory of Legion since the events three days earlier. He knows Legion can’t be J’Qwuan, and even though they know Autumn’s involved somehow, he doesn’t think she’s solely responsible. He can’t think of why Autumn would want to kill Dragons, though, and so he’s drawing a blank.</p><p></p><p>Madeline West, a sorceress bonded with the ghost of a woman hung in the Salem witch trials, has very little to contribute. She feels pent up because, even though they’re in New Orleans, a wonderfully historical city, she can’t go outside because she could get caught. Tagin has been the one to go out shopping, since he’s the most inconspicuous of the group. In order to take out her frustration, Madeline has occasionally gotten into arguments with Jenny (her ghost, Catherine, was never too fond of “red-skinned savages” when she was alive, and she hasn’t grown to like Jenny too much in her death).</p><p></p><p>Finagle P. Luckshore has been taking things the hardest. His first and only friend at the Bureau, Brian Greenman, was murdered right before they had to flee the Bureau. Autumn Yeiotana telepathically stopped his heart. And things weren’t made any better by the fact that Finagle had had a crush on Autumn before she revealed herself as a calculating murderess. Mostly he spends the day playing solitaire or minesweeper on the laptop that doubles as his spellbook.</p><p></p><p>They’ve had a few close calls, with the main problem being the ghosts. New Orleans is a city of many uneasy spirits, and so the trackers dispatched to find the party have used their ghosts as scouts. A ghost can sense another ghost within a few hundred feet, even if in the real world walls would separate them. In a normal city, the party’s ghosts could warn them if another ghost, like one bonded to a knight came near, but since there are so many ghosts in New Orleans, it’s just not possible. </p><p></p><p>Once one tracker’s ghost sensed the party’s ghosts, so Finagle’s uncle (who is a ghost and is bonded with Finagle) quickly ran out at the and began performing the whole ‘crazy ghost’ routine, shouting that he’s lost and that he has to find his motorcycle. The tracker’s ghost had apparently bought the performance, since he passed on to check other streets. </p><p></p><p>On their second evening, another knight spotted Tagin while he was shopping for groceries, but Tagin, through quick thinking, pretended to be any other citizen, and just looked at the knight funny when the man stared at him. Tagin doesn’t have a very distinctive face, or dress, so the knight didn’t attack Tagin immediately. When the knight followed Tagin out of the story and through the streets, the hacker had just ditched the food and lost himself in the crowd on Bourbon Street.</p><p></p><p>Tagin has also noticed many small children that seem to follow him late the third night. Most unusual was that they all wore concealing coats and hoods to hide their faces. It unnerved him, and he spent several hours trying to lose them by wandering the shadier areas of the French Quarter, but they dogged him. He overheard a pair of them once discussing his appearance, and whether it matched the description they wanted. They sounded too articulate for children, so Tagin had to lose them by going into various bars where children weren’t allowed. Sure, Tagin’s a year too young to buy alcohol, but that’s not what his ID says. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>After three nights in the same motel (five separate rooms), Tagin’s nervous that much longer would attract notice, so they decide to go to another. An anonymous credit card pays for five rooms for three days at another motel a few blocks away, and they leave their original motel in the middle of their fourth evening, just abandoning the rooms. They travel through the streets of New Orleans at night, staying within twenty feet of each other, but not in one group. </p><p></p><p>Then Cai, at the front of the group, sees a man step out of a sidestreet directly in front of him. Tall, with dark brown hair blowing in the street breeze. His heavy trenchcoat flutters open, revealing a crucifix around his neck and a sword hilt at his hip.</p><p></p><p>Cai stops, tensing for a fight, when he recognizes the man. So do Jenny, Madeline, and Tagin. </p><p></p><p>“Quickly,” says Balthazaar Mordred, the vampire-hunting knight who first initiated them into the Bureau, “follow me. They’re trying to close in on you, trap you. One’s a block behind you, and they have an ambush set up at the motel you’re heading to.”