Whats in your eyes?
What do you see?
What does the world look like
when your eyes are so empty?

Do you know what you’re doing?
Can you understand?
Do you see anything
beyond your haunted dreamland?

Can you hear what you say?
Can you see the damage you’ve done?
Do you know that other people hear
and you’re not the only one

Do you see your scars?
Do you see your blood?
Have your senses gone numb?
Have your feelings all rotted?

Do you see the fear?
In your own empty shell?
You’re going insane
You’ve created your own Hell

Whats in your eyes?
What do you see?
What does the world look like
when your eyes are so empty?

— Lauren Turner

---

The officers of the Doomplum returned to Moonplum to find that the villagers had abandoned the safety of the barracks and were again massed along the shore, this time with more than two dozen glaze-eyed villagers tied up, including the commander of the garrison. Margaret formerly-Allingham was the first to spot them walking in, beat up and sans horses, and quickly intercepted Caddis.

“What the fuck have you done with my husbands?!” she demanded.

Caddis took stock of the situation and reiterated his previous explanation — that there was a monster out at sea that was assaulting the villagers minds, but that they had returned with a weapon to defeat it. Gullible as ever, Margaret and the other villagers bought it and Caddis ordered all of the tied-up villagers to be loaded on the ship (for their own protection).

Once everyone was aboard, the Doomplum sailed out to meet the Vengeance. Once out of sight of land, the two ship’s pulled alongside each other, extended a gangplank, and allowed the entranced villagers to walk over. As soon as the villagers came in proximity of Doña Teresa, their faces immediately brightened and they happily went to work aboard the ship, chatting and joking as if nothing were amiss. They remained out at sea for a few hours, firing off the cannons a few times to give the impression of a battle, then sailed both ships back to the village, with the enthralled Moonplummers waving happily from the Vengeance’s rigging.

While they were out, the Crone approached Captain Caddis and the others, bearing a small piece of Leo’s demonic form, and informed them that she had a spell that could bring him back yet again. With the groups approval, she went below and worked her magic. Soon, she came back up with a tiny bat-eared creature in tow. While most of the crew seemed off-put by their sailing master now being some kind of gremlin, Zarina, who had always been fond of Leo, seemed inordinately happy about his new, diminutive form.

Back at dock, Caddis made a speech about how the “sea monster” was slain and how the grateful villagers, freed from their enchantment, had “volunteered” to serve aboard their sister-ship. He then made the pitch to the others, and, given how happy the “volunteers” on the Vengeance looked, combined with all the tales of adventure, profit, and success they’d thrown around the last couple of days, nearly eighty more villagers quickly signed up. Caddis’ younger sister, Deborah was among the volunteers, and since Jessica refused to let him turn her away, he brought his mother aboard as well.

The few days were spent sorting out the logistics of taking on more than a hundred new hands on the two ships — loading up food supplies, loading up their personal goods, finding bunks for everyone, and migrating most of the veteran sailors (i.e. the people used to working with obvious demons) over to the Vengeance. There were also issues raised with who was volunteering, as, in a small village like Moonplum, it is hard to abscond with a fifth of the population without breaking up a few families and significantly harming the local economy.

Meanwhile, the officers of the two ships, including The Crone, who had been promoted as the new Quartermaster aboard the Doomplum, and Sandara, who had taken over as the Sailing Master aboard the Red Vengeance met to plan their next voyage. Leo broke out his maps, showing the treasures left by Captain Herrera and the nereid Amphitrite. Caddis reminded everyone of the prophecy spoken by Captain Pegsworthy when he re-christened their ship: “Good fortune and sure sail await one what can crack the Tidewater Rock."

Sandara suggested that the Book of Resurrection had pointed to two more masks in close proximity to each other somewhere to the north and west. For lack of a consensus on any other destination, Caddis made the decision that they should continue to pursue collecting the masks.

With the various arguments, planning, and preparations done, and everyone who was going loaded aboard, the Doomplum and Red Vengeance returned to the sea accompanied by much music, farewells, and a mixture of crying and jubilation from their novice crews.

With Sandara and the Red Vengeance in the lead, they sailed forth in search of the next masks. At the Crone’s suggestion, they sailed northwest towards Manus Island, then tacked east for half a day to better triangulate the location of the masks. Doing calculations based on Sandara’s headings, Leo was able to estimate the location of the masks as about 1300 miles to the northwest, about half way between the islands of Palau and Guam.

Following Leo’s directions and Sandara’s magical guidance, they sailed for six days before arriving at a small island. Circling the island in search of a place to make port, they noticed numerous large, queer statues looming over the shores, like great heads with blank faces and empty eye sockets. Thaduk said that it was known as the “Island of Empty Eyes”, and that Imperial colonists had once tried to build a fort there years ago, only to vanish without a trace.

The island was not large, and, from circling it, they estimated that both masks were located somewhere in the island’s north-central highlands. They found a secluded deep-water cover on the north-west side of the island, nestled amid mangrove swamps and sailed in with the intent to drop anchor. Sailing in, however, they noticed huge stone pylons rising out of the water from the small bay’s shore, as well as the framing of a massive, ancient dock, half-submerged in the water.

Caddis ordered the Red Vengeance to drop anchor and had Sandara come over to the Doomplum, then ordered Zarina to take to the air. From the air, they were able to see much of the island — from the tumbled palisades of the failed colony and a large sunken ship in the southern bay, to the strangely massive pre-colonial stone bridges spanning the islands rivers, to the strange circular stones propped in long lines in various places. Most importantly, they saw the crumbling stone ruins of an ancient city atop the highest hill — towards which Sandara’s spell pointed them.

As they flew over the island, a lookout spotted some large things flying in their direction from the northeastern summit off their starboard side, nearly a dozen of them. As they neared, the crew were able to make out massive featherless bird-like creatures with crested heads and thirty-foot wingspans — pterosaurs.

They were moving fast, much too fast for the novice crew to likely get a shot off as they closed, so Caddis ordered Riaris to load a port broadside. As the gargantuan bird-things flew past they raked the topsails and plucked five crewmen from the rigging. As soon as they were past and at range, Riaris called for the full broadside to be unleashed. The timing and aim were off, but a few shots struck home, and the noise and flash disoriented the pterosaurs, sending most of the flock scattering — either dropping the snagged crewmen to their deaths or flying off with their prey to eat in safety.

Three of the creatures managed to wheel about for another pass. Thaduk scrambled up into the rigging to meet them, and, as they passed, lower this time, aiming for the meaty things on deck, he dropped from the rigging onto the back of one, his nearly thousand-pound frame snapping the creatures spine and dropping it like a rock to the deck. The other two managed to snag another crewman, but were caught in the area of a deep slumber spell from Captain Caddis and tumbled out of the sky.

Caddis ordered that the head be cut from the one Thaduk had downed, and had it mounted as a trophy in his cabin. The Crone, had the body dragged below where she and the cooks and surgeons had it taxidermied and treated with ointments to be used as part of her flying hex — because a giant pterosaur glider is much more terrifying than a broom could ever be.

They flew in over the city, marveling at the immense stone buildings, which stood dark, silent, and weathered by the test of time. Sandara indicated that the largest of the buildings housed both of the masks. At first, they looked for a place to set the ship down, then remembered that the keel would not allow them to land. Zarina flew the ship directly over the indicated building and the crew lowered ropes.

Caddis, Fiona, Adriana, Thaduk, Leo, the Crone, and Sandara let themselves over the side and rappelled down. Or, that was the plan at least. As soon as they were over the side, Thaduk lost his grip and plummeted to the roof, smashing right through. The others watched as he fell through…slowly…very slowly. As soon as he broke through the roof, his fall was arrested and he drifted gently down into a large, ovular chamber (of course, the impact with the roof hurt about as much as you might expect). Looking down into the chamber, they saw Thaduk trying to get up, but moving as if in super slow-motion, backlit by a strange, pulsating orange light.

One by one, they dropped down through the hole Thaduk had left, falling gently to the floor. Gently, that is, except for the Crone who tried, and failed, to do a back-flip and landed on her head. The chamber below was huge — hundreds of feet long — and dominated by a raised dais in the center, on which stood a pair of massive statues, flanking a pedestal on which rested a face-mask of golden crystal, from which the light was emanating.

The statues, of course, moved. And, as they neared, their speed apparently not impeded by whatever force was slowing our heroes’ movements, it became clear that they were not statues, but gigantic beings wrapped in funereal cloths, embalmed standing upright, with swords in hand.

Thinking quick, despite her head injury, the Crone awakened the earth, causing the ground to start pulling the creatures down into itself. With the creatures held, at least temporarily, everyone scattered.

Thaduk ran for a pair of large brass doors, and put his shoulder into it. To no avail. Again, and again, he tried, as Sandara, Adriana, and Caddis caught up to him. Finally Caddis made it to the door and, pulling lightly, opened them, revealing complete and utter blackness. A darkness so deep that not even Adriana’s darkvision could penetrate it. Seeing the giant mummies about to free themselves, they rushed forward into the darkness, but not before Thaduk rushed the dais and grabbed the mask.

The Crone, meanwhile, dimension doored back to the roof, hopped on her taxidermied, headless ptero-glider, and flew back up to the Doomplum. As she flew, she called a volcanic storm of burning rocks down on the entrapped giants, smashing and burning open the roof of an entire side of the huge building. Back on the deck, she called for Riaris to load a broadside and fire on the giant mummies (now easily visible through the blasted and burning roof). With a thundering report, the creatures were blown to tiny bits.

The cannonade also flattened the southern wall of the vast chamber, revealing a treasure-filled vault beyond. The Crone, in her new role as Quartermaster, ordered the ship to descend. Zarina dropped the Doomplum to hover directly over the hole in the roof. Ropes were lowered, and swabs swarmed out of the ship to begin sifting through the rubble and hauling loads of gold, and silver, and jewels back aboard.

Caddis and the others, meanwhile, stumbled around in the darkened room beyond the brass doors. Just as no light penetrated, likewise was there no sound, like a vast sensory-deprivation chamber. Caddis and Adriana both stuck out their arms and headed for the nearest wall, one turning to the left, the other to the right. Thaduk felt a familiar tap on his shoulder and resumed his unicorn form, allowing Sandara to climb up on his back, and, with gentle tugs on his mane, guide him out.

