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Jeff: And now it's time for "DnD Adventure Time", starring yours tr--
Ember: Starring yours truly, Ember, the resident Wizard and brains of the operation!
Jeff: ... The rude brains. You're the character, I'm the player. I have a better grasp of what happened in the game than you, since YOU didn't roll to see everything I was told outside the game.
Ember blows a raspberry.
Ember: If it weren't for me, you wouldn't have a sidequest to recap. So pipe down and let me tell the story. You can fill in the blanks.
Jeff: ... Jesus, getting told off by my own character. Fine.
Ember: Yay! So, taking a break from the normal quest, our resident hostess and employer decides to send us to a castle atop a giant mountain in order to kill a Duchess. After holding up the merchant caravans a while and getting our paperwork filled out, we spent a while trying to get a feel for the situation. Kids were scarce, Goliaths were being dealt with in a diplomatic way by the Duchess herself, and crime was fairly rampant. Why, one little punk even tried to steal my--
Jeff: You tried to get info out of the merchants you blocked, you attracted customers to the last remaining blacksmith stall after learning Goliaths' woodwork took over the economy, and then some little street urchin tried to steal the party's...
Ember glares at Jeff and grumbles.
Ember: He tried to steal the party's contract, the slip from our employer lady who hired us to kill the Duchess to start with. He failed, I burned the note and laughed at him, and a guard tried to chase us down. But when he yelled at us to stop, he looked at the sky and went kinda funny, then fell. Well, even if I was being chased down, I had to check on him.
Jeff: You're welcome for that Insight check.
Ember: ANYWAY, he was dead. It took all I had to keep the crowd from going into a panic, but Cenward and I still got arrested and taken way underground. Shackled to chairs, interrogated, and it was suggested that we were mercenaries but we didn't get totally pinned for it. Which was half true? I mean, we didn't know if the Duchess actually deserved death or not, so we didn't know if we were going to actually fill the contract. We got unlocked, but tossed in a cell. I just happened to see the guards' hands were backwards, and shouted that they were Rakshasa. I dunno if it reached the Captain's ears, though, or if he believed me.
Jeff: Actually, I meant to dig into that, but we got caught up actually playing the game.
Ember: You mean having the adventure!
Jeff: Sure, from your point of view. Anyway, continue.
Ember: Of course! Anyway, dark cell, hands bound, and time not on our side. I could still use magic, so lighting the cell wasn't heard. It was pretty much a shoddy cell, limestone. Anyone could break in or out with enough time. Picking the shackles' locks failed, burning the stone away didn't work, and needless to say trying to wash the brittle wall away with a less than family friendly method of spraying liquid failed spectacularly. The smell will be forever burned into my mind.
Jeff: And it shows your age that you'd focus so much on that.
Ember: You're the one controlling me!
Jeff: It's called being in character! You know, like wanting to use your tools to pick the lock instead of summoning the Fire Warrior?
Ember growls and twitches her tail in anger, a finger tracing her tome menacingly.
Jeff glances at the tome and closes his mouth.
Ember: Thank you. An axe of fire broke our bonds, shattered the wall, and gave us free passage into a dark hallway that seemed to be an old Dwarven castle of some make. With the wall repaired behind us, we had naught to do but proceed to an intersection. I felt a little magic to the west, which brought us to a marketplace inhabited by one single starved goblin. After some negotiation, we traded a few--
Jeff: Details, Ember.
Ember: Ugh! The goblin was hired by a "nice guy" like me but not like Cenward--a lady--to kill little people, about its height. We assumed Dwarves at the time. And we traded a few days of trail rations for an amulet from it, a nice one that lets us imitate other species for origin and language. After that, we went north into a more manmade room, burning down the door in hopes of scaring what may lie beyond it. Unfortunately, it answered almost all our questions at once when we entered. Children's corpses and skeletons were left around, having signs of being tortured... with one having died mere minutes before we entered. The "little people" turned out to be human kids. The door leading further upward was trapped, and we triggered it from a safe distance. Huge battering ram flew in, set in place, and a couple guards came running down. Instead of Rakshasa, though, it was a couple Goliath teens. Two of them versus three of us still proved to be a challenge. We won it out, though, and a stroke of luck hit us. The Duchess herself came down. Dod shifted shapes into one of the Goliaths and fooled her into exposing her back.
Jeff starts to open his mouth.
Ember: During this time, we learned that she was responsible for the abduction of the children. It was only after knocking her out and placing her among their corpses that she admitted she was also responsible for their torture and death. She was a sociopath, simply enjoying causing pain to those who were weakest. The little kids of the town. Nobody was able to stomach her behaviors, nor her thinking giving us the alleged "keys to the kingdom" would save her. Fun fact, she actually did give us some keys before Dod, fed up with her, put a blade to her throat and took her head as a trophy for our employer.
Jeff: How delightfully morbid.
Ember: I know, right? Anyway, we had to get out. Thankfully, we still had the Duchess' clothes, symbols, keys, and a shapeshifter to properly fill them all. So the trip up was easy enough, for the first hour or so. We managed to fool the guards for a while, loot a treasure chest, find a potential path out of the castle (after realizing we were played for fools and used the keys to open a door to the throne room--a lavatory). The guards behind us, Rakshasa, seemed suspicious of us and we heard a little Abyssal speech before they came with swords drawn. The little cooks in the kitchen were in disbelief but managed to keep the guards busy just long enough for us to discover the garbage chute. Headfirst I went, followed by my comrades.
Jeff: Thankfully the garbage was soft enough to not cause any fall damage. Four floors is quite a ways.
Ember: And the furnace was far enough away that we wouldn't get burned. Dod pulled an answer from the workers of how to escape quickly, and we made our way up and out into the night. There were four guards outside near a small pool of water, and were it not for Dod's way with words, we might have had a fight on our hands. However, with the door locked and guards choosing to side with us, we had a chance to escape. First was to try to go down the cliff, but at nearly half a mile long, there was no way. So we tried to maneuver down the outside of the castle. A stroke of luck came when I recalled a path down the side of the cliff, which we had to take slowly but surely. A stroke of slightly worse luck came when a Rakshasa crab-walked its way along the cliff side, causing a little debris to hit Cenward's armor.
Jeff: Remind me to give that guy some kind of robe to dull out his reflective nature and loud movement.
Ember: Will do. Anyway. He sort of noticed us, but by conjuring a sound of metal behind him, we got him to look away far enough to escape. First on foot, then by disc when we felt we could afford it. Thankfully, we could. It was a near six hour trip from the mountaintop to our campsite, with the only possible things of mention being the saltwater of the river killing the trees (which is odd, since the water would flow from the mainland out to the ocean), and a shapeshifter of some kind trying to lure us into the water. Get this, some chick starting off as a whirlpool suddenly turns into a beautiful young lady struggling to not drown. As if. So I turned her feet to stone and we went on our merry way, finding a little rock shelter to break camp under.
Jeff: We had one hell of a night. Stopping a riot, getting arrested, trolling an interrogator, locked in a dungeon, busted out, swindled a Goblin, won a fight, killed an evil Duchess, impersonated said Duchess, stole jewelry (unless something more valuable is inside the box), escaped a death trap, managed to float down a mountain, drown a Bog Hag or something, and get into a safe place to recover. Let's do this again sometime.
Ember: Only as long as that doofus DM doesn't keep getting into trouble with his clubs!
Jeff: Maybe you shouldn't call him a doofus...
Bluecoat: 43 damage to Ember.
Ember falls to 1/44 HP
__________________   Goten is dead!
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Last edited by Kikori on May 2nd, 2012, 10:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
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YEARS TO WIN A BATTLE.