Tessa ignores the serpent for now and presses her attack against wooden teeth. "You know, you could have knocked on the door and just asked. Drop your weapon and surrender and I will hear you plead your case for your stolen property."
Val sheathes her blades and sets about making ready to sail as quickly as possible.
Marisan rushes to the nearest foe and tries to deliver a jumping kick to his face!
Harmony meanwhile starts casting loose ropes with flickers of magic and calls out to her officer. "Marisan! Get on the balista, sink that boat!"
Polli's magic causes another four of the attackers to fall back through the large doorway. Marisan dives off the ship and swims quickly towards the tower. She reaches the tide-covered stone steps and rises like retribution at the rear of the buccaneers. Donomsail moves around the roof, but as she moves past the tattooed woman to reach Samms, the woman lashes out with her rapier and catches the tiefling as she moves past. Donomsail is still able to pass along divine healing to the downed rigger.
Round 5
Tessa's blade finds tattoed flesh again and the woman flinches. Harmony shouts out a command to the First Mate, but the woman has already fled the ship. Her Master Gunner is still present, though, and the Siren begins to move as her anchor is raised.
With the last of the buccaneers removed from the Siren she begins moving out of the lagoon to the open water. The other ship isn't idle, however, and a catapault stone smashes through the deck of the Siren.
At the bottom of the tower, more buccaneers surge forward only to be met by the blades of Fipps, Tilly, and Slippery Syl.
At the top of the tower, the woman glares back at Tessa. "The only one pleading will be you, Red, once I put you in your place." With words of magic, a huge ball of water attempts to engulf Tessa.
"Look here tree-teeth, you have no-"
Tessa is unable to avoid being hit and does her best to avoid being engulfed by the huge ball of water.
"Run! All of you now, GO!" she yells, slightly put out that all of them didn't decide running was a better idea then dying from lightning. BUt oh well. Just as the wizard is about to unleash another bolt, she sees a familiar whirlwind of kicks and punches. "MARISAN! We missed you!" she shouts. "but I guess that means no lightning bolt You can die in fire instead." she points at the nearest invader to let him know how he will meet his end.
Val grabs the next line that needs to be run out and pulls. As she drags it across the deck, she plans her route to take her by Harmony. When she draws near she quietly asks, "are you sure this is right move, Cap'n? Sure they're down a lot of sailors, but so are we, including almost all our officers... if we stayed and helped kill everyone storming the tower we could regroup and go after their survivors at full strength... maybe even get some healing going on the way?"
"They're as short as we are." Harmony replies, "More so if they've landed crews on the tower as well as attacking us. By moving now we drive off any support they have, and cut off their retreat. If they flee we won't pursue, but they'll have to abandon their entire crew for that. It's a gamble, but a worthwhile one."
"And these villains missed my feet!" Marisan shouts to Polli. Dripping wet, she whirls among the enemies in a handstand, feet extended to mete out whirling justice!
Polli's first target staggers under the flames, but just barely manages to keep his feet. Her second target suffers less, but doesn't manage to avoid the flames. Marisan shoves a woman's nose into her skull with a well-placed heel and also finishes off one of the still-smoking recipients of Polli's flame.
Back on the roof of the tower, Donomsail, having confidence that both of the downed women will survive their current wounds, looks up at the tattooed woman and casts a spell to freeze her in place.
The woman turns and sneers as if she's going to spit vile words at the tiefling, but goes rigid.
Round 6
With the appearance of Marisan and Polli's fearsome magical arsenal, the buccaneers at the stairs fall back to the single damaged longboat and push off into the lagoon. The longboat retreating has an effect on the other ship. They begin to weigh anchor.
End Combat
Seeing their ship fleeing, the buccaneers in the longboat surrender.
"Dony and Tessa are upstairs!" Polli tells Marisan, unaware that she already knows. "I'll make sure things stay quiet down her and see to wounds. Please go check on them?" she offers and suggests, though she desperately wants to make sure Donomsail is okay, and Tessa of course. An officer should say here though she thinks.
Once she ensures that the fallen are both going to make it, she as the seargent to bind the tattooed woman, making sure to both gag and blindfold her.
Tessa takes a knee and help her fallen wife from the ground and with a wink she says "Didn't think you were going to get out of our arrangement that easily, did you?"
