Empour

Undiscovery

@SepticGentleman@UrbanEvolution

Flowing Tunnels

Piper opened her eyes.

Not that it did much good. She couldn’t see anything, anything at all. The only thing opening her eyes did for her was make them a little colder. She was still underwater.
When had she fallen asleep? She was surprised she hadn’t gotten any nightmares from the things that had assaulted her camp last... Hang on, was it last night? What time was it, anyway? Which way was up? She couldn’t tell. The darkness was absolute, and while she could feel herself turn and spin when she tried to, she had no perception of anything but the water around her. Where was she?

There was one way to find out. She touched her wand with her other hand, it was still in the holster, secure. Good thing everything she owned was protected from water damage. Aside from her pajamas. She didn’t expect to be out swimming in these...

A thought, and a spark of light appeared. The cold blue glow illuminated the water around her, but she couldn’t see anything beyond that. She put a little more power into it, and something became visible.

There was something moving off to her left. The light suddenly got brighter without her action, and it became clear that it was stone, flying past her at incredible velocity. Was there a stone monster in the deep sea she found herself in?

The light got brighter again. The stone’s surface expanded far above her, and it sloped in her general direction. Odd.

Brighter. She didn’t understand why the light was doing this, but at least she didn’t have to use her own magic for it. The stone wrapped above and below her, curving smoothly from the surface she saw first. Where was she?

Brighter. The stone curved more, and it became clear that it was not a strange indent in a stone monster that was swimming past her, and that she was in fact, in some sort of a pit, and she was sinking.
The waterfall pond! Of course, what else could it have been? She must have somehow put on a weight spell, and the pond was very deep. She didn’t bother trying to dispel the weight, she’d do that when she was out of the water and could remember just which spell she’d used. Being underwater was great and all, but it tended to cloud the mind a bit.

Instead, she cast a different spell, one meant to use the water around her to boost her through the water like a fish.
The moment it left her wand, though, something felt wrong. First off, a good deal of pressure suddenly started to build up around her. It didn’t hurt her, she had arcane countermeasures for that, but she could certainly feel it. It was rather like being hugged, only over the entire body at once.

The light got brighter again, and so did the pressure get stronger. It still didn’t hurt, but it was getting fairly uncomfortable.
Again. The light was blindingly bright at this point, and Piper had to shut her eyes tight to keep it from hurting.
Again. Something was very very wrong. She didn’t feel like she was going up at all, she instead felt like she was floating in once place. She couldn’t even check the walls to see if she was, the light was so bright. Trying to dispel it had no effect.
Again. The pressure was starting to overcome her deep sea warding, her legs were forced together and her arms stuck to her sides. In a panic, she tried to kick them apart. This had unforeseen consequences.
The pressure suddenly converted to flow, powerful, impossibly powerful flow, and she was ripped away in the current she had accidentally created. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t see, the light was ripped away from her and it flashed around her, spinning.

Crack

Piper’s spinning world was suddenly a wobbly spinning world, as a massive vibration went through the water. Another, another explosion, and the spinning ended, replaced by a pulling. She was moving, moving faster than a bird dives, faster than a horse runs. The light when white, and she felt air.

Air, all around her. She opened her eyes. Was that the sky? It was grey, cloudy, and looked like it was just begging to start raining. She turned her head. Oh, that’s where the ground was. Down there. Just where was she?

Then came the sickening ending of rising and the beginning of falling. She felt as though her stomach had just vacated through her skull, and she let out a terribly long, undignified scream. Then, she felt wet again, her scream cut off, and a moment later, she touched the ground. All at once. It was crunchy and sandy. The water flowing over her was nice and cool. Not enough, however, to keep her from vomiting all over it.

When she was done ruthlessly removing every trace of the vegetables she’d made, she turned on her back, and stared at the sky. It really should be raining now. She raised her arm laboriously. It felt like she’d been tossed through a tornado and spat out the top, all the while running a marathon on all fours while she couldn’t move her legs apart. Still, though, she couldn’t just leave a perfectly good cloud cover like that floating around doing nothing.

