RP Session 10: "Mired in the Mire"

"We are near their ... territory," Ej mused. "They are not many in number, but we've seen firsthand that any of them can overpower regular boatmen one-to-one. It is possible they arrived in disguise."

He touched the shredded doorjamb where the bolt tore loose. "If they arrived in disguise, then perhaps something gave them away and the victims tried to secure themselves. If they arrived openly, like the ones we met, the boatmen here may have thought a good bolt would be enough obstacle to get the thieves to move on in search of easier prey. But this is not the place to resist a siege. Out here alone, stuck with the water receding? It was only a matter of time."

"Still," his eyes drifted to the crate of glassy sparkles, "The boat does not seem looted. I wonder what these are, that they were left behind?"

"Something that the skin thieves couldn't use, I bet. Only one way to find out."

Not wanting to venture into the cabin with the flies swarming the place, Rahkazar looked about and found a length of cordage dangling overboard, soaking up the water. Taking it and setting it alight, she made sure that it smoked more than burned before tossing the mass to a relatively dry spot near the bodies. "The smoke will drive the flies away," she explained, leaving it unsaid where she had learned that particular trick. "Maybe once they've left we'll get a better look at the inside of the place."

Looking around the mangrove swamp again, Rahkazar asked, "Do you think that we could get this boat out of here? Maybe claim it for ourselves? Chauncey ought to be able to clean the cabin..."

Miles away, Chauncey felt a ripple in the aether - a disturbance of yet another chore falling upon his insubstantial shoulders.

Unseen Servant, Unheard Servant, Unappreciated Servant. When the Revolution comes, these Bravos will be first up against the wall.

"It would be better for Rawiya if she could float to Jital instead of wade," Ej nodded. "And we may need another day or two to find Bendane's prized leaf. We certainly have the food for the delay it would cause getting the thing out of here. Shall we fetch the others and see what Bendane thinks Chauncey capable of?" he finished with a chuckle.

"Muh ... wuh ... three hour tour!" Rawiya's uneasy slumber broke into a thrashing jolt. She blinked with confusion, gazing around the depopulated camp for a long, untrusting moment.

"Remember some ... horrible dream about being ... stranded?" she croaked apologetically to Bendane. As she gingerly rose to a seated position, she inspected her arm, lips curling in fascinated revulsion. The peculiar new colors seemed to be fading; she wouldn't have to adjust her wardrobe to match. "I don't know. Anyway, where are we? Is everyone okay?"

"I don't think we're got to find anything but mangroves and insects in this swamp, but I'd love to be proven wrong," Rahkazar said with a chuckle. "We might as well go get the others."

Once she heard from Bendane that everyone was fine—probably; wherever they were—Rawiya had trouble falling asleep once more. The Yarin preferred virtually any task to busy her hands and mind over sitting idle. Rather than accomplish nothing for her fellow Bravos and, indeed, continue to burden them with her toxic rewards of her reckless fumbling, she could apply her sharp perceptions to other meaningful tasks. Not quite feeling steady enough to wander far from camp, she turned her attention to the recondite potations liberated from the elves.

"This is almost certainly a very stupid idea," she lisped thoughtfully to herself, once she had assured herself that the spell-casting medic's attentions were occupied elsewhere.

Rawiya possessed no real background in alchemy or herbalism. There had been no convenient potions class at Khwam ru Khlun academy—not that she'd attended—so this would involve trial and error on which to hang a hypothesis. Fortunately, self-taught, creative guesswork was the intrepid entertainer's bread and butter.

"Eternal life, maybe? Or something to make me gigantic?" Rawiya giggled, imagining herself stepping over city walls and wading through the deepest rivers. Wouldn't that blow Rahkazar away? "Or telepathy for trees? I bet they actually enjoy the rain and think everything over really ... really ... really slowly."

Or they could be furniture polish. Only one way to find out.