"Intercept that boat!" Harmony calls, seeing the ship turning into the wind. "Master Gunner, give them something to remember us by!"
With the ballistas fired once more Harmony accepts the boats surrender and supervises the Siren being returned to its previous berth. Then and only then are the prisoners taken out of their leaky boat and confined.
A simple spell lets her speak to her fiancee and fellow Captain. "Lacey. What's happening? Raiders have surrendered. Their ship is fleeing. Get the course if you can."
Marisan rushes upstairs to ensure Donomsail and Tessa are okay. Once there, she eagerly stands guard over the tattooed woman, awaiting further orders.
Val drops the ropes in her hands and hurries to the loaded ballista on the foredeck. Taking aim at the other ship's mast, she fires one then the other...
Polli starts looking over her crew when she realizes she is missing something. "Tilly, go up to the third-floor storage closet to get my medical kit..." missing a few things really "... and my clothes if you don't mind." in the rush to help she had not remembered her state of undress, and now was clothed only in a flimsy sheet. She had intended to sleep fully clothed in case there was danger, but her closet mate had other ideas. Polli was a pushover to Donomsail's many ideas.
"And hurry please, I do not wish for Captain Harmony to give me a..." she was going to say tongue lashing but decided it would be very purposely misconstrued. ".. um, I mean I don't wish to be reprimanded." She tries her best to ignore the breezes and get back to work.
Lady Agasta smiles in gratitude as Tessa help her to her feet.
"That woman just appeared out of thin air. She stabbed your woman there and then me, spouting off something about a necklace."
As they hear the chaos down below begin to settled down and Marisan arrives on the roof, the tattooed woman's body relaxes in her bonds. A moment later and she begins convulsing. Foam drips out from her gag as Donomsail attempts to hold her still. Ripping off the gag produces a gout of white foaming spittle.
An instant later and the woman is dead.
After examining her, the tiefling holds up the woman's wooden teeth with one of them broken. She conjectures that there was something very toxic hidden within.
As well as the tattooed covered woman's gear, you also have about a dozen captured buccaneers held as captives on the Siren.
Polli gets dressed quickly, then finishes her checks on the wounded, on both sides. As she does, she'll question them.
"Why in the blue balls of blazes did you f!*&ing attack us, without knowing a lick about who was in here?" she snaps at the invader she is mending. tenderly even with the violence in her voice.
"Do you have any idea what she was talking about, this necklace? It seemed to be a focal point of the attack and is quite relevant. I can't imagine they would launch an attack here for something that didn't exist?" she asks Agasta.
When the prisoner dies, Tessa frowns. "Shame. I had wanted to question her first."
She joins in on the questioning downstairs once they are concluded on the roof and everyone is safe. She approaches and taps her on the shoulder and asks "May I?" and steps forward, pulling out Wayfinder. She hops up on top of a chair and leans it forward so it is balancing on the front two legs only. In a flash the tip is barely piercing the neck of the prisoner, just breaking the skin with the blade flexed and bent so that the slightest touch would send it through the flesh.
"Speak quickly, I do not know how long I can keep my balance here." she says, staring down at the prisoner.
Polli looks over at her shoulder, to see the berry still alive, which is good. Because Tessa would stab herself a dozen times over before letting one of her own die as well, so that meant Dony was fine. "Feel free" she rises, brushes off her skirts, and moves away to watch.
Marisan frowns down at the dead woman. "Donomsail, I have heard stories of magic that lets one speak to the dead. Perhaps you could try that to question her and find out what she knows?"
"Hey, easy, easy," the captured buccaneer declares, holding her hands up. "I'll tells ya whatever ya want to know, ok? No need for this."
She visibly swallows.
"Captain Locke, she was doing a favor for Chief Krelloort. His son, see, got h'self killed going after some pirates and they took his necklace. The Chief wanted the necklace back. He's sentimental or som'hin. So's the Captain, she says we sail here 'cause she hear'ed that the necklace was here. That's all I know. Anythin' else, you'll have ta ask her."
~~~~~
Looking over the body of the tattoed woman, you note that she wears little in the way of clothing, seemingly the better to show off her many tattoos, including a large stylized sea snake tattoo on her left hip and abdomen. More crudely rendered tattoos crowd the rest of her flesh, principally sharks and other creatures with gaping maws filled with jagged teeth. Most interesting, however, is the large tattoo of a map inscribed between her shoulder blades.
