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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1402476" data-attributes="member: 15470">Issue #11: The Lizard Men and the Duck - Episode 1 of 515th of December, 2002Issue #11 The Lizard Men and the DuckWe are deep in the Mourning Marsh, seeking the home of the tribe of ratmen who attacked Kratys Freehold. After two days of slogging through the swamp, we camped on the only hummock of dry land we could find.Overnight, a shambling mound attacked us, leaving Miriel unconscious and Stone apparently dead. We were barely able to beat it off with Chuck and Telryn using burning logs from our campfire to drive it back into the swamp. Paks exhausted herself with the effort of using Madriel’s Tear, an artifact of the goddess which Miriel is carrying, to bring Stone back to life, and stumbled to her bedroll in a daze afterwards. Chuck and Telryn were both sick with Swamp Fever, and only Goldpetal, recently recovered from the disease, was awake and coherent after the shambling mound left.Goldpetal stood watch through the night, and decided that we needed to sleep until we woke of our own accord, which turned out to be well into the morning, several hours after dawn came to the swamp.  He gathered some more hag’s tongue, which helps to cure the Swamp Fever, and collected as much water as he could, using our waterskins and purifying it with a spell.It is mid-morning on the 3rd Vanday of Charder. Goldpetal stands watch, silently. He is an elf, slight of build and less than five feet tall, with the fine aquiline features and pointed ears associated with his race. His hair is long and dark, flowing down over a muddy, tattered hand-sewn cloak, which he keeps wrapped about him. He watches intently around the campsite, noticing the small lizards, frogs, and insects which abound in the swamp. Miriel wakes up first. She wears a cloak, once beautifully embroidered, which is now dirtied almost beyond recognition. Her hair is red, and she wears a holy symbol of Madriel about her neck. After greeting Goldpetal, she checks over the other wounded members of the party, waking them up as she goes to them in turn.Chuck, the Vigilant, has recovered from the Swamp Fever, since we are now familiar with the symptoms and caught them fairly early.  Telryn is likewise recovered from the disease. The youthful mage is still suffering from the weakness he’s had since the stirges attacked, but Miriel remains unable to help him with that.  Paks wakes, refreshed and otherwise uninjured. Her wounds from the fight with the mauler and shaman are now merely scars, thanks to Miriel’s divine healing. She and Miriel are the only ones who have not become ill during our sojourn in the swamp. She begins to don chain mail as the others wake up.  Stone, however, is another story. The half-orc is still unconscious, and looks dangerously weak. Miriel heals him as best as she can, bringing him back to consciousness, but he still looks as though he is teetering on the brink. He isn’t sick, that she can tell, and his visible wounds have healed, so she concludes that something else must be wrong. “What’s happened to him?” she asks the rest of us.Telryn tells her the story of how he was dead, and Paks used Madriel’s Tear to bring him back to life. He describes how a great golden light, as of the sun, filled the clearing, and Stone, who had no heartbeat, drew his first breath.Both Stone and Miriel look at Paks with respect and awe, but she shrugs and says, “I remember it only vaguely, as though it were a dream.”Miriel looks back to Stone. “You should rest, then. It looks as though the goddess has borrowed your own, inner strength in working whatever healing you have had, and even now uses it to power healing beyond what I could provide you.”He nods weakly, and lays back down. Within moments, he is asleep.Miriel is also injured after the shambling mound threw her to the ground, and she heals herself. We rest a little longer, exhausted by our travails to this point.It is already shaping up to be another hot, humid day. It still hasn’t rained. “We should press on,” Goldpetal says, when everyone else is again awake. “We should not stay here much longer.” The rest of us nod, and grimly begin to pack our gear to continue.