Ngarungadurung feels himself pushed onwards and released, his dead companion wary of the harm he might do by touching living skin too long. It takes three long, urgent footfalls to realise the ghostfella was not immediately at his side.

A glance back shows the ghostfella hurling a scooped armful of leaves and general forest fallings at their pursuer before turning to flee. It gains them perhaps a heartbeat - the impact of Ngarungadurung's next step thrumps through him, his gaze already sweeping back to the path ahead - but the speared man shakes the scattering from his face and comes over the edge of the hollow trailing leaves, a dark shape rising from the place of unnatural light.

Ahead, Ngarungadurung spots a recently-fallen trunk caught up in vines, facing mostly downslope. Should he leap on it and flee along its length as the vines snapped he might gain speed with the momentum of its tipping and perhaps hamper pursuit, becoming harder to pinpoint in the gloom as the trunk thrashed the too-dense undergrowth about. Then again, he might slip off and fall on his face. In two more steps the choice would be made.


[[Ngarungadurung has 3 Chase Actions available.

Optional DEX check (1 action) to use the fallen tree. Sucess = extra action next round.]]

To traverse the log is too risky. A slip means death. Ngarungadurung ducks under the log and barrels ahead.

He reckons that, so long as the spear stays skewered in the demon-man’s chest, the devil will have a harder time negotiating narrow or tangled spaces. Ngarungadurung runs on, looking for some way to shake his pursuer.


I've read the CoC chase rules, but I think this is my first time using them.
Ngarungadurung will test his speed and spend all his actions this round trying to gain distance on his pursuer.

The country is a dappled blur wrapped in sleep as he darts through it, the understory closing in but not quite thick enough to catch and halt a devil with a solid stroke of Ngarungadurung's time and reality through the chest. He has some peripheral notion of his pursuer vaulting the narrow triangle of fallen tree, feels the impact of the other's feet on the ground, is distracted by a sense of attention deep down coming to focus...

Ngarungadurung pushes out through some soft-leafed brush and finds himself looking at void: instinctively his feet halt their course and he leans back as momentum slides him another hand's span towards the chasm. Above his heartbeat it sounds like there's water somewhere below. The bushes and scrub obscure the edges of the chasm, but there is a silver wattle at his right hand that would surely accept his grip and swinging around to some clearer spot along the ledge. That, or he could wind his remaining spear in his packstrap and attempt to climb lower. Footsteps gain swiftly on him from the forest at his back, closer now and closer.



[[Thanks! Luck notwithstanding I'll try to make things as narritively smooth as possible without interruption from mechanics.

Right now you're still at 3 actions, but Ngarungadurung will need to spend one on a DEX check to go along the edge to safety (he can spend another action for advantage, and can instinctively trust that his totemic relation won't let him get filled with prickles or sudden snakes for doing so, regardless) or a Climb check to get somewhere further down. Alternatively, he could try to matador his pursuer off the cliff with a Dodge (again with the option to spend another action for a better chance).

That said, future risk-assessment wise, unless a roll for a bonus action was dramatically failed (99-100), only the bonus action would be lost. As for looking about for possibilities not yet mentioned, that'd be Spot Hidden at fifth value as a free action (combined penalties of darkness, speed and pursuit), or a Chase Action at normal percentage in itself.]]
This message was last edited by the GM at 02:18, Mon 29 June 2020.

Can Ngarungadurung combine two of those options? Stand by the tree, holding the branch, try to lure him over the cliff, but swinging on the tree branch to dodge, ending up on the other side of the tree. 1 action Dodge + 2 DEX?

Time clenches, seeming to run slower. Ngarungadurung can hear footfalls closer almost directly at his back.

[[*squinting* Sure. That's Dodge then DEX, both rolling a bonus die and taking the better result, the Dodge being stationary and so relatively undistracted.]]

With his left hand, Ngarungadurung absently chucks his remaining spear over to the other side of the giant tree, hoping it might wait for him there, as he uses his right to grasp a sturdy young branch that leans out over the chasm.

He risks a glance across his shoulder as he heaves his weight into the open air, his grip carrying him around the barrel of the tree, his left hand grasping for a branch to complete his semi-circuit and bring him safely to the other side...

---

05:56, Today: Ngarungadurung rolled 24 using 1d100.  Dodge (52).
05:57, Today: Ngarungadurung rolled 9 using 1d10.  Bonus.

05:58, Today: Ngarungadurung rolled 54 using 1d100.  Dex (65)
05:58, Today: Ngarungadurung rolled 5 using 1d10.  Bonus.

The bushes thrash beside him as first his own spearbutt then a lethal sweep of heavy wood crash through the foliage. Then he has swung out and the speared man follows the motion before his view is cleared, running on: his next step falls on empty air.

