Oh Gosh! I had heard that Mr. Sir Tao had lost some things recently, so this past Saturday I made my way to Castle Clarntarf in Blackwood to see if I could help him find his stuff while he was occupied with the tournament. There I found Elric, Gundalf, Viet, and my friend Thoril, who were all there to help as well. Tao explained his stuff had been going missing, but he has been pretty sure he hasn’t been losing it.
It’s hard, when someone starts to get old. As an adventurer and a gambler, Mr. Sir Tao is a proud and confident man. But when the ForgetMe’s start to set in… It’s sad to watch.
But he said his stuff was missing, and asked us to go out and look for it. The four of us agreed, but as we were about to go out when we decided to take inventory of ourselves. Thoril was a fighter I guess, but he didnt have any armor. Elric was confident in his ability to get back up, while Gundalf and I were a bit more skilled in helping and healing. Oh Gosh, it wasnt looking to promising. Then Sir Kovacks offered to lend Mr Thoril a suit of armor, and Gundalf lent me a special shield that protected me more as well. Feeling a little more confident like, we went out!
We got out there into the snow and found some wooden creatures. I tried asking them if they had seen anything that may have been Sir Tao’s, but they attacked us! They accused us of making homes from the entrails of their kin, and burning their dead to heat our houses, and oh gosh, well, they’re not wrong, but is that something we really need to worry about? Are all trees people? I’ve met two nice tree people, but do we always have to avoid working with wood?! Oh gosh, oh gosh…
Well as we were fighting them, they started swinging a big ol’ axe at us, then when we managed to get it, it turned out to be Tao’s 6’6” Mythrail Axe. With that, Mr. Thoril was able to cut our way through further. Oh gosh, Thoril sure talks about genocide a lot…
We were able to get to a chest, and as we did there began a cold and encroaching snow. Gundalf and I barely made it out!
Inside we opened the chest and found, oh gosh it was scary, a doll of Mr. Sir Tao, with a knife sticking out of it. There were also a lot of pieces of paper, a torn up plan we had to reassemble.
Plan to get revenge on Tao. Kidnap a carpenter, Steal Tao’s stuff to lure him out, Get the carpenter to make a bunch of wood golems, seemed to be about the gist of it.
Well I didn’t much like the look of that. We took a minute to warm up and get a bite, then left right away! (Mr. Viet stayed behind, he found it more lucrative to run a table at the casino) This time we fought a buncha trolls it looked like. Maybe goblins, but awful tough like ones, they were tossing around a big old rock. Well The four of us figured out a plan. We fought our way through them, which wasn’t very easy. At this point Mr. Elric had used his… Oh Gosh, this is going to be public… His “special powers” to make Thoril and Gundalf easier for him to raise. I’m pretty familiar with this healing, I’m from Stonewood. We fought through these trolls and found warm rings on them. Big old rings. Hoop like.
Well ahead there was a very cold area. Real cold. Elric jumped in and got frozen stiff almost right away! We pulled him out, and took a look. There were a lot of trolls inside. Most of them were shivering something fierce, but some were standing on platforms or standing in hoops! Well we began laying out a path of hoops, and collecting them behind us as we went. It was real tricky. They were fighting us pretty hard and trying to take our warm hoops. And one was so far away, using one of those long spear thingys. A pretty nicely made one. Green and white, the tip glowing a little. It probably took us a bit to long to realize that was another one of Sir Tao’s stolen things. But we recovered it! We tried to turn around, and found our path was blocked off! So we spotted another exit, and slowly got out of that super cold area.
It also got pretty dangerous from a nifty little nature thing. When trees freeze quickly, sometimes the water in them expands to much in one spot, causing it to explode out with wooden Splinters. Well if you got hit with any of those, it hurt real bad like. And just like getting the first stages of Frostbite, even after healing, a limb would still take half a minute or so to get moving again. And even then it wasn’t fun.