“I hate the swamp,” Telryn says. It has become his mantra, and is said with passion. He is a tall mage, with brown hair, and his robes are dirtied like the rest of our ruined clothing.Goldpetal tells us to drink as much water as we can, and then to fill our waterskins from the swamp. When we have done this, Goldpetal again purifies our waterskins. Just as we are ready to go, we hear the sound of a melee to the southeast. There’s a thick fog coming off the swamp, and we can’t see very far, so Telryn sends Chester, his white owl, to see what is making the noise. Paks asks Chuck to check the ground in the direction of the fight to see if he can find a safe path, which he does. Chuck also listens to see if he can tell who’s fighting, but with the swamp and the fog, he can’t tell much, other than that he hears metal on metal. Chuck and Paks draw their bows, and head off toward the fight, each with an arrow knocked. Telryn quickly goes after them. Goldpetal and Miriel bring up the rear with Stone, who has yet regained only a remnant of his former strength. After about two hundred yards, Chuck and Paks come upon an amazing sight. They see a small, shallow lake of water, with all sorts of worn rocks sticking up, appearing to be the remains of a ruined building, most of which is under the water, with nothing higher than our knees. The lake is full of obese brown ratmen, nothing like those we’ve seen before. They’re fighting creatures who look like walking bipedal lizards. There are a dozen ratmen fighting six lizard men, one of which looks larger and more powerful than the others. The ratmen are wearing metal armor, which is also something we haven’t seen before. Even as we come onto the scene, one lizard man falls with a scimitar in the gut. We notice a female human fighting on the side of the lizards, and if there were any doubt about which side to join, her presence makes up our minds. Chuck, Paks, and Goldpetal each shoot at the closest rat men. Chuck misses, but Paks hits one, wounding it. Goldpetal’s arrow misses his intended target, but strikes a different rat man. Telryn steps up behind Paks to cast mage armor on her. Stone loads his crossbow, but does not join the fight; instead, he keeps watch to make sure nothing sneaks up behind us.Goldpetal and Chuck continue to fire, and Chuck wounds his target. Telryn adds a crossbow bolt to the withering hail of fire, but Paks draws her longsword. The largest lizard kills his opponent, and Goldpetal’s two hawks swoop down to attack one of the injured ratmen from behind. One of them hits hard, and the force of the collision breaks the ratman’s neck, killing it! The surviving ratmen fight on with desperation; one of them knocks a lizard unconscious, and he falls into the water. Paks charges into the water towards the fight with her longsword drawn. She reaches the fight, and hits a ratman hard from behind, killing it. The strange woman grabs one of our arrows and stabs the nearest rat man with it. Miriel runs into the water to the aid of the fallen lizard, with her short spear out. She charges the ratman between her and the fallen lizard. She buries her spear into its chest, and is astonished to see it fall dead. Goldpetal, Telryn, and Chuck continue firing arrows at the eight surviving ratmen, but all three of them miss.The lizard men and ratmen continue exchanging blows. The lizard men wound one, but the ratmen are still numerous, and knock down another lizard man. The hawks dive on another wounded ratman, and one of them scratches it further. The unknown woman stabs again with her arrow, but the improvised weapon does her little good.One of the ratmen attacks Paks, but Paks blocks its blow with her shield, and counters with her longsword. Its metal armor turns her blow aside. Miriel casts a new spell, sound burst. A loud noise, as of an explosion, bursts over the battlefield, and one ratman collapses, dead, with blood streaming from its ears. Only seven ratmen remain, and two of them are stunned from Miriel’s spell.Chuck shoots twice and misses both times. On the second shot, he fumbles, and his bow makes a horrible cracking sound. It is impossible to control, and flies out of his hands to land and sink into the water, out of sight. Goldpetal and Telryn continue to fire, but to no avail. The hawks attack another ratman. One claws at its eyes, but as it brings up its arms to protect its face, the other hawk flies straight into its fist. The second hawk is stunned and flutters weakly to the ground.The biggest lizard man kills the ratman who Paks was fighting. For a brief moment, he and Paks face each other across the body. Paks asks him, in the common tongue, “Do you need help?” but he just looks at her strangely. After that brief exchange, they turn as one to face the surviving ratmen.The ratmen continue to battle, but now they are starting to give ground. Odds which had been firmly in their favor now have turned against them, and they try to fall back towards each other, circling in defense of each other. They fight like cornered rats, seeing that there is no escape.Paks steps further into the battle and swings at one of the injured rat men, but it parries her blow. That leaves it open for the leader of the lizard men, who crushes in its head with his great club. Miriel steps over to one of the stunned ratmen and attacks it with her short spear, running it through, and Telryn wounds one of the others with the next bolt from his crossbow. Goldpetal, worried about hitting his friends, fires low into