LogTorments of the Righteous-Jason-13

Game log for the 2019/04/14 session of AW: Torments of the Righteous, as taken by Jason

At the end of the last session, Inga had made her way to the torchlit path. She goes looking for Hegge. The woods are dark, and close in, and the shack is dark when she finds in. A knock on the door yields no answer. Inga finds the door slightly ajar, and she feels like she's being watched by something in the woods. She tries to look inside, and can't spot anything through the small opening. She slowly opens the door, and the house turns out to be empty. No people, no bodies, but she can detect signs of disarray. The cobwebs make it seem like nobody has been there for weeks. One of the benches looks like it's been swept clean, and now it has a couple stick figures on it, like the ones she found in the basement of Das Asylhaus. She goes looking for clues as to what happened to Hegge, and can't find anything conclusive. She can't find signs of blood, so she might not have been killed here, but she also doesn't find anything missing, so it's not like Hegge packed up and left. She decides to start a fire. She finds a little wormwood in Hegge's stores, but it has ergot, which doesn't really work for Inga.

After she gets the fire going, she goes outside to collect firewood. The moment she leaves, she has the sensation of being watched. She works fast and jumps back inside. In the middle of the night, she wakes up, having heard... something. The fire has burned down to just a dull red glow. She throws another log on. She realizes that when she woke up, she had the feeling that she wasn't alone, although it faded as she woke up, so that she can't be entirely sure she didn't just dream that feeling. Only, the house seems to have picked up another stick figure. It's a female figure holding a sprig of wormwood in its hand.

Inga decides to look in the bright place and try to understand what the hell is up with these stick figures. She finds herself on the path to Schwarzhoele, hearing voices whispering in her ears, and suddenly realizes that she's at the sacrificial rock, with night coming on. She tries to navigate back to Hegge's, and begins to hear a giant thumping sound. She ducks down and hides, and whatever it has passes her by. In its path, there's a horrid stench of rotting vegetation. She eventually makes her way back, curls up in the hammock, and tries to sleep.

Tendahl finishes packing and goes to report in at Das Asylhaus. The Archimandrix has her team ready to go, and provisions for at least eight days. Their convoy moves out. When they leave town, they find Carl waiting for them outside the gate. Nobody has coin for draft animals, so Hike (and, technically, Carl) has to help Tendahl pull the wagon. That makes the days feel long.

Inga, heading for the path, ends up falling in a ways behing the Torchbearers. Since she has a torch, the convoy knows that she's there.

Barbarossa's in the rectory, waiting for Sonja to come back and go with him to the circle of standing stones. Before she turns up, Klaus Mechner brings two men to him, Goran and Janosh, who are brothers that can't seem to agree on who owns a piece of land where one of them has been cutting peat. Barbarossa cheerfully drafts them into the expedition to the standing stones, unless they'd both like to get killed right now. That takes them aback, being perhaps contrary to the spirit of the law, and then start bickering again. Barbarossa kills Janosh, and Goran runs off. Things may be moving a little fast for ol' Klaus.

The convoy skirts Schwarzhoele until they realize they can't move the wagon through the tar swamps. The Torchbearers take the wagon through town and buy some draft goats, while Tendahl and Carl skirt the town and meet them on the other side. Hike has no trouble buying goats to pull the cart, and then driving right on through. Some of the men would like to stop and drink, but they aren't really upset, since they woke up thinking they had to walk through the swamp. Hike cautions the men that the wagon is boobytrapped, and there's nothing in there worth losing body parts over.

In the swamp, Tendahl almost gets lost, but Carl points him to the right path. The smith loses his boots in the swamp. They eventually work their way through, and meet up with the Torchbears on the other side. The Torchbearers have long since gotten bored waiting, and now they're taking bets on how long it will take the kid and the gimpy-ass smith to make their through. Hermann wins the pool.

Inga goes into Schwarzhoele and finds Julia in the Flammenkamber. Uli is willing to hire Inga on as an alewife there and let her sleep in a closet.

