wildestlogs | FLIGHT TO THE FORD

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FLIGHT TO THE FORD

The Palace is not a safe place. It's far too open and elegant, its walls broken down, its doors thrown open. There are far too many places their enemies can crawl in through. But there is an entirely different land on the other side of the palace, with an entirely different climate.

It's a land of cool temperate forests. It has a gnarled look to it. While things glow, they're knotty and thorny and a little dreary. Every so often a petrified troll can be found, covered in moss. These aren't like the trolls some of them saw frozen in Trollmarket - they're larger, uglier, and more menacing. But they're permanently frozen and no longer a danger.

Otherwise it's just misty forest. Mountains can be seen in the distance. In some areas, a road is visible, but it's perhaps not a safe place to travel, given they have enemies after them. The forest is a genuinely good place to hide. The Shadowhunters have given up chase, frightened off by the Nazgul.

And while the occasional Nazgul screech can be heard far off in the distance, they don't try to attack again.

But this is not because they've given up. They're simply waiting. Because some of the group have been poisoned by the shards of Morgul-blades. They're simply biding their time until those people turn into wraiths under their command.

They're biding their time until they can command them to destroy the group from within.

OOC DETAILS
❧ Quest magic: Players can handwave that the quest bond magic is tugging the group together, so they can regroup.

❧ Archivist Spells: There will be little eddies of magic left near the occasional little bit of human ruins. These spells run a little dark.

Death flashback spells: This spell causes a target to get stuck in a 15 second traumatic flashback of a death of a human warrior in the ancient realm of Arnor, a place that was once filled with people that were gradually culled by the dark forces of one o the Nazgul - the Witch-king. The target is completely distracted during this time. Archivists can bank up to 3 iterations of this spell. Casting the spell causes a temporary Necromancer style curse effect on the Archivist: eyes going completely black for 2 minutes, and plants withering and dying around the caster. The effects are not permanent.

❧ Network: Feel free to use the network in parallel with the log events. The log can be where characters regroup, get first aid, etc. A network post can go up to allow everyone to coordinate their efforts. The mods will leave that up to one of the players.

❧ Resources: As far as food goes, there are not many edible plants in the area, just the occasional edible root. Deer and rabbits can be found but they're rare. The occasional beehive can also be found but one has to somehow get rid of the bees or mop up honey that's dripped below it. There are not many supplies to be found here. However, there are a few plants and substances that can be used for first aid, if some among their number know about them:

Athelas: A sweet smelling green plant with small blue flowers. It can be used to cure the Black Breath by boiling it in water and allowing the victim to breathe in the vapors. It can also slow the transformation caused by Morgul-blades if the wound is washed by water that has had athelas boiled in it. This can also help relieve some of the pain and cold. It smells extremely fresh and sweet, often reminding people smelling of it specific scents that remind them of home. This means it can smell different ways to different people, such making one person smell apple orchards from back home, and another fresh cut grass after a rain. Use of this herb is more potent in the hands of a king. Thanks to the magic affecting the land, it will do so for any king.

Honey: This can offer some help for disinfecting puncture wounds, but works especially well for burns, like ones caused by the grazes of the Shadowhunters' angel blades.

Foxglove: A mashed poultice of this can be put on wounds to help with healing and prevent infection.

Pine sap: Can be used as a wound disinfectant.

Willow Bark: A tea made from willow bark can be used for pain but is not recommended if someone is still bleeding heavily, as it is also a blood thinner.

Poppies: There are a few small patches of poppies. Poppies can be used as an opioid pain reliever, by eating the seeds or making a tea out of them.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Huh." Dan settles into lying back down, thinking of how it felt like the Shadowhunters were targeting him in particular. He winces again because, as much as his leg's taken his attention, his back and shoulders hurt from falling off the horse, and he's got an ugly bruise forming on the side and back of his neck from where he was clotheslined at twenty miles an hour.

"When me and Alloran captured one of them, she told us that she was trying to accomplish the same goal as them Sisters back at the faire. I should probably let folks know that on the network." Dan looks like he'd rather eat broken glass than make a network announcement. "I've spent my whole career getting beat on and kicked around for being just a normal human and now someone's got a bead on me because I don't count as one. Don't seem right."