“Rain, please,” she croaked, waving her wand in some random, imprecise motions. That should do it. Piper smiled. Rain was nice. Water was nice. She didn’t stay conscious long enough to see the first drops.

Undiscovery

@SepticGentleman@UrbanEvolution

Incoming Pajama-Piper-Bearing Geyser, don't have the fiery-haired warrior lady or Godzilla go to sleep just yet.

Undiscovery

@SepticGentleman @UrbanEvolution

Mind if I have Piper drop in on top of Ben and Theresa? She probably won't stay long, but I'd like to have some interaction with characters that aren't mine.

Undiscovery

Just a question, would anyone want to come across my characters? Not really sure what to do with them and, until I read through the massive 73 posts in the IC, I don't know where anyone is.

@Simple Unicycle

Give the character posts a read first. I feel like these two would fit right at home over in Rockvale, described here: http://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/3222030
There's a few characters there now, they just got done with a massive bar-fight.

Undiscovery

Thunderstorm Tent

“Wake up,”

Piper’s eyes slid open. The side of the tent she was looking at was somewhat blurry. Why was she awake? She liked sleep so much more...

“Huh? What’s going on?” she said, groggy and a little bit too loud.

“Two more signatures. They’re both much, much smaller, but they’re hostile. Angry. Outraged,” Chumi said, in a worried whisper. Any trace of sleepiness instantly vanished from Piper’s head.

“What are they? Where are they?” she whispered back. Angry monsters? She couldn’t think of anything they’d done to anger anything. Were they trespassing? Was the clearing they were in already occupied?

“Can’t quite tell where they are. They’re either floating above the ground or really tall, and they’re moving towards us,” he answered. Flying angry monsters? Were they dragons or something?

“How close are they?” she asked. She wanted time to change out of her pajamas if she was going to be fighting dragons.

“Too close. I say we have a minute before they’re upon us,” Chumi said. Darnit. No time to change, then. She immediately got out of the pile of blankets she was rolled up in, and grabbed her hat. Her wand, as always, was strapped to her right arm to prevent it from being stolen. She slid it into position in her hand. Beside her, Chumi was doing similar. There was no point in remaining as though they were ignorant to these intruder’s presences if they were already so hostile to begin with. That thought brought something else to her mind.

“Hang on, what about the big bored monster?” She asked.

“It’s still there. It’s not as bored now, though. Come on, let’s go meet these angry flying monsters,” Chumi said, and stepped out of the tent. Piper followed.

The night outside was deafeningly dark. What little moonlight made it through the overcast sky was barely enough to give off the rough shape of the trees. The water, however, was bright and reflective- Almost inviting.

“Behind you!” Chumi hissed at her. She whirled around. Before them, barely visible in the dim light, were two figures. They were vaguely shaped as men, but there was something wrong about them. Maybe it was that they stretched far over a human’s height, or maybe it was the horrific, terribly incorrect shape of their heads. Beyond that, she couldn’t make out anything- Except for the way that they were slowly, steadily strutting towards them. Her eyes were drawn upwards, and looked rapidly between the heads of the two of them. Somehow, despite the utter inhibition of her perception, she could feel, no, she could taste utter hatred and malevolence, a desire to corrupt, to condemn, emanating from the invisible hellholes that surely existed upon the tall monster’s faces.

Piper didn’t even realize she was backing up until she suddenly noticed that her behind was very wet and cold- She had tripped and nearly fallen into the pool. The waterfall’s deafening roar served only to drive her terror to greater strength- It was as though the monsters, the not-men were screaming out at her, as though they were exclaiming their desire to hurt, to maim, to perform such vile acts of cruelty that they could have no name.

Chumi stood before her, wand raised in a desperate act of defiance. He screamed at her, at the monsters, but she couldn’t hear him. She could hear only the horrific roar of the waterfall, the sound that came from every direction at once. He shot bolts of light, of lightning, of gorgeous white fire, but nothing struck the not-men. They faded and fizzled long before then. The tall, strutting monsters were invincible- Even the light of the magic failed to illuminate them. They remained dark, shadowed creatures of impossible horror, of a type that no demon could compare.