</p><p></p><p>Cai fingers the hilt of his arcane blade, and Finagle shifts under his newly-bought trenchcoat as he gets a good hold of his compressed air rifle. Jenny comes up, asking why they should trust him. Balthazaar says that he’s been following what they’ve been up to ever since the first night, and he knows that they would never kill the illithid. Also, the Chief has been acting oddly lately, and he doesn’t trust what’s going on.</p><p></p><p>Balthazaar points out the man who is supposedly following them. He’s wearing a trenchcoat, and a quick detect magic spell reveals that he is packing a magical weapon. The party quickly decides to follow Balthazaar, trusting that he’s sincere about not believing the Chief.</p><p></p><p>Balthazaar takes them to the backroom of a nearby bar. When asked to explain how he found them, Balthazaar matter-of-factly states that he’s been a knight for sixteen years, and that he knows how to track vampires. “And some of them fly, so don’t think that you were particularly much of a challenge.”</p><p></p><p>[Meta: The night we ran this game, a friend of ours who games in my campaign, but who had been mostly gone for the summer and unavailable for Savannah Knights, played Balthazaar. Justin, our friend, is a very easy-going, fun guy, which didn’t quite fit with Balthazaar’s typically somber demeanor.]</p><p></p><p>Again, just to make sure that Balthazaar isn’t going to turn them in, the party grills him for a while. He says that he went to the Chief in concern, not wanting to believe that the party was responsible for J’Qwuan. The Chief had told him that he also believed the party had killed the Dragons. Balthazaar almost laughed at that. He knew the party got lucky to kill a vampiress, but one doesn’t ‘get lucky’ while trying to kill a Dragon. </p><p></p><p>Oh, and the party asks if Autumn was with the Chief during this meeting. Yes, she was, and in fact she’s been spending most of her time around him. </p><p></p><p>At that moment, Tagin spots a small head peering through the window at them, and he tells the group. Balthazaar doesn’t even hesitate. He punches through the window with both hands and yanks up a short little green-faced . . . not a child, but a Goblin. It’s dressed just like all the other ‘children’ had been that had followed Tagin the night before. Balthazaar shakes the little Goblin, neverminding that his own hands are bleeding from punching through a window. He orders the Goblin to tell them why it was following them, but the little green-skinned guy just stammers incomprehensibly. </p><p></p><p>Balthazaar opens the back door to the bar and tosses the Goblin out, watching it as it scampers off. Jenny starts to yell at Balthazaar for beating up something that looks like a child, until Balthazaar explains that Goblins never let themselves be seen. They’re usually too smart to come out in the open. If it had been a normal Goblin, they would have never seen it.</p><p></p><p>Balthazaar begins to run after the Goblin, and the party follows, Jenny reluctantly. They nearly lose the Goblin when it weaves through the crowd in Bourbon street, but Madeline shouts, “Stop my child! Please, he’s running away! Where’s my son?!”</p><p></p><p>That gets some people in the crowd to at least slow the Goblin down, so the party can follow him through the crowd. The Goblin runs down a side street, and they follow him for nearly ten minutes into an older, run-down part of the French Quarter. Tagin tries to explain to Jenny that if Autumn made the Chief act ‘funny,’ then perhaps these Goblins acting ‘funny’ might have something to do with Autumn.</p><p></p><p>The Goblin runs through a break in a chain-link fence, into an abandoned house that looks like it once belonged on a plantation. Cai and Balthazaar tear the fence open so the rest of them can go in, and a Detect Magic by Madeline reveals that something magical is inside the building, but she’s too far away to tell what. The party gets their weapons ready and slowly sneak into the fenced-in field surrounding the plantation home. </p><p></p><p>The house itself is three stories tall, quite large, but now quite dilapidated. The party stops and crouches a few dozen feet away to let Tagin sneak up and scout it out, but when Tagin nears the door, they notice Cai suddenly go stiff, then stand up and walk after Tagin. The hacker, too, is acting funny, as he keeps going and walks up the front steps, onto the porch, and in through the front door.