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.

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Ask the mods anything here!

What counts as a king? Alloran's a war-prince, but for him that's a merit-based military rank that doesn't mean succession or particular genetics. (also he's disgraced and long stripped of authority but the title's still there)

Are the Nazgul following? Can they be seen from the air?

Probably something more in the vein of a leadership with some kind of secession though it can be a little flexible. Like, for instance, Nog is the son of the Grand Nagus, and his dad was chosen as a successor to the last Nagus. Even if he's not necessarily going to inherit it, and it doesn't follow a blood line, that's close enough to classic royalty he'd probably register as a prince. (Which might get some slightly better effectiveness out of the athelas but not as much as a king.)

But war-princes are just a name for military rank so that probably wouldn't qualify.

The Nazgul are kind of hiding off in the wilderness and can't be seen. Only occasionally heard calling out to each other. They're waiting for the Morgul-bladed people to succumb and turn into wraiths.

So, about archivist magic.

When they archive some of the magic they find in these locations, do they figure out about the harmful effects the magic may have? Or is it the sort of thing they'd find out only when they use the magic?

I. A Hard Leg of the Journey (for Elle)

"Don't like the sound of that," Dan says quietly, listening to a Nazgul's distant screech bouncing around between the trees. He was lucky enough not to get too close to them back in the ruined city, and he's been able to tell from the ashen faces and barely-suppressed flinches of his compatriots what a blessing that was. The trees feel like a porous, insufficient barrier, jailer's bars against the evil sound cutting through the mist, and the echoes make it hard to tell how far out the Nazgul are beyond "at least a thousand yards."

Not far enough out for comfort.

For his part, Dan's looked better. He's pale, and his hands shake when he's not in the middle of doing something with them. He's in enough pain that he feels feverish, which he suspects is the prelude to an actual, infection-based fever if he doesn't get some wound care to the massive slash across his thigh. He's managed to get off his horse, who's tied up about forty yards yonder, and stagger over to a soft patch of pine needles and moss, where he can chip in on the network to offer advice for herbal remedies and survival skills, but he couldn't crawl much further than that.

"Alright, what are we going to do with you?" He says after getting off the network, looking at the cauterized wound across his quad and inner thigh. He takes a moment to close his eyes, dizzy, and then gets to digging through the supplies on his person for a waterskin to slake his thirst.

II. Post-Care Blues (Open to All)

Sleep doesn't come easy, what with the combination of pain and the Nazgul screams in the distance. Rest may be nature's curative, but it's also elusive when one's hair is standing on end from unease every three minutes.

Normally, Dan would be pacing to work off nervous energy, but he can't do that with his leg all mauled, and he wants to keep his wits about him in case they're abruptly attacked, so he isn't drinking much. He's been trying not to bite his hands. He doesn't have cigarettes, so he's chewing some of the tobacco leaves he got from the marketplace, but that's turning his stomach.

There's so much that needs doing, and he's so unable to do most of those things. He starts to whittle at a piece of driftwood that got belched up from the river nearby.

Elle's been, unsurprisingly, making the rounds and checking on people. She noticed Dan's absence from the main group pretty quickly, but it didn't take her long to track his scent (worryingly tinged with blood, burnt flesh, and something that reminded her far too much of Wyrm taint).

"Dan?" she calls out as she gets near. She saw his horse tied up a little ways back, which she gave a wide berth so as not to scare her, but has yet to see him yet.

When she does stumble upon him, she immediately gasps and crouches down next to him.

"Shit. What happened?"

It's up to you! You can either have them be oblivious or maybe the magic itself gives them a little instinct about the effect.

"A case of the Mondays happened," he says, meeting her with a weary smile. "One of those tattooed folks cut my leg open, and that Dean Winchester kid saved my life cauterizing it."

Elle's high up on Dan's list of people he's happy to see; he had no real concerns that she wouldn't make it out of the scrap, but he remembers her flashbacks to her brother's death at the nightrenders' beckoning. He's sure that if she got caught in the Shadowhunters' nets or anywhere near the Nazguls, those memories would burble up like from a backed-up sink.

"You holding up okay?" Dan takes a drink of water, then braces to try and pour liquor from his flask onto his injury - but no, the magic that keeps it always full has put certain limitations on how he uses it, and wound care trespasses those. "I could use some help with this."

Elle didn't get caught in another silver net, but the Nazgul's cry absolutely dredged up unpleasant memories. She'll probably have a moment about it later. For now, she's focused on helping other people.

