"What do you mean you can't reach that far?" Xander says angrily.
"Fine! I'll do it myself!" he says, rushing forward to help his friends, manifesting a translucent polearm hammer with a head the shape of a roaring lion's face.
He swings at the orderly on the ground in front of Milo in a vicious overhand blow.
"Well struck!" Milo cries to Xander as the hammer smashes down. He quickly steps forward again to take the fight to the thuggish orderlies.
Alas, he misses horribly...
"Well struck!"
"Wow." Xander says, surprised at the effectiveness of his attack.
"Thanks. You alright?"
"I'd be better if I could hit!" Milo says with exasperation, glaring at his opponent.
"Enough banter!" Mavro shouts at the others, as he swings his staff at the orderly in front of him.
Varta attacks her new friend (the baddie due north of her on the map)
for damage
Tempest targets one of the new foes, one without injuries, and hits him with a crackling ball of lightning.
Brutish orderlies with empty gaze are swarming from the right wing of the building, closing in on the five heroes. The one who called out for help grins for a second in seeing his buddies running at his side, but his petty joy is of short duration. Charging like a man of lesser stature, Xander irrupts into the main building and swings down his mystical hammer onto the orderly’s head–Milo is just quick enough to move out of the way of his friend’s attack. The brute’s caged helmet shatters, and so does its inside. The orderly falls on the ground, his cranium grotesquely wrecked, dark blood flowing from what was once his forehead.
Unimpressed, the other orderlies still charge ahead. One is a bit too eager, and gets quickly downed by a powerful combination of blows from Varta’s polearm and Mavro’s walking stick.
As another one gets a small electrical burn on his arm from Tempest, the thugs finally shake off their initial astonishment and counterattack. Two of them make a wall of meat and clubs in front of Milo, and their clubs fall down on the rogue like hammers. Luckily, their blows are slow enough for him to dodge.
Similarly ineffective is the attempt on Mavro. The orderly comes at the Pathfinder screaming, but his swing is clumsy, and easily diverted by Mavro’s staff.
________________________
Realizing he was in the thick of it now, Xander swung his translucent hammer again. Whatever else he might be, he was descended from a family of knights. Some of the heroes of the First Crusade spoke with him daily. Today they seemed to guide his hands.
Tossing a grin over his shoulder at Xander, Milo stabs at the orderly directly in front of him.
Varta steps towards the old man then attacks his new friend with zest and a glaive.
for
Grunting indignantly, Mavro thrusts the end of his quarterstaff at the orderly.
Tempest’s electric sphere, Milo’s quick blade and Xander’s ancestral hammer make short work of yet another orderly, who falls on the ground covered in wounds of various nature. His colleague tries to avenge him, but stumble on the fallen corpse at his feet, and misses Milo entirely.
By contrast, both Varta and Mavro fail to hurt their opponent. Both staff and glaive harmlessly im-pact on the thick, padded vest the man is wearing.
“D-damn midget!” spits out the orderly looking with hateful rage at the dwarven maiden “Imma bash you shorter than you are now!”. Surprisingly, he is somewhat able to follow through his unimaginative threat, as he manages to swing down his weapon and club Varta right on her head. The dwarf shakes her head for a second as a very unappealing bruise starts forming above her right eyebrow.
_____________________
Xander looks around and sees that the fight seems to be pretty well in hand now. The Orderly in front of Milo was in a pretty good bottleneck, and Xander wanted to conserve his mystic energies, so he just reached out and put his fingertips on Milo's back for a moment.
"Someone give him a hand, ok?"
(Round 5)
"What, you think I need assistance?" Milo says with a waggle of his brows, though he grins his thanks at Xander all the same.
His rapier darts out once more towards the brutish orderly with whom he is locked in combat.
It's barely a pinprick, but in Milo's mind that has its benefits. Infuriate the foe to come to you...
He takes a step backwards, to taunt the orderly to come out towards him.
"Come, you big ox! I'll give you a free shot!" he says with a waggle of his blade, the tip streaked with the man's blood.
Sneering when his dwarven ally is struck, Mavro raises his walking stick high over his head - very nearly throwing out his back - and brings it crashing down onto the orderly.
Varta attacks right back.
for damage.
(Round 5)
"What, you think I need assistance?" Milo says with a waggle of his brows, though he grins his thanks at Xander all the same.
"Me? Of course not. My uncle Laurence thinks you need to put down that oversized needle before you hurt yourself though."
It doesn’t take much for Mavro and Varta to take down their opponent. The caged helmet is shat-tered by the old man’s staff, then the dwarf swings her blade at the now exposed neck, severing the orderly’s head neatly. In death, the man keeps the same empty stare he had in life.
By contrast, Milo lightly skewers his opponent. The last orderly, dumbed and mindless as he looks, still realizes he is doomed “Boss gonna be mad! Thieves bash us!” he looks around, club in front of himself more as shield than a weapon.
Finally he seems to reach a decision “Don’t wanna make boos mad! Get away!” he screams, and darts against Milo, trying to push him away. However the young rogue is way quicker, and while he fails to pierce the padded armor, the point of his rapier seems to dissuade the orderly from his intent. “Oh, boss gonna bash me!” he cries, apparently more worried about his boss than the five armed people who just killed seven of his peers.
_______________
"Hmph. Perhaps this will teach Crove not to use drooling idiots to do his bidding. Even Myre's corpses put up a better fight. We've wasted enough time here!"
Varta attacks!
for damage
Tempest eyes the corpses as Stormcloud sniffs at them disdainfully.
