The surviving members of the team didn't get a lot of rest that night. The temperature began dropping rapidly, the cold rain turning into freezing sleet and slush. Karlof built a bivouac from tree-branches (which Pandora turned into a luxurious pavilion) and then set about trying to make a camp-fire. Pandora offered to help, but for some reason he felt that perhaps it might be better to make fire the old-fashioned way, so as not to blow everyone to smithereens again. Somewhat huffy at having her aid spurned, Pandora turned her attentions to Tallis, who was turning blue with the cold, all her clothes having been burned off in the explosion.
At some stage, somebody noticed the regeneration of the wicker man, and everyone immediately decided that Running Away would be a good idea. Karlof led the way, he being the only one with any sort of wilderness skills at all, and they slowly headed off southwards through dense, tangling undergrowth — unaccountably more dense and tangling than it had seemed to be before their encounter with the Unstoppable Wicker Monster of Doom.
It was the Leshy of this particular forest. It had been merely curious up until the fight with the wicker man, but when the party set off a fireball in the middle of its precious woods it became quite tetchy and decided they weren't the sort of people it wanted hanging around.
Tallis, with her goddess-given ability to see the auras of living things, spied a peculiar-looking old man peering at them through the trees; his hair was greenish and straggly like lichen, his skin grey-green and rough like bark, and his tatty old clothes apparently all on backwards. He didn't seem to be immediately threatening, so they concentrated on forcing their way through the pitch-black clinging vegetation by the light of Pandora's fairy lantern, to get as far away as possible before the wicker man regenerated enough to be dangerous again.
After hours of toil, making virtually no headway, they stopped and made camp in a tunnel magicked up by the local fairy. While out collecting firewood, Tallis had a close encounter with a huge brown bear but was saved from being eaten by the amazing mental powers of tiny Basil. Pandora had a talk with the bear, who confessed that he wasn't actually feeling very hungry, but that he'd been told to frighten the two-legs and eat them if necessary. He didn't actually know precisely who it was who told him to do so, but he did feel that obedience was the best thing all round.
Karlof discovered an interesting thing during all the commotion: the undergrowth became strangely less dense and tangled as long as he was heading eastwards, but immediately became almost impassable if he tried to go in any other direction. Surrendering to the inevitable, he led the party eastwards and by the middle of the next morning they found themselves on the edge of the woods, with the weather back to normal.
This is Carnelian, Kent's new character.
Attracted by cries of outrage, they investigated to find an elf up a tree, trying to shoo away a flock of little sharp-toothed reptilians which had chased him up into the branches and were in the process of pulling his pack apart.
Our Heroes chased the critters away, and (in spite of their usual pathological paranoia) immediately took the stranger to their corporate breast. And none too soon, since it was not long before they heard the familiar sound of the wicker man crashing through the forest behind them.
They decided to set another napalm-trap for it, since the last one worked so well. Carnelian created a trench with a spell, which Pandora filled with fairy napalm. Karlof waited with a fire arrow to set light to it (from a safe distance this time), and then they just waited for their nemesis to appear.... which it did shortly afterwards. It lurched into view from the tree-line, and Karlof and Tallis both saw that it had disinterred both Jim and Vallana, whose scorched and broken corpses were stuffed unceremoniously into its belly-cavity. It broke into a lumbering run and leaped over the fire-ditch just as Karlof shot — the fairy napalm ignited, but this time burned relatively sluggishly. It landed, little damaged by its passage through the flames, though a few of its smaller twigs had caught alight. At first the Good Guys thought their number was up, but the tiny flames soon spread and the wicker man became a raging inferno, burning hot enough to scorch people standing nearly twenty metres away.
A fight ensued, the details of which are a little hazy (it was a while ago). Karlof got badly hurt (again) by running into the holocaust to save Tallis, who had been knocked unconscious and was burning to death.