Barbarossa tries to read the town before he leaves, knowing that Janosh might have some angry friends. He senses that he's much less popular than he used to be, and he needs to look out for the town's simmering discontent. Once he's done with his little tour, Sonja has returned... and she isn't concerned with the project to make rubbings, because she's already studied the stones. She'll still accompany him, though. They make their way out to the stones, but at one point, she tells him that they have to stop and go around. It takes them a lot longer due to this detour, but they get out there OK. He asks her if it matters which stone he starts with, and she responds by singing a song. It's cunningly written so that the word at the end of one sentence is also the first word of the next sentence, so while the words keep repeating, the meaning keeps changing. After a couple of rounds, he tries singing along, and she makes fun of his singing voice. He starts taking the rubbings, starting each rubbing with the side of the stone facing away from the circle. There are twelve stones around, each with twelve runes, and they begin to repeat in a way that reminds him of the way the song repeated. He tries to ask Sonja about the meaning of the runes, but she doesn't really understand them, she just has conjectures.

Barbarossa's finished the bottom and gotten about halfway through the eighth stone on top when he hears a shockwave from the well. Time to go! He and Sonja immediately vacate the area, and return to town via the normal path. On their way, she tells him that she can't be sure, but it feels like Bettina's trip down the well has caused the beasts to come through with increasing frequency. He's all set to keep going to the village, but she wants him to fight the demon, because he is, after all, her Dammerung warrior.

Barbarossa prepares himself for battle and realizes that the demon is lurking, not rushing around. He also finds himself feeling drowsy, which has to be something it's doing, since mortal terror doesn't normally make people sleepy. He decides to initiate contact by firing his crossbow down into the well. He gets three bolts off before he takes a couple steps back and switches to sword-and-pistol.

When it appears, it's almost like something is foaming up out of the well. Then he realizes that it's not foam, it's eyes. Eyes are worth shooting! This thing isn't fast but it's just all eyeball foam, and he could fire about a thousand bolts into it without ever killing it. Pistols seem to bother it more, and it tries to move to cut him off, and when it can't find a way to do that, it stops, and its eyes all start pointing in different directions, and he experiences a moment of vertigo as he reflexively tries to figure out what it was looking at and failed. In the time it cost him to collect himself, he finds himself surrounded by a tendril of foam. He throws his torch into the foam and follows the flame through. The torch singes a couple eyeballs, but the aqueous humor puts the torch out. Now he has no choice but to try to slice his way out, sword against eyeball. Fortunately, Barbarossa's terribly quick with a sword, and he cuts his way free like a human thresher. The stuff of the eyeballs burns him like acid. This is not a good day, especially when he realizes that the eyeball acid has ruined his sword.

He's worked his way free of the demon's trap, and now he's trying to get away, blasting it with pistol fire as he goes. The problem is that it has thousands of eyes and he does not have thousands of bullets. He needs new tactics. He tries lighting a pair of torches and using them as clubs. It does not like being burned, but then Barbarossa doesn't like being burned with acid either. One of the torches goes out when he pushes it too deep into the foam, but that allows him to realize that the thing has some sort of structure under all the eyes. It can rearrange itself pretty quickly, but if he could mount some sort of attack on the thing's center of mass, maybe he could get it in the vitals. He tries that, and pushes the torch firmly into its demonic flesh, searing the flesh of it. That kills the demon, but he ends up disfigured by acid burns. As the demon dies, the bubbles calcify, become a sort of rigid foam. He cuts a couple of eyestalks off as trophies of his victory.

A few days later, the convoy arrives at the Capitol. The Archimandrix tells her gang to go bunk at the Torchbearer HQ while she goes to see Archbishop Kreuzmann. She gets escorted to his quarters, where she finds him poring over a large tome. She reports the trouble in Nachtburg to him, what with the killing of the Deacon and triumph of Barbarossa, and also the fact that she teamed up with Barbarossa to kill a demon. She also reports Togren's attack on the town, and suggests that it's possible the town itself has some horrible effect on people. She concludes by describing Festus' takeover of Togren's troop. The Archbishop tells her that something will be done, and if there's an expedition dispatched, he wants her to light its way. He then assigns her to give alms to the poor as penance for her sins against the demons. Of course, she has no money, so she'll have to do some work to make some barter to give any alms.

