Have to say, I was not expecting to be afforded the opportunity of mixing business and pleasure this time around. Nyx was looking for some special training in getting past an enemy's defenses to hit them right in the vitals, and went to a gang that was known locally in Sosanopa for running an underground fighting/gambling ring. In addition to myself, she brought along Teyo and Eruriel.
I'm normally not a huge fan of working for gangs, but this one seems relatively decent, or at least greatly superior to the group that wanted to replace them which favoured arson, torture, murder, kidnapping and the like. Of course, I'm not so sure the gang we worked with hasn't done the same, but at the least it seems like they weren't doing it currently, and it's probably still better to end the gang war than perpetrate it.
Conveniently, the gang we were hired to fight is related to the psychotic murderer who was tormenting Pavar's Hill, which means that I feel a whole lot better about putting holes into them as they are quite likely legitimately the worst sort of Namegiver and probably actually are worse than our temporary allies (again, not that I assume they're really the most wonderful people out there, but at least they seemed to be on their best behaviour and cared enough to act like they weren't criminals the entire time).
I suppose I should start from the beginning. The trip to Sosanopa was normal up until we came across a caravan (which to me looked more like a refugee group or something) which looked like it had been attacked by Ork scorchers, or at least, someone who wanted to be scorchers, or wanted someone else to think they were scorchers, based on the arrows. Might've been related to the gang war, our hosts had weapons that looked similar if you didn't look too closely.
Getting into the arena proved difficult, as Nyx's intel on the password was wildly wrong and she just insulted the bouncer and got everyone else stuck in a trap (I was much quicker to react, and avoided the trap... learning about traps has certainly paid off this time). We got in later, mostly with the help of a local that had fallen for Eruriel, who apparently has no filter between her brain and mouth when it comes to double entendres.
Teyo managed to accomplish what I thought was a near impossibility, gaining an audience with the gang leader before Nyx managed to offend someone important and start a brawl. Was honestly expecting everything to go much more poorly. We were asked to protect the gang's recently-acquired fence who had previously been targeted. Seemed paranoid, but oddly not paranoid enough as the traps he had were not enough to stop anyone.
One of the attackers went through the window and perfectly blocked every dart on the way in, clearing the way for the next, according to what I hear from the others. I had a bad line of sight on the door, as I was in a blind on the rooftops clearing other gang members from the rooftops. I hear one of the attackers got a poison dart into our target, but Eruriel had an antidote and we ran off or killed our attackers before they could finish the job. Also managed to keep them from starting any major fires (they tried to burn down the shop as well as random neighbouring houses, probably planning to blame out hosts.
That didn't work out too well for them, since we had captured a couple of them and could show their gang tattoos to the locals... before cutting them off of them entirely. One of the captives managed to break something with their teeth and poison themselves. The other captive was not so lucky, as Nyx performed non-voluntary non-precision dental surgery to remove all teeth. I'd feel bad for their treatment if they weren't murderers and arsonists. Anyways, our hosts managed to get some useful information out of the captive, and gave us an assignment to hit the stockyards which had been set up as a stronghold for our enemies.
Somehow or other they must've known we were coming as they had nailed some local citizens to the side of the buildings inside, dug a spiked pit at the entrance to the stockyards, and placed broken glass on the top of the fence which seemed oddly more solid than I would have expected for a place that holds livestock. There were also a lot of torches in key locations. We opted to ignore the obvious routes and had Belepheron (Eruriel's horse) kick a hole into the wall for us, and were able to take out most of our targets (one of them ran off, but knowing his boss gets her jollies out of torture I feel like he might have been better off staying than reporting failure) while also rescuing the civilians.
So that's the good news. The bad news is that everyone who was in any way involved in the death of the crazy murderer elf is a target for her crazy murderer elf kin, and there's at least two more of them; the sister (who got away... for now) and the mother (who I have only heard the name of... our hosts graciously shared this information). I'm thinking it may be time to go tie up a loose end that knows too much for his own good. Truthfully I think that he should look forward to a visit from me. I don't intend to keep him alive for long, which I think is more than the others who are looking for him can say. Someone like him is bound to have a bounty on him in half a dozen places too, so I'll have my pick of who to hand him off to.Statistics:Posted by Sharkforce — Sun Mar 27, 2022 9:11 pm
]]>