The party was attacked by a manticore, which tried to snatch Tallis and fly away, but was shot down by Carnelian's magical anti-aircraft fire. Carnelian turned it into a tattoo on his back, saving it for later (!) It all seemed to be quite a satisfactory end to the encounter, until it became apparent that the spells firing off into the sky had attracted the attention of the Sword Brethren, encamped not far away up the road. That was less satisfactory, and again the party elected to run away to hide in a muddy, boggy rill. They saw that the Sword Brother in charge of the hunting party appeared to be following their trail by using his sword as some kind of Good Guy detecting dowsing rod. Basil managed to send his horse berserk, and our heroes snuck away in the confusion, back into the forest (because the forest had proven to be so safe before, I suppose).
The next morning, still having had no rest to speak of, they heard the sound of hounds on their trail, and they hot-footed it up into the foothills of the mountains. Pandora executed a cunning hound-tricking plan involving a stream-bed and a rope, and by nightfall they seemed to have lost the pursuit. Utterly exhausted, they threw themselves down in a small clearing and went to sleep, leaving the eternally vigilant (or at least, unsleeping) Basil to keep watch.
Basil, in spite of his vigilence, saw nothing in the blackness of the forest night. It was a little surprising then, when the party awoke in the morning light to find themselve surrounded by close-set trees that they didn't remember having been there the previous evening. Tallis used her aura-vision to find what she assumed to be some sort of tree-man, but in spite of her politeness it didn't say a word to her. It did blink once. The party decided that it might perhaps be best if they didn't make a fire to cook breakfast, and carried on their way southwards.
The tree-man shadowed them for the whole day, and again, when they woke up the following morning they found themselves encircled once more. Unsettling, but not immediately threatening they decided, and now considerably better rested, made as good time as they could southwards, hoping to strike the river which would guide them down to the city of Rath Fonagel.
Pandora flew up over the forest canopy to see what she could see, and what she saw before the weather closed in and the rain made visibility too poor, was the smoke of a settlement a few miles ahead. Tremendously heartened by the news, the party trudged on through the woods until darkness fell. Nightfall found them only a kilometre or so from the pasturelands of a small walled village, so with Tallis carrying the night-blind Karlof under one surprisingly strong arm, they continued until they reached the edge of the trees, from where they could see the lights of the village not terribly far away.
The next morning they terrified a couple of goatherds, and had an encounter with a remarkably unfriendly knight and his men-at-arms, who grudgingly allowed them on to the ferry to cross the river over to RathFonagel.
The ferry ride was not quite as uneventful as perhaps some might have liked.
In the middle of the river, they were attacked by a hideous tentacled river-demon which tore the ferryman in half, and then proceeded to destroy the ferry as well. Not much went right; its terrible demonic aura reduced Karlof to a quivering, puking wreck for a while and eventually it grabbed Tallis and pulled her under the water. Basil managed to grab a piece of flotsam and went floating away downstream. Karlof went diving, trying to find (and rescue) Tallis, but to no avail. Pandora, flying above the water, saw a bright flash down below the surface, and then nothing more. Carnelian, frantically trying ton save his spellbook from becoming sodden, got Pandora (who could barely lift it) to fly it away to the riverbank, while he and Karlof made their way there by dog-paddling.
After drifting for about an hour, Basil, on his impromptu raft, fetched up against one of the pylons of a great wood and stone bridge, where he clung. He set about exerting his mental magic to find everyone, and find them he did — including Tallis, who was back on the other side of the river again.
While Karlof and Carnelian trudged soddenly down the road towards Basil's bridge, Pandora flew off to investigate where Basil thought Tallis to be. She found an ancient, overgrown ruin overlooking the bluffs at a fork in the river. Flying down for a closer look, she noticed that there seemed to be no birds or animals in evidence, but there did seem to be a remarkable number of rather large and unpleasant-looking spiders and centipedes and other such creepy-crawlies.
Oh joy.
| < Back | Forward > |