A day when the magi have assembled for dinner one of the servants announce that one of the hunter has a important message. Without hesitation Justus allows the huntsman to enter the council chamber.
The huntsman is a middle aged man whose hands and face show signs of a hard life. The huntsman bows before the magi and then begins to speak. My lords when I emptied a few rabbit traps me and my fellow hunters where attacked by a creature. I had the most luck that he missed me, when he shot his arrow, with an inch. Thankfully young Burk slew the creature with his bow. Now this thing looks almost like a man and wore some kind of heraldry. We brought the creature back but it was not easy as his friends where at our heels. Burk has the corpse outside in the courtyard.
Tatiana listens to the tale and raises and slowly heads in that direction. She has spent the past year preparing to deal with questioning people and increasing her mastery of Rego. She is especially happy with the Rego summae as it will work to extend her knowledge strongly and there are tractii after she finishes with it. The intellego summae is impressive as well.
Outside a young man stands with his bow and at his feet there is a corpse . The corpse is humanoid and a very ugly such with an arrow wound right through its throat. It is dressed in a clothes dyed in what seems to be a very expensive blue dye and with a lions head in white upon its chest.
The huntsman: Well this is the creature Burk shot and it is strange so we brought it here as we are instructed. What do you wish that we do with it?
"We wait for the others to come down and see it and see what we can figure out. Then we will let its companions have it back and perhaps speak with them when they come for it. We need to know why it attacked you but also show respect for it." Tatiana tries to see if she recognizes something about this fae creature or its heraldry since she is strongly of faerie blood herself.
OOC Faerie lore roll
Int: 3 + faerie lore 1 + 2 rolled = 6 (7 if Gold court (Novgorod summer fae) specialty applies)
Tatiana will recognise the creature as a goblin of some variety and the heraldry as an important one of the darker fae households. Ardath will with ease recognise the heraldry as belonging to a vassal of her fairy stepmother. The huntsman named Horst asks. Is there anything else my ladyship? It seems as if he is expecting something but seems anxious to try to hide it.
Mariella looks at the corpse .
Do you have the arrow it fired I would like to see what it is made of.
Then to her fellow magi
Do you think we can extract much Vis from its corpse
Tatiana bends down to touch the corpse and speaks a quick spell. If it works and answer is affirmative, she waits two minutes to cast a second one. Finally if there is vis, she will cast gather the essense of Vis to gather the vis into a easily removed finger so that it can be removed safely. She doesn't like the dark fae much at all but she will still give them back the body for funeral rites once the finger is removed.
OOC
- spont sense vis (base 1, +1 touch, momentary, ind) =2, roll was not a botch so goes off successfully with fatigue
- If the body has vis, Casting sense nature of vis, spont again sense nature of Vis, again, no botches
Casting total: Sta 2 + in 3 + vi 5 + aura 3= 13/2 or 7, enough for both spells if no botches for the intellego.
invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/2612892/
Third spell is gather the essence of the beast (ReVi 15), mastered wtih ct of 26+3 aura+roll . With no botch dice on a 0, she gets it off.
At Mariellas command Burk hauls out a arrow with a iron tip. It is a fairly good arrow made for hunting purposes. Burk seems to have cleaned it from any traces of blood.
Tatiana can easily recover one pawn of Terram vis from the body and is sure that it is fae in origin.
I had not expected the faeries to be using Iron arrows , I thought they where not supposed to like Iron or is that only some faeries? Anyway can we expect lots of these things wondering our woods shooting at people or is this just going to be a one off. If you are expecting lots of them I will go out and get rid of them , unless they have something more exotic than Iron arrows then killing them will be safe and trivial. Rather dissapointing really
Mariella really knows very little about faeries , although she clearly looks forward to the idea of clearing the forest of hostile fae but would hope for more of a challange than this one , after all iron weapons are useless against her and these fae may be vulnerable to her corpus spells and are certaonly vulnerable to her anti-faerie spells.
OCC
I expected an arguement about extracting the Vis from the body or I would have gone ahead and done it.
He displayd the arrow he used to kill the fairy. The goblins arrow where not recovered.
OCC
I half thought that may be the case but I thought I had asked for the faerie arrow. Still does not change Mariella's attitude to go forth and massacre faeries
Justus speaks Latin to his soldaes. We haven’t seen anything like this in these parts of the forest… If there are more fae heading this way it must mean something but what? It seems as if our hunter here is expecting some kind of reward but he seems not to be bold enough to ask. What shall we do? After all we have not established any rules on what to do when one of our covenfolk obey our standing order and actually find something.
I think I recognize this heraldry, and this may spring bad news, or just be a coincidence.
Justus here know my history. You... Let it be said that my father was a faerie prince. And he was married. Her wife didn't took kindly to my mother's existence, nor mine.
This is one of her servants.
Now, maybe this is unrelated: These gobelins are vicious and cunning creature, so this could be just a hunting party, out to bring mayhem and pain to humans. But maybe this is a scouting party of a sort. Anyway, we need to take care, as they will probably try to attack more of our villagers, for such is their temperament.
As for our hunter... He should be happy to be rewarded with his life. Yet, he showed bravery. We should reward him a little, more if there's vis in the creature. Maybe some food will do? *
- I'm thinking about something like this: 9 kg of ham is a fine price in a way.
Teh Best defense is a good offense, let us go out find the raiding party and harvest it for vis. If we meet your stepmother do you mind us harvesting her?
Tatiana holds up the finger she removed. "there is some terram vis. I haven't weighed it to see how much but does not seem to be a lot. Being mountain type faeries, perhaps iron doesn't bother them or they use iron weapons to hurt other fae. I am daughter to a prince of the Gold court and owe my respect to them so these dark ones would not like me, associated as they are with the winter court."
Justus: If you wish to go hunt fae then take care and I’ll remain here in case some fae show up from another direction. I will go speak with the village council and guard to be careful and extra vigilant in case more strange things will appear…
"I wish I had some armor and spell better suited to protect me from arrows but if the grogs give me enough warning, I can fast cast a spell to keep arrows from me." The Novgorod maga puts the finger with the vis in her pouch. Tatiana works to gather a collection of four rocks to toss around at need. She can always use other rocks around but she likes to have a supply on hand. "We need to capture and talk as much as fight them. Find out why they are here and if more are coming becuase doing things haphazardly without proper planning and learning details is asking for trouble. We should start at place of the attack and see if we can track the beast back."
Justus: As we are dealing with the fae here I would not trust any defence that works with illusions. There are a few shields and suits of armour in our stores so go have a look if you wish. Perhaps the armour is not your size but a shield might give you some protection.
It would be wise for us to find these fae before they cause more trouble. As they have already attempted to murder our coven folk then we need to eliminate the threat by killing them or driving them off. I am not as familiar with faeries as my colleagues so I would like to know how practical it is to acquire information from them , if it is we should aim to take a prisoner and then determine our opponents strengths and intentions.
As to protection we don't know enougth about how they will attack to determine the best defense , if they use metal weapons I can defend you unless there are metal objects you wish to touch , if they use magic we have our Parma;s against the countless other possibilities of attack we would ahve to improvise.
We are unlikely to be able to sneak up on the faeries as a group particularly as we will not be able to rely on invisibility spells so we should take this brave hunter and a couple of others to show us where the ambush was