Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Jan 6, 2014 19:36:27 GMT -8
Hopefully I'll remember to actually continue these. If not, at least this one was fun.
Dumali Rastel Hello! Oh, I suppose I shouldn’t write in this as if I were talking to a real person, but I guess that’s just the way I’ve always written, since it’s my main method of communication. I suppose I should talk about myself, so that if people read this, they don’t get confused when I refer to things. I’m Dumali, but that’s sort of hard to tell people, because I can’t talk. I can read and write, though, which is good. I’m a human, and I have light brown hair. I like wearing dresses when I’m not wearing armor, and sometimes dress armor if I can find it and afford it and it’s not useless in combat. I mentioned before that I can’t speak. I’ve always been mute, but I’ve also been pretty good at picking up other languages. I know pretty much all the common languages, and I can learn new languages pretty fast! I’m part of this new adventuring party. We’re in Axiems, in Svodlun, just south of the Wood Elven Protectorate. It’s really cold – not what I’m used to at all. The first mission we did was helping to mop up some troops from Dagdeoth that had attacked Svodlun and needed to go home but were going in the wrong direction. We didn’t fight very much – I got the feeling that we were supposed to be killing them, because they were the enemy, but pointing them in the other direction also worked, and also may have made us some allies, hopefully. The main reason we weren’t fighting them was this human woman named Talia who’s a part of the adventuring party. Aside from not wanting to kill the Dagdeoth troops, she also was giving lectures on magic and elder sorcery in between battles. I thought it was really interesting, especially the magic one – I’m not going to be a mage, probably, but it was still really interesting to learn about it. Our second mission was to help the leader of Axiems, who is Lady Sentris, save her caribou, because apparently they were getting stolen. Fortunately, we were able to find them and the giants who were stealing them. Unfortunately, everything sort of went downhill from there. There was someone who was saying he was a Baron from Blackspire, and he tried to befriend the giants, to make them stop eating the caribou, I think, but he wasn’t really able to reason with them and eventually just started feeding a few of the caribou to him. I’m not entirely sure, I stayed in the back along with Fennec, who was this girl I met who is a little scary but also nice. She has a morganti scar on her face, and she says she’s never seen morganti but I’ve seen her see it and she gets all weird. Lady Sentris is the one who has morganti. I think that Fennec’s pretty unhappy with that, when she can remember it, and also maybe when she can’t remember it. Anyways, I hung out with Fennec and a few other people and didn’t really get to do much fighting. I’m sort of glad I didn’t have to kill anyone, but I’m also a little upset because I want to improve my fighting skills. After we got back from that mission, Lady Sentris was really unhappy with the party. She seemed less unhappy with Fennec, because she had managed to save one or two of the caribou, but she seemed really upset with the Blackspire Baron. She said that she wanted to have a ‘talk’ with him, which sounds rather worrying. After that, I started learning how to decode ancient ciphers! There was an elf named Isanna and a guy named Stariln and some other people, but I forget their names. There was a code that looked like Elven and a code that looked like Dwarvish. The Dwarvish one was easier because the letters were all different and I already knew some of the runes. The elven one was hard because the letters all looked the same and some of the symbols were placed oddly. Also, Isanna and someone else were already working on that one and I didn’t really want to get in their way. After that, I had lunch with Fennec. When we finished, we stayed at the inn talking (well, I was writing) while the party did more things, because both of us were pretty tired. I hope I have more energy next time. I also hope that I get to do more fighting – not because I want to hurt things, but because I want to be able to defend myself. I don’t want to be useless in a fight, because there are going to be some of those that we can’t talk our way out of eventually.
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Post by gamemasterchris on Jan 31, 2014 0:47:14 GMT -8
Great post Miranda- It really helps to get the flavor and the role play going when you lost such great chronicles. There are in game benefits to chronicles also. Beyond the benefit to all of us who read it you also can get one of the following: (1) 1 equipment set of your choice (2) +1 lvl in Reading and Writing or Historian. (Max +1 per month) (3) 1 "hour" of game play credit. Three hours equals one session or about 1 lvl.
Enjoy!
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Feb 5, 2014 20:26:03 GMT -8
Dumali Hello, again! This past month has been very fun. I’ve been wandering around Axiems and making friends with the other adventurers. Isanna, who I think I mentioned before, is very nice. She made me a spectacularly warm winter cloak. I think we’re friends now. I’m glad she’s my friend. Today was rather interesting, though the weather wasn’t very good. It was colder than normal, and very snowy. Despite that, a group of us went to go watch an Elven ritual. It was quite an experience. As we were on our way, we kept getting lost, since we only had one tracker. We weren’t very lost, but then we ran into some tree ogres! Thankfully, nobody died, but it was pretty close. They could hide very well, and kept moving around where we couldn’t see them. Once we finally were able to deal with them, we found the Dwarven outpost in the protectorate. The people there were very nice, though I forget their names. They led us deeper into the forest, which was beautiful. There was a valley in the middle, one that I had no idea about! The canopy of the trees were all the same height, so you wouldn’t have been able to tell looking down from above, but it was still there. There was this one tree stump that must have been the size of a house. Apparently, it used to be a mana well, until it was cut down. There were lots of little stones with carvings on them. We were told that these were wishes that people literally carved into rock over the course of years and put them here with the hope of them being granted. It was amazing. Oh, dear, did I already say that? Oh well. We reached the Elven city soon after that. It was really small, for a city, but since there are so few wood elves I guess it must feel huge to them. The ritual was going to take place at sunset. It’s called the “Twilight Song” in Elvish, and it only takes place this moon on certain years. All the elves who took part were going to sing a song, so that they could “honor that inside them which yearned to be released.” This ritual is apparently all about the in-between, and what brings us from the past into the future. It sounds fascinating, and it was when it happened. All the songs were gorgeous. Isanna sang a very pretty one. It was interesting that it wasn’t all elves, though. There were a few – not many, but a few – people from different races. Hobbits and centaurs, I think – I didn’t see any dwarves or humans, but I may have not been looking in the right places. There were some very odd things that happened, though. There was a surprising amount of light, even after the sun went down, and for a moment after the ritual ended it looked like the leaves changed color and became all silver and gold! I would have thought that it was a trick of the light or something, but Isanna said that they really did change. The last song was also very interesting. It was sung by this extremely old elf who looked like a nature mage or something. The elf in charge (whose name I forget – I should really start remembering all their names) called him “Lagin” or something like that. I think it’s a name, but it could also be some sort of extremely old word. The best that Talia could come up with when she looked for a meaning was something like “not before him.” I wonder what that means, if it’s right? In the time between when we got to the elven city and the ritual, we fought a few monsters. Some of them were undead, even! I wasn’t very useful, I’m afraid, but I did help a bit. I did get an amazing spider silk dress out of it, though! It was exciting, but also scary. I see why not many people become adventurers. I’m almost fluent in reading and writing Dwarvish now. I was going to learn Elvish next, but I talked with Talia and she wanted to know why I was going to learn the language of our allies rather than the ones of our enemies, so that I could better negotiate with them. It’s a very good point. I need to make a decision soon, though. I wonder what they speak in Dagdeoth?
