Eventually, somebody said "Where's Jim?". Basil scanned for his mind and found it, then made telepathic contact with him to find that he was
Jim's mind went blank (not that it was much of a mind to begin with) and Basil deduced that he'd been knocked out, or maybe killed. Shrug.
Karlof cast about for his trail and found it easily; when Jim starts running away from peril, his feet really dig up the ground.
They followed his tracks into the forest for a while, until Pandora noticed a pair of little sprites about the same size as her sitting on a branch above. They were whispering and giggling to each other, and making faces at the surpassing ugliness of Our Heroes. Pandora engaged them in converstaion, trying to find out if they knew anything about where Jim might be. They weren't very forthcoming with useful information, but they did graciously make Barsh a bit more interesting looking by turning him bright green with a huge fluorescent pink mohawk. Pandora asked them to turn him back, and they got the hump at the lack of appreciation for their artistry and took off (after removing the mohawk in a shower of pink hair, and giving Barsh back his normal skin).
Following the trail stil further, they eventually came upon a clearing in the forest. The sharp-eyed among them noticed various suspicious signs of druidry about the place: creepy masks carved into the boles of trees surrounding the grove, and fetishes dangling from branches. In the middle of the grove stood a single menhir. Jim's tracks led straight into the clearing, but could not be found coming out again. Nobody was terribly keen to enter the area themselves, just in case.
Pandora flew up above the forest canopy to see what she could see, and not too far away spied smoke rising — possibly a village. Night was falling by this time, but the party decided that considering the availabilty of see-in-the-dark types (Tallis, Pandora and Vallana) pushing on was a good idea.
They found a track leading in the right general direction from the glade, and decided to follow it. On the way, Karlof spied a scout up a tree and shot an arrow at him (and they wonder why nobody's pleased to see them?). He missed, and the scout slid down from his perch and scampered off through the woods. The party followed along the track, and came to a wide open space in which the see-in-the-darkers could see a settlement surrounded by a ditch, dyke and pallisade.
For some reason (I confess my attention was elsewhere at the time) Barsh decided that it would be a good idea to approach the village of the guy they'd just shot an unprovoked arrow at and see if some sort of negotiation would return Jim to them. Since he couldn't see squat in the dark, Pandora helpfully gave him a pair of brightly glowing antannae sticking up and out from his forehead. Basil sat on his head, and he went out to hail the village.
The antennae made him an excellent target for night-shooting, and the guards took full advantage of the fact by putting one arrow into his guts and another into his head. Fortunately, the head-shot was absorbed by Basil's leg; he was flung off out into the darkness as Barsh collapsed unconscious to the ground. Tallis returned their fire and hit one in the arm, causing him to sing out in sorrow and woe. Woe.
The guards continued shooting at Barsh's unconscious body, but fortunately their excellent dice-rolling didn't carry over into subsequent phases and he wasn't hit again before Pandora agreed to dispel her beautiful glowing antennae. She then flew off to investigate the village, to see if she could find Jim while the others scampered out into no-man's-land to recover their fallen comrades. (They found Barsh alright, but Basil — being tiny and insignificant — could not be found for some time).
Pandora found a curious thing: she'd fly straight towards the wall, but somehow she kept finding herself flying away from it. No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn't approach the village. There appeared to be no firm barrier that she could detect, and the effect was so subtle that it was difficult to say when the compulsion to turn aside appeared. She flew back to the others and reported what she'd discovered.
Basil had eventually been found, got the telephone-pole removed from his leg (he's only wee), and Tallis healed him again. Speculation ran rife about the anti-fairy ward and exactly how fairyish one had to be to be affected by it, and whether all one's fairy-made armour would fall off one if one tried to make a frontal assault on the wall. In the spirit of scientific experimentation, Basil got Pandora to transform something into something else, which he carried across the open fields towards the village.
It took him a long time (he's only wee), and he found that while carrying the fairy-thing, he too was gently repelled. He dropped it and went on into the ditch, through the mud and slime, past the stakes and up the dyke on the other side to peer through the pallisade into the village beyond. He couldn't see much at all without actually going through the pallisade, but sensibly decided not to go alone into the settlement. He got back to the others (eventually — he's only wee) and reported what he'd found out, which was not much.
Pandora found an owl and persuaded it to go in to the village and look for Jim for her. It returned after half an hour or so, having found nothing that it could recognise as a Jim, but then it did admit that all humans looked pretty much alike to it.
Tallis decided to go for a more direct approach, and (standing carefully out of bowshot) started bellowing at the guards to give Jim back. As negotiations progressed, the village druid joined in and a certain amount of religious intolerance began to tinge the conversation. Tallis attempted bribery, while the druid's position was inflexible: he was not in a position to return Jim to them since Jim now belonged to the Horned One, having blasphemed against him, and was going to be sent to him at the earliest opportunity. Negotiations went on for some time, until eventually the druid lost interest and went back to bed, feigning an intention to ask his god if he could do Tallis this one little favour. The guards remained alert, hoping for another opportunity to shoot Barsh.
Somehow (I forget precisely how though I vaguely recall something about Pandora riding her owl around), it was discovered that Jim was nowhere in the village at all but caged in a wicker man in a stone circle further up towards the mountains. Our heroes decided to forget about the village and head straight up to the sacrificial ground to release their irritating and worthless companion. And so off they went.
What with all the to-ing and fro-ing, the night has worn on well into the early hours of the morning, and the party are having to hoof it to get to the stone circle before dawn, which is when they think the burning is most likely to take place. Nobody actually knows that dawn will be the time; they just assume that it's propitious or something. Personally, if I were a god I'd rather get my sacrifices at a civilised hour, say about ten, maybe with a nice cup of coffee and a newspaper. But there you go.
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