Only Aithaloessa manages to hit and wound the preyton, and her wish that it follows her is fulfilled. The Peryton spreads it's wings to rise in the air, leaving the others behind and swoops down on the elf.
Attracting the monster seems a good idea, but maybe Aith is not the proper one to do so. Tariq murmurs a prayer, then charges forward. He doesn't expect to hurt the creature much, but at least he seems better suited to stand for a few rounds, while the rest deal their package.
Aithaloessa manages to dodge the monster’s charge, and takes a step back to try her luck again with another cantrip. Even under the current circumstances, her inexperienced training induces her to some experimentation, and she tries a splash of acid this time.
Avoiding the charge leaves her off-balance, though, and her conjured weapon sails over the melee to mix into the river beyond.
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Antarah immediately understands Yasmeena's magic and releases it on the creature. At the same time, he applies weak magic on his sword as he makes the joint movement that he learned. He also moves slowly to achieve a more favorable position.
Unfortunately he hasn't mastered his magical attack yet, and misses with both.
The peryton doesn't care for Tariq's intervention, especially as he missed. As did everyone. But Antarah blinds it with his enchanted blade. It follows Aithaloessa and attacks, but misses wildly.
Now that the beast is distracted by chasing Aith and having to care about Antarah, Tariq puts all his strength in the blow. This ought to work, or they'll have to flee!
Finally the unlucky streak breaks. After Aithloessa's freezing bolt, Antarah gets in a hard blow and Tariq adds to that, even though something about the beast absorbs most of the blow.
Yasmeena moves up next to the creature and draws her scimitar once she is beside it. She continues her graceful dancing movements and stabs forward at it, then steps aside to make room for Antarah and stabs again.
As the others surround the blinded beast, Aithaloessa steps back and tries her luck with an arrow, hoping that when the peryton’s eyes clear she can sting it into keeping after her.
Yasmeena and Aithaloessa manage to add minor wounds to the creature. The peryton takes off into the air to get away from being surrounded.
Yasmeena stabs at the creature as it takes off to the sky.
She sheathes her scimitar and draws her bow again, firing a shot at its retreating flank.
Antarah carelessly casts next to the peryton. Which earns him a painful gore from the beast. The attack makes Antarah's spell fizzling.
Yazmeena misses the peryton with her blade, but shooting after it, she implants an arrow into it's flesh.
Tariq tries to damage the strange monster once again before it goes out of his reach.
Not wanting to let the peryton get away to slink back after it’s had a chance to lick its wounds, but knowing it’s likely to be out of range of her cantrips any moment, Aithaloessa cuts her losses and dips into her stronger magic, such as it is. From one of the pouches on her belt, she pulls what almost looks like a cartridge she would use for her pistols, but she fixes it with a glare of concentration before setting it off with a hurried Draconic phrase and a tangling gesture of her fingers.
The thrown cartridge explodes into a handful of starbursts that settle around her hand, before one of them unfolds into a tiny fiery dragon and races after the peryton.
Tariq cuts into the beast before it takes off.
Aithaloessa starts the magic that encompanies halfling midsummer festivals. Small sparkling fireworks dance in Aithaloessa's hand. One of those she sends towards the peryton. It zig-zags into the air and detonates into the peryton's face, with a loud bang, creating a small sparkling dragon.
If anyone in Kelmarene hasn't noticed the fight so far, this is now fixed. The peryton flies in a circle over the group.
“Hey! That’s mine!” the elf quips, trying to keep everyone’s spirits up.
She punctuates her boast with an arrow and another little dragon.
Tariq places himself next to Aith and readies his scimitar in case the beast descends upon her .
"Aith! Use the bloody pistol! We need to move our arses outta here, double time!"
Antarah shoots a stone at the beast, but it just falls off. Aithaloessa adds a scratch to the beast, and offers more awesome eye and ear catching fireworks.
The peryton swoops down to ram its antlers into the elf.
Aithaloessa tries to roll with the brutal charge , but it still leaves her battered, winded, and furious.
