To New Horizons(2nd ed game, game thread)

[Man Who Fights Like Woman]

Since this seemed to be more of a symbiote than anything dangerous, he took some time now and tried to gain some awareness of what was going on. First things first, of course, and he decided to cast Identify on the cloak that has been so attracted to him. Then, even though it probably wasn't the best idea, he decided to get in the water and go forward. In what was probably a worse idea, but his powerful curiosity wouldn't let him stop, he decided to find out if this trouser snake was truly a symbiote and put his head under the water. While it was nasty, he decided to see if one of the things this thing granted him was water breathing.

A few seconds later he resurfaced, spitting up the nasty water. It seems he was wrong, but not for lack of trying. He would wait a few more minutes to see if this snake would give him any actual benefits besides people being able to see his trouser snake, and then it would probably be a good idea to get rid of it. And, at the very least he would soon be finding out if the cloak was a living organism or just a pissed-off cursed cloak.

[ 02-21-2007, 02:01 AM: Message edited by: Man Who Fights Like Woman ]

[Armen]

Tamora

Breathtaking pain overwhelmed Tamora as her mind recoiled from what she was suffering. Pushed beyond the limits of endurance her mind sought refuge in the meditative contemplation that her people practiced from an early age and throughout their lives. Incapable of fully controlling herself, only fractured images, sensations and remembered thoughts from the forest of her birth swam in and out of her mind but from them she drew strength. Beyond conscious thought, and as much in her body as in her mind, she accepted the force constricting her as implacable. Against such forces of nature the trees of the forest survive not by fighting back but by bending to them and, by bending, enduring. So the entity that Tamora’s mind and body had become also sought to bend and to survive.

[ 02-21-2007, 09:02 AM: Message edited by: Armen ]

[Kazilan]

Bas saw the animals and despaired. Before embarking on this quest, he had known there would be dangers. What he hadn't expected were the psychological dangers. One phenomena after another had assaulted his sensibilities, from giant brains to magical chasms and cliffs. This assault from nature itself was the last straw, and for a moment time seemed to slow as he watched creatures he would otherwise have considered his friends approach in a murderous frenzy.

A clap of thunder shook Bas back to awareness, and the immediacy of the danger to himself as well as the people he traveled with spurred him to action. He raced towards Balth and Anne, the incantation for the spell 'Invisibility to Animals' springing unbidden to mind.

"Trust me, and don't attack them," was all he could say as he reached his companions. He casted his spell, touching each of the recipients in turn, before motioning that they leave the area with haste.

[ 02-21-2007, 07:00 PM: Message edited by: Kazilan ]

[Caleb808]

Ulik frowns, dissapointed that he wouldn't get to go whitewater rafting today due to the height of the waterfall. He goes to the quay and drags his raft on top of it to dry off. Getting prune fingers would ruin Evon's manicure.

While Evon is drying off, Ulik takes the opportunity to lie down, rest and wonder what the hell a quay is.

[PurpleXVI]

(OOC: Feeling a bit woozy, so apologies if the post sucks.)

Lorath

Lorath's new tail seemed to confer no actual benefits besides being a tail. It wasn't prehensile and it didn't help his balance much, but it did have a few spikes near the end that looked as though they could probably hurt if he slapped someone with it.

When he attempted to divine the nature of the cloak, the only thing he found out was that it was about as magical as a rock.


Ulik, Evon

Ulik laid down and managed to get in about a half hour of powernapping before something woke him up. It was the sound of something moving around beyond the doorway that lead on to somewhere from the stone platform he was sleeping on.

It sounded like something humanoid shambling walking in circles with irregular steps.


Tamora, Gan

As if in perverse response to Gan's attempts at forcing the world to bend to his will, the hollows for their limbs stopped stretching and thinning for a moment, then began to bend. At first a single bend, then another and another until the two rangers could no longer count all the places in which their extremities were being twisted. Everything beyond their torsos, already painfully constricted, was a mass of uniform agony.

Sanity fled before the merciless onslaught of torture, and as their spines were bent into non-euclidean shapes by another twist of the tunnel, Tamora and Gan's minds retreated into a protective cocoon in the recesses of their brains. All they had left was the ability to perceive that they were suffering, and the instinctive, primal responses of the animal brain keeping them alive.

After what felt like an aeon of white-hot pain, there was suddenly a breath of fresh air, and then a faint glimpse of light from up ahead. To their darkness-adjusted eyes it was painful, but to their tortured minds, it was a soothing balm.

The light grew brighter as they drew nearer, and they began to perceive faint colours of green and blue, browns and whites, then they were propelled beyond the boundaries of the cliff womb, the sun's light blinding them.

They fell on soft, wet grass, their bodies refusing to respond to their actions with more than pitiful twitches. From deep within, moving with glacial speed, they could feel that something was moving to return them to their original forms from whatever twisted mockeries they had become.

Gan had fallen in such a way that, as his eyes stopped burning from the caress of the sun, he could only see where they were, but Tamora was lying in a way that permitted her to see Gan, and had her insides not been twisted into a mess that hardly worked, she would have retched. The half-elf wasn't even recognizeable as humanoid, his limbs were twice twice as long as they had originally been, no joints were visible, rather they looked like boneless tentacles. His head was no wider than his neck, and it was probably a reason to rejoice that he was looking away from her, because judging by the weird, twisted shape of his skull, his face would have had to be even more horrifying than the rest of him.

