The gremlin easily hops over Laesah's attempt to trip them and begins to cackle, but stops as a flurry of blows connects with their face. Angrily, but off balance, they lash out.
And miss completely.
As for the fly, it is now seeping from a few holes and looks very unsteady. It's ready to drop with one more hit.
Barnabus continues to make the elves proud as his arrow sails wide of the fly.
The fly, looking desperate, lashes out at Haunt...
...Missing pathetically again. It must decide that perhaps this abusive gremlin isn't worth dying for, and fades back into the tunnels.
Laesah moves like liquid. The gremlin is fast, but she is a little quicker. One foot takes his legs out, knocking him down. Then crane strikes hammer him.
Much pulls herself woozily to her feet.
I am going to pound you into the ground!
She has lost too much blood for thoughtful quips.
Haunt steps over to flank the prone gremlin with Laesah, trying to recall what he knows about the weaknesses of this type of gremlin.
He scrapes an iron two-headed coin against his rapier (“Two heads means twice as much good luck!”) and strikes out at the fey creature using the flat of his blade to do nonlethal damage; he hopes that the students will be able to squeeze some information out of the gremlin about who ordered him to attack.
The gremlin screams out as he feels the effects of cold iron. Then he stands up with a crazed look in his eye. Or tries to... The action triggers an attack from Much.
Following Haunt's lead, Much tries a nonlethal attack...
...But the gremlin bats the stone rope away and, knowing it's outnumbered, tries to put Laesah down before she can assault him again.
The gremlin scores a viscous hit, but Haunt channels some of the pain into his amulet.
The fly has taken off down a corridor to the west, and from that direction you hear a scream, loud enough to be heard over the constant droning.
Much's ear shoot up at the sound of the scream and she looks to the group.
"I'm the slowest, I'll stay here. Someone stop that fly!" Much exclaims before turning to face the gremlin again.
I need to hit him...hard.
◆Stride
◆Trip
◆Strike
Haunt watches the severely injured fly zoom out of the cavern and shakes his head. “I don’t think any of us are fast enough to catch it. Besides, it’s not like it can tell anyone what happened to it. This little guy, however…”
Turning back to the gremlin, Haunt keeps trying to knock it out.
Laesah speeds out of the room after the fly. As she moves into the next chamber, the noise from the buzzing gets even louder. The reason is instantly apparent, as she nearly crashes into a giant mining bee. Laesah pivots and is moving on before the bee can react.
The chamber itself has strangely sticky, sap covered walls and a scent of flowers. Laesah manages to gracefully dodge getting hung up in the sap and moves towards a hazy glowing light in the northwest - the source of the scream.
When she gets there, she sees the fly is dead on the ground, smoldering. Tzeniwe, Okoro, and Ignaci are huddled together. Ignaci looks terrible. He's swollen and his eyes are bulging. Tzeniwe, the source of the scream, looks panicked, her hand still burning from the spell that dispatched the fly. Okoro is lightly wounded and in a daze, clutching a smokestick that is close to burned out.
Tzeniwe looks to you and screams again. "Laesah, thank Grandmother you are here. He's dying! What do we do?"
The bees, for their part, buzz angrily, but don't advance.
For the rest of you, the gremlin is wobbly. He spits out a tooth and wheels on Haunt. "Stop smacking me, ya git! Have the respect to use the pointy parts!" He raises his pick above his head, then his eyes flutter and he topples backward, unconscious. The fight is over.
With the combat over, you look around the room and see that the meat hanging on the hooks is pretty fresh. You see goats, a capybara, an ibex, and - on the furthest side - a human.
Much moves to immediately disarm, search, and bind the gremlin.
As she works she looks to Haunt,
"We need to get ourselves, and whoever else is back there, out of here as soon as possible. I can't handle another fight like that."
As Much takes a quick look around, it's clear the fly was feeding on the meat hanging from the hooks. One of those slabs of meat is familiar. Through the blood you recognize Hasti, dead, hanging from a hook.
Haunt stares at their classmate’s hanging corpse. He’s barely able to keep down his breakfast. “Oh, no, that’s…”
You all hear Laesah's typically-placid voice from the other room.
“What now?” Without waiting for an answer, he runs into the next tunnel and follows Laesah’s shout into the room to stand near her, rapier and amulet at the ready.
“What happened? What’s wrong with Ignaci?”
Much ignores the teeth and sprints after Haunt.
The rest of the party enters a natural chamber filled with sticky, sap covered walls and angry bees. The bees are a little slow to react, and everyone miraculously avoids getting caught up in the sap and is able to make it to Laesah, found behind a hazy bank of smoke.