Thaduk and Sandara came out into a long, wide corridor. Thaduk passed golden Sandara the mask, gripped in his teeth, and she held it up to her face, shuddering at the soul-wrenching power of the thing. Suddenly, Thaduk felt an immense surge of speed, and, directed by Sandara, went galloping up the corridor at breakneck speed in search of the second mask. Rounding a corner, they came upon a half-dozen well-armed, gigantic, one-eyed, humanoid creatures. Thaduk skidded out, turned a one-eighty and headed back the other way.

Just then, Caddis and Adriana came stumbling out of the door to see the large, demonic Thaduk charging in their general direction. Fixing the demonic unicorn with his evil eye, Caddis put Thaduk to sleep mid-stride. The beast collapsed, skidded to a stop face-first, and sent Sandara flying off of his back to be caught by Adriana. Only then did the captain see the huge creatures that Thaduk had been running from.

Hearing the commotion, the Crone hopped on her ptero-glider and went north through the great chamber, coming out into the far end of the hallway, opposite where the cyclopes were coming from. Another volcanic storm slowed the things down, giving Adriana time to wake up Thaduk and the two of them to charge the giants. Thaduk ran in full speed, skidded on the piles of ash, ricocheted off a wall, and plowed sideways into one of the giants, sending it sprawling into two more. Thaduk and the three giants sprawled in a heap, lashing out with fists and hooves and horns. The battle was short and bloody, with both Adriana and Thaduk moving supernaturally fast thanks to Sandara’s new mask.

To be continued…

---

Experience and Rewards:

• See The Doomplum for updated experience totals.
• 1 taxidermied headless Pterosaur (with a 30-ft. wingspan)
• net of snaring, a pearl of power (3rd level), a rod of wonder, a potion of neutralize poison, a scroll of divination, a wand of summon monster IV (23 charges remaining)
• Sandara is currently wearing the Eye of Serenity
• Leo is back…as a Gremlin (Zarina thinks he’s a lot cuter at this size)

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.

T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

---

The village of Moonplum was awakened by screams and the blowing of trumpets. From the deck of the Doomplum, Leo and the Crone spotted one of the local soldiers of the new Imperial garrison standing at the base of the village watch-tower shaking as he alternated between terrified shrieks and wavering toots on his bugle. In the top of the tower they saw a confused, half-awake, and hung-over black unicorn precariously standing up. It did not take long for the ruckus to draw a crowd of gawkers and equally hung-over and hastily armed soldiers.

Caddis, wandering up from his family’s ramshackle house, shook his head to clear the cobwebs and began yelling for the crowd to calm down. Looking up into the tower, he called up for Thaduk to “stop fooling around and change back to normal” and explained that the son of the old guard captain had become quite the prankster during their long voyage and even learned a few magic tricks during their jaunt into Faerie. When a much more normal and human-looking Thaduk climbed down from the tower, the crowd seemed more than happy to buy Caddis’ tale and began to disperse back to their homes and shops to prepare for the day.

Unfortunately, this first disturbance of the morning was not the last, as the Crone messaged Caddis to inform him that the Red Vengeance was currently sailing towards the village, despite their orders to remain out at sea. With much kvetching, Caddis and the rest of the crew piled onto the Doomplum and sailed out to meet them. The Doomplum intercepted the Red Vengeance about a half-mile from shore and pulled up alongside. Captain Caddis shouted across, inquiring what they were doing and why they had ignored his orders to stay out of site of land.

“There’s a mask here!” Sandara shouted back, as if that simple statement should be sufficient cause and explanation. After a minute of two of silence, Caddis realized that she must be referring to one of the demon-masks referenced in the Book of Resurrection. Somewhat reluctantly he invited Sandara to come over to the Doomplum and promised to lead an expedition to find the mask as long as the ship-full of demons stayed away from his home town.

A tug at his sleeve warned of yet more problems for the beleaguered captain. The surprisingly keen-eyed Crone pointed back to the shore where perhaps two dozen of the villagers were walking down to the shore in perfect lockstep and staring glaze-eyed at the boats. When the Red Vengeance turned and began heading away, the villagers dove into the water and began swimming after it, despite the distance between them.

Caddis order the ships back and began looking for a possible cause for the strange behavior. Teresa was certainly able to exert such influence, but seemed preoccupied with keeping the sheeple in line. Sandara and Captain Dryden had control over the undead, but were certainly not enchanters. Fishguts was a object of worship by the small (but growing) handful of demon-worshippers on the ship, but had never shown signs of being able to control anyone.

Soon the villagers reached the ships and began clawing their way up the oars trying to get aboard the Vengeance. A scan of their minds by the Crone revealed that every one of them were fixated on a single image, a beautiful woman with pale white skin, eyes, and hair, arms outstretched and glowing like the sun. Teresa, meanwhile, continued to go about her business on the Vengeance, apparently oblivious to the affect she was having on the village.

Caddis began singing the fae tune taught to him by his mother, drawing the entranced villagers away from Doña Teresa and towards the Doomplum. They were quickly fished out of the water, tied up, and put under guard while they were taken back to shore and the Vengeance was sent back out to sea.

Back on shore, Caddis tracked down the commander of the Imperial garrison, one Major Albert Campion (and Margaret Allingham’s new husband), and informed him that there was some unseen threat out at see, a beast which had entranced the minds of the villagers and wanted to lead them to their deaths (not really a lie per-se). Caddis suggested that everyone hole up in the barracks, under watch, in case anyone else should be thus beguiled. The Major agreed and soon had the entire village holed up in the now-very-cramped barracks.

Caddis, Sandara, and the Doomplum officers, meanwhile rounded up horses and supplied for a trip inland in search of the second Mask of Dormin, or, as they told the villagers, a weapon with which to defeat the beast that waited out beyond the shore. There was a short kerfuffle with Caddis and Adriana’s mothers when they noticed that Fiona, not Adriana to whom he was supposedly engaged, was sharing a horse with Caddis, but eventually the group got underway.

Sandara, guided by the book, pointed the way into the rainforests that stood just outside the edge of the moonplum plantations. They rode through the day, stopping only for lunch and brief constitutionals, encountering nothing more threatening than the occasional tree kangaroo or water rat.

They bedded down for the night under the canopy of the trees with rotating watches posted. Sometime around mid-night, Adriana heard something, faint at first, at least compared to whatever Thaduk was doing with those horses, but growing progressively more clear and distinct. The night sounds of the jungle — the calls of birds and bats and frogs and the whistling of the wind — began to synchronize, first in rhythm, and then in tone, until there was a noticable melody underpinning them all.

Adriana woke the others, but found that only she could discern the tune behind the nightly din. They went back to sleep, while she waited up, listening to the disturbing tune. When, after nearly two hours, nothing more came of it and her shift on watch ended, she laid down and tried to sleep, but found her dreams disturbed by the song.

The next morning, after watching Sandara perform some ritual involving the book, a bowl of her own blood, and some rather lurid gyration of her hips, they got underway. By noon they reached an area where the forest simply stopped, without any thinning or transition. Ahead of them, stretching for several miles, was a blasted wasteland of gray lifeless clay littered with the bones of men.

They rode ahead slowly. No signs of life were to be found — not a single green shoot, nor even the smell of decay. Even the dust stirred by their horses footfalls settled without so much as the faintest breeze stirring it. Everywhere they looked there were bones, dried, sun-bleached, and ancient, yet lying exposed and free of sediment as if they had fallen yesterday.

The Crone stopped by a promising looking skull and attempted to speak with dead. With a rattle, the skull animated and spoke, but not in any language the party new. Leo suggested that it sounded like a very ancient form of the pidgin used by the natives of the island, with none of the mixing or lone words taught by the settlers. A long exchange and a few comprehend languages revealed that the skull was just as confused as they were, unable to understand any questions they asked, and thus unable to answer intelligibly.

Finally frustrated, the Crone crushed the skull under her boot and they rode on. They rode for another mile, perhaps, before Caddis detected an overwhelming source of magic. Ahead on the ground they found an unusually large skeleton wearing a bronze mask — the first metal object they had seen here. They pried the mask off the corpse and handed it to Thaduk. No sooner had he put it on the mask than it became grafted to his face, looking very much as if Thaduk’s skin had simply taken on a bronze cast, and even changing with him when he resumed his equine form.

Of course, nothing is that easy.

As soon as the mask was on, a strong wind began to blow through the plain where previously there had been none, swirling and rapidly growing in power to near hurricane force, carrying the bones up into the air with it. Thaduk turned back towards the jungle and fled, leading the way as the miles-wide storm seemed to collapse in on itself, condensing into a swirling funnel cloud of flesh-rending bone shards.

The tornado of bones of course began to pursue them across the gray plains. After a couple painful slashes, it became clear that they could not escape, but a couple of shatter spells from Leo reduced the bones making up the storm to dust.

The funnel-cloud collapsed further, condensing the bone dust into a solid skeletal form nearly twelve feet tall, topped by a strangely live-looking jackal’s head. As the strange beast stepped out of the dissipating cloud, spurs of bone leaped from its body to strike Adriana, accompanied by a puff of bone dust which left all of them feeling suddenly exhausted and weak.

The crew of the Doomplum traded blows and spells with the creature for some time. It’s mere presence making them grow weaker and plaguing them with hunger pains, and the clouds of bone dust it hurled drained the water from their bodies. This latter attack was particularly devastating to Leo’s plant-like body, wilting it to destruction and slaying the demon-bard outright. Finally the thing fell beneath the blows of Adriana and Thaduk.

Exhausted and drained, short a bard, and with all their horses killed by the storm, the remaining members of the group hauled their asses back to town.

To be continued…

---

Experience and Awards:

• Sandara and the Crone leveled
• Theresa has a number of new Thralls
• Thaduk is wearing the Mask of Qara

The city flows as the ocean gives its tides.
Each day and evenings they move through streets.

We meet at the wharves, riding the handshake of the great Pacific.
It runs in, green with welcome.

Head and heart move high in a gull’s updraught. All light is yellow.
Behind us, the city absorbs everything, harder than foam.

The glossy surface waits for a touch of spray,
the sight of some forgotten rigging,
and the belly of homecoming sail.

Jill Jones

---

Things were not going well. The battle with the mermaid and her fleet hard started well, but ended quite poorly for the crew of the The Doomplum. Two of their leaders were dead — one had been brought back and promptly committed suicide, the other had been brought back contentedly. Likewise nearly four-hundred of their boarding crew were dead, and the commander of those forces was curled up in the hold in a state of shock. Three of the four prize ships were sunk, the last crippled, and they did not have sufficient crew for the three ships they had.

