#the investigations last as much as possible without val getting suspicious

[bluehairperson]

Apprenticember! Day 3 and 4

Day 3: Give a short summary of their relationship to the other main characters!

Day 4: What about the courtiers? What do they think of them?

[reborrowing]

a strange appearance, part five

this took what, a half a year? but it's here, with some worldbuilding hooks

Stranger Swap Masterpost | ao3 First | Prev | Next

Some regret and some research Word count: ~2800 cws: fear, reference to past abuse, death mention (distant, not specifically anyone the characters know), discussion of human-ish experimentation

Val

Val felt a little better about being in the kitchen now that she knew what they were and not just what they weren’t. They didn’t have to try to look competent and could defend themself by explaining they didn’t know how to cook because they very politely avoided starting fires in her walls. She laughed. And that was good, they figured, because it meant she was feeling better.

She was obviously less comfortable than she had been with Val touching her. When they had carried her into the kitchen, she had sat down and squeezed an arm around their finger to anchor herself. She refused to look down and rambled about her tea collection until they reached the counter, at which point she awkwardly slid off as soon as she could reach, no longer worried about the fresh mess Val had made of the counter a few minutes ago. 

They didn’t comment on it, didn’t want to make her think about how precarious her situation was, not any more than she had to. She was doing better than they had, the first dozen or so times they’d been held. Granted, Val had been a child being snatched up by a stranger, but still—they’d also spent their whole life knowing it was a possibility. If the rest of Phoebe’s life looked anything like her apartment, she had never had to even imagine something that large coming at her. They wished they could give her the space to process things without abandoning her. 

Her tea collection was…probably impressive? There was a good spread, more kinds than Val cared to care about. They’d walked by the display a thousand times and the smell had put them off from investigating. She offered them a few choices and they politely echoed the last thing that she said. None of them sounded more or less appealing than the last. Pretty, but not anything they’d choose to put in their mouth unless they were desperate.

And they were, of course, desperate to please.

Thankfully, it was well within their skill set to throw leaves in a vat—cup—of hot water and wait a few minutes. The leaves stained the water and that was it, much easier than the involved coffee-making process they’d watched the last tenants. They grabbed the carton cap from earlier and scooped out a few drops of tea for Phoebe. She eyed the plastic suspiciously when they held it out.

“You said you’ve been here, taking stuff, right? Is that yours? Did you leave it out earlier?” she asked.

“No? I just…you threw it out. Do you have a better idea for a cup?”

“What would you use? You’ve got my clothes, why not let me use your things?”

“I can’t…it’s not… I can’t get to it like this.”

“But I could, couldn’t I?”

“Not unless you want to do a lot of climbing,” they said. 

They crossed their fingers that that would be enough to discourage her. It was more than enough that she got to know that she had someone living in secret in her shadows, they didn’t want to wake up to a sledgehammer through the drywall when things went back to normal. Or not wake up, as the odds may be. They made themselves hold eye contact just to keep from letting their gaze wander to the space above the cupboards and give away where they lived. She shook her head and got up to retrieve the cap of tea.

They moved their hand to make it easier for her to reach, making her flinch. They felt bad at the relief it made them feel. She understood she was vulnerable. She wasn’t going to hurt herself and maybe, maybe, she would consider not hurting them when she got the chance. 

Phoebe

The tea was mostly a good idea. If nothing else, struggling through her directions had given Val something else to focus on. They did a decent enough job of visually masking their worries, but every time they picked her up to move her, she could feel their blood racing through their skin.

By the time the tea had brewed and Val was carrying her back into the living room, their heart rate was at the slowest yet, at least until she asked for her phone and their tendons tensed beneath her. She flinched again and craned her neck to see if that had pissed them off, or just made them nervous. She was pretty sure it was the latter, but it was a terrible angle to judge someone’s expression from. They nodded, at least.

She clutched her tea as Val lowered her to the coffee table, soaking in the soothing aroma wafting out of the mug in their other hand. The smell of her own was weak—just a few drops that she wasn’t quite sure she actually wanted to drink. It looked…gelatinous under the thin ribbon of steam and hot, herbal Jell-o was not particularly appetizing.

