Port Lorrel

[Sareth]

I gave a long stretch, eyeing the unfortunate weather. It had moved past to form a rapidly receeding line of clouds headed away from us on the horizon, but it had left behind a legacy.

*splash!*

"Oh... Luminosita's nethers..." I shook the water off my boot, hoping it wouldn't soak through too quickly. My boots were pretty waterproof, but nothing was perfect. Not even magic. One or two puddles wouldn't soak through if I got through them quickly. But it was going to be a long day of walking.

At least the scenery wasn't too bad. The last time I was on a long walk I'd had to stare at the backside of a particularly portly mule. This group, on the other hand, had a few backsides worth watching. Idly, I turned back from the retreating clouds to watch the procession ahead of me, the odd coin or pendant in my hand.

"You're staring."

"Wha?" I asked, startled by the fact that Boris, or whatever that thing's name happened to be, was speaking to me. "Aren't you dead?"

"Maybe so. Maybe not. Something like that. But I'm certainly not blind. And I'm facing backwards. Hard not to notice. So who'se ass do you find hotter? The blue chick's? Or Lu..."

"Finish that question and I'll grind you into meal then use you for tra"

*WHU-SPLASH!*

Before I could finish the statement something tangled with my legs, sending me face first into a puddle. Cold, muddy water soaked my front, marking what would no doubt be the beginning of a very unpleasant few hours, and we hadn't even left town yet.

I lifted my face from the water, not even taking the time to wipe the water from my face before shouting "TOVIO! That damned pet of yours is humping my leg again!"

[Viking-Sensei]

By mid-afternoon the group had covered decent ground and were well into the outskirts of the township (or whatever the locals used to divide their territories by) of Lorrel. The clouds were beginning to thin, although the occasional spectre of rain still plauged them; large drops, the sort you get when a storm is on the verge of beginning, kept falling on the party, a threatening preview of what the day might hold.

"Alright." Lucas said casually, looking at the map. "Let's call it lunch. That'll give the stragglers a chance to get their wind before we brave the horror that is The Mountains of Madness."

Lucas pulled an umbrella-like device from his bag and, upon pressing the button, it unfurled to several times it's normal size. Mechanical gears whirred and clicked as arms assembled themselves, forming four large support poles that the new instant canopy rested upon. A few chairs dropped from the roof, like ripe fruit falling from their magical mechanical tree parent, and slowly a large table descended from the center. Lucas pulled open a small pocket dimension bag and started producing plates, silverware, glasses... many of which were stamped "Property of the World Traveller Inn" on them... and several servings of travel-oriented prepared food.

"Alright, dig in."

[AdamZero]

(wasn't gonna have Boris be a TALKING skeleton, but hey)

"You know this is rather rude." The skeleton said, his head currently stashed in his torso. "Eating in front of me like this."

"I could have sworn I sealed your speech runes..." Marcus mumbled as he bit into sandwich. "Though I'm not too surprised..." he shot a glance at Lucas."

"Oh yes, fine gent that man. Nice and chaotic." Boris whispered.

The two were sitting a bit away from the group, under a tree, just a bit off.

"Yeah, you know I bet Jamie's gonna blame ME for you're little comment."

"She WAS staring."

"She has every right to. I'm not normal."

"Have you taken a good look at those folks?" Boris thumbed a boney digit at the group. "I may have been mad in life, but I'm sane enough to know freaks when I'm among them."

"The aren't freaks."

"Heh, so the cutlery claims the kettle's silver, eh?"

"What's that mean?" Marcus leaned in as he bit down on a nice fruit.

"Means you'll see them as normal but you refuse to accept you're a good gent."

"..."

"Won't deny the denial? That's like accepting it as truth."

"What?"

"Double negative. Two minus' equal a plus"

"That's bad logick."

"Hence why you get marks of when you say 'he isn't not a freak' in grammar class." Boris smiled, leaning against a tree, tapping his rib cage in a vague rhythm.

"You're mad."

"Madness is for the living."

"Then I'm mad enough for the both of us."

"Now you're getting it."

"GETTING WHAT!?"

Boris just smiled and kept up his little tapping song.

[Graybeard]

The pickpocket, who'd been following the group at a discreet distance, stopped dead as she saw the instant lunchroom. "Too weird for me," she muttered, as she turned back toward the grifters.

---------------

"A ... 'problem,'" Grope echoed.

