“I’m never doing shit for Mark again!” Jim swore as he kited a lumbering Meat Puppet around the large boulder in the center of the clearing.
Roaring angrily, the Meat Puppet stomped after him, swinging its large, heavy arms as the visible muscle fibers on its limbs flexed and contracted with every motion. Clutched possessively in one of its massive hands was a large log, stripped of extra limbs and missing patches of bark from where it had missed Jim and impacted the boulder it was being led around.
“Never thought I’d wish I was as small as Pear!” Jim said to himself as he opened further distance from the Puppet and prepared an arrow to shoot at it. Ducking beneath a low hanging bough of an evergreen tree, Jim dropped into a slide that took him several feet further before he sprang to his feet and turned to loose the nocked arrow toward the skinless giant that hadn’t noticed his short escape.
Watching the arrow bury itself up to half its length in the Puppet’s chest, Jim waited to see if the enchantment on it would work this time.
Roaring in pain as the arrow appeared in its chest, the Puppet swiped angrily at the arrow, snapping the shaft in half, before brandishing its crude club in Jim’s direction.
“Time to go!” Jim said, rising from his crouch and preparing to run as angry, red boils and bulbous, black tumors began to spread across the Puppet’s chest before they all, as one, exploded with squishy squelches in gouts of blood that quickly ignited in the air with a violent boom that sent Jim diving to the ground, clutching his head. Ears ringing and head spinning, Jim slowly raised his head to look back at the Meat Puppet that had been thrown onto its back, one arm missing, the other hanging by a strip of muscle. Its chest had been blown open in a shower of gore that had covered a large part of the clearing, while exposing a now empty cavity to the air.
“It’s dead,” Jim said to himself as he sagged back into the ground. “Oh thank God. I need to move before something worse shows up.”
Forcing himself to his feet was an ordeal, but Jim managed to rise from his prone position to his knees, looking around for anything he’d accidentally dropped in his mad, Looney Toon-esque run around the boulder. Seeing nothing, he grabbed his bow, made sure his bag and quiver were secure, and began to jog away from the dead Meat Puppet that he’d stumbled across as he worked to complete his map of the Peninsula.
Hours later, finally willing to say that he’d managed to escape any pursuers, Jim dropped his bag and pulled out his Bag of Colding to search for some ready-to-eat food that’d been given to him. Grabbing a sandwich with at least two kinds of meat, slices of onions, tomatoes, lettuce and three different cheeses, Jim reviewed his latest fight and looked over the only schematic that had worked for his Life Explosion Glyph set.
“More power through that connector’s a bad idea,” he muttered around a bite of his sandwich. “Maybe it’ll work with a dead-end connector? Need to get more power to the Life Glyph to see if that makes more growths. Or should I focus power of the Explosion Glyph for a bigger boom?”
As he worked through his food, Jim continued to make small alterations to his most potent weapon against the undead that he was surrounded by.
“Why was the bear going over the mountain?” Jim asked himself as he climbed the large hill to get a better view of the land around him. “Bear’s are territorial, why would one need to go over a mountain? For water? Mating season? Maybe it was just food?”
Continuing to examine the old song, Jim fell silent as he crested the hill and looked out over the view of a large, clearly abandoned, and largely ruined town that bordered on a city as its docks extended out into the ocean.
“What the hell?” Jim asked after a moment of stunned silence. “When did I get so close to the shore? What town is this?”
Looking closer, squinting as he did so, Jim was able to make out moving figures that, even at a distance, he could tell were undead due to the lurching nature of some of their steps. Watching a figure glide through a solid wall and several other figures was also a large indicator as to their identities.
“I should map that out as best I can,” Jim said to himself as he grabbed his journal and flipped to a blank page before sketching a map of the town as he could see it. Satisfied with his work, Jim stored his pen and journal and studied the ruined town further, wondering what was going on. As he looked, Jim saw several of the large, skinless Meat Puppets work together to push a large obelisk down the largest street in the town.
“What is that for?” Jim couldn’t stop himself from asking. “Time to go exploring, I guess!”
Moving quickly and as stealthily as he could, Jim made the several hour long walk down the hill and toward the town that was quickly revealed to be a city as he came closer.
“Why is everything bigger up close?” Jim wondered grumpily as he watched a large group of undead mill about the mostly intact gate that led through the mostly intact wall that surrounded most of the ruined city.
Brief dreams at scaling the wall and avoiding the undead were discarded quickly as large, undead birds wheeled through the air on wings that were likely rotten as feathers rained from them with each flap of their wings. The undead that were obviously guarding the gate were all wearing armor and each of them carried a shield with some sort of weapon. Sitting gracefully above them all on a pile of rubble and broken rock, was a pale woman with stringy hair and milky white eyes and twin rings of pale, icy blue within them.
“What are you?” Jim wondered to himself as he triggered an Examination of the woman.
Banshee: A Common Undead that takes the form of a woman to lure travelers and victims closer before revealing its true spectral form. The more beautiful the woman, the stronger the Banshee. Necromancers that create these Undead do so to make use of their greater intellect as commanders of Lesser Undead and dumber Common Undead. Extremely difficult to kill without using fire, Divine intervention, or Life magic.
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“Oh, that’s gonna suck,” Jim muttered to himself as he nocked an Arrow of Life Explosion. “Here’s hoping that I can get her before she gets me.”