Well right on the other side of that cold area was the carpenter! She was bickering back and forth with a cute woodland spirit. They were arguing about man’s use of wood, and how that hurts trees and such. Gosh, it’s a scary argument when you consider how everything is kinda alive. I mentioned that, and my views on it because ever since I visited Teng Hua, I’ve been a little more in tune with the spirits of the land, and the cute woodland spirit talked to me about that for a bit. Gundalf and Thoril spoke to the carpenter, meanwhile Elric enacted the other part of the plan. After a few beats in the conversation, Elric grabbed the frozen treasure chest, and ran! With so many strong monsters we were fighting, we had agreed to grab what we thought was important, and regroup away from scary monsters. We figured a hit and run might suit us a bit better. Unfortunately he ran straight into an invisible wall! After a little more convincing for the carpenter to come with us, the Woodland spirit offered to lead us back to the castle, so we wouldn’t have to back track. Which was good, because it was then that Trolls began to attack again. Luckily we were able to get away. But barely.
We got back in, and began the process to thaw the chest. Layers and layers of ice surrounded it, and inside the ice as we peeled it away, was gold! Gosh, Imagine being so rich that a chest frozen from your house has over a hundred gold in the ice outside it! Well, we managed to that it out, and split the gold between the four of us, 28 for each of us! Oh gosh, that’s almost a third of what Jerrick Farms makes in a year!
Well once the ice was melted, we had to get into the chest, which was puzzling. Very very puzzling to get through. But between Thoril, Elric and I, we made our way through one lock at a time. When the last lock was opened though, oof, I don’t know, but I came back to life about two minutes later… The chest contained some scraps of material that were being used to make wood golems, another one of Tao’s missing items, and a map. The carpenter came back by around then.
The carpenter told us her friend Mary had also been taken, and we had to rescue her. Well, I don’t much like the thought of anyone being in danger, so we suited back up and went out there. Gundalf wasn’t to thrilled to be leaving his gambling table, and oh, could I see why! But he wasn’t about to let us go off on our own, so the four of us went back out. Oh boy, did we…
We squared up, the four of us with two daggers, a three foot, and Tao’s big 6’6” axe, against four wood constructs. Three of them shield fighters, and one with a big sword to match the axe. Welp. We gave it a go. And the first shot landed all well and good on one of their legs, and we started to celebrate, until the next hit on it reset its armor. Then we landed a shot on one of the others and confirmed. It was the four of us versus wooden machines working like clockwork! Up an icy hill. Oh gosh, it was tough.
There was a lot of running away, I’ll tell ya that much. A shuffling on ice kinda running away. There was one shinier faced one that was also heckling and being a touch mean. But they also really didn’t like Sir Tao, which I felt pretty bad about.
In the scurrying we found a sheep, vaguely matching Mary’s description, and it was scared and wouldn’t budge without something to eat. Thoril and Elric ran off to the castle to take bread from the rich, and Gundalf and I… Did our best. I hid with Mary behind a shield belonging to Sir Tao, that bore the Tenguanise sigil for fire, Tao’s Fire Emblem. Eventually some of the constructs got to me, and ya know, I sure did manage to defeat them. I locked up the first one getting real close like with the shield I was borrowing, and figured out the order, and shut it down. I tried real hard to get Mary to get outta there, but she wouldn’t go anywhere without a snack. Elric got back with some bread, and we tried to feed Mary, but the shiny faced one came toward us. Well, I figured we didn’t have much to lose, so I attacked it in the same order, and it worked! It went down, and I found Sir Tao’s magic dagger on it!
At that point we got Mary moving and we got outta dodge! A bit more scurrying, my leg went out on the hill, but I was able to keep going. We got Gundalf, and left while we could. We came back inside, warmed up, got Sir Tao his missing items back, and had a nice evening of gambling and spending time together, enjoying the food, and the excitement of the Stacked Deck Finals behind us.
Oh, and Mary the Sheep followed me home! Now we have three Sheep on Jerrick Farms, Cloak, Blanket, and Mary!