shifty louts

Shifty Louts Session 19: Through the Pea Souper to Stormhold

Players

Summary

The Twentyninth of Yellowmonth. The Annual Martial Sung Poothers Yellowmonth Sale.

Monterey meets the Greenlander acrobat Stout Bigguy and decides to head straight for the local CUP building to better understand their job. There they meet the skittish Rocio od Setroya, the CUP Representative in Noonhold. Setroya tells them that Crackpeak is in the mountain highlands, which the locals call Old Mountain.

He then gives them their tools to perform the job: a sharpened spoon-like device.  Setroya says it has some ultratech crystal neuron lances and strong drugs, and a bit of elbow grease; unlicensed neurochirurgeons like our shifty louts can carve away the unpleasantly disobedient bits of a brain.

Setroya says he thinks the town is full of neotrogldytes and they don’t take kindly to strangers with their thousand-island stare.

The group then heads to the local inn, where a sign, illuminated by sputtering lamps, depicts a three-winged dragonfly. The stilts that hoist the low, fat building out of the water are crusted thick with ages of black mud.

Inside, a group of locals has a toad-fighting match between two bullfrogs named Tod and Hopper, a large gourmand who feasts on piles of skewered river eels and swamp reeds, cooked by a barkeep on an engine block.

The Gourmand is in a linen suit and dripping with the sweat of travel, sitting in the corner.

Stout Bigguy begins to put on a mime show for the customers as Monterey attempts to schmooze, which is rebuffed by the locals, while the Gourmand seems more amenable. Eventually the group learns the Gourmand is from the Purple Lands and pays them 90d for the entertainment. Mo

The group leaves and pays 10d for a week's stay at the spartan CUP Barracks Inn.

The Thirtieth of Yellowmonth. The Annual Martial Sung Poothers Yellowmonth Sale.

The 30th of Yellowmonth sees Noonhold taken by a pungent, gnawing, sticky, trickly, oozing fog of blue. A veritable pea souper that cloys to the skin and buildings. The beginnings of Old Mountain are across the river from Noonhold - it's far enough to be a pain in the ass, while close enough to be close!

The group goes to Leonti te Grau and pays him another 15d as a front to further repairs to shuttle them over the river to the beginning incline of Old Mountain. They tell him to meet back here in a week. Monterey is also able to sell a piece of Brother Lump to Leonti, say he’s a saint of the Yellow God.

The trek is awful, clothes sticking to their bodies and swelteringly humid. Eventually they find a track of road guarded by a CUP crab biogolem who asks them for papers and to halt. They eventually learn that the crab biogolem is piloted by the CUP peacekeeper Elga to tell them he is the last one of his squad; the neotrogldytes are hexapods, humans with six limbs, all the better to skitter and with TV screens for eyes!

It becomes clear that Elga is suffering from some sort of mental break as they say the neotrogldytes showed parts of himself. Elga says that “even with the boys blasting plasma at ‘em, the creatures made me feel calm. Reflective. At peace. Then they looked at me. Strange deep eyes. They showed me somethin’ about myself…so I blasted Mack. I hit Jumps upside the head, and he went down. The eyes showed me every shitty thing I ever did. And ever would do. And I changed, man, I changed”.

oldmountain

The group convinces Elga to remain at his post while they find help for him, and run as fast as they can as the track of road is once again subsumed by local flora. The group camps and in the night sees stalwart inquisition civilizers led by Sergeant di Dorementa, a CUP peacemaker, escorting Abyamo Dempo, an exiled Deep Bluelander, reclaim their property of Stormhold.

The group falls in and makes through the ancestral graveyard path to the ruins of Stormhold, a waterfront glass yali covered in blue fungi and weeds next to a waterfall-fed lagoon on the first of Oldsecond.

Aftermath

Treasure Found:

Foes / NPCs Encountered:

Rumors:

Deaths:

XP Awarded:

Notes

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