~~~~~
FreeXenon said:
With great trepidation and not wanting to lose a valuable tool, Arrgha'n finally relents and decides to attach the symbiont.
He gathers everyone around and says "I am going to attach this new symbiont to see what it does. Everyone watch over me very carefully. If you notice anything odd let me know. If I start acting strange, at least stranger than normal, you have my permission to tackle me or to knock me unconscious as needed. If it is used as for control this will be a concern especially when our 'Roth' is about"."
[sblock=Arrgha'n]When you attach the slug to your body, it makes a very uncomfortable kind of wriggle, and there's a brief bit of pain as some of your skin seems to part. With a disgusting squirm, it slips itself into your abdomen, leaving behind a small hole in your flesh that heals slowly. You feel a faint weakness as it sucks nourishment from your body, but it doesn't seem to be
too draining. While you occasionally feel faintly nauseous, and there's a constant bad taste in the back of your throat, nothing more has yet come of the slug-thing. However, when you sit or bend, sometimes you feel a squirming in your gut, as if it is settling itself anew when you change position. Perhaps this is what a woman might feel when she is with child... but this feeling is considerably less wholesome. Whenever the slug moves to one side or the other, both your throwing scarab and breed leach try to switch sides.
OOC: The slug-thing gives you 1d2 Con damage every other day, which is basically going to even out to a permanent -1 Con until you rid yourself of it. However, otherwise it is doing you no other harm. You suspect it has some kind of internal purpose, but you aren't certain how to activate it, if it can be activated at all. Perhaps it is activated by an outside condition.[/sblock]
Along the way I will spend some time doing some hunting and gathering of various things to save for our trip to the wastelands. I will attempt to dry it out and so on so it will keep for a while.
When traveling, you can bring down several deer, and the cooks and servants attached to the caravan can help you dry it for traveling food. It will amount to about five week's rations for a single person.
Arrgha'n nods goodbye to the Master Vorj. While in the city he will spend some time researching any dangers in the area and along our path as well as a possible guide.(Gather Info. +7/+9).
In hunting for dangers, you are warned of trickster fey that sometimes haunt pockets of the woods. Many of their tricks are meant to humiliate and to taunt; those mortals that are willing to play their parts are usually sent on their way with only a brief delay, those that are poor sports might be delayed for days or weeks or even years and have their things stolen to boot, those that fight or offer violence are often killed without mercy.
"
Fey have odd nature. They are tied to one thing or idea, and to force them to act against it is to insult their very cores. Don't ask a dryad to swim or a neriad to run. Don't take wood from an oakman's tree or try to still a fossagrim. Play by their rules, and they can be courteous hosts. Don't play and they will kill, simple as that," one woman will tell you, the violet color of her eyes and green streaks in her hair telling you that she has a hint of that fey blood in her; many do here.
Other warnings are those that any woodsman knows, wild animals or stranger beasts, wild hermits or rogue druids that see anything non-natural as a scourge to be scoured from the face of the world, occasional places where worlds touch and the rules can change at the boundary; any Eberron woodsman knows
of these things at least. There probably would not be bandit troupes here; no caravans to rob, and druids and rangers rarely have the gold and pretties desired by thieves. It is clear, it is the natural world that will be your enemy here, rather than your fellow man.
You are exceedingly careful to keep your aberrant nature to yourself in this place. A place of intense natural beauty and those that worship it, you
know some would find your very presence to be an affront, if not a blasphemy.
As for finding a guide, Yatrax will remind you that she's been this way before. And while there's no one way through the woods, particularly if you have to detour to avoid something, all you have to do it head northwest and you'll hit the foothills of the Shadowcrags Mountains soon enough. Once there, she can help get you through the Labyrinth and into the Demon Marches proper.
