Pinky hunts a tiger; Pren­tiss nearly bags a hermit.

Played

11^th August 2011.

Dramatis Personae

• Lady Ant­o­nia deVore – a Heav­ily-armed Aris­to­crat.
• Cap­tain Ben­son Cur­ruth­ers – a Mil­it­ary Police­man.
• Miss April Sharpe – a Self-taught Invent­or.
• Jack Pren­tiss – a Dodgy Ped­es­tri­an.
• Pinky – a Low Youth.
• Agent Andrews – a Stal­wart Agent of the Min­istry.
• Jemadar Khan of the Bengal Lan­cers.
• 3 Men of the Bengal Lan­cers.
• A Doomed Ban­dit Chief­tain.
• A Wise Old Man.
• A Tiger Demon.

Plot

The remainder of the battle was over quickly, with the major­ity of the ban­dits out of action and the remainder flee­ing. Ant­o­nia attemp­ted to save the lead­er, but he was badly injured and her min­is­tra­tions only made him worse. He expired in short order.

After chas­ing horses for a few minutes, the group decided to press on, fol­low­ing the trail of the ban­dits’ horses. Pren­tiss grabbed the ban­dit leader’s over­sized tul­war, think­ing it might be a slightly more prac­tic­al weapon than his trade­mark giant span­ner. As the sun began to lower behind them, they entered a clear­ing con­tain­ing the burnt-out remains of a vil­lage. They examined the ruins and it became obvi­ous that the entire pop­u­la­tion had been slaughtered and the vil­lage torched months before. Cur­ruth­ers became con­vinced that they were being watched but was unable to pin the feel­ing down.

They left the vil­lage feel­ing some­what dis­pir­ited and pressed on up the steep-sided val­ley. About a quarter-mile later, Pren­tiss nearly rode his horse over an ancient fig­ure stand­ing in the middle of the road. Cur­ruth­ers ven­tured for­ward and attemp­ted to con­verse with the old man, but he obvi­ously didn’t speak any of the lan­guages the former police­man knew. Even­tu­ally, it took using Khan as an inter­pret­er to talk to him. Speak­ing little in response to ques­tions, the old man indic­ated that he was a her­mit and had seen the vil­lage pop­u­la­tion slaughtered by the ban­dits in retri­bu­tion for not hand­ing over their food crops. He also con­firmed that the ban­dits resided in a lush val­ley not much fur­ther up the canyon and drew a map in the dust show­ing its loc­a­tion, along with the pres­ence of a small lake and an ancient temple. He referred to the val­ley as the Val­ley of Heav­enly Peace or, pos­sibly, of Serene Holi­ness – the trans­la­tion wasn’t clear. Thank­ing the old man and offer­ing him some food, the team moved on up the valley.

It was near dark by the time the group reached a cleft over­look­ing the prom­ised jungle val­ley. Decid­ing it would be safest to explore dur­ing dark­ness, they left the horses just out of sight, with Andrews and two of the Lan­cers, while they climbed down to the curi­ously well-con­struc­ted road lead­ing into the jungle.

Dark­ness fell as they reached the edge of the trees and Pinky led them along the road, main­tain­ing a short lead as they crossed the peri­met­er. For about half-an-hour, things remained peace­ful, then Ant­o­nia real­ised that the third Lan­cer, who was bring­ing up the rear, had van­ished. They wandered back along the road, look­ing for signs of him and then Pinky decided it might help if he climbed a tree. Dis­ap­pear­ing back into the brush without telling any­one, he found a suit­able can­did­ate and scaled it. He failed to spot the miss­ing lan­cer, but did see a humanoid fig­ure mov­ing par­al­lel to the river. Des­cend­ing from the tree, he headed to invest­ig­ate, com­ing up behind a hunched fig­ure about the size of a human. He decided to kill it before it spot­ted him and thrust his dag­ger at it but, uninjured, it turned to face him. At this point his nerve nearly failed him as he was con­fron­ted by what appeared to be a tiger walk­ing on its hind legs. It slashed at him with over­size claws and only his youth­ful agil­ity saved him as he screamed for help.

The oth­ers now piled into the under­growth, head­ing for the source of the screams. Luck­ily for Pinky, des­per­ately evad­ing the enraged creature’s swipes, he was closer to the road than he appeared. Although April was taken aback by the sight of the creature, the oth­ers made short work of it, tak­ing it down with sev­er­al gun­shots to the chest.

Notes

Fol­low­ing Sav­age Worlds’ usu­al unpre­dict­ab­il­ity, the battle with the tiger demon was over dis­ap­point­ingly fast although, as will become clear in the next epis­ode, a lot of this was down to Ant­o­nia’s fire­arms prowess.

At this point, I was hop­ing the play­ers would remem­ber the her­mit, he was inten­ded to play a sig­ni­fic­ant role as an inform­a­tion source later in the story.