Current Quests
The Safety Of Walls: Reach a walled town with Samorn Khantong.
Abandoned Forest Town: Investigate the abandoned forest town Courbefy with local…
They would have to leave the boat golem behind. The giant toad had ripped the boat just forward of the left forelimb down to the keel and it was tearing further as the limb kept moving. Sam rubbed healing unguent on Dave’s ravaged back and they rested for a few minutes while it took effect.
“Bye, bye, boat,” said Sam, patting the boat golem before they left.
“Sam, why didn’t you summon your skeletons?” asked Dave as he remembered in a wave that she had that ability now.
Sam’s eyes went wide.
“I forgot!” she said and gave her most self conscious grin.
“Ugh, we need to train our new abilities,” said Dave with a grimace.
Dave and Sam transferred her gear from the boat to the open thorax of the ant golem. Sam sat down in the abdomen seat, which was still disguised with an illusory top, and Dave nestled himself among the gear in the thorax section, gingerly lowering himself onto his newly healed back, and they continued their journey.
“Don’t you have a familiar?” asked Sam from inside the illusion.
Dave looked up from his notes.
“Yeah, but I don’t have the quintessence to summon it. My spellbook gives me a circle and makes my coin costs free but I still need other reagents.” said Dave.
“Oh, what kind?” asked Sam.
“96 light and 96 fire quintessence,” said Dave. “Tome, go show Sam the spell.”
Professor Tome flapped its way over to Sam through the illusion. After a few moments when Tome didn’t come back he realised that Sam was looking something up so he sat up in the thorax and watched for threats.
“Oh," said Sam’s voice eventually, “quintessence and essences come from the same place. I always wonder about that.”
“Catching up on your magic theory?” asked Dave with a smirk.
“Yes! Magic so interesting but I never had books. I would always be talking to travellers on the beach when I was a child. My mother was always so worried about me talking to strangers!” said Sam with a laugh.
“You never had books?” asked Dave. “What about these libraries that my Epistemology references?”
Although he couldn’t see it, Dave could feel Sam’s specific strained smile. His smirk fell away from his face.
“Public but not for my family,” said Sam.
That hit Dave like a punch to the gut.
“Oh,” said Dave. “Let me guess. There’s a ‘right’ kind of people and they are the ruling people?”
“Yes!” said Sam.
“And, while technically the libraries are public they’re designed by their very location to be inaccessible to peasants like us?” said Dave in a low voice.
“Yes! Always in a remote temple or in a guarded part of a town,” said Sam.
Dave let out a long breath. He was raised in Australia’s public school system which had set him on a course to complete his masters and doctorate in pharmaceutical science in Germany. Dave was acutely aware that the free education provided to him was the base upon which opportunities on two continents had come and he felt strongly about that.
“My world was like that a couple of hundred years ago. It wasn’t a good time,” said Dave. “I think I have found a purpose in this world, Sam. You keep reading my Tome, I’ll be fine for now.”
Dave flicked his wrist and summoned a small sheaf of paper to his hand with Pauper’s Paper Production then telekinetically took a quill out of a pocket and started writing a new composition for an attempt at a cabin summoning spell.
“Oh, bloody hell,” said Dave about an hour later. Ahead on the trail, was a humanoid shape. Dave selected it with his HUD -
“Forest troll,” warned Dave. A towering, yet gangly figure, easily three metres tall with broad shoulders and talon-tipped arms that hung to its knees. Its skin was a leafy green with texture like the bark of a tree. Its mouth of jagged teeth was pulling into a slavering rictus and it looked at Sam, Dave and the ant golem with hungry eyes.
“Bail!” barked Dave.
As though his command was a call to battle meant for the troll, it began lumbering forward, raising a small tree as a club. Sam and Dave rolled quickly out of their ride and the giant paper ant golem rushed forward to meet the troll.
Dave and Sam drew their weapons. Sam extended her arm and her beetle swarm buzzed towards the troll's head.
