In the last game, Burns accused Krill of witchcraft, and Krill and four other crew members died fighting. Now afraid that he and the Hedgepeth were cursed - a thought the psychic Mikal put into his mind - Burns had the bodies wrapped respectfully and held on the lowest deck until they could be buried properly.
Between capturing the Durst and the fight with Krill, the Hedgepeth had now lost eight men. Thankful for Kasskar's help in the fight with Krill, Burns now promoted him to mate.
The Hedgepeth now continued north on its mission to find the Admiralty explorer Ammiral. In a few more days, it reached the mouth of the Pollard River on Lief Bay and sailed up river to Beowolf's birth city, Highpyre.
Going ashore, the party found that except for two broken bridges and a broken tower, Highpyre was a completely flattened, charred ruin. They estimated that it had been a city of about fifty thousand people, surprisingly large given the harsh climate.
There, the party was surprised to see a group of women out of place in the desolation.
When you approach the bridges, you see that there's a group of women standing nearby, waiting for you to approach. They're clearly out of place in the ruin here. They're all dressed in delicate-looking Victorian clothing - black clothing with long sleeves, lace, lines of little black buttons running everywhere, and long wool coats. One of them is a small ancient crone with long, dirty gray hair that comes down on both sides of her face, and she has just a few standing-stone-like teeth coming out of her lower jaw. The other six are girlish young women...they're not like sexpots but they're refined beautiful women...think like a Julianna Moore, a young Lisa Bonet, that type. The young women seem to cluster around the crone, putting their arms around her, touching her arm with affection, pulling her jacket closer around her.
These were the Witches' Chorus - Alissa, Anneli, Hilja, Ifra, Kaisa, Lahja, and the crone Kanna. They answered a few of the party's questions, prefacing each response with a few condescending words about the questioner and passing judgment on the party's actions so far.
When the party asked about Ammiral, the explorer they were looking for, the witches said,
Ammiral came through Highpyre almost two years ago, heading north. Follow the river north to find him.
When Beowolf asked about Highpyre, they replied,
Highpyre was the great city of the Inkeri, Hilde's Spartan warriors and craftsmen. Highpyre was a sentinel city, guarding against abominations coming out of Hilde's inhuman waste. When it was burned 17 years ago, the residents were killed, and other Inkeri fled their cities. The Inkeri need a Hero with a capital H - Beowolf - who can reassemble them, rebuild Highpyre, and take up their fight again.
The Inkeri were great craftsmen as well; the ruined tower here once held Lethe's Star in the top, which lit the city through Hilde's long sunless winter.
There wasn't much more to see in the ruin. Beowolf explored the tower, but didn't find anything there.
The Hedgepeth left Highpyre, sailing north on the Pollard. After a day, the lookout sighted a man on a high ridge on the river bank, fighting desperately with two ice trolls. One had a second head, a dead appendage with blurred features. Saying that the man was Ammiral (mental image, character sheet), Burns led the party ashore to aid him. They defeated the trolls, and Beowolf claimed some of their hide to make armor later.
After recovering briefly, Ammiral brought Burns and the party up-to-date on his mission. Ammiral said he was searching for the meteor Noreste, and passing around his eyepiece so that each character could use it, he said,
Since it's daylight, they can just barely seen Noreste as a green dot in the sky. Ammiral says Noreste confused navigators for centuries, because it doesn't move like anything else in the sky. But after long study the Admiralty's astronomers figured out that Noreste is - or was - a meteor moving faster than light. So, although you can still Noreste's image in the sky, it has actually already hit Earth - thousands of years before any human saw it through a telescope. The Admiralty's astronomers says it hit Earth in the Hilde hell city of Bruegel.
He said he left the Dowager a week ago and had been dog sledding north since. He was confused to hear that the Dowager crew said he had been gone for two years, and to hear about the survivor's camp.
Taking Ammiral on board, the Hedgepeth traveled north, almost to the town of Bruegel. Going ashore, to a high point above Bruegel, the party looked down on the town.
Ammiral said before that Bruegel is a hell city, and now he gives you his eyeglass to look through. You can see the town is built on a lake shore, but some of the town layout nonsensically extends into the shallow water as if the land extended there. The streets are almost empty, but there's a little activity. You see a naked man bent over in the street balancing a giant egg on his back; another naked person is being ridden like a horse by a corpse. Near the waterline, you can see a giant beached fish gulping air, and it has human arms, pulling open a gash in its belly that other fish are coming out of. Another fish nearby seems to have a human leg coming out of its mouth. You see a drone-like person walking in the air, upside down on some imaginary plane 30 degrees relative to the ground.
Spying around more, you see a narrow tall house with a slate roof, with a giant hole blasted in the roof. Ammiral suggests that's where Noreste hit.
You can go into the city without interacting with the people and creatures there. When you go in the house, there's the hole in the roof, and there's snow coming in it. Below, there's a man drinking coffee, with snow falling on his head that he doesn't seem to notice. You see there's also a hole in the ground, and looking down there you can see a faint green glow down there.
Going to the basement, the party found Noreste embedded in the dirt floor there. As a few of the party bent over the meteor and tried to lift it out, they were attacked by shadows the meteor's green light cast on the walls behind them. After a few rounds of fighting, Aeris eliminated the shadows by casting his own magical light, and the party escaped the house with the meteor.
Before leaving Bruegel, Aeris searched a few of the surreal houses in a "smash and grab operation." He found a curious +1 AC shirt with the Heroic Effort power.
It has laces down the front that you would unstring to put the shirt on, and then string them up afterwards. But, strangely, the laces have no ends, as if whoever made the shirt didn't understand that someone would have put it on. Aeris can take it by cutting the laces.
With Noreste in hand, the Hedgepeth now turned south to travel home, to Hollin. Soon after:
Sailing south on the Pollard River, the characters are sleeping one night when Kasskar is awakened by someone poking at his arm and saying, "Kasskar, wake up." It's Krill, and he's looking disheveled and confused. He says "I just saw Copeland, arguing with another sailor up on the deck. Didn't Copeland die? Didn't he die taking the Durst?" He gets up, still looking confused. "Where are we? I don't remember how I got here."
Krill's apparent resurrection confused and scared the crew. They soon looked in the lower deck for Krill's body and found it still wrapped there - the resurrected Krill was a second Krill.
Not sure what the second Krill was or what to do with him, the crew put him in the same ad hoc cells that held the Dowager survivors. Prosper was sympathetic to the imprisoned Krill and comforted him by talking with him through the cell bars. In return, Krill told him the location of his family's monument in Hollin's City of the Dead, suggesting there was a treasure there he could take. For his part, Burns was shaken and unable to act, and believed Krill's reappearance was part of the curse on him and the Hedgepeth.
Ultimately, party decided that it would be cruel and possibly futile to kill Krill again, speculating that a third Krill might show up if they did. They lowered the second Krill, the second Copeland, and the first Krill's body in one of the Hedgepeth's row boats and left them to survive the best they could on Hilde.
