Log Fourteen
At the beginning of the Session, Jessica was moping around in one of Benedict's Shadows, and Benedict was AWOL, having gone off in a huff after William had been rather rude to him. William, Moradin (Coral and Rinaldo's son, brother of the late great Hazard) and Brion (son of Gerard) were looking for him. Moradin was plotting to kill William to pay for the death of his sister.
Quotes from the session.
"I remember hearing that the best way to do this sort of stuff is to piss him off so much he starts making mistakes." Moradin
"We are talking about the same Benedict here, right?" Brion. (I have removed the accent from Brion's words, for ease of translation, but he still cannot speak properly.)
"We're going to have to go see Brog. Moradin
"Brog?" Brion
"Half insect, half plant, half cheetah, half biocomputer, half sane." Moradin
"Moradin, Brion, we have a problem. I just set fire to a lot of people, by accident. William, as the Abyss Effect begins to kick in.
APOLOGY COUNT: Three. William to Moradin, again, and William to Benedict, over the matter of having been exceedingly rude and stupid after taking on Crowley. This brings William's total into double figures. Jessica also apologised to William, for trying to kill him. (And remember, she is his fiancee - so what does she do to the ones she doesn't like?)
William went back to Amber having found the assassin and cleared his name, and Jessica shot him, in strict accordance with Hazard's instructions. It seemed that Hazard had decided that if William survived the fire, he would only be getting back in one piece if he had not gone for Crowley, and this was her way of punishing him if he didn't. Jessica went on a guilt trip and William crawled back to his friends. With Moradin's help, the intrepid trio made their way out into the wild-lands of Shadow, and when they were well and truly lost, Moradin suggested they find Brog, who lived out here with his tribe. Brog, who was one of the Irregulars, is rather scarey, and Brion took to him instantly. Brog was discovered eating a tree, which he followed up with some copper coins that Moradin gave him. Brog was impressed with Brion too - no other human, even Hazard, had ever been able to produce the glottal stops that make up most of the Stoop language. Brog took them home and fed them on digestable food, and told them that while he had not seen Benedict since learning the news about Hazard, others of the Irregulars might know more - Ally-Ayr-Ra or Sehth-Ra, the sorceresses, were good at that sort of thing. (All this time, Moradin had a damned good idea where Benedict was anyhow).
They found the DragonLord contingent of the Brigade, drunk to a seven-foot tall pointy eared man, and persuaded the two who were nominally in charge that they wanted to follow. Ally and Marlon were easily convinced, once they found out the problem. Sehth-Ra, the greatest wizard, took a bit more to get her out of her coffin and on the trail.
Oddly, the trail led through the badlands once more - Moradin had delayed when the trail got clearer, so as to be by William for longer, and have a proper chance to kill him. They stopped by in Tombstone and picked up Doc Holliday, and one of the other Irregulars, Careus, also joined them, because he wanted to see if Benedict was merely a myth - that part of the Brigade had never seen action. The Doc and Legolas took an instant liking to each other, and Doc showed "Pointy" how to play poker. "Pointy" soon learned how to beat him fair and square.
The way into the Shadow where Benedict was hiding was blocked, but with the help of the DragonLords, they forced it open, despite Moradin's best efforts.
In the Shadow, the DragonLords went off together for a drink, and Moradin went away for a day and started a war. He had after all been trained by Bleys, so a day for three diplomatic incidents and an assassination was nothing. Of course, he failed to tell anybody that it was his fault.
That very evening, after ruining a pub or two because Moradin lost his head and started screaming, the companions, including Careus but not the Doc, were press-ganged, by a big man with a scar and a black beard and a dress-sense homed in on leather armour with studs. He had a couple of side-kicks, but nobody of importance. They were put onto a ship for a distant dangerous place, as Moradin had hoped, and Careus persuaded William that he didn't know how to play poker. Once William was skint, the ship had arrived at its destination, and the party left, glad to be free of sea-sickness for once (except Brion, who had even managed to finish off the ship's emergency supply of jerky and biscuits.)
They found themselves in an unknown land, but the sky was blueish and the girls were pretty. However, the sergeant who was waiting for the recruits was not, so they hit him and ran away. They found an inn, where the Doc joined them, having stowed away on the ship, and William and Brion went out and spent huge amounts of money setting up a network of spies to look for Benedict. Their contact with the head of the Organisation was a young boy, Jimi the Hand. He warned William not to be seen with that sort of money and disappeared. William was promptly mugged, and the theives wanted his rings as well as his money. As one of them was the ring Benedict had given William to assure his safe-conduct in exile, William was loathe to hand it over and got rather angry. When he started hitting people, their skin burned horribly, and their clothes caught fire.
He ran back to the inn, and after watching Moradin beat up on a couple of bar-fighters, told them the problem. Moradin had no ideas what to do, but did try to stab William. At the last moment he baulked, as William was still officially under Benedict's protsection, and Brion might kill him. The dagger ended up buried in a wooden beam, so far in that even Brion could not pull it out. William and Moradin agreed to part company, and Moradin left the Shadow and went and found Jessica instead. William and Brion went looking for the war, having decided that that was where Benedict was most likely to be found, and Moradin realised that Jessica was on a major guilt-trip over shooting William, seduced her, got her pregnant, and left. The timelines were just right for this, unfortunately for William, as he was still in Teraximion, looking for Benedict.
They found a war, they found the DragonLords, they got lost, and ended up with their own army, made up of a fraction of the Irregulars, in the middle of a vicious fight over land and honour. Right in the middle.
It was only when one of the armies that was going to wipe them out failed to pitch up on time that they realised that Benedict must have stopped it, so they went off that way. They had to leave Teraximion to find him, as he was coming down the the Greenfever, one of the nastiest results of the Curses Crowley has heaped on him from time to time. Brion had been dumped in the Shadow Teraximion, where he was teaching Jimi the Hand about sword-fighting. Of the time they spent there, some things are known - Bleys came out of the encounter with two fingers less than he had had to begin with, and some pretty odd scars on his neck, like he had been attacked by a left-handed man with a vice-like grip, who had tried to strangle him and damn near made it. Legolas, William's devoted shadow-servant, never spoke a word of what went on, and indeed pleaded, in his superlatively soft and polite voice, that he had been slightly concussed at the time, and could remember no details of what had happened.
With Benedict duly apologised to, if still seething, William and Legolas set out for Tir Na-nogth, to try and find out what they could do about "S", now believed, by William at least, to be Crowley. Benedict was still desperately ill, but knew that the situation warrented action, and was thus up and about, against doctor's orders.
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