There is only a brief yelp of surprise, no scream. A long falling. Then Ngarungadurung's hand finds another branch ready for him to hold and his attention is on the pull and step and balance to reach and stand on solid ground. His spear waits at a jaunty angle in the shrubbery and there is a distant splash below.

Whilst it's unlikely the speared man has been entirely stopped, he's certainly no longer an immediate danger. Ngarungadurung has a moment by the edge to collect himself and catch his breath.


[[I...have messed up terminology somewhere and will need to get back to that, but he rolled 72 to attack, which is a complete miss to a sucessful Dodge, so there we go! Chase done.]]

He retrieves his spear and squats by the side of the cliff, head in hand, listening. At first all he hears is himself. It takes him moments to bring his breathing under control. The sensations that course through his body form an unfamiliar mixture: the elation of the hunt, fear of the night, the cold sweat of sudden realisation. To anchor himself, he searches the night with his ears, hoping to find familiar and reassuring sounds. Ngarungadurung listens.

The spearedfella, he figures, will return to the hollow. Spirits, benign and malevolent, were tied to place. It might take the demon some time, or he might already be there. Ngarungadurung didn’t know. His thoughts moved to the little girl and the ghostfella. He had failed in his duty to them, ancestors both. Maybe if the spearedfella wasn’t there he could snatch the little girl away, carry her to safety, to his own time… Ngarungadurung shakes his head to free himself of fantasy. Maybe he could spear her. Run her through, like he was supposed to do in the first place.

Ngarungadurung listens, and then he rises, determined to circle back, silently and carefully, to the witch hollow.

---

Great chase, thank you!

The thick texture of his hair and the warmth of his scalp against his hand are somehow comforting - that he can feel his own solidity, his living, animal nature. For a while the most certain sound is that he's still breathing.

Without real thought, his breaths slow and align with the soft night song of the trees, so much clearer here than in the bounded world. He thinks there is perhaps a serpent sliding somewhere, but not close enough to cause alarm. He can't distinguish the steps of any man, however - or anything that was once a man. The distant splashing of the water below remains ambiguous.

On rising and slipping through the foliage, held by the shadows of his patron tree, he manages to spot the paint of the ghostfella quietly pacing about and peering, seeking to determine what had happened to Ngarungadurung and his pursuer. When Ngarungadurung makes enough sound to be noticed and chin-points back towards the hollow the man agrees. They go quietly. The earth under them has ceased to stir, at least for the moment.

Returning to the hollow all is as before, save that the speared man is missing from his place. The ghostfella is tense with caution, but indicates Ngarungadurung can proceed some way down the basin's slope to aim now, though he claps for attention and nods at the fire nearest Ngarungadurung when he's gone far enough. The flames nearest the live man have started a sluggish, barely-perceptible wave and flicker, taking several heartbeats for the tips of the flames to waver and change shape. He notices some large smooth rounded rocks down here, of a type he does not recognise, and strange glyphs formed of twigs about the witches' feet.

Then he looks up to the girl. Halted as she is, there is a pure form of terror in her, though it is not terror of him, nor the long spear of sharpened wood with which he plans to pierce her chest.


[[Thanks for being chased! :D  That's close enough to definitely spear the girl without needing to roll for it, unless Ngarungadurung wants to do something foolish at this point...]]

Closer to the girl, Ngarungadurung is stricken. What a foul death. To end helpless and in terror with family massacred around. He looks to the ghostfella, his eyes entreating, hoping for some other way.

He draws back his arm. There is no need to use the Woomera at this range. The tip of the spear is level with his eyes, and his eyes level with his target. In his mind he traces the spear's abbreviated path to the hollow of her throat, just above the sternum. A spear there would be mercifully quick, and certain.

If Ghostfella doesn't offer him some way out of it, then Ngarungadurung will take the shot. I'm not going to describe it in more detail--being wary not to tread on of RPoL policy with regards to depictions of minors...

The Ghostfella lacks enough face to consult with his expression, but he thumps his ribs and makes negating gestures about his throat, rasping and making the wet and awful sounds that would be words if his killer had left his shape the power of speech. It's an easier target, but no easier a task. Ngarungadurung bates his breath and feels the exact texture of the spear. He sights carefully, shutting off the part of him that is anything but hunter, but as soon as the spear has left him he shuts his eyes, hard. The impact brings the body down.

"Hhh! Hhh'kk!" the dead man calls out, or tries to. Ngarungadurung opens his eyes in time to catch the girl's wide-eyed and uncertain look at him - blank shock, no fear - before she picks herself up and scrambles frantically for Ngarungadurung's companion, awkward with the spear in her. The two witches holding her brother and one on the nearby drums shift slightly when the spear is near them, an incredible sense of waking malice in their barest stirring. It stops Ngarungadurung's breath until she is far enough for movement to cease.