"I'm good," she says, meaning uninjured and functional. "I don't think that that would be sterile anyway," she remarks as he fails to clean his injury.

She moves to get a closer look at his injury. That Winchester guy did a good job, almost professional-looking. The burn still looks like shit, but that's to be expected.

"There's a beehive right over there," she points up a tree a half-dozen yards away. "Wanna bet whether supernatural Rage scares them off, too?" she jokes.

She's pretty sure she saw some poppies as she made her way through the forest. She feels... uncomfortable at the idea of giving Dan (or anyone, really) opioids, but this situation may call for stronger pain relief than whatever's in Dan's flask can give.

Edited 2022-01-04 08:44 (UTC)

He raises an eyebrow at her I'm good, but he isn't going to press what she doesn't want to divulge.

"I was shooting for rubbing alcohol. It turns into whatever liquor I want." He sniffs the rim, gives her a shrug and a half-smile like not half bad. He leans back against the moss-covered rock he's dragged himself to. "Proof the Green wants me to be happy, I reckon."

He shifts his position so she can get a closer look at the injury. Without magic, it's ugly enough that it'll take a long time to heal, and he can anticipate worse than a nasty scar haunting him for the rest of his life.

"If you want to try it out..." He doesn't want her to get stung up on his behalf. He winces and grinds his teeth as a pang goes up his leg and hip. "I hear if you treat bees like just folks, they don't sting you none. Just pretend you're on your way to the grocery store to grab some honey."

"It may surprise you, but I don't exactly know what I'm doing," she says as she walks to the bottom of the tree.

She extends her claws and leaps, digging into the bark to aid her climb.

Surely enough, an entire swarm of bees awakens and leaves the hives, hovering for a moment. She cautiously climbs closer, and the entire swarm seems to flinch back, then flies away in a panic.

She feels kind of bad, to be honest.

Instead of taking the whole hive, she just rips off a piece. Hopefully the bees will come back and rebuild. She doesn't want to have run them out of their home.

She drops back to the ground and goes back over to Dan.

"Mission success, I guess?" even Elle sounds unsure of what just happened.

He watches the bees rise, thinking of the nymphs back home, the monsters whose presence is so often precipitated by beautiful storms of insects, whose deaths are announced by bees and butterflies plummeting to the ground. He knows that taking honey from the bees won't hurt them, but it is a reminder of how much at the mercy of nature they are, how generous nature is with them.

He'll have to ask Elle if her people have any rites they give to the earth when they take from it, the same way as he does his little rites when he hunts or collects stashes of herbs.

"They'll come home soon," he reassures her when she returns. He's breathing shallowly. "You done good."

Elle raises what would be an eyebrow, if she were in Homid, at his praise and reassurance.

"Don't do that," she scolds softly. She doesn't need to be handled, especially not right now. Not when Dan's injured like this.

She shifts into Homid. Her borrowed T-shirt's still intact, but her skirt is little more than a glorified belt with two pockets hanging from the sides. Her underwear is near completely exposed.

If she feels any embarrassment or modesty, she doesn't show it as she transfers the contents of one pocket to the other and rips the empty one off, placing the honeycomb inside.

She crouches next to Dan. "Anything we need to do before I do this?" she holds up the pocket that's now beginning to leak honey.

“Alright.”

He raises a hand in a little apologetic gesture, still smiling. His sister was smiling when she died, trying to reassure her little brother that it didn’t hurt too bad. He’s not dying, just in deep pain, but the impulse is the same, moving the locus of concern from himself to someone else, scrambling into that position of caretaker when hurt has made it hard to think straight enough to remember who he is.

If Elle isn’t bothered by the tattered clothes, he isn’t going to call attention to it. There are more pressing matters, and he gets his knife and cuts away his own pant leg to give her a clearer space to work.

“Well, Winchester told me knock-knock jokes.” He takes a drink of alcohol, then of water. “I’m ready. Once you get it disinfected, I got some spare clothes in Concrete Blonde’s saddle that can make a bandage, a pot to boil water in too.”

He pauses.

“I know she’s spooked of you, but if you can help me limp on back over there I can keep her calm.”

Edited 2022-01-04 11:28 (UTC)

She gives him a slight smile to show that she's not upset.

"I saw poppies nearby, too. We can get you some pain relief, if you want it," she's a little hesitant to offer, but leaving Dan in pain like this feels inhumane.

She starts squeezing the honeycomb through the fabric of the pocket, like a sieve. Honey begins to drip out as the honeycomb is crushed, landing on Dan's wound.

