Hello everyone! It's me Mike again...I know it was forever since my last post, but I wanted to post my weekly email recaps here, so any who are interested can keep up on the crazy situations Carl keeps throwing our way!
This way he doesn't have to post it for me...although I do enjoy laziness to some extent.
Anyways, on to the recap!
So we start off with Old Man Goudy disabled before us. We take his pouch of powder and ask him about its contents. We discover a pouch of white deer fur, sewn shut with gold thread, at which point he tells us that it is a powder he paid too high a price for. Apparently, it allows you to see anything, anywhere, anytime, without knowing exactly where you’re looking…awesome stuff! However, he also told us a story of his past once I helped him feed Akili his “wife”, who was cursed for eating a magic River Dolphin. He told us a sob story of how she was jealous of him fathering all these children in his Pig were-form and that she wanted a child, so she performed this ritual to summon the powerful river spirit and mate with it….which involved eating the dolphin flesh. He further stated that the powder in the deer skin pouch was made from the ground bones of a river dolphin and their son was cursed by the dolphins as well, into being this hideous, mentally unstabled/delayed creature. Akili kept their son calm by using one of her pseudo pods that she shoots out from her flesh that has accumulated from her curse and mass eating to blobdom, apparently these attachments burrow into the brain of the person they are fired at and allow control. Also, Goudy said his mother was from a sacred temple on the island of the Bady Badys (the temple of the Bady Badys) and his father was a spirit from one of the protective statues on the temple. Apparently immortal until they leave the temple, she had left the temple to seek a life of mortality and the spirit had basically seduced her and gotten her pregnant. As it turns out….GOUDY IS A DAMN LIAR!
Argh! Was Antillia furious! The rest of the party was keeping Akili distracted while I was helping him grow food to feed her (because she is sustained by shadow food where as no other food will “fill” her hunger) and she was riding their son (the hideous river creature) and headed for the air ship where Goudy was located. Using our magical portal coins (amazing little ritual devices that work as a portal focus and are the size of a coin…in sets of 2) we were able to get ‘Tillia into the shadow world and bring him along with Bob’s portal ritual. Now…I was more than happy to help someone in need, who dropped a sob story on me of how oppressed they are by their insatiable wife and his crazy son and how it takes him FOREVER to grow the food etc. etc. etc. However, once we finished up with Akili and Goudy for the time being, we went down the river and thanks to Bob’s awesome idea to put his feet in the river water and try and commune with the spirits of the rivers, he managed to get us blessed by the light-hearted sprite of the river. This resulted in us having a bunch of the River Dolphins show up and bless our boat! Bob is the man! I should also mention that we discovered these dolphins while Hammer was using himself as a fishing lure and trudging the bottom of the river for useful items, while being tied to our boat. This to me, is an amazing use of the ability to go without breathing and I am just amazed at how useful it is! While trudging Hammer managed to uncover some spheres of black and white clay that were along the top of a low wall in the river. They were placed there long ago by what we think might be the ancestors of the “Song People” and are warding against the Bady Badys, which are apparently some sort of eye sphere abominations. They are spheres with 4 eyes circling the center of the creatures. They aren’t very big, but they incite one to remove their own eyes upon seeing them. So, of course the first reaction of the party is to now hang onto these warding devices. Through some Arcana checking we realized that the clay sphere was much newer than the trinkets inside warding against the Bady Badys and, to our amazement, something else! So with Bob’s ritual to look into the past of an object, we found out the trinkets inside are a preserved human eye from a powerful sorcerer (which is coated in a clay, shaped to look like an eye) and a small white, four-armed ape statue. (Oh Great. These guys again…) We found out the eye wards against the Bady Badys. The clay sphere is enchanted to be hardened (Clay Pot +2!) and is set to always return to its spot on the wall in the river. We couldn’t figure out what the white ape statue does, beyond the fact it wards against an ability. Having run into these apes before, we made a knowledgeable guess it wards against them returning from the dead, or perhaps keeps them from raising up the dead as stone guardians. What it does, none of us want to tear our eyes out…so Hammer immediately made a necklace out of his to hang around his neck stating, “If we encounter these things I’m going to hold it above my head and close my eyes.” Sensible to be sure…so we decided to hang onto them for now and hopefully we can learn more with further study.
So, I know I side tracked a bit…but back to the River Dolphins! So after Hammer kicked up these trinkets and notice the Dolphins we decided to have a chat with them. Antillia (thanks to her Hekura) was able to talk with them and they seemed super friendly, happy, joyful, and cherished nothing so much as their river. Similar to Unicorns (Unicorn of the Sea! Dolphin Safe!) in their care-free, happy-go-lucky manner it gave us a good idea why the curse upon Akili, Old Man Goudy, and their son was so bad. After chatting with them for a bit and them telling us they were blessing and guarding our boat, I asked them about Old Man Goudy. They immediately picked up on who I meant, saying that he had coerced a temple guardian to leave her temple and forced her to perform the ritual. He couldn’t produce an offspring powerful enough, so he used her love for him to get her to perform this horrible ritual. So, the River Dolphins, had all come together to curse all three of them. (Originally Old Man Goudy had said he was impotent and unable to bare offspring in human form) So they cursed him with impotence, her with the insatiable hunger, and their child so he was unable to grow into the powerful creature and fulfill the destiny Goudy wanted him to. They made their son mentally delayed and with the urge to kill his mother and father. This is why Akili was using her pseudo pod to control him and why Goudy strived so hard to keep her happy and fed. It created a dependency circle that I’m sure Goudy despises and hence his want for a cure to the situation. The deceiver. After finding this out Antillia was enraged! Hammer and Bob weren’t as surprised, and I have to say that deep down Antillia didn’t expect him to be honest, but he did teach her a weave she could use in the shadow world to make a structure that would stay the same shape and endure the shadow world’s influence without changing. This is a HUGE find for her. I suppose Antillia was angry with herself for being even slightly moved, more so than she was surprised at him being a liar.
At this revelation we were getting dangerously close to the joining of the two rivers into the one great river, where Bob had discovered a flow of chaotic energy created by a whirlpool at the center of the confluence. In the exact middle of this whirlpool was, go figure, Goudy’s tower home. Well, to displace the energy of the whirlpool and get us through it safely (because we wanted to show the River Dolphins we could navigate it without fear) Antillia retrofit some of our “Rail Cannon” insect legs to absorb energy and store it in the meteorite piece we use as a battery. She began sucking the chaotic energy in the area out of the whirlpool. Luck! It seemed to be working splendidly, however, it was settling the whirlpool and causing the Goudy tower to rock on its base. Apparently, the whirlpool’s forces were keeping his spire upright. So came the choice….suck out the energy, destroying the whirlpool forever, and topple Goudy’s tower….or stop and let the whirlpool continue, leaving his tower intact. Antillia was busy manning the battery and blasters, Bob was on the helm, and Hammer was keeping the rigging in line. All three of us looked around at one another, eyes making contact, measuring our own motivations. Hammer exclaimed, “FUCK YA! Screw that tower!”, Bob shrugged his shoulders and mentioned something along the lines of, “It’s an abomination of nature.” Trying to convince ‘Tillia that this action was more just, than not. Meanwhile, ‘Tillia was worried that she had just found the best teacher for some new knowledge of herbs, the shadow world, and overall new talents…and would already make him an unwelcome enemy.
Over went the tower, away went the whirlpool, and powered up was our meteorite battery to such an extent that we’ll not have to worry about running out anytime in the next forever. And thus…Antillia gained and lost a master within an hour…..
-Mike P.
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