Chapter 28: 27- Your Plans Might’ve Been Good

New Quest received! – Rescue the Transmutation Specialist

Obviously this person must survive to assist you in transforming your Familiar.

Well, you had to go and get yourself a rescue mission, didn’t you? Good luck hauling a wounded, broken, probably half-dead caster back with your teeny little birdy feet. Did I say half dead? They’ll assuredly be mostly dead.

Reward: 2000 xp, a grateful specialist, and a massive party in your honor back in Densmeer.

 

“Party sounds nice,” he said. Also, he was on the cusp of another level up, which he’d probably get as soon as he scared off a whole slew of Fellwroth soldiers with his aura power.

Apparently she wasn’t in the talking mood.

“Listen, thanks for doing this.”

“We haven’t done it yet, and the more I think about it, the less I want to do it at all…”

“But assuming we do it, thanks for agreeing to do it.”

She snorted. “Let’s go.”

“No ‘we leave by dawn’ thing going on?”

She was determined to leave immediately, and honestly Corbin couldn’t blame her. They’d been threatened with death there, barred from getting any questions about the attacker’s motives, and sent on a single quest that would’ve ended in disaster if she hadn’t had a trick up her sleeve: a sentient Familiar. And honestly, if they hadn’t gotten into that fight just before the cemetery, he might’ve been enthralled by the Shardmage’s amulet also, and he might just be screaming inside a crystal shard for some heinous ritual.

Densmeer wasn’t the friendliest place available.

“Can we head back to Fellwroth then?” he asked. “Take the card, sell it off, find a wizard with the money.”

“They tried to kill me,” Kyessy said ominously.

“Ohhh… kayyy.”

“Unacceptable actually. They tried to kill me, bird.”

She was being smarter than he was. He had to assume for a second the magistrate, or the orc constable, or both, were in on the Shardmage situation. That meant Kyessy had disrupted that operation, whatever it meant, by surviving. She had a target on her back. The adventuring life apparently made you enemies with every city you came across.

Now he had to contend with the idea that Kyessy felt like she was trapped because of him, but he also knew she wouldn’t back down from this. Not after the swamp and not after the Shardmage debacle.

Straight west out of Densmeer followed a well-established road, something maintained probably by a jaded third-rate wizard, because it wasn’t a miserable ankle-breaking set of twin ruts with overgrown weeds between. They passed in silence for a while, before he took off and did some solitary scouting to give her some space.

Perhaps an hour later, he got back into range.

“Do you want to talk strategy?”

“No use until we get a good look at the encampment and the men involved.”

“Fair enough,” he said, and took to the sky.

He returned another hour later, exhausted and starving.

The enemy had a prison wagon similar to the one the Denspire soldiers had put Prissy in just a few days ago. This was set next to the command tent… or where the command tent had been. While he was working his reconnaissance magic, they’d started taking everything down. Most of the men were dismantling their haphazard collection of tents and putting them on the wagons clustered at one end of the camp, while the camp’s civilian corps busied packing up these wagons and feeding the oxen before getting on the road. He explained all this, including the guards posted at the perimeter. He hadn’t encountered any of their own rangers, scouting or scaring up game for the hungry army, but the Survey pop-up window assured him there were some.

“How many were there?” she asked.

“Difficult to say.” It wasn’t. The pop-up window had given him a Survey success and showed him that enemy combatants numbered two hundred and forty-nine, not including the civilians, who added another eighty-seven cooks, washerwomen, consorts, and aides to the commanding officers. “Several hundred. In either case, our best bet is to create a diversion or sneak in and break the wizard out.”

She nodded. “What do you propose?”

“First I think we ought to get off the road. They’re straight west about four more miles, and probably have someone watching.”

She nodded. “And?”

“Either use the griffins to scare them into disarray, or use them to make a quick escape. Also, I thought that cloak card you have could be an easy way to get him out of the wagon… assuming it’s strong enough magic to get him through the bars.”

She considered this in silence for a few moments before getting off the road.

