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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1849025" data-attributes="member: 15470">Issue #15: Out of the Swamp - Episode 3 of 5After an hour’s respite, Goldpetal, Chuck, and Novalia go searching for food. Miriel checks everyone else over for injuries. The three wounded slaves look like they are in need of a week of bed rest, but there’s little she can do for them. Stone and Hands of Fire are carrying injuries, Stone’s fresh from the wolf-rats, while Hands of Fire is still not fully healed from the excursion in the warren. Miriel heals Hands of Fire, while Paks heals Stone.Chuck helps the search party find some ducks, which they shoot and bring back. Miriel cooks the ducks into a very tasty stew. Chuck takes some duck feathers.  While the ducks are cooking, Chuck looks for ninequine, but doesn't find any. When the stew is ready, Miriel passes out bowls. We don’t have enough bowls, so she offers food to the slaves first.Just as they’re starting to eat, three black and white monkey-like creatures with beaver tails leap down from the trees overhead. One leaps towards Miriel and the pot of stew, but it clips the edge of the pot, and falls on its head, stunned at her feet. The other two attack slaves. Whipping their beaver tails like clubs, they kill the two slaves, grab their food, and start eating it, hissing at the rest of us in a clear signal to back off.“Swamp-gobblers!” Miriel yells.Novalia takes a hurried shot at the stunned one, but her shot misses, high, and hits a slave, injuring her badly.Goldpetal steps lithely through the panicking slaves, and with a sharp blow cuts one of the eating creatures badly.  Stone grabs the other one in a great bear hug, pinning it in his arms. Miriel picks up the dagger she was cooking with and stabs at the one that attacked her, but it knocks the blade out of her hand. Chuck steps over a slave and shoots at the same one, hitting it. It hardly seems to notice the arrow sticking from its fur.Four of the lizard men all leap to Goldpetal’s aid. Swims With Fishes, Fists of Fury, and Hands of Fire all hit it, but amazingly the thing is still on its feet. “They’re tough,” Goldpetal calls to the rest of us.Paks calls out to the slaves, “Move back! But don’t run.” She steps into the melee, attacking the one battling Miriel, but misses. Novalia shoots it, wounding it, and Chuck’s second arrow hits it as well. Drinks With Orcs runs up and pulls one of the injured slaves out of the way. The gobbler surrounded by lizard men grabs a drumstick, leaps over Goldpetal, and begins running away. The slaves drop everything and scatter in all directions. Dorin hangs back nervously, neither fleeing with the others nor coming to our aid.The one Stone is holding struggles, trying to escape, but it can’t escape the half-orc’s iron grip. He head-butts it twice. The first fails, but the second makes a resounding crack, and opens a cut over the swamp gobbler’s eye.Novalia shoots the gobbler at the stew pot again. Four arrows are bristling from its chest, but it still struggles mightily. Chuck draws both his swords, longsword and shortsword, and attacks. He cuts it deeply with the longsword. Most of the lizard men come over to help, but Swims with Fishes and Red Scale miss it. Swims With Fishes’ wild blow knocks Paks sword out of her hand, and she steps back out of the fray. Fists of Fury clubs it over the back, but somehow it is still on its feet.“Dorin!” calls Telryn. “Help me calm these people down!” The dwarf turns and helps the young mage as he tries to calm the fleeing slaves.  Goldpetal, Hands of Fire, and Drinks with Orcs run down the fleeing swamp gobbler. The short elf misses it, but the two lizard men run it down. Hands of Fire smashes it with his club, while Drinks With Orcs misses it. It doubles back to flee the other direction, and runs right into Goldpetal’s scimitar, which lops off its head with a scything blow.The gobbler near the stew pot is surrounded by enemies. It leaps desperately toward Miriel. Her dagger is pitiful defense, and turns aside on its thick skin. It bites her, ripping flesh from her left shoulder. Novalia has to pick her way around the camp to find a shot through all the lizard-men, but she shoots it again. This arrow misses, ricocheting off the stew pot with a loud ringing noise.  The slaves begin to calm down. Telryn and Dorin are doing a fine job, and Paks, disarmed, steps back to help them. Goldpetal moves over to look at the injured slave, and finds that she isn’t bleeding much. It looks like she will be fine.Stone’s swamp gobbler continues to struggle in his grasp, but now he has his left arm firmly wrapped around it, and both of its arms pinioned. He punches it twice with his right hand, solid blows to the head which leave it dazed and barely holding on to consciousness.The gobbler attacking Miriel has lost track of Chuck, and he attacks it from behind, bringing both swords together in a chopping motion. The twin swords bite deep into its ribs, and it pitches forward, dead.“Thanks,” she says. The other lizard men mill around a bit. Red Scale goes to help Telryn round up the slaves, while Fists of Fury picks up a bowl of stew and resumes eating. Swims With Fishes and Drinks With Orcs alertly patrol the perimeter of the camp, to see if anything worse has been attracted to the noise of the fight.Hands of Fire circles around to where Stone is still grappling with the last gobbler. He doesn’t want to chance clubbing the half-orc, so he wades in with his claws, and rips out the gobbler’s throat.As it goes limp in Stone’s arm, he looks at the lizard man angrily. “I had him!” the half-orc says, sharply.Miriel turns to the former slaves. “Its safe, now! Come back and get your food,” she calls. A light rain continues to fall on us.Novalia examines the unconscious slave, which she heals back to readiness. Paks steps over to Miriel’s side. “Let me look at that,” she says. With her help, Miriel pulls the mangled cloak away from it. “It looks like a vicious wound,” she says.