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Conscious that her distance from the others protected her from the electrical attack, Selena steps back away from the lizard attacking her and keeps her distance from the party as well. She pulls out her spear and attempts to fend the beast off, and whistles to Winter to take cover away from the fight. A barely audible sigh escapes her lips when she hears the guttersnipe wailing about 'tickle worms'...
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The initial panic gives way to adrenaline-fueled clarity. The world snaps into focus. There were only her muscles, the steel of the blade, and her target.
Quasit slides back and around the tail of the beast, then drops down with a fluid motion right into the spine of the lizard.
Then she sees a motionless Sakitu lying face-down in the snow.
"Saki!" she screams.
Bulvi moved over to help Selena. If he could cut the creature down perhaps she could help Sakitu.
Selena waits for the creature to attack, to parry and counterstrike it when it does, and for that moment she seems as frozen as the snow before bursting into action like exploding ice.
Bulvi tries to drive his sword through the Lizard.
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Quasit leaps over to Sakitu and goes down on her knees in the snow, then rolls the fox-girl face up and with trembling, bloody hands tries to feel for a pulse.
"I'm not sure... I don't know... I think I feel a pulse. But I'm not sure she's breathing."
Quasit obviously doesn't really know what to do. She drops her sword, and shakes Sakitu a bit roughly by the shoulder.
"Saki? Saki, can you hear me? Don't you DARE be dead!"
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"Glad to see Sakitu is still with us. It would seem that ill omens still haunt our party...seems like we can't get in a fight without at least one of us coming close to death...friend Tyrael, while your company is most welcome, I hope you don't come to regret joining us..."
Fin will take a couple of hits with the wand...
Bulvi tries not to distract Quasit as she uses the wand but once Sakitu comes around he moves to help her get to her feet.
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Sakitu emerges back to consciousness. At first she has a splitting headache but continued applications of the healing wand bring her back to full health. She smiles as Bulvi helps her to her feet. "Wow. That all happened so fast." She glances around at the dead bodies and then in a moment of panic she looks more closely to see if any of her friends are on the ground. Seeing that no one seems to be severely injured she relaxes.
"I guess I missed out on the fun part." She reaches for Quasit's arm. "You ok?"
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Quasit is so relieved to see Sakitu alive and well, that at first all she can do is nod vigorously. It looks like she's about to burst into tears, but she settles for sweeping Sakitu into a big tight hug.
"You scared me." she finally croaks.
When she finally lets Sakitu go, she settles back on her haunches in the snow, rubs an eye, and begins to yammer in her traditional way.
"You know, I would have thought that the ONE good thing about coming to the land of eternal snow was that we WOULDN'T have to worry about packs of lizards and giant bugs. Especially flippin' lightning lizards. I never even saw those things, and suddenly *WHAM!* they're hitting us like an invoker."
"Hey Tyrael, don't forget Bull and Selena." She takes a look at Bulvi and gives a low whistle and a smirk. "Jeepers Bull, you look like 3 miles of bad road. That's what you get for wearing metal armor. Didn't you know we were loose in the land of the Electric Iguanas?"
Bulvi pull out the empty vial that contained the potion of cure light wounds and tosses it gently towards Quasit "I used to look worse." He leans against a nearby tree. "If this area was properly patrolled they wouldn't be here... then again if this area was properly patrolled we'd be fighting a lot more soldiers."
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Sakitu return's Quasit's hug with gusto. "Yeah, I scared myself too. Well, I would have if I had known what was going on." Sakitu takes a moment to gather any of her belongings that she dropped then she says, "Well, I think we need to keep moving. I just hope we don't run into any giant sharks out here ."
"It's a good way to keep warm too. Thanks for the healing Quasit." Bulvi is ready to move out with the others and if they are waiting on anyone will pace back and forth, even he is beginning to feel the cold.
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Tyrael getting ready to do the healing as quasit comes up and takes the wand. Watching her heal everyone. "you seem to be pretty good with that wand. Maybe you should look into using others as well."
After the healing is done and he watches the group embrace each other. He picks up his hammer and gets ready to move along.
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Watching her heal everyone. "you seem to be pretty good with that wand. Maybe you should look into using others as well."
Quasit pauses and looks around at Tyrael in surprise, as if this had never occurred to her before now. She purses her lip just a bit, then nods.
"You know... maybe I should at that."
Looking at Quasit, "The world up here is this dangerous. One of the reasons we think so much less of southerners, because they are soft and around here they'd just end up dead, yet they remain soft and proclaim themselves as superior to us. Folks who wouldn't survive and yet think themselves superior."
After mentioning wands, Selena agrees as she picks up Winter "Using wands is great, and can be a great tactic, but it gets expensive real fast. Of course, you can be disarmed of wands, but not so your own magic."