But the smell alone wasn’t enough to calm her own nerves and the quiet only made her mind race. She needed answers. Normally, she wouldn’t bother to care that Val didn’t want to talk, but they’d done such a good job demonstrating why someone so small should be afraid of someone human-sized that she bit her tongue for the time being. She wasn’t too eager to set off another freak-out while they were holding a cup of scalding tea deep enough for her to drown in.

It wasn’t like either of them had any ideas about how to go back to normal to speak of anyway. It seemed the plan was to sit in the apartment and wait. It was going to make her insane.

Val seemed at peace with it, but then, the change wasn’t so terrible for them, was it? 

No matter what they might say, they didn’t lose nearly as much as she did in this bizarre trade, just their secrecy, while she was a prisoner in her own home. Even as they let her down onto the coffee table, it only stranded her. She was completely reliant on this near-stranger who seemed almost as likely to kill her as continue to help her.

“And you’re fine on your own now? Or do you need to—”

“Just go get it. Please,” she said.

She felt all too vulnerable as they rose away to where she could no longer make eye contact. The whole landscape changed once they left, into something alien and empty. Her furniture made up impassible monuments around her, but all but the coffee table was far out of reach. She took a seat on a textbook she’d left out, now a perfect thickness to serve as a bench.

She itched at the idea of sitting here for the next who knows how long and playing card games instead of trying to fix this. She was terrified, and she didn’t know what to do with that. She needed to channel it into doing something.

The light cut out for a second as Val came back into the room and passed by a window. God, she knew they were coming, she knew what they looked like, but it still came as a shock to watch a building-sized person step into view. They knelt down and pushed her phone towards her.

“Please don’t call anyone, just music,” they said.

“I got it. Really. Why would I try to piss you off at this point?”

“I guess you wouldn’t.”

They helped Phoebe prop it up on its side when she realized it was too large for her to move on her own. She suppressed a shudder. It belonged in her pocket, easily forgotten. Now she was using it like it was some screen out of an old sci-fi flick. Here was the whimsy she had insisted on earlier this morning, but now she was too overwhelmed to have fun with it. She just wanted this to end. 

She forced herself to enjoy it anyway, and it did help, certainly more than the tea. Fumbling with the cards was horribly awkward, but it was fun. Impressively, the two were equally terrible at trying to shuffle the rug-sized cards. She slid around the table to set up a game and got maybe a minute and a half into an explanation of the rules before Val’s head slipped off their palm and onto the arm of the couch.

She snorted. She knew rules were boring to listen to, but she had hardly expected her explanation to put them to sleep, even with the tea and chill music. And then her eyes slid over to the phone, still propped up against the glass, right within reach. 

“Val?” she called, just to be sure they were really asleep.

Their ear twitched but they didn’t otherwise stir. Phoebe pushed the rest of the deck to the side and crossed back over to the theater screen that was her phone. The lockscreen clicked. She jumped at the sound, glancing over her shoulder again. Val didn’t move.

She felt a little thrill run through her chest, like a kid getting away with something. Phoebe focussed on that and let the fear of getting caught dissipate. She swiped through a half dozen junk notifications to get to the text from Chelsea. It was, as expected, just a line asking her to check in when she “wakes up for real.”

Her hands hovered over the keyboard for a long while. She couldn’t find the words she wanted. She couldn’t find any words that came close to what she wanted to say. She started to type something, then bashed the delete key to get rid of the nonsense. She frowned as she tried and failed to come up with a way to describe what was going on. The best descriptions she could come up with were so absurd that they weren’t even worth writing out.

It is absurd, she conceded. Maybe not something to send over text. She’d probably need to show them, but that would be so much more likely to wake Val. She could tell them to come over, they had her spare key but…Val was scary. To her, obviously, but they had claws and fangs and she suspected they came with a good deal more fighting instincts than Chelsea possessed. In the end, she shot off a short text that lol of course im fine, sorry! She’d give them a better explanation later.

For now, she’d use the time she had while Val was sleeping to find her answers online.