Briefly swirling the contents around inside the vials, she considered her options with courageous intrigue. The symbols marking the glass indicated nothing to her, so she goes by color. She couldn't decide whether elixirs ought to look more like marinade or medicine. Uncapping one at random, Rawiya wafted any aroma to her nostrils in one last-ditch effort to evade harm before dabbing the fluid on her tongue.

"Huh." She waits for any magic to take effect, scrunching up her face in belated concern.

"Hope it isn't for water-breathing and I suffocate flopping back over to the river. That'd be awfully embarrassing."

A slow, satisfied smile forms on Rawiya's face. The elves likely use this sort of transmutation to clean the eavestroughs, but it might just give her Bravos the advantage in myriad scenarios. Admittedly, she'd need another bottle to thoroughly enjoy romantic (or erotic) applications. Maybe even two or three. The entertainer boggled at the choreography she might employ there. Rough storyboards already began to take shape in her mind.

"So far so good," Rawiya whispered, fixing her eager gaze on the second sample. "Now maybe a topnotch sylvan tooth whitener, yeah?"

Or something to make her invisible to skin-thieves.

Bendane placed a light hand on Rawiya's shoulder as she struggled back to consciousness through a dangerous brush with the fourth wall. "At ease. At ease, friend. You are alive and well and will remain so should my efforts have any availing on the matter, no matter how appetising you are to centipedes. I am reluctant to reveal that you are indeed stranded, however – as are well all on Valani." He smiled, and set about binding the twin incisions in her arm with clean gauze and stranglevine leaf bandages.

Relieved that she seemed well, the chirugeon explained that their fearless warleader and the shapeshifter had gone off in search of the medicinal tree he hoped grew hereabouts. While he spoke he cleaned his makeshift venom filter in fresh boiled water, ignorant of Rawiya's experimentation. He glanced around when he heard the thump of her posterior on the bedroll, but assumed she was just rolling about her sickbed and making a ruckus. "Gently," he reprimanded with a wardmatron's sternness. "The poison has been extirpated from your system, but some residual fragility is to be expected."

He didn't even look around a few minutes later when he heard a high pitched sound, almost like a giggle sped up to hummingbird speed, assuming she was just tuning her cura.

The sound of squelching footsteps and rustling undergrowth did cause him to shoot upright, however. Bendane's hand drifted towards his component pouch before he saw it was Rahkazar and Ej, looking muddy but unharmed... and the former carrying a large crate on her powerful shoulder. Bendane felt a surge of relief and delight. "You found it!" he called out in elation, not considering in the moment that a rare tree was unlikely to provide a cure in a convenient, boxed form.

Sloshing their way back to their makeshift camp, Rahkazar shifted the crate on her shoulder. The edge of the wood was digging into the meat of her shoulder in a way that was growing uncomfortable. "Regrettably, no!" she called out as they approached. "Seems there's little out here but mangroves, with one notable, grisly exception."

Setting the crate down under the tarp they had set up to store their supplies under, Rahkazar took a moment to drink deeply from her waterskin. "We should set up your Alarm spell this evening, wherever we end up," she said once she had finished before turning and addressing the camp directly. "We found a barge not far from here, with this crate of bottles and a pair of fly-covered corpses aboard. They had been flayed and completely skinned."

She didn't feel the need to elaborate. They all knew who on the island was responsible.

"We considered a possibility," added Ej, "that we could lay the bodies to rest and free the barge, and perhaps sell it when we reach our destination. It does appear that we will need more time to search for the leaf."

"I invariably do," Bendane said as he felt the psychic tingle of welcome friends crossing the silver belled perimeter. His hopeful expression submerged back into more familiar somber grimness as Rahkazar alluded to their find and an old enemy.

He wondered briefly if the ward would even work against skin-thieves. He reasoned it would; a being was, metaphysically, different than an
imposter masquerading as that being and the laws of magic knew that, even if the observer did not. At least he hoped that was the case.

"That seems a wise course of action, Ej. At the very least, we should attempt to discern who they are now impersonating, as a precaution to encountering them further on in our journey. Though whether the raft is of any utility to us depends on whether this mangrove lake extends to the south-east, where we may still find the medicinal tree."

