Unfinished Business

ACT 8 Unfinished Business

After the events in Sleepy Hollow, the Manhattan Knights settle in with the White Tail tribe and lick their wounds for a few days. Thanks to the nature of the Living Lands and Whitetail’s supreme healing powers, the trio mend far faster than any humans should.

Kimiko seethes at the wretched defeat and her near death, while Sasha is just joyous that she faced down a Tharkoldu and lived. Carlisle is intrigued by a new monster to hunt and sets about building a new set of holy bullets. He just needs to aim with more care and he’s sure he can take the monster down.

Lost in their own thoughts and disappointment they are not the only ones with issues. The return of the army from Long Island is taking longer than expected and the Shaman in the camp have been having nightmares and visions.

Visions of WOE

Interestingly the Shaman have been having differing visions of doom, but mainly two of the same vision have been charade amongst them.

IN the first vision, the undrinkable water [ocean] to the east rises up and consumes the lands, flooding everything and driving the edeinos west, but in the west all of the plants and animals are dying, withering away to barren rock, and the bones of the dead still try to rise.\

The second vision is of a globe of darkness in the north that keeps growing and everything that goes into it never comes back out.

Whitetail tries to calm his people as these visions increase. To wit, he tries to spin the interpretation that the vision of the water rising is probably linked to the creatures in eastern Long Island that Baruk is battling… and the death to the west is probably just warring with the humans to take the Earth. As to the north, he dispatches a team of scouts to go and see if anything is amiss.

Timing is Everything:

Even as Whitetail manages to calm his people and get things settled, several of his north ranging scout parties return. One scout is from far up north and he returns accompanied by more local hunter scouts. Both have interesting stories.

The edeinos from the far north brings word from Niagara that Baruk’s Redjaws have destroyed a camp of “rebel” edeinos that were ferrying humans into Canada. Having dealt with the upstarts he is moving more forces into the Niagara region. They seem to be looking for something in the area.

The hunter scouts then tell the story of an odd village that has started to grow in what was once Binghamton, New York. Three black monoliths stand in a field and a bunch of cavemen have been worshipping them. Within a few months a make shift wall was built around the field and hundreds of edeinos and cavemen have converged on the monoliths.

Our heroes, the Manhattan Knights, hear all of this and they are interested in what is going on. But they can’t handle the taste of defeat, nor of the suffering they saw in Sleepy Hollow. They must return and they must kill the demon.

Mouthwash

The taste of defeat is too bitter. And as much as they coach it in terms of finding other survivors, or in releasing the demon from his own living hell. (He was rotting and rusting away after all trying to graft flesh and steel to his body to survive). They just really can’t handle the ass kicking they took.

Whitetail offers his full support, and within minutes they are once again in the truck and heading back to Sleepy Hollow. Only this time they have Shiela and 3 of her fellow tiger riders ranging ahead, and flanking them is Samuel Magnusson and two other “knights” on velociraptors. They’ll overwhelm the demon with speed and power!

In the few days, the road has choked further into jungle and the once half an hour trip has now taken a full hour. But they soon arrive at the exit ramp that is still defying the cosm and the main raid that is still a paved path to the junk-tent.

A horde of the cobbled together undead block the road ahead of them, but the calvary smash through the poor creatures and we make short work of the obstacle.

Second Time…

The rotting demon pulls himself out of his tent as they bring their truck to a halt a safe distance away. Once again, the Knights plan on running in on foot while their calvary swarms around them handling the demon’s minions. More undead and harvesters stumble out of the tent. The tharkoldu lumbers forward pulling his hood back from his disease ravaged face and he almost seems to smile. Perhaps having people to slaughter takes his mind off of the pain of living in a Cosm with no magic and no technology.

CHARGE!

While the other animal riders race out to either flank to take on the undead, Sheila and Magnusson race up the middle with the Manhattan Knights, and the [catgirl] takes to the air with her wing-board. Magnusson holds off to the rare to be the last, covering the heroes on foot. But Sheila spurs her white tiger ahead in a massive lunge and strikes the demon while passing by. Her flint tipped spear rebounds off a metal plate to no effect.

THERE WAS A FIGHT!

The hellraiser chains erupt out of the ground and start lashing around the demon and Sasha is ready for that. She moves close enough to draw the attention of the chains, and uses her telekinesis and her own body as bait, to twist the chains around her and send them back toward the demon. It actually stymies his progress as he was moving to charge into Carlisle and Kimiko.

Carlisle fires a perfectly aimed shot, blowing a massive hole through the creature’s right eyes, and then in a blink, reality shifts and the shot went wide. Carlisle curses and loads a second shot.

Kimiko: “Bending reality is not a limitless talent. He’s using all of his energy to just keep his body alive. Sooner or later he will not be able to heal.” To prove her point she moves into melee with the monster and her electric katana tears a wide gash into his flesh. Reality does warp again, but this time a wound remains, albeit far shallower and not life threatening.

Magnusson rushes in on his raptor, and at the last minute he jumps off swinging a massive club at the demon and the raptor leaps to claw with its feet. The demon dodges both attacks and turns its attention back to Kimiko.

Demon’s Riposte

The opening attacks have not been wholly effective, but the demon only unleashed his chains which did nothing. So it’s a wash.