“Sam, skeletons!” said Dave as he repeatedly shot mage bolts into the troll’s shoulder. His HUD gave a targeting reticule so he was very much enjoying the point-and-shoot wand. The troll and the ant golem met with the troll snapping the ant’s head down with a mighty blow but the ant’s momentum merely continued its trajectory towards the leg rather than the neck, the daggers in the ant’s pincers hooking into the troll’s flesh and driving forward. The troll was clawing at the neck of the ant in response.
“Alright, skeletons!” shouted Sam. She held Professor Tome with Dave for a moment and chanted for a moment in Siamese. Dave’s eyes were attracted to the magic summoning and noticed the infusion of a pseudo-mind that was an inherent part of the magic which he’d need notes on later.
The skeletons whipped into being in front of Sam on an ethereal wind that only the dead could feel, forming a defensive line in front of Sam who ordered them forward.
“Wait!” shouted Dave, seeing they were unarmed. He reached into his inventory and started throwing weapons looted from cultists onto the ground. “Take them!”
Sam ordered the skeletons to run back and take the weapons. Dave activated his prestidigitation Attack Of The Razor Quills on the basis of why-not more than any expectation it’d be a deciding factor and continued to shoot mage bolts into the troll.
Sam was using her sling, unwilling to go near the troll for fear of its overwhelming power but her skeletons were very successful as they charged back in and started hacking and stabbing at the troll’s arms. The troll growled in response and back handed one of the skeletons who tumbled backwards with a few missing ribs and then rushed back in with a mindless enthusiasm that Dave could only compare to the psychotic energy of small dogs.
“Rotate left, take the armpit!” shouted Dave to the ant golem with a will in his voice, coaching the ant’s wrestling technique. While under fire from all the small beings, alive and dead, and ignoring a face full of beetles the troll was fighting a giant golem who did a duck-under and an improvised shoulder control. Dave was about to order a sharp, clockwise drag to trip the troll over the ant’s legs when the troll simplified the problem by turning away and just letting the daggers in the ant's pincers tear through the skin and flesh of its shoulder to get free. With its free hand pushing down the ant’s head to the ground to gain time, the troll swung its club at a skeleton, crushing it utterly, and simultaneously ate a mouthful of beetles.
Sam immediately re-positioned the beetles to fly in a circle around the troll's head to block vision as best they could but the troll had already swung its club a second time and snapped another skeleton in half. Undeterred, two of the other skeletons were relentlessly attacking the troll’s leg and the third had used the troll’s immobility to clamber onto it’s back, grab its hair with a free hand and start stabbing its sword downwards into the troll’s back over and over.
Dave was circling the troll to the left as he continued shooting mage bolt.
“Rotate your body around your head towards the troll and drag the leg!” commanded Dave. The ant did so, getting a severe-looking rent in its head but it kicked out the troll’s ankle forcing it to use its club arm as a post on the ground to avoid falling on its face. The skeleton on its back rode the troll to the ground and continued its stabbing spree, the other two skeletons not too far behind.
The golem was still struggling to unpin its head from under the troll’s arm but got the chance as the troll abandoned both club and ant head to suddenly spring to its feet, reach over its back, grab the skeleton there and hurl it against a tree, shattering it.
Dave was still shooting mage bolts into the troll and Sam hurling stones, both of them feeling like minor players in this conflict compared to their summons but the summons were doing their job well. The ant backed up a little and used the time the troll spent ripping another skeleton in half to pounce fully on the troll, bearing it down.
“Hold it in place by the upper arms and kick out the legs whenever they’re not flat!” commanded Dave. This was a bit of improvising with jiu-jitsu knowledge but he thought it’d work. The ant was much heavier and it should be able to pin the troll’s arms. That left the legs as its only escape option but so long as it didn’t get stable footing, the troll should be helpless on its back.
Dave wasn’t entirely right as the troll’s wicked claws still ripped up the ant’s forelegs quite badly but it remained pinned on the ground and the last skeleton used an axe to hack away at whatever it could reach while the ant golem began opportunistically driving its head into the troll’s neck until it stopped moving under the barrage of attacks.