the water, but his hawk attacks another ratman. Talons tear at its throat, and it falls backwards into the water, dead. Only three ratmen remain. The strange woman steps to one of the downed lizard men, holding his head out of the water, and staunching the bleeding with a makeshift bandage. Goldpetal and Telryn let loose one more volley, but then the elf puts out his hand and shakes his head, telling the young mage not to bother reloading.One of the surviving ratmen attacks Miriel. She steps into its blow, allowing it to hit her, and skewers it on her spear. It dies, and she has to step on its chest to pull her spear back out. Chuck charges into the battle with his two swords, and attacks one of the remaining ratmen, but his longsword turns aside on the enemy’s armor. The last two ratmen give no quarter, and one of them manages to wound one of the lizard men, but then Paks reaches it, and a single blow from her sword catches it through the ribs, and it falls at her feet. With only one rat man remaining, we have the fight clearly in hand, and Miriel turns her attention to one of the fallen lizard men. The stranger is holding its head out of the water so that it won’t drown, and Miriel prays for Madriel’s healing. The goddess grants her request, and the lizard man’s wounds close visibly beneath her touch. The stranger looks up at her, and says, “Thank you.”The lizard men attack the remaining rat man and beat it down with their clubs. As the fight ends, the lizard men do not put their clubs away. They look at us suspiciously. The leader says something in a strange hissing language. To most of the group, the hissing sounds threatening, but Paks sheathes her sword, and gestures at him with her palms open.Telryn yells to Paks, “He was thanking us!”He moves into the water and greets the lizard man in the same sibilant tongue. Miriel goes over to heal the other downed lizard man, and Telryn gestures at her, as though explaining that she’s a healer. The lizard men seem very impressed with her, and the attitude of the group seems to change. The leader gives a quick command, and the lizard men put away their clubs.The leader gives a short speech, and Telryn is the only one who understands what the lizard man is saying. He translates for the rest of us. “He says, ‘Thank you for saving my people. We’ve had a rough time lately. My name is Hands of Fire. I can see that you folk are in very bad shape and possibly lost here in the swamp. Please, we would be honored if you would come to our home and stay with us.’ ” Without waiting for the rest of us to respond, Telryn immediately accepts Hands of Fire’s offer. He tries to explain to the lizard man how he hates the swamp. Hands of Fire looks confused, but offers a gentle response.Telryn turns to us, and says, “He says, diplomatically, ‘One has heard that drylanders do not always fare so well in this lovely swamp of ours.’ ” Telryn asks the leader another question, about the human traveling with them. “They saved her a few hours previously, just before the rat men started hunting them. The rat men have been chasing them for the last several hours.”Paks requests, “Ask if the ratmen were hunting her or them.”“The Gorgers will eat anything they can get,” Hands of Fire answers. Telryn explains that we are hunting the disease tribe, and Hands of Fire says, “We do not like them either. Please, come to our home. We can talk there.”Telryn asks them to pick a dry path to their home, which they say they understand. Meanwhile, Chuck searches the bodies, along with the other lizard men. The lizard men throw a bunch of stuff away; most ratman gear is poorly made and not worth taking. Chuck notices an oddity – the obese ratmen don't have any food on them at all. Chuck picks up his bow and finds that it’s snapped in half, and completely useless. He rescues the bowstring, but leaves the bow where it fell.We head off with the lizard men towards their home. They make a column, with Hands of Fire leading, some of the lizard men in front, the others bringing up the rear, and our little band in the center with the strange woman. As we walk, Telryn asks the woman, “So who are you? Tell us about yourself.”“I’m Novalia,” she says. “I haven’t been able to speak with them. Can you ask them about yesterday?”Paks asks Telryn, “So how is it you can talk to them?”He explains, “They’re speaking a form of Draconic, which is the language of magic. Their pronunciation is a little different from what I’ve been taught, and they talk so fast it can be hard to understand, but I’m able to follow most of it.”Telryn overhears them whispering, talking about the priest of healing, the follower of the winged healer god. He catches up to Miriel and tells her, “You know, they seem to be in awe of you.”She looks slightly uncomfortable, and attributes it all to Madriel.</blockquote>

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