Cinder Bin - Session 2 ½ and 3

Cast

The Storyteller [aka, everyone who isn’t Deadeye, Gorman, or Eli] :: Ryan

Deadeye Duncan :: Julian

Gorman Sterling :: Willie

Eli Tabasco :: Me

notes from session 2 ½

Fleeing the fallout on foot, across the desert, we take a moment or two to consider our circumstances.

Kess—I know a shortcut, but here’s the catch. It takes us near a nest of feeders.

Eli—I think it’s worth half-a-day to find out if we can make it past those feeders.

Eli speaks with Rue later on, once everyone’s made camp and settled in for the night. Eli knows that there was a cult in town, destroyed a few years back. That cult was called the Church of the Sorrow. And Rue and Sunday have left hints that they used to be a part of the Church, but maybe not willingly. Not wanting to pick at scabs, but curious nonetheless, Eli asked Rue a few questions. Sunday got defensive on Rue’s behalf, but

Rue—They’re all dead. What does it hurt?

And Duncan wanted to know what we were babbling about

Eli—This has nothing to do with fightin’ or drinkin’, Duncan

Deadeye—What’s life without fightin’ or drinkin’, though?
Eli—It’s a little quieter. Sometimes.

Eli explained how his knack worked, and lamented that he’d never met another living soul with a knack.

Eli—Your power comes from something outside of you, y’know?

Rue—Different for me. The world’s all blocks. Sometimes I can put ‘em together.

Eli—(looking at Duncan) I can make his blood grow back.

Rue concentrates, and some bits of dirt and stone start to re-arrange themselves on the ground.

Later, Rue and Kess set about making some of Kess’s stuff feel more intact. Kess instructs her that it’s more intact, but not correctly more intact. They start over and try to get closer the next time.

We set watches, but nothing really happens.

The next morning, before anyone else wakes up, Sunday and Eli have a conversation. She speaks coldly about the Church.

Sunday—Let’s go with cult. That’s accurate.

Eli notices she has a brand on her forearm with a loop and twist motif.

Sunday—We ran away. The church in town was a branch. One little one. But as an organization, it was devoted to the death of the world before. Interested in tech, but—

Eli—To gather new, or to destroy like the Simps?
Sunday—To gather. To know everything that happened at the instant of the Burn. To do that, it collected people. Like us. Like Rue. So, you said Rue’s the first you’ve met with a knack? Everyone we knew growing up had a knack. Mechanics made up more than half.

Eli asks her about her armor. Asks if she made it, or knows how to make it. “We didn’t make this, exactly. We took it off the crew of the hummingbird. But… we also can change it in ways you can’t. The Sorrow could, I guess?”

Sunday has a blade with a wood-handled sheathe. She’s never reached for her pistol in our presence.  She also selected the sword from the dropship equipment as the only thing she was really interested in picking up.

“The sword is made out of ship-metal. Took Rue almost 3 years to shape it. Every night, just a tiny fraction came off, and bit by bit.”

“I knew how to open the ship because I’d found one before. Hummingbird.”

“They were devoted to learning everything, and they couldn’t even protect themselves. They were not good people, but they didn’t deserve to go out like that either.”

“I guess the Simplification had one thing right. Living off the bones of a dead society is no way to live.”

session 3

We need to hop the canyon. There’s really only one spot we can cross, and there are a few little switchbacks and a winding path that we need to take in order to be able to make it. About an hour in, we notice that there’s a guy, wearing yellow, standing on the cliff above us. He’s wearing a pendant that has a crystal on it.

Do we run? Hide? Kill him fast? Gorman tells us to go on ahead, and when we make a bit too much noise, the Simplification guy produces a device. Gorman takes a las-pistol shot at him and nearly kills him, but doesn’t. The device goes up and turns into a loud bang and a cloud of smoke.

Deadeye takes a shot. Not dead. Eli uses his telekinesis at finishes him off with a rock. Nice shot, Eli. We truck on, leaving the body behind. This is a bad spot.

Eli produces Haley and asks her a couple of questions – any feeders nearby? Who’s following us? She explains she doesn’t have those sorts of sensors any longer, and Eli puts her away.