Captain Caddis looked over the situation and gave the order for the Damned Jewel and the Bridgewater to be stripped and scuttled. The Dümplom set down and the crews immediately went to work transferring all of the weapons, ammunition, and food-stores from the two ships and consolidated everything on the Dümplom and the Red Vengeance. Deathshead Dryden was given control of the Vengeance, as, with the Doña incapacitated, only she could keep the now both undead and demonic sheeple under control.

Within a few hours the two remaining vessels were underway. Leo laid in a wide, roundabout course towards Moonplum, steering far to the east to avoid coming too close to the southern coast of Nova Britannia and the Imperial fleet at Port Montague.

After a few days of sailing, the crew reported to Caddis that Doña Teresa had been laying belowdecks, unresponsive, curled in a fetal position and alternately weeping or passed out since the battle. Given the importance of her connection to the sheeple, Caddis rounded up the officers and spellcasters from the crew and went below to check on her. For four days, they administered to her, trying spell after spell to break her condition or right her broken psyche.

Addidale Crone, an old witch they’d picked up in Puerto Soledad, stepped in and suggested that they might over-write her mental state by simultaneously bombarding her with conflicting emotions. They did just that. Caddis sewed thoughts to instill a general desire to live. Thaduk invoked joyful rapture. Leo contributed an unnatural lust for life (or perhaps himself). The Crone used a geas to instill a desire for vengeance against the empire’s sub-aquatic soldiers for killing the sheeple. And, lastly, Sandara invoked pure unbridled rage.

Jolted awake by the coordinated assault on her mind, Teresa bolted upright, screamed, and charged strait for the rail, determined to seek out and kill her underwater foes. The Crone hocked a mystical loogie to entangle her feet before she could go overboard, and the others dismissed their various enchantments, leaving Teresa awake, but confused. A warm blanket, a cup of tea, and several long talks with Adriana soon had her functional again (if not quite the same Teresa they’d dealt with before).

After a week and a half of sailing, swinging far to the east, and then north-west around Nova Britannia, the cry came from Henrye in the crow’s nest. “Moonplum ho! We’re home!”

The officers handed the glass back and forth, having a look at their home town. It had grown in the year since they’d left, more than triple in size, and the wharfs had been built up and extended. Right now they hosted two ships, small coastal merchant vessels, and on the shore was a large garrison of Imperial troops, likely requisitioned after the raid that had taken them to fend off pirates.

Pirates like they were now. The nature of their ships — one iron-clad and armed to the teeth, and the other covered over with the bones of some fantasic beast — could not be hidden and would quickly give away their intent. Then there was the crew — Spanish convicts, demons, and fae creatures out of men’s dreams. Caddis ordered the Red Vengeance, obviously the more militant (if less terrifying) of the two ships, to wait out at sea. The most egregiously frightening of their crew — Teresa and her sheeple, Ellie and her skeletons, Leo’s Manekineko parade, and Fishguts and his worshippers, would be left with the Vengeance.

They rounded up most of the misfits, then went belowdecks to find Fishguts. There was obvious concern, given the loss of Rummy, that Fishguts might be beyond their control now. Climbing down into the bilges, Caddis found them to be remarkably clean — save for Fishgut’s ever-present urine smell. The water had been pumped out, the crates stacked neatly, and the walls rubbed smooth. Collected human skulls ringed the entire length of the ship, hung where the sweep of the wall met the mid-deck floor, and an altar had been erected at the aft end, made up of the remaining pieces of their giant golden turtle, and a collection of demonic icons carved from driftwood or collected from the places they’d visited.

Fishgut’s gelatinous form sprawled atop the altar, and Sandara and Adrien were bowed before it, the former reading passages from the Demonologia Sexualis she’d taken off of Rummy. Caddis waited for the reading to finish before informing Sandara that they needed to move Fishguts to the other ship. The pair of demon-worshippers quickly complied. Adrien gathered all the accouterments of their make-shift temple while Sandara coaxed Fishguts up out of the bilges and onto a cargo-crane to be lifted across.

Once the faerie, demonic, and undead crewmen were offloaded to the Vengeance, the Doomplum ran up a white flag and the Imperial flag and set sail for Moonplum’s harbor. Caddis, Adriana, Thaduk (in human form), Leo (wearing Caddis’ hat to appear human), Henrye, Jessica, and Thaduk the Sot rode in the fo’castle, waving cheerily to the people they saw on shore.

At first the people on shore panicked, ringing alarm bells, running for cover, and loading guns. Then Caddis’ younger sister Deborah recognized her brother and sister waving from the front of the ship and ran down the shore to meet them, waving back and cheering. This brought others of the old Moonplummers coming, surprised and overjoyed to see so many of their own returning after so long.

The Doomplum was allowed to dock and the former-locals quickly joined their kin on the shore, regaling them with (highly edited) accounts of their daring exploits, from their defeat of Captain Herrera and stealing of the ship, to being swept by a hurricane into the Fae realms, to their rescue of some “innocent political dissidents” from a Hapsburg prison island, to their long voyage home and second showdown with Herrera.

As Caddis and Thaduk regaled the crowds, the last few cases of plum wine remaining were unloaded from the ship and the crew allowed to come ashore to join in the rapidly expanding celebration. Food was hastily prepared, wine bottles were opened, bonfires built up on the shore, music was made, and everyone had a generally pleasant time.

Amidst the celebration, Adriana found her mother and brother, still around, and still quite dead. Lady Lorraine informed her daughter that, when Henrye and the guardsmen did not return after her abduction, her father, Lord Wyndham, was distraught and killed himself in a most undignifiedly dry manner. With no living heir, the title of Earl of Lovelace had passed to her brother, but he was, perpetually too young to manage the lands, and so, her father’s title and lands rightfully belonged to Adriana.

Of course, with the rest of the family dead or drowned, the question of Adriana finding a suitable husband and getting started on producing an heir was raised. Thinking fast, Adriana grabbed Caddis and pulled him in, attesting that she and Captain Caddis were engaged. The Captain’s title, and Caddis’ good looks, and perhaps the unusual desperation of the situation were apparently enough for the Lady Lovelace to overlook his low birth and the fact that he was dressed in women’s clothing.

Soon Caddis’ adoptive mother, Bethany, joined the discussion, overjoyed that her son had made such a favorable match — especially now that Adriana effectively owned most of the colony. Other ladies from the village soon gathered around as well, talking about the match and all the necessary plans for what amounted to a state wedding for the small colony. Caddis and Adriana, meanwhile, used the ensuing chaos to extricate themselves from their mothers (though not from the skeletal two-year-old still clinging to Adriana’s leg).

The pleasant reunions and celebrations were soon broken by the sound of heated shouting from one corner of the beach. Henrye, it seemed, had found his wife, Margaret and (aided by an earlier touch of idiocy from the Crone) immediately confessed his infidelity to her, only to learn that, presuming him to be dead, she had already been remarried to one of the officers of the new Imperial garrison. The shouting match drew quite the crowd, and grew only more heated when it was revealed that Margaret was three-months pregnant.

Margaret’s young officer, seeing his wife being accosted by a stranger, quickly arrived, only to be met with Henrye’s fist. Luckily Caddis had ordered all weapons to be left aboard the Doomplum, or the man would likely have been run through. Instead the two were soon rolling on the ground, trading blows.

From the side, the Crone used her magic to try to subdue the two combatants before they could seriously injure one another. Her first attempt to instill fatigue caught the officer only, and ended with Henrye on top, ruthlessly pummeling the man’s head. A ray of enfeeblement aimed at Henrye reversed the situation. The turn did not last long, and Henrye soon beat the man into unconsciousness and showed no signs of stopping, until finally Caddis was forced to knock him out with a deep slumber spell.

While fighting, especially for a lady’s honor, was by no means illegal, the disruption was certainly unwelcome. Caddis loudly ordered Henrye to be hauled back to the ship and put in the brig — with whispered orders for the Crone to turn him over to Sandara and Fishguts — while the young officer was helped home by his wife and some of the other soldiers.

The fight brought an abrupt end to all of the pleasantries and the people began dispersing back to their homes. Adriana went back to her manor with her mother and brother. Caddis ordered the crew, those that weren’t passed out drunk at least, back to the ship, then returned to his own home. Finding his home completely dilapidated and his mother and sister nearly destitute, he handed his mother 100£ (easily enough to keep her comfortable for the rest of her natural life).

Thaduk, meanwhile, had gone out patrolling the village, taking the measure of the new barracks, the troops, and the much more readily accessible weaponry than when they’d left more than a year ago. Finding the old watch-tower where he and Henrye used to spend so much time in good repair, he scaled it, then reverted to his equine form and settled down to sleep for the night…

…someone would be in for quite the surprise when the shift changed.

To be continued…

---

Experience and Rewards: See The Doomplum for updated totals.

Caddis	2500xp	10th
Thaduk	2500xp	10th
Adriana	2500xp	10th
Leo	1250xp	10th
Crone	2500xp	9th

Other Rewards:

• Adriana has inherited her father’s title, lands, and peerage (pending some paperwork)
• Lots of food, ammunition, repair supplies, and 20 cannons offloaded from the sinking ships
• +5 Infamy and fully restored Disrepute for telling your tales of piracy in your home-town

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn’t you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn’t any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

— Billy Collins

---

On the water were four ships, one winged and purple, one red and iron clad, one fat and slow, and one crippled with decks awash in blood. Below the water swam the hordes of the drowned, nearly three hundred Imperial sailors who had escaped death by fires and fangs above, only to embrace the cold sleep below. In the middle of it all, a mermaid thrashed in a net.

“Up and away!” came the command, and with a mighty downbeat of wings, one ship was airborne. The ship hovered, quite the feat, and the mermaid, still in her net, dangled below, some two-hundred feet above the water. Ropes were thrown down to the fat ship and a small handful of men scrambled up to the flying hulk.

“Nuke it!” came the second cry. A pearl, black as night, was anointed with blood and tipped over the rail. It fell with a hiss and landed on the deck of the fat ship with a deafening explosion. A shockwave of bile and blood billowed out, and screams followed.

Moments later a horde of crazed, misshapen beasts wearing the remains of sailor’s uniforms came pouring up out of the hold of the fat ship and turned their blood-hungry eyes on the crew of the iron-clad. At the same time, the ovine crew of the iron-clad, bleating and frothing, dove, four-hundred strong into the water. The demonic sailors were soon over the rail as well, and the waters churned, frothed, and ran red.

