The Hungry Sky, Chapter Three

In Which

The Guard is Called ⁂ Dead Bodies are not Thrown out the Window ⁂ Statues are Examined and Remembered ⁂ “I identify as a zombie" ⁂ The Party Acquires Traveling Companions

Back in the Exarch's Arms, the party is continuing to offer their assistance to Threefingers, who eventually concedes that it would be convenient to have competent people travelling with her, so that she doesn't have to wait for a caravan. First, however, she wants to stick around for a few days and see if anything else unusual comes up. It also comes up that her actual name is Fritha Doonasdochtir -- “Threefingers" being, of course, a nickname. 

The conversation then turns to the dead bodies that Fritha would prefer not to have cluttering up her room. She suggests that Bork help her heave them out the window; Bork seems to think it would be a better idea to throw them into the town's well. At this point, Bariarti intervenes to remind them that the town guard are coming, and they'll probably want the bodies. The toad-creature, still frightened of Bork, nonetheless finds the courage to voice a suggestion that they be respectfully burned on a pyre.

NPC Interlude: Ralph Rudhall

Constable Rudhall of the Stagnant Lake Town Guard was not a particularly formidable-looking individual. He was a heavy man with hair that was distinctly thinning on top, and a set of florid jowls. His face was constantly red and sweaty, as if he had just run a mile, even if he hadn't exerted himself at all. However, beneath the jowls and the layer of fat, Constable Rudhall had an impressive amount of muscle hidden. He could knock a man out with one punch, and he was known in town for his strategy of ending brawls by simply lifting each combatant in one hand and carrying them to the holding cells -- easier to do when the offenders were usually goblins, but still nothing to sneeze at. Behind his piggy little eyes, however, lurked an intelligence best described as “exactly what you'd expect"; Rudhall was just as slow, dull, and unimaginative as he looked. 

This here picture of Sgt. Fred Colon just appeared in this space all unaccountable-like.
(Character from Terry Pratchett -- art by Paul Kidby)

This last is why, when Kozzory came rushing down the road looking for a guard, he wasn't alone; Rudhall was rarely trusted to patrol on his own in case something unexpected came up. This evening, his partner on the otherwise-quiet streets was Constable Betty Cosyngton; Cosyngton may have been reckless, and with a certain vicious streak, but unlike Rudhall, her mind rose all the way to the lofty heights of “roughly average". From the confused explanation proffered by Kozzory, who was apparently not even a proper witness to events, Cosyngton and Rudhall were at least able to gather that whatever was going on would be a break from their normal routine of smacking sense into a handful of rowdy drunks. Besides, they liked Kozzory; she didn't cause trouble, and treated the guard with the respect Rudhall was certain they were due.

Ten minutes later, Rudhall cheerfully kicked open the (unlocked) door on the second floor of the Exarch's Arms, taking a second to note the carefully-painted amphisbaena¹ below a number “2", indicating he had the right room. “What's going on here, eh?" He bellowed, to the apparent lack-of-fright of the motley collection of creatures in the room. The gnoll just calmly asks him to dispose of the dead bodies, and whether he can arrange a new room for the human. This is... not within his prior experience as an officer of the law.

As Rudhall tries to sort out what exactly he is supposed to do with all this, the gnoll speaks again, asking if she can go back to bed. Happy to get her out of here, Rudhall encourages this -- though the gnoll then does not actually leave -- and turns to the smallest person in the room to ask what had happened. The account he gets from Aster is pretty confused, but he gathers that the human -- “Fritha" -- is the victim, and that she was attacked by “frog people". There do seem to be frog people present, one of which is still alive, so he's willing to take that as truth for now. 

Rudhall: Right. What's with the snail?
Aster: What, Bariarti?
Rudhall: Yeah. Is he with the frogs? I mean, that kind of makes a certain sense.
Bork: That's racist.
Aster: No, he and Bork and I are all travelling together.
Rudhall: Some sort of circus?

At this point, the halfling (gnome?) and the gnoll start telling some complicated story about presumptuous priests bringing them back from the dead. Rudhall opts not to pay attention to any of that, and distractedly watches Cosyngton “examine the room". At this point, she seems to be focused on repeatedly poking the dead frog-person with her (sheathed) sword, with a moderately inappropriate grin on her face. The gnoll continues to be unpleasant.

Bork: Can you let the priests know we have a tab open at the bar?
Rudhall: Really not my job.
Bork: Well, if you're going to talk to them anyway --
Rudhall: I'm not.
Bork: They don't like talking to me.
Rudhall: Can't imagine why.

