Move 441: Fighting TiggerAloysius charged after the hook monster that had decided to chase Echo, who was now moving pretty quickly thanks to the magical boots. The monster had little choice but to attempt to intercept him. It raked him with its beak and one of its hooks. This only seemed to anger Aloysius more and, as Azrun promised, the mage scored an impressive hit. He found an opening in the exoskeleton and buried his dagger up to its hilt in the creature's midsection. The creature did not fall, but it seemed incapacitated by the blow, at least for the moment.
Dalgaer forced the monster holding him back to support his weight, which it did without much of a struggle. It bit him again, but with its hooks occupied in holding him, that was the only wound he took from it. He swung his axe at it and made contact, but the swings clanked against the thing's tough outer shell. Arachne disappeared from her spot in the cavern with a small popping noise and reappeared behind the tiger-man. The tiger creature cast one more magic missile spell, this time targeting Jana with all of the bolts. Jana put all her muscle behind her fighting, hitting the spellcasting beast a couple of times. It whimpered audibly, but it stood its ground.
Blacky and Kanon continued to lie on the floor of the cave.
"Ow, godsdamnit," Jana growled as she swung twice more at the tiger-creature.
Dalgaer continued swing with all his might between his legs at the beast. "I'M GOING CRACK YOUR SHELL AND EAT YOU LIKE CRAYTFISH, YOU BUTT-UGLY SON OF AN ORC! HUZZA!"
Apparently hoping that she had successfully snuck up on tigger, Arachne said nothing. She also neglected to draw a knife or dagger or other sharp implement before reaching out to touch tigger.
No one was more surprised by the mage's combat success than the mage himself. "Now die!" he cried. "Just . . .die!" He took another stab at the hooker.
"Thanks Aloysius," Echo said. She stopped running when she got to a wall. She put her back against it and watched the fight carefully.
Azrun smiled as he heard Aloysius attack, "Uh-oh, you done messed up now ugly...see I told you you shouldn't have made him mad. You won't like him when he's mad...oh no you won't." With that, Azrun took a swipe at the befuddled hook monster with his dagger.
Aloysius and Azrun finished off the stunned creature that Aloysius had stabbed. Echo found a spot to put her back against the wall.
The hook creature holding Dalgaer took another bite of gnome, but Dalgaer finally managed to make his difficult fighting stance work for him. He cracked the wounded creature with his axe; both of them tumbled to the floor unceremoniously.
Arachne tried to touch the tiger-creature, but she was unable to get a hand on it between its dodges. It managed to avoid one of Jana's swings but got caught with a second one, which interrupted the spell it was trying to cast. All of its guards were dead and it was sorely wounded. "Do not kill me," it whined in stilted common speech. "I can pay you with treasure and information," it begged.
"Liar," Jana growled, pulling back her blade for another whack...
"Shells!" Arachne exclaimed behind the tigger. "I am _never_ going to find out how well that trick works. Jana, he's a liar, of course! He's rakshasa. But that doesn't mean he won't have information we can get out of him. Rakshasas are all cowardly bullies." The gnome glared at the tigger's back –
"And his begging for mercy would probably sell better if he divested himself first of that knife collection he's still carrying."
Aloysius turned towards Jana and Tiger-guy. "Bind his hands," suggested the mage. "Doubts have I that, e'en through trickery, he is in a position to lure us to peril."
He glanced at Echo over by the wall. "Are you all right?" he asked.
Azrun quickly went to Blacky's side and checked the man over and bound his wounds as he could. "Hang in there, big man."
Echo nodded to Aloysius. "He might know...about the strange rock," she told Jana quickly.
"This is stupid," Jana growled, her blade held ready to strike. "We should just kill it."
Dalgaer stumbled to his feet, and stared down at his foe. "Told you." he grunted, then he leaned wearily on his ax and looked about the cavern.
"I am not a liar," the creature sniffed with, all things considered, a surprising amount of indignation. "I am true to my word, and I will give you my treasure and any information that you want if you let me go."
"Your treasure had better include a purse -- or something purse-like," Arachne grumbled, glancing back at the burnt area where various toasted things still lay. "I _liked_ that -- oh, shells!" She ran back to where she'd abandoned the remains of the purse and dug through it. "This is _such_ a bad time for all the real healers to be missing or down," she muttered. "Oh, good! It doesn't _look_ damaged." She held up a bottle. "It's a healing potion. Question is, who should drink it?" She looked around at the bedraggled group and, seeing Jana, remembered the other problem.
"Oh," she said to the rakshasa. "You know -- um, whoever you are -- even if we let you go, you're not in a good tactical position down here. Have your hooker hosts told you about a glass city somewhere in this darkness? It's a place with an ethical flexibility that you might find appealing, but without your minions and because you're a spellcaster, you might find the place personally unhealthy. The denizens of the place have been kidnapping surface spellcasters. Now that you're all by yourself, you should consider yourself vulnerable to the same treatment."
Azrun finished checking Blacky over, "I think he's going to ok, but I'm no healer. Arachne, it may be best if you look him over to be safe."
Azrun walked over to Tigger (Saddam -for Alan), "Ok, lets talk. What's the purpose of the Stone over there? What does it do? What's to keep you from stabbing us in the back, if...and I do mean if, we let you go? Do you have any maps of the caverns here?"
Arachne glanced around the bedraggled party. Hearing no immediate suggestions what to do with the potion, she opened the bottle and drank it.
Shuddering at the unnatural effect of the contents, she put the emptied bottle on the floor and moved quickly to Blacky. As she knelt by him, she said, "Aloysius, you seem least wrecked among us. And Saddam over there must have already noticed your unseemly talent at taking lives. Unseemly only for one also so skilled in the ways of wizardry, of course. Perhaps you could hover menacingly over our foe and help him to keep in the forefront of his thinking that offer of parley and a less than fatal outcome to his encounter with us?" The gnome began to examine Blacky, then said, "Dalgaer, I think I would be happiest if you used any remaining of that dust of yours on yourself. The packet's over there -- that mess that used to be my purse. I'll look at ..." She paused and looked up. "I don't know. Echo, I guess, should be next. Unless we want the healthy wrath of Jana's sword to clarify Saddam's thinking.""Methinks that Janathell has adequately garnered his attention," said Aloysius. "But we should speak with him. His lies we will unravel quickly 'enow, but he may provide a grain of truth that could prove useful."
"Do what you think best," the gnome conceded, "but I should like all the menace presented to Saddam that I can get."
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