“This goes wrong,” she said, “and we have to travel at least two weeks southwest, back to my people… you have to cross over the mountains, that’s another week. You make for the Parley to ask about a fae wizard who might be able to help you with your problem.”

“What do you mean, I cross the mountains?” he asked. “You mean we, right?”

She didn’t bother responding.

He spotted the first of the army’s outriders about a half hour later, prancing through the forest on a deer-like creature. A deer-shaped creature anyhow. Inspect told Corbin this was called a common billig, and aside from the rough size and shape, it wasn’t the same. First of all, portions of it randomly phased in and out of being invisible. So even though it had sort of fluid-looking skin with poison dart frog patterning of aqua and yellow, its skin, organs, bones, muscles and other features were constantly appearing and disappearing. The whole thing did blink out of existence for just a moment, before its skeleton, then its muscles, then its organs and finally its amphibious sort of skin came back. It also had long, straight horns the rider was using as handlebars, and these were bone white.

And these things were common to this world. He blew a long mental sigh, both loving and bewildered by the sheer bizarre wondrousness of this world.

As for the rider, this was a nellwynian on a special black saddle. Inspect told him this creature was not, in fact, a master of disguise, but a magical mishap. It was quite poisonous if you touched it or got its toxin into your bloodstream, and the invisibility power was beyond its control. Thus, the saddle had to be made of a particular material that wouldn’t slip or slide around on the creature’s moist back. The saddle also apparently secreted a substance that allowed the billig to stay in a constant wet (ish) amphibious state.

“Billigs are weird,” he sent down to Kyessy.

“Where?” she demanded, and angled to intercept as soon as he told her. She then cursed him when she figured out it was being ridden, as if she wouldn’t know that an outrider for the Fellwroth army commonly used these things to scout and hunt.

In a flash she had multiple arrows sticking out of the nellwynian soldier. She would have gotten a horn to his lips to signal the rest of the army when Corbin used Unerring Aim to crash into that horn, and almost take one of Kyessy’s arrows in the process.

A few more arrows later and the soldier fell off her mount. Luckily for them, the billig stuck around. Unluckily for them, the Fellwroth soldier’s uniform was both too small for her and covered in nellwynian blood. The billig was also too small to ride, but that was less problematic, as Kyessy had Longstrider equipped.

“Don’t kill me,” the little woman said, in between coughing up blood.

“You can’t kill her,” Corbin said.

“Circle of Ba’al, why the devil not?”

“Listen to the bird!”

“Yeah, listen to me!” Corbin agreed.

Kyessy’s face darkened even further… literally. Her skin went from a greenish brown to thundercloud gray. Corbin decided speed was of the essence here.

“She’ll just reappear where she slept and end up signaling her people. Just pin her to the tree. Tie her up.”

“I won’t though. Promise I’ll just stay here and not make a peep for a whole hour.”

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“Pff,” Corbin said. “I’ve seen that movie. You’ll end up killing Tom Hanks right at the end.”

“You got a strange bird, Ms. Tiefling. What’s a movie? And who’s Tom Hanks?”

Kyessy snorted while producing a length of hempen rope, except it wasn’t hempen, it was some other fibrous plant he’d never heard of. “Ugly. You can call him ugly. You can call him worse, I won’t scale up your punishment any.”

The wounded ranger glanced back and forth between Kyessy and Corbin several times, before offering up her hands to be tied.

Kyessy’s jaw flexed again and again before she nodded sharply. “This bloody portal,” she muttered. “The dead don’t stay gone.”

Meanwhile the nellwynian stared at her in utter horror, and some disbelief. Soon she was tied, then gagged, and the rope tied to the tree around seven feet up.

“If it takes her a half hour to free herself,” Kyessy said, “we’ll have plenty of time.”

“You hope.”

“That’s implied. It’s pretty much always implied.”

With that, she considered mounting the billig, saw it was much too small for her to ride, and instead removed the saddle. Then she gave its butt a swat with the saddle buckle, and watched it bound away into the forest.

