Atlantis: Hunter & Hunted

Back to the swords and the sandals. Here's last time.

Our heroes arrive in Dar, a pastoral sort of country that's being stalked by a mysterious creature called the "Skull Wolf." They head into the interior and come upon a farm wherein they find the corpses of a couple of cattle. Akala looks over the bodies, does a little mental math, and realizes that whatever killed these cows was big enough to pick them up and shake them until their necks broke. Thanos has his jackal companion Thanatos sniff around, but he just gets confused. No scent, and no tracks. 

Eithne uses an illusion spell to try and fill in the blanks, as it were, and see what this creature might look like. She only manages to make its skull, but it's got huge front teeth, almost sabre-tooth like. As she's doing that, a man approaches - the farmer that works this lands. He tells them that he's lost cattle, but he actually feels fortunate, as one of his neighbors lost one of their older sons. 

The farmer, whose name is Chize, sketches out a rough map of the area on the ground. There are four homesteads that the Skull Wolf has hit. It's killed horses, goats, cattle, and at least one man. It attacks at night, and hasn't been spotted during the day, which makes the characters think that it's resting during the day. Chize also tells them that even if one is staring right at the creature, one's gaze slides off it - look away for a second and you lose it. 

Akala takes to the skies and flies around a bit, looking for likely places that the beast might hide. She spots a valley in the hills in the area between all of the homesteads, as well as some cliffside rock formations further down the coast. There's a bunch of olive trees around one of the homesteads, and the north of the another farm is a small forest. Nothing but possibility. 

The heroes decide to head north and talk to Ndidi, a Gorgon woman who moved out here to Dar to live a simpler life. Chize tells them that Ndidi shot the Skull Wolf with an arrow, but there was no sign of blood afterwards. He also offers the shelter in his barn overnight, should they need it.

They approach Ndidi's farm, and she meets them and introduces them to her young son (she also asks Imani if the rumors she's heard about her homeland having a major change in regime are true). She gives the heroes bread, olive oil, and wine, and they talk about the Skull Wolf and what Ndidi saw. She says that she's sure she hit it with an arrow, but when she found the place where the creature was later she was unable to find either arrow or blood - perhaps the creature just doesn't bleed. 

Imani asks if they can buy an animal to use as bait, and Ndidi offers up an old bull, probably facing its last summer anyway. She's happy to contribute, and she tells the heroes that in her youth she'd have formed a hunting party and tracked the creature down herself, but she has other priorities now. 

The heroes set out, driving the bull in front of them with Akala watching from the air. As they approach the valley, Akala spots something moving in the nearby olive groves, and calls a warning. Imani smacks the bull on the butt and sends it towards the trees, and the Skull Wolf bursts from the trees, grabs the unfortunate bovine by the neck and shakes it dead.

Akala flings a chakram at it and yells to get its attention, figuring it won't be able to reach her, but maybe she can pull focus from the other heroes. Thanos attempts to fling a spell at it, but it fizzles (and though he doesn't know it, all of the milk in a 30 kilometer radius curdles, which is actually pretty kind as mishaps go). The Skull Wolf leaps up into the air and very nearly bites Akala in two, but she dips out of the way at the last second.

Imani lowers her head and charges at the creature, slamming her horns into its side. The Skull Wolf cries out, and then folds in on itself and vanishes. Imani topples forward, gushing blood from her chest, and the other heroes move in to help her, figuring she got bit. But no - she has a bronze dart, about a foot in length, protruding from her chest. 

They quickly move back to Chize's barn - they don't know where the Skull Wolf went and Imani is wounded. It takes an hour or two, but Akala manages to remove the dart. She studies it and realizes it's a dart from a weapon called a "thunder lance," a kind of portable Lemurian cannon that propels these darts at great velocity and range using alchemical powder. But who in Dar would own such a thing - there isn't really a Lemurian population here?

Thanos focuses his magic and follows the dart back, and it leads to a man in a hood and robe, sitting on top of the very barn where the characters currently are. Chize comes out to the barn to check it, but has no information about this dart or the mysterious man who fired it. The characters speculate that he might have been aiming at the Skull Wolf, but it's hard to know. Chize didn't see anything, but he does remember hearing a loud pop sound around the time the characters were fighting the Skull Wolf.

They decide to rest and keep an eye on Imani so she can rest. Akala flies to the top of the barn to sleep, and in the middle of the night the characters hear her cry out and fall off the roof, landing in a feathery heap. They rush out to find she has a dart sticking out of her; it just barely didn't penetrate deep enough to kill her (thank you very much Hero Points!). 

This clears up the matter of whether the hunter was aiming at the Skull Wolf! Eithne, not nearly so skillful a healer as Akala but still knowledgeable, carefully removes the dart and patches up the wound. Thanos casts his scrying spell again, and sees the man lying on a hilltop several hundred yards south. He runs out into the night with Thanatos, hoping to catch this guy, but as he's running he hits a tripwire. 

Thanos jumps up and misses the spikes that jut upwards, but Thanatos isn't so lucky - his paw is caught in a trap. Thanos frees him, and, though furious that someone hurt his dog, decides that going out into the dark against an obviously well-prepared hunter isn't wise. He carries Thanatos back to the barn, and the characters get some rest. More hunting in the morning...