[DH] The Most Necrotic Game (2 Apr 2019)
Apr 9, 2019 16:24:22 GMT
Varis/G'Lorth/Sundilar, Daisy, and 4 more like this
Post by Milo Brightmane on Apr 9, 2019 16:24:22 GMT
The four dwarves stood silently in the little top room of the small smithy. Their eyes were focused entirely on the object hung on a stand to one side. Their eyes glistened in the reflected sunlight shining through the window onto bright metal.
“...That’s a real beauty you’ve got there Milo,” said one, reaching out to touch the suit of mail, before stopping short – to touch it almost seemed sacrilege. The armour was clearly a work of art, the metal links so small that even from just a few feet away it looked like shimmering woven fabric; indeed, subtle floral patterns seemed to have been somehow worked in, using just the metal which any dwarf worth his salt would recognise as mithral. “That’s a suit for kings.”
“Tell them where you got it,” said Gety the jeweller, smirking.
Milo rubbed the back of his neck, before teasing at his beard. “I, uh, won it. In a game.”
There was an outburst of disbelief from the other two, Barm and Suri. “A game?!” from Barm, who had held back from touching the mail. “It must have been one Hell of a game. Chess with Ioun?”
“Ha! Not quite. Gety, you heard all this the other day. Will you get us some redbush tea while I tell the tale to the lads?”
As Gety headed downstairs to the kettle over the hearth, Milo sat the others down at a rough little table and began his explanation.
“I was in the Ettin last week, catching up with Big Blue, this firbolg I met last year on a trip out to Stoneleaf, when in flies these two little pictsies, and they’re carrying what looked like just a leaf at first, but it can’t have been because it had writing on it. Me and BB go up to take a look, same as these two other fellas, sneaky looking sort called Flick, and this big bald chap called Ginead, smelled a bit herbal, you know. And the writing on this leaf, right, says ‘You Have My Attention’.”
“You did?” Suri interjects. “And who’s ‘My’?”
“No idea,” said Milo. “And I can only assume the ‘You’ was to whoever read the leaf. Or maybe it meant the whole town. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, stop interrupting. Anyway, after that it says that if we want a job to get a group together and read the words on the other side of the leaf. Well, we already had a group right there, and business had been a bit slow here, so I thought ‘why not’. Well we read the words, and there was this bright light, and all of a sudden we were in this nice looking room, plain but nice, all orange and red.
Then in walks this woman, elf, but I could see there was something a little more going on with her. Introduces herself as ‘Amaya Summersbreath, Seneschal of Material Affairs for the Summer Court of Queen Titania’, and just you try fitting that on a business card. She said we’d been summoned as proxies for the Summer Queen to take part in The Game, a lot of words I’d never heard before, but if I know Gety he’s probably told you all about how I ended up in the Feywild and met the River King. Now Summer Queen and River King sounds an awful lot alike to me, and I said so. The lady talked about the River King as if he’d sent the Lassitude, at least in her opinion, and as if we were the group that had personally stopped it, an idea which I have to say we didn’t exactly dissuade her from, it didn’t really seem the time.
Well she refused to tell us anything about this Game, seeming to think we already knew all about it, but decided we were almost late as it was, did some kind of magic I think and FOOF, there we were in the most depressing landscape I’ve ever seen. Seriously lads, it was just... nothing, I guess. No colour, no life, no air almost, like when you talked it didn’t carry. I reckon if you stayed there long enough you’d go mad.”
“Shadowfell...” breathed Barm.
“That’s what we figured,” Milo continued. The only thing for miles around was this huge mountain, or tower maybe, all made of bones. I saw maybe a half mile off either side around the tower was some other figures, standing about as far from the tower as we were, but I didn’t get a good look because this metal chap, like a box with arms and legs, and wings, and big staring eyes comes up to us, says his name’s I.N.9, or Inine if we preferred, and we finally got some rules to this Game. It was basically Capture the Flag, except the flag here was a dead cat.”
