With Cultist 2 surrendered, Sir Gavin approached Cultist 1 and attacked with a brawling punch.
Move and Attack
Miss.
Gavin attempts to sucker punch the guy, but loses his footing in the process missing by an inch to the right of the guy's face.
John [Speed 7]
Teal [Speed 6](Hp 10/12)
Aurora [Speed 6(Bear)](Also need a dodge from the magic sunbolt)
Gavin [Speed 5.75]
Flynn [Speed 5.25]
Cultist 1
Cultist 2(Hp 3/10) Surrendered.
Cultist 3(HP -5/10)
John joins Gavin in his assault on the first cultist.
John moves in, striking with his weapon.
The cultist, wracked with pain, attempts to shift out of the way, his hands still clasped...
...By some lucky stumbling, he avoided the knife.
John [Speed 7]
Teal [Speed 6](Hp 10/12)
Aurora [Speed 6(Bear)](waiting on the dodge from previous round.)
Gavin [Speed 5.75]
Flynn [Speed 5.25]
Cultist 1
Cultist 2(Hp 3/10) Surrendered.
Cultist 3(HP -5/10)
Dodge magic sunbolt(9):
Sir Gavin followed up with a left hand strike...
Attack
Hit! for a possible crush damage.
Teal lunges in and swings her staff down at the final fighting cultist.
oh, ok...
Health roll(11):
She also has regeneration 1hp/minute..so that should help some...I hope!!
With the combined efforts of the team, both the cultists to the sides drop. One dead, the other beaten into unconsciousness.
The bolt that exploded on contact with the bear, however, caused Aurora to fall into a painful unconsciousness.
The cultist toward the back, try as he might, Attempts to keep his focus during his own defensive maneuvers, but the pain of his body being torn open by beams of sunlight from the inside out, His comrades falling before him...these things collected into his mind, making him loose hope.
Only one cultist remains, a man knocked unconscious with fist and staff. His face is covered in a broken bones, heavy bruises litter his body and one might argue his rips are fractured. His breathing, However, is stable.
- Three White Robes, embroidered with Gold thread.
-Three Crossbows (Str 10)
-Each possess a pair of simple silk tunics and cotton trousers.
-Between all of them, 27 crossbow bolts.
-9 bars of dense, meat infused rations.
-1 letter, written in a cypher.
-1 Leather bound tome, The Worship of Sol.
With combat over, two of the three cultists dead... Aurora Regenerates surprisingly quick. She's up within 15 minutes.
The downed cultist is beaten pretty hard and may take some constant medical treatment in order to wake him...even after a day.
It is currently Night, well into it.
John rekindles the fire immediately, filling the cave back with light. With that, he lit his torch back to full glory before going outside to retrieve his pack.
"Pray, might I have a look at the tome and the letter that these men carried?"
Provided there was no resistance; John took both and started examining the letter first hoping to better understand the cultists presence here.
Although you do not know the entirety of the letter's secrets, you do gather that this was written from a third party who offered The Cult of Sol power to lift their fears.
"Interesting. Someone promised to protect them from the dark."
'But who? Who could make a promise like that? And why would I matter?'
"Prithee, if anyone can, what is it, decode this, I only know what I do from my expertise on the occult."
Putting the letter aside, John opens up the tome to see if there was anything special about this particular copy of the tome.
We bind the surrendered one, do first aid to the unconscious one...
"Why don't you let the trained cryptographer take a look at that journal?"
Sir Gavin looked down coolly on the guy who surrendered.
"As a prisoner you have basic rights. What is your name and rank?" He asked unctuously.
Despite their best efforts, further detail on the letter seems locked away.
The Tome is Unique to the World from where John hails, aside from that, there is nothing overwhelmingly special about this 'biblical' text.
The remaining Cultist, beaten and bruised, looks up to Gavin...
"Aaron, Priest of Sol..." The man, no more then his mid 20s, whispered.
As the great bear takes the blunt of the blast, it seems to disintegrate into a mist. A few minutes later the mist coalesces into the figure of the beautiful young woman, Aurora. Hideous burns cover most of her body, but as you watch, they heal and fresh, white skin regenerates over the blackened, scarred tissue. In only 15 minutes Aurora is back to looking the same as ever.
Teal moves back to the cave entrance, and keeps watch while the others investigate the priests, it would be nice to get some warning next time strangers decide to drop in.
With Aurora back to her feet in no time and Teal watching the outside of the cave, the group can get rest if they so choose.
A rotation of 12 hours takes place to allow sleep of everyone.
The living cultist sleeps heavily and does not wake with the group as his body is too damaged to warrant activity.
Once the group is all up and capable, food will be needed as per a usual day. Even the injured man is not more than human.
Arriving toward the waking group, a group of five natives approaches.
The Scarred one, the two younger men that were with him previously, an older woman and a middle aged man wearing ceremonial plume.
They stand at a distance, but in clear view.
