JWTS6
The rest of the trip to the Archipelago of Exiles -- a small group of islands in the Uttermost West, protected from the Wyld by some ancient First Age magic, where people and spirits go when they are exiled from other places -- the rest of the trip is uneventful. Thanks to her huge pirate mojo, Tarla avoids sailing off into the Wyld and makes it no problem. \\ \\ She sights the Island of Blasphemous Prayer in the evening of the third day: a wide, scrubby island with a forested interior, a single high hill, and a natural harbor. There's a village built next to the harbor, and a small fortress or mission atop the hill. \\ \\ She pilots the ship into the harbor and sees the many canoes on its beaches. After parking the yacht at the sole wharf, Tarla is greeted by dozens of green-eyed, green-skinned natives, speaking to her in a language unfamiliar.\\ \\ "Does anyone speak Imperial?" she asks, and indeed yes, a handful of them do, albeit with strong accents. They welcome her to the Island of Reverent Prayer, and ask if she is an Immaculate Monk. \\ \\ "What?" \\ \\ The Immaculates came, lo these many generations ago, and taught them Imperial, and how to build huts, and how to make trousers, and be ashamed of nakedness, and so on. Perhaps you would like to speak to the Abbot? \\ \\ Tarla recalls that the last few times she's met Immaculate Monks, they've tried to kill her. On the other hand, those were all in the Scavenger Lands, and now she's all the way on the other side of the world... She also considers that unless she chooses to burn with holy atomic fire, it's unlikely she'll be recognized as a Solar. \\ \\ So Tarla allows herself to be led up to the monastery, and meets Seus Marahd, the Fire-Aspected Immaculate. \\ \\ "Ah!" he says as soon as he sees her. "A Solar Anathema! How wonderful! Welcome!"\\ \\
\\ So Tarla and Marahd chat for a bit. Tarla is surprised that he isn't trying to kill her, and he explains that he was sent on a holy quest, lo these two centuries ago, to establish this mission and instruct the natives in the Immaculate faith. The other Dragon-Bloods who accompanied him have since died, but enough natives have over the years joined the monastery that he feels his work has not been in vain. His task was to convert everyone on the island, and now that she is there, he understands that everything else has been mere prelude to this moment: the Immaculate Dragons want him to convert her. Sure, it'll be difficult, slow gong, but he's confident that she will come around to his way of thinking. \\ \\ Tarla objects, explaining that she is searching for a trio of pearl hags and cannot spare the time to endure his conversion attempts. \\ \\ Oh? Marahd asks. How long can she stay, then? Just a few weeks? A week? A weekend?\\ \\ Overnight, Tarla says, since it's dusk anyways. \\ \\ Wonderful! Marahd says, and instructs the villagers to prepare a big ol' Polynesians-meeting-Captain-Cook-style feast, with Tiki torches and roast pig and everything. \\ \\
\\ Later, back down in the village, Tarla is enjoying some roast pig by the light of Tiki torches, and Marahd stops by and begins questioning her and her faith. He is much less friendly and much more brusque, calling her a demon, and explaining the cycle of reincarnation by way of comparing her unfavorably (karmically speaking) to crabs. Tarla Sha, he says, died at the moment of her so-called Exaltation, killed by the demon now inhabiting her body. \\ \\ While the Immaculate faith doesn't come across as particularly appealing during this exchange (which went on for five or ten minutes, though I'm skimming over it now) Marahd and Tarla do converse civilly. \\ \\ The natives sing some Immaculate hymns, which basically run "Obey obey/Do as you're told/Obey obey/Dragon-Blooded are better than us" and "Shame shame/Reincarnate in the next life/Shame shame/Be obedient and prosper." \\ \\
\\ \\ Later still, in the dark hours of the night, most of the village has quietly gone off to bed, and Tarla looks up to see that the party has died down. She hears, faintly, sounds of a struggle on the far side of the village -- someone calling for help, then falling silent. \\ \\ Tarla rushes to investigate, and sees four of the natives in monastic garb holding down a young man from the village, clearly in the act of carrying him up to the monastery. Tarla isn't sure what's going on, but she's sure it's unsavory. \\ \\ She proceeds to flip up over the attackers and slam them into trees and all in all, they're four extras: combat takes her three rounds. On the negative side, though, Tarla nearly suffers when two of them manage to gang up on her, coming at her from two sides. She realizes that in the past, she's either been attacked by solitary