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Old 07-25-2021, 03:10 AM   #189
coronatiger
 
Join Date: Apr 2018
Location: Trondheim, Norway
Default Session 60 (2021-07-21)

19th of Ratanu, year 412 (continued)

The other captive wasn’t being cooperative when Xipil and Wolfram tried to remove his armor and tie him up, and I didn’t have time to wait for them to finish. I placed my hands on the neck of the hysterical servant and applied pressure to the right spots. It didn’t take long before he passed out. His chest wound didn’t look immediately fatal, so I figured Xipil could deal with that in due time.

I stood up and shouted, “Hala!” Old habits made me use an alias in front of enemies. Yana came running with Hylda in tow. I asked my girlfriend – my girlfriend!! – to check if the remaining horse was fit for a ride through the night, and to bring it to meet me at the gate of the farm if it was. I dashed off to retrieve my throwing knives but heard a whinny behind me and turned to see the horse galloping away. I ran after it, stopping only to instruct Yana to find my knives before they left, if they decided to go before I returned.

The horse thundered across the fields at a break-neck speed, and only the open landscape allowed me to keep it in sight. After fifteen minutes, the horse caught up to another, one of the two that Xipil had successfully scared away. My original quarry kept going, but I managed to catch the other one. Mounting, I thanked You for the dark night. Dresses aren’t best suited for riding, and I felt the one I was wearing was climbing uncomfortably high up along my thighs. If I didn’t push it down occasionally, it would have bunched up around my waist.

I soon came upon the village on the main road. My plan was to ride to Byblos and hope I arrived before the fleeing Tivito cultist. Even though it was the middle of the night, some lights were lit in the village, and I slowed down. I didn’t want to be spotted, not with a bloody dress and on a horse that was much too fine for my current appearance. I took advantage of the slower speed to refresh the venom on my knives.

As luck would have it, a particularly fine horse stood tied up outside the inn, and there were soldiers guarding the entrance. The horse still breathed heavily. The Tivito cultist had to be inside! I went back to the outskirts of the village, where I had seen clothes hanging to dry in a garden. I fastened the horse and changed into a new dress. It was too big for me, but when I fastened my belt around it, it didn’t look too bad.

I sneaked back to the inn. The soldiers weren’t watching the back door, so I entered that way. The innkeeper’s family slept on the floor of the back room, and I could tell they had just fallen asleep. The cultist must have thrown them out of their room when he arrived not long ago.

I continued through to the common room. Three soldiers sat in a corner, talking about a guy who was receiving first aid. They were going to escort him away when the doctor finished with him. The soldiers had a lamp but didn’t pay attention to what was happening in the shadows, and I made my way upstairs unseen.

There were three doors. I picked out the most likely one. I listened briefly, then opened the door a crack. An officer sat on a chair in the middle of the room, asking someone if they were doing all right. I got the impression that there were two more people there, the cultist and the doctor. I closed the door as gently as I had opened it and went back downstairs. I poured three glasses of beer, emptied my vial of river thistle into them and brought them up to the door. This would prove fatal, so I hoped to be able to poison the cultist first, then stop the other two from drinking.

I knocked softly on the door so the soldiers below wouldn’t hear, balancing the three glasses on a tray with my other hand. “I said no-one should disturb us,” a gruff voice exclaimed. The officer opened the door, hand on his sword. He blocked the view into the room, which meant the others in there couldn’t see me either. I curtsied and held out the tray of beer, trying to look as if I had just been woken up to bring them this.

The officer misunderstood, taking my heavy eyelids as a seduction attempt. He came outside and closed the door behind him. “Go sleep with someone else!” he demanded. “But, but… I’m sorry!” I whispered hoarsely, forcing out a tear. The officer turned to go inside, but I rammed a knife through his neck. Your holy venom killed him immediately, and the words of the Ultimate Prayer, the conclusion of our burial rites, blazed through my mind: “O Ashtar, open Death’s Door and welcome this soul!” I hadn’t intended for anyone but the Tivito cultist to die, but You showed acceptance of my decision by bestowing potency to the venom. Without Your will, venom is powerless.

I tried to lower the corpse gently to the ground, but the man was heavy, and I had to balance the tray of beer glasses. The noise as he hit the floor was overwhelming, at least in my mind. I put down the tray and sheathed the knife. The soldiers downstairs had stopped talking, but I heard no movement from them. When they began talking again, in hushed voices, I realized they were afraid that the officer would hear them. They were uncertain if he had gone back inside.

I put my ear to the door. Someone cursed in a foreign language and then called the officer – apparently a lieutenant – incapable. Another voice said he was going to try to do something about the other’s headache. The angry voice told the doctor not to go anywhere.

After preparing my knife with more venom and worrying that the vial was nearly empty, I dragged the corpse to the side so it wouldn’t be visible when the door opened. When the soldiers’ voices grew louder and more relaxed, I picked up the tray again and went inside. “No!” the bedridden cultist exclaimed angrily, trying to sit up. He instructed the doctor to chase all civilians out of the building, himself included. The doctor turned and saw me and blinked with surprise. The cultist was making magic gestures in the air, so I ducked around the doctor and dropped the tray on one of the beds so the glasses wouldn’t shatter and alert the soldiers. I drew both knives and plunged them into the cultist’s throat before he could finish his spell.
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You don't need to spend 100 CP on Status 5 [25] and Multimillionaire [75] to feel like a princess, when Delusion [-10] will do.

Character sheet: Google Drive link (See this thread for details.)

Campaign logs: Chaotic Pioneering / Confessions of a Forked Tongue
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