Someone banged on the door of the Bastards' room at Ishizaka's blockhouse. It was one of his security Wights, an undead Elf who told them there was a group of people here to see them. The Bastards looked out the window and saw a group of Morwenna's dragoons, towing a supply cart and reinforced by combat scribes, war dogs and Ogre doppelsoldners.
Two adventurers went down to represent the Bastards in front of the goons.
- The Prospective Suitor Aldrich Brisbane (polymorphed into the beast Umbrich Brisbulk)
- The Prospective Golemancer Laguna Tempest
The Dragoons made good time returning to the Giantess' lodge. The Bastards noted that the stylites were missing from the hill, along with the refugees enjoying their protection at the base of the now-empty poles. The horsemen drove the supply cart through Morwenna's dinosaur garden and up the paved causeway to the top of the fifty foot hill. Slaves and Ogres hauled goods up another temporary causeway from the dock at the river, using floating discs to carry the heaviest loads. Further south, vultures and crows circled a hacienda a good distance away. It was too far to see exactly what was going on, but the Bastards noticed a pair of Ogres hacking something to pieces on a large table outside the barn.
Morwenna's fort had an earthwork wall at the top of the hill, made to deflect artillery fire more than stymie attacking foot troops. Inside the perimeter was a longhouse with a peaked roof, fifty feet high at the apex. The corner of the structure was damaged, slaves lifted timbers and shoveled earth into a bomb crater. The front door was twenty five feet high, but a small door in the kickplate admitted humans. Umbrich couldn't fit through the human sized door, forcing the soldiers at the door to open the whole thing.
The Giantess' parlor had giant-sized furniture and a giant fountain. Slaves served coffee and light snacks from a stand set up under an enormous ottoman. The wall had a huge painting of the legendary giant Angrborn suplexing the Green Dragon Verdegris. The fountain had a big statue of a therapod dinosaur spitting water from its mouth, with a 15 feet deep pool filled with coins and giant piranhas. While the Bastards waited, Laguna looked for someone important he could Charm to affect the proceedings. He got his wish when the Gnoll Fortaleza, Cleric of the God of Mercy, came in and said the Bastards were up. As they passed through the human-sized door to the great hall, Umbrich's bulk shielded Laguna from prying eyes, giving him a chance to cast without getting caught. He tried to Charm the Gnoll's person and she sniffed, then continued like nothing happened.
This Great Hall was gargantuan. Long tables flanked a fire pit in the center. The tables were sized for Morwenna, ten feet high. Ramps and ladders granted access to the surface, where the slaves had set up human
size tables. On the wall was a giant banner with Morwenna’s coat of arms: a
giant devouring a globe above the house’s motto conamini sisti me. At the north end of the room was Morwenna, clad in a red doublet, Houdini the Mummy standing on the armrest of her chair.
Morwenna explained how things were going to be. Jack Fatherd had been spotted by multiple witnesses, killign the Goblins of One Ear and assaulting her own Dragoons with artillery. The Bastards could kick him out of the group and kill him if they ever saw him, or they could stand by him and share his fate. For emphasis, Morwenna grabbed a smoked human from the bowl and stuffed it in her mouth, expertly sucking the meat off the corpse like a normal size person stripping a chicken wing. She tossed the bones to the floor for the slaves to sweep up.
The Bastards weren't interested in defending Jack. With that settled, there was a second case to settle: the theft of the pay chest, which the Bastards claimed to have information about. They told Morwenna they caught the Bullywugs of the Brigands of All Nations stealing the pay chest from the fort, chased them off and forced them to drop it. Houdini made one of his Imps taste the slime on the box, and the demon confirmed it was frog goo. Morwenna would call Gorrister in, and unless he could provide an explanation for the frogs' behavior he'd be forced to disown them too.
Dave Summers and Aaron Lovejoy
The Gnoll Fortaleza spoke up to say that she felt an evil omen from Laguna, like he tried to curse her. Morwenna told Fortaleza never to interrupt her again. Her religious fanaticism was tolerated because she was a capable administrator, not because her mad gibbering about the God of Mercy was welcome during meetings. Houdini tilted his head at the Bastards in the eyeless equivalent of a wink. There was no way he believed their story about the theft of the chest. He was happy that they killed all the Dwarves and was returning the favor.
The Bastards left the way they came in. A battery of cannons went off in the yard behind the steading. Umbrich wanted to investigate, and found a group of Giff practicing marksmanship with enormous field pieces, which they fired from the shoulder like muskets. One of them had a problem with the locking mechanism on his cannon, distracting the leader of the group while the others smoke. Umbrich approached the group and traded them wine for tobacco, reassuring the hippo-men with gestures that he wasn't there to confuse and eat them. Laguna struck up a conversation with the commander, Pinkgin. His unit, the Cannon's Thunder, were mercenaries in the middle of a deadlocked contract negotiation with Morewnna. The Giantess offered generous pay and accommodations, but would not contractually guarantee that the Giff would never be required to engage in cannibalism or atrocities.
Laguna asked the Giff what their rates were. The commander quoted 5,000 silver pieces to fight in the tournament, and defend whatever lodging the Bastards assigned them until the day of the festivities. Laguna negotiated it down to 4,500 silver plus a couple barrels of dwarven rum, of course with the guarantee that the Giff wouldn't be required to participate in atrocities. He didn't have the money on him, but the hippos could come with him to get it. They set off before Morwenna could realize her artillery squad had been hired out from under her.
