Heronymus
05-19-2005, 10:26 AM
We open on the fair city of Aldis, the beginning of spring, in the second year of the rule of the new Monarch, Queen Jaelin. She's...had a tough start. A diplomatic bungle with the Jarzoni led to a border war that went badly for the Aldeans; as terms of the peace, the Jarzoni now have a permanent embassy presence in the City of Aldis, led by Prelate Ruthven.
The Council is bucking for the heir-apparent, Minister Sayvin (the son-and-heir-presumptive of the old Monarch), to be named as "co-Monarch" at the next meeting of the Council. An unprecedented move, and effectively a vote of no-confidence not just for the Queen but for the whole idea of the venisonacracy.
In addition, the land is going through a particularly difficult and ill-timed drought, which isn't helping the Queen at all.
Needless to say, there are several people, including the Current Monarch, who think this is a bad spot.
Enter the Idio--er, Heroes.
Marcus is a member of the Monarch's Finest, a "diplomat" and "negotiator". He's wiry and lithe and clever, and uses a fine rapier as his weapon.
Louis is a Knight of the Rose, and really good at hitting people with sticks, so they gave him a big-ass stick; the most noticeable thing about Louis (other than that he stands 6'4") is his tetsubo.
They've both finished top of their class as trainees, and are ready for some real-world experience, when they get the call from their respective commanders (Lord Aelmar and Sharit Ranith, for the Order and the Finest, respectively), and come rushing to meet them at the palace.
After a quick once-over, including such interesting questions as "do your parents have other heirs" and "are your families far from here", they're approved for a mission about which they know nothing, and spirited away through secret passages deep into the heart of the palace, where they meet the Queen in her private chambers.
The Queen is in trouble. The Council is against her, there's someone else who wants her job, and the people are getting hungry.
So, what does she want? She wants two young and un-attached heroes to go haring off to find a wineglass.
The Carnelian Chalice is a powerful magical artifact that would restore the land, and thereby help the people regain confidence not just in the Queen but in the system of governance of the land itself; it would be proof, after the disastrous last couple of years, that the gods had not abandoned Aldis.
Oh, and the last known resting place of the Chalice is on the border with the Lich Lord. Oh, and all of the other agents tasked with this have disappeared. Oh, and you have two weeks.
Good luck!
So, on their way out to grab their horses, they're braced by their respective commanders and it is stressed that this could be the downfall of Aldis as we know it.
But no pressure.
On the way to the stables, they're chatted up by Minister Sayvin, the guy who's bucking for promotion to co-Monarch. He...encourages...the young lads to abandon their quest. "For the good of the country." The "or else" isn't really spoken, but his bully-boys, a pair of killers to Louis' eye, make it clear. Louis privately refers to them as "light" and "dark" meat, but we never actually learn their names.
It should be noted that before the Minister accosted the lads, he was chatting amiably with Prelate Ruthven, the Jarzoni Head of Embassy in Aldis.
With that pleasant little threat in our pockets, the weight of the country on our shoulders, and a couple of horses beneath us, we rode out.
In order to dissuade followers, we rode out the East gate, instead of heading straight North, then camped off the road after a day's travel.
During the night, while Louis is sacked out and Marcus is on watch (no fire, so as not to draw unwanted attention), the camp is snuck up on by a mucking great wolf. A rhys-wolf, as it turns out, who leads our daring duo through a path they were sure didn't exist before to the ruins of a first age temple, where it proceeds to use the scrying pool to predict the future: should the duo continue on this path, they will be ambushed and killed, and within the year there will be civil war, and then a Jarzoni invasion, and finally the hordes of the Necromancer will pour across the mountains. If the duo give up and go home, this disaster is delayed for perhaps a generation, but no more. And, should they succeed in their charge, the land will be renewed and the Monarch restored.
But no pressure.
As a parting gift, two silver rings in the shape of ivy leaves are gifted from the bottom of the scrying pool.
As they leave the temple, the briars surrounding the ruins crawl back over it, and the path disappears behind them as they wend their way back to the camp.
