Session 18: Cost of Living (part three of three)

Game Date: 11/18/07 (later that evening)
In Game Dates: Novander 31st, late – Disander 5th, late

“So,” says Quirky, a brittle smile on his lips, “who wants to get drunk?”
Rowan heads upstairs to check on Badger as the rest of the party orders drinks. Quirky gets up and says he wants to go talk to Morwen. Nialia and Grumble get their drink on while Rowan comforts Badger upstairs. Eventually Rowan convinces Badger to come downstairs and join the rest of the group. Soon after that, Quirky returns, his face unreadable. After drinking several rounds with the group, Rowan excuses herself and heads out towards Potter’s residence.
As Grumble is getting well into his cups, a dwarf behind him nods and lifts his own mug in Grumble’s direction. Grumble is stunned by this; as an outcast, a normal dwarf should shun him like a festering mound of rotting garbage. After giving a cautious greeting, Grumble regards the dwarf. Craggy-featured, the old dwarf’s hair, mustache and beard are snow-white; his armor is ornate and gray as a cliff face at dusk. Nialia feels uneasy, this dwarf smells at once like and unlike a dwarf. The smell has a crisp tang to it, like ice on the rocks at dawn.
Regardless of social convention, the stranger challenges Grumble to a drinking match. As the dwarves begin to drink copious amounts of alcohol, the stranger asks Grumble about himself. “What is a dwarf who cannot hold his dwarven ale?” asks the stranger. “What is a dwarf without a clan?” Grumble responds that his friends, who’ve proven loyal and steadfast in combat, are his new clan; he finds his happiness in them. The stranger grunts and they continue to drink, switching from dwarven ale to Old HelmCleaver’s Fire Brandy. As they start downing the hard stuff, Grumble feels himself losing the drinking contest. The stranger tells (in short form) the tale of the first dwarven spirits, and how a clan of dwarves were killed while they were drunk on this new liquid.
Suddenly the stranger demands Grumble demonstrate his prowess with dwarven weapons. Quirky and Nialia are wary, but don’t interfere. Quirky’s half-mumbled comment “Strange. I can’t get a read on him.” goes unheard in the surrounding din of Morwen’s common room. Nialia follows Grumble and the stranger outside while Quirky stays within with an inebriated and still very upset Badger. The stranger daubs a spot of paint on a hitching post outside Morwen’s and draws a line on the cobbles some twenty feet away. Barely even glancing at the post, the stranger buries a throwing axe into the center of the target. Grumble tries several times, but manages only to hit the target once in his drunken state. Suddenly the small crowd around the two gasps; the stranger is now holding Grumble’s axe against Grumble’s throat. The street darkens as the stranger rumbles like a calving glacier, “Is this how you protect the ones in your care? Is this how you defend the only remaining things in this world you claim bring you happiness?” As the street grows darker, Grumble’s darkvision kicks in, showing that wisps of smoke, like fog off the mountains, are drifting off the stranger into the night air. There is a clap like muffled thunder, and everything goes black for a second. When the darkness lifts, Grumble stands alone, his axe once more secured in it’s normal place. As the stunned onlookers mutter to themselves and drift back indoors to their drinks, Grumble falls to the ground and begins vomiting as only a drunken dwarf can do. Nialia and Orderik (who’d come out to make sure there was no trouble) carry grumble upstairs and dump him face-down on his bed, his head over the side with a basin underneath. The rest of Grumble’s night can be imagined as the aftermath of the worst bender ever.
Alone in the bar now, Quirky stares at Badger, his eyes full of a weary sadness. “Come on,” he says to Badger. “We’re going to go see Morwen.”
They go out across the courtyard to Morwen’s house. Morwen greets them and ushers them inside.
“I thought since it was Rascal who told you about how your parents had relocated, you might want to make sure they’re actually all right,” explains Quirky. “I took the liberty of asking Morwen if she would be willing to perform a scrying spell to have you look and see what your family’s up to.” Morwen greets the two gnomes with a smile, and ushers Badger into her lab, where she sits the gnome in front of a large mirror. While Morwen casts the spell, Badger focuses her mind on her favorite brother. To her relief, she does indeed see her family: her parents and three brothers cleaning up after their own evening meal. She recognizes the home they’re in: it’s their house in the Addun-home! Against all odds, Rascal had told the truth, in this matter, at least. Badger watches her family settle down in the sitting room and watches her father smoke his pipe while fiddling with a piece of something or other. Her mother knits while her three brothers play a board game. Her mother looks up at the mantle, where a picture of a younger Badger stands with lit candles on wither side. Her mother’s sigh brings a tear to the eyes of both Badger and Morwen. But all too soon, the spell ends, and the vision ends.
The two women return to the kitchen, where Quirky sits, waiting. Badger hugs him tight, thanking him in a broken voice. Quirky hesitantly hugs her back, and Morwen shoots Quirky an exasperated look.
The two gnomes return to the inn, standing at the bottom of the stairwell leading up to the sleeping rooms. Badger asks again about Quirky’s past. He tells her that he wasn’t always a priest, and wasn’t always a good person. Quirky would rather Badger just know him as the person he is now. “Someday,” says Badger as she starts up the stairs, “I hope you’ll trust me enough to tell me about it.”
“And I hope that someday never comes,” replies Quirky. He turns to find Nialia nonchalantly drinking the last of her wine, gazing coolly at him. With a heavy sigh, Quirky heads off to bed as well.
Nialia heads outside the city walls and shifts into wolf form as soon as she’s out of eyeshot. Her Lythari senses pinpoint the location of the nearest pack of wolves, and she runs to join them, glad to be trading the complexities of civilization and emotions for the simple, primal directives felt by the wolves around her.

