After the Win Game Thread

More on the way. Hide!

The big guy called some friends. They are coming this way!

I then look down the shaft to see if it would be better to hide down the tree or elsewhere.

 

You stretch as far as your senses will go downward, but your panic is limiting your eye -- there's nothing but ladder for a couple of hundred feet down. Looking up, however, you can see that there's some sort of observation platform very cleverly hidden halfway up this tree, accessible by ladder.

 

A hunting blind? Platform ^^^! (Emphatically pointing with tentacles.)

Hide! The giants are coming! And I have no idea what they shot before me.

 

Cleverly hidden eh? Burn it with Pervert Fires! (Only as a last resort if we cannot find a way up there.) The ladder is too big by far to climb. Anyone have some rope?

 

Hearing the words of the crazed woodcutter called Billy, Oleandre comes closer to the hole.

"Still, with creatures of this size running about, it's easier for us if we get under the ground. Whatever the hell is down there, we'll only have to worry about it and not about getting hit with a ballista shot because some giant's a blind ass."

He takes a look down the hole, then up it. He squints his eyes for a moment as if he was trying to make out details of something that was not quite visible, and speaks again.

"The bastards are ten times our size. If everything is, then we're safe from nothing above the ground. Below, we can at least handle rats and spiders."

Having heard the tentacled man's plea for a ladder, Oleandre ponders in his thoughts for a moment and speaks again.

"If that's good enough for you, yeah. But I don't think it's good enough to take us all there."

Oleandre uses "Projectile Storm"

And, just like before, he gets his daggers out and starts throwing them, creating something resembling a ladder. On the bottom, the impromptu ladder is very orderly, but as the distance increases and the angle becomes more and more awkward, it starts becoming slightly irregular. Not enough for the tentacled man to be unable to use them, but one wouldn't want to send any unmodified humans to climb up that sort of thing.

 

"De man's right about going down. Might be safer, all said. But someone out ta take a wee look around up top, don't you dink? Make sure nothings coming too close."

Billy eyes the ladder. "Of course, he's right about it being a tough climb on dat. No worries, Ol' Dander, I got a bit of rope to climb on. May be safer den climbing knives for us heavier folks..."

Billy pulls a length of rope from his belt and pulls a collapseable grappling hook from the top of his boot and slights it up the ladder, then starts climbing up towards the platform.

 

I go up to check things out in advance of Chinny. It is always quicker to go down than up for those limited to walking and climbing. I have no idea how I get there, but I get to the platform and see.... ?

 

So, Billy and Argus are headed up. Argus easily out-climbs Billy as his limbs seem to be in several places at once, and his spread-out weight doesn't even begin to phase the 'ladder' of sai, tent pegs, butter knives, and vampire-killing stakes that Oleander has buried in the wall.

Omni, up above, you find a massive page that looks torn out of a spiral notebook. It's not written in any langauge you understand, unfortunately. It has a picture of a dude with a bow on it. He looks kind of stupid. You're still puzzling over this when Billy arrives next to you.

Everyone else hears (and Omni and Billy see) a huge rumble as the aforementioned giant hunter begins to run in the direction his prey bolted -- which seems to be more-or-less straight toward you.

 

I go to the other side of the giant and scream "He went this way" and hide behind anything I can find.

 

At the sight of the giant incoming Billy's jaw drops open (not much, but some) and he says, "Bugger. I always did wonder where de footies come from."

He looks around but Argus is gone already. Crazy tentacle guy moves way to fast for Billy to be comfortable with it. The sheet of paper gives him an idea, though. He quickly folds it in half once and pokes his grappling hook through one corner and tangles it in place. Then he runs the rope around to the other corner and pulls out another grapple. In seconds, he's improvised a makeshift parachute.

"Here's hoping dis ain't de dumbest ding you ever done, Billy." With that he wraps the rope around both arms and jumps off the platform, falling down the side of the tree and trying to kick off branches to slow his fall. Hopefully he won't hit the ground too hard...

 

Of all things, Ililani starts singing, and as she does a briar thicket forms between her and the giant. Still singing, she follows the party.

 

When earth below his feet started rumbling, Oleandre felt rising sense of uneasiness. His sense of danger wasn't telling him to do anything, but even then the giant men were dangerous. Because with their size, it would be easy for them to crush them all accidentally, without even noticing that they were there.

It didn't really improve when he heard the tentacled man shout "He went this way", as it was doubtless that this wouldn't improve their situation in any way. They were too small to achieve anything against something a magnitude bigger than them, it was as simple as that. Which was the reason why they needed to either go underground, or above the ground, so that they could either find an alternate route to wherever they were supposed to go, or observe from a safe spot until the giants went away.

Come to think of it, what exactly was their destination? That he would probably be able to learn if he could read the piece of paper they got from the dragons back then. And what exactly were they supposed to achieve here? And what exactly was the reason for them being different from the rest of those people back then? He doubted it had any connection with his rather... unique way of defeating Lord Dredmor, but it wasn't like he could check that.