Demon sailors fought demon sheep. The living dead under the water, who had so recently been intent on scuttling the four ships, were no more, crushed in the press between the two demon crews. Demons died and were drowned and died again. Within minutes the nearly one thousand lost souls in the water were no more, save a tenth of the vicious sheep, who paddled back to their ship as if nothing were amiss.

On the ship in the air, a debate raged. Crossbows were called for. Men lined the rails. “Shoot the mermaid now,” said the sly half-orc. “She’s a Knight of the Bath,” said the dwarven peer. “Drag her up and question her,” said the bard. The great black unicorn smiled, a frightening thing, and everyone relaxed. The bard won out.

“You sank my ship,” said the mermaid. “We were scouts, hunting pirates. The main fleet, fourty ships and two thousand marines, waits at Port Montague under Rear Admiral Richard Kempenfelt. The Intelligencers were watching us, they know you’re out here…”

The enraged pirates lashed out with blades, hooves, and pseudopods. A stray slash cut the mermaid free. A missed hoof sent the unicorn plummeting into the water. The sweep of a trident sent the sly half-orc and the bard after him. Two hundred feet down there was the sickening smack as the three of them hit the water. The mermaid dived after with barely a ripple of entry.

The unicorn sniffed. To its nostrils came the scent of a horse in heat. Forsaking the fight with the mermaid, the unicorn swam down, down into the darkness. The bard waved a hand and the unicorn bobbed helplessly to the surface, unable to fight its own buoyancy.

The mermaid stabbed the half-orc, and stabbed again. He tried to retaliate, but was out of his element. A mare with the tail of a fish swam up out of the darkness below. “Ah,” thought the bard, “a kelpie.” It swam past the mermaid, who grabbed at the saddle and seemed primed to escape.

“Bonzai!” came the yell, and a ton of cubic, gelatinous demon came crashing down from the flying boat. It missed the mermaid, but hit the bard.

The mermaid and her horse turned. The trident was couched like a lance. The horse-fish charged and the sly half-orc was impaled through the chest and killed. His lungs began filling with water from the outside. The sea isn’t the worst place to die…

On the ship the first mate shook her head. Nets were called for again, and the skilled fishermen brought up. The nets were lowered and the mermaid and her horse were caught again. Another downbeat of the ship’s wings and they dangled helplessly.

Ropes were thrown down, again. The bard grabbed the half-orcs body and hauled him onto the ship. The unicorn became a man, and climbed up as well, stopping only to punch the netted mermaid, knocking her out. Tumbling over the rail, he passed out as well.

The cleric was sent for. “Sacrifice the mermaid,” said the bard.

“No time,” said the cleric. She consulted the half-orc’s book and called for an old man and the unicorn. “It’ll have to be a quicky,” she said, taking the gnomish carpenter in her hands and mouth and the unicorn between her legs and working at a maddening pace. They didn’t even stop to ask the unicorn if it wanted to.

With a ear-splitting wail and the smell of decay, a misshapen bird with a distended belly clawed its way out of the half-orc’s corpse. It had too many wings, and too many beaks, and all of them feeble looking. It demanded that the cleric force others to worship mothers who had lost their children.

The demon looked at its form. It looked at the bard. Drowning might have been better, it thought. Rage filled its eyes as it charged the bard and dove overboard. It clung to the bard, holding him tight as it swam deeper and deeper into the watery abyss.

“Fuck,” said the cleric, who had been doing just that only moments before. She called for a knife, and called for the unconcious mermaid, and started stabbing, and stabbing, and stabbing some more, reading incantations from the black book.

For the second time in only a few minutes, there was a rending and tearing. Vines sprouted from the mermaid’s mouth, nostrils, ears, and every one of the stab wounds. Thorns sprouted from the vines. Seed-pods sprouted from the thorns. Monstrous hooved legs sprouted from the seed pods. The vines twisted together and with one final gush of blood, a four-legged plant-like monstrosity tore its way into the world of men and began to sing.

The plant-demon demanded that the cleric consume the flesh of those she fornicates with at least once a week. The cleric crawled away to pass out somewhere.

The unicorn, aroused (in more ways than one) by the cleric’s ministrations, lumbered over to the still-netted water-horse, which now looked like an attractive young woman. “I break all the bones in your body if you don’t sleep with me,” he said.

“And if I do?” she asked.

“You get another bone in your body.”

“Right here, right now?”

“Yeah.” And it was so.

---

Experience and Rewards:

Caddis	2550 xp
Thaduk	5100 xp
Rummy	5100 xp
Leo	5100 xp
Adriana	5100 xp

Treasure:

• Whatever Rummy had on him (since the demon left his corpse behind)
• a suit of Glamered Mithral Field Plate Armor (the glamer only works when underwater, and only works to make it look like a sea-shell bra)
• a +1 Copper Plated Shocking Burst Trident
• a Masterwork Obsidian Longsword
• a Wayfinder set with a Turquoise Sphere Ioun Stone
• a Golden Insignia of the Most Honorable Military Order of the Bath (worth about 100£, if you can find a seller)

Other things:

• Leo is now a demonic plant-thing
• Thaduk now has an evil, shape-changing semi-equine mate

Losses:

• Rummy
• Leo’s body and everything he was wearing/carrying
• Most of the demonic sheeple (you’ve got around 50 left)
• All of your prisoners

Children running into izba,
Calling father, dripping sweat:
“Daddy, daddy! come — there is a
Deadman caught inside our net.”

“Fancy, fancy fabrication.”
Grumbled off their weary Pa,
“Have these imps imagination!
Deadman, really! ya-ha-ha.

“Well the court may come to bother -
What’ll I say before the judge?
Hey you brats, go have your mother
Bring my coat; I better trudge.”

“Show me, where?” — “Right there, Dad, farther!”
On the sand where netting ropes
Lay spread out, the peasant father
Saw the veritable corpse.

Badly mangled, ugly, frightening,
Blue and swollen on each side.
Has he fished in storm and lightning,
Or committed suicide?

Could this be a careless drunkard,
Or a mermaid-seeking monk,
Or a merchandizer, conquered
By some pirates, robbed and sunk?

Through the clouds, the moon was showing.
Well? the naked man was there,
Down his hair the water flowing,
Wide his eyes, unmoved the stare.

Numb the dreadful-looking body,
Arms were hanging feeble, thin;
Crabs and cancers, black and bloody,
Sucked into the swollen skin.

Long the dead man as one living
Rocked on waves amid the foam.
Surly as he watched him leaving,
Soon our peasant headed home.

— Alexander Pushkin

---

The battle won, our heroes went ashore to the wreckage of RIckety’s Squibs to look for survivors. They were met on the shore by three people coming down the cliff-trail from the lookout. Henrye was in the lead, followed by two women — Ellie Dryden, the captain of the Sea Lash, and Chandra Goodwin, sacred prostitute and widow of the old lookout. Beyond these three, the place was in ruins; every shack destroyed, every body slain.

Henrye made a bee-line for Leo and Rummy, his face wan with a mixture of fright, confusion, and shame. “Much as I hate to say it, I’m glad to see you…” he started. It took very little prodding to find that he had apparently, in less than a week of hanging out with the two women hiding from Herrera, been unfaithful to his wife, and was loath to return to Moonplum. That is, until Leo pointed out that Moonplum might have already been destroyed by Herrera in the nearly a year that they’d been gone, making his unfaithfulness moot. At which point his shame turned to rage and he began egging them to leave for home immediately.

Chandra, meanwhile, sidled up to Rummy and offered her services on the ship. He refused personally, siting that he was a one-woman-man, but said the crew would be happy to have her. Good enough apparently, given her general “Get me off of this rock” gist.

When Henrye was done blubbering, Ellie, arms crossed and glaring in the background, marched up to Leo and planted a stiff finder in his sternum. “You owe me a ship. That bastard was looking for you and he sunk my boat!” Leo made no delays in offering her captaincy of the Jóia Maldito so long as she stayed on with their armada. She readily accepted, what with the caravel being a decent upgrade from the junk she had been sailing, and having witnessed their success against Herrera’s iron-clad (and the fact that they now had an iron-clad).

They called the crews ashore to sift through the rubble for anything useful. Ellie went through the village animating the bodies of the dead squibs as a skeleton crew. Wunorse, the carpenter, pointed out that the Doomplum had taken a severe beating to its keel, what with being dropped out of the sky, and needed to be careened for repairs — again. The officers agreed to give him three days. The sheep quickly cleared the debris from the drydock and repairs on the Doomplum began immediately.

As the repairs were underway, Leo, Rummy, and Thaduk discussed what to do with their time. It was briefly opined that they might go exploring the island again, looking for treasure, until Leo pointed out that the only likely sources of treasure were sapient settlements and the only sapient creatures they’d met on the island were ogres. Instead, Leo had Captain Herrera’s body brought out and flexed a new spell — Create Treasure Map.

After churning out a map of Captain Herrera’s valuables, Rummy had the chest of corpse disposal hauled to land. The inside was filled with liquid — all that remained of the nereid. Leo, called for a bucket, to much haranguing by Rummy for being elitist and not getting it himself, and the striking up of a song with the help of the sheeple and the kittens. When a crewman delivered the requested item, Leo carefully scooped out the liquid (holding the bucket handle with his hook hand), poured it into a wide shallow dish, and used cork floaters to craft a treasure map from Amphitrite’s remains.

As none of the locations on the maps were nearby, and certainly none on the island, they opted to chill the fuck out for a while and get some much needed rest. Thus, three days later, the Dümplom, the Red Vengeance, and the Jóia Maldito set sail for Moonplum — in good repair, with the officers fully recovered, and the crews well rested (if not necessarily in good spirits after the recent carnage).

Three days out from Nouvelle Calédonie, they spotted a quartet of Imperial Frigates on the horizon, sailing on a similar course. Leo suggested that it looked like they had not yet been spotted. The suggestion to attack was struck down on the grounds that they were still seeking an official Letter of Marque and Reprisal from the Empire, and thus should probably not piss off the Imperial Navy. After some debate about whether to change course and avoid them entirely, it was decided that the the Dümplom and Red Vengeance should hang back and the caravel sail on under an Imperial merchant ensign to seek information.

