Asami buries the blade in the frog's side, lodging it in the creature's other side, opposite the druid's spear. The frog looks to be on its last legs, but it still stands -- er... swims.
Estelle gets ready to juck and jive with the frog if it attacks, though it appears the beast is fairly intent on Oduim.
[color=green]ROUND 2
Characters in BOLD may act.
Draxxie (15/18 hp)
Oduim (17/20 hp)
Giant Frog 1 (14 dmg)
Giant Frog 2 (0 dmg, Frightened 3 rounds, fleeing)
Asami (18/20 hp)
Estelle (12/17 hp, +4 AC)
[/color]
"Let's finish the froggie!"
Draxxie pulls a sharp-edged chakram from her belt. "Better'n a bow. This'll cut riggin' as good as flesh n bone."
Stepping up to the 'shore' again, Draxxie lets fly.
With a flourish and a fling, Draxxie lodges the chakram into the frog's... neck?... and nearly decapitates it with the force of the blow. The frog's head dangles off the beast as it sinks lifelessly into the mire.
COMBAT OVER!
Estelle points at the rope and mimes swinging across.
Oh gods, hurry up. That other one might come back. Cry would just be an hors d'oeuvre for the main course, me!
Draxxie strips off the more restrictive elements of her armour, stowing weapons and buckler.
"Alright, here goes!"
She swings over towards Estelle. "How ya doin' New Girl? Don't look so scared, I'm on your side!"
Draxxie not only swings across safely, she looks damn good doing it. Like a true pirate!
Asami gestures to Oduim, as if to say "After you."
Though his aim is a little wobbly and he almost misses the timing on releasing the rope, Oduim manages to land safely on the other side, albeit perhaps not terribly gracefully. All that's left now is Asami.
Asami takes 10 and swings safely, if boringly, across.
Hopefully.
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Now that the hungry frogs have been dealt with, the party swings across with relative ease, but hustle along before the frightened frog decides to get its s%@* together and come back for a second attempt at a meal.
You travel through more swamp for another ten or fifteen minutes. The gnarled, twisted willows begin to become more sporadic, occasionally replaced with tall, broad-leafed palms. Soon enough you come to a large clearing.
A terrible stench fills the swamp here, a fetid odor of cheap perfume and rotting flesh. A huge tree stands in the middle of a clearing in the swamp, draped with some sort of huge tent. Lurid, painted faces cover both the tree trunk and tent, and both are decorated with rotting humanoid body parts and carpets of squirming insects. Inside the open tent can be seen piles of loose objects, most likely clothing and other personal effects, but it's impossible to tell more from out here. You'll have to enter the tent to glean more information.
Estelle writes a bit and then shows it to Draxxie and Asami, Our crew mates could be in there and this looks like a good test of your Captain mettle. Will you ‘lead’ from in front or behind?
Asami sees it all and snorts.
"Samurai would do this to bandit camps as a warning to others," she explains. "Ready yourselves."
She reaches down and grabs her axe and blade; if anyone's alive in there, they'll need help, but if anyone's alive and well in there, they'll likely need killing.
"Estelle--do you have that magic ready that will make me stronger? If not, I can handle it."
She chooses not to rise to the blonde's bait.
The witch nods a 'no', gesturing at her infected mosquito bites. She points her carried blade at the gross place and prepares to follow last.
"Are you goading me, New Girl?!"
Draxxie, having already shrugged on her armour jerkin once over the frog bog, readies her buckler and points her pike towards the tent.
"I ain't scared o' nuthin'!"
She conjures four witch-lights and sends them in to the open tent to reveal the contents, then marches to the front of the group.
"Come on out! We're friendly! If ya like pirates anyways!"
Asami nods in understanding; better to give her the best chance of surviving her disease than to save it on the off chance "Big Oni" would be useful. Her bulk increases and her teeth extend, face growing more dour until she has a horrible, sneering oni visage.
She looms, wordlessly, the dull yellow glow of her eyes locked on the tent.
