You talk me smash if it uses its mouth for biting. Right?
Dylan strolls up beside Lorant.
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As you approach the hilltop, it becomes apparent that the figure is unmoving, probably a scarecrow or other such device. When you close upon it, you find that a rotting scarecrow leans on a scythe at the top of this low hill. Its pumpkin face is carved with a leer and a sheep’s jaw hangs
flaccidly below. There is a cold chill in the air.
Bleh, I am all hyped up for som foighting and its a bloody scarcrow
Dylan speaks up
A stone next to Dylans feet starts levitating and presumably smashes into the scarecrow
Huh? Did Oi do that? Woit! Lets try that again!
Bleh, I am all hyped up for som foighting and its a bloody scarcrow
He repeats the sentence and
Oi, I am a Telekillet now? Yay!
Lorant draws the bardiche and gets into a defensive stance as Dylan attempts to provoke the scarecrow. This was no field with vermin to frighten off, so he figured there had to be a reason it was up here. Sometimes a scarecrow was just a scarecrow, but in Ustalav you could never be too sure...
"Oh sure, lets just wander around a place we know is haunted until we find the most creepy thing, and then throw rocks at it. What could go wrong?" Judah said, rolling his eyes. A few weeks ago the flagrant display of ghost-like telekinisis would have sent him into a panic, but now it seemed like one more drop in the ocean of madness his life had become.
Might be a warning as much as a scarecrow, he says searching the area.
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As the party searches the area, they are startled by a horrifying sight that rises up from beneath the scarecrow. Coming through the solid ground is a terrifying figure, a tempest of shadows given form. It looks like a cloud of glowing red eyes with ghostly hornets buzzing among the dark shadows of its spectral form. It arrives with the drone of a hornet swarm and the sickly sweet stench of decay.
It reaches out with an incorporeal appendage and swipes at Dylan. It passes through the man's armor, afflicting him with the chill of the grave!
INITIATIVE
Wraith
Judah
Lorant
Dylan
Mathis
negative energy plus Con drain
Dylan is hopefully unaffected by it the con drain, since wraiths normally have an albeit beefy con save on their energy drain.
23/32 hp, unless this wraith has con drain without saveing throws in which cas its 11/20
F+#& OFF
Dylan bloodrages, and immidiatly seeks to apply his claws and fangs, as his muscles swell
His claws may well strike through, his bite likely misses.
Mathus, caught off guard by his search is slowest to act but hoiks a holy water at it.
for
Lorant gets out the weapon blanch.
"Mathus! Got a flame handy?!" he barks.
Sorry old bean! My eye sight is tuned to low light at the moment!
"F***! Okay, keep it distracted while I get this blanch applied!"
Lorant rifles through his gear to get a torch out and his flint and steel to light it, so he can then apply the weapon blanch to the bardiche.
"I f#+$ing new it!" Judah yelled as he quickly backpedaled away from the horrible spectre and yanked a tindertwig out of one of his many pouches with one hand and a torch from the side webbing of his pack with the other.
"I got your fire," he said quickly, waving the pair of sticks in Lorant's direction.
"Thank you, Judah!" Lorant says, putting the blanch on the bardiche's head and holding it out. "Hold the torch under the head to get the powder to melt!"
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Judha strikes up a fire as Lorant blanches the weapon and holds it over the torch. Mathus hurls a vial of holy water at the specter, the blessed water causing the wraith where the liquid strikes it. The wraith attacks Dylan again, its incorporeal strike passing through his defenses easily.
negative energy and Con drain if Fort 17 save is failed
STATUS
Dylan: -6 hp
Wraith: -29 hp
Dylan resists the blow and lashes out with all he got
You like that you bastard? Eat another!!!
for
Judah lit his torch and held it under Lorant's weapon. A small surge of eldrich power crawled up his arm in a series of squiggly yellow runes. For a moment the torch burned gold.
Lorant nods at Judah, and then approaches the evil spirit.
"Take this, you buzzing bogeyman!"
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Dylan strikes the wraith again and it screams, "Nooooooooooo!!!!" As you watch, its essence is torn apart and the spectral hornets scatter to the four winds. The thing collapses in on itself with an unearthly howl that threatens to pierce your eardrums. As it dissipates, you notice four orbs of light from various places in the village below rising into the night sky. Then, all is quiet as the wraith's scream fades away.
Dylan retracts his claws, middlefingers erect and last, as some pretty aggressive word salads in an unusal language come out of his mouth.
Take this you ectoplasmic piece of 10 times digested bug excrement! Only Succubi get to lifeforce, and only if they pay me and ask politely! SUKA BLYAD!
You think there are more of these? Perhaps these 4 light things were other small wraiths and we just gibbed the big one? He says panting
I need 30 seconds of a breather.
Lorant doesn't flinch at the horrifying scream the wraith gives as it's sent to Pharasma at last...but his jaw drops in shock at Dylan's words. He didn't know what exactly the insults were, but he knew from his education at the War College was that it was Abyssal.