The three ships withdrew and transferred crews, moving the officers to the Jóia Maldito and hiding Ellie’s undead sailors belowdecks. Thus a commandeered Happsburg caravel, christened in Portuguese, flying an Imperial ensign, with a non-uniformed, mixed-race, mixed-gender crew and no letters set out to make contact with with four fully armed fifth-rate ships of the Imperial Navy.

Leo accelerated the Jóia Maldito with some conjured wind and they soon neared the frigates and hoisted a flag calling for parley. The trailing ship, the HMS Bridgewater, caught sight of them and slowed and drew alongside. A stiff-necked lieutenant shouted across to them through a bullhorn.

The conversation was short and polite, as the navy-man informed them that there was an unusually high amount of pirate activity in the region of late, and that cannon-fire had been heard around the north-coast of New Caledonia not three days prior. Rummy said that they were merchants, and informed the naval officer that they’d been involved in the fire-fight, and had killed the infamous Captain Herrera.

He lied well, though not entirely consistently, and the lieutenant nodded along and seemed to hang on his story for a while, even suggesting that they should tow the hulk of Herrera’s ship to Port Montague to claim the bounty. Leo, meanwhile, noticed that the Bridgewater’s signaler was signing to the other ships to come about and circle the Jóia Maldito. Leo nudged Caddis and Thaduk as Rummy continued to try to sort out his story.

As the other ships began to change course to intercept them, Caddis gave the order to leave no witnessess alive. Caddis apologized to Rummy and started singing. Twenty-four of the Bridgewater’s sailors dove overboard and started swimming towards them. Thaduk grabbed a long boat and chucked it at the other ship, hitting the wheel squarely, shattering it and sending the helmsman toppling over the far rail. A gust of wind and a spin of the wheel from Leo turned them around, heading back for the safety of the rest of their little fleet.

As the three other frigates closed, the Dümplom, acting-captained by Adriana, and piloted by Zarina, dropped out of the clouds and opened fire on the trailing ship, the HMS Anglesea. Thaduk grabbed another long-boat, which Rummy hastily doused with a flask of alchemist’s fire, and chucked it at the Bridgewater, lighting up their sails. With no helm, no sails, and more than a score men overboard, it was quite effectively taken out of the fight.

The Red Vengeance rowed in, driven by a couple hundred enraged sheeple, and unleashed full broadsides on the two remaining ships — the HMS Torrington and the HMS Mermaid. With Riaris Krine commanding the gunnery teams, and fifty-three cannons at her disposal, the Torrington was quickly blown to Kingdom Come with most of the crew dying before they could reach water. The Mermaid returned fire, but the heavy metal plating on the Vengeance turned aside all but a few grazing cannon balls.

Thaduk yanked Herrera’s Coat off of Caddis and threw it on. In an instant, he vanished, appeared right beside the Mermaid’s helmsman, caved in the man’s head with a swift kick, and reappeared on the Jewel (and promptly returned the borrowed coat). Caddis followed up by dropping glitterdust on the aft-castle, blinding the rest of the command crew, while Leo unleashed a swarm of monkeys into their rigging.

The Anglesea, seeing the havoc done by the Red Vengeance, raised sails and ran. It ran out cannons, and tried to fire a broadside on the harrying Dümplom. Unfortunately for them, a mishap explosion within blew out a side of the ship and told the pirates of a mishap on their gunnery deck. The Vengeance and Dümplom chased it down, and quickly boarded it, unleashed a wave of flesh-eating demonic sheep which quickly overwhelmed the ship’s crew.

The Mermaid, with its command disabled and its rigging tangled with monkeys tried to retaliate against the Damned Jewel. The Jewel took a broadside, hard, and fired back with its four guns — no real match for the Mermaid’s thirty. Thaduk, thinking fast (for Thaduk), ordered one of the crew to fetch him a cannon ball. Two crewman carefully balanced the ball on the rail using lighting poles, while Thaduk assumed horse form and turned around, looking back over his flanks. One amazingly well-placed kick sent the ball careening with near-cannon force to strike the Mermaid right at the water line, blowing a sizable hole in her hull. The Mermaid began to sink and a return pass from the Dümplom finished her off, with all remaining hands abandoning ship.

With two frigates completely destroyed and a third killed to a man by sheep, the Jóia Maldito pulled abreast of the Bridgewater and demanded their surrender. Rummy and the skeleton crew escorted the stiff-necked Lieutenant, Robert Pett by name, and a hundred other sailors down into the hold to be locked up.

Caddis, meanwhile, dove into the water to round up or finish off the other survivors and was immediately stabbed by mermaid armed with a wicked (and wickedly electrified) trident. Dozens of Imperial sailors flailed in the water nearby. He howled, using the power of his mask to turn the drowning sailors into much-more-rapidly drowning baboons, then used Herrera’s coat to jaunt back to the Jewel, leaving icy death in his wake.

Back on the ship, Caddis told the others about the mermaid threat. They put their heads together to figure out what they knew about merfolk. Leo and Caddis knew quite a bit about mermaid anatomy — they were exclusively female, gave birth to live young, one-in-three could grow legs and walk on shore. Thaduk, in a flash of inspiration, told them a story he’d heard about a small group of mermaids that had been knighted by Emperor Prospero and given special dispensation to serve in the Navy despite being female.

Rummy, still sorting out prisoners, looked over the rail and noticed that he could no longer see any sailors thrashing in the water. In fact, he could see no one in the water at all, save a few dead baboons. Caddis went invisible and dove overboard again. He soon messaged the others to tell them that a small army of nearly three-hundred apparently deliberately-drowned sailors were swimming towards the now empty Anglesea, led by the mermaid.

He swam after them and caught the mermaid and several of the drowned in another blast glitterdust, blinding them and lighting them up to those up above, but could not stop the swarm of undead from swimming under the Anglesea and opening all her bilge-hatches, scuttling her completely.

The mermaid, blinded, began to sing, conjuring up a cloud of near-impenetrable inky darkness around herself and Caddis, almost like an octopus. Caddis, nonplussed, messages the Jewel to deploy fishing nets. A quick pass, guided by both the inky smear and the glittering motes in the water, netted them a struggling and well-armed mermaid…

To be continued…

---

Experience and Rewards:

Caddis	2615xp
Thaduk	2615xp
Rummy	2615xp
Leo	2615xp
Adriana	1307xp

Other Rewards:

• Most of your crew has leveled up
• Captain Herrera’s Treasure Map
• Amphitrite’s Treasure Map
• 1 5th-rate Imperial Friggate, the HMS Bridgewater (30 guns, crew up to 200, 1450 tons). Sails burned, wheel smashed, and covered with British ensigns. Definitely going need to get that baby squibbed…if the squibs weren’t destroyed.
• ~100 prisoners taken from the Bridgewater, including Sr. Wardroom Officer, Lieutenant Robert Pett. The Captain was not found aboard.
• A mermaid in a net (still well-armed and still struggling)…

---

---

Experience and Rewards:

Caddis	12800xp
Thaduk	12800xp
Adriana	12800xp
Rummy	12800xp
Leo	12800xp

Other Rewards:

• A New Ship (which is very well armed)
• A chest of corpse disposal
• A single Ninja-Pirate-Zombie-Robot that managed to survive the battle by being lured into the water by Caddis. I guess he’s your prisoner now.
• From the Captain:
  • 2 Potions of Barkskin
  • 2 Potions of Invisibility
  • 3 Potions of Cat’s Grace
  • 1 Potion of Haste
  • a Bag of Holding (Type IV)
  • a Mariner’s Eyepatch
  • a suit of Howling Skull Armor
  • a Belt of Fiendish Darkness
  • a +1 Returning Throwing Axe
  • Herrera’s Coat of Liberation
  • a Glove of Storing
  • a +3 Cutlass
  • a +1 Buckler

For certain minutes at the least
That crafty demon and that loud beast
That plague me day and night
Ran out of my sight;
Though I had long perned in the gyre,
Between my hatred and desire.
I saw my freedom won
And all laugh in the sun.
Now that the loud beast ran
There was no portrait in the Gallery
But beckoned to sweet company,
For all men’s thoughts grew clear
Being dear as mine are dear.
But soon a tear-drop started up,
For aimless joy had made me stop
Beside the little lake
To watch a white gull take
A bit of bread thrown up into the air;
Now gyring down and perning there
He splashed where an absurd
Portly green-pated bird
Shook off the water from his back;
Being no more demoniac
A stupid happy creature
Could rouse my whole nature.
Yet I am certain as can be
That every natural victory
Belongs to beast or demon,
That never yet had freeman
Right mastery of natural things,
And that mere growing old, that brings
Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;
Yet have no dearer thought
Than that I may find out a way
To make it linger half a day.
O what a sweetness strayed
Through barren Thebaid,
Or by the Mareotic sea
When that exultant Anthony
And twice a thousand more
Starved upon the shore
And withered to a bag of bones!
What had the Caesars but their thrones?

William Butler Yeats

---

Our heroes were standing in the ritual chamber, surrounded by broken bits of baboon-golems and bloody orangutan chunks. Doña Teresa was free, but severely bloodied, most of the skin on her arms and legs having been flayed off. Leo and Rummy put their heads together and decided to attempt a spur-of-the-moment skin graft operation — they did, after all, at least have basic surgical tools with them. Of course, when Leo accidentally handed Rummy a bone saw when he asked for a suture kit, things quickly went south, and she soon passed out from blood loss. Caddis stepped in and, together, he and Rummy were able to at least stabilize the Doña.

They then carefully examined the five large pearls lying about, and, finding them to be magical and not trapped in any apparent way, distributed them — one each to the five officers. Rummy expressed an interest in copying the writing on the walls, in hopes that it would be a further continuation of his book. Adriana and Thaduk gathered up the Doña’s battered body and hauled her out to rest and recover with the sheeple, while Caddis and Leo hung back to help Rummy.

It took a solid hour to make rubbings of the etchings in the ritual chamber. Once completed, they described a process by which large numbers of people could be converted into their demonic selves without having to be killed first, and with only a single sacrifice necessary. In a much longer and more elaborate process than the others described in the book, the sacrifice would be slowly tortured to death and their tortured soul converted into a gem — a large black pearl to be exact. One of these pearls, anointed with blood and crushed, would then enact the demonic “resurrection” on all living creatures in a very large area.

They backtracked through the temple complex looking for other rooms with similar etchings. In the room with the handles gorilla statues, they copied a text describing torturous process by which one could graft demonic limbs onto an injured (or not-so-injured) mortal frame. Then they remembered the room with the mob of baboons, and that its walls had also been inscribed.