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Fin shakes his head at Selena. "I hail from the south and I have survived, thus far any way...but I proclaim myself superior to no one...and you judge southerners just as you claim they judge you...
"And if you and other northerners spent any time in the deserts of Osirion, where it's no less dangerous as life here, methinks you might have a different perspective on who is soft...all people could be considered soft when they're out of their own element..."
The ranger nods at Bulvi in agreement that they should move on...
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after the bout with the shocking lizard iguana things, and the round of needed healing, you make on your way. it takes a few more hours but you spot the tower.
Sharp winds whistle across this stark white plain, stinging the eyes along with the near-blinding rays of the reflected sun. A great eruption of frozen ice rises in the distance—an imposing pale tower crowned with icicles spearing into the sky. Seemingly born of the land itself, an unbroken circular wall of ice guards the tower’s base, with no means of entrance visible. High above, a large gash opens in the tower’s bowl-like crown, ringed in icy spikes and split by a massive plane of ice resembling an inverted crescent moon.
Selena laughs at Fin's response, "Didn't say it was my opinion. I simply meant notherners in general. Quasit seems to think we're all evil up here."
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Quasit sighs, closes her eyes, and squeezes the bridge of her nose.
"No, I don't think you're all evil up here. Criminey. I'm too tired to bicker with you right now."
*****
Upon reaching the tower, Quasit's heart sinks a bit at the sight. She chews her lip for a bit, then speaks quietly to the others.
"Well, there has to be some way inside. Fin, maybe you can scout around the perimeter. Look for some sign of a way in. Tracks or a path or something. I don't like our chances of scaling that ice wall, although if we could toss a grappling hook up to the top, we might be able to get up and over all right."
"I'm not sure if there is much I can do that wouldn't make his task anything but harder right now so I'll sit tight."
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A trampled path of snow, heavily tracked by footprints and sled trails, ends abruptly at an opaque wall of ice. Carvings and ancient glyphs depict only the semblance of a gateway on its surface.
There are three guards up top that can be convinced with a bluff check that will have them open the way, you can attempt to break through the ice, or possibly come up with a different idea
"Subterfuge or stealth would serve us better than brute force right now I think. If we can talk our way through we can always try to sneak in assuming it doesn't go terribly wrong. The reverse is not true."
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"Yeah, I don't like our chances of cutting through a solid wall of ice with a few swords and daggers. It'd probably take us days."
She thinks for a moment, arms crossed, staring up at the tower.
"On the other hand, talking my way past guards is kinda what I do. That's mainly what my brother used me for, back in Cassomir. That and squeezing into narrow spaces. He says I have an honest face. Compared to him, that's probably true."
"Well, if we're going to make this work, we need to be bold and all march up there together like we belong here. So we all need to be on board. I kinda wish we'd thought to grab some uniforms off those guards, but given the number of spies running around in that village, we might be able to convince them we just came here to rat someone out, or otherwise give useful information. And we have one thing going for us, we heard that sergeant calling out to someone named Radosek when he used his mirror back at the tea-house. I'd guess that's their leader. We can use that."
"Anyway, that's my opinion. I'm guessing some people here will think I'm being rash and stupid..." she glances toward Selena with a mirthless smirk, "...but unless we want to try and fight past 3 guards up on the wall, then try and scale the wall before the whole garrison comes out to shoot us, I'm not seeing a lot of other options for getting inside right now. So what do you guys think?"
"I like it, simple but functional. It all depends on if you can sell it with your honest face... and honey bunny's aid." He pokes each of them in the small of the back. "Make mischief and do me proud."
"Well, I did say I was coming to see her. No reason not to keep my word, and I do have grievence with her guards, though it would have been better if they had lived. Now, it could be bad politics depending on how much she cares about a few guards."
"If you want to go down that route you could lean into acting very... imperious and be vague on the details. But if you want to take that approach it depends more on your own ability to lie."
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"All right, it sounds like we're all on board. Now we just have to make this convincing."
"Saki, go human-looking for a while, I don't guess they see a lot of amazing fox women in that village. Then you and Bull take Nadya like you've got her tied up as a prisoner. Fin, you and Tyrael do the same with Selena. Follow me. And Saki, follow my lead once the BS starts rolling downhill."
And with a grin and a wink, she starts marching off toward the tower.
Once in front of the gate-ish portion of the wall, she calls up to the guards.
"Hey, we need to talk to Radosek. I'm a friend of Emil's. We have news about that Black Rider, and these two helped him escape. Word is that Radosek wants that guy bad... maybe bad enough to pay a bounty for what a few humble villagers can tell him. Let us in!"
Over her shoulder she whispers: "If they don't buy this, get ready to bolt..."