Waldhaxen Channel

[Graybeard]

The two trolls set off in their improbable balloon, hoping to find the rest of the clan.

However, they didn't get very far before Scrobian, the younger troll who was piloting the thing, shook his head and grunted. "This isn't going to work," he said. "This thing isn't as maneuverable as the Small Ones' airships are. If the winds are wrong, it just won't go where it is supposed to. I think there is too much heat coming from the flow from the Dwarven Forge. We can't go south."

Grope thought a minute, nodded his massive head. "You seem to be right. The wind is pushing us back toward where we left the -- people you rescued." He didn't want to say "survivors"; that sounded too, well, final as regards the ones who'd been in the valley when the volcano emitted its blast. The Robe was tickling him ... "I have an idea, though. How about if we go over to this thing you call Growf's Drainpipe, follow it to where the valley with the village opens into it -- I assume it does -- and do the search from the bottom of the valley up?"

Now it was the younger troll's turn to think and nod. "That should work. We can use the air currents rising off the cliffs to control the balloon. It'll be a rough ride, but I think I can handle it. Now brace yourself -- not only will the ride be rough, you're not going to believe what you see." He fiddled with the tiller and the balloon rose, heading north.

A few minutes later, the balloon crested a low ridge, and suddenly, the two trolls were staring down into nothingness. "Growf's Fangs!" Grope said, astonished. "You weren't kidding, were you?"

The walls of the chasm were as vertical as if they'd been cut with a knife. There was little to give a sense of scale, but far below, maybe two thousand feet below the ridge, a ribbon of water stretched from east to west, much of it cloaked in the shadow cast by the cliffs above. A similarly forbidding wall rose on the far side of the water; it too looked vertical and preposterously inaccessible. Not a living thing stirred apart from a few buzzards soaring on the thermals rising from the cliffs on the far side.

"Growf's Drainpipe," Scrobian said unnecessarily. "The Small Ones call it the Waldhaxen Channel, but I like our name better, don't you?"

"I do ... wow," Grope said, dizzy from the height. Suddenly he wasn't sure this exploration was such a good idea ... but it had to be done.

[Sareth]

[OOC]I'm going to write this next post from Jasmine's perspective, and ask you all a question. Should i continue writing Jamie in the first person? Or should I use this new thread to break into a third person perspective for her?[/OOC]

"Well, that was certainly more of an adventure than I bargained for," Jasmine muttered quietly to herself. Her entire body ached. The explosion with which her far too impulsive daughter had solved the wabbit problem had battered her quite thoroughly. Given that she was, well, of a mature age, the drubbing had left every joint at least a bit stiff, and her head was throbbing in ways that were far too similar to her memories of what a hangover felt like. Still, she had to admit, it had prevented them from becoming wabbit food, and they had walked away intact. She supposed she could give her child some credit for that.

She glanced over to where Jamie lay on her side, facing a giggling Nera. The girl was playing peek-a-boo with the child, causing giggles and squeals. Not all of them were coming from the baby, either. Jasmine smiled. It wasn't exactly how she wanted it, but it certainly warmed her heart to see Jamie finally showing some sign of actually realizing she was a girl. The girl had been a great despair to her mother, always wrestling, exploring dangerous places in the woods and fields, shooting guns, and chasing other girls... Oh, she had known that Jamie had dallied with more than one boy. She even had felt a bizarre sense of relief the day she realized that Jamie had slept with the young Connor boy. She'd been worried the girl would never accept a man into her bed, given her habits. But still, she'd despaired of the girl ever learning how wonderful it was to be a mother.

Looked like she was worried over nothing. Sure, Jamie hadn't actually given birth to Nera (and being that Jamie was 17, Jasmine was glad of that.) But the care she was taking with the baby (when no one was looking) was very reassuring. She thought about going over and teasing her too strange daughter about her sudden spat of maternal behavior, but decided that might be counter-productive.

Instead, she turned her mind to the next problem. Getting the girl to come home and settle down with her daughter-of-conscience was a somewhat moot point at the moment. Looking around at the mountains, she was pretty sure they had somehow managed to come out of those caves on the north side of them. That meant, in order to even get herself home, let alone her daughter and granddaughter (oh how she loved the sound of that word!) they would have to go BACK through the mountains!

This was a problem. Jamie had explained that there was some sort of cult between here and there, one that was prone to slaughtering outsiders to their faith. Jasmine was under no illusions that they required only virgins for that slaughter. Additionally, apparently there were trolls as well. That was ominous. And there were stranger things in the mountains besides. Not to mention it looked like the mountains here about had been dusted fairly heavily by ash from the eruption. Essentially this meant that, to get south, they had to decide to either risk death by cultists, death by trolls, or death by sucking ash into the lungs. And the whole time they risked encountering the stuff of legends.