"I don't have any knock-knock jokes, but I got stories. You wanna hear about 'cocaine bear'?" she asks, glancing up at his face to assess how much pain he's in.

"Oh, thank God. I know how to turn those into painkillers." Of course Dan does; he's as well-versed in nature's supply cabinet as he is in mind-altering substances, so the intersection between the two is a natural fit for his breadth of knowledge. "I was born in California, you know. We had poppies in the spring in this little ridge on the mountain. Looked like a crown of fire on the earth."

Talking takes his mind off his leg, and the way his back has seized up from tensing in pain. So does listening. It leaves him able to keep from whimpering as the honey drips into his wound.

"I sure do want to hear about cocaine bear." He tries to keep the pain out of his face, but it's that or keeping it out of his voice and he ends up picking the latter.

Cammie hasn't seen Dan since they separated earlier in the day, and christ, things sure went to hell since then. He's right near the top of her list of people to check made it out okay, someone she's actively seeking out when she finds him.

Her ears are back on, but that's not the only change to her look since the desert. There's extra material wrapped around her waist that she wasn't wearing before, a couple of layers of it by the looks of it. She's tried to make it look like she just felt like accessorising, rather than the mix of bandaging and disguising the wound that it is, but her success may be limited by the way she's clearly favouring one side.

"Dan! There you are. Christ, what happened to you? Or, should I say which kind of bastards happened to you?"

Dan hasn't had the chance to go around checking to make sure all the people he's keeping an eye on are okay, but Cammie would be near the top of his list, as well. He perks up when he sees her, immediately clocking her gait and the extra clothing. At least her ears made it; Dan suspects those would be entirely impossible to replace if they were damaged in the fight.

"Shadowhunters decided to sabotage my dreams of becoming a marathoner. You?" He figures it's better to ask Cammie how she is, casually, without grilling her on whether she's okay or not. If she's not okay, she'll tell him.

He sets his knife and piece of wood down. At this point, it's clear he's whittling some sort of animal totem out of it. When he's not actively carving, his hands are shaking.

"Ugh, those assholes. You gonna be, y'know, okay?"

She's relieved it was just them, not the Nazguls, like, considering everything, but that in no way lowers the degree of 'fuck them' she's feeling right now. She sits herself down, wincing a bit as the way she moves pulls her side a bit.

"They were after me too. Cornered me once, only didn't get skewered 'cause my sword apparently gives me magic armour if I want it to." Having her ears back on gives away the way she thinks in the pause that follows, flattening down against her hair. "Only got a small cut. I'm fine, otherwise, 'cause of that."

Mostly. Her head feels a bit weird, and the cut is not actually what one would call 'small', but it's not that bad.

"Yeah. I've had worse." Dan's downplaying how bad his wound is, but he's being truthful in that he's survived more injurious experiences and that he isn't about to die. He's in a lot of pain, and he's concerned that even when this injury heals it'll affect his ability to walk, but there's nothing he can do about any of that now. He just has to ride it out, wait, recover, and see.

"Dean gave me some field medicine, and then Elle did some wound care on me afterwards." He gestures at the cloth bandaging up his thigh. "Speaking of, you got that small cut looked at? Conditions like this are ripe for infection."

That he's had worse is something she doesn't doubt when he says it, and she looks relieved that what can be done for the injury has been done, but there's still a little worried crease in her brow. She's just as unused to her friends having actual injuries as she is unused to having injuries herself—it's a weird mix, really, being used to fighting on the front lines of a war but being totally unused to the realities of injuries that last, injuries that bleed and can get infected, that could get worse before they get better.

"Um. Well. I've got it covered up?" Which... is basically a no. She really has been trying to hide it since she got back to the group. There are people with much worse wounds that need attention.

"You should let me take a look at it."

The concern that crosses Dan's face is very real, because while he knows Cammie comes from a place of war, everything she's told him about the combat there seems...fake? He doesn't have the right word for it. Ephemeral. Like the violence and the injuries just pass right by and leave the memories in mind like ghosts haunting the place. Dan knows plenty about both ghosts and memories.

It also means he suspects that Cammie's never had the primer in field medicine that Dan's had. Dan was raised up by survivalists on a farm, practicing stitches on pigskin and rendering medical care to the animals and his little siblings whenever they took a tumble.

"Grab the pack with the red stripe off my horse. It's got some material I can use to stitch you up. We can use pine sap and eucalyptus to disinfect." He gestures with his chin. "And I'll teach you what I'm doing while I'm at it, so you can help me when I need help with my leg later."