assassins or else the terrain has forced them to come at her one at a time. If they did gang up on her, they could quite possibly "overbear" her in a dogpile and hold her down until others could cut away her vitals. \\ \\ The monks did get out a few shouts before she incapactiated them, and some alarm does seem to be getting raised. \\ \\ As the village has a real dearth of places where only a single attacker could come at her at a time -- the closest places she's seen are the wharf and the walls of the mission -- Tarla makes a run for the yacht. \\ \\ She doesn't know what, exactly, is up with the Island of Blasphemous Prayer, but she knows it isn't good. \\ \\ Marahd leads his assembled monks down to meet her at the wharf -- thirty monks with torches. \\ \\ ("Including the four I took out?") \\ \\ Twenty-six monks with torches, and Marahd himself armed with the only sword on the island. Tarla's yacht is moored to the wharf, with ropes and such, and requires a bit of work to loosen. If Tarla tries to lift off, Marahd will send his monks to attack her... it's a standoff. \\ \\ Marahd shouts at her for a bit -- we tried to be friendly, you couldn't play ball, now you'll have to be sacrificed to Ashikani, that sort of thing. Tarla shouts back that Marahd is a coward, and dares him to face her in single combat. She begins to attack the Immaculate faith, and Marahd commands his monks to close their ears and ignore the Deceiver's lies. Her taunting frightens the monks, and they're rattled enough for her to cast off unchallenged. \\ \\ The Immaculate commands his monks to get in the canoes and sail out to assault the yacht, but they're too frightened of Tarla (and her eight successes on a Charisma+Presence roll) to comply. Rather than risk further weaking of his authority, the Immaculate tells her that "this isn't over" and withdraws back to the mission with his monks. \\ \\ Damn straight this isn't over, Tarla decides. She waits until the monks are out of sight, docks the yacht again, and sneaks off through the woods to the back of the mission.\\ \\ Hot Ninja Action! \\ \\ Once the monks have fallen back to the mission, Tarla re-docks the yacht and runs off into the woods behind the village. She isn't, actually, very stealthy, but the woods aren't patrolled, so she's fine. \\ \\ The monks are plainly unused to fending off ninja attacks. They've posted a pair of guards at the main gate of the mission, but that's all. Tarla figures there must be a back door, and circles around. \\ \\ In the rear of the walled compound, she sees two things. First, there's the heavy, old stone foundation on which the brick outer wall was built, which juts out above the ground in the rear. Second, there is indeed a back door. \\ \\ ("Is it locked?" \\ "They don't have locks. There's barely a latch.") \\ \\ Tarla quietly opens the back door and heads into the mission, finding herself in a large, dark kitchen. She's surrounded by stored foodstuffs and barrels of cheap fermented palm wine and so forth. Something smells delicious, wafting in from the central courtyard, but the kitchen itself is plainly not being used, what with it being the middle of the night. \\ \\ (At this point I should explain that the mission is a square walled compound, all of brick, except for the older stone flooring. The outer wall is about twenty feet high. Four or five one-story buildings are attached to the interior of the wall, all looking in on a central courtyard.) \\ \\ Wary of the delicious smell, Tarla looks for and finds a side passage connecting the kitchen/larder to the mess hall. The side passage, she notes, is narrow -- only four feet wide -- since it's inside the outer wall. Perfect for fending off large groups of attackers without a scene-length defensive Charm. \\ \\ In the mess hall, three of the native monks are rearranging the long benches and tables, pushing them all to the walls and stacking them up. Making no attempt at stealth, Tarla charges forward from the side passage and jump-kicks one of the monks. \\ \\ As he falls, the other two yell and run out to the central courtyard, Tarla close behind. \\ \\ In the central courtyard, Tarla sees the source of the delicious smell, and is sickened. A wide fire pit has been dug and filled with hot coals -- work done, presumably, during the party in the village. Slow-roasting on these coals are the dismembered corpses of two villagers. \\ \\ Also all the monks are in the courtyard, running towards a small outbuilding with a "storage" sort of look to it. They appear to be retrieving and distributing earplugs, to protect them from the Deceiver's lies. \\ \\ Curses, mutters Tarla, and jump-kicks a few more of them. \\ \\ As the monks move to surround Tarla, Seus Marahd emerges