Session 223 - Dude, Where’s My Tar!?

The hunt begins! ...and ends.
Lesson learnt - don't eat Elf hearts.

Andromeda gets her groove back.
Barrett escapes a hanging.
Damnation Snels is a mob boss.
Red reads.
DJ praises the sky.
Jasmine is sliced to ribbons.

Session 223 - Dude, Where’s My Tar!?

Date:
14 years after the End.

July-August

Characters:

Character Backstories:
- Jasmine: Got into a confrontation with a way more powerful foe - the Elves! She fled, and indeed, is still fleeing. +1 to fleeing rolls.

- Barrett: Managed to blag his way out of a confrontation with the Loegrian Navy in his privateer days through adept use of signal flags. Once per session, de-escalate a verbal confrontation.

- Andromeda: Slept with a POWERLAD who wasn’t assigned to her when she was in Ereshkigal’s Drakencult. She let another Andromeda take the fall, and watched as she was punished. Heal 1 HP whenever an attack that might have randomly hit you hits someone else.

- Damnation Snels: Had sons that died tragically, as we know. One in the core of the earth, the other somewhere in the wastes. Name the location of your child’s grave. When you show a PC your child’s grave for the first time, you both gain 100*your level bonus exp.
- Red: Since Red was transported back to one point in time at her birthday each year, it led to a lot of petty bitching and revenge between her various time-displaced selves. Once per round, deal one damage to the creature that just hit you.

Murders: - A whole bunch of murderous junkies (100 exp) Total: 100 exp

Events:
--- July 9th: The Morning After the Night Before

- Andromeda and Damnation Snels awaken in the Spider Temple beneath the disapproving glare of the Spider-Priests. Andromeda’s equipment is gone, except for her hammer and armour. Her groin is gone too somehow - replaced by smooth weirdness.
- Damnation looks in his pants to find that no, the tattoo really is real. “I love POWERLAD” tattooed on his intimate parts. What a night.
- Privateer Barrett finds himself locked in a cage suspended by spiderwebs over the river, imprisoned for crimes he can’t remember. None of his equipment is here… but luckily he thought to secrete lockpicks in his capacious prison pocket!

- Andromeda vaguely remembers seeing Zulu doing a massive bar-long line of notcoke. Damnation has a flash of being blind while someone poked at his privates. Barrett was there too, stifling giggles.

--- July 8th: The Hunt Begins!
It was nearly midnight on the night of the New Moon and Jasmine was getting ready for another caper. Staying ahead of the Wild Hunt took planning and guile - she'd escaped them once, why shouldn't she be able to do it again? She gazed at the Radar Jammer spell she'd spent the last couple of weeks preparing. It was the best shot she'd have. The girl in the foxskin was here again, watching her.
“Are the Elves going to be unsporting and shoot me with Magic Missiles?” asked Jasmine.
“Oh no honey, the Gentry don’t get their hands dirty. It’s the Hounds that’ll get you!” replied the fox girl.
There wasn’t much else to say really, and so the fox girl soon flew off on her mist-horse, wishing Jasmine good luck.

A bugle sounded in the distance and the sky began to shiver with the beginnings of hypnotic colour. The Hunt was on!

Jasmine ran into New Moondin with a cloak over her head. She followed the sounds of revelry to the In Times of Mead inn. With a wave of her hands she cast Radar Jammer, and a full nine of the revellers turned into copies of her!
All nine of them coldly turned to look at Jasmine.
“There she is! Get her!” they yelled!
Jasmine fled as fast as she could! How did they know it was her?

Before they could catch her, her friend Dustin Johnson was there. He breathed out a big cloud of calming mist, and everyone chilled the fuck out.

Jasmine took the opportunity to scarper through the streets, and the house doors started banging open behind her as she ran. An angry mob was chasing after her, torches and pitchforks in hand!
Suddenly she was grabbed by a strange and smooth arm! It pulled her into an alleyway, and there she found herself face to face with Privateer Barrett. His breath was fetid with alcohol, and he insisted on trying to tell her a long-winded story before she managed to pull herself away.
She ran until she couldn’t hear them any more and hid, breathing heavily.

It was then she realised that there was an eerie quiet. Men and women stood gazing at the sky, and in the distance she could hear the rousing sound of Dustin Johnson preaching about aliens descending from above.
She ran into an open doorway, averting her eyes from the bewitching aurorae above, looking for somewhere to hide from whatever was coming for her...

