LogTorments of the Righteous-Jason-5

Game log for the 2019/01/06 session of AW: Torments of the Righteous, as taken by Jason

Having been chased out of town once, and then having to flee the next town, Inga decides that she wants to obtain a wagon and create a mobile absinthe cafe. Yul has a slave-drawn wagon that would be quite suitable for her purposes. She serves him a sample of her absinthe to break the ice, and he loves it. He's open to selling her a wagon and some slaves, but it's going to be 12-barter to get that done. She'll have to save up for that. In the meantime, he'll buy absinthe from her for resale purposes. They dicker for her to sell it to him at a discount in exchange for him selling it as Inga-brewed absinthe, this building a rep for her. Since he won't be selling in town, this isn't breaking her agreement to brew for the Post Haus. She'll need to obtain wormwood to brew for export, in which cause she asks for his help.

Hike gives her troops a little R&R, since their work is done for the nonce.

Barbarossa feels the need for a blessing before he leaves town. He asks Hike if she can get him an introduction to Archbishop Kreuzmann. She's drunk and in the middle of a game of cards. Hike agrees and advises him to just be pious and everything will be fine. The Archbishop agrees to let Hike and her friend talk to him as he takes his constitutional.

Hike gives her Dammerung buddy a very positive introduction. Barbarossa immediately explains about the botched exorcism. The Archbishop is most concerned that someone outside his outfit is performing exorcisms in his city. Oh snap, it's gonna be on. The Archbishop will totally help him... by setting up a formal ceremony to welcome a Dammerung back to the Redemptionist faith, publicly, with everyone bearing witness. Barbarossa suggests that he needs to penance before the ceremony. Kreuzmann suggests wearing a hairshirt and going around the temple three times on his knees. One way or another, the Archbishop requires that Barbarossa enounce the idea of fighting the demons, and accept that only being pure can save us. Hike tosses Barbarossa a bone, trying to play it like maybe he has important family who mustn't be offended, but the Archbishop offers to invite them and make a public announcement that it was family who brought Barbarossa into the light. In an effort to buy time, Barb tells them he needs to pray on this. They thoughtfully help him with that by taking him to a priest's cell, where he can pray undisturbed. The guard outside is purely to ensure he won't be bothered. Of course!

He tries to figure out how he can get out of this, and concludes that his best option is to start crawling around the church, as directed, and just slip away. He'll need to avoid being noticed by other penitents, of course. It also occurs to him that once the invitations have gone out, Kreuzmann has some reputation invested in it all going down as expected. If he splits once everyone expects public contrition, it will burn Hike, but make the Archbishop look pretty inept.

So he waits until opportunity appears, and then he jumps to his feet holding his head, and screams, "get out of my head, demon!" This scares the acolyte supervising him so badly that the scrawny little twerp runs away, leaving Barbarossa unsupervised. Barb runs out. Behind him, there's a hue and cry.

Tendahl is minding his own business at the safehouse when Barb runs in, wearing a hearshirt, telling him that they're fleeing town again. Tendahl is perforce travelling light, so he's pretty much ready to go.

The Archbishop checks in with Hike about how things went with Marburg. Kreuzmann is not delighted that things went as badly as they did, but he's not surprised, either. He decides to maybe ask Hike to have another go at this problem later. Just then, the hue and cry for the missing demon / Dammerung goes up. The Archimandrix decides to get the hell out before matters get any worse. Time to go back to the Post Haus and drink.

Carl goes out begging. He's made about 1-barter when the hue and cry catches up with him. He decides to join the mob, just to see how that works. Various religious figures are leading the mob, turning people out of doors and requiring searches as they see fit. Many people seem to have seen the guy in the hairshirt running around. Eventually, of course, they get to the area of the Dammerung safehouse.

Inside, Kardner has stuffed Barbarossa and Tendahl into a bolthole. That enables him to open up the house and play innocent. Carl's part of the group that goes into that house, and he can smell Tendahl, though he doesn't know exactly where he is. He goes to pocket a random trinket from the table, but then Kardner orders him to put it down. That gets everyone looking that way, so when Carl puts the trinket down and they all see that it's a Dammerung double-bladed battleaxe symbol, people get pretty pissed. They drag Kardner outside and start tearing the place apart.

Over in the Pos Haus, someone comes in telling everyone about the hue and cry. Hike makes it clear to her troop that they're there to play cards and drink, but there's a zealot there trying to shame everyone into joining the mob. She decides not to exert herself to stop them. Then cheers start going up as people think they've found various heretics.

Barbarossa figures they're bound to get caught, and his only hope is to drop his gear and act like he's part of the mob. Tendahl figures that their biggest risk is the pair of armed religious guards, that there's a specific junior priest whoeveryone seems to defer to, and that their best chance is to wait for a moment when people have circulated out of the room, and then try to play it cool.

They wait for their chance and then try to break for it. Barbarossa, stripped of the hairshirt and Dammerung gear, yells out, "We found a bolthole!" Everyone comes to look at it, and nobody's looking at them. Poor Kardner is taking the blame for everything and looks likely to suffer a lot for Barbarossa's sins, but sometimes, them's the breaks. Carl sees how Kardner's story ends - when they're leading him to the temple, he grabs a guard's knife, shouts out that he will never betray his brethren, and cuts his own throat.

Tendahl goes to the Post Haus to liase with the Torchbearers and coordinate a departure plan.

Carl decides to steal Barbarossa's stuff. He only has a moment to do it, so he can only get the shotgun, but he's got it.

