The roil of insanity swept her out to a sea of madness like a tidal wave; she was helpless before it. Even the fear of the dark was pulled under by it. The thunder of the waves grew stronger and stronger in her mind until she had to let it out-
Desdemona grasped at Broom, but to no avail. She staggered two steps, then appeared to forget how to walk as she fell to her knees, nearly dragging the Doctor down with her. Her eyes rolled and the circle tattooed in her palm was stark against the white skin around and in it. She flailed as though trying to... paint? Catch something? Stab someone? She opened her mouth and, rather than some vague apology, a flood of conflicting voices (her own, yet not) and thoughts and surreal imaginings poured out.
She was... gibbering.
The coin she'd been holding rolled off the rain-slick pier and into the dark water.
lel
Reine's eyes widened at Desdemona's reaction, and she spun to face the end of the pier, her body dropping into a half-crouch, her face locked into the mask of rage and controlled terror she hadn't shown since the asylum.
The others could feel a familiar sensation - something vaguely pressing at the backs of their minds, almost a physical pressure - a sensation they hadn't felt since the battle with the Tatterman. In that moment, it became clear - Reine, ready for a fight, affected the very world around her with her anger.
Reine closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating. Then she seemed to fade from view for a split second, before reappearing as if nothing happened, with a Harrow card in her hand. Reine let the card fall as she flexed her hands, ready to lash out at anything.
"Get some light down on the end of the pier," she said to the others.[/b]
On the rain-soaked wood behind her, the Cyclone spun in the flickering light of Broom's lamp, before disappearing a few seconds later.
As Des went mad and Reine prepared for war, the end of the pier remained empty. The voices were audible to everyone now, though- like they were getting closer, but there was nothing and no one to see.
An entire crowd of people was jabbering away, talking to each other, over each other, some reasonably, some screaming, and one even horribly singing the melody of a common nursery rhyme, all in the mad language of creatures who had no place in this world. Broom (and Des, were she sensible) could pick out individual words, but the chatter was mad, a completely insane jumble of gobbledygook.
John looks around confused.
"Under!" Reine hissed, "In the water?" She knelt and looked over the side of the pier, eyes searching in the dark water for an enemy. Her hackles were up, and she was ready to react at a moment's notice.
"Get off the pier. Back to land."
Reine had seen a lot of terrible things since waking up in Briarstone, but this? This had to be one of the worst. Atop the lapping waves, a horrid mass of eyes, mouths, and formless flesh stared in all directions, its countless maws yammering ceaselessly as it bobbed in the direction of the quartet.
"What the!" Reine's voice was filled with disgust and puzzlement. Tinged, of course, with anger. She didn't know what that thing was, but she sure as all the Hells wasn't going to let it pull any of them into the water to drown - or worse.
"Grab Desdemona," she snapped at the others, "get off the pier! Now!"
Then she glared back at the.. the thing floating towards them. Her glare was hard, and it was filled with unkind intent. Incongruously, as Reine gritted her teeth in hate, a subtle chime rang out, like a hollow brass bowl being struck and left to ring in the minds of everyone within 15 feet of the floating, gibbering mass of mouths.
As the chime rang, Reine yanked her head back above the pier, turned, and made to grab Desdemona and start running.
Desdemona babbled earnestly at Reine as the other woman grabbed her, trying to explain a million different points of view at once, none of them sane. Her arms waved and her fingers twitched ineffectually as the others were alerted to the Thing Beyond Sanity that she had fallen afoul of. Blood seeped ever so slowly from her eyes and nose, not yet a trickle, but a macabre reminder of the price of incaution.
The gabbling cacophony of voices all stopped babbling as one, coming to a confused silence as Reine's mind powers stilled the madness for a few precious seconds.
While Reine dragged Desdemona away, the babbling woman's shadow stretched longer and longer - not just as though it were stuck in place, but going farther out on the pier, then over the side, where it changed into the spined serpent's shadow. A long, long arm shot out of it as it curved along the half-sunken ship, lashing out at the hideous blob of eyes, teeth and howling madness.
Defense:20% miss chance in normal light, 50% miss in darkness. Immunity to death effects, disease, and poison. Evasion. Cold/electric resistance 10.
