Southern Continent: Picking Up The Pieces

[Jack Rothwell]

Tamina's surprise at Shorty and Rip's laughter actually shocked her into giggling a little herself. It had faded into a smile when she saw the picture, but it was a smile nonetheless.

"Ok." She said. "If you're sure. Thanks."

"We'd better get moving then."Alleece said. "We'll be ok to leave the wagon here and the sooner we get this mess over with the better."

"Oh, umm, don't suppose you got weapons for breaking thick shells, piercing gaps between plates... stuff to see in the dark with do you?" Tamina inquired. "S' gonna be dark in the tunnels. We can pick stuff up first if you don't."

[Graybeard]

Rip thought for a minute. "Light is no problem. Here." He opened his Pocket Dimension and removed two pocket-sized light globes, handing them to Alleece and Oolan. "Just think 'light' at them, and they'll light up until you think 'dark' at them. Practice a time of two. As for us, I think I can keep a simple Light spell going for long enough to get by." He looked from face to face. "Of course, that means that you'll have to do most of the fighting, not me." To his great relief, this didn't seem to be taken askance.

"As for killing the bugs," he continued, "I might have something better. Gimme a minute." He opened his Pocket Dimension, rummaged around in it, muttering to himself ... "Weave ... thought sure I'd left one in here after the fight with the Roach Coach ... aha!" He extracted a large sprayer that smelled pleasantly of daisies, one of which he extracted from its bottle. "We're looking for more of these, pretty sure I've seen them growing around here, they're widespread. Give me a basketful of 'em and enough water to fill this thing, and when I'm done with the magic, we'll have a bug spray big enough to knock out a horse. One took down that thing Shorty was riding, after all." Shorty blushed at this for some reason.

"One thing, though," Rip continued. "Two things, actually. First, what's in the daisies is incredibly toxic to fish. Don't use it anywhere near one of your fishing holes, or it'll be days before there'll be any live fish in there again. The other thing ..." Shorty's blush was deepening rapidly.

"Try not to breathe any of the fumes when you spray. They aren't poisonous to humans, and I don't think they will be to Killikah, but they can have ... unpredictable ... side effects." Shorty now looked like a nearly seven-foot-tall, ambulatory beet.

[Jack Rothwell]

Now it was Tamina's turn to laugh.

"Oh! Umm, I was asking about light for you, not us." She gestured at her eyes which, predictably, had slit-like pupils like a cats. "Killikah can see in the dark pretty well. Always thought it was weird that humans don't."

"There should be flowers like that dotted around the jungle on the way there." Alleece said. "They like to grow outside of the tree shade, near water sources. There'll be ponds some way in, also the Ganshee river has a bend that's close to the southern path from Urania. Like, twenty minutes from here."

"No time to waste then." Tamina said firmly. "Let's go."

Oolan, on the other hand, was quietly wondering what those 'side-effects' could be.

.....

Some fifteen minutes later the group had turned their backs on the tribal nightmare of Urania and were padding their way south. Riiki and T'ska had insisted on leading the way, kobold males were, after all, a little more combat hungry than their female counterparts. Tamina trailed just behind them with Dochi, keeping their eyes and ears open for any sign of trouble, or any sign of the flowers the humans had mentioned. Alleece had elect to pair up with Rip; the young kobold's curiosity about the human world was considerably more pronounced than Tamina's and Rip seemed like the scholarly type who'd be the right person to ask.

"What's it like where you come from?" She inquired. "They do a lot fish-killing chemistry there?"

And, of course, Oolan hung at the back, playing rearguard with Shorty. The giant's earlier blush had mischievous wheels turning in her head.

"Soooo, what kind of effects could the fumes have?" She whispered and then, more boldly. "Something naughty?"

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Gonna make one assumption here. Will retcon if you think it's wrong. There is at least precedent for airships flying over the Southern Continent.]

Blissfully unaware of the hidden meanings behind the question he was posed, Shorty simply answered "Hallucinations," and let it go at that.

----------

Rip, however, was jolted into a rare bit of introspection, and indeed nostalgia, by the questions that he got. "What's it like where you come from?" Well, for starters, where did he come from? What it was "like" in Tsuirakushiti, where he'd spent most of his life, was very different from what it was "like" in Isabel, where he'd been for the last couple of years. What was "home" for him? Did he even have a home?

