DreamLyrics™ Play-by-Post Forums Fantasy RRL: Rise of the Rune Lords - Burnt Offerings RRL: Trouble At The Rusty Dragon

((OOC Cat will go with Aendell. Happy to write it or skip ahead. Whichever.))

Aendell

Returning the boy to his parents, making sure to simultaneously offer him praise for his bravery and scolding him for his foolishness, he looks in town for Zak and Cat and lets them know what is happening, asking them if they want to come and look into the Goblin issue thru the caves.

Catalena

"Thank Desna you all were able to find that boy," Cat replied. "So there is now a wounded goblin that escaped into some caves and you plan to pursue it? That seems wise. We don't want it popping up near where it might hurt someone else. I'll come along."

Aendell

"Coral and Selaim are tracking it." Turing to Zak he asks, "Are you coming as well?"

((OOC Zak should be standing right next to her from last post.))

OK. Edited.

“Absolutely. Following along.”

Selaim

She keeps an eye out as they wait for the rest of the group to arrive.

Coral

As she lay on the ground with her eyes still closed, she asked, "Are they here yet?"

Aendell

Turning around he leads the group back to the beach to where Selaim and Coral are waiting.

Catalena

"Did you find the goblin?" Cat asked. "It had gone into some caves I heard?"

Aendell doesn't find the pair on the beach. Though he does find a marker pointing to which of the caves they went through.

Soon enough though they find their way to the bluff and find them lounging up there in the tall grass.

((OOC Is "the bluff" just the higher ground where Sandpoint is? And the woods are the forest to the northeast?))

[ooc It is a small cluster of woods on the seaside portion of the coast but not where the glassworks is located.]

Selaim

"Oh good you found the trail I left." Selaim said as they came out of the exit.

Nudging Coral's foot with her toe, "Coral... wake up Aendell and the others are here."

The bluff is fairly berefit of trees except the little copse where the cave exit is. They can see that the blood trail which is dwindling heads back towards the cemetery end of town and the major woods proper, where they went hunting with the Lord who paid them very well.

The trail still indicates that the little foe was running at a pretty good clip, given how far apart the tracks are located. They imagine they are about half a day behind the beast at this point.

Aendell

Looking at the blood trail, he says to the others, "Shall we?" He points to the direction the trail is leading.

Coral

She got up with the nudge to her foot. "I was awake," she claimed.

She looked the way Aendell was pointing. "Let's go."

Catalena

Catalena looked toward the forest to the east.

"There are at least five full tribes of goblins around Sandpoint," she said. "Usually folks don't venture out into their territory. If this fellow bleeding had a secret path down to the beach, he's probably Seven Tooth tribe. They base out of Shank's Wood, a couple of miles up the coastline. They scavenge Junk Beach and don't usually make a nuisance of themselves."

She looked skeptical. "If he's already made the treeline, unless he collapses from blood loss, I don't know that we'd catch up to him. Or if we did, it would be with the rest of his tribe around him. If you're all prepared for that, then I suppose I should go with you. But it might be better to just get the town to seal up this passage from both ends and consider him no longer a direct threat."

Coral

She looked at Catalena blankly.

"what? because the goblins failed to overwhelm the town this time round, and because some child-snatching miscreant has reached some arbitrary tree line we should leave them alone?"

"F*** that!" she extorted.

"We need to show them that coming to town is a bad plan - a plan to be forgotten for at least a a generation"

Aendell

His lip quirks up in a small smile at Coral's enthusiasm. "Before we go charging in to a Goblin Tribe's camp we should probably know a bit more. Like how many there are and how they are situated. Dealing with 10 or 15 Goblins is not the same as dealing with 100 or more." He points at the track. "But there is still a chance this one will slow down or collapse from blood loss so I say we keep going until we learn enough that the wiser course is to turn around."

Catalena

Cat looked at Coral and replied as she headed for the forest along with them, "It's my job to protect the town. That doesn't mean going off and kicking a hornets nest without understanding what is going on. Aendell's right. As I told you all on the day of the Festival, it wasn't just one goblin tribe that had warriors attack the town, it was five. And they hate each other usually. The Seven Tooths don't even harass travelers. They usually just scavenge our trash and mind their own business. And it certainly wasn't entire tribes that attacked. If there were, we might have been wiped out. It was maybe twenty? Twenty-five? Of those, a handful were from the tribe you're proposing to storm in with just the five of us and what... eradicate them all?"

[Sorry! I blame the wine!]

Coral

"Of course we are not going to able to eradicate them all," she replied to Catalena.

"But we have to show that there are consequences, and we have to do it soon enough that it is clearly retribution linked to the attack on the town."

Catalena

Cat shrugged. "I suppose..." she replied. "We don't even know that the ones who attacked were doing so on behalf of the tribe. And all the ones who attacked are dead except this one, I guess, and any that were mucking around in the boneyard. I'm no fan of the vicious little buggers, but if there's to be a retaliatory military strike on behalf of Sandpoint, I don't think its you or I who should be deciding that."

She paused in her stride and said, "Oh, of course!"

Reaching into her belt pouch she pulled out her Harrow deck. She riffled through the deck expertly and asked, "Desna, Queen of the North Star, Resplendent Goddess of Fortune, please reveal your wisdom in regard to our current endeavor."

She pulled a card with a portrait of a well-dressed crocodile in a top hat and coat, sipping tea with opposite-facing hands, seated atop a crouched-over naked man like a hassock.

"The Rakshasa," she mused aloud. "Signifying control by a powerful, malevolent intelligence. That doesn't seem very gobliny to me. It also could mean enslavement of some kind, which I wouldn't put past them but they're usually far too chaotic."