Session 3 (March 16th, 2019)

Previously on Sticker kills rocks

Sticker pushes him out of the grip of the now awake Thrull, and decapitates it, sending the head flying across the room." While looking at Vaa he screams "WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT" And proceeds to race around the corner, jumping on the back of one Guard, killing him with his dagger to the back of the throat, then slicing at the other guard with his trident but missing.

It is past time for all of us to pack up and go home, so we speed run the next round, where the guard gets a lucky initiative, hits Sticker for 6 damage, then Sticker finishes him off by gutting the guy.

Bucklechops manages to come back to his senses with 1 hp. Sticker is at like 9 health out of 25. He’s not feeling great. Izolda has been trapped in a room doing who knows what. We killed some guards. We’re all out of spells. Varus tried to find an alternate way out but rolled a critical fail and picked a door with nothing behind it. but nothing bad happened besides him being REALLY excited and now he's sad. We're all probably going to die.

And so begins our Third Session

I finally manage to make it almost on time, reminding myself that progress is progress in this regard. We briefly recap what just happened, that all the guards are dead, and we are not. Dumbo made it this time as well, so he uses lay on hands to heal Bucklechops so he wasn’t super close to dead. The feelings around the table after having two weeks to reflect were mostly positive. I was pretty sure that we would in fact make it out alive. Mostly sure.

Sticker and Vaa finish off the last sleeping Thrull quickly. While watching the Thrull struggle and die, Sticker has one of those crashing, momentous moments where a realization strikes his little head so hard that time seems to slow down.

This poor Thrull never even had the chance to learn what it means to live, to have desires, to know oneself. It was an abomination; an insult to the ancestors who were carved up to create its fleshy body and a mockery of anything with a breath of Agency.

He realizes that the people who make these abominations, who would dare to mock life so openly, don’t deserve life. They don’t deserve to live. They certainly deserve to suffer at the hands of the Azorius, at the very, very least, if not more.

This flow of thought blooms in his mind, like a spring flower clawing it's way through the cracks of a concrete street to touch the sun. This mission can be so much more than just avoiding jail. It can be forcing Izolda to suffer. To suffer in the same system that she mocks. Sticker is going to make this happen. He will become Izolda’s Bane if it’s the last thing he does. He’s a Goblin, and they don’t do much in their often-short lives, so this is a standard thing to feel. Make it count.

To commemorate this momentous self-discovery, and to remind himself of a new purpose, he compassionately carves the gold face plate of the Thrull off its face and puts it in his bag. If in the end he can’t put Izolda behind bars, he’s going to make sure the last think she sees is the immutable face of a Thrull as the blood pours out of her throat and her conscious is lost to this world.

The party then proceeds down the hallway to the crypt to catch up with crafty Varus who was hard at work finding the documents. As they catch up to him, he seems a little disappointed about something, but has only really managed to get one crypt door open. Bucklechops starts investigating with Varus and they find a crypt door that shows signs of much more frequent use than the rest. Sticker takes up a post on the other end of the hall, so he can make sure no one can flank them, while Varus inspects the door for Traps.

After confidently determining there are no Traps, Dumbo opens the door, and an explosion rips into the hallway. While everyone desperately struggles to understand what is happening, two Ghostly Guardians come ripping out of the crypt. Sticker turns and sprints down the hallway to engage with one of them while Dumbo, Varus, and Vaa manage to take down the other. While Sticker is approaching to engage, Vaa and Bucklechops move back to where he was standing to be out of range of the ghastly horrors.

That’s when we’re promptly reminded that we left Izolda alone. She comes strolling around the far corner, creating an ethereal dagger that she sends down the hallway, stabbing through Vaa before he has a chance to come to terms with the new spell-caster engaging their flank, and he promptly crumples to the ground. While this is happening, and just before Sticker can engage with the second shade, it shrieks out and pummels into Dumbo's ehtereal being, knocking him out as well.

Bucklechops, recognizing Izolda, shrieks out “IZOLDA LET’S PARTY HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA,” takes a potion from Vaa because he’s bleeding out now and whatever they hate each other anyway and sprints all the way to the other end of the hallway to Dumbo and heals him instead. Sticker dispatches the second shade, and turns just as Izolda strides into view, her vision narrowing to see just him. With one foot standing over Vaa’s bleeding out corpse, she points and shrieks “You!” and sends her ethereal dagger slicing through the air in an angry attempt to make Sticker feel the pain and humiliation she felt as he gutted her in her own office moments ago.

But Sticker isn’t some Wizard who doesn’t know the streets. He isn’t some punk who’s intimidated by scary glowing self-animated freaky daggers. He’s the Sticker who breaks Gargoyles with simple blades and he weaves out of the way as though Izolda's ethereal dagger was cutting through molasses, giving out a furious shriek of his own.

Feeling the rage boil out of his skin like a freight train of pain and fury, he charges down Izolda in a pit of nigh uncontrollable wrath. She’s a worm that has earned far more than a merely painful death.

That’s when Dumbo heals Vaa, who upon seeing Izolda standing over him, immediately casts sleep, causing her to simply collapse on the ground next to him, snoring like a child.

Sticker comes upon Izolda, sleeping like a baby, and lets out a deep, hateful scream as he starts stabbing and punching the wall and anything else, unleashing all his fury and wrath, reaching deep inside himself and pulling on every ounce of self-control while raining bits of rock and dust on Vaa’s unemotional face and everything else. As Sticker’s breathing begins to settle down, he looks at his bloody knuckles and counts down from twenty out loud, feeling his rage fade back into his gut, the party is hard at work gagging and binding Izolda.