If none come out, she's the first to climb.
Draxxie sends her dancing lights into the open tent, illuminating the space within, but the entrance is too narrow to make out anything specific, aside from the aforementioned piles of clothing and trinkets. The lights do illuminate the piles, which can now be seen to be covered in blood and bits of gore. No one answers the skald's calls.
When the party eventually approaches the tent and peers inside, the stench of rotting meat hits your nostrils full-force. A handful of chewed-on limbs litter the floor near the back of the tent. The clothing pile is neither neat nor clean, the garments shredded by claws and stained heavily with blood.
No creatures appear to be present at this time.
Sifting through the discarded trinkets nets a handful of useful (or at least saleable) items:
- a small chest containing six alchemist's fires
- a wedding dress inlaid with pearls and set with three tiny rubies
- a whalebone corset with mother-of-pearl inlays
- a dozen silver hatpins with tiny obsidians
- scattered gems of various types, sizes, and cuts
- 56 gp and 97 sp
The silver hatpins are worth 5gp each, for a total of 60gp.
The whalebone corset is in fair condition and is worth about 25gp.
The gems are worth about 250gp all told.
The wedding gown, in shockingly pristine condition, is easily worth 400gp.
----
Based on basic ghoul behavior, you know a few things to be true. First, they retain part of their original mind; how much can vary wildly from ghoul to ghoul, but most of them display a tendency to collect trinkets and bric-a-brac that remind them of being alive, usually taken from the corpses they just ate. This tent appears to be that same hoarding behavior. The leering faces painted on the trunk, though, is not something you've ever read about ghouls doing.
The smell of rot here is too strong to just be from the handful of limbs and bits of flesh. Most likely this is where the ghouls resided, resting during the day and hunting at night.
----
Among some of the older garments are uniforms common to the Chelish navy. It's a little difficult to tell for certain, but they appear to be the oldest articles of clothing here, maybe three or four years old judging by the state of the stitching. They are also in a separate pile, and haphazardly folded.
The patches on one of the uniform's breast pockets denotes the person who wore it was an officer on a Chelish scout ship. While larger vessels from Cheliax are a rare sight, scout ships are spotted on more occasions, though usually they are run off by pirates before they can venture too deep into the Shackles, and tend to remain in slightly more neutral waters like the Fever Sea. You have not seen a ship, however; whether it sank nearby or these sailors were marooned here, you cannot say.
Asami snorts and looks things over.
"You don't get used to a smell like this--not entirely," she gripes. She reaches the alchemist's fires and holds them out.
"Take what you need; I'll pocket the rest."
With no one here to save or murder, she's anxious to move on. If Sandara and Samms are here, I don't think they can afford for us to linger.
"Looks like the ghoulies' den t' me.
Huh. Nice dress. Corset. Hatpins. What, no hat? So disappoint."
Draxxie rummages through the booty.
"That is a very nice dress. Not a mark on it. Gods know how it survived. Fit fer a pirate queen, if I say so meself. I ain't plannin' on gettin' married anytime soon, but mebbe I c'n stash it till I do.
Hey, lookit. Chelish Navy outfits. Few years old. Ya think our three ghoulie-girls were navy? S@~*. Wonder if they were marooned?"
Draxxie takes a couple of alchemist fires. And the dress.
The witch looks at the pile and her eyes turn solid white while the unearthly voice from the ghoul fight hisses out, ”show us maaaagic…”
She accepts two alchemist fires if offered to her.
Might be good to scare someone off or burn up more ghouls… or bodies that might become ghouls.
"Might have been navy, might have eaten some seamen. Who knows?"
She looks over the hatpins and thinks a moment.
"Everyone should keep one of these for now," she advises. "A hatpin's good for stabbing, and we don't have any silver daggers on us that I remember."
"Huh. Good call, Fox. Do silver weapons work on demons, or somethin' like that?"
Draxxie sticks her tricorne in place with a silver hatpin.