"This is such a waste. Cutting up men's brains? Having them attack strangers before you even know their business? This Crove appears to be somewhat of a fool, in addition to whatever manner of criminal he might be."
"Drop your stick, man, and I'll let you run out the building!" Milo yells at the big brute. A fight is one thing, but he takes no real joy in skewering a fool with the sense of a rock who is trying to past him.
Of course, his offer may come too late if his colleagues' weapons strike first.
Hit hard on the shoulders by Varta, the orderly barely takes a second to howl in pain before resuming his effort "Agh! Lemme go, stupid thiefs!" he tosses his club in the general direction of Varta, not really an attack, more like a man tossing an old boot to a meowing cat in the night.
Seeing as he failed to push away Milo, he tries running around him, covering his head with his hands, leaving his right flank completely exposed.
_________________
Tempest hits the thick headed, brain scrambled orderly with an exasperated expression and an offhandedly thrown Lightning Blast.
Xander sighs and lets the man run. He wasn't a threat, and Xander was in the business of hunting monsters, not their brain-damaged victims.
"Poor fellow." he said with a shake of his head.
"If you surrender, I will spare you." Varta calls after the injured man. "You can not escape alive, otherwise."
With a sigh, Milo stabs the man as he bulls past.
Clearly, Milo's heart is not in the attack-- his blade misses by miles.
Mavro pays no mind to the fleeing orderly, muttering something offensive to its intelligence under his breath.
Beaten and wounded by numerous attacks he didn’t care to avoid, the orderly falls to his knees “Lemme go… jus' lemme go...” he keeps murmuring, getting up once again and slowly staggering south. Now that the heat of battle has faded, his babbling echoes through the sickly walls of the asylum, and the trail of blood he leaves behind falls upon numerous others stains, now dried, stains that speak of disease and violence.
In the room you just came in the three lunatics seem ecstatic when they catch a glimpse of one of the other orderlies’ bodies. It is only thanks to the gags Milo put on them that their crazed howls are not echoing through the whole building.
"Bah, now where were we?" Mavro asks rhetorically, approaching a door off to his left. He places an ear close to the door, and will open it if he does not hear anything.
Milo will knock the orderly out with the pommel of his sword. He doesn't want to kill the idiot, but he doesn't want him running off to cause more trouble, either.
With that done, he wipes his blade clean of blood. He moves next to the double doors nearest him, and listens briefly there.
Usually, after a battle, the echoes of the fight fade away, leaving a peaceful, if tense, silence.
It is not so in Crove’s Asylum: the noise of the fight just leaves place for the maddening shrieks of the inmates, over-excited by the clash they just heard.
Mavro leans in to the iron door, and among the shrikes he can make out that something grisly is going on in the room next to him. He hears hysteric, high-pitched laughs and the gut-wrenching sound of a saw grinding against bone.
By leaning towards the door next to him, Milo is able to notice that these doors seem much better off than the others: polished bronze studs decorate the much less rusty and even shiny double iron doors. No sound seems to be coming from the room, but on the wall to the left makes a good show of itself a brass plaque.
Waldur K. Crove, MD
administrator, surgeon, chief researcher
"This is the office of the man himself," Milo murmurs. "I can tell because of my skilled powers of deduction and observation. And also, this plaque.
"Do we, ah, make an appointment--" by which he means 'break down the door' "or is there anything else first we would do in this place?"
Xander eyes the other doors. "Those aren't locked. They aren't even all the way closed."
"And it sounds like there's people chained up. More inmates, I'd guess."
"Someone is having fun sawing through bone in here," Mavro says to the others with a look of disgust, "A little too much fun."
Milo grimaces expressively at Mavro's words. Despite his own observations regarding the door he'd found, he comes closer to the door Cain is at.
"This place turns my stomach," he mutters. "Men without the wits left to them to surrender, those sobbing screaming fools in the lobby... I mislike it. Shall we barge in on this-- sawing?"
"Yes; and put a sudden and definitive end to it," Tempest adds with finality.
"As you say," Milo says, seeming almost relieved at Tempest's answer. He opens the door, with rapier drawn!
Varta follows close behind Milo.
Milo opens the door, and immediately regrets it as he stands still for a couple of seconds, paralyzed by the horror.
In the dim light of the square room echo the hysterical laughter of two madmen. They are squatting in the middle of the room; the long, loose sleeves of their straitjackets are ripped to shreds and soaked, dripping with crimson blood.
“Gheegheeghee! Two for me!” screams one of the them. He is holding in his hands a collec-tion of scrap paper, torn pages, pieces of cloth soaked in blood as if they were playing cards. He puts two on the ground, close to the second madman.
This grabs something and throws it at the first. It takes Milo a second to realize that said “some-thing” where two human fingers, taken from a corpse the second madman is keeping next to him.
“New players!” screams the first madman. His insane, wide smile turns immediately to anger and fear “They’re gonna take my winnings!” he folds the scraps of paper and holds close to his chest, like a baby would hold a teddy bear, a grisly collection of bloody body parts.
“There’s no room for you in our game!” screams the second, and faster than Milo’s reaction, he gets up and runs at the rogue, trying to hack at him with a bonesaw.
______________
Fortunately, a lifetime of dwelling in Ustalav has inured Milo to some of the more terrible sights-- he manages to shake off his appalled disgust just in time to dodge, although he still feels sick to his stomach.
"The gods weeps," he says weakly. "I would say these wretches know not what they do... but I don't care. Pharasma can judge the worth of their poor mad souls."
He strikes with his rapier at the one that just tried to bonesaw-hack him.
After that, he withdraws to let Varta or Mavro fight more freely, or to draw the wretch out into the corridor.