Her ears give something away again: the brief flash of not quite fear, but something close to 'oh god' at the idea of being stitched up. It's a reaction that itself no doubt confirms some of his suspicions; she's never even had to be treated by the Vanguard's medics herself, let alone been taught anything about doing any field medicine.

She may seem hesitant for a moment, but Dan's not led her wrong yet and he's probably not fussing over her more than he'd fuss over anyone else so— okay. "Okay. Right."

She gets up and grabs the pack with the red stripe, bringing them back to Dan. She hesitates more about actually taking off the material that's covering the wound, because her toning down of the injury will be clear once she takes it off, but she sighs dramatically and does so anyway. The innermost layer definitely has blood on it.

It's nowhere near as bad as Dan's injury, but it's not as small as she'd prefer to make it out to be, either. It's a thin, long slash, running at a slight angle on her side, about level with her belly button. It hurts like a bitch, but she's muscled through the pain because that, at least, she's kind of used to. It's the rest that's a new kind of terrible.

Elle recognizes Dan putting on a brave face-- or voice, in this case-- but doesn't comment on it. She knows that at this point the act is more for Dan himself than for Elle.

"Sounds beautiful. My datyi, my adoptive mother, lives in California, but too far North to be near any Poppy fields."

She lives in the desert, on a large piece of land with one of Isaac's daughters. Elle loves visiting her.

She grins when Dan asks to hear the story.

"So, back at my old Sept I have a friend named Owen, and Owen's a Gurahl-- a were-bear. A few years back, when winter start coming around, he starts settling in for hibernation, because he's a bear," Elle will always be amused that some Gurahl hibernate in the winter.

"So he's super tired all the time and grumpy as hell. Unfortunately, shits going down and it's all hands on deck. We need our resident grizzly awake and functional. So Isaac, being the dramatic motherfucker he is, comes up with a plan. And one day he comes back to the Sept with several bricks of cocaine.

"So someone has the bright fucking idea to spiritually awaken the cocaine, making it way more potent, and Owen holds onto it for when he needs it. Lo and behold, some shit goes down and Owen and his pack mate are about to jump into a battle. So what does Owen do?

"He literally bursts the fucking brick of cocaine open in his face. Right next to his pack mate, Flips. So now we've got a coked out bear and a coked out wolf, and that wolf really shouldn't be given any kind of stimulant in the first place. So they go absolutely apeshit. Flips is riding on Owen's back into battle, high out of her mind, and just fucking screaming. It took her hours to come down from that."

Elle chooses not to describe the violence and carnage they caused. She doubts Dan wants to hear it anyway.

"And somehow, despite this being an absolute shit show of a test run, Owen decides that staying hopped up on stimulants is the best way to get through the winter. So instead of depending on Isaac's shady underground connections, he starts growing his own Coca in the fucking Sept. It's a miracle none of the cubs got into that shit."

It's not that Dan isn't worried about Cammie; it's just that, with the last week or so spent with her, he's picked up that any amount of fretting and fussing will just alienate her. He isn't sure if it's because she wants to be taken seriously as a peer and not a child, because she's had her good nature betrayed in the past to the point that doling trust out feels keenly dangerous, or because being fussed over reminds her of people she misses, or some combination of those, or something else - the point isn't to psychoanalyze. The point is just to be a friend.

And right now, being a friend means not making a big ordeal out of the slice in her side. Dan winces sympathetically, but that's it. The rest will just be walking her through the steps.

"Yeah, that's enough broken skin to need disinfecting. And it looks like you got a little bit of burning here, too, which is real infection-prone." Dan doesn't know what the Shadowhunters did to make their blades heat up like that, but he doesn't appreciate it. "When you were limping a little earlier, was that because of pain or because you actually can't move your muscles right?"

Dan suspects, given the shallowness of the injury and the location, that the blade didn't sever any important muscle or nerve groups, but he figures he should check. He digs through the pack for the jar of pine sap, a second waterskin, and his herbs. He has the thread, a needle and a lighter in his pocket, and he uses that as an excuse to pull out his flask and take a small drink, which he realizes a little belatedly probably isn't a comforting gesture from someone about to apply wound care.

"Lay down on your side so I can get a good angle, alright?" With an evident small grunt of pain, he sits up and switches position so that he can work on her. He rinses his hands as thoroughly as he can from his waterskin, which is sadly the best they can do out here in the wilds.

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FLIGHT TO THE FORD

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Dan Sagittarius | OTA

I. A Hard Leg of the Journey

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II

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