LogTorments of the Righteous-Jason-2

Game log for the 2018/11/25 session of AW: Torments of the Righteous, as taken by Jason

In the icehouse, Hegge, Carl, Barbarosa, and Tendahl are in the ice house and have concluded that the Bishop ain't comin' back. Outside, Dieter and friends are squaring off against Archimandrix Hike, her militia, and the town mob. Dieter wants to burn the ice house. Hike takes stock of the scene and realizes that she has to talk Dieter down if she wants to avoid a massacre. She can also sense that there's maybe a little hesitation in one of the members of the Guard - not a lot, but maybe a hesitation she can exploit. She has her Torchbearers ready behind her and her hammer ready on her shoulder, and some of her men have weapons in hand, so it could be on pretty easily, but it's not on yet. She warns the Captain that if he burns the icehouse, everyone will burn. She has seen it. The way she says "seen it" gives him a little pause. As the Captain absorbs that, the town mob fans out, and he realizes that the numbers are stacked against him. He decides to leave before he gets his ass whupped, but he makes it clear that he'll be back. Hike wishes that God should light his way, hint, hint.

Dieter does want to make sure that the body gets cremated properly. He asks Hike if she will bring the Bishop's ashes to the capital, Basilica.

Digression: there are no visible stars, which means navigation on the open sea is normally impossible. People either follow the coast, or they rely on compass and dead reckoning, or they open their third eye and use the signs from the Bright Place.

Anyway, the local rabble just faced off with the church military... and now there's a restless rabble. Inga decides to buy them all a round to settle them down and make sure the Guard leaves town without a fight. Hike decides her team wants in on that too.

Tendahl wants to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Bishop's possession, and figures he'll need time, he'll need to get the body back to the workshop, and that it will come with risk. Hegge thinks this is a terrible idea and wants no part of it. She comes right out and says his refusal to back down from the challenge will doom him. Carl escorts her home, while Tendahl asks Hike for help getting the body back to the workspace.

On the way home, Hegge says nothing to Carl, but she does whistle tunelessly. That's odd, since most people just want to be as quiet as possible in the woods. When they return to her hovel, she asks the boy for a favor. She ties up some sticks to make a little eye, and asks him to secret it in Tendahl's workshop. It's very important to her that he do this, because Tendahl is taking such a risk. He must go quickly and take the river trail.

Barbarosa tries drinking but can't get into the festive mood. He's feeling bad, so he goes to his room in the inn and tries to open his brain and get insight about what happened to the Bishop. He finds his consciousness drawn to the woods, and after a while, things stop looking familiar. He's lost in the woods, even in the bright place. He begins to hear whispering, and the ground gets boggier. He sees Bettina in the woods. She tells him she's trapped and asks for help. She tells him she's not dead, she's not here, he must look about and find the clues to help her. He promises to return for her. She tells him to look for the hangman's tree. He kneels down and prays. When a serving girl (Julia calls on him later, she drops what she's carrying and screams. Barbarosa comes to and sees that he has driven his sword into the floorboard, and the floorboard is bleeding.

Julia tells Inga that Barbarosa killed someone in his room. The gunlugger comes down stairs, blood on his feet and the fronts of his knees, and compliments Inga on the cheese. She grabs Tambor and goes to check it out. Tambor won't go in the room, but he'll look inside the door. The blood is gone (though the footprints and stains remain), but Tambor seems certain something is wrong there. Barb offers to clean up the footprints for Inga. Leia tells her that Jurgen left without paying his tab.

Carl arrives back in the village and goes over to the smithy. Hike has delivered the body and put it face down, and now Tendahl begins an autopsy. There's something wrong with the Bishop's guts. He goes in from the back, starting with the wound, and after he tentatively identifies kidneys and liver, he finds that the intestines are crepey, and dry, and they smell far worse than they should, like death. Tendahl begins to freak out a bit, because this is not his comfort zone, but Hike's company and her word of warning help him keep his cool. She stops him before he pulls the guts out of the body, so when they turn to dust, the cloud is relatively contained. Only Tendahl gets a lungful of powdered hell-guts! Hike offers him a drink, he asks for something cleansed and purified, and then she spots Carl in the back, watching. She asks the kid to find ale. She also notices that there's something different about the lad, but she's too distracted to care right now. Carl won't get close to the body but he hands the ale to Hike, who gives it to Tendahl. Meanwhile, the body seems to be collapsing in on itself. The damage was so obviously in the digestive tract that it had to be something the Bishop ate, and not something recent. He may have been exposed multiple times.