--

Val jerked back to fully alert as Phoebe muttered something to herself, immediately annoyed that they’d managed to doze off at all. She could’ve mentioned the tea was drugged, not caffeinated like the tea they’d had before. They leaned forward towards where she was perched on the coffee table, pushing aside the pillow that they’d been draped over. They had no idea how long they might have been asleep and before they could try to figure it out, they registered that she was perched in front of her phone.

“Hey! What are you doing?” Val cringed as Phoebe jumped, then softened their voice, “I told you—”

“I know, I know, don’t tell anyone. And I didn’t! I just did some research, and look at this,” Phoebe said. She ran a nervous hand through her hair and stepped away from the phone so they could take a look.

Val squinted at the screen—did people really read text this small? It was, like she said, some kind of academic text, not a phone call. Unlike most borrowers, they had been taught to read, but trying to pry apart the different lines made their head swim. Phoebe slapped her hand across the glass several times, speeding through the tight lines of jargon.

“Not everything on the internet is true,” Val wavered.

“Yeah, I’m a grad student, I have figured that out. And a lot of the easy results were nonsense, but these are from reputable journals. And I keep seeing references back to this one French author, and I have no idea how to get that translated, but there’s a few pictures thrown in with the rest of the figures.”

Val was suddenly lightheaded. If there was real, documented evidence of borrowers just floating around online for any curious human to find, how long until everyone knew? Until people started flushing out colonies or—was that already happening? They’d never heard borrower news from more than a few miles away, they had no idea what might be happening across the country, never mind France. Was it just a matter of time?

“And there are some really good medical diagrams someone sketched up in this vet journal, which are…,” Phoebe said, swiping through her tabs. “Oh, shit. I meant to skip that one, I’m sorry.”

Their thin fur stiffened as the screen flashed. Phoebe hastily swiped onto a different screen, but not so quickly that Val didn’t see it. A photo, black and white, of a body with a clean incision down their middle. Childhood stories about lab rats and cruel experiments flickered through their head. Had they been true after all? This had to be edited.

“G-go back to that,” Val said.

“No, you don’t need to look at that.”

“Is it real?”

Phoebe looked back at them hesitantly. they stiffened as her eyes landed on them, struck again by instinct warning them against any eye contact with a threat. They couldn’t quite read her expression without getting closer, and then she turned back to the phone to scroll to something else.

“Look, there’s other photos too, see?” Phoebe ducked out of the way to show off a brief slideshow of a young man leaning against a cup. Val bit their lip. He didn’t have a tail, but other than that the photos looked real. And lots of borrowers lost their tails, or maybe the man could have been shrunk, like Phoebe. She tapped the screen again. “And here, uh, studies on sprite anatomy. These are the sketches I was talking about.”

“I’m not a sprite?” Val said nervously.

But the diagram looked…well, it sure looked like a borrower skull. Almost human, with more threatening teeth and proportionately larger eye sockets. Phoebe scrolled too fast to pay much attention to the details, though. Were there other sorts of borrowers out there? Or something else altogether?

“So what are you, then? You didn’t really say, so I couldn’t get as specific as I wanted, and honestly none of them looked quite like you. I saw sprite a couple times, and the one about the girl in the photos was saying imp, and one of the others just said diminutive humanoids…”

She looked back at them expectantly and Val bit their lip. What did it matter if she knew that little bit more? She would only be able to use it to find more information if it had already been posted and it might be nice to know if borrowers had already been discovered elsewhere in the world, if the others should know.

“I’m a borrower, but—”

There was a loud crash, either from the storm outside or inside their own head, Val couldn’t tell. It cut them off, either way. Everything went dark, then everything went soft. They were standing on crumpled fleece, tucked into the vast sweater they’d just been wearing. They were back to their own, natural size. 

A loud thud, a heavy groan, and a tremor through the carpet. Val’s heart skipped a beat. Phoebe was back to her usual size too and they were sitting in the middle of her living room.

They had to get away.

The whole morning had been a disaster.

They’d hurt her.

They had to get away.

Val turned towards the light and started running. As they stepped into the light, they were faced with the sheer wall of the back of the couch. It sounded like she had tripped or fallen or something and they had to hope that would give them enough of a head start to get out of reach. They bit their lip and clawed their way to the top, thinking they could jump over and get under a bookshelf before, before, before—Phoebe shouted at them.

