SJE/Session5
Session 5 Log
(Still the evening of 13th Descending Fire RY 768 )
The action began with the Clowns taking their turn. Despite their grievous losses, they moved forward with smiling malice, 12 of the evil buggers left- Bozo, Smiley, Whitey, Duffer, Dooley, Tooley, Plonk, Tonk, Wheezy, Spangles, Skippy and Nic Nac!
As Brand raced into the gap left by the Captains firewand blast, Smiley and Whitey tip out their ridiculously large cuff sleeves and marbles and tacks litter the street causing Brand to teeter and almost trip!
Duffer gets Jaq right in the face with a custard pie. Even as therest of the table begins to laugh, Jaq starts screaming as the itching, burning powder in the custard starts eating into his eyes!
Dooley and Tooley try to double-team Alana while Spangles kneels behind her legs in best childrens trip fashion, but fortunately the eagle-eyed Alana managed to duck this highline trip. Smiley faced chakrams and sharp razor blades fly as the party battles for its life.
Brand (newly Exalted) quickly learns that his name is not a killing word as he keeps attacking, then striking a pose before a less than injured Smiley and Whitey. Bozo goes down when he botches and his huge waist underpants abruptly drop and trip him right onto Alanas knife.
Fortunately help is at hand. New recruit Ravitsu Cail and his Spear o’ Doom charge into battle to help the Watch. A few of the older Watchmen follow, but in a charge designed to arrive only when the trouble leaves. They didn’t get to be old Watchmen by charging into fights after all!
Floating Summer Orchid has a moment of sheer brilliance as she dodges in such a graceful and sweeping way that she circles around Plonk and Tonk while covertly laying a trail of cold iron filings. Then the 2 fae discover themselves trapped in a warding circle which even their voices cannot cross, turning the clowns into comedy mimes! Hilarity ensues.
Alana gets into a vicious knife fight with Nic Nac (the ‘bad’ clown), Jaq jumps around ineffectually and Orchid tries to keep from spilling her wine glass throughout. Clowns die in a hail of puns, raspberry-sound demises and tomfoolery. Overall, the combat is furious but the battle won through the martial prowess of Ravitsu and the Captain. Brand keeps posing for camera.
After this the Captain takes Jaq drinking “to make a man of him” and orders Brand to look after the 3 new recruits and sort out the circus.
Brand, Ravitsu, Orchid and Alana spot the masses heading into the gaudy, glitzy, enticing Carnivale below and realise this is a very bad thing if the rest of the circus are Fae. Half of Gems populace could be soul-Ravaged by morning!
Stopping off at a blacksmiths they load up on cold iron and we have a short montage of Orchid and Brand designing and crafting (some quick xp expenditure on a certains Twilights Caste abilities actually gave the party 2 dots of Craft!) ‘iron bombs’- a volatile mix of wood shavings, firedust and cold iron filings which explode like a grenade, shrapnelling Fae!
They head for the circus, and despite the many delights, wonders and terrors, somehow manage to resist the blandishments of the Circus of Unearthly delights. That and cold iron horseshoes hidden next to the skin work wonderfully. Orchid gets into an Evil Eye contest with a Fae fortune telling Crone and wards her back into next week. They decline to investigate the screams from the lion tent, or have a ride on the Merry Go Round (where the wooden horses might have turned into living beasts, charging across the Wyld, Ride of the Rohrrim style) or the Big Wheel (where you get off upside down) or even the Big Top with the acrobats, Trapeze and Furnace Rhino teetering round the ring, all 4 hooves on a small metal ball……
Ah well. Following the earlier lead that the Ringmasters wagon was a site of powerful geomantic effects, and the seeming centre to the Wyldzone springing up in Gem’s Hot District, they bravely head in.
At first it was a wooden gypsy wagon. Inside is larger than the outside and reality shifts to show room in Chinese Pavilion style with mats, silks, paper screens etc. An oriental gentleman with Fu Manchu moustache greets them and welcomes them in. He shares a surprising resemblance to the Ringmaster, the Arabian looking Saladin al’ Sunni. At the far end of the room is a large metal cage containing some sort of beast.
There is much fun as Brand does the old cop routine on the Fae. The fae tells them that they are not taking anything that would be missed- a moments happiness or a lifetime of misery. He plys them with Faerie Wine and small scalloped chocolate treats (“With these Fey-rerro Roche, you are really spoiling us” *groan*). Brand fails to decline and happily gets drunk on the most intoxicating and fascinating alcohol he’s ever drunk. Orchid still has her glass from last time :-)
The others spot that the beast in the cage is changing form. A lion. A crocodile. A swan. A flea. And each change causes a reality distortion to ripple out from it. They conclude that this is the source of the mobile Wyld zone. Alana with her Dynastic Primary school education recalls Anathaema 101 and spots the Tell of a Lunar Demon. Orchid spots that this creature is super-saturated with Wyld energy and is now releasing it uncontrollably. She recalls a forbidden tome, not normally read by mortals whose afternoons perusal came at dear and shameful cost which spoke of Chimera- those Lunars who have wandered beyond the laws of Creation and reason into the Deep Wyld and lost control of their protean essence. Somehow the Fair Folk have trapped it in a cage of cold iron and brought it with them, acting as a mobile Wyld zone generator and fuelling their impossible glamours.
Brand at this point has finally failed his Resistance rolls and is snoring. Ravitsu guards the door. Alana sneakily prepares an Iron bomb charge next to the cage as arch-socialite Floating Summer Orchid bends all her wiles to distract the Ringmaster. But alas, his tongue is even more silvered and she ends up inadvertently mentioning the bombs. His reply “There is no bomb” and as the Undetectable Lie takes hold in this place of variable reality, Alana finds that her cold iron filings now lack any sort of bomb quality whatsoever!
Throwing the iron filings into the cage provokes a great roar from the beast as it eats like acid through its morphic flesh. The whole room trembles and becomes a Northern yurt, Fu Manchu replaced with a Nordic, blonde Viking Ringmaster, pulling a huge axe from his bearskin cloak, Highlander style!
Brand (suddenly awake) and Alana rush the Ringmaster, whose incredible speed almost decapitates Brand and leaves him reeling. Thrusting cold iron in all its forms at him (horse shoes, bars, farmers hoes) they burn and dissolve his very flesh. At last Ravitsu strikes a killing blow with the iron tip of a farmers hoe and the Ringmaster is no more. By now Brand has been making so many ‘instinctive deflects’ that his anima shows itself for the first time, causing Alana to reel back in fear.
Somehow the party keep going and decide to kill the chimera while it is still trapped in the cage. Ravitsu takes up his mighty Hoe of Doom +2 and strikes dead centre into the raging, transmuting ball of silvery flesh and Wyld. It’s a killer blow, and he staggers back as silver light crawls up the hoe shaft, flooding into him, Exalting him as a Lunar!
Now there is much confabulation. The glowing Exalts hide in the now suddenly smaller and mundane wagon as the two remaining mortals go confer outside. Should they report this to the Immaculates? Or, looking at Brand marvelling at how even his ass glows with golden light, are they perhaps not the First Age Demons the Immaculates paint them to be?
Outside the circus is no magical fairyland of light and sound and excitement. It’s a drab, dreary collection of small tents and cages and a rusting merry-go-round, the remaining carnies soul-eaten zombies. In the distance screams sound as the magical beasts head for the open desert… .trouble for another day as the wounded heroes of the hour head back to Gem for healing and perhaps a resolution…..
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