Completed Making a Right

[Inoadar]

Fall 57, 512

The forest teased and beckoned. It's illusion of safety a difficult temptation to resist. The deep aromas of woods and soil, as well as the more exotic musks of pursuing monstrosities made tracking by scent an impossibility for a mere human. But those same twisted travesties of wildlife that gave chase were not hindered by that pathetic mockery of an ability that passed for a human's sense of smell.

Inoadar's only saving grace was that these same deviant versions of woodland creatures were not so swift as their non-mutated counterparts. And those more aggressive creatures were likewise in retreat from the warped, insanely feral beast thundering through the trees no more than thirty or forty yards behind him.

It was following his scent, he knew. It had not actually seen him, he did not believe. At least, not in the last hundred yards since they had spied each other. He only followed the road for speed. His strategy paid off as he came to an area more thickly wooded, the trunks more slender and tightly packed. Nothing that would hinder him, but would surely slow down the rate at which the behemoth pursing him would close the distance.

Inoadar hoped that, since the beast was following scent alone, it would pursue and enter at the same point, and be hindered as it was forced to shove its way between standing trees, rather than forsake the entry point and judge by the wafting of the scent on the breeze where to cut his prey off on the far side of this particular grove.

It was appearing to work, until he reached a point within ten yards of the far line of tightly packed trees and saw what the rumors had indicated. The monstrous wolf behind him WAS working in tandem with a pack of regular wolves, those same wolves now reacting with hungry eagerness as they turned as one to encroach on Inoadar's exit point from the trees.

"Damned army actions." he sneered under his breath, as he turned, pulling his whip and approaching the nearest tree with a fairly low branch on the run. "Driving all the southern creatures north with their marching."

He heard the crashing of the underbrush from both directions as he cracked his whip to encircle the target branch within a foot of its connection to the trunk. He jumped, pulling hand over hand and swinging his legs out in front of him as he clambered up to grab the branch as howls of desperate fury filled his ears below him. He unwound his whip quickly and targeted the next branch up as the monster wolf shouldered its way through the last resistance and charged the tree, leaping.

Inoadar abandoned the whip as he saw the height the creature was reaching. In anticipation of Inoadar's swing, the wolf giant adjusted its leap to a more vertical track. Aghast, Inoadar fell back as the jaws snapped at him, nearly eye level. AS it dropped, it waved its front legs at him, hitting the branch Inoadar was balancing on. He windmilled his arms in a vain attempt to regain his balance. As he toppled backwards, knowing his death was at hand, he scraped a vine from the trunk.

Panicked salvation fueled his grip as he felt a knuckle snap under the strain but held on, swinging out and around to catch a different branch he had not seen, and swinging his knees up and over it. He pulled on the vine, begging the gods he despised for it not to break, and found purchase to hoist himself up where he found the branch he had abandoned his whip on now within arms length.

relegating the pain from his dislocated knuckle to a part of his mind he could dismiss as needed, he climbed to a branch still one level higher and looked down with a heavy sigh as the giant wolf made another leap to find its efforts in vain.

The wolves circled the tree for several chimes and then slunk off into the woods, disappearing almost as if by magic. Inoadar was not fooled. Until he heard the wolfpack howling in pursuit of some other unfortunate, he would assume they were given to waiting him out. In the meantime, he reclaimed his whip and coiled it up, hooking it to his belt.

[Inoadar]

Waiting was excrutiating. His tail bone ached, his butt was numb, his legs cramped. He was adjusting his position every few chimes now, sometimes simply standing up on the branch. The wolf pack was nowhere to be seen but he had not heard their howling anywhere in range of his hearing either.

He had been using the vine for leverage while he shifted positions, grabbing it various spots where convenient. It was showing signs of wear from his weight and had abraded against the bark of the tree. Inoadar was finding himself having to wipe the odd sap off his hands now every time he moved. Dawn was not far off now, perhaps three bells. He decided to climb a bit to get his blood circulating better again.

As he usually did when he went out, he was wearing extra layers of clothing. This was not only to be sure of warmth in the late fall, but for disguise purposes. A pursuer rounding a corner in pursuit of a man wearing a dark coat with the collar upturned, will skip his gaze right over a bum sleeping against the wall with a light brown sweater and a blue scarf. Inoadar had yet to find someone so observant that they noticed him using the dark coat as a pillow as they ran past.

The extra clothes suited the situation now as cushioning when he found a point where two stout branches grew closely enough together that they combined to form a decent flat for a nap. Using his whip and the slack length of vine, he tied himself securely and drifted off.

