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The Improbable Adventures of Corvella Greyrose: Day Five


(continued from part four, upthread!)




DAY FIVE:

Strange dreams returned last night, along with the piercing headache I'd been suffering when I first awoke in the nautiloid. In my nocturnal journeys, I'd seen myself commanding lesser creatures and watching them bow to my will. I'd seen an indistinct yet compelling figure calling to me, and then she (I think?) embraced me, and I felt a sense of incredible comfort. I'd seen myself descend beneath the earth, down deep into places of oppressive darkness, where a most improbable tower stood sentinel over an inky-black lake. That place awaited me, and within I would find riches and arcane power.

When I finally rose from my restless slumber, I knew that these were no mere dreams. Something has happened to me aboard that ship of horrors, and now I am connected to . . . I don't know. A being? A force? Some collective mind? In the form of dreams, it is trying to communicate with me, whatever IT is. I need to seek out the source of this feeling, I require answers and, hopefully, an end to this wretched headache.

The little ruin I'd been focused on for the last couple of days was forgotten. I had to find grander things, I had to delve deeper. Much deeper. Perhaps I'll return to this ruin later, but for now it seems of little importance. If I close my eyes and press my fingertips to my temples, I can almost hear a voice, whispering ever-so-faint indecipherabilities. And it comes from the West. So that is the direction that I resolved to wander.







Heading further up the hill away from the river, looking for a good path to take me beyond the wreckage of the ghaik vessel, I came upon two curious-looking beings with red skin and devilish horns. They looked like fiends of some sort, but were wearing normal clothes and had humanish faces. There was a tickle in the back of my mind, as though I should have known what their species was called, but that knowledge is lost like most of my memories. The pair was talking about what they were going to do with some creature they'd apparently caught in a cage. They hadn't noticed me, as I was moving quietly and sticking to the shadows. I was tempted to take a peek in their pockets, just to make sure they weren't carrying anything harmful, but it seemed a bit dangerous, so I resisted the urge.

I was quite intrigued though, so I threw caution to the wind, incanted a quick Friends cantrip upon the closer of the two, and approached openly. As I got closer, I was surprised to see that in the hanging cage before us was Mean Green herself! The angry woman from the ship who had so kindly donated her fancy armor and sword to my collection looked no less furious now, and as she stared daggers at me, my headache spiked for a moment and I heard the green woman's voice in my mind, ordering me (quite impolitely) to get rid of the two devil people.

Look, journal, I don't like to think of myself as a "liar" exactly. I just present surgical pieces of the truth, or some POSSIBLE truth, in a way that causes people to think what they SHOULD think. What would be best for EVERYONE, for them to think. And often they have these inconvenient IDEAS which prevent them from thinking what I (and the world, including all of the little children) need them to. I just FREE them from those unfortunate ideas. For the children. That's all. Now that THAT'S clear, we can move on with the story.

So, summoning forth my most dramatic tone, I told the fiend-man that the entity in the cage was exceptionally dangerous, but that I knew how to handle it. For their safety, they should get out of there and leave it to me. Aided by my cantrip, my words found purchase in their minds, and they made ready to depart. They also told me that they had some kind of camp further up the hill, and that someone named "Nettie" was a healer there, if I needed help. As they left, somehow the female devilkin (I guess?) managed to misplace a scroll case with three scrolls in it. Wouldn't you know, by the time I noticed that it had fallen into my own Haversack, they were already too far away to catch.

Then they were gone, leaving me alone with an unpleasant lady in a cage. (She looked pretty pathetic in there, without her armor, and I did feel bad for her, despite her vituperative demeanor.) She demanded I free her, to which I quite reasonably pointed out that saying "please" would be good manners in this instance, to which she responded with what I can only assume is a dire curse in her native tongue. She was glaring at me hard enough to crush rocks, and my headache was only intensifying the longer I was near her, so I decided that the best thing for everyone involved was for me to leave quickly, and allow Mean Green some more time in contemplative retreat above the ground.

Moving on, I began to hear shouting voices up ahead. Before me rose a towering natural stone wall, and set into it was a huge wooden gate, covered in vibrant green vines. Some sort of ruckus was taking place at the gate, so I scampered up a nearby outcropping of rocks to hide and watch what was going on. Apparently a group of human adventurers were being pursued by a band of goblins, and wished very sincerely to be let past the gate. A few more of those horned fiendish-looking people stood atop the wall, and one of them (I think I heard him called "Zevlor"?) seemed very displeased by the whole situation. Then a large band of goblins, along with a massive wolf-like creature, came running in from the west, launching arrows at the defenders of the wall. The devil people DID try to open the gate for the humans, but it seemed to be an impossible task while simultaneously having arrows enter their bodies.

And so the battle was joined. I thought that I was in a safe place atop my little hill, but it turns out that I was wrong about that. Almost fatally wrong, as one of the bow-wielding little gobbos spotted me and sent an arrow flying in my direction. A vague memory surfaced of learning about a spell in school that could instantly erect a mystical shield in front of you, but I'd chosen to study something else instead. I really wish I'd known that Shield spell, let me tell you. Have you ever been shot with an arrow? (I'm asking a journal if it's ever . . . nevermind.) Well, it REALLY hurts!