“Dead cat?” Suri scrunched up his nose.
“Well, undead,” Milo added, just as Gety re-entered the room carrying a wooden tray with four steaming mugs on it. “Dead but running around apparently, and we had to catch it. Whoever was holding the cat in two hours wins the Game. And apparently we couldn’t kill anyone on the other teams, the other proxies, which worked just fine for me, I hadn’t gone there to kill anyone. Box boy gave us three questions, but we spent so long thinking what to ask we only had time to ask one! I managed to ask where we could find the cat, which Boxy said was called Phalange, and he gave us its location but only for that exact moment, so it wasn’t worth much in the end. So the Game starts, and we take off towards the tower.
Inside it was like the worst kept cemetery you’ve ever seen – the floor, the walls, were just bones, whole skeletons just hung on the side, bones poking through the ceiling. It was awful, but there was something about that place so you couldn’t even get up the energy to be properly horrified. And it was so easy to get lost, I’ll admit I almost wandered off a couple of times, but thankfully Ginead seemed to have a better head for that kind of place, and kept pulling us back on track. He’s smarter than he looks. And sounds. And smells...
Anyway, we’ve gone up a floor when we heard the sound of a cat above us, so we dash up another flight of stairs and at the top this cat skeleton goes flying past clinging to the top of a helmet, floating through the air! Well BB manages to slow it down with some ice magic, and Ginead makes a grab for the cat but only manages to get the helmet. I tried jumping after the cat, but I’m hardly the most agile, and CRASH down I go onto the floor, when the rest of the suit of armour appears, running around by itself without a head!
I’m the obvious target so while it’s whaling away at my shield Flick manages to take some huge chunks out of it just with some daggers, and Ginead finishes it off. Remind me to ask Flick about those daggers some day, they managed to go through steel like butter.
While all this is going on, the cat is sat there having a grand old time. BB uses some animal speak to convince it we weren’t trouble, and Ginead uses some kind of spell to have an actual chat with the thing and finds out it wants to go to the top of the tower for something called the Shadowtide Gathering. Well, BB seemed to have built up some kind of connection with it so it sat on her shoulder while we walked. Seemed the best way to keep hold of the cat was to take it where it wanted to go.
We were nearly at the exit of those blasted catacombs when this arrow comes flying from behind us and luckily only hits BB’s magical armour she’d put up. This elf bastard comes out of the shadows with a bloody displacer beast pet. Flick focused on fending off the displacer beast while me and Ginead started on the elf, moody git that he was. I reminded him that the rules said we couldn’t kill each other and you know what he said? ‘No, but I can make you wish you were dead!’”
The group gathered round the table burst into laughter. Barm chuckled “Who does he think he is?! Ooo, big scary elf with a bow and a big cat.”
“Well exactly. Didn’t do him much good, I got him with a bolt of radiant energy before Ginead just grabbed and shook him around. Strong fellow that Ginead! Elf boy couldn’t break free and saw it wasn’t going his way, so he had to agree to just piss off. Ginead didn’t even let him have his weapons back!” Milo wiped a tear of laughter away from his eye.
“Well, BB had gone invisible to avoid getting shot again, so we just had to trust she was with us with the cat. We left the tombs and went out into this town, such as it was. It looked like the whole thing had been built as a ruin and then left to get even worse. There were people standing around, but they didn’t seem to have the energy to do anything. They just stood and stared mostly. Through the people comes this more or less normal looking woman, except she’s got this upside down jug attached to her hip, and its constantly pouring out water, non-stop. Who knows what that was for! She was the other proxy, see, except much nicer than the first one, says her name is Brook, nice to meet you etc. She loved our weapons, seemed to think they were a bit quaint, which I have to say I took umbrage at, I put a lot of love and effort into my hammer, but it didn’t seem the time to start down that road. Flick managed to convince her that the cat was still down in the tombs, and she started to go down, but then something funny came over her, and she decided to just sit and wait at the entrance, and she went a bit slow and lazy like the other people we could see in the town. I’m telling you, I thought the Feywild was bad, being so full of rushing emotion and colour, but given the choice I’d rather be there any day. You’d just sit and waste away in the Shadowfell, and not even care.”