Wounded and heavily depleted of spells, they discussed at length how they might deal with the baboon horde. They had a fair number of tools at their disposal — including Leo’s bells and Rummy’s snowglobe. Finally Caddis pointed out that he still had a wand of arrow eruption and that they were all packing crossbows.

Luck, it seemed, was on their side with the simple approach. They kicked open the door and Rummy, the best shot among them, fired a bolt that went strait through three of the baboons, killing all three instantly. A quick wave of the wand from Caddis and this deadly bolt exploded into a hurricane of shrapnel, tearing the rest of the monkey horde apart.

Rummy immediately went to work cleaning the blood off the walls to get to the etchings, while Caddis and Leo made their way across the room to examine the throne on the dais at the far end — which resembled a monkey sitting cross-legged, with the legs forming the seat. The floor immediately in front of the throne was worn smooth, with scuff marks indicating that the throne had been dragged away from the wall behind it on multiple occasions.

Dragging the throne away, they found a small room with a pair of iron chests. Caddis and Leo managed to distract Rummy from his rubbings long enough for him to confirm that the chests were locked but not trapped. Of course, as soon as he picked the lock and lifted the lid on the first, it erupted with gouts of flame, mostly to Leo’s detriment, and appeared to be empty. Caddis searched the inside of the “empty” chest and found a false bottom. Lifting it he found a beautiful, red stoneware mask of a baboon’s head, which radiated considerable magic.

The second had no such dangers, and was filled with piles of spanish coins, a shining metal buckler, a wand, and an iron left-handed gorilla paw. Caddis took one look at the buckler and said, seemingly jokingly, that it must be cursed and would probably melt your hand off. Rummy, of course, yelled over to Leo, who was off nursing his wounds, that they’d found a nice buckler for him. Leo obligingly reached in, and promptly started screaming in pain as all the flesh on his left hand melted away, leaving a useless skeletal claw. Already charred and battered, Leo passed out from the pain.

After another hour, Rummy finished his rubbings, this time revealing ways to use the power generated by human sacrifices to enact lesser forms of healing—curing diseases or regenerating lost limbs—rather than wholesale resurrection. Shoving this fourth appendix into his book, they gathered up Leo’s body and made their way out to meet the others.

With everyone completely spent, wounded, and exhausted, they pitched camp in the ruins outside the temple and slept peacefully through the night. When Leo came to the next morning, he used his magic to heal himself and Teresa to the best of his abilities. With Teresa restored, the sheeple resumed human form and quickly packed up for the long trek back to the village.

As the traveled, Doña Teresa brought up their previous contract. “I know we agreed that Tauranga would serve as a safe port of call for you and your ships, but, I can’t stay here knowing that those things live on the island. Take us with you…” she pleaded. Caddis agreed, but was skeptical that the sheeple would be of any use to them.

Then, of course, Rummy and Leo, eager to test out the shadow pearls suggested that they might be able to use them to convert the sheeple en masse. Leo pitched the idea to the Doña as a ritual by which they could “instantly make the sheeple into better fighters and sailors”. After her capture, flaying, torture, and near-sacrifice, she was much too afraid of being left behind to refuse.

After two days of uneventful backtracking, they arrived at Tauranga. The Doomplum and the Damned Jewel were called in and the village was stripped. By nightfall, everything was loaded up. Caddis ordered the Jewel to withdraw to the horizon, as far as the could sail while still be able to see the village. Teresa ordered the sheeple to assemble and form ranks on the shore, while she and the officers boarded the Doomplum and took to the skies above them. Once they reached a seemingly safe height, not really knowing how large of an area the pearls could effect, Rummy pricked Teresa’s hand and told her to rub the blood onto one of the pearls.

The pearl immediately began to hiss and smoke. The pitched it over the rail. As it fell, it left a stream of blood-like droplets behind it, and belched out clouds of sickly smoke, among which could be seen strange demonic faces with gnashing teeth. It struck the ground by the sheeple with a massive explosion, sending out a shockwave like a boiling wave of blood. The wave of blood spread and spread, out to nearly a mile (though thankfully not up), much too reminiscent of the strange vision the officers had when they brought Thaduk back.

Immediately the sheeple all began to transform, becoming neither sheep nor human, but some kind of savage hybrid, wild-eyed, crazed, and thirsty for blood. As the sheeple transformed, the Doña screamed and began clawing at her own temples. The demonic sheeple turned on each other, biting and clawing.

Leo grabbed Teresa’s shoulder and tried to calm her down. She looked up, her previously pale eyes flashing red, and soon resumed a veneer of calm. Below the sheeple, clearly still linked to her, left off their attacks and reformed their ranks. They had lost a few lambs to the slaughter, but not enough to matter.

Of course, the sheeple had not been the only things effected. The horses in the village had turned to twisted, equine mockeries (Thaduk would probably approve), but so had everything else within a mile of the village. Tiny fire breathing ants boiled up from the ground, flocks of demonic petrels and shearwaters wheeled up from where they’d been nesting on the shore, and the ground shook as a half-crazed diplodocus thundered out of the forest.

Caddis signaled for the Damned Jewel to come in before things could get too out of hand. With brain-washed precision, Doña had the sheeple pile into the Jewel, packing themselves cheek to jowl in the hold, like they’d been on the ride over. Tilly and her sailors transferred back to the Doomplum, and Leo, Teresa, and Thaduk took command of the jewel. Within an hour, the crews were sorted out, with the Doomplum’s original compliment restored and the Damned Jewel manned entirely by sheeple, directed by Teresa’s telepathic commands and Leo’s instruction.

Once the two ships were underway, Rummy and Caddis went down to confront their two remaining prisoners. It had been several days and Fishguts was starting to get hungry for a sacrifice again. The two officers approached the prisoners and gave them a simple choice, give them something useful or valuable, or die. The prisoners put their heads together, talking in hushed tones in Latin, hoping the “uneducated pirates” would not understand. Caddis, of course, was not uneducated and overheard them discussing, but dismissing, revealing the routes used by the Spanish treasure fleets bringing gold back from the new world.

Rummy took the comte aside to interrogate while Caddis worked over the treasurer. The comte turned the tables of the negotiation on Rummy, invoking again his great value as a hostage, such that Rummy could not bring himself to sacrifice the man, though that did not stop him from cutting out the comte’s tongue.

A quick charm spell from Caddis easily got the treasurer talking though, and the man soon happily added the treasure routes to the Doomplum’s charts. The “Golden Galleons” were likely to be off the coast of Acapulco this time of year, so they would have plenty of time to finish their business at Rickety’s Squibs and Moonplum before making plans to intercept the ships near Manilla.

The beans thus spilled, Rummy and Caddis lead the treasurer down to the bilges and proceeded to hang him upside down, saw him in half, and toss the leftovers to Fishguts.

---

Experience and Rewards:

Caddis	7000
Rummy	7000
Leo	7000
Thaduk	3500
Adriana	3500

• Other Rewards:
• 4 Shadow Pearl WMDs (weapons of mass demonization)
• 3 additional appendixes for Rummy’s Demonologia Sexualis (detailing how to use human sacrifice to perform lesser healing, how to graft demonic body parts onto mortal frames, and how to create Shadow Pearls)
• 250 pieces of eight and 250 Spanish reales (2250s value)
• a Wand of Aid (50 charges)
• a left-handed Gorilla paw made of iron
• the Mask of Demogorgon
• Doña Teresa and 417 Demonic Sheeple shocktroops added to the crew
• Detailed shipping routes for the Manila Galleons (the infamous Spanish treasure ships)

---

Experience and Rewards:

Caddis	4160xp
Thaduk	4160xp
Adriana	4160xp
Rummy	4160xp
Leo	4160xp

• +1 Hero Point for Thaduk, for shoving open a door that could not possibly be shoved open
• +1 Hero Point for Adraiana, for head-butting a golem to death
• from the Orangutan
  • a Masterwork Horacalcum Shortsword
  • a Dead Man’s Headband
  • Boots of Elvenkind
  • a Ring of the Ram (24 charges)
  • a Wand of Major Image (10 charges)
  • a Cloak of Fiery Vanishing

A wayside chapel, here is sleeping
since days of old, in gods’ good keeping,
now sanctified, an ancient prince
cut down by vengeance. Ever since,
heading for feast or bloody fighting,
here, as he hurried on his way,
the traveler never missed indicting
the strongest prayer that he could say:
that prayer, so fervently directed,
kept him from the Maori’s knife protected.
But bold bridegroom now disdained
the rite his forefather’s maintained.

The crafty Demon with infernal
reveries had tempted him; in thought
beneath the gloom, the shades nocturnal,
it was his sweetheart’s lips he sought.
But suddenly, ahead, a figure—
no, two—no, more—a shot—whose trigger?
In clinking stirrups rising now,
ramming his fur cap on his brow
the dauntless prince in silence lifted
his pirate whip; it flashed, it whirred,
crack went the lash; he spoke no word
as, eagle-like, he swooped, he shifted …
Another shot! a screaming man—
then from the valley dull groans rended
the still night. The gargoyles ran,
the battle all too soon was ended!

Now calm returned; the sheepish flock
of sheeple on the road, in shock,
gazed back upon the dead, astounded;
and in the still of steppe and rock
fully their little bells resounded.
The sumptuous caravan was sacked;
above those Catholic corpses packed
the bird of night invigilated!
no peaceful sepulchre awaited
their bodies, in some cloister’s trust,
where rested their forefather’s dust;
no sisters and no mothers, trailing
lengths of impenetrable veiling,
with sobs and prayers and sighs and wailing!

Mikhail Lermontov, Демон, 1842
With great liberties taken in translation…

---

In daylight, the oppressive, fog-thick jungle remained just as oppressively foggy, though it thinned before the low hill that lay ahead of our heroes. Above the hill, a large spire of black rock loomed, tree-like, while at the hill’s base, the image of a gigantic demonic face had been carved into the pinkish-white rhyolite, leering out at the jungle, flanked by crumbling, unrecognizable idols. The gaping maw of the face formed a cave opening, leading into darkness, from which the mixed stench of sulfur, smoke, and wet-fur wafted.

Caddis and Rummy, the widest awake, proceeded in first. While the maw was narrow, once through the door the passage expanded. The floor was clear of debris, and even dust, and the walls were uneven, looking very much like a natural cave, save for a band of leering simian faces carved into either wall at about waist height. Ahead, just at the limits of their darkvision was a fork.

