quote:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
--Yeats, The Second Coming
Charging Bear creeps in the darkness, navigating completely by feel and sound. Itza-chu is quiet...but not quiet enough. Charging Bear creeps closer to the ragged breathing he hears, blades ready.
Then, suddenly, there's a flare of light. Charing Bear's night vision is wiped out in the hiss of sulpher as the match gutters, but he catches sight of a human shape in grey war paint...at least, that's what he
thinks he sees. Then the match touches on an oil-soaked rag wrapped around a branch, and a torch flares to life.
The torchlight illumines the rock face. Seems of ghost rock peak out of rock formations in the wall. Stalactites shaped like skeletons being crushed in the coils of giant serpents rise from the ground as a pair of grey-skinned COmanche warriors reveal themselves. It's not that they've been painted...their skin is bleached of all color, as if the two warriors had stepped out of a photograph.
Itza-chu lies battered and bloody on the ground, frozen at the sight of the two warriors. He raises a hand to them, as if pleading for help.
The two warriors shrug, then one tosses his brand at the ceiling above the wounded Apache. The air suddenly grows hot as the brand strike a pocket of gas, and the last sight Charging Bear sees before the walls come down is Itza-chu screaming in a sea of blue-orange flames...
((OOC: CB is effectively blind here, so he has a -6 penalty on anything involving vision. That means his 16 notice is downgraded to 10...still quite a nice roll. Itza-chu is trying to be stealthy. He has a +2 bonus for crawling, +4 for the pitch darkness, and -3 for his wounds.
00:24, Today: Itza-Chu rolled 5,8 using d8+3,d6+3, rerolling max with rolls of 2,5. Stealth! CB manages to catch on to Itza-chu's trail.
However, he fails to notice the Comanche Raiders laying in wait here...until they strike matches, light their torches, and toss them up into the collected Ghost Rock fumes in this part of the cavern!
Roll Agility (-2) to get clear of the cave-in they just caused.))
Dr. Ward treats Augustus' wounds. The wounds are slight, and oddly don't hurt that much, but they are bothersome, and it's good to have fully-functioning limbs again.
Heavy Henry knows that the 4 ways are actually 3...the passage to the left is just a short dead end. The passage to the North leads to a maze of tunnels that wind everywhere under the town, and are easy to get lost in, but there was talk of the tunnels breaking through to a cavern shortly before the accident.
The tunnel to the right leads to some tunnels that intersect into a series of natural caverns. It might be the quickest way to the heart of the maze...or it would be if there wasn't a rumbling coming from that direction...
