Session S5.O-15

1629, Fire Season, Movement Week, Fireday to Wildday

Dramatis Personae

Events

The group left Oriana behind because tearing her away from the strange portal would have been untenable¹And she was also away OOC.. They pushed the pace as fast as they could without risking the horses, but did less well on keeping direction than they did on getting the best from their mounts.

After a couple of days, Kolyey spotted a strange mound on the face, or possibly butt, of Ernalda. As they moved they saw a few people, possibly Grazelander patrols.

Later, they spotted someone with a magnificent moustache. When they saluted and made to keep going, a man with a magnificent beard popped up and spoke in Pure Horse Tongue. After Berra demanded they speak in Trade Talk, the bearded one said they were peaceful and had no gold to steal.

Getting closer, the group noticed that the strangers were mining for something. Berra gave them advice about how to be less obvious.

The strangers were talking in New Pelorian. The bearded one looked like an Esrolian sage. One of the phrases that was in tradetalk was about funding, leading people to believe there was someone else’s money behind this venture.

The group rode on. This was not their problem. It being Wildday Eve, Berra ran a worship ceremony and Kolyey muddled things up. She accidentally struck at Nayale and things did not go well in general. However, nobody died.

Meanwhile, Maalira was half on watch and half asleep, and caught the sound of something. It turned out to be a small … dragonewt mime? That is, a dragonewt that did not speak, but could communicate. What it did included taking a beer cup and miming drinking, and then miming being dead. It also did a lot of flapping and some dramatic movements. When it started burying people’s clothes, Maalira decided that it had human friends who had been hurt and needed help. There had possibly been a landslide.

Maalira could not interrupt the worship ceremony, so had to wait until morning. During that time the dragonewt disappeared, possibly thinking she was following it. As dawn arose the Wyter Priest closed the Temple, spent a few minutes not shouting at Kolyey, and then calmed down. Maalira told the group what had happened and they agreed they should go help the White Lady help people.

While attempting to find the dragonewt, they entirely failed. After wandering lost for a few hours they saw smoke in one direction and dragonewts moving in another. Berra made the call that they should go after the dragonewts, as the smoke would be unlikely to wander off. They set off at speed, save for Nayale, who had fallen asleep on Berra’s bison, then fallen off Berra’s bison. She failed to get the animal moving at any speed. Thus, Berra and Kolyey arrived at the dragonewt group first.

The dragonewts performed various dances and gyrations, and then when the group could not apparently read that, contorted themselves into the runes of Harmony and Fertility. As everyone caught up, they began trying to explain what had gone wrong. It was multiple colours and bigger than a pterodactyl. Nayale managed to guess it was a dragon. When Berra asked where, the dragonewt passed her an imaginary tankard, which she treated with the respect due to a real one. She had no idea what it meant, however. Berra finally suggested, after some more acting from the dragonewts, that ‘a dragon maybe ate the people doing the digging, and then they tried to dig to the body?’ This seemed to be close enough, according to the dragonewts.

They took two of the group with them, one on each bison; the smaller one enjoyed it more and kept trying the lean forward from the front. This terrified Lofty, but Nayale managed to keep the huge animal on course and keep Maalira from getting separated.

The group worked out that they were travelling towards where the ‘mining’ was taking place, from which the smoke was still riding. It was approximately pyre-sized. As they got closer the dragonewts started looking around more. Berra noticed they were looking upward. There was another round of dragonewt charades, which convinced people that they were bad at dragonewt charades, and also that a danger of unknown size was present. As they rounded the spoil heap to find a good way to climb it, or else a mine entrance, they saw a dead body, probably killed by fire.

Going up the spoil heap, they saw that it was a circle around a dig. Inside was a tiny model of a city, with a tiny but also huge dragon eating it. There were tiny, tiny flames, and people fleeing. They saw two tinl little researchers threatened by the flames. Nayale tried to pinch out the flames, which worked, but burned her arm horribly. She hauled them out, hurting them a little in the process.

Looking at what was going on, Nayale spotted the lost diggers first, and managed to pull them out, and the group started dealing with the problem of the dragon. Maalira cast Sleep on it, and it looked at her, then seemed to take the decision to fall over on the city. It left a dragon-shaped dent in what was suddenly just a clay model of a city, not a real place. Berra mused about what the thing was, and gave everyone an impromptu talk on the Empire of the Wyrm Friends, and the Dragonkill. After that, they went to speak to the Lunar and the Esrolian, threatening them until they promised not to reveal where this place was, and even putting them under a Humakti Oath. Notably, Berra did not include herself or her own group in the oath.

The dragonewts began to fill in the hole, and the group pressed the human diggers in to do the same, and even took up tools. In watching the smaller dragonewt, the one actually doing the work, Berra got confused and passed out. It seemed that it was using the tiniest possible shovel, a few cm long, and yet the hole was getting filled as if a giant were doing the work. Unbeknownst to the others, Berra had a dream-vision of lying, being cared for, with her head on muscular thighs. She was in a safe place. The others did the work of bringing her round, although that took some time. Finally, they set off once more for the North.

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  And she was also away OOC.