Really Bad Eggs

I'll just put the last entry from Really Bad Eggs here, since I've got them all handily stored in my email:
(I'm kind of unsure as to how the coding works, but here we go)

Scott: Unless you left anything in the hold of the Mistress o' Hell, yes, you should be wearing all of that. Recall that anything not on your person is at the bottom of the sea. Your equipment above sea level consists of those items noted in the first post of this thread, the pocket kibble listed in http://www.gamingoutpost.com/discussions/index.php?s=&showtopic=83081&view=findpost&p=99200, and the items you kept from the hold: a dingy blue vest, a floppy blue hat, a loaded pistol, six spare bullets, and spare gunpowder for about six shots.

I believe you took off the uniform jacket, the spiked helmet, and the floppy hat; we'll say those things are in the belly of the rowboat. Everything else is somehow stored on your person.

Crupp says nothing in response to you, but his white pupils swivel to Neely. The bald pirate gives his report with the flat brevity you've come to expect from him:

"As the boy says, Cap'n. Tom said the storm weren't natural and the harbor weren't safe enough, gave orders to sail 'round the island and shelter on the other side. Said there weren't time to get your orders neither. I volunteered to row back with the boy and tell you what he done."

Crupp finally speaks. His tone is hard to read. "Ordered you off his ship, did he?"

"No sir, I asked his leave and convinced him to give it. And begging your pardon, it's your ship. Sir."

Two beats.

Crupp suddenly animates, gesturing down the beach and bellowing, "ALL HANDS TO THE PRIZE! UNLOAD EVERYTHING YOU CAN BEFORE THE STORM HITS, GET IT BEHIND THE TREELINE! MOVE!"

The last command is unnecessary - everyone's already racing toward the Dutch wreck.

So, the Dutch is on the shore, right? They're running to it, not to the boats so they can get to it, right? If it was way out in the water, I would use HO-TK to lift it towards us, but thats probably unnecessary.

"Uh, Captain, is there anything I can do to help?"

If the answer is yes, then I will do that, if not I want to use clairvoyance to look above the island and examine the storm. After that I will send my probe to look around and in the clouds.

The Dutch ship has run aground; however, given how much of it normally rests below the waterline, "aground" in this case doesn't mean it's on the beach proper, but rather a little ways out, leaning heavily to one side. You're not sure if you could wade the whole distance (not knowing the slope of the ground underwater), but you could certainly swim it, and it's a short trip for a rowboat – which is apparently the preferred method, judging by the rowboats on the shore.

You concentrate for a moment and get a relatively weak hold on the ship. You lift it as carefully as you can out of the water, but the wind is blowing in from the sea ever more strongly, and you don't have much control at the moment. Are you trying to bring the ship down the beach toward the crew before setting it down, or are you settling for dropping it on the shore above the waterline?

Heavy TK roll: 04, weak success.

OK, getting back in the game.
Dropping the ship above the waterline is good, the ideal thing would be to make it easier for the men, the worst is that it made it impossible to get stuff out of.

I'll send a clairvoyant probe over the island and cloud to try and get a better idea of whats going on. I'll try to do something else, though I'm running out of options.

- Move the cloud using Heavy TK.
- Create some kind of force field around the island or just the group of men and I to protect us from the wind
- Heat up the cloud making it lose density and disperse
- Move the air to push the cloud away from the island, 'create' wind.

I know the second and last one I don't have any idea about, but I remember the guy that could manipulate temperatures from Men of Psience, so I know the third one can be done, if not effectively.

All that failing I'll move behind the tree line and look for a dry spot.

The wind makes it difficult to control the velocity of the ship once it's all the way out of the water. You don't so much set the ship down on shore as allow it to crunch sickeningly into the sand. Still, it remains mostly intact, and it is now entirely above the waterline.

The crew had stumbled to a halt as the ship rose out of the water. For a few moments after its creaky, scraping, shuddering landing, they remain still. Rain begins to fall.

McGraw cries out from the middle of the group, "Well? What're ye waiting for? You heard the Captain!" This rouses them instantly, and they're once more sprinting down the beach.

As crewmen begin clambering up the side of the beached vessel, you attempt to cast your mind above the storm. You get nothing; it's just not working right now. Then, you feel a hand fall on your shoulder.

"Good work, Bryden." It's Crupp. In your peripheral vision, his hand is quite black. "Now, unless ye've got something else real useful to do – turning back the storm, say – I suggest ye get on board and get to work. You're crew, now. 'All hands' means you."

I'd like to run your attempts of the ideas you listed, but I'm not sure if you're willing to tell Crupp that they're "real useful," so I'm saving that for next time just in case. No GE roll for the ship, because I don't feel like making one, but please do get in the habit of telling me your hopes and fears. It's quite useful for when I do feel like it.

If you'd wanted to maneuver the ship in any way more complicated than what you did, I'd have made you roll another skill check (due to conditions), but as it is you're riding on the 04 you got last time. Skill check for the clairvoyance: 95, not a botch.