It was then that he heard someone most decidedly female start singing some song. He turned his head back.

"I don't think it's a right time for performing, lady."

Oleandre turned back and started speaking again, this time to nobody in particular.

"Guess someone's gotta go and check the damn bottom of the shaft. If you don't hear stuff explode after I get down there, get some sort of rope and get your asses to me."

After that, he took a dagger into each of his hands and jumped towards the wall, trying to slow his fall by jamming the daggers into it. As soon as one weapon got stuck in the wall, he let it go and took another one, repeating the process as he fell towards the unknown.

 

The Senator is utterly confused. He notes that two people went up while only one went down, so he decides to follow Flingy down the shaft.

He calls up the shaft: "Excuse me, Mr. err... Chin! Is that rope secure enough for me to climb down into the pit?"

 

Olaf begins to descend slowly into the pit, followed by Zebedev (who gets confirmation from Billy). That's three down, two up, and Ililiani just making it to the hole in the tree as the giant, expecting to run into a real bush, is tripped up by the lack of impact and falls on his face -- eye to eye with Ililiani.

"Whaaa?"

 

(Meanwhile, Oleandre rapidly but not harmfully reaches the bottom of the chute some 200 feet below. It's a moss-covered stone floor with a clearly carefully-designed tunnel leading, straight as an arrow, toward a destination distant enough that anyone but Oleandre wouldn't be able to see it -- but Oleandre is Oleandre, and he can make out quite clearly at nearly a mile away, a 60' door with 10' letters on the middle reading "Observation And Recording".)

 

Ililani, surprised, immediately stops singing and dives after Oleandre. She'll try to catch herself from falling either by a handhold or by trying to sing herself a soft landing.

 

Having read the text on the doors on the end of the tunnel before him, Oleandre was torn. On one hand, if he were to get there by himself and take a look at what was inside, he might get a little closer to finding out their reason for being there, and possibly a way to get out of there. And on the other hand, since everything there was ten times as big as it should be, he needed time to be able to do that, a lot of it.
Of course, getting some time wasn't that difficult, it would probably be enough to just throw something flashy up there and convince those idiots that there's something nasty and they shouldn't get down yet. And that posed a conundrum in itself, because if they came down after he warned them and found out that he did it to withhold information from them, they would start doubting him, and that was the worst thing that could happen to him if he was stuck there with them.

Raising his head up, he noticed that one of them was climbing down the rope, and another one was somehow gliding down the shaft. The second one would be fine unless he was inefficacious with this sort of thing, which was doubtful as only a bumbling moron would choose to rely on a power he didn't have mastery of to keep him safe from falling down. The problem was with the first one, as the unusually long rope was still too short to reach the ground, and there were still about 20 feet between its end and the floor; not enough for skilled people to hurt themselves, but the one climbing down was supposed to be some kind of politician, and those bastards tended to be rather frail.

For him it was the last moment to decide. He could launch a signal and try to get to the doors before they spotted him, or stay there and wait for them to descend. Before he could make his decision, however, he saw another one of them jump down, with nothing to slow her from becoming a messy puddle of blood. It seemed the one girl in their group was the stupidest of their all, and he had to do something about it if he desired not to be vilified by them. His irritation level raising, at that moment he was thankful for his ability to quickly make tonnes of projectiles and store them away in that hyperspace bag he was given as a token of gratitude from Inconsequentia, but he still wanted to scream.

"Fuck."

Oleandre uses "Projectile Storm"

As quickly as he could, Oleandre pulled countless softballs from bag, cleverly masked by his clothing so that it would appear that he was taking the projectiles out of his pockets, and started throwing them onto the clearing, hoping to create as large a pile of soft junk as it was possible before the foolhardy trio of dodos changed into red juice.

 

Ililania dives, inhaling to sing a beautiful mountain of feathers into existence to stop her fall. The fall is a bit longer than she expected, but that just means more time to imagine up a larger breakfall. She zips down past Olaf, down past Zebedev, and as she's about to let her song go, a giant pile of softballs (??) appears on the floor beneath her.

She releases her song regardless, covering the softballs with a massive pile of goose down-and-silk pillows. She lands with a particularly ladylike 'oof', and then is somewhat inadvertently deposited at Orleandre's feet by the rolling of the balls. Zebedev takes the opportunity to finish dropping as well, and Olaf completes his descent in a hurry to keep up.

Shortly, all four are gathered at the bottom. Only Oleandre can see the far end of the tunnel; to everyone else it simply stretches off into the distance.

Meanwhile, Billy paper-chutes quite accidentally right onto the fallen giant's shoulder, stumbling for a moment as the giant turns it's head and glares at him with a 4-foot-wide eyeball. "Hey! What's with all these tiny little dudes?" The giant has apparently completely forgotten about his deer -- and his friends, hot on his tail, are replying.


"What the hell you talkin' about, Borat?"