The jagged, undoubtedly filthy, little thing jammed itself into my upper chest, punching through my thin robe with ease. I nearly passed out at that moment from the pain and shock of it, and I think it only missed my heart by an inch. I very well could have died from that injury, and don't know how I managed to survive, but needless to say, I screamed through the pain and ran as fast as I could away from there. No stopping to cast spells, just blind, frenzied retreat, until I found a better place to hide, safely out of bowshot range. I could still hear the battle raging behind me, the vicious yells of the goblins, the howl of their monstrous canine, the desperate shouts of the humans. I cared about none of it. I was on death's door myself, and all I knew in the world was that I needed to get away, get away, get away.

When I finally reached a safe distance from the site of the combat, I set to tending my wound as best I could. Pulling the arrow out was as awful a thing as I can remember having experienced in my life, and then there was a lot of blood. I cleaned the hole in my body, and tore off a bit of one of my sleeves to bandage it. Once that was done, I realized I was starving, so I wolfed down an entire loaf of somewhat stale, crusty sourdough bread. Eating made me feel so much better! It was like I could feel the energy from the food coursing through my body. I'm not going to say that eating food healed my wound, that would be ridiculous. But it did make me feel a lot more ready to keep moving.

Wanting to get to a safe place where none of the goblins would find me, and not yet wanting to travel down the path they'd come from (in case more were on the way), I climbed up a steep hillside overlooking the trail. Every foot of altitude gained was agony, due to my injury, but the energy from the bread really seemed to be keeping me going nicely. At the top, I found a wooden ladder, leading up to some kind of platform of logs above. I wasn't about to climb up into some kind of trap, so I called forth Nevermore and sent him up to scout things out. He found no living creatures up on the plateau, merely an abandoned camp of some kind with what seemed to be a watch post constructed atop the hill. So it seemed to be safe.

I climbed up, slowly and carefully, and looked around the area. I found another, higher platform, but there was nothing on it. Between the two platforms was a long-cold fire pit, and enough wood around to build and light a new campfire. Splayed out on the ground next to the pit was a sun-bleached human skeleton, and inside its ribcage I saw something special. The tingle of magic tickled my fingers as I picked up another amulet, grimy and rusted, but definitely enchanted. I could make out a symbol on the necklace, that of a moon and harp. I'd seen this symbol before, in those papers that spoke of a group called Harpers that I'd found in a hidden cache. This must have been one of their camps, whoever they were. What an unlikely place to find another artifact! Even half-dead and with a splitting headache, my keen archaeological senses continue to serve me well. No object of magic can hide from Corvella the Pincushion!

I also noticed a suspicious pile of rocks a short distance away from the fire pit. Looking within, I found a hollow filled with large, disgusting spiders, which I was immediately revolted by. But there was ALSO a bag in there, and something gleamed from within its partially-open mouth. I really didn't want to touch those spiders, or Sehanine forbid, get any of them ON me. But come on, journal. Do you think I could have POSSIBLY left that bag there, untouched? Obviously not.






After studying the foul little beasts for a bit, I took a deep breath, held it, and darted my hand in between approximately 10,000 twitching legs to grab the pouch and tear it free, all without getting so much as a single spider on me in the process. This is master-level archaeology, here. Even the spiders looked impressed. (All right, I could have been imagining that.) Inside my newest acquisition was some gold coins, and a very strange (and heavy) egg. I decided to hold onto it and study it further, later on. Maybe that was a bad idea, maybe something horrific is going to hatch out of it one unexpected day and eat my face off, but my curiosity outweighs my sense of self-preservation sometimes. Well, a lot of the time. Okay, virtually all the time.

I was feeling pretty tired and miserable by this point. The pain radiating from my chest wound seemed to be having an ever-escalating war with the pain throbbing in my head, to determine which of them would torment me more. All of that hard running and climbing had really drained me as well. The thought of traveling back to the nearest rune circle to get to my regular camp was unpleasant enough to bring tears to my eyes, in my current state. So I decided just to use this little abandoned camp for the night, and hopefully I'll feel better in the morning.

Since I'm not at my normal camp, and I'm in a lot of pain, I'm not going to bother with inventory tonight. I'm just going to curl up into a little ball on top of this barren hill and try to sleep. Tomorrow will be better. Something good is waiting for me. It has to be.




OOC Part:

DEATH COUNT: 2

Now, once again, with pictures!

That goblin shot poor Corvella down to ONE hit point. Definitely could have been a death, there. I guess I wasn't cautious enough.

I'm completely bypassing the Grove for now, I want to get into the Underdark as quickly as possible. Hopefully next day I at least get to the goblin vendor at the camp.

The way I do this, by the way, is I play a little bit, then write, then play a little bit more, then write, until I either have a good in-game reason to camp, or I feel like the writing has reached a good length and I don't want it to get too long.



Stay tuned for the next part, coming further down the thread soon!