He woke up shortly after, shivering slightly. But that wasn't what had awakened him. He heard the wolf pack howling furiously in the distance. He came fully awake in an instant. It was time to go! He reached to untie the whip and found his hands too cold to function well. He warmed them beneath his shirt and rubbed them. It didn't seem to help, though they felt warm enough. He moved his fingers and wrists through a normal range of movement with no hindrance, but when he took hold of the whip he couldn't grip it tightly enough to undo the knot. There was no strength!

[Inoadar]

He considered the possibilities.

The cold weather? No, it was not so cold that a few minutes of rubbing and tucking his hands under his arms wouldn't relieve him of any result of mere weather.

Circulation? He gave that a few minutes more consideration than the cold. But still, no, he had slept wrong numerous times and experienced all levels of debilitating effects of lost circulation. It was not that the feeling was lost, or complete lack of response from having blocked the flow of blood as he slept. He simply had little or no strength in his hands. They moved and felt fine otherwise. Besides, there was no tingling sensation from returning circulation.

Some Illness? If there was some exotic new illness, never seen in Nyka, that robbed extremities of strength while imparting no other symptoms, such as fever or nausea, then perhaps, but he strongly doubted it.

Some magic attack? That was possible, but what would be the point? If he had an enemy capable of inflicting attacks like that, why settle for his hands? Why not weaken his heart or lungs? No this was more like some poison...

Poison? Hmmm...that seemed most likely of all. But how had it been delivered? He had eaten nothing he had not prepared himself. He was outside, where inhalation delivery would be unreliable. He had felt no pinprick from a dart and he had suffered no combat type of wound. And why so localized on his hands?

Speaking of his hands, they were, again, sticky with resin, the resin from the vine that had saved his life. He absentmindedly wiped them on his pants, but found he didn't have the strength to really rub hard enough to have any hope of removing the pitch.

'Great,' he thought, sullenly, 'first I'm set on by wolves. Then, when they leave, I'm beset by some mystery condition preventing me from leaving.'

He rocked and twisted on his perch, eventually loosening the vine as the bark tore away where it was knotted, becoming slippery with the oily sap. Inoadar looked down and decided if he hooked his elbow on the branch he could inch his way to full extension. Then the drop wouldn't be so bad.

He swung partway over and slipped his arm over the branch at the elbow. It would be no problem to grip the trunk with his legs enough to ease himself to where he could let go with his elbow and drop. But the first time he put real weight on the grip he had with his legs, they failed utterly to hold and he slipped, swinging clumsily by his elbow just far enough to come loose at the worst time and land on his back among the roots.

While he struggled to regain his breath, his thoughts cursed. 'What? my petching legs too? Vayt's Teeth! I hope I can walk!'

As he rolled painfully to get to his feet, his legs wobbled and he barely made it. With some partially unintentional experimentation, he discovered it was only his thighs that were weak. It seemed it was localized at the front middle portion, right about where the stain from the sap was.

[Inoadar]

The connection finally clicked. 'My hands where the sap touched, and now my legs, again, where the sap has soaked through. It seems there is a pattern here.' He looked around for the vine he had tied around himself earlier and found it still hanging from the tree.

He began to run certain bits of information he had gleaned from conversations he had overheard among herbalists and farmers at the People's Market back in town. Something about certain ferns having a wet spore layer on the underside of their fronds that had a solvent application regarding other plant residue.

He looked around for ferns as he carefully walked, stiff-legged, back to get the vine from the tree. It was actually difficult to coil it up due to the weakness in his hands. His arms were not affected, but all the arm strength in the world won't keep a grip if your hands can't close with any force. But he was not about to relinquish this sample. There was clearly a poison crafting application to be discovered from this vine.

He recalled having heard the names of some vines with effective properties to them. There was one such that stuck out in his mind, the 'Rogue' vine. He didn't remember what gave it its name or what distinguishing marks it had, so he couldn't be sure that this was one of that variety, but it was known that you could brew up a syrup that inflicted a mild weakness from it. Judging by the effects on his hands and thighs that the contact with the sap had generated, it was a fair guess this was one such vine.

The ground grew softer as he began to near the edge of the lake. The foliage was somewhat different than it was back among the trees where the ground was harder as well. This was more like shrubs and ground cover, but there were ferns as well. He moved along the southeast edge of the lake, looking for a type with a wet underlayer.