Rudhall decides that he's done with these people -- what did they say they were doing here? He remembered something about a circus? He rolls it around in his brain and can't think of anything else, so he opts to chase the circus out of the room. Politely, though, since they're large and armed.

Rudhall: Why don't the three of you go back to whatever you were doing, and I'll speak to Fritha and the frog and see if we can piece things together?
Bork: Why should we trust you?
Rudhall: I have a badge.
Bork:That is so idiotic that I do actually trust you. I'm going to bed.

The circus leaves, and a quick conversation with Fritha confirms the story that the little gnome gave him. This is Fritha's room, and she was attacked in her sleep. She insists she knows nothing else, and really just wants to go back to bed. After some time conversing, Rudhall lets her go hunt down Kozzory to ask about a less-bloodsoaked room. He's not at home with complicated issues; his bosses point him in the direction of the criminal element, and he beats on them until he can drag them back to the dungeons. Witnesses say the frog-man and the hairy guy are the criminals, so they go to the dungeon. No problem. He sends Fritha off to do whatever she's going to do, and turns to the task of properly arresting the offenders.

Cosyngton has the two criminals restrained, but once it's just the two guards and the two... whatevers, there is a long moment of tension wherein the hairy one bares its teeth and flexes its claws. Rudhall is abruptly aware that the ropes are really not holding it still very well, and that it could probably take him and Cosyngton apart in a handful of heartbeats -- a phrase which might not stay as figurative as he'd like. Just as he becomes certain that all Abyss is about to break loose, and that maybe sending all of the armed civilians away might have been a tremendously bad idea, the frog-thing gives the hairy one a look and speaks. “Good sir," it says, “I would like to make a suggestion. If you were to ensure that the bodies of my comrades were respectfully disposed of, Ur-Nungal here and I would be willing to ‘go quietly,' as you say."

“Sounds complicated," Cosyngton interjected. Rudhall could see the light in her eyes as she anticipated violence -- he could also see that violence would not go well for them no matter what Cosyngton thought.

“There happens to be, according to our intelligence, a priest staying in this inn who holds no allegiance to any particular god," said the frog. “I would consider the matter settled if you simply hand custody of the bodies over to him -- as a theologically neutral party, he can probably be trusted to do the right thing."

Twenty minutes later, Rudhall and Cosyngton were leading the two restrained criminals to the cells in Count Malacaster's dungeons.

An hour later, on a borrowed boat, Brother Saros said a quick prayer and tipped two weighted corpses into the lake, where the Eternal Cycle would ensure that the substance of their bodies went to feed the fish that they had -- presumably -- fed upon in turn when they were living.

⁂

Oculi 12th, 211 Ravensblood

In the morning, the party tries to decide what their next step should be. Aster does some asking around about the town of Verunn, which is Threefingers' destination. It seems that she's going up there to look into a ring of slavers who have been augmenting their inventory by grabbing the less-fortunate off the streets and docks; unusually, the highly-competent local authorities have been able to do nothing to stop them. Aster -- hamstrung by the fact that few people in the general vicinity have been to Verunn anyway -- gathers, essentially, the information in the setting document, which is as follows.

First, she is reminded that Verunn is one of the three towns that constitute the political entity known as the Iron Law, which is centered in the far northwest. The description of the Iron Law from the setting document was reproduced in a footnote in a previous entry, but here it is again, in case you skipped or don't remember it.

A figure known as the Iron Magos dwells in a tower by the coast, in the town of Aglaitiraup. He/she/it/they have no public life, interact with nobody, and in general live like a recluse. What is known, however, is that the Iron Magos offers protection to any tribe that performs a certain rite of allegiance and whose leader signs their name, in blood, on the surface of a great iron monolith that stands outside the Magos’s tower, and on which is engraved the legal code of the land. Those tribes and towns who have sworn themselves to the Iron Law find themselves defended from outside attack by arcane intervention, generally presumed to be the magic of the Iron Magos. The price, of course, is that the same power is turned against any who violate the law within those tribes. Within the Iron Law, the penalty for any crime is immediate capital punishment, and it is whispered that the Magos uses the life force of these criminals to power the magic of the land.

Verunn itself is originally an ogre town, and ogres still maintain a plurality there, with humans as a close second. It is mostly known for a strict town guard² and humorless citizenry, but it is also home to the Mantle of God, the largest temple to Grandfather Kraken on the western coast. It's actually fairly unusual to have a significant town guard within the Iron Law, since most law enforcement is carried out by the Iron Magos -- one of the other towns in the Iron Law doesn't have one at all. In Verunn, the official explanation is that the town guard enforces the local regulations that the Magos doesn't bother with.