He became aware that Alleece was waiting patiently (by kobold standards, at least) for an answer. He decided to call Tsuirakushiti where "home" was, with a small tug since he wasn't sure he'd ever go back there again -- or wanted to. "Alleece, have you ever seen an airship?" he asked. Getting a puzzled nod [OOC: the assumption], he continued, "Imagine an airship as big as a city -- or maybe a city that is an airship. That's kind of what my home is like, like the biggest airship-city in the whole world. It doesn't travel, just sits in one place above a lake, but it's up in the air all the time. There are no lakes or rivers in the city. And so there are no fish there either, except what people keep in their homes in bowls, and in a few big tanks in the zoo and museum."

He paused for a minute. "I think that's very sad, don't you? A place should have fish, and fish should have their place. But there just isn't one for them up in the sky." Now when did I turn melancholy?

[Jack Rothwell]

Alleece gave Rip a smile.

"Well, you'll be seeing some fish soon. The river is-"

"Here we are." Riiki announced from the front of the group. He pointed a claw to a thicket of trees where the sounds of running water could be heard.

The Ganshee river was a fairly impressive, but slow moving affair. As the group cleared the last few trees they were treated to the sight of a thirty foot wide current turning back on itself in a near hairpin bend. It was obvious the natural feature was within spitting distance of being a swamp by the volume of plants and algae that decorated it's surface. Yet the river still ran, it's murky depths concealing whatever beasties may have been lurking under the surface.

Speckled around the banks were handfuls of the flowers Rip and Shorty had described being busily attended to by buzzing drones ("Teshi. Just bugs. Nothing harmful" Tamina explained), but the prize sat in the crook of the hairpin on the other side of the river. Veritable bouquets of white petals practically screamed in stark contrast to their green and brown surroundings.

"Just our luck." Tamina sighed. "At least the currents not fast."

Unbeknown to the party, a pair of eyes was watching them from the opposite treeline with great interest...

[Graybeard]

Rip frowned at the scene. "Hmmm. Not enough of them on this side to make a decent-sized batch of bug killer with. We're going to have to get somebody over there to the main stash."

Shorty frowned in turn. "I don't do rivers," he announced flatly.

Damn, thought Rip. His big friend was the only one of the group who might be tall enough to just wade across and pick some. "Why not? You'd be an awfully big bite for a crocodile -- hey, just joking, why are you looking at me like that?"

"No I wouldn't," Shorty answered, his usual bonhomie gone for the moment. "This says so." He rolled up a sleeve, to reveal a scar on one immense bicep. One didn't need medical equipment to see larger bits of scar tissue at just about the spacing that teeth in a croc's jaw might make.

Well, Rip couldn't reasonably argue with that. "Okay, let's make a raft. Easy enough magic." He summoned magic and started rubbing his fingers together, making a "Zzzzzz...Zzzzzz..." sound with his lips. A glowing form materialized along the trunk of one of the trees along the shore, and the air was filled with the distinctive odor of sawdust.

[OOC: Remember, Rip was Mister Fix-It on the airships, and he's got all sorts of magic tricks like this -- although he basically can't fight worth a darn other than the odd Force Bolt and letting his pistol do the fighting for him. As for the eyes, up to you.]

[Jack Rothwell]

The technical magic got an appreciative 'oooOOOoohh' from the kobolds. Especially Tamina, who'd was a fiend for any kind of magic outside of the internalised/medical nature her people used. Rip's skills and Shorty's strength meant it wasn't long before they had something river-worthy to float on. Although there were a few tell-tale ridges of a reptilian nature lazily poking their way above the water the crossing itself was an uneventful affair. Alleece, Dochi and Oolan had elected to stay on the original side of the river, citing 'less weight means easier travel' and an obvious hatred of dirty water.

Tamina stepped lightly off the simple craft with a smile; her recent experiences sailing on The Curious Narwhal with Captain Moriarty had taught her an appreciation for sea-faring (and all the delicious, ocean-going fish that could be obtained by sea-faring) so even a brief reminder had her mood up. She skipped happily to the crop of what she now mentally classed as 'bug killing druggy flowers' and took a sniff.