</p><p></p><p>Madeline swears, and those remaining rush after them, reaching the house just as Cai walks inside. Madeline’s light cantrip leads the way, but once inside they discover old oil lamps burning, filling the tall entry hall with dim light. Doors lead off to both sides of the room, but they’re boh closed. No, the focus of attention is the far end of the room. A wide grand staircase leads up to the second floor, covered with molding red carpet.</p><p></p><p>A handful of Goblins sit leering at the party on various steps, and two tall humanoids, also green-skinned, stand at the top of the flight of stairs. Between them, smiling at them from an armchair as though from a throne, sits the puppet master, Dalavar Kineil. He smiles confidently down at Cai and Tagin, both of whom stand like zombies at the base of the staircase. With a thought, Dalavar releases them from his grip, and Tagin immediately bursts into shouting.</p><p></p><p>“Neil? Dammit, I told you to lay off or I was gonna show you not to mess with me.”</p><p></p><p>Dalavar blows air through his lips, flubbering them in mockery. “Oh shut up. You’re lucky that I even let you live, you puny man.”</p><p></p><p>Madeline glances around in confusion. “Wait. This guy’s Legion?”</p><p></p><p>Dalavar sneers at her. “Hardly, miss. I am not he, the son of man, who shall lead the war even after his death. No, the true warriors are here, those who will fight in the apocalypse, but they must choose whether to fight for the Son of Man, or the Dragon.”</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="RangerWickett, post: 30432, member: 63"] [size=3][b]Chapter Thirteen: A Moon Over Bourbon Street[/b][/size] They have been on the run for three days, avoiding capture by the Bureau for the Management of Magicks. Once knights, they are now rogues, hunted by other knights they would once have called allies. The Bureau they once worked for holds them responsible for the murder of its head telepath, J’Qwuan, who was an old friend and companion of the Bureau’s Chief. The Chief wants revenge, and judging by the hassle they’ve gone through lately, sooner or later he’s probably going to get it. Jenny Windgrave, the party’s paladin, first wanted to return to the Bureau and try to explain what happened, but the group quickly realized that by now the Chief has probably been telepathically charmed by Autumn Yeiotana, the Elvish telepath who really killed J’Qwuan. If they went back, they’d have no chance. Tagin, the party’s hacker, has been busy making sure they can survive while on the run. If they use credit cards or cash cards, the Bureau will track the transaction and find them, so Tagin has been using his talents to garner them free cash, free motel rooms, and most importantly, anonymity. Jenny understands the necessity to do these illegal things, but she doesn’t like it. Still, they’re surviving, with hopes that they’ll get a break and be able to do something to stop whatever is going on at the Bureau. And speaking of the Bureau, Cai Maxwell, a martial artist with an intense sense of discipline, has had to revise his theory of Legion since the events three days earlier. He knows Legion can’t be J’Qwuan, and even though they know Autumn’s involved somehow, he doesn’t think she’s solely responsible. He can’t think of why Autumn would want to kill Dragons, though, and so he’s drawing a blank. Madeline West, a sorceress bonded with the ghost of a woman hung in the Salem witch trials, has very little to contribute. She feels pent up because, even though they’re in New Orleans, a wonderfully historical city, she can’t go outside because she could get caught. Tagin has been the one to go out shopping, since he’s the most inconspicuous of the group. In order to take out her frustration, Madeline has occasionally gotten into arguments with Jenny (her ghost, Catherine, was never too fond of “red-skinned savages” when she was alive, and she hasn’t grown to like Jenny too much in her death). Finagle P. Luckshore has been taking things the hardest. His first and only friend at the Bureau, Brian Greenman, was murdered right before they had to flee the Bureau. Autumn Yeiotana telepathically stopped his heart. And things weren’t made any better by the fact that Finagle had had a crush on Autumn before she revealed herself as a calculating murderess. Mostly he spends the day playing