The half-elf could see that they, or at least he, he had no idea that Tamora was with him, was lying in another part of the tree-less circle around the Cliffs. It was a semi-circular bulge in the otherwise uniform zone, extending into the nearby forest. Three stone slabs, undecorated and apparently unworked, were lying around the clearing in no particular pattern.

Then a dozen roars rose up from the woods surrounding the clearing, and ceatures moved into the clearing from beyond the treeline. At first, he had trouble remembering what they were, his tortured mind still struggling with everything except that the sky was up, the ground was down and his name was Gan. Then he recalled: They were called tigers, and they were carnivores.

Before the two became cat toys, however, there was another twist to their tale. The ground itself rose up, forming a barrier between them and their would-be attackers, then came down again, burying them, but not with crushing force. Rather it covered them like a comforting blanket, and within it's embrace they could feel the slow regeneration of their bodies accelerated.

There was also a presence, undefineable and omniscient, it formed a wordless contact with them. It didn't seem to have a mind in the traditional sense, but it was capable of making decisions and it knew things, it seemed to identify them as having passed some sort of test, and in return it granted them safety and knowledge. What they had just passed was not an artifact of the ancient druids that had once inhabited the area, but it was still something they had used. Apparently those who had committed crimes against nature, or those seeking to prove their devotion and connection to the land, were sent into the tunnels. Once on the other side, they would either become a defenseless meal for predators, or the spirit of the land would shelter them.

The druids, however, were long gone. Whatever had befallen them, the spirit of the clearing did not know, or did not want to share. Druids were not gone from the world, however, creatures of all the sentient races had taken up the mantle of protecting the wounded world, of healing it's scars. Though the spirit was tied to the clearing and the cliffs, it could commune with other guardians across the world, and through them it gave Gan and Tamora a vision of what laid beyond the jungle.

Dryness and thirst, scorching heat and barren wastes, that was what they perceived. The occasional oasis of life existed in the dead lands, and even in the depths of the wastes brutal creatures survived, but compared to their homeworld it was a graveyard. They gained a few glimpses of civilization, too, but only as the spirits saw it, an intrusion upon their domains, holes in the land often more dead to the natural order than the hearts of the burning deserts.

Like within the cliff, time was hard to judge while they were cared for. Eventually, however, the presence seemed to decide it had done as much as it was obligated to, or as much as it could, and returned them to when they had came.


Bas, Anne, Balth

Balth was about to throw himself into an attack on the animals as Bas cast the spell, then stopped as the druid instructed him. Apparently not quite trusting that it would be solved as simply as that, he maintained his wary pose for a minute even after being enchanted, but then relaxed, "Good work, priest," he complimented Bas, "I doubt we could have gotten out of that unscathed."

Even Tamora's bird seemed to realize it was no longer in danger and followed the group as they hastened their advance in order to get away from the animals.

There was a lot of uneventful travelling on the other side of the ambush. The storm still harried them, but seemed to have reached the apex of it's fury swiftly, over the next couple of hours it slowly weakened until it was nothing more than a light drizzle. By the time they arrived at the clearing, the clouds were already permitting a few rays of evening sunlight through.

As they moved forwards to continue their trip around, in case Gan and Tamora had gotten out somewhere further along the cliff, the ground in the middle of the clearing suddenly heaved like a miniature volcano was about to cover them all in boiling ash and lava.


Bas, Anne, Balth, Gan, Tamora

Rather than molten death, however, it vomited forth the group's rangers. They looked pale and exhausted, and... Different. Thinner and longer of limb than before, everything about them seemed elongated, even their heads. Besides the changes to their shape, however, they seemed to be themselves. It made them look slightly unnatural, but Bas could sense no taint of twisting magic about them.

The two tumbled out on the grass, and though they were awake, and by this point had recovered their wits enough to recognize their comrades, they were still feeling quite groggy.

[ 02-22-2007, 08:23 PM: Message edited by: PurpleXVI ]

[Caleb808]

Ulik sends Evon to check out the doorway, telling him that there were many magical mushrooms to be found within.

[Armen]

Tamora

Tamora rolled onto her back and stared up at the sky. “Learned One”, she acknowledged to Bas before relating everything she had sensed from the spirit of the clearing – she did not speak of her experiences inside the mesa though.

Her story complete she gingerly propped herself up on her elbows, she smiled at the sight of the Erdlu and addressed the others. “Thank you for coming”, she paused for a moment thinking of the horror of Gan’s earlier appearance and the strangess of his shape now. She looked down at her legs thoughtfully and experimentally clenched her fists and then asked Anne, “How do I look?”

[Man Who Fights Like Woman]

With his new duo of symbiotic friends Lorath stepped down, back into the water. He went about what he was previously doing, taking the same path and remembering to start swimming at the place where he fell off last time. Of course he picked his shield back up, and placed it on his back.

[dplax]

Anne

"Quite...different," Anne finally managed to say after several silent seconds.

"Whatever happened in there?" she then managed to ask, still quite in shock at the experience Bas, Balth and she had just had with the animals.

[Kazilan]

Bas took a moment to explain the encounter with the animals in the storm after Tamora related her own experience.

"Do either of you need healing? You look different, but not harmed. At least, not physically."

As Bas waited for a response he inspected the ground where the two had appeared, careful not to step in the exact center.