Flynn attempts to slap the prisoner cultist awake. "Hey, brother," he says softly, "Your people know how to speak with the natives?"
In her female form, Aurora approaches the native people. She holds out her hand with a symbol of the cave bear upon it.
Flynn's slap does very little to stimulate the bruised man. His eyes roll to the back of his head after a brief moment of unfocused eye darting. He's simply not doing to well... He does manage to speak.
"The savages? No..."
The natives look over the cloud-white woman before them. They are silent as the older female among them approaches.
"a-da-nv-do u-no-le..."
The woman reaches out for Aurora's hand, encasing it in both of her own. She smiles gently, though her weathered features seem to hide any other empathic body language. The middle aged, Plumed male joins behind the woman, looking over the oddity before them.
Aurora gives he most winning smile and when the woman releases her hands, she repeats the gesture with the other members of the goups, smiling to them as well.
Sir Gavin looked out at Aurora attempting to communicate and rubbed his forehead again.
"First contact, and no first contact skills or equipment. No way to capture them to administer the eraser drug either; not without, as we have demonstrated, hurting or killing them in the process." He swore aloud.
He turned to the others.
"I just hope we can play keep away until extraction.
"Meanwhile, I am very curious as to just HOW these priests were able to locate John here as well as travel here from a parallel world."
"That's okay," Flynn remarks to Gavin, "At least they now know that we have a creepy shape-shifting spirit person, which I'm sure sits well with the local religion. And we can leave whenever we want, if you've still got the key—I was just hoping for more info from those nut job cultists."
"We need to remember to take the cultist's gear with us, crossbows aren't exactly high tech, but a couple of thousand years advanced on anything I've seen the locals use"
Communications between the natives and Aurora continues with simple hand gestures and some vocalization between the others. It's still difficult to understand their actual meanings without proper knowledge of their language.
"Well, we should take the cultists, too."
The cultist doesn't say anything but looks terrified.
Sir Gavin nodded at Teal and Flynn.
"Yes I concur. Let's take this man, his friends and equipment to the ship and return to base with what we have. These 'priests' may well be a priority trumping our mission."
The remaining time passes. On the third day of your trip, all of you enter your conveyor and wait for the projector to pull you back to Mummut.
Flynn takes the time to record star positioning data to help make use of the time frame of that trip.
With your effort to remain less intrusive on the world in general, you conducted any remaining study away from tribal territory. If study of the tribes was done, it was done so at distance.
With the Aaron, and the equipment that the other priests had as well, you are pulled through time and space back to your HQ.
It goes through its 10 minute Decontamination process at which point a reminder chimes into existence from one of the staff: "It would be wise to have your report ready."
Once the hatch of the conveyor opens, The commandant is standing in waiting on the platform elevated toward the control tower. It's obvious expecting a report, though all of you may not be necessary...
This is Flynn's first mission with the IP, so, by and large, he doesn't know what he's doing. In a limited period of time, he tries to use the software at hand on the school to hack together some insights about the world.
First, he tries to find some charts or star-map software he can map star patterns to, at least down to the nearest century or two.
Second, he searches through the Homeline internet for pictures of Cherokee spearheads, and sees if he can get any sense at all of how many centuries before European contact they arrived.
He asks Aurora to spell out/sketch out on her hands some shapes corresponding to the clothing and weapons they saw, photographs these, and attaches them to the report as well.
He includes some documentation of the lack of magic, and the weirdness that may have been a Banestorm.
The cultists are mentioned, and he includes both the codebook, the prisoner (and the two corpses, presumably removed from the caves when the party had the chance, to leave no trace for the natives to see), as well as his and John's notes on the code. While waiting for their jump, he spends a day with the cypher, attempting to gain a bonus on it due to the time spent.
And, finally, he tries to write the whole thing up with appropriate language and spelling.
Aurora is more than happy to recall what she can remember of the people she saw and the tools/clothing they had. She spends some time also looking through the bases computer system, examining different animals from the database.
Flynn was able to suggest, through the use of calculating star charts, the they were within 2500-2300 BC. A rather significant placement of the world's time, however due to the lack of written language for the people of this time it was difficult to confirm further.
The Commandant was pleased that the group was able pick up the time frame so well.
With some help on the spear head type, Flynn was also able to verify some tribal information on the intelligent life. With his research he was able to deduce only that it was a predecessor of the common Cherokee tribes in the central American continent. With Aurora's help in some images were accompanied with the report.
With the magic of the world being Null, It is suggested the world to be an Echo. However, the Appearance of a banestorm and the use of magic in the world could have contaminated it into a parallel. The Commandant will have a team to sent to study the world more on that side.
The prisoner is taking to a holding cell within the compound.
With all this information presented, the group was able to succeed in their primary objectives.
The amount of time between now and the next mission is... ...two weeks.