“Got it!” the guardswoman calls, answering both Tariq and Antarah as she snatches her pistol into her hand. I didn’t expect the dragons would be so … vivid, she thinks, avoiding the idea that other suitable words would be large, or obvious.
Dropping back to stand beside Antarah, she levels the weapon and pulls the trigger with a feral grin, followed by launching her last dragon.
Her grin disappears almost as soon as it shows, as the flint strikes too early on the edge of the pan, sending her shot wide, but mercifully not igniting any of the other barrels. Stupid antique! Should have known I would need to rebuild it first!
Yasmeena shoots another arrow at the peryton, stows her bow and draws her scimitar again. She steps closer to Antarah, still moving gracefully in a magic dance.
Capitalising from the thing being down to the ground again, Tariq slashed strongly with his blade before it can flee again.
Tariq digs deep into the flesh of the beast. Bhe peritom goes after Aithaloessa and attacks her again. But before it can hit her, Antarah steps in and finishes the beast.
As the dust settles, you hear screams from the human, as the gnolls start torturing him. And froom up the road, where the watchtower is, you see a patrol of two gnolls with two hyenas approach.
"Damn, they're chasing after us!" Then, thinking the prisoner won't last for long, Tariq heads towards the group in an attempt to create a massive combat where to reach a glorious end, most probably.
A fluent stream of Elven expletives bursts from Aithaloessa’s mouth in a surprisingly un-officer-like way as she starts following Tariq, aiming for the cover of the bridge’s piers herself. She’ll have to thank the others for saving her later.
For now, she shouts out a warning as she holsters her pistol in disgust, “My weapon’s misfired! Could explode if I use it again before repairs!”
Now is not the time for an introduction to modern, scientific ballistics for the benefit of those who didn’t grow up in Alkenstar. What it might be time for, though, while the patrol is still closing, is a demonstration to show the gnolls that even at that distance they’re not safe. Switching back to her bow, she whips off an arrow as she goes.
Tariq runs forward trying not to be turned into a porcupine while he moves his head side to side. "You younglings and your fancy tech! Gimme a good ol' scimitar...!"
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Antarah wonders what the fuss was when he handled the pistol if, in the hands of an expert, it could explode. He says "Unless some scarier creatures start coming, I believe we can handle some gnolls, no?"
As he says this, his hand start forming an arcane symbol in the air and he starts chanting a growing spell.
Aithaloessa's shot goes wide.
Yasmeena stows her scimitar again and follows Tariq.
Not for the first time since leaving her reluctantly adoptive homeland, Aithaloessa reconsiders her life choices. She wasn’t much of an officer, but at least in Alkenstar she would have stood a chance of having a handful of raw recruits to cajole or terrify into providing a half-decent hail of lead in support. As it is, out here she’s the green one, with only a couple of spells fizzling in her head each day in a world full of magic, and at imminent risk of being outflanked.
She does her best to track all the visible groups of enemies, worrying most about the accursed goat. Her trained eye gauges the ranges pessimistically, and she calls out, “Goat incoming! Charging, in two arrows’ time, three at very best.”
Despite everything, she tries to keep a stiff upper lip. “Ladies, gentlemen: think we can give the doggos Hell by then?”
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t also glance into the river to see how deep it is here, in case swimming for it starts looking like a tempting option, if possible.
"Honestly? I think Antarah got it right." Tariq stands still for a second, trying to react to what his friends are going to do. Every second counts, though...
So a retreat it is, after the group was faced with an overwhelming number of enemies. The downside of this is, that they have to flee in bright daylight and the pursuers can see who does little monster slaying trips into Kelmarene.
But one interesting information the group can collect on their retreat. While the Gnolls try chasing them a while along the river, the schir doesn't leave town. It stops on the bridge and watches for a while that they don't turn back.
Finally the Gnolls also give up and return to Kelmarene.
Meanwhile you hear the screams of the prisoner, who gets tortured by the gnolls. The screams of dreadful pain echo from the hills. This lasts for an excruciaatingly long time until silence falls over the land again.
Aithaloessa’s show of bravado evaporates as the adventurers are pushed back, to the accompaniment of the tortured screams of the prisoner staked in the centre of the village. She can only hope that it won’t be fatal, that they can still do something about it.
