[After the meeting Caleb leads Eric over to the crab restaurant. It tastes like sand still, but it's about the atmosphere, right?]
[And also he finds the place hilarious.]
I have plenty of stories. Fighting fiends, daring underground escapes, and accidentally becoming a pirate, among others. But it was that last one you wanted to hear about, ja?
[They can just let the living crabs live, if they have been replaced. Eric still has some fish and chips to slowly eat while grimacing and pretending the breading on the cod is just really, REALLY thick. Arthur hasn't convinced him to starve yet.]
Well... heck ja! [He's got reasons for wanting to hear the nautical tales, anyway.] What do you mean, accidental?
[Fish and chips is good and he can at least appreciate the texture if nothing else.]
... So how to begin... hm. Fjord is a warlock, which is a type of spellcaster that gets their magic from a pact with an entity, not always a deity. It's the pact rather than the worship that makes it work. Fjord is a half-orc in our group. He used to be a sailor, and one day one of his crewmates blew up the boat. He sunk into the ocean and woke up on the beach with a sword. He'd unknowingly made a pact with Uk'otoa, a... demigod of sorts left over after the gods pulled away. It lives deep in the sea, held at bay by three seals. The keys are crystals about as big as your palm, orbs with cracks down the middle called Cloven Crystals.
We found one of those crystals by accident, and Fjord absorbed it. We got wind of another, and we didn't know what they were at the time, so we followed clues to the port city of Nicodranas. We tried to do a stakeout and catch the messenger, but we blew our cover and the person he was meeting got alarmed, so we ended up in a fight and took the ship to try to get away.
[Eric spends the first sweep of friend-explanations thinking this sounds exactly like D&D and wondering mostly as a joke if the hosts would be considered warlocks. There is no question, for example, of what the hell a 'half-orc' is, so they won't be here all night. This next part about the demigod is a lot more confusing, and for a second he had a brain fart moment where he thought the seals were the animal (he may have briefly questioned this to get corrected before moving on to crystal talk.) Keys to seals make sense. There are at least three accidents in this story already without getting to the pirate part, which is crazy. But he thinks he can attempt to recap his knowledge by now.]
So someone lost Uk'toa's crystals, Fjord has one, you're trying to get the rest, and had to run after it got fucked up. I think stealing a ship is already an act of piracy, but you must have done more?
After... killing most of the crew. In our defense we were mostly trying to get away and they were blocking us. Which I know would not hold up to a Lawmaster, but not a lot of what we do would.
We realized that we had only one person who knew how to sail a ship, so we went around to a different part of the docks and hired some crew after renaming the ship from the Mist to the Mistake and forging papers. We headed out again and then after a bit of traveling to where the crew was originally going to make the actual handoff we ran into the other party - Captain Avantika, of the Squall-Eater. She nearly sunk our ship and dragged us on board to try to figure out what was going on.
It turns out she was another of Uk'otoa's 'chosen', and she had another of the crystals. She took a... eh... liking to Fjord right away and made us a sort of... forced crew. Our boat was towed to the island of Urukaxl where a temple was. ... Long story short and skipping the part where Nott and I battled while high on hallucinogenic fruit, one of the seals was broken by Avantika. We fled the temple and got back to the ship, headed for the pirate island of Darktow.
I have not even gotten to the most actually pirate part of this.
[Three years ago the bloodshed described here might have turned Eric off this conversation immediately, but live in Skyrim for that same amount of time and, well, that's just how it is. He's squinting rather a lot at the forced crew part.] How forced is forced?
[he takes a swig of sandy alcohol pilfered from the duty free shop as he eats his sandy fries and gently coughs.]
Right. Of course it'll get more piratey on the pirate island, what was I thinking.
And no. Before that we ended up... well. Making a merchant ship stand down and doing possibly the most polite pirating ever. We boarded them, took some supplies and were sure to leave them enough to get to the next inhabited island, and offered to heal their wounded.
... And also stole a magical paint set that makes whatever is painted with it become real. It may have been a mistake giving that to Jester.
Yeah, I don't think I'd trust a jester with something like that either. Reminds me of what Yusuke did with the reality spike though... we have some really watercolor-ish parts of the world on Nirn.
Anyway... I guess that's the way to do it if you're being forced into pirating. Sounds like those merchants got off easy, all things considered.