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Mar 3, 2014 15:07:33 GMT -8
Hello. Quite a bit has happened since I last wrote here, though not a ton. I’ve decided that I am going to be a thief at the protectorate. I’d like to have city connections, but I don’t think I’d like to be beholden to the people in the city. It’s just asking for trouble, with Dagdeoth right next door. We had a very exciting day today, though ‘exciting’ probably isn’t the right word. I slept in in the morning, and then hung out with some other friends, before going adventuring with the rest of the party in the afternoon. The first mission we went on was going to fight some ogres that were killing people. It didn’t go very well – all but seven or eight people died. I was one of the people who lived, but that was more due to luck and cowardice than any skill. Isanna did die, and she’s one of the most competent people I know, even if she doesn’t like fighting. During that battle, I heard that some people were helping Abel enchant some items. These items had to have killed ten enemies of the same species, and they were killing the ogres. This seemed a little wrong to me. I get that ogres are evil, and will kill and eat people, but the only reason the weapons were killing ogres was because the people wielding them had chosen ogres. They could have just as easily killed ten dwarves, or humans, or hobbits. It’s just a little worrying. After we got back, we decided to go explore in the protectorate while we waited for our friends to get resurrected. I’m not sure why we thought this was a good idea. We had our appropriate passes and everything, but we encountered some harpies, and somewhere in the mess a bunny got killed. Some say it was the harpies, and some say it was one of our party members. I didn’t see. Eryss might have – Isanna sent him with me so that she could find out what had happened later. But either way, a while later, some elves came and killed the whole party because the rabbit had been killed. I don’t really remember that – I was killed, too, and lost some of my memory, though not all of it. It does seem like overkill to me, though I get that it’s important that the forest be protected. After I was resurrected from that, Isanna had already gone out again, this time to explore the shrine to the dwarven gods. I stayed in the inn for a bit, and helped Fennek a bit with some decoding of an ancient piece of writing. After that, though, a small party went out to follow the group that had gone to the shrine, so I joined them. I gave Eryss back to Isanna then. It was actually partway through a battle with the rest of the ogres that we hadn’t managed to kill. Once we actually got to the shrine, there was a cave that we had to climb down into, using long ropes. On the inside of the cave were lots of kobolds. I understand that kobolds are basically on a level with orcs or goblins, but I’m just going to say that I don’t think that it was right to attack these ones. They kept shouting at us to leave, because the shrine was their home. They just wanted us to stop invading their home, and we just hurt them all and left them there. Deeper inside the shrine, there was a bit of trouble. Not of the violent kind, just that everyone kept talking over each other and there were a few different options to take and nobody could agree on what to do. Eventually, most of the party went off to fight more kobolds in the shrine to the Dwarven god of battle, while Isanna, Lenore, some others, and I solved a puzzle to get us into the shrine of the Dwarven creator god. Once we solved the puzzle, we called the rest of the party, and everyone went into the shrine. It was amazing. There were statues along the walls that were apparently haunts, and would fight you if you got too near to them. I heard that if you won, they gave you their weapons. That wasn’t the most interesting thing, though. The most interesting thing was that at the center of the room, there was a glowing hot circle of protection. It was so powerful that we couldn’t even see through it. Once Isanna hit it with someone’s mastercrafted hammer, the circle went down partway. Inside it was a forging area. With the forging area, some of the blacksmiths in the party somehow made Isanna’s mastercrafted sword into a magic sword. The circle went back up after that, and we couldn’t get it back down. That wasn’t all that happened today, though it was most of it. Talia gave some more of her talks, this time about deities and the creation of the world. She talked a lot about the Elder Goddess and the three Nomad Sisters. I really like the idea of one of the Sisters, who’s called Perspective. I should find out more about that. She also mentioned the Dagdemar again, and she said that the story was that he became a god by sacrificing his entire world. I’m very interested to hear her explain more about that religion, which she’s promised to do later. I also heard a few party members calling her ‘traitor,’ because she had been healing enemies. But I wouldn’t put much stock into that – she tried to calm an ogre down after healing it. Mostly, as far as I can tell, she just doesn’t like killing things.
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Apr 8, 2014 21:13:18 GMT -8
Hello. There was a very eventful day a few days ago. We started out fighting some Blue Mountain orcs, which went okay, though it definitely could have gone better. Due to our lack of total success, we encountered them at various times throughout the day as we were departing the city. These encounters were fairly standard, so I won’t bore anyone (even myself) with the details.
After we dealt with most of the orcs, the party split up. I’ll talk about the mission I went on first, since firstly I was there, and secondly the other mission was relevant later in the day, so I’ll talk about it then. I went to investigate some bodies that had been found in the snow, along with Alais and some others. Alais is a worshipper of the Goddess – she’s going to be helping Talia and I with our research. Any way, on our way to find the bodies, we encountered some dwarven hunters. In retrospect, we probably should have gotten worried when they said that others had gone to investigate the bodies, and hadn’t come back for hours. We really should have started to worry when, once we got to the bodies, there were no signs of these others. We only really started to worry when the bodies came to life, though. Well, not quite life. Undeath. Alais treeformed me, thankfully, but my memory gets a little blurry after that. I guess that they forcefully reverted me and killed me. I was resurrected back in town, without any of my gear. I think that means they ate me. The party later determined that the bodies being searched was their trigger for animation. We also found four scraps of paper, that eventually were translated into two passages. They talk about the frostbitten and Skyeyes et Necrenef. The others think that this means something about a carakwaith named Frost. I’m trying to find out more aobut that now. The other group went and investigated some tunnels. In those tunnels, they found a large number of orcs that weren’t speaking common, or any language they could understand. The reason I’m talking about this second is because another group went into the tunnels after them, and I was part of that group. I couldn’t understand their language, either, though I began picking up on some things. These orcs kept attacking us, and eventually we got to this gigantic cavern. It went more than a hundred feet up, probably a few hundred, and it went probably even further out across. It was like descending a mountain, walking into that cavern, with switchback trails leading down for maybe an hour. We eventually found some dwarves, too, fighting the orcs. They weren’t surface dwarves, though – they spoke the same language as the orcs, I think, and only knew a bit of dwarvish. We helped them fight the orcs, and helped them capture some. I thought it was weird at the time, but they said that they were doing it to ransom back their friends. I heard later, though, that they might have been slavers. That’s really not good.
Talia says that, since Amon Town will probably fall (and it will, since the party didn’t go help defend it like we should have), Axiems will be next. I hope I can survive, at least, by Dagdeoth’s rules, if they do take over. Or maybe a bargain can be reached. If they accept the offer of a potential alliance, we may be able to work something out. Or, who knows, maybe we’ll just all die. I haven’t chosen which class I’ll go into, though I’m completely able to, at this point. It’s just that all of the classes seem to have strings attached, even in the Protectorate. Maybe I’ll go Paladin. Túrastar says that you have to swear to a deity, but Talia says that I should also be able to swear to a concept. I like the idea of swearing to balance, or to seeing all sides of an issue, or something like that. Maybe I’ll go paladin, though I’ve never really been the warrior type. Like I said, who knows?
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on May 24, 2014 18:50:43 GMT -8
Well, that was an… eventful day. The morning wasn’t so eventful. I stayed in for a lot of it, but I heard some other people went back to the Dwarven Shrines. I don’t know how that went. We didn’t do much in the morning. Isanna wanted to go to the Protectorate, to talk with them about Frost. It was a delicate situation, so they didn’t want to take too many people, but on the other hand, it’s pretty dangerous, traveling to the Protectorate, so bigger groups are better. In the end, they decided to bring a large group, but only let a small subset talk to the elves. The big group ended up being (sort of) a good thing, because we ran into some troops from Dagdeoth. Practically the entire party got taken out – Isanna and a few others managed to escape, I think, but they were the only ones. We eventually were able to get back up by sneaking around and healing each other slowly, but it still didn’t turn out very well. I got killed. Thankfully, we had a few life mages in our party, so I was resurrected out there, instead of having to go back to town. Once I was resurrected, however, we found out that a group of orcs (or maybe ogres? It’s still a little fuzzy) had captured some of our friends to try and take their magic items. We eventually got them back, but it was a close thing. Talia kept trying to negotiate, which I thought was a good idea, because we were heavily outmatched. The rest of the party thought that it would be a good idea to try and fight them, though, so it was hard to negotiate with that going on. We did get them back, though, and from there we just returned to town, instead of trying to go deeper into the Protectorate. After that, we went to a ball! Well, sort of. We guarded a ball. From the outside. Only the nobles got to go in. It wasn’t very eventful, even though we thought it was going to be. When we first arrived, there was lots of security. We all got questioned by samurai with peacekeeper abilities. I had a little trouble, due to the whole not-talking thing, but (Clara) vouched for me, even though she didn’t know me very well! So I was able to go in. Once we were ‘in’ (as in as we could be, what with us only being able to stay on the outside), people kept worrying that something bad would happen. Something big. And… people said they found a vampire, but it was chased away. And something happened inside the ball that I’m not too clear on, but it didn’t seem disastrous or anything. Which was good, but unexpected – it left the party feeling on edge for a while. We did get paid, though – in solid silver equipment sets! So it was definitely worth it. Of course, one other thing happened, that I did. I’ve been putting off going into a class, because I haven’t really liked the way all the guilds make you swear to something. So I went to one of the only classes that doesn’t – Paladin. I’m a paladin now! A Paladin of the Universe, to be exact. It’s actually really exciting. Now, if I attack with my short sword, it’s a Holy attack! And silver on top of that, with the payment from the ball. The next group of undead won’t know what hit them!