I look at Crupp and raise my eyebrows. Accenting each word, I say "Aye, aye, captain." I briskly jog towards the ship. Thinking to myself:

Eerrrg, I've barely ever done any real work. Hopefully I'll be able to use telekinesis in order to help me.

With that mindset, I'll head over to the Mistress of Hell. I guess that there will be some way I can climb up (easily)? If not, I'll attempt to use Neutral Buoyancy and climb up the side.

I don't really know what would be important to these pirates. Gold? Gunpowder? Rum? Well whatever it is, heavy TK should be able to relieve some of the weight as I carry it out (Basically, I want to use HTK in order to counteract gravity, and then just move it with my hands). I want to try and stay as unnoticed as possible. The worst thing that could happen would be the other crew members freaking out and not being able to work.

As you move toward the Dutch wreck, the rain quickly intensifies. The storm clouds have blocked out the sun, bringing that sort of half-darkness that only thunderstorms can. When you reach the ship, which is leaning very heavily to one side, someone has already thrown a knotted rope over the railing that tilts closest to the beach. Some men are climbing up handholds on the ship's hull (apparently designed for this sort of thing), but given the tilt, the rope looks easier. You manage the ten or fifteen feet (again, thanks to the tilt of the ship) without too much trouble.

Going with the flow, you head down into the hold. McGraw is directing things down here. The belly of this ship is huge, and cargo is stored in multiple holds on two different levels; most of the men are going into a deeper hold and coming out carrying very small iron-bound chests that nonetheless appear very heavy. A few, however, are being sent in another direction to a different hold on this level. You wanted to stay unnoticed; do you head into the lower hold with the majority of the pirates, or slip away with the few?

I don't have a Strength score for you, and now seems as good a time as any to get it. Your TK isn't guaranteed to work, after all.

I have you down for 1@9 Climbing (B1@3); a roll of 14 is more than sufficient.

This is a supplementary post. I've been remiss in my description.

To say that the ship is in disarray would strain the limits of understatement. Anything not nailed to the deck which has somehow managed to stay on board lies overturned a goodly distance from where it's meant to be. The planks are littered with broken glass, splintered wood, spent ammunition, and other detritus, and loose bits of tangled rigging swing crazily in the wind. Sheets of rain slide down the bloodstained planks of the tilted deck, and that crazy slant lends the whole scene a final touch of the surreal.

Let's see for a strength score.

I was the strongest in my freshman class, that is I could bench press the most. (I think the most I did was like, 100 lbs though). However, my dad almost always beats me at arm wrestling, but dad is pretty strong. I would say that I have maybe a 1@8 or a 1@7, but not 1@6 or 1@9.

I think I'll slip away with the few; it would be kind of hard to blend in with lots of pirates, considering my age and uh, reputation.

Bench-pressing isn't terribly useful as a Multiverser yard-stick, so I'll focus on your population comparative. I recall your freshman class being around fifty or seventy people; if those were all random folks, that would be grounds for 2@1, but since they're uniformly younger than sixteen, it's not. I'm inclined to go with @7 on the basis of your age at the time (about a year ago), but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and call it 1@8. To use MJ's phrase, even if I'm overshooting, your 1@8 Strength is "a not unreasonable enhancement of the character."

By the by, this fixes your Martial Strike Value at 1@9. The only attributes I'm missing for you are Agility and Charisma, and of your averaged attributes only your Target Value (dependent on Agility) remains uncalculated.

If the outside of the ship is in disarray, the interior is chaos. Imagine if your room at home were turned upside down, shaken around like a magic 8-ball, and then stood on one corner; then add forty gallons of saltwater and put out the lights. Replace all modern landlubbing items with gunpowder-age nautical gear and insert a double-handful of hurrying pirates (and expand your room to the size of full-grown Dutch merchantman), and the resemblance is uncanny.

You split off from the main group and end up following Neely, because he's familiar and because you don't know where you're going or what you're supposed to unload. You're still not sure while you're carrying it out with him (your TK doesn't work the first time), but you and the others in your small group are mostly dealing with barrels, not chests. It's quite heavy; it could be water.

By the time you get back on deck with your barrel, a ramp from the deck to the beach has been built out of loose planks. You hand off your load to a waiting pair of pirates who carry it down the ramp, where you can see Black-Handed Crupp directing operations on land.

On the next trip, you make it work: you figure out how to "get hold" of the barrel without actually moving it, and you lift the thing with ease and with no help at all from Neely. (It's more like pushing around a two-day-old helium balloon than lifting anything, actually.) Neely pauses for a moment – you can't quite see his face in the dark – and then turns to help someone else, with no comment. You carry it out without incident, although you befuddle the pair of pirates you hand it off to, and you notice McGraw eyeing you with unsettling interest. (That's "eye" in the singular, of course.)

