LogThe Watch-Jason-2

Game log for the 2020-05-24 session of The Watch, as taken by Jason

The squad arrives at the camp where Reti is. This is the primary base camp of the southern legion, commanded by Dirdu and her XO Roena. It's after dark by the time we get in. Rezi reports in and gets sent to Reti's tent. The corporal asks who's going with her and only Lomo, Tovy, and Reiku step up. Reti's confering with a few other women in the tent, going over a map. The bad news alarms them all. Reti asks how the Shadow knew about the camp at all, and Rezi opines that they may have been set up. Reti asks who she's shared this theory with, and Rezi says this is the first time she's aired it at all. tovy contradicts this theory, and Rezi agrees that she might be wrong, but still pushes for the camp to be put in a defensive state.

Reti then asks about the camp they were sent to reinforce, and our Corporal has to admit that it's a total loss and the forces stationed there are in retreat. The sergeant asks how her squad is doing, and she reports that it's down from nine troops to five (plus the Corporal).

Template:Npcred can't believe that Yeli's going to go look for a dice game. Yeli's determined to find something to take her mind off the situation.

Tovy confronts Rezi about how irresponsible her unfounded accusations were. Her explanation defuses Tovy's anger but doesn't entirely please her, and the warden walks away frustrated. Lomo, on the other hand, offers her wholehearted support. Their conversation is sound but Lomo doesn't end up feeling good about it either.

Tovy finds Yeli dicing with Loisa and Eive, who's dicing in her full clan Dothas veil-and-gloves. One of the other players quits about the time she arrives, freeing up a spot for the warden to sit down. Tovy talks up the effictiveness of her shield-and-spear-and-sword fighting style, then tells Yeli how she knows that they're all vulnerable and they'd all want to know someone else would speak up for them. Eive gets pissy and asks if they're going to get a room, at which point Yeli leaves the game and Tovy follows her. Yeli reads Tovy and sees that she's sincere.

In the morning, Rezi reports to Reti's tent, and finds Roena there as well. Roena asks Reti if Rezi is the one, and then asks the Corporal to confirm that she thinks intelligence about her mission was apprehended. She admits to having no direct evidence, just a series of circumstances, including the ambush of the wagon train, the raid on the camp, and the near-ambush of the pursuit after the raid. Roena actually gives some credence to this theory. One of the other Lt Cmdrs was captured by the enemy and knew about the forward camp. Roena tasks Rezi and the squad with finding and retrieving said prisoner. She's thought to be in a village that's now behind enemy lines and has been turned into an enemy camp. She then asks the corporal what she thinks of the Shadow. Rezi stammers out that we can't trust it. She also credits the Shadow with a certain measure of intelligence. It's not a collection of mindless beasts. They must never underestimate the enemy. Roena likes what she's hearing. They discuss a few more details, and then Reti dismisses Rezi to get her squad together and execute the mission.

First we need to go back to camp and see if they can fill out the squad from cadre in the forward base, then we need to go to the camp, see if Lt Cmd Lorru is alive, and rescue her if she is, without being detected.

Rezi gathers the squad and assigns tasks. Tovy takes point, Yeli recon, and Lomo navigates, leaving Rezi to watch our backs. Tovy gives Rezi a little help when she needs to go check our backtrail, allowing her to get a full success. Rezi then burns her hold to make Lomo's failure into a success. Yeli's recon is a weak success. Tovy knocks it out of the park on point. All in all, we owe three complications. One of the newbies we picked up at the forward camp gets separated from us and lost. This mission was particularly hard on Tovy, who marks Weary and Jaded.

At the forward camp, Marro volunteers to join up with the squad. We set out for the enemy-held village of Rock Bridge. On the map, it's south of location 9. It's about mid-day when we arrive, with excellent visibility. Tovy recommends we sit and observe, but don't move until night, since movement is easier to detect. Marro apparently can't sit still all day and relocates to get a better vantage point. We see more of the mouthless shadow-archer things patrolling the village.

