Attendees:
This week we witness Godzuki vs. Baby Rodan.
ENEMIES: Winged Elven Snipers, Giant Hawks and Condors, Chaos Angels,
Ninjals, Wolf & Storm Giant, and Baby Rodan (Mark)
We do our staggered crossing into the new world. Stings goes through and and there's no imminent danger to prepare for. DotR and Truthspinner go through ten minutes later. The rest follow an hour later.
Think of the Grand Canyon, only we are exiting a cave 2/3 of the way up, at a high ledge with a narrow path leading downward. So the job is to guide everything that exits the cave so that it does not fall down over the side in the crush. We keep the casualties to a minimum, however, the evil winged elves weren't about to leave the body count at zero.
An array of winged elves (10 or 12) start raining arrows down on our group as they stretch down the path toward that leads to the bottom of the canyon. Stings changes into a hawk and tries to stealth his way to them. Defender turns into the large wasp form we gained in a previous world, and Truthspinner does likewise. Defender takes a lot of small hits that eventually add up and Stings ends up having to swoop down and catch him as he falls, then carry him to the path. Truth was coming in much slower (in order to retain his DV) so it took him a while to get there, but once he did, he manages to sting the crap out of two elves in a row. Of course Stings did that many in the blink of an eye, but he has to now make his way back to the fight, and does so just in time, as the numbers game is catching up with Truthspinner. All the elves go down and the wasp-turtle is unconscious, and because he is attuned to the needles, he will be out for quite a while.
We find a place to camp and soon are met by more friendly forces. These are pygmies riding ostrich-like creatures. They are the worshippers of the Austrex god, a patrin. He invites us on behalf of his god to meet the god. He also takes us on a brief sightseeing tour in which we realize that the "grand canyon" is a chunk of rock floating in the air. Even the river through the middle of the canyon ends up dumping off into nothingness. There are similar hunks of rock out there and that makes transporting our people across this dimension into a huge problem.
The ostrich god is a nice guy. He's here to do just what he's doing; help point folks in the right direction. He gives us a decent size hunk of rock on which to put our people. By the way, in this world the border marches are above and below us. If you fall, you better start flapping, because otherwise you go from one level of chaos to the next until you ultimately fall into the deep wyld and pure chaos.
We find out that this is the last world that has been explored. There are 30 names on the plinth, which is the fewest so far. We are reminded of a prophecy about how when our group is recycled and returns, we will be the ones to venture into the last world before the exit of the labyrinth. Of course the prophecy also said we would be whole; that is, all of our circle would be present, which is not the case. If you recall, our 5th member is the one that when chimera and thus was not part of our reawakening. How does this affect the prophecy? I dunno.
We decide we need forms, so we go out hunting Giant hawks (for us normal sized transformers) and for our giganto-turtle friends, a giant condor is hunted. We play out quick fights with these, because they aren't pushovers.
Our people need transport. We make a deal with the Austrex (or he makes a deal with us rather--because his social skills are better) in which we build him an artifact every other year that we are present in these lands and in return he lets us mine for feathersteel. I build myself and him a bow out of feathersteel (which aint half bad). I think if we have extra time any other artifact would be something for creating light. We'll go into why shortly.
There is a gathering of patrin again. This time we meet everyone and we are selected as the ones who should venture into the next world by the senior patrin of this zone, Gird Marrow-eater, who is a hawk man. He will help us with protections for the crossover. The only prediction they have about the next world comes from the prophecy and it has to do with the world being sunless and lightless.
It is suggested that we go to a hunk of floating land that was once our home before we died and were cast back to the earlier world of Yrth. It is currently occupied by a friendly raccoon god, who technically would own it now.
In order to transport, we use a combination of Giant Hawk, Ostrechs (which we raised from eggs we traded for) and condors, each led by a patrin who takes the appropriate form for communication with said animals.
That brings us to the trio of chaos angels. They tell us that were are land dwellers and not entitled to the skies, then they attack. The three of us move up to engage. Stings slashes his to ribbons. Truthspinner glances off of his to little efffect. Defender transforms into a t-rex and wrestles with his in mid-air, which is quite an effective form it turns out, even falling. They really aren't all that tough. Well, okay they're tougher than me, but then that's why I travel with these guys.
We arrive at our old lands and recognize it sort of. Well some of us (those who didn't botch the essence roll). We meet the raccoon guy who is happy to let us lurk around. He also introduces us to... OUR CHILDREN. Yes, the races we spawned in our previous life. However, unattended they've devolved and become primative. 8 Tiger people, 16 Turtle People, 17 spider people, 13 scorpion people. We each try to engraciate ourselves to tribes. Turns out each tribe has an artifact left behind by us. They seem to keep cave-painting reproductions of our fall, which it seems was at the talons of giant Rodan-like pterodactyls.
Strangely, no people who were spawn of our missing 5th circle member.
Our people are pretty much settled. This is the nicest world they've ever been to. So we try to arrange for some help to guide our people.
I didn't mention Mouse, did I? During our stay on the land that was gifted us by the Ostrich guy, we discovered Mouse, a young woman who is basically a thief with a mouse form. She is the only patrin we've come across so far who has the knack for hiding her tattoos. Nice enough person. She seems to be hiding from everyone. She doesn't show up for the tribal moot or any other summoning by the patrin. Which makes me suspicious, by the way. Like theres more to her story than we've heard.
While in the Raccoon-mans' land, we are assaulted by a Ninjal (Ninja + Angel = Ninjal). Seems that a Ninjal is no match for a pure Ninja.
I recall now that I've glossed over a few side events. The Turtle and his Orca friend have been getting... chummy. In fact, Defender came to me to ask to build a ring (which I made at 7 successes... so pretty decent ring). They are now wed and have their first child.
So the plan for crossing over into the next world is to leave our humans behind with some other guardians. We'll crossover as a foursome and stabilize the last world by whatever means provided for us. Then I imagine it's all about planning our escape from the labyrinth.
But hold the phone... what's that shaking? Earthquake? Sort of. The ground cracks open and a Rodan egg hatches. We must do combat with a beast that can fly faster than the speed of sound and who leaves nothing but destruction in his path as he passes over very close to the ground during such sonic booms.
Truthspinner takes up the enchanted arbalest but manages to just barely miss three times. Stings loops a rope around its neck and must hang on for dear life while trying to kill it. But the real damage is done by Defender who wrestles it in T-rex form and causes the speeding bullet to crash. He remains conscious and manages to hold the beast at 0 DV while first Tspinner launches a shot at it (hurting it a little bit) and Slashy McStinger dissects it like christmas goose (hurting it a lot).
That's where we leave off. No more Rodans just now.
(For the life of me I can't remember where we were when we fought the Storm Giant and his Wolf.)