The following morning finds the group slowly assembling in Morwen’s common room over breakfast. Quirky and Badger go to wake Grumble. Quirky gives Grumble a restorative, which Grumble almost manages to keep down.
Badger has written a letter to her family (her brother, to be specific), and asks Nialia if the elf will accompany her to the elven part of town to talk to someone who can send the message. Rowan agrees, and the elf at the Silverpine Inn promises it will go out on the next coach to the Elvenhome.
Rowan takes the horses to be re-shoed for the journey south as the party prepares to leave. Potter begins shoeing the horses with his usual brisk efficiency. “You can do a good job without hurrying, you know,” she points out.”
“True” says Potter, “but I hate long goodbyes.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be back here again,” says the ranger in a small voice.
“I know,” says Potter, studying the horse hooves intently. “Our destinies lie along different paths. I’d no more ask you to stay with me as you would ask me to come with you.”
“I’m sorry,” says Rowan.
Potter looks up at her with a brittle but genuine smile. He walks over to her and holds her close. “Don’t you dare be sorry. I’ve not ever known happiness like these past few weeks. I will always have that.” He releases her and stares deeply into her eyes, as if fixing them in a hallowed hall of memory. “It will take time, but our hearts will come to understand what our heads know to be true.”
Even so, it is with a heavy heart that Rowan leaves Miel with the rest of the party. Her eyes light up when Gus comes running up as they cross the bridge out of town and leaps into her lap. Grumble is trying to hold himself together. Quirky sits behind Rowan for a few miles. He asks her for a flask of her holy water so he can test the seal on his new mace, an aspergillum. Rummaging through the pack, he finds a letter with a “P” stamped into the wax seal. Quirky hands it to Rowan, who opens it to find a poem from Potter. She breaks the seal and reads the words written on the parchment:

"Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore--
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
The gods for myself, they hear that name of thine,
And see within my eyes the tears of two."