The monsters soon stood mere feet from Chumi, as he held a glowing, blue orb within his hand, and before they could strike him, crushed it with his bare fist. He vanished in a flash of azure light, all that remained of him was the shards of the broken orb.

The creatures paused for a moment, and began strutting once more, directly towards her. They moved faster this time, as though they wanted to prevent their new favorite torture subject from escaping as the other had.

Piper’s body couldn’t move. She couldn’t lift her wand, couldn’t reach for her sword. She could only move back, in a terrified, scrambled way. It was enough, however, to send her slipping into the waterfall’s pond. She broke the surface, and the terrible noise of the waterfall’s distorted roar suddenly became softer, calmer. She still wasn’t safe. She desperately tried to swim downwards.

As she sank deeper into the waterfall pit’s darkness, the horrible forms of the monsters loomed over the surface, distorted and wavy. They watched her as she sank deeper, deeper, far deeper than she had gone in her previous little swimming session. Eventually, they grew darker, darker, until she could no longer see the surface, no longer see even the bubbles of the waterfall’s upside-down fire.

Safe. She was safe here, she was in her element, and the monsters couldn’t follow her here. She laid there for a long time, slowly trying to calm herself down. She was blind, but she was safe.

She didn’t notice the slow, steady pull of the current, which lead only downwards.

Undiscovery

I feel so bad for the poor tavern's owner. You people sure do love your collateral damage, don't you? Speaking of, how come the place isn't on fire from when Ben breathed a fire jew all over the place?

Undiscovery

Waterfall Clearing
Following the cliff face had been a good move. As they continued alongside it, the trees slowly grew thinner, the gravel less gravelly, and the cloudy sky could occasionally be seen overhead. Eventually, the team reached another source of water, this time a great, roaring waterfall, which fell into a large pond. The pond didn’t drain anywhere, which was a little weird.

More importantly, around the pond was a good deal of space clear of trees, brambles, or any other such nasty things. In fact, the raw dirt, after spending so long with the strange green gravel, actually looked a little bit unnatural. The sun, so far as they could tell by the darkening sky, was setting. It was time to set up camp.

Piper, of course, had no interest in actually helping with that. Chumi had all the camping supplies, anyway, and there was a great, wonderful, beautiful waterfall pool right in front of her! She had barely taken her boots off, before she leapt into the clear waters. Her hat nearly fell off, but it quickly grabbed her jaw before it could.

Beneath the surface of the water, the water was... Deep. Really deep. So deep that despite being right next to the shore, she couldn’t actually see the bottom. Small, oddly shaped fish swam past her without a care in the world, as though young witches popping into the water and creating a great cloud of hair behind them were a perfectly normal occurrence. One of the fish, some sort of weird carp with a mane of silly bubbly tentacles gracefully floating behind its fins, swam in front of her, inspected her, and swam downwards.

Piper, curious as to just what was at the bottom started to follow, but stopped when she realized she didn’t remember to bring anything to provide light. Instead, she contented herself with watching all the exotic, unnamed fish that swam around, doing their own business. The waterfall, when viewed from underwater, was really very pretty. It was as though there was a constant stream of bubbles, which, when viewed upside-down, looked like a sort of magical, underwater fire on the surface.

She closed her eyes, and smiled. It really was wonderful, being underwater, when you didn’t have to worry about coming up for breath. She did, however, still have to come up to eat. She opened her eyes, and swam back to the surface. That silly carp was back again, watching her with almost sad eyes as she left. She blew it a little kiss, as though to say that she’d be back later.

One quick drying spell later, and she was warm, and facing a moderately annoyed Chumi. He didn’t say anything, but she could tell he didn’t appreciate the way she left him to do all the setting-up of camp. She’d change his mind, though. She pulled her hat off and reached within, pulling out all of the ingredients and cookware necessary to make a small meal of fried vegetables.