from another doorway, holding a worn but functional Imperial bow. \\ \\ As he prepares to open fire on him, Tarla flips back towards him (kicking off a few handy monks), lands on his shoulders, snatches the bow from his hands, and swivels up to the roof of the building he's just emerged from. \\ \\ Livid with rage, Marahd hurls curses at Tarla while his monks hurl rocks. Tarla responds by breaking the bow over her knee, then activates Graceful Crane Stance and leaps down onto Marahd's forehead, then runs along the heads of the monks to the mission gate, leaps up again into the trees, and starts moving away through the forest Crouching Tiger style. \\ \\ Marahd distributes more torches and half the monks follow him out into the woods to find the Anathema, while the other half stay back and guard the mission.\\ Out in the woods, Tarla takes advantage of her lead, and her capacity to leap from tree-top to tree-top with mighty fu. She evades Marahd's pursuit before it begins, and circles around to the back door of the mission. \\ \\ The larder/kitchen is still empty, so she moves to the mess hall and sticks her head out into the courtyard. The fifteen or so remaining monks -- \\ \\ (Thirty minus the four Tarla took out in the village is twenty-six. Twenty-six minus the two Tarla dropped in the mission before is twenty-four. Half of the monks went with Marahd; half of twenty-four is twelve.) \\ \\ The twelve or so remaining monks are vigilantly standing around in the courtyard, and move to attack Tarla when they see her. Tarla determines that the door to the mess hall is too wide for her to prevent them from slipping past and around her, surrounding her, and overbearing. She drops one (eleven!) with such ease that three more fail their Valor checks and run away (eight!), then pulls back to the narrow hallway. \\ \\ Once in the passage, of course, she's golden, and simply picks monks up and throws them at other monks until they're all unconscious. It's Bowling for Extras! \\ \\ Tarla takes the opportunity to scour the mission, looking for, well, pretty much anything. She finds Marahd's bare bedchamber, with a couple of hooks on the wall that once held a sword and a bow. She finds the spartan barracks of the other monks. She finds the storage closet, with torches, earplugs, bolts of cloth, and old stone stairs going down. \\ \\ (Dramatic music!) \\ \\ Tarla grabs a torch and heads down the stairs, unsure what to expect. The stairs are dusty and worn, but sturdy, and about fifteen feet down end in a small (12'x12') room with no other exits. The room is bare, except for the circle carved in the stone floor. \\ \\ Tarla examines the circle, and recognizes it as a summoning circle. Specifically a demon-summoning circle. Specifically an intact demon-summoning circle. \\ \\ She inexplicably fails to activate Spirit-Detecting Glance and instead decides to stow the unconscious monks in the basement chamber. \\ \\ After she's taken two down the stairs, however, Marahd and his remaining monks return. Tarla does the leap-up-to-the-roof thing again, and is surprised to see Marahd rush immediately for the basement. She effortlessly evades the other extras, and follows him. \\ \\ Down in the basement, Tarla finds Marahd slitting the throats of the unconsious monks and feeding their blood to something inside the summoning circle, something invisible that laps it up. \\ \\ Tarla still doesn't activate Spirit-Detecting Glance and moves to attack Marahd, who raises his sword. At this point, however, the summoning circle crackles as a small figure appears in its center -- a wispy slip of a girl, with coal-black eyes and coal-black fingernails. The demon child gestures at Tarla, subjecting her to hideous mental attack. Confused, Tarla runs away. \\ \\ She runs all the way back to the yacht, in fact, woozy with enchantments, and falls into a deep slumber. It was the misty predawn hours by this point, anyway. After a short and restless sleep, Tarla emerges. The sun is up, the villagers are cleaning up from the party the night before, and they all ask her -- what was all that activity we heard? When we were hiding in our beds? \\ \\ Tarla finds a chair and stands on it. The time has come, she tells the crowd, to rise up and end the Immaculate plague upon this Island of Blasphemous Prayer. Trousers or no trousers, cannibalism is not okay! Follow me! And we will bring Seus Marahd's reign of terror to an end! No more will you hide in your beds as your children are eaten by psychopathic demon-worshippers! \\ \\ (Emily decides to spend a point of Willpower, channels it through Compassion, rolls Charisma + Presence, and gets nine successes. \\ \\ Nine successes.) \\ \\ As one, the entire village leap to their feet, grab