- Potter

Her eyes brimming, but she tries to hold it in while in front of her comrades. Quirky gives Rowan a hug, and while holding on to her, casts calm emotions on her. Rowan finds the pain lessening, and her heart feels eased.
The party makes little progress that day, not necessarily all the fault of Grumble's hangover, and they decide to stop over at the same farmhouse they visited a few days ago. Knocking on the door, however, it seems disaster has befallen the family: one of the farmer’s sons was kicked by a horse and lies in a bad fever. Quirky examines the lad and grimly determines that there must be severe internal bleeding and perhaps a ruptured appendix. With the aid of Nialia, he tends the boy overnight, trying to keep him alive so he can receive the needed spells for surgery the next morning. The surgery and healing is a success, and Nialia examines the horse that kicked the farmer’s son. The horse had an infection in it’s back leg that was causing it pain, and made it lash out. Nialia heals the animal. Only repeated protestations of the urgency of their mission to the Duke gets the party out from the immeasurable gratitude of the farm family. Right now, if a slot for a saint opened up, the party would elect Quirky in half a heartbeat. Badger comments that Zook could carry them both comfortably. Quirky, blithely ignoring a glare from Grumble, climbs onto the back of the enormous Diunsearch wolfhound and Badger suppresses a squeak of glee. It was probably because Quirky was unused to riding a hound, but Badger keeps his hands firmly planted on the dog’s saddle with her own. Of course Badger has to keep tight against him to make sure the tired gnome didn’t slip or slide unduly.
As evening falls, Nialia’s keen nose picks up the scent of blood. Sure enough, there are a few dozen raucously crying crows overhead. Nialia shifts to wolf form as Rowan slides off her mount. The road they ride on now sits atop an embankment some four feet high, with ditches on either side. The woods to either side are thicker and close to the road; there are no farms around for miles. The perfect spot for an ambush. Rowan finds evidence of several men having laid in wait, and a small but abandoned camp a ways into the woods. The tracks are at least two days old, and somewhat obscured by the recent drizzling rain. On the other side of the road, Nialia finds a corpse that was rolled down the embankment and into some brambles. Her nose tells her before her eyes do: the corpse was once a young but foolish gnome named Rascal. His throat has been slit, but aside from being picked at by crows, no other marks are evident. No signs that someone took a body part as proof for a bounty. Likely it was just a plain old bandit attack.
Quirky appears the most shaken by this. “Apparently the gods reserve the right to decide who gets second chances,” he mutters. The sobered party leaves the corpse for the animals to feast on, and they move on.
Speaking of sober, the party notices that Grumble has not touched a drop of his supply of ale or Ha’ak. Grumble has been quieter than usual, thinking over the words of the strange, smoking dwarf. His head pounds, his hands shake, and his skin is chilled from cold sweats, but he says nothing, knowing a true dwarf does not complain of such trifles. Even Rowan senses something deep moving within the dwarf, and for once does not make any jibes. A bit unnerving to Grumble is the frosty cold he feels radiating off his axe, even under the mid-day late summer sun. It’s been like that ever since the night before they left the city; the night he spent turning inside out.
The next three days of travel are uneventful. Wolves have been traveling with the party, and it has become common for a few of them to settle down next to Nialia as he meditates. That night, however, under a night sky cloudy and devoid of stars or moon, Grumble takes out his collection of ale canteens and the filigreed flask containing his precious Ha’ak. One by one he throws the canteens of ale away into the darkness, a strange look on his face. The Ha’ak he looks longingly at for a moment and then tosses the flask into the fire. To his stunned comrades, he says in a clear, strong voice: “I’ve been thinking. It’s time I stopped feeling quite so… Well, I think it’s time to move on.” Quirky and the rest notice that the dwarf’s eyes seem clearer in the dancing flames. Nialia notes he smells slightly different now. Grumble apologizes for behaving the way he has been, and proceeds to take the first watch. His thoughts are awash with the unknown, but now he faces it with a clear head, and the iron determination that only a dwarf can muster.