Drawing the feathered fletching to his cheek, Jim took aim at the woman that gazed boredly around the area, her eyes often drawn to the shambling Lesser Undead that bumped into one another and tripped over loose stones that littered the ground.
With a final, smooth, even breath, Jim loosed his arrow at the Banshee and watched as it flew across the gap to slam into her chest.
Drawing air to scream, even as her form faded and changed into a grotesque, spectral one, the Banshee’s chest, covered by a simple sheet, swelled as Jim nocked a Silence Arrow and quickly fired it at the mound of rubble the Banshee sat on.
At the moment of impact, Jim was thrown back as the Banshee’s scream physically impacted him, nearly sixty feet away and a sharp, piercing screech was cut off before a more forceful, muted thud made itself known through the ground. Looking up as he drew himself to a standing position, Jim saw the effects of his now working Life Explosion Arrows on smaller Undead such as the Banshee, that had been torn apart by the force of the explosion, despite its natural form of a spector.
Rolling on the ground, knocking into each other, the zombies silently clambered to their feet as Jim made use of his Silence Arrow’s effect to send more Explosive Arrows and a few Freezing Arrows among them, killing the rest of them as the first one to pull itself to its feet managed a steady shamble toward him, jaw open and arms outstretched, club and shield forgotten on the ground.
Stepping back, Jim loosed a final arrow at the zombie’s head, dropping the Lesser Undead as sound rushed back into the world and Jim looked around the gathered, newly deceased undead creatures that once guarded the gate to the ruined city.
“Now to hope that no one’s going to throw a fit about that before I leave,” Jim muttered as he gathered himself and stepped into the city.
“No, you fools! Thirty degrees to the right! The right!” the robed figure screamed as the Meat Puppets pushed the large stone obelisk around. “Damn you, Karmich! Leaving me with these imbecilic cretins!”
As the robed man berated the Meat Puppets, Jim watched as he directed them on the correct way to align the obelisk for whatever purpose he was using them for.
“Janick,” a woman’s voice rang out in greeting to the man, pulling his attention away from the Puppets that proceeded to turn the obelisk a full 180 degrees. “How are things going here?”
“Slowly,” the man said, snapping the word angrily between his gritted teeth as he looked at the woman. “Karmich’s so damned particular about how the ritual’s anchors need to be aligned and he’s only giving me these damned Puppets to work with. If he’d sent that Dread Knight with me, I’d be done by now.”
Studying the two robed figures, Jim did his best to listen to their conversation as he slowly sketched out a rough picture of the obelisk the Puppets were now standing around.
“You know Karmich,” the woman told the man. “Too paranoid by far, but a visionary if I’ve ever met one.”
“Indeed,” the man agreed with a note of grudging respect. “It still rankles to have to work with such incapable servants as these.”
“Never mind that,” a third voice said as two men strode into view. “We’ve just come back from the front gate. The Banshee and the zombies there are dead. Someone’s here in the city. We need to find them and eliminate them before they ruin our plans.”
“If the arrows littered back there were anything to go by, they have a bow,” the last man said, holding up an arrow, still covered with gore. “Looks as though most of the arrows are enchanted, crudely, but all the same.”
“What sort of enchantments?” the woman asked.
“Runic,” the man said, holding the arrow out to her. “Basic Runes and Glyphs, but still very effective.”
“How did they manage to kill the Banshee?” the first man asked.
“If I had to guess, it was a combination of a Silence Glyph on an arrow and an Explosion Glyph,” the second man said. “That or a very lucky ambush.”
“Even if it was lucky, the Silence Glyph was likely to keep us from hearing the explosions,” the final man said. “We need to find him. I will be marshaling Ghouls to track whoever is here. I’d suggest that you all do the same.”
“I can’t,” the first man said, a note of anger creeping back into his voice as he gestured to the obelisk and the gathered Meat Puppets. “Karmich wants me to place the ritual anchors. If it’s not done by his deadline, he’ll be upset. And we all know how that Dread Knight of his gets when the master’s upset.”
“It would be for the best to have Janick continue with his work,” the woman said. “If he is able to finish in time, then we can continue with our plans, despite the rat scuttling about.”
“It does make sense,” the second man said. “If the three of us inform the others and while Janick works, then we can corner the rat and complete the ritual.”
“Very well,” the third man agreed. “Good luck Janick. And patience.”
“I’ll need the patience,” the first man said with a snort as he turned back to the Meat Puppets and began to give them more orders while the others left him alone and began to hunt Jim.
“This is so bad,” Jim whispered to himself as he finished sketching the obelisk, making sure to make notes about the carvings he could make out on the faces he could see. “I need to be careful.”
You’ve stumbled onto a Hidden Quest!
Slow the Ritual: You have found evidence of a ritual being prepared by members of a cabal of necromancers. Slow the ritual’s completion by any means necessary. Extra rewards will be given if you manage to stop or destroy the ritual.
Rewards: Unknown.
You’ve stumbled onto a Hidden Quest!
Escape the Cabal: A cabal of necromancers have found evidence of you in their territory. Thinking you to be a threat to their plans, they have set out to capture or kill you. Successfully survive the cabal’s hunt. Extra rewards will be given if you manage to kill over half of the cabal and their forces.
Rewards: Unknown.
“I’m gonna die,” Jim whispered as he read the quest notifications.