“I’ll take care of it,” Miriel says grimly. She lays a hand on it, and invokes Madriel, and the worst of the wound closes, although the injury is still troubling her.Stone sets about skinning and cleaning the dead gobblers. Chuck says “They taste like chicken,” and sets to helping him.We don’t have time to bury the dead slaves, so we cover them with leaves and branches, eat quickly, and set out again. We march throughout the afternoon. At first, the slaves are feeling much better for the food and rest, but the longer we walk, the darker it gets, and the harder it starts to rain. By mid-afternoon, it feels like twilight, and what earth there is has become a muddy quagmire, further slowing our progress. By late afternoon, it is almost as dark as night, and the rain is hard and cold. Everyone is soaked through, and miserable. Nobody has spoken a word in over an hour, concentrating what willpower they have remaining on the monotony of trudging one foot after the other.Finally, Miriel has had enough. “Its getting too dark to be safe. We should stop and rest.”This is met with silent, weary nods. “Hands of Fire,” she asks, “Is there any shelter nearby?”The lizard-man points ahead and says, “Trees.”A few minutes later, we come to a slight rise, with some small trees overhanging the crest of the little hill. At the top is a small ruin, mostly a foundation, with some crumbling remnant of what once might have been a wall and a fireplace. The ground here is merely muddy, not underwater, and the small trees overhang the ruin, reducing the rain from a hard steady rain to an irregular drip of large droplets.Stone dumps the treasure out of his tarp, which he and Chuck use to make a small canopy. The shelter provided isn’t large enough for everyone to sleep under, but some of us will stay dry and it makes a covered area to cook in.Miriel looks at her shoulder again, and calls Madriel for more healing. The goddess hears her priestess, and the wound is reduced to a pink area of new skin.It takes a long time to light a fire. The wood we can find is damp, and away from the hill everything is covered in water. When Chuck and Goldpetal finally do get a fire going, it is weak and smoky. Miriel cooks the swamp gobblers, which is fairly difficult over the weak flame. However, they turn out quite tasty. This time we eat without interruption.After we finish cooking, we lay out to go to sleep. Stone has a winter blanket, which he loans to some of the slaves, and Paks offers one her bedroll. We set watches of three people each, and curl up for what promises to be a cold, wet night.The wind begins to pick up. The rain comes down harder. Nonetheless, most of the party is asleep, a couple hours before midnight. Chuck is standing watch with two of the lizard-men, Swims With Fishes and Fists of Fury. One of the slaves sits up. He looks around him, with somewhat wild eyes. He gets up and comes over to Chuck. “Do you hear that noise?” he asks.Chuck looks around, but nothing seems out of the ordinary. “I don’t hear anything,” he says.“It’s a kind of tapping noise,” the slave says.Chuck looks at the two lizard men, and puts his hand to his ear, as though listening, and gives them a questioning look. They both shrug and shake their heads. Apparently neither can hear it either.Chuck pulls out his glowing dagger, which provides a better light than the low burning campfire. He points at Fists of Fury, and makes a stern look with his arms crossed, then draws a circle in the air. Then he points at Swims With Fishes, and crooks his finger in a “come here” gesture. Fists of Fury stands guard, as Chuck and Swims With Fishes go to investigate.As they approach the trees, Chuck can hear a tapping noise, as though there were someone knocking on one of the trees. The noise is intermittent, and he can’t tell which tree it is. He looks up at the treetops, but can’t see anything, and neither can Swims With Fishes. Without warning, a great dark shape falls from the tree, towards Chuck. It is a large, leathery black triangle, with tentacles, and it lands on Chuck’s head. One of the tentacles stings him, as though it has poison or sharp edges.Fists of Fury shouts an alarm, trying to wake the rest of us, while Swims With Fishes attacks the creature with claws and teeth. He can’t put his full force into it for fear of injuring Chuck, beneath the thing, and he pulls his blow, which is too weak to penetrate the thick leathery skin. It is trying to suffocate Chuck, but he brings up the glowing dagger into its softer, grey underbelly. The magical blade cuts deeply into it, and seems to have cut a muscle – the thing can’t grip with as much strength, and Chuck manages to struggle and draw a breath of air.Swims With Fishes claws at it again, and this time he rips a great chunk out of it with one claw. The monster goes limp, and the lizard man peels it off of Chuck.The rest of us are just getting to our feet, and Chuck tells them, “Its okay, go back to sleep.” Most of us are happy to comply, curling back up in whatever dry spot we’ve managed to find.Goldpetal comes over to examine it. Chuck says, “I think it’s a darkmantle. I’ve heard of them.”“Yes,” Goldpetal says. “They lurk in the trees and wait for the unwary.” He glances at the Vigilant with an unreadable expression on his face, which Chuck completely misses.“The tough leather might make good armor,” Chuck says, picking up the corpse.“I should stand watch with you,” Goldpetal says, and Swims With Fishes, who was wounded in an earlier battle, goes to rest.Chuck searches around a little bit, and finds a skeleton under the darkmantle’s tree. He pokes at it with his long sword, but the skeleton is inanimate, clearly a previous victim. He searches it, but the hapless human had only a good quality mace, and some rotting leather armor. Chuck takes the mace.As we sleep, Goldpetal searches for more ninequine, which he is able to find.When Miriel and Paks wake up for their watch, in the middle of the night, Miriel takes a look at the angry wound Chuck has from the Darkmantle. “Why didn’t you say something?” she chides him, and works Madriel’s healing. The wound responds well, and Chuck is returned to health. She also heals Swims With Fishes. Finally, most of the group is healthy after our many fights.</blockquote>

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