A million ideas bounce frantically through her brain until, when the group finally finds a safe place to catch their breaths, her ashen face turns grim and guilty to the others, and her thoughts come pouring out.
“I’m sorry, I should be better than this,” she says, simply, her hands already moving to clear the worst of the debris from her misfired weapon prior to examining it more closely for appropriate repairs. Mentally, she’s already annotating her spellbook with additional notes about her pyrotechnic spell, and…
“Preferred weapons notwithstanding, now that we know there are creatures here that resist mundane weapons, we should return to the monastery and re-equip,” she suggests, taking the group in with a quartermasterly look as she considers her recommendations. “It doesn’t have the range or precision of the fireworks, but I can prepare a spell to deny area, with a nasty surprise on top.”
“Did you notice? That thing didn’t cross the bridge. Dawn attack tomorrow, goat priority, but failing that, try to use that detail while we do as much damage as possible?” She doesn’t quite flinch at the word failing, nor at the pressure of what she’s sure are cracked ribs as she draws in a breath. With little fuss, she calls on her magic to try to patch herself up.
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Antarah agrees with Aithaloessa. "Yes, we can exploit the fact that the goat didn't cross the bridge. However, it does venture outside of town on its patrols at night. Maybe the river prevents its crossing. Or maybe it was only a coincidence. We do have much to report, however. It would be better to have that prisoner with us, not only to prevent his torture, but for what he knows. On the other hand, knowing that there might be more prisoners could influence Garavel to send more muscle with us to try some rescue."
He would be glad to have other people take the blunt of the outsiders they've been fighting.
"Yeah, let's go back to safety."
Once back in the monastery, Tariq spends his remaining prayers in healing his comrades.
He dosesn't have the spirit to face Garavel and tell him they've miserably failed, so he leaves that for others this time, and instead he meditates on which invocations to ask his Lady for tomorrow.
“Early days yet,” Aithaloessa tells Antarah after talking things over on the way back. “They may have been able to placate the peryton, and mainly avoid that huge boar, but that makes me wonder what else they might just be letting lurk in the outskirts as another form of natural defenses.” Hopefully not actually more pugwampis.
She thanks Tariq for his healing, before hurrying away to the lab she’s sharing with Zastoran. First of all, it’s both embarrassing and dangerous to have neglected the weapons the adventurers found in the catacombs, and which she digs up again from the mess of alchemical notes and apparatus that still needs to be sorted through. Also, as a cleric of Nethys, Zastoran might have insight into creatures from the great beyond, so she decides it can’t hurt to ask while she rounds things up and checks her pistol.
The elf spends the rest of her day until the group’s ready to report to Garavel balancing a surprising number of tasks, as if to distract herself. Apart from checking in with Zastoran, she painstakingly cleans her strange new pistol, adjusting the frizzen and pan, and even scratching some rough calculations on a scrap of parchment based on her best estimate of the weapon’s materials, in an attempt to minimize the risks of future misfires. The results are most interesting, but she files them away for now before opening her spellbook, finding the special inks she uses for it, and adding a few notes about her dragon firework spell in the margins. Conspicuous is a word that appears early on.
Yasmeena takes it upon herself to speak for the group, attempting to explain their actions as diplomatically as possible. "When we heard the sounds of the creatures torturing their prisoners, well, it occurred to us that said prisoners might have valuable information to give us, and we immediately decided to attempt to rescue them. We were ambushed by the strange creature called a peryton, and decided that since we could not stop the ceremony, we might be able to distract them with loud noises and thus delay their horrific activities until tomorrow. Having defeated the winged beast, we beat a retreat and discovered that the goatlike outsider creature would not follow across the bridge." She sighs. "Sadly, it sounded like the gnolls proceeded to abuse their prisoner anyway."
"There is a reason we want the gnolls eliminated to reestablish Kelmarane as a tarde post in Katapesh. They are horrible creatures. You killed a dangerous beast with no losses on your side. I count that as a success."
"But those gnolls might have more prisoners. Don't let them use it to lure you into a trap."