--- July 9th: Gathering Evidence

- Andromeda blearily asks the spider-priests if they’ve heard anything about Euclid, her tar-like pet, and they inform her that they’ve had reports from the Power-Temple that are “really fucked up”. Power Temple it is, then!
- She grabs Barrett’s equipment from amongst the confiscated items and heads out, Damnation in tow. He looks quite the worse for wear.
- Barrett jimmies the lock and plunges into the cool waters of the river below, leaving his clothes propped in his cage to make it look like he was still in there. He swims to a bank and drags himself up it… but hears a retching sound from above!
- Damnation Snels vomits into the river, hitting Privateer Barrett on the back of the head! Barrett throws up himself. It’s a 90s grossout movie now I guess. Andromeda keeps walking.
- As the pass the Hot Box, the den of the Junkies, it’s weirdly quiet and enveloped with a hazy cloud of weed-stank. Might have something to do with last night. Andromeda remembers stripping off for an orgy and flinging her gear everywhere. And was Barrett wearing a bunch of sticks on his head and saying he was a spider-priest??
- No time to investigate! They hear screams from within the Power Temple, and Andromeda rushes in! Snels suddenly has a flashback to a prophecy he had last night about the present moment! They’re about to see a false POWERLAD and Andromeda!!!

--- July 8th: Go to Ground!
Jasmine ran up the stairs inside the house she’d run into. Picking a door at random, she burst in and saw the window was shuttered. Good! The next room was full of bunkbeds and, crucially, had no other door. The windows, too, were shuttered.
There was a sound like shattering glass getting closer and closer, then a scrabbling sound against the roof above. She heard something moving in the room she’d just come from and peeked out - it was Privateer Barrett!
He was facing away from her with a strange arachnid-esque headpiece, standing before the window which had its shutters yawning wide, staring at the sky in fascination.
The shattering sound grew until suddenly hundreds of glistening butterflies were swarming through the window! Jasmine slammed the door shut and threw a blanket on the floor to stop them coming through the crack at the bottom. What was she to do!?

She hid under a shuttered window, hoping that they wouldn’t find her.
There was a short moment of silence, the shattering sound of flying butterflies fading…

But with a cry of “Tally-ho!” the window shutters burst open! Thousands of butterflies began pouring into the room, swirling and cutting her with their razor sharp wings!
Jasmine was clever - she’d already created a Hammerspace big enough for herself!
She rolled under the bunkbed and into Hammerspace, appearing in the other-dimensional pocket containing a mausoleum beneath the shining moon.

The breaking-glass shattering sound of the butterflies was gone.

She was safe.

“Hi!” said the girl in the foxskin.

--- July 9th: Grim Homunculus
- Andromeda kicks in the door to the Power Temple and is confronted by a horrific sight! Exaggerated versions of POWERLAD and Andromeda made up of an amalgam of body parts stagger and wobble around the room, while priests and priestesses yell in horror!
- Black tar writhes across their faces and clings to the joints between body parts. Andromeda wills the object to come back to her shoulder… and it does so! The homunculi collapse into body parts which start wriggling their way towards their original owners.
- It transpires that they were using Euclid as a coke straw last night! Whether it was the coke or the discussion or the orgy, Euclid got the wrong idea and tried to create the perfect versions of POWERLAD and Andromeda. It went wrong.
- Her stuff isn’t here though, sadly. Apparently she turned up naked! She also has another flash of memory - Zulu murdering a soldier who was cheating in an arm wrestle. She rammed a candle into his eye and smashed his head into a slick of oil, laughing as the pub went up in flames.
- They find out that they came to the Power Temple via the Hot Box and set out there, hopefully they’ll find Andromeda’s gear there!

--- July 8th: Run!
Jasmine saw the fox girl, knew she was in danger, and jumped back out of the pocket dimension! She rolled back out from under the bed into a cloud of sharp-edged butterflies. Their flickering flight cut her as she ran to the window and jumped out, Feather Falling to the ground.
The butterflies were everywhere. Overhead, winged Gads flicked around to corral them into Jasmine’s path. She set off running for the Hot Box - the people there would be too high to hurt her!

Sharp butterflies packed the streets, slicing Jasmine’s flesh. She grabbed a knotted lasso of rope from her backpack and began swinging it like a hoop around herself as she ran, shunting butterflies into Hammerspace. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped.
Despite the dimensional shunt, she was still getting torn to pieces by the cloud of shattering insects. Only a third of the way there and she was nearly ready to just lie down and die.

She turned a corner and nearly ran straight into Dustin Johnson! He stared blearily at her, clearly incredibly drunk, then gave her a healing slap on the butt and sent her on her way.
The Gods were clearly with her this night. Every time the lacerations of the butterflies threatened to overwhelm her, she would find herself face to face with another drunk Cleric who could heal her wounds. Damnation Snels and then Andromeda gave her a boost as she scurried through the sharp-edged streets.

Breathing hard, Jasmine arrived at the Hot Box and dived through the doorway, past the bouncers who were still staring gormlessly at the sky. She was suddenly surrounded by the stale grassy smell of Otherpot and a loud pulsing beat. Dancing people were everywhere.
Finally safe.
Suddenly she screamed at a sharp flash of pain in her back! She turned to find she’d been stabbed, and menacing ravers wielding Andromeda’s equipment (how did they get her equipment!?) were advancing on her.
They needed to be stopped - she began to cast Stinking Cloud.