She decides to hit her troop up for some good stuff she could give to the poor, and they cough up about 1-barter worth of crap, which she gives as alms. Then she sells the goats for a couple more. Hike then finds Sister Frieda, who takes in the children orphaned by the lottery out in the villages. Frieda tells the Archimandrix that there's an officer, a member of the King's guard named Sir Ingmar, who has an unnatural interest in the children. She fears he will eventually molest one, if he hasn't already, and would love it if Hike reminded him that messing with the kids. She'd make sure that such a virtuous paragon of the Church was rewarded. She concludes by telling the Archimandrix where to find him.

Tendahl builds a prototype werfer of flammens.

Carl wanders off to see if he can find simple work as a child laborer. He tries to get hired as a messenger, but he can't convince the merchant he approaches that he's trustworthy. Carl decides to hang back and see who does get hired, which turns out to be some bucktoothed page. Carl then chases after him, and he can keep up, but the kid sees him, and it turns into a chase. When Carl catches him, he tackles the kid. Yes, he really is tackling a liveried castle page in a public place. A merchant asks what the hell is going on, and Carl yells that the page stole his message and his livelihood. The merchant buys it and picks the page up, shaking him until the note falls out of his tunic. Carl picks up the note and runs off to deliver it. When he does, the recipient tosses him a coin. Carl eat it when nobody is looking.

The Archimandrix goes looking for Sir Ingmar. They find him and his buddies at an upscale brothel called the Silken Curtain that's also a sort of tavern and also a sort of drug emporium, catering to the courtier class. The Torchbearers immediately get some looks when they walk in, and Hike doesn't bother with the preliminaries. "Hey Ingmar, they say you're a child molester.!" She cues her team to keep Ingmar's friends off her back. Ingmar draws steel on her, so she readies her hammer. He rushes in, surprisingly quick, and lunges furiously with his weight behind it, driving the tip of his weapon through her armor. Her counterstroke smashes his head, hearing skin right off his face. Screaming begins. The Kingsguard don't like that. Hike tries to read the situation and figure out who to cow if she wants to shut this down, but there's just no time. A fight breaks out, Kingsguard vs Torchbearers, with weapons. The Torchbearers form a line, the Kingsguard form a wedge to try to penetrate it, they fail, there's a skirmish, and then the madam shrieks, "Enough!" and the fight goes on pause. Hike compliments her foe, buys him a round, and chills things out. The guy turns out to be Sir Mads, and he comes to believe that Hike was doing God's work in defending the defenseless. Mads quietly tells her that he had his suspicions about Ingmar, and she also realizes that the Kingsguard has a lot of respect for skill at arms. In fact, they're so impressed that after hearing some tales of daring-do on the road, the Guard put in a good word for them with the local armorers, and with a financial contribution from the Archbishop, Hike's crew get uparmored. Sadly, Ardner was killed in the fight.

Tendahl goes to visit the Archimandrix in the Torchbearer in the monastary, which is also sort of a fortress, and also pretty sketchy. Hike takes him to a spot where it's safe to do some flammening and some werfening. Tendahl, with his ruined voice, is struggling to explain how this prototype works, and Hike is bored and fiddling with it, and it goes off, catching Tendahl in the corner of the burst. Well, as a demonstration, it definitely proved that the device can be made to do its thing. The Archimandrix pays Tendahl 3-barter, and then they both go to get medical attention.

While she's healing, Hike tries to meditate, and figure out what's happening in bright place Nachtburg. She dreams of Barbarossa, disfigured, with an excessive number of foaming eyes. She wakes up with a stone eyeball in her bed.

When Barbarossa staggers back into Nachtburg, the air feels tense. He realizes that the dissent in the townsfolk has escalated to defiance. He doesn't see who does it, but someone throws a rotten turnip at him. He decides to let that go, and he summons his lieutenants. He shows them his wounds and his trophies and tells them that this is why they have to fight. He gives them the speech about how one stick is weak but a bundle of sticks is strong. He's given Henrik the Elder the assurance that he asked for, but with Henrik the Younger dead, the Elder is in a dark place, and he's not the strong lieutenant he was a few days ago. Thaddius Margner has some influence, though, and he could be turned. Barbarossa approaches him privately, tells him he's not getting the respect he's due, and gives him 1-barter to become his new soldier. That leaves Klaus and Thaddeus as people the Dammerung can rely on, and Henrik more or less in his corner, but only passively so.