Badger takes the second watch, but an hour or so into the watch is awakened by Quirky, who has been lying awake. In the firelight his face looks drawn, almost haggard. He does not meet Badger’s soft blue eyes as they speak. Quirky, his heart in his throat, tells Badger that he has feelings for her. More, even. In all his travels, he’s never met someone like her. Not just physically (though Quirky is quick to point out that he finds no flaw in her physical appearance), but that her poise, her heart, and her mind have a rare purity to them that he says has captivated him. He can’t stop thinking about her.
Badger whispers that she has feelings for Quirky as well.
There is another pause, and if Quirky had looked up into Badger’s eyes he would not have been able to go on, such was the dawning joy that was spreading across her face.
As if dragging every word from the blackest pits of the abyss, Quirky asks her if he remembers entering the Sunless Citadel that first day, and encountering him in that orc-held dungeon cell. Confused not so much by the question as the tone of his voice, Badger nods.
“I arrived in that cell scant hours before you found me. I chained myself up in the hopes that you would rescue me.”
Badger’s confusion is quickly turning to alarm, “What? But you-"
“You know the horrible dreams you had that night? I had a device that gave you those evil dreams. I was to use it on you every night until they drove you and Grumble mad. Then I was to kill you both. I was the first assassin sent after you that I spoke of before.”
Badger feels something shrivel and char within her, feels herself turning to ice when just a moment ago she had burned with a never-before felt delight. As if it were someone else, she hears herself ask in a tortured whisper: “Who hired you?”
Now Quirky forces himself to look up, forces himself to gaze into the eyes that now brim and spill over with tears. “I think you know. He told me you and Grumble had murdered his daughter and robbed his estate. I was surprised that someone like me would be hired for such an easy target, but not enough so that I declined the job.”
“It was either kill or be killed by her. We didn’t want to, but she left us no choice!” says Badger hotly.
“I know that now,” nods Quirky. “Your version of events fits much better with what I’ve come to learn about Baron von Hawkmoor. He misrepresented the facts to me, which voids his contract. This may sound odd coming from an assassin, but I won’t be used as that kind of tool. I only killed those I deemed to be worth killing. And once I met you…”
Quirky falters and stops, wishing Badger to scream, to attack him, to call him every foul curse ever uttered by mortal mouths, but she merely gazes at him, tears streaming down her face.
“At any rate, I couldn’t use that device again after that first night. I destroyed it and left it in that forsaken pit. At first I told myself it was because I needed you all to get out of that hell-hole with my skin intact, but afterwards, I couldn’t bring myself to let harm come to you, I cared too much about you. I couldn’t bring myself to touch Grumble either, because he meant so much to you.”
Silence falls, filling the space between the two gnomes like the cold darkness between the stars.
“Look,” says Quirky, “I’m not lying about my feelings. Those are genuine.”
It is the wrong thing to say, and now Badger does lash out. “How could you betray me like this? How could you lead me - lead us all – on like that?”
“If you want me to go, I will go,” says Quirky softly. “You can tell the others whatever you wish.” The words I’m sorry stick in his throat like burrs. Even in his head they sound as hollow as his heart feels.
After a pause, Badger speaks, “Get away from me, Quirky. I need to think. I’ll tell you in the morning.”