"Dylan! That is a VILE tongue! You shouldn't be speaking it. Especially since in some towns in Ustalav, saying those words will have you impaled on a stake and then burned!"
He takes a moment to compose himself and then nods at Dylan's suggestion.
"I suspect so."
He thinks again on wraiths and their spawn, to see if he'd read anything in the War College's books about battling the undead that matched this description.
Wraith? Maybe they got something to do with the emotion of wrath? The letters are nearly the same right? Maybe thats why my bloodrage worked pretty well? Abyssal can be quite melodic btw. just not if spoken by a Bloodrager after a life and death fight.
In a completely different tone, Dylan starts singing
Белый снег, серый лед,
На растрескавшейся земле.
Одеялом лоскутным на ней -
Город в дорожной петле.
А над городом плывут облака,
Закрывая небесный свет.
А над городом - желтый дым,
Городу две тысячи лет,
Прожитых под светом Звезды
По имени Солнце...
И две тысячи лет - война,
Война без особых причин.
Война - дело молодых,
Лекарство против морщин.
Красная, красная кровь
Через час уже просто земля,
Через два на ней цветы и трава,
Через три она снова жива
И согрета лучами Звезды
По имени Солнце...
И мы знаем, что так было всегда,
Что Судьбою больше любим,
Кто живет по законам другим
И кому умирать молодым.
Он не помнит слово "да" и слово "нет",
Он не помнит ни чинов, ни имен.
И способен дотянуться до звезд,
Не считая, что это сон,
И упасть, опаленным Зведой по имени Солнце
White snow, grey ice,
On the cracked earth,
Like a patchwork quilt upon it...
There's a city on a loop in the road,
And above the city there are clouds drifting,
Hiding the heavenly light,
And above the city, there's a yellow haze,
The city, for two thousand years
Lived under the light of a star
Called the Sun...
And for two thousand years there was war,
War with no particular reason,
War is a young business,
Like medicine against wrinkles.
There's red, red blood,
After an hour, it was absorbed into the ground,
After two there were flowers and grass,
After three, the earth lived again,
And it was warmed by the rays of a star
Called the Sun...
And we know, that it's always been so,
That Fate loves the one
Who lives by his own rules,
The one who dies young..
He doesn't remember the words "yes" or "no",
He doesn't remember ranks nor names,
And he could reach the stars,
Not realizing, that it was a dream,
And to fall down dead, burned by a star
Named the Sun...
Lorant makes the sign of the sword as Dylan sings, making it clear that the melodicness of the tongue is not what he takes issue with.
The doctor just slumps to the earth.
Gods I hope he took those other spirits with him. I don’t think we have the wind to fight them.
From the hilltop, Judah looked around the empty town and it's surroundings. Back in Gallowstone, when they'd laid all the ghosts to rest, the whole countryside felt different. The fog lifted and the clouds broke. Birds started singing again. Everything just seemed a little brighter and less tense. The sun even came out for a while. He didn't really understand how or why, but he knew that powerful hauntings made everything gloomier. His hope was, if the wraith was the source of the haunting here, they'd be able to tell if they paid attention to the right things.
I am feeling unusually heroic, its weird. Dylan states.
Where and what now?
"I think the place is safe now. We could go back, but we still don't actually have any evidence that the Beast isn't responsible for the deaths here. It would just be our word about the wraith." Judah said. "Lorant, do you think your word as a knight would be good enough for the court?"
"No, I don't think it would," Lorant says with a shake of his head. "I'd say we can now investigate the town unmolested, see if we can recover any physical evidence."
Excellent idea.. and we can try sleeping in the saddle on the way back.
"We should check the locations where the spirits seemed to rise from...maybe there will be more clues as to what happened to those children in those spots."
Roight, I got some juice left in me
Dylan looks around for clues.
As does the Doktor.
Lorant gives a depressed sigh.
"The murdered children, in a shallow grave. A foul coincidence that we find them here so close to the residence of their killer. But it doesn't bring us closer to identifying that killer...not unless one of us had the ability to call their souls back to speak. I unfortunately have not yet been blessed by the Three to make such an entreaty of them."
Can anything be known from their bones? Rough time of death perhaps? I have heard that smart people can tell from wood how long the tree that made it lived? Not something I can do myself, my skillset is rather... THe big man pauses
Narrow an sharp
That hollow is like to small for the "beast" to have buried them there though, and is there any or all residue of magics on the scarecrow? Perhaps there are any documents or diaries left around?
I think the bones are evidence yes? Lets bring them with us, and bury them post trial. The mercenary suggests
"There is one thing we will need to consider," Lorant adds. "We know the Beast did not place the children here. The question is, did that...thing put them here after it killed them, or did the villagers do it after discovering them dead somewhere else? The lack of marks or trauma may be a good indication the Beast didn't harm them, but if we say the Beast couldn't be responsible for putting them in the hollow, and it turns out that was just where the villagers decided to inter them, we've just unwittingly desecrated their resting place..."
The doktor does his best to maintain the bones of each seperately, if need be, by looting the village for an old horse blanket, canvas etc.