Jaq was beginning to think she'd spend the rest of her life in basic training. She'd just completed boot camp when the Power Alliance, with some of her less reverent fellows calling it the Stupor Power Alliance, had disintegrated under the burden of economic collapse. Only few months later, she found herself entering boot camp again, this time with the Memphis Belle Security Group. Now, barely a year and a half after completing boot camp for a second time, she was just finishing with her third round of it.
"Well, at least it wasn't the same stuff from the first two times," Jaq mused as she made her way to workshop, barely able to keep from skipping and singing all the way there. She had a week to herself and she'd spent far too long away from her tools back home.
Home.
That thought did take the spring form her step. It'd been over eighteen months since she'd been home, and almost four since she'd last spoken to her parents. For all they knew, she'd been killed along with her platoon-mates when some remnant group of soldiers had ambushed them en-route to their next patrol zone.
Jaq slowly opened the door to the shop as she remembered those terrifying seconds. Everything was fine, then the Osprey had been rocked by an impact that caused the pilots to crash-land it. Jaq was the point of the lead team, and had just enough time to clear the stricken craft before it, and thirty men and women, was blotted away by two high explosive rockets meant to bust bunkers and pillboxes. Against the thin skin of the Osprey, it was carnage.
She didn't even hear their screams. There had been no time for them. Jaq was thankful that the shop was empty save for her as she closed the door behind her and began to weep.
It hit her without warning. She'd be fine, her usual chatty, cheerful self, then a few seconds later, something would remind her of what had happened, of the men and women she'd become friends with over the course of a year, close friends in many cases, and how thirty of them, all of them members of the same platoon since she'd been assigned to it, had just been blown away.
She needed the solitude, the quiet. There'd be time to work on her projects in a little while, but now? Now she needed to grieve.
====
The week rolled by all too quickly for Jaq. She'd spent most of her time in the workshop designing, fabricating, and testing a drone she'd had in her head for a while now. More often than not, some students training to be Patrolmen found the young woman asleep on the couch only a few hours after she'd stopped working for the night.
Still, the day had come and Jaq was thankful that the case for her battlesuit had a handle and wheels. She already looked like she'd fall over with the rest of her gear on her back, and the 150 lb. suit would likely have tipped her over. She didn't know if she'd need everything, but it was better to haul too much and just deal with having to stow it than to leave something important behind if she or her team needed it.
It looked about the hangar and found it empty. It looked like she was early, and she probably had at least a few minutes to herself. She pulled the keypad from her left arm and powered up the screen and the small computer in the top of her pack. She sat on the big bulk case that held the battlesuit and began working on another design she'd had floating in her head. Mechs were fairly common back on her world, but here, they were non-existent. She'd guessed she'd just have to fix that.
Shortly after she had arrived, Jaq was lost in the design studies and papers she'd collected on her computer, her lips pursed in concentration as she began iterating over different designs, materials, and components.
I wonder if the commandant would let me borrow a foundry?
"So, who's for getting riotously drunk and partying until next mission." Teal asks, a half smile on her lips.
Two weeks pass, A summons is called to the Operations Office where the Commandant waits for all active members.
"Would all Operatives Working under the Commandant please report to the Operations Office for Preparation and Organization..."
There's a pause then a follow up note...
"Only those partaking in the next mission need bother..."
The Commandant waits in the office, the door open. She sits at the head of the 9 seated table, a holographic image of the conveyer rotating slowly at it's center. On the wall, picture is mounted with a series of numbers, the mathematical coordinates of what is now refereed to as Echo2300, the team's first world.
John was definitely with Teal on the partying idea. Begrudgingly when the two weeks were up, though, he was there. He had reasons he needed to explore.
John spent 5 points to lower his fear of the dark. The last mission seemed to address it fairly head on. 2 points on perception, and 1 increasing my body language skill. Just making sure I do this right.
Jaq arrives fifteen minutes after the announcement only slightly winded from the jog.
"Corporal Cho reporting ma'am," she says as snaps to attention out of reflex.
"Corporal."
The Commandant says simply with a nod. She motions the Jaq to a seat. She looked over to John motioning to the new arrival.
"John, This new recruit will be an addition to your current exploration team. A tech expert, as it were."
Al-Wahid sighed, looking to the clock that hung simply against the wall nearest the door. The others were late and she was growing impatient.
"The mission requires I have a minimum dispatch team of Four... John, Jaq, have either of you seen the Math Magician, the cloud of nanites, The blue statuette, or the Commander?"
Her eyes darted most notably to John, where her gaze lingered.
Sir Gavin hurried in, still dressed in his formal Guards jacket.
"Apologies, Mon Commandant. I was delayed at the Ball." He said, snapping a precise salute.
She gave a dismissive nod to Gavin as she pondered further... Gavin's arrival caused her building irritation to subside, if only a moment.
"Gavin, This new addition is Jaq. She's a tech Expert.
Jaq, this man dressed in out-of-time Finery is the Commander."
She made very little effort toward anything else further as she closed her eyes in waiting.