Rock Bridge was a mining village, and Yeli's recon suggests that any prisoners the Shadow keeps would be in a well-guarded mineshaft. Rezi orders us to set up a remain overnight site with watches for both camp security and observation of the village. She assigns Tovy first guard duty. Lomo helps set up camp. The corporal orders us to do nothing else active until Marro comes back. Reiku warns that Marro's not going to quietly scout and come back, she's going to try to go in. Rezi thinks she'll follow orders and report back, and if not, she'll be the distraction they need.

Lomo and Tovy have a little bonding moment as the older Warden explains why camp gets set up the way it does. Rezi has a conversation with Yeli about losing people, in which she admits that she regrets losing Palita, but she's not sure she'd have done anything differently. Yeli's not real impressed and seems to view the whole thing as an admission of fallibility from the corporal. Somewhere during the march from camp to village, Loisa gets separated from the group, but Tovy and Yeli find her before anything bad happens, and that cements their bond over not leaving people behind. Lomo and Tovy have another bonding moment in which Tovy talks about the little tricks that keep your weapons ready when you need them.

When darkness comes, Marro's not back, but we also haven't observed anything good. Rezi lets the Shadow in to see if she can figure out where they're holding Lorru. She "hears" screaming coming from the bottom of a hole, then a man laughing, with both sounds getting louder and louder until it sounds like it's coming from right behind her. When she opens her eyes, she sees a glipse of a dark figure over her shoulder, with bright red painted lips.

We see a figure come out of the mineshaft and walk over to the old stable inside the village. It's tall, slender, dressed in a black chain mail hauberk, with a rictus grin on its face, exposing bloody teeth. Rezi leads the squad in, and we're able to take out the guards without raising an alarm. We sneak into the mine.

Inside the mine, it's very hard to navigate, because there are no lights. The Shadow, unsurprisingly, doesn't put a lot of emphasis on illumination. We go in with Tovy in the lead, followed by Yeli, Loisa, Lomo, Reiku, and Rezi. We hear female voices and end up in a chamber with a few torches (which give off a thick, greasy smoke) and two women talking lowly. When we look in, we see rough-hewn iron bars and timbers arranged to create cages, and four women in the cages. Rezi orders us to move in, quietly. The two women who were talking stop talking. Three of them stand up, and one of us asks who we are. Yeli says we're there to rescue them, and the more talkative women tell us to hurry and rattles the lock on her cage. The other woman in that cell is lying back against the wall. The two women in the other cell are standing up but not talking. Yeli moves up to try and pick the lock, which requires her to slap the prisoner's hands away from it. The loud prisoner makes more unhappy noises about that. Rezi tries to calm her down while Tovy and Lomo prepare for the guards to return.

Rezi asks the talkative prisoner who she is and where she comes from. She identifies herself as Eira, and says she's been there for months, since she was taken from clan Charsa. She thinks her husband and children got away and she can't wait to see them. One of the other women asks who Rezi's CO is, and identifies herself as Lorru. Jackpot! Meanwhile, the moment Yeli cracks the lock, Eira goes running back up the tunnel. Rezi orders Reiku to grab Eira, which she does. More noise is made befoew Reiku can quiet her down. Eira's cellmate seems to be dead. Yeli pops the second lock quickly and Lorru walks out of the cell, over to the entrance, and asks how many we saw on the way in. The third inmate is Vina. We hear screams from another tunnel. Rezi asks Lorru what's down that way, and she guesses it's more prisoners. Lomo starts to argue with the corporal, wanting to depart the mineshaft immediately, but Tovy grabs her shoulder, yanks her around, and whisper-shouts into her face, "shut the fuck up and execute the corporal's orders!" Rezi defuses things slightly by ordering Lomo to help Reiku keep Eira quiet. We make our way through a pass-through chamber into a different tunnel, which has five more women in cages or chained to the wall. When we walk in, they stop screaming. One prisoner asks, "What are you doing here? Where did it go?" Just then, Rezi sees a shadow-thing materialize behind Loisa and move to attack her. She shoves her out of the way and curses her for a stupid cow, telling her to keep her head on a swivel. More screaming ensues! Yeli breaks the various locks as fast as she can. Tovy, watching their backtrail, sees a black hand with ten-inch fingers coming around the corner of the passage. She shouts, "Shadow!" and attacks with her spear. Upon closer inspection, the creature is wraithlike, resembling a starving person somehow stretched to be ten feet tall, and then it tries to scuttle away on the ceiling. A general flight from the mineshaft ensues, and Lomo lets Eira go so she can flee too. Rezi orders her squad to retreat as well. Vina seems a little dazed and isn't moving with proper haste, so Yeli grabs her and starts moving her out. At the minehead, we see Marro with a bloody sword, calling, "Come on, come on, let's go!" There are a few dead Shadows near the mine head, and we think we see more gathering, but it's hard to tell.