From there, Kyessy made good time skulking through the forest, even with her Longstrider active and moving her 50% faster than normal. She bounded through the stands of pine and over the brown needles at a good clip. They came upon the army, a slow moving machine of combat, under an hour later, on the main road they’d left behind at the beginning of the whole shenanigans.

“That’s just like I remember it,” he said. “Wagons in the middle there, formations of troops on either side. Officers and commanders mounted on those poison dart deer.”

“Poison… dart… deer.” She seemed to be on the verge of asking, but the old Kyesiara squashed whatever feeble thing that passed for wonder in her soul for probably the millionth time.

She surveyed the scene, hopefully activating higher skills than he possessed. Them being in the forest augmented his attributes and skills, though Tracking, Trapping, Survival and such weren’t useful here. Thank the various other world gods he hadn’t needed to try and survive some inclement weather, given he couldn’t make a fire, build a shelter, or any of that.

“Stay on topic,” he told himself. “Okay, what do you say to a couple of instances the Terrifying Aura, and after that, I draw some of them off with Mimicry, then dive bomb them a few times with the vine wrap, set that on fire, badaboom badabing, solid distraction.” She didn’t respond, so he wrinkled up his imaginary human nose and surveyed the scene again. “Okay, instead, we’ll summon the griffins down, get some chaos rolling, I attack one of the leaders away from the prison wagon, you slip in amongst the chaos, grab the keys and free the guy. Summon the last griffins to get you away.”

Nothing.

“I can’t keep making up plans on my own,” he said.

 

You’ve failed a Perception (Survey) check. Your plans might’ve been good if you hadn’t already been spotted, flanked and your only ally captured.

 

He swore, loudly, and turned to find Kyessy staring at several glowing spear points.

 

 

***

 

Kyessy blamed him, and he couldn’t really blame her for blaming him. He was getting the idea that this was classic Kyesiara, ranger of the whatever mountains. It started like this:

“Why didn’t you tell me they had battle mages?”

“Because I don’t know what battle mages are or what they look like?”

“Not a great excuse.”

“I’m from a different world,” he retorted, “I think that’s a pretty great excuse. Heck, I don’t even know what any of the gods are called, or what their domains are.”

“You might as well start winging it down to the Parley,” she told him.

“Don’t show that card,” he said. “They’ll kill you, take it– wait. Can we just kill you and start this mission over?”

“Absolutely not. Do you have any idea how much dying… what was your expression? Oh… sucks the big one. Dying sucks the big one.”

“I’ve been lucky so far. Haven’t died yet.” He was pretty sure this was wrong, and he’d died a whole bunch of times. His mind that apparently shut the whole thing out though, perhaps to keep him from going completely mad. It was entirely possible amnesia was a blessing.

“Back on track,” he communicated to her through their thought connection. “When they sleep we have to figure out if that cloak will get you through the bars of the prison wagon.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“I will burn this whole army to the ground.”

He had Versatility, vine arrow, a flame strike… which for some reason now had an icon of a flaming arrow rather than a fireball. He brought up the window in his abilities menu and took a closer look. Yep, it was now called Fireburst Arrow and had the Wild aspect. The sidebar even explained that this card had been unaligned before, but had taken on the Wild aspect by remaining with this character for more than 48 hours.

He glanced down at the wagon and discovered her staring at him.

“What?”

“Nothing.” This was Kyessy for ‘definitely something’ and all he had to do was peel back a few layers through sheer force or guesswork in order to suss it out.

“Because you got captured? I’m sorry. It sucks the big one.”

“It’s… not that.”

“Because… I got you wrapped up in this whole wizard situation to begin with? Well I already apologized.”

She shook her head and turned her attention to the other occupants of the wagon. “Never mind.”

“Is it because I’m still here and willing to kill all these people to get you back out of there?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, in a tone that told him he was exactly right. That tone? Stoic, stony-faced obstinance… with a hint of a chink in that armor.

“You want me to start now? I don’t like our chances until they set up camp, but I will give it a go right now.”

Now he got a ghost of a smile out of her.

“Tonight,” she said.

“You got it.”

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