You make a few more runs into the hold, feeling like you're getting the hang of this telekinesis thing. You don't get it on every try, but more than half the time you do.

While you're working, thunder booms ominously – and loudly. You've only heard thunder this bad once or twice in your life, and it's apparent that the men around you are more frightened of it than you are. You also notice that Captain Crupp is taking a direct hand in the work on shore; once, you catch sight of him carrying two of the small chests (the ones his men have been hauling out by the work of two men at a time) - one in each hand.

While you're making another trip into the hold, you hear a loud, dull crash of water hitting something and the whole ship shakes. McGraw calls out, "Last run! Grab what you're getting and get out! This be yer last trip," and so on; you're already out of earshot and into the hold you've been unloading. You get a grip on a largish barrel with your TK – a blessing, means you don't need to work with a partner on your last trip – and lift it in your hands.

As you do, something inside the barrel shifts.

_____

I rolled your TK a few times and extrapolated from there to see how you did over the long haul: 58 fails, 02, 22, 60 fails, 27. Three in five's not bad, and the first success is a new use, bringing your SAL for Heavy TK to 1@8.

I immediately release the barrel with my hands, but still hold on to it with Heavy TK, keeping it floating. I stare at the box and count to five, breathing deep. Then I attempted to navigate the barrel out of the hold by pushing the barrel forward and then walking up to the barrel and pushing it again.

I'll personally escort the barrel off the ship and onto the shore. When I get on solid ground, I'll let the barrel down and try to use clairvoyance to see inside it. If I can't see anything, I'll try to create a light using psionics inside the barrel and then look inside using clairvoyance. If none of that works, I'll go to Crupp/the Captain and say "Uhm, I felt something move in this barrel. We need to break it open, I have no idea what's inside it."

I'll update your thread properly soon (within a day or two), but while I'm stalling and/or writing Paul's overdue post, tell me more about your attempt "to create light using psionics." Assume for the sake of explanation that you succeed at clairvoyantly peering into the barrel only to find that you can't see anything because it's dark in there. It sounds to me like you're going to try spontaneous generation of photons (or whatever) from nothingness, which isn't very much like anything else you've done with psionics, but I could be misinterpreting your intent. There's lots of ways to get light into a barrel, after all.

My original idea was to create light within the barrel psionically by generating light waves within it, yes, however seeing as I have little experience with energy generation besides the temperature changes from Men of Psience, this probably won't work. After attempting to generate light ex nihilo, I think what I may do is poke a hole in the top of the barrel using whatever I can find that would work, some kind of small pick or hammer and circular chisel being the most optimal or just having to use my saber to cut a hole using circular motions with the point. Once there is a small source of light, I would use clairvoyance again but this time a trying a different form that is kind of like nightvision. Sine the receptors in the eye are composed of rods and cones and rods, for black and white and shades and what not, require less light it would seem that an almost 'black and white' version of clairvoyance if you will would be more enhanced and would allow me to see more.

Interesting. The closest mention to this I can find in the rules is under the entry for clairtacticity, wherein sit-mods are awarded for omitting some of the various senses we lump together under "touch." However, you're not just limiting your skill by omitting a class of sensory input, you're using that omission to ease the task of enhancing that input. Accordingly, I'll treat this as High-Contrast Clairvoyance (-5 SM) P3@5 black & white only, with the +5 SM for excluding color used to partially offset the standard –10 SM for inclusion of a second skill (P3@1 Heightened Awareness).

You guide the barrel down to the beach with no trouble or interruption. It seems you're one of the last off the ship (though not the last, that's McGraw), and very few are paying any attention to you on account of the pounding rain and the bellowings of the Captain from inside the tree line. Nothing is being left on the beach; everyone and everything is being taken into the shelter of the forest.

The moment you step into the trees, the already dim light immediately gets dimmer. The foliage here is thicker than you were expecting. Crewmen are working around trees and fighting through undergrowth as they pile small iron-bound chests and the occasional crate or barrel; the island essentially transforms quite abruptly from broad open beach into jungle.

On the plus side, that means you get a fair amount of shelter from the downpour. You find a half-way level place to set down your barrel and focus on casting your visual perceptions inside it. You successfully do so – you get a minds-eyeful of utter darkness.

Your attempt to create light inside the barrel fails (you can tell because your clairvoyance is still up.) You have no idea where to begin, and after a minute or two blind of concentration, you give up.

With the notion of seeing intensely in black and white, you have better luck. You locate a small orifice in the side of the barrel (the bunghole, one supposes) and open it. The variation on your clairvoyance is difficult – you're not just trying to see from somewhere else, but to see in a way that you never have before – but with a little mental finesse, you manage it.

There's not much to see inside the barrel, because there is not, after all, much light. But, with the enhanced contrast of your black-and-white clairvoyance, one thing is clearly visible: a slight gleam off of one staring eye, caught in the faint ray of light entering the bunghole.

