Rinkaiel, Part 2

[4uk4ata]

Kalin clicked his tongue in disapproval. "What? We need to make sure there are no more people trapped in there. Apart from that, I'll try to make sure everything is undisturbed." He turned back to Tess again, but his attention was on Layla. She didn't seem to be meaning what she said - and what she said is that she - no, they would be killing anyone who engineered this - if it was not an accident, which was still a possibility - slowly and painfully. He was quite sure she, and probably the others, had done something like that before.

Kalin,in general, was not very fond of killing, and when necessary much preferred it quick and, well, without bothering about such things as ensuring pain. You either needed to kill someone, in which case you got right down to it as soon as possible, or you were not in a situation where you needed to kill someone at all. Apparently, Layla - for all her various good traits - did not share this worldview.

[Graybeard]

"There's nobody else on the ship," Joe answered. "This isn't a commercial vessel, it's a -- corporate ship." And after all I've heard about it, the first time I ever got on the damn thing, it goes and blows up. Peter is gonna be pissed... "And don't worry about Layla. She's a new mom, after all, and new moms are fiercely protective of their kids. They talk like that, particularly here in Farrel." Although she probably will try to do just what she said she would. "Now let's find out what happened here."

Meanwhile, Layla was cursing herself for the way she'd acted -- not that she didn't intend to follow through on liquidating whoever had tried to kill Zachary (that was a given), but she'd possibly blown her cover. That wasn't good. She'd have to work on mending her image with Kalin -- but first things first.

She glanced at her passengers, didn't like what she saw. Zachary seemed fine, thank Luminosita or whatever other gods there might be, but her mother was starting to show signs of shock. The burns and the fracture might be worse than she'd originally thought. Ace's knee was making him grit his teeth and occasionally groan softly, even as he insisted he was fine. And their passenger ...

I really need to find a healer. She quickened the hack's pace into town.

[OOC: Anybody want to help her find help? Might Rice be out and about doing some shopping? Zander? Anybody else?]

[4uk4ata]

((If he can reasonably believe there are no more people within the wreck, Kalin might. It's not like he can help much here anyway... unless Tess decides to interject, he doesn't have that much more to do; he is almost as skilled at using healing magic as he is in medical knowledge))

[Graybeard]

OOC: Agreed, paging Tess! But if you're unable to post, and Rice and Zander have also wandered away, I'll do something shortly to stir the pot.

[4uk4ata]

((Dude, in a matter of two days we've had several assassination attempts, dead bodies, conspiracies, now a downed airship... just make sure there's a town left by the time we leave it ))

[Graybeard]

[OOC:

((Dude, in a matter of two days we've had several assassination attempts, dead bodies, conspiracies, now a downed airship... just make sure there's a town left by the time we leave it ))

LOL ... OK, I get the message! Calming influences hereby presented... /OOC:]

I don't like this at all, Layla thought, eyeing her mother. Faye was showing definite signs of shock, and she needed treatment. Ace was clearly hurting more than he wanted to admit as well. And Tess...

Fortunately, help was at hand. She noticed a sign advertising a healing operation doing business as "Sisters of Divine Mercy," and it was only a block or two away. She quickly directed the hack there and dismounted, to be met at the door by a woman ...

... with a hunchback. Not a real one, but the getup used by priests and nuns of the Temple of the Divine Dwarf.

Before she could escape, the woman spoke. "Good Morning, the Dwarves Love You. How can we help heal your infirm?"

Crap, Layla thought. My mother may be better off dead...

[OOC: For previous encounters with the Temple of the Divine Dwarf, check here (including followups) and here. Time for a little comic relief...]

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Where did everybody go? To get things moving again:]

"Come here and look at this," Joe called to Kalin.

He was looking at a strange artifact attached to a piece of the airship's wreckage, toward its tail -- right where that magical fire started, Joe thought. It was about the size of a dinner plate, and although there were scorch marks all around it, the object itself didn't seem to have been burned. Characters from no known language were incised on its surface.

"What do you make of this?" Joe asked. "I wish I could cast a spell to detect magic, because it damn well feels magical..."

--------

Layla was having an encounter with a strange artifact of her own as the mock dwarf bustled toward Faye. This wasn't looking like such a good idea, she thought. "Uh, wait a minute, we're not that badly hurt, I think we'll move on --" she said, but the nun wasn't buying.

"Oh, you poor thing!" the nun clucked, just as Faye let out an involuntary groan -- whether because of her pain or at what was happening, Layla wasn't sure. "That must hurt terribly! Let me just sprinkle some holy water on your burns --" Faye's groan turned into a muted scream, but it didn't help -- "and I'll get right to work with some Healing spells."

Reaching back to her "hunchback" costume, which appeared to double as a backpack and medical kit, she extracted what looked like a bottle made of an unfamiliar, pliable, white substance. At its top was no simple cap, but rather a trigger-like arrangement connected to what looked like a nozzle of some kind. The bottle was decorated with a faded image of a muscular, bald man with his arms folded, wearing an earring in one ear.

Faye's scream became a shade less muted as the woman pulled the trigger and a spray of water gushed out of the nozzle ...

[OOC: I don't really need to say whose picture is on that bottle, do I?...]

[4uk4ata]

"What do you make of this?" Joe asked. "I wish I could cast a spell to detect magic, because it damn well feels magical..."

Kalin left Tess for the time being - perhaps that person was still a bit too shaken from everything that had happened recently. After all, one didn't just barely survive an airship crash every day - at least, not from what he had seen. Enough near-death experiences, he always thought, tended to put one on the other side of death sooner or later.

