2020-09-29 – Important Milo-stone – Dwirhian
Oct 6, 2020 21:10:42 GMT
Daisy, Queen Merla, the Sun-Blessed, and 1 more like this
Post by Dwirhian on Oct 6, 2020 21:10:42 GMT
You’ve been talking for a while now, and Dwirhian seems as attentive as she was when you began; but you can feel yourself running out of interesting things to say about what you’ve been up to in the few days since you saw each other last. Sensing the lull in the conversation, she tries a new topic, and the topic is: what is the name of the red-haired dwarf who works with Milo the smith?
She explains that she met him the other day but in all the excitement she forgot to ask his name.
With some further questioning you soon discover what ‘all the excitement’ means. It began, Dwirhian explains, with the brief advertisement: ‘Hammerfall Smithy in need of extra hands for a renovation project’. Actually by the time she turned up there had already been so many people answering the call that there wasn’t any work for her to do, so she found herself just hanging out with some of Milo’s friends and a handful of other job-seekers who arrived at about the same time: Ymaren and Osborin, a tiefling named Nikja, and a human called Veridian. (Dwirhian is fairly sure Veridian is a human. She thinks she’s getting the hang of humans now.) A child called Gigi taught Nikja a board game called ‘hops’ and the group sampled a drink mixed from beer and wine – which Dwirhian recommends you avoid. Osborin played some music and Milo asked where everyone was from.
This nice scene was disturbed when a bugbear cub ran up to them, grabbed Veridian’s spell-book, and took off with it. Dwirhian gives a vivid account of the chaos that followed, with her and Nikja running after the little thief while the Ymaren and Osborin used magic to try to frighten and threaten him. Not liking this approach, and especially not liking the look of fury she’d seen on Veridian’s face before she took off running, Dwirhian tried to protect the child by tempting him to follow her to safety; but he hesitated, and in that moment a bolt of magical force from Veridian struck the child in the back of the head and knocked him, bleeding, to the ground. Dwirhian was with him in a moment, healing his wound, and Nikja arrived moments later to help.
Under questioning by the group (which, you can tell from her narration, Dwirhian thought far too aggressive on the part of Osborin and Veridian) the bugbear boy insisted that he hadn’t wanted to steal the book but had been made to by a ‘pretty lady’ in the southern part of town. He said that his name was Baby, though ‘the pretty lady’ called him Silhouette; he seemed unable to describe, or perhaps unable to remember, where he lived or who his parents were. Osborin urged the group to leave the boy, while Ymaren’s suggested they use him as bait for ‘the pretty lady’, but Dwirhian persuaded them to take him back to the smithy to be looked after while they investigated the ‘lady’. There they found Milo’s friend, the other dwarf, who offered to take Baby to the Thia’s Refuge orphanage near by.
Meanwhile, Dwirhian narrates, she and the others went down into the smithy’s cellar where Milo was finishing packing up some things – he was moving to Vorsthold, he explained, to act as Daring Heights’ ambassador there. He showed them a dead creature that looked like a ‘humanoid’ brain with legs, according to Veridian.
This causes the conversation to take a bit of a detour as Dwirhian asks you about the word ‘humanoid’. She knows the word, of course – it means people, like elves and orcs and dwarves and so on. But she’s interested to know whether the word has anything to do with ‘humans’. Anyway, eventually she resumes the story, saying that Milo believed the brain creature and others like it were coming into his cellar from a hole in the wall. Some magical investigation revealed that the hole was one end of a rather narrow tunnel apparently leading toward the graveyard, so the party made their way (above ground) to find the other end.
In the town graveyard they found a tombstone inscribed with words that were nonsensical but hid a pattern; when Osborin traced the pattern with a candle-flame, the ground opened and the whole group fell in, down a deep shaft and onto a large slab of rock that seemed to be floating on a lake of magma. A strange, long-clawed creature tried to take Veridian’s spell-book but the party fought back – a very tough fight, as Dwirhian describes it, and one that could easily have gone very badly. But they killed it eventually, or re-killed it, as Osborin believed it was undead.
She describes the strange transformation of the surroundings after the destruction of the creature. The magma vanished – had it been an illusion? – and the platform of floating rock turned into a torch-lit underground room containing a sarcophagus and a mirror. The mirror-frame was engraved in what Osborin thought might be old drowic language. Stairs led back up to the surface, and the group made their way back to Milo at the Hammerfall.
That seems to be the whole story, and although Dwirhian tells it to you in her usual lively and compelling manner, it seems rather unfinished and unsatisfactory. What was the underground place? Why did the undead thing want Veridian’s book? Was it the same as ‘the pretty lady’? Why had little brain-monsters burrowed into Milo’s cellar? The two of you talk about these questions for a while, without reaching any conclusions, and then the conversation turns to other things.