___
04 on the clairvoyance succeeds, 75 on creation of light doesn't botch, and 32 on the new skill succeeds even with the penalty. I've added 1@1 High-Contrast Clairvoyance (-5 SM) P3@5 black & white only to your sheet. I might regret allowing that skill later, but what the hey. Multiverser characters are destined for imbalance anyway.

Excuse my belated reply.

A thought flits through my mind; that the pirates of the Black Pearl contracted their zombie disease from monkeys, not from Aztec Gods, but I hurriedly push this thought out of my mind.

My immediate action will be to set down the barrel, pulling out and cocking my Rudolphian Revolver. I'll call out "Hey, I need some help here!" loud enough that people should be able to hear me if they're near by. Then I'll attempt to contact McGraw just using telepathy. If that doesn't work, I'll use clairvoyance to look down on the island and 'zoom in' in steps until I find McGraw, and then try and contact him.

Upon contact, I'll say "McGraw, I'm in the forests. I picked up a barrel with something...alive inside. I need some help here, though I've got protection."

Best case scenario: McGraw is nearby, within earshot of my call, and comes running. The thing does not move from it's barrel and does not attack me. It would be awesome if it was benevolent.

Worst case scenario: McGraw is not nearby and is under some dense foliage, making him impossible to see with my clairvoyance. The thing bursts from it's barrel and attacks me. Also, it would suck if my gun didn't work.

You draw your gun and call for assistance. You've only contacted McGraw once before, and you fail to find him now. One particularly scruffy-looking pirate has already answered your call. From beside you, he says, "Here, now, what's the trouble?" Seeing your gun out, he puts a hand on his sword; another pirate is joining him.

You have your gun trained on the bunghole, but the owner of the eye is still inside the barrel. Are you dropping your clairvoyance inside the barrel to look for McGraw, or are you trying to maintain two remote viewpoints at once?

__
79 on telepathy fails; GE roll comes up 14, "not desired, but generally favorable." I forgive your belated reply in exchange for retroactive forgiveness for all of mine.

"There is something moving inside that barrel, I don't know if it's hostile or not. Does anyone have a crowbar, or a prybar, to open the barrel?"

And no, I won't try and maintain two at once, I'll drop the barrel to look for McGraw.

You're still not much good at clairvoyance, and you're having trouble dividing your perceptions between that barrel and anything else.

The pirate looks at you like you're mad. "Open it? It's a rum-barrel, it don't open anywhere but the bunghole. An' how would anything get in there, anyways?"

A hand falls on the pirate's shoulder, making him jump. McGraw has slithered in between the two of you; the rainwater drenching his hair and running down his face somehow makes him look even more dangerous, like a one-eyed, hungry crocodile. He speaks softly.

"Beastie in the barrel, boys?"

"Aye, McGraw. Couldn't see what it was, just saw the eye glimmer. It can't be too big; it is a rum barrel after all. What should we uh, do?"

OK. After a long hiatus, I'm finally going to begin the summary for the immense live session Scott and I had. So much has happened, Scott and I agreed to stagger the synopsis quotes.

So, I was just asking McGraw about the beastie in the barrel. Eventually, a reptilian creature begins to push itself out, using some form of joint manipulation and contortionism. McGraw grabbed it and started interrogating it, and through his persuasions and my mind reading, this is what we were able to gather;

On the Dutch ship, there was a magician, sent with the ship to protect the gold. When the ship was under attack, he began to summon a djinn, but when I turned the ship upside-down, the summoning was canceled and the djinn only received partial commands. When, Grendel, was it? woke up, he saw a patch of blood, and his master and the djinn were gone.

We couldn't figure out who his master really was or anything like that. Did I get a new skill for reading the mind of the reptile? Did we deem it as too humanoid to count?

Oh, and the royal navy was accompanying the ship, they're probably a couple days sail behind us.

Moving along, we formulate a plan. Tom will sail to the other side of the island and wait, while the pirates on the island will bury the treasure in a few obvious and a few not so obvious spots. We will then hide and wait on the island until a. the storm clears or b. the navy shows up, grabs some gold, and leaves. Captain Crupp told me to keep a look out for the navy and what not. I hang around with McGraw and come up with some stupid ideas for stuff, eventually botching and getting macrovision. Skipping along, McGraw and I hunker down for sleep a little ways from the main bulk of the pirates and start to kind of talk. I notice someone behind us and alert McGraw as I turn around. A voice pops into my head, ::You are surrounded and at spearpoint. Surrender, and may the Gods have mercy on you.::

Well, that's not first and foremost in McGraw's mind, so off we go running through the jungle. I use neutral buoyancy to take some of the weight off McGraw, and we run (and bob) through the jungle. We reach some arbitrary point and dive under a bush and wait for about ten minutes(?) or so.

My Memory is fuzzy here, so I'll draw the border and Scott can fill it in if he feels it necessary.