The fastest way back to the Bastards' base at the Dwarf Fortress was along the east shore of the lake. They passed the wedding grounds and an abandoned drystone hut, scaring away a herd of wild horses on their way through. They passed a swamp, where decaying warriors clad in copper and bronze struck each other fruitlessly with ancient weapons. This was the bog where the Dark Creeper and Deep Gnome told them the dead rose to refight ancient battles. The Bastards weren't interested in picking a fight with the zombies just yet, even with the hippos to back them up.
They were interested in exploring the canyon to the east, where the archaeologists told them there was a giant iron hand in front of a cave. The rock face was scribbled with old pictograms of humanoids drowning in an underground lake, which made Umbrich suspicious. The iron hand sculpture was at the end of the gulley, facing a fissure in the rock that led down into the earth. The cave was narrow and Umbrich had to widen it to fit inside. The passage turned sharply and right around the corner, just out of sight of the hand, was a seething mass of slimes.
The jellies reached out toward Umbrich, repelled by an unseen force. He backed up and Laguna tossed a fireball into the confined space, turning the heaped slimes into a runny mess of flaming biological parafin. The heat fed only fed the brown mold, which rapidly grew to fill the space formerly occupied by the other slimes. Umbrich tried scooping out chunks of it with tools but just getting close made him dangerously cold. Laguna scooped away at it with his ring of telekinesis, but something on the other side was replenishing it faster than he could scrape. They needed a way to chill the mold to death.
It was the end of autumn and the lake water was cold. The lake was a couple miles away from the canyon, a distance Umbrich could dig in a couple hours. He burrowed into the earth and got to work on a qanat while Laguna took the Giff back to the base.
A rider flagged down Laguna and the giff. It was Sabul the Dragoon, who the group hired to watch the base. He had woken up in the hunting blind with dart wounds in his neck, like someone had jabbed him with a huge syringe. He didn't know what happened while he was asleep but he was worried the base had been robbed. Umbrich let the Giff take the lead. They moved down the causeway to the bunker entrance, cannons at the ready, shielding him with their bodies. The door was broken open, but that was because Umbrich broke it initially and didn't have the carpentry skills to fix it. Nevertheless, as the Giff swept into the fortress it was obvious someone had visited while the Bastards were out. They were long gone, but they had cleared out the rubble blocking the treasure chamber and taken all the money. Only the rum barrels were left, in the holes Aldrich dug in the floor for them.
Laguna convinced the Giff to wait for the Bastards to retrieve the money, accepting the rum as a down payment. He sent Sabul out to inform Umbrich of the bad news.
Umbrich popped out of an access shaft dug on the beach, just in time for Sabul to flag him down and inform him of the theft. Umbrich wrote in the sand that the horseman should go back to the base and tell Laguna to come down to the canyon. Wilusa the Lamia was clearly behind the theft, and she was going to get hers. Then he went to the cave to see how the slime was faring.
Cold water poured out of Umbrich's tunnel into the cave. The brown mold shriveled and detached from the stone, washed into the depths below. The Umber Hulk ventured into the cave, using his claws to anchor himself so the rushing water wouldn't suck him down too. The passage went down into a chamber with a big statue of Mothermonster, idiot Goddess of mindless beasts, standing guard over a pile of treasure. The statue's many maws endlessly drooled slimes, which floated around in the rapidly flooding chamber. The flowing water stopped them from climbing out the entrance tunnel, but it wouldn't hold them back once the whole cave filled up. Umbrich could climb on the ceiling with his claws and drop on top of the statue to get the treasure, but escaping a flooded room full of floating slimes would be a literal tarpit. He went back up to the canyon and burrowed into a wall to wait.
Richard Sardinha
Laguna came down the mountain to the swamp with a solution, and a cannon-armed Giff who came to draw water for the other hippos. Something hit them with a Sleep spell, which Laguna tanked but the Giff improbably fell victim to. Laguna scanned the reeds for the culprit and spotted a Cave Elf lying in ambush. The Drow realized he'd been spotted and fled when Laguna mimed casting a spell in response. The mage woke the Giff up from a safe distance with a stick. The Giff pulled the lock on his cannon back to half-cock, so if he fell over again it would go bang and wake him up.
Umbrich popped out of a wall and greeted Laguna. The duo went down into the cave and the wizard used his Ring of Telekinesis to simply pull out the treasure. Scrolls, potions, money, and a couple unidentified magic items. The haul would pay off the Giff with a little gravy to spare. They left the hole and almost ran into a whole squad of adventurers, several of whom they recognized as the Lamia's warriors. The Bastards quizzed them about the theft of the treasure from the Dwarven base, Wilusa's Warriors pled ignorance. They had a deadness of affect that indicated WIS drain and ensorcelment, and the Bastards realized they could break the enchantment if they brought sufficiently powerful magic to bear.
Umbrich suggested killing the six adventurers, speaking in undercommon so only Laguna could understand. The Gnome adventurer responded that they had the bastards outnumbered two to one. If Umbrich had ambushed them from his hiding place in the cave wall then they'd have had a chance, his confusion effect could have disabled the whole group. On even footing, the odds weren't great. But the adventurers weren't confident they could easily overpower the magic-resistant hippo holding a shotgun on them.
Don Greer and Rob Stern
The two parties went their separate ways, Wilusa's Warriors taking exquisite care not to give away the location of their hideout while the Bastards were in line of sight.
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