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May Event Log B: Return to Einjar
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| 🜙 Mod Note | |||||||||||||
| Return to Einjar's resolution is dependent on the choices the involved players make and will affect the resolution of Song of Suffering. It is not too late to sign up There will be a comment below for plot-specific questions and exploration we encourage everyone to use to help drive the resolutions/plot of the event. After you have read through this post please respond to This Poll as soon as you feel comfortable making the choices in it. Please respond even if your character is not participating in either event as the choice made effects the game world/all players. | |||||||||||||
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| 🜙 Trouble in Preciposte April 26th | |||||||||||||
| The first stop on the excursion is Preciposte. Arrival to the Northern Outpost is greeted by near silence. Only a handful of people remain in the deserted outpost and all of them are waiting for the excursion team within the town's tavern. Stew and Hot Mead are available to anyone who needs or wants it and the outpost's designated healer has one of the larger rooms set up with beds for rest and recovery if anyone is injured during the side mission. The mountain goat satyr and her assistants, a very short kobold and a cheerful blue orc, are around to offer their help where needed but they won't leave the tavern. Once everyone is off the airships and crammed into the building, Ser Medraut has a few of his men hand out supplies and split the group into teams with different dedicated tasks. He explains the dangers of the mountain cliffs and the creatures that live at this altitude, including the cliff hawks that do not often differentiate between an easy animal meal or a person. He says that reports from Preciposte citizens that have been relocated to Krimnos claim a large flying beast with scales has been picking people off, and that at dusk its roars and screeches can be heard throughout the outpost. As he finishes and the teams are formed up the kobold in the tavern gets up on the bar to speak to the group. He explains that the little outpost might not look like much but for a lot of folks it's home and they'll do what they can to help the team while they search for the cause of the attacks. Whatever is hunting the mountains is big enough to take on the cliff hawks and it has already carried off a few of the Krimnos mountain horses (Clydesdales). The excursion company is split up into three teams with the Defensive team being made up of people on both teams to allow them to rotate.
Rescue team's job is a grim one. Recover the bodies and any evidence of lives lost from the ravines and paths. Collect any obvious personal belongings and remains and send them back to Preciposte for the loved ones of those lost or for proper burials. The same risks exist for both Search and Rescue team, but Rescue team's instructions are to get to cover and hide immediately if the threat is spotted. A portion of the team is dedicated to stealth and illusion to help the team get through their tasks without having to directly confront the creature causing the disappearances. A tracker is on the team to help locate signs of life in the mountains and avoid following beast tracks rather than people ones. The Defense team is made up of members of both teams and their job is to protect the ships and Preciposte from cliff hawk/creature attacks or thieves. A company of around 12 knights goes with Search team, 3 with Rescue team, and the other 15 knights and Ser Medraut remain in Preciposte to help with Defense team.  All three teams can encounter the creature, though only search team should directly try to contain or kill it. Being bitten by the creature or looking into its gaze will cause the characters to begin slowly turning to stone from their extremities or the point of the bite. The injury starts with a slow, creeping discoloration of the skin to gray and a stiffness of the limbs. It progresses to a hardening of digits and then lower extremities followed by upper extremities and eventually the entire body will turn to stone. The whole process takes about 1-2 weeks depending on the size and health of the individual. The creature is small, only around nine feet tall with an eighteen foot wingspan. It breathes fire and unusual metal fixtures on its chest, wings, legs, and tail appear to be armor and spikes made of a golden alloy of some kind. It is highly aggressive but will attempt to flee back to the caves if wounded. When the creature is killed, or contained in the airship hold if captured, the excursion company boards the airships once more, sends word to Krimnos of their progress, and continues on to Einjar. | |||||||||||||
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| 🜙 Eroding Memories April 28th | |||||||||||||
| The flight from Preciposte to Einjar is tense. The ship crews have to call out to one another as the airships drift through dense, freezing cloud cover. Silence hangs heavy over the whole excursion team other than the echoed call outs for jutting rocks or turns. Progress is a slow drift in the blinding white and gray, and freezing condensation clings and freezes to the ships and everything on board. The air clears as they approach Einjar without hindrance, and the ships grind to a rest on stone dwarf reliefs carved out of the cliff edges.
