Local Conditions wrote:
CASTLE REFUGE
- Location: Northern Arkansas
- Population: thousands
- Date & Time: 1334 October 24 PA110
- Ley Line Activity: Ley Line 100' away
- Weather: Sunny, 54 degrees F.
- Visibility: Good, overcast
Nameless Map
WEST COAST TURNAROUND
The leaves on the trees are just starting to turn. A few of hints of gold and red peeking out from the green canopy. The stream continues to murmur over the small rocks, with a rhythmic sounds creating a soft lullaby in the wooded area.
Despite the beauty, the feeling of wrongness continues to grow. As Tiberius melts into the forest and Egil blunders into the woods, more and more evidence to support the feeling appears. First, both Egil and Tiberius get no sense of any sort of aberrant magical or psychic energy in the area. But then they spot the arm. It's armored in black, the hand curled around a broken laser pistol. The arm has been ripped from the body and the the bones are exposed and the flesh is hanging out strips waving slowly in the water. The chilly stream has contained the blood flow, or maybe it had bled out by the time it had floated this far down. It's pretty clearly a CS Dead Boy has been torn to shreds.
Moving in for a closer inspection, Egil not only makes a racket, but falls down face first in the deepest part of the stream. He's soaked, his Huntsman armor practically a bucket. When he straggles out of the stream, he realizes not only is he soaked, but he makes a squish-squash noise with every movement.
Only slightly deeper into the woods they find more dismembered body parts, all CS. Dog boys and a psi stalker too, but the number of grunts is hard to determine.
The footprints in the soft area around the small river do tell a story. Large, maybe 24" to 30" long. Two clogged toes in the front, one long claw in the back. But what Egil (squish-squash) finds most disturbing is that they foot prints don't tend to walk from place to place but they hop or fly judging by the distances between prints. The CS bodies were actively piled up. He can faintly smell something alien and horrible. The monstrous footprints disappear, but Egil can see that whatever they were, took off flying through the trees, below canopy level. He spots enough broken twigs and piles of disturbed leaves to know that they went north.
Tiberius and Egil both reach the same disturbing conclusion. Xiticix. Somewhere between five and ten.
The dappled shadows provide plenty of cover for Whisper to move unseen through the woods. Her exalted detect arcana picks up a very faint trace of psychic energy. She can tell that the level was low in power, not attenuated or otherwise dispersed.
"Safe" in Bop, Chevy uses the sensor suite to do his own checking. Not much is available in the electronic spectrum. Not much, but there is a little. There is a fading signal, like a beacon somewhere off to the north, but he doesn't have enough signal strength to make any better analysis.
What are you doing?
Butcher's Bill:
- Egil: -1 Stealth, -1 Pace