“Why can’t I loot - oh, yeah,” said Dave, getting halfway through his thought before he noticed Sam was retrieving some lantern oil from her pack and he remembered that trolls regenerate.
Sam began splashing the oil over the troll. Dave followed her and used Magician’s Meagre Magics to light the edge of the oil. After the flame covered most of the troll, it finally became a lootable object and Dave kneeled to loot. He saw his lesser and iron rank spirit coin values tick up as well as an item notification; You have looted, [troll’s heart] from, [Forest troll (iron rank)].
Dave started inspecting the damage to the ant golem and using Grand Mage’s Gravitas to clean the troll-bits from it. Sam was reading from Tome the whole time and then looked up at Dave.
“Hey!” announced Sam. “Trolls often have a lair with treasure. It says here!”
Sam hopped over to Dave and showed him the forest troll page from Bestiary Of Frankish Byzasian Empire.
“Sure, that seems good. Is there any catch?” asked Dave, still cleaning.
“It says that trolls often attract other lesser monsters who scavenge, but your ant is strong enough to kill them, right?” beamed Sam.
“Yeah, it is,” said Dave confidently. “But, we need to wrap the neck with twine just in case. The troll’s claws tore it up pretty good.”
“You clean, I wrap,” said Sam, and she dug a bundle of twine out of her pack and started wrapping the torn up pieces of the golem’s neck in place. Her remaining skeleton was wandering about, picking up the weapons of its fallen compatriots which it presented to Dave when it was done.
“Oh, thanks!” said Dave, who’d been thinking about something else and stuffed them back into his inventory. The skeleton made a snappy salute and immediately walked over to Sam who grinned and laughed at Dave’s reaction.
Being a rural farm girl and spending the last couple of years as a ranger, Sam was quite adept at tracking and soon she was leading the paper golem along with Dave perched on top who was taking frantic notes on the nature of the animation of the skeleton.
They ran into many normal rank monsters along the way but Sam was right, the golem dispatched them with ease. It was mostly a pack of ‘rabid wolves’ who would attack, take a savage kick from the ant golem and then retreat back into the forest while being shot at by Dave with mage bolt. After about half an hour they made it to a small cave on the side of a hill. They peered in and immediately froze. There was a slightly larger forest troll sleeping at the bottom of the small cave.
The troll suddenly grunted, sniffed and opened one eye. That was enough for Dave.
“Milled for my purpose!” intoned Dave, and a tonne of stick-like small paper bricks each connected by a strip of long paper was conjured on top of the troll at the bottom of the cave. Dave willed his paper ant golem forward, which barely fit in the space.
“Just trap it!” barked Dave to the ant who leaned its forelimbs on the paper mass that was beginning to writhe with the troll’s attempts to stand. Dave put a restraining hand on Sam’s shoulder as he cast Warming Fire at the bottom of the cave on the slavering troll. The troll snarled and roared wetly but couldn’t move properly underneath the combined two tonnes of summoned kindling and golem.
“Have your skeleton stab and shove any part of the troll that comes up back into the paper,” said Dave and Sam willed the skeleton to do so.
“We just wait?” asked Sam as they watched from the cave mouth, looking down at the struggle.
“Yep. I’m starting a fire,” confirmed Dave grimly, concentrating intently at the scene. The ant golem was kneeling with its forelimbs and head pressed flat to the paper bundle. The troll had pushed out a single arm and had partial range of motion but as soon as its claws had found the golem’s leg, Sam’s skeleton was hacking ferociously at the wrist.
The troll didn’t stop screaming and roaring from under the paper. Eventually the fire took and the adventuring pair had to exit the cave because of the smoke. Dave ordered the smoke-immune golem to stay until the fire started to affect it and then stand back to a safe distance and focus on shoving the troll back into the flames. Sam ordered the skeleton back and to press forward again if the troll got a hold on the golem.