Before the excursion company, in the clearing air, is an unsettling sight. The doors to Einjar lay in crumbled ruins at their base, blocking up the rivers that flowed down Einjar's steep staircases. An overflow tunnel beneath the great landing pours forth torrents of clear water and at the base of the waterfall the lake that rests in the valley before Einjar and the river that flows from it are now visible below the clouds. The lake is a deep blackish-red, and the river sluggishly flowing from it runs red like blood. Ser Medraut calls his knights and volunteers together, the company of knights and a few hands worth of volunteers is small, but the vast landing and doors of Einjar make the team feel impossibly small. Scorch marks in arcing lightning bolt patterns and hardened ice cover the open entrance and crumbled doors to Einjar, the 3 foot deep stone doors have been smashed like clay and lie in a rubble heap blocking the lower half of the entrance in. Ser Medraut gathers Alucard, Trevor, Lauralae and two of his knights and asks them to go over the rubble and quietly, carefully, check ahead into the entrance. They will be the first group back inside of Einjar. He sends Daenerys, Sansa, Poe and Robb to seek out the kobolds the last excursion team met in the hopes of getting information from them. Medraut says Daenerys should be able to lead the group back to the kobold's home a little ways back along the mountain. Nike, Jon, Kylo, and Sypha are tasked with guard duty while the rest of the knights work to clear the rubble, and will quickly have their work cut out for them, as large dire wolves begin to appear on the cliffs to the left and right of the landing, their lips curled back in threatening snarls. | |||||||||||||
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| 🜙 The Enemy Within April 28th-May ?? | |||||||||||||
| Once the team enters Einjar they find the city bathed in an eerie reddish-purple light. The dome above the city's mountain spring fed lake is cracked and stained red, a slow and steady drip sounding from the back of the city. Many of the buildings inside Einjar have been damaged, some cracked and others now housing crumbling holes where something caved part of them in. The waterfalls barely trickle down into the river, the water pinkish-red. The river, partially drained, is at half its level leaving the heads and helms of stone kobolds and dwarves visible in the canals. Deep claw marks scour the stone floors and some of the buildings and bridges are coated in a thick, beautiful white-blue ice. Each time a drop falls from the dome and hits the lake a ripple of ringing sound echoes through the city, sending a shiver of Paranoia Reflection through anyone who hears it. Touching the water or disturbing it in any way causes the Song of Suffering to ring out, while direct contact and prolonged contact cause the excursion team members who touch or drink the water to be overtaken by Fury or Desperation.
