Port Lorrel

[Graybeard]

"I do not like this," Grope said. "My people are ... nervous ... about magical constructs."

"Yeah, I kinda got that impression," said Chippy. "That's what the other trolls said."

"The other trolls?" Now Grope was interested.

"You know, those guys up in the mountains," Chippy explained. "They're the ones that taught me your language. Fortunately the big brains set it up so that we chipmunks learn languages fast. We just about had to, to keep tabs on what the tourists were doing."

"Did the other ... modified ... animals have language skills too?"

"Naw, they're too stupid for that. They can talk a little, but the dim things aren't much for conversation..." Condescension? In a chipmunk?

Grope was just starting to inquire about the trolls "up in the mountains," when he became aware of a most unfamiliar, and unsettling, sensation: the scar where he'd done the Blood-Binding ceremony with Lucas was itching, in a way that he'd never felt a scar itch before.

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Lucas, Jamie, and the rest of the intrepid travelers got back on the road, with the usual badinage, complaining, and so on, under skies that were still angry-looking, but not raining at the moment. A strong southwest wind at their back urged them on ... and carried their scents (by now fairly gamy) over the horizon.

They were only a couple of miles beyond the last houses of Lorrel when the first signs of farm livestock began to appear in the fields. Here there were a half a dozen scroungy-looking cattle; there, three or four moth-eaten horses grazed. In the far distance, in a field ahead of them, what looked like a flock of sheep appeared to be heading in their direction.

Wait a minute. Why were these sheep hopping?

[Viking-Sensei]

Lucas remembered, two or three years back, travelling through this countryside with a lovely woman named Susan and her daughter. She was fleeing an abusive husband, and made arrangements to stay with some distant relatives in a small out-of-the-way community on the edge of the Northern Territories, a haven for all those who civilization didn't quite know what to do with.

But they'd encountered a bit of a problem... the abusive husband was a portal mage, and the last two times she'd tried to escape from him he'd somehow detected them travelling via portal and had quickly moved to intercept them. That had lead them to Lucas, master of moving without being detected. It's not that he's overly stealthy - often, far from it, but in a world where enchanted magical everything is the method most people use, a good-old-fashioned walk-across the countryside was almost completely invisible to all but the most observant.

Since this was a special situation, he'd actually agreed to meet them in Port Lorrel, which is where her husband was stationed, so as to avoid arousing suspicions. She left a note saying that she was going up north to take their daughter to the Mountains of Madness for her 6th birthday and that they'd return in a day or so, just to throw off any suspicions that they might be making their permanant escape, and had met Lucas on the edge of the city.

He'd aranged a ferry to meet them in the far northern city of Rinkaiel that would transport them to their destination. Because of the incognito nature of their travels, he had to leave Ayiee behind, as a distinctly female distractable blue golem construct with a penchant for nudity tends to draw even more attention than one would normally imagine. No, any/all the threats he imagined for this trip were supposed to be from humans, so most of what he was carrying on his person was designed to stop people, not... other things.

Hopping things.

It was his fault, he recalled bitterly. It wasn't going to happen again.

"Ayiee, Bob... Defensive Formation - Hare-Raiser."

[Sareth]

I stared at the approaching bouncing figures. After all, this was hardly the most common thing to be seen. Sheep didn't hop that I'd ever noticed. Not that I was any kind of expert or anything.

Lucas, on the other hand, ssemed to know something about it, based off his reaction. As Ayiee and Bob spread out to do... whatever it was they were about to do I arched an eyebrow at Lucas. "Defensive formation? What, one of them your ex or something?" As I snarked, however, I drew a pistol with each hand, standing behind and slightly to the side of Ayiee.

[Viking-Sensei]

"Lepivores." Lucas growled in response. "Feral familiars. I was hoping that we weren't going to have to deal with them, but either their migration patterns have moved, or they've boomed in population since last time I was through here. Don't make any sudden movements - they're intelligent... ish, and we might be able to reason with them. They're highly reactional and they've got a strong sense of pack loyalty, so sniping them now will only serve to really piss the survivors off that much more. So... put your guns down, just not too far down."

[Sareth]

"Put my guns down? Are you crazy?" I muttered. Putting my guns down was far from my idea of a good choice. I mean, I wasn't sure what a "Lepivore" was, though they were coming close enough for me to start getting the idea. They looked a lot like a Jackelope I'd once seen, although Jackelopes were definitely still herbivores. These I wasn't so certain about. I really had no intention of becoming the prey of giant killer bunnies. What would my mother say?

I snaked even closer behind Ayiee. I wasn't going to put the guns down completely, but then Lucas hadn't asked me to put them away altogether. Instead, I sheltered behind Ayiee close enough that I could shelter my guns from view by holding them behind her. I figured anything semi-intelligent to intelligent that looked towards the two of us would be too busy staring at the blue skin to notice he more normal figure was hiding something.

It's a good thing I hadn't hidden behind Bob. Hard to hide guns behind something less than a foot tall.

[Tiamat]

[OOC]Let me state in advance that Jonathan has no idea that Lucas is the cause of all the magic troubles. Yet.]

Jonathan saw the beasts headed down the slope and stood complete still for a moment. Winston looked up and said, "What're those?"

Jonathan's only response was "The only mistake in familiar-making that was worse than you. How the hell could they let them escape!?"

As Lucas began his own battle preparations with his golem and the gunman, Jonathan stopped paying attention to him and kept his eyes on the pack - no pistol would kill one of those abominations, and the golem wouldn't be able to protect everyone from the whole pack.