I went on another adventure, this time with a smaller part of the party. I went with Turastar and Isanna and Lenore and some others to try and help clear out the Protectorate of Dagdeoth troops, because they were becoming a real problem. We did run into some trouble – we beat four groups pretty easily, but one group gave us some trouble. A few party members died and had to be resurrected – thankfully, we had a magic item that let everybody in the party cast Resurrection. I was able to help defeat the undead and heal everybody, with my new Paladin skills! Of course, I still need lots of practice, but still. I helped! A mysterious elf showed up to help us out with the last division. He could cast Death Ray through his staff, which was very helpful. He didn’t talk at all, but I couldn’t tell whether he couldn’t or just didn’t. Isanna and Stariln got his staff at the end – he was trying to tell them something, but I’m not sure they understood. I know that I didn’t really understand.
A few days after that, a different subset of the party went north. Turastar and Isanna and Lenore were there, but Talia also came along. The strange multicolored person that I met at the inn a few days ago came along, too – Talia thought he was insane, and wanted to get him checked out by the life mages’ guild. Turastar and Isanna made him take off his cloak, which was covering half his face. They eventually managed, but there was a bit of combat. I don’t know why it was such a big deal – after all, he’s not the only new party member keeping secrets. We met up with a few members of the Snowdrifts Guild – they were dwarves riding wolves, which was pretty cool. We did encounter some odd snow goblins, that could cast spells! The first group cast spells on us that made all our clothing invisible until they were defeated. It was quite embarrassing. The second group of them that we encountered had much more dangerous spells, though – I don’t quite remember how it happened, but somehow they killed me. Turastar got a new weapon – a bow, that was also a shield, that also had a blade. It’s a beautiful weapon, but it seems to me like it would be difficult to wield. He’ll figure it out, though. Part of the party is trying to figure out where the things that ghouls eat go. Last I heard, they’d figured out that it was some sort of displacement spell on their stomachs. I wonder where it leads? Ghouls have to be created somewhere, so it’s logical that the spell would lead to a specific place. Otherwise, you’d have randomly appearing bodies and magic items everywhere, and that’s not the case, so it must lead to somewhere.
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Jul 6, 2014 21:48:00 GMT -8
Today was… interesting. I’d missed the last few days of adventuring, so I took a while to catch up while the rest of the party went out to kill harpies. On the way to the harpies, they found Talia’s corpse, with paperwork saying that it had been a legal assassination. She was rebirthed already by the time I heard about it, but it was still a shock. Coupled with what I heard about happened while I was absent, it was… troubling. Just after that, though, we went out and investigated a mysterious storm that’s been coming out of the north into the protectorate. Lady Sentris thinks that it’s going to continue on towards Axiems, which could be a lot of trouble. Of course, I do have the excellent winter clothes Isanna’s made me. So I’m fine in the cold.
The storm was really weird. We faced some trolls on the way, which we dealt with rather rapidly – we had to make sure we faced them before we got into the storm, so our torches would still work. But we beat them quite easily, and then we got into the heart of the storm. This was the first time I’d used that throwing axe I’d gotten – and it turns out to be an excellent axe. Its magic was surprisingly useful – there were giant snow cat things that were extremely difficult to kill, so being able to just knock them back a few feet was invaluable. The snow gremlins were exceedingly annoying, though – one of them froze my heart, and I had to be rebirthed. Later on, they were delaying peoples’ minds – making them extremely stupid. It was a frustrating battle, made all the more frustrating when a haunt or wraith of some sort showed up. It was charming people all over the place – I was resistant, due to my paladin skills, but others weren’t. I was able to remove the charms on some of them, but others could avoid my skills, and remained charmed. That’s not to say that I didn’t get injured, though – the ice cat things bit and froze people, and I took damage quite a few times. A lot of those times, though, I was healed – mainly by Talia, actually, as we tended to be in the same area. She was flying, so she flew down, picked me up, flew back up, and healed me. We eventually dealt with it, but the entire party had the chance to either expend some energy or view a vision. I chose to see the vision. It started off as a man in a cloak walking over a frozen surface – hard to tell his species, either small human or dwarf or hobbit. There were dark things moving under the surface of the ice. He broke it, and the things rushed out and we felt something pass through us, somehow. After that, we saw ten huge storms. We focused in on one, in a forest. There were animals trying to run to safety. They all got to safety in their dens or burrows, and once the snow covered the dens, we got a sense that they were all safe. The storms were chasing someone else. That man we’d seen earlier. Lastly, we saw some… other party members called them Ice Titans. They were huge, and had icicles hanging off of them. They were all completely blind, though – their eyes were completely white all around. They were playing around with shapes, holding objects that shifted from cube to pyramid to sphere, and passing them to each other. And then the vision ended, and our eyes were turned to ice. We were able to heal them, but some people had had a similar experience before, and seen a different vision, and their eyes didn’t heal the second time. I think they got that dealt with eventually, but it’s a scary concept. I didn’t like being blind. People are saying that the storm is the same as the Ominous, which I still don’t know quite what it is but we encountered it in a different form later.
After we got back, I went along with some others on a mission for Abel. There were some giants who were acting peacefully, and he wanted a small party to go find out what was up with them. There were some goblins and kobolds on the way, which I was pretty useless for – I’m best with undead and people who can read. There were also some Grey Ogres, who were afraid of magic – it was a little amusing and a little sad. Imagine, being so unfamiliar with magic that you can’t help but fear it. The giants were just passing through, but they were scared of dwarves – they said that dwarves attacked them, and so they’d attack dwarves. We got the situation sorted out eventually, and sent them on their way with an escort to keep dwarves from attacking/getting attacked.
Lastly, we dealt with a stone tablet the party had found. They’d tried to solve it once before, but had messed up and run out of mana. They – being mainly Stariln and Alais – called it a Dimension Door, and had come up with solutions to those problems, though, so we actually solved it on our second try! I contributed two mana, as did most people, but I was also the one who definitively figured out that one section was actually a compass! At the end of the ritual, we were displaced, into somewhere weird. There was grey mist everywhere, and things that were sort of like haunts wandering around. All the haunts were different – there were some snow gremlins, a mage and his student (who kept switching roles with each other), some crafter dwarves who looked like they were from Axiems, this ridiculously attractive person who managed to charm (not the spell) Isanna until Talia knocked her out and dragged her away, even some party members… it was ridiculous. We had no clue what was going on. We stayed far away from the ‘haunts’ – everyone was smart enough to do their best to avoid interacting with them. Some people did get affected by them – they lost their best skills, or got turned into boxes, or just smiled and waved and politely tried to back away. Eventually, something wearing a black shround appeared. All the other ‘haunts’ looked towards it, and it asked us questions. It asked, “Who are you?” And we gave a variety of discordant replies. It asked, “Who are you?” again, and then “What am I.” Talia stepped forward, and said, “I am Talia, and you are the Ominous.” And then it all dissolved and we were back in Axiems.
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Aug 27, 2014 20:32:32 GMT -8
Well, we’ve had a busy few days!
The party decided to go experiment with the stone tablet again, this time changing up the coordinates. There was only one small problem – the stones of the tablet had been disordered, and nobody remembered how exactly they’d been set up, so we had to figure it all out from scratch.
That took a while, to say the least. Eventually, Stariln, Alais, and the others set it up correctly. We only lost one of the smaller round stones that sat on top of the tablet during the ritual. This time, instead of doing star-seven, we went to hammer-seven. We ended up somewhere we think was the Polar North – it was twilight out when we first arrived, or something like it. There was a cliff in the distance one direction and some sort of warmer stone area in the other direction. We went towards the cliff first. On the way, we encountered some undead. We managed to kill them all, but they had a weird light flickering between them – it looked like it might have been storm magic. In conjunction with the undead, that could mean only one thing. What we found at the bottom of the cliff was also pretty revealing. After another encounter with more undead, we found bodies at the bottom, all wearing identifying cloaks. Some of the cloaks had the insignia of an eye with a teardrop under it. Isanna called them “Mourners.” The other cloaks were white, with a purple lotus insignia – Dagdeoth. We also saw some Dagdeoth ships patrolling out in the sea beyond the cliff. We made a few jokes about “at least having an out if there’s no other way we can get back” (by surrendering ourselves to Dagdeoth and hoping Talia could talk us out of it) or wishing that we’d brought the Jester along so we could get rid of him for good (he’d been trying to get into the tablet room, but Talia, Isanna, and Túrastar all agreed that he shouldn’t be allowed in). We decided to ascend the cliff and explore towards the hotter spot some had noticed earlier. On the way, though, we were attacked by another group of undead that seemed to also be fighting a group of frost trolls, turning that fight into a three-way battle that the frost trolls won. A few of us were left out on the battlefield, including myself and Talia. They searched me and noticed that my axe was magic – it was the one I had gotten from Throlis – and hacked all my limbs before healing me so I could give it to them. I was able to use it to bargain for my and Talia’s release, but I lost the axe, and I suspect they agreed in part because Talia was wearing a Dagdeoth cloak we’d found at the bottom of the cliff (most of the party had gotten cloaks, either from dead Dagdiens or dead Mourners; not all of them had been wearing cloaks when we’d activated the tablet). Eventually, we got to the hot spot. The ground was rock there, not snow, and there were a few humans fighting off some more varied undead and some ice golems. We helped them, but ran into some difficulties, as they didn’t trust us and we didn’t speak their language. I couldn’t understand them, but I did sort of recognize the language – it was the one the spirits of the bodies we’d found in the snow a few months ago spoke. Isanna borrowed my pencil and tried to communicate through drawings. Eventually, we did get confirmation that they were Mourners, and recognized the word (or maybe name) “Shadeoak.” They also mimed something to do with vampires, and freaked out when they saw someone in our party use some storm magic. The area practically reeked of Frost. We decided to get out of there and come back some other time.