He had no success in that regard, but just the water itself was a help as he washed his hands in the lake. The water was remarkably clean, The Voice claiming that Rhysol himself gave his blessing to the people of Ravok in the form of lake water pure enough to drink. Inoadar was naturally skeptical of this. Having seen children urinate and drunks vomit in the canals of the city was sufficient cause to be hesitant to embrace the belief that the lake water so clean as all that. But it was certainly clean enough to wash the sap from his hands.

It took far longer than it should have. His hands were so weak, he had tremendous trouble truly scrubbing and had to rely on arm strength as his hands flopped ineffectually against each other. Eventually, however, a little strength returned, and from then on the improvement was exponential.

He returned to the city, going through the usual verbal pat-down at the southern trading post, but his oratory on the "...beneficial qualities of the analgesic medicinal applications of the discharges gained from the bruised pulp of this strain of climbing vitis sylarianus..." was sufficient to encourage an expeditious pass to the ferry for a ride back to Ravok.

[Inoadar]

He got back to his lab at 'Ino Vations' and began at once to set up the root press from his poison-crafter's kit. As he ran the vine through the assembly, bit by bit, he began to amass a green liquid, which appeared to be present in the sap that smeared on the outside of the vine's bark layer.

He scraped some of the sap from the bark and wiped a small lump of it on a rag. He went back to pressing the vine. When he had run the full length of the sample, he had a small beaker mostly full of the runny oil. He looked at the rag and saw that this same oil had oozed from the thicker sap, which was getting dry and rubbery, to stain the rag around it.

He lit the oil burner and placed the beaker in the suspended hanger to heat. AS he watched it, waiting for it to boil and condense, he thought about its effects. The sap had been concentrated at one spot, well, two if you think two hands. It had been effective enough where applied, but it had taken a long time to develop. It was probably equal to the time it had taken to soak into his skin and reach his bloodstream.

It would take quite a bit to affect an entire body to any useful degree. And then it would need to be much quicker as well. Boiled down to a very purified form, and fired with a loaded dart, it would cause weakness. He didn't know if there were more vital weaknesses it would cause, like weak lungs, or if it would just be muscular weakness.

He doubted it would extend beyond just muscular weakness, considering that, even as his hands had become so weak he couldn't wash them, there was no other debilitating effect. No numbness, no feverishness or dizzyness, no nausea, just the simple physical weakness.

[Inoadar]

He made a note of the fact that the sap also had weakening properties. Perhaps if there was some way to transfer that quality, or even simply coat the lining of an enemy's gloves or gauntlets, it would be worth the bother. For now, though, he focused on the delivery systems he was used to.

He took the beaker off the heater and estimated the amount that the reservoir of one of the darts would hold. He dumped that much on a small chunk of bread and ate it. He made a face. The taste was not going to fool anyone. If someone tasted this, they would have to be an idiot not to realize they should spit it out. But for test purposes, he swallowed it and went out for a short walk.

There was no debilitating effect, even after several bells. Either it was not a serum that metabolized in the digestive system for the desired effect, or it wasn't concentrated enough. He decided to compromise. He boiled it down further and repeated the measure. But this time, he cut his arm and smeared the oil in the wound. He left to take another walk, but was not even at the top of the stairway when he felt the effect. It was not devastating, or really even profound. He felt basically as if he had just finished his walk, and wanted to sit or lie down to rest and catch his breath.

He spent a day or two allowing effects to fully wear off and then repeated the process. He simply sat and looked out the window. He felt no effect whatsoever. But as soon as he stood up and moved, he again felt like he had just run some errands and would like to get a few breaths.

'Okay' he thought, 'not something that will turn the tide of a battle, but definitely something that will give me an edge in a duel.' He felt he could probably hope to charge 20 to 30 gold mizas, more or less, for the usual four-dose vial.

He sat back, partially enjoying the remotely narcotic effect of the swoon and weakness of the test, since he had nothing he had to do today. Perhaps he would go out in a day or two and look into finding those ferns and see if their juice or nectar counter-acted the effects.

[Verilian]

. . Thread Award . . Inoadar +1 Running +1 Whip +2 Climbing +1 Acrobatics +1 Bodybuilding +1 Wilderness Survival +3 Poison You Question My Logic? : Let me know if you have any questions on your award. Lores: The Giant Wolf of the Wildlands, Poisonous Vine Sap, Effects of Poisonous vine Sap, Possible discovery of Rogue Vine Notes: Good thread. In regards to the lore, since you did not actually confirm what the poison was, I didn't give you a lore for it. But.. in regards to your shop, if it is the Rogue Vine, then feel free to call it that (or call it something else, but make sure to note that it is Rogue Vine and you just named it something different).