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| 🜙 Einjar's End | |||||||||||||
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As the last member of the team enters Einjar a thunderous roar sounds from outside the city, and the screech of a dragon sounds, deafeningly loud through the cavern. A blast of blue and white light blinds anyone who looks back at the entrance, the sound of crystals shattering and bumping against one another accompanying it. With the muffled sound of wing beats the excursion team looks up to see the entrance barricaded by a thick wall of blue-white ice at least ten feet thick. The team is temporarily trapped within Einjar and the heavy beat of wings and further screeches and shattering sounds can just barely be heard outside the thick stone and ice walls. With the effects of Paranoia gradually increasing, affecting more and more of the excursion team more strongly with the passage of time and the trapped waters of the Einjar river gradually rising the clock is ticking. Behind the team comes the sound of cracking stone and shifting earth. From out of the broken ravine a creature crawls, leather skin pulled tight over dense bones, ancient armor hanging loosely off its thin form. It slams its axe into the stone and pulls itself up out of the ravine, glowing blue eyes fixating on the nearest knight. It pulls itself up and charges with its axe raised, taking four arrows to the head and chest without slowing before bursting into flames with a horrifying shriek. Behind the draug the familiar tall form of Monty stands, his hands glowing with yellowish-orange light. "Come on, quickly." Monty forms a ball of light in his hand, throwing it down into the ravine to the shrieks of the draugs below and waves his other hand with urgency, breaking into a sprint for one of the towers that had previously appeared to be made of solid stone in an earlier visit. He leads the excursion team along and over the river, the sounds of the emerging draugs echoing behind them until they reach the building. Monty shoves his shoulder into a large circular stone slab covered in runes at the entrance, encouraging others to help him push it. It takes the force of four of them to roll it over in time and they just barely make it, the stone slab dropping down slightly and sliding forward with a thin flash of light until it forms what looks like a solid wall between them and the draugs. A pack of frightened young kobolds are huddled in the back of the main tower room and a large table rests at its center, a single dwarf sitting at its head. Closer inspection reveals the dwarf to be entirely made of stone, a grim expression on her face, her eyes locked on the now solid former doorway and her hand clasped tight around something. Monty pulls off his hood and warily greets the knights before going to check on his siblings, looking them over for injuries and asking them questions with reassuring head pats or back rubs as he goes. A series of five doors cover one circular back wall of the cavern room and stacks of papers and books cover the table, covering dwarf history, dragons, draugs, curses, the long night, and various other events. Ser Medraut sets the volunteers to work on the documents and the kobolds to try and find some answers about what is going on. The knights and their leader climb up the tower to the upper levels, watching the draugs through the barely visible arrow slits, keeping an eye out for trouble, ready for another fight. Ser Medraut descends to give the team the good and the bad news not long after. They can't count how many draugs are out there, but the draugs don't seem to know where they are. The bad news? The river is starting to flood the city, and the ringing sound from everything the water hits is gradually growing louder. | |||||||||||||
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| 🜙 Escape From Einjar | |||||||||||||
| After the fifth of May the dragon's roars can no longer be heard outside the city. The water's levels have risen, covering the ground in four inches of red water. The draug's numbers have been considerably cut down, and the creatures themselves seem to mill about, sloshing through water and adding to the constant ringing echoing throughout the cavern. Their weapons drag in the water and the blue glow to their eyes has lessened. They appear to have grown sluggish, but their speed will return if they realize there are still living among them. With the dragon gone, at least one way out is available to the excursion team: Through the ice wall at the city's entrance. Once out of Einjar the team will discover the wreckage of two smoldering airships, covered in ashes and ice and shattered against the stones far below the cliff. The ship whose hold contained the creature from Preciposte remains intact, listing slightly where it is anchored to the cliff. The knights immediately go to check on the ship and grow concerned when there is no sign of the creature that was captured in the ship's hold. They begin to open up the side of the vessel to search for damage and fire blasts outward from the hold, catching several of the knights in its path. The basilisk emerges from the hold, its scales shimmering back into their normal coloration. Its tail slams into part of the team, trying to sweep them off the cliff, and it makes a horrible crowing hiss as it charges out of the ship. Free of the ship the feathers around its head extend out like a mane and shake threateningly. After that display it ignores the team, running straight for Einjar's entrance and launches an attack on the stone statues that stand guard outside the city. Any dragonets present when the basilisk crows will become temporarily paralysed by fear. | |||||||||||||
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2. The wolves are not the eyes the spirits spoke of, but they may have contributed to the destruction of the ruins.
3. 7 wolves of the pack appear. The dire wolves have larger heads and more powerful jaws than regular wolves. These dire wolves are around the size of a fully grown grizzly bear.
4. Monty does know about the runes, and says his parents had used a similar enchanted slab to hide their home. It's not an uncommon dwarf spell of concealment. It tells the stone to become one again with its mother stone, wherever it was carved from. It's used to hide passages or to block off bad mines so no one mistakenly goes down there and gets sick.
