Session 10

What Elk did displays a growing understanding and anticipation of the consequences created by the rules being employed in his circumstances.

By offering up the loss of his arm, he understood that consequence would act in place of whatever consequence the game master would invariably have put in that place themselves.

Perhaps the passive approach he’s taken so far belies an underlying strategy of some kind.

----------------------------------------

Is it my left arm? I figured I had my peel in the right one, and was clutching the hook with my left.

Yeah, that tracks.

That might make it easier to stay alive.

Severe injury (body) 1d12 + Remote Wilderness (environment) 1d12

17 (2 Steps)

I try to tie something around the wound to stop the bleeding.

There’s lots of loose rope dangling off the edge of the scaffold, most of the equipment has been knocked loose and is either piled in the lowest part of the platform, or scattered in the mud around you.

Step 1 - Scattered Emergency Supplies (Equipment) 1d10

1

You find the ropes all attached to something else, and most usable items are caked with mud or crushed. Any material you attempt to use fumbles in your trembling remaining hand.

You feel your balance swaying as energy rushes out of your body. The clumped soil under you is starting to give way to cloying mud.

I have to wake up Accretio.

I move to the front of their shell, where the tilting steering plate is. I want to pry it off of them.

Added challenge: Awaken Accretio (1d4)

1

Free Step (Asset Surrendered - Piloting device) – Vehicle Maintenance (Equipment) 1d10

7 vs 1 + 17

You pry the plate off of the spike of rock you had initially planted it on. It comes off with ease, as if some source of pressure was also pushing on it from below. As soon as it erupts off you can feel a fierce rumble from Accretio as their entire body lurches and quakes. Their great shell quivers with the movement, insulated and contained by the dense mud.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

As their body corrects its odd tilt, the scaffold atop them stresses and the woodwork gives in to the strength of the motion.

Steam shoots from every opening and the natural bodies of water on the shell bubble. A wave of heat breathes heavily from the oven’s opening on their side.

I want to take some soot from the mouth of the oven.

I want to grab some dough I had stored in the proofing cavern.

I want to grab the remnants of my arm and the hook it’s twisted up in and make a greasy dough slurry to stick onto it.

I want to take the doughy hook arm creation and stick the plate I pulled off Accretio and stick it to the shoulder and put the whole thing in the oven.

And when it's glowing hot I want to stick that plate to my shoulder.

So you’re anticipating that the sooty sand mixture around Accretio’s oven entrance will act with the same properties as the ink created and used to paint plates.

And that somehow the nature of the plate and ink enchantments will act with this twisted hook arm you’ve created with mounds of dough and that you will be able to attach the cooked result onto your body and it will function like an arm?

Yes.

Step 2 - Limb Attachment Magic (Hearthspark demigod) 1d20

8 + 7 vs 17

It’s not quite enough. You find the dough stored in the cavern, but it's already been slightly steamed by the increased head of a newly awoken Accretio.

You hastily paste it into a gravelly soot soaked mound with your detached arm and the toads severed tongue, but it barely holds as you plaster the plate to it and roll it into the forge level heat of the oven mouth.

You see there’s a reaction. The dark soot spreads in a barbed twisting pattern that wraps itself around the plate shoulder joint you created.

Your final moments are escaping you, your vision darkens. With scalding fingers you pull this abomination from the oven. The twisting barbs that distend from the shoulder of this thing avoid your shoulder joint, unwilling to latch on and become one with you.

I take my coin and stick it to the shoulder plate. Then shove the whole thing into my open wound.

Step 3 - Paid Limb Attachment (20 filigree) - 1d6

2 + 15 vs 17

The hesitant tendrils of the hook arm are quickly attracted to the value held in your coin. They latch on and the coin pulses with dull energy.

At once the arm takes to your body and you can feel energy rush back into you before you lose consciousness.

The first few flexes feel strange and alien, but you are able to make it move.

One band of ivory white circles the shoulder joint, separating your new arm from the rest of your body. It spins in place slowly, and you can see the filigree adorned on it, now pushed to the outer edges.

You see 19 of these familiar, bank issued decorations, being slowly drained.

It appears that this arm might be a rental.

Accretio faces you, a bright molten glow in their cavernous eyes.

Bright white lights shoot from a quickly spinning Portable Orbital.

You have survived.