The demon untangles himself from the chains and sends them out in a burst, he also pulls a long chain whip off from around his waist and whips that out. Four chains snake out in each direction. The first whips past the raptor, the second nearly misses Carlisle, the third one hooks Sheila and yanks her off the back of the tiger and smashes her to the ground. And the final, whip shot takes Magnusson in the face and knocks the massive bronze hero to the ground.

Four attacks and only 50 percent accuracy. But two of their allies are down. [Catgirl] buzzes past on her wing-board and slings a stone right into the demon’s temple. He ignores her.

Distraction!

Our knight’s go to push forward and suddenly the ground heaves and the road buckles and they have to fight to stay on their feet. A huge section of asphalt falls away into a pit and a number of undead and tiger riders tumble in with it.

Despite this happening a dozen meters off to their left it does distract the knights long enough for the Demon to attack again. Lashing out with his chains and then bringing up his other arm and exposing the gun hidden within the flesh.

The raptor is once again missed by a chain, and two of the other chains come for Kimiko, but the lithe samurai ducks them, while they don’t tear her flesh one of them does knock her down. The energy blast from the gun strikes the bounding raptor and explodes it.

Knight’s Press Forward!

They recover from the heaving ground and press forward. Sasha activates the bio-armor unit that she had implanted back at the dome. Her body is covered in an alien bio-mesh and she triggers her psionic gift to boost all of her ally’s defenses, and then during on even further reserves of strength she steps forward and fires a massive blast of bioenergy from her chest.

The demon staggers back and his robes are burned away, revealing his rotten corpse body and broken cybernetics. While some of his flesh does also burn in the light, he is not wounded by the blast.

Carlisle aims his rifle and goes to pull the trigger, and immediately disconnects from his reality. Becoming a slope headed caveman in an instant. He doesn’t know what to do with the strange club in his hands but it seems familiar.

Kimiko and [Catgirl] attack from opposite sides in a rapid pattern of sword slashes and slingshot attacks. They start off ineffectual but on the last stroke Kimiko opens a wide wound in the demon’s belly, spilling out pus, maggots and rotting entrails.

And the TURN

Carlisle snaps back into reality, the cavemen banished in a second but he’s lost his train of thought and he still needs to remember what’s going on. He drops to a knee and takes stock.

Kimiko and [Catgirl] try another series of attacks and it is met with a strong defense. Sasha screams and reaches up to the chest of her armor and pulls the plates further apart and fires a second, even more massive, blast of pure energy from her chest. Kimiko and [Catgirl] have to hurl themselves back from the blast and the entire form of the demon disappears in the white light.

The blinding flare dies down… and the demon is still standing. But now all of the rotted, ruined flesh has been burned away. Only the skeleton, lumps of burned muscle and all of the cybernetics are still standing. The machinery and the muscles refuse to stop fighting. The skeletonized demon lurches forward and its hand finds the large metal junk staff. It lashes the staff out to hit Kimiko in a solid blow. But Kimiko draws on her own reserves of possibility energy and warps reality so that she was missed. It’s a final middle finger to the demon who repeatedly ignored all of their damage in the first fight.

Just DIE already

The skeleton rears back to strike Kimiko again, and Carlisle finally has his wits about him. He shoots the demon and the wound closes again. Reality still favoring the demon. Sasha is out of her mind and she runs forward and punches the demon, to little effect.

Demon: “HA! I am Sardu the Undying. You will never kill me; nothing can kill m—”

Kimiko cuts his head off in a single stroke and the body falls to the ground. Apparently he is powerless without his head.

They all stand, tense, waiting for the demon to raise… 6 seconds… 12 seconds… 18seconds. Overhead [Catgirl] is doing a victory dance on her wing-board when she suddenly disconnects and goes feral. The board and her body crash into the ground at two different locations. Kimiko rushes to her fallen and is forced to sedate the suddenly feral and mindless cat.

The aftermath is almost worse than the fight

With Sardu not moving, Sasha and Carlisle look to their companions. Sasha runs off toward the new sinkhole to check on the tiger riders that fell into the pit. As she goes though, she tries to use the scanners in the bio-armor and the Living Lands does not like that. She disconnects, hard, and can’t find herself.

She staggers and the armor withdraws back into the node in the back of her neck. IT takes a supreme effort of will [and burning a level in Reality] for her to come back to herself. She falls to her knees at the edge of the pit and is happy to see that all of the tigers and their riders are still alive in the pit and actually just finishing a fight with a bunch of undead creatures.

Carlisle gets to Sheila and Magnusson and gets them patched up and stabilized using the medi-scanner from the Dome. All is well and within a few minutes they are back on the truck and headed up the street.

They knock on every door and gather what few people they can coax out of hiding and head back to the Whitetail Tribe. Amazingly they only lost a single raptor and head [Catgirl] go feral. A resounding victory.

Tying up the loose end

Returning to the tribe after only being gone for less than 3 hours, Whitetail is impressed and asks that they tell the story of Sardu the Undying. Carlisle and Sasha take care of this while Kimiko asks the shaman if they can send a message among the spirits to the Catpeople. Within the hour, a portal opens and a panther headed catman steps out. He will take [Catgirl] back to her people and her own cosm where she will slowly reconnect to her own reality and be healed.

With that handled, Kimiko joins in on the celebration and they act out the part where Sardu says he can never die and Kimiko just decapitates him and walks away.

They drink some moonshine and settle in and their final thoughts for the day are toward their next goal. The Manhattan Knights think that these Obelisks/ Monoliths need investigating. It sounds more like a cult than a village is growing around them.