That evening, the storm with the Ominous inside it hit Axiems. A Pinical mage showed up to help protect the city, but he needed to be protected himself while he was setting up the protections. That was where we came in. There were little glowing lights in the area where he needed to set up the protections, along with some wraiths or specters (I couldn’t tell which; I was too distracted). The lights cast various magic at us, some beneficial, some harmful, some just plain annoying. I got my limbs temporarily turned to dirt five or ten times, got ‘buried’ in a grave for a minute or so, got frozen, unfrozen, displaced, and any number of things before the mage finished his spell.
I also got mana drained once, but that wasn’t because of the lights – that was because of the haunt. (At least, we’re pretty sure now that it’s some sort of haunt.) It was the Ominous, but different. I got caught in its mana drain aura once, and only getting displaced by one of the lights kept me alive. Isa and some of the others were killed by it, though they were resurrected due (again) to some of the lights’ magic. At the end, they had just gotten somewhere – the figure had turned into some woman in a dress, petting a small animal – when the mage completed his spell and a protective dome appeared over the city, keeping the worst of the storm out.
The next day, we helped Boro deal with some people called the ‘Beardburners;’ they hunted dwarves and burned their beards. To be more accurate, we dealt with the beardburners while Boro went and talked to some peasants about how they were viewing our party, given the mistakes with a village that had been made a while ago. We dealt with the beardburners fairly quickly, but once we were done, Boro showed up – at the head of a group of angry villagers, all shouting about how horrible we were. I mostly tried to stay unobtrusive at the fringes, since there wasn’t much I could do, silent as I am. I really was having a horrible time, with all the shouting and anger and barely keeping from breaking out into violence. Of course, everything changed when Boro stopped pretending to be drunk and angry, after the assassins hiding with the peasants had been taken out. It was a surprisingly effective ruse, however unpleasant it was, and resulted in protecting the party and maybe even restoring some goodwill with the villagers. Once we got back, we decided to try out the tablet again, this time by going to hammer-star.
What happened when we got there is a little fuzzy – honestly, I’m not sure that the whole thing wasn’t a vision, but we did come out of it in possession of some papers. I do remember that the Norse gods were fighting with the Greek gods, with the dwarven gods watching on, the fates standing in a corner, and the Dagdemar watching from another corner. (Talia spent the whole encounter meditating by the Dagdemar.) There was one more being: the ice wraith we’d seen in the storm. Isanna and the others asked it questions, and eventually it dropped all the papers we needed, and we returned. After that was when things got complicated. Isanna and a small group needed to go into the protectorate to do things, so the rest of the party went to check that the wyrm demon that had hatched from the egg hadn’t left any eggs of its own. It would have been a nice, relatively simple mission, mostly, if Talia hadn’t decided partway there that she had some vital things that she needed to ask Isanna. The party objected, of course, given what had happened last time they looked for wyrm demon eggs and Talia had left. Túrastar sided with Talia, and was willing to accompany her back to the protectorate, but the other party members didn’t find this satisfactory. Talia suggested that Túrastar go alone with a list of questions she had, and everyone found this satisfactory. Except, of course, for Túrastar. We were approaching some goblins, so we put the discussion temporarily on hold. The goblins were all stuffed into a hole, talking about “wizard lizards” at the bottom of the hole. Nobody could figure out what was going on. I’m mildly ashamed, looking back, that I was the one who suggested that one of the amazons do a whirlwind aura to blow the goblins away from whatever it was. Mainly because that turned out to be a horrible idea.
There were two drakes at the bottom of the hole.
Yeah.
As we were cleaning up, I noticed Túrastar knock Talia out and carry her off away from the battle.
He was really unsubtle about that; five or six people ended up following him. I was one of them, along with Avalous and the Snowdrifts party members. Túrastar explained that he was arresting Talia; that was clearly, excuse my language, bullshit. Avalous insisted that if that were the case, he could take her to town or deal with her here. We ended up waking up Talia around that point; she confronted Túrastar about what he was trying to do and he admitted that he was just trying to take her to the protectorate like she’d originally wanted. Eventually, a compromise was reached. Túrastar and Talia would go – along with Avalous and all but one of the Snowdrifts, leaving us with a greatly-diminished party, with me as the only paladin. We found the eggs eventually, but honestly, that’s where things got really bad. I was planning to do the exorcism ritual then and there; the party insisted on hacking up the eggs first, which I honestly wasn’t averse to. Of course, I was averse to Naritath slipping one of the intact eggs into his pocket and running off when I confronted him about it. I managed to get the others’ attention, and we took him down. Twice. And he regenerated both times and got up and ran away. And then the Dagdeoth division showed up, so we ran, and around then was when I realized that (Scott) and Baron von Schnitzel were missing, and (Isaac) had run in the opposite direction as most of the party. To make a long story short, we chased after Naritath and took him down. But it took a while.
I destroyed all the eggs we had with my might strike, since we didn’t have enough time for an exorcism. The Baron and (Scott) had an egg, so we tracked them down, too. They had somehow managed to exorcise it with nature magic, and the Baron invited all of us to his keep to heal up and prepare for the trip back to town. We’d taken Naritath’s body and burned it to keep him from regenerating – but on the way to the keep, he regenerated anyway, and seemed to have no clue who any of us were. Thankfully, he didn’t object to going to the keep with us. Once we got there, we experimented a little and realized that he had some form of multiple personality disorder – once he was knocked out, he switched personalities. We think. Except for the fact that he was knocked out at least once, possibly twice, when he was running away from us. I still don’t know what’s up with that, but he hasn’t done anything evil since then, at least.
Since nothing that day was going nicely for us, the keep got surrounded by Dagdeoth troops soon after we reached it. We were stuck until we got some help. Thankfully, (Isaac) had gotten back to town on his own, and let them know that we needed some help. With the help, we fought off Dagdeoth and got back to town safely. Then we got news that the storm had changed – instead of one ice wraith, there were three, and they seemed to be battling each other.
It was as… interesting as the first time we’d gone out, if not more interesting. I got mana drained, displaced, killed, turned into a ghost, given glowing eyes (that one was awkward; I still was a ghost, so I looked like a wraith), rebirthed, got my swords warded, glowing, one of them doing medicine ball… any number of things. It was an adventure.
We tried the tablet one more time, the next morning. There had been a fire, or maybe an explosion of some sort, and some of the spheres had been destroyed. But inside one of the spheres, there was a magical ring called the Moon Lord, and he told us where to go to talk to the Mourners. We followed his directions and ended up inside a cave, right in front of a man on a sort of a throne. They were all clearly Mourners – they spoke the language that I had heard before and didn’t understand. Stariln had the Moon Lord, which used some sort of magic to let Stariln speak and understand their language. He and the Mourners’ leader had a long conversation, and there was only one word that the rest of the party could understand. It was the leader’s title: Shadeoak. Stariln read them the translated poem we had gotten from the Ominous in the gods’ realm. After that, though, something… happened.
It all gets a little… odd, there. The party started attacking each other. My memory is a little fuzzy, as are my notes (I must have miswritten them or something), but I did go down pretty quickly.
The next thing I knew, we woke up back in the tablet room – or rather, we were resurrected. As far as I heard, only two people were still alive. One of them was hacked up – all his limbs were useless. The other of them was Naritath, since his regeneration kept him up even when he got killed. He ran for help. I don’t know what Sentris and the historians must think of all the ‘research’ we’ve been doing. It was a really weird experience. Some of the party’s even getting arrested because of it – The Jester accompanied us, but Alais made him sign a contract that said if anything went wrong, it was his fault. Some other party members also started spouting out crazy conspiracy theories. I think it was a little harsh to arrest them for it, but Throlis and Broncis both thought it was reasonable, so there must be some good reason.
