Powerful emotions still existed.
Anleth took a deep breath to slow her heartbeat after the long climb, and looked down with mixed feelings about their future endeavours. “I don’t know,” she mentioned when she noticed Tarbo’s unshakeable, downward gaze. “It looks... steep for beginners.”
“I still can’t believe you talked me into this,” Mioralynthia contemplated similarly from Tarbo’s other side.
“Just stay behind me and in my tracks,” Tarbo said, and his grin grew savage, his gaze even more determined. “You’ll be fine.”
“We’re going to race down a mountain,” she said with a tone well adapted to local temperature, “at break neck speeds —a very fitting term— on two wooden boards set on ice.”
“Lynthia,” Tarbo said, and he tore his gaze away from the snowy descend, “just trust me. It’ll be fun.”
°°°
You sit comfortably in the cozy, warm inn high in the mountains. From the inside, you can see the vast hills of snow and rock, the tall, powerful pine forests, and the gently falling snow crystals twirling through the sky before settling silently with their predecessors on the ghostly white, cold blanket. It is all as the brochure had promised.
Behind the wooden bar, a tall, gruff, wiry elf stands, cleaning the drinking glasses with idle determination and sense of duty. He is a man of few words and fewer pleasantries. He was not mentioned in the brochure. He is the ski instructor.
You gaze over the other occupants of the inn while enjoying your hot beverage; drinks, the gruff elf excels at. You pass the pleasant faces little more than a cursory glance and focus back on your moment of inner peace.
Then, the door sways open, and you see three elves enter the inn with varying amounts of effort. One woman, luckily light of frame, is supported by another woman and a man on their way in.
“Is this your idea of ‘fun’?” Mioralynthia says while being helped into the warm, inviting inn, leaning heavily on her associates.
“Well, I thought it was pretty hilarious,” Tarbo says.
Anleth snorts into a laugh, but quickly covers it with a cough when met with a gaze that can freeze her bodily appendices.
“What I don’t get is,” Tarbo says while helping the sorceress into a comfortable seat, “did you even try to dodge the tree?”
“You never taught us to dodge anything,” Mioralynthia replies, clearly not amused.
“I never thought you would aim for anything.”
°°°
Tarbo hid his chuckle only halfly and headed for the bar and its tender. “Never imagined seeing you doing time behind the bar, Cliff,” he said. “Teaching people to ski didn’t work out?”
“Bartender punk went AWOL,” Cliff replied. “I knew that asswipe punk would be as useful as armour in a swimming contest.”
Cliff was a legend in most senses of the word. He had spent ages in the City Guard, growing a reputation for excessive violence, colorful language, and contempt for lesser authority. He put more criminals behind bars, and in the hospital, than any other officer in the guard. Rumour went that the Black Guard approached him for recruitment, but that he turned them down. Too soft for him.
Now, he had a job as a ski instructor, teaching people to ski without breaking their every bone in their —or anyone else’s— body.
“You wanna drink or are you just gonna stand there?”
“I’ll have a scotch and...” Tarbo peeked over his shoulder at Mioralynthia and Anleth, and then turned back to Cliff. “Something fruity for the ladies.”
“If you don’t want alcohol, you can take one of these glasses and scoop up snow outside. You come to this bar, you get a real drink.”
“Fair enough. Red wine for the ladies.” Tarbo idly looked to his side while waiting for the drinks. He found, wide-eyedly staring back at him from mere inches, a pale woman with flaccid, curled hair, and a vacant gloss in her eyes.
“Cliff,” he said, angling for his friend’s attention. “Is she supposed to be like this?”
Cliff snorted contemptfully. “That’s one of Sacharund’s cooks on holidays.”
“Who?”
“Doctor Sacharund,” a smallish, rounder elf stressed as he approached the bar from the serving side, “runs a respectable institute at the beaches of our nation. He has booked several rooms to test his new treatment in fresh mountain air.”
“They let the nut run the nuthouse,” Cliff added.
Tarbo kept an eyebrow well over regular elevation while an impeccably white-dressed orderly escorted the gazing woman away. Tarbo’s eyes lingered on her for a while, but then he took the served drinks and headed back to his companions.
°°°
Anleth slammed her shoulder into the running, shrieking patient, and tripped him roughly against the wall. She considered she might have hit him a bit harder than was strictly necessary from a law enforcement point of view, but she didn’t feel like taking chances with these people. Not after she had seen the cabin.
An axe laid buried in the back of an anonymous skull that had broken in half but was still held together by the surrounding skin. Kitchen knifes, military blades, and a blunt pencil had all found their way into another one’s organs in alphabetical order.
Anleth had seen murders before. She could reliably tell fear from anger, passion from callousness, spur from calculation. But when she read the words bloodily scrawled across the wall, “They made me do it,” —followed with a calmer, “No, we didn’t,” in the same handwriting— she felt she had stepped into an ugly, stenchful world.
There had been a solemn silence while Anleth and Mioralynthia stood there. However, Tarbo carried different sentiments, and whistled, impressed, when he entered. He hadn’t really seen that much carnage in that small a room before. Did somebody tell a Maibd she looked fat in her dress, he asked. He didn’t need an answer.
°°°
You’re up early this morning. It is not really your habit when on vacation, but the ruckus in the far end of the inn had dulled your otherwise pleasant sleep, so you decided to get up and enjoy a good coffee. You can’t really tell whether the coffee is good, but you now know that caffeine, in its purest form, is a stark white.
When you are informed of recent events, you wonder briefly whether someone overdosed on coffee and snapped. It would explain how they had gotten as high as the ceiling, without a trampoline.
Mioralynthia straightens her robes. She has recovered well from her bark-related impact with Mother Nature, though her mood seems not to have warmed. Or thawed, for that matter. Such is the way with some sorceresses.
“The doctor has been murdered, and we haven’t been able to apprehend everyone involved,” she says. “Although some have surely escaped into the thenwhile night, we’ve also found your ranks... slightly swelled.”
You look around at the mention, holding back a scoff, and look over the other faces. Few seem familiar, and it dawns with you that you couldn’t reliably tell who you’ve seen before, and who you haven’t. Any one of them could be one of the frightfully calm madmen that caused the slaughter. Others have clearly come to the same realisation. But then, surely—
“We have no capable psychologist,” Mioralynthia breaks the silence. “The fact remains that, while we have caught some, we have not caught them all. Some of them are hiding among you. We need to find them, and fast.”
Mioralynthia nods once towards Anleth, and adds, “our captain will take whomever you nominate in her custody. She may not be a the capable psychologist we need, but she is a very capable interrogator. If you find them, she will make them talk.”
A silence fills the chilly morning air. You’re perhaps a bit miffed at the lack of ceremony but, in hindsight, what really could you expect from the situation? You suppose this is where you start searching for those responsible.
And so, recently awakened to the precarity of the situation in which you find yourself, you prepare to make the first moves.
________________
- Players
- Drainial
- SleekDD
- Raneth
- Sidorio
- Zardock
- Belial
- Kefka
- Draknir
- Katash
- Deroth
- LordAnubis
- sassmaw
- gramash
With 13 players, 7 constitute a majority.
It is now Dawn. Dawn ends at Thursday, 20h00 GMT. People who have not posted by then are removed from the game.
________________
Welcome to the Frosty Dozen! Okay, so there are thirteen of you. Sue me. Sixteen isn't a dozen either.
A note of warning: if Night sets in and no-one has been voted off, the infiltrators get an extra kill. That's right: if you don't pick someone at Day, they will pick someone at Night.
Regardless of whatever choice expletives you have in mind right now, I will refer to this as a gentle incentive.
Good hunting, and good luck!