I contact a pirate through various mind scan attempts who informs us that they are all tied up and what not.
I botch trying to connect McGraw into our conversation, resulting in a psionic shockwave on the pirate's end.
I use clairvoyance based on the mind scan to see where they are, and judge their location relative to the beach. McGraw and I head back to the ambush site and make our way from there. I forget exactly what happened, and I don't think anything really did, but eventually McGraw and I find the savages' village and wait out on the far side so we don't intercept them as they come around.

We stopped our first or second live session there, so that's where I'll leave it. Scott you're welcome to continue, but if you don't I'll plan on updating on Saturday.

I have the advantage of having told the entire story to someone (it took me an hour) upon returning home, thus cementing the events more firmly in my memory. On that note, corrections:

The homonculus' name was Grimmel. Had Grendel emerged from the barrel, your stay in that world would have ended that much sooner. I deemed his mind human enough that your mind-reading skill was unpenalized.

Tom was already on the other end of the island, having sailed there to escape the storm (which conveniently stopped and hovered over the natural harbor). At the time, none of you could be sure of that, but you eventually discovered this via persistent clairsentience.

I can't think of anything you're skipping where your memory goes fuzzy. You tried a lot of things to find out what you did, but the details of that aren't important given that you did find out: you and McGraw were the only folks to escape capture (Crupp was asleep when it happened, thanks to a modified GE roll of 27), and the others were being led uphill toward the topographical crest of the island.

Actually, it was an interesting trick he pulled to find the pirates. He expanded his Remote Broadcast-Thought Reception (originally developed to eavesdrop at dinner) to cover a very large area, eventually picking up another area-projected message from the cannibal chieftain to the captives - something along the lines of, "any further resistance will be dealt with in the same manner." He then used that message as a point-of-origin for both a mindscan and a clairvoyant probe. I'm not sure if I should have allowed that, but at the time it seemed reasonable.

/corrections

I'm getting woozy and I need to be at work in twelve hours, but since you told me earlier that you would rather I was the one to write the part where you get struck by lightning, I'll try to push on and post the second third tonight.

Graham and McGraw circled around "behind" the savages' settlement and came upon a small cliff (a steep hill, really), perhaps twenty or thirty feet high, the base of which was littered with debris, large animal bones, and partial human skeletons. The canopy around this area was clear, and the flat place on top of the cliff was the highest point on the island.

Here McGraw, who had previously stuck to Graham like tar to a feather, decided to leave him behind in order to scout about solo (leaving Graham with strict orders to not get found). With McGraw gone, Graham removes his uniform coat and shirt, uses his psi Alter Appearance skill to make himself jet black from head to toe (eyewhites and all), and army crawls to the base of the cliff. There, out of sight from any who might be above, he spies on the clifftop with clairvoyance.

_
[Bah. I'll either finish later or I won't. Either way, I'll edit out this bit in the brackets.]

I'd rather you didn't edit it, but made another post; that way I'll be able to sort out what I read from what I haven't read.

--M. J. Young

Of course. I didn't mean to imply I'd be editing anything in. I just wanted to get rid of the "boo, I'm tired" comment in favor of a brief note at the beginning of the next post.

Now, of course, I won't be doing any editing at all, because otherwise these two posts wouldn't make any sense.

Let's see, I left off with Graham crouching in the bones at the base of a small cliff while scrying on the cannibals' gathering place above. I'll try to Cliff's Notes the rest.

A few forerunner cannibals set up a canopy (a cannibalopy?) over the fire pit to protect it from the continuing rain (unnatural storm, remember, caused by a possibly-rogue djinn). Cannibal chieftain is there, looking superior on his wood-and-bone throne, flanked by elite spear-toting guards and sporting a mini-chieftain (his son?) standing to one side. Folks bring out dry firewood (protected by animal-skin wraps), set it up in the fire pit, and C.C. lights it on fire with his mind. A skin cauldron is suspended over the fire and quickly filled with water from nearby rain-pots. Oh joy, I wonder what they're getting ready to do? Graham tries to get a telekinetic hold on the cauldron in preparation for dumping on C.C. at the opportune moment; fails, waits.

A couple of warriors run in from the woods and deliver a message to the chieftain (which Graham can't hear, though a lot good it would do him if he could). Graham doesn't know this, but McGraw tried an ill-fated (GE 23) sortie against the in-transit prisoners' guards and was forced to flee into the bush with a minor wound. The chieftain gives a silent order - hand signals - and two men leave.

Soon the prisoners arrive, tied in six chains of five pirates each (hands linked to hands, feet to feet), along with the rest of the fighting population (roughly forty spears, all told). Crupp has special treatment. For some reason, he has been hogtied and is being carried in a bone cage by four cannibals, with a guard on either side holding him at spear point through the bars. The cage is set down on a flat rock. The carriers join the warrior throng guarding the tied prisoners and paying rapt attention to the idle C.C, but the guards stay by the cage.