It was a pretty disastrous day, but it could have been worse if Naritath hadn’t gone for help, I guess, so maybe he’s not all bad.
I’m really worried. Weird things keep happening. Stariln lost all his memory of that day, so he can’t even tell us what he said to Shadeoak, and the ring has vanished, too. Apparently there are four others – the Sun Lord, the Black Lady, the White Lady, and the Earth Child – but we don’t know where any of them are, or even if they’d help us in this situation. We could use all the help we can get, though. I have the feeling we’ll need it.
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Sept 18, 2014 20:24:41 GMT -8
We’re in Pinical now. The story of how we got here is pretty long, though, so I’ll just… try to start at the beginning. Tensions are getting high. People keep accusing each other of being traitors. Three people got accused in the inn this morning, and one of them was Isanna. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I know that she wouldn’t betray us, but at the same time, she was saying things that all the other ‘traitors’ had been saying. Thankfully, she was out of jail pretty quickly, but there were still problems. For one, part of me had been all to ready to draw my swords when she started talking, and that just wasn’t right. Also, I clearly remember thinking that things were being weird. We were working with the tablet again, and due to the chaos that happened last time, Lesil warned us that it would probably be taken away from us by the end of the day. Our solution, of course, was to preempt this by taking it with us wherever we went, by including it in the “ours” pronoun we thought of when teleporting. It took a while to reassemble it (again), but once we got that done (and decided where we would go, and decided how we would try to go there, and agreed on any other number of small things that took forever to discuss), we activated it. We landed on the western side of Hostor, right on a beach. I don’t know if there are safeguards on the tablet to keep us from landing in the ocean, or if we just got lucky, but either way I’m glad that we didn’t land in the middle of the sea. Either way, we were in Hostor, and we needed to decide what to actually do from there. Isa realized that she knew somebody – a woman named Enyari – on this side of Hostor who lived on the way to Pinical, and could apparently give us some credibility. We had, after all, used a possibly-dangerous magical artifact to semi-legally teleport there from across the continent. She and (Max) flew ahead to warn Enyari that we were coming, while the rest of us packed up the tablet and started walking up after them. On the way, we encountered an elemental. We don’t know if it was a random encounter or something summoned by the tablet, but it attacked us. My backup sword was unforged – I was just lucky my silver sword hadn’t been in that hand. Túrastar almost got his foot unforged! It was a good thing that he could spellturn it. After that trek, we finally got to Enyari’s house. Before she let us in, though, she had us undergo a series of tests, so that she could be sure that none of us were vampires, or controlled by vampires. After that, things seemed to go much quicker. Enyari took us up to Pinical itself, so that we could meet with Embarcarious. Of course, we had to go through some bureaucracy first; there was the ‘are-these-mass-destruction-or-not’ discussion, the ‘are-these-illegal’ discussion, and the ‘why-do-you-need-the-High-Mage-of-Pinical-for-these’ discussion. After we got through all that, the party wandered around the town, doing things. I wanted to go to the library, to see what they had about the Mourners, so Isanna walked me over there and introduced me to her sister, Xey, who works there. (Isanna said that Xey has all my chronicles, so she’ll probably get this one, too. Hi, Xey!) I figured that the Mourners’ language would be similar to ancient Odilathen, since that was where Oakenshade came from, so I started learning it from the books that they had there. The Pinical Library is huge, I could stay in it forever. Except probably not, I’d have to go eat and sleep sometimes. And adventuring is actually pretty fun. But I could definitely stay in the library for a long while. Anyway, eventually Embarcarious was available to talk to us. We explained to him about the tablet, and he said that the language was ancient mountain dwarven, not the Mourners’ language, which makes sense because the mountain dwarves made lots of different magical artifacts. Around then, (Jeremy) mentioned to Embarcarious that he’d like to get identified by him. Embarcarious did the identify, and (Jeremy) started going insane, attacking people all over the place. Enyari dealt with it. Other people also wanted to get identified; I think Túrastar was the second or third. Embarcarious started a spell, but then turned it into a Cure Insanities spell. After a bit more investigation, he gathered us close and removed everyone’s insanity.
DON’T READ THIS IF YOU ARE AN AXIEMS PALADIN, KNIGHT, STORM MAGE, SNOWDRIFTS, AND HAVE NOT HAD AN INSANITY REMOVED SINCE YOU LAST USED YOUR CLASS SKILLS
He said that something in our training – in my case, both my paladin and my knight skills – was causing us to be mind controlled by Frost. With Storm Mages, it was worse, since there was something in the overlay that was refreshing it; for us, if we don’t use any of our class skills, we should be fine. Hopefully. We’re staying in Pinical over the month, but some people also want to travel to other places in Roekron, so who know how long that will take. I have to say, I don’t miss the cesspit of scheming creepers and liars that is Axiems. Things are going on. I have so many secrets, none of which are mine to tell. People keep getting hurt, sometimes because of mistakes I’ve made. I hate this.
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Nov 1, 2014 20:02:02 GMT -8
So, quite a bit has happened. Not objectively – objectively, like four things happened – but subjectively, lots of stuff has happened. Getting back from Pinical was… complicated. It shouldn’t have been complicated – (Max)’s energy comes from the stars, so he has unlimited mana at night, when we were traveling. The main problem arose from the fact that we decided to demonstrate it for him, since he’d never done it before. It was all going quite well, actually, until (Josh) turned to the sickle symbol and, instead of putting in a mana, disenchanted it and it exploded. I died from the wave of mana that it sent out when it exploded, but most of the other people there didn’t. (We didn’t have the full party there; some of them had decided to travel to Randwin to do things before getting teleported back.) I was quickly rebirthed, but then we faced another problem: how would we actually get back to Axiems? We didn’t want to go to Embarcarious; he might be mad at us – well, (Josh) – for destroying an ancient magical artifact, and Alais was adamant that (Josh) face party justice, not Pinical justice. Eventually, we realized that we still had the method of going back we’d always had; the return clause hadn’t been destroyed with the tablet. All we had to do was decide that we were returning, and so we did. That morning, we went out north, looking for some way to get to the Mourners, since we didn’t have the tablet any more. We found them eventually, sort of – we encountered two of them, and they said that we should meet them back at that spot once we dealt with whatever was messing with our party members’ minds. We haven’t dealt with it yet, and it’s actually become a problem – I should explain this better. Something… happened. I’m not quite sure how to explain it. Basically, as far as we can tell, the assassins and thieves are trying to take control of Axiems. It’s not just the assassins and thieves, is the worst thing – it seems like lots of our party members are also under some sort of mind control. There was a group out in the protectorate, and as they were coming back, a few of the assassins ran at them and shouted things, which I think triggered the mind control somehow, because they started fighting us. Hopefully we can get this all worked out soon.
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on May 2, 2015 13:53:45 GMT -8
A lot has happened. A lot has always been happening, though; I guess I just didn’t realize it sometimes. I guess that’s a bit of a theme. People were in danger and I didn’t realize, people needed help and I didn’t realize, there were so many things I could have fixed if I had just made a few choices differently. Lots of this is not my story to tell. Lots of this is about other people. If those people don’t want this story circulating around, let me know and I’ll cross it out, on the public documents. I don’t want to violate anyone else’s privacy. There were some things I skimmed over, last time. One big event, really. Talia turned into a demon. The Talia-demon couldn’t be exorcized; it just got back up when the ritual began. It was treeformed, finally, but later a small stick was missing from the tree. She wasn’t there any more. The inn was practically empty at the beginning of the day.