“Woah, woah, stop! Hey!”

They chirped in panic as fat white fingers curled around their chest. They scrambled to keep their hold, their freedom, but it was useless. Their claws tore through the threads Val clung to and Phoebe was free to pull them into the air.

They kicked twice then gave up, shivering as they fell into her palm. They'd been through this before. She had them, she’d do whatever she wanted with them and if she could harass a giant for answers, they were terrified of what she might do now that they were toy-sized again.

-

tagging: @da3dm @whumpsday @gt-daboss (not sure if you wanted to be added to everything or not?)

please send an ask, comment, or dm to be added or removed to the taglist! requests in the tags are easy to miss

[hazecat-blog]

Pathfinder Adventure p.4

previous –> next

Summary: In this session, our party manages to finish off the mini-dungeon we stumbled upon in the last session in approximately the correct order.

The party (decided I should include a list like this for reader reference, and so I can remember how to spell everyone’s name right)

Phoof (played by me) - blossoming treant bard Altaei Nacriex - mysterious (human?) ninja Elisi Urenie - fiery human monk Kaito - kitsune pirate barbarian Valeriy - aquatic elf water witch and adopted sibling to Ash Ashcaul - pirate kitsune magi June - androgynous mixed-blood half-orc spell-caster Noggan - weird rogue floating skull embedded with jewels Zakhar Nikolaev - human alchemist living in Sandpoint

Further on past the prison -- after crossing a rickety bridge -- the Heroes of Sandpoint found a small, abandoned torture chamber. The equipment was still there but had all rotted and rusted away. In a small side room, they found three doors with strange symbols on them as well as a few dozen scrolls ripped in half.

Zakhar and Phoof started sorting through the scrolls, but it started taking too much time and Elisi and Altaei opened the other door from the torture chamber to continue exploring while they did that. It led to a suspicious staircase built in a cleft in the rock by having wooden slats extend from either wall as stairs -- they were sure it was a trap that would dump them into the abyss. Altaei kept searching for traps at every step, but it never did.

When they got to the top, Phoof, having given up on the scrolls to join them, warned them she felt death within the room. They opened it and found a freezing chamber with wooden palettes covering a checkerboard of deep pits, from which moaning noises could be heard. This was even more obviously a trap, so they hesitated a while until Elisi and Altaei entered the room.

It was a trap! Or, well, an ambush. A three-armed mutant goblin dropped from the ceiling and attacked Elisi with an axe. He got in a couple of deep hacks, then retreated away to blow fire on the three of them! Altaei attempted to block the flames from Phoof's body, but the tips of Phoof's branches ended up singed. Elisi followed the goblin to punch him some more, while Altaei hung back and threw kunai. Kaito circled around to try to flank the goblin, while Val moved in with a trident, taking Elisi's place after she took another dangerous hit and had to pull back to drink some potions. Together, they took down the goblin and -- since he was quickly regenerating -- slid the lid off of one of the pits and chucked him to the bottom, where the ghouls started eating him to keep him from standing back up.

Meanwhile, another enemy -- that looked like a rotting zombie with a tattered robe and blank white eyes -- advanced on Altaei. They appeared to be blind and possibly deaf (since they were immune to Phoof's piercing screech), but it didn't seem to keep them from flailing around with their fists and occasionally connecting.They were tough -- hitting them was like hitting a pillar of wood -- but between all of them, they finally managed to take them down right around the time the trio from below (Zakhar, June, and Noggin's valet) finished with the scroll room and rejoined them.

The three of them had only found a couple of intact or even repairable scrolls. It seemed most of the scrolls had one-half missing. Behind the doors, they'd found various mutated creatures -- one with a giant head, one with a rib cage down to his pelvis and tiny legs, and one with three arms, like the goblin they'd just fought.

"Oh, by the way," Phoof said, "I'm pretty sure that goblin was one of the goblin lords I read about. The one supposedly hiding in an unknown cave?"

Kaito frowned. "Didn't he have a magic sword?"

Phoof nodded.

Kaito sighed. "Then I guess we have to fight whatever's in that pit."

