Where The Captain does his own thing

Daisy the Eldritch Cow has just died. Louie, Raymond and Dennis are in a field to the north of the hill, while The Captain is on top of the hill. He knows roughly where we are, but neither party can see the other. This will become important later.

The Pixie is holding out her hands, gesturing to us to stop moving! We do, and there is a long pause. Just as everyone is relaxing, thinking the danger has been avoided - Blammo! An enormous Caterpillar/Wasp/Elemental thing bursts from the clover and into the air. All around Louie, Dennis and Raymond, plant growth bursts into life, making movement across it difficult. The Caterpillar gets a surprise round, and uses it to grapple Louie, dragging him 60’ into the air.

Initiative! The Captain goes first, then Louie, Dennis, Raymond and lastly the Caterpillar. The Captain does a ranged sneak attack and does 22 damage, then hides behind the tree on the top of the hill. Louie attempts to escape the grapple, but fails. Dennis flies up to it (it’s huge, so while it went up 60’, there are parts of its body only 40’ from the ground), and stuns it with his first hit. It falls to the ground. Dennis chooses to fall too, relying on his Slow Fall ability to protect him from damage. Then he hits it again, with the poison that paralyzes it. Then, he switches to the Demon Screech poison. The Caterpillar is stunned, prone and paralyzed, so every hit Dennis does is a critical. He has 3 flurry of blows strikes left, and half the damage from Demon Screech is fire damage, which the Caterpillar is vulnerable to. He smashes the caterpillar for over 250 points of damage in one turn. Which, astonishingly, does not kill it. Raymond steps up to steal the kill, granting him enormous amounts of temp HP.

The Pixie wants the clover, and Louie wants the fairy floss, so a trade is made. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to everyone else, The Captain is still in combat with something that ignores his attempts to hide, and cannot be seen by the rest of the party. He runs down the hill toward us and tries to hide behind Raymond, but his assailant sees straight through that and drops The Captain - but his riposte damage also kills it. While the party stands there, gobsmacked (fair enough in Dennis’ case - he’s feebleminded at the moment), The Captain nat 20s his death save and revives himself. He steals a potion off Dennis and drinks it, then also gets Dennis to Hand of Healing him (after we checked with the DM whether Dennis could even use that ability).

How to cure Lycanthropy, part 1

Next, the party gets into an argument about what they should do to cure The Captain’s latent lycanthropy. Louie is in favour of going back to Rusty, who he knows can make Wolfsbane potion - but we’re not certain if he has any Wolfsbane to make it with. The Pixie, very helpfully, mentions that you can also cure lycanthropy using the heart of a lycanthrope. This is fucking music to The Captain’s ears, and he sets off on a revenge quest! Louie manages to almost forcibly drag him back to town, where we learn that Esmerelda has some Wolfsbane, and Rusty whips up a cure. Esmerelda takes the Fairy Floss and whips up a cure for the Revallians, and The Captain gets a scroll of Greater Restoration off Esmerelda, which he uses to cure Dennis’ feeblemind. With the exception of no fangs for Dennis, the party is basically back to full strength.

An Ethereal visitor

During the night, The Captain can’t sleep, thoughts of the stupid party not helping him with the fight, and him having to resurrect himself, and not letting him kill the stupid Wereshark. He snaps back to consciousness to see a floating drone, looking like a sphere with a ring around it, scanning his brain. That shit is not flying, motherfucker! The Captain stabs it straight through with his rapier, one-shotting it. He takes it to Rusty to investigate. Rusty is fascinated - it is obviously some form of bio-mechanical construct, and its internals have membranes that The Captains memories are actually visible in. Rusty checks to see if The Captain remembers the scenes presented, in case the scanning was destructive, and they notice something odd - there are two lines of casuality being displayed - on the left side is what The Captain remembers as actually happening, while on the right side is an alternate timeline that did not happen. Shortly after this observation is made, the drones insides dissolve into goop. Rusty stores the goop and notices that the outer shell is made of a new material, which is dubbed “Rustinium I”.

We also check on the other party members at this point, in case there are more drones scanning people, but we don’t see any. Louie, when woken, does see something nobody else did - because he can see the ethereal plane, and didn’t tell anyone! There are a bunch of hooded figures around the drone shell, and a purple Davy Crocket lookalike standing behind The Captain. Louie the does not tell anyone, because he is afraid the hooded figures will notice and get angry at him.

The hooded figures notice Davy Crocket, and run away. Davy Crockett also fades away, and then Louie tells Rusty what he saw. Rusty more closely investigates the orb, but can’t determine anything else. We set watches during the night, and Rusty spends his time fixing Raymond’s barding and planning what to make for the party to cover our weaknesses.

How to cure Lycanthropy, part 2

The Captain, frustrated that there is still a known source of lycanthropy wandering the forest, starts a campaign amongst the villagers to start putting silver in all the water sources. Louie is upset because he thinks this might kill the local frog population, of which we have seen absolutely none. Probably because all the sharks are eating them.

The Blacksmith offers to fix Louie’s morningstar for 50GP, and it will take 30 minutes. Rusty could do it cheaper, but it would take him 1 1/2 days, so he tells Louie to take the offer. During these negotiations, The Captain sneaks in the back of the smithy and steals a pile of silver - but leaves enough gold to cover the cost on the counter. Also during these negotiations, many villagers approach the Blacksmith looking to buy silver to put in water sources. Rusty attempts to ameliorate the damage by telling them to make sure not to shave it too finely or it will dissolve and then evaporate. They have to put small shavings in, instead.