He doesn't want to wallow in self-pity. He tries to shake it off. "Who's Miranda? New girl?"

She sees that look, and says, "I might pass it on, at some point. 'bout that and the weapons bein' a possible problem. I know we're not the only ones with them."

It's not exactly a guarantee that she really will make an announcement, either. And she doesn't realise, of course, that some weapons are different from theirs. As far as she can tell, right now, Dan has a weapon with a downside, and she has one with only an upside; why would she think there was any difference in treatment for some magic weapon users compared to others?

Her ears shoot up as she remembers right, she hasn't actually mentioned Miranda in any of what she's said about home. "Oh! Aye, yeah, Miranda's new here, but uh, she's also from home? Not one of my team, but she helped train us an' goes into battles with us sometimes, just, y'know, not as a robot."

"Oh, that's great."

Certainly anyone who understands Cammie's world, whom Cammie has a positive relationship with, will be a good thing. It must be lonely and isolating, being the only person to come from such a high-tech setting, dumped here in the wilderness and being forced into relying on others. Dan gets it. He has to rely on others to read for him, and it means he's always uneasy and insecure.

"You ought to introduce us. I always love meeting new folks."

Cammie flashes a smile. "Definitely I should. She's great, Miranda; I once carried her into a fight on my shoulder when I was in my Holon an' it was her idea. She plays all serious professional sometimes but she's got a chaotic streak, I know it."

They've not been super close, she's not someone Cammie gets chance to just hang with, considering they don't operate out of the Anvil much these days, but she likes her. And it's nice to have someone here from home.

"Apparently last she knew, I was off on the last mission I remember, so, sounds like life back home hasn't moved on without me."

She looks tangibly relieved by that. That was one of her biggest fears about home, really.

"Love me a good chaotic streak. You know, what some people call chaotic, I just call adaptable." Dan grins. It's good, taking his mind off his leg, hers off her own injury.

That grin softens from something wild into something warmer. "Good. I'm glad it'll still be waiting for you there."

Dan has no intention on returning to his home, because there's nothing left there. If his daughter were still alive, he'd be worried sick, but...

He isn't in any rush to go back.

She snickers at that, "Gotta agree with that. Mission we did that on was adjustin' our plans last second, same one I suggested Kazu came through the wall like the Kool-Aid man."

Was it a serious mission? Yes. Did they end up choosing some chaotic methods of entry when just blowing the place to hell became unviable? Also yes.

"Miranda an' me will have some wild stories to tell, that's for sure. Confuse the hell out of the others."

"I can't wait to hear them. Sure they'll confuse me, too, but you always been good at giving me context when I ask for it."

He closes his eyes and tries to feel for the plushness of the moss, take his mind off the things that hurt. He gets his flask out and takes a drink.

"Did I ever tell you I once saved a party full of people from certain death by serenading a dragon with a piano?"

That provokes a surprised little snort out of Cammie, and she looks over at him with ears lopsided and a curious expression. Dan’s stories are equally wild and/or curious to her as hers likely are to him.

“Cannae say that you have. What happened there? Dragon was gonna kill some folks but you were just that good a player?”

"Something like that. We were on a case, me and some colleagues, and we ended up in a fancy party - very fish out of water for me, but my colleagues all came from money, so they blended right in. And we found out right quick that it wasn't a party, it was a feeding ground for the dragon that lived below the mountain. Some folks were going to sacrifice everyone there to it."

Dan settles back, arms behind his head, stretching out.

"Problem is, we didn't put those pieces together until the mountain had already started to rumble, and the drinks there were all laced with sedative to make sure no one left the party. So, I can handle my sedatives, so I'm conscious, and two of my colleagues had enough wherewithal to magic their way back to sobriety, but there's an entire party full of people in this mansion about to get ate up.

"So, I had one of my colleagues cast a spell that amplified all the sound in the room, and I can speak Dragon. Common Tongue, actually." Dan says something in a rough, guttural, hissing language to demonstrate. "So I get on the piano and I tell the dragon that if she wants dinner and a show, she needs to have the show first. I can't very well play from inside her stomach.