So. It’s been a while since I’ve written. A few years, actually, though I’m writing this on the same page that I last wrote on. I’ll be honest, here: I don’t really want to think about what happened. But I just took took an oath to keep the flame of knowledge going, so I’m going to write down what happened as clearly as I can remember it, so that people can know what happened. (It has been a few years.) I’ll start out with what was actually going on: I was the one who was mind controlled, and it was Frost doing the controlling, not Dagdeoth or whatever we’d thought it was. All of us knights and paladins and rangers were, and the storm mages, too, not the thieves or assassins. The thieves and assassins had their own stuff they were dealing with at the time. The inn was practically empty at the beginning of the day because everyone who wasn’t a knight, paladin, or ranger was arrested or under house arrest under suspicion of mind control. A large group of the party had been out at the Protectorate, though, so they got away – some of the sane people hidden in town had gotten out and warned them. They decided to go to the Keep. I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure what happened, but I do know the end result: they’d discovered that Frost was somehow in the overlay, and gotten some specialized mages to literally take them into the overlay where they could fight Frost. I wasn’t there, though: I was at the Keep eventually, following Túrastar, who’d heard about Talia’s transformation. I’d been the one to tell him. It wasn’t fun. He fainted. I forget how we learned that the stick with Talia in it was at the keep, but he got that knowledge somehow. It turned out that Sharon, the assassin that Lesil Sentris had sent to follow Talia everywhere, had gotten the stick before we could, and thankfully had taken her out of the city and to (relative) safety. The people at the Keep didn’t want to let us in, and we didn’t particularly want to work with them; Túrastar, though an elf, was also a paladin. Our frosty minds, however, still let us prioritize; to me, keeping Túrastar from going on a murder rampage was most important, and to Túrastar, Talia was most important. We didn’t participate in the actual ritual. (Scott) had a specialized version of the ritual that both trapped Talia in, kept the Dagdemar out, and managed to actually exorcise her. Halfway through, she started singing a song – a variation of the Ulalina song that Lagine sung, one that summoned monsters to her. Túrastar and I and the others kept the monsters off (Scott) while he finished up the ritual, ending it at the same point she ended her song. I’m not sure of the specifics of what happened after that. Túrastar did something, took something on for Talia, and when she stopped being a demon her mind wasn’t controlled by Frost, even though she was a storm mage. She went off to help the group in the overlay. I was locked up, and Túrastar was locked up separately; he’d gone... worse, pretty much, accusing everyone of betraying him, even people he was mind controlled with. Eventually, everything calmed down; we were healed from the mind control, and it didn’t come back, since the group in the overlay had been successful. Frost had been cleared from the overlay, and we were all ourselves again.
It was actually sort of nice to get that out. Cathartic. I made some bad choices that led to some complete disasters, but I was able to help fix them, at least a bit. Life has moved on, and I’m still living, albeit with a few weird scars from that time I almost passed on. (It’s weird; they look like morganti even though I wasn’t killed by it (thankfully). One on my forehead and one opposite that, at the base of my skull. Maybe I’ll figure something out from them, though in all honesty I should have taken them as a warning sign.) It’s been a while. Some things have changed, some haven’t; I’m thinking of starting a school. It seems like something we need. Especially me, really, since if people can’t read how am I supposed to communicate with them? I mentioned the idea to Talia, since she’s a teacher, and she said she’d like to do it with me. But I haven’t seen her for a while, so it looks like right now I’m on my own. That’s okay, though. I’ll manage on my own; I’m pretty good at it.
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on May 4, 2015 19:42:25 GMT -8
Well. It certainly has been a while, hasn’t it. I didn’t actually expect to get back into adventuring, really – I mean, it’s been, what, thirty-three years now? But here I am, writing a chronicle about my day adventuring and exploring old temples and fighting dark ogres. I guess, as always, that I should start at the beginning. Dagdeoth made a frontal assault on the city, which is what prompted Lady Sentris to call us all back in – well, not all of us, but a lot of us. Lenore was there, and Isa Snowflake, and a few others, too. But there was also a whole party of new adventurers! I met this very nice tailor named Eleanor, and an interesting elf named Círdan, and a whole host of others whose names I completely forget. I arrived partway through the day. The first mission I heard about was one that I decided not to go on for personal reasons, though a majority of the party went. After that, though, a group of us who had stayed behind decided to go out and investigate an odd dungeon that had been found up to the north. We were permitted to go since there were rumors of undead there, and a few of the new party members had to kill undead as part of their training to become Snowdrifts rangers. The dungeon was cold. I’d almost forgotten how cold the far north can be. I wore my old cloak, along with the gloves and the scarf, though I lent the scarf to a hobbit who’d forgotten to bring any sort of warmer clothes. The shrine – we figured out later on that it was a shrine – was fascinating. There were some oddly frozen zombies, but those were dealt with reasonably easily, despite their number. Eleanor and an interesting girl I met named Vanessa tried to talk to the spirits of the zombies, but the only thing they could hear was one spirit saying “cold” repeatedly, quietly. The storm mages in our party decided to try identifying one of the bodies, to see if there was anything to be found from that. About halfway through the ritual, though, we were attacked by harpies, which were annoying to deal with – they were flying and we didn’t have nearly enough ranged weapons. I was rather useless except in healing, I’m afraid, though I suppose that’s not quite ‘uselessness’ if I keep our party members alive. Someone cast a chain lightning bolt. It went about as well as expected, though thankfully it didn’t hit me. Eventually we won, and around then was when I decided to inspect the walls more carefully myself. There was writing on them, much to my surprise; I wasn’t able to read most of it, even with my skills, since it was impressed into the walls and hard to read. I did get some things – it was talking about making homage, or praise, and something about snow, and gods, and frost. Not the proper noun, thankfully. There were some other odd symbols – I managed to put them together into a full page of what looked like a letter, or maybe a poem, I’m not quite sure. It still needs to be translated. Once we got back, though, was when the real adventuring started. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, going to old places and finding weird papers has always been our style of adventuring; but fighting Dark Ogres and Dark Heroes outside the city gates with IsannSnowflake and Lenore, and (Jeremy) on his wyrm? Just like old times. It was a hard battle; I died twice. I wasn’t the only person, either; Snowflake was running around regeneration-touching people as fast as she could. There was one – I’m not sure if he was a mage or what, but he was teleporting around faster than I could blink. We eventually managed to take them all down, and recovered a number of interesting magical items, but as we were taking them inside the city, us idiots decided to make absolutely certain that they couldn’t regenerate or heal themselves, so the obvious solution was to kill them. And their spirits escaped. So we’ll have to fight them again some time. After that, another secret mission – only Abil is and always has been horrible at keeping secrets, which was probably what led to the disaster. A group was captured by Dagdeoth. I won’t go into details about how they were rescued, both for “secrecy” and since I wasn’t there; I was in the inn working on translating the paper and keeping Jerik from going completely insane. Jerik was one of the new adventurers – a knight, like me – who’d wanted to go on the rescue mission. Unfortunately for him, he had a bodyguard who wasn’t afraid to knock him out and have Círdan stick him in a circle of protection for his own safety, so he was stuck in the inn with me until the rescuers got back. We had a long discussion. He’s a good kid, though a little overzealous. To keep him from going stir-crazy, he and I talked about strategy, and Dagdeoth, and a bit about theology and metaphysics, though of course I’m hardly an expert on any of those things. He needs some way to be effective while also being safe, a difficult balance to find. In a few days, there’s an expedition going out to the Grey Isles. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard such fascinating things about it; I can’t wait to actually see them.
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Jun 13, 2015 8:50:50 GMT -8
Well, looking back, I suppose a quick recap on the Grey Isles mission would be handy. The main problem there is that partway through, I apparently died, and was unable to remember even getting to the Isles, let alone whatever happened there to kill me. I woke up as a wisp on a beach, with no boats in sight; my party members were all around me, all but two or three of them also wisps. Not everyone, though; a large group of the party was apparently off doing something else. We were able to get resurrected, mostly due to a few Runeweavers that were in our group – I don’t know if I’ve written about them before; they’re new party members, named Ivamin and Círdan. I was allowed to pass a message back to the rest of the party. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, and I wasn’t allowed to aks anyone else; I just told them our situation, and wished them luck. Eventually, a doorway appeared. It glowed green and felt like home. We went through it, and suddenly were in Axiems, a week later. I do not think I want to go back to the Grey Isles.
I attended the festival in Krodigros. It was certainly very fun to look around at all the things for sale, and all the adventurers from around the world; some of them I knew, but many of them I did not know. The main thing that really happened at the festival was the trial of Shanetill, Melimo, and Linder, who were accused of attempting to murder the prince Norino. There were rumors floating around all day, and even during the trial itself; I didn’t know what to think, really. The High Queen Kuni Sinthrea was there, watching over the trial, her and her many guards and two drakes besides them. Enyari, who I’d met years ago that time our party went to Pinical, was the legal representative for Linder, though in reality all three legal representatives were defending all three people on trial. A Sorikonian Martial Master served as Shanetill’s representative, and Abil came and represented Melimo. I must say, I rather did enjoy Abil’s arguments, in regards to the supposed items that prevented the user from lying that had apparently been used in the investigations; he picked a random person from the audience as his witness, to explain in his typical roundabout way that if a magic item was not being actively used in the proper way, it would not be effective. It became clear that the three accused were not guilty of their crimes; Queen Thresa Svod let them off with a harsh warning. I lingered in the courtroom for a while, waiting for the majority of the crowd to leave, but before I myself left, something else happened. There was a blue flaming thing, up in the gallery where the High Queen was. Everyone caught on fire, partially; I put myself out and healed myself, only to realize that everyone else was suddenly going blind. I suppose these are the advantages to already being blind in my third eye; though I saw no visions and heard no prophecies, I didn’t go blind, either. After that, chaos reigned, The High Queen was evacuated by her drakes and guards; a duel or two broke out; people were running around yelling. The doors shut and locked; nobody could get out. Eventually, a rumor went around that Prince Norino had gone missing, and Shanetill, Melimo, and Linder were suspected of involvement. Many of us were allowed to leave the room, afterwards, provided we had nothing to do with the three accused; since there was nothing I could contribute, and probably many ways I could accidentally make the situation worse, I left.