That turned out to be easy enough -- Zakhar tossed a bomb in, killing the zombies, and Kaito was able to borrow Phoof's rope and slide down to strip the goblin of his weapons before he could wake -- assuming he was ever going to since the fire might have stopped his regeneration.

Sure enough, his sword was magical. No one in the party really used longswords as a primary weapon, so they agreed to sell it and split the proceeds. Kaito did claim a silver dagger for himself, to add to the bandolier he'd stolen from another goblin earlier.

While they healed up -- because several of them had taken a lot of damage in that fight -- Val wandered off (with Elisi close behind to keep an eye on her) to find her isopod familiar, who was missing. She found him back in the prison, flipped on his back. It wasn't clear how he'd gone missing in the first place, though.

At any rate, they eventually moved on. Past the Cold Zombie Storage, they found a short hallway leading to a scary room. It was plated with some weird red metal, and black lightning would periodically crawl up the walls and form strange glyphs that no one could read. Val gave Zakhar a comprehend languages spell, but he didn't want to touch the lightning.

He did want to read the book floating in the middle of the chamber, though. After an experiment with an empty vial, to verify that objects could be added and removed to the cache in the center of the room without incident, they retrieved the objects to examine them further. Phoof claimed a forked wand (that later turned out to be 'shocking grasp'), Zakhar the book (on the worship of Lamashtu, the god of madness and monsters) and a scroll, Kaito the bottle of wine (a nice vintage, but being in stasis probably meant it wasn't as aged as its bottling date would indicate), and June took the dead crow, for unknown reasons, but didn't want all the tasty maggots that came with it.

While they were futzing around with the chamber, the rest of the party headed through a side door to investigate a spiral staircase. It ended in a pile of collapsed rubble with some sort of weird scary glyphs that appeared, wrote out scary things in abyssal, and then disappeared. Phoof, in particular, got a very bad vibe just by being on the stairs while Noggin's valet was fascinated with the effect and had to be dragged away from it against his will.

Since that avenue was apparently played out, they decided to head up the other flight of stairs, west of the statue, and examine the pool flanked by human skulls. It was another ambush! But this time only by one skull-monster with creepy entrails, that didn't really get to do much before being sliced to bits by the party's combined efforts. Past the pool was another staircase, this one leading up, but also ending in a pile of rubble.

That left only one hallway to investigate, way back near where they'd broken into the strange complex, that they were starting to gather was a temple of Lamashtu. Following the tunnel quickly confirmed it, as they arrived at a shrine with a clear pool of water in an altar on one side of the room.

Kaito was interested in the water, which didn't smell safe to drink but did give off a sense of power. He called in Zakhar to identify it, but all he could tell was that it was a powerful, cursed transmutation effect.

"Maybe I should drink it? I could shapeshift back afterward, right?" Kaito suggested, not convincing himself. He and Zakhar took samples, though, to possibly use later. They also dipped the dead crow in the water to see if it would trigger the effect, but nothing happened.

"We should test on wolf," Zakhar suggested, referring to the goblin dog that June had tamed in the basement of the glassworks, which was still following him around.

"Noooo!" Elisi shouted. "I won't let you hurt wolfy! If you want to try it out so bad, you should drink it yourself."

"You should do it," Kaito added. "You're always drinking mutagens anyway, aren't you?"

Somehow, that convinced him, and Zakhar downed the vial... and then collapsed to the floor, screaming in agony, as his body twisted and mutated. Phoof screamed in horror with him as he transformed.

He didn't get an extra arm. He got an eye in the back of his head, although he lost one of his original eyes to compensate. He lost all his hair, one of his legs shrunk to half its normal length, and his body twisted 90% in the middle of his abdomen leaving him pointing sideways. Worst of all, he took a *huge* (-5) penalties to his INT and DEX, which were his primary stats.

GM: "I was looking at the effects, and when you said you were drinking it I was like 'noooo'!"

Kaito: "Okay, I don't want to drink it anymore."

Once the alchemist had recovered -- or at least, as much as he was going to -- they pushed open the heavy stone door and entered what looked like a temple chamber. There was a fountain in the middle with a ring of skulls on spikes, and the room was dimly lit by a shaft of yellow light emerging from another pool in the back of the room, up on a sort of stage 15 feet off the ground.

