Penny

Gold & Glory: AU thread

Emmaline laid her head against the gunnel of the boat trembling faintly in the aftershocks of her seasickness. She was about as wrung out as she had ever been. The spells she had been working were not complex. Sea serpents were on average about as intelligence as the Altdorf street patrol which ranked them a little above dogs and a little below pigs. Even so, maintaining the illusions had been very draining. She was also trying very hard not to imagine the Hammer being swarmed by the cruel dark elves, its crew being dragged into the bowels of the Black Ark to suffer slavery and worse. More than once she had heard experienced crewman state that it would be better to touch off the powder magazine than submit to the Druckles as they slang termed them.

The land was approaching quickly, the wavelets beginning to toss the boat as the waters shoaled. Emmaline hauled herself up and started to wretch into the gray water. Markus let go of the oars and stood up, grabbing her by the arm and hauling her to her feet.

“No time for that,” Markus snapped, propelling her towards the front of the boat with a shove.

“It’s too rocky to properly land, we will probably…”

There was a sudden crunch and the boat pitched violently as submerged rocks stove in the front timbers. Emmaline squawked in alarm as she pitched violently over the bow and into the frothing waters. She gasped as she hit the surf. It wasn’t the icy kiss of death she expected, but it was cold enough to knock the breath from her. For a miracle she missed the large rocks just beneath the surface. Her natural buoyancy lifted her up and she sucked in a mouthful of salty air. A wave knocked her into a slimy rock and she stroked inexpertly towards the rocky strand. With the drive of the surf and a little luck she managed to wash up on the graveled beach, gasping and shivering.

“Markus!” she called as she forced herself up on her elbows. She needn’t have sounded so worried. The captain was was cutting through the water like a fish, dragging what few supplies he had managed to salvage from the boat, the wreckage of which was currently being dashed to splinters on the rocks.

“Ranald’s balls,” she moaned and flopped back onto her back, staring up at the gray and threatening sky.

Fortune & Glory: Grimdark Pulp RP

Jocasta grinned at Beren and then reached out and squeezed Beren’s muscled bicep in an approving manner. A few of the various acolytes gave them some strange looks, but no one commented. Rough and ready adventurers clearly weren’t so unusual as to arouse comments.

“So any idea where you want to start?” Beren asked as they walked down one of the cluttered aisles. Shelves on both sides groaned under the weight of ancient books and Jocasta had a momentary image of being buried in a vellum avalanche

“I don’t suppose they have an ‘ancient dwarf fortress’ section,” Jocasta mused. They rounded a corner into a large antechamber in which literal pillars of books reached towards the sky. A few scholars seemed to be making an effort to do a rough sort of the contents. Jocasta suspected that she would be long dead before the project made any useful progress. As they watched, one of the teetering stacks began to lean. Jocasta opened her mouth to shout a warning, but froze, figuring there was nothing she could add that would do anything other than sow further confusion. With glacial slowness the books tilted sideways and then collapsed into two other stacks. Dust and must exploded upwards in all directions as they collapsed into ruins. There was a wind rush of a thousand rustling pages that was almost deafening. As the dust settled Jocasta saw that one of the scholars had been buried to the waist and was cursing fluently in several languages.

“I’m going to tentatively say… no,” Beren observed when the dust had begun to settle and Jocasta’s comical wince began to relax.

“Fortunately… I’ve done this kind of thing before,” Jocasta said. Reaching into a pouch she rummaged around for several long moments and then came out with a pair of large glasses with lenses of bright green glass and polished rims of brass that had been painstakingly inlay with sigils. One of the lenses was crazed and broken, crushed at some point during their adventures. She tutted in irritation and then snapped the glasses at the bridge of the nose. She slipped the surviving lens over her left eye and turned to Beren.

“Woah,” he said in shock. Jocasta’s left eye appeared huge in the lens, almost insectile, her black pupil darted left and right.

“Sorry, I forget what these things look like,” she apologized. Beren opened his mouth but closed it again without speaking.

“If you were about to ask what they do, other than make me look like a bug, they let me tell the age of documents. I figure whatever documents your friends need are likely to be among the oldest,” She explained. There was no real guarantee that was true. Someone might have stumbled on it a year ago and scribbled the information on the back of a recipe book, but the balance of probabilities was in her favor.

“I hope you're ready to hold some ladders!”

__________

“Well I’ll be damned,” Beren marveled. They were seated at a stone table surrounded by dozens of moldering tomes. The remnants of a large meat pie, procured from a local chop house after several house of searching the library, sat on one corner as did a couple of stone crocks of cider.
“Looks dwarfish right?” Jocasta said as she lifted a book she had found wedged under a table.

“Dwarven, but yes,” Beren replied. The object in question was a family crest on the inside of a rather boring genealogy that detailed the small deeds of minor aristocrats. The heraldry was very mundane, a quartered shield in blue and white with a lion rampant in one corner and an odd symbol in the inverse.