Louis takes over the watch, and then experiments with the rings (much to the chagrin of Marcus). It turns out the ring, when worn, makes the wearer completely deaf.
Back on the road, they wend their way north through the dense woods towards the north woods, along the way picking up a pair of relief horses to move faster and a miserably bad meal at Molly's, an inn that has most definitely seen better days. Much like Molly.
Emerging onto the North Road, they find the major Inn on this corridor, which is much, much better than Molly's. In the main room, there is a Jarzoni preacher, and indicative of just how bad things have gotten, no one has heckled him off the stage.
Louis, er, "convinced" him to take the rest of the night off. For this, the innkeeper ponied up a couple of free drinks, and Marcus spent some time chatting him up, including convincing him that we were traveling back towards the capital city and would be trustworthy enough to carry some mail...including a couple of dispatches from the Jarzoni preacher. Hm.
A good night's rest and a good breakfast later, the stable boy was kind enough to point out that the two relief horses both had colic, but would get better if they were allowed to rest. Instead, Louis and Marcus rode the sick horses hard, to get the most out of them before they died. On the trail, Marcus extracted a cipher from the letters, and found that the preacher was in fact an agent of Jarzon, who had been sending assassins after the parties looking for the Chalice...and planned to do the same to the lads.
Instead, Louis had the idea to ambush them unexpectedly, and the Dynamic Duo sets up a trap to catch the enemy unaware, between a bend in the road and a ravine with a river at the bottom. The plan, such as it is, is to drive the colicky horses into the bad guys, hoping to force a couple off the cliff, and sowing confusion. Plus, the bad guys' horses are probably more healthy and could therefore be procured as replacement mounts.
Indeed, the ambush is particularly successful, mostly because the attack of the two heroes is focused on the guys carrying crysions, or magical zap-gun crossbows.
It is discovered, in the ambush, that Louis is indeed very good at hitting things with his tetsubo, and when a man gets hit with a telephone pole, he generally decides to lay down for a while. It's also discovered that the zap-guns are very, very painful to get hit with, according to Marcus.
The interrogation of the leader of this band of cutthroats is cut short by a sudden mystical attack, which freezes the bandit's body and shatters it into a million shards. On his remains, however, is found a noble seal, identified by Marcus as being similar to the old king's seal. On closer examination, the rescued horses are all marked as Army Cavalry property, and the bows and zap-guns so expensive as to be officer weapons, rather than bandit weapons. With new concerns and new horses, the lads make haste to the North, rapidly passing into the mountains and beyond the settled regions.
A sudden attack of deja vu brings to mind the scene in the scrying pool where Louis is shown his own death, and the narrow pass ahead of them is identified as the ambush point in the vision. Rather than riding to their death, Marcus and Louis slip off their horses, off the road, and up the side of the pass, to come upon a contingent of bowmen laying in wait for our heroes. In the attack, Louis takes an arrow to the hip and Marcus proves that he's bad with a zap-gun but good with a sword.
A quick examination of the equipment of the losers indicates more Army involvement; in this case, fine officer swords in the hands of the ambushers. A quick reconnoiter discovers eight horses staked out at the end of the pass on the northern side, so bypassing the other half of the ambush, the lads steal all their horses and ride hard for the temple in which the chalice is reputed to rest.
Hurrying now, as time is of the essence, the lads find and explore the temple, finding only an arch suggesting a door, but no door. Louis, in a test of faith, convinces himself that, in fact, the door isn't a door and steps through what would seem to be solid rock. ("When is a door not a door? When it's ajar...")
Best quote: Marcus, to Louis -- "It seems your tenuous grasp on reality has come in handy today."
A long decent along a dark and foreboding stair deep into the heart of the mountain discovers a chamber of bones...thousands of skeletons, strewn about the floor, and a set of double doors at the far end. A low and continuous moan fills the chambers and sends shivers down the spine of Louis, and it is agreed that now would be a good time to be deaf.
Hey, those rings actually came in handy!
As the jumble of bones turns to dust under their touch, the two make their way across the chamber, open the doors, and stride into...
...a bathroom. Now, it's a pretty nice one, with fine tile floors and a deep, claw-footed tub. But it's still a bathroom.