Offense:
Slam reach 10', bite reach 5', increased by 5' each when Large. Melee attacks affect incorporeal creatures as if it had the ghost touch weapon property. All attacks are treated as magic. Combat reflexes (3 AOOs).
Broom still didn't know what was going on, only that there was something under the pier. She helped Desdemona struggle back towards the land, but as she neared the the plank leading over to the boat her curiosity got the better of her. She took a tentative step onto the rickety boards and held up the lantern to peek at whatever was under the pier.
Broom grinned with a mixture of excitement and horror. She knew what this was! She had touched the minds and memories of things like it before. She had experienced the awful feeling of enveloping prey and feeding from them while they struggled within its mass and their incessant babbling and jumbled thoughts.
"Its a gibbering mouther!" she called out, as if the name alone would mean anything to the others.
She reflexively called down the cold mist from between the stars to protect her from the fearful aberration. The black haze formed around her momentarily before condensing into a slick oily substance and then fading from view, leaving behind an unseen suit of magical armour.
Desdemona's shadow slipped under the pier and smashed down at the floating mass of eyes and mouths, its shadowy fist punching straight into an oversized eyeball.
"The eyes!" John yells.
"Don't let it get away!"
He jumps from the pier down into the docked boat.
He quickdraws Red Destiny and stabs to put out an eye.
John jumped down into the boat and adroitly made his way to the bow, where he stabbed down at the bobbing mass of eyes and mouths. It was like plunging his sword into thick mud- unlike a normal opponent, this monster had no bones to speak of, just hungry flesh.
They can see in the dark and with so many eyes, can never be surprised by an attack from behind.
The like to bite and latch on, drinking a target's blood even as they try to take bites out of them. More than that they often engulf their unfortunate victims in their amorphous bodies like a tidal wave of biting mouths and suffocating flesh.
They have even more weird abilities, like launching acidic spittle at far away targets. Their mere presence seems to warp reality a little bit, turning solid surfaces mushy and hard to walk in- they of course can flow over those same surfaces with ease.
While she can't think of any specific banes to them, she can think of several ways their malleable bodies would be resistant to harm- they'd probably take more damage from bludgeoning than slashing or stabbing, and without a normal anatomy they're probably immune to precision strikes.
Slowly, slow as molassus it seemed to Desdemona, the cacophony of voices in her head faded - but terror still electrified her tongue. "The dark! Beware the shadows!" she shrieked at Reine, dragging at the woman's arm with a better grip than before, but an absolutely unhinged rant about the malice of the darkness pouring out of her mouth.
To demonstrate when Reine didn't appear to be heeding her warning, Desdemona wrenched her arm free and intoned a harsh, demanding incantation that brought curving geometry to mind.
Her lantern oil leapt from her satchel, flung toward the churning water - only to take a sharp turn and fly under the pier.
"I shall douse it in oil and set it alight, and then we shall see where the dark can run! DO YOU HEAR THAT, NIGHT? I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU!" she howled, terror plain on her face. That was familiar enough to Reine, though it was strange not to be the source of it.
Reine looked at Broom, and then at John. Rather than taking advantage of the thing's stunned condition to get to safety, they were actually moving towards the thing! And Broom was holding up her lamp to make herself a target for it!
Reine sighed. "That's great, Broom," she said, exasperation in her voice. "Now we'll know what to say when people ask what killed John," she muttered to herself.
She wanted to run. Wanted to at least get onto dry land, where the thing couldn't drown them as easily as anything else. But if she ran now, John would die. He would probably die anyway, but if she left him, it was guaranteed. And she wasn't willing to let all the work of getting the four of them out of the asylum alive go to waste. Besides, something about that thing just pissed her off.
The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. At John, at Broom, definitely at the...thing threatening them. At the whole damned situation.
Suddenly, the lamp in Broom's hand seemed to flare for a second, and a Harrow card appeared in Reine's hand. She tossed it to the water, and for a few seconds, the Bear floated on the waves, growling and snarling at the indignity before the card disappeared.
Even as the light flared, Reine shrugged out of her rucksack, and reached for the flask of alchemist's fire from her bandoleer.
"This is going to suck," she said.
Neither the night nor the gibbering mouther responded to Desdemona's shout, but the lantern oil spread out atop the water and the monster. The oil almost seemed to rouse the unnatural creature, as it started babbling, moaning, and screaming again from its dozens of mouths just after being bathed in the stuff.