Both Sam and Dave watched as the smoke-obscured form of the golem repeatedly reared up and smacked the troll back down the slope into the burning bottom of the cave. The drooling, snarling troll roared and screamed the whole time until, eventually, it was consumed in the inferno.
Afterwards, they went a little way away and Dave started magically removing soot and sweat from Sam.
“That was… loud,” said Sam quietly, her smile absent.
“I should have realised that a tonne of loose paper and kindling would get very hot,” said Dave, looking at the cave mouth that smoke was still billowing out of and was still very, very hot inside. “Do you think it’ll affect the loot?”
“That’s what you think about right now?” said Sam.
Dave nodded and shuddered at the same time.
“All monsters have to be killed, right? If we don’t, even the nice ones go mad and start killing everything in sight. At least, that’s what it said in the books, right?”
“Yes,” said Sam. “They are made of magic and when it runs out, they just attack everything.”
“Yeah, and trolls aren’t nice ones to begin with,” said Dave seriously. “They eat people, don’t they? So, the choice is easy. Do we let the trolls make those kinds of noises? Or the troll's victims?”
Sam nodded but looked a little wan. Dave wasn’t feeling so great himself. Burned alive was a particularly nasty way to hear something die. Dave busied himself by taking all of their gear out of the ant golem and instructing it to go to the nearest stream, kneel down, take on water into the thorax, bring it back here and tip the water onto the hot coals. While the ant golem was doing that, Dave took his note paper and went back to sketch some magical directions for a cabin spell while Sam read an Adventure Society publication of advice aimed at new adventurers.
Two slow trips of water and half-an-hour later, the flames in the cave had burned down to the point that Dave could walk inside. It was a complete mess with a charcoal troll corpse at the centre with a sparkly effect over it indicating it was lootable.
“Okay, I can kneel and collect all the lootable items but there will be a lot of rainbow smoke,” said Dave.
Sam immediately turned on her heel and went outside the cave and a good distance beyond.
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“Okay, go now!” called Sam cheerily.
Dave knelt, held his breath, activated loot all and ran for it as rainbow smoke rose all around him. He could feel it clinging to his skin and trying to get into his nose. He ran a little bit off from Sam and started using Grand Mage’s Gravitas to clean the residual smell off.
“What’d we get?” called Sam who was being careful to position herself upwind.
Dave opened the command chat box history and looked at the rewards.
“Uhh, bunch of money, couple of gems, monster core… Oh, magic amulet and a plant awakening stone!” announced Dave and then looked more closely. “The awakening stone was part of the horde not from the troll itself. Alright that makes more sense. You want it?”
Sam grinned and nodded.
“Throw to me!” she said.
“It’s not much good until you want to come close!” laughed Dave. “The spellbook needs my hand as well as yours.”
“I just want to hold it,” said Sam, looking happily at the awakening stone. It looked a little like a large seed with imperfections that, if they caught the light just right, looks like the start of shooting buds. Professor Tome took the opportunity to be open in front of her on a page about plant awakening stone abilities.
Dave checked the amulet.
Item: Troll bone amulet
Rank: Iron
Description
An amulet made from the bone of a forest troll, this amulet gives the wearer a substantial passive health recovery.
Detailed Information
“Hey, you should take this too,” said Dave and had Professor Tome come and fly it over to her. “It makes you heal fast. Between your healing spells, familiar and this; really fast! You don’t have a good ranged option so this will free you up to get stuck in with that sickle, eh?”
Sam took it gratefully and hung it around her neck. Dave soon stopped cleaning himself and held onto Tome as he chanted the awakening stone ritual for Sam. Sam’s skeleton watched Dave with a grin. It didn’t have a choice but Dave still felt sure Sam was making it do that too intently, just for the giggles.
Sam used the awakening stone while Dave looked at his chat box and clicked for details that he read out as the ability awakened in her.
Samorn Khanthong has used an awakening stone of the plant. Samorn Khanthong has acquired a new life essence ability, Health Blossom.
Ability: Health Blossom
Essence: Life
Rank: Iron 0
0% to iron 1
Awakening Stone: Plant
Type: Spell
Tags: Healing.