Silence settled around the table as each dwarf thought about such a place of horror, with no emotion, no drive to do anything, even exist.
After a moment, Milo shook himself and carried on. “Past the town we could see this two big staircases winding up towards the top of the tower, up into these huge cubes that just floated around. As we’re walking towards them we hear this moaning, not in pain, just like someone making noise for the sake of it, and I recognised that noise from Stoneleaf – the unquiet dead, bodies up and walking around, and we could hear them behind every building and every corner. So we tried going as quietly as possible.”
“And how’d that work out for you eh?” laughed Gety, punching Milo on the arm.
“It’s not my fault I’m a big lad! Besides, anyone could have stepped on that skull, it just happened to be me. Plus Ginead walked into the wall looking at me and fell over, so it wasn’t all my fault...” Milo blushed a little, knowing what a blatant lie he’d just told. “Well of course, that drew all the dead after us, so we just had to run. BB managed to distract a few of them with a bone she cast a Light spell on, but there was just so many.
As we got to the first staircase we could see another figure at the top, really strange looking, like blue with icicles for hair, weird, and we realise it must be a fourth proxy we hadn’t even known about. By this time BB’s invisibility has worn off, and the cat is so spooked by the dead it’s started running ahead of us, so this ice person spots the cat and starts pelting down the stairs towards us. Behind us is this enormous horde of undead, hundreds, so many I can’t count them, but I don’t know if it was just the effect of the place or whether it was Moradin stilling my heart, but I knew I would be fine. I shouted at Ginead to run on ahead up the stairs, and as he passed me I turn around, and the dead were so close I could smell the rot, even in that place with no air, and... and I called on Moradin, properly, for the first time. I’ve channelled his power before, but not like this. I just held out my hammer in my hand, and this light grew from it, in its shape, and it pushed the dead back, all of them near us. They couldn’t come near it, and they got crushed under the rest of the horde trying to get through, who then couldn’t pass the light either. All of a sudden this ball of pink hair and rosy cheeks rolls past me down the stairs and straight into the crush of the dead – apparently Ginead had cut into the icy figure up the stairs and they’d tripped, and transformed while they were falling. I thought maybe we’d lost for killing a proxy, but I guess the rules were literal, as we technically hadn’t killed them. Either that or they hadn’t died, but no one could have survived that.
Anyway, once we were at the top of the stairs and in the middle of the floating cubes you could see it was something like an astrolabe, telling time, but who knows on what clock or calendar. And right in the middle was hundreds, I mean hundreds, of other skeleton cats. BB managed to grab Phalange before it jumped in, else we’d never had found it again, just as the Game ended. So I suppose we won. This scoreboard appeared though it didn’t make any sense, the points were measured in fruits, and colours, and made up words, and an actual waterfall that splashed out, so who knows who was winning.
And then we were back in the room we started in. BB still had Phalange last I saw, so I guess they had some kind of bond. And Amaya Summersbreath presented us with some gifts for winning, bizarre things like the memories of a bard from the Feywild, a bow that could make people fall in love, a 'driftglobe'," at which Milo shurgged his shoulders. "I don't know. And, you might have guessed, this suit of mithral chainmail.”
The dwarves turned to look at the mail again. “I won’t lie, I don’t make a habit of begging, but I begged for that. Ginead looked interested but I think I embarrassed him into letting me have it. I’ve never seen anything like it, the craftsmanship... Ginead took the bardic memories, which I think suits him much better anyway.”
“I don’t blame you Milo,” said Barm, “I’d have begged too. I’d beg for it now if I thought it would work.”