They did... there was a guard, but he... eh. We healed him a little afterwards, though I think we may have damaged his reputation...
Darktow was its own series of trials, but to put it shortly we met the man in charge and then promptly broke the code he told us about when some of us snuck into Avantika's room and stole her journal. And escaped via making a large hole in the floor.
The only reason we're still alive is because I cracked the code in her journal, deciphered it, and we fought off her crew long enough to get it to the Plank King. Normally we probably would have been executed but we did him a bit of a service with Avantika, so we were only banished instead.
... We took our crew and her ship and left. And that was the end of us being pirates.
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branchandroot
Week 3 Tuesday
Date: 2020-02-13 07:23 am (UTC)[And also he finds the place hilarious.]
I have plenty of stories. Fighting fiends, daring underground escapes, and accidentally becoming a pirate, among others. But it was that last one you wanted to hear about, ja?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-13 07:40 am (UTC)Well... heck ja! [He's got reasons for wanting to hear the nautical tales, anyway.] What do you mean, accidental?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-13 07:55 am (UTC)... So how to begin... hm. Fjord is a warlock, which is a type of spellcaster that gets their magic from a pact with an entity, not always a deity. It's the pact rather than the worship that makes it work. Fjord is a half-orc in our group. He used to be a sailor, and one day one of his crewmates blew up the boat. He sunk into the ocean and woke up on the beach with a sword. He'd unknowingly made a pact with Uk'otoa, a... demigod of sorts left over after the gods pulled away. It lives deep in the sea, held at bay by three seals. The keys are crystals about as big as your palm, orbs with cracks down the middle called Cloven Crystals.
We found one of those crystals by accident, and Fjord absorbed it. We got wind of another, and we didn't know what they were at the time, so we followed clues to the port city of Nicodranas. We tried to do a stakeout and catch the messenger, but we blew our cover and the person he was meeting got alarmed, so we ended up in a fight and took the ship to try to get away.
Following so far?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-13 08:57 am (UTC)So someone lost Uk'toa's crystals, Fjord has one, you're trying to get the rest, and had to run after it got fucked up. I think stealing a ship is already an act of piracy, but you must have done more?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-13 09:07 am (UTC)We realized that we had only one person who knew how to sail a ship, so we went around to a different part of the docks and hired some crew after renaming the ship from the Mist to the Mistake and forging papers. We headed out again and then after a bit of traveling to where the crew was originally going to make the actual handoff we ran into the other party - Captain Avantika, of the Squall-Eater. She nearly sunk our ship and dragged us on board to try to figure out what was going on.
It turns out she was another of Uk'otoa's 'chosen', and she had another of the crystals. She took a... eh... liking to Fjord right away and made us a sort of... forced crew. Our boat was towed to the island of Urukaxl where a temple was. ... Long story short and skipping the part where Nott and I battled while high on hallucinogenic fruit, one of the seals was broken by Avantika. We fled the temple and got back to the ship, headed for the pirate island of Darktow.
I have not even gotten to the most actually pirate part of this.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-14 08:07 am (UTC)[he takes a swig of sandy alcohol pilfered from the duty free shop as he eats his sandy fries and gently coughs.]
Right. Of course it'll get more piratey on the pirate island, what was I thinking.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-16 06:58 pm (UTC)[So. Very.]
And no. Before that we ended up... well. Making a merchant ship stand down and doing possibly the most polite pirating ever. We boarded them, took some supplies and were sure to leave them enough to get to the next inhabited island, and offered to heal their wounded.
... And also stole a magical paint set that makes whatever is painted with it become real. It may have been a mistake giving that to Jester.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-27 09:40 am (UTC)Anyway... I guess that's the way to do it if you're being forced into pirating. Sounds like those merchants got off easy, all things considered.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-28 02:42 am (UTC)They did... there was a guard, but he... eh. We healed him a little afterwards, though I think we may have damaged his reputation...
Darktow was its own series of trials, but to put it shortly we met the man in charge and then promptly broke the code he told us about when some of us snuck into Avantika's room and stole her journal. And escaped via making a large hole in the floor.
The only reason we're still alive is because I cracked the code in her journal, deciphered it, and we fought off her crew long enough to get it to the Plank King. Normally we probably would have been executed but we did him a bit of a service with Avantika, so we were only banished instead.
... We took our crew and her ship and left. And that was the end of us being pirates.