Cost: Low mana
Cooldown: None
Description
Apply a small heal over time for ten seconds that can stack three times. If allowed to reach the end of the heal time, it will heal a large burst multiplied by the amount of stacks.
Detailed Information
“Oh! This is really good!” cried Sam happily and immediately cast the spell on her remaining skeleton.
“Ugh, was that wise?” asked Dave, his caution confirmed as he watched the skeleton’s health bar start ticking down slowly.
“Yeah, I want to try new spell and skeleton needs healing,” Sam stopped talking as she noticed the skeleton spontaneously shedding bits of bone and remembered why she hadn’t used regrowth on the skeleton.
“Oops. Undead,” said Sam in a small voice and smiled her guilty smile at Dave.
“Well,” said Dave in a tone of hesitant reassurance, “At least we’ll get an idea for how big the bloom is, right?”
“Right!” said Sam who grinned guiltily at her impassive skeleton.
They both watched in silence as the heal ate away at the undead skeleton who affected an atmosphere of patient optimism. The skeleton didn’t have a lot of health compared to an adventurer of the same rank, skeletons mostly survived on damage reduction, but it would be interesting to observe anyway. The heal ticked away at most of its remaining unlife before the bloom effect happened. When the ten seconds of heal over time completed and the bloom happened, the remaining third of the skeleton’s heath dropped away and it clapped as it disintegrated.
Dave couldn’t help giggling and Sam laughed at Dave’s laughter. There was just something about the look of happy acceptance on the face of the skeleton that made the whole situation ludicrous.
When they’d stopped laughing, Dave was using Grand Mage’s Gravitas to dry out the ant golem, Sam did some reading on the mechanisms about why healing magic is destructive to unliving creatures.
“But it says that the healing only half converts to damage!” said Sam.
“Good!” said Dave with relief. “Bad conversion ratio but good to know if the corruption where we’re going is undead.”
“And, so many awakening stones!” said Sam in a sing-song voice.
Dave smiled. She was right.
Dave and Sam returned to the old trail that Sam had found to Courbefy and she kept the ant golem on it for the rest of the day. There were some normal rank monsters encountered along the way; a flock of tyrannical pheasants, which attacked enmasse and were mostly dispatched with a well placed corpse explosion, and a psychotic goat which got focus-damaged down quite quickly.
They stopped walking at sundown and upon selecting a flat area out of the wind, Dave summoned their usual paper cabin and, at Dave’s request, Sam summoned her skeletons while he watched with his magic sight and took careful notes.
Given that they had a powerful golem and Dave could summon a sturdy structure with only one entrance, it was agreed that they would both go to sleep as much as they damned well liked, so long as they awoke before dawn. Both Sam and Dave were subsisting on spirit coins now but they snacked on ham and cheese sandwiches as well as a cup of tea for the taste.
“I’ve been reading An Introduction To Adventuring by Arabelle Remore. It says that we have to meditate to increase our abilities,” said Sam, grinning at him as he served tea. “We have to look into our soul and tend to the essences there. Like a garden.”
“Are there other metaphors or is it all gardens in my soul?” asked Dave.
Sam smiled a happy smile and sipped her tea.
“All gardens,” she whispered.
Dave summoned professor Tome to himself and asked for the pages on meditation that Sam referred to in An Introduction To Adventuring and skimmed the page.
“It also says that I can visualise it as any peaceful activity that involves organisation,” said Dave with a small smile.
“Gardens are best,” said Sam, blowing on her tea with a smirk and a sense of superiority.
Dave picked up his tea, blew on it and sipped.
“Okay, I’ll try the garden,” said Dave.
Dave and Sam woke the next day before dawn, each of them eating a spirit coin before having some jam toast to wash away the licking-a-battery taste of the coins. They both watched as the first rays of true dawn hit the sky and the ant golem became inanimate with a thunk. Dave had stayed up later than Sam last night, taking notes on the magic animating her skeletons and finishing his new spell; Origami Golem. A spell that he was sure would simultaneously summon the paper construct and animate it with a pseudo-intellect.