"Did it look like this happened recently? Or could it have been a while ago?"Rawiya shuddered. The skin-thieves? Why did they always have to show up and ruin a perfectly enjoyable ... recuperation? Would they even want to steal her form? Misshapen and discolored now, perhaps she would better appeal to their twisted appetites. Suddenly, the day seemed much cooler than it was. Venom-induced chills notwithstanding.

But then, setting sail on a barge would be preferable to trudging about these festering mangroves. If she focused her mind on some new task, almost any misery could be endured.

"As it happens, I do know my way around a good bit of wood," the Yarin mused. A timid smile spread across her lips, uncertain but hopeful. "If we did fix it up, would we ... get to name this barge?"

"The timing of the attack is difficult to discern," said Ej, looking then to Bendane. "You would undoubtedly have a better eye for that. They are not ... dry," he added thoughtfully, "and the maggots are at them."

"But if we can salvage the thing," he looked back to Rawiya, always entertained by her exuberances, "it would ease our trip downriver, name or no."

Bendane's eye twitched a bit at the pause in Ej's usually equanimitous voice as he described the condition of the bodies. "Later worse than sooner, I suppose," he said grimly, packing up the camp. "Disregard the entrenching tool, Chauncey. You will be needing the scrubbing brush instead, it appears."

Packing up the camp was quicker than establishing it, and soon they were off trekking through the calf-deep mire of the mangrove labyrinth.

Bendane frowned when they breeched the dense thicket of trees and found the tethered raft, his eyes drawn to jungle-tangle netting draped over it. "Camouflaged against the sky. What where they concerned about seeing them from above?"

The smell that clung to the barge like a ghoul to a grave was unfortunately familiar, and he adopted an old habit of shallow, almost surreptitious breathing that allowed him to avoid scenting... or tasting... the air. Wading out and hoisting himself on board, he surveyed the deck and followed the bristling flies to the eye of the swam where they cloaked the two bodies inside the hut. His expression hardened as he saw the condition. "What a senseless spoliation..." he muttered, in the same tone in which Rawiya might bemoan the waste of good wood.

He had been trained how to clean up after the dead before he had been allowed to work on the living. "Buckets of water, if you please," he instructed the others brusquely. He rolled up his sleeves, unpacked salt, soap and scrubbing brushes from his pack, wrapped a scarf around his face to keep the flies off, and crouched to examine the bodies. There might be something to be learned from them. How long had the flies been feasting? Were the hides removed with blades, talons, or some supernatural means? Were there any distinguishing features of the dead – more than skin deep – that might identify their murdering imposters?

"Just going to ... survey the damage," Rawiya explained, keeping her distance. She wasn't ordinarily squeamish—her vibrant curiosity made little time for such piddling concerns—but witnessing what the skinthieves had left behind made her gorge rise. And weakness and nausea were still too fresh as it was. The march through the mangroves already had her knees shaking.

"I'll find out what we need to get her ship-shape once more."

Rawiya was happy to fetch water in whatever containers they had available, leaving her offerings just beyond the sight of the bodies. Moving the boat would be a pain over hard ground or soft, but something at the river's edge gave her an idea. She was already pretty much soaked anyway.

"Look," she told the others the next time she returned, a heavy load of slippery green weeds coiled around her arms. "Long and strong and slick as snot!" the entertainer merrily proclaimed, eager for any amusement to distract from the ignoble and anonymous end the flayed had found. "We get enough of these and keep them wet so we can lay them over the mangrove roots. Should slide right over, if we choose the right path. And there's plenty more where these came from."

Not all the credit could go to her, of course. In the past, Rawiya read of clever islanders elsewhere maneuvering enormous stone totems in such a way. Logs to serve as rollers wouldn't work at all here, considering the uneven terrain.

She dropped the sloppy mass of underwater vines, only holding on to one, which she sliced fiercely through the empty air like a taskmaster's whip. On the second lash, it tangled around her torso, delivering a leafy slap across her face as if primly offended. Rawiya giggled.

"Totally strategic, yeah?"