“It looks like someone copied a dwarven rune, badly, it could be a couple of different things,” Beren said. Jocasta dug through her pile of books and found another work, this one on the noble families of the area some five hundred years ago. She leafed furiously through it until she arrived at the same blue and white crest. The rune was visible on this one too, though subtly different in shape.

“I’d say that is…part of a warding,” Beren said slowly, turning the book upside down to reorient the rune.

“The sort of thing one might find outside a dwarven city?” Jocasta asked.

“Maybe, but other places too,” he conceded. Jocasta read the archaic language. The text made no mention of how the device had come to be. A history of local heraldry might help but there was no guarantee such a thing existed in the library.

“I’m willing to bet you that this family, the.. Morloke’s, found this somewhere on their land and incorporated it into their coat of arms,” Jocasta postulated.

“According to the records they still hold their estate. Or did fifty years ago anyway. The story of how they found it might be in family folklore.”

Fortune & Glory: Grimdark Pulp RP

Jocasta felt momentarily crestfallen when Beren described them as ‘just traveling companions’. Fortunately she was standing behind Beren when he said it and his attention was focused solely on the dwarves. Well it wasn’t that big a deal, she had known him for less than a week after all. The demonic tattoo on her midriff seemed to throb slightly in mockery that Jocasta did not appreciate. Before she had too much time to dwell on it the conversation turned in an unexpected direction.

“There is a library here?” she interjected suddenly. The dwarves stared at her in surprise, apparently deeply sunk in their quest to locate this lost hold of theirs. Jocasta juggled the references to dwarves in her mind, quickly setting the date of any major dwarven presence to several hundred years ago.

“Well aye,” the leader of the dwarves agreed, “maybe not what you would call a library. A hundred and some odd years ago there was a would be despot who conquered Iskura and the surrounding area. Man named Cumberbean if you can believe it. Anyway he was from the south and had some odd ideas. Fancied himself an intellectual. He forced all the noble families and all the temples to give up their books. Piled them all up in what today they call ‘The Library’ though we gather it was a temple to some old god before that.” The dwarf made a gesture with his chin, indicating a large stone building that loomed up on the hill that formed the center of the town.

“Most of its trash, some of it we can’t read, but three ages of men must have seen something,” he sniffed in a tone that clearly despaired of humans ever amounting to anything. Jocasta neglected to point out that a race that had gone through an ‘Age of Reckoning’ probably shouldn’t be throwing any expertly shaped stones.

“Well it sounds like we might be able to help you, I know a thing or two about libraries,” Jocasta told the dwarves. Dubious would have been a charitable description of the looks they shot her.

“Hey what are these?” Jocasta asked, suddenly distracted by a pile of paper wrapped tubes in the corner of the smithy. She picked up a lantern and leaned closer to take a look.

“NOO!” the shout was general. Every dwarf jumped at her at once. One caught her across the chest and knocked her sprawling, spilling the lantern from her hand. She crashed into a pile of neatly stacked firewood, sending timber in all directions. The lantern tumbled towards the ground in slow motion. Beren kicked out at the last second, getting a toe under the lantern and kicking it upwards, catching it neatly. Jocasta sat up among the firewood she had been driven into by the crash tackling dwarves.

“Fireworks,” the head dwarf said with a scowl, brushing splinters of timber from her coat. “For the founders day celebration tomorrow.”

Penny's Pencils

Penny's Pencils

Penny's Pencils

In The Guard Now (Warhammer 40K)

That explains the :

3) Itches.

@BangoSkank

In The Guard Now (Warhammer 40K)

Maybe you're doing rails with some hookers.

I've a wee twist or two in mind.

@BangoSkank

Given warhammer slang, this could imply small mutant hookers.

Fortune & Glory: Grimdark Pulp RP

Jocasta shifted uncomfortably as a half dozen dwarves bustled out of the shopfront. Most were stripped to the waist wearing leather breeches and barring the many slight discolorations that came with a life of minor burns in a smithy. Though one of them wore a short jerkin of polished leather. All of them were armed though it seemed habitual rather than in response to being called out front. Several of them had quite impressive tattoos in striking geometric designs though whether this was art or script Jocasta didn’t know. There were very few extant examples of dwarf writing, mostly from inscriptions on old monuments and while certain mages certainly possessed some knowledge of the language they kept it to themselves.



A traveler stepped in through the door and froze when he found himself confronted by a crowd of obviously excited, if not necessarily hostile, dwarves. He held up both palms and stepped out of the store and hurried off.



“They aren’t going to try to kill us are they?” Jocasta asked, “I’m just saying that would make five different species that have tried to kill me today.” Beren looked back over his shoulder.