"Uncle! Uncle!" she calls out, and coughs a little blood without seeming to care: she has known pain so much worse than this, died without him in a manner so much more terrible. "Uncle -!"

She reaches out to him at the edge of the hollow, still not sure she will be saved, and then the dead warrior has crouched and reached and pulled her to him and they hold each other tight and close as a joey in the pouch, the spear pressed along the ghostfella's side. It has been a long time, Ngarungadurung knows to look at them. A very long time since they saw each other something like alive. The ghostfella kisses the top of her head, weeping a thin sap from the eye his totemic tree had given to reconstruct from flowers, and the girl just clings, feeling all she can of an adult not minded to do her harm. Her tears are not terror now, but joy to be with him, sorrow at the circumstance, and sheer, unimaginable relief.

Neither of them are currently listening or looking out for the speared man; Ngarungadurung should get up there. The vicious cruelty of the frozen witches feels like a physical thing here, like a terrible stench he can neither stand nor smell.


[[More importantly, it counts as 'extreme violence' under this game's Content Guidelines...it's not a Freudian spear, though. I will never, ever give detail on the last part of that ceremony, but as the "witch-ghosts" have degenerated into incarnations of mindless, horrifically extreme cruelty over their repetitions it's very likely he's saved her from suffering any more of that sort of thing, too.
edit: noticed a silly typo.]]
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:01, Thu 02 July 2020.

Ngarungadurung stalks to the top of the crater. He must get away from the light if he is to see anything coming. He leaves the huddled ancestors at a discrete distance and walks some paces away. He squats in a position with a good vantage of the surrounds. As he waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness he listens to the bush and wonders absently, can they free the brother too? What will happen to the tableau now that two of its participants are missing? Will the speared man return to the frozen hollow or wander this place, active and malevolent?

It's hard to forget the small boy's terrified stare - aimed at the leader of the ceremony, the one spearing his father, but still... Still. The ghostfella must have tried all he could over the years. It was clearly objects with a fixed time and place that had power here; if he speared the boy, those two witches holding him at least would move with the time the object lent and surely tear the child apart. Hands and teeth and thorn and stone.

Would they stop, after that? They might grip the spearshaft and break it to pieces, pierce their own and comrades' flesh with splinters that might keep them moving on, deathless and forever...

Ngarungadurung notes the strangeness of the way the shadows fall and sways to see around the treetops a little, catching a glimpse of the moon printed double in the sky. Perhaps standing elsewhere the it would look different. There is some stirring of his companions behind him and a muted but tolerant sound of pain.


[[May I have a Listen check, please?]]
This message was last edited by the GM at 21:50, Fri 03 July 2020.

Ngarungadurung rubs his eyes and blinks, squinting at the moon. In the Dreamtime, of course, it was possible to be in a multitude of timelines all at once. Everyone knew that. But few had experienced it. He wondered if that was what was happening now, with the twinned moon and shadows, and what it meant for their safety, if the speared mean was nearby…

He turned to look at his companions.

05:04, Today: Ngarungadurung rolled 61 using 1d100.  Listen (50).

The ghostfella holds Ngarungadurung's spear out towards him and nods in the direction they should go, his niece hefted against his side. The forest sounds as before, though Ngarungadurung thinks he can hear a single distant bird.

Coming up on them, he can see the ghostfella's skin shiny with the small girl's bleeding, though she seems calm now and content, if inclined to cling. She coughs a little as they move off downslope, wary and alert, then manages to talk: "Uncle says you can't understand him...hnn *kaf* -because you're properly alive: he said to- *kaf* -to say it's because when they tried to save us from *hhk* *kaf* -the...the..." she can only flinch from thinking of the witches, but her meaning is clear "-them, the people with my uncle killed one of the Ones Below, before it was born. It made this place...bad. Worse than it was. It...remembers.." she pants a few times, the blood running out of her, and the ghostfella strokes her head.

Ngarungadurung can see her skin becoming like bark, her hair more like old leaf litter. Perhaps she had always been no more than Dreamstuff, the spirit of the place heaped up around a moment of dying pain and the echo of a little girl. A footprint on the Dreaming. Regardless, she reaches out with the impulsiveness of a true child, trying to touch the arm of the man who'd saved her. "I love you," she tells him, then buries her face against the ghostfella's neck, her breathing a shallow rasp.
This message was last edited by the GM at 02:12, Sun 05 July 2020.

Ngarungadurung accepts the proffered spear and says nothing as they walk. He has many questions but doesn’t want to disturb the pair, what might be the little girl’s final dying, and their last moments together for eternity.