Estelle accepts the hatpin and hands it to Cry, who wraps a tiny tendril around it and begins fencing motions from her shoulder perch.
She scribbles a note, It'll be as dangerous to anyone in her 'hands' as in mine. We need anything else here?
"Somethin' like that," she says, taking two of the hatpins for herself--the way she fights, it's better to have a pair, after all. "Don't really remember the specifics..."
"I think we're good. Take a last sniff if you think you'll miss it."
Once the party is satisfied you've scoured the grisly scene for anything of note, you continue southward.
Within about a half hour, the muddy swamp fully dries out, and the willows are steadily replaced with sparse rosewoods. Finally you pass out of the swamp entirely, into a long, thin expanse of grasslands. To your right, the grassy plain inclines up to a thicket of rosewoods and cinchonas, with a handful of palms interspersed, before eventually sloping sharply upward in an angle that isn't quite a hillside and isn't quite a cliff. It looks like it would be arduous and time-consuming to climb.
That's not where your path leads, however. The dirt path you've been following continues, dipping toward the island's east coast. Soon the path vanishes into the wide expanse of sandy beach, though the more keen-eyed of you can see it resumes less than a mile down the beach. The stretch is littered with massive palm trees, each roughly 50 feet high or so. A few of them even have the remains of broken coconuts at the base of their trunks. Climbing up to get fresh ones would be tricky, though the prize would be some fresh coconuts.
Estelle's stomach grumbles and she scrawls a note, I doubt we have time to stop to climb, but we should try to get some coconuts on the way back, right? I'm getting hungry. I never got breakfast.
She glances quickly through a couple piles, hoping to spot a diamond in the rough. Cry looks as well.
Asami nods. "The man who does not stop to eat will be stopped by any obstacle in his path instead," she states.
"No tougher than ship's riggin'. Race ya, Fox!"
Draxxie stows buckler and weapons, but doesn't bother stripping her armour. She hustles up the tree to reach the coconuts.
Draxxie and Asami easily scramble up the trees and collect a few coconuts each, while Estelle and Cry sift through the broken ones on the ground below, most of which are old and rotten shards, but a couple surprisingly unbroken ones remain. All told the trio gather a fair pile.
As Draxxie and Asami begin their steady descent, the witch plucks up the last coconut and just manages to pull her hand away before a massive pincer snaps her fingers off!
Two shapes lumber out of the sand and coconut refuse, clacking their pincers at Oduim and Estelle. These crabs are of incredible size -- each one easily as tall as a dwarf -- and appear displeased that their territory has been tread upon.
[color=green]ROUND 1
Characters in BOLD may act.
Asami (18/20 hp, 20 ft up)
Crab 1 (0 dmg)
Draxxie (15/18 hp, 25 ft up)
Oduim (17/20 hp)
Crab 2 (0 dmg)
Estelle (12/17 hp)
[/color]
It's a crab. I mean, it's a really big crab, like you didn't even know they could GET this big, but it's still just a crab. If it grabs you in that giant pincer, it's going to hurt a lot.
No s*~!. You think I WANT to get eaten by a monster?
Uhuh, sure. Tell you what, if I die you get a turn to see how you do. Dodging ain’t that easy.
Asami slips down the tree...
...relatively poorly, actually?
Falls onto yielding surfaces (soft ground, mud) also convert the first 1d6 of damage to nonlethal damage. This reduction is cumulative with reduced damage due to deliberate jumps and the Acrobatics skill.
Asami tries to wriggle down the tree a little further before jumping in hopes of avoiding a rolled ankle, but in her haste she slips and falls the full distance. Thankfully the sand breaks her fall a bit. Asami takes lethal and non-lethal from the fall and lands prone.
[color=green]ROUND 1
Characters in BOLD may act.
Asami (17/20 hp, 4 NL, prone)
Crab 1 (0 dmg)
Draxxie (15/18 hp)
Oduim (17/20 hp)
Crab 2 (0 dmg)
Estelle (12/17 hp)
[/color]
Asami grits her teeth as she hits the sand, and swiftly pushes herself back to her feet.
