Author: Erin Klitzke

So Tolwyn’s awake but bad things are still coming our way.  Mei and I send Grace down to the castle bailey (she was at a heavily wounded health level at that time — a little worse off than my own wounded level, but what’re you going to do?).  We’re still down three men — Tyche hasn’t joined us from Avalon yet (we left her behind with Nicodemus) and Albert and Amarant are lost in the city someplace.  Great, just great.  Albert shows up poisoned and whimpering as a werewolf.  That gets fixed.  He has no pants and pouts as usual.

And then the crap starts landing.  Gargoyles, giant hellbats, and the Dark Lady–who looks exactly like a dark mirror of Tolwyn.

You can imagine what the first words out of my mouth were.

Epic combat ensues.  Things decide I’m tasty and chew on me.  About the fourth time, as I’m going to go stab something in the face…the something I was about to stab suddenly has its head explode.

Thanks, Grant.  I was about to vent my frustration on that.  So not only am I being rescued by my potential love interest, I’m also being shown up by him, since I’m not really a combat oriented character in the first place.  So much for somehow convincing him I’m not some sort of damosel in distress (though I’m sure it went miles toward convincing him to actually believe that I’m not Allison, his wife).  So before I can run off and stab something, he spins me around and points and says, “We have problems.”

Well, duh.

And then I notice that Mei is out of her suit and yelling in Chinese and think “Oh man.  Not again.”  So I go to her.  And try to get her to reconnect.

It works on the second try!

Of course, then there’s a dragon crashing down into the middle of the city, fighting something fugly and made of plants.

And then it decides Albert is a tasty treat and flies off with him.

Then, Tyche and the fey pull a Gandalf at Helmsdeep and come to our rescue.  The batle turns in our favor, though Tolwyn’s not in good shape and the Dark Lady isn’t anywhere to be seen.  Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.  But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Tyche has a ritual that’ll fix the seal on Draconis but at the same time seal off the Realm of Magic from the rest of the world.  I, of course, don’t like this much, especially when she says that she’s staying in the Realm of Magic.  Knee-jerk reaction is “there has to be another way.”  Eventually, I accept the inevitable, though I don’t like it.

Here’s the kicker:  There has to be a regal sacrifice.  Someone of regal blood has to become the living barrier between the material world and the Realm of Magic.  Amarant (being the Emperor a la his Tarot card) volunteered.

Of course, I’m liking this plan less and less every second.  But I’m not getting a vote.  So I get Tyche on the guilt train so she’s not happy, either.

In the end, we go down two characters — Tyche goes into the Realm of Magic to stay and Amarant becomes the barrier.  I told Tyche to kick some frog god ass for me.

And then there were four (well, five including Grant, who was scandalized that I forgot him in my protests against the plan–I countered with “Are you going to stick around?” and got an answer I could live with).

And we’re supposed to go to France next?  We’re doomed.

Well, crap.  I’m in the process of updating Ren’s journal after last night’s session and several weeks of not having between-game journal time (because all of our previous cut points had zero downtime involved–and I do mean zero downtime; we’ve been cutting in the middle of combat scenes, or right between combat scenes that were blending together with scant amount of time between to do anything other than patch up wounds).  It’s going to be a huge entry, because lots happened.

Aysle, when we got there, was in a state that can only be described as “totally screwed.”  London was beseiged by the Armies of Dark and the seals on Draconis were breaking down.  Oh, and the fey had all disappeared.  None of this was a happy thing at all.

So guess who drew the suicide mission to find Queen Mab, leader of the fey, and talk her into fixing the seals on Draconis?  That’s right, us.  So off we go to find our way to the Realm of Magic.  Adventures in fey lines ensue (walking through walls what?) until we come to Ys, where I banished an evil frog god back to whence it came (it’s still angry about that, by the way, and wants to eat my soul).  There were zombies there, wandering around half underwater.  So we fight zombies to get to a place where Tyche can open a doorway into the Realm of Magic.  Except there’s a problem.  Tyche screws something up and can’t open the door.  So Albert opens it.

Albert is never allowed to do that again ever.  Ever.  And I mean that.

We wander aimlessly through dark parts of unseen areas of cosms until Nicodemus finds us (he’s a half-pint of a fey that’s quite literally on speed) and leads us through the Wasteland into Queen Mab’s realm.  At which point she tells us that she can’t help us and sends us on a suicide mission to help her so she can be freed up to see what she can do about our problem.  Caught between a rock and a hard place, we head out to Avalon to fight some demons who are trying to break through into the Realm of Magic.

Demons.  I hate demons.  Mei hates them more, I think–no, I know.  Grace gets more pwned.  I get pwned.  Explosions ensue, but not before I scare myself doing some sort of crazy gun move that belongs in a Wachowski Brothers film (note to self, talk to Grant about that later).  So we manage to stop the demons from breaking into the Realm of Magic.  Great!  Three Sisters of Avalon send us back to the outskirts of London.

The seige is not going well.  The bad guys have breached the outer city and are now beseiging the keep.

For the first time since he got the damn thing, Amarant’s plasma rifle became a good plan.  Imagine Mike’s excitement.

We cut our way through the city and three of us make it to the walls and get hauled up by Tolwyn, who’s directing the seige…who falls on her head in the middle of a rainstorm when bad things are trying to eat our faces.  Of course.  It’s been raining since we left Avalon, by the way.  Lovely English weather.  We get her up on the wall and then I spot smudges on the horizon.  More bad things incoming.

Good thing I have a skill for shouting orders and making people listen to me.

We manage to wake up Tolwyn, who agreed that they were bad things.  And it only got worse from there before it got barely a little bit better.

And I do mean barely better.