“It’s a good job you know better then. The only downside of the whole adventure was that even though the Game had only lasted two hours, when Amaya sent us back, we reappeared in the Ettin, and two days had gone! I hadn’t had a chance to ask about offering protection at that grand ball all the bigwigs were going to. It was over by the time I got back.
Oh well. I doubt I missed much. Nothing ever happens at those things anyway.”
“...That’s a real beauty you’ve got there Milo,” said one, reaching out to touch the suit of mail, before stopping short – to touch it almost seemed sacrilege. The armour was clearly a work of art, the metal links so small that even from just a few feet away it looked like shimmering woven fabric; indeed, subtle floral patterns seemed to have been somehow worked in, using just the metal which any dwarf worth his salt would recognise as mithral. “That’s a suit for kings.”
“Tell them where you got it,” said Gety the jeweller, smirking.
Milo rubbed the back of his neck, before teasing at his beard. “I, uh, won it. In a game.”
There was an outburst of disbelief from the other two, Barm and Suri. “A game?!” from Barm, who had held back from touching the mail. “It must have been one Hell of a game. Chess with Ioun?”
“Ha! Not quite. Gety, you heard all this the other day. Will you get us some redbush tea while I tell the tale to the lads?”
As Gety headed downstairs to the kettle over the hearth, Milo sat the others down at a rough little table and began his explanation.
“I was in the Ettin last week, catching up with Big Blue, this firbolg I met last year on a trip out to Stoneleaf, when in flies these two little pictsies, and they’re carrying what looked like just a leaf at first, but it can’t have been because it had writing on it. Me and BB go up to take a look, same as these two other fellas, sneaky looking sort called Flick, and this big bald chap called Ginead, smelled a bit herbal, you know. And the writing on this leaf, right, says ‘You Have My Attention’.”
“You did?” Suri interjects. “And who’s ‘My’?”
“No idea,” said Milo. “And I can only assume the ‘You’ was to whoever read the leaf. Or maybe it meant the whole town. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, stop interrupting. Anyway, after that it says that if we want a job to get a group together and read the words on the other side of the leaf. Well, we already had a group right there, and business had been a bit slow here, so I thought ‘why not’. Well we read the words, and there was this bright light, and all of a sudden we were in this nice looking room, plain but nice, all orange and red.
Then in walks this woman, elf, but I could see there was something a little more going on with her. Introduces herself as ‘Amaya Summersbreath, Seneschal of Material Affairs for the Summer Court of Queen Titania’, and just you try fitting that on a business card. She said we’d been summoned as proxies for the Summer Queen to take part in The Game, a lot of words I’d never heard before, but if I know Gety he’s probably told you all about how I ended up in the Feywild and met the River King. Now Summer Queen and River King sounds an awful lot alike to me, and I said so. The lady talked about the River King as if he’d sent the Lassitude, at least in her opinion, and as if we were the group that had personally stopped it, an idea which I have to say we didn’t exactly dissuade her from, it didn’t really seem the time.
Well she refused to tell us anything about this Game, seeming to think we already knew all about it, but decided we were almost late as it was, did some kind of magic I think and FOOF, there we were in the most depressing landscape I’ve ever seen. Seriously lads, it was just... nothing, I guess. No colour, no life, no air almost, like when you talked it didn’t carry. I reckon if you stayed there long enough you’d go mad.”
“Shadowfell...” breathed Barm.
“That’s what we figured,” Milo continued. The only thing for miles around was this huge mountain, or tower maybe, all made of bones. I saw maybe a half mile off either side around the tower was some other figures, standing about as far from the tower as we were, but I didn’t get a good look because this metal chap, like a box with arms and legs, and wings, and big staring eyes comes up to us, says his name’s I.N.9, or Inine if we preferred, and we finally got some rules to this Game. It was basically Capture the Flag, except the flag here was a dead cat.”
“Dead cat?” Suri scrunched up his nose.