And it's occupied.
Swirling around the bath, like a rising steam cloud, are spirits, defenders of the Chalice, which lays sparkling in the bottom of the tub. While Louis rescues the Chalice from it's resting place, his ears deaf to the screaming of the spirits, Marcus goes trolling for other artifacts...and finds a circlet of silver with a sapphire fitting, possessed of serious arcane powers.
The two tomb raiders make their way back up the stairs, the spirits dogging them all the way to the wards protecting the sepulchre. And then, there in the entry cavern, are the bully boys, white and black.
Black is a dagger man, who has the ability to make his blades fly. White is a swordsman, and his sword is a beautiful silver blade with no cross-guard: a murder weapon, a weapon of pure offense that has no defensive value. Oh, and he dances.
They square off, Marcus against black, Louis against white.
Marcus is puts the tiara on, and it turns out that he's now very powerful, and proceeds to use his new arcane abilities to disarm Black, and then close with him to drill him with a sword through the heart.
Louis finds his particular weakness when fighting white: it doesn't matter how much damage you do to someone if you can't hit them. White dodges blows and proceeds to cause Louis to suffer the death of a thousand cuts...while each individual slice of the sword isn't bad, they add up fast, and soon Louis is lagging.
Of course, when Marcus kills black, white goes apeshit and tries to kill Marcus.
All-out attack makes one easier to hit. This is a good thing. Marcus trips white up, then slashes him, and white stumbles, dropping his sword...which Louis then shatters with his caber--er, tetsubo. Finished and beaten, Marcus cuts him down, and then turns to Louis and says "The circlet--take it off." Louis, afraid of the implications, removes it quickly by punching Marcus in the face, sending the tiara flying.
When Marcus explains that the tiara is actually the resting place of a Necromancer who is trying to possess Marcus, Louis does what he does best: he breaks it.
The resulting explosion nearly kills the both of them.
The chalice remains intact, however, and indeed the blood of white having spattered into it, reveals it's power: blood poured into it can be dripped out, but never empties, and where the drops fall white chrysanthemum and black briar spring up...but the surrounding area is made green and fertile again.
With 8 horses, they race back to the Queen in record time, and deliver the grail--er, Chalice.
The Council is bucking for the heir-apparent, Minister Sayvin (the son-and-heir-presumptive of the old Monarch), to be named as "co-Monarch" at the next meeting of the Council. An unprecedented move, and effectively a vote of no-confidence not just for the Queen but for the whole idea of the venisonacracy.
In addition, the land is going through a particularly difficult and ill-timed drought, which isn't helping the Queen at all.
Needless to say, there are several people, including the Current Monarch, who think this is a bad spot.
Enter the Idio--er, Heroes.
Marcus is a member of the Monarch's Finest, a "diplomat" and "negotiator". He's wiry and lithe and clever, and uses a fine rapier as his weapon.
Louis is a Knight of the Rose, and really good at hitting people with sticks, so they gave him a big-ass stick; the most noticeable thing about Louis (other than that he stands 6'4") is his tetsubo.
They've both finished top of their class as trainees, and are ready for some real-world experience, when they get the call from their respective commanders (Lord Aelmar and Sharit Ranith, for the Order and the Finest, respectively), and come rushing to meet them at the palace.
After a quick once-over, including such interesting questions as "do your parents have other heirs" and "are your families far from here", they're approved for a mission about which they know nothing, and spirited away through secret passages deep into the heart of the palace, where they meet the Queen in her private chambers.
The Queen is in trouble. The Council is against her, there's someone else who wants her job, and the people are getting hungry.
So, what does she want? She wants two young and un-attached heroes to go haring off to find a wineglass.
The Carnelian Chalice is a powerful magical artifact that would restore the land, and thereby help the people regain confidence not just in the Queen but in the system of governance of the land itself; it would be proof, after the disastrous last couple of years, that the gods had not abandoned Aldis.
Oh, and the last known resting place of the Chalice is on the border with the Lich Lord. Oh, and all of the other agents tasked with this have disappeared. Oh, and you have two weeks.