“Answer my call,” intoned Dave, casting the spell.
A horizontal split appeared to open in the air a few metres in front of him. Cardboard and paper appeared to crawl out of it in every direction as though coming off the assembly line of an omnidirectional paper factory and out crawled the newest model. A large, hexagonal body made of compressed, stiff cardboard with reinforcing panels running to a central seat area that took up most of the room in the hexagon but still with room behind the driver for cargo space. There was a stiff cardboard roll-bar, to make sure any slippages wouldn’t immediately crush the rider and, finally, three very large legs running down each side, slightly grouped to the sides rather than equally spaced. The legs were thicker and longer than the ant’s legs and were tipped with what felt like the closest thing that materials science could make paper into a hoof.
“That’s scary!” said Sam, but with a congratulatory tone.
The origami golem turned to her and she saw a folded down part at the front left of the golem that had a cut-out which read ‘I am a happy beetle!’ and had a smiley face indented across the front.
“Ha! Cute!” cried Sam.
“That one’s yours,” said Dave with a grin. “Here’s mine. Answer my call.”
Another hexagonal origami golem walked out of unspace and turned to face Sam. This one had a face with reading glasses and indented words that said ‘busy studying’. Sam laughed.
“Yes, that’s you!” she said.
“These are bigger than the other ones by a good amount and should move a bit faster. The previous golems were made with permanent paper and a whole bunch of the magic gets spent on the realness, it seems. These will unsummon in about half a day so I could get more weight for the same magic, although some of the weight I traded for higher quality cardboard in places. Also, these count as alive for healing magic so you can heal them and I can also have them absorb more paper to heal them as well.” said Dave with pride.
“Glad you’re with me, Dave!” congratulated Sam, gesturing for her origami golem to come down for her to clamber inside.
“Girl, you disintegrate the undead by accident! It’s me who’s glad you’re on my side.”
They continued their journey and started encountering more powerful monsters like the frog. At first it was a murder of milky-eyed and bloated crows called carrion crows on his HUD that swarmed at Dave and his golem. Dave got severely shaken as the golem spun quickly to scare the birds away but he managed a cast of Attack Of The Razor Quills anyway, which took one out of the sky. He then used his telekinetic control of quills to pick up the corpse and interpose it between himself and the flock of birds. As they flew back around for another pass, the tightly grouped murder went straight past the floating corpse which is when Sam cast Corpse Explosion, killing some and so she cast again on one of the new corpses to kill the rest.
“Thank you, scary-Sam!” called Dave.
“You alright?” inquired Sam.
“Just shook up is all,” replied Dave.
They continued and within the next hour, encountered another pack of rabid wolves. Fortunately this was much easier to handle. Their rabidness apparent, they charged mindlessly at Sam and Dave. Even when they avoided the golems, they were met with sickle and arming sword. Both Dave and Sam took scratches from the wolves’ claws during this fight but were not affected by any rabid afflictions.
Later on they found a single dire bear. It was an overly large bear specimen but even so, as a single, large creature it didn’t represent much threat. Sam and Dave followed their plan; they both approached the dire bear about ten metres apart and opened with ranged attacks. Whichever of them the bear charged at would move backwards and the other would flank the charging beast.
Their plan worked well with the beast charging Sam and although the beast turned to meet Dave’s counter charge, Sam showed her initiative by switching roles and making her own counter charge into the bear’s flank. The bear gouged deep furrows in the forelegs of Dave’s golem before it died but the legs of Dave’s golem were still usable.
“I can heal some of your golem’s damage but I think it’s lost some total health,” said Sam, furrowing her brow.
Dave hopped down and inspected the ravaged area of his golem.
“Oh, I see. Bits of it have been torn off. There’s nothing there to heal. Let me try adding paper.” said Dave and used Pauper’s Paper Production to add paper over the damaged areas like bandages. The paper stuck to the areas fast and Dave looked to his HUD and saw the health of the origami golem slightly improve.