“Well, undead,” Milo added, just as Gety re-entered the room carrying a wooden tray with four steaming mugs on it. “Dead but running around apparently, and we had to catch it. Whoever was holding the cat in two hours wins the Game. And apparently we couldn’t kill anyone on the other teams, the other proxies, which worked just fine for me, I hadn’t gone there to kill anyone. Box boy gave us three questions, but we spent so long thinking what to ask we only had time to ask one! I managed to ask where we could find the cat, which Boxy said was called Phalange, and he gave us its location but only for that exact moment, so it wasn’t worth much in the end. So the Game starts, and we take off towards the tower.
Inside it was like the worst kept cemetery you’ve ever seen – the floor, the walls, were just bones, whole skeletons just hung on the side, bones poking through the ceiling. It was awful, but there was something about that place so you couldn’t even get up the energy to be properly horrified. And it was so easy to get lost, I’ll admit I almost wandered off a couple of times, but thankfully Ginead seemed to have a better head for that kind of place, and kept pulling us back on track. He’s smarter than he looks. And sounds. And smells...
Anyway, we’ve gone up a floor when we heard the sound of a cat above us, so we dash up another flight of stairs and at the top this cat skeleton goes flying past clinging to the top of a helmet, floating through the air! Well BB manages to slow it down with some ice magic, and Ginead makes a grab for the cat but only manages to get the helmet. I tried jumping after the cat, but I’m hardly the most agile, and CRASH down I go onto the floor, when the rest of the suit of armour appears, running around by itself without a head!
I’m the obvious target so while it’s whaling away at my shield Flick manages to take some huge chunks out of it just with some daggers, and Ginead finishes it off. Remind me to ask Flick about those daggers some day, they managed to go through steel like butter.
While all this is going on, the cat is sat there having a grand old time. BB uses some animal speak to convince it we weren’t trouble, and Ginead uses some kind of spell to have an actual chat with the thing and finds out it wants to go to the top of the tower for something called the Shadowtide Gathering. Well, BB seemed to have built up some kind of connection with it so it sat on her shoulder while we walked. Seemed the best way to keep hold of the cat was to take it where it wanted to go.
We were nearly at the exit of those blasted catacombs when this arrow comes flying from behind us and luckily only hits BB’s magical armour she’d put up. This elf bastard comes out of the shadows with a bloody displacer beast pet. Flick focused on fending off the displacer beast while me and Ginead started on the elf, moody git that he was. I reminded him that the rules said we couldn’t kill each other and you know what he said? ‘No, but I can make you wish you were dead!’”
The group gathered round the table burst into laughter. Barm chuckled “Who does he think he is?! Ooo, big scary elf with a bow and a big cat.”
“Well exactly. Didn’t do him much good, I got him with a bolt of radiant energy before Ginead just grabbed and shook him around. Strong fellow that Ginead! Elf boy couldn’t break free and saw it wasn’t going his way, so he had to agree to just piss off. Ginead didn’t even let him have his weapons back!” Milo wiped a tear of laughter away from his eye.
“Well, BB had gone invisible to avoid getting shot again, so we just had to trust she was with us with the cat. We left the tombs and went out into this town, such as it was. It looked like the whole thing had been built as a ruin and then left to get even worse. There were people standing around, but they didn’t seem to have the energy to do anything. They just stood and stared mostly. Through the people comes this more or less normal looking woman, except she’s got this upside down jug attached to her hip, and its constantly pouring out water, non-stop. Who knows what that was for! She was the other proxy, see, except much nicer than the first one, says her name is Brook, nice to meet you etc. She loved our weapons, seemed to think they were a bit quaint, which I have to say I took umbrage at, I put a lot of love and effort into my hammer, but it didn’t seem the time to start down that road. Flick managed to convince her that the cat was still down in the tombs, and she started to go down, but then something funny came over her, and she decided to just sit and wait at the entrance, and she went a bit slow and lazy like the other people we could see in the town. I’m telling you, I thought the Feywild was bad, being so full of rushing emotion and colour, but given the choice I’d rather be there any day. You’d just sit and waste away in the Shadowfell, and not even care.”