Well, maybe just one question.

“What are your names?” he manages a weak, hopefully reassuring, smile at the little girl and places a hand on his heart.”I’m called Ngarungadurung.”

"Blackduck," Yurungay answers, quiet since breathing is hard though she echoes his smile, no blame or fear in her at all. Her uncle rasps something and she listens to his chest, repeats it on: "Uncle doesn't think he should give you his to carry in your head..hh... *kaf* he thinks that to know is to carry the temptation to speak it, and he *kaf* ...hnn, he worries, as he touched you before. He doesn't want you to get sick."

"Hh'hnn," the dead man says.

"-But he says thank you," Yurungay adds. The group falls quiet awhile, their footsteps gently crunching in the hush under the trees. Yurungay holds tightly to her uncle until she has no more blood for consciousness, and even then her fingers stay but slightly moved from where they were. Her uncle goes carefully, carrying her close. At some point her breathing stops.

Gently, so gently it's as though he fears to wake her, the ghostfella starts brushing away his niece's substance: her hair crumbles to a soft black earth. The dead man swallows as though his breath might hitch and sob, though he has none. He moves his thumb harder over her forehead and the flesh acts like no more than dried forest loam, breaking away in bloodless dust and clumps light as rotten wood.

The ghostfella keeps going, always gentle and with so much care and focused love Ngarungadurung is hard put not to think of his own child and their last time at play. Despite the destructiveness of its appearance, the act seems to be one of liberation, the way flames climb a pyre.

At last there is only a moonbright feather between the dead man's fingers, and they have come down far enough to be about level with a creek. Even more cautious now, the ghostfella signs to be wary and dares to step fast across the open space between the creekside trees and a half-visible area around a rise of rock. The water makes it hard to catch specific sounds. The ghostfella kneels beside a small sapling as yet unformed and unconscious of its full nature as a tree. Crooning softly as his broken throat permits, he grips it as though to pull it up, the feather in his palm.

When he lets go, the tree unpulled and unharmed, there is a marking like the blue flash of the feather and he has empty hands. Any trapped remnant of the child sleeps now in the Dream of the white gum sapling, there to sift into its nature like ash to earth. Perhaps they might become a mighty tree.

The ghostfella motions that they should return to a spot less exposed to any roaming devils on the far bank. Once back among the trees he makes as though to grasp Ngarungadurung's arms in earnest thanks, but manages to catch himself in time. Ngarungadurung gathers, though, that the man is very, very grateful.

Ngarungadurung checks the progress of the moon in the night sky. He is not certain what will happen if daylight finds him here in the Dreamtime.

“What next to do?” he quietly asks the ancestor.

More birds are starting to sing, though here they are easy to understand. The ghostfella also looks up, then jerks his head to indicate they should go a way further downstream, keeping to the deep shadows of untended bush. Once he seems satisfied that they're probably out of immediate danger, he draws a line on the earth with a stick and nods that Ngarungadurung should walk over it.

Ngarungadurung sticks out his chin and gives a small nod of understanding. “If I return to where we met, will I find you again?”

The ghostfella thumps his chest with a fist and gestures open-handedly to Ngarungadurung, nodding once. The place had enough connection to the dead man that he would become aware of a living being nearby, though clearly he did his best not to make them sick by his unfound and uncremated presence. This ghostfella had kept a lot of himself, for a dead man out so long.

Repeating the chest thump, Ngarungadurung nods and lowers his eyes, making a gesture of respect for the elder before turning and walking several steps across the line. He doesn’t look back.

There's no real transition, save the sudden early daylight and racket of the birds: a slight feeling of gravity about his bones and a sense of knowledge faded on waking, great understanding drawn back just out of reach, as with the tide. The ground feels more solid underfoot.

There is a distant scream, an echo carried down the nearby creek. Even as the thought forms that he might be able to assess potential danger should he walk quietly down to the bank to his left he smells smoke some way ahead, and the scent of the dung from the large and vaguely dingo-shaped prey animals the whitefellas held captive to carry them about.

Whitefellas. More dangerous than Dreamtime ghosts, most of them. Stinking. Diseased. Predatory. Without morals. But possessed of animal cunning and powerful knowledge.

Ngarungadurung wanted naught to do with them and worked very hard to avoid them. But he was intent on finding his uncle, and his uncle had travelled to this place with the Whitefellas. So Ngarungadurung resolved to stalk ahead and assess the occurrence.

His Dreamtime walkabout and brush with the eternal faded as all visions in sleep, as he carried quietly down towards the edge of the stream, searching for a vantage point.

[[End of Prelude. Please switch to The Creek thread (4a), which you will be able to see presently.]]