He came over to Joe and looked at the strange object with some curiosity. It could be magical, he thought, though he would much prefer not to deal with another magical thingamajig... Magical or no, it was at the place near where the sparks were. He looked at Joe, and the man's nod told him his supposed coworker had noticed this as well. But what was it doing here? And since when?

There didn't seem to be anyone around all that interested in them (after the initial wave of gratitude, people generally felt they needed to make sure they really were okay). Good, Kalin thought, and sighed. "Dunno," he told Joe with a shrug. "I'll see what I can do, though... magic or no, there should be something there. " He then crouched and concentrated, trying to sharpen his senses. He breathed heavily, and his hands were twitching almost involuntarily. He put a hand on the ground to steady himself, then put his undivided attention to the disc-like object, as if entranced.

After the various charms and the ... fence around the shack, he was starting to be familiar with what magic (or whatever it was there) felt like. This thing... it wasn't quite it. Maybe it was a different kind of magic, or maybe it did smell that way. He could see the very, very small holes at the side, and thought he heard something there...nothing that sounded exactly threatening, more like a spent ember hissing in the air. He could probably find out more by touching it, he thought, but he wasn't exactly eager to do something like that.

He shook his head a few times to clean his mind, then looked up at Joe. The man probably believed that was magic, or close enough, but acted quite cool under the circumstances. A man of the world, indeed. "Magic or no, it has a very peculiar smell. Pungent, like... I don't know, some of that stuff you can smell when passing by a leatherworker, or distillery, or one of those chemist fellows. There are some small holes at the side, a little way off from where the burn marks start, and I think I heard a quiet hiss."He stopped, thinking. "Magic or no, this probably started the fire. There's something that bothers me, though... Lum'nosita help me, some of those marks looked a bit like a script, and not any I know. Only it sure doesn't look like it was attached - it fits almost like it was a part of the ship."

[Graybeard]

"Let me see those," Joe said, bending toward the symbols incised on the plate-like object. "Hmmm ... you know what? I'd almost say that's the elven alphabet."

He started to say more, but was cut off, as the mysterious passenger's groan of pain turned into a snarl. [OOC: I thought Tess had gone on with Layla to get medical attention, but if you say she's here, so be it. Paging DA! You're desperately needed to put some words in Tess' mouth here... /OOC:]

---------

Remarkably enough, the strange "holy water," and the healing spell the pseudo-dwarfette cast in its aftermath, seemed to be working; at least the pain in Faye's arm was receding, and her burns were vanishing before her eyes. She gingerly tested the arm, found that it could stand weight.

I never thought I'd say this, but the next time I pass a Temple of the Divine Dwarf, I'm actually going to make a donation, Layla thought. She turned to the nun. "That was wonderful, thank you. What can you do for my -- friend?" She indicated Ace.

"Ah, I fear I'll have to rest a little until I get the energy back to cast another healing spell," the woman said. "His injuries don't look quite as severe, or at least as painful. If I just splint his knee, that should help him until I can cast the heal. I think I even have a Divine Dwarven splint in his size." She reached into her hump/backpack, extracted a long, tapered piece of wood, expertly braced his leg with it using a roll of gauze.

"Thank you," Ace answered; the splinted knee really was feeling better, at least more stable. "But what do those inscriptions on it mean?"

The woman smiled. "Ah, when the Dwarves Return, they'll surely inform us," she said. "For right now, I think we just have to take it that Lou-ville Slug'r was one of their own deities..."

[Dallen Andair]

[ooc]Very very sorry! HEctic holiday weekend, then endless work since Sunday![/ooc]

She wanted to fall down, but forced herself not to. Instead she simply knelt on her good knee and stared at the grass.

If you hit the dirt, you'll be even more screwed up than you already are.

So much for Heroic Resolve. Here she'd been expecting to drag herself from the wreckage and start digging out the others, only to find them more or less intact and herself in need of being carried. Looking to Kalin as he worked with Joe, she started to speak.

"Theres-" he voice cut off in pained coughing that went on for several seconds, making her already fractured ribs scream. There was an alchemical medpack normally given to Tsurirakan military forces in her pack, encased in the enchanted box she knew had survived the blast and the crash. Trying to make that known however, was proving difficult.

Smoke inhalation and scalded windpipe. Oh, yay. She took several short breaths and focused on reining in the pain. She blocked out the rest of the world and forced what little healing magic she knew past her inherent resistance to such force. Magics trickled inward to aid the internal injuries. "I'm going to regret this more than the injuries tomorrow" using internal magic on herself always left her with a pounding headache afterwards. Still, the throbbing slowed and eventually stopped, as did the wooziness of her concussion.

Her ears started ringing. Heralding what she knew was going to be a real monster of a headache from the strain. Groaning from the strain, she forced herself to stand up again.

"...that's the Elven alphabet"

The groan cut off as pain was forgotten. Her hand went to her spatha as she snarled, her lungs cleared "If it's elves responsible for this, get the hell away from here and find a place to hide. They'll likely be more interested in me than you" injuries temporarily, she began looking around, her movements still pained and stiff, but at least bearable "If the bastards are true to form, their fucking murder squad won''t be far off."

She locked gazes with the looks Joe and Kailn were giving her "I know a bit of healing magic. Just enough to keep myself standing, really. Now, if Elves took at shot at the ship, unless you and the others have been really pissing them off of late, they were aiming at me."


[ooc]Again, sorry! And I'm trying to take cues from Grays last post. I'm not busy anymore, aside from normal work, so I can finally keep current[/ooc]