“Yes, that’s fixed it,” said Sam.
“Can’t use healing magic to fix all of my problems, hey?” grinned Dave.
Sam also grinned and remounted her origami golem.
They continued on but Dave was no longer studying and Sam wasn’t singing to herself. The monster density was truly more than Sam had anticipated. At midafternoon they were attacked again. A large flower Sam was riding past let out an enormous puff of perfumed air and Sam immediately passed out. Dave shouted in alarm and rushed his own golem over but he needn’t have bothered. A giant vine had also snaked out of the ground and grabbed the leg of Sam’s origami golem which the golem used to yank back on exposing a giant, screaming tree-baby from the ground.
Dave quickly used Stop And Think, selected it and used Epistemology in his HUD to find out that it was a giant mandrake. A flesh eating plant which would sedate its prey with an airborne sedative and constrict them to death. In confirmation of this he mentally selected Sam who had ‘giant mandrake sedative’ as a debuff. Thankfully, golems were immune to poisons.
Dave unpaused time and both origami golems galloped over to the unearthed, giant baby-like figure and stomped it to death, ignoring the constricting vines. Sam woke up a few seconds later and drooled a bit. Dave hopped over to her golem to make sure she wasn’t injured and wouldn’t freak out when she came to.
Soon, Sam’s eyes opened and she slurred something in Siamese. Dave patted her arm and made his best attempt at comforting noises. After a few more seconds she was lucid enough to make another attempt at reality.
“Wha’ go’ me, ka?” asked Sam.
“Giant mandrake,” said Dave softly.
“Ka.”
Dave let her breathe until her eyes started to focus.
“This quest seems to have more monsters than we initially expected,” said Dave.
“We win, ka?” asked Sam.
“Yeah, golems stomped it. You want to keep going? Or, go home?” asked Dave.
“It’s fine. Keep going, ka,” replied Sam.
“Well, you rest up. I need you. You see, I… err, I don’t actually know where to go,” said Dave.
Sam smiled cheekily at the sky.
Sam recovered in twenty minutes and they spent the rest of the day travelling and fighting two more rabid wolf packs which were dealt with as the first one. These not only gave monster cores but a particularly large wolf gave some corruption quintessence. Dave and Sam shared a worried look.
They arrived at the Courbefy valley on a large, only slightly sloped prominence that looked over the crumbling buildings of the town in the distance before dusk. Sam insisted on clambering over the rocky cliffs with the remaining light until she found a windy perch that would barely fit the cabin on the ledge.
Sam immediately cast her skeletons and told them to guard. Dave refreshed his golem conjuration before casting Paper Mill Production to make their small cabin, with extra attention to the shape of the floor to fit the uneven rocky surface so they wouldn’t sleep on a slope, and they went inside.
“You don’t think we’re safe?” asked Dave.
“We are attacked all day. Why you think they stop attacking at night?” said Sam.
Strangely, the monsters did stop attacking at night. Sam and Dave slept in shifts. Sam was supposed to sleep first but Dave saw her turning fitfully and did the same when it was his turn in the early hours. If there were any monsters out there, he was going to be annoyed at them for sleeping when he couldn’t. It felt like he had only just got to sleep when Sam woke him up.
“Wha’ ‘s it?” asked Dave blearily. It was pre-dawn but most of the landscape could be seen.
“The hills are weird,” said Sam seriously. Dave found this sentence incongruous and roused himself properly.
“What do you mean weird?”
“They’re moving bits towards us?”
“Show me.”
Sam pointed at the bare hills which were, indeed, having what looked like shrubberies or small tufts of grass crossing them but always in the direction towards their camp site. Dave quickly cast The Clairvoyant Eye Of Transvection and cast it in the middle of a field where he could see one of the moving bushes coming.
There was a moment of disorientation as he became a floating eye on the distant hill. Dave righted himself and gazed around. The ‘bushes’ were herds of goats. He selected them. Psychotic goats! He panned his vision around and confirmed with another herd further away and another glimpsed in some trees. Herds and herds of psychotic goats converging on their position. Dave cancelled his Clairvoyant Eye spell.