This close to it, the gibbering was so loud as to be maddening, and the survivors had to work hard just to keep their line of thought going.
As Reine shrugged out of her backpack and pulled out a vial of alchemist's fire, the monster responded to John's stab by flowing up the side of the boat, shooting out pseudopods of flesh, mouths, and eyes and hauling itself half up out of the water to bite at the man in the boat.
It was like being assaulted by a entire pack of hungry creatures as half a dozen sets of teeth tried to snap through John's defenses. Fortunately for John, his armor stopped most of the teeth cold.
Unfortunately for John, most was not all. One mouth clamped its teeth down hard, gaining purchase for what was almost certainly going to be an unpleasant next move.
+2 if it's a fear/emotion effect
(will attack self with... mage hand? UAS? on her turn, or babble. GM?)
(Babble?)
The shadow paused, then merged with the darkness under the pier - and again, a flood of conflicing knowledge swept over Desdemona.
"It's in me - it's inside me!" Desdemona screamed, clutching at her head.
Reine felt the babble wash over her, and it knocked free the last of the restraint on her anger. That cold fury rose up inside of her, and it froze the fear, shattering it, allowing Reine to focus clearly on what had now become her prey.
Broom was familiar with this odd sensation of muddled thoughts, though she did not know why. One part of her mind easily kept itself grounded while the other part used the stability as an anchor to not be swept away in the torrent of madness. She couldn't help shake the feeling that they had done this before, perhaps more than once?
With the mouther emerging from the water, and on the... advice, suggestion, command? of Des, she hauled back the lantern and made ready to throw it at the monstrosity, intending to set the thing aflame. The only thing that stayed her hand was that John was suddenly being engulfed by the thing and she did not want to burn him as well.
"Don't listen to it's babbling! Its like living mud, it will be hard to cut or stab mud, you have to splatter it! It can also spit acid, so be careful!"
Unwilling to toss the lantern, the thought of acid suddenly gave her an idea. Summoning up all the strength she could muster, she conjured up an extra large blob of her purply black liquid. This time instead of having to toss it, she thought about her invisible magic hand and her invisible friend as well. With these thoughts in mind, the large blob was propelled with great speed from the palm of her hand towards the gibbering beast.
The air filled with the acrid smell of strong vinegar as the black liquid began burning away at the mouther's flesh
Unlike her other acid blobs though, this one remained potent, continuing to eat away at the foe.
"Get it off me!" John yells.
He stabs down again.
(power attack, grappled)
Don't know if I need the acrobatics given it is holding me.
"Get it off me!" John yells.
He stabs down again.
[dice=Red Destiny]1d20 + 10 -2 - 2 (power attack, grappled)
[dice=confirm]1d20 + 10 -2
[dice=damage]1d6+6+4
Don't know if I need the acrobatics given it is holding me.
[dice=acrobatics]1d20+6
Missed that.
John is confused.
Broom's magic ate away a tumorish lump of malformed teeth and one abnormal looking eyeball but the gibbering mouther continued to try to ingest John.
"GET IT OUT! GET IT OUUUUUUUT!!!" Desdemona screamed at full volume, and began digging at her face with her nails, using all the force she could muster, dragging raw trenches of bleeding flesh through her pale skin.
(She has no Str bonus, but OUCH)
John punches himself in the face.
Reine shook her head. This was going almost as badly as she'd feared it would. At least no one had been dragged under water to drown though. Yet. John, on the other hand, was getting closer to becoming part of the... what had Broom called it?... right. A 'Mouther.' That wasn't OK.
Pissed off at the whole situation, Reine took a moment to focus her anger on her target, then went running down the pier, leapt, and came down beside John in the boat. She took a half a moment to steady herself as the boat rocked under the impact of her landing.
Then she turned all the focus of her hatred, fear, and anger on the filthy thing grabbing at John. She reached out with one hand, attempting to grab some part of the goo that had grabbed John.
Reine swiped at the floating mass of rolling eyeballs and screaming mouths but the flesh just... parted to avoid her touch. Reine could have sworn the maddened eyes nearest her hand looked mocking and some of the mouths babbles changed to a taunting cadence.