The rain continues to pour down, gathering on top of the canopy. Two things happen at once. First, six cannibals go to the lip of the cliff and begin hammering in six very large stakes. Second, Graham notices the approach of the two men sent out to scout around for McGraw; they're heading straight for him, poking about in the brush as they go.

Seeing the scouts as the more pressing problem, Graham tries to settle in a little better into his hiding place. This backfires, and they notice the sound of shifting bones. Thinking quickly, he tosses a human skull as far as he can into the jungle; it hits a tree, and they notice that, too. They exchange a glance and decide to split up to check out both sounds at once.

Before his scout can get to him, Graham seizes the spear from his hands with TK and stabs the man with it (new use). It's only a flesh wound, but it creates the desired effect: diversion. Even the folks with the stakes notice the wounded man below, who cried out after apparently stabbing himself with his own spear. Or is he struggling with it against an unseen power?

Not unseen for long. Even as Graham takes advantage of the man's newly tightened grip on his weapon to send him on a spear-ride deeper into the jungle (high-velocity TK, new use), Captain Cannibal takes in a clairvoyant view of the cliff base and spots Graham despite his camouflage. While the second scout runs off after his companion, the chieftain grabs Graham with heavy-TK of his own - and Graham fights him off. (Yay willpower!)

Next post, the stunning climax. Will our hero survive? Well, obviously not, but will he survive getting struck by lightning? Come back in a week to find out!

Welcome to another installment of Super Action Summary Theatre. We left off last time with Graham simultaneously diverting the cannibal scouts away from his position and resisting the cannibal chieftain's telekinetic power. Although he has fared well enough so far, in this installment our hero's fortune takes a turn for the worse.

Having failed to lift Graham on his first attempt, the chieftain sends Graham a private telepathic message, addressing him as "rouge mog-ur." The jist of the message is "come out and confront me in a civilized fashion, or continue to hide and may the gods have mercy on your soul." Graham responds by dumping the cauldron of water on him and tossing the empty container over the cliff.

This time, the chieftain gets a hold. Graham is hauled up to the level of the cannibals and held suspended over the fire (which until recently was heating the cauldron). He's soaking wet from the rain, so the fire is just drying him out – for the time being.

As the chieftain thought-broadcasts that this "rogue mog-ur" was skulking about and by the way what does he have to say for himself, Graham notices (with his still-present clairvoyant sensor; his vision is still macro-ed beyond easy use) that McGraw is now creeping out of the undergrowth toward Captain Crupp's cage – safe from prying cannibal eyes thanks to the convenient spectacle of a pitch-black Graham Bryden floating over a fire.

(At this point, Graham asked me if the captain's guards were still holding their spears to him. I supposed it was possible, though unlikely, that they might have relaxed their guard in the face of recent events, so I rolled a GE. Congratulations go to Graham for the very first 3 rolled in my game. As I recall, I ruled that not only had the cannibals moved a few feet away from the cage and closer to the center of the action, one had dropped his spear when the chieftain was splashed.)

Graham's smart enough to know his role. He responds with some nonsense about being sent by the Gods as judgment on them for their sins; the chieftain calls him on it, saying essentially "if the gods are on your side, how come I'm dangling you over the fire and not the other way 'round?" Graham is still jet-black, and since chieftain made allusions to possible demonic influence or origin, he responds with another body-alteration: he adds an enormous tattoo of a golden sun to his chest, and he changes his irises from black to gold. Graham – as I recall, you never reversed these changes, and this was your final state until verse-out. Does that match your recollection?

By this time, McGraw has made it to the captain. Not bothering with the cage, the first mate simply cuts the bonds on Crupp's arms and legs; the captain destroys bone-and-tendon structure with an explosive display of brute strength. Roll initiative! Yay!

___
Continued later today, probably. Unless Graham steps in before that . . .

Yes, the tattoos and iris are still changed. Continue with the summary, I barely remember the fight, though I do remember the boat and stuff vaguely.

Here's where my combat notes on Crupp and McGraw came in handy. The two pirate officers seized the initiative, quickly dispatching the two nearby cage-guards, McGraw with two swipes of his knife and Crupp with a single punch to the chest. (Remember that everyone here except Graham, McGraw and the cannibal women and children were severely hurt in an earlier psionic shockwave). Due to the position of the cage and the slow reactions of the cannibals, the only other combatants between the Captain and the Chieftain were the latter's two elite personal guards and the young chieftain-in-training - all three of which were dispatched by the charging Captain with a speed and brutality not seen again until the famous Locomotive v. Cantaloupe match-up of 1859.* Just as Black-Handed Barnabas reached the cannibal chieftain's throne, the savage leader employed his powerful telekinesis – to no effect. Shrugging off the spears of the now-onrushing cannibal warriors, Crupp seized the cringing cannibal, twisted him into an unnatural shape, and heaved his broken body halfway to the fire.

As the ex-savage twitched and finally lay still, Graham realized he was no longer suspended in the air.