When I arrived in the inn the next day, I learned that a group had set out early to go investigate the frozen shrine, and were late in returning. We did not worry too much about them, since expeditions like that often run overtime; I didn’t hear exactly what happened, but apparently they went on not one but two detours and never even made it to the shrine. Later that morning, in another mission I did not go on – fighting dark heroes, I believe – disaster struck our party. The dark heroes had morganti, and lots of it; I don’t know how many of our party members died, but I do know that some of them did, and others were wounded by the morganti. Many of our friends were also captured, including Jerik, the young man who I’d befriended last month who just so happened to be a Nonas. We, being the sane and rational people that we are, decided to go after the dark heroes again. Lady Lesil sent a few people with us, some of whom had morganti of their own, as per the rules of combat, where if one side brings in morganti the other side is liable to do so as well. It seems to me like that causes escalation to an extreme extent, but good solutions are hard to find. I hesitate to call the battle ‘easy;’ though nobody died morganti, some did die, I believe. However, we did use one of our many tactics for winning battles: we brought in an overwhelming amout of force, with said force being two of Flynn’s drakes. We won, needless to say, with the help of the drakes; one froze practically half the battlefield, and left it frozen for the whole battle. We were able to rescue all of our friends, and retrieved and turned in some of the enemy’s morganti on top of that. There is one more important thing that happened that day; it actually happened before I went out on the rescue mission. Prince Norino came into the inn, seemingly whole and well. For a few minutes, he wanted to go out on the mission with us, but we mentioned that it had morganti and he decided not to risk undoing all the hard work that had been put into healing him. I do not know what is even going on in this city any more, if I ever did.
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Jan 8, 2016 21:05:05 GMT -8
This chronicle was written in 16,026, and is only being released in 16,030.
Skyeyes Madwing called a meeting of the adventurers, away from Lesil or any of the other innkeepers or people who might inform her. She said that since Lesil had declared that we couldn’t leave the city, since it was at war, we would just have to sneak out and continue on north. Everyone in the meeting – most of the adventurers – went around and listed their skills and abilities, and why they thought they should be included in the group going north. She would choose us, and we wouldn’t know who else was in the group until they left. If we weren’t in the group, we wouldn’t even know that it was leaving until it left. It seemed a little paranoid, but given that we’re still not sure how Lesil reacted, it may have been necessary. That night, one of the missions was going out to deal with one of the odd storms that was passing over the region. It was a perfect opportunity to leave. Madwing came up to me and told me that I was in the group, and handed me a special pack filled with necessary supplies. On the way to the storm, we fought a Dagdeoth Division. We didn’t all get taken down, but some of us did, myself among them. The rest of the party came back for us, but I lost the magical half-plate that I had just borrowed from the keychain. When we got to the storm, it was very chaotic. I barely managed to dodge some lightning. At the center, there was something very clearly haunt-like. It said some things that I didn’t quite hear. After that, it started dancing, and some of the party started dancing with it. This was apparently the solution, as the haunt threw lights up into the air and some light went into the dancers’ hands. After that, we gave Jerik some letters, distributed the non-flyers to the flyers, roped ourselves together, and headed off north.
The entire party consisted of Madwing, Snowflake, Finch, Legs, (Will) and I from the party thirty-three years ago, along with Willow, Ink, Rune, Badass (who will henceforth be referred to as “Ass” for purposes of… let’s call it conserving ink), and Lo’gosh from the newer party. I flew with Finch, in the back, since I’d become a ranger during the festival in Krodigros, where I wouldn’t need to become a snowdrift. It was a long, quiet flight; we landed as the sun came up, and the snowdrifts in the party (Ass and Legs) built us a snow fort. We took the watch in turns, and when night fell we continued on.
Passing through Titanswatch Fortress was interesting, to say the least. It rested in the only pass of the giant mountain range, so we had no choice but to walk through it – and, of course, it was Dagdeoth-controlled. In the packs, we had reversible cloaks – one side was plain, and the other side had Dagdeoth insignia. We polymorphed Finch and Legs, who were centaurs, as well as Willow, our only hobbit, into mice to hide under our cloaks. The elves (Snowflake and Ink and Rune) were disguised as humans – easy enough with the cold making everyone wear their hoods up anyways. Madwing took the position of our group leader, since she was fluent in Dagdien and since she actually was our group leader. With the papers that I had forged, and in a tight formation we hoped would pass Dagdien standards, we walked into the pass. We only ran into a few spots of trouble: a group of ogres that questioned us more thoroughly, but eventually let us pass, a group of some animals that almost took us all down before we ran, and a group of snow gremlins, who played their usual pranks while we tried to get past. Eventually, though, we cleared the pass, reverted Finch and Legs and Willow, and continued on our way. We flew for ages, with the only break in the monotony (aside from the brief moments of heart-stopping terror) being trying to teach everyone some basic Dagdien commands – “Stop” and “No” and “I’m not allowed to say” and “Ask my superior” and things along those lines. Madwing turned out to have some levels in teacher, which helped immensely. Around here was when we came up with “Plan Ridiculous.” Since none of us really wanted to get captured and tortured by Dagdeoth, or morganti killed, we knew that we had to come up with a plan to kill ourselves in case something happened. The problem was that while Madwing had a death ray and Lo’gosh had slay, it would be hard to get everyone killed before whoever was trying to capture or morganti us succeeded. The best way, we decided, was for Madwing as our leader to kill someone justly according to Dagdeoth’s standards, and aside from the “slaves” (the centaurs and hobbit) the next best person was Ass. Plan Ridiculous worked like this: Madwing would hopefully realize that somebody had figured out who we were, or was about to figure out. She would slip in the word “ridiculous,” which we had taught the entire group. Ass would step up and call her a bitch (he begged us to teach him how to say that in Dagdien; the first time he asked, I told him how to say nice to meet you. It was pretty funny), and she would death ray him for it. Then, Lo’gosh would start slaying people and everything would generally devolve into chaos, and hopefully we would all be dead by the end of it. And hopefully – hopefully – not buried.
The weather started to get worse. We were walking at this point, since it was too bad to fly. Well, running, really. Everyone was thankful for the cloaks – the were made specially, the way the Mourners did, to keep you even warmer. But despite the worsening weather – no, actually, the worsening weather should have been a clue. We came into a calm place, where the storm had died down. Or maybe, we guessed, we were in the eye of the storm. We encountered the polar dragon again, the one that had shown up briefly 33 years ago, the blind one. We talked at it a bit – well, Madwing mostly – and it pointed us in a direction, and we went. Eventually, we came upon a person. He was strange; he wore a hat and his face was covered, and he carried a staff and seemed to talk in riddles or questions or maybe both. I don’t remember the exact conversation, but he and Madwing and the others were trading questions for answers, and Madwing was being… her fae-like self. By which I mean seemingly taking nothing seriously and still getting answers. I don’t remember what they were talking about, exactly, because I couldn’t really participate in the conversation. After a few questions, he started swinging his staff for charms, which luckily hit only people who wouldn’t be affected. He did that as one of his answers, I think. He vanished a little bit after that. We proceeded in the direction we thought Skyeyes was in, and it started getting really foggy. We decided to tie ourselves together again and hover, to keep together; but as we were discussing that, we heard something, figured we ourselves had been heard, started shouting “Run! Run!” assuring that we had been heard, and as Finch and I were in the back we were the first hit and I don’t have a firsthand account of what happened after. I heard afterwards that Madwing was waving her papers around frantically; the one in charge of chasing after us, a (whatever Tyson was), apparently only did not kill us because he had morganti, and it was too risky to make a *permanent* mistake. We landed. Finch and I were healed, and we formed up to await questioning. Madwing, as our leader and one of the few in our party actually fluent in Dagdien, was of course the one being questioned. It was a very intense questioning, with her insisting that we were on a “Top-secret mission of great religious importance, coming straight from the front lines” and them insisting that it was all complete nonsense, which in fact it was, except that almost everything she said was factually correct. The most terrifying bit – no. It was all terrifying. One of the more terrifying bits was when Madwing got identified – but the identify turned up nothing condemning. We were still being questioned, but one of the officers – apparently one in charge of some more covert operations – decided for his own reasons that it would be an excellent idea to vouch for us, and claim that he knew our mission. With that solved, he started leading us around the city, talking to us. He warned us that though floodpains were very dangerous, there was an easier way into the garden through a gap in the hills. He led us to the hills, and there left us, with some last words: “We mourn with you.” In the dialect of Ancient Odilathen that I had studied thirty-three years ago, when we contacted the Mourners.