No, in her opinion, an opinion she'd happily impose on Jamie if at all possible (after all, mother knows best) it would be better to go the long way around and get clear of those areas altogether before turning south and taking her family back home. Which meant initially going north. That should be easy enough. They'd just have to parallel the Channel.

Jasmine nodded to herself firmly. It was a good plan.

Satisfied with her thinking, Jasmine then allowed herself to succumb to temptation. After all, if you couldn't tease your children, who could you tease?

"Awwwwww. Look at you!" she called to Jamie. "You make a lovely teenage mother!"

"MOOOOOOooooooOOOOOOOOM!"

[AdamZero]

(Not bad, I think we should shift into 3rd perspectives but you can shift over the shoulders of Jasmine and Jamie as appropriate.

Marcus laughed not far from Jamie, walking back with a young stag draped over his back, a long arrow sticking out of it leading straight to the heart. A bow was slung on a leather thong at the boy's back, attached to a long quiver.

"Whose up for venison?" He asked, as smile on his face. The sight of food clearly brightened the faces of the three adults, Jamie looked famished and Jasmine had a mixed looked. Besides relief that she would be eating soon, there was something else... suspicion? approval? Something... Marcus wasn't sure what. He flicked a knife out from the folds of his cloak. "Well... then, better get to work...." Boris drew a wide leather mat from inside his pocket portal and unrolled it in front of Marcus, who eased the dead hart down onto it.

And so he set to properly cutting it apart with mild proficiency getting very little blood on himself, somehow, and drawing out a few days rations out of the deer.

[Graybeard]

It took the two trolls a while to master steering the balloon on the shifting winds coming off the chasm, but after some experimenting, they found themselves heading east along the edge. The terrain was remarkable. Ridges and valleys came down off the mountains to the south, some high and steep, others gentle, but all having one thing in common: when they reached the channel, they simply ended, period. Even the streams cascading over the edge from the larger valleys hadn't made much of an impression on the vertical wall.

"I've never seen anything like that," Grope marveled to his nephew. "It's like someone just cut a big knife slash in the land."

"I haven't either," the younger troll said. "You get a different view of the world up here, but none of the other valleys -- say, what's that? Small Ones?"

All of the valleys they'd passed until now had appeared uninhabited, but Scrobian was right: a small band of humans was emerging from the trees several hundred feet below them, a few hundred yards from where the valley reached its sudden, vertical end. They were too far away for the trolls to identify them ... except that one had a strange, blue glow to her skin. "I know those people," Grope said...

----------

What have I done? Layla wondered. Barb, however, didn't stop to think, or to try to get her speech back; she just reached into her bodice, extracted the tiny pistol, and fired.

Crap, Soc thought hurriedly, then cast a Shield spell, knowing it would be too late.

----------
OOC: While we wait for the bullet to fly slowly toward Layla (slowly compared to a Wraith's reflexes, anyway):

[OOC]I'm going to write this next post from Jasmine's perspective, and ask you all a question. Should i continue writing Jamie in the first person? Or should I use this new thread to break into a third person perspective for her?[/OOC]

The first-person style for Jamie has worked marvelously, so I'd suggest you stay with it. At the same time, using third person for Jasmine will help clarify who's talking when. But do whatever you feel comfortable with.

[Sareth]

I got a fire going. Frankly, I hadn't yet managed to figure out if it was mid morning or mid afternoon yet, since I had emerged from a cave and hadn't bothered to try to find which way was north yet. You sure get turned around underground sometimes. That being the case, I figured a fire to cook up some of the venison sounded like a good idea.

Mother was kind enough to help, while Nera busied herself chewing on a nice, smooth stick I'd found.

"So..." Mother said. "I think that we should turn to either the east or the west and parralel the Channel until we can find a way around all of... that." She waved towards the mountains behind us with their load of ash and evilmonks and all of that.

"You don't think we could make it to the north?" I asked.

"Jamie, I love you dear, but sometimes you are an idiot." Mother's smile took some of the sting out of her rebuke to me. Some of it. Just like the day she'd declared that spending a day and a half in labor had been a joy compared to when I hit puberty.

"MooooOOOOooooOOOOOM!"

"Seriously, Jamie, have you seen the Channel?"

She had me there. I hadn't. Which she knew only too well, owing to the fact she knew I had gone east when I'd left home, not north. "Noooooooo."

"No, you haven't. So trust me when I tell you there is no getting past it. Face it, Jamie, you haven't got much choice but to head to the south eventually. And that means home, young lady."

"Supposedly there's a way across."

"Jamie, don't be ridiculous. There's no way ac... what in the world is that?" Mother was looking up with a foolish look on her face.

"Mom, you don't have to resort to such silly tricks to try changing the subject."

"It's not a trick. There's a balloon up there."

"A balloon?"

"Correct," Ayiee responded. "It is roughly 300 feet up, riding the wind in an easterly direction."