"As luck would have it, the dragon was a fan of music, and she paused long enough - even though she was hungry - to let me help her compose a song about how much she wanted to eat us. A little ragtime number. And that bought us enough time that my colleagues got all the party people out."

Dan smiles. This is one of his better stories. Everyone lived. No one was traumatized. It's the reason he got into hunting monsters.

“Okay, that’s brilliant. The quick thinkin’ part, obviously not the y’know, people nearly bein’ sacrificed as a dragon’s dinner part. Dinner and a show…”

Everyone being fine after that story makes her feel okay snickering to herself at the mental image of Dan at a piano writing a song with a dragon, being so convincing and entertaining that she was distracted enough to not stop a whole party of people being rescued.

"You know, that dragon weren't a half-bad singer. Needed some polishing as a lyricist, though." Dan laughs and, in his wheezy, raspy two-tone range, starts to sing, "eat them in packs of all alones, love to eat humans meat and bones..."

The wide grin betrays how silly he finds this grotesque tale.

Cammie dissolves from snickering into actual laughter, which jolts her side something fierce and makes her wince, but she can't actually bring herself to care much. It's nice to laugh, after the day today turned into.

"Dinnae ken what ye mean, that's— that's artful," she gets out before laughing again; oh yeah, that could sure do with some polishing, "true genius."

"Eat them for meals or just for snacks, eats their thighs, kidneys and backs," Dan continues, then starts laughing himself, lacing his fingers over his stomach.

"It's probably my favorite little anecdote from my work. Oh, and then to get the last little few people out, we piled them on top of the piano and I had to keep playing while we used it to wheel everyone out. Never discount the power of music."

Cammie would be doubling over if she wasn't already folded in half, knees up. As it is her head just falls against her knees, her shoulders shaking with her laughing. "Now that is a fuckin' amazing mental image."

"Careful, careful, don't pop your stitches," Dan teases, beaming. "See, even life-or-death situations got some silver linings."

"I'm tryin' not to," she says still through laughter, lifting her head and blowing some hair out of her face. She mimes rubbing her side, but she's fine, it just aches. "Those kindsa life or death stories are the best ones. High stake humour. Christ."

Dan keeps smiling, taking another drink from his flask; the alcohol is starting to take the worst of the pain off his leg, but Christ, a big gash, turned into a big, deep burn, hurts like hell. He needs something to occupy his mind, and conversation with Cammie is great for that.

"Tell me your favorite war story."

"Oh, man. Ye've heard the one of 'em, the whole wall-bustin' one, but..."

Her ears cock sideways as she thinks; a lot of the full-on battlefield stuff is downright boring or just stressful, but that's not the only kind of mission they've ever done.

"Okay, so, we were runnin' this mission along the 88th meridian, down in Alabama, I think. Big ol' hurricane, worst on record, yadda yadda, same old story. We'd been in a couple fights, Union'd tried to hack my brain, it was a whole thing. I beat 'em back. Teaches them to mess with the best hacker the Polity has."

It's not tooting her own horn if it's true. She's been told that before.

"But Chase still didnae want me goin' right back into a fight after that, so, he sent me an' Kazu off to help with some rescue efforts. Lots of flooding, thanks to the storm. Needed to get people to safety, both 'cause of that an' 'cause if we didn't, they might've been collateral if the Union ran their way.

"Kazu's hands were bigger so he could carry more adults, so I mostly helped the kids. You shoulda seen the look on some of their faces when giant mecha came to their rescue. Lit up like it was Christmas mornin'. I let at least one of 'em ride on my head 'cause he promised he could hold on. Lookin' like a giant rabbit, like me, an' an old school anime hero, like Kazu does in his, an' you can almost turn it into a game for them. Keep 'em happy.

"But the funniest bit was Kazu rescuin' this cow that floated past. He reached out to grab it before he even realised what it was and it mooed so fuckin' indignantly at him for the crime of bein' picked up. He put it down on land an' it immediately ended up running back into the water, he had to try three times before the people managed to calm it down. He was so confused, an' he blushed like mad when I mentioned it to the others later."