You’re just coming to the end of a discussion about the sizes of different towns and cities you’ve been to when Nikja arrives. Dwirhian explains that the two of them are going to Thia’s Refuge to see whether they can find out more about Baby and what happened to him, and perhaps get some clue about his home so they can take him back there.
As they’re about to leave, Dwirhian turns back to you, suddenly remembering – so, do you know that other dwarf’s name?
She explains that she met him the other day but in all the excitement she forgot to ask his name.
With some further questioning you soon discover what ‘all the excitement’ means. It began, Dwirhian explains, with the brief advertisement: ‘Hammerfall Smithy in need of extra hands for a renovation project’. Actually by the time she turned up there had already been so many people answering the call that there wasn’t any work for her to do, so she found herself just hanging out with some of Milo’s friends and a handful of other job-seekers who arrived at about the same time: Ymaren and Osborin, a tiefling named Nikja, and a human called Veridian. (Dwirhian is fairly sure Veridian is a human. She thinks she’s getting the hang of humans now.) A child called Gigi taught Nikja a board game called ‘hops’ and the group sampled a drink mixed from beer and wine – which Dwirhian recommends you avoid. Osborin played some music and Milo asked where everyone was from.
This nice scene was disturbed when a bugbear cub ran up to them, grabbed Veridian’s spell-book, and took off with it. Dwirhian gives a vivid account of the chaos that followed, with her and Nikja running after the little thief while the Ymaren and Osborin used magic to try to frighten and threaten him. Not liking this approach, and especially not liking the look of fury she’d seen on Veridian’s face before she took off running, Dwirhian tried to protect the child by tempting him to follow her to safety; but he hesitated, and in that moment a bolt of magical force from Veridian struck the child in the back of the head and knocked him, bleeding, to the ground. Dwirhian was with him in a moment, healing his wound, and Nikja arrived moments later to help.
Under questioning by the group (which, you can tell from her narration, Dwirhian thought far too aggressive on the part of Osborin and Veridian) the bugbear boy insisted that he hadn’t wanted to steal the book but had been made to by a ‘pretty lady’ in the southern part of town. He said that his name was Baby, though ‘the pretty lady’ called him Silhouette; he seemed unable to describe, or perhaps unable to remember, where he lived or who his parents were. Osborin urged the group to leave the boy, while Ymaren’s suggested they use him as bait for ‘the pretty lady’, but Dwirhian persuaded them to take him back to the smithy to be looked after while they investigated the ‘lady’. There they found Milo’s friend, the other dwarf, who offered to take Baby to the Thia’s Refuge orphanage near by.
Meanwhile, Dwirhian narrates, she and the others went down into the smithy’s cellar where Milo was finishing packing up some things – he was moving to Vorsthold, he explained, to act as Daring Heights’ ambassador there. He showed them a dead creature that looked like a ‘humanoid’ brain with legs, according to Veridian.
This causes the conversation to take a bit of a detour as Dwirhian asks you about the word ‘humanoid’. She knows the word, of course – it means people, like elves and orcs and dwarves and so on. But she’s interested to know whether the word has anything to do with ‘humans’. Anyway, eventually she resumes the story, saying that Milo believed the brain creature and others like it were coming into his cellar from a hole in the wall. Some magical investigation revealed that the hole was one end of a rather narrow tunnel apparently leading toward the graveyard, so the party made their way (above ground) to find the other end.
In the town graveyard they found a tombstone inscribed with words that were nonsensical but hid a pattern; when Osborin traced the pattern with a candle-flame, the ground opened and the whole group fell in, down a deep shaft and onto a large slab of rock that seemed to be floating on a lake of magma. A strange, long-clawed creature tried to take Veridian’s spell-book but the party fought back – a very tough fight, as Dwirhian describes it, and one that could easily have gone very badly. But they killed it eventually, or re-killed it, as Osborin believed it was undead.
She describes the strange transformation of the surroundings after the destruction of the creature. The magma vanished – had it been an illusion? – and the platform of floating rock turned into a torch-lit underground room containing a sarcophagus and a mirror. The mirror-frame was engraved in what Osborin thought might be old drowic language. Stairs led back up to the surface, and the group made their way back to Milo at the Hammerfall.
That seems to be the whole story, and although Dwirhian tells it to you in her usual lively and compelling manner, it seems rather unfinished and unsatisfactory. What was the underground place? Why did the undead thing want Veridian’s book? Was it the same as ‘the pretty lady’? Why had little brain-monsters burrowed into Milo’s cellar? The two of you talk about these questions for a while, without reaching any conclusions, and then the conversation turns to other things.
You’re just coming to the end of a discussion about the sizes of different towns and cities you’ve been to when Nikja arrives. Dwirhian explains that the two of them are going to Thia’s Refuge to see whether they can find out more about Baby and what happened to him, and perhaps get some clue about his home so they can take him back there.
As they’re about to leave, Dwirhian turns back to you, suddenly remembering – so, do you know that other dwarf’s name?