"Well, two problems, actually," the chipmunk said. "For one thing, most of us figured out that if we had all these magical skills, we could make a pretty good life of it without hanging around the amusement park. So pretty soon, everybody just split. Now the woods are full of talking chipmunks, packrats and pigeons, and the people still have to clean up the messes and do the security stuff themselves.

"And the second problem ... is a little matter of killer rabbits."

[Graybeard]

"Killer ... rabbits?" Grope echoed again, starting to feel as if he'd wandered onto some other plane of existence.

"That's what I said," Chippy confirmed. "It all started when the big brains got the idea of talking mascots for the place. Ignoring what was right under their noses, they thought, 'bunnies are the most cutesy putesy fluffy cuddly widdle things...' It's enough to make a chipmunk puke, I tell you."

Jealousy? In a chipmunk? Grope thought, with more than a little amusement. "I can see why," he sympathized. "Nobody ever called a troll cute and cuddly either. Well, except for another troll."

"Yeah, just sickening," the chipmunk said. "So the talking rabbits were bad enough ... and then some maniac got the idea that what they really needed were big talking rabbits. I mean, rabbits the size of sheep. So they made up a test batch where they enchanted the damn things for speech and then used a Growth spell on them. And only then did they realize that rabbits aren't as cute and cuddly as people make 'em out to be. They're mean when they get a chance, they just don't get many chances when the whole world wants to eat them. But when they're twice the size of their predators ... brrrr." The chipmunk shuddered theatrically.

"Yes, I can see that that might be a problem," Grope said neutrally, hoping to get away from this topic. But Chippy wasn't done yet.

"And then it got even worse, because the huge, nasty, talking rabbits got together ... and started to hunt in packs."

[Sareth]

Coming around from behind a bush I finished tying the front of my shirt. The break for a meal had given me the chance to change out of my wet and muddy things into something a bit dryer. I dropped the sodden wet things into my pack, making a mental note to hang them up to dry when we camped for the night, pulled my cloak back on around me (wet or no) and then dropped down onto a chair under the... parasol? Where the hell had that come from?

I grabbed one of Lucius' MREs (Magically Reconstituted Entree) and popped the magic seal on it, pulling out a packet of heated Tsuirakan egg noodles with chicken and sauce, dumping it on one of the plates and starting to spoon into the spicy stuff. Between bites I looked over to our guide.

"So, Lucius... can you tell us more about these Mountains then? Anything of particular interest about them? Strange magics, odd creatures, big abandoned mines full of filthy lucre?"

[Viking-Sensei]

(OOC: Lucius?)

"Well, remember, these are mountain*S*, emphasis on the plural. There's a lot of them - a whole range, actually, that runs across the northern half of Farrel, just like the Mountains of Sorrow run across the bottom half... of course, there's pretty elven names for them too, when the locals aren't trying to sound too depressing, but ever since they built the amusement park up here, the whole "Mountain of Madness" name has kind of come back."

Lucas pulled out an old and tattered map of Farrel, obviously his own personal map, annoted with memos and reminders about different towns. Curiously, the "Port Lorrel" entry now had in fresh ink "Don't stay at the World Traveller Inn again" written under a list of names, addresses, and instructions.

"Let's see... strange magics and odd creatures we've got an abundance of, and that's before you take the god damn amusement park into consideration... but there are some old abandoned mines. Bob, index coasting roller, please."

Lucas' hat lurched forward and Bob came crawling out from under. "Coasting Roller, also known as the Rolling Coaster. Class - Very Bad Ideas I should Avoid at All Costs. Legend has it that local children were taking turns riding around on an enchanted mine cart. The cart had been programmed to move on it's own, taking whatever had been mined from the depths of the mines to the surface and then returning for more. The children rode around in the cart inside the mine, up and down hills and around turns, and found the experience to be fascinating. The rightful owner of the mine discovered what the children had been doing and, after a few unsuccessful attempts to stop them, started charging them a small fee for the ride. Rumors spread about the "Mad Mountain Rolling Coasting Mine Cart" ride, and eventually reached as far as Tsuiraku, where prominent - edit - insane businesswoman Saiko Mesuinu heard the rumors and purchased the entire plot of land sight-unseen from the mine owner. Since then, the Rolling Coaster concept has been re-developed, with rides being above ground, taking advantage of the hilly natural terrain. See Also: Mountain Of Madness Amusement Park, Mountains of Madness geographical feature of Farrel, Saiko Mesuinu, Very Bad Ideas, Hubris, Places marked to Avoid at All Costs, People marked to Avoid at All Costs, and Squirrels, Wild Familiars."