solitaire or minesweeper on the laptop that doubles as his spellbook. They’ve had a few close calls, with the main problem being the ghosts. New Orleans is a city of many uneasy spirits, and so the trackers dispatched to find the party have used their ghosts as scouts. A ghost can sense another ghost within a few hundred feet, even if in the real world walls would separate them. In a normal city, the party’s ghosts could warn them if another ghost, like one bonded to a knight came near, but since there are so many ghosts in New Orleans, it’s just not possible. Once one tracker’s ghost sensed the party’s ghosts, so Finagle’s uncle (who is a ghost and is bonded with Finagle) quickly ran out at the and began performing the whole ‘crazy ghost’ routine, shouting that he’s lost and that he has to find his motorcycle. The tracker’s ghost had apparently bought the performance, since he passed on to check other streets. On their second evening, another knight spotted Tagin while he was shopping for groceries, but Tagin, through quick thinking, pretended to be any other citizen, and just looked at the knight funny when the man stared at him. Tagin doesn’t have a very distinctive face, or dress, so the knight didn’t attack Tagin immediately. When the knight followed Tagin out of the story and through the streets, the hacker had just ditched the food and lost himself in the crowd on Bourbon Street. Tagin has also noticed many small children that seem to follow him late the third night. Most unusual was that they all wore concealing coats and hoods to hide their faces. It unnerved him, and he spent several hours trying to lose them by wandering the shadier areas of the French Quarter, but they dogged him. He overheard a pair of them once discussing his appearance, and whether it matched the description they wanted. They sounded too articulate for children, so Tagin had to lose them by going into various bars where children weren’t allowed. Sure, Tagin’s a year too young to buy alcohol, but that’s not what his ID says. After three nights in the same motel (five separate rooms), Tagin’s nervous that much longer would attract notice, so they decide to go to another. An anonymous credit card pays for five rooms for three days at another motel a few blocks away, and they leave their original motel in the middle of their fourth evening, just abandoning the rooms. They travel through the streets of New Orleans at night, staying within twenty feet of each other, but not in one group. Then Cai, at the front of the group, sees a man step out of a sidestreet directly in front of him. Tall, with dark brown hair blowing in the street breeze. His heavy trenchcoat flutters open, revealing a crucifix around his neck and a sword hilt at his hip. Cai stops, tensing for a fight, when he recognizes the man. So do Jenny, Madeline, and Tagin. “Quickly,” says Balthazaar Mordred, the vampire-hunting knight who first initiated them into the Bureau, “follow me. They’re trying to close in on you, trap you. One’s a block behind you, and they have an ambush set up at the motel you’re heading to.” Cai fingers the hilt of his arcane blade, and Finagle shifts under his newly-bought trenchcoat as he gets a good hold of his compressed air rifle. Jenny comes up, asking why they should trust him. Balthazaar says that he’s been following what they’ve been up to ever since the first night, and he knows that they would never kill the illithid. Also, the Chief has been acting oddly lately, and he doesn’t trust what’s going on. Balthazaar points out the man who is supposedly following them. He’s wearing a trenchcoat, and a quick detect magic spell reveals that he is packing a magical weapon. The party quickly decides to follow Balthazaar, trusting that he’s sincere about not believing the Chief. Balthazaar takes them to the backroom of a nearby bar. When asked to explain how he found them, Balthazaar matter-of-factly states that he’s been a knight for sixteen years, and that he knows how to track vampires. “And some of them fly, so don’t think that you were particularly much of a challenge.” [Meta: The night we ran this game, a friend of ours who games in my campaign, but who had been mostly gone for the summer and unavailable for Savannah Knights, played Balthazaar. Justin, our friend, is a very easy-going, fun guy, which didn’t quite fit with Balthazaar’s typically somber demeanor.] Again, just to make sure that Balthazaar isn’t going to turn