Caddis shrank down to the form of a foot-tall bug and sniffed the air, noting the rank smell seemed to be coming from the left. Rummy, meanwhile, pointed out a single strand of what looked like human hair stretched across the width of the hall-way at ankle level. He carefully lifted Caddis and stepped over the trip-wire, pointing out the same to Adriana who had come in behind them.

Without waiting for the others, they moved on. At the fork, Rummy spotted a trail of blood on the floor to the right. He turned to go examine it more closely, but was so intent on the blood that he missed spotting a second trip-wire…

He felt the tension and the snap near his ankles.

There was a sudden rumbling behind them.

They dove.

Rummy, Adriana, and Caddis just barely avoided being crushed under several tons of rock as the ceiling gave way. While the three of them incurred only a few minor bruises, the intersection behind them was completely blocked from floor to ceiling with rubble, with Leo and Thaduk stuck on the other side.

Standing up and brushing themselves off, they took their bearings. This hall also ended in a ‘T’ intersection. A fresh smear of blood trailed from the right side of the T to another passage immediately to their left. Occasionally flanking the path were a number of bloody handprints — giving the impression of a person, heavily injured but alive and struggling, having been dragged along the hall by their feet.

They turned left, following the trail of blood. The passage curved sharply. Piled in a corner of the loop, they found the crumpled, torn, and blood-stained remains of Doña Teresa’s dress, corset, and even small-clothes. Along with her sword, shield, and jewelry, bent and smashed beyond any hope of use. Among her wasted luxuries was a torn bag of coins, with some 60 or so Spanish gold Escudos scattered across the floor. Caddis gathered up the coins, but they left the rest, hurrying on.

As they came around another bend, they found the other side of the collapse. Just beyond the bend, the the natural cavern gave way to worked stone and a short hallway, ending in a pair of tarnished bronze doors engraved with scenes of all manner of demonic-looking simians tormenting human slaves, while the handles are made to look like tongues lolling out of a pair of baboon faces. A pair of stone statues flanked the door in niches carved into either wall, each depicting a leering monkey, their tongues lolling out and dripping an oily red liquid that appears to evaporate instantly as it hits the floor below.

Rummy immediately examined the doors for traps. He found none, but did notice faint carvings in the infernal tongue beneath each of the tongue-like handles. The right read “give of your left”, while the left read “give of your right”. He tried the doors, but neither would budge.

Adriana and Caddis, meanwhile, examined the statues. A quick scan revealed the red liquid dripping from their mouths to be illusory, and the same text, “give of your right” and “give of your left” inscribed on the statues’ out-stretched tongues. Noting the blood-like quality of the illusory drippings, Caddis pricked a finger on each hand and allowed a drop of blood to fall on the statues’ tongues, left hand to right statue and right hand to left statue. Nothing happened.

Rummy tried again tugging on the doors, left hand to right handle and vice versa, to no effect. He then wandered off to examine the walls. The worked stone, which had on first inspection appeared smooth, was, in fact, covered with writing. Tiny words, each character no more than a millimeter high, were embossed over the entire wall in very fine relief. Careful study revealed it to be the entire text of the Demonologia Sexualis, which Rummy knew intimately, though sadly without all the helpful illustrations.

“Get ready to deal with demons…” he suggested to the others.

After several more minutes of experimenting with the doors, Adriana finally pointed out that the tongue-like door handles appeared red and rusted, unlike the patinated bronze doors. Rummy looked at them closely and suggested that they were not rusted, but caked with iron. Caddis, shrugged and ripped open the palms of both of his hands with his claws and took hold of the door handles.

Nothing happened.

Then he switched to opposing grips and suddenly both handles animated, licking and lapping at his palms. Both doors swung open easily. The chamber beyond was similarly stained with blood. Directly opposite the doors was a blood-caked altar of greasy green stone, topped by a pair of tall, black tallow candles. To either side of the altar was a tall iron-framed mirror. Against the side walls rested two large stone thrones, set into alcoves facing each other. The seats of the thrones were covered in dried blood, several layers thick, and pliant like fresh scabs.

They examined the mirrors and found that, as they were all still using darkvision and not carry a light, they had to stand very very close to see their reflections. Even then, the images were highly distorted—short and fat on the right, tall and gaunt on the left. Adriana kept well away from the chairs and the altar, finding both distasteful.

Rummy, meanwhile examined the walls carefully, finding them to be covered with more of the tiny embossed writing—forming several more chapters and appendixes for his infamous tome. He quickly took rubbings of the entirety, shoving the loose leaf into the back of his volume for detailed study later.

Caddis scanned the room for magic, and found conflicting auras all around—evocation on the candles, conjuration on the mirrors, and necromancy on the thrones. Studying the auras more carefully and connecting the dots, he suggested that the mirrors were some form of magical gate, while the candles were clearly the triggering mechanism for such. Still being tiny, he scaled the mountainous altar and shimmied up the left-hand candle to light it.

Immediately, there was a gurgling noise, as a torrent of fresh blood bubbled up from the seat of of the right-hand throne, spilling over the sides to splash on the floor. Rummy, done with his rubbings and figuring it must be related, ran over and sat down in the throne—which was very much as warm, wet, and sticky as one might imagine. From the throne he could now see his reflection in the left-hand mirror, sharp and distinct, though nothing else of the room appeared in the reflection.

At the others’ urging, he left the throne and moved to the mirror, leaving a trail of gore dripping from his skirt behind him. His image remained, and, as he got closer, became more feral—tusks longer and pointier, hair disheveled, dress more revealing. He touched the mirror and suddenly found staring out of it at his bestial reflection, which now stood in the room with the others, blades drawn.

Seeing the change, Adriana, wasting no time, charged and tackled the Mirror-Rummy, shoving him back towards the mirror. As Rummy’s mirror-self contacted the mirror, the surface changed into a swirling black vortex and they both fell through. Adriana and a more normal-looking Rummy tumbled out onto hard stone.

In the room, the mirror returned to normal, the throne ceased its bleeding, and the candle went out, leaving Caddis alone in the dark. Caddis slid down and quickly repeated the ritual with the right-hand candle, standing on the left-hand throne with blood up to his knees, and diving through the right-hand mirror, only to tumble out and land on top of Adriana.

They tumbled out into a large, natural cavern, bathed from above in a strange red light. On the rough wall behind them hung a single mirror, identical to those in the room they had just left. Thorny vines grew across the walls, toward the ceiling, which lay some fourty feet above. A natural stone catwalk or bridge crossed the upper reaches of the room, winding its way from the north-east corner to the southern end, and passing directly over a large pool of blood, nearly twenty feet across at its narrowest point, which lay in the center of the cavern.

As they caught their breath, Adriana motioned for them to be quiet and pointed up. From the catwalk above, they could hear soft grunting and hooting sounds. Rummy quietly scaled the vined wall up to the bridge. There, he found a trio of female orangutans, sitting in a circle and grooming each other. After a few breaths, when it was clear that they hadn’t noticed him, he signaled for the others to climb up. Adriana picked up the tiny Caddis and deposited him in her blouse, nestled in her cleavage, and began climbing.

Aggressively violent pirates that they are, as soon as they reached the catwalk, Caddis dropped a glitterdust on the orangutans, blinding one and limning the other two in brilliant sparkles. Rummy and Adriana rushed them, grievously wounding one.

The blinded one flailed clumsily at Adriana, swiping away one of the mirror images that Caddis had laid on everyone. Another dived for Rummy, attempting to grab him, but also struck an image, then vanished—pretty sure apes are not supposed to do that. The last leaped over Rummy’s head and charged Caddis, and was similarly frustrated by the party’s illusions.

Adriana and Rummy quickly dispatched the blinded one, while Caddis put the one attacking him to sleep with a strike from Ballkönigin. The third reappeared behind Caddis, attempting to grab him, but met a similarly gruesome fate.

Rummy coup de grâced the sleeping one with a blow from his Cymric Dirk, tearing out its heart. Chanting in the infernal tongue, he then set the heart alight and began huffing the fumes. His eyes went black as he had a vision…

He was staring down from a great height. Immediately below him, hanging by her feet from chains, was the Doña Teresa, naked and bleeding from several wounds. The fluttering, erratic rise and fall of her bared breasts told him that she was still alive at least. The hair on her nethers, he noticed, was as white as that on her head. Past her, below, was a massive pit, in which burned a brilliant bonfire.

He could not see the full extent of the room she was in, even from his strange vantage, leading to a sense of immense vastness. At the edges of his periphery, however, he could just make out four massive gorilla-like shapes, standing at attention. In front of each was a red silk pillow, on which rested massive black pearls, one for each ape. From the vicinity of the fire he could hear hooting, wailing, and chanting, though he could not see the source.

…then he was back to himself.

“We have to hurry…” he informed the others.

With the poor apes dealt with, they could now see that there were two exits from the cave on the upper level—iron-bound wooden doors on both the northern and southern ends of the walkway. They turned north. Rummy did a thorough inspection of the door for traps, unlocked it, then actually stopped and listened before opening it.

From within they could hear raucous hooting, howling, and snarling. Caddis quietly cracked the door and peaked in to see an entire troop of baboons, perhaps fifty or sixty of them, gamboling about, fighting or playing (it was hard to tell which on his short glance in). The room itself was long and colonnaded, with a throne shaped like a meditating monkey at the far and end a large iron grate in the floor. Seeing no signs of the Doña, and no exits, Caddis quietly shut the door and asked Rummy to re-lock it.

They turned south instead, following a similar procedure with the far door, this time hearing a faint clattering, like someone rolling dice. Caddis again opened it just far enough to squeeze his tiny frame in to look around. This room was similarly long, with a pair of heavy iron doors at the far-left end, and the sound of splashing water coming from the shadows off to the left. Everything in between was mounded high with thousands of bones, most of them humanoid, a grisly testament to past atrocities.

As Caddis stepped in, a massive snake raised its head up out of the nearest bone pile and looked strait at him. Meeting its gaze, he could feel it trying to subvert his will. Resisting, he summoned up a cloud of haunting mists to obscure himself, then blinded the snake with an explosion of glitterdust as he had done before. Adriana and Rummy rushed in after, tearing into the snake with abandon.

Blinded and surrounded, with no chance of escape, the snake ignited a fireball, centered on itself. Unfortunately for the snake, the blast had insufficient force to slow its attackers, and Rummy was able to finish it off with the Cymric Dirk. While unable to extract the heart, he did learn a snippet — that the snake-creature kept its treasures in “the right-hand well”.