Bob, his entry now recited, proceded to eat some of Jamie's chicken before curling up on Lucas' lap.

[Graybeard]

Predatory, sheep-sized rabbits that hunt in packs, Grope mused to himself. That might be ... entertaining. He'd been on light rations ever since leaving Kiyoka, apart from the one pig ... "How many?" he asked Chippy.

"The packs are usually about half a dozen," the chipmunk answered. "Enough to give the farmers lots of problems, but you should be able to handle 'em without much trouble. Or did you mean how many total? I think the big brains only made about 20 to start with, but the damn things breed like, well, rabbits. I don't know how many there are now, but it's a helluva lot more than that."

"Where are they?" Grope's hunting instincts were starting to kick in.

"Most of them went up into the mountains," the chipmunk said, waving a front paw, in an amusingly human-like mannerism, toward the Mountains of Madness. "They're smart enough to know to avoid all the people with guns, and nobody in their right mind goes into those mountains; all sorts of bad stuff up there."

Grope didn't mention that part of that "bad stuff" was a single band of trolls; his sister and her clan had left the troll homelands to explore, much as he and Zhbrigeeul had, and were trying to make a go of it there -- at least he hoped they still were. He remained silent as Chippy continued, "Every so often, though, a pack of 'em comes down and makes trouble. Usually they just kill livestock around Volkanenborg and make nuisances of themselves until the town kills them or runs 'em off -- you wouldn't believe all the guns that those people carry. But some of the packs have made it all the way to the outskirts of Port Lorrel."

"Not my kind of place," Grope observed. "How can the Sma-- humans stand to live all cooped up like that? To me, nobody in their right mind goes there, not into the mountains."

Chippy nodded agreement. "Yeah, you gotta think that anybody in Lorrel who runs into those things kinda has it coming..."

[EDIT: Had to retcon this, much later, to straighten out the troll references.]

[AdamZero]

Marcus sat rubbing some grass between his fingers. The blades left tiny drops of oil on his skin. He didn't need to smell it to know it was blood, at least a few days old. He sniffed it once, if only to determine the race, using magick to heighten his senses. He really should have known better, doing that within shouting distance of Lucas.

The sound he made was somewhere between hideous disgust and moral violation. He threw the grass away, as if tainted by a plague. "WABBITS!" He screamed. For anyone who'd picked up a copy of Doctor Alfred Finch's 9212 Crimes Against Nature, in which many of the good doctor documented his entire menagerie of self conceived abominations, a wide range of other horrible things his contemporaries created, and a few choice places turned into vile pits of the damned by magick (Mandatory reading at all schools in Tsuiraku), that the 'Wabbit' or 'Whirl-a-death Rabbit' is a breed of rabbit enlarged by magick, given certain self defense mechanisms, human speech, and on top of all that, semi-human intelligence. Worse than anything, nobody in all the creation of 'Wabbits' has ever bothered to STERILIZE them, with the exception of Dr. Finch himself. However he said that: "the sheer fury of a male wabbit lacking his fuzzy bits is only overshadowed by a barren female wabbit's relentlessness to KILL everything she lays eyes on. Thus the best counter measure to defeat such wabbits is to get the females to kill the males, then have the females look at themselves, or each other, in mirrors."

Marcus, having seen far too much from the magick blood sense, was currently sitting next to Jamie. He had his legs pulled close while Boris leaned against him, the bony being's elbow on the boy's head.

"I coulda told you it was Wabbit blood." the bony thing said with a mock sigh.

[Sareth]

Idly leaning back, I contemplated the information that Lucas had given. Well, that Lucas' familiar had given. An entire chain of mountains, and whoever had sent me that little message seemed to think that the famous lost mine happened to be the same one that had been turned into an amusement park based around some animated ore cart?

I've heard of less plausible things.

If that was the case, though, it was possible that someone might have gotten there first. After all, who would buy a played out mine sight unseen? Someone who believed there was something there worth having.

"So, tell me more about this Saiko Mesuinu pers HEY!" I swatted at Bob, attempting to keep him from stealing the chicken bits out of my noodles. I was less than successful at this, but I was successful at fighting off the urge to pull out my pistols and perforate the pilfering pestilent pet.

... And now I'm alliterating. Maybe I should let him have the chicken, They must have put something in it.

"Wabbits!"

"I coulda told you it was Wabbit blood."

I glanced over at the odd fellow and his wizarding friend. "Rabbits? What do rabbits have to do with anything?"