At this point it's a new mission. Rezi gets a strong hit, Lomo needs her hold to make a week hit, Yeli gets a weak success, and Tovy a 14 because she's metal. Complications are: the Shadow takes hold of Rezi, we screwed up, and both Lomo and Tovy were hurt during the mission.

We're making for the camp site with eight prisoners in tow, which means we're leaving with more than twice the people we came in with. Eira is out in front because she's in full-on panic run mode, and Lorru gets after her. Eira is taking us in completely the wrong direction, and between Shadow troops ahead and those coming out of the mine, we're about to be surrounded. Lomo and Tovy stop in their tracks and use their bows to stop the troops from the mine from following. The Lt Cmdr gets hit with an arrow and goes down, and as Rezi goes to lift her up and get her going again, the big bad bloody-toothed thing from the mine appears over her shoulder and whispers something at her. Suddenly Rezi drops Lorru and starts running toward Tovy and Lomo. Yeli, who had been leading the less panicky prisoners toward the camp, points them in the right direction and goes running toward Lomo and Tovy. The fight is going messily for Lomo and Tovy, and to make it worse, Lomo leaves Tovy and goes running to protect Lorru.

Lomo makes it to her, and sees that she's down but alive. She picks up our mission objective and starts carrying her to camp.

Rezi and Yeli's courses intersect, and Rezi yells "run!" right in her face. She ignores the order and covers Lomo with her bow, then retreats with her and Tovy. That gets everyone but Rezi retreating in the right direction. When we rendezvous at camp, everyone's there but Rezi.

Rezi comes to herself somewhere in the woods, out of breath and feeling like she's run for hours. She looks beyond to try to figure out where she is. She figures the camp is beyond that hill... but the thin thing is on that hill. She'd lose it in the darkness if its eyes weren't glowing slightly, and it seems to be tracking her. She lets the Shadow in to see if she can figure out how to lose it. She tries many strategems, but it's always there, following, until she finally perceives that it wants something personal to her. She cuts off a lock of her hair and leaves it on the ground, and it scuttles up to the hair in the blink of an eye and takes it with its freakishly long fingers. As it pulls its hand back with the lock, Thin Boy slowly vanishes.

Back at the camp, Lorru's in a bad way, which means there's no clear leader. Lomo tries to give her first aid but she's declining, so she asks Yeli for help. Yeli shows her a little something and with her help, Lorru's going to be OK. Marro really wants to find the Corporal, as do Tovy and Lomo. Since two of the women we rescued were soldiers, there's some hope they could fend for themselves. Yeli pushes hard to have Yeli, Lomo, and Tovy find the Corporal, while the rest return to the new forward camp. Marro's game for that assignment.

Tovy suggests we estimate the route Rezi would take to escape, and then make our course to intercept her. Lomo and Yeli both Look Beyond for insight into her likely course, and come up with good ideas. Yeli guesses that Rezi's delay may have something to do with the red-mouthed creature. We're able to find her! We then rush back to the front-line camp.

At the front, we find Marro again, who's being tended by an apothecary. She confirms that she brought back all the escapees. She asks us about Reiku - who we didn't know was missing. Marro never saw her come out of the mine. Yeli turns to Tovy, expecting that the warden would follow their informal pact to always rescue their squad buddies, but Tovy completely ignores her and goes to wash up.

Lomo gets some healing but finds the experience dispiriting. It's less like a hospital and more like mechanics repairing a war machine.

Rezi goes to bathe, so she can relax by herself and blow off steam. Yeli finds her there but decides to come back later. Rezi's not satisfied. She tries to relax and catch a little peace, but she thinks she sees glowing eyes looking at her from the hills. She can't shake the feeling of being watched.