018 - Breathe
Solana stumbles out of the cave, significantly worse for wear than she was going in. It’s nighttime: how long was she down there?
Two soldiers, apparently the only survivors of the entire incident, are waiting for her. They are less than pleased to see her. Solana’s attempts to calm them down go on deaf ears - things would have went about the same whether she showed up or not, right?
One simply walks up to her, and delivers a crushing punch to her stomach. She barely hears their words as she falls: “You’ll be marked for this”.
When Solana recovers, she’s alone. Well, that’s better than dead. Time to get back to Bittermoor…
Bittermoor’s brutalist life does little to soothe the mind, but the body can be mended finely. Enjoying a creamy stew of ingredients she’s sure she’s never heard of, Solana reflects…
With Kjeld finished and the being he summoned handled by the guardians (…?), it’s probably safe to assume no undead are going to cause any more trouble, though this whole “marked” thing that one soldier said is scary. This was a much more dangerous, harrowing experience than ever. Solana has fought: of course she has, getting into dumb battle-wagers for money or dinner is what her life was mostly like, up until Timberhome changed everything. But this was on a much more dire, much grander scale than anything she’s done before. She screwed up a whole lot. Maybe people are right: she’s not very bright. And maybe that’s okay, too. She just has to focus on learning from her mistakes when they happen.
…Thinking about it, she did do an interesting move while escaping. She used that one soldier’s momentum against him, when he tried to charge her into the bone-pit. His heavy armor did him no favors in trying to resist it, either. This seems like… a good idea? What a revelation! If she truly wants to become a hand-to-hand master, on par with any sword or axe, she needs to keep things like this in mind and refine them.
There’s some unfinished business to wrap up here. First, she needs to get back to Olgar’s Stand, and make sure everything’s okay. Then, she completely forgot about the mystic who she did the ritual for. And finally, she never did get an answer about what that newly-appeared iron pillar is all about… oh, and there was… uh…
Solana falls asleep, mid-thought, exhaustion finally getting the better of her.
Her dream stands out to her on awakening: She is walking on a beach - the ragged coasts? The lighting is odd: it’s a solar eclipse. A shadowy figure is traveling the same path. In one hand, an ornate bow, in the other, a skull. It passes by her without a word. She turns around to look at them, but they’re no longer there.
While having breakfast, Solana muses she liked things better when her dreams weren’t crazy and no visions happened. Oh well, this is her life now, isn’t it? She can feel her usual good nature returning with each bite, her next destinations clear and concrete. Up and at ‘em, Solana, there’s some work to do!
Mid-Story Commentary
After the severe and extreme action of the last bit, I took some time to have a wind-down. The whole "revelation" bit ties back into her original background vow, and is a pretty direct homage to the "Revelations" in the Yakuza series of learning new stuff. Like I said in a past commentary, this campaign is going to be very Yakuza/Like A Dragon coded.
This was also a moment where I scrolled back on what happened and tried to remember everything I was supposed to be paying attention to. I think this was the first moment I really sat down and considered that a "story arc" just happened and it was "done". Now was wrapping up and playing the fallout into whatever the next part of the story would be.
Having re-read all this like 4 years after having played it, I'm actually surprised with myself at the story I managed to weave. There's a lot of open-ended parts and unanswered things that are borderline non-sequiturs, but I was obviously setting up future threads for myself so I could explore them later in the campaign. That seems like a pretty good GM thing to do, and I definitely had a sense of pacing at this point. This is me giving myself a medal.