The thing didn't switch its focus to her, though, as nearly half its mass was now wrestling with John and trying to drag him out of the boat.
Mouths and teeth and leering eyes latched on to John's arm, mounded over his shoulders, flowed down John's back, and pulled him bodily out of the boat and into the monster's main mass. Inside the floating blob of flesh, unseen mouths bit at John from every angle.
John goes from punching himself in the face to struggling to break free of the eyeball monster.
Done with taunting Desdemona, the shadow appeared once more, stretching from the darkness beneath the pier. It flowed over the grappling opponents, one man and one madness personified, and it began to sap the life... from one of them.
Defense:20% miss chance in normal light, 50% miss in darkness. Immunity to death effects, disease, and poison. Evasion. Cold/electric resistance 10.
Offense:
Slam reach 10', bite reach 5', increased by 5' each when Large. Melee attacks affect incorporeal creatures as if it had the ghost touch weapon property. All attacks are treated as magic. Combat reflexes (3 AOOs).
Broom's acid continued to burn the aberration's flesh before becoming inert.
Broom herself rushed into the boat, treading over the piles of rubbish and filth to get as close as she could to the mouther. With images of deep places once again in her mind, though this time more vivid for some reason, she summoned up the purple electricity and reached out towards the beast.
Even though she expected it, the little tendril that emerged from her wrist still startled her. The rubbery appendage flicked pas Rein's shoulder and the sparks of electricity danced about it towards the mouther.
"Oh, you piece of absolute $#!t! Reine muttered, though whether she was calling the Mouther a name or merely describing much of its apparent body content was unclear. She focused for a moment preparing her mind for a metaphysical rolling in the offal, and then she leaned out over the railing of the boat, trying to reach the thing with her hand once more.
Desdemona's shadow pounded on the monster but its oversized fists just drove the malleable flesh into the water for it to pop back up a moment later.
Broom followed that up with a blast of electricity that left the monster reeling even as her acid melted away another eye.
And John followed all of that up by slicing his way out of the mound of disgusting, cancerous flesh and paddling away. He might not be in a loot-minded state of mind at the moment, but he noted as he swam that there was a bundle secured on the under side of the end of the pier.
The gibbering monster was slumping into the water by the time Reine scratched the unnatural skin and sent a blast of mental energy through it, so powerful anyone watching could see it reverberate through the creature's entire body, rippling outward from her touch in noisome waves.
"Wow .... I feel bad."
"Can someone give me a hand getting back up to the pier?"
Broom watched the fleshy abomination sink beneath the waves. For some reason she felt a fleeting pang of pity for the thing, despite it horribleness.
John's splashing caught her attention. She reached down and help pull him out of the water. Once on land she was about to help dry him off, but the rain made that a pointless gesture.
"Are you OK? We kind of know what it is like being covered by one of those." though she didn't add that the memory she had experienced was from the mouther's point of view. "Why do you think that was there? Do you think it came from the mists around the asylum?"
"I've seen one of those things before....." John says.
"No one believed me when I told the story though. At least you guys were here to see it this time."
He sits down hard on the the dock.
"Broom ..... I think what you came here looking for is underneath the dock."
Once she was satisfied that John was ok, or as ok as he could be under the circumstances, Broom headed to the end of the pier. She left her lantern with John and conjured up her small magical lights that floated in the air and moved according to her whim.
Hesitantly, she floated her lights down near the water and waited a moment to see if anything happened. Then she reached under the edge of the dock and felt around for anything out of place, almost expecting something to grab her hand and pull her down.
Once she felt the package, she pulled it out of its hiding place, but instead of immediately opening it up, she paused and stared down into the inky depths. The waters sparkled as the rain splashed down on the surface and her lights reflected across the ripples. The faint sound she had been hearing far off in the distance evoked a longing in her, an odd desire to seek out its source down in the inviting depths of the lake and beyond.
For just the briefest of moments, Reine had locked minds with the Mouther - the moment in which she had ended its miserable existence. She'd sent some very satisfied feelings at the thing as she felt that terrible consciousness wink out.
When that was done, she helped Broom help John onto the boat, and then onto the dock.
Then she went to check on Desdemona.
"Are you OK?"
Broom felt several somethings inside the bundle, one of them long enough to be a sword.