Tendahl and Hike move the body outside behind the shed and throw some sticks over it. Tendahl then goes looking for Barbarosa. Once they're both outside, Carl tries to hide Hegge's little widget inside Tendahl's smithy, but Tendahl has booby traps. There's a fur trapper's snare in the rafters to keep people from sneaking in through the trap door in the roof, and when Carl tries to hide Hegge's eye up there, he sets it off.

Back in Das Asylhaus, Inga has kicked Barbarosa out of his room and back to the stables. Inga tries to look into the bright place to see why her floor was bleeding, and if it was maybe tied to Jurgen leaving. She goes to the room under the stairs where Barb was staying, and finds a big clay pot there. It's the clay pot the Appeasers use for the lottery. The lid is off, and inside, every tile has Heinrich's name on it. $appeaser_faith--; She comes out of the bright place when Julia asks for permission to close up.

Back in Tendahl's smithy, Chuck tries to escape through the bright place before Tendahl can catch him. It's trickier when he's caught in a trap but he's skilled at this. This time, he leaves a few fingers in the trap, but they grow back. He appears back in the real world an hour later in the stable with Barbarosa. Tendahl sees the trap swinging, but doesn't notice the fingers on the rafter. It is a problem for later, as Hike follows Tendahl back to town in search of Barbarosa. They see Rolf picking up Julia to walk her home, and she tells them that the Mistress kicked Barbarosa back to the stables, after all the blood. Hike asks about the blood. Tendahl and Rolf both look at Julia funny. She shakes her head, to let them know that she doesn't want to talk about it. At this point, Hike has had enough, and goes to the stables to sleep.

Barbarosa makes a flaming herbal concoction for Tendahl, which probably does nothing for his risk of possession, but does burn the shit out of his month. He tries to check himself out in the bright place, and while he's burned himself, he's pretty sure he's not cleansed. Maybe if he got waterboarded with holy water? That means an actual Damerrung cleric, not their crazed loner fighting man, and only Barbarosa would know how to find them. He hears the whisphering in the bright place, and it resolves to his own voice, telling Hegge that drowning would be better.

When Carl reappears, Barbarosa opens one eye and asks him if he's heard of the hangman's tree. The kid has not.

The next day, the body is gone. No tracks, no ashes, no nothin'. Carl tries to go back for his fingers while Tendahl and Hike go round and round over that. Tendahl looks for tracks in the bright place and sees none - but the ground around where the body was is wet, and the small of death and crepey intestines is strong there. He goes back to the real world to see if the same thing is true there, and sure enough, the ground is wet, and it smalls (though less strongly). Tendahl shows Hike where his hearth is, and she shovels some random ash in to an urn. Tendahl raises the worry that the ashes won't show any traces of demonic energy, and if the Appeasers test for such, and don't find it, they'll blame the village for whatever happened.

Barb asks Hike about the hangman's tree, and she does know where it is! If you're headed to town, and take one of the tracks that leads to a different village, you'll come to a split in the track where's there's an ancient dead oak tree. That's the tree that both villages use to hang people out for the shadows. Barbarosa then explains to Hike that he needs to go to the tree because of a vision, and offers her a barter to guide him. She gives him directions and goes into town to collect her gang and some bones.

Inga finds that she's on her last bushel of brewing grain. That will need addressing, but first, she's off to see Jurgen about his tab. He's at the mill. His wife, Sasha, is perpetually pissed at Inga. Jurgen gives her some bread to pay for his extra drinks. He ran out because it got late and he had to get home, and he always meant to settle up. He claims not to know of any odd doings at Das Asylhaus, asks what (if anything) she knows of weirdness, and suggests that Inga's father saddled her with a job that requires her to be a slave to sin in order to stay afloat. She starts reading him, since he seems to be hiding something. He's really feeling nervous, and he's feeling awkward because of how bad Sasha hates her. She tells him that if he doesn't come clean, she's going to make his wife real mad at him. He'll talk, but not here. They agree to meet at the icehouse.

