I'm just sayin', we're now four sessions in and this is really the first time swords have come out. Here's last time.
Our daring space heroes have all appeared in the Hidden Garden on Kieron, and spend a moment looking around. It's...nice. Temperate, pastoral, woods in the distance, but also houses? Like, not mass-produced dwellings, but houses of wood and stone and mud, some fairly recent, some older. The four of them wander over to one where a woman is watering a garden, and ask her kind of what's going on.
The woman, Ila, tells them that once you get in here, it's hard to leave, but the folks here are pretty happy with it. She's lived here with her wife Rose for a while, now. Izzy tries to flirt a bit, but Ila isn't immediately smitten (or Smitten) with her. They ask her whether she's seen a couple of princesses, and Ila knows just who they're talking about - they got in yesterday or the day before, and they're just over that rise, last she saw them.
They follow her directions and walk over the rise, and see that it slopes to a gentle hill. Down that hill a ways, they finally find them - Sarina, the Infanta of Andromeda, and Malfi, daughter of the Overlord of Nero. Sarina is dressed in flowing robes and scarves, and has dark skin and long, flowing black hair. Malfi is wearing a smartly tailored suit, sports shorter hair and wears a gun on her hip. They're in the midst of a discussion, but when they see the characters appear, they quickly size them up, nod to each other, and draw weapons.
Sarina draws a pair of short swords and braces herself, while Malfi draws her pistol and fires at the characters! Hedera instinctively calls up a wall of plants to defy disaster, but overdoes it and gets knocked backward. Cleo, still in cat-form, flies into a snarling, spitting rage and charges down the hill at her. She leaps into the air and chomps on Malfi's wrist, spinning her around and making her drop her pistol, but she draws a dagger from a sheath and slices off some of Cleo's floof!
Izzy falls in lust at first sight, completely Smitten with Malfi, launches into acrobatics and flips down the hill (fools rush in, you see). She lands and draws her rose crystal sword and waggles it in challenge. Esme, likewise, runs down the hill and tackles Sarina, pinning her to the ground, but Sarina puts her swords to Esme's throat and growls "what does the Circus want with us?"
Cleo snarls menacingly, calling upon her big [cat] energy, and snaps at Malfi's other wrist, causing her to drop her dagger. But she also rips Malfi's sleeve off her shirt, exposing an intricate sleeve tattoo. Malfi's expression gets angrier and she hurls a handful of metal objects at Cleo. They bite into her face like a thousand bees, and she back up, bleeding a bit.
Hedera has had enough of this nonsense. She walks slowly down the hill and conjures up witch's water (like the witch's fire move, only wetter), spraying both Malfi and Cleo. She knocks Malfi over with the force of the water, and Malfi pulls herself up to one knee and tells them to let Sarina go. Esme tries to explain that they're not here to hurt anyone, and Hedera says that one of their dads sent them (Hedera doesn't remember which one). The newlyweds agree to a truce, and everyone stands up and brushes themselves off.
The characters explain that Overlord Nero sent them to make sure they were all right. They both seem to be fine, if a little dinged up. Malfi laments her torn shirt, and Hedera offers to make her a new sleeve from woven grass (Malfi isn't really interested, but Sarina encourages this). Hedera tries to call on her wild friends to grow the grass out and weave it into a shirtsleeve...but she can't. The grass here shifts, moving in and out of Hedera's attention each moment.
Malfi says that she's going to go find their stuff and get a new shirt. Esme offers to go with her, and the two of them walk off. Cleo, still smarting from the battle, sits down near Hedera, and Hedera sends Helix, her little pet blobtopus, to comfort Cleo and dry her off a bit (and offer some emotional support).
Unfortunately, Cleo is a cat, and has a cat's instincts. The small creature on her head is edible, and she paws at it. Helix is too fast and zips over to Hedera, and Cleo pounces at her and tries to eat the little thing. Izzy, thinking fast, draws her sword and uses it to catch the sun, making a little light for Cleo to chase, and manages to talk her down.
With Cleo calmer, Sarina looks at Izzy's sword and asks about where she got it. Izzy hasn't really used it all that often, so Sarina offers to spar (Izzy asks if it's OK if this fight is more meaningful to her than to Sarina, and Sarina doesn't much care either way).