Varus finds the documents they need, and Sticker very unceremoniously drags Izolda into the crypt, where he punches her in the face as hard as he can, and as she comes to and sees him looming over her, he screams in her face as fiercely as he can, driving his dagger deep into the rock next to her eyes.

Then he calmly stands up, steps away from her, and grunts out “I want you to know this hurts me deep inside. More than it hurts you.” and he seals her in the crypt. Alive.

The party starts to leave, but we stop to steal any other possibly incriminating documents from Izolda’s now empty office. Sticker sets his hunting trap up under her desk where her feet go, and Bucklechops finds a magical Dagger and gives it to Sticker.

As the party arrives back upstairs, someone is attempting to break down front door, so Vaa hastily creates a large Gruul sign to distract them and they break a window overlooking a back alley and jump out. The party heads to a bar and inn to rest up in the transguild promenade and to prepare the documents for deliver to the Azorius in the morning. Vaa, who is starting to take a liking to Sticker, offers to determine the magical effects that have been applied to the dagger, and determines it's a dagger +1.

The next morning, the party heads to the Azorius, where they must surrender their weapons and they meet with Dallid, turning over the documents. As they all sit down, and Dallid inspects the Runic Magic around the edge of the meeting room, Sticker casually takes out the flesh covered faceplate of the Thrull and a rock and starts scraping off the skin and flesh onto the floor, much to Dallids distraction and disdain.

Seeing an emotional response from a Vedalken makes this entire meeting worth attending for Sticker, and Dallid follows up with him giving him the names of the Boros guards he would have hospitalized. They were two wojeks, one a human named Nikos Skyspear and the other a minotaur named Zarka. Sticker’s eyes raise a bit, realizing he’s going to have to hospitalize a Minotaur but Dallid misunderstands the shock as shock over the atrocity of hurting two guards. Sticker very carefully thanks Dallid for giving him this information, and Dallid says he hopes this will help Sticker in his quest to reform. Sticker simply responds “Hurting people is not something one should take lightly” which Dallid also misunderstands.

No one in the party understands what Sticker does. When he was younger, Ficklebits, the Viashino Shaman in his clan once told him “A foretelling is not something to be changed. It is to be pondered until it reveals it’s true meaning.” He didn’t understand what that could mean, but it stuck with him, helping him to understand his current predicament. The future him is the present him. His arrest has merely shown him his path he was always destined to take.

Dallid says the Azorius will need some time to review the documents, and that they will find the party once they have come to any conclusive results, and the party is left with about a week of downtime to go about their own lives.

Sticker spends this time investigating the two people he’s going to hospitalize. He isn't able to learn very much off the street about Zarka. Apparently she's new to the scene, and hasn't built up enough of a reputation for anyone to bother remembering much about her. Nicos, on the other hand, has a long, long list of people who remember him. In fact, Sticker had a hard time getting anyone to shut up about him, and the more he heard, the easier he knew hurting Nicos was going to be. Nicos hated freedom of expression. He hated people who wanted a system that allowed one to be themselves. He was notorious for his brutality in the arrest of blue collar criminals. Of people who wanted to tear the system down. Of people who couldn't stomache the punishing structure anymore.

He was incredibly tidy, wanted polished streets, thought people should be statues or methodical robots with no heart or soul or passion. This guy was trash, but as trash as he was, there were some other worrying parts about him. He was recently promoted to Skyjek, and had a formidable Roc as a mount. More frustrating than that, was no matter how hard Sticker pressed or looked, no one knew where he was currently located. As he was a Skyjek, he would be deployed with shock troops directly from Sunhome. This meant he was virtually untouchable.

It was around this point that the party was summoned back to Prahv by Dallid. They had reviewed the documents, and determined they aren’t enough to convict Izolda. They were clearly altered to match the official records through magic. Sticker decides Izolda probably cast a spell to ‘fix’ the papers when he woke her up, and decides next time he’ll cut out her tongue and cut her hands off just to be sure she can’t do it again. She will suffer. In prison or before it doesn’t matter to Sticker. He doesn’t want to go to jail himself so he’s going to try having her suffer in jail first if possible.

Dallid goes on to state that the only way to corraborate their suspicions about what the documents used to say would be to get a confession from the boros wojek who was paid off to fumble the original arrest. At this point Dallid gets notably more uncomfortable, and while looking at Sticker, he says that the Wojeks name is Nicos Skyspear. Sticker stops grating dead flesh onto the floor and locks eyes with Dallid out of surprise. Dallid says that this creates rather unusual circumstances, which are even further exasperated as Nicos is currently deployed surpressing Gruul riots near the rubblebelt.

Sticker has too many thoughts screaming through his head to make sense of anything as he struggles to quickly ingest this information and just mumbles something about being careful as he doesn't want to do the wrong thing and starts grating the flesh onto the ground again while furiously trying to think, which is incredibly difficult for him.

Dallid offeres them a magically charmed rock that can record a conversation, and states that they will need a confession from Nicos that he did in fact accept a bribe to purposefully foil the arrests, and the party departs and heads through the Transguild Promenade towards the rubblebelt to settle into an inn and work out their next plan.

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