The ravers yelled and began to charge, hoping to prevent a spell going off, and saw the look on Jasmine’s face as she realised that the magical energies were going out of control.
Chaos Burst!

It all happened at once. The Stinking Cloud erupted immediately, then spread exponentially. Everyone in the club was at the epicentre of a new cloud of stench. Still Alive played loudly, and overhead the roof sagged as the very stone began to be transformed into mud.
Everyone in the Hot Box was incapacitated except for Jasmine, who grabbed her hoop of rope and dived down into Hammerspace.

It was full of butterflies.
They tore Jasmine to ribbons inside her own pocket dimension.

--- July 9th: The Hot Box
- Andromeda, Barrett and Damnation Snels arrive at the Hot Box to find it a stinking wreckage.

- As they pick their way through the rubble they find many dead bodies. A true tragedy - this is the loss of a tenth of the remaining human population.
- DJ finds the silver lining - this is a real coup for his digging company!

--- Aftermath
- Jasmine’s body is never found, presumed taken by the Wild Hunt. There is talk in the town about strange men who asked after her in the days leading up to the New Moon. Horseshoes are affixed to doorways as a superstitious precaution.
- The Snelsmen become extremely vocal in the aftermath - the foolish drug habits of the Junkies have been punished and most of the town was ensorceled by Elvish influence. Signs of moral terpitude!
- Damnation Snels secretly funds the rise of the militant Denialist Brotherhood - a collection of rough Snelsmen who demand tithes in a sort of religious protection racket.
- Red capitalises on the destruction of the pub to create Red’s - a popup bar with a focus on honey whiskey. She also consults her book on the Iounians of the Moon, finding out all sorts of strangeness.

- DJ’s digging company finds Andromeda’s stuff in the wreckage and returns it to her. Andromeda, for her part, finds that she’s kinda really getting into the Otherpot culture these days y’know?
- The road to the Saviourbone Mine is close to completion… although expect some fun™ new Rebuild mechanics next session because I’ve reworked them a bit. The summer days stretch on, but they’re gone too soon. September opens to a grey autumn. Adventure awaits!

Total: 2600 exp

Team Bonus:
- Balls to the Wall bonus
- Best of Intentions bonus
- Better Part of Valour bonus
- Bookworm bonus
- Coitus boners
- Classic Charles bonus
- Deja Vu bonus
- Diplomancy bonus
- Dramatic Chase bonus
- Enmity Inciter bonus
- Fame bonus
- Heresy bonus
- High as Fuck bonus
- I Immediately Regret This Decision bonus
- Infamy bonus
- Leave a Man Behind bonus
- Literally for real a terrorist bonus
- Ludicrous Gore bonus
- Michael Bay bonus
- Mind Control to Major Tom bonus
- Pundemonium bonus
- Split the Party bonus
- Pacifism bonus (500 exp)
Total: 1600 exp

Individual Bonus:
- Chronicler (Carter - 100 exp)
- Expedition Leader (Kitty / Andromeda - 100 exp)
- Cartographer (Carter - 100 exp)
- Paymaster (Tom / Barrett - 100 exp)
- Quartermaster (Kitty / Andromeda - 100 exp)
- Vanguard (Carter - 100 exp)
- Triage (Kitty / Andromeda - 100 exp)
- Chef (George / Snels - 100 exp)
- Art Attack bonus (Tom, Carter - 100 exp ea.)
- Attacco d’Arte bonus (Tom, Carter - 100 exp ea.) - Fiction Fanatic bonus (George - 100 exp)- Chippo Champion bonus (Tom*2 - 100 exp ea.)
- JÜGBRINGYR bonus (Kitty, Charles, Timothy - 500 exp ea.)
- Addictive bonus (Kitty / Andromeda - 100 exp)
- Awesome Death bonus (Carter / Jasmine - 500 exp)
- Lonely Death bonus (Carter / Jasmine - 500 exp)

Experience Totals:

- Kitty / Andromeda, Level 5 Laddite Cleric: 18320 (Level up at 28000) - Tom / Privateer Barrett, Level 5 Specialist: 16623 (Level up at 24000) Level up: +1d6 HP! +2 Skill Points! +Improved Saves! +Backstory! - George / Praise-God-For-He-Gave-His-Only-Son-So-That-We-Might-Be-Saved-From-Damnation Snels, Level 5 Snelsman Cleric: 15420 (Level up at 28000) - Timothy / Red, Level 4 Fighter: 15220 (Level up at 16000) - Charles / Dustin Johnson, Level 4 Intergalacticist Cleric: 10475 (Level up at 14000)

- Carter / Granite "Grumpy" Ironjaw, Level 2 Forgelore Dwarf: 2217 (Level up at 4400) Level up: +1d10 HP! +Backstory!