Thunderstorm Tent

“Hey, Piper, do you remember any warding spells or anything?”
“No, you know I’m awful at those. Why?”
“There’s something... Odd, intensely magical and disturbingly bored, in the forest nearby. I think it’s watching us, and I don’t know what it is,”
“Something’s watching us? Since when? Where is it?”
“I’m not sure. I started to sense something odd nearby while we were following the cliff after we ran into that really big, ugly tree. Don’t look, but I think it’s in the forest on the far side of the clearing,”
“Don’t look? Why? I want to know what’s creeping on me, if something’s creeping on me!”
“I can’t detect any sort of malevolence from it, so it’s not hunting us, and it’s concealing itself very well. I don’t want to startle it, it might attack if we do,”
“How strong is it?”
“Strong enough that if it were a person with that glow, I’d be making getaway plans,”
“Geez. It’s not a person, though, is it?”
“No, definitely not a person. I can’t even comprehend that thing’s emotions, aside from an overwhelmingly intense boredom. It might not use its magic for anything but good, like a unicorn or something,”
“Maybe it’s a magical cat or something,”
“Not a cat, either. It doesn’t want to ask us any riddles,”
“I wonder what it is, then,”
“Me too,”
“You have a getaway orb ready, right?”
“You bet I do. This one’s configured for the orb pile we left behind, I made it there,”
“I hope I don’t have to leave my skillet behind. I left it outside to cool off,”
“Me too, those vegetables were good,”
“I’m gonna try to sleep now, let me know if the bored monster is gonna cut our heads off or anything,”
“Goodnight, Piper,”

Undiscovery

Sorry about the length there, got a little carried away. I'll definitely tone down how long my posts are, once I come into contact with some characters not-controlled-by-me, be they NPCs or whatever.

Undiscovery

Jaded Woods: Creekside Path

The creek was long, curved, and flat. The forest, once they’d reached the point where the trees didn’t let any sunlight at all through, didn’t change much. The only visible source of sunlight, at the moment, came from the center of the creek, which was for the most part unshrouded by the trees. The terrain, however, did start to change slightly. It was gradual, but the ground slowly started to slope upwards. The creek, too, grew faster and the occasional rapids could be seen.
The green sand, which continued to blanket the ground, became coarser and more gravel-like as they continued.

Eventually, after a few hours of bickering as to what they’d do when they reached the creek’s end, Chumi was treated to the hilarious sight of Piper walking directly into a green wall that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. She let out a squawk of surprise as she fell back into the creek, and shot a burst of water in the general direction of the wall.

“You ok, Pip?” He said, once he stopped laughing enough to get the words out.

“Yeah, I’m, um, fine,” she said, face red, looking at the thing she’d run into. The wall, it seemed, stretched far above the trees. Piper, already in the water, waded to the center of the creek. The creek’s head seemed to be here, and the water was flowing out of a very small crack in the green expanse. The wall itself was mostly smooth, and looked to be made of the same green stone the gravel that covered the floor was made from. The spot where her blast of magic had hit was gouged, far deeper than it would have been if it had hit any sort of stone she could think of. There was still water dripping from it, carrying a sort of sandy sludge with it.

“Chumi, what do you think this thing is?” she asked, touching the wall with her hand. It was grainy and rough, almost as though it was made from the sand, rather than the sand being made from it.

“Some sort of cliff? Can’t say I can think of any cliffs this smooth, though...”
“Maybe a wall of some sort?”
“Let’s follow it and find out!”

Chumi reached into his bag, and pulled out a lantern. A quick spark, and warm red light shone from it, lighting the deep, dark forest.
The creek abandoned, they followed the sandstone cliffs edge. The map, bound to her own perception, simply marked the structure as the forest’s edge, calling it Jaded Wall. The cliff was as unnaturally straight as it was smooth.

Barrier Cliffs

An hour of following it through the forest later, and they encountered what looked like the walls’ natural counterpart. A tall cliff, whose very presence caused for there to be no neighboring trees to obscure the sunlight. So tall, in fact, that they couldn’t actually see the top of it. What they could see, however, was something shiny, blue, and slightly sparkly. Piper’s heart started to race in excitement at the sight- That couldn’t be what she thought it was, could it? It was hard to tell, the sun was hiding behind the cliff itself.