__
*Victory went to the Locomotive. By the bye, the "Stomp" maneuver was back-written into the style to legitimize my verbal descriptions of this scene.

This is probably the seventh or eighth time attempting to start a summary that hasn't ended in me closing out Firefox due to too much work. Now however in my brief rest between doing work I don't get paid for and doing work I <i>don't</i> get paid for, I decided the summary had been too long unwritten. I apologize to Scott who will of course attempt to apologize for all his lateness past present and future, and although I see his logic my southern geniality denies me any attempt to not feel sorry.

I used neutral buoyancy to stop myself from falling into the fire, quickly climbing up to the skin ceiling. It was at this moment that Scott decided lightning would hit the tent. I remember his justification for it later going something along the lines of "Wouldn't it have been cool?" which, consequently, it would've been err I wasn't on the ceiling at the time.

There was a terrible ghastly silence.
There was a terrible ghastly noise.
There was a terrible ghastly silence.

The roof exploded. I was flung to the ground and was basically useless though not unconscious. I was dragged out of the fire and the muck by a pair of hands, perhaps McGraw and another, I forget. I remember nothing of consequence happening between now and the beach, but Scott can jump in if something did indeed happen.

We reached the beach on the otherside of the island where Muderin' Tom was waiting for us. A little ways out was the Mistress o' Hell in all her glory, and we were pretty happy to see her. A rowboat comes to us and takes the captain and about four other guys back to the ship. A good while passes. The rowboat comes back and another five pirates leave with the rowman. At this point in time, I used clairvoyance to see inside the ship. The top was fine, just Tom and some other guys. I remember Tom looking kind of jittery and nervous. I moved the probe down below deck and saw several prim and polished Dutch soldiers waiting for us. I moved the probe up to the sterncastle and peeked inside the Captain's cabin met with the view of the captain and four(?) soldiers with what I now know to be silver-bayoneted rifles along with one admiral with a solitary pistol inscribed with a fleur de lis. When I relayed this to McGraw, he was skeptical then serious at the mention of the fleur de lis.

McGraw and company attempted to come up with a game plan while I signaled the other pirates to return by firing off my pistol.

--
My time runs out here, but I will attempt to update again soon.

Graham, I'm far too delighted at your having posted at all to care in the slightest about apologies to or from either of us. (Good guesses, though.)

Players take note: the GE roll only sees the unaltered future. Contrary to Graham's summary, I decided the round before that the canopy would be struck by lightning; I had no idea that he would be on it at the time. New use for the Neutral Buoyancy.

I remember nothing of consequence happening between now and the beach, but Scott can jump in if something did indeed happen.

You mean besides the slaughter of a cannibal tribe at the hands of two men? Nah, nothing of consequence.

In fairness to McGraw, he started calling back the rowboat at your first mention of the soldiers. The rest of your information was relayed as the boat made its way back. Everyone on shore was quite surprised that the revolver actually fired, by the way. (Minor corrections: six men in the captain's cabin, not four; McGraw's skepticism was at the idea that seven men were enough to contain Crupp, rifles or no rifles, and your description of the pistol cured his skepticism by informing him of the identity of the officer).

The game plan was rather hurried, because the longer they took to make it, the more suspicious Tom's men and/or the navy men would become. It went something like this. Send folks to the ship by rowboat just as before, knowing full well that each boatload will be apprehended, stripped of weapons, and thrown in the brig under guard (six men in the brig, for a total of thirty soldiers plus the admiral). However, everyone leaves his cutlass on shore, taking only the wet, useless pistols onto the Mistress. The last boatload will contain Graham, McGraw, the four best men, and all the swords (just in case). Out of desperation and necessity, these six are charged with storming the ship, freeing the Captain and the men, and arming said liberees.

I'd say "wish them luck," but it's a little late now.

Storming the ship went well at first. Just after the crew throws down ropes to the rowboat, Graham gives the Mistress of Hell a sudden rock to one side, to throw everyone on board off balance and maybe even give Crupp a chance to get out of the captain's cabin.

It works; McGraw and the rest climb on board and overpower Tom and his men. Graham and Tom engage in a brief shoot-out before McGraw closes the distance across the deck. I believe Graham got off two shots (missing twice) and so did Tom, despite Graham having a revolver to Tom's multiple flintlock pistols; that's skill at work. As if he wasn't battered enough, one of Tom's shots grazed his thigh, adding blood loss to his list of woes. In any case, the first and second mates dueled it out at close range with knife and pistols, and the knife won.

Around that time Crupp comes running from the captain's cabin with two gunshot wounds, getting a third as he flees. He takes cover behind a mast, and someone tosses him a spare sword. Meanwhile, the four loyal pirates are guarding the hatches that lead up from below decks, two to a hatch. Graham decides to hide under the bowsprit.

There was a nice humorous moment when he discovered that one of Tom's men was also hiding under the bowsprit. By silent agreement, neither gave the other away.