There was no sign of habitation, so the sneakier party members crept into the room quietly. Zakhar stomped in holding his sunrod without caring. But it was Elisi, who was the first to climb the stairs to the stage, who got the demon's attention.

Demon: "Who are you, who dares violate my sanctum?!"

While she waited for a response, Elisi turned to the rest of the party, behind her, and hissed out, "Psst! Guys! What's a sanctum?"

That was not the correct response. The demon flew up into the air and slashed her own forearms, dripping blood into the central pool, which spawned a quartet of ghoul-looking but not-ghoul sinspawn... and then the faint light from the pool flickered out as it used up the last of its power.

It was a fight against an enemy hovering 20' up in the air. Elisi started flinging sling bolts at it, and could at least hit it, while Kaito tossed the silver dagger and missed. Altaei suddenly hunched over and sprouted a pair of black feathered wings from his back, and flew up to duel the demon in a sneak attack.

It was a short duel. The demon could see through Altaei's invisibility and paralyzed him, dumping him into the pool below to drown. Phoof ran in to save her, but it was at the cost of being stuck in melee with the sinspawn and unable to do much. Thankfully, Phoof's natural armor protected her from most of their attacks, and Kaito and Zakhar joined her in fighting them off since they had no good way of hurting a flying creature. The bites from the sinspawn tried to infect Phoof with sinful thoughts, but Phoof's mind was too pure to be infected. Zakhar, on the other hand, received a bite that left him in a daze for one round. The other players asked what kind of things Zakhar was thinking about.

He said, science. Dirty science.

Meanwhile, June tried shooting the demon with scorching rays...it took a couple of tries to hit, and of course, she resisted fire. Still, he did enough to gain her attention, and she commanded him to leave.

Noggin's valet was up on the podium, searching for some place to hide to make sneak attacks with his bow. Since he couldn't find any he instead spent his time educating the party on the resistances of demons -- they resisted fire, cold, acid, normal weapons, magic weapons, and were immune to lightning and poison. To fight her effectively they'd need weapons of Cold Iron or Good. They did not have any such weapons available.

The other option was to hit her with bursts of massive damage to get through the DR, which was hard when she was flying...until Elisi remembered that she had a potion of Enlarge Person. That would make her ten feet tall, with a ten-foot reach...and the ceiling was 20 feet up. She wouldn't be able to escape.

She didn't *quite* take out the demon with one punch, but it was close. Altaei finally shook off the paralyses and flew back up to strike the finishing blow, after which it was simple to mop up (or in Elisi's case, stomp down) of the remaining sinspawn.

Elisi stared at Altei's wings. "Are you an angel?"

Kaito peered at her. "I think she might be a Tengu."

Elisi was confused. "Is that a kind of angel?"

Kaito shrugged. "Well, it's not a kind of demon."

Altaei refrained from commenting on their theories.

In the aftermath, they examined the fallen demon. She had a magic dagger (which they let Altaei keep) and Noggin's valet identified her as a Quasit -- like the quasit that had been helping the old priest's daughter transform herself. They were pretty sure she wasn't the daughter herself since she was a full demon and the daughter had been trying to finish the transformation, and also because she was in a weird cave temple and not at a place called 'Feathertop'.

They also found 1000 platinum pieces in the glowing yellow pool on the platform. It took some work to get them out since the pool was boiling hot, but mage hand and patience (and eventually, the use of Phoof's rake-like weapon and Kaito's buckler as a broom and dustpan) managed to fish them out.

They were rich! Well, okay, not that rich since it needed to be divided *nine ways*, but still. Much better off than before.

Time to shop! And to beg Zakhar to brew them potions to replace the ones they'd used up. And for Zakhar to beg the village priest to heal his transformation for a steep discount, since he couldn't afford to actually pay for it.

After the fight: GM: "Why didn't you use your rage? I had a magic trap set up for when you raged!"

Kaito (ooc): "Um... I only had a few rounds left and was saving it for when I had a chance to hit the demon, but I never actually got the chance?"

So, hooray for dumb luck. n.n