torches, and fall into line behind Tarla as she marches them up the hill, chanting Tear down mission! Tear down mission! \\ \\ In the mission, it's not a pretty sight. Dead monks are everywhere, hacked to bits with Marahd's sword. Marahd himself is curled up in the fetal position in the courtyard, wailing. \\ \\ Then he sees Tarla. "You!" he shouts. "Anathema! Demon-spawn! Deceiver! You have returned to kill more innocents?!" \\ \\ "What?" Tarla asks, as the villagers look on in confusion. \\ \\ According to Marahd, who does not appear to believe he's lying, according to Marahd, he and all the other monks retired at sundown the night before. When he woke at dawn this morning, he saw his old sword missing from its hook in his cell, and then found all his followers cruelly slaughtered. Plainly it was the work of the Anathema, for do the Immaculate Scriptures not say... \\ \\ Tarla silences him, and accuses him of demon-worship. \\ \\ Marahd denies the charge fervently, saying he's always been loyal to the Immaculate Dragons. \\ \\ Tarla has the villagers tie him up and gag him, and then while the villagers amuse themselves tearing the mission down, she goes downstairs to the basement, where the corpses are stacked like cordwood. \\ \\ She again doesn't activate Spirit-Detecting Glance, and instead confirms that the binding circle is still intact, then deliberately uses Marahd's sword to break it, ruining it for the binding of demons. \\ \\ Then she waits until sundown to talk to Marahd again.\\ Once the sun is down, Marahd's personality changes completely, from Leland to Bob. He cheerfully admits having served Ashikani the demon child faithfully for around a hundred and eighty years, leading the monks in debauchery and generally terrorizing the natives. He confesses freely to killing all the other monks, as they were no longer needed, and thanks Tarla for freeing Ashikani. \\ \\ Tarla groans, and presses him for more details. \\ \\ Marahd explains that Ashikani is the child of two Second Circle demons, who committed the grave crime in Hell of either falling in love or mating, he isn't really sure which. Regardless, after Ashikani was born, her parents were erased by the Demon Princes, their names stricken from the records. Ashikani herself was exiled from Malfeas, sent to the island, where she remained for five centuries in solitude. \\ \\ Then Marahd and the Immaculate missionaries came, and built their mission over her prison. In their sleep she corrupted them, one by one, killing those she grew tired of and favoring whom she liked. And then Tarla came, and Ashikani was excited, for Marahd had told her all about the Solar Anathema. But then Tarla proved to be no fun at all, objecting to the rapine and cannibalism, and so it's just as well Tarla freed Ashikani. \\ \\ Tarla shudders, realizing she's unwittingly unleashed a demon upon the world, and asks Marahd where Ashikani has gone. Marahd has no idea, however -- maybe to another island, or maybe she's heading back to the mainland. Regardless, he's sure she'll have a wonderful time. \\ \\ Wincing, Tarla decides Marahd is homicidally insane and a danger to himself and others. She kills him with his sword -- not hard, as he's tied up and helpless.\\ So, first things first, Tarla decides. She makes a list in her head of things to do, urgent. First, she needs to find the pearl hags and rescue Hezriel's consort. Second, she needs to deal with Ashikanti the demon, whom she unwittingly unleashed. Third, she has a whole boatload of things to do back in the East. \\ \\ She's still at the mission, where the villagers are cheerfully tearing things down and setting up a big bonfire. They'll be busy for a while. So she goes back to her ship to think, reviewing as she does so what she knows about demons. \\ \\ Demons exhibit a wide range of abilities, that's for sure. And yet Marahd had told her that before Tarla arrived, Ashikanti had been trapped on the Island of Blasphemous Prayer. So... what did that imply? It implied, she decided, her ship. It was possible that Ashikanti was a skilled sailor, but unlikely. The demon wouldn't need to breathe, but she probably couldn't swim, and (as Tarla's learned firsthand) walking along the ocean floor is tricky, inasmuch as it's dark and easy to get lost. \\ \\ Her ship was missing something, she discovered: her albatross, which she'd left circling around looking for trouble, was gone. Her horse, Virtuous Raccoon, was spooked and unhappy. A thorough search of the ship revealed the albatross, tied up with twine, under her bunk, looking pitiful. \\ \\ "Stupid albatross," she muttered as she untied it. \\ \\ It wasn't my fault, the albatross's frantic hopping about seemed to indicate. I was attacked from behind