"Plenty here!" She declared. "Should be enough to fill your-"

"Woooorrrrkikikikikiki!!"

"-pack?" She finished, looking around in confusion.

What burst out of the treeline at a dead run was one of the strangest creatures the kobold had ever seen. It was humanoid in shape, shorter than even her small stature by a good foot but very broad shouldered as if in compensation, streaks of white warpaint decorated it's brownish-green skin, making a skull-like image over a flattened face, framed by a pair of very wide, pointy ears.

It's grass skirt flapped in indignation as it sprinted towards her. Tamina made a squeaking noise as her attention fixed urgently on the short spear it held. She almost turned to run as it skidded to a halt some ten feet short of her.

"Basha!" It said, in a gravelly, yet high-pitched voice.

"What? I don't understand..."

"Samba!" It declared, jabbing the spear at the puzzled kobold like an accusing finger. "Dreka! Workiki!"

"<Do you speak kobold at all?>"

The short humanoid did a movement that was somewhere between a jump and dance that would've been funny if it wasn't for the sharp weapon in it's hands. It pointed meaningfully to the flowers.

"Kochee! Basha! Workikiki!"

"O...k" Tamina said, backing away with her palms raised. "Anyone know what this is or how to translate?"


OOC Yep, it's a ghob. Southern Continent edition. /OOC

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Ghob! Don't that take you back? Ah, if we could just reconstitute the bunch that ran into them in the Goriel threads! Incidentally, the weird body in the other thread is definitely not a Ghob. Anyway, a short one:]

Rip recoiled from the sharp weapon and the apparent gibberish, then caught himself. "It's okay. I got this one."

Any anthropologist (any Tsuirakuan one, anyway) learned Translation Effects at the very beginning of his education at Sashi Mu. It was just one of those things that an anthropologist had to know. Rip had rarely had any occasion to use the spell since graduation; after all, Thurston was hard-wired with it, and if the familiar could take care of that little bit of spellcraft, it freed his boss up for other things, like magical mayhem. Presumably that wouldn't be needed here. (On the other hand, that was a nasty-looking spear.) However, he still remembered how to make it happen. He cast and cleared his throat. "We come in peace, sir." (It looked male, anyway.) "Are these flowers yours? We wish to -- trade for them." He figured that "buy" would be a subset of "trade for" if push came to shove.

[OOC: Translation Effects has come up quite a few times, both in Errant Road and in Errant Story itself, and has always been treated as more or less an area-effect spell. (Remember when Jon got exposed to it in Praenubilus Astu? Typical Poe.) Rip isn't a specialist in this particular spell, but I think it would probably cover the group on the same side of the river as he is. Not sure whether Tamina would hear anything other than Veracian, which Rip would be using here, and Ghob gibberish (ghobberish?); your call.]

[Jack Rothwell]

Luckily Rip's translation spell proved to be effective (making it another thing Tamina resolved to study if the opportunity arose), unluckily Rip's peace-making efforts did nothing to change the demeanour of the angry native.

"Sacred! Only for Earth people!" He said, pointing at the flowers again. "Trespassers!" This time switching his spear to the human with the fancy spells.

It was at this time that the kobolds on the other side of the river became aware of a rustling noise behind them. Alleece looked over her shoulder and gulped.

"Chief will judge trespassers! You will come!"

"Workiki!"

"Workiki!"

"Workiki!"

There emerged from the undergrowth what could only be described as a 'metric shitload' of the strange creatures. The group found themselves surrounded front and back by a lot of feathers and bone clad individuals giving them the same level of indignation of their scout, accompanied by a chorus of 'workiki's', which apparently even Rip's translation spell had no equivalent for.

OOC ...and neither do I. I just thought it was a funny thing for them to say./OOC

[Graybeard]

OOC: I'm at a loss as to how to continue here. Rip and Shorty aren't fighters, even with odds less strongly against them than they appear to be with all these Ghob. For them to go Mary Sue at this point would be not only distasteful (I hate Mary Sue characters) but so out of character that I don't know how to do it. So I guess just drag them along with whatever the kobolds decide to do. I'm sure they'll think of something.