Ahead, we see the feeder nest. Behind us, we hear footsteps. We concoct a plan to try and slam our enemies into each other by making a stand near some fallen stones. We wait in ambush until we hear a masculine voice shout out, “Tech worshippers!”

This fight went worse for them than it did for us.

Gorman fires a sniper rifle shot and hits one for 26! Duncan tries to finish him off, but misses. The simplification dudes all rush in. One of them gets cleft in twain by Sunday. Another one uncorks a flask, and out pops a weird creepy ghost. It looks like one of those black-clad Simplification priests! Spooky!

A wreath of red fire pours out of one of the red-clad dudes’ chests, dealing us all some freaky damage. We respond by killing him with guns. The ghostly dude does a trick that knocks Sunday and Eli flat on their asses, then he proceeds to maul poor Sunday.

The feeders show up, then. They swarm the remaining Simplification, and we all escape, even Sunday. The ghostly dude gets mobbed and, before going down, turns into a yellow-clad normie. How strange.

Deadeye—A cave!

Eli—Shut up!

The feeders aggro and chase us a bit, but ultimately, we get away. We leave the battlefield behind us.

Later, we camp. Rue took a crystal from one of the dead Simplification dudes. Eli examines it and casts identify.

When worn, the crystal lets us see more purple. Very good quality crystal, commonly found nowhere ‘round here. Connected to something south of us. It has some sort of mystical bond to something… south-ish. We decide to keep it.

We head to bed. On watch, Gorman notices a cylinder on a SmartParachute™ floating down from the sky. Inside, a small sheet of paper with some writing on it, and an object folded in thirds. Gorman reads the note. He says to himself, “Oh, great. Now I need to think of more plans.”

The object is a pair of glasses. “Oh, glasses! I’ve done one of these before.” Thermal vision. Neato.

Duncan fails a Perception test on his watch, right before dawn. Later, on our way to town, we spy a column of smoke. Kess spies it with his drone, and then freaks out, and starts running.

Every building in town’s been knocked over, burned. Lines of bodies on the road covered in sheets. People trying to dig out buildings. There are fifteen foot tall posts in the middle of town. Mel, Olegard, Doc Peska, and Tyro the mechanic have all been crucified. Their corpses are still nailed up on those posts.

This was Simplification. Fifty came to town, maybe more. A passerby says they came into town yesterday and just started killing. They killed everyone who fought, then grabbed these guys – called ‘em out by name – and killed ‘em in front of everyone.

Even the metal looks like it’s been rusted or corroded somehow. There’s nothing here that couldn’t have been built in the dark ages.

Gorman checks on something… The doctor’s hut has been leveled. No scanner. Dang.

Deadeye—Step one, recover moonshine. Step two, recover bike. [Sees moonshine jug, all shattered] Noooo!

Olegard’s place has been burnt. Totally looted. Backroom is smashed up, tech's corroded. All gone.

Rue brings a kid, maybe nine, covered in mud, crying, to stand before Eli and Kess.

He says, “It was Jethro. It was your brother, Kess. He was pointing people out. Calling us out, just yelling at all of us, saying we were evil.”

Rue pats him on the head and he slinks away.

There’s another settlement north-east from here, and the sea’s east after that. We don’t really know what’s south of us, but the Simplification comes from that region, so… North, far far north, is the frozen forest, and after that, the ice. To the west, there’s the mountains. The Storm Spires. Where do we go from here?

Sunday muses, "Most of those Simplification folks aren't fighters, they're farmers who figured that the way of the Great Above is something better than scraping cattle shit off the ground. If we can kill those reds, they'll scatter, and maybe we've got a shot."

We go north and gather some of the horses that ran off, then head off to the town to the north-east. Some folks just followed us and grabbed horses as well. Sunday drops back and starts talking to a small family. They’re planning to head to a smaller town, along with us. City means a bigger target in their thinking.

Three townsfolk join the party.

Evening. We cluster together and make camp. Sunday’s training in earnest. Rue and Kess work on the radio and, that night, they get it to work. Maybe, just maybe, we've got a shot at getting some revenge.