them in, the party grills him for a while. He says that he went to the Chief in concern, not wanting to believe that the party was responsible for J’Qwuan. The Chief had told him that he also believed the party had killed the Dragons. Balthazaar almost laughed at that. He knew the party got lucky to kill a vampiress, but one doesn’t ‘get lucky’ while trying to kill a Dragon. Oh, and the party asks if Autumn was with the Chief during this meeting. Yes, she was, and in fact she’s been spending most of her time around him. At that moment, Tagin spots a small head peering through the window at them, and he tells the group. Balthazaar doesn’t even hesitate. He punches through the window with both hands and yanks up a short little green-faced . . . not a child, but a Goblin. It’s dressed just like all the other ‘children’ had been that had followed Tagin the night before. Balthazaar shakes the little Goblin, neverminding that his own hands are bleeding from punching through a window. He orders the Goblin to tell them why it was following them, but the little green-skinned guy just stammers incomprehensibly. Balthazaar opens the back door to the bar and tosses the Goblin out, watching it as it scampers off. Jenny starts to yell at Balthazaar for beating up something that looks like a child, until Balthazaar explains that Goblins never let themselves be seen. They’re usually too smart to come out in the open. If it had been a normal Goblin, they would have never seen it. Balthazaar begins to run after the Goblin, and the party follows, Jenny reluctantly. They nearly lose the Goblin when it weaves through the crowd in Bourbon street, but Madeline shouts, “Stop my child! Please, he’s running away! Where’s my son?!” That gets some people in the crowd to at least slow the Goblin down, so the party can follow him through the crowd. The Goblin runs down a side street, and they follow him for nearly ten minutes into an older, run-down part of the French Quarter. Tagin tries to explain to Jenny that if Autumn made the Chief act ‘funny,’ then perhaps these Goblins acting ‘funny’ might have something to do with Autumn. The Goblin runs through a break in a chain-link fence, into an abandoned house that looks like it once belonged on a plantation. Cai and Balthazaar tear the fence open so the rest of them can go in, and a Detect Magic by Madeline reveals that something magical is inside the building, but she’s too far away to tell what. The party gets their weapons ready and slowly sneak into the fenced-in field surrounding the plantation home. The house itself is three stories tall, quite large, but now quite dilapidated. The party stops and crouches a few dozen feet away to let Tagin sneak up and scout it out, but when Tagin nears the door, they notice Cai suddenly go stiff, then stand up and walk after Tagin. The hacker, too, is acting funny, as he keeps going and walks up the front steps, onto the porch, and in through the front door. Madeline swears, and those remaining rush after them, reaching the house just as Cai walks inside. Madeline’s light cantrip leads the way, but once inside they discover old oil lamps burning, filling the tall entry hall with dim light. Doors lead off to both sides of the room, but they’re boh closed. No, the focus of attention is the far end of the room. A wide grand staircase leads up to the second floor, covered with molding red carpet. A handful of Goblins sit leering at the party on various steps, and two tall humanoids, also green-skinned, stand at the top of the flight of stairs. Between them, smiling at them from an armchair as though from a throne, sits the puppet master, Dalavar Kineil. He smiles confidently down at Cai and Tagin, both of whom stand like zombies at the base of the staircase. With a thought, Dalavar releases them from his grip, and Tagin immediately bursts into shouting. “Neil? Dammit, I told you to lay off or I was gonna show you not to mess with me.” Dalavar blows air through his lips, flubbering them in mockery. “Oh shut up. You’re lucky that I even let you live, you puny man.” Madeline glances around in confusion. “Wait. This guy’s Legion?” Dalavar sneers at her. “Hardly, miss. I am not he, the son of man, who shall lead the war even after his death. No, the true warriors are here, those who will fight in the apocalypse, but they must choose whether to fight for the Son of Man, or the Dragon.” [/QUOTE]
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