The remainder of the night for them both feels like an eternity of torture: Badger alone with her grief, and Quirky alone with his guilt. Dawn comes at last like a tired plow horse and sluggishly brightens the low slate sky in measured levels of gray. Quirky is nowhere to be seen as the rest of the party awakes, but soon returns with a pair of rabbits for breakfast. Everyone sees the red puffy eyes of both gnomes, but say nothing.
Badger strides off into the forest, and once out of eye and earshot, is finally able to let out some of the raw fury in her heart. Badger collapses to the cold earth, pounding her fists into the soil as if demanding answers from a world that she never knew could be so cruel. Eventually she returns, stone-faced, to the camp. She leans over Quirky, who sits holding the rabbits on skewers over the fire.
“Don’t you leave me just yet, Quirky Timbers,” she whispers with a savage fierceness. Quirky’s face doesn’t change, even though his heart leaps at her words.
That day Quirky rides behind Rowan as she scouts ahead of the party. Badger stares down at the swirled patterns of Zook’s thick fur, wrestling both with her feelings and with concealing them from those around her.
Up ahead, Rowan looks back at the blank face of the gnome behind her. “Things not go too well with Badger last night?”
“No,” Quirky says, willing his voice not to crack. Rowan doesn’t press things, and eventually they arrive at a crossroads. A lonely signpost marks the distance to Miel, Pythus, and another town neither adventurer has heard of.
Alert, the gnome and half-elf scan the area for the bandits that they know are out there somewhere. Oh, please, let there be bandits around here Quirky wishes fervently, gripping his mace hard enough that the bones in his hand creak. Rowan notices Quirky scanning the sky more than the ground. “See anything up there?” the ranger asks.
“Nothing,” says the gnome with a troubled look.
They wait for the rest of the party to catch up, and then take the road towards Pythus together. Dusk creeps across the gray sky, and the party settles down once more. Badger volunteers to take a watch once more. When she’s sure everyone else is asleep, she approaches Quirky, who is fairly certain he will never be able to sleep again.
“Are you even a real cleric, or have you lied about that too?” Badger asks finally.
“I don’t serve Pelor, no.” says Quirky with a sigh. “I’m not a cleric as such. I’m part of a very small cabal of magic users who call themselves Ur-priests. We use our power to steal magic from the gods and use it for our own brand of divine magic. It’s not evil per se, but it’s not good either. I wear the emblem of Pelor because he’s the most commonly worshiped. A healer bearing the Peloric sun is welcomed in many more places than would welcome a travel-dirty gnome in armor. It was just another part of the disguise.”
If looks could kill, Quirky and a good many of his ancestors would have been blotted out of existence.
Finally, Quirky's voice cracks. “Oh, gods, Badger, I can’t take seeing you like this,” Quirky bursts. “Please, for pity’s sake, tell me something, ANYTHING I can do, and I will do it. Tell me to walk through fire, tell me to flay the flesh from my bones, just let me do something for you!”
The two gnomes stare at each other. For the first time, Quirky is crying, his hot tears spilling across the stubble on his cheeks and dripping with barely audible pats onto his bedroll. “You can stay up with me,” says Badger softly.
Quirky laughs softly. “You know, it never happens this way in the ballads, but I really have to pee. I’ll be right back.” Badger almost smiles as Quirky heads off into the darkness among the trees. After a few moments, Badger hears a crackling of branches, and turns to greet Quirky.
Her words die on her lips as she sees a much larger form creeping rapidly towards her. For a half-second she thinks it is a wolf, perhaps even Nialia, but then the thing leaps for her, and thick-skinned claws encircle her throat, choking her scream before it can get past her lips.
With a pump of perfectly camouflaged wings, the creature flies across the camp and alights in the upper branches of a tamarack. The thick bough under them bends under their weight, but holds. Badger struggles, only to feel cold claws at her belly.
A soft, female voice like gravel sliding over honey rasps in Badger’s ear. “So thissss is what takes him away from me, yes?”
Badger draws a ragged breath. Where normally she would find terror, she feels only anger. “When I get free I’m going to end you!”
The thing laughs cruelly, tips of her claws just breaking the skin. “Oh, I don’t think so, little one. I’m going to gut you for stealing him from me!” And spitting the word as if it tastes foul, “Or do you think your cleric will save you?”
Below them, Badger hears Quirky calling softly for her. She gets out a squeak before the thing chokes her.
But Quirky hears. With a few muttered words, the fire blazes up, and the clearing fills with a dirty red glow. Quirky sees the creature and her hold on Badger and goes pale as mist. “Grayle, don’t do this. Let her go.”
Nialia awakes to the growling of the wolves around her and quickly takes in the situation. She is readying a spell when Quirky stops her with a desperate look in his eyes. “If she dodges your spell she’ll kill Badger!” Nialia reluctantly subsides as Rowan and Grumble wake up. Grumble calls to Badger in Dwarven, but before she can complete her answer, Grayle hisses “speak Common, or I’ll bite out your tongue!”
“Grayle, please,” pleads Quirky. “don’t hurt her!”
The creature cries, “Why? Look at her! She will never understand you as I do! She will never accept you! She will never love your real self!” Swiveling her head to look into Badger’s eyes from a scant few inches, Grayle asks her, “Do you love him?”
Without hesitating or blinking, Badger says simply and steadily, “Yes.”
Grayle screams like the death of a comet an raises a hand full of claws the length of Badger’s forearm to strike.
Nialia begins casting, Rowan dives for her bow, and Grumble for his javelins, but Quirky is ready for this and strikes as fast as the assassin he is. His scream for a moment drowns out the gargoyle’s cry, but his scream is full of dark speech. It feels like the very life is sucked out of the clearing for a moment, and a huge, smoky black claw that even the non-magic users can feel the evil washing off of streaks from Quirky's outflung hands. With a sickening crunch of snapping sinew and bone, the claw slices into and through Grayle’s body, nearly ripping the gargoyle in half.
Released from a dying Grayle’s clutch, Badger finds herself falling. As Rowan starts running towards her, time slows down for Badger. With dream-like clarity, she realizes the sprinting ranger will never get to her in time. Idly, she notices that something shiny is hurtling towards her, and she snatches it from the air out of reflex. It’s a fancy ring. Badger wonders why she shouldn’t go out looking glamorous, and puts the ring on her finger…
On the ground, Rowan sees Badger’s fall abruptly slow, which gives the ranger the precious second she needs to throw herself the last few inches, and Rowan catches Badger in her strong arms, cradling the gnome to her.
As the corpse of the gargoyle smacks into the dirt a second later, Quirky whispers, “I loved you Grayle. You were my only friend since childhood. I’m sorry I let it come to this; I should have known.”
He’s still muttering when Grumble grab Quirky, throwing the gnome roughly to the ground and puts his axe to Quirky's throat. “What the hell just happened, Quirky? And what the hell was that spell you just cast! Start talking, because if you've hurt Badger, I swear-”
At Rowan and Nialia’s urging, Grumble takes the axe away and let’s the gnome sit up.
Looking at them, Quirky asks, “do you remember entering the Sunless Citadel that first day, and encountering me in that orc-held dungeon cell?”