Good luck!
So, on their way out to grab their horses, they're braced by their respective commanders and it is stressed that this could be the downfall of Aldis as we know it.
But no pressure.
On the way to the stables, they're chatted up by Minister Sayvin, the guy who's bucking for promotion to co-Monarch. He...encourages...the young lads to abandon their quest. "For the good of the country." The "or else" isn't really spoken, but his bully-boys, a pair of killers to Louis' eye, make it clear. Louis privately refers to them as "light" and "dark" meat, but we never actually learn their names.
It should be noted that before the Minister accosted the lads, he was chatting amiably with Prelate Ruthven, the Jarzoni Head of Embassy in Aldis.
With that pleasant little threat in our pockets, the weight of the country on our shoulders, and a couple of horses beneath us, we rode out.
In order to dissuade followers, we rode out the East gate, instead of heading straight North, then camped off the road after a day's travel.
During the night, while Louis is sacked out and Marcus is on watch (no fire, so as not to draw unwanted attention), the camp is snuck up on by a mucking great wolf. A rhys-wolf, as it turns out, who leads our daring duo through a path they were sure didn't exist before to the ruins of a first age temple, where it proceeds to use the scrying pool to predict the future: should the duo continue on this path, they will be ambushed and killed, and within the year there will be civil war, and then a Jarzoni invasion, and finally the hordes of the Necromancer will pour across the mountains. If the duo give up and go home, this disaster is delayed for perhaps a generation, but no more. And, should they succeed in their charge, the land will be renewed and the Monarch restored.
But no pressure.
As a parting gift, two silver rings in the shape of ivy leaves are gifted from the bottom of the scrying pool.
As they leave the temple, the briars surrounding the ruins crawl back over it, and the path disappears behind them as they wend their way back to the camp.
Louis takes over the watch, and then experiments with the rings (much to the chagrin of Marcus). It turns out the ring, when worn, makes the wearer completely deaf.
Back on the road, they wend their way north through the dense woods towards the north woods, along the way picking up a pair of relief horses to move faster and a miserably bad meal at Molly's, an inn that has most definitely seen better days. Much like Molly.
Emerging onto the North Road, they find the major Inn on this corridor, which is much, much better than Molly's. In the main room, there is a Jarzoni preacher, and indicative of just how bad things have gotten, no one has heckled him off the stage.
Louis, er, "convinced" him to take the rest of the night off. For this, the innkeeper ponied up a couple of free drinks, and Marcus spent some time chatting him up, including convincing him that we were traveling back towards the capital city and would be trustworthy enough to carry some mail...including a couple of dispatches from the Jarzoni preacher. Hm.
A good night's rest and a good breakfast later, the stable boy was kind enough to point out that the two relief horses both had colic, but would get better if they were allowed to rest. Instead, Louis and Marcus rode the sick horses hard, to get the most out of them before they died. On the trail, Marcus extracted a cipher from the letters, and found that the preacher was in fact an agent of Jarzon, who had been sending assassins after the parties looking for the Chalice...and planned to do the same to the lads.
Instead, Louis had the idea to ambush them unexpectedly, and the Dynamic Duo sets up a trap to catch the enemy unaware, between a bend in the road and a ravine with a river at the bottom. The plan, such as it is, is to drive the colicky horses into the bad guys, hoping to force a couple off the cliff, and sowing confusion. Plus, the bad guys' horses are probably more healthy and could therefore be procured as replacement mounts.
Indeed, the ambush is particularly successful, mostly because the attack of the two heroes is focused on the guys carrying crysions, or magical zap-gun crossbows.
It is discovered, in the ambush, that Louis is indeed very good at hitting things with his tetsubo, and when a man gets hit with a telephone pole, he generally decides to lay down for a while. It's also discovered that the zap-guns are very, very painful to get hit with, according to Marcus.
The interrogation of the leader of this band of cutthroats is cut short by a sudden mystical attack, which freezes the bandit's body and shatters it into a million shards. On his remains, however, is found a noble seal, identified by Marcus as being similar to the old king's seal. On closer examination, the rescued horses are all marked as Army Cavalry property, and the bows and zap-guns so expensive as to be officer weapons, rather than bandit weapons. With new concerns and new horses, the lads make haste to the North, rapidly passing into the mountains and beyond the settled regions.
