Session 26: A Broken Clock...
General Summary
We start our trek back to the ship with talks about guinea pigs. The rest of the party has no clue what a guinea pig even is, so I regale them with all the information they could ever need. After that light-hearted banter, it’s back to business for us as we immediately start ripping into Noah. I make sure to point out that he’s dead-weight, opening up the door for everyone else to interrogate and berate him until Owkbanok shuts us all down. Later on as we camp for the night, even he’s starting to have doubts and tries to find out what else Noah can do besides make bombass drinks. The answer is a staggering “nothing” apparently, which doesn’t give Owk much hope, but he’s willing to work with him.
With their private talk of potential magic over, Noah turns in for the night and Owk catches Amelia sneaking out of camp. What for? Oh, you know! Just a ritualistic sacrifice because she’s been having weird dreams about it for days now. She puts the final touches on the ritual by taking some of Owk’s blood and congratulations to the happy couple cuz they just made a skeleton. Well, the skeleton actually crawled out of a pit of skeletons who all wanted to go to a good home, but either way; it’s clear it has some strange affection for both of them. While most would be startled over all the creepy shit Amelia is capable of, Owkbanok shrugs it off and turns in for the night.
I get introduced to our new companion, Griffith, when I step out for my watch and catch him waving at me…and then I’m immediately struck by lightning. Everyone lovingly checks on me and by that, I mean we all scramble to pack up and leave before the storm itself hits. We reach another small town in no time and finish the night off with some heavy drinking, also learning from the bartender that this place is allegedly cursed. They’ve hired a group of adventurers to take care of the problem, but no matter what they do, they can’t figure out how to break the curse. Not our problem tonight, we say and down another round or two of drinks before retiring.
But like all problems that aren’t our problem, it becomes ours in the morning when a weird eight-legged giant weasel attacks our horses. Any attempts to befriend and capture said creature is met with hissing and claws, so we have no choice but to kill it. The alleged town protector’s race in the moment it’s dead to ask us if we’ll split the reward, but we decline. TT is immediately suspicious of them because there’s an elf among them and as we all know by now, she’s got a problem with their kind. While her and Owkbanok take the weasel pelt to the sheriff to collect our reward, me and Amelia go tracking this thing’s lair down. And this is where things get truly ridiculous.
While collecting our reward, TT randomly accuses the town protectors of being the ones behind all of this mess. They staged the curse to have a steady paycheck and had no intention of solving any of this. The sheriff wants proof, but as Owkbanok feeds into the lie too, the sheriff takes their word for it. The “protectors” are to be arrested the next time they stop in for a reward…which will be never considering me and Amelia found their lair. It’s full of cages of creatures that they had been unleashing on the town, two of which we take as our prizes. A dire guinea pig that Amelia is quite fond of and an owlbear. When we return, we share the news with everyone and have a total “oh shit” moment before we nudge the sheriff to arrest the other crew on the spot.
With that, we make our leave, taking the forest paths back to the ship in order to avoid suspicion. But a small bit of karma catches up with us in the night when we’re attacked by gnome bandits out of nowhere. They nearly manage to kill both Owkbanok and Noah before the rest of us wake and join the fray. What do they want? Who sent them? Why is an unruly bunch of pirates getting their asses kicked by gnomes? These questions and more to be answered on the next episode of Pathfinder: Pirates.
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