5. There is a lot of information available in the books within the tower, but most of them are written in dwarvish.
The draugs are referenced mostly in the fashion of folklore. They are the restless spirits of dead dwarves. In the book that talks about them there is a warning that proper burial methods for dwarves are pyre burials or another referred to as 'returning to the mountain' in which the dwarf's body is ceremonially encased in stone. The method that is used isn't mentioned, but it is mentioned to be a high honor done for the great members of dwarf history. Dwarves are always buried with their armor and most prized possessions, which makes the draugs a particular threat. They come back wielding those same weapons and protected by their armor. In the folklore draugs are said to be the angry spirits of forgotten dwarves improperly honored in death, though there is another book that claims that draugs are exclusively part of a long-lasting curse on the dwarves of Einjar. In the stories their weakness is light or fire magic.
The main curse talked about in the books on the table is "the" curse. An unnamed curse talked and theorized about in depth by the record keepers and guardians of Einjar, mentions and books about which date back farther than the existence of the three kingdoms. In these books the curse reportedly was put on the dwarves of Einjar by a creature called either "Dwarf's Bane" or "Mother of the Mountain". The translations for this are old and possibly inaccurate. The Mother of the Mountain cursed the dwarves for carving out Einjar's heart and harnessing her life's blood. In this book Einjar is used to refer to the mountain, rather than the city built within it. The curse was meant to be a 'forever' curse that would continue to plague dwarfkind in the mountain, keeping them from ever truly leaving and forcing them to suffer the perpetual greed that drove their ancestors to trap and harvest the mountain's heart.
The Long Night from the perspective of the old dwarf texts is a time when the Shadow Realm and the Living Realm touch, causing the barriers between realms to weaken and allowing the angry ancestors of the past to return and seek revenge. There are multiple records of the "Darkness" overtaking Einjar, and the many shadows flooding the mountain with their anger and pain. Einjar (the city this time) is referenced as being built on the bloodied stones of immeasurable suffering. There are rituals of light and purifying in another book that references the long night, that include a ritual for sending the mountain back to sleep. The page is wrinkled, stained, and thin, all signs of heavy usage.
6.She can turn the snow around Einjar into purifying mist, but she would need access to it from outside of Einjar. The water within Einjar is contaminated, but the water elemental from her flask is not, and can not be contaminated. The ringing can be drowned out or shut out. If either is done its effects will fade and eventually dissipate from those who do not hear it, or weakened for those who can only partially hear it. Singing against it would be advisable. If she sings with the ringing it may overtake her or use her music to boost its own effects.
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2. If Nike used her powers to summon the rain (without the help of her flask) over the contaminated water, will it have any effects or does she need to find the source of the pollution for a difference to be made?
3. And speaking about the pollution, is the source back at the pool she encountered last time or somewhere else entirely? Will she be able to ask any type of lingering spirit to help her find it if she pleads her case in wanting to help restore the balance of the area?
4. If Nike shows Monty the passage about the Long Night, would he know more about the ritual for sending the mountain back to sleep or about the "Mother of the Mountain" story? Or is the legend uncommon knowledge?
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2. She does not need to find a source, so long as her rain does not pull in water from the river to create itself.
3. The source appears to have taken over the river from the spring at the top of the city, where the small lake pours out into the river. The hidden cavern pool appears unchanged from their last visit, other than the statues pushed into it that have raised its level slightly. The spirits that were their before do not respond to her calls and she can feel animosity, anger, and a lack of clarity present anywhere she tries to communicate.
4. Monty is unfamiliar with anything in the books and doesn't seem to understand the stories or the ritual. This isn't his mountain and he feels lost inside the walls of Einjar, saying they are still almost as unfamiliar to him now as they were the first time, and that it feels wrong to be there.
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2. So if Nike uses water from someone with water magic, for example, then it'll work? SORRY to ask this question, but wanna double check before I go suggest this idea for Nike's top level.
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2. Correct
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