The situation was now thus:

Twenty-four soldiers with guns and swords belowdecks;
Four pirates with swords above decks, guarding the hatches so that the soldiers can't come out without dying;
Six soldiers and Admiral Natter in the captain's cabin (under the sterncastle), armed with rifles with silver bayonets and loaded with silver bullets, who are unwilling to sacrifice their defensive position in the face of the absolutely bestial combat prowess of
Crupp and McGraw, taking cover behind a mast and the stairs to the sterncastle, respectively.

Did I mention that Black-Handed Crupp is a werewolf? That never came out in play, but if you were wondering about the silver, that should satisfy you. Anyway, the point is that this was a standoff of which any Mexican could be proud.

Briefly.

Right, let's finish this sucker up.

There was some bogus negotiation going on between the Admiral, the Captain and the First Mate, but Graham couldn't hear it. Instead, he watched the inside of the captain's cabin via clairvoyance and used Heavy TK in conjunction with Heavy Furniture to cause enough chaos to break the stand-off (at least part-way): thanks to his disruptions, Crupp was able to cross the distance from mast to sterncastle, putting both himself and McGraw just beyond the cabin door. Also, two of the six soldiers were partially evicted from the cabin by a table; these were immediately cut down.

In the time this took, however, the soldiers below had not been idle. At least one had realized that the pirate's munitions were down there with them. In a well-coordinated maneuver, two lit smoke-pots were thrown up on deck, and smoke quickly choked the air on board the anchored ship. Using this as cover, the Admiral's men forced their way on deck to try and win via superior numbers.

Graham made a brief effort to crawl toward the smokepots and throw one overboard, but he quickly abandoned this. Deciding that none of this was worth it, he taught himself to levitate on the spot (1@1 Levitation P4@8) and hid in the rigging to wait for the smoke to clear.

Literally. See what I did there?

When the smoke cleared (I crack myself up), everyone still alive was below decks. After a minute or two (during which time Graham attempted to turn himself white as a sheet – get it? A sheet? They used to call sails "sheets," see . . . oh nevermind), uniformed men emerged on deck, which of course told Graham who had won.

Incidentally, I asked him who he wanted to win (so I could do a GE roll, slanted by the combat odds) and he told me he genuinely didn't care. He was more concerned with how many survived on the winning side to pilot the ship and how well those survivors would treat him until he could get to shore. So, I rolled for that instead. 18 was pretty middlin'.

Graham's earlier attempt at camouflage had failed, and he was unfortunate enough to be spotted quickly. The admiral called him down in a friendly sort of way, and Graham came. A brief and friendly chat ensued during which the admiral correctly deduced a great many things, including Graham's abilities and role in the battle (but not that Graham was a verser), and then our hero was sent down to the hold to be kept prisoner, at gunpoint, quite separate from the other pirates.

__

Graham wasn't content to let matters alone. He decided to start trouble with a variant on his conversational (read: area effect) thought-projection – he wanted to create unrest by projecting low-level anger and hostility into the minds of everyone on board.

I told him that when similar skills had been used to communicate with him, he was easily able to tell that these were someone else's thoughts and feelings, and that this wouldn't create the effect he wanted. That's fine, says Graham, but I want to try and make them feel it themselves, and not know I'm doing it.

Ho, boy.

Because such a thing is possible in theory, I allowed a skill learning roll for Mass Emotional Suggestion (-??) P1@4, thinking with an area as large as a small ship, I might go as high as –50. He rolled; I did the math; even after the penalty (which I wasn't even sure about), he'd succeeded. Pooh. Ah, well, I thought – I can still apply a GE roll to see if all that anger makes them act how he wants them to.

12, "as good as expected." Pooh.

Well, everyone's in a fine temper (especially the imprisoned pirates below – I recall a guard complaining of being bitten), so when the ship meets up with the Imperial Frigate and Graham is brought on deck for transfer, perhaps he is not being watched quite as closely as he had ought to be.

As soon as he sees the other ship, he pulls it underwater with Heavy TK.

Or, he tries – it's connected to the ship he's on by a series of grapples, so as soon as the attempted dunking puts the slightest tension on those ropes, he can't move the ship any more (just like how you can't lift your own feet). So of course he teaches himself multiple-object TK on the spot (1@1 MulTK P4@7), throws off all the grapples at once, and then dunks the ship.

Realizing that everyone will realize his culpability in a few seconds, he tries to run for the rail, hoping to jump off and run away across the water. He's caught by his guards before he gets two feet – tries to bluff them telepathically – fails – feels the Admiral put the barrel of his loaded flintlock pistol to the base of Graham's skull.

"Bring it back."

He does.

There is a click, and the hiss of burning powder . . .

____

Thus ends my very last player summary ever. Only took, what, a month and a half? With perhaps more live play to come as early as late December? Bah.

Graham, if you've anything to add, you're welcome to. And if anyone has any input on sit-modding an area-effect P1@4 Induce Emotion, I'm listening.