“Five?” he asked in surprise.



“Humans, troll, giant spider, dark elf, demon…” she trailed off.



“You’re right, dwarves would make six,” she corrected apologetically.

The Enemy Beyond: Warhammer 40,000 Inquisitor RP

We didn't need any sophisticated method to find our way to where Bahometus and the coven were at work. There was a wailing psychic wrongness in the air that screamed their location. Even the troopers, bereft of any mental gifts, could feel it, the hair on their necks prickling and standing on end. We passed more bodies as we advanced deeper into the xenos lair. Many were the metal men we had seen, their chrome bodies hacked and mutilated almost beyond recognition. The bodies of our own men were worse. We found them in ones and twos, their entrails ripped from their chests and strung around the walls like bunting, blood spattered everywhere. I was trying very hard to come up with a suggestion that we ought to pull back and let the navy sterilize the site from orbit, but I couldn’t find a way to do so that wouldn't make it sound like I thought running away was the right choice. Abruptly, the corridor opened into a vast plaza. The place must have been a mile square, completely composed of black stone veined with the unwholesome xenos green. A large pyramid stood in the center, surmounted by a spinning point of sickly purple light. The pyramid had protrusions like skeletal arms that emitted an arcing greenish discharge around the light, as though containing or conjuring it. There were a dozen or more smaller pyramids surrounding the first, their points glowed green, and periodically bolts of green lightning snapped between the smaller and the larger structure. The air was ionized beyond belief, though not quite enough to block out the filthy stink of the warp that permeated the place. Great obelisks of silvery metal erupted from the ground around the central pyramids, rising nearly to the ceiling before sinking away again to no rhythm I could determine. Xenos glyphs glowed on their surfaces in green. Some remained up for minutes, others only a few seconds, before sinking into the floor leaving no sign they had ever been there. I felt stark terror at the sight. Who knew what this place had been designed for. We were like ants who were toying with the controls to a battle tighten in hopes it might flatten a few other ants.



“We have to reach the central pyramid,” Hadrian declared, as though that were simply a matter of marching over there.



“Commander,” Lucius said in a voice that was probably conversational for him but registered as a shout to the rest of us. We followed his out stretched bronze finger and saw dark red figures running towards us. There was no mistaking them as human. Each had six spindly arms tipped with razor sharp talons, the top two arms held swords that looked to be made of black and red stone that thrummed with malevolent energy. Their faces were beyond horrible, vaguely equine and eyeless save for where brass studs marked with hideous eye searing glyphs had been hammered.



“Throne preserve us,” one of the guardsmen muttered. I tried to share the sentiment but felt a welling of despair as I remembered Lucius’ mental images of the Emperor as a man, a great general to be sure, but just a man. There were a dozen of them, yipping and calling in what might have been language but what I preferred to think of as simple animal noises. Suddenly an obelisk erupted beneath the feet of the demon pack, throwing the bulk of them two hundred feet into the air. Daemonic they might have been, but they cracked like eggs when they hit the ground, oozing an oldly luminescent smoke. A pair that had been by the edge of the pack had merely been knocked off their feet. They scuttled forward like spiders, regaining their footing as they came.



“For the Emperor!” Hadrian shouted and the troopers opened fire. Laz bolts ripped through the air, their energy leaving lingering purple tracks in the ionized air. The lead daemon shuddered like a man hunching against the snow, las bolts blasting smoldering craters in its carapace. The second one, seemed to race past the first, like a drafting swan. It leaped into the air thirty feet from us both blades and four sets of talons raised to strike. I knew I was going to die. It was a certainty. If not from these two daemons then from the other packs I could already see heading towards us on sparking claws. An icy feeling settled into my stomach. Without really thinking about it, I lifted the force staff and pointed it at the leaping horror. My will exploded through the psycho-conductive alloy. This was no unfocused panicked strike like the one I had employed while escaping the ball. It was a hard lance of pure will, just like Hadrian had taught me. It caught the Daemon in mid air. The thing might have been inhumanly fast, it might have been impossibly strong, but so long as it wasn’t touching the ground, it was simply an object in motion. The blast caught it in the thorax and hammered it back like a juvie hitting a hive ball. It shrieked in rage for a brief moment before it hit the obelisk which had so fortuitously dispatched its companion. It wasn’t a clean strike, it hit the trapezoidal edge of the structure and flew off at an angle, its back shattered and trailing glowing warp smoke. Its companion continued to stagger forward, but the death of one of the things seemed to have lifted the fog of panic from our troopers. The panicked fire became accurate and placed, the whole front of the daemon glowed like metal that had been overheated. The thunder warrior stepped into the hail of las fire as though it wasn’t their and drove a great fist into the things glowing chest. It burst apart in a spray of ichor.



“Forward!” Hadrian screamed and strode towards the pyramid weapons raised.