The Free Captains are the most obvious menace of that maze of hell-cursed waterways and a thousand perilous isles and knife-edged reefs called the Shackles, but they are not its only danger, nor the worst. Nearly a century ago, Free Captain Cyrus Wolfe, a black-hearted rogue with an even blacker gift for the dark arts, plied the waters off the western coast of Garund and brought fear to hundreds of ship’s captains and crews. His daring daylight raid on the fortified Thuvian port of Aspenthar directly under the nose of that city-state’s admiralty left a dozen of the principality’s warships in flames and over a hundred of its citizens carried off as captives for ransom. For that grand audacity, Wolfe was offered the Hurricane Crown by his fellow Free Captains, but it is said that he simply laughed in their faces.
After 3 decades of terrorizing the shipping lanes, Captain Wolfe made his biggest haul ever when he surprised a convoy of Katapeshi treasure ships returning from secret mine holdings on the coast of southern Garund. It is believed that Wolfe divided up his treasure and hid it in several different sites, but the locations of most of them have been lost to time. However, one name has stayed at the forefront of maritime legend as the location of his spoils — Mancatcher Cove.
To dispose of the most valuable portion of his plunder, Captain Wolfe selected an uncharted island somewhere in the Shackles — an island shrouded in dense jungle and surrounded by forbidding cliffs save for one cove said to be so deep that it descended all the way to the pits of Hell. There Wolfe hid his treasure, reputedly using his sorcerous powers to reach down into the very heart of Hell to summon forth a guardian beast to crush any ships that dared anchor in the cove. Before departing, Captain Wolfe made a map of the island and the location of his treasure. However, less than a year later he was captured by a flotilla of ships commissioned by the queen of Aspenthar and the Pactmasters of Katapesh. Even under torture, Wolfe refused to divulge the location of his ill-gotten treasure, and so he was hung from a gibbet over the harbor of Aspenthar, where his bones were picked clean by gulls and crows as a warning to others.
Since then many of Captain Wolfe’s treasure troves have been located and looted, and copies of his map of Mancatcher Cove have likewise managed to find their way into the hands of fortune seekers. However, unlike at Wolfe’s other caches that were looted, those few ships that came to Mancatcher Cove in search of the fabled treasure were never seen again — victims, it was whispered, of the Beast of Mancatcher Cove. In time, the last few copies of Wolfe’s map were lost, and the hunt for the greatest hoard of Captain Wolfe’s treasure subsided, leaving little more than an old sea dog’s legend.
Polli makes the rounds looking over the dead to make sure. At the tatooed woman she exclaims with all certainty "Yes, she's dead."
She does pause at the artwork though "This one..." pointing at the map "... see how it is stretched. It means she grew after it was inscribed on her. She was very young I think."
of what it means besides that, she knows nothing.
Leaving the bosun to watch the prisoners, Harmony disembarks the Siren to assess what's going on at the tower.
"What was done when she was young?" She asks, shooting a glance at Tessa and seeing her both unharmed and dealing with her 'wife'. She leaves well enough alone and joins Polli.
"Mancatcher Cove eh?" She says, "That's a famous story, I heard it in T-, at home even before... everything." She goes on to retell the story, in brief outline, concluding with "Some a legendary treasure guarded by an equally legendary beast. Polli, could you make a copy of this map? I'd like to study it further."
That done she turns to her fellow Captain. "I hope things went well here. We held the Siren against boarders, killed a dozen or so and captured the same number. Their ship fled when we made sail. Did you get a heading?"
"As well as could be expected. Unfortunately Agasta was injured, luckily Dony was light on her feet and saved her life. Remind me to have Agasta send her some of that cheese." she says, getting side-tracked.
"Heading? Right. Uhm..."
Polli is nodding along until she hears about the legendary part of the story. That part makes her groan, specifically because she thought she knew her captains well enough at this point to know they will be heading there soon. Still, she copies it to the best of her ability.
Tessa wasn't paying a huge amount of attention to the other ship, but by her best guess they were heading off near due east.
The captured prisoners are made fast in the hold of the Siren and the dead (none of the Siren's crew, thankfully) are buried in shallow graves on the other side of the island.
By the time the glimmer of the rising sun appears on the eastern horizon everyone's exhaustion is total and all consuming. Not much else is accomplished until near noon.