When Tendahl arrives, just on a whim, he decides to get a feel for the discard pile of cards. He discovers that at least one of the cards is extra, and advises Hike that it's bad luck to gamble with a deck of 55. In seconds, some stranger leaps at the Archimandrix with a knife, only to get the crap beat out of him by the Torchbearer gang. In the turmoil, Tendahl notices Hermann pocketing an extra card or two. Rutger runs in, trailed by his bouncers, to put a stop to all fighting. Tendahl then advises Hike that it really is time to leave town.

Tendahl then informs the Archimandrix that it was Hermann who was cheating. Hermann swears he wasn't and claims that it was Dieter, who then discovers his pocket was picked. Barbarossa appears, out of uniform, saying he's ready. The story about how Kardner dies then begins to spread through town.

As the rest of the party plan to leave, Inga explains to Rutger that she needs to get more wormwood to keep brewing, and will be stepping out for a while.

As the gang leaves town headed toward the monastary, Carl appears to join them, with a big bedroll on his back.

As they walk, Hike begins talking to Tendahl about her dream of a flamethrower. He's intrigued, but he can't really work on the project until he gets back to his / a workspace. She and Barbarossa then begin to make peace. She and Ardner give him a lot of grief for not just faking conversion.

Hike leads us down the trail that should take us around Schwarzhoele, with Barbarossa providing suggestions based on his previous travels, when Tendahl vanishes. Inga looks around and figures that he probably sank into the tar, so she begins testing the ground and marking a safe trail. Carl points to the spot of tar Tendahl probably vanished into, at which point Barbarossa tries to dive in after the savvyhead, but he slips and falls instead. Tendahl tries to look in the bright place for a way out, and while it's nicer there than in the real world, it doesn't really give him a lot of tools to escape. He has a better sense of up and down now, so he's trying to swim out, but that just uses up his air faster. Luckily, it makes a disturbance at the top of the pool, which gives Hike a clue about where they are, and she uses the beak of her axe to reach in and haul out Tendahl and then Barbarossa. Hike notices that Tendahl is coughing up tar and smoke. That can't be good.

Inga's trail gets the gang out of there, but via a roundabout path. This is a long enough detour that they'll be short of rations when they arrive at Eisenwald. Inga goes into Schwarzhoele to buy a little more food for the team, and comes out with another day's rations, which should get them there. Hike tithes the next group of travellers she sees, which turns out to be a group of people moving wheelbarrows full of iron ingots. The team ends up spending the night at Hangman's Tree.

While everyone else sleeps, Barbarossa enters the bright place, and finds a message on the tree bearing the Dammerung symbol. It's in Bettina's hand and says, "Trail leads to Nachtburg. Clues to location of dark well. Bring the golden key."

Hike overhears her gang planning to kill Tendahl, since they think his possession is getting worse. They'll arrange an accident for him in the mountains.

The next day, they arrive in Eisenwald, up in the foothills of the mountains. Inga makes note of the places she finds wormwood. The team buys provisions to get them to the monastary. Inga tries to get a temp job working for Clem at the Adit tavern. He's not super impressed by her absinthe, but suggests that his wife (the madam) might hire her. She thinks not. She could work at the Silt Pan, a filthy dive, or maybe look at the domestic job that the local deacon has open while his wife is pregnant. She decides to talk to Deacon Ramsbottom, and he offers room and board for her services as housekeeper. She accepts.

Hike explains to her team that she has to go to the monastary to help Tendahl out, and that it really is a good thing to do this. She tells them that if Tendahl lives, he'll make them a flammenwerfer. He pays the gang 2-barter to stay in town and out of trouble, with Inga keeping an eye on things for her. When they ask, she tells them to stay for a week, and then, if she's not back, to assume she's dead and move on.

Without the gang, it's just Hike, Barbarossa, Carl, and Tendahl headed into the mountains. There's a trail of sorts, and Carl will help find the path. Two days later, they're at the monastary. There's a point where we hear the snarling out beyond the path that says "demons coming," and that's when Carl hands Barbarossa his shotgun. Of course, Carl claims that it's his and he wants it back. As we climb up, we hear some wingbeats off in the darkness, and that's worrying.

The monastary is small, built on a rocky pinnacle, and clearly a fortress. There's only a little light escaping, but the gates are very stout. Barbarossa bangs on the gate, and when the viewing port opens, Cedric invites him in. He quickly grabs Tendahl and leads him to the chapel, where they take him underground to one of the ritual spaces. There's a monk in the chapel, bare except for a linen shift, kneeling on the salt-covered stone floor, praying. Hike lies down on a pew. Carl sneaks off to the dormitory kitchen. They lead Tendahl and Barbarossa further down into the catacombs, and Father Benedict asks them for the story of what happened.

They chain Tendahl down, put a funnel in his mouth, and drown him in holy water. The demon puts up a fight, causing Tendahl great discomfort. Holy water boils back out of the funnel, so they force it in with a funnel. After enough drowing, there's a terrible wailing, black smoke blasts the nose clip off him and begins coming out his nose, and the monks capture it in a brass vessel they prepared for the purpose. Once the entire demon is in the vessel, it sort of sucks the cap onto it, and then the monks seal it with blood-red wax. Exactly blood red, unambiguously. Tendahl watches it all in the bright place, and there, he can see that the smoke is comprised of a cloud of very small insects, so the tendrils are just swarms of microscopic things, hooked together. He also gets the feeling that the thing is afraid, trying to save itself by fleeing his body. Tendahl looks like absolute shit, but he's free!

Barbarossa uses monastary healing stocks to try to stabilize Tendahl and does a thoroughly mediocre job. The wrong choice of unguent means that his blistered cheeks are going to scar badly, and his voice sounds exactly like someone has been boiling water in his throat.