by hideous monsters with hands. \\ \\ "Hands, huh?" Tarla activated Spirit-Detecting Glance and looked around for a hiding demon. All the tiny gods of the cabin were present. Same on deck... \\ \\ Tarla questioned the deck-spirit and the gangplank-spirit and the door-spirit and, after an aggravating series of conversations with things about as smart as monkeys, and working backwards in her own memory to recall exactly how many times she's gone up the gangplank/opened the door et cetera, determined that someone else -- someone with hands and feet -- had lately gone up (not down) the gangplank, walked around on the deck, and gone into and out of the cabin. She also found that three of the tiny gods of the ship were missing -- the keel-spirit, the hull-spirit, one of several rigging-spirits. And some rigging was gone, about thirty feet of rope. \\ \\ She also managed to learn from a few cavorting jellyfish-ish water elementals in the bay that there'd been a big splashy-splashy. \\ \\ Aha! Tarla reasoned. The demon had come aboard, neutralized the albatross, and stolen some rope and a few ship-spirits. She/it had probably set out to make another boat. So she searched the island, found nothing. Eventually she decides to take the yacht out and circumnavigate the island, looking for clues or smarter water-spirits she can question. \\ \\ (Tarla's ability to talk to spirits is not unlike Aquaman's ability to talk to fish. \\ "Hello, fish." \\ "Hello Aquaman!" \\ "So, have you seen anything unusual going on, underwater? Any crime?" \\ "Hello Aquaman!" \\ "Goodbye, fish." \\ "Hello Aquaman!" \\ Only slightly more useful...) \\ \\ She spots a big shark-spirit and starts questioning it, and it mentions in passing the loops of rope fastened to the yacht's keel. Tarla pulls out her maruera gum and hops overboard. Sure enough, lashed to the hull and the keel, is Ashikanti. \\ \\ "Hi!" says Ashikanti. "This isn't what it looks like."\\ \\ \\
\\ "This isn't what it looks like," says Ashikanti. "See, after you freed me, I thought oh, I'll just quietly leave without bothering you further, and..." \\ \\ "You attacked my albatross!" \\ \\ "I didn't kill it, though, did I? I didn't, because I knew that would make you mad. All I want is a quick ride away from here. And the way I see it -- demon to Anathema -- we don't have any reason to not get along. You've got to go along to get along." \\ \\ "And my hull- and keel-spirits?" \\ \\ "Would have told you about me being down here, which, again, I didn't want to bother you with. Now, I know you can make things pretty bad for me, but I can also make things pretty bad for you --" \\ \\ Tarla, fed up with the prattling demonling, moved to attack Ashikanti. Ashikanti responded with another of her horrifying mental attacks, stunning the Exalt, who fled the scene and returned to the monastery. \\ \\ At the monastery, the villagers were arguing over how to best tear down the six-foot-thick clay walls of the place. Tarla eventually recovered command of her faculties and returned to under the yacht. \\ \\ "All right," she said to Ashikanti, her mouth half-full of manuera gum, "you can make things hard for me and I can make things hard for you. We can make a deal." \\ \\ "What kind of a deal?" \\ \\ "I need to rescue a hostage. If you help me with that, I'll see to it you're taken... where do you want to go?" \\ \\ Ashikanti considers. "I had such fun corrupting that one monk... take me to the Blessed Isle, where he's from! He said it was full of monks like him." \\ \\ Tarla maintains a poker face (while Emily chortles. "'On the Blessed Isle they tame gods and demons,'" she says, quoting the Ninefold Lord of Thunder way, way back when). "Very well. I help you, you help me, we don't try to kill or hinder one another until the hostage is rescued and you have been sent to the Blessed Isle. Agreed?" \\ \\ "Agreed!" chirps Ashikanti. "Wait, you're glowing with holy atomic fire!" \\ \\ "I'm sanctifying our oath, that it cannot be broken." \\ \\ "....oh."\\ \\ Tarla unties Ashikanti from the keel, leaving the scraps of rigging to fall to the bottom of the bay. Virtuous Raccoon can't stand being in the presence of the demon, so Tarla tells her to stay in the cabin. For her part, Ashikanti has realized a) she missed her chance to invade Tarla's dreams; the Solar is far too alert now for it to work, and b) she can't act against her at all, thanks to the binding power of her oath. So she's become petulant and pouty. \\ \\ Anyway. While the villagers are still concerned with tearing down the mission (Tarla got nine successes telling them to do it, remember -- they're very strongly motivated) Tarla pilots the yacht out of the bay, in search of the next island. \\
Back to RagTagMisfit
