DCC Campaign Update: Don't Judge me, I Needed the Money

When we left off, our intrepid anti-heroes had made it to the fortress of the Dark Elves.  They had been told of the Witch-Queen, which looks like their only chance of getting back to Lol (given that the city isn't responding to their calls, and they suspect Jaludin has betrayed them).  For the moment, though, the party is resting for a week or so to try to recover.

Now:

-The Pundit's cat caught a bird.

"It's still alive!"
"Yeah, she's playing with it. She likes to torture her captures a bit and watch them suffer before killing them off."
"So, much like her master, huh?"
"Does your cat also GM DCC?"

-Mu is planning to cast "Find familiar" and he wants some help from the Dark Elf King's summoner. So he goes up to his tower, which is of course very black, and filled with skull motifs.
"The summoner even has little tiny skulls on his pointed shoes. They might be halfling-baby skulls or something."

-"What can you give me to help you?"
"I have this brain-eater body-part-mash. You could use it to summon a brain-eater!"
"Servants of the Dark Ones?! That way lies madness! Are you crazy? It'll be the ruination of us all! I'm all dark and sinister, but this is just completely fucked up! Get out of here!"

-Mu begins his slow process of turning into a supervillain.
"I'll find a great use for this brain-eater; then you'll see! You'll ALL see!!"

-Vizi and Roman spend most of the week using 'medicinal herbs'.  Publio is not impressed.
"I'm from Highbay; back there we give kids that stuff for breakfast."

-"So, what is Roman, again?"
"We don't know."
"I'm Tonut's uncle!"
"Oh... sorry for your loss."
"Huh? Oh yeah, he's dead... yeah, so sad."
"And for Sami too, you adopted her."
"I did? Oh shit, I forgot... I guess I should have suggested we dig her out from that cave in...oh, well."
"You're the one who said we should leave her behind!"
"I did?"
"You totally did. I think you said 'always leave hookers buried'."

-"No! No one is taking Mongo around the city with them, and no one is sparring with him! This guy is our ticket to the Crown of Creation! For fuck's sake, he's a musclebound retard; he couldn't be more at risk of dying if he was sexually attracted to fire!"
"How do you know he isn't?"

-Publio & Vizi go to the market.  Publio buys himself a pet monkey, for reasons only understandable to his adolescent mind.

-"I'm going to spend the week training my monkey!"
"The monkey flings shit at you."
"That's ok, it's all part of the training."

-Vizi goes to a healer; but he only caters to dark elves. Vizi offers him psychic services in exchange; and receives a vision of when the healer was frantically trying (and failed) to save the life of a dark elf officer with a big spike run right through him.

"You are a true psychic! It is true, but you have now reminded me of my greatest failure. To this day I have not been able to devise the correct herbal treatment for curing someone who's been impaled by a huge spike."

-Mu summons his familiar: it turns out to be a chimpanzee in a little wizard costume.

-The Chimpanzee can't talk, but can communicate telepathically with Mu. It turns out his name is Gilbert, and he (mentally) has a british accent.

-When Gilbert sees Publio's monkey, he's immediately attracted.
"I'm going to sniff her arse sooo much!"

-Heidi makes it clear that he thinks Publio is not mature enough to take care of a monkey.
"Who's going to end up walking it, huh? And cleaning up after it? And now with the wizard-chimp we're going to have to worry about them having monkey-puppies."

-The party heads out across the Shadowlands to see the Witch-Shaman.  Along the way, they end up being ambushed by orcs! Publio throws a rock at one, misses, and gets cut down!

-Roman once again blows up the brains of about a dozen orcs.

-The orcs are driven off, but it turns out Publio is dead!
"Aww."
"It's ok. He had 7 Luck. It's a miracle he lasted this long."

-The wizard-chimp had hidden for safety, with Publio's monkey, behind some rocks. Now the wizard chimp comes out behind the rocks with a satisfied look, smoking a cigarette.