A sudden attack of deja vu brings to mind the scene in the scrying pool where Louis is shown his own death, and the narrow pass ahead of them is identified as the ambush point in the vision. Rather than riding to their death, Marcus and Louis slip off their horses, off the road, and up the side of the pass, to come upon a contingent of bowmen laying in wait for our heroes. In the attack, Louis takes an arrow to the hip and Marcus proves that he's bad with a zap-gun but good with a sword.
A quick examination of the equipment of the losers indicates more Army involvement; in this case, fine officer swords in the hands of the ambushers. A quick reconnoiter discovers eight horses staked out at the end of the pass on the northern side, so bypassing the other half of the ambush, the lads steal all their horses and ride hard for the temple in which the chalice is reputed to rest.
Hurrying now, as time is of the essence, the lads find and explore the temple, finding only an arch suggesting a door, but no door. Louis, in a test of faith, convinces himself that, in fact, the door isn't a door and steps through what would seem to be solid rock. ("When is a door not a door? When it's ajar...")
Best quote: Marcus, to Louis -- "It seems your tenuous grasp on reality has come in handy today."
A long decent along a dark and foreboding stair deep into the heart of the mountain discovers a chamber of bones...thousands of skeletons, strewn about the floor, and a set of double doors at the far end. A low and continuous moan fills the chambers and sends shivers down the spine of Louis, and it is agreed that now would be a good time to be deaf.
Hey, those rings actually came in handy!
As the jumble of bones turns to dust under their touch, the two make their way across the chamber, open the doors, and stride into...
...a bathroom. Now, it's a pretty nice one, with fine tile floors and a deep, claw-footed tub. But it's still a bathroom.
And it's occupied.
Swirling around the bath, like a rising steam cloud, are spirits, defenders of the Chalice, which lays sparkling in the bottom of the tub. While Louis rescues the Chalice from it's resting place, his ears deaf to the screaming of the spirits, Marcus goes trolling for other artifacts...and finds a circlet of silver with a sapphire fitting, possessed of serious arcane powers.
The two tomb raiders make their way back up the stairs, the spirits dogging them all the way to the wards protecting the sepulchre. And then, there in the entry cavern, are the bully boys, white and black.
Black is a dagger man, who has the ability to make his blades fly. White is a swordsman, and his sword is a beautiful silver blade with no cross-guard: a murder weapon, a weapon of pure offense that has no defensive value. Oh, and he dances.
They square off, Marcus against black, Louis against white.
Marcus is puts the tiara on, and it turns out that he's now very powerful, and proceeds to use his new arcane abilities to disarm Black, and then close with him to drill him with a sword through the heart.
Louis finds his particular weakness when fighting white: it doesn't matter how much damage you do to someone if you can't hit them. White dodges blows and proceeds to cause Louis to suffer the death of a thousand cuts...while each individual slice of the sword isn't bad, they add up fast, and soon Louis is lagging.
Of course, when Marcus kills black, white goes apeshit and tries to kill Marcus.
All-out attack makes one easier to hit. This is a good thing. Marcus trips white up, then slashes him, and white stumbles, dropping his sword...which Louis then shatters with his caber--er, tetsubo. Finished and beaten, Marcus cuts him down, and then turns to Louis and says "The circlet--take it off." Louis, afraid of the implications, removes it quickly by punching Marcus in the face, sending the tiara flying.
When Marcus explains that the tiara is actually the resting place of a Necromancer who is trying to possess Marcus, Louis does what he does best: he breaks it.
The resulting explosion nearly kills the both of them.
The chalice remains intact, however, and indeed the blood of white having spattered into it, reveals it's power: blood poured into it can be dripped out, but never empties, and where the drops fall white chrysanthemum and black briar spring up...but the surrounding area is made green and fertile again.
With 8 horses, they race back to the Queen in record time, and deliver the grail--er, Chalice.