They two of them fence, and all is well until Izzy misses a thrust and stabs Hedera in the shoulder! Izzy is horrified, and Sarina admonishes her to always check her backdrop when fighting. But Hedera is upset, and tells Izzy that she doesn't much like her at the moment, and then walks off to find Esme. Izzy starts to cry and berate herself for being selfish, and Cleo tries to offer emotional support, but winds up effectively calling Izzy an idiot who doesn't think before she acts. Izzy, now really devastated, starts to cry harder, and Sarina puts her arm around Izzy's shoulder (glaring at Cleo) and leads her away. Cleo is left alone, and confused.
Meanwhile, Esme walks with Malfi and the two of them chat. Esme asks Malfi a few questions and starts to figure her out. Specifically, she gently presses on whether Malfi wants to live here, and learns that Malfi would be much happier in a bigger city (like her home on Nero), but she's willing to give that up to live here with Sarina.
Sarina leads Izzy, still sobbing, further into the garden and they find a great big stone oven. Despite Izzy's initial fears that she's smelling bread because she's having a stroke, it turns out that an older lady named Nicolette is baking bread. She sits Izzy down and brings her bread and butter, and the three of them sit while Izzy eats basically the whole loaf and talks about how she's only ever looked out for herself and she doesn't think ahead and she's never had real friends, just lovers.
Cleo, meanwhile, wanders away, feeling a bit upset that she hurt Izzy with her bluntness (which helps her transform back into her human form). She comes upon a glass structure, like a greenhouse, but it has no door and the glass is frosted so it's hard to see inside. Something inside is glowing, though, and Cleo, intrigued, changes back to cat form and tunnels under the wall. Inside the building, she finds a strange object - a rectangular solid composed of several thin sheets of metal. She bats at it a bit, but is too short to try and pry a sheet off.
Hedera, on her way to find Esme, sits down and awakens the wild. She wants this place to defend the princesses from anyone who wishes them harm, and she manages to do it, but in talking with the plants here she can't ever quite get a fix. It's like their voices are cutting in and out, and Hedera hates it - nothing is real, everything is shifting out of phase. She comes upon Esme and Malfi and tries to explain what happened to her shoulder, but her explanation misses out a few details and kinda makes it sound like Sarina and Izzy weren't exactly "fighting" in the conventional sense. They start heading back to find them, but when they get back to the site of the fight, no one's there.
Esme tracks them, but winds up at the glass building with Cleo. Hedera crawls into the hole Cleo made and, seeing the object, grabs it, but it becomes intangible and slips through her hand. Hedera reiterates her dislike for this place, and they leave the building and go searching for Izzy.
At the oven, Nicolette comforts Izzy and challenges her newly self-deprecating attitude. It doesn't matter, she says, if Izzy has never done anything useful (and she suspects that's not the case) - tomorrow she could. That's up to her.
The others arrive, and Malfi is initially prickly but when she learns that Sarina and Izzy were sparring, she calms down. Izzy, however, is still distraught, and Esme finally grabs her and kisses her, despite her protests that she's not good enough for anyone, let alone Esme (Esme, for her part, can only smile sadly - Izzy still doesn't know what she did for the Circus). Esme takes the opportunity to talk with Sarina, and after a bit of figuring out, learns that Sarina, like Malfi, isn't really keen to live here but is willing to do it for her wife. Esme suggests that there are other places with a bit more civilization that they could disappear to, and that the characters are happy to help.
But that brings up another problem - the Garden doesn't let you leave. Nicolette tells them that she's heard that some people can leave the Garden at will (Hedera thinks she could do it), but it's pretty rare. Beyond, there are three ways to leave - the Sad Way, the Dangerous Way, and the Worst Way. Hedera, still upset from her experiences and especially by the shifting nature of this place, wills herself to leave by way of illustration, and vanishes.
The others kind of blink, and Nicolette muses that she isn't sure where Hedera would end up - she doesn't know how the space in the Garden corresponds to the planet Kieron. She does know, however, that there's an old fellow who's been here longer than she has (and she and her partner have been here 30 years!). He's pretty knowledgeable about this place, and is in fact where she heard about the "three ways" to leave.
The group of them head down the path to see him, hopeful that one of those methods to get out of the Garden will work.
Meanwhile, back on Kieron, Hedera is overjoyed to be able to hear the grass again, but it's saying "DANGER! DANGER!"
Hedera looks around, and realizes she's surrounded by Lunar Loyalists. Standing in front of her is Tranquility, and her silver gauntlet has extended out into a long, pointed blade, which she pokes under Hedera's chin. "You stole my crew," she says icily.
No comments:
Post a Comment