The fly is dead on the ground, smoldering. Tzeniwe, Okoro, and Ignaci are huddled together. Ignaci looks terrible. He's swollen and his eyes are bulging. Tzeniwe, the source of the scream, looks panicked, her hand still burning from the spell that dispatched the fly. Okoro is lightly wounded and in a daze, clutching a smokestick that is close to burned out.
The bees can't quite get on any of you, though it's clear that they want to. Laesah and Barnabas know that the smoke is likely keeping the bees at bay, but once that dissipates, all hell will probably break loose.
Tzeniwe screams again, this time in answer to Haunt, "He's DYING! Can't you see that?" She bursts into tears. Okoro is still muttering to himself, clutching the smokestick.
Much does her best to keep the others' panic from overwhelming her, but between the circling insects and horror of Hasti's death, her frustration boils over.
The puckered scars across her forearms darken into the face of a snarling hyena.
"Calm yourselves. she hisses.
Pick still in hand, she plants herself between the nearest bee and the panicked students.
Okoro and Tzeniwe look up at Much. At first their panic seems to amplify, but it very quickly subsides.
Tzeniwe tries to explain. "Ignaci got stung, he kept saying he needed to find Hatsi and wouldn't wait for us to keep up. Okoro got stung trying to drag him back, but hasn't had nearly as bad a reaction. He was smart enough to grab a smokestick from Ignaci's pack and use it to keep the bees back, or we'd all be dead. It was quick thinking."
Okoro gives a tight grin. "Just following proper strategy... But what about Ignaci? I'm no medic, and even I can tell he won't last much longer. We need to get him out of here, now, but the two of us can't move him AND cover our retreat. Unless one of you can help him? I have enough smokesticks to keep the bees back for a little while."
|
Laesah calms down once her colleagues arrive and Much reminds her of her own composure.
"I'm sorry, everyone," she explains more to her colleagues than to the other students. Turning to Ignaci, she approaches her swollen fellow student. "This shouldn't hurt; I'm just looking," she says in a soothing voice.
Laesah knows a thing of two about allergies and how people react to them, and she knows that Ignaci has a bad allergy to these bees. Fortunately, she also knows how to manage them, and makes a hasty poultice for the wound.
Within a couple moments his breathing begins to calm, and his eyes start to gain some focus. He's still in rough shape, but he no longer looks like he's on death's door.
Okoro hands her the smokestick, letting his hand linger on hers, and says, "Take this - it should buy you some a little time while we get him out of here." He smiles, looks her in the eyes, and says with sincerity, "You really never cease to amaze."
Tzeniwe breathes a sigh of relief as Ignaci starts to stir a little. "I think we can get him out now that he's not dead weight. Is there a safe way to the surface? We got pretty turned around after a small cave in." Tzeniwe asks.
Much looks down at the pick in her hand. Her and Laesah's blood has grown sticky over its tip. She slumps, inwardly cringing at the outburst she directed at her fellow students.
"The bees are dangerous, but they aren't evil. If we can leave safely without more bloodshed, I say we do."
Haunt looks back the way they came, thinking about their classmate's corpse, which they left hanging from the meat hook in the next cavern. "We should be able to guide you out along the path we took to get here, but... there's something... something we need to do before we bring you through. Right, Much? Barnabas?"
There's something... something we need to do before we bring you through. Right, Much? Barnabas?"
Much looks away, then down at the pick again, and nods silently.
"What do we need to do, Haunt"
"We have a prisoner we need to bring. As much as it pains me, I won't leave a bound enemy to die. There's more, but we can bring you up to speed once we're at the surface."
Half truth complete, Much is able to look back up at his companions."Laesah, if you can get the group to the surface through this tunnel to the north, I can double back with someone else and get the prisoner."
“Hang on a sec.” Haunt jogs a few steps up the tunnel to the north and returns. “Let’s all just take you guys back to the cave entrance - it’s just a little ways this way, through an area we’ve already cleared - and then the four of us can go back and deal with the prisoner and … other stuff. We’ll come back as soon as we can - will you please let Teachers Ot and Ulawa know that they should meet us at the entrance? Only them, though.”
Okoro and Tzeniwe lead Ignaci out, and your group is able to go leave the bees alone and take the long way around to Hatsi's body and the bound gremlin without incident.
Much approaches Hasti's body on the wall.
"I don't know his customs, hopefully mine will be enough until we can get him back to his family."
She clears the floor around him before lifting his drained body off the hook and laying him on the ground.
Kneeling beside his body, Much composes Hasti, moving his clothing to cover his wound as best she can.