“Chumi, are those gems up there...”
“I think they are. Can you cut me a spot for the ladder?”
A few measurements later, and she gouged out a hole near where the glimmering rocks were. Chumi threw up a rope, tipped with a strong hook, with many little rungs to the sides. When it landed within the hole she cut and found purchase, he gave it a few tugs, and offered her the rope. Piper began climbing.

Just as she thought! The glimmering gemstones in the deep green sandstone were none other than perfect, raw, un-used orbs! Deposits of them were very rare, and highly sought after. Just the amount she could see from here would leave them rich and wealthy beyond anything they’d ever had before.

“They’re orbs! I’m gonna cut some out! Be ready to catch them!” She called out to Chumi, who fiddled with his bag for a moment, then pulled out a large net. While Orbs couldn’t be broken until they were enchanted and then exhausted, it wouldn’t do for them to fly all over the place.
The net was spread out on the ground, so Piper pulled out her wand once more, and started blasting the gems out of the sandstone. It was really fortunate that the stone was so weak.

Before long, there was a massive hole in the side of the cliff, and still hundreds of clusters of the little fist-sized gems. She’d really hit the motherlode! Her arms were getting tired from holding on to the rope ladder, though, so it was about time to climb down.

The net below was absolutely stuffed with orbs- They’d never be able to take this many with them, even with magic on their side. Even then, you could only compress orbs within other orbs so many times before the spells started to become unstable. A rush of water later, and the sandy slush that had come down with the orbs was cleaned away. Chumi got to work magically compressing some of the loot, and Piper sat down, watching him work. Chumi really was quite the masterful enchanter, with a few tricks, he could compress a whole second layer before compression instability started to become an issue. As it was, despite his prowess, they could only take sixteen of them, not including the orbs used to store the others.

They both looked at the compression orb once he was done, watching the tiny ones below its translucent surface spin.

“Even if we just took this one home, we could afford to live comfortably for the rest of our lives,” Chumi said.

“Yeah, but...” Piper frowned.

“We’d never be hungry or anything, we could even open our own business,” Chumi reasoned.

“We won’t go down in history that way,” Piper said, with a sort of finality to it that didn’t actually close the topic.

“Right, we’d have to really take home a lot of these if we were to make history,” Chumi agreed.

“How would we, though? There’s no way we can carry that many, you know the rules about carrying around more than one top-level compressed orb,” She said.

“I mean, if we got a cart, maybe...” Chumi proposed.

“What would pull it? This forest’s far too thick for a centaur to make its way through, even if we’d brought one,” Piper shook her head.

“We could pull it ourselves,” Chumi said, obviously joking. Obviously. Piper ignored it just in case.

“You know,” Piper said, thoughtfully, “they did do that thing over in Palimalou, where they found some strong, stupid Paliise, and got them to handle the agriculture. Saved them a lot of money, not having to ship workers over,”

“What are you proposing?” Chumi asked.

“I’m saying, if we were to find some... Whatever savages live around here, mystify them into thinking we’re gods or something, we could have an entire mining operation handling all these orbs for us, and we wouldn’t even need to do anything,” Piper said, somewhat pleased with herself for thinking of it.

“I mean, there’s no guarantee that they’d fall for it, though,” Chumi said.

“Well, yeah, but we can just have anyone smart enough to figure that out either elevated to a management position or executed as an example,” Piper said.

“Right, good idea. I think they did something similar in the Pali Pals Tomato Company, and they were very successful,” Chumi reinforced.

“Okay! That’s that settles it, then. We’ll leave the net here, give me a moment,” Piper pulled out the map, and touched the spot they were on, the only place not called Jade Something, with her wand. A little blue dot appeared there, marked Orb Mining Facility.

“We just need to find ourselves some savages, and we’ll be good to go,” Piper said. She also went over and released the grappling ladder from the cliff face, and handed it to Chumi. Chumi stored it, and the compressed orb as well. They looked around, trying not to forget anything, and decided there wasn’t anything they needed. They looked at the now-soaked cliff face, and followed it once more.

Undiscovery

Please be merciful in where the horrible tentacle monster touches Piper, I really don't want to have to deal with writing the horror and agony she'd be in if it were to go on her face or similar.
@SepticGentleman

Also, hi Urban, good to be back.