Having gathered this information, Aster goes to take a look at the magic items Bork got Fluryka to show her last night, with the intent of casting identify. She finds the ambassador, and asks to see them in a friendly, nonthreatening sort of way [Diplomacy: 15].

Aster: So, I'm -- I've been travelling -- I'm with Bork.
Fluryka: Ah, yes, the hyena with the free beer.
Aster: The gnoll, yes.
Fluryka: Right. So hard to keep up with the politically-correct terms these days.³
Aster: Anyway, I hope it's not too indiscreet, but she did mention that you had some objects you might want identified, and I might be able to help you with that.

Fluryka turns out to have the cyclops statues on her person, as she's not comfortable leaving them lying around in her room. Aster convinces her to step into a private corner of the inn so that they don't air her business for everyone to see.

Bork OOC: Are you trying to lure her into an alley and murder her?

The cyclopes are produced, and Aster leans in to look at them. As a bard, her magic works in a somewhat undignified fashion -- she quietly sings to the statues as Fluryka holds them.

Aster OOC: ♫Who do you think you are♫ / ♫Runnin' 'round leaving scars♫

The ambassador looks slightly baffled. Aster's visual examination confirms the lack of a shadow, and something else. As she looks at the statues, she notes certain scuffs and spots that tug at her memory; she suddenly realizes that she's seen them before. She'd forgotten all about it, but when she was a child, her mother had these exact statues in her laboratory, doing duty as bookends. Not just statues like them, but these specific items: she recognizes a scratch on one's head, and a slight discoloration on the other's side that she knows for a fact was the result of an errant arcane experiment. How, she thought, did her mother's bookends end up buried outside of a goblin town, only to be coincidentally dug up by archaeologists a few years later?

As she thinks, she continues singing, and a soft glow appears deep within the statues -- at least, to Aster's sight, augmented by the spell. She stares at the light and tries to analyze it [Spellcraft: 22 (after the +10 bonus from identify)]. Watching the patterns in the statues' inner light, she sees that they are not only so much more complex than she was expecting, but that the patterns themselves are completely unfamiliar to her. These are items of significant power, the function of which is beyond her; all she can say is that the arcane techniques that power them are apparently unlike any practiced today.

Aster asks Fluryka where her village is, thinking that maybe it's near her mother's home. Apparently she's from Norfrici, which is technically closer to the gnomish settlements than Stagnant Lake is, but not significantly so.

This is from a map of the Waste Lands I included in the setting document. I forgot to include a scale, but suffice to say that it's several hundred miles from Norfrici to the gnomish settlements on the southern shore of Brightmoor Lake -- which is slightly off the bottom of the map there. (The dotted lines are rough approximations of common overland trade routes.)

Fluryka takes this opportunity to ask about some gossip she's heard -- that the party and Fritha are travelling up the coast in the near future. She's interested in going with them, as they're going more or less directly where she needs to go; not only is Verunn in the right direction, but travel from there to Fluryka's destination in Aglaitiraup is trivial to arrange. First, though, she confirms that the party is at least moderately skilled at self-defense; the reason most people wait for a caravan is for the protection of the guards, so she wants to be sure that the party can provide a reasonable substitute for that protection if she travels with them. Aster assures her that they're “all right" at that, and that she'll check with her traveling companions to make sure there are no objections to Fluryka going with them.

Bork, who has wandered into the dining room for breakfast and has excellent hearing, comes over to suggest to Fluryka that maybe showing those things to everyone that asks isn't the best idea, security-wise. (Bork has decided against just stealing them by this point.) Aster, upon receiving little guidance from Fluryka as to what people do for fun around here, starts considering the option of livening the place up with her own bardic performances, which sparks the following conversation:

Aster: I think I ought to volunteer myself to perform.
Bork: Something about that sounds lewd.
Aster: I just dress up and put on a show for strangers, for money.
Fluryka: Do all your performances involve singing to rocks?
Aster: No, sometimes I sing to other things. Or people. I can also do a bit of tumbling, but it's not my specialty.
Fluryka: Tumbling? You... fall off of things?
Aster: No, no, no -- have you ever heard of a circus?
Fluryka: I think I heard one was in town, actually.
Aster: ... we should check that out.