He shows up there, on the river side of the ice house where people can't see them easily, looking nervous. He admits that he went to speak to Deacon Schmitto yesterday, because he feels like it's unfair to Inga that she has to run the tavern. The bleeding floor was the last straw for him. He could provide for her. Deacon Schmitto could make Inga Jurgen's second wife. She pulls her knife on him and assures him that she can handle herself just fine, thank you very much. He protests that he loves her. Their fuss gets Klaus looking their way from the dock, and Jurgen goes running off.

Carl's outside the torch line, chilling out and eating plants, when he sees the Torchbearers, Barbarosa, and Tendahl leaving town. He goes to see what's up and decides to come to hangman's hill. The Torchbearers split off and go to Hegge's hut in search of parts to make the ashes a better fake.

The Archimandrix asks Hegge for the parts she needs like she was ordering at Wendy's. It takes the witch no time at all to realize that Tendahl's plan went awry. As Hike explains more of what he's trying to do, Helmut begins to give her the "are you crazy" look. The Archimandrix tells him that they have no choice; Helmut thinks it might be wiser to tell the the truth, even though the village would probably end up burned. She tells him that if he won't promise not to talk right now, she won't need those bits from Hegge after all. Anyway, Hegge will do business, but she wants Tendahl's lungs in exchange. This is not making Helmut any more comfortable. Anyway, she'll settle for having the Archimandrix bring Tendahl to her, but they have to make a blood pact on it.

The Archimandrix decides to chase them down and bring Tendahl right to her, so as to clear his new blood obligation as quick as she can. She intercepts them on the road. Tendahl accepts the Archimandrix's instructions with a certain resignation. Hike tells her team to ride the circuit and meet back at the rock, while she rides with Barbarosa and Tendahl to Hegge's.

Tendahl opens his mind as he walks toward Hegge's, wondering if he's going to live. As he gets closer, he gets shorter of breath.

They arrive at Hegge's, and she walks up to them as they approach. Tendahl trades guarded words with her, and as they talk, all of them hear a growl in the woods. Tendahl explains that he will not surrender quietly, or refuse to take risks. He believes in taking action to redeem humanity. She offers to let him go to the Dammerung, then, but makes Barbarosa promise to kill Tendahl if he must. Tendahl senses that Hegge is losing control of whatever growly thing is out there in the woods. He leaves with the others, on the path toward town. They hear a loud crack behind them and the sound of at least three women screaming. Tendahl tries to stop and look at what's screaming, but the Archimandrix won't let him. They make it safely to the torch barrier.

Inga is out making absinthe deliveries when the folks running from Hegge's arive in town. Way off in the distance, she can hear strange noises. Carl goes running right past Inga this time, where he might normally seek her out. Tendahl sets up his torch-reflector and points it out into the woods. Inga reads the situation and senses that the biggest threat is Klaus and Deacon Schmitto see the five of them at the edge of town with weapons. We can see a dark shape moving around in the woods. Barbarosa opens his brain to the bright place, hoping to see the thing in the woods, and he does. It sees him too. It's kind of like a big cat, with seven legs, two tails in back, and two tails in front. It moves quickly and oily. It looks at him with Bettina's eyes. Barbarosa wets himself and fires his shotgun. Hike runs in, swinging.

She can only see rough outlines of the enemy by torchlight. It slides to one side and pounces on her. She swings the point of her hammer into its guts, and it makes a yowling noise. Tendahl tries to move in with his torch to wound the demon with light, but all he can accomplish is to get it off the Archimandrix. Barbarosa pulls her to safety and compliments her on her badassery. She tells him he smells like piss.

A crowd is gathering and Deacon Schmitto turns to Jurgen and says that he must prepare the tiles.