-"Gilbert, with Publio dead you'll have to take care of the she-monkey."
"Now hang about, old chap! It's one thing to get a bit of totty for fun, but quite another to be tied down with her! We should just leave her here in the oasis."
"Won't that hurt her feelings?"
"I really don't think she's clever enough to understand or care. I mean, she's peeing on the corpse of her former master as we speak.."

-The party reaches the cave of the Witch-Shaman. She makes some dubious prophecies about how someone's goal is to conquer all of Creation, and how Heidi is going to die very soon, when he's up in the sky. To prove her power, she summons up "the rest of your party", which is Sami (who had been slowly dying all this time inside the ruined skyship following the cave-in), and three newbies no one had ever heard of.  They are an orc, an annoying bard with a recorder-flute, and a vegan-mutant.

-"You left me for dead, you fucks!"
"To be fair, it would have taken us several hours to dig you out."

-Heidi is quite concerned about his death-prophecy.
"What did you mean, about me dying, Witch-Shaman?"
"Ye will die, when you go up high into the sky!"
"Whoa, she must be a really good prophetess..she rhymed!"
"She's impressive...you're doomed, man."

-"Who's the chimp in the wizard outfit?"
"That's my familiar, Gilbert."
"Well, good! We finally have a wizard in the party."
"Hey!"

-The Dark Elf who had been accompanying the party since the Ancients' ruin had only agreed to guide them to the Witch-Queen because his honor had been besmirched by Vizi, and he said that when they arrived at their destination he and Vizi would have a duel.  The time has come.
"So, to first blood, right?"
"Yes."
"I decapitate him."

-Looting the dark elf's body, they find a book of dubious pornographic sketches that seem to feature Sami in her previous profession as a strap-on wielding sex worker.
"Hey, it's Sami!"
"Give me that!! Don't judge me, I needed the money!"

-The Witch-Shaman gives the party 3 questions. They utterly waste two of them, but the third is actually relevant to their interest, as they ask what would be the next step to fulfill their mision.
"You must go into the hills and find... a bear!"
"What?"

-"Maybe its a metaphorical bear?"

-"Will you heal me?"
"I hate you the most, Roman, you left me to die!"
"Hey, I adopted you!"
"Well... anything for family."

-That night, after going in search of a bear in the hills, the party gets attacked by hippogriffs!  Vizi, the party's second-best warrior, hides behind some bushes, again.
"Why does vizi keep on hiding?"
"I want to take them by surprise!"
"God damn it, you're a warrior, we need you on the front line."
"I rolled a 20."
"Wow... that's surprisingly good hiding for a warrior."

-The hippogriffs are driven off, but not before the flute-playing minstrel died. There was much rejoicing.

-"Now I have to come up with a personality for the vegan."
"I would suggest 'annoying'."

-Heidi is now 1xp from leveling up.
"I'm so dead!"

-"Maybe your death-prophecy is a metaphor too; like you get really high and die of an overdose?"
"That's very possible, Heidi, you should leave the medicinal herbs to us!"

-The vegan survived but had one of his arms shattered.
"I'll heal the vegan's arm, but only because it's too gross."
"Are you going to apply some kind of herbal ointment?"
"No, she does Reiki."
"Don't encourage him!"

-"You don't need to worry about healing me, I'll be fine!"
"You're a vegan; you barely have any antibodies! If I don't heal you you're going to die of infection!"

-It takes Sami multiple tries to repair the vegan mutant's broken arm.
"Finally! I healed you."
"I don't know, it might have been that kale he ate."
"I hate you all.."

-A couple of days later, the PCs spot a rocket in the middle of the woods. Incredibly, the rocket appears to be in the process of being slowly repaired by a bear. There are some serious communications issues at first and it looks like the bear will be hostile, until Mu remembers he has the psychic power to talk to animals.