Complete, she moves to squat below his feet. With both fists pressed to the ground and her head bowed, she offers a silent prayer.
Moving to squat above his head next, Much takes Hasti's head in her hands and presses her forehead to his.
"Stay strong, brother, you will see your family soon."
Much stands slowly and looks toward the group.
"Now we deal with him." Much says with a gesture to the fallen gremlin.
As Much composes Haunt, she is somewhat surprised to see that the fatal wound on Hatsi's body doesn't look like it's from a pick - it looks more like a morningstar.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
The tears stream soundlessly from Laesah's eyes when she sees Hatsi's body. Her mind goes back to her first few hours on the Magaambya campus. She recalls the warm brown eyes of the older Zenj student, his confident affability, his cheeky charm...
"...you’ll be seeing a lot of me around these grounds..."
...now all gone, all tainted.
"What happened to him?" Laesah asks no one, her voice lower than ever before, her eyes directed at nothing but Hatsi's face. "......why?"
It's hard to say why he was killed, but Laesah's examination shows what Much noticed - Most of the blows came from a morningstar, not a pick. You also notice soil and bits of rock covering him all his clothes. It's more than a dusting, there's debris under his nails, in his ears, and through his hair.
Outside of the wounds from the weapons and the puncture wounds from the fly, there are signs of light battery and a heart crudely scratched into his forearm, with the letters "AA."
Cause of death seems to be exsanguination.
Haunt has seen plenty of people suffer nasty injuries, occasionally fatal ones, as part of the minor monster hunting he participated in during his journey from Murraseth. Nevertheless, Hatsi's brutalized corpse leaves him uncharacteristically speechless for a minute.
When he recovers a bit, he says, "This is awful. I mean, of course it is, our classmate is dead. But whatever did this to him, those injuries, they didn't kill him quickly. Maybe that dirt under his nails is from trying to dig his way out of something like you say, Barnabas, but that heart - those are Amino's initials, right? So he did that himself, while he was ... what? Stuck someplace, waiting to die alone?"
|
|
Laesah considers things.
"A'mino couldn't find him for the longest time....she was pretty upset about it when we found her. He probably did this as a kind of gruesome honorific..."
Laesah scrutinises the dirt under the fingernails, trying to figure out something that might help decipher Hatsi's demise.
You don't know exactly how long Hatsi was gone, but you are guessing it was a little over a week.
Much leans down over the Gremlin and smacks him awake.
"We have questions. Tell us anything you think we'll sway us from taking you to be executed right now."
The gremlin's eyes flutter open, and his head lolls back and forth. He mutters, barely audible, still not awake. "Ah, bugger off, I was just getting to my favorite part of that dream!" Then his eyes focus on you and the situation sinks back in. He struggles against his bonds to no avail. His shoulders shrink and he looks up at Much.
"What do I know, I'm just the muscle, right? Boss told me to go kill ya, and I was getting to it, promise, but that stupid fly don't listen." He spits, another tooth coming out with a glob of blood, and mutters angrily. "Oh, you buggers are gonna pay when I get out, or when the boss finds ya. Pay like that one." He jerks his head in Hatsi's direction. "Always in the tunnels, that one. Even I know 'im. Lil lover boy, going this way and that. Boss got tired of having to go around 'im, so he's done, just like that. Just like you, when it's your turn."
He stops talking and broods, trying to give you his best glare.
Haunt’s fur puffs out. He leans into the gremlin’s battered face and bares his teeth.
The amurrun practically hisses his questions. “Who’s your boss? Where do we find him? I hate having to wait my turn.”
The glare melts, and the gremlin winces away from Haunt. They try to keep composed, but they break down and start screaming. "He's the Stone Ghost, and he's a f*&&ing nightmare, he is! But I don't know where he is, sometimes he's down here, sometimes he's somewhere else. The Ghost is wherever he wants to be. All I know is he hates this place even more than we do, and Kurshkin followed him, for all the good that did 'em."
Much leans in and tries to ride Haunt's scary vibe.
"What ancestry is the stone ghost? Is he a magic user? Why do you work for him? Whom did you kill??"
"Ancestry? How should I know? He looks like a badly done statue walking about. Is that an ancestry? And yeah, he's got magic, but so what? Everything's got magic around here?" He cringes a little at your other questions. "Kurshkin said he'd be a good boss. Hates the hell outta this place, and the lot o' you. That's a pretty good start for me an' mine. Getting to mess with the Magaambya would make you a legend."
He spits on the ground at the talk of killing. "I didn't kill nobody around these parts. Was working up to the job, but never got around to it."