Desdemona knelt on the pier, blood running down her face along with the rain, and gasped for air as she came to her senses. She regarded her red fingers with appalled horror, then gingerly touched her face, only to flinch at the gouges she had inflicted on herself.
Still, she firmed her resolve and looked up at Reine. "What an unpleasant bit of bother. I'm quite all right now, however, I assure you." She rose to her feet with the tattered remains of her dignity wrapped tightly around her. Lifting her chin, she met Reine's gaze without fear - at least, fear of Reine. "I apologize for that foolishness. I... I did mean to help."
Then it dawned on her that Broom, who held the lit lantern, had moved away, leaving her in the dark. It had taken a bit because, she realized, the darkness was no impediment to her vision.
With a sick smile, she drew her rose-glowing dagger, clutching it to her as though she could ward the dark from her mind.
That done, she nodded her thanks to Reine, and approached John and Broom. "You look as though you've taken a turn, John. Perhaps this will help." Rummaging in her satchel, she took out a vial and passed it to him. "Drink that. It will bring back your strength," she instructed.
Then she turned to see what Broom was doing.
"Thanks Des." John says.
"What's in the bundle, Broom?"John asks as the throws back the potion Des gave him.
His wounds recede and seem to knit themselves shut as the magic does its work.
Then he pulls out the wand they had found back at the Asylum.
points of con damage.
As he activates it, the color returns to his cheeks and he shudders as his life force is restored.
Broom took a few moments to respond to John. While the calling from the water seemed to be getting louder, his voice sounded far off.
She smiled and suddenly perked up as if nothing had happened. "Oh, this? We don't know, lets have a look!"
She brought the bundle back to the group and began excitedly looking through its contents despite the rain. She paused for a moment and asked worriedly "Are you going to be OK Des?" There was nothing she could do about the rain, but she did what she could to tidy up any traces of blood if she was allowed to continue.
Inside the bundle were a few items. Each of the survivors recognized something as theirs.
Broom, wooden wand case with the letters M.M. inlaid in gold leaf and a doctor's bag containing a medical kit and surgeon's tools.
John, a long, beautiful scabbard matching the one holding Red Destiny, unfortunately empty.
Reine, a taut black band with small black metal skull clipped to it, that looked like it could be attached on the outside of a hat or worn as a normal headband.
Des, a smooth round bracelet that looked like it had been carved out of a single piece of onyx.
Additionally, there were a pair of oddly translucent potions, a scroll, and a coin purse.
Desdemona reached over dreamily, forgetting even to reply to Broom's words, or her ministrations. She lifted an onyx bracelet from the bag Broom had opened, her hands cupped around it.
Landscapes where the laws of physics had turned against themselves; impossible, twisting shapes and shifting shadows across plains of alien madness. In the sky, a hint of some massive, unknowable entity behind the clouds.
Rain plastered her dark hair to her head. She breathed out slowly, her eyes fixed on the simple black band. It was perfectly round. For some reason, that was important to her.
The soul-freezing screech of what pursued. No edges. No edges. They were too close!
A sacrifice had to be made.
Desdemona gasped, snapping back to full awareness. She stared at the others like a startled deer, but her jaw was clenched.
"I... do believe that this was mine, once upon a time. I think I'll take care of it." There was no doubt in her voice as she tucked it onto her wrist.
Reine frowned, then looked at the items in the bag, her eyes piercing the darkness easily.
"Wait," she said, then reached into the bag and pulled out a strip of black cloth. Closer inspection revealed it to be not cloth at all, but something that looked almost like the skin of some kind of black reptile. Affixed to the band was a metal clip, shaped like a skull and painted black as well. "This..." she stroked the band with her fingers, closing her eyes.
Without opening her eyes, her hands lifted the band to her head, and with a series of movements that seemed almost instinctive, she flipped back her hair - the first time any of the others had seen her without her hair covering at least one of her mismatched eyes since awakening in the asylum - and slipped the band into place around her head. The skull settled on one side of her face like it had been there the entire time, and as Reine opened her eyes, the band just looked... right where it sat.
Of course, it was just as disturbing as anything else about Reine, but somehow, it didn't seem out of place.
"This is mine," she said, with a gesture in the direction of her head. "I don't know who had it, or how it got in this bag, but now that it's been returned to me, it'll stay."