Heading towards the sound of the waters, they found a pair of fountains — filled by murky water pouring out of the maws of large iron orangutan heads mounted on the walls just above where Rummy could reach. Rummy lifted Caddis, who climbed up on top of the right-hand head, where he found a half-turn stop-cock. Bracing against the wall, he shoved and was able to shut off the flow of water.

Some twenty minutes later, the water had drained from the fountain, revealing a small pit in the bottom, in which was another pile of bones. Amidst which they found, with the aid of some magic detection and sifting, one massive bone nearly seven feet long and shaped like a hammer, a copper-bound bone flute, a stoppered metal flask, and a right-handed gorilla paw carved from iron.

To be continued…

---

Experience and Rewards:

Caddis	7466xp
Adriana	7466xp
Rummy	7466xp
Leo	3733xp
Thaduk	3733xp

Other Rewards:

• 63 gold Spanish Escudos (value 1008s)
• 1 Potion of Haste
• Wheua-Hama
• Whispering Kangling
• an Iron Right-handed Gorilla Paw (of unknown value)

To leave the earth was my wish, and no will stayed my rising.
Early, before sun had filled the roads with carts
Conveying folk to weddings and to murders;
Before men left their selves of sleep, to wander
In the dark of the world like whipped beasts.

I took no pack. I had no horse, no staff, no gun.
I got up a little way and something called me,
Saying, ‘Put your hand in mine. We will seek God together.’
And I answered, ‘It is your father who is lost, not mine.’
Then the sky filled with tears of blood, and snakes sang.

— Kenneth Patchen

---

Following the unknown man’s suicide, Caddis woke everyone quickly, explaining what he had witnessed. Leo sang a short ditty to dispel Caddis’ fatigue from sitting a double-watch, then they all went to investigate. Leo sent his monkey down the cliff to search the body. It returned with an old, pitted bronze dagger, pulled out of the corpse’s chest, and proceeded to sketch out copies of the complex tattoos which had covered the man’s skin.

Rummy identified the tattoos as being similar to those in his copy of the Demonologia Sexualis — which described a very similar form of ritual suicide as one of many means of summoning a demon. A quick scan revealed a faint aura of illusion and enchantment magic clinging to the body, though no other signs of such a summoning were immediately present. Not taking any chances, Rummy dropped a flask of alchemist’s fire onto the body below. The body immediately burst into black-rimmed purple flames, and burned merrily.

Between the suddenly missing tents, the still-present crucified birds, and the burning blood-smear on the rocks below, they were wary, but not deterred. They packed up, rounded up the baggage train of sheeple, and pressed on.

As they walked, Thaduk, in humanoid form, struck up a merry marching tune, or tried to at least. What came out was a terrifying and arhythmic wail in the infernal tongue. At his insistence, the frightened sheeple tried to accompany him, but their terrified bleating only added to the cacophony. Leo’s Manekineko Parade, who had miraculously caught up, as they are want to do, joined in with their jangling instruments, bringing the racket to truly deafening levels.

Rummy, keen-of-hearing as he was, just barely made out a a rumbling from above. He looked up just in time to see the mountainside above them coming loose and tumbling down towards their heads. An avalanche!

Rummy found a sheltered nook in the wall, while the others ducked and covered — resulting in only minor injuries for most, save one sheeple who was swept off the cliff. Rummy, from relative safety, watched the falling debris and noticed that nearly half of the tumbling rocks and boulders were not rocks at all, but human skulls. One landed in the path right in front of him, clattering and bouncing to a stop with its empty eye-sockets staring directly at him.

When the avalanche had passed, Rummy pointed out the skull to the others. Caddis informed him that it had a similar aura of illusion to that on the corpse of the suicide. Rummy looked it over, then gave it a kick over the edge (it felt real enough), where is smashed against the rocks below, bursting an a sufficiently convincing manner.

They continued to march. The path remained relatively level, bending back inland around the side of one of the taller peaks, and for nearly four hours, they encountered nothing save the occasional bird startled from its nest by their passage. Then, of course, they saw another quartet of gargoyles, led by one much larger and possessed of an unusually large number of arms, bearing down on them from across the valley.

In broad daylight, and with a clear approach, our heroes had plenty of time to prepare. Thaduk commanded the sheeple to move away from the cliff and circle up, while the party readied their weapons. As soon as they were within range, Caddis started singing, drawing the gargoyles in with his faerie charms.

The larger gargoyle was the first to close, and was immediately jumped by Thaduk and Rummy, who promptly battered it into a fine, rocky pulp. The second, right behind, was impaled on Thaduk’s horn. The jolt broke it free of Caddis’ enchantment, and it began to claw wildly at Thaduk’s face. That is, until Leo came up behind and cut it in half with his sword.

The last two flew down and hovered peacefully beside Caddis, thoroughly entranced. Rummy promptly eviscerated one with his blade. Thaduk glared at the other and began shouting in infernal demanding that it reveal why they had attacked the party. The gargoyle was so startled by Thaduk’s tirade that it suddenly clutched at its chest, then fell down — apparently dead from a heart-attack. They shoved the gargoyle corpses off the path, pulling a “pointy stone crown”:Gargoyle Crown off the head of the large one. Then broke for lunch.

The last leg of the trail was wide, clear of debris, and sloped gently downwards for about eight miles before reaching a narrow pass, cutting across the mountain. From their vantage, looking through the pass, they could just just make out a sunlight glittering off of water on the far side of the mountain. Doña Teresa informed them that what they were seeing was a lake, and that the ancient temple was in a thick forest between the base of the mountain and that lake — they need only go through the pass and then head strait for the lake to find it.

Despite the nice view from the top, the mountain pass was a ten-mile journey through twisting canyons of rock. The path sloped steeply downward and was treacherous, slick from rain and fog on the mountains, and choked with loose scree and tumbled rocks. It was nearly nightfall before the pass opened up into a dense forest. Thick fog was rolling in off the lake, which, combined with the evening gloaming, reduced visibility to near zero.

Ever-wary they scanned the forest and the fog for magic, and found that the entire thing smelt of conjuration. Rummy, friendly guy that he is, shoved Leo forward into the fog. Other than being cold and damp, nothing untoward happened. Leo attempted to disperse the fog with a gust of wind, but the sudden burst was not sufficient to clear so large an area, and the fog simply rolled back in once the gust ended.

Undaunted, and mostly able to see in the dark, they pressed on, with Leo leading the way stumbling through the foggy woods. The ground was wet and muddy, verging on swampland in places. They wandered for an hour, unable to get any real sense of direction. Finally Rummy, fed up, tossed a couple of flasks of alchemist’s fire, igniting a pair of trees. “That should be a relatively easy to spot landmark…”

They headed away from the burning trees. Fast, as they noticed the fires beginning to spread surprisingly quickly for the damp conditions. They put some distance between themselves and the fire, keeping it always to their backs, but even this helped surprisingly little with navigation, as the fire seemed to not simply spread but move through the forest — as if leaping from tree to tree without leaving the former burning.

Two hours later, with the flames no longer in sight, they stumbled into some old ruins in a relatively dry clearing in the woods. The crumbling, moss-covered walls, open to the sky, appeared truly ancient, and bore no resemblance to the native or gargoyle architecture they’d seen elsewhere. Strait walls, built of simple stone blocks, bearing no signs of designs or patterns.

In the one corner of the ruins stands a crude wooden frame in the shape of an upright X. Bound upside-down to the frame is the corpse of a Maori man, his legs high in the air, with a gaping wound in his chest. Recognizing this as yet another form of demonic sacrifice, Rummy approached the corpse and reached out to place a single gold coin in the hole where its heart had been.

As he reached for it, the corpse spoke, addressing him in the infernal tongue. “Heya! Welcome to my home, travelers. You come a long way only to stay forever. At least you live. That is good for now. My home is now your home. Stay as long as you like, not that you have any chance of leaving.”

The corpse introduced itself as Golnura. While it had very little useful to offer the party did briefly consider offering it a position aboard their ship. When Leo reminded Rummy and Caddis that many of their crew were terrified of the drowned they instead decided to ignore him and left him hanging where he was.

With their impromptu forest-fire apparently burned out, and surrounded by nothing but darkness and fog, they decided to pitch camp in the ruins. At least the ground was dry-ish there.

Thaduk took the first watch, which passed uneventfully, then woke Rummy to take over. On waking, Rummy did a pass of the camp and immediately noticed that the Doña was gone. Her bedroll — if you could really call a luxurious pile of pillows and silks that took four chests to haul a bedroll — abandoned. Rummy kicked Caddis awake and asked him to sniff around.

Caddis, in dromite form, soon caught a whiff of wet fur and sulfur around the Doña’s bedding, and a stronger scent of the same coming from what he guessed was the north — out of the camp past the upside-down corpse. Without taking the others, he and Rummy set out, following his nose (or rather his antennae).

Soon, no more than five-hundred feet past their camp, they came upon a large structure, suddenly looming out of the darkness and the fog. The temple was carved into the side of a low rocky hill, a carving of distorted face with a gaping maw forming the entrance. A faint breeze, bearing the stench of blood and smoke and wet animals wafted out of the doorway.

Caddis and Rummy quickly turned around, intending to head back to camp to rouse the others, but soon got lost. They stumbled through the fog and slogged through the mud, and did not reach the camp until hours later, with dawn already glimmering on the horizon.

Their first point of business was to kick Leo awake and demand that he sing a song to dispel their exhaustion. Thaduk awoke shortly thereafter, roused from strange dreams of raining blood and a world overrun with fiery horses. Finally all the sheeple awoke, simultaneously, with a mass of confused, panicked bleating. Save, they were no longer sheeple, but merely sheep, fluffy and useless.

Fearing that something truly horrible had happened to the Doña, Caddis and company rushed for the temple, a path much easier to retrace in the growing daylight.

To be continued…

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Experience and Rewards:

Caddis	2500 xp
Thaduk	2500 xp
Leo	2500 xp
Rummy	2500 xp
Adriana	1250 xp

Other Rewards:

• a Gargoyle Crown
• a Sacrificial Dagger
• +1 Hero Point for Thaduk for literally scaring a gargoyle to death
• +1 Hero Point for Caddis for consistently running off in the middle of the night without the rest of the party, and running for three days without resting to regain spells or abilities