That gets plenty of mirth out of Dan, picturing that cow, picturing that kid on Cammie's armor, picturing Cammie's skills being used for something as entirely wholesome as a rescue instead of for war.

"Speaking as a farm boy, trust me, cattle are dumb as hell. Reckon it's a miracle the poor thing was smart enough to float." The fond memory of working with cows makes him laugh harder. "That's the ideal kind of mission for me, honestly. Search and rescue."

"I need to remember an' tell him that. Him an' Val got into a weird debate about if cows like swimming after, I dinnae even know what that was about."

She snickers remembering it; their old married couple friendly bickering is one of many signs of those two's closeness.

"We get to do a fair bit of it, though it's mostly refugee pick-ups. That was the first really hands-on rescue we've done, usually we're just the firepower keepin' the Union from being arseholes at the pick-up sites. Nice change of pace."

"Yeah, I reckon so. I mostly do, ah...I do a lot of rescue, but usually it's rescuing from someone in particular, not from a natural disaster, so it comes to blows a lot. I like to try and make it into a negotiation, you know, convince a monster they don't gotta eat a human, keep humans from killing monsters in retaliation."

He sighs; it's wistful but not necessarily sad. "I miss that work."

Cammie nods with understanding. "Tryna get out of it with everyone alive, least harm done, yeah?"

Yeah, that's exactly what she'd expect from Dan, based on what she remembers from the rig and everything they've talked about here. And it's an approach she can certainly agree with. As much as she has killed a lot of people, war and all, she really does wish she didn't have to. She has to switch off caring so much when she's on the battlefield, imminent danger makes that necessary, but it doesn't change her feelings off the battlefield.

Even back in the city just now, she didn't kill any of the Shadowhunters coming after her. She just couldn't bring herself to. Not when they could just be knocked out.

"S'good work. Savin' as many people as possible's always a good feelin'."

"Yeah." He doesn't feel like he's had that feeling much here, aside from at the faire. He got sixteen folks out, although he thinks two of them probably didn't make it. But it's been a few weeks since then, when he's been used to churning through a case a week back home, flitting between hotspots of monster activity.

"Is it what you'd want to do, if the war where you're from ends?"

"Maybe? I think..." She pauses, ears tilting again, chewing her cheek as she thinks. "I think I wanna try an' help finish what Doc Weller started. gen:LOCK wasn't originally designed for war. He designed it to be somethin' more than a weapon. Had all these ideas about it expandin' communications, bein' a new stage of humanity's evolution, all that. But the war was on, an' so..."

She gestures vaguely. In a time of war, there's no time or budget for peaceful things. Anything that can be weaponised is weaponised.

"An' I'm gettin' a decent understandin' of the tech, working on it the way I do. Think maybe I could help expand compatibility, make the tech... smaller. Easier to use as somethin' besides a weapon. Holons are huge, y'know, 'cause the brains are so big. If you could make 'em smaller... well, poor Chase'd be able to actually interact with us as more than a hologram, again. The Holon he's stuck in otherwise is too big to do normal people stuff with his physical form."

She shrugs. She's had a lot of thoughts about how gen:LOCK could be expanded upon, improved. Made into something closer to what Weller wanted it to be. gen:LOCK can help people. Just in a different way.

"I reckon you'd be great at that." Dan says that as a friend, absent any patronizing sense of trying to boost a child up - even if he is starting to feel himself, through his mentor-like role with Cammie and just through getting to know her, think of her like a little sister of sorts. At least, someone whom he wants to see flourish and grow, whom he has an investment in supporting in that endeavor.

Dan doesn't want to attach to anyone, and yet he's the sort of person who can't help but bond with others.

"You know, even for someone who ain't never touched a computer...my phone's got voice control on it, you know, Siri. Someone installed her for me a few years ago and it honest to God changed my life. I can get directions places, I can call folks, I can send them messages without having to call. If that's just what I can get from a little robot on my phone, I can't hardly imagine what the technology in your world could do for folks like me. Folks who can't read."

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