. . .

After hearing all Quirky had told Badger, Nialia, Rowan and Grumble are dumbfounded. He explains that Grayle was his partner for many of his jobs, and they had worked as a team for many years, though he had no idea of her feelings for him.
Nialia says she trusts him. Rowan thinks that the gnome should be judged by the behavior he’s exhibited since they met him, not by past misdeeds. Grumble remains adamant, though, he most definitely does NOT trust the would-be assassin. Badger is huddled in a small ball, her head in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. Grumble goes to her and puts his arm around her small, shivering form.
“Are you even a gnome,” wonders Grumble, eyes bright with suspicion.
Looking at the still sobbing form of Badger, her hands covering her face, Quirky, agony etched in his face, silently mouths the words, “Please. Not now.” Aloud he says, “Yes.”
Eventually, Rowan suggests that they all try to get some sleep.
Quirky stands up and says grimly, “I’m going to bury my friend. I don’t want help.” He walks off into the darkness, leaving a pensive elf, a concerned half-elf and an angry dwarf holding a weeping gnome girl all staring at his retreating form.

****

DM's Notes:
-This was kind of a Role-laying Season Finale. I do not expect to be writing out a session summary this detailed for a while.
-The poem is not mine. It was written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the sixth of her "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
-My players did some of the best role-playing I've ever seen this session, I'd barely scripted anything for this, so I hope it wasn't too melodramatic. Kudos to you all.
-Lastly, "WAAAAH! I NEED A HUG!"