This segues, somehow, into an argument over whether the monks who brought them back are assholes for doing so. The argument arrives here:

Bork: Well, maybe you should have preconceived notions.
Aster: My preconceived notions are that caravans should treat their donkeys well  --
Bork: Hey, maybe this “Beware the Turning Wheel" thing means we should avoid caravans.
Aster: I'm pretty sure it means we should avoid more people like Saros.

Aster decides to make a Bardic Knowledge roll to see what she knows about Brother Saros's religion, the Church of the Eternal Cycle [Knowledge: 19]. She knows the basics well enough, then -- it's a fairly recent (i.e., only a few decades old) religion that worships the abstract concept of cycles and renewal rather than an actual god. She also knows that it is centered in the nearby gnoll-majority town of Airuuur (Gnoll for “blood" -- since Gnoll is hard to pronounce without a lot of practice, people just call the town “Blood"). In Blood⁴, ever since a long and dramatic period of strife and feuding between religious factions, the Church of the Eternal Cycle has taken and held onto control; it more or less runs the town. Aster knows the basic details about the town as well, since the town of Blood and the Church of the Eternal Cycle are overlapping entities in many ways. There are no other significant centers of this religion, but proselytizing is a big part of their belief system, so wandering evangelists like Brother Saros are scattered all over the continent. Aster hasn't met them before, but that's not a huge surprise -- the Waste Lands are a big place, and the Church of the Eternal Cycle has a very small congregation.

Bork wants to go talk to the monks, and see if they know any more about the prophecy than they've been told. Aster is pretty sure that the monks are just going to tell them to “please, please, please, please go away," since the whole business makes them uncomfortable. Bork declares that if the monks are that uncomfortable around them, the party can “hold them hostage by our very presence". There follows some discussion about the proper term for the party's resurrected status:

Aster: ... but we're not undead.
Bork: I identify as a zombie.

They go to give Fritha a heads-up about Fluryka wanting to travel with them -- or, as Bork says, “the ambassador from I-forget-where is going to I-forget-where, and she wants to come with us." Fritha is perfectly fine with this, on the grounds that if something attacks that they can't defend against, maybe it will eat the ambassador instead of Fritha.

Fritha, in turn, gives them a similar heads-up: Brother Saros wants to join them, on the grounds that he needs to move on to proselytize in other places. This is, Fritha makes clear, something of a mixed blessing: an extra cleric around means more healing available if they need it, but it also means that they have to put up with Saros's irritating personality. Aster and Bork decide to consider the matter -- Bariarti registers no opinion one way or the other.

Bork then declares, to Fritha's confusion, that they're off to visit the “zombie monks". An incoherent multi-person explanation follows, in which the general concept that the party was brought back from the dead to save the world from “the Hungry Sky" can be extracted. Aster asks if Fritha has ever heard of the Hungry Sky; when Fritha says she does not, Aster immediately rolls Sense Motive. (The GM does not have any ranks in Bluff.) Unfortunately for the party, Fritha crits her Bluff check, and Aster is perfectly satisfied that their new companion is hiding nothing.

---

1. Kozzory is fascinated by human culture in general, and heraldry in particular -- which is why, upon taking over her family's inn, she added some additional decoration. In the dining area, there's a Ravensblood coat of arms and the arms of the chief of Tribe Scum-Stone (who holds a hereditary knighthood), in addition to the pre-existing Malacaster arms. She has also assigned each room in the inn a heraldic beast “theme", but thus far the budget hasn't let her get past painting the doors.

2. This is pretty standard for ogres, at least in my campaign world. You'll notice from their creature type that they're not big humanoids, but small giants; the way I've described the relationship in past setting documents is that if a true giant is like a wolf -- with all of the danger, beauty, and wildness that that implies -- then an ogre is like a bad-tempered Boston terrier. Ogres thus tend toward a certain petty evil and bloody-mindedness, and a love of pushing around smaller species. This makes them very bad law enforcement in terms of morality -- but very good law enforcement in terms of effectiveness. In a previous campaign, a cop bar in an ogre-majority town was called B'zintwarri -- a Giantish term that roughly translates to “Suicide By Cop". It says something about a culture that has a single word for that.
3. She's not a very good ambassador.
4. From the setting document: “The ruins of some forgotten city surround this town, and there is consistently some form of archaeological research going on here. However, other than that, it’s a deeply unpleasant place to live. The founding tribe is xenophobic in the extreme, and there’s just something… wrong with the area. Until a few years ago, there was also constant infighting over religious differences, but such things were put to an end when the Church of the Eternal Cycle gained the upper hand and took complete control of the town."