Session 02

Emilia wants to rejoin the group, but an overly-curious soul from the camp – having also heard the gunshot – may get there first. A woman named Lieutenant Vir'iq stops her. “Where are you going there, little hunter?”

The name of the road warden is Kifle Bain. With some pressure from Runato and Lei, he eventually admits why he was being held prisoner: he wanted to strike a deal with them where he fed information to them in exchange for a cut of their profits. This tense confrontation is interrupted by a soldier from the camp.

Elsewhere, Emilia is feeling the pressure, and decides to take an attack on the hopefully unsuspecting Vir’iq – with hopes of distracting or incapacitating her long enough to rejoin the others. After the first blow Vir’iq is down but not out.

SYLO TAMES A WYVERN! Or not. 😦

Actually, the wyvern tames Sylo. It concludes that Sylo is a little lost wyrmling. It carries him back to the camp. It keeps him safe and secure in the nest. Tai'chaar is amused, and lets Rubah keep his new pet. Sylo’s patron is amused. It contemplates: sometimes you take on a role SO well that you kind of get locked into it…

Meanwhile, Lei makes a cunning play to convince the soldier from the camp that, in fact, she and Emilia ran away when the camp seemed to be “attacked” by “dragons.” What could be more reasonable than that? In the midst of repeating the hunting party line, Runato quite reasonably points out that it’s all bullshit. Lei sighs and trains her gun on the bandit, but Kifle’s getaway breaks her line of sight long enough for the brigand to get away and start shouting and banging his shield to alert the camp to their presence. Lei considers their options for a moment, and fires the gun… into the dirt at her feet, hoping that the noise will alert Sylo and Emelia to their location as it previously alerted her. They hear an answering whistle from the east, and Lei reasons (correctly) that it’s one of the bandits signaling trouble in the form of one of the Fellowship. Lei prepares to run in that direction… but hesitates when Runato very clearly loses his memory of the past several days.

Emilia is now in close combat with Vir’iq, and with a dissonant serenity she tries to persuade her to round up the brigands and get them elsewhere. Vir’iq is unimpressed.

Var’iq counters: she claims that Dahlia has by now already told them where all of Emilia's crew are, and that if she doesn’t leave now, they’ll kill them. Enraged, the battle becomes more pitched, and by the time Lei and Runato find her Emilia is standing bloodied and messy over the unconscious and enucleated form of Vir’iq, subtly crying.

Back in camp, Sylo gets a closer look at the Triumvirate mage. Viverrid blood, a civetlike woman (but with crescent moon eyes), she is directing the soldiers one-by-one into different areas of the forest to capture the unsuspecting members of Emilia’s crew. Getting increasingly desperate to escape, Sylo tries to understand what Rubah wants, and to think of any way to communicate how badly he needs to get out and needs this horrible mage to be out of the action. Miraculously, he makes some kind of connection with Rubah… who responds by viciously mauling the mage and busting a traumatized Sylo out.

Lei has some concerns about Runato’s memory loss – this isn’t the first time it’s happened, and she starts to tell Emilia “it’s happened again”. Alise tries to lead Runato elsewhere to give them a chance to discuss; unfortunately, it backfires (but in a good way?) when he sees one of the mage’s brigands slit Lucia’s throat. He calls out the alarm, and Emilia orders the attack. It is swift, bloody, and conclusive – definitely conclusive, and Tai'Chaar is definitely dead. (Whaddya mean we never found the body?)

Session 01

It’s raining. We’re crouching, half-hidden, in the mossy undergrowth. We arrived in Kesh a bit over a week ago. We got tasked with “dealing with” a crew of brigands in exchange for being allowed to investigate the ruins. After some days of interviewing victims and following in their wake, we’ve tracked them to this camp in the middle of the woods.

Lei and Emilia go in to try and negotiate with the brigands. They immediately confiscate their weapons and demand to know what we’re doing there. Emilia spins a tale of being a lost hunter, and Lei backs her up on dulcimer. Lei has heard tales of these Kareta and their dragon riders (Unakh-Drakken) before; their formerly-nomadic people recently took over Arred, a city in the west.

Their leader, Tai'chaar, has Tytonid blood. Some kind of jackalope/deer/owl thing.

Sylo Xu has a chat with his divine* patron. “My power wanes, but I will do what I can… always for you, my child.” He turns into a falcon and scopes out the camp, with the intent of freeing the animals and causing a commotion – but he quickly discovers that the animals are wyverns, wyrmlings large enough to carry a rider.

What the brigands have stolen is mainly foodstuffs and needful supplies. There’s maybe one significantly valuable shipment that they intercepted on the way into Kesh, which is probably what got us sent out here. Emilia presses for information – why are they doing this, what will get them to stop? They are stealing stuff to try and take down the city of Kesh, which is… unrealistic to say the least.

Sylo Xu forms a new plan, totally and entirely by himself, the idea originated in his own head. He approaches near to the wyvern pen to tempt the wyverns, and sure enough, before long they peel off after him. He leads them on a merry chase, finally turning back to his human form and beginning a weary trudge back towards the vicinity of the camp.

Emilia sees a robed figure with luminous eyes emerge to guide the recovery, and takes advantage of the distraction to sneak into their tent and poke around. She finds a trap which she avoids and some papers, which she steals for later perusal – covering her tracks by adding some blank papers and spilling an inkwell over the desk, making it impossible for the mage to determine what was taken.

In the chaos, a man dressed as a Roadwarden flees from the camp into the forest, almost stumbling into Runato and Alise (still in hiding). Alise shoots off his bonds, a totally stealthy move which alerts Lei in the camp that something may be going awry. At first he claims to be relieved to see them and get free "with just the shirt on [his] back", but things quickly sour when Runato calls him out on his lies. Then it gets weird, and the maybe-warden takes one of Emilia’s crew members as a hostage. Then it gets even weirder, and Lei arrives to snatch the gun from the maybe-warden. A tense standoff ensues, and we close the session with Lei holding this stranger at gunpoint (with Emilia’s gun).