Ink and Rune studied an area in the pass, giving them a teleportation location there; after a break for mutual panic and prophecy discussion, we continued on, in formation as always. We met some sort of large icy giant being, who questioned us and threatened us with morganti before finally letting us pass.
I got a little ahead of myself. I should describe the area that we saw; it was certainly something. In the middle of a giant boiling lake surrounded by lava, there was a morganti tower sticking out, like a lance in some giant eye. Surrounding the lava, and starting to die off, was some sort of jungle. There was a large stone citadel off to one side; it was this we decided to head towards, to avoid the Dark guard sky knights flying armored shadow drakes and circling around (but not too close to) the boiling lake. As we approached the citadel, we saw what looked like some sort of frost titans chained up outside. The citadel seemed to be built for people their size; the steps were giant. Once we got up the steps, we realized our mistake, since guarding the door into the citadel was a demon. Madwing decided to try and stall, not approaching the demon but going out to look off to the side and looking at a map; the rest of us remained in formation. I remembered what I had learned about how demons were treated in Dagdeoth, and motioned to the “slaves” to act properly. They and the rest of the group followed suit, bowing to the demon as was “proper.” The demon looked pleased with itself; Madwing returned to standing in front of us and it began questioning her, in broken-sounding Dagdien. (Though honestly it sounded like it could speak normal Dagdien just fine.) It feared her and snared her, and she answered as well as she could in that state; it burned up our papers, along with Finch and Legs and Willow. We continued on into the citadel; it wished us good luck and laughed as we entered. Inside the citadel was… interesting. It felt sanctified; more than that, it felt like the Grey Isles had, where I couldn’t reach the Universe at all. There were twelve walls, not counting the door; they looked like they used to have carvings on them, but the carvings had been scorched away viciously. In the center of the floor was a giant blue eye. It felt haunted, but those with spirit guide saw no haunts. I’m afraid I’m not much use describing what happened from then on out; since my third eye is blind, I don’t receive visions. Thankfully, that allowed me to be in control when the others received visions and went varying degrees of blind and insane. Ink used an agate and his runeweaving to try and see if there were any spirits. He saw three, I believe, and then a series of symbols; Madwing and Snowflake thought they had something to do with Lagine, I believe, though you should probably read their chronicles for more details. Rune tried Ink’s agate next. She saw a True Name and the eye she was looking through morganti exploded. The group decided to sit in a circle around the eye and recite an old prophecy, I believe; they all saw something and went blind, and then everyone acted weird for a time. Ass tried to stab me (not unusual, but not usual either); Rune acted like she didn’t know who or where she was. I knocked her out. She didn’t regenerate, thankfully, but I’m still glad I knocked her out. There wasn’t much we could do from there, with half the party blind and the other half not coming up with any better ideas. We were pretty sure that Dagdeoth was on to us, so we couldn’t just walk out the door; we certainly couldn’t walk past the demon again. We decided to try and use runeweaving to teleport out. That went… interestingly.
The way teleport works, to my understanding, is that the people being teleported are split apart into their composite particles, moved elsewhere, and reformed. As we later determined, the splitting apart process happened for us; we just did not seem to be reforming. We had a sort of collective consciousness, as our mishmash of particles. It felt like we were repeating something, almost haunting something. Forming and reforming, over and over again. We tried to push it through, having run out of options and not knowing how long it had been in there; it felt like it cost us something, some of our energy, for a time. Maybe a long time. We knew that we could either try and push some more, and get where we were going, or let the location go free and not know where we would end up; we decided on a third option, trying to sort of curve the teleport as one would… I don’t know. There was a boat metaphor. I don’t know boats. We ended up just north of the protectorate, wearing our usual clothes. Not the clothes we had gone in; the clothes we usually wore in day-to-day life. Maybe it has to have something to do with being particles for weeks on end, that we came out as what the particles remembered being the most. We flew down to Pinical. A dragon started following us around Stonehammer Pass; Snowflake stayed back to distract it. She caught up with us at the coast, and said that she wanted to eat her arms and also Ink because the dragon made her crazy. That got mostly unwoven when we got to Pinical. We went to Enyari, and then Embarcarious the next morning. He gave us some options; depending on how well the one we chose goes, you’ll either know about it already or reading this will be heresy. I know which one I hope is true.
I think I’ll always blame myself for letting them go without me. I know, in my head, that if I had gone, likely the only result is that I would have died as well – we knew that was the most likely result when we planned to go. But knowing that you’ve signed up for a quest to the death, and letting your friends go on a quest to the death without you… those are two very different things. There’s the sadness, of course, the heart-wrenching pain of having lost people dear to you. There’s the anger – at myself, for not having been able to go, at Dagdeoth, for being the cause behind their deaths, at the situation, for needing to be solved, and needing to be solved so desperately we had to send people to their deaths. And all I could manage was the barest of connections – I felt the world tilt on its axis, I felt a pain in my eyes. I felt like they were around me, haunting me, or maybe I was around them. I knew when they’d started on their journey. I knew when they ended it. On one hand, I wonder that the world may not remember them, these people who changed the world so thoroughly, who hopefully healed it when it had been suffering for years. But would they want to be remembered? Who knows. I will remember them, for as long as I’m able.
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Mirandy
Commoner
Miranda
Posts: 30
Leagues Played: Club League, Adult League, Falnorian
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Post by Mirandy on Feb 11, 2016 12:15:19 GMT -8
Celeste Firstmoon, 16,049
The first thing I remember is walking. I remember being on a beach, and the roar of the waves, and the trees on the other side, and the sky above it all, shifting from bright blue to sparkling black and then back again. I don’t remember how many times it did that. I remember that I hurt, in sort of a dull, distant way – the people who found me explained that it looked like I’d been stabbed, and that the wound had healed on its own, over time. They asked me if I remembered how I got it. I didn’t. The elves who found me brought me to Spireguard, to see if I could find anyone I recognized. I haven’t so far, but I have joined up with a group of adventurers. I figure that adventurers travel a lot, and learn lots of things, so if I can learn things maybe I can find out who I really am. There are lots of interesting people. There’s Bones and her friend, who are teaching me about puns. Bones makes plants grow on dead things, and her friend (I forget his name, sorry) he can reanimate things. There’s Daine, who’s a centaur, and also has a green gem in her forehead. She’s really nice. There’s also Quiet, who also has another long name that starts with a Sir, who apparently made a deal with death? I’m not really sure what’s going on with him, though he seems nice. I also just met Laura, who knows how to hear the names of things that can’t talk. I want to know her better; she seems smart. There’s also Mist, who seems like an interesting person – she’s the one I got my name from, since I didn’t remember one if I had one before, so I was going around and asking people how they got their names, and when I asked Mist how she got her name she asked whether there were things that I saw that I liked, and I said the stars, and she said that “Celeste” had to do with the stars, which is nice. I like the way it sounds, too, with the sounds lining up like they do. There were a few missions we went on during adventuring; we went into the Loglin Forest to investigate rumors of a fairy. We did find the fairy. Its name was Spring, we think, which is interesting, because I’ve heard that the fae left because it was coming to be winter of some kind. It flew up into a tree, and some people flew up to talk to it, but the rest of us left. One of the innkeepers is a harper. I like him; he’s upfront with us, in a roundabout way, and he plays nice music, and he tells stories. I like the stories, even though the one about the elven queens was very sad; the stories tell us a lot of things at once, even though sometimes it’s not obvious at the time. He also told us about the gods, the elemental ones. And when he was talking about the water goddess, and her being changeable, I remembered something. I remembered a still bowl of water, one that seemed… sort of holy, I think. There was a face reflected in the water. I… don’t know if it was mine, but I think it was. It looked like me, but also not like me. Like there was something missing. Or maybe I’m missing something. The face knew more things, I think. I don’t know why I’m here or what I’m doing or anything, really, but I’m figuring it out. I hope I remember more soon.
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