The herd (or pack) stopped, and then the largest of them turned its head towards them and began to sniff the air. Jonathan sighed. "They can smell you. They hate other familiars more than they hate mages." As if on cue, the entire pack began to head straight for them.

"If they're feral, they're probably non-responsive to any of the command words. Which leaves us with Plan B: Rocks fall, everyone dies." As soon as Jonathan finished Winston immediately dived into a pocket of Jonathan's robe and sunk his claws into the fabric to ensure he could not be removed. Jonathan tried to pay as little attention to the sudden stabbing pain in his leg as he began casting an incredibly potent variant of the standard earth smash. Halfway through the casting, however, he realized that it wasn't the Inn that had been messing with his magic - he could feel the spell change this time into some twisted parody of what it should be - but the spell's target location hadn't gotten any closer, so he decided to finish the casting and damn the consequences.

It was at this point that a fifty foot long carrot appeared in the air and plummeted directly on top of the lead rabbit.

Winston poked his head out and said, "... You've really lost your touch, you know that?"

Jonathan, open-mouthed, could only stare.

[AdamZero]

In the twisting wake of the 'summon: giant carrot' spell, Marcus regained some of his sanity. He took every ounce of it and used it to run up the path, as the carrot and the horde of wabbits now devouring it were adjacent to the road, with Boris following behind.

"Must go faster, must go faster." He muttered, as a glimpse in the edge of his vision showed the rabbits were rather well into eating the vegetable.

Then one of them bit another... and the cannibalism started. Marcus nearly vomited as death after death rippled over him. It wasn't so many deaths right after another, but it was the artificial nature of the lives being ended, compiled with the incestuous slaughter and devouring of sibling flesh that got his guts a churning. When he crested a hill, he fell to his knees, panting for breath.

He could hear slowing foot steps that weren't Boris's, so he guess the rest of the group had followed him, or at least some of them.

"I....HATE....WABBITS!!!" he roared down at the ground.

[Graybeard]

The orgy of rabbit-eat-rabbit was winding down when one particularly sturdy, or smart (or stupid), or something, rabbit noticed that the pack's original quarry was escaping. It took off in Marcus' direction, not speaking but rather singing, to a tune from an opera currently popular in Port Lorrel:

"Kill da Fudd ... Kill da Fudd..."

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The itching in Grope's wound ebbed out. Was this what Blood-Binding was all about? he wondered. Had Lucas gotten himself into serious trouble ... and then somehow got out of it? And just where was Lucas? Somewhere close, apparently, but where, and how, and why?

He put the thought of his friend away for the moment as his attention returned to Chippy. "I have many questions to ask you about the other trolls," he rumbled. "Would you be willing to travel with me for a time and share your wisdom?" He carefully did not use the troll-ese word that specifically connoted God-Wisdom or Many-Fathers-Wisdom; if this small being knew the troll language as well as he appeared to, he'd get the significance -- and Grope had no intention of eating him.

"Sure," the chipmunk said. "I was getting bored with this backwater neck of the woods anyway." And he allowed Grope to gently pick him up and deposit him in a pocket of the Many-Fathers-God-Wisdom-Robe, but not without a token protest:

"Pee-yew! This thing stinks!"

[Sareth]

I'm not completely certain what had prompted the sudden retreat, whether it was Marcus turning and beating feet, the sudden appearance of a giant carrot, or the realization that if these rabbit-things were willing to eat one another, they'd have no qualms at all about eating people. Personally, I wasn't interested in being eaten, so the moment Aiyee turned, her ponderous mammaries nearly knocking my gun from my hand, and hauled blue ass, I followed.

Reaching the top of a rise, I looked back over my shoulder. One particularly brutish looking rabbit was leading a charge of the survivors, heading straight for us. Disconcertingly, it appeared to be singing a show tune from an opera I'd caught part of once (shooting the lead diva kind of put a hold to the rest of the performance). I drew a breath to shout a warning...

And promptly caught Marcus' head in the gut. Inexplicably, he had dropped to his knees before me, and with my head turned looking back over my shoulder, I hadn't noticed. My feet had connected with his, they'd gone out from under me, and I'd come down atop his skull right in my midsection.

Naturally, this had the expected result. It totally knocked my wind out, leaving me able to only point from the pile of limbs and torsos that were a combination of Marcus and I. I waggled my finger back over the hill, trying desperately to gasp out a warning, but only able to get out a disturbing wheezing sound.

Just as the first rabbit's ears could be seen over the crest of the hill at the top of each hop, I realized a further problem. Not only was I unable to breath and tangled far too intimately in a pile of Marcus, but I had dropped my guns in the fall.

Oh, this was going well...

[AdamZero]

Not how I was hoping to get this close to Jamie, but interesting none the less. Marcus thought as he managed to get the two of them into a somewhat sitting position. However a few unstable stone cause him to shift and the hand he had intended to use to keep himself upright found itself on Jamie's groin. He paused for a long moment, and opened his mouth to say a rather fell phrase apology, when the wabbits started hopping in.

"Kill the Fudd..." Oh snap the bastids were quoting the Warner Sisters? That just wouldn't fly if Marcus had a say in it.

"Boris... my boom staff." He held out a hand for the deeply enchanted staff... well... really it was nothing more than a glorified hollowed out staff he focused a ball of death into to kill things from a distance... really nothing grand... and it was unreliable...

The skeleton wobbled, all his joints spinning about before he drew out the black staff from his head. He handed it to the boy and the young necromancer held the stick like a rifle. It crackled and popped as he charged it with his magick... then it turned into dust.

"Yeah.... that was a bad idea.... Jamie you got anything?" He asked his entangled person.