Silence settled around the table as each dwarf thought about such a place of horror, with no emotion, no drive to do anything, even exist.
After a moment, Milo shook himself and carried on. “Past the town we could see this two big staircases winding up towards the top of the tower, up into these huge cubes that just floated around. As we’re walking towards them we hear this moaning, not in pain, just like someone making noise for the sake of it, and I recognised that noise from Stoneleaf – the unquiet dead, bodies up and walking around, and we could hear them behind every building and every corner. So we tried going as quietly as possible.”
“And how’d that work out for you eh?” laughed Gety, punching Milo on the arm.
“It’s not my fault I’m a big lad! Besides, anyone could have stepped on that skull, it just happened to be me. Plus Ginead walked into the wall looking at me and fell over, so it wasn’t all my fault...” Milo blushed a little, knowing what a blatant lie he’d just told. “Well of course, that drew all the dead after us, so we just had to run. BB managed to distract a few of them with a bone she cast a Light spell on, but there was just so many.
As we got to the first staircase we could see another figure at the top, really strange looking, like blue with icicles for hair, weird, and we realise it must be a fourth proxy we hadn’t even known about. By this time BB’s invisibility has worn off, and the cat is so spooked by the dead it’s started running ahead of us, so this ice person spots the cat and starts pelting down the stairs towards us. Behind us is this enormous horde of undead, hundreds, so many I can’t count them, but I don’t know if it was just the effect of the place or whether it was Moradin stilling my heart, but I knew I would be fine. I shouted at Ginead to run on ahead up the stairs, and as he passed me I turn around, and the dead were so close I could smell the rot, even in that place with no air, and... and I called on Moradin, properly, for the first time. I’ve channelled his power before, but not like this. I just held out my hammer in my hand, and this light grew from it, in its shape, and it pushed the dead back, all of them near us. They couldn’t come near it, and they got crushed under the rest of the horde trying to get through, who then couldn’t pass the light either. All of a sudden this ball of pink hair and rosy cheeks rolls past me down the stairs and straight into the crush of the dead – apparently Ginead had cut into the icy figure up the stairs and they’d tripped, and transformed while they were falling. I thought maybe we’d lost for killing a proxy, but I guess the rules were literal, as we technically hadn’t killed them. Either that or they hadn’t died, but no one could have survived that.
Anyway, once we were at the top of the stairs and in the middle of the floating cubes you could see it was something like an astrolabe, telling time, but who knows on what clock or calendar. And right in the middle was hundreds, I mean hundreds, of other skeleton cats. BB managed to grab Phalange before it jumped in, else we’d never had found it again, just as the Game ended. So I suppose we won. This scoreboard appeared though it didn’t make any sense, the points were measured in fruits, and colours, and made up words, and an actual waterfall that splashed out, so who knows who was winning.
And then we were back in the room we started in. BB still had Phalange last I saw, so I guess they had some kind of bond. And Amaya Summersbreath presented us with some gifts for winning, bizarre things like the memories of a bard from the Feywild, a bow that could make people fall in love, a 'driftglobe'," at which Milo shurgged his shoulders. "I don't know. And, you might have guessed, this suit of mithral chainmail.”
The dwarves turned to look at the mail again. “I won’t lie, I don’t make a habit of begging, but I begged for that. Ginead looked interested but I think I embarrassed him into letting me have it. I’ve never seen anything like it, the craftsmanship... Ginead took the bardic memories, which I think suits him much better anyway.”
“I don’t blame you Milo,” said Barm, “I’d have begged too. I’d beg for it now if I thought it would work.”
“It’s a good job you know better then. The only downside of the whole adventure was that even though the Game had only lasted two hours, when Amaya sent us back, we reappeared in the Ettin, and two days had gone! I hadn’t had a chance to ask about offering protection at that grand ball all the bigwigs were going to. It was over by the time I got back.
Oh well. I doubt I missed much. Nothing ever happens at those things anyway.”