"Kuso," she grimaces.
The crab that snapped at Estelle goes for a flurry of clacking, slashing pincers. The first swipe gets hold of Estelle's left arm and squeezes. The witch feels something crack under her skin and a lightning bolt of pain fires up her arm.
It then slashes at Estelle with its other claw, grabbing and ripping at the flesh around her collarbone. Overwhelmed by agony, Estelle collapses in the crab's grip and begins to bleed out.
Its quarry limp in its arms, the crab whirls on the nearest of the creatures who dared to impinge on its territory and steps toward Asami.
[color=green]ROUND 1
Characters in BOLD may act.
Asami (17/20 hp, 4 NL)
Crab 1 (0 dmg)
Draxxie (15/18 hp)
Oduim (17/20 hp)
Crab 2 (0 dmg)
Estelle (-4/17 hp, unconscious and dying)
[/color]
"Besmara's t@+#! What is wrong with this island, that everything's tryin' t' kill us?" Draxxie complains.
"Hey, I don' think those f$+%ers c'n climb trees. Watcha doin' down there, Fox?"
A puzzled, and really f**%ed off, Draxxie pulls her trusty chakram and lets fly at the second crustacean.
"Neither can she," Asami says, gesturing toward Estelle's limp body.
"She still alive? Hard t' tell from up here." Draxxie peers down at the bloodshed with a frown.
Asami rolls her eyes; no appealing to a pirate's empathy.
"If she's not, then we have to find actual water," she points out. "Let's do what we can to make sure."
As she collapses, internal organs rupturing and blood burbling out of her mouth onto the ground, Estelle begins reconsidering her life path. Perhaps this pirate thing isn't as good as she thought, though to be fair she hasn't really had many actual choices to make recently.
Despite her height up in the tree and the distance to her target, Draxxie strikes true with her chakram. It bounces off the hard, chitinous shell of the giant crab, but it does leave a nasty crack in its surface.
#2, confused by the sudden pain followed by the equally sudden weather change, wanders into the fog to the spot where it saw one of the remaining intruders to their territory. Seeing nothing, it pauses to wonder what the f&++ is going on in its tiny crab brain, then randomly picks a direction and moves that way. By sheer dumb luck, it bumps into Oduim and raises its pincers threateningly.
Meanwhile, the witch contemplates the fact that she's lying incapacitated in a pool of her own blood for the second time in as many days.
[color=green]ROUND 2
Characters in BOLD may act.
Asami (17/20 hp, 4 NL)
Crab 1 (0 dmg)
Draxxie (15/18 hp)
Oduim (17/20 hp)
Crab 2 (5 dmg)
Estelle (-5/17 hp, unconscious and dying)
[/color]
Asami shrugs; one hand opens in an imitation of the crab's own claws, while the other lashes out for a hard punch.
Asami takes a stance mimicking the crab's clacking pincers, in hopes of boosting her defense against the crushing power it showed against Estelle, then swings once at the beast. Her blow connects, but it jukes at the last second and ruins the strike's trajectory, causing it to bounce harmlessly off its shell at the new angle.
The crab seems particularly upset at Asami's mimicry; perhaps it thinks she's mocking it. Regardless, it responds with supreme violence.
It snaps once at her with one pincer, which Asami dodges, but in a shockingly brilliant move (or, more likely instinctual) she finds herself ducking the blow -- right into the waiting pincer on the other side. It snaps down on her thigh and crushes with shocking agony.
Things are looking considerably more dicey now.
[color=green]ROUND 2
Characters in BOLD may act.
Asami (6/20 hp, 4 NL, grappled)
Crab 1 (0 dmg, grappled)
Draxxie (15/18 hp)
Oduim (17/20 hp)
Crab 2 (5 dmg)
Estelle (-5/17 hp, unconscious and dying)
[/color]