-It turns out the bear has always dreamed of getting to fly. His ancestors had seen the rocket in the air before it crashed, so he spent his life trying to figure out how to fix it. Roman takes a quick look and figures that the PCs could jury-rig it into a (barely) flyable state with a few days of work. Cue the A-Team Montage!

-Vizi has a psychic vision of the rocket when it crashed; of a wizard sobbing uncontrollably while encrypting some media files and then declaring that 'no one must ever know'.

-"So the previous owner of the rocket had some terrible secret no one must ever know? I bet it's inter-species porno!"
"Why did you go straight to interspecies porno?!"
"I don't know. Maybe it's because that bear is so rugged and handsome..."

-Sami has the hots for the bear, particularly after he violently drives off a Giant Badger (the bear later psychically explains to Mu that the badger is "a total asshole").
"So, is there a Mrs.Bear?"

-Unfortunately for Sami, the bear is very not interested in her.
"His only love is the sky!"

-"My Vegan-Mutant people all died in the mountains. We had to leave our village because Bill the Elf was coming."
"Yeah, well, actually there was some confusion about that. It wasn't quite accurate."
"So my people died for nothing?"
"Yup."

-That night, Heidi gets his 1xp by avoiding combat with a pair of giant wasps while standing guard.
"Great! Now the party is immune to Morris being Leader!"
"But we're not immune to his ASS."

-Ever since he heard about the wizard and the media files, Roman has been useless in helping with the repairs. He's been trying to spend all his time decrypting the files. Unfortunately, they have "64-level encryption", which makes them almost impossible to crack.
Sami, who has money riding on whether it's interspecies porno, even tries to use Divine Aid to crack the files, but it doesn't work.

-Heidi is sick of his own fear, and decides to fly up into the air and confront his mortality. He flies up and... nothing happens. He starts to happily soar through the air.
Everyone else is busy watching him go and cheering him on, so no one notices the two Sand-Elemental Ninja-Cows who come in and surprise attack!
"Shit, maybe the prophecy was actually that all the rest of us are going to die while Heidi is high in the sky!"

-The Sand Cows are impossible to hit except by magic or magic-weapons. The PCs are on the ropes but the real target is the rocket, which the Cows try to knock down!

-Finally, Vizi manages to psychically dominate one of the cows, to make it attack the other. Roman blows the other one up, and Vizi sends the one he controlled into the bear's cave and orders it to explode.

-"What the fuck were those things?"
"Elemental Sand-Cows. Created by the fucking Archemaster!"

-"Does this mean the Archemaster got out of the Forever Pit?"
"Probably. And that might explain why Lol isn't answering us."
"And how did he know where to find us?"
"Because I've been transmitting messages to Lol?"

-Heidi returns from his joyflight a few minutes after the battle ends.
"You absolute bastard."
"Hey, I didn't die!"
"You'll probably die in the rocket flight..."
"That would be OK because I'd be taking you all with me."

-Roman finally decripts the media files. It's not porno, inter-species or otherwise. It's actually a break-up message from an attractive human girl named Lysa, who is dumping the former owner of the rocket, a wizard named Timoteus. She's dumping him because he was so nerdy he stood her up for a date in order to make it to a Posh Elf stamp-collecting convention. Roman reveals that Timoteus was the name of the wizard who eventually went mad, and became The Archemaster!
"So that explains why he's always trying to get a fair human maiden!!"

-"What should we do with this video?"
"The Archemaster tried to kill us to avoid it being discovered."
"Then obviously, we need to transmit it on all channels so that everyone can know his secret shame!"
"Now he'll really want to kill us!"
"Yeah, but fuck him."

-Fortunately, the sand cows were dispatched before they could do any permanent damage to the rocket. But now that the PCs suspect Lol has falled into the Archemaster's hands, they decide that instead of flying to Lol, they're going to go straight to Geb, where the Sunstaff is said to be found.


Will the PCs manage to save the universe before the Archemaster murders them for revealing his humiliating secret?  Check back in our next installment to find out!


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