Sidebar: Rusty is informed at this point that he has managed to repair the Shield Guardian that they recovered in Hara’Kir. It is now fully active, and is a Horcrux of Pharaoscar. If we gather all the horcruxes (there are 7, we think), then we can use them to bring down the Pharaoh of Hara’Kir.

At this point, The Captain has had enough of this passive bullshit, and heads off to kill the Wereshark. Louie comes along to argue with him about biology, and Dennis follows along because The Captain fixed his head, and he feels indebted to him. Along the way, we come across another Capybara, which The Captain punts into a tree, killing it. At that point, the polymorphed Revallian returns to its original form, still dead. Louie revivifies it, and sends it back to town, whereupon it immediately falls into some quicksand. Louie sends Raymond to fish him out, and escort him home.

A bush nearby rustles, and a baby Wereshark comes into view, gathering berries. We capture and question it, and find out the following:

1. It was born a wereshark. We reason that this means there is a mommy somewhere.
2. It is the most annoying fucking creature we have ever met.

The Captain feeds it a berry with a silver coin hidden inside, at which point its head dissolves all over Louie, who is holding it. Louie is upset, and confused when he can see a giant coin in the ethereal plane hovering over The Captain. It starts to spin, and The Captain is given a choice of accepting this power, or rejecting it. Well, of course, he accepts. The Captain gains the power of Retributive Strike.

We proceed to the place we last saw the Wereshark. The Captain sneaks up on it. Dennis, knowing he isn’t as stealthy as The Captain, waits behind a tree, but close enough to move into combat in one turn. Louie wants nothing to do with this, and hangs back. Louie is approached by an order of Hedgehog knights, who want his assistance killing a great evil - not the Weresharks, oddly. They do tell Louie that the daddy wereshark is a nice guy, but the mommy is nasty. He apparently keeps her in check. Louie writes this on a piece of paper and throws it at Dennis, before going off with the Hedgehogs.

Dennis reads it, and tosses it at The Captain. Unfortunately, the noise of the paper hitting The Captain’s head was enough to alert the Wereshark, spoiling The Captains surprise attack. Ooops. Sorry.

Two separate combats ensue - The Captain and Dennis versus The Weresharks, and Louie and the Hedgehogs (that’s their band name now) versus an Ashen Construct (maybe a cadaver collector?) I will split the narrative here for clarity.

Louie and The Hedgehogs

Louie casts Compelled Duel, and hits the beast. It hits Louie, and drops a corpse bomb. The knights drink a healing potion, and hit the construct. Raymond hits the construct.

The construct eats a corpse to heal itself. The knights hit it! Raymond hits it! Louie hits it, does crit damage, and then recasts compelled duel. The construct hits Louie.

Louie hits it back. The construct drops another corpse bomb. The Hedgehogs are starting to fall by now. By the time they do a coordinated strike on the construct to kill it, there are only 3 hedgehogs alive of the original 7.

Louie revivifies as many as he can, and they have a party.

The Captain and The Wereshark(s)

The Captain hits the daddy Wereshark. Dennis hits the daddy, stunning it, and telling it to use its action to plead for it’s life (he checked - they can speak falteringly while stunned). It does not - it just looks angrily at The Captain. Well, it has nobody to blame but itself, now. Another wereshark appears behind The Captain and takes a swing, but misses. Then it disappears again.

The Captain stabs the daddy, and kills it. Dennis holds his action for when the invisible one reappears. The Captain gets hit by a baby wereshark, and it holds on to him, reducing his AC by 2. The invisible one has a go at Dennis, does massive damage, and infects him with lycanthropy. See, this is why we can’t have these things wandering around. Dennis takes a swipe back, but misses. Mummy disappears again.

The Captain kills the remaining kids on his action, but not before he is re-infected with lycanthropy. Dennis swings wildly with his attacks and manages to hit once. He’s had enough of being a sitting duck, and flies 50 feet up. The mother reappears, hits The Captain, and disappears again. The Captain also goes invisible. They now spend time trying to find each other. Dennis starts throwing random objects from his backpack to try and locate the invisible mummy, and does manage one or two hits. Then he tries to draw her out by dragging the daddy’s body into the water and breaking bits off. Then, he has the bright idea of grabbing a body of one of the kids and using it as a mobile bag of blood to spray it around to try and locate the mother, but it doesn’t work. The Captain has spent this time chugging potions.

Ethan is getting bored by this point, so he grants the mother the ability to see invisible, and she has a go at The Captain. The Captain uses his held action and his retributive strike, and drops the Mother. Yay!

We stop, because it was late

But, Dennis is going to gather up all his stuff, The Captain takes the Ring of Invisibility, and Dennis is going to nick some shark teeth because he is missing some fangs right now. He might get Rusty to coat them in silver and make prosthetics for him. Plus, we should check around for other loot, and also take the wereshark hearts just in case the Pixie was actually telling the truth.

Oh, and The Captain got another power up. Looks like Oath of Vengeance Paladin abilities. Cool.