“Sam?” asked Dave.
“Yeah?”
“They’re all psychotic goats.”
“...”
“All of them are coming towards us.”
“We’re in so much trouble!”
“Yes, but we have some nice spells!”
“Dave, there are at least two hundred psychotic goats!”
“Well, goats are relatively small? That’s good right?”
“Not really! Should we run?”
Dave smiled.
“You know they’ll catch us if we try.”
Sam nodded and looked scared.
“I had trouble sleeping last night but I didn’t waste time. I got that cabin spell I was working on finished.”
Sam hit his arm.
“We don’t need a bed right now!” she scolded.
Dave’s eyes turned mischievous and dangerous.
“You don’t understand,” said Dave as he opened Professor Tome to the spell for memorisation with a deadly calm. “The cabin is designed to be very strong. We will practically have a small castle.”
Sam’s mouth fell open while her brain was trying to find a gear for this idea.
“Find me a defensible position about six long strides across and summon your skeletons, Sam! I’m pretty sure we can do this,” said Dave with the insane confidence of a man who’s had an idea.
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As you descend into the grand mausoleum, the air grows heavy with centuries of dust and decay,” Florian narrated, his voice low and ominous. “Stone sarcophagi line the vast chamber, some cracked, others intact, their carved lids depicting ancient, long-dead figures. Rows of skeletal remains lie undisturbed in alcoves, their hollow sockets staring blankly into the darkness. Dozens of undead guardians turn towards your intrusion. What do you do?”
“Turn Undead!” blurted Krista, immediately rolling her dice.
“That’s going to agro the whole dungeon,” said Dave, smiling.
Florian gave his goofy grin. Krista winced but also smiled. No take backs was the rule. Florian rolled dice and moved tokens on the virtual tabletop for a minute.
“Okay, the two undead knights who weren’t turned move to engage, their armours scraping together as they close with Beldove.” Flo moved the two virtual tokens into contact with Krista’s character. Then, with an almost gleeful flourish, he began moving other tokens through unexplored doors deeper into the dungeon. “As they flee, turned by the power of your god, the ground begins to quake. Dormant skeletons stir, their bones clattering in waves. From every alcove and sarcophagus, skeletal warriors emerge, grasping rusted weapons.”
The players groaned and grinned in resignation.
“This is going to be bad,” groaned Krista as Florian started rolling to hit her character.
“Not if we find somewhere defensive,” muttered Dave, going over the map. “We have good AoE damage in you and Vash, and Marc and I can hold a line.”
“I have Wall Of Fire!” offered Vash happily.
“And we do have some good ranged damage,” murmured Dave. “So we don’t need to be mobile. Okay, why don’t we stand in the corner, use the big sarcophagus there as cover and triangle ourselves in with a Wall Of Fire?”
Lacking a better plan, everyone agreed. Grinning, Florian confirmed that Dave had been right, the fleeing undead had aggroed the entire dungeon. The next turn, tokens representing waves of skeletons flooded toward their position. Krista cast a high level Spirit Guardians as soon as she could and between that and Wall Of Fire, all but the most high level threats died immediately under cleansing flame and holy light. Even the death knight striding through the flames at the height of the battle had little effect on the outcome.
“I’ll initiate a grapple and hold him right there,” said Dave.
Florian laughed and rolled dice with Dave for the grapple. Dave won.
“Well, I guess 5d8 damage at the start and end of his next turn,” said Florian.
“Good positioning will do that,” said Dave with a self-satisfied smirk.
Vash and Krista’s character cleaned up what was left of the dungeon’s undead after the death knight died from Spirit Guardians at the start of its next turn.
“The mausoleum falls quiet,” said Florian. “Except for the sound of your ragged breathing. The undead champion’s ancient greatsword lies on the floor, glowing faintly with eerie light. What do you do?”
“Loot the sword,” said Marc immediately.