"What's it doing here?" Mother asked. "People avoid this region. There's nothing around."

"It's being flown by trolls," Ayiee responded.

"Trolls?" I thought about that a moment. "Mom, you owe me a pony."

"What?" My mother looked startled. "Jamie, this is hardly the time to go off on silly tangents."

"But mom! You told me years ago that I could have a pony when pigs fly! Well..."

"Jamie, this is no time for such racist language."

"Sorry mom..."

[Viking-Sensei]

[OOC - Sorry to everyone who my extended absence has off-put... like I've said, things were a bit crazy for a few weeks there with my very own convention appearance, but it's over and I'm mostly all caught up on everything now, so I should be back and posting regularly from here out.]

Ayiee sat on a large rock, soaking in the 45 degree angled sun. Her internal sensors were still calibrating to the surface world again. Being disconnected by proximity from the improvised connection Lucas had helped create to the tsuirakan crystal-powered data network as well, now, with the far more familiar dwarven systems had left her feeling strangely empty, as if her databanks were tripping over a sector of damaged crystal. What was she...

She sat up.

"Lucas!"

[Graybeard]

Actually, Soc needn't have bothered with the Shield. Layla's Wraith reflexes took over, and she did a fast drop and roll just as Barb fired. The bullet whistled overhead as her roll took her straight into the larger woman's knees, which bent at an angle that knees aren't designed to bend at. Barb went down in a heap, her face contorted in a soundless scream, as her male "friend" turned and ran for parts unknown.

----------

"You know them?" a very surprised Scrobian asked his uncle as they peered out of the basket at the humans below.

"I think so," Grope said. "In fact, I'm sure of it. I have a Blood Bond with one of them. We saved each other's lives long ago and far away, and then again more recently."

"A Blood Bond with a Small One," the younger troll mused. "Now I've heard everything... Should we stop and help them? They're heading for the Drainpipe, after all."

That was a very interesting question, Grope reflected, but then the answer became clear without even consulting the Robe. The Blood-Binding scar wasn't particularly bothering him, so Lucas didn't appear to be in immediate danger. The clan, however... "No, our people must come first. Once we have seen to their well-being, if they're still alive, or taken their Wisdom if they are not, we can decide whether to contact these Small Ones. I owe the man Lucas much ... but he's still a human."

The balloon rose to clear the next ridge and continued east.

----------

And as it went, Wilbur Hamael, watching from concealment atop the ridge, took notice.

[Sareth]

Before I realized it, I was standing in front of Nera, a gun in each hand, scanning everywhere.

"What! What is it, Ayiee?"

[Graybeard]

This is ridiculous. I shouldn't be this out of shape. I'll have to start increasing my mileage, Layla thought as she disentangled herself from Barb's devastated legs, breathing far harder than the move should have required. She struggled to her feet as the older woman clutched her knees, the derringer forgotten and a silent scream still on her face.

"Not good, Layla. Not good at all," Soc said. "Come on. Let's get out of here. She can fend for herself." He steered his student, still puffing hard, down an alley. When they were out of sight of the park, he stopped and fixed Layla with a stern stare.

"Don't ever make that mistake again," he said. "I don't just mean the loss of discipline and flying off the handle with uncontrolled magic, although that's bad enough. What you did that was really bad was the undisciplined use of energy to set the spell up. Mages kill themselves through exhausting their own energy. You could very easily have done that here."

Layla didn't like that. "Look, I'm about fifty years younger than a lot of those mages, and baby or no baby, I'm in great shape. I just had to work harder taking that bitch down than I thought. Don't lecture me about energy and fitness. I --"

Soc cut her off with a pair of hands placed firmly on her shoulders; she started to throw them off, but rapidly realized she couldn't. "Listen to me, Layla! When I was going through my own studies, I watched an 18-year-old in perfect health give himself a fatal heart attack because the dumb bastard was too stupid to monitor himself while he was working up a big-time spell. You could have done that. I don't care how fit you are, you still have to learn to control yourself when working with magic, or it'll eat you alive. Got that?" He gave her shoulders a shake for emphasis.

That didn't go over well either. "Get your damn hands off of me!" Layla seethed. "I'm just not back in shape after Zachary, and I don't need your damn lecture on discipline! I -- I --" And that was when the dizziness hit. Spots formed in front of her eyes; her legs got wobbly; her balance was shot. She barely managed to make it to a conveniently located box to sit on before she collapsed entirely.

"Yes?" Soc prompted.

"I -- I -- I apologize," Layla said sincerely, barely retaining consciousness, but realizing that he'd been right, and that she'd learned her most important lesson about magic yet.

[AdamZero]

I looked up from cooking the food at Aiyee's remark. "wait what? Trolls? Lucas? What's going on?" I looked to Lucas, who seemed just as confused as everyone else.

I hate when I miss out on things... Ah well, food was almost done!