"You have my gratitude," Lady Agasta offers over the midday meal. "What are your plans now?"
~~~~
The map tattooed on Captain Locke’s back depicts the outlines of several small islands. A stylized half sun sits to the right of the islands, while simple images of a monstrous eye and the face of an aged, bearded king are to the left. Beneath the map are five lines of crude verse:
From blue bight’s embrace
Spy the Grave Lady’s prize tooth
With the Dawnflower’s first kiss
Climb the Captain’s wayward orb
To claim old king’s hoard
"The Beast of Mancatcher Cave... that's what the eye represents... I read that somewhere now that Violet has jogged my memory."
Val follows Harmony through the tower and listens attentively to the story of the lost treasure and it's guardian.
Staring at the map she sighs and says, "there's something familiar about those islands... but I can't place it... is there anyone we trust in the tower right now who's good with maps?"
Tessa turns to Agasta and asks "Do you have a library or reference material here on the Rock that my crew could use to research this further?"
"Southern Shackles." Harmony adds to the debate after searching through her mental archives. "West of Besmara's Throne. [b]"A hundred miles or more north-west from here and not frequented. If we decided to go looking for this its a wild goose chase and well away from the sea lanes, so little chance of plunder unless we can really find it."
"We have some maps," Agasta offers. After pulling out some nautical maps, the island on the map is located.
"So are you really going after Captain Wolfe's last treasure cache?" the Lady questions in amazement. "So many have never come back from there. I won't lie. If you accomplished that then you would almost be guaranteed a letter of marque."
"What about the necklace?" Polli asks, pulling the attention away from mythical treasures and the real danger of this Chief "Krelloort, was it? If he sent fools once, will he again?"
Tessa nods "Of course we are. We are The Sirens! There's not a ship in the Shackles with a better crew and absolutely nothing stands in our way." she says, completely believing every single word of her statement as indisputable fact.
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Harmony catches Polli's eye but, to their credit, neither of them acts on the immensely strong desire they both have to slap their heads into their respective hands...
Tessa turns to Polli and nods "This is true, Polli. I'm sure he wants whatever necklace he thinks you have, Agasta. I wonder why he thinks it is here. Could it have been before you arrived? When did you come to The Rock, Agasta?"
"I've lived here at the rock for many years," Agasta replies, considering events. "I don't know anything about a necklace. Were they, perhaps, looking for you? It is known now that you call Tidewater Rock home. Have you come across a necklace?"
Val thinks for a minute but can't recall any noteworthy necklace.
"There be a necklace," she says quietly almost to herself. "Twas a while back but Ah 'member there be a queer one on o' those Fish folk that attacked awhile back. Twas the time we lost Anand, seen the doodad in yer room jist the other day. Gold coral it had, 'n' funny design too, blue-black swirls. Do you 'member it Captain Harmony?"
"Now that you mention it." Harmony says. "Yes. If this chief is going to keep pursuing us for that its going to be a nightmare, we sold it somewhere in Port Peril. Polli might remember where exactly... so this chief is a sahuagin? Bother!"
"Yes" she sighed "I remember the store. The shopkeep was what you would call handsome, aggressively forward, and into halflings. Rosie will probably remember him better than me."
"Are we headed back to the Port then?"
"I don't think we'll ever find it now." Harmony says with a sigh. "That ship sailed when we sold it the first time. We either need to meet this chief to explain or simply expect more attacks. But given that they killed out crew in the first place I don't care much to negotiate with this Chief. Agasta, will you be able to hold the Rock if this chief comes looking for his necklace? We won't always be within sailing distance."
”We’re being stalked across the seas by the fishmen because of some necklace that wasn’t even magical?” Val asks with a mixture of surprise and frustration. ”Should we see if anyone knows where to find this chief?”
”Should we see if anyone knows where to find this chief?”
No one on your crew or living in the tower is aware of where sahuagin's might dwell.
"I'll try and see if they know what the fish headed f#~! is." Polli says before asking for someone's help to ask the prisoner's questions.
Polli will spend some time calming describing all the ways she's seen a Siren beat, bloody, or kill a man or woman in a very detailed manner. Yes, each one of those was during a battle, but that part she'll leave out. Then she'll smile, and excuse herself to get her tools, leaving the 'good' questioner to aks the question they want to know, where is Chief Krelloort?